In Paradise: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

urge that he feels now, a half century too late, to beat and kick those dolled-up SS pigs into a jelly—
    Stop!
To rage this way over dead history is ludicrous. Among the participants in this retreat, the several sons and daughters of defunct SS may well be the most agonized of all, and their ordeal will be stark enough without the unearned indignation of some damned onlooker from abroad who has no connection to the place and no meaningful witness to contribute.
    He has faltered, needing to compose himself, find his breath before proceeding. But when he starts forward with intent to walk the platform all the way to those half-hidden ruins in the woods, he stops again almost at once, feeling somehow threatened. In a moment, he retreats, edging backward into the tunnel mouth like some night creature in response to a dim instinct not to expose itself outside its lair.

    C LEMENTS O LIN is not sorry to have missed the film, having seen enough of that grim footage elsewhere; the last time, numb, he had shifted in his seat every few moments to rouse himself to his moral duty and absorb more punishment. He’d felt ashamed. But even horror becomes wearisome, and by now every adult in the Western world has been exposed to awful images of stacked white corpses and body piles bulldozed into pits—no longer human beings, simply
things
, not nearly as shocking as a photo from the SS archives of two live wild-haired women crying out through the small barred window of their cattle car. Crying out to whom? Their fellow men? Perhaps this fellow man taking their picture? In the absence of their God, who could have heard them, let alone set them free?
    Images of howling victims protesting insane fate had always horrified him more than those apparitions clutching at barbed wire, too far gone even to grasp that these rough figures outside the fence, pointing cameras at their pitiful condition as children might point fingers in a zoo, are the saviors prayed for throughout thousands of hours, day and night and night and day for months and years until prayers guttered in their throats and their eyes stared in the way they would in death.

    T HE GUIDED TOUR after the film has been slow in getting started; by the time he returns, his companions have only just entered the museum, moving slowly up the stair to the exhibits on the second floor. He trails after them, but on the landing he hangs back to avoid the droning of the guide (who reminds him not agreeably of that seedy local who had peered too long into Mirek’s car the night before).
    Hunched in his cocoon of statistics, the guide moves sniffing through the midden heaps of humble things—grayed toothbrushes, tins of cracked shoe polish, tangles of wire spectacles, their old-fashioned round lenses broken out or missing, all protected behind walls of glass. From whom? What breed of scavenger would pilfer such sad stuff?
    Needlessly—senselessly, he thinks—the guide identifies these objects. This big pile of little shoes, he rasps, contains two thousand pairs removed from the killed children. “So who was counting?” an American complains under his breath. Nobody smiles but none look offended, either. Nobody knows whom to be angry with in such a place, unless it’s these mute Germans with warm breakfast in their guts who stand among them. Afraid of glancing at a German by mistake, they look straight ahead, glaring at nothing.
    The nagging is monotone, mechanical—the voice of a tour guide in Hades, Olin thinks:
Over here, please, ladies? You are please looking over here? Is grand scenic attraction! Is world-famous River Styx!
    And there it is, oh Christ, the hair. Hacked from the heads of mothers, lovers, daughters, whole bins of it, like dusty heaps of ancient hay left behind by war.
    Feeling faint, he touches the wall to find his balance. He knows his resentment of the guide is no more reasonable than his rage last night at the local guy at the car window. Still, this little rat might