For a long moment, she looked out to the horizon, where the sky met the land. And then she folded her arms, bent a fierce gaze upon him. “Look, Walczak. You can’t leave a little girl alone in the house all day. It’s not safe. Not for her and not for you.”
“What am I supposed to do, hire a babysitter? The fields won’t plow themselves.”
“Put her to work! That way she’s not in the house, waiting to be discovered by the first szwab soldier who gets it in his head to knock on your door looking for a free breakfast. Why don’t you send her out with the animals? The dog seems to like her. Put a babushka on her, and no one will know the difference.” To demonstrate, she whipped off her own shawl, a faded black square embroidered with flowers that must have been red once, and knotted it under the little girl’s chin. The transformation was breathtaking; without the accusatory distraction of the telltale orange curls, she could have been anyone’s child.
Standing shoulder to shoulder with the widow Michalowa, Pavel became aware of a sweet smell wafting through the night air. A flowering vine? Clover? Whatever it was, it danced on a tightrope between honey and vanilla, seducing him into noticing her uncovered hair, a miraculous glamour of lights and darks, pulled away from her face in long, smooth braids. Inside himself, he felt something perceptibly move. He wanted nothing more than to loosen her plaits, to feel the satin strands falling through his fingers. Catching himself, he almost laughed. His nails were caked with mud, and he was crusted in a contiguous layer of soil and manure from head to toe. He was even dirtier than usual.
Cezar ran his tongue around his black lips, leaned his bulky body in to Michalowa’s skirt. As she patted his scarred head, his red eyes closed, and his right leg pawed the ground in frenzied ecstasy.
“She can keep that babushka,” she said, scratching under the dog’s chin. “Don’t worry. Once they take a look at this monster, I promise you. No one will want to go near her.”
* * *
In the spring of 1944, Pavel Walczak counted among his possessions a horse, some chickens and geese, a cow, and a pig. In the past, he had enlisted the help of a neighbor’s boy to drive them to pasture. Did he dare to let the girl do it? Michalowa had a point, it was smarter to hide her in plain sight than to lock her up in the house. She spoke no Polish, but she understood it well enough. If she met up with other shepherds, she could do as her brother had suggested, pretend she was mute.
Pavel walked her to the pasture to show her the way. They made a curious parade. In front, the geese and chickens strutted proudly, like politicians showing off their ribbons. The dog galloped ahead, periodically doubling back to nip at the cow’s straggling hooves. The pig trotted briskly alongside the little girl, snuffling and wagging her bristly head with every step.
At the meadow, Pavel handed her a sack with some lunch, told her to stay put until he came back for her. She regarded him with those dark eyes, black and shiny as coffee beans. Then she took the staff and sat down beneath the spreading boughs of a chestnut tree.
He worked feverishly all that day and deep into the evening. After all, he was only one man, and already two weeks behind schedule. By the time he returned for her, it was late, stars twinkled in the cornflower-blue sky, dusk gathered in the dips and hollows of the pasture. Beyond the patchwork of fields, past the bell towers of St. Adalbert’s, there was a fading band of aqueous light. The animals had spread themselves thinly over the meadow, he could barely see them. Bustling toward him on stubby legs, the pig grunted inquisitively, clearly baffled at being kept out so late. The geese bobbled forward to form a circle around his feet. He was irritated when he found the cow knee-high in a stand of onion grass. The milk would taste of onions for days.
But where was the girl? He was surprised by the fear that tightened like a chain around his heart. Gradually, as his eyes grew accustomed to the low light, he could see the malevolent shape of the dog, his demonic eyes glowing crimson, awake and alert. Swathed in Michalowa’s babushka, she had fallen asleep among the broom and wild marjoram.
To wake her, Pavel rapped on the bottom of her feet with the staff, scolded her for nodding off. If the animals wandered into someone’s field, there would be hell to pay. That was when he noticed the holes in her shoes.
On the way back, Pavel considered his options. He couldn’t very well waltz into the shoemaker’s shop and order her another pair. People talked. By the time he left the store, one half of Włodawa would be telling the other half that Pavel Walczak was hiding Jews.
He decided to try something else. After dinner, he traced the outline of her foot on a chunk of lumber he fetched from the woodpile. By the oily light of the lamp, he began to shave long curling strips of wood onto the floor. A pair of wooden clogs took shape. He spent hours rubbing the insides with sand until they were smooth as glass.
She accepted his gift with appropriate solemnity. With a child’s agonizing slowness, she took her time removing her broken boots and arranging them just so at the side of her mattress. Equally slowly, she wiggled her little pink toes into the wooden shoes. Finally, she looked down at her feet, turning them this way and that way, like a lady in a shoe store.
“Well?” he burst out. “Do they fit?”
Emphatically, she nodded her curly head up and down, once, twice.
“Good,” he said. “Now go to bed.”
The matter was finished. But the feeling of satisfaction he took from this accomplishment would last him through the end of the season.
* * *
Pavel was preoccupied with harvesting new potatoes, that’s what he told himself. Though it was only July, he could tell it would be a good year. Not a bumper year but a solid one just the same. He would be forking potatoes out of the ground through October. Perhaps he was feeling cocky, that was why he told the girl to drive the animals home by herself.
She was late. Pavel paced back and forth on the road in front of his small cottage and peered uneasily into the distance, trying to see past the blackened foundation of a manor house shelled to rubble during the invasion. It was almost curfew, the sun was setting fast. At seven-thirty, as the sun dipped behind Jasinski’s rye field, he hurried up the path toward the pasture.
He didn’t have far to go. Just beyond the ruins of the manor house, a man on a horse came into view, taking shape against a coppery nimbus of clouds. Before the horse stood a child in a babushka that was too large for her. Pavel whipped off his hat, trembling; every farmer in the province knew that particular prancing chestnut mare.
“Is this your shepherd girl?” inquired the Reich Regional Commissioner of Agricultural Products and Services, frowning. “What’s the matter with her? She won’t talk to me.”
The babushka was askew, revealing a froth of orange curls on her forehead. Pavel found he couldn’t speak—his mouth was dry, his tongue cleaving to his palate—so he just nodded.
Reinhart tilted his head, surveying the girl with critical green eyes. People called them hypnotic. “Jewish?”
Pavel’s fingers kneaded the cloth of his cap. “No, sir. My sister’s daughter, sir. From Drohobych, sir.”
Reinhart dismounted, looked down into the diminutive round face. Pavel thought he was going to faint. True, people used to say that Reinhart was a Jew lover, but somebody’s signature had to be on those orders to shoot the Jews in Adampol. “She’s Catholic, then. Say the Lord’s Prayer for me, little girl.”
The girl stared into the green eyes. “I don’t have to say my prayers for you. I say them for God,” she snapped.
Reinhart stared back at her, stunned. And then he guffawed, an exhilarated belly laugh so deep and so unexpected that he dropped his riding crop. Pavel, standing to the side of the road, smiled uncertainly, too terrified to laugh.
After wiping tears from his eyes with pearl-gray gloves, the German officer bent down, his hands on his knees. “I know who you are,” he said to her in a soft, steady voice. “You’re Soroka’s daughter.”
And then he swooped her up in h
is arms. To Pavel’s everlasting astonishment, the German officer was pressing his cheek tightly against hers. The babushka slipped down to her shoulders, revealing the rest of her hair in all its sunset-colored glory. His next words were almost lost in the thicket of curls. “Don’t worry,” he said gently. “Your secret is safe with me. And when you see your father . . . tell him Reinhart says hello.”
Cezar sat down at Reinhart’s feet and began to gnaw contemplatively at his own hind leg. Pavel was mystified. Six months ago, this same dog had launched himself at the commandant, slavering as if he were made of raw meat.
Reinhart let the little girl slide out of his arms. He wrinkled his nose, made a face. “I remember this dog. God, what a stink! What do you call him, Cezar? Tried to rip my throat out once. He’s a hound from hell. I don’t know why you keep him.”
“His name is Fallada,” piped the little girl.
The commandant’s eyebrows arched up in mock surprise. “Fallada? But that can’t be! That’s the name of my horse!”
Fondly, she stroked the dog’s hairy neck. He pressed his boxy muzzle against her chest and sneezed, nearly bowling her over.
Reinhart put his foot in the stirrup, swung himself back up on his horse. She snorted like a prima donna and shook her lovely pedigreed head, the long tawny mane falling coquettishly across one eye.
“You’re the potato farmer, the one who’s such a good friend to Hahnemeier,” he said.
Pavel nodded, relieved. That should buy him some goodwill, he thought.
But Reinhart’s face was expressionless when he turned the horse around and said, “Be careful, farmer. We are living in dangerous times.”
* * *
Michalowa was waiting for them at the door. She was holding a heavy iron pot; she had taken to cooking for them.
Pavel had accepted the widow’s attentions with reluctance. Every time she knocked on the door, he felt ashamed all over again. She’d never mentioned any kind of trouble with Hahnemeier’s Tartars; perhaps, sloshed to the eyeballs, the Volkdeutscher had forgotten the name Pavel had slipped him. He took a guilty pleasure in her visits, though they were a measure of her regard for Soroka, whom she had liked, not for him, Walczak the collaborator.
He explained why they were late. After setting the pot on the rings of the tiled stove, she sat heavily down at the table, put a shaking hand to her forehead. Had it been any of the other local Reichsleitung—Rohlfe, Haas, even Hahnemeier—they’d be dead by now, lying beneath the soil of the rye field. Michalowa, too, because Pavel would have been tortured until he cried out her name.
After dinner, the little girl went to sleep, the dog curving himself into a U around her box. Michalowa rose to her feet. Pavel racked his brain for a way to keep her there just a little longer. “Who’s Fallada?” he said.
She sat down across from him again, giving him another chance to admire the high round cheeks, pink at the center, her skin the color of an apple after he’d cut into it. “You don’t know The Goose Girl? A princess goes to a faraway land to marry a prince, with only her maid and a talking horse for company. On the way, the wicked maid forces her to trade places. When they arrive, the maid marries the prince, and the princess is put to work as the goose girl. The talking horse knows everything, so the fake princess has it slaughtered. The butcher hangs the head outside his shop. Every time the goose girl passes, it says, If your mother only knew, her heart would surely break in two. The horse’s name is Fallada.”
Why did he have goose bumps up and down his arms? “How does it end?”
“Oh, you know. Everyone lives happily ever after. When the prince finds out he’s been fooled, he tricks the fake princess into coming up with her own punishment.” She was readying herself to leave, rearranging the babushka around her shoulders.
“What is it?”
“She’s stripped naked. They put her in a barrel lined with nails. Horses drag her through the streets until she’s dead.”
He shuddered. Those old fairy tales could really be gruesome. Her hand was already on the doorknob when he said shyly, “You know, you don’t have to go.”
As she stood there deciding, Pavel moved quickly. He brought out the slivovitz, plunked down two glasses.
“Real slivovitz!” she marveled, holding the bottle up to the lamp to test its clarity. On the opposing wall, a kaleidoscope of rainbow-colored lights chased each other across the plaster.
By the light of the smoking lamp, Pavel gazed into Marina Michalowa’s clear eyes and saw the world as it used to be, a world run by the seasons, not by soldiers with machine guns. With harvest dances and girls who wore flirty, flouncy skirts, singing as they spun flax in their parents’ parlors. Where neighbors helped one another instead of running to tell tales, where people made an honest living working the land of their fathers, where it was against the law to kill another man’s children because of how they worshipped or the color of their hair.
Over the slivovitz, she confessed: Two of her sons were fighters in the illegal Home Army, she hadn’t seen them in months. She feared sleep. When she slept, she dreamed, and when she dreamed, it was always the same thing, her boys screaming, tortured by SS butchers, or torn open in a ditch somewhere, crying out her name.
This was why, when she discovered that Pavel was hiding the saddlemaker’s daughter, she wanted to help. While her sons fought for Poland by stealing arms and sabotaging troop trains, her battle was waged in a two-room hut at the edge of a potato field. She would fight to keep a single Jewish child alive.
Pavel felt a pang of shame. His motive was self-interest, pure and simple; he was hiding the girl because the dark-haired partizan had threatened to burn him alive. Before Michalowa’s innate altruism, he was touched by an almost religious awe. He had never met anyone who could be so good, so righteous, and still so beautiful. She was like one of the saints painted on the walls in St. Adalbert’s, like the Blessed Virgin herself. Had Lidia lived, she would have been just like this, he was sure of it.
For the first time in many years, he uttered a private prayer. May the Holy Mother care for Michalowa’s sons in the same way that the widow cares for the child of a lost saddlemaker.
* * *
The dog barked and barked. Pavel roused himself from sleep before dawn to the sound of someone knocking at the door. It was a firm knock, an authoritative knock, the kind of knock that announced that the person delivering it would not allow himself to be ignored or denied entrance.
Panicking, Pavel glanced at the girl’s crate. She was gone. “All right, all right,” he groused loudly, pulling on his trousers.
It was Hahnemeier, looking sober and upright, his hands clasped behind his back. Today his eyes were a cold cluttered gray, not unfriendly, but the eyes of a tyrant just the same. “Looks like you’re a little behind with the harvest, Walczak. We expected to see your potatoes a week ago.”
“Sorry,” he said, pulling up his braces. “I’m just a one-man operation here.” Fear clawed at his heart. This could not be the real purpose of his visit. The Reichskommissar did not send Volkdeutscher officials to friendly farmers’ cottages at this hour of the morning to remind them that they were late with their taxes.
“How’s your dog?” Hahnemeier said. He was peering past, trying to see into the dark house.
“I don’t know,” said Pavel. “I haven’t seen him this morning. Probably out hunting somewhere.”
“I thought you said he has arthritis.”
“You tell a dog not to kill rats.”
“Come on, Pavel. Don’t keep me waiting out here. Aren’t you going to offer me a coffee?”
Reluctantly, Pavel opened the door. Hahnemeier hobbled in, his alert gaze darting here and there, oozing over each object in the room. Pavel followed every move of the small, piggish eyes, fearing the discovery of a nightshirt, a shoe, the doll. His gaze came to rest on the drain board. “An extra cup and bowl, I see!” he said jovially. “Company?”
Prickles of heat burned Pavel’s che
eks. He’d never been so frightened in his entire life. Visions of a painful, violent end swam before his eyes. Would he have to dig his own grave before they shot him, like the Jews they marched off into the woods? Would he be clubbed to death, hanged? Would they drag it out or make it quick? How much would it hurt?
“Yes,” he mumbled. “I mean, no.” He felt, rather than saw, the fat, inquiring face turn toward him. His head was pounding. How much slivovitz did he have last night? He buried his face in his hands, awash in an agony of contradictory feelings. I’m no good at this. I’m a farmer, I’m just a farmer.
“Please, Lothar. In honor of our long history as friends,” he finally blurted.
Hahnemeier drew a short, sharp breath. “I can’t make promises like that. I represent the law here,” he said sternly. “What is it, Pavel? You have a guilty conscience, it’s all over your face.”
The farmer swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing visibly up and down. Then he expelled a long, sorrowing sigh. “All right,” he said quietly, surrendering. “You’re going to find out anyway. I might as well tell you. Michalowa—”
“Ja, ja, ja, Michalowa.” he said crossly. “My boys already paid her a visit. She was clean. You have something new for me? Communists? Partizans? Black-marketeers? Jews?”
Pavel dragged a heavy hand across his damp forehead. “Oh God, no, nothing like that. The cup, the bowl . . . ” he stammered. “They’re Michalowa’s. She stays over sometimes, that’s all. Please don’t tell anyone, Hahnemeier, I’m begging you. She’s a crazy person when it comes to privacy. You know how people talk. If this gets out, it’s all over. She’ll kill me.” He felt sick at drawing Michalowa into his lies again, but it was all he could think of on the spot.
With a fat pinkie finger, the Volkdeutscher official went excavating inside one large, whiskery ear. “That’s it? That’s what has you all nervous and sweaty like a kid with his first prostitute? You have a girlfriend?” He saluted, clicked his heels together, made a my lips are sealed gesture with his right hand. “So you took my advice after all! Don’t worry, Comrade Walczak, you can tell Michalowa that her secret is safe with me. Come to think of it, don’t tell her anything. I know that woman. She will kill you. But what a way to go!”
In the Land of Armadillos Page 13
