The Polish Officer: A Novel Page 4

  It took forever for them to work their way through Lublin. At one point, a shirtless work crew, bodies black with soot, laid twenty-five feet of track almost directly beneath their wheels. The passengers gagged on the smoke, tried to get away from it by taking turns lying flat in the aisle, rubbed at the oily film that clung to their hands and faces, but that only made it burn worse. Farther down the line an old wooden bridge had collapsed onto the track and the huge, charred timbers were being hauled away by blindfolded farm horses. A saboteur—identified as such by a sign hung around his neck—had been hanged from a signal stanchion above the track. A group of passengers came to the last coach and pleaded with de Milja to get off the train. Nowak got the engine stopped, and a small crowd of people scurried away down the firelit lanes of the old city.

  And then, once again, the war was gone.

  The train climbed gently into the uplands east of the Carpathians. Warsaw, a northern city, seemed a long way from here—this was the ragged edge of Europe, border land. They ran dark, the lamps turned off in the coaches, only the locomotive light sweeping along the rails where, as the night cooled, land mist drifted through the beam. Beyond that, the steppe. Treeless, empty, sometimes a few thatched huts around a well and a tiny dirt road that ran off into the endless distance, to Russia, to the Urals. Now and then a village—a log station house with a Ukrainian name—but down here it was mostly the track and the wind.

  De Milja stood beside the engineer and stared out into the darkness. The boy who’d taken the fireman’s job fed coal to the firebox when the engineer told him to. His palms had blistered after an hour of shoveling, so he’d taken his shirt off and torn it in half and tied it around his hands. When he stepped away from the furnace he shivered in the night air, but he was a man that night and de Milja knew better than to say anything.

  At some nameless settlement, the train stopped at a water tower, the engineer swung the spout into position and began to fill the tank. It was long after midnight, and deserted—only the sigh of the wind, moths fluttering in the engine light, and the splash of water. Then, suddenly, a girl was standing by the locomotive. She was perhaps sixteen, barefoot, wearing a soiled cotton shift, head scarf, and a thin shawl around her shoulders. She was the most beautiful girl that de Milja had ever seen. “Please, Your Excellency,” she said—the dialect was ancient and de Milja barely understood her—“may I be permitted to ride on the train?”

  She raised her hand, opened her fingers to reveal a pair of tiny gold earrings resting on her palm.

  De Milja was speechless. The engineer, standing atop the front of the locomotive, stared down at her, and the boy stopped shoveling coal. The hem of the shift was spattered with mud, her ankles thin above dirty feet. She is pregnant, de Milja thought. She stood patiently, her eyes not quite meeting his, a sign of submission, her other hand clutching the shawl at her throat. But when de Milja did not speak, she looked directly at him and, just for an instant, her eyes lit up green fire as they caught the light, then she hid them away.

  “Please, Excellency?” The earrings must not be worth what she thought; her voice faded in defeat.

  “You do not have to pay,” de Milja said.

  Her face hid nothing, and it was plain how she had struggled, all her life, to understand things. She had never been on a train before, but she knew one or two people who had, and she had asked them about it, and one certainly had to pay. Atop the locomotive, the engineer swung the water spout away so that water splashed on the ground beside the tracks until he shut it off.

  De Milja waited for her to ask where they were going, but she never did. “You may ride on the train,” he said.

  Still hesitant, she closed the earrings in her fist and held them to her throat. Then turned toward the passenger coaches. Did he mean what he said? Or was he just making fun of her? No, he meant it. Before he could change his mind she ran like a deer, climbed cautiously onto the iron step of the first coach, peered inside, then vanished.

  Past Lvov, then Uzhgorod.

  Sublieutenant Nowak took the watch for an hour, then a little after four in the morning de Milja returned. Now the train was climbing a grade that ran through a pine forest, then past Kulikov, then deeper into the mountains that marked the southern border of Poland.

  Captain de Milja and the engineer saw the dim shape ahead at the same moment. De Milja wondered what it was, and squinted to bring it into focus. The old man swore and hauled on the brake with both hands. The wheels locked and screeched as they slid on the iron rails, and the train finally shuddered to a halt just short of the barrier, tree trunks piled across the track.

  The light was strange at that hour—not night, not yet dawn—so the shapes coming toward them from the forest had no color, and seemed to glide on mist, like phantoms in a dream, with white plumes steaming from the horses’ nostrils in the cold mountain air.

  The bandit leader—or ataman, or headman, whatever he called himself—was not to be hurried. Rifle at rest across his saddle, he walked his horse to the cab of the locomotive and stared at de Milja. “Get out,” he said softly. This was Ukrainian, of which de Milja understood that much at least. The bandit was perhaps in his fifties, wore a peaked cap and a suit jacket. Two or three days’ white bristle covered a stubborn jaw below the small, shrewd eyes of the farmer’s most cherished pig.

  De Milja jumped to the ground, the engineer followed, the boy did not. Hiding, de Milja thought. All along the train, passengers were filing out of the coaches, hands high above their heads, lining up at the direction of the bandits. The leader looked him over: where was the danger in him? Where the profit? De Milja met his gaze. Back by the coaches there was a rifle shot. The bandit watched to see what he would do, so he did not turn around to see what had happened.

  “Who are you?” the leader asked.

  “I work for the railroad.”

  The bandit did not quite believe that. “You ready to die up in a tree?” Ukrainian executions lasted all day. De Milja did not react.

  “Hardheaded, you people,” the leader said. “You’re finished,” he went on. “Now it’s the Germans and us.”

  De Milja was silent.

  “Carrying anything valuable on that train?”

  “No. Just people heading for the border.”

  The bandit glanced back at the passenger coaches, de Milja followed his eyes. The passengers had their hands on the sides of the railcars, their baggage was laid out on the ground so that the bandits could pick and choose what they wanted.

  A bandit on a gray pony rode up beside the leader. “Any good?” the leader asked.

  “Not bad.”

  “Gold?”

  “Some. Polish money. Jewelry.”

  “And the women?”

  “Good. Four or five of them.”

  The bandit leader winked at de Milja. “You won’t be seeing them again.” He paused, something about de Milja fascinated him. “Come over here,” he said. De Milja stepped forward, stood beside the bandit’s boot in a stirrup. “Give me your watch. It would be a railroad watch, of course.”

  De Milja undid the strap, handed up his watch, long ago a present from his wife. The bandit glanced at it, then dropped it in his pocket. “Not a railroad watch, is it.”

  “No.”

  The leader was getting bored. With one hand he raised his rifle until de Milja was looking down the barrel. “What do you see in there?” De Milja took a deep breath, the bandit was going to ask him to look closer. One of the passengers screamed, de Milja couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The bandit on the gray pony trotted a little way toward the sound. A rifle fired, a flat, dull crack like the earlier shot; then another, deeper. The bandit leader puffed out his cheek so hard it burst in a red spray, his horse shied and whinnied. De Milja grabbed the harness and pulled himself close to the horse’s body. The barrel of the rifle probed frantically, looking for him. Somewhere above, the bandit was wailing and cursing like a child. De Milja hung on to the reins with one hand and snatched the rifle barrel with the other. The weapon fired but he didn’t let go. Then the boy came out from behind a locomotive wheel and hit the bandit on the head with the shovel, which rang like a bell as the rifle came free in de Milja’s hand and the horse tore away from him.

  The other bandit danced his pony around and shot the boy again and again, de Milja could hear the bullets hit, and the boy grunted each time. He fumbled the rifle around to firing position but the bandit galloped away, jumped his horse over the coupling between cars and disappeared. De Milja flinched as something hissed by his ear. Then Nowak called to him from the coal car and he ran up the ladder mounted on the wall as a bullet struck a silver chip out of the iron and the locomotive’s light went dark. Two horses thundered past, then a cluster of rapid rifle shots, a yell of triumph.

  Nowak was lying on the coal at one end of the car, firing a rifle into the darkness. De Milja threw himself down beside him. Between the train and the forest, dark shapes were sprawled amid clothing and suitcases. A yellow spark from the trees—both he and Nowak swung their weapons. Nowak fired, but de Milja’s clicked as the hammer fell on an empty chamber. He threw it aside and worked the pistol free from beneath his sweater. “Who has the other rifles?” de Milja asked, meaning the weapons they had hidden behind a panel.

  “Don’t know, sir,” Nowak said. “It’s chaos.”

  He couldn’t permit chaos. Rolled over the lip of the car, slid down the ladder on the other side, stood between cars for a moment, then jumped to the ground and ran along the length of the train. The conductor ran by him going the other way, eyes white, teeth clenched, pistol held up in the safe position. Combat-mad, he never even saw de Milja, who wondered who he was chasing. Passengers were climbing through the coach windows; some of them had gotten a horse off its feet and it kicked and whinnied in terror as they tried to kill its rider, who howled for mercy. De Milja stepped on a body, then through a tangle of clothing that reeked of cloves—hair tonic from a shattered bottle. He tripped as he leaped for an open doorway, then went sprawling into the last coach.

  The smell of gunpowder and urine hit him like a wall. Someone moaned softly, but mostly it was very dark and very quiet—the people packed together on the floor were breathing audibly, as though winded. A bullet from the forest went through the car and a triangle of glass fell on a seat without breaking. A silhouette rose suddenly in the middle of the car and returned the fire.

  As de Milja crawled along the aisle, the train moved. Barely, only just making way, but he thought he could feel the logs being slowly forced off the track. The engineer is alive, he thought, using the locomotive like a bulldozer. The rifleman knelt quickly, moved on his knees to a neighboring window, straightened up, and fired. It was Herschensohn, the violinist. The homburg was jammed down on his head, a muscle ticked in his jaw, and he was muttering under his breath—“Stay still, you”—as he took aim.

  De Milja reached the far end of the car—the back of the train—just as something seemed to give way and, with the sound of splintering wood, the train moved a little faster.

  “Wait!”

  A running shape burst from the forest—the peasant girl who’d begged to be let on the train at the water tower. “She got away!” Herschensohn had appeared beside him. The girl ran in panic, tripped, went sprawling on her face, struggled back up again, limping now and much slower. She waved her hands and screamed as the train gradually picked up speed.

  De Milja was abruptly shoved aside. A man in a gray suit, with carefully brushed hair, leaped off the train and ran toward the girl, circled an arm around her waist and tried to help her. No longer young, he could barely run fast enough to keep up with the injured girl. “For God’s sake don’t leave us!” he yelled.

  The bandits, on horseback and in the woods, saw what was happening. De Milja pinpointed the muzzle flashes in the half-light. The range was absurd but he aimed with both hands, changed the action to single-shot, and squeezed off round after round from his automatic. Herschensohn muttered angrily under his breath, talking to the target, as he fired his rifle. A young woman in a sweater and skirt jumped from a window, stumbled, came up running, took the girl around the waist from the other side. De Milja heard footsteps pounding above him as Nowak ran down the roof of the car, firing into the trees. Somebody yelled “Save her, save her, save her,” like a chant, and others took up the cry. De Milja thrust his empty pistol into his pocket and stood on the lowest step as the three people gained on the car. Herschensohn was firing over his shoulder and Nowak was shouting something from the roof. The three faces were distorted with exhaustion, with tears of effort, mouths gasping for breath, hands clawing frantically at the railings beside the door. But as the last log rolled away, the locomotive accelerated, the three runners flailing and staggering as the platform moved away from them.

  Then the train quivered—the shock slammed de Milja against the wall—and suddenly the runners were close. He reached out and grabbed handfuls of shirt, coat, hair, whatever he could get, and hung on desperately. Someone caught the back of his coat just as he started to fall onto the tracks, other hands reached over his shoulders, people yelled, shoes scraped on the boards as somebody fought for traction, and the two rescuers and the girl were hauled aboard with a cry of triumph.

  De Milja ended up on hands and knees as the train—something wrong with the way it ran now—slowly ground through a long, gentle curve. At the bottom of the embankment lay what was left of a truck: cab torn in half, gasoline flames flickering over the radiator, a tire spinning, a mounted machine gun aimed at the sky, and a man, arms flung wide, half-buried in a pile of broken brick.

  When de Milja worked his way forward to the cab of the locomotive, he found bullet marks everywhere—the Ukrainian gunners had had their moment—and a very pale engineer. They’d mounted a machine gun on a brick truck and parked it on the tracks behind the log barrier. Just in case.

  For the last hundred miles they were well up in the Carpathians, some of the passes at seven thousand feet, and the train switched back over ridges and granite outcrops, through sparse grass and forests of stunted pine where hawks floated on the mountain thermals. The train barely went now, maybe ten miles an hour, crawled along a trestle over a thousand-foot gorge as the passengers prayed silently and not-so-silently, oil trickling from beneath the engine. The sun didn’t reach them until ten in the morning; they were cold, there was nothing to eat, and very little water.

  They crossed the Tisza River; there’d been a fire on the bridge, but it still held. De Milja walked along in front of the engine, watching the track bow under the weight, trying not to hear the sounds the wooden girders made. They traveled for a time beside a deeply rutted dirt track, where stone mileposts gave the distance to Romania. A burned-out Polish army car had been shoved into a ditch, a wagon and a pair of horses hit by a dive bomber, a truck lay on its side in the middle of a mountain stream.

  They worked at it all day, Nowak and de Milja taking turns standing with the engineer in the locomotive, sometimes running the train themselves since he was long past exhaustion. Slow as their progress was, there were no other trains. The stationmaster at Mukachevo told them the Germans had bombed the lines running south—the Polish railway system didn’t really exist any longer.

  They were what was left. De Milja and Nowak changed into officers’ uniforms a few miles before they reached the frontier at Sighet. The train stopped at the Polish border station, but it had been abandoned: an empty hut, a bare flagpole. A mile farther on, at the Romanian customs post, a tank was parked with its cannon facing down the track. “So,” said the engineer, “we are expected.” De Milja took a set of papers, prepared in Warsaw, to the Romanian major who greeted him at the wooden barrier pole.

  The two officers saluted, then shook hands. The major was dark, with a movie-hero mustache and excellent manners. Yes they were expected, yes everything was in order, yes they’d be processed through in a half-hour, yes, yes, yes. The sun dropped lower in the sky, the children cried because they were hungry, the truth was to be seen in the eyes of the passengers on the train: despair, boredom, fatigue—the refugee life had begun. Please be patient, the Romanian major said. Please.

  Two Polish diplomats materialized; eyeglasses, Vandyke beards, and overcoats with velvet collars. Negotiations continued, they reported, but a diplomatic solution had been proposed: the Polish passengers could enter Romania—temporary immigrant status would be granted—the Polish train could not. A troublesome technicality, but . . . The hanging sentence meant what can be done? Poland could no longer insist on anything. It was a former nation now, a phantom of international law.

  Meanwhile, de Milja used the diplomats to make contacts he’d been given in Warsaw, and with a few code words and secret signs, things started to happen, not the least of which was the delivery of hampers of bread and onions and wormy pears brought by Romanian soldiers.

  And eventually, long after dark, another Polish Captain Nom de Guerre showed up. They recognized each other from the meeting in Vyborg’s office: shared a cigarette, a walk by the tracks, and the news of the day. Then a phone call was made and, an hour later, a train appeared at the Romanian frontier post: a few freight cars, a small but serviceable locomotive, and Polish regular army soldiers with submachine guns. This train was moved up to the edge of the barrier on the Romanian side, and the Antonescu government, an uncertain mistress to several lovers—England, Germany, Russia—agreed that the passengers could bring whatever baggage they had onto Romanian soil.

  It was very dark at the border, so pitch-pine torches were brought. And several volunteers among the passengers were given prybars. The floorboards in the coaches were prized up and, by flickering torchlight, the Polish National Gold Reserve, more than eleven million dollars, was carried into Romania.

  Standing with Nowak by the train, Captain de Milja felt his heart stir with pride. From the Pilava local, with its shattered windows and bullet gashes, its locomotive reeking of singed bearings and burnt oil, the passengers handed out crates stamped NATIONAL BANK OF POLAND. Blood had been shed for this; by a locomotive fireman, a ten-year-old girl, a boy from a country village. By a conductor of the Polish National Railways who, teeth clenched, pistol in hand, had disappeared into the darkness. De Milja did not believe it had been shed in vain and stood very nearly to attention as his little army struggled past with the heavy boxes: Vladimir Herschensohn, his violin carried off by Ukrainian bandits, the veterinarian who had treated the wounded, the pensioned engineer, the peasant girl, the man and woman—from some comfortable professional class—who had run onto a battlefield to save a life, a few country people, a few workers, women and children. Poland had lost a war, this was what was left.