Jerzy

by Jerome Charyn

  “She and the boy visited a certain SS captain at his estate—Herr Flotner. And your wife was seen playing the piano.”

  “But that’s impossible. She never leaves this room.”

  “Mieczyslaw,” his mother said. “I didn’t want to upset you, but Kapitan Flotner’s men came to fetch us in his car. They insisted that Jurek go with us.”

  Moses’ mouth moved with a mean, raw pull. “You should have refused,” he spat at her.

  “Refuse the SS, my dear husband—tell me how?”

  “But that settles it, Comrade Gavrila,” said the tallest NKVD man. “We must make an example and destroy a few of these Polish pests. Then they’ll reveal the hiding places of the Home Guard.”

  “Please,” said Moses. “They are good people. They did not betray me to the Home Guard.”

  “But we cannot guarantee your safety,” said the generals. “There are informers in this village.”

  Gavrila intervened again. “Comrades, this village will not be touched. And Mieczyslaw’s family can remain here.”

  GAVRILA ASSEMBLED THE ENTIRE VILLAGE in Jozef’s barn. The elders were in awe of Moses, who could come out alive from a palaver with the NKVD. But Moses didn’t bask in his new glory. He was seething at his son.

  “Have I taught you nothing, you piece of manure! You cannot have secrets from your own superior in our secret service.”

  “Papa, an agent has to take the initiative sometimes. I was protecting mama.”

  “From whom?” Moses asked with a scowl.

  “From you, Papa.”

  “And who am I? Hitler’s secretary?”

  Jurek didn’t answer. He was listening to Gavrila, who sat on the elders’ platform without the elders, but with the NKVD men beside him. The generals looked ominous in their blue-and-bloodred shoulder boards. They hovered over Gavrila, sniffing at the farmers with a strident, superior air.

  “My Polish brothers and sisters,” Gavrila said, “we have come to liberate you from the Nazi heel. We will not harm you. But you must not interfere and protect the Home Guard. They would like to bring back the old aristocracy, saddle you with some prince or a king. They are killers who have no heart. You must support your brothers and sisters in the Workers’ Party, the PPR. They are your friends. The PPR will not betray you.”

  Moses listened to Gavrila with a claw in his throat. He knew that Soviet agents had infiltrated the PPR, that it was run by the NKVD, but he couldn’t survive without the rosyjskis. The Home Guard would be squashed into submission, and Moses had to be on the winning side.

  This Gavrila went around Jozef’s barn in his peasant boots and kissed the farmers and their wives. He was much more clever than the NKVD, who kissed you with a bullet in the head. But Moses would never be able to get off the tightrope he had been walking on ever since he was a baby. He must have been born with talons instead of toes.

  Horses were heard in the village just as the meeting was about to end. Some of the farmers smiled under the flaps of their hunter’s hats. The Home Guard had come to Dabrowa to “entertain” the NKVD. Jurek was standing near the barn’s big door. He could see a member of the Home Guard sitting backward in his saddle, as if he were having a dialogue with his horse’s behind. He wore an ammunition belt slung from his shoulder and a captured SS officer’s cap. With him were five other partisans, with pistols and ammunition belts: he recognized one of the maids from the castle at Charzewice. She clucked at Jurek.

  “Come out, little boy, and bring your whore of a mother and your father the komunista.”

  Jurek should have ducked back inside the barn, but he stood there transfixed by these warriors, who were much more frightful than the Kalmuks.

  “Come out, come out,” the woman clucked.

  “Quiet,” said her leader, the man in the SS officer’s cap, who was still communing with his horse. “I shit on that little boy! I want the rosyjskis.” And he called into the barn. “Polish patriots, come out of that stinkpot. You have nothing to fear. Bring the Soviet dogs to us. We will not harm you. Show your allegiance to the Home Guard.”

  The NKVD men sank deeper into the barn, but Gavrila stepped outside in his boots.

  The partisan chief clapped his hands.

  “Bravo! What do we have here? A political officer. But where is your regiment?”

  “They will be here in a minute, brother.”

  “That’s odd,” said the partisan chief. “We did not see one rosyjski on our ride into the village.”

  Gavrila smiled. “That’s because we told them to hide.”

  “You’re bluffing. We’re going to stand you against the wall, little comrade. And we won’t send a priest to such godless men. You’ll die without absolution, you dogs!”

  But Gavrila didn’t even shiver. He whistled once, did a kind of dance step, and the partisan chief flew off his horse and landed with his face in the ground. Jurek had heard only the softest of sounds in the distance, like snow falling from a tree—but there wasn’t much snow in July.

  The other five partisans stared at their dead chief in bewilderment. But they didn’t even have time to aim their pistols at Gavrila. Jurek listened to the same soft chirp from the woods that had such a fiendish pull: The five partisans flew off their horses and were dead before they hit the ground.

  Gavrila didn’t seem surprised. He winked at Jurek, while the farmers crowded near the door. Then two men marched into the village in hats made of twigs like the crown that Jesus wore; they had twigs all over them and were carrying the longest rifles Jurek had ever seen, with pieces of dark cloth wrapped around the muzzles.

  The farmers whispered among themselves.

  “Szatański,” they said. “The Russian devils and their sharpshooters.”

  Gavrila laughed and went back inside the barn.

  — 30 —

  JOZEF STILL DIDN’T TRUST THESE SATANS and their sharpshooters. The Red Army had raped women in other villages; that’s what white partisans hiding in his cellar had sworn to him. He curtailed his welcoming committee. The elders locked daughters and wives in their farmhouses or retreated into the woods. Moses scoffed at their foolishness. These dolts were not chess players. They could not even think one move in advance. The rosyjskis were here to stay. The elders could cross themselves and spit three times, but their incantations would bring them little—it was like pissing into the wind.

  Moses had Henio wear a red banner and wave his miniature Red Army uniform and a pistol made of wood. The rosyjskis adored him. They carried Henio around on their backs, tossed him into the air. And Moses could greet Gavrila’s regiment without interference from the elders. He smiled at the red partisans, who were really Russian thugs—most of them, and the rest were retired schoolteachers. He shook hands with the thugs, played chess with the NKVD generals, drank their sour beer and puffed on their bitter, unbearable papierosi. The generals had silver cigarette cases, papierośniki that had blackened in their pockets during the war.

  He couldn’t lure Gavrila into a chess game. Gavrila was constantly with his soldiers, tussling their hair, helping them write letters to their loved ones, protecting the few women in the regiment—nurses and radio operators—from the greedy paws of the NKVD men. The Russians didn’t seem to have prostytutkis in a green bus like the Germans, and Gavrila had to watch that his noncommissioned officers didn’t prey upon the village, didn’t offer papierosi to young girls. And when he caught a recruit lurking in a farmer’s cellar, he slapped that soldier from one end of the village to the other.

  Jurek noticed tears in Gavrila’s eyes. He didn’t even wash his own raw knuckles. “These are good boys,” he muttered to himself.

  He made time for Jurek, let him smoke half a papierosi. They would hike across the hill behind Jozef’s barn, sometimes with one of the sharpshooters, a shy boy called Mitka, who had picked off the partisan chief from a very tall tree in the woods. Mitka was illiterate, but he had the sweetest voice, and could sing like an angel. He also had a fierce temper,
and it was Gavrila who would get him out of scrapes with the NKVD. But whenever Mitka sang, the whole regiment wept, even the NKVD men. He knew only love songs—about blond boys and older women with dark, mischievous eyes.

  Gavrila wouldn’t let any tanks into town. He didn’t want Dabrowa to be overrun with soldiers. But he climbed the hill with Jurek and Mitka, who didn’t say a word. Jurek was already out of breath. He couldn’t keep up with the two rosyjskis.

  “Comrade Gavrila, do you have a rank? Are you a general, like the NKVD men? Or an admiral sent over from the navy to fire up a regiment with political zeal?”

  Gavrila laughed with his double chin. “You talk like a Russian lawyer, little one.”

  “I’m not so little. I’ll be twelve one of these days.”

  “The NKVD wear shoulder bars—we wear none. Yes, I do have a rank. But that is not how you sway an army. The Germans lost at Stalingrad because their generals were in the rear lines. Our generals fight with their claws.”

  “Was Stalin at Stalingrad? Did he kill Germans with his claws?”

  Gavrila spat on the ground. His eyes seemed agitated. “Comrade Jurek, our Little Father would gladly fight at our side. But we would worry about him. And he does not want to put so big a burden on us. No father ever had such love for his children—did you know that Comrade Stalin never sleeps?”

  Jurek was suspicious of that devil with the dark mustache who never sleeps and didn’t look so different from the farmers of Dabrowa. Jozef Stalin could have traded places with Jozef Stepak, and who would have been the wiser?

  “Comrade Gavrila, you must love your Little Father very much.”

  And Jurek was astonished that a man like Gavrila, who could face the white partisans without a blink, had watery eyes at the first mention of his Little Father.

  “Comrade, I dream of him every night. How would we ever have had the courage to deal with such a heartless war machine without our Little Father and the love of the Russian people? . . . Tell him, Mitka.”

  But the sharpshooter shrugged his shoulders. He could pick off partisans from a treetop but had an irrational fear of talking to anyone, even a boy who understood less of his own language than he did. But Gavrila poked him. Mitka shut his eyes and whistled a few words.

  “Little sir, the Russian soil groans every time our Little Father scratches a finger.”

  Gavrila glared at him—“Mitka, you should not speak in superlatives”—and then turned to Jurek. “He’s a sharpshooter, and as such he lives in a world apart from ordinary fellows.”

  “How?” Jurek asked, insanely jealous.

  “They do not camp with us or eat with us. They live in the woods, and steal their food or pluck it from the ground. They have contempt for army cooks. If there is a rabbit within a few kilometers, they will find it, skin it, and suck out its flesh.”

  “And what will Mitka do after the war?”

  “Shhh,” said Gavrila. “We train our sharpshooters to treat all men as targets. They have no future outside of war.”

  “But won’t you help him, Comrade Gavrila?”

  “I am nothing but a soldier who keeps other soldiers in line.”

  “Gavrila,” said the boy, “won’t you tell me your rank?”

  “Me, little one? I have no exact rank. I fall somewhere between a captain and a colonel.”

  And he climbed down the hill with Mitka the sharpshooter, wrapped in his own mystery. Perhaps Gavrila was much too important to have a rank.

  MOSES HAD BECOME A LITTLE KING while the elders were in the forest. The witches and hags of Dabrowa bowed and called him “Uncle Moses.” The NKVD preferred him to their own thugs in the PPR. He translated documents for them into Polish. He helped them interrogate German prisoners who wandered into Dabrowa in rags and begged for food; he did not like the Germans, but it bothered him that these prisoners disappeared after the interrogations and were never seen again.

  The little king had to relinquish his posts and welcome back all the elders once Josef’s spies said it was safe to return to the village. He couldn’t risk a war with Jozef. The rosyjskis would move on to other towns, and even the red partisans couldn’t help him if Jozef decided to cut his throat with a scythe. But Moses had an exalted position now. He wasn’t a zyd with a fugitive family that the elders had to hide. The rosyjskis had more Jews in their army than there were trees in the Dabrowa woods.

  The elders saved a seat for him at their own table. He was now Brother Mieczyslaw, their conduit to the rosyjskis and the red partisans. They still had secret dealings with the whites. They scrutinized the red streaks in the sky—no streak could tell them what side would win. Moses wasn’t a sentimentalist, but the elders had saved his skin.

  “Brother Jozef, you must sever all ties with the white bandits.”

  “They are not bandits,” Jozef had to insist.

  “But the NKVD think they are bandits, and theirs is the reality you have to consider.”

  “Speak plainly. Will you inform on your brothers?”

  “No. But I cannot keep them off the mark forever—not while you hide whites in your own attic.”

  The elders got down on their knees and kissed Moses’ hand. “Save us, brother. We are caught in the middle. The white bandits swear they will kill us if we don’t hide them. And the bandits make obscene noises when our daughters bring them cake.”

  “Then you have little time to spare,” Moses said. “Tell them you have a spy among the rosyjskis, and that the NKVD men are planning to search every farmhouse from top to bottom.”

  Thus Moses became the elder whom the elders relied on. And his new status rubbed off on his son. The children of Dabrowa did not dare to taunt him. He walked the streets with a new swagger. He became friends with Lech, a boy who suffered from brain fever. Most of the other children shunned Lech, who had seizures and outbursts of violence, when he would spit at people. He was five years older than Jurek but could never perform the simplest tasks at church or school. He stumbled rather than walked and had no real expression on his face, as if he were lost in a dream that neither God nor the devil could decipher. But Lech had one extraordinary gift—he could tame birds, call them out of the sky with a warbling sound that didn’t seem human.

  Lech had a fondness for crows. He would capture a crow, put it in a lopsided cage that he himself had built, paint its feathers white with bird lime the farmers had given him, and set the painted crow free. Other crows were curious about this white creature, then cackled at it until it flew away. But even in its isolation, the white crow couldn’t survive. It would succumb to “Szatan,” a notorious chicken hawk that the farmers could not kill with their slingshots or their pathetic guns. Szatan raided their chicken coops, swarming down from nowhere, and blinded squirrels with its claws. Szatan’s wings were not very wide, but its white-and-brown tail was very long and almost served as another wing.

  Lech had tried and tried to call Szatan down from the sky, but the hawk remained hidden in the trees. And when it did swoop after some victim, it wasn’t vulnerable to Lech’s songs. He had lost ten white crows to Szatan, and when he wanted to risk an eleventh, Jurek asked him to wait.

  “Please. I’ll find a solution.”

  Jurek had no solution. He was stalling for time. He felt more pity for Lech’s white birds than he did for most humans. But he couldn’t pick his own brains fast enough. Lech had already painted the crow and was preparing to release it, when Jurek saw Gavrila loping through the village with his military case. Jurek was intrigued by this case that Gavrila always carried with him, slung from his shoulder. It was made of some magnificent cardboard that did not wilt in the rain. He would open this case in the middle of a speech and pull out booklets that Stalin had written. And Jurek could not help it if he had been born a spy! He once glanced a shiny pistol inside the case, a pair of binoculars, and pieces of string. But he was less curious about Gavrila’s cardboard case right now.

  “Comrade Gavrila, you must help us, or Lech’s white cro
w will die.”

  Gavrila bowed in the middle of his stride, without upsetting the constant swing of his cardboard case.

  “Jurek, are you such a brute that you cannot say hello to a friend?”

  “We do not have time for hellos, Comrade Captain-Colonel.”

  Gavrila laughed and thrust two fingers into his mouth. He whistled so loud that Jurek thought his ears would break. Suddenly, Gavrila’s sharpshooter appeared behind him.

  — 31 —

  MITKA HAD A TINY SCREWDRIVER TO ADJUST the telescope at the top of his rifle. He adjusted the telescope twice, then put the screwdriver into his pocket. It was no more complicated than that. He licked his finger and held it in the wind. He hummed to himself. He had the blondest scalp that Jurek had ever seen. And that’s why Mitka had to wear a cap of thorns and twigs while hunting Germans and white partisan chiefs. His blond scalp reflected so much of the sun that German sharpshooters could have picked him off in a second.

  But he was hunting hawks today, and he didn’t have to wear his hat of twigs. He walked to Szatan’s usual forest lair with the two boys and the painted crow. He sat on the ground, placed his rifle onto a metal fulcrum that was like a miniature music stand, and had the two boys crouch well behind him. He was still humming to himself. Lech took the white crow and tossed it into the air. He sang to it, but the crow hesitated, like some cripple relearning to fly.

  Jurek worried that it would crash into the forest floor. But it climbed in a sudden frenzy to the tops of the trees. “Szatan, Szatan,” Jurek clucked like an incantation, and the hawk must have listened to its name—it sprang from the foliage in a great blur that his eye could hardly catch and then it splattered into pieces, its feathers and guts swirling where the hawk had once been.

  That music stand rocked for a moment, but the rifle itself had never budged from its cradle. Its report had been no louder than a muffled clap. But the rags around its muzzle had caught fire.