The Amber Room

by T. Davis Bunn

  “Funny what you think at a moment like that. I was only worried about my camera. I looked over my shoulder as they led me from the room in handcuffs. They were going through my files of stills and slides and negatives. One of them picked up my camera, opened the back and stripped out the film, then with a casual motion swung it against the wall and smashed it. I felt as though I had lost a limb, and part of my life spilled to the ground with the little pieces of glass and metal.”

  Jeffrey felt a chasm growing between him and the room’s glittering display as the man continued with his soft-spoken story. “Midnight Saturday they declared martial law. Sunday morning there were no phones, no radio, no papers—no one knew what had happened. All of this I learned later, from friends who had either gone underground and escaped the first sweep or were not listed by the police and remained free. My own story was quite different. But before I tell you what happened to me, first I shall speak of what my nation experienced.

  “Later that day, Jaruzelski appeared in uniform on television. Jaruzelski at that time was Secretary of the Polish Communist Party and head of the armed forces—the first time one person had ever held those two posts. He announced that martial law had been declared. But it is important to note that the words in Polish for martial law are the same as for a state of war or a state of siege. You can imagine the reactions. Some said it was just the next stage of the argument between Solidarity and the government. Others lived that time in the terror of believing the Soviets had invaded.”

  Jeffrey glanced up and was astonished to find the entire table watching and listening. He inspected the circle of faces and sensed an unwavering quality to their attentiveness, a solemn sharing of what the photographer was saying. They listened with an intensity born of shared concern, a somber gathering who knew already of what the man spoke and yet listened with the patience of ones willing to allow the moment to live yet again. Jeffrey searched their faces, found a common bond and a collective strength rising from their love of the Polish nation.

  “Monday came to those not arrested,” the photographer went on. “For those of us in prison, the names of passing days meant little. People who were free went back to work and found that everything was much the same, yet altogether different. Everybody worked under much tighter control. Only one telephone line functioned in each factory, no matter how large the company. A stooge for the regime was placed in charge of the outgoing line. Every other hour, someone at Party headquarters would call to ensure that all was quiet.

  “There was a curfew from ten in the evening to six the next morning. You were forbidden to leave town. You were forbidden to buy petrol. Train services were cut back, and a special Party permit was required to buy a ticket. Tanks were stationed on many street corners. Soldiers were everywhere. The military scrambled the army units. The central authorities did not want sons standing across the barricades from their sisters and mothers. So units were sent to distant cities—Cracow to Gdansk, Gdansk to Warsaw, Warsaw to Wroclaw, and so on.

  “It was a very cold December, and on every street the soldiers kept bonfires burning in order to stay warm. Our cities remained shrouded by smoke from these fires throughout the cold winter weeks.

  “Our cities lived a very oppressive life. People had no way of knowing what was happening. The papers said only what the government told them to say, which was the lie of convenience. Everyone on television wore uniforms. You could see how nervous the announcers were, how terrified. The authorities forced these reporters to dress up in military uniforms and read the Party line.

  “The despondency was made very bitter because it arrived on the crest of hopes that Solidarity had ignited. Over all this loomed the constant fear that our friends to the east would arrive—that is how Soviet propaganda always described itself, Poland’s friend to the east.

  “That first Monday, everyone went into the stores and bought out everything they could find—all the flour, all the sugar, all the cans and boxes of preserved food. After that, no further shipments of food arrived. The shelves remained empty. Grocery stores remained open because they were told to do so, and yet they had nothing to sell except perhaps a few bottles of vinegar. Sales clerks just stood behind the counters. Then in the spring, when the first vegetables arrived, even the vinegar disappeared. People used it to pickle vegetables at home.

  “Suddenly there were ration cards for everything—meat, alcohol, cigarettes, butter, cooking oil, flour, even cards for shoes and undergarments and little chocolates for the children. But the fact that you had a coupon did not mean you could buy the article. Usually the stores had nothing to sell. It simply meant you had the right to enter a store to ask.

  “Rumors started then. People stood in line ten, twelve, fourteen hours just because of a word from a friend of a friend of a friend that this store might get a shipment of shoes or socks or sugar or bread.

  “Basically, martial law was the latest brutal reminder of how Poland was manipulated by Russia. People lived under a constant cloud of depression, waiting, waiting, fearing the worst. They knew, whether or not it was spoken. International attention kept us from being annexed, but we were totally under the power of our friends to the east.

  “I have talked to all my friends about this time, trying to fill in the gaps, seeking to close the void that my arrest caused in my life. I could not take pictures of that vital time, so I borrowed the images of friends. I remember only darkness and silence and cold. Over my absence of light and memories of bitter fear, I have set the recollections and photographs and experiences of others.”

  Waiters appeared in unison to sweep away the plates and set dessert in their place. The photographer’s gaze was very bright, but he spoke in quiet tones; the people on the other side of the circular table had to lean forward to catch his words. Their table remained an island of intense silence in the swirl of evening splendor.

  “My own glimpses of the fall of Poland’s night came through a tear in the side of the army truck which carried us off that Saturday evening. We were not taken to the local prison. I heard a guard say as we were processed that the prison was already full. We were taken to an army barracks. I was led off alone and locked inside a cellar storage room. There was nothing in that room. No window, no heat, no water, no mattress, nothing. For light I had a single bulb strung from the ceiling. Hours later, two soldiers, an officer and an enlisted man, came in. They set down a blanket, a pail of water, and a slop bucket. I asked the officer how long I was to stay there. Until I have orders to release you, he replied. How long will that be? I asked. He did not answer, only shut the door and locked me in.

  “There was no way of telling the passage of time. There was no day or night, only the bulb dangling from the ceiling. After a time, my fears began to take control of me. Food did not come regularly, or so it seemed, and I grew terrified that they would forget me and I would be left to starve. Then there was the fear that the bulb would burn out and I would be left in the dark. I spent several days fighting off sleep, terrified that I would wake up in the darkness and never see the light again.

  “Weeks passed. I know that now. At the time it was an eternity, marked only by occasional meals handed to me by guards ordered not to speak, and by my growing fears. Then came a point when I realized I was going insane. That became my greatest fear of all, of losing my mind and my memories and my ability to give the world meaning through photographs. I decided I would kill myself in order to keep that from happening. But I did not know how. I was given no utensils with my food, I had no weapons or any other sharp article, and there was nothing in the seamless concrete walls from which I could suspend my blanket and hang myself. I spent hours and hours and hours searching for a way out of this man-made hell and finally fell asleep.

  “I dreamed of a time as a very small child, so long ago that I was still in my crib. I recalled something I had not thought of for years and years. My mother used to come in as I was going to sleep, sit down beside my little bed, and say a rosary. I would f
all asleep to the sound of the clicking beads and her murmured prayers.

  “I awoke with a start, crawled to my knees, and prayed to a God I did not know for rescue. As I prayed, I had an image of something falling from myself, as though I were shedding an old skin. I did not know the Bible then, and I could not describe what was happening. All I could say was that I returned to sleep with a calmer spirit.

  “And then I had a second dream. It was not of the past, but of a scene I could not recognize. I was looking out over beautiful green hills lit by very bright sunshine. In the valley below me was a small village of triangular-shaped thatched roofs—it was a very peculiar design. I was certain I had never seen anything like that place or those houses ever before. But it was not the scene itself which had an impact on me. I awoke with a sense of overwhelming peace, a feeling so strong that there was no room left in me for despair or doubt or even fear. I sat in my bare concrete cell and knew that I was going to be all right. I could not say how, or even if, I was going to be released. But the power of that peace was enough to make me know beyond doubt that I was not alone, that I was going to be all right.”

  A waiter appeared to collect the untouched dessert plates. The bejeweled matron seated beside Jeffrey waved the waiter away with a sharp motion. No one else at the table moved. All attention remained fastened upon the photographer.

  “A short while later, an amnesty was declared. I was released, along with many others. It was night when I came out of the barracks. A friend was there to meet me, and he and his wife drove me immediately from the barracks to a place where I could rest and recover, a family cottage in the Tartar Mountains, down on our southern border. By the time we arrived I was too tired to pay any attention to the surroundings. I went straight up to bed.

  “The next morning I awoke, walked to the window, pushed open the shutters, and cried aloud. There before me was the exact same scene I had dreamed of in prison—the green slopes, the tiny village with the thatched cottages, the bright morning sunshine. And the feeling. It was there as well. The peace and the love and the assurance that I was not alone, would never be alone, that I was loved for all eternity.”

  CHAPTER 23

  The man who answered the door at the Dresden address which Birgit had supplied to Erika was not an aging Nazi colonel; he was a middle-aged Wessie who looked at the trio on his doorstep with ill-concealed disdain. His family were now the sole occupants of the building, reclaiming the home that had been stripped from their grandparents when the Communists took power.

  Even Ferret showed real emotion at that point, demanding in shrill anger to be told where the old man had gone. But the Wessie had never been taught to fear the authorities and replied with bored hostility. He had no idea where the occupants of the seven cramped apartments that the Communists had made of their home were now. Then he rudely ordered the trio away with threats and closed the door upon their fury.

  The following two weeks were spent in helpless panic as Erika returned to her friend and Birgit returned to her records. They could do little then but wait—wait and worry and fret over the unknowns. What if the old man had moved away to another city? What if he had spent several frigid nights in the open, then taken his secret to an unmarked grave? Such questions left them tired and eaten with worry and snapping at each other. To be so close, so close, and then to—no, better not to say.

  Then Birgit came through again.

  The old man had done as any good Ossie would do, trained as they were from birth to follow any instructions from authority without argument or question; he had given his corrected address when accepting his monthly pension check.

  There was an entirely different flavor to this second journey. They drove in grimly determined silence through a night turned treacherous by fresh snowfall. Not a word was spoken between Schwerin and Dresden. Not a word.

  The address belonged to a two-room hovel, a place granted the name residence only because of the housing shortage and the lack of governmental control. It was a plywood shack set at the back end of garden plots stretching between an autobahn exit ramp and the railroad lines leading into Dresden. As in many European cities, sections of otherwise unusable property had been parceled out to the very poor, granting them a tiny postage stamp of earth where flowers and vegetables might be grown.

  The shack stood at the garden’s far corner, shaken by the man-made thunder of passing cars and trains. Smoke from a wood-burning stove poured from the tin pipe poking out of the roof. A pair of wires slumped down from a solitary pole, signaling that the shanty at least had electricity and perhaps the luxury of a phone. There was no indoor plumbing; a hand pump sprouted a long icicle in testament to recent use.

  They sat in the car a very long moment, frozen into immobility by two weeks of worry. Finally Ferret spoke. “I will handle this myself.” He waited; there was no dissent. “Very well. Let us begin.”

  * * *

  The frail old man opened his front door and took an involuntary step back. The man and woman facing him were both of a size, as the saying went, solid and beefy and cloaked in knee-length leather trench coats. The starchy diet of the East had weighted them with undue pounds, yet their menace remained intact. The old man clutched his chest at their faces and the sweep of memories that accompanied the sight. He had seen many such faces through the years.

  Then a third figure stepped forward, smaller and slighter than the pair, but no less menacing. “We have questions, Herr Makel,” the little man said, his sibilant whisper matched perfectly to a face unmarked by age or emotion.

  “I—I know no one by that name.”

  “We have not driven through nine hours of traffic and snow to stand in the night and talk drivel, Herr Horst Makel. We know who you are, and we are here for information.”

  “May I see your identification?”

  “Of course not,” the little man snapped. “And you will stop wasting my time with stupid questions.”

  The old man drew himself up as tall as years and arthritis would allow. “We are living in a democracy nowadays. The old days are gone.”

  “The new days have a lot of hunters out looking for Nazi criminals,” the stranger replied.

  “I have committed no crimes,” the old man cried.

  “Of course not. It was simply convenient to spend fortyseven years living under a false name, working as a tool-and-dye maker. Nicht wahr, Herr Oberst?”

  The little man waited through a very tense moment, then stated flatly, “We are coming in, Herr Colonel.”

  He shouldered past the sputtering old man and entered the threadbare cottage. The silent pair walked in behind him and camped solidly by the door. That left the old man the choice of either arguing with a pair as pliant as two large trees or following the strange unfinished man into the parlor.

  “I don’t understand what this is all about, but—”

  “Czestochowa,” Ferret replied. He pronounced the name correctly, so that it sounded like Chenstohova. He then waited and watched as the old man deflated. “It has to do with Czestochowa, Herr Colonel.”

  “This is insanity,” the old man replied, fainter now.

  “It must have been agony to know all that wealth was just across the border, yet there was no way for you to get at it.” Ferret selected the most comfortable of the chairs for himself and settled down with a sigh. “Was there, Herr Colonel? Always the risk that if you applied for a passport and someone checked the fingerprints, they would come up with things better left buried.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No, of course not. You don’t happen to have a glass of schnapps, do you? It’s been a long drive.”

  “I want you out of my house immediately.”

  “No, I suppose not.” Ferret stretched out his short legs. “Well, to business. We’ve taken it quite far enough to have you turned over to the authorities. No doubt they’d be kinder to a former Nazi than the Ossies and their Russian comrades, especially once they caught the
first whiff of riches. With the Wessies, torture has been outlawed, or so they say. Still, no doubt Spandau Prison would seem rather unpleasant if one were doomed to spend the rest of one’s days there. I imagine that would be the fate for one with your record, no matter which authorities were in charge.”

  “Authorities,” the old man spat.

  “Our feelings exactly. Interlopers from the West out to buy us heart and soul. Everything for a price, especially loyalty. But we are not of them, and we come with a proposition.”

  “I have nothing to say.”

  “Not so fast, Herr Colonel. The night is young. Let me tell you what we have, and you might wish to sing a different song.”

  The old man groped for a chair, said nothing.

  “You were commander of the Königsberg Transport Division at the end of the war.” Ferret raised one gloved hand. “Don’t deny it, Herr Colonel. We have proof. I assure you, I did not drive this distance on such a night to bandy hunches about. So. You were given a certain cargo to transport the last week before the Russians overran your position. An unlisted cargo, one so large it required three trucks. The trucks were carried by train as far as the rails remained intact, in order to save precious petrol, then you continued on by road, or what roads existed after the bombings.

  “Strange, is it not, that a transport commander is ordered away from his post on the eve of a crucial battle and given three trucks and strings of petrol canisters, items which by that time were almost impossible to come by. Strange also that such a valuable cargo was granted no guards whatsoever, not even relief drivers. Stranger still is the fact that passes were issued, granting you passage through the entire Third Reich. It indicates, does it not, that this unlisted cargo was destined for somewhere so secret that only a handful of people ever knew of its existence.”