by Alan Furst
Down below, hundreds of people broke the curfew to run outside and snatch up a leaflet. These were, with the aid of friends and dictionaries, soon enough deciphered—the English-style printing, as opposed to the usual Polish letters, made it just a little more difficult to read—and by breakfast time everybody in Warsaw and much of occupied Poland felt good the way one did when a friend came around to say hello.
To the Brave People of Poland
Greetings from your British allies. We are
flying over your troubled land tonight to
let you know that you are not forgotten.
We’ll be back soon, there will be lots more
of us, and next time we won’t be dropping
leaflets. Until then, keep your chin up, and give the Germans hell any way you can. Long live Poland! Tenth Bomber Wing
RAF
“. . . but he changed his mind and they had to hit him a few times before he’d calm down.” Thus the night watchman at the Pruszkow airfield. But nothing more. De Milja had carried a small 9 mm automatic—there wasn’t any point in not having something, not for him. But Colonel Broza had said in their last meeting before the operation, “Don’t kill him, Captain. Let’s not start that yet.”
Yet.
But then, it wasn’t really up to them, of course it never had been, and the miracle was that fifty days or so of occupation had passed so— peacefully. Then it happened, out in Praga one Friday night, and that was that.
A workers’tavernin aworkers’part oftown. What wasa Wehrmacht noncom even doing in such a place? Probably a worker himself, back in Dusseldorf or Essen or wherever it was. Not the classic Nazi—some fine-boned little blond shit quivering with rage and overbreeding, cursing Jews in a squeaky voice with saliva on his chin. The breed existed, but it didn’t fight wars. Who fought wars was the guy in the Polish tavern: some big, blunt, slow-thinking German workingman, strong as an ox, common as dirt, and not such a bad type.
Here it was coming Christmas and he was stuck in Poland. He wasn’t making out with the Polish girls, everything was a little grimier than he liked, there was garlic in his food, and people either wouldn’t meet his eyes or glared with hatred. Hatred! Christ, he hadn’t done anything. They put him in the army and they said go here, go there, and he went here and there. Who wouldn’t? That was the way of the world; you did what the Wehrmacht told you to do, just like you did what Rheinmetall or Krupp told you to do.
And Friday night, like always, you went to a tavern, just to get out from underneath it a little. Ordered a beer, then another, and minded your own business.
But taverns were taverns, especially in working-class neighborhoods, and it was always the same: a word, a look, some little thing that just couldn’t be ignored. And people who couldn’t afford to lose their tempers brought them in here on Friday night in order to do exactly that. And then, some people didn’t like Germans. Never had, never would. Maybe they thought that Hansi or Willi or whatever his name was was spoiling a good night’s drinking. Just by being there. Maybe they told him to leave. Maybe Hansi or Willi had never been told to leave a tavern. Maybe he figured he was a conqueror. Maybe he refused.
Well, he wasn’t a conqueror that night. Somebody took out a knife and put it just the right place and that was that. The Gestapo came running, hanged the tavern keeper over his own door and next day executed a hundred and twenty neighborhood men. So there. The Germans were famous for reprisal long before they forced the Polish frontier. In 1914, stomping into Belgium, they encountered franctireurs—snipers—and responded with heavy reprisals, shooting hundreds of Belgians when they couldn’t get at the franc-tireurs. They didn’t invent it—revenge killing was right up at the front of the Bible—but they believed in it.
And it was just about that time when Hans Frank, named governor-general of the swath of Poland around Warsaw not directly incorporated into Germany, wrote in his diary that “the Poles will be the slaves of the German Reich.” Meanwhile they had the Jews sewing Stars of David on their breast pockets and hanging signs on the shops that said nicht arisch, not Aryan.
The ZWZ was besieged. Everybody wanted a piece of a German. De Milja didn’t exactly recruit, but he did look over candidates before passing the name on to a committee, and the first two weeks of December he barely had time to do anything else.
Two days before Christmas, de Milja went to see the maid who was taking care of his father, a newspaper-wrapped parcel in hand: sausage, aspirin, and sewing needles, the latest items that had become impossible-to-get treasures. “He wants to see you,” the woman said. “He told me to tell you that.”
De Milja thought a moment; he was staying in the basement of a large apartment house in central Warsaw, just off Jerozolimskie Avenue, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. “There’s a bar called Zofia, just by Solski Park, with a public room above it. Ten minutes after seven, tell him.” The maid nodded that she understood, but de Milja could see she disapproved of the idea that the professor would set foot in such a low place.
It was a low place, an after-curfew nightclub with a room upstairs that held three pool tables and an assortment of Warsaw lowlife— mostly black-market operators and pimps and their entourages. Tough guys; plenty of hair oil, overcoats with broad shoulders and ankle-length hems, a little bit of a cigarette stuck up in the corner of the mouth. They played pool, bet on the games, practiced three-bank wizard shots, sold a tire, bought a few pounds of sugar. De Milja liked it because someone was paying off the Germans to stay away, and that made it useful to people like him who’d had to learn one of the cardinal truths of secret life: anything clandestine is temporary. So the room above the Zofia was a welcome item on a list that could never be long enough.
Watching his father walk through the smoky poolroom, de Milja felt a pang in his heart. With hair combed faultlessly to one side, and round tortoiseshell spectacles, he looked like photographs of T.S. Eliot, the English banker/poet. His face was thinner and brighter than de Milja remembered, and he wore a raincoat, not his winter overcoat. Where was that? de Milja wondered. Sold? Clutching his professorial briefcase tightly, he excused his way through the crowd, ignoring the stares of the poolroom toughs. Some of them would have liked to humiliate him—he was an inviting target, a large ungainly bird who cried out for insult—but he was moving faster than they realized and before the right words could be said, he was gone. He paused while a boy with a huge pompadour and a royal-blue suit squinted down his cue to line up a shot, and winked suddenly at his son: there in a minute, must wait while Euclid here gets it all worked out. Thus had his father survived years of the Ostrow uncles: the more his sensibilities were offended, the more he twinkled.
They shook hands, his father settled himself at the table, noting the rough wood with hearts and initials carved in it, the water glass of vodka, wilted beet slices on a plate, and a saltshaker. “How’ve you been?” he asked.
De Milja smiled. “Not so bad. You?”
That was ignored. “Most thoughtful of you, that package. We ate the sausage, and sent the aspirin and the needles on to your mother and sister. They are in Hungary, I believe Sonya told you. Near Eger, in a sort of tumbledown castle—decrepit nobility wearing earmuffs at the dinner table, very Old World, I’m sure.”
“I think you should join them.”
“Me? What would I do for a library? Besides, I still have students, a few anyhow. As long as they show up, I will.”
“But Hungary is safe, you think.”
The professor hesitated. “Yes. They’re just now Germany’s great friends. Maybe later it will turn out they loved England all along. In their secret heart, you see.”
“And the house?”
“Cold as a donkey’s dick.” A sly smile bloomed for a moment— shocked you, did I? “I’ve got newspapers stuffed in every crack, but it doesn’t seem to help.”
“Look, why don’t you let me find you an apartment—”
The professor cut him short. “Really, you need
n’t bother.” Then he leaned closer and lowered his voice. “But there is something I want you to do.” He paused, then said, “Am I correct in assuming you’ve been recruited into the underground? That you remain under military orders?”
De Milja nodded yes.
“Are you anything important?”
No reaction, at first, then a slight shrug: important?
But the professor was not to be fended off. “Don’t be coy. Either you can talk to the leadership or you can’t.”
“I can.” De Milja felt his ears getting warm.
His father searched his face, then decided he was telling the truth— it really was some other boy who’d thrown the chalk—reached into his briefcase and surfaced with three pages of densely written pen-andink script. “For the right person, this would be of consequence,” he said.
“What is it?”
“A study.” His father stared at it a moment. “The research is thin. I merely talked to a few of my old students, had a coffee, a little gossip. But they’re smart—that I know for a certainty because I made them prove it more than once—and well placed. Not at the very top of the civil service but just below it, where they actually read the paper and make the decisions and tell the boss what to say. Anyhow, it’s the best that I could do, an outline, but useful to the right people.”
He paused for effect. “The point is, I’d like to be asked to do more.” He met de Milja’s eyes. “Is that clear? Because what I have in mind is far more ambitious, an ongoing study that—”
A sudden commotion interrupted him; two of the local princes had reversed their pool cues and were snarling at each other while friends held them back. When de Milja looked back at his father he caught him with a particular expression on his face: irritation, disappointment, why did he have to see his son in places like this? Why wasn’t it a faculty dining room or an intellectuals’ café? The response was irrational—he would have admitted that—but it was the truth of his heart and for a moment he’d forgotten to hide it.
De Milja took the papers from his father’s hand. “I can only promise that it will be read.”
“Well, naturally. I don’t expect more than that.”
De Milja glanced at his watch. “I’d like to spend more time, but if you’re going to get back home before curfew . . .”
His father stood quickly. “You’ll be in touch?” he said.
“Through Sonya.”
They said good-bye; it was awkward, as their time together always was. They shook hands, both started to say something, shook hands again, then parted. At the door, his father turned and looked back; de Milja started to wave but he was too late. The raincoat and briefcase disappeared through the doorway, and de Milja never saw him again.
It was cold in Warsaw that night, there was ice in Captain de Milja’s basement room; a rust-colored stalactite that hung from a connection in the water pipe that ran across his ceiling. A janitor had once lived here, his church calendar—little girls praying with folded hands—and his French movie star torn from a magazine, a Claudette Colbert look-alike, were still stuck on nails in the wall. Cold enough to die, the captain thought. Wondered how cold that actually had to be. He wore an army greatcoat, a scarf, and wool gloves as he sat on the edge of a cot and by the light of a candle read the report his father had written.
He read it twice, then again. The writing was plain enough, and the facts were not obscure—just a listing of things governments did on a daily basis; a few administrative procedures, some new policies and guidelines. Really, not very interesting. But look again, he told himself. Principles of the German Occupation of Poland: 10 December 1939. There wasn’t anything in the report that Colonel Broza and the directorate didn’t know—all his father and his informants had done was to gather up what was available and synthesize it. Three pages. Four principles:
1) Calculated devaluation of the currency. 2) Replacement of the judiciary. 3) Direction of labor. 4) Registration. That was all—the real, arid horror of the thing lay in its simplicity. The essential mechanics of slavery, it turned out, weren’t at all complicated. With registration you knew who and what and where everyone was—a Jew or a metallurgical engineer, it was all filed for future reference. With the direction of labor they worked where you wanted, and had to meet production norms you set. With your own judiciary, you controlled their behavior with their own police. And with devaluation of the currency you “bought” everything they owned or produced, and then you starved them to death.
De Milja passed the report to Colonel Broza in Room 9. The colonel put on his reading glasses and thumbed the pages over. “Yes,” he said, and “mmm,” and finally “thank you.” That was all.
But there was something much more troubling on the agenda that day: the man who had printed the RAF leaflets had been arrested in his shop by the Gestapo. “Find out about it,” Broza said. “Then see Grodewicz.”
He went to visit the printer’s wife. They lived in a quite good neighborhood—surprisingly good for a man with a small job shop— broad avenues with trees, solid apartment houses with fire-escape ladders on the alley side, toilets in the apartments instead of the usual privies in the courtyard, and a building superintendent, a heavy woman in a kerchief, polite and not a bit drunk. De Milja asked her about the family. She took notice of his warm coat, and heavy, well-made shoes and raised her palms to heaven: didn’t know, didn’t want to get involved.
The apartment was on the seventh floor, the top of the building. De Milja trudged up the endless staircase, the marble steps gray from years of scrubbing with Javel water. He stopped to get his breath at the door, then knocked. The wife was a small woman, tepid, harmless, in a faded apron. They sat at the kitchen table. “I don’t know what he did,” she said.
“What about the neighbors?”
“Mostly they only knew me. And I never made an enemy, Mister.”
He believed her. “And him?”
“He was away, you know. Here and there. Some wives, they know when their husband breathes in, when he breathes out. Not me. You couldn’t do that with him.”
“What did you imagine?”
“Imagine? I only know we had a lot—a lot for who he was and what he did. He was ambitious, my husband. And maybe rules weren’t made for him, you know? But nothing serious. I swear it. Whoever you are, wherever you come from, go back and tell them he didn’t do anything so wrong.”
She started to cry but she didn’t care, didn’t touch her face where the tears ran and didn’t seem to notice it; everybody cried these days, so what?
“Are you in touch with the Gestapo?”
She nodded that she was. “On Szucha Avenue.”
That wasn’t good—Szucha Avenue was the central Gestapo headquarters. “I go every week to get his laundry,” she continued. “Do the wash and bring it back.” Her eyes found his, just for an instant. “There’s blood on his underwear,” she said.
“We can stop the interrogation,” he said.
Just for a moment she believed him, and her eyes widened, then she realized it was a lie.
“He did something for us,” de Milja said. “For the underground. Will he tell them?”
She wiped the tears away from her face with her hand. “Not him,” she said. “If only he would—but he won’t.”
“A last question,” he said. “How did they catch him?”
She thought for a time, stared out the window at the gray sky over the winter city. “Betrayed,” she said. “He never gave himself away.”
She was right, de Milja thought. He sensed it wasn’t the jealous neighbor, or the business partner with a grudge. It wasn’t a denunciation in that sense. He went to see another detective, a man with a big stomach and white hair, who had a line into the Gestapo office on Szucha Avenue. A clerk, perhaps, or a janitor. Information was fragmentary, and uncertain—as though somebody saw an open register, or a list on a desk. Nonetheless, his question was answered: Chomak.
De Milja hadn’t expected that. “
Why?” he asked.
The detective shrugged. “A man reaches a certain time in life, and a certain conclusion. He’s alone. For himself. At war with the world. So he’ll do this for that one, and that for this one—he’s a spider, this is his web. Everybody is corrupt, he thinks. So he’d better be the same.”
It wasn’t much, de Milja thought. But there might never be any more, and they were at war, so it had to be enough. As Broza had directed, he went to see Grodewicz. They met at night in the office of a broom factory.
He had known Grodewicz for a long time, they belonged to the same social class, were not quite the same age but had overlapped for a year or two at university. While de Milja had labored desperately— and, it turned out, fruitlessly—to be a mathematician, Grodewicz had thrown himself into drinking and fighting and whoring to such a degree that it had become an issue with the police, and eventually with the university authorities, who finally had to expel him. What bothered de Milja was that Grodewicz not only didn’t care, he didn’t suffer. He walked away from university life, served as a merchant seaman, was said to have smuggled emeralds into the Balkans from South America, killed a shipmate in a knife fight, screwed a movie star in Vienna. Too many rumors about Grodewicz were true, he thought.
De Milja watched Grodewicz as he spoke quietly into the telephone—making him wait, naturally. He had long, lank, yellow hair that hung over his forehead, was handsome in some indefinably unhealthy way, and arrogant in every bone in his body. Now Captain Grodewicz—perhaps a post-invasion commission. De Milja sensed he’d gone to war not because Poland had been attacked, but because Grodewicz had been insulted.
“We’ll paint the south wall first,” Grodewicz said, obviously using code, from memory and with great facility. “And extend the line of the roof over that window, the south window. Is it clear?”
Grodewicz met de Milja’s glance and winked at him. “Good,” he said. “Just exactly. Plumb line, chisel, ripsaw and so forth. Can you manage?” The answer evidently pleased Grodewicz, who smiled and made a galloping rhythm with three fingers on the desk. “I would think,” he said. “Maybe we’ll all move in.” He replaced the receiver on its cradle.