Jan laughed scornfully. ‘Why don’t you travel that way here? It would leave the rest of us more room.’
‘I could never do that again,’ said Edek.
‘No,’ said Jan, and he looked with contempt at Edek’s thin arms and bony wrists. ‘You’re making it all up. There’s no room to lie under a truck. Nothing to hold on to.’
Edek seized him by the ear and pulled him to his feet. ‘Have you ever looked under a truck?’ he said, and he described the underside in such convincing detail that nobody but Jan would have questioned his accuracy. The boys were coming to blows, when the printer pulled Jan to the floor and there were cries of, ‘Let him get on with his story!’
‘You would have been shaken off,’ Jan shouted above the din, ‘like a rotten plum!’
‘That’s what anyone would expect,’ Edek shouted back. ‘But if you’ll shut up and listen, I’ll tell you why I wasn’t.’ When the noise had died down, he went on. ‘Lying on my stomach, I found the view rather monotonous. It made me dizzy too. I had to shut my eyes. And the bumping! Compared with that, the boards of this truck are like a feather bed. Then the train ran through a puddle. More than a puddle – it must have been a flood, for I was splashed and soaked right through. But that water saved me. After that I couldn’t let go, even if I’d wanted to.’
‘Why not?’ said Jan, impressed.
‘The water froze on me. It made an icicle of me. When at last the train drew into a station, I was encased in ice from head to foot. I could hear Polish voices on the platform. I knew we must have crossed the frontier. My voice was the only part of me that wasn’t frozen, so I shouted. The station-master came and chopped me down with an axe. He wrapped me in blankets and carried me to the boiler-house to thaw out. Took me hours to thaw out.’
‘You don’t look properly thawed out yet,’ said the printer, and he threw him a crust of bread.
Other voices joined in. ‘Give him a blanket.’ ‘A tall story, but he’s earned a bed by the stove.’ ‘Another story, somebody! One to make us forget.’ ‘Put some romance in it.’
The stories petered out after a while. When all was quiet, and the refugees, packed like sardines on the floor of the truck, lay sleeping under the cold stars, Ruth whispered to Edek, ‘Was it really true?’
‘Yes, it was true,’ said Edek.
‘Nothing like that must ever happen to you again,’ said Ruth.
She reached for his hand – it was cold, although he was close to the stove – and she clasped it tight, as if she meant never to let go of it again.
14
City of the Lost
IT WAS THE end of May when the train reached Berlin – after nine days of stopping and starting, of lying up in sidings, of crawling along the battered track.
The station was a shambles, but everyone was glad to escape from their cramped quarters. They swarmed out of the trucks and over the lines, some of them disappearing at once into the dusty ruins of Berlin. Most of them hung about or sat down on their luggage – hundreds of tired and disconsolate men, women, and children – in the hope that they would be given food or told where to go. A few UNRRA workers appeared, shouting orders in broken German, trying to make them stand in a queue. Carts piled with bread pushed their way through the mob, and there was some ladling of milk out of vats for the mothers and babies. But this was the second refugee train that had come in that day, and there was not enough food to go round.
Hungry and unfed, the family were directed to a transit camp not far away. They left the station shouting and laughing, for their spirits were high. Only a few weeks ago they were in Warsaw, ten days ago Edek had not been found – and now they were all together and had covered a third of the way to Switzerland.
They did not seem to notice that everything round them had been destroyed, that buildings that had stood for generations had been wiped out. Perhaps it was because they were too used to it – Warsaw looked no different. Perhaps it was because the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and Switzerland was just round the corner.
‘Nobody’s going hungry,’ said Jan, and from the mischievous grin on his face Ruth knew that he was about to show them he had not lost his gift for sleight of hand. Out of his shirt popped a long cigar-shaped loaf of bread.
They all sprang to catch it, but Jan held it high above his head and ran across the road.
There was a blaring of horn, a screeching of brakes, and a jeep grazed his pants. A voice shouted some insult at him in a language he did not understand.
Turning, Jan looked up into the moustache of a British officer. He made a long nose at it and in a leisurely manner finished his crossing of the street.
The officer pretended not to notice and waved his driver on.
Each party promptly dismissed the matter from his mind. But they were to meet again soon – and in the oddest of circumstances.
Meanwhile all interest was focused upon the loaf. The four sat down in the rubble to make short work of it.
‘I bet it cost you a pretty penny,’ said Edek, sarcastically.
‘I borrowed it when the cart came round,’ said Jan.
‘In Germany we call that organizing,’ said Edek.
There was more food for them at the transit camp, a disused cinema whose floor appeared to contain the entire population of Berlin. After four helpings of soup each, they were given blankets and straw-filled mattresses and ushered into a dark corner of the hall. Here a seedy-looking flag and a scribbled notice on the wall indicated that they were in ‘Poland’. The electricity was not working, and the only light came from the hurricane lamps suspended from the balcony above.
As far as they could see, the whole floor was carpeted with mattresses. They threw down theirs where they stood – in the no-man’s-land between ‘Poland’ and ‘Yugoslavia’.
This was to be their home while they were in Berlin. It was warm and dry and comfortable, and they were delighted – especially Bronia, who loved to hear Polish voices, as they made it feel like home. Next to her she found a child of her own age, whose mother was as good as Ruth at telling stories and knew many folk-tales that Bronia had never heard.
In spite of the crowded conditions, all was quiet and orderly in the hall. Except at meal times, when they went up on to the balcony, people were content to lie about on their mattresses, smoking, reading, talking, playing cards. The night was so quiet that Edek felt ashamed of his coughing and tried to smother it in his blanket for fear of waking the sleepers.
Then, in the early morning, when the first wakers were stirring, came an unexpected moment of panic.
Someone shrieked near the entrance. People sat up, heaved off their blankets, stood up, craned their necks to see what was happening. There was a general movement towards the entrance, stifled almost at once by another in the opposite direction. A wave of bodies rolled inwards, and for a minute or two it looked as if there was going to be a stampede. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the noise died down, and all was quiet again.
‘What was it all about?’ said Bronia.
‘Here’s somebody who can tell us,’ said Ruth, as an excited new arrival, jumping from mattress to mattress, landed three jumps away.
‘A chimpanzee – escaped from the zoo!’ the new arrival announced breathlessly.
Jan was instantly alert. ‘That’s nothing to be afraid of,’ he said. ‘I wish he’d come over here.’
‘Thank the Lord the brute’s taken itself off,’ said the man.
‘Oh,’ said Jan. If he had been told that Switzerland had been flattened in an earthquake, he could not have been more disappointed.
‘Those Greeks threw their boots at it, and a couple of hurricane lamps as well. They’ve got some sense.’
‘Stupid,’ said Jan. ‘The chimpanzee will copy them and someone will get hurt.’
He was ready to continue the argument, but the Pole on the mattress opposite was reading out (or rather, translating) from a German news-sheet an article that demanded all his attentio
n.
‘Chimpanzee escapes from zoo,’ he translated. ‘At large since Monday evening. Bistro the chimpanzee, who for some years has delighted visitors to the Tiergarten with his amusing antics, escaped from his cage on Monday night. He was seen to board a tram in the Adolf Hitler Strasse, where he bit one of the terrified passengers before alighting at the next stop. Police gave chase, but the animal climbed a derelict building and, from a dangerous perch high above the street, proceeded to throw bricks at anyone who approached. He was still there when darkness fell. A watch was kept on the building all night. But the animal must have given them the slip, for he was not there in the morning. There have been several reports of him since, many of them contradictory.’
The reader looked up from the news-sheet and saw with some surprise that all Poland was standing on his mattress. Flattered, he continued, ‘Bistro was one of the few animals to escape unhurt from the bombing of the Tiergarten. A highly intelligent and usually docile animal, with a passion for cigarettes, he appears to have been much shaken by the months of bombing the city has endured. His keeper reports that he has been difficult to handle because of his melancholy and sometimes violent moods. Anyone who sees him is advised to do nothing to anger him, and to report at once to the police.’
The crowd dispersed and the news-sheet passed from hand to hand. Soon, somewhat the worse for wear, it disappeared into Yugoslavia.
‘It’s a good thing Bistro took himself off,’ said Ruth, who had returned to her mattress.
‘Jan would have saved us if he hadn’t,’ said Bronia.
‘Where is Jan?’ said Edek.
Jan’s mattress was uninhabited. They looked for him, but he had vanished.
15
Jan Finds a New Pal
LATER THAT WEEK, in the sitting-room of a Berlin house which had been commandeered for him, a British officer was writing home to his wife. It was the officer whose jeep had so nearly knocked Jan over outside the station.
‘Dearest Jane,’ he wrote. ‘My unit’s been in Berlin a week now – we’re here to meet the Russians. You never saw such a place. Other cities were badly blitzed, but not on this scale. I’ve seen pictures of it as it used to be – one of the world’s great capitals. Now it’s more like a moon landscape, craters everywhere, mountains of rubble. The Reichstag and the Kaiser’s Palace are roofless, Unter den Linden piled with wreckage. And the queerest things keep happening. How’s this for one? – I’ve been attacked by a chimpanzee. Don’t worry – I’m quite OK, not hurt at all.
‘On Wednesday I was sitting in the jeep with my driver, studying a map. I had a cigarette in my mouth and was about to light it, when a hand slid over my shoulder, clapped on my lips and tweaked the cigarette out. I looked round and saw a chimpanzee jumping up and down on the back seat, with the cigarette in his mouth. You never saw such a revolting creature – huge arms, hairy chest as broad as mine, deep-set evil eyes, and the face of a heavy-weight boxer. He could have knocked the pair of us into the middle of next month but we didn’t stay to let him. We streaked out of the door and left him to his dancing.
‘Quite a crowd was gathering – they kept their distance, of course – and I heard someone say the chimp was called Bistro, and he’d escaped from the zoo, or what was left of it after the bombing. He had a chain round his neck, and it kept clanking against the tailboard as he jumped. He seemed to be in a rage because he hadn’t any matches – or because he’d swallowed the cigarette and it was making his belly ache. When he was tired of jumping, he sat down in the driver’s seat and started fiddling with the controls.
‘That put the wind up me. There was a goodish slope on the street, and fifty yards ahead a bomb crater big enough to swallow a church – and cordoned off with only a bit of rope and a plank or two. If the jeep took a header down there, I should be answerable.
‘“Come on, Jim,” I said to my driver. “We’ll have to do something about this.” But my knees were like jelly, and I think Jim’s were too.
‘Then the strangest thing happened. A boy stepped out of the crowd, one of the thousands of urchins that abound in the ruins here – about eleven or twelve years old, I should say, but you can never tell with these kids, they’re so undernourished.
‘I shouted to him in German to come back, but he didn’t understand. He was a Pole and his name was Jan, though I didn’t know that till afterwards. But I recognized him as a boy we’d nearly run down in the street the day before.
‘He walked right on, quite unafraid, and when he was alongside the jeep he said in a gentle voice, “Hello, Bistro.”
‘The chimp gave him a dirty look, but Jan only grinned. He fished something out of a small wooden box he was carrying, and it made the chimp curious. It was a cigarette and matches. He handed over the cigarette. Then the matches.
‘“OOOO, Warro … umph,” said Bistro, and he lit up at once, and flung away the matches. He sat back in the driver’s seat, inhaling, puffing out clouds of smoke from his nose, and all the while keeping his eyes fixed on Jan. Quite suddenly Bistro stood up and held out a soft pink-palmed hand for the boy to shake. Then he climbed over on to the back seat and lay down, his legs crossed, and puffed away.
‘It may have been my imagination, but I swear that the jeep began to move. Like a fool, I tiptoed up behind and called out in my best German, “Sonny, put the brake on – she’s beginning to shift.” He didn’t understand. I pantomimed the action.
‘But Bistro didn’t like me. He sat up and screamed. Then he opened the tool-box, which Jim had been far-sighted enough to leave on the floor, and flung the wheel brace at me. It made him mad to see me duck, so he generously made me a present of the whole tool-box plus contents in one almighty fling. It hit the pavement, scattering the crowd. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him leap over the back and shoot after me.
‘I don’t know what happened next. I ran like hell, and it was all rubble and dust and scramble up here and slide down there. I ran behind a wall, panting. Then I realized I wasn’t being followed any more, and I heard the boy’s shrill voice, scolding.
‘I peeped out, down the street.
‘The boy had got a stick from somewhere and was standing with it raised above his head. Bistro lay in the dust at his feet, his face and head covered with his long arms, whimpering. I don’t know whether the boy had struck him or not. I expect not, for I guess it would have been about as effective as trying to knock down Nelson’s column with a fly-swatter. But there was no doubt about the scolding he gave. When it was all over, Bistro sat up cautiously and started to pick a few fleas out of his chest and eat them. He offered one to Jan as a peace offering.
‘Then Bistro did something to Jan that would have killed me dead of fright if I’d been in his place. He took the boy’s hand in his, lifted it to his mouth, and bit his finger. Jan stood as still as a rock. Some sixth sense which most people don’t possess must have whispered to him what the chimp was up to. It wasn’t a real bite, only a nip and a token of friendship between the two. So the keeper explained afterwards. When Bistro gave his hand to the boy in return, Jan knew what to do. He gave it a friendly nip with his teeth.
‘Next thing I knew, Jan was leading him down the street by the chain. Only Bistro didn’t wear it like a prisoner’s chain, but with pride and glory, as if it were a chain of office.
‘That’s not quite the end of the story. Jim had fixed up the jeep and braked it properly. Now he was picking up the scattered tools, and I saw he had the boy’s wooden box, too. I strolled over to help him – or rather, to direct operations, as it doesn’t do for an officer to go down on his hands and knees. I felt a fool in front of all those people. I knew they were laughing at me.
‘Then I saw a small silver sword – sort of paper-knife – lying in the dust. It hardly looked worth bothering about, but I got Jim to pick it up.
‘Two keepers had arrived by now and were leading Bistro away. We found Jan, and Jim handed him his wooden box. Seeing the lid was loose, the boy checked through
the contents in great agitation, then burst into tears. I tried to ask him what was the matter – then I remembered the silver sword and, showing it to him, asked him if he’d lost it. The cloud-burst ended abruptly and out came the sun again. He seized it greedily, wrapped it up and popped it into the box amongst the other treasures. It didn’t seem to me worth all the fuss he made, but evidently he attached some importance to it.
‘I invited Jan round to my lodgings for dinner – he looked as if he hadn’t had a square meal since he was born – and he turned up promptly with three other Polish children as skinny as himself. Luckily Frau Schmidt’s larder with its army rations was equal to the occasion. One of them, a sixteen-year-old lad named Edek, with a cough like a deep-sea foghorn, spoke some German, so I learnt all about them.
‘They’re on their way to Switzerland to find their parents – started from Warsaw last month – and they don’t mind footing it all the way if they have to. Jan doesn’t really belong at all. Ruth, the eldest (about seventeen), picked him up on a slag-heap half dead and adopted him. She’s a remarkable girl, quiet and self-assured, with the most striking eyes – they have a deep serenity, a sense of purpose and moral authority quite unmistakable. No wonder they look up to her as a mother, and a leader, too.
‘Edek is brave and intelligent and looks as if he had suffered a lot – he spent nearly two years slaving for the Nazis. You can see it in his face – a kid’s face oughtn’t to be creased and pinched like his. I wonder if he’ll hold out. Switzerland’s a long way.
‘The one that took my fancy most was Bronia, the youngest. Blue eyes, very fair hair, she seemed to live in a dream world – like our own Jenny, as I remember her on my last leave. I didn’t understand a word Bronia said, and she didn’t understand a word I said, but we got on fine together. If they don’t find what they’re looking for in Switzerland – and I’m afraid it may be only a mirage – I was wondering if perhaps we … But it’s no use thinking that way. I’m sure Ruth wouldn’t part with the child, and quite right, too.
The Silver Sword Page 6
