The National Treasure

by William P Wood

  Dr Sakovich said, “You may wish to wait outside. This will be unpleasant.”

  “No. We’re staying with him,” Janusz said curtly. Whatever Lidia’s assessment, he didn’t trust this chubby gasbag.

  “We’ll stay here, thank you, Daniel,” Lidia added more politely.

  “As you wish,” Dr Sakovich shrugged and continued snipping, palpating, poking, injecting, sewing again, humming scraps of Strauss it sounded like to Janusz. Appalling sense of tune and rhythm. Waltz tempo, waltz tempo, you idiot. Calls himself a doctor. Lidia gasped when a spurt of blood shot up, Peszek’s head raised and then thudded back to the examination table because he’d fainted.

  This monster likes hurting him, Janusz thought in fury. He likes inflicting pain on a helpless man. But his own dizziness and Lidia’s hand clamped on his rooted him and silenced him.

  Finally, Dr Sakovich stopped humming and came to them, facing Lidia. “I’m afraid your friend is quite ill. He’s contracted septicaemia from his injury. The next forty-eight hours are critical. How was he injured, by the way?”

  “Fixing my car …” Lidia said as Janusz said at the same time, “… repairing a cart axle.”

  “I would have guessed gunshot, but he could have done it either way you suggested,” Dr Sakovich smiled sweatily at Lidia. He kept glancing at the clock on the wall. Nurse returning. Patients shuffling in any time. “His hand will need constant attention. Septicaemia’s very tricky, too. It’s out of the question for him to stay here. I assume he can’t go to the hospital in the city?”

  “He hates hospitals,” Janusz said with a giggle. “He was born in one.”

  “I’ll take him home with me, Daniel. I have enough room.”

  Janusz immediately noticed how this obvious alternative delighted Dr Flabby. The fat face beamed like a searchlight. “He needs rest and he can get excellent care with you, Mrs Rogalski, I’m sure he can. I could arrange my schedule to come out and check on him every morning, say my visits are social calls. How would that be?”

  “Yes, Daniel, certainly. It’s very generous of you.”

  “No, it’s my duty, my contribution to the country.” He smiled at her, “He’s obviously a soldier from what he was muttering to me.”

  “A damn brave one!” Janusz said. He swayed like a tree in an irresistible wind.

  “I don’t doubt it. Now we better hurry and get him into your car.” Dr Sakovich had imperceptibly moved himself nearer and nearer to Lidia. He was going on and on about seeing her, being close to her, his flabby fungoid lips flapping, and Janusz thought of Mrs Tarnowkski’s priapic schnauzer trying to copulate with his leg whenever he encountered it. Yes, Dr Flabby was exactly that: a fat, hairless white schnauzer shimmying lasciviously up Lidia’s leg, licking its bloated purple lips …

  Next thing, the floor hit Janusz in the back of his head and Lidia cried out.

  It wasn’t awful, actually even relaxing to float in this miasma for an unknown time, hearing bits of things, mostly from Dr Flabby: “dehydrated” … “hasn’t eaten” … “obviously let himself go”. That last fragment enraged Janusz. Let myself go? Running for my life, shot at, facing death and indescribable horrors? He wanted to pummel the sadistic fat charlatan.

  Then Lidia spoke, urgently, hands on him, “Get up, get up, get up …” He couldn’t move to hold her or punch the doctor until suddenly the blue fire of smelling salts blew the top of his head off and he coughed violently, lurching into a sitting position. Dr Sakovich was agitated; time was running out, people coming, danger …

  He shook them both off, got shakily to his feet. “I’m fine, let’s get out of here,” and with great effort, Lidia and Dr Sakovich helped him bundle Peszek back into his coat and blanket and take him down along the hallway.

  The alley was still clear, and Gabriela bounced out of the car and opened the back door as they gently slid Pezsek, still unconscious, onto the floor and covered him. Janusz wobbled on his feet and the fat physician slapped him on the back saying he needed a good meal and a drink and he’d be fine. The man’s presumption of comradeship was insulting, but before Janusz could do anything, Dr Sakovich, small inquisitive eyes intently watching him, whispered, “Your secret is safe with me, Maestro Rudzinski.”

  They were off and Janusz lost time without realising it. Passing through the town in reverse, Lidia driving carefully, warily, the same stops at the checkpoints. But it was different now; Dr Sakovich had just changed everything.

  Janusz heard Lidia and Gabriela talking. Lidia said, “Thank God no one came by. I don’t think I could’ve stood it if you’d honked.”

  “Oh, three soldiers did,” Gabriela said brightly. “They came to the window, tapped on it, and made me get out and we talked for a while.”

  “Three soldiers?” Lidia said in horror.

  “Kurt, Otto and Rudolf. Otto has a farm, too. Kurt plays the piano.”

  “Good Lord,” Lidia said softly.

  “Before they left, they gave me chocolate. I don’t mind sharing.”

  Janusz grasped what Gabriela was saying, but his own vital, burning information made it seem faraway. He felt a thick piece of something pressed into his hand, heard Lidia rapidly interrogating Gabriela, while he automatically put the thick something in his mouth and instantly tasted rich sweetness that stimulated him, cleared his obscured thoughts.

  “Must tell you something. Important. Must do something,” he said thickly.

  “Janusz, what is it?” Lidia asked softly, slowing the car for another checkpoint, the same soldiers with the same rifles and the same blank, stamped tin gaze.

  “Important. Very important,” he said again.

  “Janusz, what is it?”

  He sucked the last of the wonderful chocolate down. “Mrs Tarnowksi’s schnauzer recognised me. He knows who I am.”

  “Good Lord,” Lidia said quietly and fiercely to him, “What are you talking about?”

  Twenty-Three

  Stillness came much later when they were together after the day’s kaleidoscopic swirl of activity. The stillness lasted, in fact, until near midnight when Lidia said contentedly, “You can teach an old dog new tricks.”

  Janusz grinned in the darkness of her bedroom where they lay in the tangle of sheets and piled pillows, the night air gently cooling their sweat. “Blame it on Zosia. She has more imagination than I do.”

  “You were very imaginative and gentle. I like the new Janusz,” Lidia stretched, her hand on his chest, pressed against him so he felt her breast nestled there. She brushed her hand along his raggedly whiskered chin. “It’s been three years since we did this.”

  “I remember,” he said, stroking her arm, staring up at the dim white ceiling seemingly as far above as heaven. The night was weirdly quiet, as if the whole world had gone silent in shock or terror. He couldn’t remember it ever being so still. Janusz had just mentally compared their lovemaking tonight to the first time, when they were younger, knew each other not at all really, and things happened fast, each of them merrily discovering the new. Then there was the last time, under the lemon tree in the derelict garden of Marchessa Malaparte, like this late at night, but melancholy, even despairing because both of them knew that the familiar feelings and responses, limb to limb, body to body, were ending. It was like a death. They separated, for good it appeared, two days later.

  He placed tonight’s renewed intimacy squarely between those two poles. Lidia was careful, deliberate and passionate. It was discovery again, now flavoured with the bitterness of their past and the uncertainty of their future.

  “The fat marchessa,” he said. “I haven’t written anything for her concerto. Spent her commission completely. You remember her?”

  “Abriana,” Lidia sighed. “Always had her hands on me. She tried to fondle me twice.”

  “I wondered why she gave me the commission. You played hard to get.”

  “Very hard. She had terrible breath and four teeth.” Lidia kissed his arm lightly. “She commissioned you be
cause you’re what Henryk said: a national treasure. She simply wanted to bask in your glory.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “No. Just stating facts. It’s what you are for me, too. I realised tonight how much I missed you, Janusz. It was exciting when you were working, I was working. I seemed to have ideas and plans as fast as you did.”

  They were silent for a moment. One of the cows, unhappy in its new home in the straw-lined garage, lowed and the mournful complaint carried in the dark stillness of the night like a rock thrown into a deep pond, rippling on and on.

  “I haven’t written anything since, well, for years. Notes get jotted down, maybe a scrap of melody or an instrument, and then it goes away,” he said. He could just, in the faint nocturnal light, make out her eyes and mouth. We’re older, he thought, inside and out, time has stamped us. The world is stamping us now. Lidia’s body, which he could chart unerringly, had new folds and added flesh, just as he did. Yet we’re also unchanged. Those we love are like a fugue or passacaglia or a basic theme and variations. Love is the theme that anchors the variations as time and life beat away.

  “I haven’t done anything new or original,” Lidia said, rolling a little from him, pulling the expensive sheets to her chin, “since I don’t know when. It’s all stolen from myself – old designs, old ideas, old plans.”

  “You’re doing well. This house is enormous. It’s beautiful.” They had caught up on the last months and years quickly, highlights only; each admitted following the other’s trail through the world – newspaper stories, common gossip, sometimes a once or twice removed account from an acquaintance. So the old links never were completely cut even if they were dormant.

  “I started the design when we were together, when I could still imagine,” Lidia said. “It has nothing to do with Bolek and me.”

  “Are you worried about him?” It had to be risked, whatever her answer.

  “I don’t want anything to happen to him. He’s a generous man. He loves me. He works hard at being married.” She breathed harshly. “But he doesn’t make me feel like I’m alive. Like you do.”

  “Like you do,” he agreed. “I hope so for the future. I’m suddenly sick of the past.” He kissed her and found her hand under the sheet. “These last few years I actually thought I was a genius. I had my bad reviews and critics, but a lot of people were like Henryk and the others – salutes and toasts forever. I believed them. That’s the apex of my vanity. You remember, I could sit down and churn out pages of music like it was pouring onto a roll of paper, notes everywhere. Now I see I was just profligate. Some genius. I could work fast and to order. Piano Quartet coming up, three days. The National Theatre needs incidental music for Macbeth, they’ll have it by dinnertime. Poor old Song is the clumsy child of my self-regard. For my sin, I heard it everywhere and from everybody until it hurt to hear it.”

  “None of us will hear it anymore,” she said softly.

  “Rest in peace, faithful workhorse. No, I wasn’t joking this morning, Lidia. I’m going to write something better, more passionate, more true because of what these monsters like Henselt are doing to us. When I thought about those people slaughtered on the road I realised that most of them had heard my music, sung it themselves. I was in each of them, if only a small part. So, I’ll write something for anybody to play, like Bach. If you’ve got a piano, fine. Harmonica, perfect. Violin, it will bring tears to your eyes.” He paused in the rush of emotions and thoughts. “For Gabriela, I’ll make sure she can play it on her flute. I’ll show her myself.”

  “She’s an odd little girl,” Lidia said, looking at him. “Calling you papa. That’s sweet, but I think she means it.” Lidia stopped and he knew what she was thinking.

  “I still grieve for ours. I would have given anything if she lived.” He stopped, too.

  “I came to terms with it a long time ago. I’ll never understand it, but I can’t change it. That’s what took so long to accept.” The medical verdict had been final and unequivocal and, for the first time in years, Janusz remembered it. He and Lidia would never have children on their own. She went on, “Now I concentrate on what can be changed.”

  “So do I.”

  Lidia whispered something to herself that he couldn’t make out and then said, “Gabriela’s got her own ways, doesn’t she? She hardly talks and getting the cows and horse taken care of, then making sure your friend Peszek was in bed and comfortable, it was as though she’d done it all before. Charming three armed soldiers without batting an eye about doing it. I’d say she’s self-reliant but this is, well, stranger.”

  So Janusz told Lidia everything he knew about Gabriela, from their first encounter in the farmhouse bedroom, to the gypsy nights travelling and her forlorn life until then. “She’s been through a great deal, I think,” he said. “She survives, that’s her gift. She’s the future.”

  “What about us?”

  He chuckled and kissed her. “We’re the here and now, for our sins.”

  “You still talk about sin and vanity. Did you wonder why you write religious music, Janusz? You’ve written a lot of it and it’s very moving. But you don’t believe.”

  “I’m not making love to someone who does either.” He said it lightly.

  “It’s a serious question.” She propped her chin on her hand and gazed at him intently. “If I designed churches or chapels, you could ask me why I did.”

  “What would your answer be?”

  “I don’t because the purpose doesn’t interest me. I’d rather spend my imagination on practical architecture.”

  He waited, sorting out his reply. He had never faced the question directly, but on the surface it did appear contradictory. This was a strange conversation to have in the depths of the supernaturally still night in the middle of war, after three years of exile from each other. But the last few days had accustomed him to deal with the strange and uncommon.

  “Music’s hardly ever practical, so I can’t use your reason. I suppose the simple fact is that I don’t see the mystery of things the way most people do. Failure of imagination, isn’t it? I can’t picture a maker of all things. I suppose I see the world in some ways believers do, though: a lot of wickedness, a lot of simple goodness, and the possibility of redemption. Besides, the rituals and traditions matter to people. I can take part in that much.”

  “Still Janus. Looking in both directions.”

  “Right now just one,” he said, putting his arms around her, pulling her closer, making them one human being, perhaps alone and certainly in peril, but stronger and more imperishable together than apart. They made love again, slowly and with care and generosity.

  Later still, Lidia said, “Yesterday Dieter was here again. All smiles and bourgeois courtesy. Acting like it was one colleague calling on another, even if one had a pistol and six soldiers guarding him. He started babbling about the new world, the new thoughts, new monumental buildings we could design together. At least poor old Abriana didn’t make me listen to idiotic ideology before trying to paw me.”

  Janusz tensed in quiet fury.

  She went on, “Dieter was happily laying out our new order. We’d have a wonderful partnership. Then you told me about the massacre and I suddenly thought of the department stores and banks my father had designed. Especially the big bank in the capital, with bronze doors he was so proud of. It’s all rubble now, of course. Everything he worked to build is ruins. Dieter’s bombs erased my father’s whole life in a matter of days. All of his dreams, the beauty he tried to create. My poor father. He must have believed that steel and stone would outlive him for generations.” She coughed softly, a solitary note of futile rage and resignation. “Killing and bombing: that’s his new world.”

  “I’m so sorry. But this isn’t the end. Not for us.”

  “Your music can’t be bombed. Dieter and his gangsters can’t shoot it or kill it like those people you saw.” She gripped him more tightly. “What are we doing now, Janusz?”

  “Lidia …
” he started and she answered her own question with the same toughness he had heard that morning.

  “We’re going to build together, like we always did. Here in this house, with me, we’ll build fortresses they can’t shoot or bomb. We’ll fight them in ways they can’t fight back against.”

  So the day ended with Lidia’s fervour firing his.

  Earlier in the day, it was a riot of frightened action and furious purpose once they got back to Lidia’s house from town. The morning had become noticeably cooler than earlier in the week, the china blue sky broken with enormous white clouds. Below with the other scurrying ants, Janusz hazily comprehended bringing Peszek into the house and installing him in one of the many bedrooms on the second floor, swaddled like a great ailing baby in layers of blankets, breathing stretorously, his newly bandaged hand resting on his chest. Gabriela efficiently brought water, more bedding, swiftly creating a makeshift hospital room while Lidia tried to untangle Janusz’s potentially threatening news about Dr Sakovich.

  It took some doing, but Lidia finally drew from him that it was not the small dog belonging to a likely now deceased widow named Tarnowski who recognised him as the famous composer Rudzinski, but helpfully conspiratorial Dr Sakovich. Even in his exhausted, befuddled state, Janusz retained enough presence of mind not to elaborate for Lidia that he had imaginatively transformed the physician into a sexually predatory pet.

  Lidia was bluntly practical. “Daniel’s always been friendly to me.”

  “Like Dieter. Is there anyone in the world who isn’t bowled over by you?”

  She ignored his slurred rant. “He doesn’t want to hurt me, I’m sure. I think it’s all right if he knows who you are. He can’t do anything about it even if he wanted to. He’s got as much at risk now as we do. He just secretly treated a wounded soldier.”

  “Don’t trust him,” Janusz said, slumping down in a chair in the gleaming cavernous kitchen while Gabriela was amused at the adults’ bickering and helped put together a simple hearty meal for all of them.