The National Treasure

by William P Wood

  “I ran into the trees and hid there,” she said, looking down at her hands, “because I knew Papa would come for me and then we would take everyone with us.”

  “He never came?”

  She shook her head. “I came back and they were all gone. They left me,” and she dropped her head as if a string holding her up had been cut, and she began sobbing.

  Peszek didn’t move, but Janusz put his arm around her. What else was there to do? Unlike the sergeant he had no children, and even though Lidia and he tried, they were not successful. So now he awkwardly yet tenderly held a disconsolate little girl because that was all he could do. Sometimes, he realised, the one important thing in the whole world was to tell a fearful and frightened child that everything would be all right and make it so.

  “Jesus Mother Mary,” Peszek said, getting up and heading for the kitchen. “Any more food around here, kid?”

  “I think so,” she wept and coughed.

  “Then go and get it.”

  Janusz helped her up, talking to her. What else was there to do, when you considered where he was, what had happened, what was ahead of them all – what else was there to do?

  The late afternoon became lush purple twilight, then a sighing evening of invisible insects. There was a sense, false he assumed, of safety and isolation in the darkness on this farm set in the fortress of the pine forest.

  Peszek roughly stripped off his bloodstained green tie, hung his coat on a chair, stormed around while Gabriela unearthed more bread, a forgotten jar of pigs’ knuckles, a jar of pickles, and another wedge of cheese only slightly tinged with bluish mold. On his own, Peszek found a half full bottle of vodka and an unopened bottle of plum brandy. Gabriela cleaned up the broken dishes even after Janusz said she didn’t have to, and he would, of course, pay for them. She said softly, “It’s my house.”

  They ate by a single lamp, turned low, their faces shadowed, grim and pale. Peszek insisted. “Word gets around these farm districts,” Peszek said, nodding. “They hear a family’s clearing out, they swoop in like vultures. I don’t want any snoops to know we’re here. Only got this …” He had the rifle beside him on the table.

  “I suspect everyone has run somewhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re alone in this area,” Janusz said, eating gingerly. His appetite, like the vanished urge for cigarette after cigarette, was tuned to an unfamiliar switch which had been flipped off. But he still needed nourishment. Gabriela sat quietly, cutting up a knuckle and some bread. Janusz wondered what she was thinking, cast adrift by her family, left with two strangers, the next day uncertain, appalling under the circumstances? He wanted to comfort her. He really didn’t know how.

  “Gone quiet, professor,” Peszek said, sitting back. He had appropriated the vodka for himself. He had also apparently decided to needle Janusz by calling him ‘professor’. Typically childish, Janusz thought.

  “I’m thinking about tomorrow.”

  “Well, so am I. I don’t know what we’re going to do. Can’t follow the Lieutenant’s plan now, all out of date. Trains gone, people gone. No telephone here. No idea where the enemy is. Got to figure out some way to get word to my friends. Only way to get us to Switzerland.” He drank jerkily, his disturbing, unfocused gaze either on Janusz or Gabriela. He wiped his moustache with one finger. “You got more ammunition for the rifle, kid?”

  She nodded slowly and went out.

  Janusz stood. The shadows around the room were spiky and hallucinatory. He was so tired. “I can’t think straight now. We’ll be more clear-headed in the morning. I will be anyway.” He would make sure they went straight to Lidia. His quest pointed only to that destination.

  Peszek belched twice. “I got to hand it to you, professor. You did all right today. You did. Take fancy Lieutenant Walicki, he wouldn’t have lasted two minutes in a real fight. Shit, he didn’t today. But you,” he wiggled a finger at Janusz, “I bet you’d be the only one who walked away. I know this kind of thing. Guys you’d bet would make it through machine guns, grenades, bombs without a scratch, you’d find a leg or maybe just a helmet afterward. Then guys like you, who shouldn’t last longer than a fart,” he giggled, drank, and stood too, “they walked over a pile of bodies like it was a stroll in the fucking park. Figure that out, professor. I sure as crap never did.”

  “Magnum mysterium,” Janusz replied. He noticed the small gold cross around Peszek’s neck with his tie off and shirt open. The faithful always had names for magic and mysteries, even if they were clueless about the real answers to their desperate questions. “I don’t feel lucky. I didn’t this morning.”

  Peszek belched again as Gabriela came back with three boxes of shells and put them on the table. “It’s not luck …” Peszek stood up fast, his chair tipping over behind him, “… it’s the fucking hand of God. That what you’ve got, professor. The hand of God on you.”

  “I decline the honour.”

  “It’s not the fucking lottery. You don’t have a choice. But, why a guy like you, why a guy …” he shook his head. It truly was a mystery too great for him to understand. It simply was.

  Janusz motioned and Gabriela took the lamp and rifle shells and they all went back to the front room. It was impenetrably dark outside, a warm early autumn night around and over them like swaddling. The sergeant sat in a chair with the rifle propped beside him, the boxes of shells on the floor. The departed family silently, disapprovingly regarded them from the framed picture. Peszek was saying something, but for some reason Janusz couldn’t hear him clearly. Tired. Just tired and muddle-headed, he thought. They tried the radio again, but this time only got static. It was as if the world had ended outside of that room and its cone of lamplight.

  At some point, Gabriela sat on a chair beside Peszek, carefully removing his bloody handkerchief while he emptied the vodka. He’d left his gun and the plum brandy in the kitchen and he didn’t seem very attentive to the rifle and Janusz, standing in a daze, gazing out of the window into the inky night, the rhythm of the unseen crickets and flies and frogs, was adrift in a swirl of noisy impressions. Like dreaming while half-awake or perhaps half-asleep. Something was roiling beneath all of it, a sonorous river, but he couldn’t quite get into it.

  When he turned back, Gabriela was intently sewing flaps of skin on Peszek’s hand, her neat needlework as unruffled and methodical like she was repairing a sock hole. Pesezk looked bored except when he groaned. She finished by wiping iodine on the sergeant’s wounded hand, wrapping a clean bandage around it. Peszek watched her. “Farm girls know how to handle a man. There was one. What was her name? Farm girl, little older than this one …” and he lapsed into obscene reverie, Gabriela wide-eyed.

  Janusz came awake. “Shut up, sergeant.” He said it wearily but with force. “You’re drunk and you make me sick.”

  Peszek abruptly paused in his happy recollection. “Know that. Know that from the first time you saw me. You make me want to puke, professor. So we’re even. No. We’re fucking comrades.” He dropped the empty vodka bottle. He got clumsily to his feet and began to sing Song of the Fatherland’s Children. He had a tolerable tenor, much to Janusz’ surprise: ‘No enemy can defeat children of the blessed homeland! Fatherland, fatherland, to you all voices sing! Comrades to all, peace forever! Fatherland, fatherland, to you all voices sing!’

  He waved his newly bandaged hand in a sloppy salute and fell face forward to the floor.

  Gabriela jumped back in surprise, knocking over the iodine, which spread in a rusty stain over the rug. Janusz contemplated Peszek, who gave out a low, clattering snore. “He saved my life this morning. There’s no avoiding it. I would have been killed,” he said to the girl, wondering whether to leave Peszek where he was. “And tonight he’s singing my song. I wrote that.”

  “You wrote it?” she asked in bewilderment.

  “In one hour. Dashed it off. Didn’t give it a second thought. Let’s put him in the chair.”

  The two of them struggled with Peszek’s noisome dead
weight. Janusz noticed that Gabriela looked at him oddly. “Your song?” she said, and it was clear she didn’t believe him.

  “Yours too,” he said. It was simpler to let it go at that. Many people, he’d discovered early on, thought tunes materialised from the ether around them. A universal patriotic ditty like Song just popped in existence.

  Magnum mysterium, Janusz thought for the second time that night. That’s what inspiration was, a great unfathomable mystery.

  He smiled wanly at Gabriela. A depraved fear crept into his exhausted mind. He wondered if civilization had fallen away so fast and so far that he had to protect her from Peszek.

  Twelve

  I’m a spectre, Janusz thought. I haunt hallways.

  He glided from Peszek, now snoring away in the master bedroom and headed for Gabriela. He carried the lamp, whose flame wavered as he walked so his shadow slid sinuously along the wall. I’m the ghost of the farmhouse, he thought. Oooooohhhh.

  A few minutes ago, as he turned to leave Peszek where he and Gabriela dumped him on the big bed beneath the bullet-holed crucifix, the sergeant called out, “Where you going with the rifle, professor?”

  “I’m taking it with me in case I see any intruders.” He cradled the rifle in one arm, held the lamp in the other. “I’m going to be keeping watch first, so I need the rifle.”

  “Leave it with me. You ever use one?”

  “It can’t be that hard.”

  “Leave it,” Peszek said, half-sitting up in bed, “I know how to use it. You’ll shoot yourself. Besides, I still think that one,” he jerked his injured hand toward Gabriela’s room, “might try something when we’re not looking.”

  “She’s a scared child and you frightened her even more. She’s not going to attack either of us. She bandaged your hand. Good Lord.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Leave the rifle anyway. You really will shoot yourself or me or maybe even the girl.”

  Janusz thought for a moment. The sergeant was probably right. The likelihood was that he would miss anyone he aimed at, alert any intruders, or shoot Peszek or Gabriela by accident. He put the rifle alongside the bed where Peszek could reach it.

  “You’re not going to touch her,” Janusz said. “The way you were talking before. I won’t let you do anything to her.”

  “You have a dirty mind, professor,” Peszek chuckled. “That was just soldier chatter, right? I wouldn’t go near one hair of her sweet little head.” He kept chuckling. “Now, if you want her—” and Janusz broke in.

  “Stop. Please. No more.”

  Something else bothered him, though.

  “You mentioned your children,” he said. “You have a wife and daughters.”

  “So what?”

  “If you’re going to use me to get into Switzerland, you’re not only deserting your country, you’re deserting your family.” And I just gave him the rifle, Janusz thought. But, of course, Peszek had made it abundantly clear how much he needs me. He wouldn’t hurt one hair of my little head, either.

  Peszek wearily flopped back on the bed. “Go to hell, professor. Fuck you. My family’s my business, not your fucking business.”

  “So they are. No offence, sergeant.” A diplomatic retreat was in order. Nothing could be gained by fighting over what a bastard Peszek was. “I’ll wake you at two a.m.” They had agreed to keep watch on the road to the farm in two shifts. Janusz volunteered for the first because the sergeant was drunk, although he seemed to shake that off with incredible rapidity, and wounded and exhausted. I’m merely exhausted, he thought.

  Peszek muttered, “Keep your eyes on the road. I don’t want to wake up with some fucking soldier or farmer sticking a bayonet in my face. Don’t go to sleep.”

  Janusz left the room. Everyone knows spectres don’t sleep. He walked toward the children’s bedroom. But spectres, he knew, are not exempt from their own phantoms.

  He was haunted by ghosts. His mother was one, even with her exuberant laughter, that he could barely recall now. It hadn’t saved her. He had loved her extravagantly. He admitted that Lidia resembled her, but without what turned out to be his mother’s fatal fragility. We all struggle to hold onto what makes us happy or get it back, he thought. Perhaps to him outgoing, adventurous Lidia was the spectre of his mother. Dire notion. Then there was Mickhal, the bold son and good brother who was fearless on the playing field and in any game. Mickhal’s spectre was a blur of happy motion.

  Janusz paused at Gabriela’s door. Exhaustion had loosened recollections and reflections. His father was his last spectre and the most equivocal. A very tall, slightly stooping man with a large nose, big hands, always bundled in vests, sweaters, shirts under his suits no matter what the season. An ambiguous grin for me. If he had been asked any time before today, Janusz would have firmly pronounced that his father loved him and spoiled him after his mother’s death, when it was just the two of them. Clothes, toys, then schooling, including years of expensive tutoring in musical composition, even after Janusz had petulantly declared he would not be a doctor as his father hoped. He really seemed to enjoy my juvenile music, Janusz recalled, and he drove me harder to study piano, then musical composition. But, the fact was that his father hated music, claimed repeatedly he had no sense of tone himself or saw much point in banging, scraping instruments. Standing in the hallway by the flickering lamplight, Janusz realised that his father had not spoiled him at all. The relentless forced march to become a composer was his father’s way of securing his abject failure. He never thought I had any talent, Janusz saw. He must have resented and hated me very much after his wife died, and blamed me completely for the destruction of his family. His vengeance was to let me become a composer and fail at it.

  Or was it a more subtle punishment? Become a successful composer, achieve fame and fortune in an endeavor my father derided as trivial, pointless and indulgent?

  These unsought nocturnal epiphanies were very disturbing. Better to lay them aside. Janusz tapped on Gabriela’s door, and carefully opened it.

  She sat on her bed, wearing a long plain nightgown that buttoned up the front. There was an ancient cloth doll, too young for her, laid on the bed, and a small tattered booklet. She started when he came in. He apologised.

  “I’ll be right next door,” he said. “I’m going to keep an eye out for a while.”

  She nodded. Quiet child, he thought. He was a little surprised to see that her bed was not the neat one with the blue and white coverlet. She had torn her own apart and put it back together. Like Cassius ravaging his bedding when he feared he was being abandoned, Janusz remembered. “Don’t worry a about the sergeant,” Janusz said with a reassuring smile. “He’s sleeping and I’ll be keeping an eye on him too.”

  As he was about to leave, Gabriela got up and showed him the booklet and a simple flute. She shyly held it. “This is my little book of music. I practise when I’ve finished with my chores, but Papa keeps taking it away. I steal it back from him.”

  He looked at the well-worn booklet of old tunes and fingering exercises. None of mine, he thought automatically. Janusz was astonished. He wrongly assumed she was ignorant about anything musical. “So you understand when I told you I wrote that song the sergeant sang. Well, tried to sing.”

  She laughed. “We sing it at school every day.”

  “My apologies for that. I wish I had given you something better.”

  She lowered her head slightly. “Would you show me how to play better on this?” She indicated the flute. “Please? I would really like to play so much better.”

  “It would be a pleasure, Gabriela.” He hesitated. “We can talk about it tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” she said, getting into bed. Two more small wooden crucifixes on the wall, small black and white photographs of the mountains. Not much to dream about in this place or this room, he thought. He made a vow. I can help her dream. But he was adamant about leaving the next day to go to Lidia. How to nurture Gabriela at the same time? It was too late tonight t
o work out how all of these things could harmoniously occur.

  She curled tightly in bed and whimpered when he turned to go. She wanted him to leave the lamp. “I’ll turn it down,” he said, putting it on a small bureau at the end of her bed, and lowering the flame. “It will last longer.” The bedroom was cool with shadows but at least not lost in the complete darkness everywhere else.

  He felt his way along the dark hallway to the sewing room and fixed himself a perch in a stiff chair beside the open window. He could see the black ribbon of road leading to the house vanishing into the pines. He had provisioned the room with some cheese and the bottle of plum brandy. On the sewing machine table, which he pulled near his chair, he set Peszek’s empty gun. It definitely was empty. At least I can wave it around if the barbarian hordes swoop down, Janusz thought, or point it at nosy scavengers. He settled into the chair pulling a rough blanket over his legs, facing out into the forest, stars overhead and the moon a bare sliver.

  I am a shepherd, he thought. I guard my flock.

  He opened the plum brandy and cautiously sipped. It was violent, sharp, and hot. Then warming. A distant owl sounded, joined by other birds. After you got out of the city’s overbearing soundscape, you were amazed at all these primeval noises like scattered pebbles in the ocean of silence.

  Blanket pulled closer. What a day. Peszek said he was lucky. Not lucky materially or even in renown. Lucky because he had some kind of invisible protective cloak. Was it lucky when he didn’t jump into the flood lapping at their doorstep and Mickhal did? I lived, he died. Like this morning. Lieutenant Walicki, Jozef, died and the youngster Dunin too. I lived. They died. Peszek was a true judge of such things from personal experience.

  Janusz shivered slightly. They died, he thought, and they died for me.

  He sipped the brandy again, a fiery trail flowing down in his chest. Tonight I’m the guardian of two lives and my own. Luck would be welcome.