by Louis Begley
Also surveying the scene, with an air of contempt that matched Tania’s indignation, was a fat middle-aged Wehrmacht captain, standing alone a few meters from us, in the middle of the platform. I realized that Tania was including him in her outraged stare and that her show seemed particularly directed at him. All at once, I felt her pulling me behind her again. With a few rapid strides she reached the officer. Addressing him in her haughtiest tone, she asked if he would be kind enough to tell her where these awful trains were going. The answer made my legs tremble: Auschwitz. Completely wrong destination, replied Tania. To find herself with all these disreputable-looking people, being shouted at by drunk and disorderly soldiers, and all this in front of a train going to a place she had never heard of, was intolerable. She was a doctor’s wife from R., about two hours from Warsaw; she had come to Warsaw to buy dresses and have her son’s eyes examined; of course, everything she bought had been lost in this dreadful confusion. We had nothing to do with whatever was going on here. Would he, as an officer, impose some order and help us find a train to R.? We had spent almost all our money, but she thought she had enough for a second-class compartment. The captain burst out laughing. My dear lady, he said to Tania, not even my wife orders me about quite this way. Could Tania assure him her husband would be glad to have her return? And where had she learned such literary turns of expression? After he had an answer to these basic questions he would see about this wretched train business. Tania blushed. Should I tell you the truth, even though you won’t like it? Naturally, replied the captain. I think my husband doesn’t mind my being sometimes hot tempered. I learned German in school and probably I managed to improve it by reading, especially everything by Thomas Mann I can find in the original—not much in R., but quite a lot in Warsaw. It’s a good way for a provincial housewife to keep occupied. I know Mann’s work is forbidden in the Reich, but that is the truth. I am not a party member, merely a railroad specialist, announced the captain still laughing, I am glad you have chosen a great stylist. Shall I get someone to carry your suitcases while we look for transportation to R.?
The captain was a man of the world. He did not feel compelled to introduce himself and gave no sign of being discouraged or startled by our lack of luggage. Having handed Tania into a first-class compartment of a train waiting at a distant platform, he clicked his heels. Tania was not to worry. He was signing a pass to R.; it was not necessary to buy tickets; the German reservist in charge of this military train would see to it that she was not disturbed.
The train remained in the station for some hours after he left us. Slowly, it filled up with soldiers; noisy groups of officers were in the compartments on both sides of ours. Meanwhile, Tania’s excitement left her and with it her boldness: her face turned haggard, it was the face of the night before. She could not stop shivering or talking about our being doomed because the train had not left. She was sure the captain would mention the amusing little shrew from R. with an interest in Mann to some officer whose understanding extended beyond railway trains, and they would immediately send the Gestapo to get us. Once again, she had gone too far with her lies; we would pay for it. But no one came. The officers who glanced at us curiously as they passed in the corridor continued on their way. A whistle blew, the train started, and soon the elderly reservist came to tell us that the next stop would be G., more than halfway to R.
VI
THE fields were very flat. At the edge of the horizon one could distinguish a line of trees, probably similar to the parallel line of trees near us that marked the western boundary of the pastures belonging to the village of Piasowe. To the right and left were other lines of demarcation: rutted passages, made by cart wheels and hooves of horses and cattle, running in an almost straight line to that western boundary, just wide enough for a cart; and elsewhere long, thin, grass-covered mounds separating a peasant’s land from that of his neighbor. Farther off to the right, at a distance of some three kilometers, there was the dirt highway with which the main road of Piasowe made a right angle. Peasants’ horse-drawn carts moved along it, sometimes at a brisk trot when the cart was empty and the peasant cracked his whip, and sometimes at a pace so slow that a good part of the day was gone before the cart disappeared from view. Once in a long while, rarely enough to provoke comment in the village, a German truck or staff car would pass, enveloped in a cloud of white dust. The highway led west to Rawa; to the east lay W., where the market was held, and, much farther, G. Beyond the highway was the forest. At this time of the year all the crops were in, and the passages between the fields were used mostly to haul hay from distant stacks to the barns.
Returning to the stables in the evening, we would drive our cows along these passages, together with other children from Piasowe who grazed cattle in adjoining pastures. We could get the cows home more quickly that way than through the fields, without making them run, which was bad for the milk and sometimes even dangerous for the cows. The cows liked having a path to follow. It was also more fun for us, because it made a large herd of cattle, cows lowing and jostling one another. There were four of us who took cows to the same pasture, two other boys and a girl; the houses we belonged to stood in a clump with their outbuildings; the other houses of Piasowe were up the village road, closer to the highway. The barns and stables gave onto the fields directly; the houses were separated from them by large yards. Perpendicular to each house, on one side of the yard, were usually pigsties and chicken coops, and on the other side manure piles. The houses faced the village road; their outbuildings were enclosed by wooden fences to keep the poultry and piglets inside during the day. At night, the dogs would be off the chain: the fences kept them in too.
We children were responsible for some twenty cows and heifers. Three of the cows belonged to Tania’s and my master, a slow-talking bald peasant called Kula. The cows grazed peacefully, picking at the stubble; when Stefa told us it was time, we would move them, calling them by their names and waving the stripped branches we used to poke at them and hit them. At thirteen, Stefa was the oldest. The boys were my age. We always did what Stefa said when it came to taking care of the cows. In fact, there was not much to do, besides changing every couple of hours from a place that was overgrazed and making sure the heifers did not wander off. The cows were content to eat and chew and drop turds; we brought excitement into their lives only occasionally, when Stefa agreed that a little running early in the day would do them no great harm. Then we would give one another boosts to get on a cow’s back and try to ride her in a circle around the herd. Sometimes even Stefa would take a turn. She usually managed to stay on the longest.
Our serious business was to keep from freezing. There were no trees in the pasture and no dead branches to burn. We made fires out of a few dry cow turds and sat cross-legged around them. At noon, we would scratch a hole in the ground, put our potatoes in it, and cover them with dirt. Then we pushed the fire right over the potatoes. We would build the fire up to make it really strong, still trying not to use many turds because very dry ones were hard to find. In about an hour, the meal would be ready. Somebody always brought salt. The baked potatoes would make warmth circulate from the stomach throughout the body. They thawed out our hands. We would eat two or three potatoes and wish we had more.
We used a little hay from a nearby haystack to start our fires; it reminded me of dry flower stalks and the game my grandfather had played with Zosia and me in our garden. I told Stefa and the boys that we could make fires to jump over. They wanted to try it. The next day, we brought bundles of straw under our jackets and arranged the fires in a row, close together, so that as soon as one had jumped over a fire one had to leap into the next one. The straw burned with a quick hot flame; they liked the game, although we didn’t have enough straw to make it last long. We began to play almost every day. Running and jumping helped warm us.
I realized that jumping over fires, which I had taught them, was the only game they knew. They liked to ride the cows, to hit a crow with a stone, or to grab a
cat by the tail and whirl it, but that did not seem to me to be playing; it was real teasing and hurting, more like catching a hen in the yard, holding it with one hand by the wings and, with the other, wringing its neck. I could not deny that I enjoyed watching a hen killed this way. The hen would flap its wings and try to fly and skid when it was running away and make a huge cackling sound once it was caught; even Kula and his wife, Kulowa, laughed each time they saw it. But it had nothing to do with pretending. I told Stefa and the boys about how I had played when I was little—only I didn’t say it was in T., because T. was none of their business—in the sandbox in the courtyard of our house, or on the swing and the slide that were attached to the jungle gym, or on the jungle gym itself. I drew pictures of this equipment in the dirt with my finger. Such stories made them cover their mouths with their hands and giggle; they didn’t say I was lying, they said I was crazy. Who would ever make a pile of sand for a child to throw around or pour water into? That would just make a mess. These other things, nobody had ever seen them or anything like them; there had never been any talk of jungle gyms in Piasowe.
As I told them about Warsaw, where I said we had once lived, its tall buildings, trolley cars, automobiles, electric lights and radios, their wonder grew, and so did mine. I found that only Stefa had ever been to another village, one just like Piasowe but a long walk past the line of horizon we stared at all day, because that was where her mother’s parents lived. The others had never gone beyond the line of trees at the end of the fields of Piasowe or the end of the village road, where it met the highway. That is why the line of the horizon was so mysterious; neither they nor I knew what was hidden beyond it. I knew about Rawa only as a name: Tania had told me that was where the highway led if one traveled on it more than fifty kilometers past Piasowe; it had a railroad station. I knew about G. and W. because Tania and I had passed through them.
Stefa and the boys liked to listen to me, especially after I learned to avoid talking about things that bothered them by being strange instead of amusing. The uprising in Warsaw interested them—I disregarded Tania’s orders and talked about it; they knew about guns and about fighting between the Germans and the partisans. There were partisans in the forest. Once, during the previous summer, German soldiers tried to get the partisans there but failed and afterward went through the village looking for any who might be hiding with the peasants. But none were found, so the Germans just took away all the sausages and bacon they saw, and the partisans were still in the forest. Sometimes they came out at night and raided the village, also to get food. Stefa said they could be worse than the Germans: they were after women as well as food.
I liked to listen to their stories about Piasowe. According to them, only Komar, the rich peasant who sold vodka at the entrance of the village, could read a little and, some people said, knew how to count better than any town person. Nobody in Piasowe had been to school; W. was too far. The idea of going to school instead of working in the fields or with the animals made them giggle. The priest came to Piasowe from W. every few weeks to baptize, marry and celebrate Mass. He had given them Communion.
They talked about Kula and Kulowa. I knew, of course, that Kula’s son Tadek was the butcher for all of Piasowe and the adjoining villages, in addition to helping his father with the land. They said Kula was afraid of Tadek, although he was himself very strong. When Tadek was drunk, he beat his parents, especially Kulowa. Once he knocked out Kula’s teeth. They fought because Kula would not divide his land so Tadek could marry. They advised me to stay out of Tadek’s way. He would leave Tania alone: it didn’t matter that she now worked as Kula’s servant; she was still a schoolteacher. The Kula daughter, Masia, they all liked, as did Tania and I. This gay and round-faced girl used to take Kula’s cows to pasture until Kula got Stefa to help out. Masia too wanted to get married, and Kula wouldn’t hear of it and whipped her every time she talked to him about it. He preferred to keep her at home, so she would work, and he didn’t want to give her a dowry. Still, Stefa’s brother, Jurek, really wanted to marry her, and Jurek put it into her in Kula’s barn every Sunday and whenever else they had a chance, to get Masia pregnant. Then Kula would have to give them permission. Tadek liked to watch. They did it in a corner so that Tadek and some of his friends could climb to the hayloft from the outside and see everything. Kula and Kulowa were probably the only two people in Piasowe who didn’t know what was going on.
Stefa said it was no wonder Kula had hired Tania when we arrived: Kula had so much land that getting in the potatoes and beets on time was too much even for the four Kulas. Somebody had to do the rest of the work, taking the cows to pasture, milking, feeding the poultry and the pigs. Now Kula might begin to ask himself whether, with Tania doing so much of the work in the house, Masia wouldn’t get lazy and run after Jurek even more. I was another matter; having Masia instead of me go out with the cows was a waste, and he didn’t like paying Stefa’s father to have her do it.
I would tell these things to Tania when we lay down for the night on our straw mattress and began listening to Kula and Kulowa snore in the next room, like peasants sawing logs, and Masia’s gentler and more regular noise. Tania said she had already considered the problem and was making her plans.
WE HAD been in Piasowe almost two months. On the train from Warsaw to R., Tania had grown increasingly nervous. Fortunately, it seemed that the Wehrmacht captain had not spoken to anyone about us before the train left the station, but it was only a matter of time before he talked, and then they would telephone the Gestapo in R. We would be picked up as soon as we got off the train. And why R., why had she said we were from R.? R. was much too big, really a little city, it would be full of Polish and German police. They would check our papers at the station, and how was she going to explain why we were traveling from Warsaw to R. instead of Auschwitz? We must get off at the next stop, G. She had never heard of G., so it must be small, perhaps without any police at the station. Also, if she was right, and the captain had talked by now, it was unlikely they would be looking for us in G. But we wouldn’t get off the train until it began to pull out of the G. station; that way the German reservist wouldn’t have an opportunity to interfere even if he was surprised we were not continuing to R. and became suspicious. We would simply wait near the railroad-car door, as though we were getting a breath of fresh air.
Tania was right. We left the train in G. unhindered. There were no policemen on the platform or in the station; outside, the town seemed asleep or deserted. We went into the first restaurant we saw. Tania asked for soup and bread; I was so hungry that the smell of the potato soup made me feel weak. The serving girl who took the order disappeared into the kitchen. Through the open door, we heard her talk and a man’s voice answer. The soup turned out to be wonderfully thick and hot. It burned its way down my throat to my stomach.
Before we finished eating, a man came out of the kitchen, said he was the owner, and very politely asked if he could sit down with us. Tania told him he was welcome and began to talk quickly about how good the soup tasted. He interrupted her with a smile; there were more serious matters he needed to discuss with her. He could see at a glance we had somehow managed to get out of Warsaw but wasn’t sure we understood what kind of danger we were in. The Germans had published orders not only to the police but to the entire population that refugees from Warsaw were to be turned over to the German police. Of course, we were not the first refugees to have reached G. Most had come at the beginning of August; apparently they had more or less walked out of the city and made their way here. Lately, there had been very few. He didn’t know what happened to the ones the Germans got. They were not seen again. He was going to help us, that was his responsibility, but the organization had limited means. All they could do was give us some clothes and find a peasant with a horse and cart to take us as far away from G. as the peasant could be persuaded to go. Then we would be on our own. But all that could wait until the morning. For the moment, we should eat all we could hold and then g
et a good sleep.
While we had more soup and later fried eggs with kielbasa, Tania and our host kept talking. She told him about the fighting during the last weeks in Warsaw and how we escaped. He explained about the Mazowsze, the region we were in. There were villages in this part of the country so remote and isolated—he hoped to send us to one of them—that they might as well be in another world. If Germans went there, it was to confiscate horses or pigs, not to check documents. The peasants had not changed in the last hundred years. They didn’t know that taking in refugees from Warsaw was forbidden or that money could be made blackmailing them. Probably not too many of them even knew there was such a place as Warsaw. But Tania didn’t need to feel guilty about the peasants: our presence wouldn’t be a danger for them. There weren’t enough Germans to look for refugees in those villages, where the devil wishes you good-night. He thought Tania might tell the peasants that we had run away from the Russian front—no use giving details, since they wouldn’t understand and wouldn’t care—that she was a schoolteacher, which ought to win her some respect, and that for lodging and food we were willing to work as farm servants until the war was over. We were lucky, because peasants were now digging up potatoes and soon would be digging beets; they needed all the help they could get. Once that work was finished the peasant we were living with might not want to go on feeding extra mouths, but the war was ending, and, besides, by that time Tania would know more about Mazowsze peasants than he.
