Churchill's Triumph (32 page)

“The soldier’s return. A most compelling moment in any man’s life.”

“I’ve seen films of what happened to Berlin and Hamburg, even Dresden, but that was nothing compared to what was done to Warsaw. And yet we were innocent. We had started no war, we had done our neighbor no wrong. So why us? Why Warsaw?”

An edge was creeping into the Pole’s voice as his passion pushed up against his self-control. Churchill searched for some response that might be adequate, knowing he would fail. “Warsaw died a brave death, and many times over, Mr. Nowak.”

“But what good is that to me?”

“Its name stands as a symbol of hope.”

“You delude yourself. It stands as a symbol of betrayal and inhumanity, nothing more.”

They fell silent for a while, watching as another yacht passed innocently by, slumbering on a sea that was studded with turquoise and diamonds. In the distance the shore seemed to be melting in the midday heat. Yet Churchill felt alive, more vital than he had in years. This man, this Pole, had stirred old passions that he had thought were not simply dormant but stone dead, and if their revival brought along with them memories of compromises and inadequacies, even pain, it was but a small price to pay. His life had become crowded with those who tumbled over each other to flatter and fawn, yet the only loyal companions of old age were loneliness and endless time. Nowak made him feel young again—why, seventy years young! And the fact that he represented a challenge, a threat, even, made the moment all the richer.

“Your home, Mr. Nowak. Your family. Pray, what of them?”

The Pole stared directly into the honey-gold sun and for a moment closed his eyes, as though hoping its heat would burn away the memories. Then his hand came up to touch the spot over his heart.

“We lived off Aleja Ujazdowskie. It’s a long boulevard that runs to the very heart of the city. Many trees, many magnificent buildings, a place where people loved to be seen. It was also the route that the panzers took, and where the fighting during the Uprising was most fierce. My wife ran a casualty station in the cellar of our house, so a neighbor told me, filled with women tending the wounded, nothing more. But the troops that came were SS. What was left by the tanks and the bombers, they finished off with grenades and flame-throwers. They made no distinctions, and gave no quarter. No one in our cellar survived.”

“And. . . your daughter?”

Suddenly Nowak’s foot began tapping upon the deck. It was as though something inside him had been switched on, a motor, a source of energy that was too great to be contained and had to find release in the steady, monotonous movement.

“She ran away. They said she was last seen running down our street in her favorite checked dress—that’s how the neighbor recognized her—just as a tank shell hit a nearby house and everything disappeared in a blast of flame and smoke. No one has seen her since.”

“Surely there must have been some trace. . . ”

“When a city is razed to the ground, Mr. Churchill, when the gutters run with fire, when even the sewers are filled with petrol so they will burn, there is so little place for a young child to hide and so many places for her to vanish. I searched, of course I did. I never stopped. And I found so many lost little girls, begging, hobbling on crutches, shivering in their rags, and every time I looked into their eyes I wondered if… if she might be little Kasia. But how could I tell?” The drumming on the deck became more insistent. “I didn’t even know what my daughter looked like. There was no photograph, no image, only a neighbor’s muddied memory. And I kept wondering, if she had survived that blast, what might have happened to her? What does a little girl of five do when everyone she knows is dead and her home is broken and she has seen more vileness and brutality than anyone deserves in an entire lifetime? Where does she go? What becomes of her?”

Churchill was openly weeping, yet Nowak’s eyes were dry, bruise-grey, tortured with the pain of so many unshed tears.

“Every morning my hopes rose, and every nightfall they died a little more. For an entire year I searched, looking in shadows, in orphanages, in homes and graveyards, scratching away in every dark corner, until it drained my soul.”

“I can find no words to express my sorrow,” Churchill whispered. “I, too, lost a little daughter. Marigold. We called her the Duckadilly. She was so beautiful and full of delights, and only two.” He produced a huge handkerchief from a pocket in his blazer and wiped his eyes, yet Nowak’s tone, like the tapping of his foot, remained mechanical.

“I found myself one day in a gutter. Drunk, of course, desperately drunk. I had no idea how long I’d been there—hours, days, weeks, the difference no longer mattered much to me. Then an old woman spat at me. She crossed the road so she could spit on me. I think I recognized her. She told me I had brought shame on my family. That word—‘Family’—but I had none, not a soul, no one. All… gone.” For the first time the mask began to slip and the Pole’s suffering twisted his face. “You know, I imagine them looking down on me, my father, mother, my wife, little Kasia…”

“I think I can understand how you feel,” the old man replied softly, his lower lip trembling like the wings of a swallow. “My father’s ghost has walked alongside me all my grown life. He always told me I would come to no good. He still does.”

The Pole was startled—Churchill with his father’s ghost? He paused for a moment, struggling to see this man as any other, as one who might have self-doubt or be haunted by his past, but he dismissed the idea as preposterous. They shared nothing in common. What could this man know of family? Why, even his own son treated him with contempt.

“I was in the gutter. It was one of those moments when a drowning man has to decide if he’s going to cling on a little longer or simply open his fingers and allow himself to be taken. One more drink and it wouldn’t have mattered, but as Fate would have it the bottle was empty. So I got up. And I walked to Piorun.”

“To where?”

“To the home of Marian Nowak. I had been him for so many years. I had nowhere else to go. If I’d stayed in Warsaw I would have ended up in a gutter so deep that I’d never be able to crawl out. Anyway, I thought I owed it to his family, to tell them how he had died. My existence as Marian Nowak may have been imaginary all those years, but it was the one part of my life that remained real to me. So—I walked. Through a countryside that looked as if it had been ripped from the Middle Ages. Nothing but peasants scraping fields for food, living in filth and degradation, in fear. Poland as it hadn’t been since the Black Death.”

The Pole’s foot was still tapping remorselessly upon the deck and it was beginning to irritate Churchill, making it more difficult for him to hear, but it was scarcely the moment to complain. “And did you find them, the family of Mr. Nowak?”

“Piorun was a town like so many others. It had no airs, no pretensions. It had so very little to lose, but what it had was taken from it. And when I arrived, the people of Piorun had little to offer but suspicion. So many strangers had come to Piorun and left behind them nothing but heartache. They demanded to know my business. I pretended I was a distant cousin of the Nowaks. And that was when they told me what had happened. They were gone, almost the entire family. Wiped away as though they’d never existed. Nowak’s father had disappeared, along with an aunt. One uncle killed. Another, a priest, arrested. His mother sat herself down in the town square one night in winter, outside the church, and simply froze to death.” Nowak’s lips twisted with contempt. “And when the liberators of Poland heard that I had arrived in Piorun and was a relative of the most troublesome family in the town, they invited me for a little chat. Wanted to know who I was, where I had come from. And when I couldn’t answer their questions, they arrested me, too. Ten years in the gulags, Mr. Churchill. Sent to wander Siberia until Stalin was cold in his coffin and they no longer had any use for an aging man with half a hand and a freshly mangled leg.”

Churchill began to mumble an expression of dismay, but Nowak cut across him.

“The one thing that sustained me until the time I met you in Yalta was the love I had for my family. And afterwards, the one thing that kept me alive was my hate. I carried it with me every stumbling step of the way. Hate. For those who were responsible for what had been done to my family and my country. It was the only way to survive in the camps, to get through another winter or another beating. So I swore vengeance on them all. Promised my little Kasia that, if ever I had the chance, I would make them pay for the many ways we were betrayed at Yalta.”

The old man shuddered.

“But they cheated me, Mr. Churchill. They died, Stalin and Roosevelt. It’s so difficult to hate the dead. And then, out of the blue, you walked into my life once more. You know, I’d almost forgotten about you, a sad old man surrounded by so many fables. The living legend, the man who won the war. But you and I know better, don’t we?”

“My heart trembles for you, Mr. Nowak. But these calamities— they were not my fault.”

Nowak sprang to his feet, like an angler striking for a pike. “Then whose fault was it? Who turned the blind eye to Katyn? Who held out their hand in friendship to the Russians even as they sat on the other side of the Vistula, watching Warsaw—and my family—being reduced to ashes? Who applauded as they marched into Poland and made us all slaves?”

“You cannot blame me for those things.”

“Then who should I blame? Who was it who betrayed not only my country at Yalta but me—me? And who better to pay the price?”

“What price would that be, pray?”

The foot had stopped its tapping. Nowak’s battered body was still. And suddenly, Churchill was staring down the barrel of a revolver.

❖ ❖ ❖

“Is the condemned man allowed a final drink?”

“You think this a joke?” Nowak tightened his grip on the handle of the revolver.

“Not at all. I have faced gunfire many times. They have invariably been the most exhilarating moments of my life.” Churchill looked directly at the gun, his voice sounding almost wistful. “Whatever else you have done, Mr. Nowak, you have brought a spark back into my soul and, as strange as it may seem in the circumstances, I thank you for it.”

“If you’re thinking of playing for time, I shouldn’t bother. Your detective has gone in the launch with your son, your valet is fast asleep in his cabin—a little something I gave him in his coffee—and the crew members have been told by Mr. Onassis not to disturb you unless they want—I use his words—their balls to be turned into Turkish sweetmeats.”

“Play for time? Why would I do that? At my age, there’s precious little point. Altogether too damned much of the stuff.” He held the other man’s stare. “So, shall we take the neck off another bottle, Mr. Nowak? What do you think?”

The Pole shrugged. Cautiously, reluctantly, he set about refilling both their glasses. Pol Roger. Churchill’s favorite.

“Your splendidly good health,” Churchill offered in thanks. “Glad you made it after all.”

“Ah, the Englishman’s stiff upper lip, laughing in the face of death.”

“I am not mocking, Mr. Nowak. We have both walked with Death, many times, you and I, smelled his breath on our shoulders. The difference between us is that I am very old. There comes a point where life is like a gramophone record, stuck in the same groove, going round and round, constantly repeating itself, and no one dances to the tune any longer.”

“You pretend you are not afraid of death?”

“Since I watched my father die, slowly, by fractions, it is the waiting I have feared. I watched my father being stripped of his wit and his reputation, and eventually his identity. In the end, it was Death who rode to his rescue. Just as he did with Franklin.”

“Your friend,” Nowak sneered.

“Yes, he was a friend, and a splendid one.”

“He was a man who threw away everything we had fought for.”

“That is a question I have often asked myself.”

“It wasn’t a question.”

“You’ll have to allow a dying man a few doubts of his own,” Churchill snapped back. “Franklin was weak. His sin was to be aging and infirm. And, above all, idealistic. If they are faults, then in his case they proved most grievous.”

“You can’t pile the blame on his shoulders. You were there, together, side by side.”

“I am English, he was American. Standing together, but separated by an ocean of turbulent water and contesting interests.”

“What? You’ve spent the last twenty years bragging about your Special Relationship.”

“And it was destined to be special. Just as it was destined to fail. At its very start, on the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the president declared it to be a day of infamy, while I quietly and most secretly rejoiced. It was what I had wished for, had fallen to my bended knee and prayed for over so many months. At last, America at war! It was something I had badgered and bullied him about and he had hated me for it. But when it happened, it was worth a private jig or two, I can tell you.”

“You were one and the same. Franklin and Winston. All but brothers.”

“‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. . . ’” Churchill picked up the refrain, only to cast it aside. “It wasn’t like that. Franklin used me as I used him, as it was right for us both to do. We served interests that frequently coincided, but we saluted different flags.”

“But he—”

“For God’s sake, listen, man! And learn. Be the first Pole in Christendom to listen before he leaps to conclusions.” Churchill’s voice had found a new edge; perhaps it was the heat, and the drink. “He was an American, and I was not. He was a sick man in a hurry, and I was not—not then, at least. He was a heady idealist, while I have always preferred my arse to sit on solid ground.” Churchill wasn’t any longer used to such outbursts, and he panted with the effort, but was determined to continue. “Yes, he was a friend, as much of a friend as any foreign politician can be, but he was also in a fearsome hurry and sped off in directions where I had no desire to follow. Why, he was so keen to get the Russians into the war against the Japanese that he gave them everything they asked for. Yet in the end it was utterly pointless. After all that groveling, America dropped their bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and brought the war to an end before the Russians even got round to loading their rifles.”