While Still We Live (14 page)

Sheila rose unsteadily. One of the men caught her arm.

“Don’t go!” said Elzbieta suddenly. “Don’t you go with them!”

“You’ll get into trouble for this,” the man said.

The woman outstared him. “Shall I?” she said with every inch of insolence. “War or no war, no young man is coming to my door and taking away a young girl. I’ll call the police, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll show you who will get into trouble. Now go on; clear out of my house.”

The men exchanged glances.

“Take her too,” one suggested. “There’s nothing else to do now. Come to the same thing, anyway.”

Elzbieta made a dash for the door. After her late conversation with her husband, it was strange that the one call for urgent help which came to her lips was “Henryk, Henryk!”

Either the woman was a star actress, or she really was in love with Henryk. Sheila watched her again in astonishment. She was still more astonished when the man nearest the door acted even more quickly than Elzbieta. One movement blocked her way, another had her in a firm hold, and as she struggled with a fury and skill which threatened to free her, a third movement had her limp and senseless. It was hardly a vulgar clip to the jaw, but it had the same results.

“Well,” the man who had first entered was saying, “I don’t see what else we could do. Who tipped her off, anyway?” The other two shrugged their shoulders. “And what about the man?”

“Out digging with the air warden,” Sheila said slowly, and received a curious, unfriendly stare.

“Let’s move,” said the man who held her. “We’ll help you to get these air raid victims into the car. And then two of us will
come back here and wait for the man. Stop worrying, Tomasz; they were to be picked up later tonight, anyway. This saves us a double journey.”

The first young man shook his head. “It still worries me. We’ve gone beyond our orders.”

“What else could we do?”

Tomasz shrugged his shoulders in agreement, and the procession started for the entrance gate. Sheila went first, firmly supported by one man. The woman was carried by the other two.

An air raid warden looked at them with all the authority of his official position.

“Casualties. Shrapnel,” Tomasz said, who seemed hypnotised by that explanation. “They
will
look at the airplanes—”

The air raid warden, whose particular worry was people who would come out of shelter to look at airplanes, nodded sympathetically.

At the edge of the pavement, there was a large black car with its windows screened. Far back in the car’s depth sat Mr. Olszak.

“Really!” he said in protest, as Elzbieta’s inert body was bundled onto the seat beside him. “Well, explanations later. Hurry.”

“Two of us must wait for the man. He was out,” Tomasz said.

Olszak’s polite voice was in contrast with the phrase he used. Then he leaned forward to say to the quiet man who sat beside the driver, “You wait with these two for Henryk. You can identify him.” And as the unobtrusive little man, who had kept watch at the gate last night, got out of the car, Olszak said
quickly to Tomasz, “You come with me and tell me how this happened.”

The car moved off and Tomasz explained.

“I see,” said Mr. Olszak. “Once she refused to let the girl go without creating a scene, you hadn’t much choice. Pity she didn’t come quietly like the girl.”

“Oh,
she’s
scared stiff,” Tomasz said with returning confidence, and turned to look at Sheila. “She’s still trembling.”

“Shock, no doubt,” Mr. Olszak said. In the darkness his cool hand touched Sheila’s gently to catch her wrist and feel her pulse. Then he patted the back of her hand. But he didn’t speak to her, and Sheila had gathered enough from the young man’s tone to know that for this journey, at least, she was classified with Elzbieta.

She would have liked to be able to speak. She wanted to say, “That woman felt danger in the room, and nearly escaped you. Perhaps I’ve been infected by her; but I too felt danger, there in the dark street. I felt someone standing back in the shadows, watching us. Not the air raid warden, either. There was someone else, I felt. I think it was Henryk.” But silence was imposed on her now, and doubly imposed because of Elzbieta lying so limply in the car’s other corner. Elzbieta might not be so limp as she pretended. Elzbieta might be listening, waiting for her moment when the car at last halted. Mr. Olszak had been waiting too, for the woman’s sudden desperate movement as the car slowed down had no success. There was a brief struggle, and then the woman was being carried, cursing and fighting, up the broad steps which led to the hall outside Colonel Bolt’s office.

Sheila felt as if the last remnants of her strength were ebbing
quickly away. Now that Elzbieta had gone, there was no need to try to keep her mind working. And as her mind relaxed, her body sagged. Mr. Olszak had stayed with her, was guiding her into an empty room through a doorway into another empty room, through another doorway into a small dark hall. Then there was the cold touch of open air on her brow. There was hurry and silence, and Mr. Olszak guiding her firmly and quickly. There was a car, waiting so quietly in a side street that Sheila’s overtensed nerves jumped as Mr. Olszak pulled her quickly into it. The engine came to life as Olszak closed the door, and the car was moving expertly through these smaller streets which had so far escaped bombs.

After the car, there was a flight of stairs, an open door, familiar voices and faces. She thought she heard a man speaking English. It sounded like Stevens’ voice, which was a silly kind of idea. And there was a woman. It was only when she was touching Sheila that Sheila could be really sure the woman was there. At last the room stopped lurching, and swayed gently instead. Sheila, the sheets and blankets drawn up to her chin, which wouldn’t stop its trembling no matter how she clenched her jaw, opened her eyes to see fair hair and very straight eyebrows focus for a moment before they swam into a white haze.

“Barbara,” Sheila said softly, and smiled, and then stopped smiling. That too was a silly kind of idea.

“I’ve such a terribly bad cold,” she complained to the room. A silly, irritating kind of room with faces and then no faces. So many faces. So many Olszaks and Barbaras and, yes it was after all, there he was, Stevens. Too many for her to look at without getting dizzy. Sheila closed her eyes and wondered who could be breathing in such a peculiar way.

BESIEGED

In the fields that summer, the peasants had first marvelled and then complained at the long drought. Towards the end of August, even the townspeople and city dwellers, who normally paid little attention to the weather unless it was unpleasant, were shaking worried heads too. In September, this cruel trick of nature bore bitter fruit. Over the hard, dry earth came the tanks and the armoured cars, running smoothly, rapidly, ruthlessly. The Polish cavalry, which could have efficiently attacked so many of these monsters if they had been wallowing through the usual universal mud of autumn, found that their quick brave sweeps ended in grim death traps. The dry fields were sown with blood and flesh. Horses and men were ploughed under by the relentless caterpillar wheels.

Russell Stevens, in the short hours when he rested in his rooms, would rave against the very idea of cavalry. Barbara Aleksander, in the short hours she could spend there away from
the emergency hospital now established at the University, would listen in silence. Both of them were suffering; each expressed it differently. Once Barbara said sadly, “But if eighty per cent of Poland lives on farms and not in factories, then we have got to depend on horses and men and not on machines. We haven’t enough.” And the American nodded glumly. You can’t, he was thinking, go to a shop and buy so many tanks and planes. You can’t hand brave men guns and then say you have an army. In his own mind, he was acutely unhappy. For months previously, newspapers in the anti-Nazi countries had had editorials and articles on Poland. All men in anti-Nazi countries had hoped that Poland would fight, had cheered when there was a sign of resistance to Nazi demands. He ought to know: he had broadcast in the belief that the Germans must be stopped in their continuous course of blackmail. And now Poland had opposed Germany, now Poland was fighting. And only two allies had come forward so far, and these two weren’t able to help. You can’t go to a shop and buy so many tanks and planes. And all the other countries were either silent, or saying what an evil thing war was. As if every sane person didn’t know that. He had seen enough newspaper articles recently from the outside world to make his stomach turn over. The assumption that countries at peace were either especially sensible or virtuous, or both, at a time when the fight against Nazism had begun, seemed nauseatingly callous. And for the first time in his life, he found that he was entirely with Poland.

Once, he had argued angrily about Poland, had denounced the inequalities, and the conservatism which clung to the past. He had admitted that Poland had inherited a bitter legacy, when she won her independence: for nearly a hundred and fifty years
she had been divided between three countries with different religions, different languages, different laws. He had even gone so far as to admit, when pressed, that the Jewish question in Poland had risen only under the tyranny of these three masters. Poland, before its partition, had been one of the first European countries to have religious toleration. Three foreign conquerors had found that a subject people’s unrest and unhappiness could often be turned away from the conqueror if another outlet could be provided, and invariably that outlet was the Jew. Stevens could see the basic truth in that, but his crusading zeal—a zeal shared by all liberal young men who have had the good fortune to be born into any country without a conqueror’s heel on its throat—made him want to see Poland as part of the modern scheme of progress. Like all young men, he was impatient of those who asked only for time. It is with age that men discover how necessary time is.

* * *

Today was the seventeenth day of the siege of Warsaw. Russell Stevens stood at the window of his living-room and wondered if he would be able to stand there tomorrow and say with equal amazement, “This is the eighteenth day.” He looked down into the quiet street bathed in sunlight, and thought how strange it was that the rain of bombs and shells had missed this part of the town almost entirely. The houses round him here looked indecently normal. Seventeen days of pulling people out of ruins; of washing blood off sidewalks; of digging trenches for bodies (trenches for human protection had long been abandoned as an unnecessary waste of time); of helping in any way, like the other foreigners who had stayed in Warsaw, as if by their wild efforts they could atone for the inaction of their
countrymen... There was a Swede who worked and cursed like a man possessed. There was the wife of an American wounded during one of the earliest raids who nursed him along with sixty others in a school, where mattresses spread on the floors formed emergency wards. There was an elderly Frenchman who had turned surgeon’s assistant, an Englishman who had the self-appointed task of getting into ruined basements from which came weak cries, a Swiss and a Belgian who helped to pull the wounded into the courtyards when the hospital wards were in flames. They were kept busy: the hospitals were under constant attack. There was an Italian, bitterly ashamed of the ally his country had chosen, who drove a makeshift ambulance through bomb-pocked streets. And there were others: some were bandaged, one had been killed, all had stayed when there had been a chance to leave. There were those, like Stevens himself, who argued with their head offices and firms back in their own countries that their jobs still required them to stay on in Warsaw. And some of them, who would lose their jobs if they refused to leave with the last parcel of journalists and diplomats, refused to leave. Not out of heroics, Stevens had decided, but simply (as he himself felt) out of shame and a sudden disquietening humility. You had only to watch the faces on the streets, watch the women and the children, to feel chastened. For you knew they could have avoided this if they hadn’t resisted the Germans. And it seemed as if the German guns which now had the city well within their range were being specially vindictive to make the Polish people pay for their rejection of Nazism. Even now, as the shells fell with savage accuracy on warehouses filled with food, on hospitals crammed with already broken bodies, there was no sign of faltering in
these faces on the streets. There was no evidence of bribery or treachery or cowardice. Differences neither in politics nor religion nor wealth mattered. The people of Warsaw closed their ranks. The soldiers who had survived the battles round the city had now entrenched themselves in the ruined suburbs. Together, soldier and civilian, they faced the enemy who was advancing on them from the northeast, from the west, from the south. They neither asked for mercy nor expected it.

“The seventeenth day,” Stevens said. He stopped peering through the strips of white paper, and turned back into the room. “I bet I am one of the few possessors of windowpanes left in Warsaw.”

Barbara nodded, and went on with the dusting of the room.

“Wouldn’t it be better to sit down and rest?” the American suggested. The girl’s movement in the room made him irritable. He was tired and he wanted to rest. She was equally tired, and she wouldn’t rest. “Let Madame Knast look after her precious two rooms if she feels like it.” Madame Knast was the owner of the apartment. She had rented two rooms to the American, called him a “paying guest”; and in this way managed to keep on her apartment in this pleasant section of the town after her husband’s death last year, without any loss of pride.

“Madame Knast is out looking for her son,” Barbara said quietly, and arranged the couch so that he would sleep more comfortably. Stevens hadn’t slept in a bed since the first day of the war; Olszak had brought the English girl here then, and she had been lying ill in the bedroom next door ever since. Stevens searched in the pocket of his stained and wrinkled jacket for a cigarette. He had lost his clothes as well as his bed: the suitcases which he had taken to the office, in his first obedience
to instructions to leave, no longer existed. An incendiary bomb had landed on the office building, and his clothes and his notes for that book he was going to write some day had gone up in flames. Now all he possessed was the clothes he wore, a typewriter, and the pictures and ornaments he had bought to make his two rooms more homelike.