Winds of War (32 page)

The ambassador rubbed the side of his bulbous nose with a small neat hand, and gave Byron a wise look. “Very much so. Yes indeed. And he should perhaps take notes.”

“Just what I thought. Hop in, Byron.”

A blood transfusion could not have changed Slote more. Byron had talked to him an hour earlier; the familiar gray, dour, slumped Slote, who had been glooming around the embassy, talking medicines, snapping short answers, and spending hours locked in his office. Ever since a bomb had fallen on the building next door, killing ten Poles, Slote had been like that. Byron figured the responsibility was wearing the chargé down. But now his face had color, his eyes were bright, and the very plume of blue smoke from his pipe looked jaunty.

As Byron got into the back seal, Natalie blurted to the ambassador, “Can I come along? Byron and I are travelling together.”

With an annoyed grimace, Slote shook his head. The ambassador looked her up and down, with masculine amusement. Natalie wore a green silk dress and an old pink sweater, an atrocious getup pulled from her suitcase without thought. It made her look vulgarly sexy. “But, my dear, wouldn’t you be frightened?”

“Of what?”

“The sounds of guns. We’re going to inspect the safe-conduct exit route.” The ambassador’s slow British speech was almost perfect. His small pink hand, resting on the open window, was manicured to a gleam, siege or no siege. “We may come rather close to the front.”

“I’ve heard guns.”

The ambassador smiled at Byron. “Well, shall we have your friend along?” He moved to make room for her beside him as he spoke. Slote said nothing, but gnawed his pipe in an annoyed way.

The car started off on a rough, zigzag ride toward the river. Warsaw had been crumpling in the past four days. A strong wind was blowing away the smoke, and beautiful morning sunshine gave a mocking look to the streets. But smashed buildings met the eye everywhere. Thousands of windows had been blown out and patched with bright yellow plywood. Warsaw was becoming a place of smoke, broken masonry, and yellow patches. The sidewalks and gutters were broken and cratered, and spiky tank traps and barricades cluttered main intersections. Glowering nervous soldiers at these intersections stopped the car with raised machine guns, their fingers at the triggers. Few other people were in sight. Far off cannon drummed and thumped. Each time that a soldier lowered his gun and waved them on, Slote laughed boisterously.

“What I find so incredible,” he said, as they came to a long stone bridge over the Vistula, crowded with carts, trucks, and bicycles, “is that this thing is still standing at all. Haven’t the Germans been bombarding it for two weeks?”

“Well, you see, they are just not quite as devastating as they would have us believe,” the Swedish ambassador said. “Nor as accurate.”

The car drove out on the bridge, over the broad brown river serenely flowing between Warsaw and its eastern suburb, Praha, a place of low houses and green woods. Behind them in the sunshine, under a soft smoky blue sky, Warsaw at this distance looked surprisingly unharmed: a broad metropolis with wide avenues, baroque church domes, tall factory chimneys, and many climbing columns of black smoke. It might almost have been a manufacturing city on a busy day in peacetime, except for the yellow fires billowing up here and there, the flashes like summer lightning all around the horizon, and the distant whumping of the artillery. Several busloads of singing and joking soldiers went past the car. Some waved at Natalie and shouted. Many soldiers were also heading the same way on bicycles.

“Where are they all going?” Natalie said.

“Why, to the front,” said the ambassador. “It’s quite a war. They leave their guns and go home for lunch or dinner, or perhaps to sleep with their wives, and then they take a bus to the front again and shoot at the Germans. Madrid was rather like this when I was there during the Civil War.”

“How far do we go?” Slote said. Here over the river the gun booms from Praha were louder.

The ambassador pursed his lips. “I’m not sure. We have to look for a schoolhouse with a stone goose in the front yard, a hundred yards or so past a wayside shrine.”

On the other side of the river, they found a scene of ruin. Broken houses, burned tree trunks, and fallen trees lined the narrow tarred road, which was so torn up by shell-fire that the car had to detour time and again on dirt tracks. A camouflaged heavy Polish gun in the woods suddenly went off as the limousine bumped along one of these paths. The driver swerved and brushed a tree, the passengers leaped in their seats. “My God!” Slote said. The car steadied up and drove on through the wooded flat land of Praha. They passed a house with its roof ablaze, and the family outside dolefully watching. Loud explosions went off around them, two or three a minute. Sometimes they saw flames from gun mouths in the woods, though the guns themselves were invisible. Sometimes through the trees they could observe Polish gun crews feverishly moving about. It was all novel and exciting, at least to Byron, and they seemed to be enjoying this wartime sightseeing in perfect safety, despite the unpleasant bumping along grass and dirt to avoid the shell holes. But then a German shell burst near the car, throwing up a geyser of dirt which rattled and tinkled on the limousine roof.

Slote said, “Christ Almighty! We’re at the front right now!”

“Yes, the schoolhouse must be right past that next curve,” the ambassador said. But past the curve they saw only four log houses around a dirt courtyard, where several pigs trotted here and there, bewildered by the gun noise. Beyond, the straight tar road continued into leafy woods and smoke, and visibility ceased.

Slote said, “Please stop the car.”

The ambassador glanced over his shoulder at him, rubbed his nose with a pink hand, and spoke to the driver. The car pulled to the side of the road.

“I didn’t in the least understand from you,” Slote said, gesturing with the pipe clutched in a fist, “that we were going into the actual zone of fire. Are you sure that we haven’t missed a turn, and that we aren’t behind the German lines right now?”

The ambassador pushed out his lips. I don’t believe we’ve come more than three miles from the bridge.”

Slote burst out laughing, and jerked the pipe at Natalie and Byron. “These young people are my responsibility. I can’t expose them in this way.”

Two loads of soldiers came along in lumbering old street buses with route numbers still displayed in front and faded movie advertisements on their sides. The soldiers were singing, and some waved out of the window at the halted limousine, or gave good-humored yells in Polish.

“Clearly we’re not yet behind the German lines,” said the ambassador.

“Nevertheless we’ll have to take these civilians back to Warsaw,” Slote said. “I’m sorry you and I misunderstood each other.”

Natalie exclaimed, “But why? There’s no reason on earth to take us back. I’m perfectly all right.”

“I’m afraid there isn’t time.” The ambassador deliberately scratched his eyebrow. “The cease-fire will probably come within the hour. As soon as we get back, I’ll have to start assembling my party.”

“So will I. But it’s up to the Poles and the Germans, after all, to ensure that the neutrals cross the lines safely.”

The ambassador glanced at his watch. “Colonel Rakowski asked that we come out and view the route ahead of time. I really do think we’d better go on.” Two heavy guns went off in the woods - RRUMPH RRUMPH! - one to the left, one to the right. The chauffeur whirred the ignition.

“
Just a moment
!” The driver turned around and looked at Slote, who had gone dead pale, his mouth working. “Ambassador, I must insist that you at least take us back to the bridge first. Perhaps there we can hitch a ride on a truck or bus.”

“But my dear sir, you should see the route, too. Our parties may get separated later in the woods.”

A peculiar feeling knotted Byron’s stomach. The ambassador’s faultless manners did not obscure what was happening, and Slote represented the United States. He said, “Leslie, I think you’re dead right about Natalie. Why not take her into one of those log houses and wait? I can go on with the ambassador and get the information, if you like.”

The ambassador at once said cheerfully, “Excellent idea! We can go and return in ten or fifteen minutes, I’m sure.”

Slote opened the car door and got out. “Come on, Natalie. We’ll wait in the one with the green blinds, Ambassador. I saw a woman at the windows.”

Natalie stayed in her seat, looking from Slote to the ambassador, her mouth pulled down unpleasantly. The ambassador said to her in a stiff European tone, “My dear, please do as you are told.”

Jumping out, she slammed the door and ran toward the house. Slote hurried after her, shouting. The limousine shot forward in a rattle of pebbles. The haze ahead thinned as they drove into it. About half a mile further along they came upon the shrine, a luridly colored wooden Jesus on a gilt cross in a sheltering frame; and not far beyond that was the schoolhouse. Several soldiers, smoking and talking, lounged in front of it around a stone goose bordered with red flowers. Byron thought that if Leslie Slote could have held on only three or four more minutes, he would have been all right. That one bad moment in the limousine, when the dirt hit the roof, had been unlucky for him.

Colonel Rakowski hailed the Swedish ambassador with a shout and a hug. He seemed in unrealistically good spirits, Byron thought, and indeed all the staff officers looked too chipper, considering the bad news that shrieked from the military map of the front on the wall: a crude thick red crayon circle, completely ringing Warsaw. On other walls of the schoolhouse, bright kindergarten pictures hung. Rakowski, an enormous man with pointed blonde moustaches, and a big nose empurpled by good living, led the visitors out a back door, and along a leaf-carpeted path to a concrete gun emplacement, where grimy, whiskered men stripped to the waist were piling shells. Motioning the visitors to come on up, the colonel climbed the shallow cement slope and mounted the sandbags. Byron followed the ambassador. A forested plain lay before them, dipping toward the east, with a scattering of houses and farms, and three widely separated church spires. Puffs of smoke out there, Byron realized, came from German artillery.

Panting from the little climb, the ambassador and the officer talked volubly, gesturing at the church spires. The ambassador scrawled notes and translated bits to Byron. On the terms of the cease-fire, he said, the neutral refugees would cross unescorted from the Polish to the German lines, heading for the farthest church, where Wehrmacht trucks would meet them. Colonel Rakowski feared that some refugees might wander on the poorly marked dirt roads, head for the wrong church, and find themselves between two fires when the truce - for which the Germans were granting only two hours - was ended. So he had asked the Swedish ambassador to come out and study the route beforehand.

“He says,” the ambassador observed to Byron, closing his notebook, “that the best view is from that observation tower. You can make out the different roads, all the way to the Kantorovicz church.”

Byron looked at the spindly wooden tower erected close by in the school’s play yard. A narrow ladder led to a square metal shielded platform, where he could see the helmet of a soldier. “Well, I’ll go up, okay? Maybe I can make a sketch.”

“The colonel says the tower has been drawing quite a bit of fire.”

Byron managed a grin.

With a paternal smile the ambassador handed him the notebook and pen. Byron trotted to the ladder and went up, shaking the frail tower as he climbed. Here was a perfect view of the terrain. He could see all the roads, all the turnoffs of the brown zigzags across no-man’s-land, to the far church. The soldier on watch glanced away from his binoculars to gawk, as the young American in an open shirt and loose gray sweater sketched the roads in the ambassador’s notebook, struggling with the pages as they flapped in the wind, marking all the wrong turns with X’s, and crudely picturing the three churches in relation to the route. The soldier nodded when Byron showed him the sketch, and slapped his shoulder. “Ho kay,” he said, with a grin of pride at his mastery of Americanese.

Natalie leaned in the open doorway of the cottage, arms folded, as the limousine drew up. She hurried to the car, followed in a moment by Slote, who first said good-bye at the door to a kerchiefed old woman in heavy boots. As the car drove back toward Warsaw, the ambassador recounted their visit to the front including Byron’s venture up the tower. Meantime Byron worked on the notebook in his lap.

“Think four copies is enough?” he said to the ambassador.

“Plenty, I should think. Thank you.” The ambassador took the notebook. “We may have time to run off some mimeograph copies. Very well done.”

Natalie clasped Byron’s hand and pulled it to her lap. She was sitting between him and Slote. She pressed his fingers, looking seriously at him, her dark eyes half-closed.

Through her light green dress, he felt the flesh of her thigh on the back of his hand and the ridge of a garter. Slote repeatedly glanced at the two hands clasped in the girl’s lap as he calmly smoked, looked out of the window, and chatted with the ambassador about assembling and transporting the refugees. A muscle in Slote’s jaw kept moving under the skin of his white face.

In the embassy all was scurry and noise. The mayor’s office had just sent word that the cease-fire was definite now for one o’clock. Polish army trucks would take the Americans to the departure point, and each person could bring one suitcase. The rush was on. The Americans still living outside the embassy were being summoned by telephone. A smell of burning paper filled the building, and fragments of black ash floated in the corridors.

Mark Hartley occupied the cot next to Byron’s in the cellar, and Byron found him sitting hunched beside a strapped-up suitcase, head in hands, a dead cigar protruding from his fingers. “Ready to go, Mark?”

Hartley uncovered a drawn face, the eyes frightened and bulging. “Horowitz is the name, Byron. Marvin Horowitz.”

“Nonsense, how will they know that?” Byron pulled from under the cot his old torn bag with the sprung hardware.