The National Treasure

by William P Wood

  “Cows and a horse. So this place is turning into a farm again. I suppose I can tell Dieter that I’m taking precautions in case there’s a food shortage. He’s not like the others who showed up a few days ago, Janusz. He’s a decent man.”

  Janusz knew the time was running fast and he had to go back for the other two, but he couldn’t let that fantasy germinate or live another moment. “Listen to me about your decent friend, Lidia. Just listen …” and holding her two hands loosely because he was leading her reluctantly to something from which she would recoil, he described the massacre on the main road not so many miles away. “So you’re right, I am in danger. So are you. So are the people I’ll bring here.”

  Lidia’s face hardened, her hands tightened abruptly in his. “When you called a few days ago, you thought I was in trouble. I was in shock. Dieter Henselt and some soldiers had just come through my front door. He bowed to me. He wanted to see me again. We met at the international architectural congress in Paris last year and he said he would stop by if was ever in the area. I didn’t know he meant he’d bring an army with him.”

  “A professional colleague? That’s all?”

  “Oh, he’s decided we’re much more.”

  Janusz had a mirthless smile. “He’s a monster with impeccable taste.”

  Lidia looked at the ornate eighteenth century clock on the mantelpiece. “Hurry and bring your friends here, Janusz. I’ll get the garage ready for them. “

  They walked to the front door. He said, “We need a doctor for the sergeant right away. Is there anyone nearby you can trust?”

  She nodded. “Daniel Sakovich in the town. I can call him, but it he won’t be able to get out here without going through all of the checkpoints on the roads and everyone will know he’s coming and I’m supposed to be the only one here now.”

  Janusz said, “Because Bolek’s where?”

  “His unit was called up a month ago. I haven’t heard from him in two weeks.”

  Impossible to avoid the catch in her voice. Not now, not now, he berated himself.

  “It’s chaos everywhere. I’m sure he’ll be in touch when he can.” Right thing to say, he realised, because Lidia looks worried, stricken even, and if saying the words lifts her slightly, he was game to say them. But hypocrisy had its limits.

  “All right,” Janusz said, “call the doctor. I’ll have to figure some plausible excuse for him to come here, but it’s very risky. He might bring Dieter or see the girl.”

  “You have to go,” she pushed him a little. “There may be another way,” she said slowly, hesitant to tell him apparently. “Dieter gave me documents.”

  “What kind of documents?” he asked sharply.

  “Travel passes. To get through the checkpoints.”

  Twenty-One

  He trotted back to the forest and the cart, lugging the basket of food because he knew Gabriela was ravenous. He was hungry but he couldn’t eat from excitement. And he fancied that he was regaining his old stamina, even in the midst of the last days’ privations, because he wasn’t winded at all going over the paved road, disappearing into the welcoming dark trees.

  He found the cart quickly. He told Gabriela about Lidia, and that she must keep a very vigilant eye out as they approached the house: there were enemy soldiers all around. Gabriela nodded and eagerly began devouring the boiled eggs as they made their way back. He led the mare. He felt quite electric, buzzing with questions, fears and happiness. The flare-up just now between Lidia and him was excellent, superb, because it was the necessary sputtering out of old, obsolete rancour, dead suspicions, useless jealousies. Clean sweep, out with the ashes of the old.

  He drew the cart and grumbling cows down the gravel driveway, Gabriela devouring the grand house as eagerly with her awed gaze as she did the eggs. Around to the back, hidden from the road, he brought the cart into the spacious garage, the touring coupé standing outside. Lidia hurriedly came to them and closed the garage doors behind her, diffused acid lemon sunlight falling on them through two dusty windows.

  He helped Gabriela off the cart and introduced Lidia to her. There was pride and shyness in his introduction, but Gabriela sighed unabashedly at Lidia. “She’s your princess, Papa.”

  “Papa?” Lidia repeated to him, puzzled.

  “She needs one,” he said. ”I’ll tell you all about her. Let’s see how poor Karol is doing,” he said hastily. They carefully pushed aside the little straw and blanket over him. Peszek lay on his back, grey-skinned, eyes closed, breathing in irregular snorts. “Come on, faster, faster, faster, bastards. I’ll show you,” he mumbled heavily.

  “He saved our lives,” Janusz said to Lidia, covering Peszek with the dirty blanket. “I have to save his. Help me get him to your car.”

  It seemed Peszek was more of a dead weight than previously as Janusz and Lidia awkwardly lumbered him out of the cart, half-dragging him with Gabriela’s help to the blue touring coupé, the back door opened, and very tenderly almost, laid him out on the floor, covering him with a fresh blanket Lidia brought from the house. Peszek went on muttering exhortations to invisible friends or foes, trembling too. Lidia locked the garage, concealing the cart.

  Gabriela efficiently bustled doing her best to settle the mare and the cows on the expansive lawn, tethered to the fruit trees, water and whatever that could serve as fodder from Lidia’s kitchen.

  Lidia closed the car door. “Poor man, Janusz. He’s very badly off. I talked to Daniel and he’s going to see us right away. I warned him it might be dangerous, but he said it didn’t matter if I thought he could help.”

  Janusz thought he detected another irritating addition to the situation when Lidia spoke, but Peszek’s urgently needed care came first. Janusz nodded to Lidia and motioned for Gabriela. She came to them, as Lidia got behind the wheel of the coupé.

  “We’ll be gone some time. Actually, I don’t know how long” he said to Gabriela. “I want you to stay in the house. If anyone comes by, especially soldiers, tell them you’re Lidia’s niece from …” He searched, looked at Lidia.

  “Nice,” Lidia said with a smile.

  “Gabriela doesn’t speak French.” To Gabriela he explained, “The princess has an inappropriate sense of humour. Say you’re from the capital if anyone asks.” He started to get in beside Lidia.

  “I have to come, Papa.” Gabriela moved to the car.

  “No. It’s dangerous.”

  “It’s more dangerous if I stay here alone. Bedsides, you need me to keep a lookout while you’re with the doctor. I can honk the horn to warn you if anything bad is happening.”

  Janusz suspected he would lose this argument with the girl, having done so once already, and he was spared the defeat when Lidia leaned over said, “She’s right. It would be very helpful to have some warning. Not just for us, but your friend and Daniel, too.”

  “To do what, my love?” he asked softly. “We don’t have any weapons. Well, rifles, but we can’t carry them into the doctor’s office.”

  “I don’t know,” Lidia said. “A few moments’ warning could give us a chance to get away.”

  Well, there was the rock on which every logical argument foundered now, he realised. Chance had ruled his life for the last four days, perhaps longer even, but he hadn’t been given the brutal sharp perception to see it before: chance was death but it was also life.

  “Get in, Gabriela,” he said, conceding the issue. “Sit in the back near the sergeant and if we’re re stopped, you’re my daughter.”

  “Yes, Papa,” she said contentedly, clambering into the car and arranging herself as both concealment for Peszek and disguise for them. She looked as enthused as if she was about to ride a Ferris wheel.

  “Are you ready?” he asked Lidia, the engine growling to life.

  “Yes,” she answered with enough toughness, he was sure, to encompass everything that lay ahead.

  Twenty-Two

  Five miles into the small town, four checkpoints with barbed wire and stolid, hard
soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders and each time they slowed behind other cars or trucks, Janusz clenched his jaw. But each time Lidia smiled and they rolled through after the soldiers, studying the buff-coloured paper she handed to them like they were medieval scholars wonderstruck by the magic spell inscribed on it, smiled back at her and waved her on. Gabriela waved each time, too, with a full, freckle-faced grin.

  Janusz risked a quick look over his shoulder after clearing the latest checkpoint. The soldiers were in different uniforms from Captain Kluk and his bedraggled men with another overwhelming difference: these hard soldiers were the victors – and they were everywhere.

  “Let me see that thing,” Janusz said to Lidia. She handed him the buff piece of paper and he saw it was stamped and marked with cabalistic military signs, but the command words were clear enough: ‘allow to pass without interference’; ‘render any and all assistance’; and ‘notify Major Henselt immediately’. “Amazing. He’s given you the keys of the kingdom.”

  “Dieter wants what he wants and he wants me,” Lidia said, eyes on the road since, while it was largely clear of animals and people, the unpredictable couple or horse suddenly popped up. The ones they passed all had a weary, dispirited, defeated look. “I can handle him, Janusz.”

  He restrained his usual retort because it was outdated and he was a different man and, plainly, Lidia was different too. Only a fool or a lunatic would continue doing the same things when it was apparent they were the wrong things. “We’re going to have to keep him at a distance somehow.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. You’ll have to register tomorrow. Do you have any documents, any travel papers, identification?”

  “No. Well, passports in different names, slightly changed photographs. But Henselt knows I’m farmer Rybak. I should stay him for a while at least.” Janusz looked at her, “Is Henselt musical? Is he going to recognise me?”

  “You look nothing like Janusz Rudzinski, and with Gabriela as your daughter you can carry it off,” Lidia made it sound like a bouquet and Gabriela beamed. ” You’re a wonderful actor. I’ve told you so.”

  “I missed my calling. After we find out the sergeant’s condition, we have to plan,” he said. “That’s your calling. I’ve told you how wonderful you are.”

  “I hate making things up as you go along. It’s messy. We can’t afford to do that now.”

  Gabriela chose that moment to lean forward and guilelessly ask, “Do you have any children, madame?”

  Not now, Janusz thought. Not that thorny past grief. “How much longer?” he broke in sharply. Gabriela sat back, plainly rebuffed.

  “Nearly there,” Lidia said, her mouth set, not in anger as much as the kind of regret Janusz had seen on Peszek’s face several nights ago. Gabriela had inadvertently dislodged Lidia’s memories.

  The town was a procession of low two- or three-storey buildings, bakery, cafés, shoes, clothing, tobacco, brick and white stucco, an old gaudy bandstand in the middle of an empty park, narrow streets with silent homes off of them. The whole town appeared stunned, moving slowly, the few people on the streets or the sidewalks barely looking around themselves, the conversation minimal. Drifting haughtily among them were the new soldiers, helmeted and with rifles casually held. Janusz tensed again at the last checkpoint at a stone municipal building flying a new and terrifying flag in front, military vehicles ringing it, and more soldiers. So many soldiers for such a small town. It seemed pointlessly callous.

  Loudspeakers on spindly tripod legs were set up in the square in front of what was the mayor’s office, now the occupation army’s headquarters. The den of Dieter, the barbarian suitor, Janusz thought. As they drove by slowly and with great care to avoid drawing interest, Janusz heard a clipped neutral voice booming out over the town: “Attention, attention, the following activities are prohibited and punishable by death: listening to foreign radio broadcasts; the music of Chopin; gathering in groups of more than two people; remaining in any public place for more than fifteen minutes; the playing or singing of patriotic or nationalist songs or music, particularly Song of the Fatherland’s Children …” There was more, but it faded as they drove several blocks.

  “Good Lord,” Lidia said, “The look on your face. I know that look. You had it the night of your first all-Rudzinksi programme at the Opera House. You’re enjoying this, Janusz.”

  “No. Ridiculous. You’re wrong. I’m furious.”

  “You’re flattered.”

  “Only as a representative of the nation” he said stiffly. He was sheepish at his own untamed self-love. Would it never be sent to cower in a corner? He was haunted that Lidia, and Gabriela for that matter, would think less of him. How could they not? What kind of petty, self-regarding braggart finds flattery in the fact he’s been banned by the murderers invading his country? Janusz faced it. Well, me. “I’ll prove it,” he said with great resolve for their benefit and his own. “I’ll write a song infinitely better than the one they banned. Something anybody can play or sing. A people’s song of defiance.”

  Gabriela, as if cued, began cheerfully whistling the tune from their days on the road. “Papa wrote that,” she said when she ended. “I like it.”

  “I’ll make it even better.”

  The car slowed. Lidia put her hand on his. “Cold. You need to get warm. Listen, I believe in you. I always have.”

  “Have you?” he said thickly. Her hand burned on his, fire on ice.

  “Yes, and you know it underneath all of the stupidity and needless things we did or said or didn’t say to each other.”

  He shuddered and thought he would cry, but he held himself together. So much to atone for, so much to undo, rebuild. Like the unwritten anthem he resolved to conjure, he would do it all. This was the imperative of the new world.

  Lidia turned down an alley lined with overflowing trash cans behind a red brick building with old-fashioned crenellations. A tarnished brass plate said ‘Infirmary Rear Entrance’ beside a plain black door. Lidia parked and told him and Gabriela to wait, went to the black door, knocked to signal. The door opened a moment later and a short, fat man with a round tonsured head, round black-framed glasses, in a physician’s white coat over a grey three-piece suit popped out, head craning back and forth up and down the alley. Wordlessly and swiftly, they all extracted Peszek in his blanket wrap from the back of the touring coupé. Janusz reluctantly left Gabriela sitting primly in the front seat, with grim instructions to honk three times at the first sign of soldiers. Then Lidia, the doctor and he dragged Pesezk into the building, shutting the door and locking it behind them.

  Down a linoleum hallway smelling of carbolic and roses, lined with small watercolours of fruits and vegetables, they carted him into a white consulting room and with much effort, got him roughly onto an examination table. Peszek groaned, “I counted two dozen. There better be two dozen in that barrel now, you bastard …”

  “Thank you for doing this, Daniel,” Lidia said, cool and charming as if she were in her home or hosting a party.

  “No, I’m glad to do what I can, Mrs Rogalski,” the stout doctor said with barely hidden ardour. Janusz noted with dislike that Dr Sakovich was over forty, his pale face hectically flushed, either from exertion or excitement or both, and ringed with fat. He had two cigars in the pocket of his white coat. The rotund pale sight of him made Janusz dizzy. “I’ve given my nurse just an hour off and I have patients coming at eleven, so we have to hurry.”

  He began peeling open Peszek’s sweat-crusted and filthy coat, wrinkling his nose at the smell. Janusz said, “He’s a very brave man, doctor. Do your best for him.”

  Sakovich glanced up with small, inquisitive eyes. “Who are you again?”

  “A farmer. Rybak.”

  “Mr Rybak’s helping out with the grounds at my home, Daniel, since Bolek is away on duty.” Lidia said it quickly. “I can’t manage alone.”

  “Defending the country. How I envy him,” Sakovich said without sincerity. ” But, I think
that manning my post here is serving the nation just as much.” He grunted, and Peszek’s hairy, grey torso lay exposed under the white lamp of the consulting room. The doctor went on babbling as he worked, but Janusz found it hard to parse the particular words or even the thoughts. He felt Lidia slip her hand into his, a long-absent gesture that felt as familiar and natural and perfect as always. He found his attention wandering in jitters around the room, the shiny steel autoclave, white cabinets of sinister-coloured vials and bandages, sinks, rows of glass syringes and wicked needles, and on the walls, hideous gaping images of flayed human bodies, muscle, bone, organs. Janusz closed his eyes, still saw the bodies dissected on the main road by heartless airborne surgeons, so completely, with such painstaking diligence. He was very dizzy again.

  Dimly he heard the doctor say, “These stitches are quite good. He’s had excellent care.” Sakovich squinted, turning Peszek’s swollen sewn hand as he near-sightedly studied it. Peszek groaned and writhed.

  “You’re hurting him,” Janusz said, trying to push the doctor back.

  “Not at all. That’s just a nervous response. There’s no sensation.” He sniffed again at the stink. “And where did he get medical attention?”

  “A ten-year-old girl sewed him up,” Janusz said sourly.

  “Well, well. Hard to believe. I have stiff competition to match. Ten-year-old girl? Why not? Little girls will be doing amputations and appendectomies next.” He thought this was very funny and chuckled as he laid out instruments, bandages and bottles. Peszek continued to mutter and groan.

  “Give him something, Good Lord. Some anaesthetic!” Janusz snapped.

  “He’s fine. Trust me. He doesn’t need it. Looks like a sturdy fellow. Besides, there’s no telling when medical supplies are going to be available. Have to save them for those who really need them.” He kept chattering, Peszek kept groaning, Lidia squeezed his hand because Janusz was growing angrier and dizzier; the smell of that carbolic and Pezsek’s rotting flesh was stifling.