While Still We Live

by Helen Macinnes

  “Reading simple Polish stories to the younger children. Drawing funny pictures. Making rabbits out of handkerchiefs. Barbara won’t let me do much of the heavier work, yet. Sort of funny, isn’t it, to spend the last six days since I’ve seen you doing nothing but thinking up things so that the children won’t think of other things? And what have you been doing?”

  “The usual.”

  “The last of the diplomats and the journalists left four days ago.”

  “Meaning, what am I still doing here? Much the same as you are. Probably less.” He smiled and added, “How’s friend Olszak?”

  Sheila was smiling too, but her eyes were watchful. “Tell me, Russell, did you ask me to dinner tonight because you were being polite, or because you wanted to keep track of Sheila Matthews?”

  He wasn’t smiling now, although this was the biggest surprise she had yet given him. “I had a much more natural reason than either of those,” he answered, and saw he had routed her. She was still watching him, but this time she wasn’t quite sure whether to be pleased at the implied compliment or to be afraid that she had seen a compliment where none was intended. She shifted her ground and got back onto a safer level of conversation.

  “What about your job?”

  “That’s over, meanwhile. I think that I’ll get it back once I do get out of Poland. The New York office will come round to seeing it my way. If ever they wanted a big story, then this is the place to get it and not on the road to Rumania.” He was being casual about it, but Sheila guessed he was more worried than he sounded. He had been enthusiastic about his job; now, perhaps, he had ended the career he had chosen by his decision to stay here. He went on talking as if to persuade himself that all was well. “There’s one other American reporter left. He has the same idea as I have. And my Swedish friend and several others on the staff of the American Bank are still here. The bank is going to keep open even if the Germans do take over. Then there are skeletons staffs at all the neutral embassies. So we aren’t the only foreigners left in Warsaw.”

  “But why doesn’t your head office see it your way now? Why did you have to lose your job?”

  “I’ll get it back again, perhaps. That’s more than you can say for the guys in this country. And anyway, the New York office was probably right. It’s quite a chance that my big story will be cold news by the time I leave here.” Sheila’s face was such a study in horror that a smile was forced out of him.

  “But people have got to listen,” she said. “If they don’t then all this sacrifice is useless.”

  “People react in ways you don’t expect. Some will see the writing on the wall, and start taking action. Some will say it’s propaganda and warmongering. And some will say that it’s all too tragic—give us something with a tune in it. Why should they listen anyway? I agree with you, personally. But why should they? Why shouldn’t they just go on concentrating on pleasanter subjects?”

  “Because it weakens them, because they are making themselves incomplete, because—” She floundered in her attempt to express what she felt: her emotions were racing far ahead of the words on her tongue. She took a deep breath. “Look. This evening I arrived here babbling about Greek tragedy. Now I know I really meant it. For why did the Greeks believe so much in tragedy? They must have, or they couldn’t have written such good ones. Didn’t they believe that men must have a periodical housecleaning in their minds and emotions? Wasn’t that why they gave men drama which roused their pity and fear? Pity was for the characters in the tragedy; fear was for the audience’s own chance of having the same kind of experience. Pity and fear together make a powerful purge for any mind. A public which won’t look at or listen to tragedy develops a sluggish mind. That’s what the ancient Greek knew. And the richness of their minds has never been equalled.”

  “Didn’t I hear some place that Athens once fell? And for good?”

  “Yes, it fell when its people didn’t want to hear or believe unpleasant things.” Sheila relaxed again. “You see,” she said more quietly, “I really feel this. I really believe it I am worried for those people outside: not the people here—I pity and I admire them. And I feel so angry when I see what is happening to them that I could go out and kill fifty Germans with my own bare hands. I could... If I couldn’t I would be a callous wretch. But I worry... Poland is nailed to the cross. And the rest of humanity will not be warned in time. If what you say is true, that your news of the siege will be cold news in a month or two, then this whole sacrifice is in vain.”

  “You speak like a Pole.”

  “No,” Sheila said slowly, “like a Scot. If I were a Pole, then sacrifice in itself would be so noble that I wouldn’t worry about what it pays for. I can’t bear to see sacrifice wasted.”

  The old waiter stood beside them. “Another alert has been sounded. The management offers the wine cellars as suitable shelter.” He had said it so often in the last three weeks that he might have been announcing that veal was off the menu today. “This way,” he added, and waited for them to rise.

  Stevens looked at Sheila with an eyebrow raised.

  “No one bothers, now,” she said, and Stevens shook his head at the waiter. The old man nodded and went slowly as if he had expected that. His shoulders were bent, his feet hardly lifted off the ground. He was very old. He went to the other tables. Only three people rose, and these hurried out of doors with the business-like look of some duty to be done. Air raid wardens, Sheila thought. They had probably come here to relax in an off-duty interval. But they had known there was no off-duty time for anyone when a big raid was announced.

  “It must be a very big one,” Sheila. “They don’t bother to let us know about the average ones, now.”

  The American nodded, lit another cigarette, and kept looking at her.

  “The Greeks...” he said. “I believe we were talking about the Greeks. So you don’t believe in modern progress?”

  “Bigger and better battles?” She flinched suddenly and caught the edge of the table. “Wish I wouldn’t do that,” she said shamefaced, after the explosion had died away.

  “I was almost under the table, myself, at that moment.” They both laughed at that, rather too loudly, rather too vehemently.

  “Let’s keep talking,” the American urged. I didn’t bring her here to have her talk, he thought and laughed again, this time at himself.

  “I’m overtalking,” Sheila said. “I don’t know why... I don’t usually do this.”

  “It’s the reaction to the bombs,” Stevens said gently. “Some people think of food all the time. Others want to sleep. Others want to make love. Others talk their heads off.”

  Sheila smiled. “Unfortunate for you that I am the kind that...” She paused, as if she had said more than she should have.

  “Talks,” the American concluded. He was laughing again. This is mad, he thought. The bombs are falling, and I’m laughing and I haven’t much to laugh about; this evening isn’t going to end as I had planned at all. And I’m laughing. “You loved Andrew Aleksander like a brother, and you love me like a father confessor. What’s wrong with you anyway? Or should I ask what’s wrong with Andrew or with me? Sorry: I see I’m embarrassing you. But some day I’d like to know.”

  Sheila searched for one glove which was, as usual, under the table.

  “I’d like to know, too,” she said in a low voice and accepted the glove from Stevens. There was a loose thread in its thumb. If she pulled it, there would be a hole. It would be nice to outwit that rule, she thought. She pulled the thread. “Perhaps,” she said, “I want to be quite sure. The way Barbara and Jan Reska were quite sure. I’d rather be alone all my life than not sure.” Her thumb came through the opened seam.

  “Stop doing that!” Stevens said. “You’re ruining it.”

  She obeyed, much to her own surprise. And she suddenly knew what she had missed in Andrew: she wanted someone who could say “stop doing that” now and again. She stared at Russell Stevens and thought, if I could mix you and And
rew together, I’d be sure for the rest of my life.

  “That was a big one,” Stevens said, listening, “not far from here either.”

  Sheila listened, too. The long, dull roar from the east gathered intensity. She was suddenly afraid. Not for herself, not for the people round her. She rose, clutching her opened powder box and lipstick. She jammed them into her bag as they were. “I must go,” she said.

  “Hey, wait. The check,” Stevens called to her, and then as he saw her reaching the door, he threw down some notes and coins on the table and started after her. He caught her arm as she stood hesitating in the doorway. Together they looked out into the street, dark under its black ceiling of smoke, as if they were reconnoitring. It didn’t take long to develop little habits for self-preservation when you lived in a beleaguered city.

  “Must we?” Stevens shouted.

  Sheila nodded. We must, she told herself as she shrank from the noise and desolation of the street. She tried to shake herself free from the terror she had suddenly felt inside the restaurant. Someone called my name, someone called me, she was thinking. She tried to tell that to the serious face beside her, but she couldn’t. Stevens thought she was mad enough already. Perhaps she was. Sheila, Sheila!... How could she have heard that, inside the restaurant? How could anyone hear anything in this noise? The attack was more to the east of the city, over towards the banks of the Vistula. The black smoke above the buildings became lined with orange. Somewhere there was fire. The American was looking down at her face. His grip tightened on her hand.

  “Keep to the doorways. One at a time. When I say dodge, dodge,” he shouted, his mouth close to her ear. And then they were out into the street, into Marszalkowska Avenue which had once been Warsaw’s gayest. The smart clothes, and the laughing voices, and the music and flowered window boxes, were gone. Only the trees still stood untouched in their neatly spaced circles of earth. A gaily striped awning flapped pathetically over a boarded window. The solid buildings stared across the avenue at each other’s wounds. The names over the shops and night clubs and cafés were meaningless. On the roadway were fragments of bodies instead of taxicabs and red tramcars. On the pavements were broken slabs of concrete, like the crushed remains of a huge ice floe ruptured by its own force. The people who walked there, now, were people with urgent heart-twisting business. They walked quickly, dark figures moving through a nightmare of sound. There was the constant thunder of the encircling guns, the scream of plunging shells, the angry bark of planes, the whistle of dropping bombs, the roar of explosions, the staccato crescendo of machine-gun fire as a plane swept contemptuously low. Then suddenly there would be a terrifying blank of silence; a short lull to be counted only in moments, before the dentist’s drill plunged once again into the naked gum.

  “Where?” Stevens asked in one of these moments.

  “The children’s hostel,” Sheila had time to answer, and only time. For Stevens pushed her violently into the slight alcove of a boarded doorway and stood behind her, pinning her flat against, almost into, the wall. Then she heard the planes’ sudden roar as they swooped low, heard the sound of heavy hail on the pavement behind her. It was over before she had even grasped the coming of danger. In the street others were now stepping away from the walls, or were rising from the ground where they had flung themselves. Two women remained on their knees to finish decently the prayer they had begun. Some bodies didn’t rise.

  Stevens was staring at the sky beyond the University buildings which they were now approaching. The children’s hostel, Sheila had said. And the children’s hostel lay over there. Sheila was staring too. The low-hanging smoke clouds and the coming of night made it difficult to see clearly. And then the flames broke loose, leaping higher than the black clouds. Stevens pointed suddenly to the north and centre of the city. Flames all round were growing. The fires had begun. The clouds became scarlet. Sheila, remembering how Warsaw had been set on fire with incendiaries three nights ago after the water supply had been blasted into uselessness, gripped Stevens’ arm in desperation. Five hundred fires three nights ago. Tonight, how many? They cast all caution aside, and broke into a run towards the once pleasant garden and the once quiet square of houses.

  “It’s the hostel,” Sheila kept saying. Stevens couldn’t hear her, but he knew, too. They were near enough to realise now that it could only be the hostel or one of the buildings beside it.

  They reached the open square flanked by well-spaced, modern houses. One of the buildings was already being devoured by flames.

  “It’s the hostel,” Sheila said again.

  A warden shouted “No nearer: the walls are dangerous.” He pulled them roughly to a halt. “Help with the sandbags,” he yelled over his shoulder as he rushed towards a group of firemen who were entering the other buildings. The incendiaries were just beginning their work on these houses. Fire fighters, already on the rooftops, were silhouetted against the knee-high fence of dancing flames. They were emptying the sandbags, which had once protected the buildings’ foundations from blast, over the greedy tongues. No water, Sheila remembered—no water. Stevens was already lifting a bag of sand onto his shoulders.

  “Stay back,” he shouted to her. “You’ve been ill. You can’t manage this.” He pushed her towards a woman who had paused to wipe the streams of soot-stained perspiration out of her eyes. “She’s been ill,” he yelled in Polish, and plunged into the stream of people carrying the sandbags towards the doorways of the buildings. At the doorways, they were met by others who came down the stairways to seize the bags and carry them up to the roof. The procession of old men, women and boys never halted. Some of the younger men had found ladders and climbed, with their load of sand, like flies against the face of the buildings.

  The woman pulled Sheila back roughly as she tried to lift a load of sand.

  “It takes strength,” she said not unkindly, and pointed towards the centre of the square, towards the huddle of figures on the grass and flowerbeds. “Help there!” She herself lifted a bag of sand and joined the moving stream as Stevens had done. Sheila looked towards the women lying on mattresses and blankets in the middle of the broad gardens. They must have been evacuated from the maternity hospital across the square. Nurses were with the women; ambulances were already arriving to take them to new quarters. A young girl, too young to be able to lift a sandbag, was dragging it slowly over the grass. The desperation on her face decided Sheila. She caught the other end of the bag. Singly you and I aren’t much good, she thought, but together we can help. And to help with the fire-fighting, now that the people inside the buildings had been evacuated, seemed the most important thing to her. Stevens passed them as he returned for another load. He saw Sheila and the girl. He shook his head, but his face relaxed for a moment.

  On one of the roofs, the fires had been extinguished. There was a sigh of relief from the crowd, almost swelling to a shout of triumph. But the neighbouring house had suddenly five little crowns of fire, and the people’s work was all to begin over again. Other houses were less lucky: there the flames were higher, but they were still fought. It was then that Sheila heard the increased drone of planes, like a mosquito’s hum mounting at her ear. The planes were so low that the flames, leaping above the pall of smoke, lighted their shark-like bellies. Some swooped even down between the flames. Machine guns added their noise to the crackle and roar of fire. And the firemen, fighting their desperate battle on the rooftops, suddenly ceased to be black silhouettes: there was nothing left but the orange flames. A woman cried out in helpless anger. Looking at the tense faces, blackened with smoke, wet with sweat, Sheila saw the woman’s impotent hate repeated in the bloodshot eyes as they stared at the sky.

  Other fire fighters had climbed to the roofs to replace those who had been murdered. And again, just as they seemed on the point of controlling the flames, the planes roared down. Again the machine guns levelled at them with the precision of scythe strokes in a cornfield. Only two of them were left standing. The flames roared high
er in triumph. Sand was useless now.

  Stevens came to Sheila, pulled her hands from her eyes, and led her away from the building across the grass. “It’s no good,” he kept repeating, “it’s no good. Damn and blast them all to hell.” They sat down on an upturned barrow which one woman had trundled until the flames had shown them all that it was useless. He kept his face turned away from Sheila, and Sheila, weeping openly, looked towards the big building which had been the first to flare up. The red walls were now crumbling, falling like a row of children’s red and yellow blocks.

  “That was where we were,” she said at last. “I wonder where Barbara took the children. Perhaps to the shelter?” She looked at the dark hump in the middle of the grassy square. She rose, unsteadily. Her back felt as if it would never straighten, her feet were heavy, her hand throbbed. She looked at it curiously. It had a raw, shiny look. It began to throb and burn.

  Stevens rose too, and then he looked at her and said, “What’s wrong?”

  “I seem to have got my hand blistered. I can’t think when... We’d better find Barbara. She will be with the children.”

  He took her arm, and they walked towards the dark mound of earth. There was no one sheltering there. There were only two nurses who had come with some first-aid equipment. A line of injured women and men began to form. But the stock of medical supplies was low, and only the worst cases were being treated. The most desperate, of these (“I told them the building was going to fall,” an exhausted warden was repeating to everyone who would listen) were being taken to the emergency hospital cars which were now arriving.

  “I’ll take you to the apartment. I’ve got some Vaseline there which will cover your hand. Hold it up. Don’t let the blood run down into it.” He turned away from the crowd of exhausted, worried, suffering people, and led her away from the shelter.

  “Barbara,” Sheila kept repeating. “We must find Barbara.” Everyone kept repeating his words, as if by saying them over and over again other people might understand, as if he hadn’t heard himself speak and thought other people hadn’t heard him speak, as if... Sheila stopped thinking, for even her thoughts were repeating their words.