Prague, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia - March 1942
This chapter is the most difficult I have written, and not because of the history, though the history is difficult enough. It is difficult because I am in it.
I have written this record in the third person throughout, with the exception of these framing notes, because the record requires a narrator who stands outside the events being described. I have tried to be that narrator - to write about the psalter in Mas-Dieu, about the mason and the archivist in Barcelona, about Thomas of Hexham and Ockham in Avignon, about Marie-Anne Forestier and her soup pot, with the care of a man who understands that the record is larger than any one person's experience of it.
I cannot maintain that distance in this chapter. I am going to try anyway. I am going to write about myself in the third person and I am going to do it badly, which is the cost of the record requiring it.
What follows is drawn from a set of handwritten notes found inside a chalice case in the possession of Teodor Maren at his death - my death, which has not yet occurred as I write this but which will have occurred by the time you read it - and from a partial journal kept by Father Josef Novák between 1938 and 1942, which Father Novák gave to Teodor Maren along with everything else, and which has been in the Alton house since 1968.
- T.M., 1961
Father Josef Novák had been the pastor of the Church of Saint Wenceslas in the Vinohrady district of Prague since 1931. He was sixty-one years old in March of 1942, which meant he had been a priest for thirty-four years, a pastor for eleven, and a keeper of certain materials for twenty-three - since 1919, when his own predecessor had pressed a chalice case into his hands with the instruction that he would know when to pass it on and that he should not delay when that moment came.
He had not known, in 1919, what the chalice case contained. He had learned over the following years, slowly, through the study of what was inside it and the correspondence it led him to and the understanding that arrived not all at once but in the way of all genuine understanding - incrementally, over time, as the implications of each new piece revealed themselves and required the reassessment of everything that had come before.
By 1942 he understood what he held. He understood it well enough to know that the occupation had changed the arithmetic in a way that could not be ignored.
He had been methodical about the assessment. He was a methodical man - his parishioners said this about him with the mild affection of people who found his precision occasionally excessive and fundamentally reassuring. He had listed what he knew about the occupying authorities' approach to the Czech Church. He had listed what he knew about the fate of clergy who had been identified as problematic. He had considered, carefully and without sentiment, the likelihood that he would survive the remainder of the occupation, and had arrived at a probability he judged to be low enough to require action.
The chalice case had to go somewhere.
He had been watching Teodor Maren for two seasons.
Maren was twenty-two, a student at Charles University studying medieval history with a concentration in ecclesiastical administration - one of the handful of students who had continued their studies after the university's forced reorganization, which said something about either his dedication or his stubbornness or both. He had come to Father Novák's attention through a mutual acquaintance on the faculty, who had suggested that a student doing research on medieval Czech church records might benefit from access to the parish archive, which contained materials dating to the fourteenth century.
Father Novák had agreed to allow the access. He had then observed what Maren did with it.
What Maren did with it was work. He arrived when he said he would arrive and stayed until the light failed, which in the winter months was earlier than either of them preferred. He handled old documents with the care of someone who had been taught correctly and had internalized the teaching. He asked questions that were specific, relevant, and honest - he did not pretend to know things he didn't know, which Father Novák had come to regard as among the rarest of scholarly virtues. He was not religious in any active sense, which Father Novák had noted without judgment. He was - and this was the quality that mattered most, and which Father Novák had taken two seasons to confirm to his own satisfaction - a man who could be trusted with something he did not fully understand.
He had confirmed this in the way that matters: not through conversation but through observation. He had left certain materials accessible to Maren that were not quite part of the ordinary parish archive - materials at the edge of what a careful student might plausibly encounter - and had watched what Maren did with them. Maren had catalogued them correctly, handled them carefully, and had not mentioned them to anyone Father Novák was aware of. He had treated them as what they appeared to be: old documents in a parish archive, interesting and requiring careful attention, not his to dispose of or discuss beyond the immediate research context.
This was the test. Maren had passed it without knowing he was being tested, which was the only way the test was valid.
He called Maren to the sacristy on a Tuesday morning in March, which was not one of Maren's usual days in the archive. Maren came without asking why, which was itself a small signal.
Father Novák had the chalice case on the table. It was a plain case - fitted leather over wood, the interior lined with faded green velvet, the chalice and paten removed and placed elsewhere, the case now containing only what it had contained when his predecessor gave it to him. He had spent the previous evening reviewing the contents one final time, not because he needed to but because it seemed right to know precisely what he was handing on.
He told Maren what he needed to tell him. Not everything - there was not time for everything, and some of what he knew had taken him years to understand and could not be compressed into a sacristy conversation on a Tuesday morning. What he told him was: these materials are very old and very significant. They are part of a record that has been kept for centuries. They require a custodian who will keep them and pass them on. He had been watching Maren for two seasons and believed Maren was capable of being that custodian.
He told him he was not required to accept.
Maren looked at the chalice case for a long moment. He asked two questions: what is the record, and why me.
Father Novák answered the first question as fully as he could in the time available, which was not fully enough but was sufficient. He answered the second question honestly: because you are here, and because I have watched you, and because I believe the same qualities that make a good archivist make a good keeper, and because I am running out of time.
Maren was quiet for a long moment. Then he said yes.
Father Novák handed him the chalice case. He gave him his predecessor's journal, which contained instructions he had written out in a notation system he had spent the previous evening making sure Maren had enough context to begin decoding. He gave him an address in Bratislava and a name - someone who could be contacted if Maren needed guidance - and he told him to memorize both and destroy the paper.
They shook hands. Maren left with the chalice case under his arm, which Father Novák had told him to carry openly rather than concealed, because a theology student carrying a chalice case through the Vinohrady district attracted no attention from anyone.
Father Novák watched him go from the sacristy window. He then sat down in the chair he sat in every morning after Mass, folded his hands, and said the prayer he said every morning after Mass, which was the same prayer he had said every morning for thirty-four years.
He was arrested eight weeks later. He died at Mauthausen in September of 1942, which was faster than he had expected and for which he was, in the way of methodical men who have completed their work, not entirely ungrateful.
The chalice case arrived in the Alton house in 1968, when Teodor Maren emigrated with his wife and his three-year-old son to the United States. It has been in the study on the shelf above the desk since that year. The materials inside it have been incorporated into the record. The record continues.
- T.M., 1961