Winds of War (23 page)

“What’s that, what’s she saying?”

“Are you all right, Byron? How do you feel?”

“Sort of dizzy. What’s that little girl saying?”

Natalie looked strange. Her nose seemed pinched and long, her hair was in disorder, her face was livid and dirty, and her lipstick was cracked. She had a little of Byron’s blood smeared on her forehead. “I don’t know. She’s hysterical.”

Berel stood beside Natalie, stroking his beard. He said in French, “She keeps saying, ‘Mama looks so ugly.’”

Byron got to his feet, propping one hand against the car’s hot fender. His knees felt watery. “I think I’m okay. What does the wound look like?”

Natalie said, “I don’t know, your hair is so thick. But it’s bleeding a lot. We’d better get you to a hospital and have it stitched.”

The driver, hastily tightening the bolts of the jacked-up wheel, smiled at Byron. Sweat rolled off his pallid nose and forehead into his beard. His wife and the bridal couple stood in the shade of the car, a look of shock on their faces, fazing at the sky, at the road, and at the crying girl. All down the road, wounded horses were plunging and screaming, and fowls from overturned carts were scampering helter-skelter, chased by children making a great noise. People were bending over the wounded or lifting them into carts, with much excited shouting in Polish. The sun burned down white-hot from a clear sky.

Byron walked uncertainly to the crying girl, followed by Natalie and Jastrow. The mother lay on her back. She had caught a bullet straight in the face. The big red hole was an especially bad sight because her fixed eyes were undamaged. Berel spoke to the father, who had a stupid gentle face and a bushy yellow moustache. The man shrugged, holding the little girl close. Yankel’s wife came and offered a red apple to the child, whose sobbing almost at once died away. She took the apple and bit it. The man sat by his dead wife, folding his dusty bare feet, and began to mutter, crossing himself, his shoes dangling around his neck.

Natalie helped Byron, who was very dizzy, into the car. They drove on; Jastrow said there was a good-sized town three miles away, where they could tell the authorities about the wounded on the highway. The bride, who out of her wedding clothes was just a freckled girl with thick glasses, started to cry, and cried all the way to the town, repulsing her wan-faced husband and burying her face in the huge bosom of the driver’s wife.

The town was undamaged, and the hospital, a small brown brick building beside a church, was quiet and cool inside. Several nurses and nuns went off in a truck after Jastrow told his story. Byron was led to a white-painted room full of surgical equipment and buzzing flies. A fat old doctor in a white jacket and patched canvas trousers sewed up his head. The shaving of the hair around the wound hurt worse than the actual stitching. He suggested to Natalie, when he came out, that she get her knee taped, for she was limping again.

“Oh, hell,” Natalie said. “Let’s go. We can still reach Warsaw tonight, Yankel says. I’ll get it fixed there.”

What with the tablespoon of pain-killer the doctor had given him, general weariness, and the aftermath of shock, Byron dozed. He did not know how much time had passed when he woke. On a broad cobbled square near a red brick railway station, two soldiers, rifles in hand, had halted the car. The station and a freight train were on fire; flame and black smoke billowed from their windows. Several buildings around the square were smashed or damaged; two were in flames. People were crowding around shops, passing out merchandise, carrying it off. Byron realized with surprise that this was looting. Across the square, men were pumping water at the burning railroad station from horse-drawn fire engines, such as Byron had not seen except in old silent movies. A crowd was watching all this as it would any peacetime excitement.

“What is it?” Byron said.

One of the soldiers, a big young blond fellow with a square red face marred by boils, walked around to the driver’s window. A conversation ensued in Polish between the soldier, Yankel, and Jastrow. The soldier kept smiling with peculiar unpleasant gentleness, as though at children he disliked. His scrawny companion came and looked through the yellow glass, coughing continually over a cigarette. He spoke to the big one, addressing him repeatedly as Casimir. Byron knew by now that
Zhid
was a Polish epithet for “Jew”;
Zhid
was occurring often in this talk. Casimir addressed the driver again, and once reached in and gave his beard a caress, and then a yank, apparently displeased with his answers.

Jastrow muttered something to Natalie in Yiddish, glancing at Byron. “What is it?” Byron said.

Natalie murmured, “There are good Poles and bad Poles, he says. These are bad.”

Casimir gestured with his gun for everybody to get out.

Jastrow said to Byron, “Dey take our automobile.”

Byron had a rotten headache. His ear had been nicked by the bullet, and this raw patch burned and throbbed, hurting him more than the stitched head wound. He had vague cramps, having eaten old scraps and drunk dirty water in the past two days, and he was still doped by the medicine. He had seldom felt worse. “I’ll try talking to Redface, he seems to be in charge,” he said, and he got out of the car.

“Look,” he said, approaching the soldiers, “I’m an American naval officer, and I’m returning to the embassy in Warsaw, where they’re expecting us. The American girl” - he indicated Natalie – “is my fiancée, and we’ve been visiting her family. These people are her family.”

The soldiers wrinkled their faces at the sound of English, and at the sight of Byron’s thick blood-stained bandage. “
Amerikanetz
?” the big one said.

Jastrow, at the car window, translated Byron’s words.

Casimir scratched his chin, looking Byron up and down. The condescending smile made its reappearance. He spoke to Jastrow, who translated shakily into French, “He says no American Navy officer would ever marry a Jew. He doesn’t believe you.”

“Tell him if we’re not in Warsaw by tonight the American ambassador will take action to find us. And if he’s in doubt, let’s go to a telephone and call the embassy.”

“Passport,” Casimir said to Byron, after Jastrow translated. Byron produced it. The soldier peered at the green cover, the English words, the photograph, and at Byron’s face. He spoke to his coughing companion and started to walk off, beckoning to Byron.

“Briny, don’t go away,” Natalie said.

“I’ll be back. Keep everybody quiet.”

The smaller soldier leaned against the car fender and lit another cigarette, hacking horrible and grinning at Natalie.

Byron followed Casimir down a side street, into a two-story stone building festooned outside with official bulletins and placards. They walked past rooms full of files, counters, and desks to a frosted glass door at the end of the hall. Casimir went inside, and after about ten minutes poked his head out and beckoned to the American.

A pudgy man in a gray uniform, smoking a cigarette in an amber holder, sat behind the big desk at the window; an officer to judge by his colored tabs and brass ornaments. The passport was open before the man. He sipped tea from a glass as he glanced at it, and tea dripped on Byron’s picture. In the narrow grimy room, metal files and bookshelves were shoved in a corner, with dirty legal tomes tumbled about.

The officer asked him if he spoke German. That was the language they used, though both were bad at it. He made Byron tell his story again and asked him how an American naval officer happened to be mixed up with Jews, and how he came to be wandering around Poland in wartime. When his cigarette was consumed to the last quarter inch, he lit another. He queried Byron hard about the head injury, and smiled sourly, raising his eyebrows at the account of strafing on the highway. Even if this were all true, he commented, Byron had been acting foolishly and could easily get himself shot. He wrote down Byron’s answers with a scratchy pen, in long silent pauses between the questions; then clipped the scrawled sheets to the passport, and dropped them into a wire basket full of papers.

“Come back tomorrow afternoon at five o’clock.”

“I can’t. I’m expected in Warsaw tonight.”

The officer shrugged.

Byron wished his temples would stop throbbing. It was hard to think, especially in German, and his vision was blurry, too. “May I ask who you are, and by what right you take my passport, and by what right this soldier tried to take our car?”

The unpleasant smile that Casimir had displayed – Casimir stood by the desk all through the interview with a wooden look – now appeared on the officer’s face. “Never mind who I am. We have to make sure who you are.”

“Then telephone the American embassy and ask for Leslie Slote, the political secretary. That won’t take long.”

The officer drank off his cold tea and began signing papers with a mutter in Polish to Casimir, who took Byron’s arm, pushed him out of the room, and led him back to the car.

The station and freight cars were pouring steamy white smoke, and a smell of wet burned wood filled the street. The looting was over. Policemen stood in front of the wrecked shops. The faces of the three women looked out tensely through the yellowed car glass at Byron. Casimir spoke to his companion, who caused the bride to shrink from the window by knocking on the glass and winking at her; then they went off.

Byron told Natalie what had happened and she recounted it in Yiddish to the others. Jastrow said they could stay the night in the home of a friend in this town. When Byron got in behind the wheel, Yankel seemed glad to retire to the back seat beside his wife.

Following Berel’s directions, Byron maneuvered to a crossroad. A large arrow pointing left, down a road through fields stacked with corn sheaves, read: WARSAW, 95 KS. Jastrow told him to turn right, along a road which led past small houses toward an unpainted wooden church. Byron, however, shifted gears and swooped left, driving out into the fields. “That’s a bad outfit back there,” he said to Natalie. “We’d better keep going.”

Natalie exclaimed, “Byron, stop, don’t be crazy! You
can’t
drive around among these people without your passport.”

“Ask Berel what he thinks.”

There was colloquy in Yiddish. “He says it’s much too dangerous for you. Go back.”

“Why? If we run into any trouble, I’ll say I lost the passport in a bombardment. I’ve got this hole in my head.” Byron had the accelerator pressed to the floor, and the overloaded bumping old Fiat was doing its best speed, about thirty miles an hour. Overhead the pots were making a great din, and Byron had to shout. “Ask him if it isn’t safest for you for the rest to get the hell out of here.”

He felt a touch on his shoulder and glanced around. Berel Jastrow’s bearded face was fatigued and ashen, and he was nodding.

It took them two days to go the ninety-five kilometers. While it was happening it seemed to Byron a saga that he would be telling his grandchildren, if he lived through it. But so much happened afterward to him that his five-day drive from Cracow to Warsaw soon became a garbled fading memory. The breakdown of the water pump that halted them for half a day on a deserted back road in a forest, until Byron, tinkering with it in a daze of illness, to his astonishment got it to work; the leak in the gas tank that compelled them to take great risks to buy more; the disappearance of the hysterical bride from the hayfield where they spent one night, and the long search for her (she had wandered to another farm, and fallen asleep in a barn); the two blood-caked boys they found asleep by the roadside, who had a confused story of falling out of a truck and who rode the last thirty kilometers to Warsaw sitting on wooden slats on the sizzling hood of the Fiat – all this dimmed. But he always remembered how ungodly sick to the stomach he was, and the horrible embarrassment of his frequent excursions in to the bushes; Natalie’s unshakable good cheer as she got hungrier, dirtier, and wearier; and above all, never to be forgotten, he remembered the hole in his breast pocket where the passport had been, which seemed to throb more than the gashes in his ear and his scalp, because he now knew that there were Polish officers capable of ordering him taken out and shot, and soldiers capable of doing it. Following Jastrow’s directions, he wound and doubled on stony, muddy roads to avoid towns, though it lengthened the journey and played hell with the disintegrating car.

They arrived in the outskirts of Warsaw in the chill dawn, crawling among hundreds of horse-drawn wagons. All across the stubbled fields, women, children, and bent graybeards were digging trenches and putting up tank barriers of tangled iron girders. The buildings cluttered against the pink northeast horizon looked like the heavenly Jerusalem. The driver’s immense wife, squeezed against Natalie for days and nights in an intimacy the girl had never known with another human being, smelling more and more like an overheated cow, embraced Natalie and kissed and hugged her. It took three more hours before the boys jumped off the hood and ran away down a side street. “Go ahead, go in quickly,” the mushroom dealer said to Natalie in Yiddish, stepping out of the car to kiss her. “Come and see me later if you can.”

When Byron said good-bye, Berel Jastrow would not let his hand go. He clasped it in both his hands, looking earnestly into the young man’s face. “
Merci. Mille fois merci.
Tousand times tank you. America save Poland, yes Byron? Save de vorld.”

Byron laughed. “That’s a big order, but I’ll pass it on, Berel.”

“What did he say?” Berel asked Natalie, still holding Byron’s hand. When she told him Berel laughed too, and then astonished Byron by giving him a bear hug and a brief scratchy kiss.

A lone marine stood watch at the closed gates. Gray sandbags lined the yellow stucco walls, ugly X-shaped wooden braces disfigured the windows, and on the red tile roof an enormous American flag had been painted. All this was strange, but strangest was the absence of the long line of people. Nobody but the marine stood outside. The United States embassy was no longer a haven or an escape hatch.

The guard’s clean-scraped pink suspicious face brightened when he heard them talk. “Yes, ma’am, Mr. Slote sure is here. He’s in charge now.” He pulled a telephone from a metal box fastened on the gate, regarding them curiously. Natalie put her hands to her tumbled hair, Byron rubbed his heavy growth of red bristles, and they both laughed. Slote came running down the broad stairway under the embassy medallion. “Hello! God, am I ever glad to see you two!” He threw an arm around Natalie and kissed her cheek, staring the while at Byron’s dirty blood-stained head bandage. “What the devil? Are you all right?”