The National Treasure

by William P Wood

  They actually advanced through the mob. Fashionable stores being looted on either side of the solid street of fleeing people were hallmarks already of the new order of things. Peszek squinted at the map trying to see street signs, cursing at people crowding his side of the car. “This,” he waved his bloody hand, “is a scratch. The last time around, you might get a couple days away from the front, with a little scratch like this. The trick is to keep your guts inside, your heart from beating fast, don’t get excited. I saw a guy with his toe shot. He started screaming, he ran around, and he fell over dead. His toe! This? I’ll live. Now drive there,” and he jabbed his hand to their left.

  In fact, Janusz had formed a great dislike for the sergeant but he was also very afraid that if Peszek bled to death or lost consciousness, they would be left to his invariable misdirection and they would drift around on the sea of moving people and cars and wagons like a helpless leaf caught in a whirlpool and never get out of the city until the relentless planes found them and they were blown up or buried by a falling building. He had told Peszek about Lidia’s farm outside the city and received only a noncommittal grunt in reply.

  “Where does Lieutenant Walicki’s plan say we’re supposed to be now?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Peszek reached down and shook a slim, elegant brown leather valise, papers and bogus passports falling to the floor of the car. “He wrote it all in fucking code. All I can read is his map – and it’s just a map.”

  “But he told me we’re on a strict schedule,” Janusz said. “We have to be places at specific times.”

  “Look around, okay? There’s no more schedules, no more plans. No more Walicki. All I’ve got are passports to get us across the border. Don’t need Walicki’s or the kid’s now.”

  Janusz felt conflicting emotions. His old life chains were gone. That was good. It also meant, however, that he was in free-fall trying to get to Lidia. “Then we can go where we like. We can go to the farm …”

  “Get us out of this shithole. That’s all. I don’t care shit about a farm, your old bitch,” he coughed, wiping his mouth on his coat sleeve. He had the maybe empty gun resting on the map in his lap. “You’re going to goddamn Switzerland. I’ve got some friends, we’ll figure something out, but you are going to walk me into Switzerland and out of this crap.” He gestured with his bloody hand at the thronging horde all around them.

  “You’re a deserter,” Janusz said. He did not bother to conceal the revulsion in his voice. He didn’t know soldiers, only a few officers. He had never fought until that morning. But even to him, Peszek’s offence was nonetheless viscerally loathsome.

  “Thanks to you. Sir.” Walleyed, the sergeant stared at him hungrily like he was an Easter ham about to be carved.

  Ten

  They came to the farmhouse with an apple orchard in a Scots pine forest in late afternoon, the sun still hot so the car stank of their sweat and closeness for so many hours.

  They were nearly out of fuel. Janusz was thirstier than he could ever recall and he had to urinate with a pain that verged on being metaphysical. Pesezk had not permitted them to stop or even pull over even after they finally got beyond the city and onto country roads. The country roads themselves were nearly impassable for miles. Janusz accepted the sergeant’s wisdom on that score, underlined by the unspoken threat of his maybe empty gun. If they had got out of the car for even a moment in the midst of surging, pulsing columns of people, they probably never would have been able to have got back to it.

  So here at last, down a long narrow, dusty road off a country road that had gradually thinned of people until it was empty, was a farmhouse. Janusz had a pang. It wasn’t Lidia’s farm. That lay nearly thirty miles further. But he was exhausted and so was Peszek. They had to rest.

  “It looks deserted. I don’t see anyone,” Janusz said as they slowed some distance from the house.

  “Well, you wouldn’t if they’re planning on shooting at us. We’ll sit here for a minute and see if anything stirs,” Peszek said. He breathed heavily and his face had a greyish pallor.

  That was too much. Janusz said, “I’ve got to get out”, and before Peszek could stop him, he sprang from the car, hurried to an overgrown ditch that ran along the road and with a gratitude that surpassed many wonderful moments in his life – shaking hands with Toscanini in Rome, for one – relieved himself. As he finished, calmer and reflective, he imagined a decorous plaque that might be placed on the spot: ‘Janusz Rudzinski Pissed Here’ and the date. Like Beethoven ate a cutlet at this inn, or Brahms played the piano in this whorehouse. Fame was not always genteel.

  He got back behind the wheel. Peszek was furious.

  “Don’t do that again, you idiot. They could’ve picked you off easily from the house.”

  “There’s no one here. I can see that,” he said coolly. “You haven’t lost your meal ticket.”

  Peszek just grunted and waved for Janusz to drive ahead.

  He stopped in front of the white-painted farmhouse with a high-gabled roof. A cupola-topped barn was nearby and an orchard of forty or fifty trees heavy with bright red fruit. It was so quiet he could plainly hear the faint breeze stir among the apple trees and the pines ringing the farm. The smell enveloping him was warm and sweet and resinous. They got out of the car.

  Peszek pushed past him and through the open door to the house. He was obviously in pain, and surly. Janusz followed inside. It was a prosperous home. Signs of haste were everywhere – cupboards hung ajar, papers scattered over the floor, chairs overturned, a disordered rug as if someone had slipped rushing over it. A framed contented Madonna hung on one wall and on the opposite wall, a row of old Gothic lettered proverbs: ‘The Sower Shall Reap’, ‘A Noisy Cow Gives Little Milk’, ‘God Grant Me a Good Sword and No Use for It’. A formal photograph of the family, father in open-collared shirt, black suit, mother in full white blouse and long dark dress, grim children centred in front of them, watched Janusz trespass. He felt guilty under their absent gaze. He straightened up, tightened his shoulders, things he did whenever he passed a mirror or saw someone who looked taller or stronger.

  “They cleared out fast,” the sergeant said sourly, going into the kitchen. “Better make sure. I’ll poke around here, you take a look outside and in the barn. Be careful, right? Shout if you see someone and I’ll come introduce myself.” He patted the gun in his coat pocket.

  “I thought you were out of ammunition.”

  “Maybe I made a mistake. I make a lot of mistakes.”

  Janusz didn’t answer, but went to the sink and drank greedily from the tap. Peszek started yanking open drawers, hunting for something to eat. Well, there were always apples.

  Outside, after hours of incessant cacophony and movement streaming out of the city, the stillness and sheer deserted atmosphere of the farmhouse and its orchard were disorienting. Janusz felt leaden, too. He stood with his hands on his hips, then checked the barn, a dim, dry-smelling expanse of farm tools, sacks and bins. A small rusted generator provided electricity to the farmhouse, a rarity in the area certainly. The barn was also occupied by two sullen cows and a brown mare in her stall. A gangly foal lay in it with her. They all watched him expectantly. Janusz studied them, a pulse beating just behind his awareness. It slipped away, though, and he couldn’t even say if it was a melody or a headache. Sometimes when he was working fiercely it was both.

  He walked back around the house, admiring the well-laid out orchard and neat flower beds, all now sad and abandoned. He went into the house through the front door. This time the noticed a large radio cabinet in the corner, and without thinking, turned it on. It was obviously the pride of the family but they had decided, quite clearly, it was pointless to take it with them. He heard Peszek scrape a chair on the floor in the kitchen.

  Static. Hiss. He twisted the dial around, suddenly wild to hear a voice with news, and ominously got nothing until a tinny trail of music, a Chopin polonaise. Well, small blessing. At least it wasn’t Wagner
yet.

  In the kitchen, at the table where a stack of dishes waited to be put away, Peszek wolfed down cheese and a half loaf of bread. He had a tankard of water and he drank sloppily. “Get some food,” he gestured to Janusz. “There aren’t any servants here. I bet you had servants to wipe your arse.”

  Janusz was hungry, but the prospect of eating with Peszek was too repugnant. “We had a woman who came in twice a week to clean and a cook. I told you, I’m not rich. I wasn’t rich growing up. My father taught chemistry at the university.”

  “Cleaning lady? Cook? I guess I win. I had three brothers and two sisters, my old lady and the old man. My old man, his, and his old man – all coalminers. That’s what I was supposed to be doing. But I made something of myself,” and he laughed.

  Janusz said, “After my mother died, it was just my father and me. We managed to get by on his university salary.”

  “I don’t believe you. I know your kind. Rich and spoilt. Everything handed to you. Expects everybody to wait on you.” He chewed with his mouth open and talked bitterly. Janusz noticed that the bloody hand was laid in front of the plate of cheese, inert, like a sausage.

  “You’re an idiot.” He said it suddenly and without regret.

  Peszek grinned. “This is all I could find. I guess they took the rest for a picnic on the road.”

  Janusz said stiffly, “I want to leave an inventory of anything we use, you understand? I want to pay for everything. We’re not stealing from these people.”

  Peszek grunted and with one swipe of the bloody hand, swept the stack of dishes to the floor where they crashed and broke. “Add that to your inventory.”

  A surge of anger hit Janusz, but he forced it back. “I will. We’re paying for everything.”

  “You can. You’re rich. Last time around, we lived off fucking places like this, and nobody paid. It’s no different this time. You should wake up. Things have changed.”

  “I know that,” he said, and turned. “I’m going upstairs.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to see what the apple orchard looks like from the second floor.” He went up a narrow staircase with a shiny polished railing. It was plain that Peszek was an annoying lower class snob on top of his cowardice. It was hard to imagine a more grotesque combination of qualities to have in someone he had to travel with, and worse, rely on for his safety and security.

  Janusz passed several rooms: a sewing room with forlorn machine and shirts and scattered socks never to be mended; and a room that belonged to the children in the picture downstairs, two narrow beds, one neatly made up with a blue and white coverlet, the other with the bedding and mattress half on the floor. The windows in each room were wide open for some reason, the plain muslin curtains stirring in the breeze. Farther down the hallway, overlooking the orchard and the pine forest beyond, was the master bedroom, where the sturdy parents in the picture slept. The large metal-framed bed here was also disarrayed, a table overturned and the lamp broken. Over the bed was an ornate wooden crucifix. Who were these people? What had they loved and dreamed and feared? He thought of his father and him, their solitary meals with lecture hall conversation about politics and science, the occasional parties with colleagues from the university, all bright and dynamic. So different, he imagined, from the faithful family who had recently lived here. Different from that specimen downstairs in the kitchen, too, he thought.

  He went to the wide window and looked down over the orchard. It was beautiful and sad, like the whole farm, like the animals in the barn, the fruit going to waste because it would never be harvested, the lives here torn up in an instant and, very likely, never to be restored. He leaned out. He couldn’t imagine Zosia here. She was a pure city girl. On their infrequent excursions into the country she complained bitterly, and with some justice because the summer swarms of tiny black midges found her irresistible. After one picnic she had to soak in a bath of Epsom salts and looked like she had the measles. Midges even flew into her mouth and made her cough madly, but then, Zosia often had her mouth open because she chattered so much. Midges and bugs left him alone. That was welcome but mystifying as well.

  Lidia loved the countryside. Of course she lived on a farm now. This vista would delight her. The pulse started again just outside his vision of the trees, the red apples, the dark green pines and his fingers unconsciously tapped out a rhythm on the windowsill.

  As if in reply, he heard a scuffling, stirring from inside the closet behind him. It sounded exactly like the agitated noises Cassius would make when he had to be locked up in the closet at home. Janusz felt a nostalgic swell. The farm family had probably done the same thing with their dog or they decided, like the radio, he had to be left behind.

  Carefully, Janusz opened the closet door. He didn’t want a strange dog leaping at him. Instead, he was amazed, then terrified to see a little girl perhaps ten years old, with a cold stare, pointing an older rifle almost as big as she was, directly at him. He had a split second to register that she had cunningly braced the rifle on a stack of books so it was aimed at his chest, then she pulled the trigger.

  Eleven

  Janusz reflexively swatted the rifle just as she pulled the trigger and the barrel swung wildly away, blasting a neat hole in the wall right below the crucifix. The rifle clattered off the stack of books to the floor and the little girl tried to run past him, but he grabbed her around the waist.

  He was incredulous. A child tried to kill him. It really was a new world.

  He expected her to struggle and squirm and so he had gripped her tightly, but she became inert and limp instead, staring away from him toward the open bedroom doorway.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said vehemently. “Do you understand?”

  She hesitated, then nodded. She was a like a very large doll. “Yes. I do.”

  He let her go, again assuming she would run away, but she stood still, then faced him. She was a plain, open-faced girl with hazel eyes and tightly curled reddish blonde hair and freckles. She wore a white-frilled dress with high sleeves and lime-coloured shoes.

  He took a deep, heavy breath. He had been shot at twice today and the day wasn’t over yet. “What’s your name?” he asked gently.

  “Gabriela,” she said gravely.

  “A very pretty name. I’m Mr Rudzinski.” He put out his hand and she took it briefly in her feathery grasp.

  Before he could say anything else, they both started at the frantic clumping, stomping up the stairs and then along the hallway and Peszek bolted through the door. “Who’s shooting?” he yelled. He instantly surveyed the room, saw the rifle and with agility that impressed Janusz, scooped it up with his good hand. “Was that you, professor?”

  “No, it was the young lady. I’m not a professor,” he said. “I surprised her and she was defending herself.”

  “Little shit!” Peszek snapped. “I should blow your head off!”

  “Watch your language, sergeant. She’s a little girl and I believe this is her house.”

  Peszek’s grey skin had turned an unhealthy pink in his fury. “Fuck her and fuck you, professor! This is my house. Get the fuck downstairs!”

  “It’s all right,” he said to Gabriela soothingly, taking her hand and leading her downstairs, Peszek menacingly following with the rifle. Going down the stairs was like a little march and Janusz heard a march tune, maybe for piccolo and a comic toy drum. “Dum, dum, dum, ta-dum,” he muttered. He wished he had something to jot it down on.

  Peszek brought them into the disarrayed front room and he sank down into a high-backed chair, the rifle across his knee. “You know what I do when one of my girls does any kind of shit?” he shouted at Gabriela, who stood calmly. “I take them over my knee or I get out my belt—” He stopped, dumfounded that Janusz curtly waved him down.

  “That’s enough, sergeant. You’re frightening her” Janusz said, the march tune evaporating. He turned to the girl, “We’re not going to hurt you. The sergeant’s been wounded and he’s in p
ain. He doesn’t mean it.”

  “What do you know about kids, professor? She doesn’t look scared to me. Probably got ideas to cut our throats.”

  “Why don’t you sit down?” Janusz said, righting a chair for her. He noticed that the dress and shoes, which initially seemed appropriate for a party or formal occasion, were slightly torn and spotted with dirt. “Now, Gabriela, where is your family?”

  “Yeah, are they coming back? How many of them?” Peszek growled quickly. “You have a telephone?”

  “Give her a chance, sergeant,” Janusz said quietly. He suddenly yearned to know if he could contact Lidia. “Do you have a telephone, Gabriela?” She slowly shook her head.

  As he and Peszek see-sawed questions ineffectually, the girl sat still and straight. The cold stare he imagined when she pointed the rifle at him was actually more a vacant look. She’s in shock, Janusz thought uneasily and with sympathy.

  Then they spoke for the next fifteen minutes. She answered in a level voice no matter if Peszek shouted or Janusz spoke gently. She had been left behind. Her mother and father and her brother had driven away the day before, packing just what they needed with brutal haste into the truck that was usually used for taking the apples to the village. The village post office, Gabriela said, had a telephone, but there wasn’t another one for miles. She had been left behind because when the truck drove off, she was hiding in the pine forest. Her father had cruelly decreed that the two cows, which she loved, milked and tended, were to be abandoned. So were the mare and her foal. Janusz could see that this made perfect sense, but a ten-year-old girl would see it very differently, especially when she was the Cinderella of the family, or at least made it sound that way, shouldering all the chores, all of the drudge work, while her older brother lazed away.