Her voice broke.
I said, “It’s finished now, Madame Gorza. You’re both free. If you would prefer not to talk now, I can come back later.”
“No, I’d rather talk about it.” She touched her eyes apologetically with the handkerchief. “Excuse me, please. I’m not a brave woman, and it was a terrible experience.”
I didn’t know her definition of bravery. I said nothing.
“The guard was still angry at us. He came back and took the key out of the car. It would have been impossible for us to escape quickly past the pillars in the road, and both of the guards who remained had pistols, so taking the key was pointless. But he growled at us, and said – I remember every word, it was so cruel: “That will hold you. And God help you if the paper is no good, citizens. Two years is the least you’ll get.”“
“He hadn’t recognized your husband’s name, then?”
“No. Two years—” She managed to smile, saying it. “I would have paid two years willingly for a promise that we would live that long and be free afterwards. But I knew we would never be free. I didn’t want to let Sigmund know what I knew – even a few minutes of hope were so precious. But I couldn’t help it. I began to cry.”
Telling of her weakness, her voice grew stronger. “The guards had taken the bags out of the car and were searching them. I sat there, crying, while Sigmund patted my hand and said something comforting, still not understanding what was the matter with me when we were so near to freedom. Icould only think of how his dream would collapse when they took us back. And then, all of a sudden, there was this peasant. Out of nowhere.”
I hitched my chair forward to watch her face better.
Except for her husband, who hadn’t seen the peasant as closely or as clearly as she had, she was the only living person who could describe the man who had saved them. I thought I might catch something, even from her expression, to help me draw a picture of him. The story I wanted to write was from her viewpoint, but the peasant was the whole object of the view.
She said, “He had some kind of a peculiar gun, not a revolver. It was larger and heavier. He held it with both hands across his hip. Like this.”
She showed me how he had held it.
I didn’t care about the gun. It had almost certainly been either a Schmeisser machine pistol or a Schwarzlose, and in any event it wasn’t important. I said, “How was he dressed? How big was he? What was his coloring? Did he have any scars, or a beard, or a moustache? What color were his eyes? Did he have an accent?”
“He was dressed like any peasant; sheepskin coat, felt trousers, muddy boots, a skull-cap. Except for the gun—”
“His face wasn’t masked or concealed in any way?”
“No. He wasn’t masked.”
“What kind of a face was it?”
“A Slav face.”
She was being evasive. I didn’t want to antagonize her by crowding her. I let it go until I had heard the rest of the story.
“All right. He was suddenly there with the gun. What happened then?”
“The guards put up their hands. He didn’t order them to, but it wasn’t necessary. The gun was pointing at them, you see, and he had made it click somehow to attract their attention from the suitcases. The first words he said were when he told the guard who had taken the key to put it back in the car. Then he told the other man to close the bags and put
them
back in the car. The second man did what he was told, immediately, but the first guard stood there, quite calmly, and said, “Who are you, citizen? Your face is familiar.” The peasant moved the gun, just a little bit, and said again, without any particular feeling, “Put the key in the car.” Then—”
She had to stop and wet her lips before she went on.
In my story, as I tried to do it before I saw I couldn’t finish it, I wrote and rewrote the part about the shooting. I was trying, each time, to get a running start with it that would carry me over or through the block. All I did was fix the same picture in my mind more firmly each time, so that I saw individual actions as I chose them to happen, probably much more clearly than she had seen them as they really happened. Certainly with more drama. In my story there were no false movements, nor regrets, nor twinges of pity or cowardice, nor doubts, nor even an explanation. Only drama.
The peasant had been waiting behind his concealing tree trunk for minutes or hours. At that time of the year the leaves of the trees in the valley would have turned red, and yellow, and gold. There would be drifts of them on the ground, making a blanket of color, and a nip to the air that would keep the guards inside their hut while the peasant watched and waited. No traffic on the road, a little wind to loosen the leaves from the trees and float them down, an occasional bird call. No other sound but the murmur of the creek that was one barrier to passage around the tank-trap, until Gorza’s car came jouncing through the ruts and up to the pillars of the trap, on its last lap.
The guards would have heard the car before they saw it.
I had them buttoning their uniforms as they came out of the post. The sound of an automobile would suggest Authority to them. Instead of Authority they found a racked old man and a nervous old woman who had been ten hours at the wheel of the automobile without a passport but with a
laissez-passer
over the signature of the Minister of Internal Affairs that flatly contradicted all regulations which the Minister himself had issued. The senior guard – I made him a corporal, since he had to give orders – would be first puzzled, then angry at the need for decision, then furious because the post’s telephone line was dead. They found the cut in the line later, and the peasant’s footprints where he had stood a long time in hiding, so I wasn’t conjecturing too much.
Madame Gorza was quite clear about the corporal’s angry gesture in removing the key from the car after he had sent the third man off on the motor cycle with the
laissez-passer.
As clear as she was about the sudden appearance of the peasant with the gun, and the click of the safety when he pushed it off, after the sound of the motor cycle’s popping exhaust had left the valley. As clear as she was about his orders to the two remaining guards, and their differing reactions, one springing to obey with the suitcases, the other stand his ground even after a second demand by the peasant that he replace the car key. I had no trouble with the story up to that point.
Possibly the flatness of the peasant’s orders, the apparent absence of any threat in his voice, deceived the guard who was slinging the suitcases into the car. Perhaps he failed to realize how much more menacing the peasant’s lack of emotion was than bluster. Whatever went through his mind, he made his contribution to Security, the Party, and his job by a sudden warning shout and a leap which took him away from the car and his corporal, widening the distance over which the peasant would have to swing his weapon to cover them both. With luck, or a moment’s indecision by the peasant, one of them might have had time to pull the gun out of his belt holster and snap off a shot.
But there was no indecision, no hesitation, in the peasant’s action. The machine-pistol swung instantaneously with the guard’s leap. A burst from the gun caught him in the chest while he was still in movement, driving him stumblingly backward and down and futilely out of existence before his hand even reached his holster. Madame Gorza had no reason to lie, and she was quite positive about it when she said that the other guard, the corporal, instead of trying to preserve his life by standing still with his hands raised or risking it in an attempt to draw his own weapon, committed suicide, in effect, when he snatched the key from his pocket and drew back his arm to throw towards the creek. The loss of the key might have immobilized the car, briefly. As a gesture of brave defiance it was useless. The machine-pistol had already swung back to him, bucking and roaring in the peasant’s hands. The stream of bullets caught the corporal under his uplifted arm, stitching him from belt to armpit. The shock of the blast immobilized his muscles in mid-throw. He fell with his arm still upraised, like a statue. The key slid from his dead fingers into the dust of the road.
“It all happened very quickly,” Madame Gorza said, lacing her fingers tightly in her lap. “In less than a minute, I think. He slung the gun over his shoulder-strap, picked up the key, and came around to my side of the car with it. Sigmund and I were both paralyzed with terror and shock. The man smelled of sweat and dirty sheepskin and gunpowder. And blood, it seemed to me, although of course he had none of the blood on him. I shrank away from him when he put his arm in through the window. I couldn’t help it. But all he did was put the key in the ignition lock and turn it on. Then he said to me – I’m afraid I can’t remember his exact words, but he spoke slowly so that I would understand his instructions-”
“As nearly as you remember them.”
“He said, ‘It will be half an hour before they can get back from the village. The border is four kilometers down the road, and there are no patrols in this area. Nobody will try to stop you. The first building you will see is the border post on the other side, two kilometers beyond the frontier. They will have a telephone. Tell them who your husband is, claim political sanctuary in his name, and ask them to call their Foreign Ministry for clearance to let you go on. The farther you get from the border before nightfall, the safer you will be. Don’t waste any time.’”
“He didn’t talk like a peasant?”
She hesitated, staring at her interlaced finger. “No.”
I could have explored the lead further, but I thought it better to wait. I said, “What happened next?”
“I was still half-paralyzed – it was all so shocking and brutal and sudden, you see – but I reached for the starter button. Then Sigmund said, in a kind of whispered croak, ‘We have no papers. We can’t go without the Minister’s letter. They’ll bring us back.’”
Gorza had been more than paralyzed with fear. He was paralyzed by the awful hypnotism of Authority. Six years in the Republic, where he could not go anywhere, do anything, make a single move without the right permit or pass or certificate or other essential piece of paper, properly sealed and countersigned, had conditioned him. He was an old man, and timid. To him, the Minister’s letter, not a clear road and an unguarded border ahead of him, meant freedom. Without it, he couldn’t move. He was a prisoner in his mind.
The peasant said, “The letter was a forgery. Forget it. They can’t bring you back once you are safely beyond the frontier.” He was still speaking to Madame Gorza. “Start the motor.”
Gorza shook his head, weakly stubborn, and put his hand on her wrist. “Not without the letter. I forbid it,
liebchen.”
Madame Gorza’s voice was apologetic when she told me this part. She said, “Of course I knew it was madness. But I—I couldn’t oppose him. He was my husband, you see. I won’t try to explain if you don’t understand—”
“I do. Go on.”
“I took my hand away from the starter button. Without a moment’s hesitation the peasant reached in through the window and slapped me in the face with his open hand, so hard that it blinded me for a moment. Then, taking his time – I think so I could see the blows coming – he was quite deliberately brutal – he did it again, and a third time.
“Now do what you are told,” he said. “ Start the car and
go—
”
“Sigmund couldn’t stand it. He was pleading, ‘
Liebchen, liebchen
, go, go! Take us away from these animals!’ at the same time the peasant was speaking. I started the motor. My face was quite numb, but I was filled with a most unbelievable exhilaration, as if I were going out through the gate of a dungeon into sunlight. I worked the car through the pillars in the roadway with the peasant walking backwards ahead of us signaling how I should turn the wheels. Just like a traffic policeman. Then we passed him – he didn’t show the slightest interest in us, once we were beyond the pillars – and drove across the border without any further trouble. That’s all.”
“And you never knew who he was, or why he helped you, or how he knew that the Minister’s letter was a forgery, or anything else about him?”
She hesitated again before she answered.
“No.”
“Madame Gorza, I have a feeling that there is something you haven’t told me. Excuse me for saying it. But are you quite sure you could not even make a guess at the man’s identity, or his motivation for what he did, or his source of information? He knew you, and that you were coming at a certain time, and that you had a forged
laissez-passer,
and that it would probably be necessary for him to kill the guards to set you free. He wasn’t a simple peasant who happened to be there with a machine-pistol and disliked border guards. It was all planned for you, if not with you. Who could it have been?”
She looked at her locked hands for a while. Then she smiled, faintly.
“You’re very acute. Yes, there is something more. But it’s so utterly ridiculous that I’ve disregarded it as a coincidence. It really isn’t worth mentioning. It has no meaning.”
“Perhaps it has. What was the coincidence?”
“That peasant looked very much like Colonel Bulič.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said the peasant looked very much like Colonel Bulič. The Chief of Security Police. I never saw him very often or very closely, but I noticed the resemblance. I told you it was ridiculous.”
That was my block, the reason I was never able to finish the story. If I hadn’t insisted on probing for that last bit of information – misinformation, rather – I could have done a good cloak-and-dagger yarn. But Bulič was simply an impossibility. Bulič was head
roko,
the second most powerful individual in the Republic and the most feared, a sadist, a fanatical Party man, a murderer directly of dozens of people, indirectly of thousands. He ruled the whole country, under the Minister of Internal Affairs, with an iron hand on which he didn’t bother to wear a velvet glove, or a glove of any kind. He was chief jailer and top thug of the whole prison camp that called itself the People’s Free Federal Republic, the man whose responsibility and very probably pleasure it was for six years to see that the Gorzas were guarded night and day beyond chance of escape, a pair of mice in a trap. To picture him as the man who had set them free was as preposterous as attributing kindness and Christian charity to a meat grinder. Yet there was just enough in the peasant’s character, his brutality to Madame Gorza, his ruthless murder of the guards, to make him sound like Bulič in action.