“I’m afraid you’ll have to leave. It’s a matter of your own safety. Henryk and the woman are too interested in the unknown Anna Braun. And Hofmeyer has got to invent a life story for you that will fit and you can’t answer any German questions until you learn that story. You’ve got to get out of here and be well hidden.” Mr. Olszak began to walk about the room. “The best way,” he said at last, “will be to let Henryk do his planning, to let him smuggle you out. You will appear then to have escaped from this room with his connivance, whereas you really have escaped from him.” Olszak was looking pleased, now. “Yes,” he added, “that would be a neat way to use Henryk, and catch him.”
“Madame Aleksander—” Sheila began miserably. “I want to see her.”
“Yes, yes. Don’t worry. I’ll look after all that. Don’t worry. Get some sleep.” His voice was reassuring and strangely gentle.
* * *
Bombs wakened her again.
Olszak had come back into the bedroom. He was standing beside her.
“I’m afraid it would be ungallant to climb under your bed,” he shouted, and won a weak smile.
“Uncle Edward?”
“Still not here.” He glanced impatiently at his watch. “I can’t wait much longer. Yet I can’t leave you alone.” Sheila thought, it isn’t the bombs he is worrying about so much as the woman downstairs. As long as someone was with Sheila she would be safe from Elzbieta’s curiosity.
At that moment, even as if their thoughts had attracted the woman, they heard a pounding at the entrance door. Olszak gave Sheila a warning glance and moved quickly into the hall.
“Everyone to the shelters!” Elzbieta was yelling. “Air warden’s been hit. I’m following his instructions.” She pushed past Olszak to enter the room.
“Get dressed before the next raid. This is going to be a bad night. Everyone’s to get to shelter. Orders.” She stared at Sheila and then turned on her heel.
“Miss Matthews is ill,” Olszak’s voice was saying.
“I’ll help her to the shelter. Orders.” She left them as a building shattered to the ground. That bomb had landed not so far away. She didn’t even flinch. Her eyes, as she left the room, gave Sheila a final look and command. The entrance door slammed shut once more.
“She’s without fear,” Sheila said.
“She’s enjoying it. If I were in Berlin and the bombs started dropping, I’d dance with joy.”
“Have they dropped there, yet?”
“No.”
“England, France? Are they fighting?”
“Not yet.”
“America? The other countries?”
Olszak shook his head. In a quiet moment he dropped his voice to normal and added, “This approximates my idea of hell.” He sat on the edge of the bed, as the torrent of noise broke loose once more. He had taken hold one of her hands as if to give her strength, and she clung to his wrist desperately. The anti-aircraft guns had burst out again with renewed venom. The angry coughing of the planes was nearer. The living-room window, which Korytowski hadn’t had time to board up—his guest’s room had seemed the only urgent one, to him—shattered suddenly. As the curtains blew wildly aside, and the doors were sucked open, Sheila could see a strange light sweeping through the blasted window to reach into the hall. Its rhythmical ebb and flow told her it was only a searchlight. Perhaps because her first fear had been so great, she felt almost calm in her relief. If only she could be out of this bed, if only she could identify these ripping, smashing, tearing crashes, she would feel better. She felt vulnerable because she felt so helpless. If she could see other people waiting for the bombs, too, she would lose this feeling of war waged against her personally. It was always easier to bear trouble if you felt you weren’t the only one.
The noises slackened at last, and then ceased. She could smile to Mr. Olszak and say, with more determination than truth, “I think I’m getting accustomed to it, now.” She let go his wrist and added frankly, “But I’m glad you were here.”
He said urgently, “Can you get dressed? Can you travel for a short distance? I have a feeling that Henryk has planned your rescue from this room during the next big raid. Elzbieta gave you the warning. You saw that, didn’t you?”
Sheila nodded.
“I may have to leave you, for I have our own plans to put into action.” Olszak glanced at his watch. “It has stopped,” he said fretfully. “Damn Edward...what’s keeping him?”
And then the ’phone bell rang, a pathetic, plaintive little sound after all the noise of the last fifteen minutes.
“Edward!” Olszak said in relief and hurried to answer the ’phone. First, he listened, and than he insisted on something he proposed. He ended with the words, “Hurry, Teresa.” So it wasn’t Professor Korytowski. It must be Madame Aleksander, Sheila thought drowsily. It must be. She must ask but when Olszak returned to the room, she was already deeply asleep.
* * *
She was still asleep when Madame Aleksander arrived.
“Michal, what’s wrong?” were Teresa Aleksander’s first words.
“Gently, Teresa.” First I must calm her down, he thought. His voice was reassuring. “You are looking well, if a little tired. Come and sit down while I explain.” He locked the front door carefully.
“Where’s Edward? You were so strange over that ’phone. Why didn’t you let Barbara come up here? Why did you insist that she should go to your flat? What’s wrong?” She halted at the doorway of the living-room. “Oh, look at this glass everywhere!” Her domestic instincts were outraged.
“Gently, Teresa,” he said again as he watched her white face. The silly disorder in the room seemed as if it were the breaking point of Madame Aleksander’s resistance. Small things like that were always the last straw. He tried to make the blackout curtains secure once more, so as to shield the room’s one small light from the courtyard. “As if it mattered, anyway,” he said irritably, thinking of the city so brightly illuminated now by flames. “Now tell me your story, Teresa. How did you get here?”
By the time she had finished her story of hopeless roads, of crowded fields, of children and women machine-gunned, she was again in control—as if by talking of these things she could bring herself to accept them for the harsh reality they were. Just as Barbara and she had reached Warsaw, walking the last ten miles on foot, the raid was taking place. “All we did was to stand and crane our necks,” she said in surprise. “So did everyone else. I suppose it’s because it is all so strange: it is like another world, somehow. I kept thinking, this can’t be Warsaw. This can’t be me or Barbara... We just stood and looked. Then it was all over, and the trams started running again, and people got into them, or started walking down the streets. And then I ’phoned Edward and found you; and I’ve sent Barbara to your flat as you insisted. But why?” She pulled off her hat wearily. “I hate hats. They make my head ache. But my feet feel worse. Fortunately, I made Barbara wear a pair of sensible shoes this morning. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been here yet. Now, where is Edward?” She smoothed the heavy braid of silver hair which encircled her head. She looked more tired than she would admit: the shadows under the eyes were stronger, the high cheekbones seemed more pronounced.
“He is out. But the news is Sheila Matthews. She’s still here. She didn’t go to Britain.”
“Sheila!” Madame Aleksander was first aghast, and then dismayed. “Oh, Michal!”
“And she’s ill. Caught a severe chill. I want Barbara to nurse her at another address. I didn’t want Barbara to be seen coming here at all. No, don’t go to see Sheila now. She’s asleep. And I have more to tell you, for I must leave here, now that you have arrived to take charge.”
“What’s wrong, Michal?” It was not for nothing that Madame Aleksander had known Olszak for twenty-five years.
“I am sending Sheila to another address. She is in danger here.”
“But this house isn’t any more dangerous than other buildings. Really, Michal, bombs don’t respect pla
ce or person. We’ve all the same chance.”
“It isn’t the bombing that worries me. Let me finish, Teresa, Sheila was instrumental in uncovering certain German agents. They know she is here. She must leave and hide.”
“Well, tell the police at once, Michal. Surely you’ve done that?”
“Teresa, things don’t work so simply. The police are very busy right now doing a hundred jobs outside of their own duty. Besides, we have little time. We shall have to help Sheila. We can protect her. When the next raid warning comes through, get her dressed. When the concierge or his wife come upstairs, let her go with him or her. But you must stay behind. Say you want to wait for your brother; give any excuse that seems natural. But don’t say one thing more than that to the person who comes for Sheila. If you do, you will kill Sheila.”
Madame Aleksander looked at him unbelievingly. “Michal!” she said. Yet he was serious: he really meant what he said.
“You will hear the full story later,” he was saying. “I will see that Sheila is safe. And Barbara. In two or three days, you will see both of them again. Please trust me in this.”
“But of course,” she said slowly. “Of course I trust your judgment.” She followed him into the hall. He opened the bedroom door and they stood looking at the sleeping girl. Madame Aleksander crossed quickly over to the bed. “Her brow is damp. She’s flushed. Her breathing is heavy. Michal, I don’t think she should leave this bed. Really, I don’t.” Olszak said firmly, almost coldly, “She must go. Now do you see how desperate the situation is if I insist she must get up and go in her present condition?”
Madam Aleksander nodded. “She looks so young at the moment. There is always something so pathetic about the young when they are asleep: all their grown-up ways quite gone.”
“She’s twenty-three. What were you doing when you were twenty-three?”
Madam Aleksander smiled gently. “In Siberia, with my husband. Andrew was only a year old. Stanislaw had such dreadful bronchitis I never thought he would live.”
“But he did. You all did. Hardship and danger destroys fewer people than indulgence.”
“Sometimes I used to think that if we suffered, then we would save our children from suffering,” she said sadly. “Now it seems as if no generation escapes suffering.”
“Each generation suffers so that its children will be strong, for children whose fathers have escaped hardship come to think that life is easy. Soon they believe that easiness is life. There is no greater danger to a country than when its citizens assume that danger no longer exists.”
“I wish I didn’t believe you,” Madame Aleksander said. “I wish I didn’t.” At the door, she gave him her hand to kiss.
In the kitchen cupboard she found a dustpan and broom. She turned the radio on, so that she might hear the next air raid warning. She took off her costume jacket and rolled up the sleeves of her white silk blouse. How do you begin to clean up so much broken glass? she wondered.
She had almost finished the seemingly impossible task, when the radio suddenly interrupted its concert, and in place of violins came the impersonal voice of the announcer. “Look out! Look out!” So many enemy planes passing this zone, and then this zone, and then this zone. They were heading for the centre of the city. She hurried into the bedroom. “Wake up, Sheila, wake up,” she was saying frantically as the radio voice warned the last zone of all: “Warsaw! Warsaw!”
“Quick, Sheila, quick.” Madame Aleksander was already drawing a thin stocking over Sheila’s damp instep. “Wake up, Sheila. Air raid warning. Wake up.” Madame Aleksander was in tears, tears shed in anger at her own weakness at ever having promised to get Sheila out of this flat. “Sheila, my dear Sheila,” she was saying. “I’ll never forgive myself.” She hugged the girl tightly.
Sheila forgot to be surprised. The quinine was playing havoc with her head. She had begun to shiver again once she had left the warm bed. Only when Madame Aleksander had managed to close the zipper on her girdle, and had slipped her skirt over her head, did she say, “Madame Aleksander! I thought you’d never come.” Madame Aleksander blinked back the tears, and gave Sheila a second hug, and then pushed her arms into the sleeves of her linen jacket.
“Where’s your coat?”
Sheila nodded towards the curtain which disguised the pegs on the wall. But even with the coat’s warmth belted tightly round her, its collar turned up round her ears and across her throat, she was trembling with cold.
The anti-aircraft guns were going into action. As Sheila fumbled weakly after a shoe which her foot had kicked by accident under the bed, the door opened and Elzbieta entered. She had pretended to retire for the night. She had pinned a shawl round her head to hide the thin plaits of hair. A coat hung over a tent-like nightdress. Her bare feet had been thrust into an old pair of sand-shoes.
“Everyone downstairs,” she said in Polish. “It’s a big raid. Orders.”
Madame Aleksander, kneeling beside the bed with one arm stretched under it, produced the missing shoe. It was probably her exertions which made her face so red and unnatural.
“Miss Matthews is ready,” Madame Aleksander said. “I don’t think she is well enough, but she insists a shelter would safer.”
“It certainly would. Hear that? Come on, I’ll help her,” Elzbieta said.
“I’ll follow. I must get my own coat, and my bag, and my brother’s manuscript. He would want me to take it with me.”
Elzbieta nodded agreeably. She was pleased at this turn of events. Madame Aleksander saw a last, almost despairing, look from Sheila, as Elzbieta urged her out of the door. The woman was holding the girl very firmly around the waist. A sudden chill struck Madame Aleksander’s heart. She was afraid, not of the bombs beginning to fall so methodically, so callously. She was afraid for Sheila, for Barbara, for little Teresa and Stefan and Marta. She was afraid for Andrew on a crowded road leading to the front for Stanislaw who was still in Warsaw. Even for Eugenia, his wife, much as it was hard to like her. For if anything happened to Eugenia, it would hurt Stanislaw; and anything that hurt one of her children hurt her. She had become part of them, just as they had once been part of her.
This war has scattered us, she thought sadly. Now none of us even knows what the other is doing, where he is, whether be needs us. We are all shut off from each other as if we were strangers. Each time a bomb falls, I shall wonder if it is worse for them wherever they are...
The planes were almost overhead now.
Madame Aleksander switched off the meagre light. She clasped her slender fingers and knelt beside the bed in the deafening darkness.
9
THE ARREST
“Hurry up. No time to lose.” The door had closed on Madame Aleksander’s anxious face. Outside, the babel of sounds had increased. The woman’s arm tightened around Sheila’s waist, urging her through the dark courtyard, past the shouting men, round a pointing gun, into the entrance gate. Tonight no blue-painted bulb was needed to light the vault. A dim glow was reflected from red patches in the sky.
“In here, quick.” The woman pulled her into the doorway of the porter’s lodging.
“Here,” a man’s voice echoed sharply, and firm hands guided her through the dark narrow hall into a poorly lit room. The smell of stewed sausage and sour cabbage was everywhere. The hands freed her, and Sheila caught the edge of a table for support its dishes rattling nervously as her weight shifted them. She wished she liked the smell of stewed sausage and sour cabbage. The nearest chair seemed so far away, and her legs had suddenly lost the power to move. Olszak was right: this was worse than bombs.
“As soon as the raid is over,” Henryk was bellowing, “Martin will have the car here. And as soon as the car’s here, we can all stop worrying.” The outside noises slackened, and he could drop his voice to a shout. “So you’re Anna Braun, Hofmeyer’s little surprise packet ‘You’re a fool,’ I told him this morning, ‘to think that you’re important enough, to pick and choose your own private agents. What do
you think you are? A head of a department?’”
“You were the fool,” Elzbieta said. She paused for a sudden burst of gunfire to finish before she went on. “Hofmeyer’s got influence. He soon will be the head of a department.”
“I’m superior to any Hofmeyer. Just remember that, my girl.”
The background of noise lessened again. But the last crashes and slams and smashes had seemed to make Elzbieta angrier.
“Yes. You were. But his time is coming. He’s chosen the right friends. He will probably be made the head of a district. It’s a pity you didn’t use a little more tact my man. I’m tired of playing a porter’s wife. It’s time you got something better for us than this. Before I tied up with you, I lived in the Athene Palast, and the Dorchester, and the Waldorf-Astoria. This is what I get now.” She flung her arms tensely apart.
Sheila was praying, let them go on using their bad temper on each other; let them bicker, and perhaps they’ll forget to question me. But her legs were treacherous. She sank to the ground, kneeling beside the table, shifting it with her weight. Henryk took a step forward, peered down at the flushed face leaning against the table leg. Sheila’s eyes were closed. Her breath came in short stabs.
“She’s ill,” he said, and felt her brow. “She’s damned ill.”
“Doped,” the woman said. “Why all the sympathy? Last week I had a worse cold than that. I had a pain which bent my back double. But I kept on my feet and did my work. Much credit I got for it, too.”
“Shut up. She’s ill. She’ll never stand the journey out of Warsaw. Martin will have a dead woman on his hands. What will Hofmeyer say then?”
“None of us is irreplaceable.”
“Tell that to Hofmeyer.”
“So you think he’s important now, do you?” Elzbieta sneered.
“Shut up,” Henryk said savagely. “Help me get her onto this chair.”
The noises offstage had burst out again with uncontrolled fury.
“It won’t matter whether she’s ill or not if a bomb hits this dump,” Elzbieta shouted. “Did you hear that one? It was the closest yet.”
While Still We Live Page 10
