The National Treasure

by William P Wood

  “To make sure she’s all right, because I’m very worried about her,” and his voice caught because the spectacle of the road rose before him, real and imminent, and appalling. He couldn’t talk for a moment. He tried not to imagine Lidia lost among the dead on the main road. Or himself, come to that. Certainly not Gabriela or Peszek either.

  Peszek pulled himself closer to Gabriela. “Listen, kid, I have two daughters, a couple of years younger than you. Sometimes at night they start crying, and I come in and say, ‘little princesses’; I call them both princesses, they don’t cry. They’re never scared. You know why?”

  Gabriella turned to look at him and shook her head.

  “I tell them, little princesses always have the most loyal guard who watches over them. He stands right outside their bedroom all night and makes sure no one – no bad wizard or evil queen – can get in. You know who that guard is? It’s me,” he tapped his chest with his bandaged hand and winced. “No one gets by me. So, don’t worry, okay?”

  Gabriela studied Peszek’s grinning, walleyed features, then she nodded. She mulls, Janusz thought. She mulls things and then makes up her mind. Janusz was touched by Peszek’s attempt to soothe the girl. He wondered about those little princesses and why the sergeant apparently was capable of abandoning them.

  “How far now, Karol?”

  Peszek rustled the dead lieutenant’s detailed map. “We’re on these back roads and they twist and turn, but only another eight or nine miles.”

  So close. “Can we make it tonight?”

  “Depends on the barnyard,” he jerked his hand to the unhappy cows slogging behind the cart. “It’s getting dark. I’d say we should stick it out one more night and start early.”

  “Is it safe to do that?” Janusz asked carefully.

  “What’s safe now, professor? We haven’t seen anybody today. That means everyone’s run head, like you herd sheep. If I had to guess,” he shook his head and slumped down again in the back of the cart, “I’d guess we’re already behind the enemy lines now. We’re just lucky we haven’t run into patrols or columns of the bastards. They’re probably moving fast and avoiding these rotten back roads.”

  Janusz clenched his jaw. The tantalising prospect of being so close to Lidia, and in the midst of the monsters who slaughtered the people on the main road was terrible. He refused to admit even the possibility that they would be thwarted now.

  “All right,” he said, “we’ll go a little further and then stop for the night.”

  He glanced at Gabriela who cried, “Papa!”

  They hadn’t crossed paths with the enemy, but rifles were pointed at them anyway.

  Eighteen

  Janusz was astonished at how quickly and quietly the three men with rifles had materialised from the depths of the forest and now completely blocked their path. Two men were a few feet ahead of where Gabriela rigidly sat and the third was on the other side of the cart. They had a feral, carnivorous look, dirty mismatched pants and suit coats, shirts, even a gold cross on one. They were the ages of man, too: one young, another a grizzled middle-aged, and the third, white haired and whiskery with years. There were battered hats on all three of them. Janusz thought they looked like armed vagrants. Which is what they were.

  “Come on down, little girl,” yelled the middle-aged bandit, waving his rifle at Gabriela. “Come stand by me.”

  Janusz said quickly, “Gentlemen, look at us. I’m just a poor farmer and his daughter trying to find some refuge. We have nothing.”

  “Like the last poor farmer and the silver stashed in his wagon! He squealed for a while,” shouted the oldest bandit, cackling. “Got your gold and silver and jewels there in the back?”

  Janusz felt icy cold terror. He was beside himself with fear that something would happen to Gabriela. She had not moved and he could see that her chin quivered. The bandit shouted at her again to get off the cart.

  “Please, sirs, please,” Janusz said, hands up. “We only want to go on our way.”

  “Shoot the fucking cows,” snapped the oldest bandit.

  Gabriela screamed and the three bandits reflexively turned to her.

  Peszek instantly rose to a crouch from the back of the cart, swinging the rifle at the first two bandits, his good hand working the rifle’s bolt action with precision. The shots were sharp, penetrating cracks in the stillness of the forest. The youngest bandit wildly fired and then he and the other one bandit nearest Janusz collapsed. Peszek pivoted and aimed at the old bandit, who scampered with extraordinary speed into the nearest thicket and then into the forest.

  Janusz had flung himself toward Gabriela, trying to shield her, his arms thrown up protectively. He heard Peszek curse loudly. Gabriela lunged into Janusz’s arms and they both staggered backward.

  “I’ve got you,” he gasped. “It’s all right now.”

  She weighed so little, small for her age, and they clung together for a moment. Peszek said, “Bastard got away. Are you and the kid all right?”

  “Yes, yes,” Janusz said, breathing out, backing into something. He jumped away from the two bodies as if he had encountered a snake. “That was remarkable.”

  “Check those two,” Peszek said. “We can use their rifles.”

  Janusz hesitated, but Gabriela didn’t. She grabbed the two rifles and passed them to Peszek, who quickly hid them under the straw and apples and their few belongings in the back of the cart. She cried out, piercing Janusz, who saw her embrace the foal, which had gone down on its forelegs, and sank to the ground on its side. She was calling to it, rubbing it, and it was clear that the stray shot had killed the foal.

  “Do something, please,” Gabriela turned to Janusz.

  “I can’t. It’s too late.”

  Peszek groaned and sat down heavily. “We’ve got to get out of here. The one who ran away may have pals out there.”

  “Yes, you can,” Gabriela implored Janusz, ignoring everything except the foal, she knelt beside it. “You can save him.”

  Gently, Janusz lifted her by the elbow. “No, I can’t, Gabriela. No one can. This is very sad and terrible, but we can’t spend any more time here. The sergeant’s right. We may be attacked again. We have to go.”

  “I can’t leave him,” she said, staring grief-stricken at the foal. “What about her?” Gabriela petted and stroked the mare, who had been remarkably calm during the last tumultuous moments, but now, with the foal lying beside her, began making disturbed whines and shaking her head rapidly.

  Peszek began, “Kid, listen …”

  But Janusz took Gabriela gently by the shoulders. “You must comfort and calm her, Gabriela. Only you can do it. Our lives depend on it. We need her to pull the cart. We’ll mourn later, I promise. Trust me and do what I say. All right?”

  He didn’t know where this formal, fatherly character had come from, but there he was, and Gabriela nodded. What a world now: innocents massacred in random piles not far away; men like Walicki and Dunin cut down doing their duty; bandits cut down in the midst of their crimes; and the only grieving, intense sentiment was permitted even briefly for a poor dead foal, killed by chance. Janusz accepted that the world he navigated so recently, which made sense superficially, idiotically, often preposterously, had been exchanged for this uncharted terra with its horrors, dangers and caprice. Like Gabriela and Peszek, he must learn to survive in it.

  With Peszek hoarsely urging haste, Janusz and Gabriela cut the foal loose from the cart, and dragged it to the side of the dirt road. Gabriela then stroked and talked to the mare, which gradually quieted even as she kept flicking her head in search for her lost offspring.

  Soon after they were back on the forest road, watching around them intently, moving quickly, Janusz said to Peszek, “Pass me one of the rifles, Karol. I think it would help if I had one that could be seen. I promise not to shoot myself or you or Gabriela.”

  Rifle in hand, Janusz hurried on, thirsty and anxious, knowing that he was getting closer to Lidia by the minute and he damne
d each one still to come.

  At some point, half-trotting beside the cart, he heard Peszek close behind Gabriela, and the sergeant said low, “I was sold too, kid, just like you. I was eight years old and my old man took me down to the army camp day after my birthday and he sold me. Too many mouths at home, the mines weren’t hiring kids, so someone had to go and I was last in line. You were too young to know, but I was eight, and when my old man patted my head as he left, I knew exactly what he’d done. They put me to work in the kitchen, then cleaning the latrines.”

  “Just like me. It was a terrible thing to do to us,” she said, eyes ahead on the road.

  “Sometimes you have to do terrible things. I hated my old man for a long time. I don’t so much now. I know what he had on his mind, thinking of the rest of the family. But listen, kid, I’m only telling you, so you know it’s not so bad, is it? Here we are both of us, alive and well, and the professor’s taking us to someplace safe.”

  “I can’t forgive. I’ve prayed and tried, but I hate my mother and father and I hate the Rybaks.”

  “There’ll be a lot more things to hate, kid. Save it for later.”

  Janusz was impressed again that Peszek had made such an effort to touch Gabriela, who was plainly mourning the foal, and certainly shocked by her brush with those predators. He watches how he talks around her now, Janusz thought, saves the cursing for me.

  They had no more food and their water was nearly gone, too. It was a dreary, sad dark camp they made after nightfall, too timid to light even a small fire because it might draw dangerous attention. They sat close together, wrapped in two blankets. When the silence grew awful, Janusz conjured up cheerful pictures of the farm they had nearly reached. There was no assurance that they would continue to avoid the enemy, but thus far Peszek’s conclusion that the enemy was prowling the main roads had been accurate. Janusz had nothing to base his warm, happy images of Lidia and her farm other than the rock-solid certainty she would be there, he would be welcomed, and they would all be safe as the storm Captain Kluk pronounced raged around them.

  “I hope you’re right, professor,” Peszek groaned, rocking slightly back and forth. He was taking the first watch. “I wouldn’t mind resting up there a little before we go on to you know where.”

  “Go where?” Gabriela asked. She was far too clever and caught the slightest hint or implication in the air. “Are we going someplace else, Papa?”

  “Nowhere else,” Janusz said quickly so she wouldn’t grow anxious. “We’ll be staying at the farm until things quiet down. How is your hand, Karol?”

  “Could be better, I suppose. So stiff I can’t move it.” The bandage hadn’t been changed since the day before because they no clean or fresh cloth.

  “We’ll get a doctor. First thing. Then a rest.”

  Gabriela said, “Tell me where we’re going.”

  This was a sensitive area because Janusz had no intention of going anywhere else, much less Switzerland, but he didn’t want to discuss it in front Peszek tonight. So Janusz tried entertaining Peszek and Gabriela, the way he did at countless dinners and parties, by telling the notorious story of the premiere performance of his First Piano Concerto and how he had been talked into having it at an open air stage one evening and how, after the dramatic clashing and booming of the cymbals and drums in the first movement, the neighbourhood dogs started yowling and went on yowling for the remainder of the performance. “It turned into the Canine Concerto,” he said. Both Peszek and Gabriela chuckled so he told another story on himself, one he dined out on many times, when the harpist snapped four strings during his Second Symphony, third movement, the whole concert hall hushed because the orchestra was playing pianissimo so the snapping strings sounded like a cartoon boing and everyone started laughing so hard and then the contrabassoonist’s stand collapsed, which made everyone laugh harder. Janusz got two full-blown laughs from Peszek and Gabriela, who sat so near him he could feel her body shake. It took some time, he told them, for him to persuade critics and audiences, even his publisher, that he hadn’t turned from real music like Song for example, to snide musical jokes.

  “You really made that one up, professor?” Peszek asked, a huddled shape in the darkness.

  “I did. I wrote a lot more, too. Some better than others.”

  “Hard to get hold of, if you know what I mean. Here you are, sitting here with us, and you made up a tune I know like I know Happy Birthday.”

  “Well, anyone can do it. We’ll do it now,” he said, thinking this would take Gabriela’s mind off the death of her pet foal and disquiet about where they might be heading ultimately. “Gabriela, do you remember the tune I was humming?”

  “I think so. Like this?” and she hesitantly, then more confidently repeated what she had heard him doing earlier.

  “Excellent. We don’t need any other instruments but our voices.”

  “Keep it down, professor. We’re not in a concert hall tonight.”

  “No. Quite right. Yes, remember that everything should be sotto voce. Watch me.” He scrambled to his feet. “Gabriela, you start the tune. I’ll join in after Karol enters.”

  “Enters what?” Peszek asked suspiciously. “I can’t sing.”

  “Not sing, just a low note, then another. Like this,” and he illustrated the two contrasting tones he wanted Pezsek to drone. “Listen, you’ll be fine. Ready, Gabriela?”

  “What if I forget or lose my place?”

  “I’ll bring you right back. It’s hard to see me, but try to watch my hands and listen to me.”

  He pointed at her with a grand stretch of his arm. He was in white tie and tails conducting at the State Opera House. Gabriela was an indistinct grey dress, but her eyes were plain and he held her gaze. She bobbed her head slightly and began the tune. Janusz waited for the right beats, and pointed at Peszek. The sergeant grunted and then settled into the contrapuntal two-notes of his part.

  Finally, Janusz joined them, an unassuming accompaniment, and he kept time by swaying and pointing. It was a chant, almost, a worshipful anthem for safe journey and final shelter out of harm’s way. It didn’t matter, he realised, that they made their anthem alone, in the forest’s darkness, unsure of their surroundings, beset everywhere by mortal terrors.

  Janusz felt something joyous bursting inside himself and he hadn’t felt it for years. Not since before Lidia left him, or he had scrambled the memory, and it was the other way around. There was no rational reason for it now, and many to the contrary, but he had never felt so happy as he did at that moment.

  The Fourth Day

  Nineteen

  Fog settled over the forest and over them during the night, and they shivered in their uneasy sleep. Janusz, on guard, heard Peszek cry out once in his sleep and Gabriela’s frightened reaction and he quieted her like she had quieted the mare because fear was universal and inherent for people and animals now. Janusz sniffed the fog, its cold autumn fragrance, and wondered what made the sergeant call out – his children, his dead comrades, the slaughter so close by, or something inchoate, unnamable? Good Lord, Janusz thought, pulling his baggy coat around himself for warmth, maybe this is what the believers mean when they call from the depths. Signs and wonders everywhere and not one decent explanation for any of them. He wished he heard an answer. He wished there was an answer.

  But he was like a child on Christmas Day, even in the fog and the uncertainty, waiting excitedly for the wonderful surprises to commence. He had no watch anymore, but he knew in a very short time, he would see Lidia again. He thought that thought until it became worn. Lidia, Lidia, Lidia.

  “Something’s wrong with the sergeant,” Gabriela said, sliding close to him. “He’s shaking like when I was sick with the fever last winter.”

  Janusz crawled over to Peszek, who had curled into a tight ball that even as Janusz touched him, seemed to writhe and groan. “Karol, Karol,” Janusz said, nudging him. “Wake up. It’s time for us to go.”

  “Put another coal in the stove,
goddamn it, and keep the goddamn kids quiet. I can’t sleep, can’t get warm.”

  Janusz tried gently nudging him again, but it was pointless. He motioned to Gabriela and together they hoisted Peszek off the cold ground, and as he went on mumbling and berating them, managed to get him into the cart. Gabriela had already done her chores for the mare and the cows, but there was nothing left for them to eat now either. Janusz hoped they wouldn’t run into any obstacles in this last leg of the journey. They had no reserves to sustain them if they did.

  Gabriela said, as their little caravan started out, the world a clammy grey mist with indistinct gaunt trees shimmering in it, “He’s got a fever. He needs the medicine they gave me when I had one.”

  “Yes, he does. I’ll get him what he needs. At least when we’re someplace civilised, he can get properly treated.”

  “The doctors told the Rybaks I would die,” Gabriela said with her customary dispassion. “But I didn’t. I didn’t want to. The sergeant doesn’t want to.”

  “No, he doesn’t. I’d bet on that,” Janusz said, wishing it was so. Against all expectations, he had come to like Peszek and believed that he could persuade the sergeant to forgo his reckless plan to desert in Switzerland. But to do that, I’ve got to make sure he doesn’t die, Janusz thought. “This fog’s a good thing. We can hide in it and we don’t have far to go.”

  Later in the morning, the sun shone dimly through the dissolving fog and they broke from the forest onto a modern paved road, which made Janusz nervous, but their luck continued because they appeared to be alone, at least for the moment. The road cut across a broad and sparsely grassed plain, and then plunged back into the forest. Janusz asked Gabriela if she was hungry, and she said she was, but so was the mare and the cows and made their discomfort known for several miles. Peszek gave out commands and sharp curses from time to time but then slipped into silence. Janusz worriedly checked and found him shivering, muttering, eyes closed.