Nocturne

by Diane Armstrong

  It hadn’t been Karolinka’s blonde prettiness or long slim legs that had attracted him as much as her breathless eagerness to do her bit for Poland. No risk was too great for her. Feeling invincible, she ran around the city from morning till night, carrying dangerous newsletters and documents tucked under the neatly folded laundry in her shopping bag.

  Perhaps she had considered him part of the cause she was fighting for, because, although she was deeply religious and unswervingly moral, when he folded his arms around her and kissed her lips she didn’t resist, not even when he licked the inside of her soft mouth. Whenever they made love, she seemed to melt into him, and unlike most women he knew, who used sex either as a prize or a weapon, she appeared to delight in it as much as he did. The fact that she didn’t know his real name had never bothered her. Sometimes he wondered whether the mystery added to his appeal.

  He knew it was unwise and unfair to become involved with liaison women. They had to stay clear-minded and uninvolved because they were the most exposed and least protected members of the Home Army. If they were caught with incriminating documents, they were savagely interrogated to betray the identity and addresses of those whose messages they delivered. The AK watched them all the time to ensure that they were contactable and reliable. They were never told the names of their superiors to ensure they couldn’t betray them, but whenever they were caught, their associates immediately moved to new lodgings.

  What happened wasn’t altogether his fault, but he knew that if she hadn’t spent that night with him she would have been more alert. She always left his room after a night of love-making in a daze of euphoria, like a naughty schoolgirl who has got away with a daring escapade. He was standing at the window that morning after she left. As she walked out of the gate, he was smiling at the memory of the lovely pliant body under the demurely buttoned coat when suddenly she tripped over a piece of broken paving and dropped the bag. He let out a string of curses because, before she could scramble to her feet and pick it up, a solicitous plainclothes policeman was at her side, helping her.

  Adam could see that Karolinka was flustered and was insisting too nervously that she didn’t need help. Expert at interpreting facial expressions and tones of voice, the Gestapo officer didn’t take his eyes off her face as he tipped the bag upside down. Adam dug his nails into his palms as the envelope fell out. He stepped back from the window and his jaw muscles jumped with tension. He hoped she wouldn’t look up. She didn’t. From behind the curtain, he saw her being pushed into the back seat of a car, which sped off in the direction of Szuch Avenue.

  I’ll have to find another room fast, Adam thought, dismayed at having to leave his comfortable room and helpful landlady to search for yet another safe place. A moment later he felt ashamed that his first thought had been for himself. In the days that followed, he thought up reasons why Karolinka hadn’t been in touch, why he hadn’t been able to contact her, and why no one had seen her.

  Weeks later, an Underground courier took him aside. He’d met a woman who had recently come out of Szuch Avenue and had shared a cell with a liaison woman called Karolinka. She had told him that, although the Gestapo had interrogated Karolinka for days, she hadn’t revealed Adam’s address or anything about him. ‘I hope he knows she was in love with him,’ the woman had said. Adam listened with his head bowed. Women never ceased to surprise him. They were so different from men. He thanked the courier for passing on information about Karolinka but wished he hadn’t described in such graphic detail what they’d done to her during the interrogation.

  The new liaison woman was a skinny girl with protruding teeth and such a rapid stride that he had stifled the urge to ask whether she was training for the Olympics. The route she took to the meeting with Zenon, through side alleys, courtyards and squares, was so circuitous that he almost lost sight of her, and was fuming at this unnecessary waste of time and energy when she pushed open the heavy wooden gate of a convent and disappeared inside. He stood inside, breathing in the odour of floor wax and furniture polish, when an elderly nun inclined her head to indicate that he should follow. At the end of the corridor, she drew aside a heavy brocade curtain, which revealed a concealed door and then waddled away, her black habit swishing on the wooden floorboards.

  As soon as Adam entered, he saw the reason for the secrecy. Sitting beside Zenon at the small oak table was the Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Underground. The Chief rarely left his headquarters, so it wasn’t likely that he’d arranged this meeting to discuss the tragic fate of a liaison woman. It was an all-too-common occurrence, a regrettable byproduct of their struggle, but fortunately there was no shortage of women willing to risk their lives for Poland.

  The Commander-in-Chief was a middle-aged man with greying hair, a severe expression and the peremptory manner of a military officer.

  Without preliminaries, he informed Adam that he was to be sent to London on a top-secret assignment. At the prospect of leaving Warsaw, Adam felt as elated as a prisoner who has just been paroled. False papers had already been prepared for him to travel to England via Spain and Portugal. In London he was to meet with members of the Polish government-in-exile who were based at the Rubens Hotel, and report to them in detail about the activities and problems of the Underground. His stare boring into Adam’s face, the Chief said he must impress on them that the Home Army needed cash, weapons and ammunition immediately.

  He was also instructed to organise meetings with top English politicians, to brief them about German repression in Poland and the country’s desperate need of aid in their lone struggle against Germany. ‘Remind them of their obligation to their first ally in this war, and their promise to guarantee our sovereignty.’ The Chief’s eyes flashed with anger as he spoke. While in London, the Chief continued, he was also to inform as many people as possible about the Jewish tragedy taking place in Poland. ‘Let them know that in Warsaw, at this very moment, the Germans are committing systematic murder of an entire race on a scale unprecedented in the history of the world.’

  Adam smiled to himself. The Commander-in-Chief was quoting his own words from the AK’s Information Bulletin, in which he had criticised not only the inhuman policy of the Nazis but also the callous and apathetic attitude of so many Catholics to the fate of their fellow Poles. But although he was outraged at the systematic slaughter of the Jews, it was an intellectual reaction, like the time he had penned indignant letters to stop the hunting of elephants without ever having seen one in its natural habitat.

  ‘If I’m to report to the exiled government about the plight of the Jews in Warsaw, I’ll need to get into the Ghetto and see it for myself,’ he had told the Chief.

  His announcement was received in silence. Zenon stroked his thick moustache. He seemed about to say something but cleared his throat instead.

  The Chief studied Adam for a time before replying. ‘I’ve been told it’s very dangerous in there, especially with the deportations going on. They’re likely to grab you and push you into one of those cattle wagons together with the Jews. I can’t allow you to take such a risk.’

  ‘But I put my life on the line every day in this work!’ Adam retorted. Zenon’s raised eyebrows and the Chief’s cold expression calmed him down.

  ‘I understand your concern, sir,’ he continued in a calmer tone, ‘but I have to see for myself what’s going on in there.’

  The Chief made a resigned gesture with his hand to indicate agreement.

  Arrangements had then been made with the Jewish Underground for Adam’s visit and, as arranged, the guide led him through the tunnel that linked the Aryan side with the Ghetto. As he inched behind her, bent almost double in the dark, he bit the inside of his lip to control the feeling that the walls were closing in on him, and wondered whether insisting on being smuggled into the Ghetto had been such a good idea.

  When he finally emerged from the tunnel into the cellar, trembling and covered in dirt, he shook out his cap and noticed that the guide was staring at him as though he
were an apparition.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.

  She was still staring.

  Finally she found her voice. ‘You’re the airman who saved my life,’ she whispered.

  Now it was his turn to stare. The girl was either crazy or she had confused him with someone else. He was about to demur when she said, ‘That day on the road from Warsaw. Just after the war started. You stopped to give my mother and me a lift. Then there was an air raid and the Stukas were bombing us and you …’ Her voice had become so hoarse it disappeared inside her throat. It had been the most overwhelming moment of her entire life.

  ‘I remember those bloody Stukas,’ he said slowly. ‘I threw you into a ditch.’

  So many times she’d replayed that scene in her mind, and each time her overheated imagination had added details that grew more daring and more salacious. And now to have him standing beside her in the flesh, to be able to see him, and hear him recalling the incident was too improbable to grasp. She knew she was staring like an idiot but couldn’t stop. If only this moment would never end. But, at the same time, she fought a sense of disappointment. Ever since that encounter, she had dreamed of seeing him again, and now they were finally together. But she sensed that he hardly remembered her, and he seemed more distant than before. The conflicting emotions were so intense that she felt an impulse to flee to give herself time to absorb this meeting, but she couldn’t bear to miss one second of his company.

  He eyed her up and down and she blushed under his scrutiny. ‘You were a little girl then,’ he said. ‘You’re not a little girl any more.’

  She pulled at her blouse self-consciously. ‘I’m almost seventeen,’ she said. Perhaps he would realise that the gap between them was narrowing. After all, Scarlett O’Hara had been sixteen when she and Rhett Butler had met.

  She wanted to thank him for saving her life, to tell him that, ever since that moment, he had been her inspiration, and that the hope of seeing him again had made it possible to endure the past three years. She wanted to say that nothing had turned out the way she’d expected. She had become a nurse so that she could heal people, as Florence Nightingale had done, but instead she had ended up killing babies and watching as they exhaled their last soft breath. She wanted to tell him that all the ideals her father had instilled in her about nobility and courage had turned out to be illusions, and the saddest illusion of all was her father himself.

  Her head was bursting with all the things she wanted to say, all the thoughts she’d saved up for this moment that she had been unable to articulate, confide or share with anyone before, but she continued to stand there, as tongue-tied as a peasant girl on her first visit to the manor house.

  As he walked beside her through the Ghetto streets, every few moments his legs stopped moving and, when he tried to swallow, his throat closed up. He couldn’t imagine that the sun ever shone on these grey streets that exuded an odour of death, damp and decay, and whose inhabitants moved like shadows. Their bodies, sacks filled with sharp bones, reminded him of a medieval drawing called The Dance of Death that had haunted him as a boy.

  He looked at the tiny children, no bigger than fledglings dropped from their nest, propped up against the walls, their bellies swollen between their stick-like limbs, too weak to sing or even plead. Mothers with breasts like empty gloves stared into space as they tried to suckle their babies. Around the corner, he heard singing. Five children had joined hands and were dancing around in a circle chanting a ditty.

  ‘They’re playing,’ he said hoarsely.

  Elzunia nodded. ‘They play until the end,’ she said.

  Looking sideways, she saw that his square jaw was moving in a strange way.

  They walked on in silence, he staring at vignettes of hell, she staring at him. He was drowning in a nightmare while she was immersed in a dream, and neither could believe their eyes.

  Something was lying on the pavement under sheets of newspaper and he bent down and saw that it was the naked body of a woman, her face stiff and waxen. A stone had been placed on top of the papers to stop them from blowing away. As he watched, a black funeral cart loaded with bodies pulled up. The undertakers jumped out, put the body on top and, as they bumped over the rough pavings, the heads of the dead banged on the wooden sides of the cart. He stood very still, and horror, pity and disgust mingled on his sallow face.

  ‘Their families can’t bury them, so they leave them on the street until the funeral cart takes them away,’ Elzunia explained.

  ‘But the newspapers … she was naked …’

  ‘These people have nothing,’ she began and then stopped, overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness. There was no way to explain this. To him, having nothing probably meant not having money for a new shirt or a glass of vodka.

  But he was still waiting for her to explain.

  ‘They don’t have any sheets to wrap the bodies in, so they use newspapers,’ she said. ‘As for the dead woman’s clothes, they’re no use to her any more, and the living can sell them and get something to eat.’

  He shuddered. An irrational feeling had seized him that he’d stepped into an inferno far more hideous than the one Dante’s imagination had been able to concoct. When he turned his head in her direction, Elzunia saw the revulsion on his twisted mouth, the disgust in his eyes. Suddenly she felt much older than her companion. The sights that shocked him no longer had the power to shock her. She held out her hand to touch his arm, to comfort him, to say how heroic and compassionate he was to visit this realm of the doomed, but drew back. He might think she was too familiar.

  When they had chosen her to guide him around the Ghetto, she had been thrilled that at last someone from the other side of the wall cared enough to risk coming inside, to witness what was happening, and then transmit that information to the outside world. But his expression made her realise that would be impossible. If he couldn’t believe his eyes or conceive that such misery and oppression were possible, how could anyone believe it who hadn’t seen it for themselves?

  She jumped as a staccato of pistol shots rang out. People were screaming, yelling, boots thudded on cobblestones and then there were more shots.

  Adam flinched. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The German guards are amusing themselves around the corner,’ she said bitterly. ‘When they get bored, they shoot people. We’d better get off the street.’

  They ducked into the doorway of the closest building and ran up the stairs. She was about to warn him not to go near the window on the landing, but it was too late. Grabbing his arm, she pulled him away. A moment later, a bullet flew through the pane where he’d been standing.

  They sat on the floor for a long time without speaking, their faces white and frozen. He looked down and saw that her small hand was still gripping his sleeve. He raised it to his mouth and the blood rushed to her face as he pressed his warm lips on it.

  His breaths were still coming in gasps. ‘Good job you’ve got such quick reflexes,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how you knew that bullet had my name on it. I think I should keep you as my lucky charm!’

  ‘Perhaps you should,’ she said lightly. Suddenly a thought struck her. ‘Anyway now we’re even!’

  ‘You’re a funny girl,’ he said, and for the first time she saw a faint smile flickering in the corner of his mouth.

  They were back in the cellar again and she had the sensation of sinking, drowning in soft black earth that subsided beneath her feet with every step. Her father used to say, ‘Elzunia, if you see someone drowning, take their hand and pull them out.’ Well, she was drowning now, but who was going to pull her out? For the past three years her hopes had fed on seeing him again, but this time their parting would be final and there was nothing more to hope for. He would walk out of her life, never knowing that she would have followed him to the ends of the earth if he had asked her.

  Before stepping into the tunnel, he turned towards her.

  ‘I’ll never forget what you did, or what I saw here tod
ay.’ He coughed and she realised that his voice was choked with emotion.

  The haunted look returned to his face. ‘I promise you that when I’m in London I’ll tell them everything. They’ll have to do something to stop this.’

  She took something from her pocket and put it into his hand. ‘I’d like you to have this,’ she said.

  Surprised, he looked down at a sleek silver cigarette case with the initials EO intertwined in acanthus leaves. ‘It was my father’s,’ she said. ‘But they’re my initials as well.’ She didn’t dare say that she hoped it would remind him of her.

  ‘That’s very generous, but I can’t accept it. You should keep it,’ he said.

  She shook her head. There wasn’t enough time to tell him that she had kept it as a talisman, hoping it would bring her father back, but she no longer believed it would.

  ‘I hope it brings you luck,’ she whispered.

  He was looking into her eyes with his unnerving stare. ‘Elzunia, you need luck more than I do.’

  She tried to smile. ‘What I need is a miracle.’ Anger she could no longer suppress welled up. ‘Why doesn’t the world help us? Doesn’t anyone care?’

  He didn’t reply immediately. Then he said, ‘Every country is fighting its own war, but it’s up to individuals like you and me to create our own world.’

  She sighed. ‘That sounds very noble but sometimes I wonder what difference individuals can make.’

  ‘They can save each other. Like us.’ He was smiling now. ‘And they can show others what’s possible. Perhaps that way they can save the world.’ He took her hand and held it between his own. ‘I hope one day, when this is over, we’ll meet again.’

  He turned and stepped quickly into the tunnel that divided the living and the dead. Elzunia replaced the boxes and sacks to conceal the entrance to the tunnel and walked slowly back into the Ghetto.