Winds of War (31 page)

Hurrying down Marshal Pilsudski Boulevard toward the Jewish section he heard the thumping of heavy guns, and nearby explosions like the blasting at a building site. Byron muttered routine curses at the Germans. He had spent a week in Germany after defecting from the University of Florence. They had seemed odd but no more so than the Italians; foreigners, but human enough, with a boisterous sense of fun and very polite manners. Yet here they were, surrounding the Polish capital, pounding it with explosives and flying steel, breaking the water mains, killing the children, turning living people into stiff glassy-eyed dead stacked garbage to be carted away and disposed of. It was really the most amazing outrage. To call it “war” was not to make it any more understandable.

This peculiar and horrible state of affairs in which he accidentally found himself was nevertheless far more colorful and interesting than “peace,” as Byron remembered it. Delivering water to the United States embassy was the most satisfying thing he had done in his life. He loved the job. He was willing to be killed doing it. But the odds were all with him. This was the novel thing he was finding out. Most of the people in Warsaw were still alive and unhurt and going about their business. The city was far from destroyed or even half-destroyed. As he made his way to Nareiskaya district he passed through many a block of brown three-story houses which stood undamaged, peaceful, and quiet, looking exactly as they had before the German attack.

But in the Jewish quarter itself there were no such undamaged blocks. It was one broad smoky ruin. Clearly the Germans were raining extra shells and bombs on this district - a pointless course, since the Jews of Warsaw could not compel the surrender of the city. Such a deluge of fire and explosion concentrated on the city’s vitals – power, water, transport, bridges - instead of on the Jews, could break Warsaw much faster. The bombardment of the Nareiskaya was an irrational wasteful assault by a powerful army against sad unarmed paupers.

The JUDEN VERBOTEN signs Byron had seen on park benches in Germany had been too bizarre to seem real. This bombardment of the Nareiskaya district first drove home to him the queer fact that the Germans really had murder in their hearts for these people. Trolley cars lay on their sides, burned out. Swollen dead horses stank in the streets, in clouds of fat black flies that sometimes settled stickily on Byron’s hands and face. There were dead cats and dogs, too, and a lot of dead rats scattered in the gutter. He saw only one human body, an old man crumpled in a doorway. He had noticed before how quick the Jews were to remove their dead, and how they treated the corpses with respect, covering the loaded carts with cloths and following them in silent mournful straggles through the streets.

But despite the smashing up of the houses, the continuing fires, the smoke, the rubble, this quarter still abounded in eager crowded life. On one corner, outside a ruined schoolhouse, boys in skullcaps sat with their bearded teacher on the sidewalk chanting over enormous books; some of the boys were not much larger than the books. Kiosks were still festooned with dozens of different newspapers and journals printed in heavy Hebrew lettering. He heard someone in a house practicing on a violin. The vendors of wilted vegetables and spotted stunted fruit, of tinned food and old clothes, stood along the sidewalks or pushed their creaky handcarts amid crowds of people. Work gangs were clearing rubble from bombed houses off the streets and the sidewalks. There were plenty of hands for the work. Byron wondered at this, for in the past weeks Jewish men and boys - perhaps because they were so recognizable - had seemed to erupt all over Warsaw, digging trenches, fighting fires, repairing mains. One bent old graybeard in skullcap and kaftan, wielding a shovel in a trench, gave a Jewish look to a whole work force. Nevertheless they did appear to be pitching in everywhere.

Berel Jastrow was not in the council building. Wandering through crowded, dark, dingy corridors lit only by flickering thick candles, Byron chanced on a man whom he had once seen conferring with Berel, a little, neat, bearded Jew with a glass eye that gave him a walleyed stare. Talking a mishmash of German and Yiddish, the man conveyed that Berel was inspecting the community kitchens. Byron set out to hunt him down, and came on him in a huge Romanesque synagogue of gray stone, undamaged except for a broken stone Star of David in a round glassless window. Jastrow stood in a low hot anteroom where people were lined up for a strong-smelling stew ladled out by kerchiefed perspiring women from tubs on wood-burning stoves.

“The Russians!” Berel stroked his beard. “This is definite?”

“Your mayor came to the embassy with the news.”

“Let us go outside.”

They talked out in the street, well away from the food queue. The raggedly dressed people in line stared at them and tried to hear the conversation, even cupping hands to ears. “I must report this to the central committee,” Berel said. “It may be good news. Who knows? Suppose the two robbers cut each other’s throats? Such things have happened. The Russians could be messengers of God.”

He was taken aback when Byron offered him Natalie’s wallet. “But what is she thinking?” he said. “I have money. I have dollars. She may need that herself. She isn’t out of Warsaw yet.”

Byron was embarrassed. It had not occurred to him that Jastrow might be offended, but now the reaction seemed natural. He said the Americans expected to leave Warsaw soon under a flag of truce.

“So. We won’t see you or Natalie again?”

“Possibly not.”

“Ah. Well, if the Germans let all you Americans out together, she should be safe. She told me an American passport says nothing about religion. Tell her I thank her, and I’ll put the money in the food fund. Tell her –
Vorsicht
!”

A shell whistled down and exploded some distance away, making Byron’s ears ache. Berel spoke hurriedly. “So, they are coming back to this neighborhood again. They shell by a system, the Germans. Yesterday was Yom Kippur, and all day the shells fell on us, they never stopped. Now, you will be seeing Arele?” He smiled wryly at Byron’s blank look. “Dr. Aaron Jastrow” he said, mimicking English pronunciation.

“I guess so.”

“Tell him,” Berel said, “
Lekh lekha
. Can you remember that? It’s two simple Hebrew words.
Lekh lekha
,”

“
Lekh lekha
,” Byron said.

“Very good. You’re a fine Hebrew student.”

“What does it mean?”

“Get out.” Berel gave a worn white card to Byron.

“Now, will you do me a favor? This is a man in New Jersey, an importer. He sent a bank draft in August for a large shipment of mushrooms. It came too late. I destroyed draft, so there’s no problem, but - what are you smiling at?”

“Well, you have so much to worry about. And yet you think of this.”

Jastrow shrugged. “This is my business. The Germans, they’ll either come in, or they won’t. After all, they’re not lions and tigers. They’re people. They’ll take our money. It’ll be a very bad time, but a war always ends. Listen, if the Russians come they’ll take our money, too. So” – he held out his hand to Byron – “so, God bless you, and –”

Byron heard the noise of a shell very close, the unmistakable sloppy whir and whistle. It went splintering through the synagogue roof. The stunning explosion came a second or two later, giving him a chance to clap his hands over his ears and fall to the ground. Strangely, it did not blow out the front wall, and this was what saved the people on the line. Fragments of the roof went flying through the air, raining in a clatter on the street and on nearby buildings. Then, even as he and Jastrow stood, they saw the whole façade of the synagogue come sliding down like a descending curtain, disintegrating as it went with a rumble and a gathering crash. By now the queue of people had run out of danger. White dust boiled up, and through this cloud, which the breeze thinned at once, Byron could the marble pillars and carved wooden doors of the holy ark untouched on the far wall, looking naked and out of place in the pale smoky sunshine.

Berel slapped him sharply on the shoulder. “Go, go! Don’t stay here. Go now. I have to help.”

Jewish men and boys were already groping into the new ruin, where many little fires were flickering. Little as he knew of Judaism, Byron understood that they meant to save the scrolls.

“All right, I’m going back to Natalie.”

“Good. Thank you, thank you. A safe journey to both of you.”

Byron left at a trot. The uncovering of the holy ark to the sunshine had shocked him like a piece of powerful music. Jogging back through the Jewish quarter of Warsaw, he saw these smashed rows of gray and brown houses, these cobbled streets and dirt alleys, these shabby courtyards and mews hung with drying laundry, these crowds of orderly Jews in beards and broad hats, these dark-eyed cheerful children playing under the bombs, these dogged tired street vendors with their carts and baskets, these kiosks laden with newspapers, magazines, feuilletons, and paperbound books, this smoke-filtered sunshine, these overturned trolleys, these dead horses – he saw all this in superbright detail, each picture printing itself on his mind as though he were a painter.

Without surprise or fear, he noticed thick V’s of German planes soaring out of the north. The sight had grown ordinary. He continued to trot, a little faster, through the emptying shell-pitted streets toward the embassy. People around him glanced at the sky and took shelter. The first waves were Stukas, diving down and spitting out black smoke, and Byron heard the irritated answering rattle of the weak rooftop machine guns of the Poles. One plane dove toward the street where he was running. He jumped into a doorway. Bullets went chattering down along the cobblestones, with a great whing-whang of ricochets. He watched the plane zoom away, then he trotted on, muttering the usual obscenities about the Germans.

Byron was developing a sense of invulnerability to the worst the Germans could do. To him they were contemptible bungling butchers. He was sure that the United States was going to rise in its wrath in short order, cross the Atlantic and knock the hell out of them, if the British and the French really proved too decayed or too scared to do it. The events around him must be making gigantic headlines in America, he thought. He would have been stupefied to know that the Polish war, its outcome clear, was already slipping to the back pages of United States papers, and that people were ignoring even the supposed “great debate” in the Senate over revising the Neutrality Act, because of the tight National League pennant race.

He loped through the embassy gate very much out of breath. The marine sentry gave him a salute and a familiar grin. Inside, in the big dining room darkened by window braces and blackout curtains, some fifty or so Americans caught in Warsaw were lunching at long trestle tables lit by oil lamps, making a loud clatter. Slote sat with Natalie, a small dark man named Mark Hartley, and some others at the ambassador’s polished dining table. Panting from the long run, Byron told Natalie about his meeting with Berel. He did not mention the destroyed synagogue.

“Thanks, Briny! God help them all. Sit down and eat something. We have marvellous breaded veal cutlets, by some miracle.”

Slote said, “Did you come here through the streets during this air attack?”

“He has duck feathers for brains,” Natalie said, giving Byron an affectionate look.

“Byron is all right,” Hartley said. He was a fourth at bridge with Natalie, Byron, and Slote, when they whiled away long night hours in the cellar. Mark Hartley’s name had once been Marvin Horowitz, and he liked to joke about the change. He was a New Yorker in the importing business.

Byron took an empty seat beside Natalie and helped himself to a cutlet. It had a rather gamy, sticky taste, but after a week of canned sprats and sausages it seemed delicious, and he was famished. He downed it and forked another onto his plate. Slote smiled at him, and glanced around with satisfaction at the Americans happily consuming the cutlets. “By the way, does anybody here object to eating horsemeat?”

“I most certainly do,” said Natalie.

“Well, that’s too bad. You’ve just eaten it.”

Natalie said, “Aagh!” and choked into her napkin. “My God. Horse! I could kill you. Why didn’t you warn me?”

“You need nourishment. We all do. There’s no telling what’s going to become of us, and I had the chance to buy up this lot and I did. You’ve been dining on one of the great breeds of Poland. The mayor ordered the slaughter of a thousand of them yesterday. We were lucky get a share.”

Mark Hartley took another cutlet from the platter. Natalie said, “Mark! How can you? Horse!”

He shrugged. “We got to eat. I’ve eaten worse meat in kosher restaurants.”

“Well, I don’t claim to be religious, but I draw the line at horses. I’d as soon eat a dog.”

Byron pushed away his plate. The awareness of horseflesh heavy in his stomach, the gluey taste of horse in his mouth, the remembered smell of fly-blown dead horses on the Jewish streets, blended in his consciousness as one thing - war.

Chapter 14

Four days later, early in the morning Natalie came scampering out into the embassy back yard hair and skirt flying, and pounced on Byron, who was burning passport blanks and visa application files. The embassy had hundreds of the maroon passport booklets, which went up slowly and smokily; in German hands they could be used for smuggling spies and saboteurs into the United States. The stacks and stacks of visa requests, because they identified Jews, were also high on the burn-list. Byron had given up riffling through the files for the American currency often clipped to application forms. His job was to reduce the stuff to ashes as fast as he could; he was burning money and didn’t care.

“Hurry. Come with me.” Natalie’s voice had a cheerful, excited ring.

“Where?”

“Just come.”

In a chauffeured black limousine at the front gate, Slote sat next to a plump, pink, gray-headed man. “Hi there, Byron!” Slote too sounded surprisingly cheerful. “This is the Swedish ambassador. Byron Henry’s father is our naval attaché in Berlin, Ambassador. It might be well to take him along, don’t you think?”