by Ben Pastor
Bora spent the night in a small village at the foothill of the mountains, where a reconnaissance detachment had also halted.
A wind had risen, and although the snow had tapered off, it was exceedingly cold. A full moon sailed above stringy clouds of a sickly colour. The colour and curdled texture of sour milk, Bora thought. Before retiring, he took a walk down the rutted central street to be alone and think, to free his mind from the scenes of the day. Against the ragged grey sky, like a sharp-angled herd, the army half-tracks were stationed at one end. Few houses had lights in them, visible as flickering lines around windows and under doors.
As on the day he had identified his dead companions in the schoolhouse, a sudden sense of surprise for finding himself here caught him, like an awakening. Everything outside this moment had the quality of a dream. Colonel Schenck and Father Malecki were ever so briefly like phantoms to his mind. He had to ask himself if he had really seen a dead nun in the cloister, if he had really punched a priest and quibbled with a Red Army commissar.
The moon seemed to roll swiftly on, past the stringy sour-milk clouds. Odourless, cutting, the wind pushed the moon ahead of itself.
Bora turned at the end of the road and walked back. Another grey, ragged horizon, with the shaggy back of thatched houses to limit it. One thing he could count on: having to put up with Major Retz, who in a few weeks had become an unpleasant inevitability in his life.
Well, he’d go directly to work in the morning, and at least avoid running into one or the other of the major’s women visitors.
18 December
On Monday, Bora stopped halfway through the removal of his greatcoat, one hand still clasping the button. “The major is what?”
“Dead, sir.” The orderly lifted from under the desk a box with a few personal items Bora recognized as belonging to Retz.
“When?”
“Sunday morning, sir. He was found dead at home. Colonel Schenck thought you might want to take these along.”
Bora lowered his eyes to the box. He had a hard time connecting the orderly’s words to Retz, and whatever other questions pressed him - how, why - he didn’t ask now, but automatically took the box and brought it to his office.
A colleague was sharpening a pencil when he walked in, and said at once, “You’d never expect he’d kill himself, would you?”
“Is that what happened?”
“He put his head in the stove and breathed in. It’s a miracle the whole building didn’t blow sky-high. The cleaning woman smelled gas from under your apartment door and had the good sense of calling for help. It had saturated the place, and all it would have taken was for her to go in and flip the light switch on.”
“But why? Did he leave a note, or something?”
“Nothing that I heard of. Salle-Weber would know, maybe. He was looking for you yesterday.” The pencil came out of the sharpener with a long clean point, which Bora’s colleague licked with his tongue. “You roomed with Retz, don’t you have a clue?”
Bora went to see Salle-Weber. Patently unimpressed or uninterested in the news, the SS looked conciliatory for a change.
“Of all the officers in Cracow, Bora, you’re the one who spent the most after-hours time with Retz. You’re an observant fellow. Did Retz tell you anything that might hint at private trouble? Did he behave in an out-of-the-ordinary way just before you left?”
“Why, no. Not at all. The only thing is - on weekends he always drank a bit.”
“He drank a lot.” Salle-Weber corrected him. “But drunks usually kill themselves by the bottle. No, I mean women trouble, affairs, matters of money. Political things.”
Bora wondered if he should speak of Ewa Kowalska, but Salle-Weber was ahead of him. “We know he had a girlfriend or two he liked above the rest.” He glanced at the file on the desk. “One Ewa Kowalska, one Basia Plutinska and there was also a younger woman, Helena or Helenka Sokora. He took those home, so you must have seen them if nothing else.”
“Yes, I’ve seen them. And nothing else.”
Salle-Weber smirked at the answer. “So, he got along with all of them?”
“He seemed to.”
“Well, I don’t know why I even ask. We routinely checked the women out, and they all looked distressed, especially the Sokora girl. He’d been ‘nice’ to all of them, according to their depositions, and I had the feeling they’ll miss their sugar daddy. We have to look elsewhere, just for the satisfaction of figuring it out. All I’m interested in is making sure there was no politics involved.”
“I don’t think politics was the major’s weakness. He was completely orthodox. Two of his brothers are in the SS, you know.”
Salle-Weber closed the folder and put it away. “Has Colonel Schenck contacted you about writing a letter home to Retz’s wife?”
“Yes.” Bora knew that Salle-Weber wanted to instruct him in reference to that, so he added, “I’m at a loss as to what I should say.”
“You should say that Major Retz died in an accident during the execution of his military duties.”
“Very well.”
The conversation continued for nearly an hour. When Bora was about to leave, he had a curiosity of his own. “What did you tell the captain’s women?”
“That it was an accident, but I’m sure they found out the truth from the cleaning woman or the house scuttlebutt.” Salle-Weber gave Bora a perceptive, amused stare. “In case you decide to pick up with one of them where your room-mate left off, stick to the accident theory.”
“The girl you called Sokora-Ithought Kowalska was her name.”
“Sokora is the name she uses on stage. I guess she doesn’t want to be confused with the other one.”
It was snowing hard when Bora came out into the street after talking to Salle-Weber. Straight ahead, the Wawel and the Old City resembled a Christmas-like sketch of themselves, cold, conventional and graceful. It would be dark soon. Spires and walls and buildings old and new would be swallowed up by night and other images would take their place, mind-born and less graceful.
Bora was due out in the field early in the morning, but tonight he had to go home.
As soon as he entered he expected to smell gas, but of course the apartment had been totally aired out. Nothing seemed different at all. Bora stepped from the vestibule to the living room, to the hallway and from there he found that he was in fact ambling his way towards the kitchen, because he had to see the kitchen.
He looked at the stove as if seeing it for the first time, and as if it bore little resemblance to what it was, because it had served another purpose. It didn’t disgust him, it just seemed alien and sinister.
Retz’s bedroom had been “thoroughly gone through”, in Salle-Weber’s words. Now all was back in place. Uniforms hung, magazines stacked, his toiletry in order on the dresser. Bora realized he’d never entered the room before. He’d come to the threshold of it once or twice, chatting, but - well, he’d heard plenty of what had happened in this room at night.
Bora’s eyes sought the bed with a little envy and much expectation. When Dikta would come, if she should come. He’d do what Retz had done with his women, only more, harder. Better. Longer. Then he caught himself, blushing: it seemed somehow sacrilegious to think of his wife here. He walked out and closed the door.
The perspective of sleeping in a house where a man had killed himself wasn’t disturbing, though Bora did feel guilty for not mourning Retz. After uselessly trying to read for nearly an hour, he admitted that he wouldn’t fall asleep any time soon.
Close to midnight, when he finally went to brush his teeth before going to bed, he glanced at Retz’s little bottles of salve and hair dye with a new eye. How things never meant to survive their owner manage to do so. Toothpaste, nail clippers, security razor. Retz’s absence amounted to those, and whatever beer and wine he’d left untouched in the refrigerator.
What would his own absence amount to?
In the mirror, his face was new in some ways, too. He saw himself
serious and younger than he felt. Ewa Kowalska must have thought him immature because of the lack of hard-edged wear in his features. Maybe he was immature.
Strange that Retz had left the blade in the razor. Is that what men do before committing suicide - breaking their own little rules, like never leaving a wet blade in the razor?
At dawn, before leaving for the field, Bora divided the objects to be shipped to Retz’s widow from the useless ones. These he threw away, bottles and cigarettes and prophylactics and vitamin tablets. Retz’s razor, he forgot in the glass.
8
20 December
The girl’s breasts pressed against the cloth of her faded blouse, small like gathered fingertips. She was still a child, really, and Bora looked away, at the round-faced infant astride her hip. The baby had wetted her, and she didn’t seem to notice.
At Bora’s prompting, Hannes continued to ask questions in a monotone. The farmers listened and now and then answered, wide-eyed with worry. Despite the season they were all barefoot; crusts of snowy mud coated the heels of the women, who had been surprised at their wash.
By their looks, Bora had a sense for the relationship among them. There were two elders and an aged woman - the parent group - and three sons with their wives, the girl and the infant. Two steps away stood a small woman of undetermined age, snub-nosed and pale. She drooled from an open mouth and had since Bora’s arrival been picking furiously at the back of her left hand, where the skin was covered with sores.
“Hannes, make them understand that all I want to find out is which way the armed men went. Tell them I know they’re not hiding Polish soldiers here.”
Again Hannes spoke. The men did all the answering this time. Bora caught a few words that resembled Russian, and the name of a nearby hamlet, Skalny Pagórek.
“They say they were going towards Skalny Pagórek the last time they saw them, Herr Hauptmann.”
“And when was this?”
The men consulted one another. Leaning on a knotty staff, the oldest among them posed questions, listened, nodded. Bora, too, listened, without understanding, staring at the archaic profile in shoulder-length hair, plaited in wiry grey braids down the sides of the elder’s face. Next to him, daughter or in-law, Bora recognized the young girl’s mother by the clearness of her eyes. A stout, fair woman, she’d stepped ahead of the others to greet him by kissing his hand, in peasant deference for the uniform. He’d drawn back and now he knew he should not have done so, out of respect for the same uniform. The sores on the snub-nosed woman’s hand began to bleed.
Dates, directions, bits of information trickled in. Bora and Hannes were almost through, when two SD vehicles came bouncing up the dishevelled country path. Bora expected them to drive by, but the staff car turned instead into the snow-rimmed track that led to the farm. It stopped by the wooden covered well, and so did the truck. Several soldiers alighted from it, checked the well for ice and filled their canteens.
An officer emerged from the car. He made no attempt to draw closer to the threshing floor, where Bora had gathered the farmers. He remained by the car, thirty or so paces away, consulting a folded map.
Bora said, “Wrap things up, Hannes.”
By the time he reached the well, the SD officer had finished reading the map, and was now replacing it in its case.
“Are you done, Captain?”
Bora took a short, irritable breath. “This is army-controlled territory. We have jurisdiction over it.”
“Well, we’re on a slightly different errand from yours, so don’t you worry about a duplication of tasks.”
The soldiers, Bora saw, stood in the cold, blue shadow of the truck. They had stacked weapons to one side - machine guns, carbines - and were beginning to eat their rations. It was too early in the morning for lunch, so they might have travelled overnight. Their boots were covered with dry mud, and their uniforms looked slept in.
“What’s your errand?” he asked the officer.
“We’re getting provisions for another week in the field.”
“There’s nothing left on this farm. We came through during the invasion, they’ve been hit hard.”
“We’ll do our own asking, Captain. Have a good trip.”
Bora checked his watch. He’d spent more time here than expected. He still had a long list of tasks in the field before making it back for a staff meeting at three in the afternoon, and Schenck didn’t tolerate lateness. Waiting for Hannes to bring the car, Bora debated whether he should stay until the SD carried out their search.
They didn’t seem to be in a hurry, any of them. The soldiers munched on their food or sat in the truck smoking.
Their officer dipped a canteen in the pail to fill it. He drank from it, rinsed his mouth and spat the water back in the well. “You can wait around, Captain, but I’m sure you have better things to do.”
Bora would for ever regret the lack of foresight that made him get in the car then, and drive off.
They’d come about a kilometre from the farm, past a double line of gaunt trees that sheltered it from the north wind, before they had to slow down to a creeping pace to negotiate a ford. It was a steep, muddy incline they’d had difficulty crossing on their way here. The mud was beginning to ice over and was slippery. The car reached the bottom, which was a frigid mixture of rocks, loam and water, and began straining.
A high wind carried sparse clouds coasting from the south. After sunrise it had turned comfortable enough, and now Bora kept his window rolled down. Against Schenck’s advice to sobriety, he lit himself a cigarette, and watched the smoke escape from the car in capering blue curls. Skalny Pagórek. Skalny Pagórek came next. Spread across his knees, the map showed a criss-crossing of country paths and Slavic place names.
“Hannes,” he began to say. And then, over the low grind of the straining engine, Bora heard a sound that made his back harden against the seat.
Machine-gun fire. Not so distant, machine-gun fire was breaking out from behind the line of gaunt trees. Hannes’ nervous look met him in the rear-view mirror.
Bora put the map away. A void seemed to open at the pit of his stomach, a sudden sharp ache. But he could not have made such an error: he couldn’t have misread the men’s intentions to that extent, it was impossible. He was prejudiced against the Security Service. He always thought the worst. What he should think was - what he should think was that the SD had met with the Polish army stragglers.
“Go back, quickly!”
They were at the middle point of the ford. Hannes put the car in reverse and caked mud spun from the tires before he was able to back up the incline and turn around. They roared past the trees in a storm of reddish pine needles, and devoured the flat space that separated them from the farm.
All Bora could make out from afar was a handful of soldiers leaving the barn.
The truck was empty. The staff car was empty. There was no one on the threshing floor.
Bora ran from the car, crossing the expanse of snow trampled over the muddy dirt. He halted on the doorstep of the barn.
The void in his stomach caved in.
“What have you done?”
The SD officer shouldered past Bora to get out of the barn, and stopped with him on the threshold.
All around the building, soldiers were bringing gasoline cans, and pouring a consistent trickle of fuel on its foundations. Stubble and hay were thrown on it by the handful. Bora smelled the gasoline and heard the soldiers move about, but paid no heed to them. His eyes were riveted on the dirt floor of the barn.
“For God’s sake, they’re not even dead!”
“Your job here was done when we came, Captain. Don’t you get involved in ours.”
Bora stepped forwards to enter, unlatching the holster.
The SD gripped his wrist. “I’m warning you,” and when Bora freed his hand with a twist of his arm, he pushed him hard against the door frame. “Don’t meddle.”
Bora pushed back. He took his gun out. The SD came chest to chest
with him, shoving him, and Bora elbowed him back. Grimly they confronted each other by stance and hardness of muscles, vying for control of the doorway.
“I want your name, Captain.”
“And I want yours.”
Fire flared up next to them when it caught a tall bundle of straw and engulfed it in red, in a surge of suffocating smoke. The SD backed off, waving with contempt, and Bora walked into the barn.
Smoke was already starting to seep from under the disconnected planks all around the building. Bora’s boots pasted blood into the dirt floor as he drew close to the centre of the barn. The bodies were heaped there. First he saw the girl. Face up, she’d been shot through the forehead. Her left hand twitched frantically in the blood, where her mother’s arm pinned her down. The back of her mother’s head had been blown off. Bora stumbled over a man’s bloody bulk to reach the girl. Straddling her body, he finished her off. Then he turned to the others, one by one firing point-blank into them. When he was out of shots, he changed clips and kept firing.
“Herr Hauptmann, Herr Hauptmann!” Hannes called to him from the threshing floor. “The roof is giving way!”
Bora kept firing.
When he walked out, the SD vehicles had already left. Turning his head towards the well, he saw their wake braiding a storm of ice crystals on the dirt road that headed east. His eyes burned and ached with smoke, and he wouldn’t wipe them for fear of appearing moved, because he wasn’t.
Hannes stood by the car, his slight field-grey figure looking insignificant against the immense background of rolling pastures. His face was pale and averted.
Bora was not moved. Only conscious of an unbearable weight at the end of his arm. Morning sounds came from the fields. Very far, it seemed. The crispness of morning lovingly brought them to him, once he turned away from the crackling and smell of the flames.
Many times afterwards he would think of this day, and feel the drain of standing there with the bulk of the Walther weighing his hand, his arm down. There was a heaviness in the gun that wanted to drag him low, and sink him.
