by Alan Furst
Summer would actually continue, he realized, for a long while yet, well into September, when the harvest would occupy almost everybody in the countryside, when people would sleep in the fields in order to start work at first light. At night they’d sit around and talk in low voices, they’d even have a small fire once a field was cleared, and couples would go off into the shadows to make love. Still, for him, the summer had just about run its course. He had a schoolboy’s sense of time, and the end of August was the end of liberty, just as it had been in childhood, just as, he supposed, it always would be. Strange, he thought, that he found himself once again free as the summer ended. 31 August 1939-that was the official date. He reckoned once again and made sure. Yes, that was it. By tomorrow he’d likely be “himself” again, the official himself, the journalist Andre Szara, riding on trains, writing things down, doing what everyone expected of him.
But for the moment he was a lone traveler on the tiny road to Czestochowa, enjoying a perfect freedom on the last day of summer.
He reached Czestochowa by late afternoon, thanks to a ride in an ancient truck delivering cucumbers to the markets in the city. A trolley ride took him to the railroad station and he bought a ticket to Cracow, where he could get another train to Lvov. “We call it the midnight train to Lvov,” said the dignified ticket seller. “We also say, however, that dawn in the city of Lvov is very beautiful.” Szara smiled with appreciation at the characteristically Polish bite of the description. The cities were a hundred and eighty miles apart. That meant the train from Cracow was not expected to leave on time, that the locomotive was very slow, or both.
At the restaurant across the street from the station he prepared for the journey, eating cold beet soup, rye bread with sweet butter, a piece of boiled beef accompanied by fresh red horseradish that made tears inevitable, and several glasses of tea. He was sore from sleeping in a hayloft and from miles of walking and was covered with a fine, powdery dust from the road, but the dinner was curative, and he dozed in the first-class compartment until the 6:40 for Cracow chugged away from the station a little after eight. In the gathering dusk of the Czestochowa countryside he saw a lightning storm, great, white bolts of it, three and four in a row, on the southern horizon. Two hours later they were in Cracow.
He had long ago been a student at the university, but he elected to remain at the station until the “midnight train to Lvov” actually departed. The ticket seller in Czestochowa had told him the truth- the train was very late leaving; some of the people who joined him in the compartment arrived after two in the morning. He watched the night streets of Cracow go by under flaring gas lamps, the Zydowski cemetery, the railway bridge across the Vistula, and then he dozed once more until the muttered comments of his fellow travelers woke him up. The train was barely moving on what seemed to be a branch track, people in the compartment were trying to peer out the window, and then, suddenly, they lurched to a halt. Such a stop was apparently quite unusual. One or two groans of fury were heard, others attempted to solve the mystery by lowering the window and squinting into the darkness outside. A man in a railroad uniform came down the track carrying a lantern, passengers called out to him, asked him what the problem was, but he ignored them all. The compartment was dark; Szara lit a cigarette, sat back against the worn plush fabric of the seat, and set himself to wait. Other passengers followed his example. Newspaper crackled as a sandwich was unwrapped, a young couple spoke confidentially in low voices. From the third-class car, a violin started up. Some minutes later a troop train went past, moving very slowly. Soldiers could be seen hanging out the windows and standing packed in the aisles, some dangling their feet from open doorways. Szara could see the glow of their cigarettes. “They go north,” said the young woman across from him. “Away from the border. Perhaps the crisis with Hitler has been settled.”
A man sitting next to her lit a match and pointed to the front page of the evening newspaper. “Shooting in Danzig,” he said. “You see? I would have to say they’re headed up there.”
The conductor came down the passageway, opened the door of the compartment, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I fear I must ask you to get off the train. Please.”
This statement was greeted with general indignation. “Yes, yes,” the conductor sympathized, “but what’s to be done? I’d tell you the problem if I knew, I’m sure it will all be fixed quickly.” He had a drooping mustache and rather doleful eyes that gave him the look of a spaniel. He went off to the next compartment and the young man called after him, “Do we take our baggage? “
“Why no,” the conductor said. “Or maybe yes. I’m not sure. I leave it up to you, good ladies and gentlemen.”
Szara took his valise down from the rack above the window and helped the other passengers with their luggage. “I tell you …” the man with the newspaper said forcefully, but then seemed not to have anything to tell. Slowly the train emptied and the passengers half-slipped, half-jumped, down a grassy embankment and stood about on the edge of a field of weeds. “Now what?” Szara said to the man with the newspaper.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” he said. Then he bowed slightly and extended his hand. “Goletzky,” he said. “I’m in soap.”
“Szara. Journalist.”
“Ah, well. Here’s someone who’ll know what’s going on.”
“Not at all,” Szara said.
“Do you write for the Cracow papers?”
“No,” Szara said. “I’ve been in Paris the last few months.”
“You’re a lucky fellow, then. I count myself fortunate if I get to Warsaw once a year. Mostly I call on the southern provinces- perfumed soaps for the gentry, the old-fashioned yellow bar for the farmer, Dr. Grudzen’s special formula for young ladies. There isn’t much I don’t offer.”
“What do you suppose they’re going to do with us?” Szara asked. He glanced at his watch. “It’s well after four.” He looked to the east and saw a faint glow on the horizon, then he yawned.
Up the track, the locomotive released a long hiss of steam, then the slow march of pistons could be heard as it moved off. A cry went up from the assembled passengers: “Oh no! It’s leaving!” Some people started to climb aboard the coaches; then everybody realized that the train was standing still, only the locomotive was moving away.
“Well, that’s very nice I must say,” said Goletzky angrily. “Now they’ve uncoupled the engine and left us sitting here in the darkness between Cracow and Lord only knows where!”
The passengers began to realize that nothing was going to happen very quickly, and sat gloomily on their suitcases to wait for someone in the railroad system to remember them. Fifteen minutes later their locomotive reappeared-they had the conductor’s word that it was theirs-now pulling the troop train in the opposite direction. The engineer waved his cap: a gesture taken variously as cruelty, compassion, or an arcane signal known only to railroadmen; and the soldiers were singing, their voices strong in the early morning air. The troop train’s original locomotive appeared last, ignominiously towed backward. “So,” Goletzky commented, “it’s army maneuvers that have got us stranded.”
Szara didn’t like what he saw, but he didn’t know why. He wrote the feeling off to the sort of pointless irritation that comes with fatigue. Some of the passengers returned to their seats in the coaches. The conductor made no very great attempt to stop them. “Really, ladies and gentlemen,” he said sadly, shaking his head at the anarchy of it all. Others remained outdoors, trying to make a holiday of it. Somebody got a fire going and the garlicky aroma of roasting sausage filled the air. Another group gathered about the violin player. Still others could be seen wandering into the fields, some in search of privacy, others taking the opportunity to observe the countryside.
The drone of an airplane caught everyone’s attention. It was flying somewhere above them in the darkness, circling perhaps. Then the noise of its engine grew suddenly stronger, a drawn-out mechanical whine that climbed the musical scale and grew louder in the
same instant. “It’s going to crash,” said the young woman from Szara’s compartment, her voice shrill with fear, her face lifted anxiously toward the sky. She crossed herself as her lips moved. Goletzky and Szara both stood at the same instant, as though drawn to their feet by an invisible force. Somebody screamed. Goletzky said, “Shall we run?” Then it was too late to run-the noise swelled to an overwhelming shriek that froze the passengers in place. The plane materialized from the darkness for only a fraction of a second. Szara saw swastikas on its wings. Something made him flinch away, then the bomb exploded.
The blast wave took him off his feet-for an instant he was adrift in the air-then threw him into the embankment. He felt the force of impact shift the teeth and bones on one side of his face and his hearing stopped, replaced by a hissing silence. When he opened his eyes they didn’t work: the right half of the world was higher than the left, as though a photograph had been cut in two and pasted back together with the halves misaligned. This terrified him, and he was frantically blinking his eyes, trying to make his vision come right, when bits and pieces of things began to rain down on him and he instinctively protected his head with his forearm. Then something moved inside his face and his vision cleared. He forced himself to sit up, searching his clothing, frightened of what he might find but compelled to look. He found only dirt, bits of fabric and leaves, and a stain on the lapel of his jacket. Nearby, Goletzky sat with his head in his hands. At the bottom of the embankment the conductor lay still, face down in the earth. His feet were bare and a red line ran down one heel. Szara looked for the young woman but could not see her anywhere. An older woman he did not recognize-hair wild, tears streaming from her eyes, dress half blown away-was screaming at the sky. From the way her mouth worked and the sickened anger on her face Szara could tell she was screaming, but he could not hear any sound at all.
He was taken first to a hospital in the city of Tarnow. There he sat in a corridor while the nursing sisters cared for the injured. By then, most of his hearing had returned. By then his valise had miraculously reappeared, brought down the corridor by a soldier asking if anyone knew who it belonged to. By then he had heard that Germany had attacked Poland sometime after four in the morning. Polish soldiers, the Germans claimed, had overrun a German radio station at Gleiwitz, killed some German soldiers, and broadcast an inflammatory statement. This was no more than a classic staged provocation, he believed. And now he knew what had become of the Polish uniforms stolen in Paris. When his turn finally came, he was seen by a doctor, told he’d possibly had a concussion. If he became nauseated he was to seek medical assistance. Otherwise, he was free to continue his journey.
But that was not quite the truth. Outside the examining room a young lieutenant politely informed him that certain authorities in Nowy Sacz wished to speak with him. Was he under arrest? Not at all, the lieutenant said. It was only that someone at the hospital had notified the army staff that a Soviet journalist had been injured in the attack on the Cracow-Lvov line. Now a certain Colonel Vyborg earnestly wished to discuss certain matters with him at the Nowy Sacz headquarters. The young lieutenant had the honor of escorting him there. Szara knew it was pointless to resist, and the lieutenant led him to an aged but functional Czechoslovakian automobile and had him safely in Nowy Sacz an hour later.
Lieutenant Colonel Anton Vyborg, despite his Scandinavian surname, seemed a vestige of the old-fashioned Polish nobility. Szara fancied the name might date from the medieval wars between Poland and Sweden, when, as in all wars, families found themselves living on the wrong side of the lines. Whatever the story, there was something of the Baltic knight in Vyborg; he was tall and lean and thin-lipped, in his forties Szara thought, with webbed lines at the corners of his narrow eyes and pale hair cut short and stiff in the cavalry officer style. Like a cavalry officer, he wore high boots of supple leather and jodhpur-cut uniform trousers. Unlike a cavalry officer, however, his uniform jacket was hung over the back of his chair, his collar was unbuttoned and tie pulled down, and his sleeves were folded back. When Szara entered his office he was smoking a cigar, and a large metal ashtray held the stubs of many others. He had a handshake like steel, and looked hard at Szara with very cold blue eyes when they introduced themselves. Then, having made a rapid and intuitive judgment of some kind, he grew courtly, sent his orderly scurrying for coffee and rolls, and presented what was likely, Szara thought, the genial half of a sharply two-sided personality.
While he waited for his orderly to return, Colonel Vyborg smoked contentedly and stared into space, apparently at peace with the world. He was alone in this, however, since officers were rushing past the open door with armloads of files, telephones were jangling continuously, and the sense of the place was frantic motion, just barely below the level of panic. At one point, a young officer stuck his head in the door and said, “Obidza”-which could only have been the name of a small town. Colonel Vyborg made the merest gesture of acknowledgment, a polite, almost ironic inclination of the head, and the man wheeled and trotted off. Szara heard him somewhere down the hall, “Obidza,” telling someone else the news. Vyborg blew a long stream of cigar smoke into the air, rose abruptly, walked to the window, and stared down into the courtyard. The office-obviously temporary; the sign on the door read Tax Assessor-was in the Nowy Sacz city hall, an imposing monstrosity dating from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when Galicia had been a province of Austria. Vyborg stared onto the courtyard for a long time. “Now we burn files,” he said.
He looked meaningfully at Szara and cocked an eyebrow, but did not seem to want to hear what a journalist might think about such events. He settled himself back at the desk and said, “I think perhaps we ought to start our discussion without the coffee-nothing is really going to go smoothly today, and that includes my orderly’s trip to the bakery. Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” Szara said.
“Now a Soviet journalist, if he’s survived the last two years, can be no fool. You certainly know who you’re talking to.”
Szara had assumed from the beginning that Vyborg was the director or the deputy of a military intelligence unit. “An, ah, information bureau,” he said.
“Yes. That’s right. You’re legally a neutral, Mr. Szara, since last week, 23 August. As a Soviet citizen you are officially neither a friend nor an enemy of Poland, so I’m going to offer you an accommodation of mutual interest. For our part, we’d like to know what you’re doing here. Your papers are all in order, we assume you’ve been assigned a specific task. We’d like to know what’s of such interest that Pravda would send you here a week after the USSR has signed a treaty that’s going to turn out to be this country’s obituary. In return, I’ll make certain that you are provided with transportation out of this region-we’re forty miles north of the border, by the way-and will in general make sure you get to Lvov, if that’s where you want to go.
“That’s the offer. You can certainly refuse to accept it. The Germans’ promise of nonaggression no doubt extends to you personally, and you may feel you want to take them up on it. If so, you needn’t move very far, you may stay right here in Nowy Sacz-in two or three days they’ll come to you. Or even sooner. On the other hand, you may want to leave right away. In that case I’ll have my aide drive you to the railroad station-or as close to it as the crowd will permit. Thousands of people are milling around down there, trying to get out any way at all, and the trains don’t seem to be running. Still, you can take your chances if you like. So, how shall it be?”
“Seems a fair offer,” Szara said.
“You’ll tell me, then, the nature of your assignment in Lvov.”
“They want to know something of the daily life of national minorities in eastern Poland: Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Jews, Lithuanians.”
“Persecuted national minorities, you mean. In a former Russian province.”
“The assignment, Colonel Vyborg, is not that. I’d like to point out that I was asked to make this journey some weeks before any pact was
announced between the USSR and Germany. They did not, in other words, send me into the middle of a war to write a story about the lives of tailors and farmers. I don’t really know what my editors had in mind-they send me somewhere and I do what I’m told to do. Maybe they didn’t have very much in mind at all.”
“Jolly anarchic old Russia-the right hand never knows what the left hand is doing. Something like that? “
“What can’t be said about Russia? Everything is true, eventually.”
“You are, in fact, a Pole.”
“A Jewish family from Poland, in Russia since I was a teenager.”
“Then I’ll revise my statement-a typical Pole.”
“Some would say not.”
“Some certainly would. But others would answer them by saying horseshit.”
Vyborg drummed his fingers on the table. A studious-looking man in an exceptionally rumpled uniform, a sort of shambling professor with spectacles, appeared in the doorway and stood there hesitantly, eventually clearing his throat. “Anton, excuse me, but they are in Obidza.”
“So I’m told,” Vyborg said.
“Well then, shall we …”
“Pack up our cipher machines and go? Yes, I suppose. I’ve asked Olensko to organize it. Tell him to begin, will you? “
“With you commanding? “
“I’ll find you in Cracow. First I’m going to take our Russian war correspondent to see the front.”
