Nocturne

by Diane Armstrong

  As soon as Elzunia closed the door, Granny hobbled towards her and grabbed her arm. ‘It’s Zbyszek,’ she gasped, wringing her gnarled hands. ‘He’s gone.’

  Zbyszek had often complained of being bored in the loft. He missed his pals and the activity in the square. Granny and Elzunia had explained repeatedly that he had to stay there, not only for his own good but for theirs as well, so he wouldn’t accidentally betray them. Each time he nodded so hard that it looked as though his head would fall off his neck, but the following day he would nag them again about going to the square.

  He must have sneaked off while Granny was out.

  She had found out about it on her way home with her pannikin of soup that afternoon. She had stopped to cross herself in front of St Aleksander’s Church when Basia ran up to her, pulling at her sleeve with agitated fingers.

  ‘That little devil; I knew we couldn’t trust him. Now he’s gone and done a bunk and God knows what’ll happen,’ Basia said.

  By then, Toughie and some of the other children had gathered around Granny, all gabbling at once. They had been horrified to see Zbyszek rushing towards them that morning. Basia had told him he could stay with her for a while, but he had to go back to Granny’s that afternoon. Her attention had been distracted for a moment, and, when she looked around, Zbyszek had disappeared. The cigarette sellers searched all over the square, distraught in case he’d been caught by the szmalcowniks or the Germans.

  ‘Poor child. He’s only seven! How will he manage out there? What will become of him?’ Granny lamented.

  So the small figure she’d seen darting into the doorway had been Zbyszek after all. ‘I spotted him this morning,’ she said, and described what she had seen. If only she had followed him and brought him back.

  Granny nodded with relief. Looking up from the soup on the stove, she asked, ‘How come you were near the square today?’

  Before Elzunia could think of a reply without mentioning her aborted meeting with her father and her botched attempt to throw herself under the tram, the old woman was peering into her face. ‘You look pale, child. Here, get some of this into you,’ she urged, ladling the steaming broth into a bowl.

  Elzunia’s eyes followed Granny as she moved slowly around the kitchen. Although she was frail and crippled, she was like a gnarled oak with roots that ran so deep and true that no storms could shake or topple it. It’s what people do that counts, Elzunia thought, not their noble sentiments and beautiful-sounding words.

  Forty-One

  Elzunia hurried along the street, checking her watch every few minutes. There was still time before the siren sounded. She shivered. The first day of August was marked Sunflower Day in the calendar but there was nothing bright or sunny about this drizzly, grey afternoon in 1944. It was almost four o’clock and the streets were full of young people who, like her, were heading for their posts. Many of them wore loose coats to conceal whatever weapons they had been able to lay their hands on: antiquated revolvers, pistols from the last war, hunting rifles or homemade filipinki. For the first time since the war began, the streets of Warsaw were charged with a sense of purpose and a feeling of exhilaration. The Uprising was about to begin. Only a few days more and their capital would be free.

  Ever since they heard the boom of Russian artillery from the other side of the river the previous week, they had sensed that the Uprising must start soon. In the evenings, they pointed to Russian reconnaissance planes and bombers that flew over the city, lighting up the summer sky with rockets that sparkled like chandeliers. By day, Soviet broadcasts and leaflets exhorted the people of Warsaw to take up arms and join with them to expel the Germans. ‘Poles! The time of liberation is at hand! There is not a moment to lose!’ they urged.

  Now that General Rokossovsky’s victorious Red Army had stopped on the left bank of the Vistula outside Praga, the people of Warsaw exulted that they’d soon oust the Germans. It wouldn’t be long before Poles were finally in control of their capital.

  To add to the optimism, the Germans had started retreating. The people of Warsaw rejoiced as dejected German soldiers, civilians and officials headed west, their belongings tied onto the roofs of cars or heaped on trucks that raised clouds of dust in their wake as they left the city they had occupied for five years. Smoke emanated from offices all over the city, as the invaders destroyed incriminating documents. The day of liberation was approaching.

  But as Elzunia neared Kierbedz Bridge, she felt uneasy. There were more German patrols circulating around the city that afternoon than she had seen in the past week, and tanks had been rumbling along Jerozolimskie Aleje. The trucks that rolled slowly across the iron girder bridge were filled with soldiers who looked strong and arrogant, not like the demoralised ones who had slunk away like mangy dogs the previous week.

  She was mulling this over in her mind as a German truck screeched to a halt beside two youths on the other side of the road. Judging by their loose coats and bulging pockets, they were also hurrying towards their posts.

  Watching from the other side of the road, Elzunia held her breath. One of the Germans jumped down from the truck, scrutinised their papers as though memorising every word and pointed to the coat pocket of one of the lads with a commanding gesture.

  The boy put his hand into his pocket as though to empty it, but, before she realised what was happening, he had raised his arm and thrown a grenade. The soldier jerked backwards and lay on the roadway in a spreading pool of blood. A moment later, shots rang out from the truck and the two youths lay sprawled on the road, dead.

  Elzunia forced herself to keep walking but the exhilaration she had felt a moment earlier changed to a sense of foreboding. There was still one hour to go. What if this incident alerted the Germans to the Uprising and removed the vital element of surprise? Perhaps the increased patrols indicated that they already suspected that the revolt was due to begin and had prompted them to send in the tanks and reinforcements.

  At her post near the Warsaw power station, in the riverside district of Powisle, she reported nervously to her commander. No one had heard about the incident near the bridge and morale was high. Singing the stirring words of ‘Hey Lads, Grab Your Bayonets!’ scores of insurgents were milling around, laughing and bursting with pride as they pulled their red-and-white AK armbands above their elbows. Some of the men wore their fathers’ army trousers from the previous world war or the Polish–Russian war, while others wore ordinary trousers tucked into their boots. On their heads they wore field caps, peaked caps, the four-cornered caps of the Polish army, and some even wore tram-drivers’ caps. Like most of the girls, Elzunia wore a skirt and blouse. Only their armbands revealed that they belonged to the insurgent army.

  After pulling on her armband, Elzunia made her way to the chief nurse, who was distributing first-aid satchels. She felt excited and sad at the same time. Sixteen months had passed since she had joined the Ghetto insurgents in a fight that was doomed from the start. If only the AK had joined forces with the Ghetto fighters then, how different the outcome would have been for them all. The Ghetto and its inhabitants might have been saved, Warsaw might have been freed, and this battle might not have to be fought. But there was no time for reflection. As she joined her group preparing splints and dressings, there was a buzz of nervous chatter in the room.

  ‘Oy yey, I wish I had trousers like the boys,’ the girl beside her lamented. ‘What if I have to climb a ladder or go up a hill and they see my panties?’ Janka covered her wide mouth with her hand in anticipated embarrassment.

  Elzunia couldn’t help smiling. ‘I don’t think that in the midst of battle the boys will be looking at your panties.’

  Janka was braiding her ash-blonde hair and pinning it on top of her head in a coronet. Taking two bobby pins from her mouth, she gave a loud snort. ‘If you think that, you don’t know boys. All they ever think about is what’s inside our panties and how to get into them. Believe me, I know. I’ve got four older brothers!’

  The other gir
ls were all talking at once now, but Elzunia fell silent. She felt very young and naïve, and was shocked by their crudeness. Ever since she had met the airman who turned into an AK courier she knew only as Eagle, she had daydreamed of having an intimate relationship with him, but what that might actually entail was veiled in vague fantasies and romantic yearnings.

  ‘Hey, girls! Look outside!’ one of the nurses shouted. They pushed past one another in their rush to get to the window. A Polish flag fluttered from the top of Warsaw’s tallest structure, the Prudential Building. Across the road, a young boy had clambered up to a balcony and ripped off a German poster. In the apartment above him, a toothless old man was leaning from his window, triumphantly waving a Polish flag. All over the city, flags that had been concealed for five years were finally being unfurled.

  Janka started singing the Polish national anthem at the top of her voice, and the others joined in. ‘Jeszcze Polska nie zginela,’ they sang, and their eyes glistened with tears. They were still singing when the siren sounded, long and shrill, and the hair on the back of Elzunia’s neck stood up. It had begun, the moment they’d been waiting for.

  Together with the other nurses she followed the route they’d been given towards the power station, through back alleys and dusty underground passageways, until they reached the barricade. Along the way, people cheered and blessed them. ‘Look at our brave youngsters, going off to win our city back for us,’ Elzunia heard someone shout.

  ‘May God bless you!’ another called out and others made the sign of the cross over their heads. Elzunia felt her heart swelling. This was how heroes felt when they marched off to war.

  When they were all gathered at the barricade, behind sandbags, planks of timber and broken furniture that people had hurled into the street, the commander explained that their objective was to capture the power station, the source of Warsaw’s electricity. Elzunia tried not to jump each time the stuttering salvo of machine-gun fire rang out from the direction of the power station. It was obvious that the Germans were attacking, and the fighting was already intensifying. Fighters carrying wounded comrades on stretchers or slung across their shoulders brought them to the barricades and ran back to continue the assault or bring back more wounded. Elzunia tried to stay calm as she bandaged ripped flesh and splinted broken bones, but many of the injuries were too severe for her limited first-aid kit. As she looked at a boy’s chest that had been ripped open, she reassured the grey-faced soldier that he’d soon be fixed up in hospital, and hoped she sounded more convincing than she felt.

  She looked up and froze. Two insurgents were carrying a wounded comrade on a stretcher towards the barricade when shots rang out. They dropped the stretcher as they fell to the ground. The Germans had deliberately fired on the men bringing a wounded soldier to safety. The injured soldier and one of the carriers lay motionless on the ground about fifty metres from the barricade, but the other stretcher-bearer was writhing in pain and she could hear his moans.

  While the nurses watched in horror, the unit commander discussed the situation with his deputy.

  ‘Two of the nurses should go and get him,’ the commander said. ‘It’s their job.’

  ‘You can’t send them out there under fire,’ the other protested. ‘They wouldn’t stand a chance.’

  The commander shrugged. ‘We can’t spare the fighters. Anyway, I haven’t got time to stand here and argue. Let them decide,’ he said and strode away.

  The nurses looked at each other helplessly. You couldn’t leave the man out there to die but it was suicide to go and get him.

  Janka was fiddling with her braids. Finally she said, ‘I’m game. Anyone coming with me?’

  Without a second thought, Elzunia sprang up to join Janka. In her mind was an image of Szmuel, Edek and Lech who had given their lives to save their colleagues. To save her as well. She had to live up to their example.

  Clutching the stretcher between them with one hand, and their first-aid kits over their heads with the other, they crouched down and started across the road. Almost immediately, bullets started whizzing around them.

  ‘We’d better crawl on our stomachs,’ Elzunia hissed. ‘Keep moving! Not in a straight line!’ she warned Janka who had slowed down. ‘Don’t worry, no one can see your panties.’

  That struck her as so comical that she forgot the danger they were in and started laughing while Janka kept repeating ‘Hail Mary’ in a voice verging on hysteria, like a record stuck in a groove. The sniper didn’t let up but by some miracle he missed them. Covered in perspiration and shaking all over, they reached the wounded soldier, and, exhausted, lay flat on the ground beside him.

  Assuming from their motionless bodies that he’d killed them, the sniper stopped firing. Elzunia fumbled in her first-aid kit for a syringe and managed to inject the insurgent with morphine without sitting up. She and Janka lay on the ground, exchanging terrified glances while they encouraged the wounded soldier to hold on. As soon as it was dark, they placed him on the stretcher and staggered back with him, trembling so much they could hardly stand. Janka touched her cheek and saw that her hand was red.

  ‘Oy yey!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m wounded! I’m bleeding!’

  Elzunia shook her head. ‘That’s iodine, you dope. The phial probably broke when you were holding the first-aid kit over your head.’

  Janka lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. ‘Is this what they call baptism by fire?’ she quipped and they both burst out laughing.

  Forty-Two

  Adam was lounging outside the mess hall popping blackberries into his mouth. He had picked them from the bramble bushes near the base, nostalgic for the pleasures of childhood, but as he examined his scratched arms, he realised he’d forgotten that those pleasures came at a price. The thorns had made deep welts on his skin. He settled back in the sagging armchair to read The Express at leisure. Half of 1944 had already passed, and perhaps it was the exhilaration of having survived so many tours that made him so keenly aware of the blueness of the sky, the sweetness of the lark’s call and the coolness of the breeze that ruffled the hairs on his scratched arms that August morning.

  As he unfolded the newspaper, he sat up so suddenly that the dish fell off his lap and the berries rolled onto the cement, staining it crimson with their juice.

  A moment later, his colleagues were crowding around him, tearing the pages from his hands in their eagerness to read every word. An uprising had broken out in Warsaw. Their pride that Polish honour would finally be vindicated was mingled with envy and regret that they couldn’t fight shoulder to shoulder with their countrymen to liberate their capital.

  Romek lined up a row of glasses and poured the whiskey. ‘Let’s drink to their success,’ he said in a voice hoarse with emotion.

  ‘May it come quickly,’ Tomasz added.

  Several hours later, Adam was in a lorry speeding towards London to meet Feliks, who had recently returned from Warsaw. He could hardly wait to see his old friend to discuss the news.

  As a courier between the Polish government-in-exile and the AK leaders in Poland, Feliks had access to the top people in London and Warsaw, as well as to the British politicians. No one was as well acquainted with what was going on behind the scenes in both groups as he was. This was the post Adam would have held if he hadn’t joined the RAF and at times like these he felt frustrated at being so far removed from the corridors of power.

  Most of the tables in the restaurant of the Savoy Hotel were already taken when he arrived, and the warm smell of roasting meat permeated the dining room. As the maître d’ showed him to his table, Adam suddenly felt a yearning for pierogi stuffed with mashed potatoes and cabbage, or bigos stew with smoky sausage and sauerkraut, and he ached for his mother, his home and his country.

  Inside the restaurant, waiters leaned over the starched tablecloths listing the day’s specials — roast lamb from the carvery, accompanied by mint sauce and roast potatoes, followed by apple-and-blackberry pie. Looking at the menu and the diner
s — men in their pin-striped suits and women in little hats turned down at a saucy angle on their marcelled hair — it seemed as though the war and the Uprising were taking place in another world.

  He looked up expectantly when he saw the maître d’ ushering Feliks to their table and noticed with amusement that, as usual, his friend was dressed in the latest fashion, a double-breasted jacket with long lapels. He was about to make a facetious comment, but without any preamble Feliks said, ‘I’ll give you the short version. Confusion, conflict and chaos.’

  Adam felt as though he’d turned on a hot-water tap and been showered with ice cubes. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the waiter hovering in the background with a large leather-bound menu, and waved him away. Feliks propped his large, bald head on one hand and drummed the table with his long fingers.

  ‘Tell me,’ Adam said.

  Feliks raised his eyebrows until his high forehead resembled a washboard. ‘How much time have you got?’

  For the next hour he spoke in a rapid staccato that resembled a salvo of machine-gun fire, accompanied by sweeping hand gestures. It appeared that there had been dissension in London, disagreement in Warsaw, misunderstandings between the exiled government and the Home Army leaders and even confusion about when the Uprising should begin, whether it was to encompass the whole of Poland or just Warsaw, and even whether it should break out at all.

  In London, the Commander-in-Chief and Prime Minister of the government-in-exile mistrusted each other and disagreed about practically everything, including the timing, extent and location of the Uprising.