The Book of Ten

Decalogue: Ethics

 Decalogue: ethics n today is yom Kippur and because there is no special day of atonement for the skeptical and confused i am at home alone watching this movie and thinking, nevertheless, of the transgressions from A to Z: we abuse, we betray, we are cruel, we destroy, we embitter, we falsify . . . and of this the eighth Commandment: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. it’s the child’s face that haunts me, always the child: eyes like muddy water after rain, deep as a ditch with no bottom, ditch with hundreds of bodies shoveled in, covered with cold rain. those eyes as she looks back at the woman in the doorway and says, as though she knows a secret, “Curfew time.” but the woman just stands there. forty years she stands there and the child will remember everything. they sat at the table and each china cup had a different flower painted on it—rose, peony, lily. the one she held, the lily, was chipped. She was five, Warsaw, february . in the ghetto her father had long ago burned the dining room table. outside afternoon dimmed at the smoky windows, the green oil lamp unlit. a young man, gray-faced, paced up and down the small flat while the woman served tea and an old man in a wheelchair kept his back to them, picked at the blanket in his lap the way the dying do. the child wanted more tea, but it was time to go.  “Curfew time,” she said. they’d come for the baptismal certificate—whatever that was, something the goyim had—but the woman wouldn’t give it, had decided she couldn’t lie, couldn’t bear false witness to him in whom she believed, she said. (though, as someone would point out later, any good Catholic would know saving a life comes first—god would forgive that falsehood.) at the gate the child looked back and swore she’d never be afraid again. but now, forty years later, she is, elisabeth, an american now, sitting in the classroom of the one who refused to help her, telling her story as though it happened to someone else, offering it as a problem for this ethics class—the subject for the day is “ethical hell.” She’s come all this way to see the professor’s face. and the professor? a cloud passes across that face, like a shadow passing over a doorway. “nothing is more important than the life of a child,” she says. We’ve seen her goodness all along, the director makes it clear in the movie’s first frames, how kind her face, how wise, when she’s talking to her neighbor, buying flowers, tidying her apartment. but how is one to reconcile that goodness with the woman who turned the child away? the explanation, after all, is almost mundane, an ordinary, terrible wartime story: a rumor— false, it turned out—that the resistance was about to be betrayed by nazi sympathizers kept her from risking the child’s rescue. and she, of course, has long  believed she sent the child to certain death, has spent a lifetime trying to atone for that moment in the doorway, just as elisabeth has spent one trying to understand it. it’s moving to see them there, these two, in the lamplight of this simple Warsaw apartment, late Soviet Warsaw, sharing their moment of reconciliation, what buber would call the I-Thou, the presence of god. Some things remain mysterious. the tailor, for instance, the one Zofia falsely believed a traitor, simply stares and stays silent when she goes to his shop forty years later. What are we to make of that? the cold eye of justice? but that’s not what pulls me back to the film three times in one week. the professor has a son— it’s his old room in which she places flowers—lilies—every day. they’re estranged, we don’t know why, but when elisabeth asks her where her son went, she says, “Quite simply, far away from me.” and perhaps that’s some kind of retribution for turning away a child in the five o’clock dark of noakowski Street, in february . Perhaps she turned her heart away from her own child out of guilt, or self-loathing, maybe, couldn’t give him what she thought she had denied another. i’ll...