Evil, artfully done

The narrator of these 13 beautifully crafted, mysterious, often unsettling stories is an elderly Polish writer living in Naples, Italy. Ailing and an insomniac, he spends his semi-retirement as a metaphysical sleuth piecing together accounts of ancient and modern acts of unspeakable evil, outbreaks of cruelty and self-destruction, downfalls of illustrious families and cases of moral debasement of seemingly stalwart characters. Though hardly enjoying those spectacles of desolation -- they sometimes make him physically sick -- he seems to be on a personal mission to record some of the devil’s more imaginative exploits.

The reason for this strange fascination, we are led to believe, is hidden somewhere in his own past. From scattered remarks we learn that he was a soldier in World War II, lived through a shattering personal tragedy and has intimate knowledge of the horrors of the 20th century.

In those respects, the narrator is a literary double of the book’s author, Gustaw Herling, one of the finest Polish memoirists and fiction writers, who died in 2000 in Naples. Born in 1919 in the Polish town of Kielce, Herling moved eastward in 1939 searching for an opportunity to fight the Germans. He was arrested by the Soviets and sent to a labor camp on the White Sea. In 1941, when Hitler broke his pact with Stalin, Herling staged a hunger strike and was released in 1942 to join the Polish army that was being formed in the Soviet Union. Together with his Polish unit, he took part in the Allied campaign in Italy, for which he received the highest Polish military medal.

Herling spent his first years after the war in London, where he wrote his best known work, “A World Apart,” a slightly fictionalized account of his two years in the Soviet gulag. It was one of the first such literary testimonies, preceding Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by seven years.

It was also in London that Herling’s first wife, Krystyna, committed suicide. In the only story set in that city, the narrator calls it his personal “heart of darkness,” a place that gives him attacks of breathlessness and “indefinable fear.” Soon after the tragedy, the author moved to Italy, where he married the daughter of the Italian philosopher and anti-fascist Benedetto Croce. He was one of the co-founders and co-editors of the legendary Paris-based Polish magazine Kultura, which, during the communist decades, served as a forum of Polish free intellectual life. Though equally at odds with Italian leftist elites and their conservative-Christian counterparts, Herling developed several lifelong friendships among Italy’s more independent intellectuals, especially with Ignazio Silone and Nicola Chiaromonte.

After the fall of communism, Herling frequently visited his native country and became a regular contributor to one of its largest dailies. His feisty, uncompromising views, and his declared hostility toward former communists (he refused to call them “former”), who soon returned to power as “social democrats,” estranged him even from some former democratic activists.

Yet Herling was equally pugnacious about the policies of the Polish Catholic Church and did not hesitate to criticize Pope John Paul II. “Beata, Santa,” one of the stories in “The Noonday Cemetery,” touched off a controversy in Poland because it was interpreted as an open attack on the church’s antiabortion stance -- some people even took it for a report of real events.

“Beata, Santa” tells the story of Marianna, a young Polish girl who is captured by Bosnian Serbs on a visit to the former Yugoslavia and is placed in one of the “rape camps” for Bosnian women. She gets pregnant, but after her release she decides to follow the pope’s appeal to raped women and not have an abortion. The church starts a propaganda campaign presenting Marianna as a model of Christian womanhood. What is more, the girl seems spiritually untouched by her terrifying experiences. She remains pure, innocent and full of love for God, people and the child she is carrying. A kindly Italian priest, who offers her shelter (she is reluctant to return to Poland), starts to spread rumors about her saintly qualities. When the girl dies in childbirth -- serene and acquiescent -- the church immediately begins her beatification process.

And then ... a horrifying discovery is made. In an exceptionally cruel way, fate seems to mock the young woman, the church zealots and all their naive attempts to turn the story of unparalleled evil into an edifying tale of triumphant Christian virtue.

After the publication of the story, Herling admitted that he was aggravated by the pope’s appeal to raped women. “I thought it was very unjust -- terrible,” he said in an interview. Yet “Beata, Santa” is much more than a polemic against the smugness and hypocrisy of organized religion. Like most other stories in the volume, it touches upon something ambiguous and impenetrable that Herling finds at the core of every great act of evil. His narrator is attracted to this forbidden zone and yet recoils from it with horror. We never learn, for example, what hides behind Marianna’s angelic appearance. The narrator thinks he may know -- he has heard her talking in her dreams -- but he is too disturbed to tell. It also seems that evil done to Marianna by people, horrific as it is, may only be a tiny splinter of some extra-human, one wants to say “cosmic,” evil that wishes to destroy everything that makes her a person.

Similar puzzles appear in almost all Herling’s stories: a missing chapter, a lost document, an unreliable witness, a fact too strange or ominous to recount. In the title story, the narrator investigates a double suicide, or a murder and suicide, of a pair of unlikely lovers. He is traumatized less by their fate than by the anonymity and inexplicability of their death. In “The Height of Summer,” a scrupulous captain of the Roman police tries to finally get to the bottom of an epidemic of suicides that descends on his city each year around Aug. 15. At the end, however, he must seal his report with “a large question mark in the middle of the page.”

In “The Silver Coffer,” a document containing a confession of incest and murder by a 16th century aristocrat and monk, crumbles into pieces before the narrator has a chance to read it. The narrator tries to re-create it from the few readable scraps, aware that he merely creates his own fantasy of the events. “At the most there were two or three words here and there, which allowed one to speculate, and stimulated the imagination, forming the separated spans of a ruined bridge across an abyss of silence.” A ruined life, the author seems to suggest, is like a ruined edifice: It stirs images and speculations but conceals its original, obliterated form.

In some stories in “The Noonday Cemetery,” the author plays with the convention of the gothic tale. There are visions on the border of waking and dreaming, demonic possessions, exorcisms, inanimate objects that seem to possess their own hidden life. There is even an apparition that steps out of an old portrait to deliver a hearty kick to a trembling supplicant. Those deliberate pastiches suggest that the author takes his own fascination with evil and death with a bit of irony. Sometimes his characters engage in arcane disputes on the origin and nature of evil. “The Eyetooth of Barabbas” is built on a heretical theory (though found in the writings of St. Augustine) that God needed evil to make his creation complete.

For the most part, however, Herling looks at evil with the eye of a storyteller, not a philosopher or a theologian. He shows how evil blends into the landscape of daily human affairs, how it colors human longings, ambitions, hopes and fears, and how skillfully it evades every attempt to comprehend and justify it. The secret of evil, says the Polish author, is the most persistent and insoluble secret of life. How can people dwell so deeply in the valley of the shadow of death and yet, occasionally, enjoy the light of reason and beauty?

Written in the last years of the author’s life, the stories may at first seem morbid and obsessive. And yet, by the force of Herling’s perfectly poised, dispassionate, Stendhalian prose, they show something beautiful, even uplifting in those parables about people at their limits, plunged in total isolation, where they have to decide whether to reject life or to affirm it despite it all. In the face of these two possibilities, the narrative voice remains detached and unprejudiced. Yet the author also lets us know that he would rather stand with those who reach the finish with unconditional defiance. “When it comes down to it, what is hope?” asks Herling, a former prisoner, soldier, exile and witness to his century. “Impotent rebellion against despair. Whoever says that one can’t live without hope is simply asserting that one cannot live without constant rebellion.”