While Still We Live (51 page)

“Oh yes,” Sheila said quickly, “I’m all right. I wasn’t ill. Only exhausted. And now I’ve exhausted my exhaustion. All I want to do is to move about, and see, and do.” She smiled and
said once more, “Everything is so strange.” It was a new world, she thought.

“When I first came here, I missed everything I had been accustomed to think was a necessity. You will be surprised how very little is necessary in life, and how simply one can improvise. It becomes a kind of game—like keeping house or playing shops when we were children. Then you find yourself beginning to despise your old way of living, you begin to like this way. If I live to see the day when we return to our towns, I expect I shall miss this forest. Funny, isn’t it?”

“A thousand years ago, most people lived in forests,” Sheila said, “for the forests were deep and thick all over Central Europe, then. Forests like this one.”

“The Dark Ages,” Franziska said slowly. “I used to think that name meant people couldn’t read or write. But if they lived in forests, then there was darkness all around them.”

“When I saw the churches of the Middle Ages, I used to think the people who had built them were still remembering the forests of the Dark Ages. The tall windows are like the winter trees, and the light strikes through them as if it were piercing a forest. Even the way the stone pillars branch into the curve of roof...”

The two girls smiled together at their fancies. Then Franziska suddenly came over to her, saying eagerly, “Can you nurse?”

Sheila stared at the anxious, affectionate face. “No,” she said in mild surprise. “But I can learn. It’s really a matter of
not
being lazy, isn’t it? Like being a good cook—just taking every trouble you can and not finding easy ways for anything?”

“I’ll teach you. I’ll help you. Say you can nurse when they ask you. I’ll show you.”

Sheila’s surprise deepened. Now that the sadness had gone from this girl’s face, Sheila thought of Barbara. Here was Barbara, a little older, a little less pretty, a little less decided. But here was Barbara.

“Why?” Sheila asked gently.

“Because I want you to stay here. I don’t want you to be sent to live in one of the villages. I want you to live here. You see—” Franziska’s quiet eyes were half-smiling now—“you see, it isn’t a husband I need. Antoni is wrong. In fact all the men would be insulted if they knew how little I wanted them—as men. Men wouldn’t understand that. But you do, don’t you? I just want someone who will talk with me, will laugh with me. Marian has her Antoni. I’ve felt so alone. But now we can work and talk together. Isn’t it strange how two women can spend an hour together talking about nothing really very important, and yet there is such a nice satisfactory feeling at the end of it? With men—well, either you are everything or you are nothing. Either they make you feel that you are being hunted like an animal, or that you are as unattractive as a stone wall. It’s—it’s disturbing. Either way.”

“Yes,” Sheila could agree. “It’s disturbing. Either way.” Then they both laughed.

Marian’s voice, talking, explaining, was outside the hut. She entered, her head turned to answer the man who followed her. It was the white-haired man who had come to Reymont’s camp, the man who was a colonel and served under a captain.

“Well, you certainly sound much better,” he said.

Marian said, “Franziska, Antoni needs you. Two more men have reached the camp. One has smashed his shoulder in falling off a roof.”

Franziska picked up the empty cup obediently, and gave Sheila a parting smile.

“Perhaps you will be needed, too,” the colonel suggested smoothly.

“Yes, Colonel Sierakowski,” Marian said regretfully. The conversation between these two had promised to be so interesting... And then, as if to assert at least a little of her authority, “Now don’t you go tiring my patient. She’s doing very nicely.”

“Yes,” the colonel said, and waited until the doctor’s wife had left the room. Then he pulled the bench across to Sheila’s bed. He obviously was not going to speak his information across the length of the room.

He spoke in English. His voice was quiet, exceedingly business-like.

“We sent a man to Warsaw. He got through. We’ve just had a brief, coded message. So your warning has been given into the right hands.”

Sheila looked both relieved and puzzled.

“We have a radio, of course,” he said quickly. “We can receive messages. Soon we shall be able to send them; we have an electrician here who is putting smuggled parts of a transmitter together. Anyway, we do know that our man got through and that he gave the message about you.”

“I keep wondering what they’ll do with it.”

“That will have been decided by this time. We will not know until Olszak arrives.”

“Here?”

“For a brief visit. A meeting of sorts, in other words. Some changes must be made in the organisation, changes to suit what
we have learned from the Nazis. Their technique has changed in several ways from that of the German occupation in the last war. The Nazis have been even more cruel and ruthless than we had expected.”

“Yes,” Sheila said, and thought of Korytów. “Yes.” It seemed as if anyone who had come under the power of modern Germany always found that the Nazis were worse than anyone had ever imagined. They were a perpetual shock. And the worst shock was to know that they were human beings. She met the man’s sad eyes and said, “If they were some kind of monsters like robots or men from Mars, we could expect this ruthlessness. But I’ve come to hate them just because they are human beings like ourselves. That gives them no excuse at all for behaving the way they do.”

“Quietly, quietly. Or we shall have Nurse Marian back here, saying I am upsetting her patient. Now, when Olszak arrives we shall hear, among other things, about your friend Madame Aleksander. He will also have discussed your future with the man whose secretary you were supposed to be. All you can do, now, is to get quite strong again, and then you’ll be able to do whatever Olszak has decided.”

“I’d like to stay here.” It was out, quite unthinking.

Colonel Sierakowski restrained a smile at her impulsive frankness.

“I can’t go back to England,” she said in embarrassment. “Not now. If the Germans were to find out that a Sheila Matthews was living there, then the whole Anna Braun story would come crashing down. Wouldn’t it?”

“Unless your recent employer can arrange a suitable ending to it.”

She thought desperately for some reasonable explanation why she should stay here. There were obviously no passengers in the camp. Everyone had his job. Her face lighted up. With a woman’s instinctive leap in reasoning, she had found the solution.

“Colonel Sierakowski, there’s no good pretending I’m a nurse. I can learn. But I’ve had no training. But there’s one thing I really could do. I could be your listener-in for foreign broadcasts. I could listen to American, British, French and German news. I could be here all the time to listen and make notes. You do need to know what’s happening abroad as well as in Poland, don’t you?”

His rare smile appeared. “Of course,” he said. “We have had a man listening, but you would release him for active duty. Captain Wisniewski will be interested I’m sure, when he returns from the raid.” His smile deepened. “And then Olszak wouldn’t have to think up any more plans for you.”

Sheila flushed. “Well, he certainly has arranged it to his own taste in these last weeks.” Her embarrassment grew as Sierakowski’s smile deepened further. “Of course, he knows best—I suppose.”

Sierakowski laughed at the tone of her voice, at her raised eyebrow. Then he sat and looked at her so gravely that she wondered what had brought that thoughtful look into his eyes. It was as if he were forming a decision about her.

“I’m afraid I’m dealing with a rebel,” he said at last. But she knew that wasn’t what he had really been thinking about in that long pause. “Perhaps if you start your job before Olszak gets here, you will have more chance of persuading him. There’s a lot of weight carried by a successful fait
accompli
.”

“And Captain Wisniewski?” Her words had been quite evenly spoken. And why not? Captain Wisniewski was in command of the camp: his permission was necessary. Her question had been merely a routine one. That was all, she thought, as she studied the coarse weave of the blanket over her knees. That was all she was going to allow it to be.

“He will have no objections, I’m sure.” He still watched her thoughtfully as she looked up at the slight inflection in his voice. He was puzzled by the sudden unhappiness in her eyes.

“Why do you want to stay?” he asked suddenly.

Sheila felt as if she were under examination again. She answered directly and simply, “Because I’ve done enough escaping and running away. I’m going to stay—and—and—” She halted. This sounded so much like mere heroics.

“Fight it out?” he suggested gently.

“In any way I can—yes.”

He thought, this girl was honest: she wasn’t a sensation-seeker, a wide-eyed romantic. She knew the dangers, she didn’t minimise them. And she could be of use.

“Good,” he said with unexpected brevity, and rose to his feet. His salute as he left the hut was equally unexpected.

Sheila stared at the rough ceiling’s shadows thankfully. Sierakowski had believed her. She had won an ally. Whatever decisions were made about her, he would be on her side.

There were voices outside now. Darkness had come. Work was over for the day. We are gathering at the Lodge, she thought: how many of the raiding party have reached home? We...home...the words had come naturally: this new world was no longer strange. She watched the black square of night in the window’s frame, listened to the rustle of closely laced branches
in the stirring wind. She thought of those others who were now moving back to the forest under cover of this darkness. When you hoped the way she hoped now, it was as if you prayed.

ADAM

A calendar became a curiosity. Time was measured by sun and moon, by patrols and sentry duty and raids, by increasing frosts and colder winds. Winter was coming, and as nature prepared for her long sleep, the men in the camp prepared for winter. The raids, in the last few days left of autumn, were never-ceasing. Supplies, clothing, and food were snatched from under the sharp greedy German nose, were hidden nearer the forest for future needs. (“Nearer” meant within ten miles of the forest’s edge. The raids themselves, as far as Sheila could discover, pushed as far north as Lowicz, as far south as Cracow. It seemed as if man had regained the power of travel which nature had meant him to possess. These soldiers could cover ten miles as easily as if they were walking down the street to buy an evening paper.)

Men who were resting between raids helped with the preparations in camp. Huts were enlarged and weatherproofed
with bark and thatch. Fuel, dried, and as smokeless as could be found, was stored as carefully as gold. So were the sacks of rye and potatoes, the barrels (fashioned out of birchbark like the cooking pots and cups) full of salt meat. Animals, hunted or trapped, also gave them skins for winter clothes. The melted fat was used for cooking, for soap, for candles, and for greasing rifles. Nothing was wasted. Everything, like everyone, had its function. Life was primitive and simple; work was hard, the sense of danger was constant. But perhaps because there was no time to sit and brood, perhaps because each man had learned savagely and cruelly why they were fighting, for what end they were fighting, there was unity of a broad and deep kind.

It was the best kind of unity, Sheila thought as she studied the men’s faces in the Lodge each night. Work—except for the constant forest patrol—and the one meal of the day were over. The camp relaxed in the warmth of the large room, gathered together with tolerant, unforced friendship. Perhaps it was the cold wind rising outside, symbolic of loneliness and anger, that made officers and men appreciate these hours together. Perhaps men always enjoyed themselves when they got together after a good job well done. There was talk—plenty of it, for no one could accuse the Poles of lack of conversation. There were boasts and arguments and discussions and stories. There was singing, with verses invented to fit every man in the camp. Music and poetry seemed to be rooted and growing in every Polish heart. Even Jan, that prosaic silent man, could turn a rhyme to set the others laughing. It was the best kind of unity, for each of those men was still an individualist. You could see that in their reactions and unexplained prides. The engineer was still the engineer; the lawyer remained the lawyer; the
farmer and landworker still belonged to the villages. But these differences were like salt and pepper in the flavour of a broth. The communal dish was all the better for their varied seasoning.

Strangers still arrived in camp. Some stayed, and filled the gaps in its ranks after each raid. Others left: either they were better suited for another branch of the underground movement than for guerrilla fighting, or they had come for training in the camp’s methods before returning to their distant villages. There they in their turn would organise and adapt what they had learned, for the use of their own districts.

The rest of Reymont’s band arrived. But Captain Reymont didn’t. Nor did Thaddeus. Jan had awaited their coming. Then suddenly he said one day, “They won’t come.” And he turned away in disappointment from the two ragged strangers who had come out of the forest. After that he stopped looking for newcomers. So did Sheila, but she kept thinking about Reymont. She owed him her life.

“I don’t think he ever wanted to leave his own camp,” she said to Jan that night. Jan was silent. They were sitting in the Lodge. The shutters and doors were secure. The voices round them rose and fell with the rhythm of men who enjoyed themselves while they could. There had been food, there was vodka, there was story-telling, there was warmth, there was laughter. Hard faces softened in the candlelight, and coarse voices mellowed into music. Jan didn’t look up at her. He was fashioning a long stick, strong and pointed, into a spear-like weapon. “No?” was all he would say. But he believed her. Reymont had enjoyed his own command too much: he had been proud of it. Sierakowski had persuaded him that only in co-operation with a larger group was there any chance of permanent survival. So he had
sent his men where opportunities were bigger. For this camp, here, with the work and united effort of so many men, seemed fantastically efficient and luxurious compared with Reymont’s camp. He had been a good leader, probably as good in some ways as Wisniewski, but he had worked on too small a scale. He had lacked Wisniewski’s vision.