The Polish Officer (12 page)

She didn’t react. She wasn’t going to help a thief—her expression was suspicious and hostile. But then, a moment later, she changed her mind. She held out a hand, fingers stiff:
stop.
De Milja put his hand back on the surface of the roof, three, four, five. Pause. The woman held her signal. Then, just as a new sequence of footsteps began, she beckoned abruptly, excitedly:
yes, it’s all right now, he can’t see you.
Three, four, five. Pause.
No, stop, he’s facing your way.
Three, four, five. Pause.
Yes, it’s . . .

De Milja leaped up and ran for his life.

He almost got away with it.

But if he could feel the policeman pacing on the roof, the man could feel it when he ran. “Halt!”

As de Milja reached the parapet he could see the woman’s face with perfect clarity: her mouth rounded into an
O,
her hand came up and pressed the side of her face. She was horrified at what was about to happen. The first shot snapped the air next to his ear just as his foot hit the parapet. It was a long way across. Seven floors down, broken glass in the alley glittered up at him. And the parapet was capped with curved, slippery, ceramic tile. It was a bad jump, one foot slipped as he took off. He flailed at the empty air, and he almost cleared the railing, but then his left heel caught and that spilled him forward, his head hitting the iron floor of the fire escape as something pinged in the stairway above him and somebody shouted.

He had not felt the bullet, but he was on his knees, vision swimming, a rock in his chest that blocked his air. He went away. Came back. Looked down at a windowsill, worn and weathered gray. A big drop of blood fell on it, then another. His heart raced, he clawed at the iron fretwork, somehow stood up. The world spun around him; whistles, shouts—a brick exploded and he turned away from it. Saw the ladder to the floor below, made himself half slide, half tumble to the iron platform.

His escape—from everything, forever—was six stories down into the alley and he knew it, he just had to get one leg over the railing and then the other and then the terrors of Szucha Avenue no longer existed. Hide under the ground, they will never touch you. He was going to do it—then he didn’t. Instead, the window on the fire escape exploded into somebody’s kitchen—glass, blood, and de Milja all showing up for breakfast.

A family around a table; a still life, a spoon frozen in air between bowl and mouth, a woman at a stove, a man in suspenders. Then he was in a parlor; a canary tweeted, in a mirror above a buffet a man with bright blood spattered on his face. He fumbled at the family’s locks, somehow worked the right bolt the right way, the door opened, then closed behind him.

He froze. Then the door on the other side of the landing flew open and a man beckoned fiercely from the darkness of his hall. “This way,” he said, voice thick with excitement. De Milja couldn’t see—objects doubled, then faded into ghosts of themselves—then a bald man with a heavy face and small, restless eyes emerged from the fog. He wore an undershirt, and held his pants up with his hand.

When de Milja didn’t move, the man grabbed him—he had the strength of the mad, he may have been mad for all de Milja knew—and shoved him down a long, dark hallway. Once again de Milja started to fade out, he felt the wall sliding past on his right shoulder as the man half-carried him along. There was a sense of still air, the odor of closed rooms. A hallway made unlikely angles, sharp turns into blank walls, a wood panel swung wide, and he found himself in a box that smelled of freshly sawn planks. Then it was dark, with a heavy silence, and as he blacked out he realized that he had been entombed.

There was more. It went on from there, but he was less and less a part of it. Merely something of value. It was not so bad to be something of value, he discovered. He was fed into a Saving Machine—a mechanism that knew better than to expect anything of fugitives, the damaged and the hunted. It simply saved them. So all de Milja ever retained of the next few days were images, remnants, as he was moved here and there, an object in someone else’s operation, hidden and rehidden, the treasure of an anxious miser.

He came to rest on a couch in a farmhouse, a place of palpable safety. It was drizzling, and he could smell wet earth and spring. It took him back to Tarnopol, to the Volhynia. There too they burned oak logs, wet dogs dried by the fire, somebody wore oilskins, and the smell of a stone house in the rain was cut by bay rum, which the Ostrow uncles always used after shaving.

His head ached, his mouth was dry as chalk. A young woman doctor sat on the edge of the couch, looked in his eyes with a penlight, then put a delicate finger on a place above his forehead. “Hurt?” she asked.

“Not much.”

“I’m the one who sewed you up,” she said. “In a few days we’ll take them out.”

He had six stitches in his hairline. He had not been hit by a bullet, but the fall on the fire escape had given him a concussion.

An hour later an adjutant took him upstairs, to an office in an old farm bedroom with a little fireplace. The man behind a long worktable had tousled gray hair and mustache and the pitted complexion of childhood smallpox. He wore a country jacket with narrow shoulders and a thick wool tie. When he stood to shake hands, de Milja saw that he was tall and thin. “Captain,” he said quietly, indicating a chair.

He was called Major Olenik, and he was de Milja’s new superior officer. “You might as well hear all the bad news at once,” he said. “The basement of Saint Stanislaus Hospital was raided by an SS unit, what files were there were taken. Colonel Broza was wounded, and captured. The woman you knew as Agata swallowed a cyanide capsule. You and Captain Grodewicz survived.”

For a moment, de Milja didn’t say anything. Then, “How did that happen?”

Olenik’s shrug was eloquent: let’s not waste our time with theories, we don’t know and it’s likely we won’t ever know. “Of course we are working on that,” Olenik said. “Did you know who Agata was?” he asked.

“I didn’t, no.”

“Biochemist. One of the best in Europe.”

Olenik cleared his throat. “The Sixth Bureau in Paris informed us, a few days ago, that our senior intelligence officer in France has been relieved of duty. We are going to send you as his replacement, Captain. You studied at Saint-Cyr for three years, is that correct?”

“Yes. 1923 to 1926.”

“And your French is fluent?”

“It’s acceptable. Good workable French spoken by a Pole. I’ve read in it, in order not to lose it, but conversation will take a few weeks.”

“We’re sending you out, with couriers. Up to Gdynia, then by freighter across the Baltic to Sweden. We’ve created an identity and a legend for you. Once in France, you’ll report to the Sixth Bureau Director of Intelligence in Paris. It’s your decision, of course, but I want to add, parenthetically, that you are known to the German security services in Poland.” He paused, waiting for de Milja to respond.

“The answer is yes,” de Milja said.

The major acknowledged his response with a polite nod.

Later they discussed de Milja’s escape from the Germans. He learned that the customs official, his family and Madame Kuester, had gotten away successfully and been taken to safety in the countryside.

As for the man who had hidden him in his apartment. He was not in the underground, according to Olenik. “But he did have an acquaintance who he believed to be in the ZWZ, he confided in her, and she knew who to talk to. Word was passed to us, and the escape-and-evasion people picked you up, moved you around for a time, eventually brought you down here.”

“I owe that man my life,” de Milja said. “But he was—perhaps he was not entirely sane.”

“A strange man,” Olenik said. “Perhaps a casualty of war. But his hiding place, well, it’s common now. People turning their homes into magicians’ boxes, some of it is art, really. Double walls, false ceilings, secret stairways, sections of floorboard on hinges, drawer pulls that unlock hidden passageways to other buildings.”

Olenik paused and thought about it. “Yes, I suppose he was a little crazy. What he built was bizarre, I went to see it, and it was,
byzantine.
Still, you were lucky—your mad carpenter was a good carpenter. Because the Gestapo did search that apartment, every apartment in that building, in fact. But to find you they would have had to rip out the walls, and that day they didn’t bother. That’s not always the case—they’ve turned Jewish apartments into sawdust—but all they did was break up some furniture, and so here you are.”

Olenik smiled suddenly. “We must look at the bright side. At least the
Kulturtrager
”—it meant culture-bringer, a cherished German notion about themselves—“brought us ‘subhumans’ some new and adventurous ideas in architecture.”

3 April 1940. The “subhumans” turned out to be adept pupils, gathered attentively at the feet of the
Kulturtrager.
The Germans had, for example, a great passion for important paper. It was, all prettily stamped and signed and franked and checked, order and discipline made manifest. Such impressive German habits, the Poles thought, were worthy of imitation.

So they imitated them, scrupulously and to the letter. As de Milja was moved north through occupied Poland, he was provided with a splendid collection of official paper.
Passierscheine, Durchlasscheine, Urlaubsscheine,
and
Dienstausweise—
general passes, transit permits, furlough passes, and work permits. The Poles had them all—stolen, imitated, doubled-up (if you had one legitimate citizen, why not two?—it’s not unsanitary to share an identity), forged, secretly printed, altered, reused, and, every now and then, properly obtained. To the Germans, documentation was a fence; to the Poles, it was a ladder.

And they discovered a curious fact about the German security police: they had a slight aversion to combat soldiers. It wasn’t serious, or even particularly conscious, it was just that they felt powerful when elbowing Polish civilians out of their way in a passenger train. Among German soldiers, however, whose enemies tended to be armed, they experienced some contraction of self-esteem, so avoided, in a general way, those situations.

The lowly
untermenschen
caught on to that little quirk in their masters right away: the new ZWZ intelligence officer for France reached the port of Gdynia by using
Sonderzuge—
special night trains taking Wehrmacht soldiers home to leave in Germany. These “specials” were also used by railway workers, who rode them to and from trains making up in stations and railyards all over Poland. De Milja was one of them—according to his papers and permits a brakeman—headed to an assignment in Gdansk. Taken under the care of escape-route operators, he moved slowly north over a period of three nights.

Three April nights. Suddenly warm, then showery, crickets loud in the fields, apple trees in clouds of white blossom. It meant to de Milja that he would not see this country again—it was that strange habit of a thing to show you its loveliest face just before you lost it.

The trains clanked along slowly under the stars in the countryside. Across the river on the rebuilt bridge at Novy Dvor, back to the other side at Wyszogrod, then tracking the curves and bends of the Vistula as it headed for the sea. The railwaymen gathered in a few seats in the rear of the last car on the
Sonderzuge
trains, and the tired Wehrmacht soldiers left them alone. They were just working people, doing their jobs, not interested in politics. A heel of bread or a boiled potato wrapped in a piece of newspaper, a cigarette, a little quiet conversation with fellow workers—that was the disguise of the Polish train crews.

Captain de Milja rarely spoke, simply faded into the background. The escape-route operators were young—the boy who brought him to the town of Torun was sixteen. But the Germans had helped him to grow up quickly, and had sharpened his conspirative instincts to a fine edge. He’d never been an angel, but he should have been lying to some schoolteacher about homework, or bullshitting his girlfriend’s father about going to a dance. Instead, he was saying “Nice evening, Sergeant,” to the
shkopy
police Kontroll at the Wloclawek railroad station.

“New man?” the sergeant said.

“Unh-huh,” said the teenager.

Polite, but pointless to seek anything further. The sergeant had had a teaspoon of human warmth in this godforsaken country, he’d have to make do with that. Stamped de Milja’s papers, met his eyes for an instant, end of discussion.

In the daytime, he was hidden in apartments, and he’d grab a few hours sleep on a couch while young people talked quietly around him. The escape-route safe house in Torun was run by a girl no more than seventeen, snub-nosed, with cornsilk hair. De Milja felt tenderness and desire all mixed up together. Tough as a stick, this one. Made sure he had a place to sleep, a threadbare blanket, and a glass of beer. Christ, his heart ached for her, for them all because they wouldn’t live the year.

Germans too thought in numbers, and their counterespionage array was massive: Abwehr, KRIPO—criminal police, SIPO—security police, including the Gestapo—the SD intelligence units, Ukrainian gestapo, railway police, special detachments for roads, bridges, forests, river traffic, and factories. In Poland, it
rained
crossed leather belts and side arms. People got caught.

“There is soup for you,” Snub-nose said when he woke up.

“Thank you,” de Milja said.

“Are those glasses false?”

“Yes.” Because they had his photograph, he had grown a little mustache and wore clear glasses.

“You must not wear them in Torun. The Germans here know the trick—they stop people on the street and if their lenses are clear they arrest them.”

People came in and out all day; whispered, argued, left messages, envelopes, intelligence collection. Young as she was, Snub-nose had the local authority and nobody challenged her. That night, another railwayman arrived, this one eighteen, and de Milja’s journey continued.

Late in the evening, they left the train at Grudziaz. De Milja, wearing a railroadman’s blue shirt and trousers, metal lunchbox in hand, walked through the rain down a street in front of the station. A whore in a doorway blew him a kiss, a half-peeled German poster on a wall showed a Polish soldier in tattered uniform, Warsaw in flames in the background. The soldier shook his fist in anger at a picture of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister. “England, this is your work!” said the caption. Along with their propaganda, the Germans had put up endless proclamations, “strictly forbidden” and “pain of death” in every sentence.