by Alan Furst
It was very dark at the border, so pitch-pine torches were brought. And several volunteers among the passengers were given prybars. The floorboards in the coaches were prized up and, by flickering torchlight, the Polish National Gold Reserve, more than eleven million dollars, was carried into Romania.
Standing with Nowak by the train, Captain de Milja felt his heart stir with pride. From the Pilava local, with its shattered windows and bullet gashes, its locomotive reeking of singed bearings and burnt oil, the passengers handed out crates stamped national bank of poland. Blood had been shed for this; by a locomotive fireman, a ten-year-old girl, a boy from a country village. By a conductor of the Polish National Railways who, teeth clenched, pistol in hand, had disappeared into the darkness. De Milja did not believe it had been shed in vain and stood very nearly to attention as his little army struggled past with the heavy boxes: Vladimir Herschensohn, his violin carried off by Ukrainian bandits, the veterinarian who had treated the wounded, the pensioned engineer, the peasant girl, the man and woman—from some comfortable professional class—who had run onto a battlefield to save a life, a few country people, a few workers, women and children. Poland had lost a war, this was what was left.
20 October 1939. Bucharest, Romania.
Now the war was over, a pleasant autumn.
Hitler had what he wanted. Maybe he did, after all, have a right to it, a case could be made, you had to accept the reality of politics in central Europe. The days were cool and sunny, the harvest in, a little fog in the morning and geese overhead. Germany had Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and was, officially, officially, at war with England and France. But this was politics; eddies and swirls and tidal shifts in the affairs of diplomats. Slowly the sun warmed the squares and plazas, the boulevards and little winding streets and, by midmorning, all across Europe, it was just right for a coffee on the café terrace.
On the terrace of the Dragomir Niculescu restaurant, a man at leisure—or perhaps he simply has no place to go. A respectable gentleman, one would have to say. The suit not new, of course. The shirt a particular color, like wheat meal, that comes from washing in the sink and drying on a radiator. The posture proud, but maybe, if you looked carefully, just a little lost. Not defeated, nothing that drastic. Haven’t we all had a moment of difficulty, a temporary reversal? Haven’twe all, at some time or another, washed out a shirt in the sink?
Still, it must be said, the times are not so easy. The police are seen a good deal lately in the neighborhood of rooming houses that take in refugees, and the medical school does have all the, ah, subjects that its anatomy students might require, and the police launch on the nearby river almost always has a customer on the early-morning patrol, sometimes two. Difficult, these times. Discontent, dislocation, shifting power, uneasy alliance. The best way, nowadays, is to remain flexible, supple. Almost everybody would agree with that.
Speaking of the police: the gentleman on the terrace of the Niculescu is evidently of interest to at least three, one uniformed, two not, and they are in turn doubtless assisted by various barmen, drivers of horsedrawn trasuri cabs, and the rouge-cheeked girls left over from last night. Such a wealth of attention! But, frankly, whose fault is that? Poor Romania, the flood comes to its door—Jews and socialists and misfits and Poles and spies and just about any damn thing you care to name. It’s gotten so bad they’ve had to put little cards on the tables at the Plaza-Athénée. by order of the government, political discussion is forbidden.
The gentleman on the terrace of the Niculescu ordered a second coffee. When it came, he took a handful of leu coins out of his pocket, then hesitated a moment, uncertain what was worth what. The waiter, the natural curl of his lip tightening just a bit, deftly plucked out the right ones and dropped them in his waiter’s saucer. Here was the land of “saruta mina pe care nu o poti musca”—kiss the hand you cannot bite—inhabited solely by the contemptuous and the contemptible, and those who had some doubt as to where they belonged could find instruction in the eyes of any café waiter.
If the gentleman on the terrace of the Niculescu didn’t particularly care, it was, at least in part, because his head swam with hunger. Just behind him, lunchtime lobsters and crayfish were being set out on beds of shaved ice, the Niculescu’s kitchen was preparing its famous hotmeat-and-fried-mushroom patties. Two peddlers with packs and long beards had stopped nearby to eat slices of white cheese and garlic on cold corn polenta, even the Gypsies, just across the square, were cooking a rabbit over a pot of burning tar. The gentleman on the terrace took a measured sip of coffee. Discipline, he told himself. Make it last.
The woman was stylish, somewhere in middle age, wearing a little hat with a half-veil. She arrived in a trasuri, bid it wait with a wave of a gloved hand, and accepted the doorman’s arm to descend from the carriage. The gentleman on the terrace was pleased to see her. He stood politely while she settled herself on a chair. The waiter pushed the lank hair back from his forehead and said “Service” in French as he went for her coffee.
She drank only a sip. They spoke briefly, then she whispered by his ear, and they held hands for a moment beneath the table. He stood, she rose, he took her hand, she presented her veil for a brush of his lips, said a parting word behind the back of her hand, walked quickly to her trasuri and was gone, leaving a cloud of lilac scent. “God go with you, Captain,” was what she’d said.
The gentleman on the terrace touched the pocket of his jacket, making sure of the money she’d passed to him, then strolled slowly across the square, past the policemen, uniformed and not, and their helpers, past old women sweeping the cobblestones with twig brooms, past a flock of pigeons that rose into the air with beating wings.
Captain de Milja left that night. He’d had enough of Bucharest: the rooming house, the police, and the assorted ghosts and wolves who lived in the cafés. And more than enough of Romania. The country, under German diplomatic pressure, had started to intern Polish army units crossing the border—as they had interned most of the senior ministers of the Polish government. Time to go.
He traveled under a cover he’d created for himself, using a blank identity card they’d left in his dossier the night he went to work for Vyborg. Name: Jan Boden. That made him a Silesian Pole—like his father—with a good knowledge of German and likely some German blood. Profession: Buyer of wood for coffins. That made it normal for him to travel, yet wasn’t a profession that the Germans would want to draft—not, for example, like an expert machinist—for labor in Germany. He wore a leather coat so he wouldn’t freeze, and carried a VIS, the Polish army automatic pistol, so he wouldn’t be taken prisoner. If he had to drop it quickly somewhere, he could always get another. After six years of war, 1914–1918, then the 1920–1921 campaign against the Red Army, Poland was an armory. Every barn, every cellar, every attic had its weapons and ammunition. And the Poles were not Russian peasants; they cleaned and oiled and maintained, because they liked things that worked.
He had some time to spare—the message that the courier delivered along with the money was Room 9 at Saint Stanislaus Hospital on Grodny Street by 23 October—and that probably saved his life. He took a train from Bucharest up to Sighisoara in the Transylvanian Alps, then another, going west, that crossed into Hungary near Arad. Changed again, this time going north to Kisvarda, in the Carpathians. As it grew dark, he caught a ride on a truck into a border village by a stream that fed into the Tisza, close to one of several passes over the mountains.
He entered the local tavern, ordered beer and sausage, and was approached by the local passeurs—smugglers—within the hour. He said he wished to be guided into Poland, a price was set, everybody spit on their palms and shook hands.
But soon after they started out, he realized that, contractual spits notwithstanding, they meant to kill him and take his money. It was black dark. The two passeurs, reeking of taverns, goats, and rancid fat, squatted on either side of him. They whispered, and touched his arms. Too much, as though familiarizing themselve
s with his physical capacity, and dissipating his protective magic. One of them had a knife in his belt—a dull, rusty thing, the idea of being stabbed with it gave de Milja a chill.
“I have to go behind a tree,” he said in Polish. Then he faded away in the darkness and just kept going. He found what he believed to be the south bank of the Tisza, then a dirt track that someone might have intended as a road, then a bridge, where he could hear the unmistakable sounds of Russian soldiers getting drunk: singing, then arguing, then fighting, then weeping, then snoring. As one of the Ostrow uncles used to say, “Here is something a man can depend on—never mind some silly ball rolling down an inclined plane.”
De Milja crossed the bridge a little after two in the morning; he was then in Soviet-occupied Poland. He walked another hour, winter cold numbing his face at the high altitude, then came upon a deserted farm—no barking dogs—opened the milking shed, kicked together a straw bed for himself, and actually slept until dawn.
By midday on the twenty-first of October, he was in the town of Kosow, where the railroad went to Tarnopol. He bought a ticket and caught the next train; his night in the milk shed had left him rumpled, unshaven, a little smelly, and thoroughly acceptable—proletarian—to the Russian guards at the railroad station. He leaned his head against the cold glass of the window as the train crossed the Dniester: yes, he was under orders to go to Warsaw, but he meant to find his wife at the clinic, meant somehow to get her across the border into Romania. Let them intern her if they liked—it was better than being at the mercy of the Russians.
In Tarnopol, the taxis had disappeared from the railway station, so he walked through the winding streets in late afternoon, found the way out of town, and was soon headed for the clinic down a rutted dirt path. He knew this country, the Volhynia, it was home to his mother’s family estates, more than three thousand acres of rolling hills, part forest, part farmland, with bountiful hunting and poor harvests and no way to earn a zloty, a lost paradise where one could gently starve to death with a contented heart beneath a pale, lovely moon.
The birch trees shimmered in the wind as night came on, butterflies hovered over a still pond in a meadow, the shadowy woods ran on forever—a fine place to write a poem or be murdered or whatever fate might have in mind for you just then. The little boy in de Milja’s heart was every bit as scared of this forest as he’d always been, the VIS pistol in his pocket affording just about as much protection from the local spirits as the rock he used to carry.
It was near twilight when he reached the clinic. The wicker wheelchairs stood empty on the overgrown lawns, the white pebble paths were unraked; it was all slowly going back to nature.
He walked up a long path lined with Lombardy poplars, was not challenged as he entered the hundred-year-old gabled house, formerly the heart of a grand estate. There were no bearded doctors, no brisk nurses, no local girls in white aprons to bring tea and cake, and there seemed to be fewer patients about than he remembered. But, on some level, the clinic still functioned. He saw a few old village women making soup in the kitchen, the steam radiators were cold but a fire had been built in the main parlor and several patients, wrapped in mufflers and overcoats, were staring into it and talking quietly among themselves.
His wife was sitting a little apart from the group, hands held between her knees—something she did when she was cold—face hidden by long, sand-colored hair. When he touched her shoulder she looked startled, then recognized him and smiled for a moment. She had sharp features and generous, liquid eyes, the face of a person who could not hurt anything. Strange, he thought, how she doesn’t seem to age.
“Helena,” he said.
She searched for something, then looked down, hiding her eyes.
“Let’s sit over here,” he said. Often it was best just to go forward. He took her hand and led her to a sofa where they could be private. “Are you all right?” he asked.
A little shrug, a wry smile.
“Have you seen soldiers? Russian soldiers?”
That bore thinking about—she simply did not hear things the way others did, perhaps she heard much more, echos and echos of meaning until no question could have an answer. “Yes,” she said, hesitantly.
“Was anyone . . . hurt?”
“No.”
She was thinner, her eyes seemed bruised, but they always did. She disliked the Veronal they gave her to calm down and sleep, and so hid it somewhere and paced away the nights.
“Enough to eat?”
She nodded yes.
“So then?” he said, pretending to be gruff.
This never failed to please her. “So then?” she said, imitating him.
He reached for her, resting his hand lightly on the soft hair that fell to her shoulder, it was something she allowed. “Helena,” he said.
Her eyes wandered. What did he want?
“The Russians,” he continued, “are here now, perhaps you know. I—”
“Please,” she said, eyes pleading. She would not stand for exegesis, could not bear it.
He sighed and took her hands. She took them back—gently, she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, she simply wanted the hands—folded them in her lap and gave him a puzzled look. Usually he was so courteous.
“I have been thinking that I ought to take you away from here,” he said.
She considered it—he could see a certain shadow touch her face as she reasoned. Then she shook her head no. The way she did it was not vague, or crazy, but sharp, completely in control. She’d thought through everything: soldiers, what they did, how bad it was, that she was not vulnerable to whatever he feared might happen to her.
He dropped his hands into his lap. He felt completely helpless. He considered taking her away by force, but he knew it wouldn’t work.
“To go where?” she asked, not unkindly.
He shook his head, defeated.
“Will you walk me to the lake house?” she asked. She could be soft and shy to a point where he came near tears—the ache in the back of the throat. He stood and offered her his arm.
What she called “the lake house” had once been a pavilion, where guests were served cream cakes, and tea from a silver urn, and the doctors could speak frankly in peaceful surroundings. Now it was dark and abandoned and some bird out in the reed marsh beyond the lake repeated a low, evening call.
She stood facing him, almost touching, reluctant to speak at first, and, even for her, very troubled. “I want you to make love to me as you used to,” she said. One last time—her unspoken words were clear as a musical note.
Looking around, he found a cane deckchair, gray with years of weather. He sat down, then invited her to sit on his lap with a flourish, as though it were a masterpiece of a bed, all silk and wool, in some grand hotel. She liked to play like this, raised her skirt just an inch, settled herself on his legs and laid her head against his shoulder. A little wind blew across the lake, the reeds bent, a few ducks flew over the marsh on the horizon. Idly, he stroked her dry lips with an index finger, she raised her face to it, and he saw that she had closed her eyes.
He took the hem of her sweater in his fingertips and lifted it to her shoulders, then lowered her slip, pulled her coat tight around her for warmth, wet his finger in her mouth and rubbed her breasts for a long time. They were heavier than he remembered but that had always been true of her, even when she was nineteen—her body full and round for a girl with a small face. She sighed, sentimental, yes, this was what she’d meant. Then she hummed softly and where her weight rested on him he could feel the V of her legs widen. When he slid his hand beneath her skirt, she smiled. Covertly, he watched her face, wondered what sort of dream she was having. Her lips moved, drew back slowly, then parted; her breathing became louder, shallow and rhythmic, until her weight suddenly pressed into him.
“Stand up,” he said. He stepped behind her, slid her coat down her arms and spread it on the broad, dry planks of the pavilion floor. She took her skirt off, then stepped out of her unde
rpants. He knelt, embraced her hips, hard, as though something in the sky meant to sweep her away. She smoothed his hair—it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter. Then she settled herself on the coat, and swung her knees to one side, hands clasped beneath her head, a girl in a soap ad. He laughed.
They made love for a while; like strangers, like husband and wife, eventually like lovers. “I want to ask you,” she said quietly, almost to herself, as they lay curled around each other to keep warm. “You didn’t bring flowers, this time.” The words trailed off into the evening sounds by the lake.
“And you think, do I love you? Yes, I do.”
“But you always . . .”
“Left on the train,” he said. “You have to forgive me.”
She burrowed closer to him, he could feel the tears on her face.
On the train back to Warsaw he made a mistake.
He went north from Tarnopol, to Rovno. Stayed overnight in the railway station—technically illegal but tolerated, because people had to wait for trains, yet dangerous, because security police knew that railway stations attracted fugitives.
A uniformed NKVD guard looked through his documents, reading with a slow index finger on each word, then handed them back silently. He got out of Rovno on a dawn train to Brzesc, near the east bank of the river that formed the dividing line between German and Russian occupation forces. On this train, two men in overcoats; one of them stared at him, and, foolishly, he stared back. Then realized what he’d done and looked away. At the very last instant. He could see from the posture of the man—his age, his build—that he was somebody, likely civilian NKVD, and was about to make a point of it.
