While Still We Live

by Helen Macinnes

  Zygmunt’s injured leg kept the pace steady and even, seemingly slow. But his knowledge of the path and its short cuts brought them to the forest’s edge, without loss of time. In three hours they reached the plains. The last trees were behind them, the last outpost, the last bird-cries which signalled their going. The wind was stronger, the air colder, the moonlight clearer. Now they walked Indian file, some distance apart, obeying their guide. Zygmunt’s knowledge of the most sheltered path to the village made the journey simple. He used every haystack, each tree, each windbreak, cunningly, skilfully. He brought them eastwards round the village, towards its north side.

  There, in the deep shadows of a wooden barn, with the sharp, frosted stubble cutting at their feet, he left them and entered the village from the north. He seemed to be part of the night, so difficult it was to follow his progress. Olszak, Stefan, and Sheila waited in silence. They waited unmoving, as though they were carved out of the rough wood against which they leaned. Only their eyes were alive, watching the sleeping village.

  “No Germans,” Zygmunt whispered. He had come back from another direction, so that Sheila, startled, bit her lip and stifled a cry. Olszak looked pleased, as much at Zgymunt’s skill as at the good news.

  “This is where we leave our weapons, in case we are surprised and searched in the village. Rule of the camp,” Zygmunt whispered. He was watching Sheila’s hand, which had travelled so quickly to her waist when she had bitten off that beginning of a scream. She relaxed her grip, but kept her hand at her waist, and hoped it looked like a natural gesture.

  “No weapons,” Olszak said. Two schools of thought: here was the other of them, Sheila reflected. She made no move.

  “All right.” Zygmunt’s tone was brusque. Either he had no idea of Olszak’s importance, or he didn’t care. Probably both facts were equally true: Zygmunt wouldn’t care even if he did know. “The girl goes with me. You two will follow. You know the inn.”

  Olszak nodded.

  “Give us a hundred yards’ start,” Zygmunt said. He was still watching Sheila’s hand resting at her waist. But he said nothing more as he led her towards the village.

  * * *

  There weren’t more than twenty houses, squat and lumpish, although it was difficult to count the number, so haphazardly were they grouped together. Large, age-twisted trees, isolated remnants of the primitive forest that had once covered all this land, sheltered the sides of the cottages, or spread over the scattered barns and straw covered root-houses. In daylight, Dwór might have the charm of disarray (“a pig’s breakfast” Uncle Matthews would have said), but by night it was bewildering. Bewildering, but safe. Sheila felt more confident as she followed Zygmunt’s tortuous course. It was almost midnight now. The villagers were probably abed: certainly no lights showed.

  Zygmunt saved her in time from the cold water of a communal duck-pond, guided her across the narrow stone causeway of a lurking stream. They had reached the centre of Dwór, a little open space too small to be called a village square. At one side was the tiny wooden church sheltering its cupola and cross under the protecting branches of its trees. At the other, was the squat gable-end of a house and the beginning of a narrow road, its ruts of mud now crusted by frost. The road wandered westward. It was Dwór’s one link with the world outside.

  They paused under the church’s covered gateway. Then, following the trees round the open space, they reached the gable-end house. The inn. A very glorified title, thought Sheila. Or did people once stay here on hunting trips in the forests? Now it seemed as dead as the other village houses.

  But she was mistaken. Someone had been waiting for them. The door at the left of the gable opened slowly and quietly. Quietly and slowly it closed behind them. “Careful,” a woman’s voice whispered.

  They were standing in a dark, narrow hall, running the whole length of the house, like a corridor in a train with the rooms as its compartments. The blackness at first numbed Sheila’s eyes, and then, as the woman began to move silently towards a panel of light near the end of the corridor, Sheila could distinguish the deep shadows which were the recesses of other doors. Five, she counted; four solidly closed. Through the nearest one, the one almost opposite the entrance to the house, she could now hear a murmur of voices. A laugh added itself to the murmur, so suddenly that her grasp tightened on Zygmunt’s arm and her body stiffened. He patted her shoulder gently. She followed the woman. The floor was either stone or hard-packed earth, for there were no creaking wooden boards to betray them. Zygmunt had a wonderful bedside manner, she was thinking as they stepped into the panel of light: the right mixture of domination and reassurance. The woman—she was young, Sheila now saw, with a round pleasant face and a strong body—closed the door behind them, and they were in a small room.

  How warm it was, Sheila thought, although the small wood stove now gave little heat from its low night fire. And how bright! It seemed a long time since she had seen a room as small as this one lit by a lamp.

  Madame Aleksander had risen from the bench beside the stove. She looked smaller, somehow, and thinner. Her hair was completely white. But there was still that strange blue light in her eyes.

  “Sheila!” she said in surprise and then in delight. “I didn’t know you were coining to meet me.” She was watching Sheila’s face closely. “Something’s wrong,” she added quietly. “Something’s happened to Stefan.”

  “No,” Sheila said quickly. “No. Not Stefan. He’s all right. He will be here any moment.” She looked towards the girl who had waited for them at the door. Zygmunt had her firmly round the waist, and her feet were dangling. She was scolding him for being late, and he was interrupting each phrase with a well-placed kiss. He set her down on her feet again.

  “Two more, milady,” he said to her. “That old fellow who was here last night and a boy. Quick.” He helped her out of the room with a neatly timed smack with the palm of his hand. As he came over to the stove, there was a wide happy grin all over his ugly face. The three of them sat down on the bench and looked at the half-open door. They hadn’t to wait long. Out of the corridor’s shadows the girl’s smiling face appeared, still flushed and happy, then the more sombre countenance of Olszak, and last of all, Stefan.

  The door was safely closed. Mr. Olszak and Sheila had drifted together naturally, as if driven by the emotion they felt all round them. He watched Madame Aleksander and Stefan with a strange sadness, and then looked at Zygmunt and the girl with almost a smile. “Yes?” he asked Sheila, so suddenly that she said what she had been thinking.

  “I’ll never know what you really feel, Mr. Olszak.”

  He took her hand, gently. “That’s just as well,” he said. “Do you still hate me as much as you did this afternoon?”

  “I believe I don’t,” she said with some surprise at her own calm voice; “I think you meant well.”

  Mr. Olszak grimaced and dropped her hand. “That’s the most damning praise of all,” he replied. “But like most clichés, it is true.” He watched her again. “After all,” he went on, “you’ve been a big personal responsibility, you know. Your father would have expected me to do as I’ve done. And he would have expected you to do as you have done, too. It is strange how much you resemble him, in every way. The had a great capacity for self-sacrifice.”

  And that, thought Sheila miserably, makes me seem wilfully selfish if I ask Mr. Olszak to change his decision. He request had been on the tip of her tongue. She looked at him and began to laugh.

  “No, no. Not that. Please.” Mr. Olszak really looked unhappy. He turned to the astonished Zygmunt and his girl.

  “Now, before I leave,” Mr. Olszak was saying, “where’s your mother? Any Germans appear?”

  “No Germans,” the girl replied. “My mother’s in the front room. She’s with Zak and Peter and a stranger.”

  “Another recruit?” said Zygmunt. “Fine, bring them all along.” But the girl didn’t share his lightheartedness.

  “He doesn’t know anything a
bout the camp. He wasn’t sent here by any of our friends. But he was asking about the forest. My mother got Zak and Peter to give him some drinks in the front room. She’s just making sure of his story.”

  “How does that stand up?”

  “It’s true, I think. I feel sorry for him. He’s had a pretty hard time of it.”

  “What about me, Kati? Haven’t I had a hard time of it?” Zygmunt clipped her broad waist expertly.

  Kati laughed and pushed him away.

  “That’s right, Kati,” said Olszak with an unexpected smile. “Business before pleasure. Have you someone here to take these people to Nowe Miasto?”

  “Peter,” said the girl, “but he’s in the bar, too.”

  Olszak consulted a cheap battered-looking watch tucked into a disreputable waistcoat pocket. “I don’t want to leave until I see them begin their journey,” he said, as if to himself. “But I may have to.” He bit his lip. “Damn the man for coming at this time. Tomorrow night he could have drunk Peter under the table for all I care.”

  Madame Aleksander said slowly, “Michal... What is all this? What journey? The forest isn’t far away.”

  “We aren’t going there,” said Stefan. His mouth was a straight line. His large dark eyes were angry, mutinous.

  Madame Aleksander sat down once more. “Just what are we doing, Michal?”

  Olszak walked over to her. He was sitting beside her, talking quickly in his low precise voice. Yet, to Sheila watching them, there was a softening of the hard lines of his face, an earnestness mixed with gentleness that revealed more about the man than she had ever guessed. There was only one person to whom Olszak was vulnerable. That was Madame Aleksander. “I’ve known him for years,” she had once said. She had concealed a lot in that simple under-statement: she wasn’t the kind of woman to flaunt her past conquests. Watching them, Sheila realised the incredible: Olszak had once been in love. He had lost. Madame Aleksander had chosen to forget about it. But he was always aware that she had never reminded him of his defeat, and her power had increased instead of diminishing. Even now, she was unaware of it, and Olszak had to fight twice as hard because of that. Sheila, watching them, was suddenly hopeful.

  “No, Michal. Really no. I will not leave Poland. If I die, I die here.” Madame Aleksander turned to Stefan. “And would you have me take him away to safety, to a country where he could be separated from all the other boys of his age? Where he would grow apart, and come back to find himself out of touch with them, even an intruder? He cannot share honourably in the peace if he hasn’t suffered equally in the war. Can he?”

  Stefan’s reply was to give his mother a wild embrace. Madame Aleksander tried to free herself from his arms. She still had something to say, and it was difficult. It wasn’t only Stefan’s bearlike hug that made her words halting, breathless.

  “And I must be here, so that little Teresa or Marta or Andrew will find me here if they escape. They would need me. So I shall stay. And Stefan stays. As for Sheila—” Madame Aleksander was in control of her voice again—“as for Sheila, perhaps she ought to go. There’s her uncle, for one thing. For another, this isn’t her country, and she’s done more for us already than we had any right to expect.”

  Sheila’s hope was gone once more. “There are no countries any more,” she said slowly. “Just people. People who are on your side, or people who are against you.”

  “But Sheila, why don’t you take this chance of going away? You have friends who are waiting for you, who want to see you. Your uncle.” And then, hesitatingly, shyly, “And there’s Mr. Stevens.”

  “Yes,” Sheila said. So Olszak hadn’t told Madame Aleksander about Adam Wisniewski. She looked at him bitterly. He pretended to be examining his watch.

  “Every time you women change your minds,” he said irritably, “I lose an hour.”

  “But I haven’t changed my mind, Michal,” Madame Aleksander protested. “I always meant to stay here.”

  “Then you intend...?”

  “To go to the camp, help with the nursing and cooking and sewing and mending and weaving and cleaning.” She turned to Zygmunt. “You can take us back when you return, can’t you?”

  Zygmunt looked at Sheila. “Her too?” he said, with a wide approving grin spreading over his face.

  “No,” Mr. Olszak said firmly. “Peter will take her to Nowe Miasto. From there she will go to Radom by the way Madame Aleksander came. At Radom she will be hidden until her papers and clothes and story are all ready.” Madame Aleksander was still watching Zygmunt’s face. Then she looked quickly at Sheila.

  “I seem to have misunderstood something,” she said. Then very quietly, “Michal, did you tell me everything?”

  Olszak said rapidly, “There’s hardly time now. When I visit the camp again, I can tell you all the details. The important thing now is to find that Peter.”

  Kati said, “I’ll get him out somehow. Come on, Zygmunt, you can take his place in the front room. Better knock at the door as if you’d just come in. I’ll be there to welcome you. You’re my young man over here on a visit from Opoczno.”

  “That’s right I’m your young man,” said Zygmunt.

  She looked at his laughing eyes and evaded his arm. “None of that in the corridor,” she warned. “Not until you’ve knocked at the front door, and I’ve let you in.” They left the door half open. Kati waited there until Zygmunt had reached the front entrance and given a cautious knock. Then they heard her footsteps walking along the corridor.

  “Clever girl,” said Olszak approvingly. “How did Zygmunt let her know that we had arrived?”

  “By the window. He knocked there, gently. I didn’t even hear it. But she did. She had been expecting him all evening. She put out the light and opened the shutters. They talked in whispers. Then he went away. And she waited in the corridor. It sounds simple now, but it really was quite a strain. For me, anyway. Kati doesn’t seem to worry. She has no nerves at all. And no fears.”

  Mr. Olszak put a finger to his lips, went over to the door to close it gently. He paused. For the front door had been opened by Kati. Her voice was welcoming. There was a smothered laugh, a stifled squeal. Zygmunt was going into action. A man who must have come out into the corridor from the front room said boisterously, “Well, who’s this? All safe? No Germans? Thought I’d better make sure.”

  Kati was explaining now.

  The voice said, “Come in, come in and have a drink. Come on, fellow. You’ll need it if you’ve been doing any travelling. What’s the news?”

  Other voices, more distant, more blurred, said, “Come on, Zygmunt.”

  Zygmunt was saying, “Never refuse a drink or a pretty girl.” There was laughter. Then the voices, the laughter, the sound of footsteps were shut inside the front room. In the corridor, there was silence, darkness. All that remained was the mixed smell of pinewood and boiled cabbage.

  Mr. Olszak finished closing the door. “That wasn’t Peter who spoke,” he said. “Was it Zak?”

  Madame Aleksander said, “No; it must be the stranger. He sounded cheery. I’m glad. His story is so sad.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  “Oh no. I’ve been kept in here. He only came this evening. But Kati heard it and she told me. He’s lost his wife and her young brother. They were refugees. He can’t find either of them.”

  “That’s the man I met this morning,” said Stefan. “He was in Zorawno then.”

  Olszak was watching Sheila. “Yes?” he asked.

  She shook her head. The rough voice from the corridor had been familiar: a note, an inflection... Something so vague, so distant yet faintly disturbing. She shook her head again. “Nothing definite,” she said. “Just...”

  She sat down on a bench and imagined the voice once more. Come in and have a drink. Come on... What’s the news? The harder she tried to catch it, the further it slipped away. She looked up at the observant Olszak. “Nothing,” she said. “Just a very faint imagination.”

  “Which w
as he?” Olszak said. “Anxious or curious?”

  The two women and the boy looked at him in perplexity.

  Madame Aleksander said, “You don’t trust this man?”

  Olszak sat down on a bench. “Until I find out more about him, I shall have to stay here.” He looked sharply at Madame Aleksander. “You were followed as far as Radom after you left Warsaw.” She looked so amazed that he smiled. “Why else do you think the Germans gave you such quick permission to leave Warsaw, after questioning you? But we took great care you wouldn’t be followed from Radom to this district. The only thing is the dog. He could easily have given you away. That was why I was angry about the dog, Teresa.”

  Madame Aleksander looked crushed. “Casimir was so happy to see him. Besides, I couldn’t abandon him in Warsaw again. I couldn’t do that, not even to a dog.” Then her voice brightened. “But he was hidden for most of the journey from Radom to here. Inside bundles, inside jackets, covered with rags on the bottom of carts. He wasn’t allowed to run along after us. Your men saw to that.”

  “You are positive no one saw him?”

  “Only the people with whom I stayed. And you trust them.”

  “Yes. Then the Pole who is looking for his wife and brother-in-law may be looking for his wife and brother-in-law after all. Perhaps—” he silenced them with his hand. The front room door had opened, then the entrance door.

  “Someone’s going out,” Olszak said. Other footsteps were running lightly along the hall. Kati entered, and held the door open for a man.

  “Here’s Peter,” she said. “Zygmunt is taking the man out for—” she glanced at Madame Aleksander—“for a walk. He’s showing him the barn where he can sleep tonight. They’ll be back soon.”

  She was gone, leaving Peter, tall, red-faced, blue-eyed, waiting for Olszak to speak. He shuffled his feet in their clumsy high boots, rubbed his square chin with a very large, very red hand, and then scratched his wrinkled brow uncertainly. The straight straw-coloured hair bristled like a haystack. On the broad face was a fluctuating smile. Peter swayed a little, the smile vanished, and then reappeared. He walked towards the bench with a slight list and rather too much determination. His audience looked at each other in dismay. Olszak said coldly, as the bench grunted beneath Peter’s sudden weight, “Peter, I’m afraid you’re drunk.”