The National Treasure

by William P Wood

  Janusz blinked. Then there was Lidia, who cried for a long time once they were home again. ‘Dieter wants what he wants and he wants me,’ she had said. The nation had surrendered, given up, wouldn’t the conqueror demand the same of her?

  He had to do something. He casually propped the rake against the tree and strolled to the rear of the house, going in through a ground floor hallway filled with unused furniture and boxes. He could make out laughter and voices, then an explosive male honk of hilarity. He paused. Lidia could take care of herself quite sufficiently, he realised. It was his own insecurities he had to tend.

  Janusz went up to the second floor by the side stairs, the echoing celebration downstairs following him and maddening him as he went. He stepped carefully and lightly so as not make any sound.

  On the second floor, he went to Peszek’s room, going inside quietly.

  “Who is it?” Peszek asked weakly in the semi-darkness because the curtains were closed.

  “Me.”

  “Nobody interesting.” Wheeze, wheeze.

  Janusz listened. He couldn’t hear anything from downstairs, which meant that nothing in the room would be heard there. Still, best to stay in a lower register. He pulled a brocaded chair gently beside the bed and sat down.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked Peszek.

  “Not so bad, professor. I’ve been dreaming. I took care of everything. I took care of everybody, including you. Hero of the day.” He spoke quietly and thinly, but his voice had force behind it and even in the dimness, Janusz was startled how much better Peszek appeared after his treatment and a full day unconscious. “How am I doing?”

  “You could be worse. You’ve got septicaemia and your hand needs to be watched. The doctor is coming by sometime today.”

  “I think I remember him. Reminded me of an orderly I used to have, always stuffing his face with whatever was around. Married another fatty and probably had a lot of fat brats.” He coughed a laugh.

  “Try to be quiet. There are guests.”

  “I don’t like the way you said that.”

  “The military commander, Major Henselt is downstairs. He brought champagne.”

  “He did? Why?”

  “He has something to celebrate. They won, Karol. We surrendered this morning.”

  Peszek made a sighing, deflating sound, and his restless eyes bounced from Janusz to the wall and back. His thickly wrapped hand waved in the air like he was swatting away something obnoxious and vile. Janusz, half lost in the diminishing echoes from his time in the corrugated iron-roofed building, and thinking about Lidia downstairs with the conqueror at first didn’t hear Peszek’s moist, sad question.

  “What did you say?” Janusz leaned in.

  “We’re not going to Switzerland are we, professor?”

  Janusz sat back, hands in his lap. “No.”

  “I dreamed about Switzerland – lakes, mountains, blondies with huge titties – but I never could get there. You understand? It just kept floating away.”

  “We’re not going anywhere until you’re well enough.”

  “Then where?”

  “I don’t know,” he rubbed his eyes. Another loud sound from below popped up like an unpleasant bubble. “We’ll have to decide if we’re going anywhere at all or staying here.”

  Peszek coughed. “Water around here?”

  Janusz saw a glass carafe on the bedside table and a glass. He poured half a glass and helped Peszek sit up enough so that he could take several deep gulps and fall back as if the minor exercise had exhausted him. We’re not going anywhere, Janusz realised. Not for a long time. He’s too sick.

  “We gave up,” Peszek said hoarsely. “We didn’t do that last time. We got a country of our own after wading through shit. Now that bastard downstairs got it, right?”

  “I’m sure we would have kept fighting if there was any chance of victory,” Janusz said in a worn voice, unpersuaded by the banality of the sentiment, just as he was sure Peszek didn’t believe it either. It was a banality that demanded utterance, though, like an idiot child who refused to be ignored. “Look at this way, Karol, you’re not a deserter. You never will be.”

  A broken small laugh from the figure on the bed. “Too bad. My old man always beat it into me that you’ve got to try.”

  Janusz slowly stood up. It was growing cloying in the room, and a little despairing, and the time for despair, he hoped, hadn’t arrived. “Would you have taken me to Switzerland and left your wife and children, Karol?”

  Janusz half-expected the usual curt rebuff to the question that he had gotten in the past. But the past was a different country all of a sudden.

  Pezsek stared up and then looked over at him. “Oh, professor, she left me a long time ago and took the princesses with her. When Walicki came through asking for volunteers for his secret mission, I jumped up. Me. Never volunteered for anything. I didn’t care where we were going, who the fuck you were. It was just a chance to get away.”

  “Do you ever hear from her or your daughters?”

  “Like clockwork. Every four months, send money. Nothing about the girls, how they are, if they miss me, what they’re doing. Nothing about herself, either. Thank God. Heartless bitch.” He sighed suddenly. “Listen to that, professor. I’ve said it so many times, I believe it. She was smart to go when she did. You know me. She was smart to get out of it.”

  “I do know you,” Janusz said, moved. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Get some rest. I’ll come back when the doctor arrives.”

  Peszek said something unintelligible and thrashed restlessly for a moment. Janusz again quietly left the room. He stood in the hallway, listening, wondering why we lacerate ourselves because it seemed the right penalty for sins real and unreal. Or like his own rationalizations about Lidia’s responsibility for their separations, why armour ourselves in victimhood and martyrdom? But he and Peszek had reached the end of all that. The excuses died for lack of replenishment. The new world demanded punishing clarity.

  Some engine of recklessness made him go down the stairs, cross through the kitchen, and the parquet foyer, to the airy grand living room. What did he imagine doing? Chastising Henselt? Throwing him out? Where did he think he was?

  He was, in fact, standing in the hall entryway to the living room. The tableau before him was brief: Lidia rigid as a statue, elegant face in profile so the noon sun struck her; Major Henselt, crisply uniformed, one hand on his hip, the other holding her hand like he was giving it back to her.

  Janusz kept walking toward them and the tableau broke and he heard Henselt say, “All right, I’ll see you tomorrow, Lidia. Think about what I said. Life is going to be so much brighter for you now. I give you my word.” Then he bent and kissed her hand in imitation of a tapestry or woodcut he must have seen as an impressionable boy. No grown man would so crudely mime a knight taking his leave of his lady.

  Lidia didn’t move, then sat down as he cockily strode out. Every motion, arms, legs, body was sharp, precise, like a tightly wound mechanical toy set loose. Henselt couldn’t see Janusz as he left. Janusz was no more than a fixture, a shoddy bit of scene dressing. He wasn’t tangible enough to notice. What Janusz noticed were the almost glowing, bright wide eyes on the major, and the twitchy briskness of his walk.

  Janusz stood by Lidia when they were alone. He sat beside her.

  “He reminds me of the head waiter at that overpriced restaurant in Paris we went to after my first concert.” Janusz said. “Madame is a Botticelli angel! At least he gave us a good table because of you. But nobody bows like that in real life.”

  “Dieter saw his Leader bow that way at Bayreuth when he met the old Wagner widow.”

  “There you go. Another head waiter.”

  “We had langoustines that night,” Lidia said wistfully. “Odd what you remember.” She stiffened. “You think this is funny.”

  “He made it look funny. A man in uniform with a pistol can’t kiss a woman’s hand and bow convincingly. You’re always think
ing he’s going to shoot her before the opera’s over.”

  Lidia smiled and sat back, raising her eyebrows. “Well, I’m fixed for the duration. I don’t have to do anything. Dieter made it very clear that he intends to treat me with very great respect. I’m going to be the very respected mistress of the king of this area.”

  “He said king?”

  “Several times.”

  “Head waiter,” Janusz said, putting his arm around her because none of it was remotely funny. Henselt couldn’t be scorned away or laughed off. He was an inevitability and he was a monster.

  “I have to do something,” Lidia said, head back, graceful neck in the sunshine so that Janusz had to lean and kiss it gently. “I’m not going to be the king’s mistress.”

  “Always thinking of yourself. What about me?”

  She smiled again, sitting up. “Seriously. I won’t do it. Dieter won’t take no. He’ll do something.”

  Janusz nodded. “What time is your Dr Fatso coming?”

  “Right after lunch. You shouldn’t call Daniel names. He’s helping us.”

  Janusz got up. “Helping you, sweetness. He’d be mortified to know you’ve been claimed by the new king.”

  “What’s to be done?” Lidia stood up, too, chewing her lip carefully. “I have to figure some way to keep Dieter happy without doing anything.”

  “I don’t know the solution,” Janusz admitted, putting an arm lightly around her waist. It was natural and familiar, and he could not remember at that instant one even halfway rational or crazy reason why he had ever stopped doing it. “Let’s find out how Karol upstairs is coming along and we’ll plan. We will stay on top of everything.”

  Lidia stopped chewing her lip and looked at him with a combination of hope and cynicism. “That’s what we have to believe, isn’t it, Janusz?”

  “I’m afraid so,” he said, pushing back against the faces and fears from the last days that abruptly crowded in on him. “If you make lunch, I’ll go get Gabriela and she can tell us all about the friendly soldiers she met. I swear that kid could charm a cockroach.”

  They strolled to the kitchen. Janusz thought of notes held impossibly long sometimes by the strings generally, not always high registers, but drawn out notes that seemed to freeze the world and for that space, convince us that the moment will last for eternity. He felt that moment now. It was outside mind or thought or experience. He and Lidia could exist, safe, happy, inviolate in that moment.

  But the note always descended or broke off. Nothing lasts, he thought. Only faith that it could makes the rest of transient, bloody existence tenuously endurable.

  “Come back in fifteen minutes,” Lidia said, taking charge in the kitchen. “Dieter’s keeping all of the livestock fed. He brought hay for the cows and butter and ham and coffee, and I don’t know what else for me.”

  Janusz stepped out into the mild September late morning. No guns, planes, screams, groans. No machines, no voices, only the birds and the imperious lowing of a cow in the garage. So sad this was so ephemeral.

  Gabriela was combing the shiny flanks of the mare and talking to her. The cows had settled in, swaying very slightly in their corner of the garage, and all of the beasts were happily gorging on the bounty from the conqueror.

  “Lunch in a few minutes, Gabriela,” Janusz said, admiring how she easily shifted when the mare moved, almost like one creature. Gabriela had pulled her hair into a sensible bun, anchored with a wooden pin so that her whole freckled face was revealed. It somehow made her simultaneously much older and much younger. “Did you make any boyfriends this morning?”

  “No, Papa, I didn’t. Don’t tease me.” She actually flushed.

  Janusz was stricken with embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to do that. Really. It was a compliment. You have a rare talent for making friends. Didn’t you have loads of friends at school?”

  She stopped brushing the mare, the brush held in upstroke. “I didn’t go to school. The boy did. I read his books and helped him with his homework, but I never went with him.”

  “Incredible. You’re far more educated than most of the people I have to deal with,” he laughed in part to cover his lingering embarrassment. “Did the soldiers have anything interesting to say?”

  She finished brushing and went over to the cows, who both regarded her with great brown eyes. “Well, they’re happy to be going home soon. A lot of other soldiers are coming here instead. They made jokes about something I didn’t exactly understand.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Well,” she frowned at the effort to pin down the unfamiliar concept in the words that had been used. “They thought it was funny there was a mare kept out here because there was another mare in the house someone was going to ride a lot very hard.”

  Janusz clenched his jaw and the remorseless tic returned as he absorbed the obscene barracks image. He vowed that there was no way on earth Dieter was going to do anything to Lidia.

  But how that noble purpose would be achieved, he hadn’t the slightest idea.

  “More soldiers? That’s something to look forward to,” Janusz said. “Lunch in a few minutes. Wash first.” He stalked out before she could see how furious he was.

  Twenty-Seven

  Janusz knew he should tell Lidia what Gabriela had heard, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. They had a pleasant lunch outside on the granite patio and then he purposely vanished into Lidia’s spacious studio on the first floor, the glass ceiling like a great greenhouse letting in as much light as possible. The drafting tables, drawing tools like parallel rules, triangles, protractors and corner squares, ceramic charcoal and graphite pencil holders, the neat stacks of drawing papers and the perfectly ranged photographs hung on the beige walls of buildings Lidia had designed and the ones her father had done years earlier, made him feel at ease. Lidia was here in the orderliness and deliberateness of the place. There was one, and just one, silver-framed photograph of her and the absent Bolek, taken at a lake in high summer. Although she was smiling, Janusz assumed that must have been for show and she was merely tolerating the picnic or whatever the event was. Anyway, that’s what he surmised. He still couldn’t acknowledge that she had been truly happy somewhere without him or with someone else. He turned the picture face down in any case.

  He spent two hours using sheets of Lidia’s intricately lined graph paper to sketch out broad melodic arcs and a bit of orchestration. This was big in concept, Mahler very nearly, but more nimble and sharp, he hoped. His intense effort on the destroyed To the Future yesterday had snapped open a trove of ideas. He wrote fast again, barely making key changes or even tempo notations, just getting the flow of the thing onto paper. Janusz’s hand cramped and he stopped once to rest it, but after that brief indulgence, he moved the papers to one of Lidia’s upright drafting tables so he could stand and work and he went on adding, correcting, filling up the paper.

  He didn’t think about the possibly intractable nightmare presented by Henselt or the precarious circumstances he was in. Or Pesezk or Gabriela or even Lidia. He was, once again, somewhere else, and he was an obsessed explorer determined to bring back the wonders he had found in the strange land revealed before him.

  He only returned to the house, to the time and place, when he heard voices in the foyer. Dr F had arrived.

  Reluctantly, he left the studio and met Lidia and Dr Sakovich. She had just taken the fat man’s well-tailored overcoat. They were chatting. He kept shifting his black medical bag from hand to hand like a nervous schoolboy.

  “Maestro Rudzinski,” Dr Sakovich said with satisfaction, putting one hand out not to shake but to gesture with. “I didn’t have a chance yesterday to say how much it is an honour to meet you. I knew, of course, that Lidia,” he bobbed his white, fat-wreathed face toward her, “had the connection, but I never imagined I would meet you myself. And under these astonishing circumstances!”

  “War does that,” Janusz said. “People die, cities are destroyed, and unsought introducti
ons are made. Let’s see your patient. I’m no doctor, but he seems a lot better today.”

  Janusz didn’t care that his peevishness was obvious or that Lidia made an admonitory face at him as they went up the stairs. Lidia? What happened to Madam Rogalski? The fat doctor was a regular chatterbox this afternoon, expounding on the remarkably mild weather, the wonderful drive out from town, even the unexpected politeness and professionalism of the soldiers at the checkpoints and patrolling the town. “Really fine fellows, on the whole. So far, yes? Who knows what the future will bring, but for now, I’m frankly impressed by the decency of these gentlemen. I don’t mind saying so publicly. I mean, they could have been so much worse, yes?”

  Janusz briefly considered a quick shove that would send the blubbery physician rolling down the stairs like a well-dressed beach ball. Every second with him was irritating; and he wanted to get back to the studio and the music.

  They were at Peszek’s door. Lidia smiled at Dr Sakovich. “Daniel, I think so many people could take lessons from the way you are handling things now. It’s quite inspiring.”

  He beamed at her as they went inside. “I believe there is no need to make an enemy when there is no need to make an enemy.”

  “I’d like to frame that and put it in my wall, doctor,” Janusz said sourly.

  Lidia warningly shook her head at him. Dr Sakovich bustled to Peszek who peered up at him from beneath the bedclothes like a wary frog. “Good morning, sergeant,” Dr Sakovich said merrily. “Awake! I won’t ask you to do twenty press-ups today! Tomorrow is soon enough!” and he chuckled for Lidia and a frowning Janusz. “Now, let’s see if I know what I’m doing!” He popped open his medical bag.