While Still We Live (64 page)

The priest silenced Zofia’s reply with his upraised arm. He moved to the window and instructed two men to go round to the barn. Then he spoke to the white-haired man, still standing speechless, motionless. “Take the guns. Hide them with the others.” To Tomasz he said, “What about Zygmunt?”

“The leg’s no good to him. We’ll cut it off.”

“Kati?”

“She’ll come round.” And then Tomasz called on the two men standing at the door: “Come on there, give me a hand. We’ll lift her over to the bed. Careful Watch out for the blood on the floor.”

The priest sat down on the bench beside Sheila. “We have accepted your warning,” he said gently. The deeply shadowed
eyes looked at her not unkindly. “But you must stay here until Kati or Zygmunt can talk. You understand? After all, we don’t know yet who you are. We cannot let you leave until we do. We must
think
of the village.”

“Yes,” Sheila said. “I understand.” She tried to smile. “Anyway, I don’t know where to go. Not now.” She looked at Peter. And then, “What time is it?”

“After eight o’clock.”

“Then we have perhaps an hour’s grace. Perhaps less. I don’t know, really.” It might indeed be only a matter of minutes. She stared at Heinrich Dittmar’s limp body. Powerless now, and yet not powerless enough. He could still harm them if he were found by Hefner. He must be the first one to be hidden. But the two others and Zak must be hidden safely too. Not that the Germans objected to the Poles quarrelling and killing each other; that saved the Germans a lot of trouble. But the bodies carried bullet wounds, and bullets meant hidden guns, and that the Germans would not tolerate. Sheila remembered their ingenious theory of “collective responsibility.” Evidence of one gun in a village made the entire village responsible. Hostages were taken and shot. The number depended on the Germans’ whim.

“What can we do?” she asked suddenly. “We must act at once.”

The faces at the door nodded. They kept their grim silence. They were too stunned by the blow that had struck the village, to be able to plan. They liked time to shape their ideas: there was something wild and indecent about such haste. They were peasants, and they moved slowly, like the earth.

“Dig a grave?” Sheila asked, and then realised the hard frost
would show the newly turned ground. And digging took time. Tomasz was shaking his head.

“Take them out of the village in a cart?”

“Where? And if Germans are coming they, will meet the cart and search it,” Zofia said scornfully.

Sheila, looking at the woman’s face, kept silent over a third suggestion. A fire might solve the problem. Yet if this house burned, it might take an hour or two before the blaze was really strong enough to destroy all evidence of bullet wounds. In any case, Zofia and the others would be shocked. They would not let their dead be burned: their dead must have decent Christian burials.

“Well?” Sheila said. Her insistence must seem callous. And then she realised that as the stranger here, she alone saw the tragic incident as part of one large pattern, involving not only this village, but the camp and Hofmeyer, and Olszak, and God knew how many others. To the villagers, the tragedy consisted only of the murder of their friends and of the threat of “collective responsibility.” They could not realise that the tale of death would not stop in Dwór. Nor could she tell them. The explanation she had already given them had baffled them enough.

“Father,” she said quickly to the priest, “in many Polish villages, there is a house with coffins displayed for sale in racks before its door. Is there such a house here?”

The priest nodded, gazed at her gravely. He wasn’t going to approve of her idea, she knew. She explained with increasing desperation. When she had finished, his serious eyes confirmed, her guess. But he hadn’t refused to listen. There was still hope. She waited impatiently for his reply. She saw that Tomasz agreed with her: so did another man. Zofia was looking uneasy,
uncertain. They all waited for their priest. He would decide.

“God grant us strength for what we do,” he said at last, and rose to his feet.

It was the signal for all of them. The spell of silence and inaction was broken: commands, quick movements, willing hands gave life to the room and were echoed outside. Tomasz was in charge. “Give us half an hour,” he said.

Zofia, now that she had become accustomed to the idea that the Germans might come, that Sheila had not lied, worked eagerly, unquestioningly. She was even beginning to take pride in the plan, inventing little details of her own. Perhaps some day, if this story were told in the long evenings before her kitchen fire, the plan would become hers entirely.

Sheila relaxed. The village was together. It was working with an energy as intense as its gloom had been. Even the children did their share: some went to the main road, where the short track to Dwór branched from it; others carried water, brought sheets of linen from their mothers’ store cupboards.

Half an hour, Tomasz had said. In half an hour, they were ready.

FUNERAL

At nine o’clock, punctually, a large black car jolted over the rough road and halted in front of the inn. The children had taken a short cut over the fields and had shouted as children do when they race each other. Now their game was over. They stood in a breathless, wide-eyed group and stared at the enormous car. Behind the shuttered windows of the cottages, older eyes watched the four men who stepped out of the car. One wore a grey tweed suit and a fitted, dark blue coat. There was a touch of the dandy in him, with his casually worn Homburg hat, and the yellow gloves gripping the cane. The business-like briefcase seemed out of place but authoritative. The three men who accompanied him were in the black uniform of death.

At the first warning from the children’s raised voices, the small procession had formed outside the inn, and the cortege of white wood coffins moved slowly over to the church. When the car arrived at the village, the first coffin had already
been carried carefully into the church, the second one was disappearing inside the door, the third was being edged through the gateway, and the fourth was still being slowly borne across the small village square. For one moment, the file of mourners turned their faces to stare with village curiosity at the newcomers. Then they bowed their heads once more. The four men paused to look at the procession. Then they turned abruptly, swinging neatly on their heels. The women who had been watching through the half-closed shutters of the houses crossed themselves thankfully, and turned back to the younger children whom they were guarding. The older children outside in the square were completely silenced as they transferred their attention from the Nazi car to the funeral, and watched the last coffin pass through the church’s narrow gate. The two slow-swinging bells commanded silence and respect for the dead. Everywhere, there was the brooding peace of mourning.

The four men halted at the inn door. Hefner and the Gestapo officer were in front; behind them, in neat order, were the two other black uniforms.

“This is it,” Hefner said crisply. He was more business-like than Sheila had ever seen him. “This is it.”

The officer glanced over his shoulder. “All looks dead to me. How do they know, these people, when it’s time to enter their coffins?” He laughed at his own joke, and Hefner joined in politely.

“Wait here,” the officer was saying to his two men. He rapped briskly against the door. Sheila moved back from the half-shuttered hall window into the bedroom where Zygmunt was lying, as the Nazi pushed the door open and entered. Tomasz was coming out of the front room to meet him.

“They’ve come?” Zygmunt whispered hoarsely.

Sheila nodded and sat down beside the bed. It was strange how the panic which had first seized her, as she had heard the car approach, had now quite vanished. She felt calm, even sure of herself. We are so desperate, she thought, that we just don’t care. She made sure that Kati’s red handkerchief was knotted round her head so that not one strand of hair was shown. She placed Kati’s thick black shawl over her shoulders, crossing it over her breasts and tying it behind her waist to give her a bulky look. Kati’s long wrinkled boots hid her legs. The grey ashes from the stove with which she had touched her eyebrows had made them dingy and colourless; her cheeks and lips were pale, and she had added a streak of charcoal from her smeared hands. If the hands looked dirty enough, perhaps the scar on the left one might never be noticed. She tried to look like a patient, huddled woman watching beside a sickbed.

“You’ve left the door open,” Zygmunt said.

“We’ve nothing to hide,” she whispered. “Don’t worry... You remember your story?”

Zygmunt nodded. His lips were dangerously white. His head moved weakly against the narrow pillow.

“I’m all right.” His words were halting. She touched the large, powerful arms, now so motionless.

“Of course you are. It’s just loss of blood. Keep still, don’t talk and try to sleep.”

“Kati?”

“All right. She’s been sick. That’s all. Don’t worry.”

“You should have gone away.”

“Not enough time,” Sheila whispered back. She placed
a finger lightly over his lips. She was listening attentively to the German voices, to Tomasz and his slow steady replies. The Nazis had pushed past him into the living-room, hardly listening to his answers.

“There
is
no one here,” the Nazi officer’s voice was saying with a mixture of annoyance and surprise.

“Have your men start searching the houses and barns, Captain Winkler,” Hefner answered. Then he must have turned to speak to Tomasz, for his voice had a sharp aggressive note which Sheila had never heard before. In Warsaw, his voice had been gentle, lingering over his words with an accent almost feminine.

“You said you were the doctor?”

“I’m a bit of a doctor. I’m a bit of a blacksmith, too. I’m a bit of everything.”

“You said you had your patient here. Anyone else in the house?”

“The nurse. And Katarzyna Hulka’s daughter, who has been ill.”

“Hulka is the owner of this place?”

“She was. She died two days ago. Her daughter is recovering.”

“Send her here.”

“She isn’t well.”

“Send her here!”

“One moment.” It was Captain Winkler’s voice. “What’s wrong, here, anyway? An epidemic which you haven’t reported?”

Tomasz said slowly, “No, I don’t think it is typhus.”

“
Typhus?
” Hefner’s voice rose sharply. Without seeing him, Sheila had guessed that, he had backed away from Tomasz as
he spoke. Charming Herr Hefner with his elegant taste in shirts and fine shoes...

Winkler said angrily, “Hefner! You don’t catch typhus from people. You get it from what they carry on them. We aren’t going to sleep here, you know.”

His heavy, assured step moved into the hall, and he was giving orders to his two men. “Touch nothing and no one,” he ended, and came back into the room.

“Well,” Winkler demanded. “Where’s this woman’s daughter?”

Tomasz’ slow footsteps came down the hall. Sheila strained her ears, but the flood of German from the front room was too quick, too confused. All she could gather was that the captain was annoyed that they had to wait, perhaps annoyed with Hefner, too. Hefner was definitely subdued, anxious to find Dittmar and leave the village. Sheila heard Kati’s light step added to Tomasz’ shuffling.

“Stand there!” Hefner said. Tomasz and Kati must now be standing at the doorway of the front room. He began a series of sharp questions, scarcely giving the girl time to reply. Sheila felt her admiration for Kati growing. She had learned the story they had prepared, between attacks of vertigo and violent sickness, and yet, even with one shoulder hideously discoloured, a broken rib at her side, and a green-shaded swelling across her stomach, she was standing there giving the right answers in an even, quiet voice.

Zygmunt was listening, too. He saw the sudden emotion in Sheila’s face.

“What’s wrong?” he whispered, staring at her anxiously.

Sheila bent over the pillow so that her lips almost touched
his ear. “I was just wondering: what makes some people so brave, and other people such—” She searched for a word he would use. “Such—?”

Zygmunt gave a slow smile, with something of his old humour in it. He nodded his agreement and closed his eyes.

The voices still came unceasingly from the front room. To Sheila, straining to catch each point and counterpoint, the talk was like an unpleasant fugue, harsh, scraping, dissonant. It was obvious that Hefner and his friends had not come armed with questions: they had hoped to find Dittmar waiting. If they had expected any talking, it was to have been done by Dittmar.

No, Tomasz repeated, the village of Dwór harboured no criminals. Only the people of the village were here. As the elder of the village, he could swear to that.

Winkler must have consulted one of the documents in Hefner’s briefcase. “You lie. It says here that the head man of the village is called Zak. Where’s this Zak?”

“He’s dead. He was cutting down a tree with another fellow, two days ago. We found them yesterday afternoon. Zak had died, and the other fellow’s leg was pinned down and crushed into jelly.”

“You mean the tree fell on them?”

“Looked like it.”

“And your patient is the other fellow?”

“Aye. Just cut his leg off. It was turning green.”

Hefner said, “You are wasting our time. We aren’t interested in amputated legs. We came here searching for a man. A Pole called Ryng. You say he hasn’t been here. I warn you that if our men find him in a barn, your village will regret that your memory was so short.”

“I said he isn’t here. And he isn’t.”

Winkler’s voice cut in quickly. “One moment. He isn’t here. I see. But was he here?”

Tomasz didn’t answer.

“Was he? Out with it. Was he?” Winkler’s voice rose threateningly.

Tomasz said slowly, as if fear were making him betray his news in spite of his desire to be loyal, “A stranger came yesterday to the village. I don’t know his name. He didn’t stay long.”

“Now that’s a lie,” Hefner said triumphantly. His voice was mocking. “He didn’t stay, did he?”