I telephone Jerzy.
‘It’s turned cold,’ I say. ‘Do you feel like a hot chocolate and cake at Krystyna’s?’
We meet halfway, take a turn through the streets and sit together on a bench for a while before going in for our drinks.
‘I’ve been thinking all week about the war,’ I tell him.
One black eyebrow travels alone up his forehead and then settles down again. This is how he registers coincidence.
‘So was I, just this morning,’ he says. ‘I had a letter from a former comrade in Philadelphia. In fact I was going to call you about it. Did you ever know a Zygmunt Szadkowski?’
I tell him the name is not familiar to me.
‘This letter I have is about him. Very curious story. He was one of our most brilliant couriers. Absolutely fearless.’
‘Why should I know him?’ I ask.
‘He was from your city, and the same age. Small, very pale complexion and hair as black as a raven. He wore round, extremely thick spectacles. He had the most terrible eyesight.’
I had him then. Trismegistus.
He was a pupil in the school I went to before moving to Naklo. One day a new priest came in to see us just before we made our First Communions. He was from Latvia. He wore a crimson cassock with little pearl buttons and his hair was pomaded. He took up a seat before us, folded his hands together on the desk and said he had a story to tell us about the Communists. In Gulbene, not far from where he grew up, two Russian soldiers came into a church during Mass. When the time came for Holy Communion they went up to the rail along with everyone else and placed their tongues out to receive the host. The priest did not refuse them. When they had the Body of Our Lord in their mouths they stood up, fired their guns into the dome of the church, cursed the priest and laughed at all the people at prayer and went out into the street where they spat the hosts out on to the ground. What did we think happened then? he asked us. We were all holding our breath. No one moved so much as the smallest finger. I looked from the priest to the wide brown eyes of the statue of Jesus behind him, His thickened brows, His exposed heart ready to pour forth the sacred blood, then back to the priest again. ‘Well, their laughter stopped soon enough,’ he said, ‘for just at that moment, from the doors and windows and up from the cracks in the pavement, the road all around them flooded with blood. They went mad there and then, and never spoke a word of sense after.’
The priest folded his hands again. He looked slowly around the room at all of us. It seemed that when he came to me his eyes went through my eyes and into my head. When he finished he said, ‘You are God’s children now. But soon you will be His warriors.’
Then he smiled broadly and addressed himself to the girls. Maybe he felt bad that we might have been frightened by the story. ‘Now, how many of you girls feel the calling to be nuns?’ he asked. As I picture it now I would say that just under half of them raised their hands. Some wanted to be schoolteachers, others nurses. There was one with the name Elzbieta Celmer who had the idea of being a pilot.
‘Now the boys,’ he said. ‘How many of you would like to become priests?’
Every one of us, including myself, immediately raised their hands – with one exception. That was Trismegistus. He was a small boy with neatly combed black hair who rarely spoke and when he did you could barely hear him. His spectacles had the thickest lenses of any I had ever seen. We called him Trismegistus, but his real name was Zygmunt Szadkowski. Most of us had names then – the Brigadier, Tarzan, the Beluba. I was the Quaker. How these names came to be assigned, I cannot now say.
The priest inclined his head towards the master in order to get Trismegistus’s name. Evidently the situation amused him greatly.
‘Zygmunt,’ he said. ‘I note that you are the only boy in the class who does not wish to be a priest. That is your prerogative, of course. Not everyone is called. But I wonder if you could shed any light on the fact that you are alone in your disinclination?’
Trismegistus looked up at the crimson-robed figure before him. He swallowed once, and then he said,
‘I’m Lutheran, Father.’
When I tell Jerzy this story he says, ‘That’s right. That was one of the things that made him valuable. He had protection because of his German blood. His mother was a German from Gdansk. That made Zygmunt a Volksdeutscher.’
‘I lost track of him when I went to Naklo.’
‘His father was given the directorship of the largest tobacco importers into Poland and they moved to Warsaw. They had a lot of money. They had a cook and a maid. The father drove a long black car from America, a Packard. Zygmunt was frail, but a brilliant student. He wanted to be a judge. It was something very specific and clear, like wanting to be a priest, or a jockey.
‘Then one morning when he woke up he looked out of his bedroom window and saw the eyes of the cook looking back at him from the street. He told me about it. He said they seemed to be falling from their sockets. She was one of fifteen Jews hanged from lampposts in the night. He told me she used to sing to him when he was sick.
‘He came to work with us. He began by forging identity papers for couriers. He was superb at that. Then he began running messages himself. He crossed the Slovak and Hungarian frontiers. He substituted for another courier who had become ill with dysentery for a nightmare journey to Stockholm, lying still on a pile of coal for three days in the hold of a boat being rained on by black water that fell from the ceiling. He even brought propaganda leaflets into the Reich itself. He really was astonishing. He was like a spore in the wind. No one seemed able to see him. He was very small and dignified-looking. Maybe that was it.
‘Then he got caught. He was a law student by this time and was seeing a girl who was studying medicine at the same university. He had asked her to marry him and she had accepted. He called in one evening to see her and her family. Inside was the Gestapo. Zygmunt wasn’t carrying anything and he had his Volksdeutscher documents, but they had information from somewhere. They went through the lining of his clothes and then they beat him. They beat the family too. No one spoke. One of the Germans broke Zygmunt’s glasses and pushed the splintered pieces into his face. They took them all down to a cellar they used and brought Zygmunt’s father in and beat him to death in front of him with bars. They left the corpse with him in his cell. They shot everyone in the family and dumped the bodies in the street. Then they pushed a live pigeon into Zygmunt’s mouth and shocked him with electrodes. We knew all this from people we had in the building. The next day he was shipped to Mauthausen. We held a funeral service for him. He was awarded a medal.’
By now we are in Krystyna’s with our hot chocolates in front of us. Each time we come here there is a ritual of flirtation between Jerzy and Krystyna which Krystyna always initiates and Jerzy endures.
‘And how is your wife, Jerzy? Away in the south visiting her sister by any chance? Leaving you all on your own?’
‘No, no, at home as always. And keeping very well, thank you.’
‘My Tomas can’t seem to keep his eyes open after eight o’clock at night. Always tired. I think he needs a tonic. I have so much time on my hands! I’m sure you’re awake and keeping busy much later than that, aren’t you, Jerzy?’
And so on. She is round, wide and ample-breasted and wears tight violet or red pullovers made from wool. Sometimes when she brings you your hot chocolate her breasts sit neatly on your shoulders like an oxen’s yoke. Her hair is golden and turned up neatly at the ends and so lacquered it looks like a solid mass of sculpted wood. She has this kind of exchange with nearly any male more than fifteen years old, but she pays particular attention to Jerzy. She tells me it’s because she worries that he’s always so serious.
When she goes back behind her counter he turns again to me.
‘But the thing is,’ he says, ‘that wasn’t the end of the story of Zygmunt. That’s what I wanted to call you about. I only heard this morning. The letter I received from Philadelphia was about him.
‘
Here is what happened. It seems there’s a rooming-house with many Poles in the city of Paterson, New Jersey. In a room a young immigrant was listening to his radio. Something came on about the war in Poland. It happened that it was taken from a book written by the courier who had missed the journey to Sweden because of the attack of dysentery. The young man went to the door of an older man who lived alone. He thought he might like to hear the radio programme. This old man was Zygmunt. He had not died in Mauthausen. He was transported from there because of his knowledge of German to work in a factory they had built under a pine forest for making planes. It was an incredible thing a kilometre long and five storeys high, completely underground. The Americans found him there.
‘That night in Paterson, New Jersey, he listened to the man on the radio describe his experiences during the war, including how he had missed the boat to Sweden that time but how his place had been taken by one of the many unrecorded heroes of the underground named Zygmunt Szadkowski, who had long avoided the Gestapo but had then been captured and taken to Mauthausen, where he died. He had lived just long enough to see his father and his fiancée killed by the Germans.
‘Zygmunt wrote a short letter to the radio station to tell them that he was not dead. The author of the book, who at that time was living in France, was informed and through him many veterans of the underground heard the story, including my friend in Philadelphia. It was him they sent to Paterson to find Zygmunt.’
‘How was he?’ I ask.
‘As before, it seems. Quiet, serious. A little slower, of course.’
‘What had he been doing all that time?’
‘Well he never became a judge,’ says Jerzy. ‘He was cutting grass in parks.’
Something is happening to me which I don’t understand. It’s like having dreams while still awake. Something bubbles up as though from an underground spring and when it breaks to the surface there are words.
On a May evening in Warsaw, with the fortunes of war already turning, the trees blooming pink and white in the gardens and the setting sun shining red and gold on the buildings, Jerzy and a small group of his comrades were waiting in a second-floor apartment overlooking the spot where it had been announced that four people suspected of involvement in the underground were to be released due to lack of evidence. Three were men and one was a woman. Their names had not been given but Marek Koc and his sister Marysia had been arrested three days earlier and Jerzy hoped they would be among them. Marek had served in the army and gave instruction in the use of weapons and Marysia sang patriotic songs on the underground radio. Jerzy had met her when he went to a house in the outer suburbs of the city to collect a piece of a gun-sight scavenged from a disabled tank. He was struck by the sweeping curves of her short body, her blonde hair tied up by a black ribbon, her generous mouth and amused brown eyes. He had never thought of himself as being witty, but when he tried to be she laughed. It was a lovely sound, he said, like the tinkling of small bells. He tried to find ways of being around her. He brought her flowers he found among the ashes of Warsaw. One night after drinking vodka and waltzing around the floor to a tune on the radio she led him by the hand to her bed, only the second such time he had been with a woman, the first having been when he was traversing the land from Lwow and a farmer’s wife whose husband was away smuggling pigs gave him shelter and then came into his bed in the night and took his virginity.
On the evening that Jerzy was waiting for Marysia, others were gathered on the pavement in the hope that it would be a member of their family who would be included among the released prisoners. The atmosphere, said Jerzy, was nervous, but light. They had seen the German army more than two years earlier sweeping eastwards in their gleaming vehicles like a herd of stallions. Now they were coming back, limping, bitter, bereft. You could see in their eyes the knowledge of their vanquishment.
When the Gestapo brought the prisoners out Jerzy could see that Marysia was among them. He stood up. He had the urge to call to her but repressed it. Two of the men were bleeding from the mouth, where, he later learned, their teeth had been torn from their gums with pliers. The Gestapo were holding all three of the men by the hair and when they arrived in the centre of the street they fired a bullet into each of their heads. The officer with Marysia called out in German that he had been fucking her for three days and he did not intend to waste a German bullet on a Polish whore. Then he cut her throat open with his knife and threw her in the road.
The three men died, but Marysia did not. This was the Marysia who had no voice and whom Jerzy later married after he passed his examinations at the military academy.
When this happened Jerzy no longer wanted to write messages insulting to the Germans on walls or to make careful observations of the movements of aeroplanes or to transmit patriotic songs on the radio. He had greater aspirations for destruction. But he was Polish, and the infinite ineffectualness of this condition was just as instantly apparent to him. He obtained a key from a sympathetic secretary and for three nights went into a chemistry laboratory in the university. He purchased paper and envelopes. Then he posted letters saturated with anthrax to Gestapo headquarters throughout Poland.
When I got to the capital after the war had ended people were down on their hands and knees in the ruins of buildings looking for photographs and rings and clocks. Some were pushing dirt and pieces of wood around to make homes for themselves. Their movements were slow, as though they were under water. Above them were buildings with the walls missing. You could see wallpaper and mirrors and pipes. They were like the drawings in textbooks of anatomy which showed muscles and organs. There was the smell of extinguished fire and of dead flesh. There were trucks and horses and people with loads tied to their backs moving around and above them a cloud of dust hanging over the whole of the city and turning in the beams of sunlight like tiny pieces of gold. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know who belonging to me was still alive. I walked around and looked at the people so gaunt and lost and speechless while I thought about it all. On the walls and railings were thousands of pieces of paper on which people looking for their relatives had written addresses. They stirred when the breeze blew. They were like the feathers left behind in a henhouse cleared of its birds.
I made my way to Naklo. I slept for two nights on the floor of the old ballroom where Pan Kazimierz’s violins lay broken and scattered, and then I found Jerzy. He was wearing a soldier’s tunic and a beret with a red star pinned to it. He’d found them in a camp left behind by the Russians, he said, and liked the look of them. We walked over the big lawn now clogged with weeds, down past my grandfather’s cottage, among the trees of the forest and back through the ruined rooms without rooftops where orchestras played, knowledge was imparted and a life never to be known again was lived. This is our home now, said Jerzy. Where else had we to go? He told me about the death of my father and mother under the beams of our home and of my grandparents in their bed and of how Renata had survived it all and was living, he thought, in Plock, just along the river from Warsaw. He told me of how Pan Kazimierz had charged at a German officer with a drawn sword and a loud wail and how the soldiers had laughed as though at a circus clown as they fired bullets into him even as he lay dead on the ground. He told me about living on the fruits of the forest, about the lice in the wooden boxes in the laboratory at Lwow, about the letters drenched in anthrax and about the woman with no voice he had fallen in love with when the German drew the blade of his knife across her throat.
‘After the Gestapo had shot Marek and the others and cut open Marysia’s throat, they walked along the street. Their guns were still in their hands. They had the look of drunks searching for another drink. Soldiers were herding Jews who had been hiding in a cellar out into the street. The Gestapo ordered that they be tied to a lamppost and when that had been done they took grenades from the soldiers and blew them up. They poured petrol over the pieces of the bodies and down into the cellar of the building and set fire to it all. There were still families in the buildin
g. Then they got into a car and were driven away.
‘We went down the stairs and out into the street. Just as we got there a woman with a scarf tied over her face ran out in front of us and took the shoes from Marek’s feet. I looked at his face. He seemed to be staring at me. There was a wide hole in his forehead where the bullet had come out. He looked as if I’d asked him a question he didn’t yet know the answer to. Two nurses took Marysia away and I was about to follow her when a priest tapped me on the shoulder. “I’d like you to assist me in the offering of a Mass,” he said. I suppose I looked at him as though I had not heard. “A Mass for those who have died,” he said then. People were jumping from the windows of the burning building, the bodies of the Jews were burning, Marek and his comrades were lying dead at our feet, Marysia’s wound was leaving a trail of blood in the road and soon the scavengers would be out to take what they could from the corpses. “And to whom would we be praying?” I asked him.’
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