While Still We Live (13 page)

“What’s wrong, Michal?” It was not for nothing that Madame Aleksander had known Olszak for twenty-five years.

“I am sending Sheila to another address. She is in danger here.”

“But this house isn’t any more dangerous than other buildings. Really, Michal, bombs don’t respect place or person. We’ve all the same chance.”

“It isn’t the bombing that worries me. Let me finish, Teresa, Sheila was instrumental in uncovering certain German agents. They know she is here. She must leave and hide.”

“Well, tell the police at once, Michal. Surely you’ve done that?”

“Teresa, things don’t work so simply. The police are very busy right now doing a hundred jobs outside of their own duty. Besides, we have little time. We shall have to help Sheila. We can
protect her. When the next raid warning comes through, get her dressed. When the concierge or his wife come upstairs, let her go with him or her. But you must stay behind. Say you want to wait for your brother; give any excuse that seems natural. But don’t say one thing more than that to the person who comes for Sheila. If you do, you will kill Sheila.”

Madame Aleksander looked at him unbelievingly. “Michal!” she said. Yet he was serious: he really meant what he said.

“You will hear the full story later,” he was saying. “I will see that Sheila is safe. And Barbara. In two or three days, you will see both of them again. Please trust me in this.”

“But of course,” she said slowly. “Of course I trust your judgment.” She followed him into the hall. He opened the bedroom door and they stood looking at the sleeping girl. Madame Aleksander crossed quickly over to the bed. “Her brow is damp. She’s flushed. Her breathing is heavy. Michal, I don’t think she should leave this bed. Really, I don’t.” Olszak said firmly, almost coldly, “She must go. Now do you see how desperate the situation is if I insist she must get up and go in her present condition?”

Madam Aleksander nodded. “She looks so young at the moment. There is always something so pathetic about the young when they are asleep: all their grown-up ways quite gone.”

“She’s twenty-three. What were you doing when you were twenty-three?”

Madam Aleksander smiled gently. “In Siberia, with my husband. Andrew was only a year old. Stanislaw had such dreadful bronchitis I never thought he would live.”

“But he did. You all did. Hardship and danger destroys fewer people than indulgence.”

“Sometimes I used to think that if we suffered, then we would save our children from suffering,” she said sadly. “Now it seems as if no generation escapes suffering.”

“Each generation suffers so that its children will be strong, for children whose fathers have escaped hardship come to think that life is easy. Soon they believe that easiness is life. There is no greater danger to a country than when its citizens assume that danger no longer exists.”

“I wish I didn’t believe you,” Madame Aleksander said. “I wish I didn’t.” At the door, she gave him her hand to kiss.

In the kitchen cupboard she found a dustpan and broom. She turned the radio on, so that she might hear the next air raid warning. She took off her costume jacket and rolled up the sleeves of her white silk blouse. How do you begin to clean up so much broken glass? she wondered.

She had almost finished the seemingly impossible task, when the radio suddenly interrupted its concert, and in place of violins came the impersonal voice of the announcer. “Look out! Look out!” So many enemy planes passing this zone, and then this zone, and then this zone. They were heading for the centre of the city. She hurried into the bedroom. “Wake up, Sheila, wake up,” she was saying frantically as the radio voice warned the last zone of all: “Warsaw! Warsaw!”

“Quick, Sheila, quick.” Madame Aleksander was already drawing a thin stocking over Sheila’s damp instep. “Wake up, Sheila. Air raid warning. Wake up.” Madame Aleksander was in tears, tears shed in anger at her own weakness at ever having promised to get Sheila out of this flat. “Sheila, my dear Sheila,” she was saying. “I’ll never forgive myself.” She hugged the girl tightly.

Sheila forgot to be surprised. The quinine was playing havoc with her head. She had begun to shiver again once she had left the warm bed. Only when Madame Aleksander had managed to close the zipper on her girdle, and had slipped her skirt over her head, did she say, “Madame Aleksander! I thought you’d never come.” Madame Aleksander blinked back the tears, and gave Sheila a second hug, and then pushed her arms into the sleeves of her linen jacket.

“Where’s your coat?”

Sheila nodded towards the curtain which disguised the pegs on the wall. But even with the coat’s warmth belted tightly round her, its collar turned up round her ears and across her throat, she was trembling with cold.

The anti-aircraft guns were going into action. As Sheila fumbled weakly after a shoe which her foot had kicked by accident under the bed, the door opened and Elzbieta entered. She had pretended to retire for the night. She had pinned a shawl round her head to hide the thin plaits of hair. A coat hung over a tent-like nightdress. Her bare feet had been thrust into an old pair of sand-shoes.

“Everyone downstairs,” she said in Polish. “It’s a big raid. Orders.”

Madame Aleksander, kneeling beside the bed with one arm stretched under it, produced the missing shoe. It was probably her exertions which made her face so red and unnatural.

“Miss Matthews is ready,” Madame Aleksander said. “I don’t think she is well enough, but she insists a shelter would safer.”

“It certainly would. Hear that? Come on, I’ll help her,” Elzbieta said.

“I’ll follow. I must get my own coat, and my bag, and my brother’s manuscript. He would want me to take it with me.”

Elzbieta nodded agreeably. She was pleased at this turn of events. Madame Aleksander saw a last, almost despairing, look from Sheila, as Elzbieta urged her out of the door. The woman was holding the girl very firmly around the waist. A sudden chill struck Madame Aleksander’s heart. She was afraid, not of the bombs beginning to fall so methodically, so callously. She was afraid for Sheila, for Barbara, for little Teresa and Stefan and Marta. She was afraid for Andrew on a crowded road leading to the front for Stanislaw who was still in Warsaw. Even for Eugenia, his wife, much as it was hard to like her. For if anything happened to Eugenia, it would hurt Stanislaw; and anything that hurt one of her children hurt her. She had become part of them, just as they had once been part of her.

This war has scattered us, she thought sadly. Now none of us even knows what the other is doing, where he is, whether be needs us. We are all shut off from each other as if we were strangers. Each time a bomb falls, I shall wonder if it is worse for them wherever they are...

The planes were almost overhead now.

Madame Aleksander switched off the meagre light. She clasped her slender fingers and knelt beside the bed in the deafening darkness.

THE ARREST

“Hurry up. No time to lose.” The door had closed on Madame Aleksander’s anxious face. Outside, the babel of sounds had increased. The woman’s arm tightened around Sheila’s waist, urging her through the dark courtyard, past the shouting men, round a pointing gun, into the entrance gate. Tonight no blue-painted bulb was needed to light the vault. A dim glow was reflected from red patches in the sky.

“In here, quick.” The woman pulled her into the doorway of the porter’s lodging.

“Here,” a man’s voice echoed sharply, and firm hands guided her through the dark narrow hall into a poorly lit room. The smell of stewed sausage and sour cabbage was everywhere. The hands freed her, and Sheila caught the edge of a table for support its dishes rattling nervously as her weight shifted them. She wished she liked the smell of stewed sausage and sour cabbage. The nearest chair seemed so far away, and her legs
had suddenly lost the power to move. Olszak was right: this was worse than bombs.

“As soon as the raid is over,” Henryk was bellowing, “Martin will have the car here. And as soon as the car’s here, we can all stop worrying.” The outside noises slackened, and he could drop his voice to a shout. “So you’re Anna Braun, Hofmeyer’s little surprise packet ‘You’re a fool,’ I told him this morning, ‘to think that you’re important enough, to pick and choose your own private agents. What do you think you are? A head of a department?’”

“You were the fool,” Elzbieta said. She paused for a sudden burst of gunfire to finish before she went on. “Hofmeyer’s got influence. He soon will be the head of a department.”

“I’m superior to any Hofmeyer. Just remember that, my girl.”

The background of noise lessened again. But the last crashes and slams and smashes had seemed to make Elzbieta angrier.

“Yes. You were. But his time is coming. He’s chosen the right friends. He will probably be made the head of a district. It’s a pity you didn’t use a little more tact my man. I’m tired of playing a porter’s wife. It’s time you got something better for us than this. Before I tied up with you, I lived in the Athene Palast, and the Dorchester, and the Waldorf-Astoria.
This
is what I get
now
.” She flung her arms tensely apart.

Sheila was praying, let them go on using their bad temper on each other; let them bicker, and perhaps they’ll forget to question me. But her legs were treacherous. She sank to the ground, kneeling beside the table, shifting it with her weight. Henryk took a step forward, peered down at the flushed face leaning against the table leg. Sheila’s eyes were closed. Her breath came in short stabs.

“She’s ill,” he said, and felt her brow. “She’s damned ill.”

“Doped,” the woman said. “Why all the sympathy? Last week I had a worse cold than that. I had a pain which bent my back double. But I kept on my feet and did my work. Much credit I got for it, too.”

“Shut up. She’s ill. She’ll never stand the journey out of Warsaw. Martin will have a dead woman on his hands. What will Hofmeyer say then?”

“None of us is irreplaceable.”

“Tell that to Hofmeyer.”

“So you think he’s important now, do you?” Elzbieta sneered.

“Shut up,” Henryk said savagely. “Help me get her onto this chair.”

The noises offstage had burst out again with uncontrolled fury.

“It won’t matter whether she’s ill or not if a bomb hits this dump,” Elzbieta shouted. “Did you hear that one? It was the closest yet.”

“Why didn’t you tell me she was ill? We could have made other plans. Too late now.”

“I still say she isn’t ill. Just—”

“Oh, shut up!” The planes and guns obeyed him incongruously, leaving the angry voice to shake the room.

Footsteps hurried on the flagstones outside. Someone thumped a fist on the porter’s door.

“Too early for Martin,” Henryk said. “See who it is.”

Elzbieta was gone for only a few moments. “The air warden,” she said quickly. “He’s all bandaged up. Thinks he’s a hero. He wants the hosepipe.”

The footsteps had entered the hall.

“Damnation,” Henryk said quietly, and pushed his way past Elzbieta. “Keep them outside, you fool.” He was speaking in his usual tone of voice when he reached the hall. “Here’s the hosepipe, gentlemen. Right here.”

“Good,” a strange voice replied. “Any extra spades? There’s digging to be done on the next street. We’ll need you. Did your wife get everyone out of this building?”

“Everyone except the old cripple on the third floor. She wouldn’t leave her dog.”

“Better get her down to the first floor, anyway. Bring the dog too.”

Sheila could almost hear Elzbieta’s unspoken protest as she obeyed the warden. The men’s footsteps died away too. She opened her eyes. She was feeling better now, except for this trembling: she was shuddering with cold. For a moment, she thought of going put into the street, to wait for Olszak there. He had indeed been right. She would rather face an air raid than this little room, smelling of sausage and sour cabbage. Henryk and Elzbieta, she named them, and giggled weakly. Sour cabbage fitted Elzbieta so exactly, and sausage wasn’t too bad, either, for Henryk.

* * *

When Elzbieta returned, the raid was almost over. The larger explosions were less regular and more distant, almost far enough away to sound like grumbling thunder. The anti-aircraft guns had reached a last frenzy of protest and were silent again. There was only a strange patter of heavy hail, now. And after two or three minutes, that ceased too.

Elzbieta had been running. Apart from a slight breathlessness, she was as calm and hard as ever. She sat down on the chair
opposite Sheila, and wrinkled the small square of tablecloth with her elbows as she cupped her chin in her hands. A sharp chin, a sharp nose, pale eyes, pale hair. That was Elzbieta. The two women sat staring at each other. She doesn’t trust me, Sheila realised. Elzbieta was probably sensing that danger she had talked about today.
Smell danger,
she had said. All Sheila could smell was sour cabbage.

“Wipe that grin off your face,” Elzbieta said. “You don’t need to try to fool me. You didn’t like the big bad bombs, did you? I never saw such a coward. You’re trembling all over.”

In the street, a car’s brakes grated.

“There’s Martin. Too bad Henryk wasn’t back in time so that you could extract a little more sympathy. Come on, get on your legs. They’ve got to do more than look pretty. No time to lose.”

But the man who came into the room was obviously not Martin, to judge from the woman’s face. Two other men followed him.

“Martin stopped a piece of shrapnel,” the first man said. And then to Sheila he added, “Come on!”

Elzbieta looked at him strangely. Her eyes narrowed, her thin nostrils were dilated and rimmed with white. She
could
sense danger, Sheila admitted in amazement.

“What are you talking about? Who are you?” Elzbieta flashed at the men. “This is a young lady from upstairs, too ill to go to the shelter. I’m the caretaker’s wife. She is certainly not going out of this house with strange men.” She had all the shocked dignity of an honest working woman.

“Come off it,” the man said. Once more he turned to Sheila. “Hurry up. The car can’t wait forever.”