In Paradise: A novel - Hardcover

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IN PARADISE
One

He has flown all night over the ocean from the New

World, descending from moon stare and the rigid stars into the murk and tumult of inversion shrouding winter Poland.

From the airport, a cab takes him to the city and sets him down in an empty square where a row of buses, closely parked, stand side by side facing a wall; the cab is gone by the time he discovers they are locked. (The imprisoned air inside, he thinks, must be even colder than this outside weather.) At the corner café he is informed that buses to that destination won't be available before spring, and that he has missed the morning train he would have caught had he been driven to the depot; there will be no other until evening.

At a loss, he drinks black coffee at the counter, scowling at the unshaven traveler reflected in the dirty mirror. His antiquated Polish is eked out by the primitive English of a young couple who have overheard his inquiries about hiring a car and boisterously endorse the waiter's protest that the cost would be far too high. Concerned that a visitor to their fair land has been inconvenienced, they offer to escort him to that small museum he had mentioned: the waiter will keep an eye on his old suitcase. On the way he can ad- mire the Royal Palace and cathedral on Wawel Hill and the St. Mary's Basilica destroyed in the thirteenth century by Asian Tatars and rebuilt in the fourteenth with that strange crowned tower. "Like black icicles!" the girl cries. Thus their guest can at least enjoy the historic center of Poland's oldest city, still so beautiful, they say, because Cracow, like Paris, had been spared bomb and fire in the war. Pardon? Oh no, sir, they giggle, they have never been to Paris!

Exhausted, he trails his merry guides past the medieval Cloth House on the Market Square. Mirek and his love- struck Wanda will not let him visit this city he knows more about than they do without dragging him into a shop to find a souvenir of Poland "for delight your sweetheart in America." Wanda supervises the selection of a silken lozenge of transparent amber. "Beauty gift for Mama!" This golden drop encasing flecks of ancient insects is the very essence of his ancestral earth, yet its acquisition further sinks his spirits. He knows no one who would have much interest in this scrap of fossil tree sap, never mind "delight." He has no sweetheart, only a married lover he does not much miss-in fact, is rather glad to get a rest from-and no surviving family in the New World. Were they still alive, his father and paternal grandparents would have disapproved this trip, having always warned him against returning to this region of southwest Poland just because he happened to be born there. "You have no memory of that place, and our own memories are sad," his father said.

The one thing he will make sure he sees in Cracow is the Leonardo da Vinci portrait of a Renaissance girl holding a white winter weasel in her lap. Long ago, his father had shown him a faded reproduction clipped from an art magazine ("She reminds me so of your dear mother!"). Alas, on this cold Sunday of 1996, Young Woman with Ermine is locked away behind the small museum's obdurate wood door. His guides stare at the notice as if hoping that at any moment it might change its mind. Disappointed for their guest and sensing his annoyance, the poor things are looking a bit desperate.

On the return, in an effort to intrigue them, he relates how over the centuries this portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, Count Ludovico Sforza's adolescent mistress, had wandered in times of war and conquest-sealed up in castle cellars, stolen, sold, and finally recovered, only to be confiscated by Hans Frank (crony and former lawyer of the Leader in Berlin, now Governor General of Occupied Poland) and displayed in his office in the Royal Palace-

"Is up there!" Eager to contribute, the girl is pointing at the fortress castle looming in the mis