by Alan Furst
So they imitated them, scrupulously and to the letter. As de Milja was moved north through occupied Poland, he was provided with a splendid collection of official paper. Passierscheine, Durchlasscheine, Urlaubsscheine, and Dienstausweise—general passes, transit permits, furlough passes, and work permits. The Poles had them all— stolen, imitated, doubled-up (if you had one legitimate citizen, why not two?—it’s not unsanitary to share an identity), forged, secretly printed, altered, reused, and, every now and then, properly obtained. To the Germans, documentation was a fence; to the Poles, it was a ladder.
And they discovered a curious fact about the German security police: they had a slight aversion to combat soldiers. It wasn’t serious, or even particularly conscious, it was just that they felt powerful when elbowing Polish civilians out of their way in a passenger train. Among German soldiers, however, whose enemies tended to be armed, they experienced some contraction of self-esteem, so avoided, in a general way, those situations.
The lowly untermenschen caught on to that little quirk in their masters right away: the new ZWZ intelligence officer for France reached the port of Gdynia by using Sonderzuge—special night trains taking Wehrmacht soldiers home to leave in Germany. These “specials” were also used by railway workers, who rode them to and from trains making up in stations and railyards all over Poland. De Milja was one of them—according to his papers and permits a brakeman—headed to an assignment in Gdansk. Taken under the care of escape-route operators, he moved slowly north over a period of three nights.
Three April nights. Suddenly warm, then showery, crickets loud in the fields, apple trees in clouds of white blossom. It meant to de Milja that he would not see this country again—it was that strange habit of a thing to show you its loveliest face just before you lost it.
The trains clanked along slowly under the stars in the countryside. Across the river on the rebuilt bridge at Novy Dvor, back to the other side at Wyszogrod, then tracking the curves and bends of the Vistula as it headed for the sea. The railwaymen gathered in a few seats in the rear of the last car on the Sonderzuge trains, and the tired Wehrmacht soldiers left them alone. They were just working people, doing their jobs, not interested in politics. A heel of bread or a boiled potato wrapped in a piece of newspaper, a cigarette, a little quiet conversation with fellow workers—that was the disguise of the Polish train crews.
Captain de Milja rarely spoke, simply faded into the background. The escape-route operators were young—the boy who brought him to the town of Torun was sixteen. But the Germans had helped him to grow up quickly, and had sharpened his conspirative instincts to a fine edge. He’d never been an angel, but he should have been lying to some schoolteacher about homework, or bullshitting his girlfriend’s father about going to a dance. Instead, he was saying “Nice evening, Sergeant,” to the shkopy police Kontroll at the Wloclawek railroad station.
“New man?” the sergeant said.
“Unh-huh,” said the teenager.
Polite, but pointless to seek anything further. The sergeant had had a teaspoon of human warmth in this godforsaken country, he’d have to make do with that. Stamped de Milja’s papers, met his eyes for an instant, end of discussion.
In the daytime, he was hidden in apartments, and he’d grab a few hours sleep on a couch while young people talked quietly around him. The escape-route safe house in Torun was run by a girl no more than seventeen, snub-nosed, with cornsilk hair. De Milja felt tenderness and desire all mixed up together. Tough as a stick, this one. Made sure he had a place to sleep, a threadbare blanket, and a glass of beer. Christ, his heart ached for her, for them all because they wouldn’t live the year.
Germans too thought in numbers, and their counterespionage array was massive: Abwehr, KRIPO—criminal police, SIPO—security police, including the Gestapo—the SD intelligence units, Ukrainian gestapo, railway police, special detachments for roads, bridges, forests, river traffic, and factories. In Poland, it rained crossed leather belts and side arms. People got caught.
“There is soup for you,” Snub-nose said when he woke up.
“Thank you,” de Milja said.
“Are those glasses false?”
“Yes.” Because they had his photograph, he had grown a little mustache and wore clear glasses.
“You must not wear them in Torun. The Germans here know the trick—they stop people on the street and if their lenses are clear they arrest them.”
People came in and out all day; whispered, argued, left messages, envelopes, intelligence collection. Young as she was, Snub-nose had the local authority and nobody challenged her. That night, another railwayman arrived, this one eighteen, and de Milja’s journey continued.
Late in the evening, they left the train at Grudziaz. De Milja, wearing a railroadman’s blue shirt and trousers, metal lunchbox in hand, walked through the rain down a street in front of the station. A whore in a doorway blew him a kiss, a half-peeled German poster on a wall showed a Polish soldier in tattered uniform, Warsaw in flames in the background. The soldier shook his fist in anger at a picture of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister. “England, this is your work!” said the caption. Along with their propaganda, the Germans had put up endless proclamations, “strictly forbidden” and “pain of death” in every sentence.
They were stopped briefly by the police, but nothing serious. They played their part, eternally patient Poles. The Germans knew that Russia had owned the country for a hundred and twenty-three years, until 1918. They certainly meant to do better than that. The policeman said in slow German, “Let’s see your papers, boys.” Hell, who cared what the politicians did. Weren’t they all just working folks, looking for a little peace in this life?
After midnight, the leave train slowly wound through the flat fields toward the coast, toward Gdynia and Gdansk. It kept on raining, the soldiers slept and smoked and stared out the windows of the darkened railcar.
The escape-route way station in Gdynia was an office over a bar down by the docks, run by the woman who owned the bar. Tough exterior—black, curly hair like wire, blood-red lipstick—but a heart like steel. “Something’s wrong here,” she grumbled. “Shkopy’s gota flea up his ass.”
In a room lit blue by a sign outside the window that said bar, the couriers ran in and out. Most carried information on German naval activity in the port.
“Look out the window,” said the woman. “What do you see?”
“Nothing.”
“Right. Eight German ships due in this week—two destroyers and the rest merchantmen. Where are they?”
“Where do you think?”
“Something’s up. Troops or war supplies—ammunition and so forth. That’s what they’re moving. Maybe to Norway, or Denmark. It means invasion, my friend.”
“I have to get to Stockholm,” de Milja said.
“Oh, you’ll be all right,” she said. An ironic little smile meant that he wouldn’t be, not in the long run, and neither would she. “The Swedes are neutral. And it’s no technicality—they’re making money hand over fist selling iron ore to the Germans, so they’ll keep Hitler sweet. And he’s not going to annoy them—no panzer tanks without Swedish iron.”
They were getting very rich indeed—de Milja had seen a report. Meanwhile they were righteous as parsons; issued ringing indictments at every opportunity and sat in judgment on the world. Pious hypocrites, he thought, yet they managed to get away with it.
“When do I go out?” de Milja asked.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “On the Enköping.”
Two men in working clothes arrived before dawn. They handed de Milja an old greasy shirt, overalls, and cap. De Milja shivered when he put them on. One of the men took coal dust from a paper bag, mixed it with water, and rubbed it into de Milja’s face and hands.
Then they gave him a shovel to carry and walked him through the wire gates to the dock area. A German customs official, glancing at de Milja’s pass to the port, held himself as far away as possible, his lip
curled with distaste.
They joined other Polish stevedores working at two cranes loading coal into the hold of the Enköping. The Swedish seamen ignored them, smoking pipes and leaning on the rail. De Milja had a bag on a leather string around his neck, it held microfilm, a watch, some chocolate, and a small bottle of water. Casually, one of the workers climbed down a rope ladder into the hold. De Milja followed him. “We’re not going to fill this all the way up—we’ll leave you a little space,” said the man. “Just be sure you stay well to one side. All right?”
“Yes.”
Above them, a crane engine chugged and whined. “Good luck,” the man said. “Give the Swedish girls a kiss for me.” They shook hands and the man climbed back up the rope ladder. An avalanche of coal followed. De Milja pressed his back against the iron plates of the hold as it cascaded through the hatch and grew into a mountain. When it stopped, there were only three feet between de Milja and the decking above him as he lay on the lumpy coal. The hatch cover was fitted on, the screws squeaked as it was tightened down. Darkness was complete. Later in the morning he heard commands shouted in German and the barking of dogs as the ship was searched. Then the engines rumbled to life, and the freighter wallowed out into the Baltic.
It was seventy hours to Stockholm.
The deck plates sweated with condensation and acid coal-water dripped steadily and soaked him to the skin. At first, discomfort kept him alert—he turned and twisted, wet, miserable, and mad. But that didn’t last. With the steady motion of the ship and the beat of the engines, the black darkness and the cold, dead air, de Milja fell into a kind of stupor. It was not unpleasant. Rather the reverse. He drifted down through his life, watched certain moments as they floated by. He saw dead leaves on a path in the forest in the Volhynia, his feet kicking them as he walked along, a little girl who’d come to stay with a neighbor that summer, a kiss, more than that. It made them giggle.
This silly stuff—what did adults see in it? He had no idea he was dying, not for the longest time. Heavy snow fell past a window in Warsaw, Madame Kuester looked over her shoulder into a mirror, a red mark where he’d held her too tightly. He said he was sorry, she shrugged, her expression reflective, bittersweet. It must be time to sleep, he thought, because at last he did not feel the cold. He was relieved. His wife jammed her hands in the pockets of her coat, stood at the shore of the lake as evening came on. She looked a little rueful, that was all. If you stood far enough back, the world wasn’t frightening. It wasn’t anything. In the end, you were a little sad at what went on. Really, it ought to be better. Casement window at the manor house, the first gleam of the sun at the rim of a hill, two dogs trotting out of the forest onto the wet grass of the lawn. Finally, he became aware, for a moment, of what was happening. He did what he could—took long, deep breaths. Coal, he thought. Sulfur, carbon monoxide, confined space, red blood cells. It was all very confusing. One painful stab of regret: a crumpled body, Polish stowaway found on a mound of coal in a Swedish freighter. Captain Alexander de Milja hated that idea, simply one more senseless, muted death in time of war. He lay on his back at the foot of a poplar tree and looked up as the wind rattled the little leaves.
Every summer had one perfect day.
The green sea rose under the ship, held a moment, then fell away. Sometime later, the engines slowed, the iron walls shuddered, a tug tied on and nudged the Enköping against its pier. The rusty bolts squeaked as they were backed off, the hatch cover swung into the air, and a crane began to scoop the coal away. Later, under the dock lights, too bright against the pale evening sky of Sweden, a booming voice shouted recognition signals down into the echoing hold.
Was the third of June, 1940.
A springtime day in Paris and, last days being tricky this way, especially breezy and soft. No, Lezhev told himself, don’t be seduced. Le printemps, like every other spectacle of the French theater of life, was an illusion, a fraud. That was absurd, of course, and Lezhev knew it; spring was spring. But he chose to indulge himself in a little unjust spite, then smiled acidly at his intransigence. On this day above all he could say whatever he wanted—nobody contradicts a man writing a suicide note.
Stationed at the window of the smelly little garret room, he had watched spring come to the Parisian slums: to the tiny, dark street covered in horseshit and dire juices, to the fat women who stood with folded arms in doorways waiting to be insulted, and to the girls. Such girls. It would take the words of a Blok, a Bely, a Lezhev, to do them justice. “In Lights of a Lost Evening, the tenth volume from Boris Lezhev, this fierce apostle of Yesenin reveals a more tender, more lyric voice than usual. In the title work, for instance, Lezhev . . .”
Now, there you had girls. Lithe, momentary, a flash in the corner of your eye, then gone. Nothing good lasted in the world, Lezhev thought, that’s why you needed poets to grab it as it went flying by.
Well, now and then there was something good. For example, Genya Beilis. Genya. Yes, he thought, Genya. Lithe and momentary? Hah! You could never call her a girl. Girls had no such secret valleys and mysterious creases, girls did not contrive to occupy the nether mind quite as Genya did. He would miss her, up on his cloud or wherever he was going. Miss her terribly. She’d been his salvation—good thing in a bad life—the last few years of exile. Sometimes his lover, sometimes not, indomitable friend always, his brilliant bitch of a hundred breeds.
It was true, she was an extraordinary mixture. Her father, the publisher Max Beilis, was Russian, Jewish, and French. Her mother was Spanish, with some ancient Arab blood from Cordoba. Also an Irish grandmother on the maternal side. Lord, he thought, what wasn’t she? You could feel the racial rivers that flowed through her. She had strange skin; sallow, olive, smooth and taut. Hair thick, dark, with reddish tints in full sunlight, and long enough so that she twined and wound it in complicated ways. Strong eyebrows, supple waist, sexy hands, eyes sharp with intelligence, eyes that saw through people. —You were right to be a little afraid of Genya Beilis. The idea of some great, naked, flabby whale of a German hovering above her made Lezhev sick with rage, he would rise up and—
No, he wouldn’t. The German panzer divisions were racing south from Belgium, French troops surrendering or running away as they advanced, the police were on the verge of arresting him—the closer the Germans got, the worse for all the Lezhevs of Paris. So he wasn’t going to be anybody’s protector, not even his own.
Fact was, they had finally hounded him to the edge of the grave. The Bolsheviks had chased him out of St. Petersburg in 1922. He fled to Odessa. They ran him out of there in 1925. So he’d gone to Germany. Written for the émigré magazines, played some émigré politics. 1933, in came Hitler, out went Lezhev. So, off to sad Brussels; earnest, neutral Belgium. He hadn’t much left by then—every time he ran, things flew away: clothes, money, poems, friends. 1936, off to fight in Spain—the NKVD almost got him there, he had to walk over the Pyrenees at night, in snow up to his knees. He barely made it into LibertéEgalité-and-Fraternité, where they threw him in prison.
Amazing, Lezhev thought, the things he’d done. As a St. Petersburg teenager in 1917, he’d torn a czarist policeman’s club from his hands and cracked him on the nose. Stayed up all night, haunting the dark alleyways of the city and its women: talking to the whores, screwing the intellectuals. He saw a man executed with a leather cord as he sat in a kitchen chair at a busy intersection. He was a worker of the world. For a year or two, anyhow. Worked with a pen, which was mightier than the sword, he discovered, only when approximately the same size. He’d run from raging fires, crazed mobs, brawling Nazis, rumbling tanks, and the security police of at least six nations.
My valise, dark-eyes. Quick. It’s under your bed. There’s nothing in there, and nothing to pack, but I take it along.
So, at last, after all that, who got him? The ronds-de-cuir. French bureaucrats, laboring all day on wooden chairs, were prone to a shine on the seat of the pants. The antidote was a chair-sized round of leather—rond d
e cuir—carried daily to work, placed ever so precisely beneath the clerical behind. The makers of Parisian slang were not slow to see the possibilities in this. To Lezhev, the ronds-de-cuir seemed, at first, a doleful but inevitable feature of French life but, in time, he came to understand them in a different way. Fussy, niggling, insatiable, they had some kinship with the infamous winds of Catalonia, which will not blow out a candle but will put a man in his grave. And now, he realized, they were going to do what all the Okhrana agents and Chekists and Nazis and pimps and machine gunners and Spanish cooks had failed to do.
They were going to kill him.
But maybe not. On his rounds that night, in Le Chasseur Vert and the Jean Bart out in the Russian seventeenth arrondissement and Petrukhov’s place up in Pigalle, he felt the life force surge inside him. He laid some little glovemaker’s assistant among the mops and brooms in Petrukhov’s storeroom. Tossed his last francs out on the zinc bars as a rich slice of émigré Paris got drunk on his money and told him what a fine fellow he was. Sometime near dawn he was with the acmeist playwright Yushin, too plastered to walk any farther, propped on a wall and staring down into the Seine by the Alexandre III bridge.
“Don’t give up now,” Yushin said. “You’ve been through too much. We all have.”
Lezhev belched, and nodded vigorously. Yushin was right.
“Remember the Cossacks chased you?”
“Mm,” Lezhev said. Cossacks had never chased him, Yushin had him confused with some other émigré poet from St. Petersburg.
“How you ran!”
“Mm!”
“Still, they didn’t catch you.”
“No.”
“Well, there it is.”
“You’re right.”
“Don’t weaken, Boris Ivanovich. Don’t let these sanctimonious prigs stab your heart with their little quills.”
“Well said!”
“You think so?”
“Yes.”
“You’re kind to say that.”