Churchill's Triumph

by Michael Dobbs

  Churchill shook his head, trying to fend off the confusion that had settled on him like a fly. He could see him so clearly, this ghost, and could hear him, every word, as though the years had been stripped away.

  “I know, difficult to believe, isn’t it?” the Pole continued. “An Englishman whose word could be trusted.”

  “Sawyers? What the hell did he have to do with it?”

  “Everything. You left him, behind, at Yalta.”

  “Collecting the laundry. Packing. Some such nonsense.”

  “That’s when I arrived. You, Mr. Churchill, had offered to help. You had promised to take me with you, and I had trusted you, trusted your word. Why, I gambled my life on it.”

  Churchill tried to settle back in his chair, pretending comfort, but he was breathing heavily, his nostrils flaring, giving an excellent impression of a goaded bull.

  “Tell me, Mr. Churchill, I’ve always wondered—did you forget me? Or simply discard me? Sawyers wouldn’t say. Too loyal.”

  Churchill scowled. “They were tortuous times.”

  “Ah, I see. Then that would explain it.”

  The insolence cut deep. The old man had grown accustomed to getting his own way; he wasn’t used any longer to fending off insults, hadn’t been for many a year. Once upon a time, his sharp tongue would have sliced the man to ribbons but it was a habit lost long ago, the tongue blunted like a knife left out in the rain, so in some confusion he finished off his champagne and held out the glass, not knowing what to do with it. Without being asked, the Pole refilled it, and his own. To anyone watching they seemed like two old friends.

  “Your English has improved.”

  “Then it is the only part of my life that has.”

  “Please, tell me. What happened?”

  After you disappeared from the Vorontsov without me?” The Pole left a little silence to allow the accusation to sink in. “I arrived, half dead—it had taken everything I had to get there. And before long I would most certainly have been entirely dead, because by that time they were looking for me. When I discovered you had gone, everything became hopeless. I think I went through some sort of collapse, almost passed out, but then Sawyers appeared. A light in the darkness. He ran me a bath—your bath. He shaved me to make me look decent, then dressed me up to make me look English. He was a very special man, your Mr. Sawyers.”

  “Bugger left me. Resigned,” Churchill mumbled, a distant stare settling on his watery eyes as he tried to pull back the curtain of time. “Asked me for a reference, then the bloody man packed up and left. A year after you met him. You know, I don’t think he was ever the same after Yalta.”

  “No one was.”

  “I’d lost the election, you see, been hurled out of office, and everyone assumed that I was nothing more than discarded litter on the scrap heap of history. So he went.”

  “You accuse him of disloyalty?”

  “I think. . . ” Churchill paused. When he spoke it was in a series of gentle hesitations, like the sails of a yacht trying to catch the breeze. “I think it may have been partly my fault. It hurt when they rejected me after the war, hurt like hell. Clemmie says I was pretty foul to everyone, damnably bad company, and Sawyers said—Sawyers told my wife he had seen me at my best, and that was how he wished to remember me. Was that disloyalty?”

  “Sounds to me like a very fine degree of respect.”

  “I was angry at the time. He was always scrupulously honest, sometimes to a fault, and his leaving me hurt so very much. It implied criticism—of me! You can take that sort of thing from a creature like Goebbels or even the editor of the bloody Times, but from a servant . . . ”

  “He was a very special man,” Nowak repeated slowly. “And when I was bathed and shaved and dressed, he pushed me into the car along with all the baggage and suitcases and your hairbrushes and your suits, and we drove out, right through the gates, no questions asked. By that time, Stalin had gone, left Yalta, and taken the clouds of suspicion with him. The guards were relaxed. Why, we even had a couple of salutes.” The Pole smiled grimly at the memory of the sentries, the ones who had mocked him on his way in, standing to rigid attention and presenting arms—arms that in other circumstances might have shot him. “We caught up with you, a few hours later, at Sebastopol, on your ship.”

  “They allowed you on the Franconia? While I was aboard?” Churchill asked, his surprise edging into indignation.

  “No one bothered to question me there either. I was with Sawyers, he was your man, and his word was enough.”

  “Are you telling me he played me for a fool?”

  And it was Nowak’s turn to grow indignant. “Oh, how dull-witted can you be? Don’t you see? He was trying to prevent you from being a fool—and, even worse, a wicked liar. Sawyers was the one thing that stood between you and damnation.”

  They were both rattled. Churchill’s glass thumped down on the arm of his chair, spilling champagne over his fingers. “How dare you?” he barked, as he licked his fingers clean.

  “Oh, I dare, Mr. Churchill. You see, Sawyers took your word of honor—the word of honor you gave me—as sacred. In his eyes it was a sin to break it. So he wouldn’t let you. And you dare accuse him of disloyalty?”

  “No, not disloyalty. He was headstrong, willful, stubborn—and I can’t criticize him for that. A little like me, I suppose. Even did a passing good impression of me, so my daughters told me. One of the family, practically, and the only one who didn’t shout. That was why it hurt so much when the bloody man just upped and left.” For a moment, Churchill lost himself in regret, then raised his chin once more. “So we saved you after all.” It was a remark that carried more condescension than compassion. Churchill immediately regretted it; Nowak ignored it.

  “You and Sawyers flew off to Athens, and the liner followed, but by the time we arrived you’d already left again. Egypt, I think. But the crewmen were beginning to ask questions about the strange man who’d come unexpectedly on board and, of course, I had no answers. So I jumped ship.”

  “You could have entrusted them with your secret,” Churchill encouraged.

  “I trusted you.”

  In the silence that followed, Churchill trawled his mind to find the words to justify himself, but his net came up empty.

  “Then I went back home,” Nowak whispered.

  “To Poland? How?”

  “I walked.”

  “But that must have been. . . ”

  “The best part of a thousand miles, as the crow flies. Except I wasn’t a crow.”

  “And still no one asked questions of you?”

  “The world was in chaos, the whole of Europe overflowing with people trying to get back home—prisoners-of-war, civilians, refugees, demobbed soldiers, a million homeless strangers trying to find their place. We were no more than stray dogs, mongrels, worth a kick if we got in the way, but that was all. No one bothered very much with us, we had little worth taking, not even our lives, unless of course you were Russian and sent back for the amusement of Marshal Stalin.”

  “I’m. . . I’m feeling a little hot. Too much sun. I should move back into the shade. Would you mind?” Churchill held out his hand, and slowly the Pole raised the old man and moved his chair back beneath the cover of the canvas awning that had been spread above the deck.

  “Thank you, Mr. . . . Nowak.” Churchill was surprised that the name had stuck after all these years, embedded deep within his conscience like a splinter of remorse. “So where were we?” he asked, as he settled back into his chair.

  “We were sending Russians back home. No, forgive me, you were sending Russians back home. Against their will, most of them, even those who had fought alongside the British. A deal you’d done with Stalin. Sent them all back—just as you’d have sent me back. You hear all sorts of rumors about what happened to them. Ugly whispers, about more graves, about how your fri
end Marshal Stalin picked up where he left off at Katyn.”

  “Stalin was never my friend.”

  “Then why, in God’s name, did you give him Poland?”

  The question came in a voice that remained as calm as the confessional, but a fire had begun to burn in his eyes that denied any crumb of forgiveness.

  “I didn’t give him Poland!” Churchill snapped defensively, growling, his voice resembling the grinding of old bones. “How the hell could I? He already had it.”

  He tried to turn away, fumbling to relight his cold cigar and wishing he could get rid of this belligerent bloody man, but he couldn’t get the flame to take hold in the breeze that was grazing across the sea. Nowak stooped and lit the cigar for him. Still struggling with his emotions, the old man nodded his appreciation. “I seem to remember that even all those years ago you had your own way of doing things, Mr. Nowak. In England, we call it being bloody-minded.”

  “A singularly inappropriate phrase in the context, don’t you think?”

  And always giving him a kicking: Churchill remembered that, too. He never trod softly, this Pole, always came in his boots, as if he wanted to start an argument. Nothing wrong in that. There had been a time when Churchill had loved an argument, thrilled to its call, but no one challenged him any longer: they simply stuck him on top of Mount Olympus and left him there. He found it so lonely.

  “Tell me, Mr. Nowak, you said you got home. And I seem to recall…” his hand scraped across his forehead, massaging his memory “… you mentioned you had a family. Did you find them? I do so very much hope you did.”

  The Pole remained silent for a while. He was still standing, propped once more against the guardrail, looking deep into his glass, drinking it, needing it. In the silence there was nothing more than the lap of the sea against the hull and the distant mewing of a seagull.

  “The Poland I remembered had gone,” Nowak said eventually, softly. “Six million dead—more than the Germans, more than the Japanese, far more than the Italians. Nearly one in five of everyone who had been alive in Poland when I left had been killed. No nation suffered as much as we did, Mr. Churchill. You think Britain suffered—well, I grieve for your sorrow, but it was the prick of a pin compared to what happened in Poland. It took me almost a year to find my way back.” He raised his hand as though wiping sweat from his eyes. “I remember that everything had a particular smell. I arrived in the spring when the blossoms should have been bursting through, but there were no trees, and instead of honeysuckle and primrose there was smoke and dust and something else, something sweet and sickening. You’ll remember it from your time in the trenches. The stench of human flesh that had been burned and rotted. It was everywhere, seeping out from beneath the rubble. And there was still so much rubble. No schools, no hospitals, no Conservatory, not anything I remembered. Nothing. You know, Mr. Churchill, before the war, Warsaw was the finest city in Europe. It could stand up and look Paris in the eye and gaze down on places like Berlin from a grand height. It was the capital of a renewed nation, full of gaiety, of music and laughter and young people falling in love, that’s how I remember Warsaw. But it had gone. All I found was broken walls and lonely chimneystacks standing like monuments in the graveyard. In the very center of the city, I came across two twisted metal towers. Somehow they seemed familiar. Then I saw the sign and I realized where I was. Jerusalem Street. These broken towers were all that was left of the railway station that was—had once been—the most magnificent railway station in Europe.” Nowak smiled ruefully, feigning light-heartedness. “Oh, I know it seems ridiculous for a man to get sentimental about a railway station, but it was like the heart of Warsaw, always beating, a place where we said our goodbyes as we went off to war, and where we found our loved ones if we came back. It should have been a place of bustle and beauty, of tearful farewells and the most joyful reunions, yet I found nothing but ghosts.”

  “The soldier’s return. A most compelling moment in any man’s life.”

  “I’ve seen films of what happened to Berlin and Hamburg, even Dresden, but that was nothing compared to what was done to Warsaw. And yet we were innocent. We had started no war, we had done our neighbor no wrong. So why us? Why Warsaw?”

  An edge was creeping into the Pole’s voice as his passion pushed up against his self-control. Churchill searched for some response that might be adequate, knowing he would fail. “Warsaw died a brave death, and many times over, Mr. Nowak.”

  “But what good is that to me?”

  “Its name stands as a symbol of hope.”

  “You delude yourself. It stands as a symbol of betrayal and inhumanity, nothing more.”

  They fell silent for a while, watching as another yacht passed innocently by, slumbering on a sea that was studded with turquoise and diamonds. In the distance the shore seemed to be melting in the midday heat. Yet Churchill felt alive, more vital than he had in years. This man, this Pole, had stirred old passions that he had thought were not simply dormant but stone dead, and if their revival brought along with them memories of compromises and inadequacies, even pain, it was but a small price to pay. His life had become crowded with those who tumbled over each other to flatter and fawn, yet the only loyal companions of old age were loneliness and endless time. Nowak made him feel young again—why, seventy years young! And the fact that he represented a challenge, a threat, even, made the moment all the richer.

  “Your home, Mr. Nowak. Your family. Pray, what of them?”

  The Pole stared directly into the honey-gold sun and for a moment closed his eyes, as though hoping its heat would burn away the memories. Then his hand came up to touch the spot over his heart.

  “We lived off Aleja Ujazdowskie. It’s a long boulevard that runs to the very heart of the city. Many trees, many magnificent buildings, a place where people loved to be seen. It was also the route that the panzers took, and where the fighting during the Uprising was most fierce. My wife ran a casualty station in the cellar of our house, so a neighbor told me, filled with women tending the wounded, nothing more. But the troops that came were SS. What was left by the tanks and the bombers, they finished off with grenades and flame-throwers. They made no distinctions, and gave no quarter. No one in our cellar survived.”

  “And. . . your daughter?”

  Suddenly Nowak’s foot began tapping upon the deck. It was as though something inside him had been switched on, a motor, a source of energy that was too great to be contained and had to find release in the steady, monotonous movement.

  “She ran away. They said she was last seen running down our street in her favorite checked dress—that’s how the neighbor recognized her—just as a tank shell hit a nearby house and everything disappeared in a blast of flame and smoke. No one has seen her since.”

  “Surely there must have been some trace. . . ”

  “When a city is razed to the ground, Mr. Churchill, when the gutters run with fire, when even the sewers are filled with petrol so they will burn, there is so little place for a young child to hide and so many places for her to vanish. I searched, of course I did. I never stopped. And I found so many lost little girls, begging, hobbling on crutches, shivering in their rags, and every time I looked into their eyes I wondered if… if she might be little Kasia. But how could I tell?” The drumming on the deck became more insistent. “I didn’t even know what my daughter looked like. There was no photograph, no image, only a neighbor’s muddied memory. And I kept wondering, if she had survived that blast, what might have happened to her? What does a little girl of five do when everyone she knows is dead and her home is broken and she has seen more vileness and brutality than anyone deserves in an entire lifetime? Where does she go? What becomes of her?”

  Churchill was openly weeping, yet Nowak’s eyes were dry, bruise-grey, tortured with the pain of so many unshed tears.

  “Every morning my hopes rose, and every nightfall they died a little more. For an
entire year I searched, looking in shadows, in orphanages, in homes and graveyards, scratching away in every dark corner, until it drained my soul.”

  “I can find no words to express my sorrow,” Churchill whispered. “I, too, lost a little daughter. Marigold. We called her the Duckadilly. She was so beautiful and full of delights, and only two.” He produced a huge handkerchief from a pocket in his blazer and wiped his eyes, yet Nowak’s tone, like the tapping of his foot, remained mechanical.

  “I found myself one day in a gutter. Drunk, of course, desperately drunk. I had no idea how long I’d been there—hours, days, weeks, the difference no longer mattered much to me. Then an old woman spat at me. She crossed the road so she could spit on me. I think I recognized her. She told me I had brought shame on my family. That word—‘Family’—but I had none, not a soul, no one. All… gone.” For the first time the mask began to slip and the Pole’s suffering twisted his face. “You know, I imagine them looking down on me, my father, mother, my wife, little Kasia…”

  “I think I can understand how you feel,” the old man replied softly, his lower lip trembling like the wings of a swallow. “My father’s ghost has walked alongside me all my grown life. He always told me I would come to no good. He still does.”

  The Pole was startled—Churchill with his father’s ghost? He paused for a moment, struggling to see this man as any other, as one who might have self-doubt or be haunted by his past, but he dismissed the idea as preposterous. They shared nothing in common. What could this man know of family? Why, even his own son treated him with contempt.

  “I was in the gutter. It was one of those moments when a drowning man has to decide if he’s going to cling on a little longer or simply open his fingers and allow himself to be taken. One more drink and it wouldn’t have mattered, but as Fate would have it the bottle was empty. So I got up. And I walked to Piorun.”