The National Treasure

by William P Wood

  “Well, Gabriela, you have the heart of a showman,” he said to her. “Well played. Now Pesezk and I have to go in case the soldiers come back or someone else comes along.”

  He started for the house as Gabriela said clearly and unequivocally, “I’m coming with you, Papa.”

  “Impossible!”

  Fifteen

  These days, Janusz discovered, the impossible was likely and even inevitable.

  There were seven of them, counting the two cows, the mare and her foal. The mare slowly pulled the long cart, her foal tethered alongside while the loosely roped cows sauntered at their leisure behind the cart, making occasional noises of protest when Gabriela, who sat with the reins, spurred the mare a trifle too fast. There was no alternative to this menagerie on foot. The car, worked too hard, ridden too far, had passed to its final reward.

  Janusz walked slowly beside Gabriela’s side of the cart. In the back were a thin covering of apples and straw and beneath them, Pesezk bundled in a blanket. It was very tense for the first few miles as they left the farm, Janusz and Pesezk always braced for the snap of rifles shooting at them or troops bearing down on them, unavoidable and lethal.

  But all it did was get hotter. He was sweatier than the day before, and felt worse without a bath in between. Pesezk grunted and groaned and grumbled from under his fruity camouflage. They had to take Gabriela, of course; she insisted and it was too dangerous to leave her alone at the farm. Before they left, Gabriela had calmly changed Pesezk’s bandage and the sight of the purple, puffy flesh was disturbing even to a layman like Janusz. He and Pesezk argued ceaselessly on the road.

  “We have to avoid the village, Karol,” Janusz said. “You heard Kluk. The front is around here. We don’t want to get caught in a fight in a village.”

  “Now you’re a military genius, professor? They have a telephone! I can call my friends, start arranging things!”

  “Lidia has a telephone. Call from there. You’ve got the map, your job is to keep us heading in the right direction.”

  “How long? How many days crawling along like this?”

  “I’ve learned that you can’t hurry cows. Brass sections, some singers, but not cows.” He smiled up at Gabriela who made a trilling sound to make the mare move faster. He had also learned, in a burst of revelation that was actually not too surprising, that Gabriela was not the daughter of farmer Rybak. She had been sold to him when she was three years old and raised much like the cows and the mare, to do work for a little food and a place to sleep. She was granted the boon of actually sharing a bedroom with the Rybaks’ son. “He pulled my hair and hid my flute,” she said, reporting facts not feelings. “He wasn’t so bad except he was so lazy.”

  No wonder she became self-reliant, Janusz thought. She had to survive.

  Janusz begrudged the slow pace, but recognised that they could not move any faster. They stopped every couple of hours, drank water and ate the little food Gabriela had scrounged. As they walked, he kept trying to picture what he would say to Lidia, or what she would say to him. A multiplying variety of reunions came to him, all dissolving like the morning mist in the hot sunshine. Janusz admitted he was terrifically anxious to see her again and more than a little frightened.

  “I don’t have to lie here,” Pesezk complained in the late afternoon. “I can walk, too.”

  “No, you can’t. It’s hard. Besides, I don’t want anybody seeing you. A man and his little girl are much less threatening than you, Karol.”

  Gabriela giggled. It was not a bad journey. Soon they would turn to the main road, the one Captain Kluk and his soldiers had travelled to the farm. They met few people, only slow wanderers like themselves. The friendliest was an old couple in an ancient touring car, dented and tied with ropes, festooned with luggage and bags so that it crept along like a fat black beetle. The couple stopped and they all chatted, exchanging scraps of information about how badly the battles were going, where the enemy might be, and finally, bartering some food for apples. Gabriela was the expert, firmly insisting on so much sausage and potato for so many apples. Exactly. Janusz carefully removed the apples from Peszek’s hiding place and passed them to the old couple.

  “We could’ve taken their fucking car,” Pesezk said as they resumed their walk. “I’ve got a rifle.”

  “They’re miserable people just like us. What if they’d turned a rifle on us and taken the cows?”

  Gabriela giggled again. “Served them right. My cows only like me. If they took my cows, they’d get kicked all the time and they wouldn’t get any milk.”

  “Those two old carcasses had things we could use, professor.”

  “We’re not highway bandits.”

  “Maybe we should be.”

  Janusz ignored him. He was concerned that the old couple, like Captain Kluk, had only the vaguest notion where the enemy might be. The invaders were close, that was understood, but from where along these fields, the forest, were they likely to erupt? He wiped sweat from his eyes.

  “What’s that, Papa?” Gabriela asked.

  “What’s what?”

  “What you’re humming.”

  “Was I?” Janusz was genuinely surprised. He hadn’t noticed he was doing anything but plunk one dirty shoe in front of the other or listen to the cows or watch the foal nudge its mother. “I suppose it’s a melody.”

  “I like it,” she announced. “Do some more of it.”

  Peszek swore nosily from the cart. “I’m a dying man and you two are killing me. Have mercy and shoot me.”

  Janusz held the side of the cart as he walked and from somewhere a melody rose around him and he hummed it. It was clear and simple and he saw it scored for a small orchestra. Unlike many of his colleagues, he had the gift of orchestration from scratch when he composed rather than going from, say, piano to orchestral score. This sojourners tune he was hearing, perhaps it would be played on violins, oboe, clarinet, cello, trumpet. And a solo flute. He looked up at Gabriela as he hummed. A simple melody that an amateur could play with confidence and appreciation.

  “Gabriela” he asked suddenly, “you keep calling me papa. Why are you doing that? I’m not your father.”

  She trilled for the mare and said, “I have to have one.”

  “Shoot me, shoot me,” Peszek grumbled.

  Janusz wished he had something to jot down even a few parts of the tune. He was afraid it would dart away as quickly as it had come, but then, he felt reassured. No, he had it. It was his and it would not escape.

  They walked until the early evening. In a small clearing just off the road, they made a crude camp, Pesezk started a small fire, and they ate the sausages and potatoes. Gabriela tended the cows and the horses. Janusz felt useless.

  “How far to the main road?” he asked Peszek as they sat around the fire after eating.

  “Tomorrow morning sometime. If we don’t stop to gossip. If we don’t get shot at. If we don’t—” He stopped. “Shit. I’m tired.”

  “We’ll make better time on the main road. All right, I think we should get to my ex-wife’s farm by nightfall.” Ex-wife, former wife, wife-to-be, once and future lover – they all sounded inadequate and weak.

  “We’ve been lucky so far. Too lucky. I wouldn’t believe it, except it’s you, isn’t it?” Pesezk sat cross-legged on the ground, blanket over his shoulders, wounded hand in his lap. He still had on his dirty shirt and cheap suit from their earlier flight and he looked feverish. He sounded very hearty, though. “You’re our luck, professor. I said so.”

  Gabriela sat nearer the small fire, the ring of pines and white elms bounding them like sentinels. She took off her cap and her hair was lank, sweaty. “I don’t understand. I had a lucky chicken foot once. I don’t think it’s the same.”

  “It is precisely the same. Superstition.” Janusz was adamant.

  “It still is, professor. No use denying what is. Listen to me, kid,” he leaned close to Gabriela, “I hope you never have to find out if what he’s got is real or no
t. The things you have to see. The things you have to do to find out, well, it’s better you never do.”

  “Now I really don’t understand,” and she looked at Janusz who yawned. He didn’t want to debate metaphysics with either of them. Firelight shimmered off of them and the ring of trees. Last night they were alone in the world on the farm; now they were alone in the haunted forest.

  “I would like you to play something, Gabriela,” he said. “Whatever you please.”

  Peszek grumbled, grimaced, and pulled the blanket around him like a carapace. “Why not? She won’t know anything I’d like to hear.”

  Janusz encouragingly nodded as Gabriela, putting the flute to her mouth, with smiles then solemnity stood in front of the fire and began playing an old country tune, timeless, worn, but vital. She kept her eyes on Janusz, searching for his approval, and he nodded to her several times. Peszek eventually watched her, and Janusz thought of unspoken regret in the sergeant’s expression. The worst devils might lurk out there amongst the dark and primeval forest, but here, at the fire, they were together and safe.

  And tomorrow they would be on the main road.

  The Third Day

  Sixteen

  “Something’s wrong. Very wrong,” Peszek muttered uneasily as they broke out of the trees and headed for the main road not far away across a field. “You hear it, professor?”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “That’s what’s wrong.” Peszek braced himself, rising halfway up in the cart. He had the rifle close to his good hand. Gabriela urged the mare on steadily and they crossed a field of low grass and flowers. There was a vague acrid tang in the air.

  Janusz, like the others, had spent a restless night, uncomfortable sleeping on the ground, dreamlessly though. The mid-morning sun was high and hard, the air dry. He was irritated at the cows and their petulant objections, the creeping, ambling pace, his own hunger and anxieties. Only Gabriela seemed immune, serenely driving the cart, milking, feeding, checking the bandage on Peszek’s hand. It looked awful still.

  “Can you be more specific, Karol?” he said, as they continued toward the main road.

  “It’s wrong. It’s wrong.” Peszek trembled with nervous agitation.

  “Well, that is more specific.”

  “Slow down, kid,” Peszek ordered in his old command voice. He was already awkwardly swinging himself out of the cart. Janusz eased him down to the ground. “I’m going to take a look ahead.” He gripped the rifle.

  “I’ll come too.”

  “Stay here, professor, with the kid. I’ll give the all clear if it’s safe, but if I don’t, you get back to the trees as fast as you can.”

  Janusz nodded, and stood beside the mare’s damp flanks, the foal playfully nudging his side, while Peszek loped across the field and up the embankment. Gabriela sniffed. “What can it be, Papa?”

  “I have no idea,” he said, suddenly nervous. Peszek’s blocky form scuttled up the gentle grassy embankment and lay prone at the top where the main road was laid. Janusz patted Gabriela’s hand. The terrible suspense of these few moments was the worst he had ever experienced, and as he was about to say, “I think everything’s all right,” he saw Peszek slowly stand up, the rifle hanging down from his hand. Peszek stood on the main road, his back to Janusz and Gabriela.

  Why didn’t he signal, one way or the other? Janusz’s involuntary tic returned. But the sergeant was immovable, a blocky figure against the cloudless blue sky, inscrutable and nerve-wracking.

  Finally, Janusz couldn’t wait. Something must indeed be wrong. He said to Gabriela, “I‘m going to check. Keep an eye on us and if I start waving my arms …” he demonstrated like a clumsy flightless bird, “… turn the cart around and hide in the forest, just like you did before.”

  “I’m scared” she said uncharacteristically.

  “That’s fine. So am I. We’re both scared. Look at the sergeant up there. He’s probably scared too. Probably the only ones not scared at this moment are the cows.”

  He tried to sound amusing, but Gabriela’s strained expression indicated he failed. She had first struck him as a plain-faced little girl, but sitting on the cart’s driver seat, simply dressed, afraid yet resolute, he saw she was quite beautiful and wonderful.

  Janusz nodded repeatedly as he rapidly crossed the field, always keeping Peszek’s immobile figure in view. What would his music publisher, the wealthy and important ladies and gentlemen he had dined and cultivated and sported with just days ago, the snooty composers and conductors all over the world, think if they watched unshaven Janusz Rudzinski scurrying across a ragged field in stolen unwashed farmer’s clothes, like some cliché character from a police melodrama? What was he running from? What was he running to? And, couldn’t he have come with a more inventive or original scene?

  Puffing, he climbed the gentle embankment, whispering the sergeant’s name hoarsely. When Peszek didn’t answer, Janusz took a deep breath, stood up, and joined him at the main road. The acrid reek was stronger here with good reason.

  Beside him, Peszek murmured rote prayers. Janusz said something, but it was distant and pointless. He stared and stared.

  Peszek stopped praying and said softly, with great intensity. “The kid mustn’t see this.”

  “No. No matter what.” He was dazed and shot through with sick stabbing pains, as if someone unseen were actually knifing him. “What happened here? What is this?” Janusz gasped.

  His strangled questions must have touched something reflexive in Peszek. The rifle came to port arms, and the sergeant slowly walked along the main road, Janusz a step behind him. The sergeant spoke with utter neutrality about these monstrous sights from Bosch or Durer.

  The main road itself for a long distance was a wild clutter of objects among which jumped and snarled household dogs gone mad. Janusz rubbed his eyes because he was either crying or the burning tyres and bodies trapped in overturned cars or trucks had perfumed the air with a stinging scent. They walked carefully, stepping over bloody, bullet-decorated bodies, people of all ages. Two sisters in stylish coats and pretty flower print dresses, faces red masks, arms flung in frozen mid-dance, lying on the crowded road. Dead horses, rotting bellies swollen in a diabolical mimicry of new life, lay everywhere. Many bodies had fallen off the other side of the road where Janusz, Peszek and Gabriela couldn’t see them, where they lay in heaps, clothing thrown up over white legs and breasts bared by the violence of their deaths.

  “There must be hundreds of them,” Janusz said in rage and sorrow.

  “Thousand maybe. See, what happened, professor, a couple of days ago they were bunched up on the road here, heading along like us, fast as the slowest truck or family ahead of them, and then the planes came dropping out of the sky, no warning, maybe a second or two, enough for a few people to try to run for it,” Peszek dispassionately lectured as they strolled among the obscene killing ground. “But nobody can outrun a machine gun. The planes just came along the road shooting as they went, and after the first pass, they came back as often as they liked, and the road turned into a butcher’s block, didn’t it? Nothing could use this road now, no trucks or cars or tanks. Fuck, nothing could move two feet unless they were like us, taking in the sights.” His voice caught and he shook. “Not a chance. Not a fucking chance, not any of them.”

  Janusz saw a baby stroller bedside him, the stroller still startlingly upright as if the mother or nurse had just stepped away, except that red dripped down one side from five neat holes punched in it. He could not look into the stroller. There were many small bodies sprawled around, if you had the courage to see them. The maddened dogs avoided him and Peszek because we’re still walking. But the starving dogs tore and snarled at the flesh splayed and bloody on the road.

  “Kluk was here. He should have warned us,” Janusz said savagely.

  “He didn’t know we were leaving.”

  Janusz then saw the true horror. “What would he have said in any case?”

  Dies Irae in
fact, he thought. This is what it looks like. This is the world now.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said haltingly. “Move fast. Avoid places where there are people.” He looked down the road, then back, trying to print the colours and shapes irrevocably in his memory. “Is there anybody alive?” he asked the sergeant.

  “We are,” Peszek said harshly, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. “Come on.”

  Seventeen

  The afternoon sun broke through the thick forest in random bright spots, so their route in the silent, otherwise dark ranks of pines, elms and oaks was marked by cheerful golden pools. Janusz welcomed the darkness, though, after the images blasted in his mind just hours before.

  They were moving faster now, regardless of the cows’ voluble displeasure, the cart rattling and shaking. Gabriela asked again and again what was wrong, sounding more anxious each time, her worry beginning when she watched Janusz and Peszek careering off the road back to her. Well, actually more Janusz holding the sergeant up as they ran since whatever intensity had kept Peszek upright on the road seemed to have leached from him. All Janusz told her was that they needed to go faster, they had to get where they were going more quickly. Peszek was quiet in the back of the cart, except that every so often he would strike the wooden side with his good fist.

  “Don’t be afraid, Gabriela,” Janusz managed to say, leaving off his own horror and terror. “You’ll like where we’re going, I’m sure. I know you’ll like Lidia. I’m certain she’ll like you.”

  “She’s your wife.” Gabriela frowned to herself. “Why does she lives so far from you?”

  “Well, it’s complicated. She was my wife. Well, she was my wife, then she wasn’t, then she was again, and then she wasn’t again.”

  “That sounds silly.”

  “I suppose so now that you point it out.”

  “But why are we going to see her?”