While Still We Live (19 page)

At the hospital on Bracka Street—once a recreation hall—the car was emptied.

“I must return. I cannot take you further. I am sorry.” The man’s gentle voice was in quiet contrast to his recent rage. He was leaning heavily over the wheel.

Sheila nodded to let him see she understood. She gave him
her good hand. He held it, and patted it gently.

“Go down that way,” he said and pointed. “You will pass a large bank at the corner where Bracka meets Main Street. Keep on south, through the square, into Wiejska Street. Then you’ll be home. It’s quiet down there, tonight.”

Sheila nodded again. She couldn’t even say thank you. She just stood there, looking at him, and nodding, and looking at him. The car started northwards into the centre of the burning city.

Sheila’s body had become a machine. It was like a child’s toy which is wound up and runs on, unable to stop its rhythm long after it had struck a wall and lies sideways on the floor. Without thinking, or seeing, or feeling, she walked the distance to Stevens’ flat. At the same even, unfaltering pace she crossed torn streets, skirted shell holes, stepped over debris; at the same even, unfaltering pace she climbed the stairway to Stevens’ rooms, and passed through the half-open doorway into the hall. Later, when she tried to recall that journey, all she could remember was that she saw the stranger drive away, and then she was standing in Madame Knast’s entrance hall, listening to the voices which came from Stevens’ living-room, staring into the desolate kitchen.

Stevens’ two rooms were at the front of the building; the kitchen, across the hall from them, faced into, an enclosed garden. Once it had been as cheerful and gay as the trees and flowers it overlooked. Now, lit theatrically through its empty window by the reflected glow from the sky, it was desolate. The table was cluttered; dishes had fallen off the shelves and had smashed on the floor beneath. The curtains, without any glass to restrain them, were waving dolefully out into the garden. No
one had lived in this kitchen for many days. Madame Knast’s rooms, farther along the hall, were silent too. Only from Stevens’ room came voices. Voices talking in English.

Sheila stood in the hall. The forsaken kitchen had sapped her will power. The machine had run down: her legs wouldn’t move any more. She stood and looked at the kitchen. Once, she thought, this was the life of the house. Then the son had been lost. Madame Knast must be lost, too. Lost, searching for her son. The curtains flapped back against the window sill, then blew out into the night again. Madame Knast was lost. And Barbara was lost. Lost, lost, lost, the curtains echoed gently.

Stevens’ door creaked behind her. A man’s voice said in English, “Hello, I thought I heard someone. Come on in, whoever you are.” He was an American. When she didn’t move, he repeated the invitation in Polish. Over his shoulder he called back in English into the room. “Tuck in your shirt, Jim. It’s a woman.”

The man came towards her curiously. “Come in,” he said for a third time, and touched her gently on the shoulder.

THE OUTLANDERS

No longer would Madame Knast have thought of calling her “paying guest’s” rooms “nice.” Here, the disorder had spread too. But it was of a different kind. There was a friendliness in the opened suitcases sprawling over the floor, in the bottles standing on the table, in the saucers filled with cigarette ends, in the sheaves of ill-arranged papers beside the typewriter on top of the bookcase, in the blankets hanging over the armchairs. Candle stubs burned cheerfully in the necks of three empty brandy bottles. Roughly hacked sardine tins and a piece of marbled sausage, a knife and a corkscrew and a can-opener completed the still life on the table. The window now was boarded-up. Russell Stevens had lost his bet.

The man who had been washing the cuts on his cheek in a bucket of much-used water paused in drying his face with a shirt to stare at the newcomer. Another man, with a decided wave to his hair, had one foot on a chair and his trouser leg
rolled above the knee while he wound a puttee-like bandage round his calf. He had paused to look up at Sheila, and he kept looking at her while his fingers finished the knot on the ragged piece of muslin round his leg. Sheila recognised the remains of Madame Knast’s best white curtains lying at the man’s foot. A third man struggled with the waistband of his trousers. He must be Jim. He was staring, too.

“Well, it certainly can’t be Madame Knast,” said the man who was drying his face, and threw the shirt into a dark corner of the room. He had spoken with a decidedly French accent.

“No, thank God,” the American said. Then he began slowly and carefully in Polish, “Did you come to see Madame Knast or Stevens? Madame Knast hasn’t been here for almost two weeks, now. Stevens will be here any moment. We are expecting him.”

Sheila made an incredible effort. “He sent me. Here.” The words seemed to have been uttered by a stranger.

The man called Jim said, with a hint of cockney in his vowels, “You’re English, aren’t you?”

Sheila nodded.

The man with the wave in his hair tucked the last strand of bandage in place, unrolled the wrinkled trouser leg methodically, and walked stiffly over to her. He bowed with great politeness and said, “Gustav Schlott. You must be Miss Matthews. Steve has spoken of you.”

The men lost their first curiosity. Another kind, more subtle and less staring, took its place.

“Have a chair,” suggested the black-haired American. He tipped one forward to empty it effectively of its mixture of clothing and books, and carried it over to her.

Schlott had noticed her hand and was searching for the first-aid
box. It had wandered considerably from its usual place, and no one seemed to remember who had put it where. With Swedish perseverance he found it at last, stuck inside a biscuit jar.

Jim was saying with humour made heavy in his embarrassment, “Don’t tell me you’ve been out for a stroll in the moonlight.”

Schlott smeared her hand generously with petroleum jelly. His middle-aged, heavy face creased in a smile as he patted her shoulder encouragingly. “That will cure it. Now, would you like vodka or wine or schnapps?”

“Wine,” the Frenchman said decisively. “It’s both nourishment and drink.” He chose a bottle carefully from underneath the table, kissed it mockingly and uncorked it gently. “We can even offer you some food. Bill, our American friend here, has produced a suitcase of delicacies. There is pâté de foie or caviare or pâté de foie. Bill is a very wise man. He chose to save these tins of food rather than his clothes.”

Bill said, “Nuts. That was the first suitcase I could grab. That and my manuscript. Just didn’t get round to finding my clothes.”

“All I’m dreaming about is a slice of soft white bread with lashings of butter, and a pot of tea,” Jim said. “Never thought I’d sink to dreaming about them.”

Bill handed her the wine in a kitchen measuring cup. “Try this,” he urged.

Sheila wished she could smile. They were all so eager to help her, as if they had read in her face all she had seen and heard in these last hours. She raised the cup slowly, but when she tilted it the rim wasn’t at her mouth after all. She only realised that the cup’s rim was pressing below her underlip when the wine trickled coldly down her chin and splashed on her coat.

The men exchanged quick glances. Schlott unclenched her hand as gently as he had applied the Vaseline, took the cup and held it to her lips. She swallowed the wine in quick hard gulps.

“What about resting on the couch?” Bill said. He was already arranging a blanket for her. “Sorry we can’t offer you the bed next door. But there are a couple of fellows in there, dead to the world. You can go on sleeping here until Steve or one of us gets back again. Steve doesn’t know it, but his boarders are increasing. We’re the Bombed-out Brigade. This part of the city is the luckiest, so here we are. Steve’s going to be the most popular guy in Warsaw before the siege ends.”

“A doubtful honour,” murmured the Frenchman, looking round the confusion in the room.

The Swede was tucking the blankets methodically around her legs, folding them envelope fashion. “Warmth is necessary,” he was saying to himself.

Jim, watching him, nodded in agreement. “Lord, the things we’ve learned in the last weeks!” he said, as he helped Schlott arrange everything to his satisfaction.

“Try and sleep. Yes?” Schlott said, and then moved away with Jim to sit and talk quietly with the others. They kept their voices low, but everything they said now sounded twice as loud to Sheila, as if, by lying so still and not having to move or talk or make any effort, her power of hearing had been strengthened. She wasn’t listening, and yet she heard every word in spite of the constant roll of noise from outside. She wasn’t sleeping, and yet she felt she wasn’t in this room. It was only the body of Sheila Matthews, and not Sheila Matthews, which lay so still.

The serious voices argued on. The problem was ammunition: for the last week it had been rationed sparingly. The problem
was food: none was left in the shops, and the warehouses had been bombed to bits, and the city was surrounded. The problem was water: the waterworks had been destroyed, and the old wells were inadequate now. The problem was the hospitals with so many in ruins, so much equipment destroyed; thirty-six thousand wounded soldiers and more than that number of civilians lay on floors and in corridors. The problem was the burst water mains; the sewage pipes blasted; the increasing tempo of night raids which made burial more difficult. The problem was the guns which smashed day and night at the city: they were getting worse and worse, and soon people wouldn’t be able to move about the streets to help where they could; no human being could stand this much longer.

The serious voices argued on. The only thing they agreed about was the fact that there were problems.

Schlott came over to her once more. “Not asleep?” he asked gently.

She could answer him now. “I’m much better, thank you. I’m all right now.”

He seemed pleased.

He turned back to the others. “Time to go now,” he said to them. The men gathered up their odds and ends of equipment silently. And then they started to talk again as they left the room. They filed out slowly. Only by their slowness, not by their faces or toy their voices, could you tell that they were loath to leave this room. Here at least you could rest. Here at least you were together. Here at least the walls shut out the sight of the streets.

* * *

When the storm of sudden tears had passed and she was calm
again, Sheila listened to the bursts of snoring from the sleeping men next door. How strange, she thought, to be able to sleep like that through all this shellfire; and then she remembered that she had slept equally deeply through the worst raids in the early part of the siege. But this shelling was worse than the bombing. The centre of the city must be crumbling. Bill, that new American, was right. Steve had chosen a lucky spot for his apartment. Steve... Sheila found herself wanting to smile at the precise way in which she had called him “Russell.” Of course, his friends would call him Steve. Russell was probably only used by his great aunts. She sat up on the couch and moved her legs onto the floor. She was feeling better now. She had almost smiled for a moment. Are we really all heartless? she wondered in amazement and shame as she reached the boarded window. Two hours ago she couldn’t have smiled. Two hours ago all she could do was to walk and walk and walk. She couldn’t even think then. She hadn’t been afraid of bombs or shells or things lying before her on the street. Now she could smile. She could think. She could be afraid.

The bedroom door was flung violently open, and a thin dark-haired man stood staring at the candle-lighted room. “They’ve gone, damn them. I told them to waken us.” He spoke bad German. Behind him stumbled a young man, with rumpled hair and a blond beard. They looked at Sheila curiously for a moment.

“Where did they go?” the bearded man asked. He had the soft accent of Vienna.

“I don’t know. They left about an hour ago.”

“You are a German?”

“No. British.”

The two men forgot about her. They were searching for their coats, cursing the others for having left them behind even out of thoughtfulness. The dark-haired man was probably Spanish, Sheila guessed, as he burst into a long stream of fluent phrases which neither she nor the bearded Viennese could understand.

“If we miss them,” the Viennese was saying, “tell them we’ve gone to the Poniatowski Bridge. Tell them to come along there when they’ve had some sleep. They’ll be needed there.”

The Spaniard nodded, took a drink of wine and passed the bottle to his friend. Together they left the room. The Spaniard was limping. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder and an armband round the sleeve of his torn jacket. The Austrian had stuffed some empty bottles into his pockets, and carried two in his hands. They were discussing something about petrol for the bottles.

She was alone once more. She moved a board which had been fastened only at one end so that people could “open” the window. She stared towards the north, to the heart of the city. It was bright blood-red.

BATTLE WITHOUT GLORY

In the eastern suburbs across the river Vistula, the cloud of dust from crumbled bricks and shattered cement blotted out the night sky. To the men, crouching behind the ragged walls of houses, or lying in trenches slit through the rubble of gardens, there was left neither night nor day. Time was remembered only by the gnawing hunger under their belts, by the taste of sulphur and lime on their parched tongues. None of them turned to look at the flaming city behind them to the west. Their red-rimmed, sleep-heavy eyes stared towards the east, towards the shroud of dust, suspended like a cloud on a volcano’s rim, which wrapped their enemy round.

That afternoon, on one of the smaller streets which ran parallel to the main road into the city, a group of nine men, two of them wounded, had settled themselves in the little Café Kosciusko. Formerly, it had been a basement room. Now, the upper part of its window, which reached above street level,
served very adequately for a combined machine-gun slit and observation post. The machine gun was silent. Like the watchful man beside it, like the others resting wearily behind it, the gun waited. Above the men’s heads, above the gaping ceiling and the empty space where two other stories had once formed a neat house, was the unseen arc of whining shells aimed at the city across the river. A dull glow warmed the dark shadows of the room, turned the white faces gleaming with sweat and streaked with black to bright copper.