While Still We Live (15 page)

“What’s wrong with the son?” Stevens thought of the thin, nervous boy who had just begun an engineering course at the University last year.

“He’s been wounded. He was brought here from the East Prussian front, and he’s in one of the hospitals. But as the wounded have been moved to different buildings each time a hospital is blasted, Madame Knast doesn’t know where he is. So she goes each day to the new hospitals and wanders about in them, looking for him.”

Stevens said something under his breath. “Nothing,” he said aloud to Barbara’s “Beg pardon?”

He made an effort to be polite, too. “How’s the invalid?”

“Much better. She wants to get up. I had to take away her clothes and hide them. It’s too soon, yet. Normally, she wouldn’t be out of bed for another week at least.”

“Normally, yes. But I wouldn’t call these normal times. In another week, God knows where we will be.”

Barbara ignored his pessimism. “I am going to take her some soup, in a minute. I managed to get a cupful today from the canteen kitchen, and I brought it here in a bowl. How could we heat it? The gas doesn’t work today.”

“I had a spirit lamp.” He rummaged in a cupboard set into one of the walls and produced a small chromium object. He unscrewed the wick on the little cup, but the contents had
almost evaporated.

“We can try,” he said doubtfully. “What about a candle?”

“We’ll have to use them carefully. The electric power plant has been destroyed.”

“So I heard. And the printing presses were shattered today, too. No more newspapers.”

“So that is why you are depressed.” She was smiling, and Stevens gave her a grin. Any joke is better than no joke, he was thinking.

“How are your children?” he said. “All two hundred of them?”

“A hundred and eighty-two, now,” Barbara answered. She wasn’t smiling any more. “They keep me so busy that I haven’t time to worry about my own family. Not much, anyway.”

“Have their relatives been found?”

“No.”

Both were silent thinking of the children who had been found wandering in the fields and ditches in the first week of the war. They had been among the refugees from the west, driven forward by the Germans. They had been machine-gunned and bombed on their long journey across Poland. By the time they neared Warsaw, many children were orphans, alone in the middle of a battlefield.

“If we don’t find any relatives, I have a plan. After the war, I’m going to take them to Korytów. Aunt Marta will find room for them, somehow. She’s wonderful at that. And mother will have a wonderful time playing teacher. She always loved doing that.”

Stevens looked in silence at the girl. Hadn’t she heard? She returned the look with eyes trying very hard to be calm. Then
her self-possession ended. She sat down on the couch, and her face was suddenly old.

“Yes, I know,” she said at last. “The last pocket of resistance to the southwest of Warsaw was wiped out two days ago. I know. Korytów is in German hands. What are we to do? Mother is nearly demented. She’s nursing at the hospital organised by the Knights of Malta, and there are so many wounded that she hasn’t been outside of the building for five days. If only she weren’t needed here, if I weren’t needed, we could try to slip through the German lines and reach Korytów. That’s the only way we can learn about little Teresa, and Stefan, and Aunt Marta. What shall we
do,
Russell?” It was almost a cry.

Stevens shook his head slowly. What could he say? What could anyone say?

“Don’t worry. We may get news. Korytów is probably all right.” It wasn’t important enough to be bombed or shelled. “You leave it to Aunt Marta. She can rout most men, even a German. Have you heard from Andrew?”

“His division was shattered. What was left of it joined the Eleventh Infantry. We heard that from one of mother’s patients who fought with Andrew at the beginning.”

“How’s the Professor?”

“Digging away. He looks very noble with a bandage round his head and a spade over his shoulder. He reminds me of some painting I once saw. The...” She halted. “Oh, I can’t remember anything these days.”

“He was lucky. Just a fraction of an inch nearer the brain, and that piece of shrapnel would never have let him return to his apartment.”

“That was so long ago now,” Barbara said sadly. “That was
the—first day of the war, when Sheila was brought here, and mother waited and waited for Uncle Edward at his apartment. When she went down to the porter’s lodge she found three men who questioned and questioned her, and she was late in reporting for duty at the hospital. That’s so long ago now.”

“Today’s the seventeenth.” Tomorrow would be... Perhaps it wouldn’t.

“Sunday. The churches which are still standing are packed. As I came here I saw people kneeling on the pavement outside, joining in the Mass through the open windows.” She brushed the white dust on her skirt. Stevens noted that the white smears were at knee level. Now he knew how they had got there.

“Did you see any of the leaflets the Germans have been dropping today? An ultimatum. Surrender, or else.”

“Surrender!” Barbara said contemptuously. “I like that, I must say.”

“Don’t look so angrily at me, Barbara. I’m not a German.”

Barbara calmed down. “Sorry.”

“How’s the soup?”

“Lukewarm. Do you think that’s the best we can do?”

“I think it’s a pretty good best, considering everything. I’ll come in and see her too. She’s been asleep every time I’ve mustered a few jokes and knocked on the door. I never thought anyone could sleep through the bombing and shelling and machine-gunning as she has done.”

“Mr. Olszak says that is why she is recovering. He was quite worried about her, as if it were his fault that she had pleurisy.”

“How’s friend Olszak?”

“Digging with Uncle Edward. Do you know, Russell, I went round unexpectedly to see Uncle Edward yesterday, and I could
swear that they were digging where there was no bomb damage. Am I mad, or are they mad?”

“I’m quite sure Olszak isn’t,” Stevens said with much feeling. “He’s the only man I know who would be a match for Aunt Marta.” He knocked at the bedroom door.

Sheila was awake. Her eyes were larger than ever in the thin, white face; the colour in her lips and cheeks was gone; the hand she gave Russell Stevens seemed frail and weak, as if the fever had burned up all its strength. He looked doubtfully at Barbara; perhaps Sheila should be kept in bed, after all.

As if she had understood that look, Sheila said firmly, “I must get up.”

“Drink the soup, Sheila.”

“Where are my clothes, Barbara?”

“Drink the soup. All of it. It tastes awful, doesn’t it? It was the best I could find today.”

“It’s wonderful,” Sheila said. “I could eat anything now, even a piece of horse.” She didn’t notice the look that Barbara and Stevens exchanged, fortunately, or she might not have finished the soup so enthusiastically. “First, I did nothing but sleep. Now I want to eat and eat.”

Barbara said, “If Russell will stay here and look after you, I shall dash round to see mother. She may have some food. People are bringing all their food round to the hospitals so that those who are wounded and ill may get something nourishing.”

“This is enough,” Sheila said, handing back the empty bowl. But Barbara moved determinedly towards the door.

“No,” she was saying. “If you want to get up you must have food, the right kind of food. Or else, you’ll be too weak to move, and you won’t be able to help.”

“To help...” Sheila said, and laughed. It was a thin, weak laugh. Stevens was startled. As he pulled the high-backed chair over towards the bed, he was thinking: it must have been God-awful for her here, with all the rest of us so busy that we could only thrust medicines on a table beside her and tell her to help herself.

“What is it like—out there?” Sheila was asking. “What’s happened? I daren’t ask Barbara. You must tell me everything before she gets back. Sometimes I see the flames reflected into this room. Sometimes I can smell horrible burning smells. I lie and try to identify all the noises, as if I were suddenly blind and had to try to learn to live without eyes. That was a house, that was solid road, that was a hundred windows, that was an engine exploding, that was an enemy plane, that was one of ours.”

“Ours?” Stevens smiled gently.

“That’s how I feel now. Don’t you?”

“Yes.” His voice was so harsh that Sheila raised herself on her pillow.

“Go on,” she said, “tell me. Then I won’t get such a shock once I do go out into the streets.”

Stevens told her. After he ended there was a long pause, broken only by the renewal of some anti-aircraft guns from the western side of the city. There were fewer guns now than there had been yesterday. Each day saw the death of more.

“Another attack,” Stevens said, stretching his legs and reaching for a cigarette.

The British girl didn’t seem to hear him. “What’s to be the end of all this?”

Stevens studied the flame of his lighter, and then killed it
with a characteristically decisive flick of his thumb. He shook his head.

“You think it’s hopeless?” Sheila was amazed and hurt. She would keep believing that people who fought so bravely and so unselfishly must be rewarded with victory.

“I’m not a Pole. That’s why I seem gloomy, I guess.”

“If this were happening to your own country? To New York?”

“I suppose then I wouldn’t think it’s hopeless. I’d keep fighting as long as I had a gun in my hand and something to go in it.”

“I know. I’ve been lying here thinking about London.”

“New York...” Stevens was saying. “All the bridges under heavy air attack. Brooklyn and Queens levelled to the ground. Last-ditch stands by the soldiers in all the outlying boroughs. Manhattan itself under heavy artillery fire. Airplanes swarming over. The Empire State Building gone, and all the blocks around it. The stations just a heap of twisted girders. Radio City a ragged shell, with burst water-mains pouring down Fifth Avenue. The museums in flames. The Metropolitan and Times Square a shambles. The Medical Centre in ruins. All its equipment gone. Blood running down the trolleycar lines on Broadway. The dock area one line of blazing warehouses. No power, little food, less water. Gaping windows, crushed walls, buildings smashed to pieces. And no one complaining, everyone helping, all trying to tidy up after each night’s new destruction. No one talking about peace, no one wanting to accept an ultimatum.”

“And the Poles were so proud of their Warsaw. They’ve rebuilt it, and cleared the slums, and made gardens and parks
and driveways...”

“Even if it’s in ruins, it is still a city to be proud of,” Stevens said shortly. “Hell and damnation.” He began pacing the room.

“I really must get onto my feet again. Have you any idea where Barbara’s hidden my clothes?”

“Don’t ask me! You just stay where you are. If you have a relapse, you’ll be less of a help than ever.”

Sheila relaxed obediently. She saw the sense in that. She said, with a touch of bitterness, “It’s rather a joke on me. I stayed because I wanted to help. And all I did was to lie in bed through the siege of Warsaw. My grandchildren will have a very poor opinion of me.”

The American was looking at her in amusement. “I have a suspicion you will have at least one story to tell them.” Sheila pretended to be wide-eyed and innocent. How much did Stevens really know about her? Mr. Olszak had somehow persuaded him to give her this room, so that she might be well hidden from any friends of Henryk who still searched for her. How much did he really know? She had such an impulse to tell him everything, if only to release the worry which still pressed on her mind.

And then, his next words told her that he knew really very little, that he was puzzled, that he wanted the key to that puzzle. “I have one source of information on the fringes of the Second Bureau—Military Intelligence, to you. He gives me gossip. No state secrets, so you can look less shocked. He told me an interesting story a few nights after you were brought here.”

Sheila still said nothing, but her heart had started that offbeat again.

“It seems a German agent, pretending to be an English girl,
had smuggled herself into a reputable Polish family. She was arrested on the day before the war started. She was handed over to a Mr. Kordus, who was head of a special department. He released her and placed her under close observation in the hope of catching two other spies. She was arrested again along with one of the spies, who was the porter’s wife at the apartment house where the girl was staying. The porter’s wife was sentenced and shot. But the girl escaped, and she hasn’t been traced so far. Interesting story.”

Sheila said, “Yes.”

Stevens laughed.

“All right,” she said with an answering smile. “Do you think that English girl was a German spy?”

“I might, if I hadn’t found her diary in my car.”

“Diary?” Sheila had forgotten all about it. It must have fallen from her lap in that drive from Korytów to Warsaw.

“There was no name on it, and half a dozen people had been in my car that day, so I had to read an entry or two to make sure whose diary it was.” The American’s voice was half-apologetic, half-teasing.

Across the river, the bombs were falling steadily now. Sheila caught her breath and counted them. At last she said, “Of course. It must read rather strangely now.” She thought, all that life is dead, as easily abandoned as the diary was forgotten—and she felt a mixture of surprise and shock at the idea.

“I didn’t read much, but it was enough to make me sure that the girl wasn’t a German spy. Anyway, no spy would bother to fake a diary and then lose it carelessly. A spy would have produced it at a convenient moment along with her passport.”

Sheila relaxed once more. How utterly satisfactory it was to
be believed.

And then Stevens said, in that smooth voice which he kept for his most alarming statements, “But the most interesting thing of all is this: once, I had Kordus pointed out to me. He was a thin little man with receding hair and pince-nez. Friend Olszak would have been peeved.”

Sheila was really aghast this time. The casual voice, the fact that the American didn’t fully know the dynamite he was handling, were as upsetting as the actual statement. “Have you talked about this?” she asked.