The Polish Officer: A Novel Page 3

  “Thank you,” said the little man. He was somewhere in his forties, de Milja thought, with the face of a Jewish imp. “I am Vladimir Herschensohn.” He extended his hand, and de Milja shook it. Herschensohn saw that de Milja was staring at his battered violin case. “I am,” he added, “the principal violinist of the Polish National Symphony Orchestra.”

  De Milja inclined his head in acknowledgment.

  “So,” Herschensohn said. “We are going to Pilava.” He had to raise his voice above the chuff of the locomotive, but he managed a tone of great politeness.

  “South of there,” was all de Milja said.

  At the 9:15 meeting with Colonel Vyborg, de Milja had brought up the issue: what to tell the passengers. “What you like, when you like, you decide,” Vyborg had said.

  Vyborg’s room had been crowded—people sitting on desks, on the floor, everywhere. De Milja knew most of them, and what they had in common was a certain ruthless competence. Suddenly the days of office politics, family connections, the well-fed wink, were over. Now the issue was survival, and these officers, like de Milja, found themselves given command and assigned to emergency operations.

  The agenda of the meeting was long and difficult and devoted to a single topic: the dispersion to safety of the national wealth. War cost money and Poland meant to keep fighting. And there wasn’t that much. A country like Great Britain had a national wealth of two hundred million dollars, but Poland had only been alive as an independent nation since 1918—this time around—and owned barely a tenth of that.

  Stocks and bonds and letters of deposit on foreign banks were going to leave the port of Gdynia on a Danish passenger liner. British pounds, French francs, and American dollars were to be flown out at night by one of the last remaining air-force transports, while millions of Polish zlotys and German reichsmarks were being buried in secret vaults in Warsaw—they would be needed there. Senior code and cipher experts, the cream of Polish intelligence, had already left the country. And it was de Milja’s job to take out the gold reserve, carrying it by train to Romania, where another group would move it on to Paris, the time-honored host to Polish governments-in-exile.

  From Gdansk station they traveled slowly through the central districts of the city, where crews were filling bomb craters and repairing rail by the light of fires in oil drums. They crossed the railroad bridge back into Praga, then turned south on the eastern bank of the Vistula. Soon the city was behind them, and the track left the river and curved gently southeast, toward the city of Lublin.

  The conductor who’d gotten on the train at the Dimek Street bridge was a man of old-fashioned manners and grave demeanor, with a droopy mustache, a conductor’s hat one size too large, and a limp from wounds received when his train was dive-bombed in the first hours of the war. When he’d reported to de Milja at the bridge, he had stood at attention and produced from his belt a 9 mm Parabellum pistol—a 1914 cannon—and informed de Milja that he’d fought the Bolsheviks in 1921, and was prepared to send a significant number of Germans straight to hell if he got the opportunity.

  As the train chugged through the Polish countryside, the conductor went from car to car and made a little speech. “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please. Soon we will be stopping at Pilava; those who wish to get off the train are invited to do so. However, this train will not be returning to Warsaw, it is going all the way to Lvov, with brief stops at Lublin and Tomaszow. The military situation in the south is unclear, but the railroad will take you as far as you wish to travel. Passage is without charge. Thank you.”

  From the last car, de Milja watched the crowd carefully. But the reaction was subdued: a number of family conferences conducted in urgent whispers, an avalanche of questions that God himself, let alone a train conductor, couldn’t have answered, and more than a little head shaking and grim smiling at the bizarre twists and turns that life now seemed to take. The Polish people, de Milja realized, had already absorbed the first shock of war and dislocation; now it was a question of survival; ingenuity, improvisation, and the will to live through catastrophe and see the other side of it. So when the train stopped at Pilava, only a few people got off. The farther from Warsaw the better—what consensus there was among the passengers seemed to follow that line of reasoning.

  For a time, the countryside itself proved them right. South of Pilava there was no war, only a rainy September morning, a strip of pale sky on the horizon, harvested fields, birch groves, and tiny streams. The air smelled of damp earth and the coming October. The leaves a little dry now, and rustling in the wind.

  De Milja’s mother was the Countess Ostrowa, and her brothers, known always as “the Ostrow uncles,” had taken it upon themselves to teach him about life; about dogs and horses and guns, servants and mistresses. They were from another time—a vanished age, his father said—but his mother adored them and they lived hard, drunken, brutal, happy lives and never bothered to notice they were in the wrong century.

  His father was an aristocrat of another sort: second son of a family occupied for generations with polite commerce, senior professor of economics at Jagiello university. He was an arid man, tall and spare, who had been old all his life and who, in his heart, didn’t really think very much of the human mammal. The vaguely noble name de Milja, pronounced de Milya, he shooed away with his hand, admitting there was a village in Silesia, some forty miles from where the family originated, called Milja, but the aristocratic formation he ascribed to “some Austro-Hungarian nonsense my grandfather meddled with” and would never say any more about it. Exiled to the top floor of the family house in Warsaw, he lived by the light of a green-glass lamp amid piles of German periodicals and stacks of woody paper covered with algebraic equations rendered in fountain pen.

  So de Milja’s world, from its earliest days, had a cold north and a hot south, and he spent his time going back and forth; as a boy, as a young man, maybe, he thought, forever. The uncles laughing and roaring downstairs, throwing chicken bones in the fire, grabbing the maids’ bottoms, and passing out on the sofas with their boots on the pillows. Up two flights, a family of storks nested among the chimneys on the opposite roof and his father explained spiders and thunder.

  They’d married de Milja off when he was nineteen. The families had known each other forever, he and Helena were introduced, left alone, and encouraged to fall in love. She probably saw the wisdom of all this much more clearly than he did—gazed at his belt buckle, kissed him with swollen lips and a hand on his jaw, and he was hers. Two weeks before the wedding, his favorite Ostrow uncle had taken him into a disused parlor, the furniture covered with sheets, where they fortified themselves with Armagnac, and his uncle—scarlet face, shaved head, glorious cavalry mustaches—had given him a premarital lovemaking lesson with the aid of a dressmaker’s dummy. “You’re not a bull, dammit!” he’d bellowed. “You don’t mount her when she’s at the kitchen stove.”

  In the event, the problem did not arise: she never bent over to get the bread out of the oven because she never put it in—that was done by a series of country girls charitably called maids, more than one of whom had flipped the back of her skirt at him.

  Over time, Helena changed. At first she would flirt, touch him accidentally with her breasts, and hold him between the legs with both hands. But something happened, she would only make love in the dark, sometimes cried, sometimes stopped. He learned to work his way through her defenses, but in the process discovered what she was defending. He began to realize that the membrane that separated her from the world was too thin, that she could not tolerate life.

  She’d gotten pregnant, then lost the baby during an influenza epidemic in the winter of 1925. That was the end. In the deepest part of himself he’d known it, known it the day it happened. For three years, everyone pretended that everything would be all right, but when little fires were started in the house she had to go to the doctors and they prescribed a stay at a private clinic near Tarnopol “for a few weeks.”

  Absence f
rom the world cured her. He didn’t say that back in Warsaw, but it was true. Visiting once a month, bouquet in hand, he could feel the calm she’d found. In fact she pitied him, having to live amid anger and meanness. In good weather they walked in the forest. She, wrapped in a shawl, said little, lived in a self-evident world—there was nothing to explain. Once in a great while she would reach over and take his hand, her way of saying thank you.

  He woke suddenly, snapping his head erect just as his chin grazed his chest. He stood braced against the doorway of the last coach, track falling away through rolling fields, wheels in a steady clatter. When had he slept? Not for a long time.

  He cleared his throat. Sublieutenant Nowak was pointedly looking elsewhere—no commanding officer of his, de Milja realized, would ever be seen to drift off.

  “Coming into Deblin, Captain.”

  De Milja nodded. Nowak was too young—fresh-faced and eager. Out of uniform, in his Sunday suit, he looked like a student. “Map?”

  Nowak unfolded it. Deblin was a river town, where the Wieprz flowed east into the Vistula. The route south continued into Pulawy, Krasnystaw, Zamosc, Tomaszow. Crossed the river Tanew into the Ukrainian districts of Poland at Rava-Russkaya. Then the major city of Lvov, down to Stryj, a sweep around the eastern tip of German-occupied Czechoslovakia—known as Little Ukraine—into Uzhgorod, and finally across the border into the Romanian town of Sighet in the Carpathian Mountains.

  Four hundred and fifty miles, more or less. With the locomotive making a steady thirty-five miles an hour, about fourteen hours. Nowak heard the airplanes at the same time as he did, and together they looked up into the clouds. A flight of Heinkel bombers, in V formation, headed a little east of due north. That meant they’d been working on one of the industrial cities in the south, maybe Radom or Kielce, and were on their way home, bomb bays hopefully empty, to an airfield in East Prussia, probably Rastenburg.

  “Nothing for you down here,” de Milja said quietly.

  He’d done the best he could: it was just a little train, yellow coaches with red borders on the windows and a locomotive puffing through the wheat fields. Pastoral, harmless.

  The Heinkels droned on. Below and behind them, a fighter escort of ME-109s. The pilots were bored. Sneak attacks on Polish airfields had blown up the opposition on the first day—and stolen their war. Now their job had little to do with skill or daring. They were nursemaids. From the wing position, a fighter plane sideslipped away from the formation, swooped down a sharp angle in a long, steep dive, flattened out in perfect strafing attitude, and fired its 20 mm cannon into the annoying little train chugging along below as though it hadn’t a care in the world. The pilot had just broken off the attack, soaring up through the smoke of the locomotive’s stack, when the radio crackled furiously and the flight leader gave a short, sharp order. The plane slipped back into formation, maintaining rigid spacing and perfect airspeed discipline all the way home to East Prussia.

  The engineer remembered his orders and followed them: slowed down, rolled to a stop. Flight excites hunting dogs and fighter pilots, nothing standing still interests them for very long.

  De Milja called out to Nowak as he swung off the platform: “Go through the cars, get the dead and wounded out, see if there’s anybody who can help.”

  He ran along the track, then climbed into the cab of the locomotive. A column of steam was hissing from a hole in the firebox, the engineer was kneeling by the side of the fireman, who was lying on his back, his face the color of wood ash, a pale green shadow like a bruise already settled on his cheekbones. De Milja cursed to himself when he saw it.

  The engineer was breathing hard; de Milja saw his chest rise and fall in the old cardigan. He went down on one knee and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “That was done well,” he said. Then: “You’re all right.” More an order than a question, the of course unvoiced but clear.

  The engineer pressed his lips together and shook his head—very close to tears. “My sister-in-law’s husband,” he said. “My wife said not to ask him.”

  De Milja nodded in sympathy. He understood, patted the man’s shoulder twice, hard, before he took his hand away. The engineer said, “She—,” but there was nothing more. It was quiet in the fields, the only sound the slow beat of the locomotive’s pistons running with the engine at rest. A bird sang somewhere in the distance. The fireman raised his hands, palms up, like a shrug, then made a face. “Shit,” he said. As de Milja leaned over him, he died.

  Nowak had the casualties laid out in a beet field; a dark woman with hair braided and pinned worked over them. When de Milja arrived, she put him to work tearing cotton underdrawers into strips for bandages and sent Nowak running up to the locomotive for hot water.

  “This man has been shot through the foot,” she said, carefully removing the shoe. “Went in above the heel, came out the sole just here, behind the second toe.” She put the bloody shoe aside. “Foot scares me, I’m unfamiliar with it.”

  “You’re a nurse?”

  “Veterinarian. A paw or a hoof, there I can help. Grab his hand.” De Milja held the man’s hand as the veterinarian swabbed on antiseptic from a big brown-glass bottle.

  “A little girl is dead,” she said. “She was about ten years old. And a man in his forties, over there. We looked and looked—there’s not a mark on him. An old woman jumped out a window and broke her ankle. And a few others—cuts and bruises. But the angle of the gunfire was lucky for us—no glass, no fire. It’s fire I hate.” She worked in silence a moment. “It hurts?” she asked the patient.

  “Go ahead, Miss. Do whatever you have to. Did I understand you to say that you were a veterinarian?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Hah! My friends will certainly get a laugh when they hear that!” De Milja’s fingers throbbed from the pressure of the wounded man squeezing his hand.

  A grave-digging crew was organized, which took turns using the fireman’s shovel, and a priest said prayers as the earth was piled on. The little girl had been alone on the train, and nobody could find her papers. A woman who’d talked to her said her name was Tana, so that name was carved on the wooden board that served as a gravestone.

  De Milja ordered the train stopped at a village station between Pulawy and Lublin, then used the phone in the stationmaster’s office—he could barely hear through the static—to report the attack to Vyborg, and to revise the estimated time of arrival “in the southern city.”

  “The Russian divisions have crossed the border,” Vyborg said. “They may not reach your area for a day or so, but it’s hard to predict. The Germans are headed west—giving up territory. We believe there’s a line of demarcation between Hitler and Stalin, and the Russians will move up to occupy the new border.”

  “Does that change anything for us?”

  “No. But German aircraft have been attacking the line south of you. The railroad people say they can keep it open another twenty-four hours, but that’s about it. Still, we think you ought to find cover, then continue after dark. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All the roads out of Warsaw are now cut. This office is closing down, so you’re on your own from now on. Consider that to have the status of a written order.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “So, best of luck to you. To all of us.”

  The connection was broken.

  A corporal in the Geographical Section had made a specialty of hiding trains. Using his hand-drawn map, de Milja directed the engineer to a branch line south of Pulawy that wound up into the hills above the Vistula. There, twenty miles west of Lublin, a gypsum mining operation had gone bankrupt and been shut down some time in the 1920s. But the railroad spur that ran to the site, though wildly overgrown, was still usable, and a roofed shed built for loading open railcars was still standing. Under the shed, with the engine turned off, they were very close to invisible.

  17 September, 8:25 P.M. Over the years, the abandoned quarry had filled with water,
and after dark de Milja could see the reflection of the rising moon on the still surface.

  The engineer had patched the hole in the firebox, using tin snips, a tea tray, and wire. A big kid, about fifteen, from a farm village volunteered to work as the fireman—what he lacked in skill he’d make up with raw strength. Nowak took the opportunity to sight-in four rifles, which, with a few boxes of ammunition, had been hidden behind a panel in the last coach. He chose four men: a mechanic, a retired policeman, a student, and a man who didn’t exactly want to say what he did, to be armed in case of emergency.

  There wasn’t much else they could do. The engine moved cautiously over the old track, heading east for the ancient city of Lublin, the countryside dark and deserted. The passengers were quiet, some doubtless having second thoughts about being cast adrift in a country at war. Maybe they would have been better off staying in Warsaw.

  They reached Lublin a little after ten. Warehouses along the railroad line had been blazing since that afternoon, and the city’s ruptured water mains meant that the fire department could do little more than watch. The train crawled through thick black coils of heavy smoke, the passengers had to wet handkerchiefs and put them over their noses and mouths in order to breathe. A brakeman flagged them down. De Milja went up to the locomotive.

  “We’ve been ordered to get you people through,” the brakeman said, “and the crews are doing the best they can. But they bombed us just before sunset, and it’s very bad up ahead.” The brakeman coughed and spat. “We had all the worst things down here; wool, creosote, tarred rope. Now it’s just going to burn.”

  “Any sign of Russian troops?” de Milja asked.

  “Not sure. We had a freight train disappear this morning. Vanished. What’s your opinion about that?”