While Still We Live (66 page)

It was Adam.

WEDDING

He closed the door firmly behind him, shutting out the curious faces of Zofia and Tomasz and Kati.

He looked at her gravely. “Men have been shot for less,” he said. His voice was serious, his face set. And then, as he watched her eyes widen, there was the beginning of a smile. He crossed over to her swiftly. His hands were leading her round the table. He pulled the red handkerchief off her hair, and rumpled its curls back into life.

“Sheila,” he said. “Sheila...”

She smiled with all her heart. She laughed. Life was simple and easy and wonderful once more. Now she could walk not only to the Russian border, she could find her way alone to Vladivostok.

Between kisses he was saying, “I told her to wait... She said she would... And then she left in the darkness... Rebel.”

She struggled free to protest, “Adam, you
know
I didn’t want to go.”

He was serious again, and this time his face and voice were gentle. “Yes, I know.” He kissed her once more.

She suddenly noticed her hand as it touched his shoulder. She remembered her appearance.

“Oh Adam!” And then as he looked at her in surprise, “I should have known you would come. You always see me when I’m...”

“When you are what, darling?” But he knew what she meant, for he was smiling now.

She had to smile, too. “Why can’t you see me
just once
in my prettiest dress?” she asked ruefully, and unfastened the shawl from her waist.

He was laughing. He pointed to the stained peasant clothes which he now wore and said, “I don’t look much of a bargain in these things, do I?”

“Wading through ditches...milking goats—” she went on, but he silenced her with his arms, holding her so tightly that there was no more breath left in her lungs, and the rest of her words became a gasp.

He searched for a scrap of handkerchief in his pocket. He cleaned her face gently. “Why did you leave the forest?”

“You know why, Adam.” Her eyes met his steadily.

He spoke very quietly now. “That was the only reason?”

“It was the only reason.”

He was wiping her hands. He kissed them each in turn.

“That was what I wanted to hear,” he said.

She tried to speak. I love you, I adore you, I love you, Adam. I never want to leave you, but if I must I shall wait forever and ever. But all she did was to put her arms round his neck and kiss him.

“After I stopped cursing Olszak, all I could think was that perhaps you...” His voice hesitated. He wasn’t sure of himself, any more. He looked at her uncertainly, pleadingly. There was a sadness, a sincerity in his face which twisted her heart.

“You
do
love me, Adam,” she said gently.

“I more than love you, Sheila. You know that, too.”

“Yes. I know that.”

“As I know that you love me?”

“Yes. I love you, Adam.”

“Forever?”

“Forever.”

“That is all that matters.”

She nodded. It was all that mattered.

* * *

Kati entered, preceded by a timid knock, and then by a second, more urgent rap on the door. She looked apologetically towards Wisniewski. He and the fair-haired girl were standing so close together, talking so earnestly and sadly that she was afraid to speak.

“Yes?” the Chief asked impatiently without looking at her.

“Father Brys and the first of the men have got back from the burial,” Kati replied.

Zofia, her neck straining to see past Kati, had tried to edge into the room too. But Kati’s broad shoulders and outstretched arm blocked the way.

“Father Brys wants to know where the meeting is to be,” Kati added.

“I see.” Adam turned to come slowly to the door, his arm still round Sheila. “In here, I suppose.” Zofia was looking very impressed as she stood aside to let Sheila enter the hall.

“Tell the other men, as they arrive, to come here,” Adam said to the round-eyed village woman. “And we shall all need a hot meal before we leave again.” Zofia nodded her head and bustled away, well-pleased at having been given some commands to dole out. To Kati he said, “Tell Zygmunt I’ll come and see him before the meeting starts. If he isn’t asleep.”

“No, he’s been waiting for you to come. Captain—” Kati was unexpectedly slow, hesitating. “Do you think you could have him back in camp, please?”

“He is badly injured.”

“That’s what he keeps saying: a one-legged man is no use for the camp. And he is lying there, just miserable, not caring whether he gets well or not.”

“I see.” There was a pause in which Kati’s unhappy, strained eyes watched Wisniewski’s face constantly. “We’ll find some job for him to do, out of camp. Perhaps as our key man, here. You would like that, wouldn’t you, Kati?”

“Yes. That’s what we used to talk about all the time—about having this war over and the Germans away and all of us living the way we want to live, and Zygmunt and me here at the inn. And now he’s got the chance to be at the inn. And he doesn’t want it. He wants to go back to the camp. To finish his job, he says.”

“He could do an excellent job here, Kati, now that Zak and your mother and Peter have gone.”

Kati looked unhappily at Wisniewski. “Could you make that job seem important? Sort of dangerous?”

“Yes.” He repressed a smile. “If that will help, it will be very important and very dangerous.”

“Thank you, Captain.” Kati hurried along the hall with her
news. Sheila watched her go.

“What’s wrong, Sheila?”

“I was just wishing.”

“What were you wishing?”

“That you’d have a leg amputated.”

He kissed her quickly. “That’s the only way to silence you, my girl,” he said. “You don’t often say things like that, darling.” She felt more ashamed of her words than any reproof could have made her.

“No, don’t look like that, Sheila. God knows I’ve thought of enough mad things since I got back to the camp this dawn and Sierakowski told me you had left. Even before then, when we waited in the forest for the Germans to show up, I had thought of them.”

“Perhaps it would have been easier if we had never met here; I was becoming resigned to everything. Now I am all mixed up, again,” she said sadly.

“No, Sheila, this way is best. This way, we make our own decisions. We aren’t children to have them made for us. If we aren’t strong enough to make the right one, then we are dishonest—pretending what we want to do is what we ought to do.”

She nodded.

“You believe me, Sheila?” he asked anxiously.

“Yes.” She kissed him to silence his doubts. She tried to smile, to make her voice light. “I’m bad for you, Adam. I make you break too many rules.” She patted the gun in his pocket.

He smiled and said, “We came here for business, not for pleasure. If you hadn’t broken that rule, yourself, this visit would have been purely a business one.” In spite of his smile, she saw that the journey he had made from the forest to this
village must have been a nightmare.

As she looked at him, she remembered the first time she had met him. Now his face was thinner, older; his eyes were more thoughtful, his lips tighter. It was a stronger face, the face of a man who had come to know himself. Everything had been taken from him. All he had left was his body, his brains and his courage. These were the real man: not what he had owned in land, or in money, or in the prestige of a name. And he knew that, and he accepted it.

Adam Wisniewski watched the girl’s face looking at him so intently. What was she thinking? From the first time he had met her, he had wondered about that. His memory of her as he had first seen her—leaning out of the window at the Korytów house, her eyes and lips laughing, fair hair falling to her shoulders, warmth and life in her face—had haunted him. Then later, when she came downstairs for that last dinner and his impatience had increased as he waited for her to appear, she had seemed another being. Still with the same fair hair, the same large brown eyes, the same smiling mouth. But she had become suddenly cold and remote; there was a challenge in the way she ignored him. He had watched her all through that dinner, and he had discovered two things. One was that she didn’t love Andrew Aleksander and never would. Somehow he had been relieved to know that. The other was that she was shy, and her coldness was a guard put up against a frightening world. He had been amazed that any girl with her beauty and charm should be shy, and his interest had quickened. Before he could talk to her, tease her, try to make her lose that self-control so that she would become as alive and warm as in the first moment of seeing her, events had crowded in. Personal thoughts and desires had to be forgotten. At the
meeting in Korytowski’s flat he had been angry that she should have been there: she was being drawn into danger; he wanted her away. Safe. It was then he had realised the incongruous fact that he was in love with this girl: incongruous because he had at last found what he most wanted at a time when he, who had always got what he wanted, couldn’t even try to possess it. There was no forgetting her either. There never would be. But there were other things to be done, and if he kept her near him she would always be in danger. The journey from the forest to this village, without knowing what had happened except that shots from the village had been heard, had been undiluted hell. But it had proved to him that she would have to leave. Not for Olszak’s reasons, not for all that damned talk about leadership. He was a captain with a job of fighting to do. He would fight as well with her as he had fought without her. But what would happen to her if he were killed? Or if she were taken hostage by the Germans? They’d soon know that she wasn’t Polish; they’d learn about Anna Braun. Did she know what danger she was in? Probably she did. But she wouldn’t go away if that were the only reason for not staying. He tightened his grasp round her waist. Not for Olszak’s reasons, then; but Olszak’s reason would have to be used if he sent her away. These would be the only ones she would listen to.

They heard Kati clearing her throat more loudly than necessary. They were once more back in the inn at Dwór. Behind Kati was the white, furrowed face of Father Brys. He was watching them with his calm grey eyes. Sheila felt he understood everything. Without being told, he knew, and knowing, understood. Quickly she followed Kati out into the open.

* * *

In front of the inn there was a group of waiting men. Sheila knew the younger men, some seven or eight in number. They were from the camp. Adam had picked the toughest fighters, too, she thought, as she recognised them. They greeted her smilingly, with a sort of informal, vague salute.

“You cheated us out of a job, we’ve been hearing,” one called over to her as she passed, and the others grinned widely. Then they started moving into the inn with the older men from the village.

“What you need is a good scrub,” Kati said critically. “Tearstains and all. You’re a beauty at this moment I can tell you.” She led Sheila round to the side of the house where there was an open pump. “Go on, stick your head under that. I’ll have to get you fresh clothes, anyway.”

“How’s your side, Kati?”

“All right. Zofia bandaged me up. It doesn’t hurt. Not much.”

“Where are the women?”

“Cooking. The older children are pretending to work in the fields near the main road. They are keeping watch.”

“How did the men from the camp arrive?”

“When the old woman and her son got to the forest, they found the Chief setting out for the village. He had just heard you came here last night. They told him about the German spy, and about the shots they had heard (that’s what made the old woman and her son go straight to the forest instead of waiting for night to come), and the chief then chooses some men to come with him, and they come straight to the village. Not all together, you know. Not marching. Just the way they slip into places. But they all got here about the same time, just as the
service was ending in the church. I was looking out of the hall window to see if everything was all right. And what did I see? First the Chief and Ladislas, then little Jan, then Kasmierz and Julian, then Edmund, and then three men I didn’t know. What excitement there was in the square! The Chief was talking to Father Brys and Tomasz. They were telling him everything. And then I knew we were all safe.” Kati was happy: the village had been in danger, and the camp hadn’t forgotten it. The camp was taking charge. All was well.

“What happened to the—to the coffins?”

Kati stared at her. “You know nothing, do you? What in the wide world have you been talking about in there?” She nodded over her shoulder in the direction of the inn. “Nearly an hour, you were. And you know nothing.”

“What happened?”

“The Chief’s a quick one. As soon as he knew what had been happening here, he gave his orders. The—” Only the slight hesitation, the drop in the girl’s voice as it spoke the next word, was there to remind them of Jadwiga—“the bodies must disappear so that the Germans wouldn’t find them. We are to tell the Szwaby that we burned them in case of typhus.” The sadness in her voice disappeared. She added, vindictively, “But we haven’t buried Ryng.”

Sheila, drying her face and scrubbing her arms with her apron, looked up in surprise.

“No,” Kati went on. “See that cart with logs in it? He’s under there. The cart is going to Nowe Miasto. Zofia’s husband had orders from the Germans to bring in a load of his best wood before the end of this week. So he is going today. The chief and his men will meet the cart at dusk just before it enters the
little town. They will take the body, and when they raid Nowe Miasto tonight, they’ll leave the body with a lot of bullets in it on the road behind them. It will be found after they’ve finished the raid.”

“Captain Wis—the captain is going on a raid?” Sheila tried to keep her voice calm.

“Of course. He told Tomasz that if the Germans get enough to occupy them at Nowe Miasto, they wouldn’t come here for a day or two. And if they found the spy’s body, then they wouldn’t start searching for him here. If we had buried him the Szwaby would have kept on looking and looking.”