by Ben Pastor
When he opened the door to his room, his impression was that he must be running a fever, because he felt warm. He freed himself of coat and scarf before noticing that the water in his wash basin had lost its veil of ice. Stretching one hand towards the radiator, he felt heat rising from it.
“Pana Klara!” he called out hoarsely. “What’s happened with the furnace?”
The landlady came up the stairs wiping her hands in a dish towel. “Things one wouldn’t believe, Father Malecki. An hour ago the coal truck came and the men knocked on my door to tell me there was a delivery for the tenement, and asked whether I was going to show them where to dump it, and sign a receipt for it. I told them I wasn’t about to sign anything because I hadn’t called them to begin with and I didn’t know what the bill was going to be. They told me there was no bill.”
Father Malecki sneezed into his cupped hands. “Well, what do you make of it?”
Pana Klara took a card out of her apron’s pocket. “Instead of the bill, they handed me this. ‘For the priest,’ they said.”
The card was blank on one side. On the other one, in English, Malecki read, “You should have accepted a ride.”
As for Major Retz, he dropped Helenka at the corner of her street and watched her walk up the sidewalk towards home.
She was worth it, he told himself. She was worth the little agonies of lovesickness and his argument with Bora - he’d get Bora to leave the apartment sooner or later. There she went, little feet, thin waist. The way she held her head high like her mother. The quick strut that gave life to her small hips.
Helenka disappeared inside the gloomy front door of the dingy tenement. Retz put the car in reverse, turned direction and headed for the Old Theatre.
The smell of inexpensive perfume and women’s sweat welcomed him to the narrow hallway that led to the dressing room. Retz sniffed it, nostrils dilating. It reminded him of the last war, although it wasn’t the same theatre and it wasn’t even the same city. Women’s odours excited him.
He heard Ewa’s voice rehearsing her part from behind the closed door.
“I go, because of you, stripped of my honour—”
Retz knocked on the door.
It happened half an hour east of Debica, and too quickly for either Schenck or Bora to realize what had hit them. It came as a loud crash and whipping sound, with a spray of blood and glass that flew at them from the front seat.
The staff car lost control and careened before jumping the shoulder and sideswiping a low stone wall. A hand grenade thrown in their direction missed the car and went on to raise a column of snow, earth and twigs past the wall. Behind them, another explosion blasted the sidewalk, sending metal and chunks of asphalt flying.
Rapid fire cracked down at the convoy from an incline to the right of the road. At once, by reflex, Bora and Schenck left the car and stood in the open in a firing stance, side by side. Rifle fire and bursts of machine-gun fire converged against them, as if the brushwood had a life of its own, hostile and determined to keep them from getting past. The escort truck was already pouring men out in a sequence of burnished helmets, and nothing short of a battle followed on the stretch of solitary road. A furious and wordless, largely mindless shooting back and forth, with men who crawled and ran for cover or out of it to shoot.
When it was over, Schenck was recriminating over the dead driver and a ruined windshield. He barely paid attention when Bora came back from the incline where the attackers had been hiding. He hadn’t even noticed Bora was gone.
“It seems they were all killed, Colonel. Six men, no uniforms, one empty machine gun, three carbines and five handguns retrieved.”
Schenck disregarded the news. “Damn, I’m not meeting the Russians with a totalled windshield. I wouldn’t give them the benefit of knowing we’ve been shot at.” He struck Bora’s shoulder with the companionable rap of a closed fist. “Let’s you and I drive to the next post and get ourselves another staff vehicle.”
Bora only had time to order the removal of the dead driver before Schenck methodically took to breaking with the butt of his Walther what remained of the smashed windshield. “At least we can see where we’re going,” he said. And when the job didn’t proceed quickly enough for his impatience, he vaulted on the hood and kicked the rest of the glass in.
As for Bora, he was glad Hannes had not been the driver today. With a rag he wiped blood and glass from the front seat and the dashboard as best he could, turned the key in the ignition and backed the car up into the road.
Still cursing under his breath, Schenck took his place alongside him.
“The colonel should consider riding in the back,” Bora said.
“Get this thing going. The colonel rides where he goddamn well pleases.”
Retz and Ewa had breakfast at the Pod Latarnie restaurant.
“Aren’t you hungry?” she asked.
They were sitting in the middle of the room, and Ewa could see from where she sat the sparse population of mid-morning on Sunday. There were some well-fed German soldiers, ethnic German civilians with narrow, bony faces; two women wearing ratty furs around their necks sat at the table where the soldiers drank and laughed. Looking over her shoulder, she glimpsed at the recess of the window where she had sat with Bora. There was no one at that table now. She brought to mind Bora’s stern attention, unflattering to her.
Retz, who’d breakfasted with Helenka at the apartment, simply said, “I guess I’m not hungry. Do you want more coffee?”
Ewa held out her cup.
“Richard, do you dye your hair?”
Her question came so entirely out of context, Retz was confused by it despite his ability to joke about it. He spilled some coffee. “Why, does it look like I dye my hair?”
“Yes.” Ewa put a crumb in her mouth. “It didn’t look this colour twenty-one years ago.”
“You have a good memory.”
“I think you’d look more distinguished with grey hair. Was it turning very much grey?”
Retz grumblingly said something about having started to turn grey at thirty. “I don’t see why I should look older than my age.”
Ewa pushed her shoulders back. She had her hair up and liked the way she looked this morning, so she could afford this little cruelty. “We don’t look a day older than we are, Richard.” Out of the pack he had laid by his plate she extracted a cigarette. She placed it in her mouth, and when she took it out again to remove a speck of tobacco from her lips, rouge had drawn a bright circle around it. “I stopped menstruating this spring.”
Retz’s lighter was aluminium, with a brass regimental crest. He held the steady small flame for Ewa to take a first drag of the cigarette. Some good humour had returned to him. “Well, it makes it safer for us, eh?”
While they waited for a car to be driven for them from Rzeszów, Schenck and Bora went to sit on a bench in the yard of the small field Kommandantur. Slim birch woods bristled the land down the way, pencilled white against the ground. It was not cold, and a jay whistled sharp. Most of the snow fallen among the trees had melted or formed clean blue patches in their shade. A glory of sunlight filtered through the woods.
The accident, if anything, had made the two of them euphoric. To Bora, being alive had been downright heady to him until moments ago, like on the day the armed man had jumped out of the haystack, which was the same day he’d seen for the first time the photograph of Mother Kazimierza.
Schenck seemed to read his mind. “These sudden jolts are good for a man’s nerves. They’re like a tonic. Danger gets the adrenaline flowing, with all that follows I did some reading about it. Adrenaline at first raises your pressure, dilates the bronchi, increases production of saliva. It stimulates the seminal vesicles, I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
Bora had noticed. He wondered whether Colonel Schenck ever thought of anything else.
More and more, as a reaction to the drop in stress, he sat entirely relaxed, smelling the odour of wood burning in the stove of the building behind th
em.
Schenck kept his arms crossed tightly against his wiry self. “Take today. You and I could have been killed. You could be dead now, or worse.” He caught Bora’s rise in curiosity, although no questions followed. “You could be mutilated. In Spain I saw a man whom a grenade had castrated. Took both testicles clear off. What do you say about that? Luckily the man - he was a Basque from Santander - had produced children prior to his accident.”
The mention brought Bora back to the sight of mangled bodies in the Jewish schoolhouse, with an unexpected rise of disgust. He guarded it, but euphoria and relaxation had gone. He felt reminded of mortality and very insecure.
Schenck smiled his bony, mean smile at him. “I hope you don’t mind my interference, Captain, but I wired General Sickingen to bring your wife along to Cracow.”
Bora said something disciplined, he was sure, though a wild urge to whoop risked breaking out of him all the way to Przemyśl.
There, the Russians were leery, not unfriendly. Rosy-faced, stuffed in uniforms with the peculiar peasant shirt pattern, they resembled overgrown gnomes. They insisted that Schenck and Bora be shown at once a display of captured Polish equipment and insignia. A Red Army photographer took snapshots of the Germans listening to the explanations of a tow-headed, bespectacled commissar. Vodka was brought out. Lunch, they were told, awaited in Lvov.
“As if I came to eat with the Russians.” Schenck grumbled to Bora, and then, “Tell them we look forward to lunch.”
In Cracow, Father Malecki said he doubted it would help, which didn’t keep Pana Klara from presenting him a demitasse of strong coffee with brandy.
“It’s the old-fashioned recipe, Father. Gulp it down when it’s hottest.”
At half-past noon, while at the border Bora translated for Colonel Schenck the third toast of the Russian post commander, Malecki was about to fall asleep in the parlour. The combination of head cold, drink and comfortable temperature would have succeeded except for the landlady’s call from the hallway.
“Father, there’s someone from the American consulate to see you.”
Immediately behind her, towering over her small stature, a youthful foreign-service officer in a white trench coat greeted the priest. Malecki recognized him from his visits to the consulate. His name was Logan, and he’d graduated from Notre Dame some five years back.
“Father Malecki, I hope I’m not intruding.”
“You’re not intruding. You’ll probably just catch a cold from me.”
Logan removed his hat but not his coat. “I’m not going to stay long. I really didn’t come officially. The consul told me to stop by.”
“Well, sit down.”
“No, thank you. Father, the consul is aware that you were instructed by the Holy See not to leave Cracow, even though the reason for your visit terminated with the death of the abbess at Our Lady of Sorrows. We also understand that German authorities have taken over the investigation of her death.” Logan made a meaningful pause. When he saw that Malecki didn’t encourage him to continue, he cleared his throat. “The consul feels very strongly that soon the violent cause of the abbess’s death will become known, whoever was behind the killing. Due to her popularity among the Catholic population—”
“You speak as if you weren’t Catholic yourself,” Malecki interrupted. “Come, come. What are you trying to say?”
“The consul feels you might want to consider leaving Poland.”
Malecki rested his hands on the crocheted doilies Pana Klara pinned to all the arms of the overstuffed chairs there were in the house.
“Why?”
Logan cleared his throat once more. The bulge of the Adam’s apple on his neck rose and fell above the line of his collar.
“The consul fears there might be violence in the streets when the news breaks out.”
“And?… Does the consul think I’d get involved in the riots? Or does he think that in their blind anger the Poles will attack a Polish-American priest? That’s nonsense.”
In the silence that followed, the hollow ticking of a mantel clock made itself conspicuous. Malecki sneezed. Logan was about to start another sentence, but was prevented.
“See here, Mister Logan. I appreciate your motoring here on your day off to tell me what the consul thinks - except that it isn’t what the consul thinks.” Malecki held up his hand to avoid recriminations. “What the consul really thinks, if I’m allowed to speculate, is that I shouldn’t continue to visit the convent while the investigation proceeds. Has His Eminence the archbishop called at the consulate, by any chance?”
Logan fingered the rim of his floppy hat. “It makes little difference what lies behind our concern for an American national. The concern is real. We understand there has been some violence against your person already.”
Now Malecki knew the archbishop was behind this. He decided to take his time before replying. He loudly blew his nose, opened the box of mints and rested one on his tongue. Logan watched him expectantly. Malecki offered him a mint.
“To tell the whole story, I struck first.”
Logan needed a few seconds to recuperate. He swallowed the mint without even tasting it. “Father, if the consul were informed - do you realize to what risk any action against a German places you?”
“From one Midwesterner to another, Mister Logan, I’d much rather if you didn’t take it upon yourself to inform the consul on this any further. I will speak when and if I see fit.”
“You cannot ask me to ignore the fact that you’re in danger!”
Malecki shook his head. “With a war in the offing, I wouldn’t lose sleep over the danger any of us run in Cracow.” He rose from the armchair. “You know, I have this nasty cold which I would like to sleep off. Be kind, Mister Logan. Go and tell the consul that I’m obliged to him. I have no wish to leave Cracow and I don’t think you or the consul can make me. My church work here isn’t done, and I promise I’ll deal with the Germans more wisely than in the past. As usual, they’re their own worst enemies.”
Two hundred and fifty kilometres to the east, Colonel Schenck told Bora that one more toast was all he’d accept from the Russian commander. “The last thing we need is to get to Lvov stone drunk.”
Bora held liquor well, but felt an increasing level of giddy merriment at the thought of what alcohol might be doing to the colonel’s seminal vesicles. He hardly worried about his own, now that the perspective of Dikta’s coming was sure to set him on an edge of perpetual urges for the next three weeks.
The Russians were installed in the Hotel Patria at Lvov. The hotel was within walking distance from the museum on the four-fountained Market Square, which the Germans were made to visit for a last-minute aperitif.
“Dobro pozhalovat!” A dapper colonel in steel-grey tunic welcomed the guests in the venerable carpeted lobby. Inevitably he was flanked by a commissar, identifiable by the red star on his sleeve. Bora couldn’t help comparing these to the shabby uniforms of the privates outside, standing under their long-eared cloth helmets.
Schenck frowned. “Tell him I’d like to start the talks right after lunch, Bora. I don’t want to be stuck with another tour of the city or propaganda sales talk.”
Bora translated throughout the reception. The commissar was seated across the table from him, and observed him closely. He said at one point, “You speak Russian well. How is it that you studied it so zealously?”
Bora answered with some polite generality. What Schenck had whispered to him on the way to the table was probably closer to the truth. “Mark my words, Bora, we’re going to take back this town. We surely haven’t entered Poland to leave half of it to the Reds.”
In the afternoon, the church of the Dominicans in Lvov reminded Bora of the church of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows in Cracow. The same Roman baroque volumes multiplied into cupolas and side chapels, although the open square gave this building more relevance than the convent had along the narrow street in Cracow.
Schenck had succeeded in obtaining a first round of
talks immediately after lunch, primarily matters of common intelligence, the preliminary draft of an agreement to collaborate against local resistance by open exchange of communiqués and issues of border protocol.
The Russians took their revenge by dragging the visitors through a sight-seeing tour of the city. Benignantly, the commissar turned to Bora. “You see how adversary propaganda has done Marxism wrong, Captain. The churches are intact, open and useable.”
Bora had been glancing at the street signs in the Cyrillic alphabet, aware that they carried the same signs of temporariness of the German ones in the west.
“Yes,” he spoke back, and smiling came easy. “But there’s a nursery rhyme in English that goes, ‘Here’s the church / and here’s the steeple…’ Today is Sunday, and I wonder where all the people might be.”
With news about Helenka in mind, Kasia almost forgot she was carrying a small piece of margarine in her pocket. When she pulled out a coin for the streetcar, her fingers met with the paper wrapper. Luckily it was cold enough for the margarine to stay solid. She stood through the short ride, holding on to the hand strap with an anxious eye to the names of the streets.
This was the stop for Święty Krzyża. Kasia got off in the slushy remnant of snow at the edge of the sidewalk, careless of wetting her shoes. Her toes were soaked in the time it took her to go from the corner of the street to Ewa’s door.
“I’m a friend of Pana Kowalska,” she explained to the porter. Ewa had told her the house management was strict, and the war had made it even more suspicious. It was easy to see, Kasia told herself while the porter kept her waiting, why Ewa didn’t take Richard Retz home.
“What is your name?”
Kasia answered.
“Why are you in such a hurry, young lady? What is the matter?”
