Spring Will Be Ours (29 page)

‘First floor!' Wroński shouted over his shoulder, and broke into a run himself, as the sound of shelling burst into the air. They began to run after him, stumbling on the uneven paving, into the open doorway to the stairs, not pausing for breath until they had reached the first floor, and found one room of the apartment already occupied by another unit, sandbags at the broken windows. Jan pushed his way through, moved the rifle off his shoulder, and managed to find a space at the window in the corridor; he stood peering between the shoulders of the two men in front.

‘What's happening?'

‘It's starting,' said one of the men. ‘I don't know if we're going to get out of here.' He looked at the rifle. ‘You're lucky.'

Jan nodded. Then Wroński was yelling for him, and he moved quickly back into the main room. ‘To the centre window,' Wroński snapped. ‘Cover the street as far as you can.'

Jan crossed quickly to the window, and hoisted the gun to his shoulder. From the far end of the street, quite empty of running figures now, came the rumble of a tank, like the one he'd heard the day the airdrop came, and then the sound of shelling, much closer than before. Paweł was suddenly beside him, peering over the heap of sandbags.

‘Wroński says we can share this shift. You all right?'

‘So far,' said Jan.

By the evening his head throbbed and hammered with the roar of the shelling. Between the bursts of anti-aircraft fire came the sickening tearing rumble of buildings falling apart, thundering to the ground. And everywhere, fires raged.

As dusk fell, Wroński returned from a meeting on the ground floor and announced: ‘At first light, we advance: couriers say they need every man.' He nodded to Jan, to Paweł and Piotr and the two others who had each done a shift at the window. ‘There's a field kitchen two houses along, access through the cellar. Go and have a break, then get some sleep.'

They put down their arms and went down the stairs, across the hall and down into the sprawling cellar. Lit by candle stubs, every corner, every small storage room or passage was crowded with people huddled on blankets, next to cardboard boxes spilling with clothes, saucepans, tin plates. Children wailed; an old woman was coughing and coughing, bent double. As the boys with their armbands went through, a path was cleared between the families, and one or two people called out: ‘God bless you,' but Jan also heard grumbling, and someone mutter: ‘You got us into this.'

They bent down to crawl through the hole in the wall leading to the next cellar, also packed full, and lit by a few candles. From the top of the stairs on the far side they could hear loud voices, and plates and saucepans clattering; they could smell soup. They made their way through and climbed the flight in single file. Across the narrow hall a door opened into a noisy, crowded room, a long trestle table under the windows, with a wood-burning stove in the corner. Women in overalls were behind the trestle, ladling hot soup into bowls; a queue of people, AK and civilian, waited. The air was thick with cigarette smoke.

‘God, I'm hungry,' said Paweł. They stood in the queue, and Jan saw that the opposite wall was plastered with notes and messages, some scrawled directly on to the plaster, some little scraps of paper tacked up.

‘Keep my place a minute,' he said to Paweł, and went over. Was it possible that Mama could have got a message sent here? He searched the wall, his head still throbbing.
Marek: we are in Dobra Street now, number 8. Maria. Tomasz was here, 14.8.44: Krystyna, I love you. Will anyone who knows of my daughter, Hania Kowacz, please try to inform Rybacka Street, number 7. Krysztof: Wojtek was killed 12.8. Please contact. Mama.
There were at least five notes addressed to different Jans but none of them was for him. Where was his mother now? There was no chance of getting back to her; in any case, she would not, could not be at home – he could not even begin to know where to look for her. Despite all this, he fumbled in his pocket, and found a stub of pencil. What could he write on? He went back to Paweł. ‘Have you got any paper?'

‘No,' said Paweł. ‘Of course not.'

A girl in the queue behind said: ‘I've got a notebook.'

‘Thanks.' He tore off a sheet and smiled at her, then went back to the wall, and pressed on it.
Mama: I was here, 19.8. Thinking of you. We are moving tomorrow. See you when it's all over. Jan.
He folded it and wrote his mother's name, Pani Zofia Prawicka, then took a tack from someone else's note and pinned them up together.

Paweł and the others were almost at the table. He hurried back and stood with them again, winking at the girl behind, who had long brown hair piled up under a cap. She was very pretty.

All night the sound of shelling shook the house, and the sky was filled with the scream of Stuka jets, and the violent light of flares and fires.

‘Fire to put out! Fire to put out!'

The shout came every hour; they ran out to stand in a line, passing buckets of precious water from hand to hand. They'd been given a ground-floor room to rest in, but no one rested until just before dawn, when a brief, sudden lull made their ears ring, and they slumped into sleep for perhaps half an hour. Then Wroński was shaking them awake, his own eyes puffy and his face unshaven, and they stumbled after him down into the cellars again.

Early morning light slipped through the cracks and slits of windows, touching the grimy blankets and the grey faces of the sleeping families. Moving between snoring grandmothers, stepping carefully over restless children, all Jan could think of was sleep, of lying down here, beside any one of them, and not having to get up. He fixed his eyes on Wroński's head, and went on, ducking through the holes in the walls of perhaps eight houses, the names of the streets overhead, and arrows to others, scrawled on the walls in chalk, or white paint.

A courier girl, sixteen or so, her face, shirt and trousers covered in dust and dirt, came out of the far tunnel.

‘Lieutenant? You are in command of which unit?'

‘Of Boar.'

‘I have a message for the first officers coming through this morning.' She opened her canvas bag, took out a small sheaf of paper, and passed him a note, roughly duplicated. Wroński took it and read it, expressionless.

‘Thank you, my dear.' He turned to the boys, pressed up behind him. ‘We are to move as close as possible to the cathedral.' He paused. ‘The fighting is very heavy – there have already been a great number of casualties.'

‘Sir.' They said it automatically, following him as he bent down and ducked through the hole into the tunnel, where another girl was waiting.

‘Maria,' she said, and led them through, and up the steps from the next cellar.

When they came out, they found themselves at a doorway on to an alley littered with rubble: almost opposite stood a small house with shattered windows, the front door riddled with bullet holes.

‘There was a skirmish here yesterday,' said Maria rapidly. ‘A great many people were taken to the nearest field hospital, and I'm afraid there are bodies in that house we haven't had time to bury yet, it's very distressing. But the house itself – the damage to it is superficial. You are to be stationed here – I think you have already been given written orders.'

‘Yes,' said Wroński. ‘I have them here … We are to defend this house, until ordered otherwise, as a possible place of retreat from the cathedral.'

Maria nodded. ‘I'll bring you new bulletins whenever I can.' She looked as if she hadn't slept for days. We all look like that, thought Jan, watching her shake Wroński's hand, and hurry back to the cellar.

They picked their way across the alley, avoiding precariously shifting piles of bricks. Inside the house, in a little room off the hallway, they found the bodies of four boys, laid neatly side by side. They were still covered in plaster dust, but you could see the pools of caked blood beneath. The room stank.

‘Check them for arms,' Wroński said flatly, and Jan and Paweł bent down, and fumbled at the leather belts. The boys'eyes had been closed, the dust brushed quickly away from waxy faces; one of the faces had been half shot away, and that side was turned down towards the floor.

Jan felt himself heave. ‘One pistol, sir,' he said, getting to his feet, and somehow did not throw up.

Wroński took it and gave it to Piotr, who stood staring.

‘Thank you, sir.' His voice was a whisper.

Then they all crossed themselves, quickly, and went out of the room.

They spent the next few minutes making a reconnaissance of the house. There was a tiny kitchen at the back, where a blackened stove stood next to a cracked sink and wooden draining board. On the table was a small cast-iron saucepan, half-filled with water: dust floated on the surface. Who had been going to cook what, before they were ordered out of here, or fled?

A flight of wooden stairs led up from the hall, with a door beneath to a small cellar. Wroński flicked at the switch on the wall, but no light came on.

Jan fumbled for his lighter, and passed it. By its tiny flame, they went cautiously down the stairs, and made out packing cases, firewood, a tin trunk. Though there had been no rain for a least three weeks, it was very damp; somewhere in the walls they could hear a faint trickle of water.

Upstairs there were two small bedrooms. In the one at the front an old iron bedstead had been pushed back against the wall, the mattress lumpy and thick with plaster dust. On it, a book lay open, face down: Jan picked it up, and blew off the dust.
Błysk Gordon
– Flash Gordon: one of the boys downstairs must have been reading that, having a laugh during a lull in the fighting. Was it the one whose face had been shot away? He put it down again, and followed the others on tiptoe and craned his neck – a view of the whole alley from here.

Wroński's boots sounded loud on the bare boards as he moved off the balcony and crossed the room to the one at the back.

The back bedroom had a casement window: they could lean out and crick their necks to see over the red-tiled rooftops to the ruins of the palace, the pink-washed walls blackened, full of ugly holes. Incredibly, the clock tower was still standing, the hands still stuck at half-past twelve, but the flag was filthy, in shreds. The Germans had the outbuildings and perimeter, but the interior, they knew from the bulletins, was still in Polish hands, and battles were raging in there – in the elegant audience chambers, in the ballroom and throne room, places some of them had visited as schoolchildren, before the war. Even from here they could make out the sound of grenades exploding inside, and imagine the black marble pillars crashing down. From the gaping holes in the roof, thick smoke was drifting into a hazy morning sky.

From one of the palace walls, a covered bridge some eight yards long crossed a little street and led directly into the cathedral – a long time ago, kings used to go through there, to mass. The cathedral's steeply pitched roof and massive walls blocked out much of the light and view on the east side of their house: they couldn't see the bridge from here. Jan looked down on to the tiny back yard. Dusty weeds sprouted between the cracks in the flagstones; the wooden door of a privy hung open. From the open windows of other houses in the alley he could make out quiet voices: other units, waiting like them for the action.

‘You understand,' Wroński was saying, ‘that it may be only the bridge which divides the Polish and German lines?' He looked down on to the yard. ‘And now – we bury those poor boys.'

‘Yes, sir. Where, sir?'

‘Down there. Those flagstones won't take much pulling up.'

They followed him out of the room and down the creaking stairs.

By half-past ten, four rough wooden crosses marked the places in the yard where the unknown boys lay buried. Inside, down in the cellar, Marek and Feliks were hacking at the wall to see if they could break through to the next. Upstairs in the front bedroom, Jan and Paweł stood at the window, sweating behind the sandbags they'd hauled up, listening to the scream of the Stukas diving towards the palace, the cathedral, the whole of Stare Miasto. They had begun just after eight; in the past two hours, four different formations had flown over.

The screams died away; their ears rang.

‘We're going to die in this house,' said Paweł.

‘Crap. Shut up.' Jan lit a cigarette stub – he was making each one last half a day, three puffs each time. ‘Want one?'

‘No. I wish to Christ something would happen. I mean here – get it over with.'

‘It will.'

Paweł breathed deeply. ‘Go on, then, give me a drag.'

Jan had a long drag himself, then passed it over. His hand was shaking with tension and hunger.

‘D'you think Wroński's going to let us eat?'

‘Piotr says the girls are coming with food later.'

‘How does he know?'

‘He doesn't. Here.' Paweł passed back the butt, and Jan dropped it, carefully trod on it, just on the edge, then picked it up between wet finger and thumb.

‘Mean bastard.'

He grinned, and straightened up; they leaned against the wall. Paweł, with a pistol, was covering the lower half of the alley; Jan, with the rifle, had the cathedral end. His head was swimming with nicotine, hunger, sleeplessness, nerves. The air was full of dust from the shelling – outside, floating and sunlit; and drifting over the balcony, in here, settling lightly on their hair, their hands, their clothes.

Right at the end of the alley, something moved.

‘What's that?'

‘What?'

‘Something moved – come over here.'

Paweł ducked down and crawled along the sandbags. He stood up beside Jan and squinted. ‘Can't see a thing.'

‘Something
moved!
'

‘All right, all right, we'd better report it.'

‘You go.'

‘You come too, come away from there.'