by Alan Furst
For a time, the road crossing the Carpathian foothills was clear, then they came upon the remnants of a retreating Polish regiment driven back from the border: exhausted soldiers, faces and uniforms gray with dust, wagonloads of bandaged, silent men, walking wounded leaning on their rifles or helped by friends, officers who gave no orders. It was, for Szara and evidently for Vyborg as well, worse than the battle at the Dunajec. There they had seen courage in the face of superior force; this was the defeat of a nation’s army. A group of peasants harvesting wheat in a field stopped working, took their caps off, and watched silently as the troops walked past.
For a time, the sergeant drove slowly, at the pace of the regiment. Then, around noon, the forward units were engaged. According to a lieutenant questioned by Vyborg, a German corps that had fought its way across one of the Carpathian passes from northern Slovakia had now turned east-with extraordinary, unheard-of speed; a completely motorized force that moved in trucks and tanks-to close the pocket and cut off Polish forces attempting to retreat along the road. When the mortar and machine gun exchanges started up and the regiment began to organize its resistance, Vyborg directed the sergeant to take a tiny cart track-two wagon ruts in the dirt- that cut through a wheat field.
Thus they spent the day. “We will get you to a telegraph or a telephone somewhere,” Vyborg said, his mind very much on Szara’s presumptive dispatch to Pravda. But the tiny path wound its way among the hills, in no hurry to get anywhere, over numberless little streams that watered farm cattle, past the occasional peasant settlement deep in the Polish countryside, far, far away from telegraph wires or much of anything. Deeper and deeper, Szara thought, into the fourteenth century-a land of high-sided hay carts with enormous wooden wheels hewed by axes, farm women in aprons, the rooty smells of dry September earth flavored with pig manure, sweet hay, and woodsmoke. “See what we have lost,” Vyborg said.
They stopped in midafternoon at a dusty farmyard and bought bread and sausage and freshly brewed beer from a frightened peasant who called them “pan,” sir, with every other breath. A man with the fear of armies running in his very blood-getting him to take money almost required force. Just go, said his eyes while he smiled obsequiously. Just go. Leave me my wife and daughters- you already have my sons-spare my life, we’ve always given you whatever you asked. Take it. Note that I’m a humble, stupid man of no interest. Then go away.
They stopped in a wood to eat. The sergeant drove the car far enough in so that German spotter aircraft would not see it. When the engine was turned off a deep silence descended, broken only by the low, three-note song of a single bird. The forest reminded Szara of a cathedral; they sat beneath tall oak trees that filtered and darkened the light until it was like the cool shadow of a church. One worshiped simply by being there. But it seemed to do Vyborg more harm than good; his mood grew darker by the moment, and the sergeant finished his bread and sausage and took his canteen of beer over to the car, folded the hood back, and began to tinker with the engine. “He disapproves,” Vyborg said. “And shows it in his own way.” But for courtesy, Szara would have joined him. He knew this black depth that lived in the Polish soul and feared it-the descent to a private hell where nothing could ever be fixed, or better, or made right often ended badly. He’d seen it. He noticed that the flap on Vyborg’s holster was unbuttoned. An innocuous detail, but this was not the sort of officer who would be casual about such things. He knew that if Vyborg determined his honor lay in the single shot fired in a forest there was nothing he could say or do to stop it. “You cannot take this on yourself, Colonel,” Szara finally said to break the silence.
Vyborg was slow to answer. Considered not bothering to say anything at all, finally said, “Who else, then?”
“Politicians. Not least, Adolf Hitler.”
Vyborg stared at him in disbelief, wondering if perhaps he’d adopted the most hopeless fool in the world to tell his nation’s story. “Sir,” he said, “do you believe that what you saw forcing the Dunajec was the Nazi party? What have I missed? If there was a lot of drunken singing and pissing on lampposts I somehow didn’t see it. What I saw was Deutschland, Poland’s eternal enemy. I saw Germans. ‘C’mon fellows, there’s a job to be done here and we’re the ones to do it, so let’s get busy.’ I saw the Wehrmacht, and I would have been, any officer worth his salt would have been, proud to command it. Do you believe that a bunch of shitbag little grocers and naughty schoolboys, led by Himmler the chicken farmer and Ribbentrop the wine salesman, would have overcome a Polish battalion? Do you?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Well then.”
Vyborg had raised his voice. The sergeant, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, working at the engine of the car, began whistling. “And,” Vyborg went on, now in control of himself, “I do take this on myself. Is there somewhere, in some filing cabinet in Warsaw, a report signed A. S. Vyborg, lieutenant colonel, that says the Stuka dive-bomber may be expected to do such and such? That says the Wehrmacht is able to cover fifteen miles of countryside a day, using tanks and motorized infantry? There is not. We are going to lose this war, we are going to be subjugated, and the fault lies with diplomacy-you’re not entirely wrong-but it also lies with me and my colleagues. When a country is conquered, or subdued by political means, the secret services are always to blame-they, who are supposedly allowed to do anything, should have done something. In political life it is the cruelest equation there is, but we accept it. If we do not accept it we cannot continue with the work.”
He paused, drank the remaining beer in his canteen, and wiped his lips delicately with his fingers. The sergeant had stopped whistling, and the three-note bird had started to sing again, low and mournful. Vyborg settled his back against a tree trunk and closed his eyes. He was very pale, Szara realized, tired, perhaps exhausted. The strength of his personality was deceptive. The lost light of the forest muted the color of his uniform-now it seemed heavy wool fabric, cut by a tailor, not a uniform at all, and his sidearm became a bulky nuisance on a belt. The colonel forced himself to return from wherever he’d been, leaned forward, searched his breast pocket for a cigar, and showed a brief anger when he couldn’t find any. When he spoke again his voice was quiet and resolved. “Every profession defines its own failures, my friend. The doctor’s patient does not recover, the merchant closes his shop, the politician leaves office, the intelligence officer sees his country dominated. Surely, on the level you’ve lived in Russia, you know that. You’ve had, so to speak, at least contacts with your own services.”
“Rarely,” Szara said. “To my knowledge, at any rate. You’re referring not to the secret police-of course one sees them every day in some form or another-but to those who concern themselves with international issues.”
“Exactly. Well, I’ll tell you something, you’ve missed a historic era, a phenomenon. We know the Soviet services, we oppose them after all so we had better know them, and what most of us feel, alongside the appropriate patriotic wrath, is perhaps just a little bit of envy. Seen together it is a curious group: Theodor Maly-the former Hungarian army chaplain, Eitingon, Slutsky, Artuzov, Trilisser, General Shtern, Abramov, General Berzin, Ursula Kuczynski- called Sonya, that bastard Bloch, all the Latvians and Poles and Jews and what have you-they are, or perhaps one ought to say, in most cases, were, the very best that ever did this work. I don’t speak to their morals, their personal lives, or their devotion to a cause in which I do not believe, no, one really can’t see them in that light. But in the business of espionage there have never been any better, possibly won’t ever be. I suppose it could be considered a pity; all of them slaughtered to some strange, enigmatic purpose known only to Stalin, at least a pity you never came to experience their particular personalities.”
“You’ve met them? “
“Not in the flesh, no. They are paper men who live in file folders, but perhaps it is, for them, their truest manifestation. What, after all, is there to see? A little fellow with glasses reading a newspaper i
n a cafe. An overweight Jewish gentleman choosing a tie, charming the sales clerk. A man in shirtsleeves and suspenders, berated by his wife for some small domestic stupidity.” Vyborg laughed at the thought of it, his gallery of rogues muddling through their daily lives. “Ah, but on paper, well, that’s another story. Here an ambassador is compromised, there a powerful emigre group simply disintegrates, plans for an ingenious ciphering machine are copied and no one knows it has happened. An incident in Brussels, a disappearance in Prague-one must surmise that a fine hand is at work. As the stage magician says: now you see it, now you don’t. Ah, but dear ladies and gentlemen you must forgive me, I cannot tell you how the trick is done.”
The sound of an approaching aircraft made Vyborg glance up through the trees. For a time, while the plane wandered invisible somewhere in the clouds above the forest, neither of them spoke. At last, it faded away into the distance. Vyborg stood and brushed himself off. “One thing we certainly do know: it isn’t one of ours.” Szara stood up. Vyborg glanced back up at the sky. “We’d better be moving,” he said, “or one of these clever Wehrmacht pincer maneuvers is going to close around us and we’ll wind up as prisoners. In the last war the officer class respected the gentleman’s code, but this time around I’m not so certain.”
They drove on, the countryside shimmering a thousand shades of green and gold in the haze of the waning afternoon. Three wagons came toward them and the sergeant, at Vyborg’s direction, pulled over to let them use the twin ruts of the path. Polish Jews, men, women, and children, eyes downcast for the occasion of passing army officers, headed east, away from the advancing Germans. When the car was again in motion, Szara said to Vyborg, “No gentleman’s code for them, evidently.”
“I fear not. If we are to be occupied by German forces, I am afraid our Jews will suffer. Those who just passed us believe that, and I have to agree. They, however, are headed east. Will Russia have them? “
“Russia does what it has to do,” Szara said. “Life won’t be good for them there, but most of them will survive. Stalin will find some use for them in the end.”
“In the camps?”
“Perhaps in labor battalions. They won’t be allowed to settle down and live their lives.”
“Don’t you love your adopted land, Mr. Szara?”
“It doesn’t love me, Colonel, and in an affair of any sort that tends to make life uncomfortable.”
“But you could go away, yet you don’t.”
“Who hasn’t thought of it? And I’m just as human as the rest of them. But something about this part of the world makes it hard to leave. It’s not to be explained in the ordinary ways, and poetic yearnings for the sky and the earth seem awfully meager when the Chekists come around. Yet one stays. One decides to leave, puts it off a week, then something happens, so then it’s Thursday for certain, but on Thursday it can’t be done, then suddenly it’s Monday but the trains aren’t running. So you wait for March, and some new decree gives you hope, then spring comes in April and your heart is suddenly strong enough for anything. Or so you think.” He shrugged, then said, “You wake up one morning; you’re too old to change, too old to start again. Then the woman in your bed snuggles up because her feet are cold and you realize you’re not that old, and after that you start to wonder what shattering horror or peculiar pleasure the rest of the day might bring, and by God your heart has grown Russian and you didn’t even notice.”
Vyborg smiled. “I should read your writing,” he said. “But what kind of a Russian speaks this way yet lives in Paris? Or do I have it wrong?”
“No. You have it right. And all I can say in my defense is, what poet doesn’t praise the love that loves from afar? “
Vyborg laughed, first politely, then for real as the notion tickled him. “What a shame,” he said, “that we’re about to lose this beautiful, heartbreaking country of ours. If that weren’t the case, Mr. Szara, I assure you I would recruit you to the very corner of hell simply for the pleasure of your company.”
That night he lay on a blanket beside the car and tried to will himself to sleep. That was the medicine he needed-for exhaustion, sore spirit, for survival-but when it came, for a few minutes at a time, it wasn’t the kind that healed. An area around his right temple throbbed insistently, seemed swollen and tender, and he feared something far worse than he’d imagined had gone wrong inside him. The night was starless and cool. They’d driven and driven, managing only a few miles an hour over the wagon ruts, then given it up just at the last moment of dusk.
Leaving the oak forest, they’d suddenly entered a seemingly endless wheat field that ran uninterrupted for miles. There were no villages, no people at all, only ripe wheat that rustled and whispered in the steady evening wind. The last jerrycan of fuel had been poured in the gas tank; somehow they would have to find more. Szara had frightening dreams-the genial irony that had sustained their morale during the day disappeared in darkness-and when he did manage to sleep he was pursued and could not run. The ground beneath him was hard as stone, but turning on his other side made his head swim with pain and forced him back to his original position. Long before dawn he awakened to the roll of thunder, then saw on the horizon that it was not thunder: a pulsing, orange glow stained the eastern edge of the night sky. For a few minutes he was the only one awake; rested his head on his arm and watched what he knew to be a burning city under artillery barrage.
When the sergeant and the colonel awoke, they too watched the horizon. For a long time nobody spoke, then the sergeant took both canteens and went off to try to find water. They’d had nothing to eat or drink since afternoon of the previous day, and thirst was becoming something it was hard not to think about. Vyborg lit a match and tried to study the map, not at all sure where they were.
“Could it be that Cracow is on fire?” Szara asked.
Vyborg shook his head that he didn’t know and lit another match. “Our little wagon track is not on the map,” he said. “But I’ve estimated we’ll hit the north-south rail line at a switching station somewhere north and east of here.”
Szara took the last crushed Gitane from a battered pack. He had two more in his valise, rolled up in a clean shirt. He thought about changing clothes. He had sweated and dried out many times and was everywhere coated with a fine, powdery dust that made him feel itchy and grimy. Too much Parisian luxury, he thought. Baths and cigarettes and coffee and cold, sweet water when you turned on the tap. From his perspective of the moment it seemed a dream of a lost world. France had declared war, according to the colonel, and so had England. Were the German bombers flying over their cities? Perhaps Paris was an orange glow in the sky. Vyborg looked at his watch. “There must not be water anywhere near,” he said. Szara sat against the tire of the staff car and smoked his cigarette.
An hour later the sergeant had not returned, and dawn was well advanced. Colonel Vyborg had twice walked a little way up the path-with no results. Finally he seemed to make a decision, opened the trunk and took out an automatic rifle. He detached the magazine from its housing forward of the trigger guard and inspected the cartridges, then snapped it back into place and handed the weapon to Szara. From the markings it was a Model ZH 29 made in Brno, Czechoslovakia, a long, heavy weapon, not quite clumsy; the hand grip just behind the barrel was protected by a ribbed metal alloy so the shooter didn’t blister his fingers when the gun fired automatically. Vyborg said, “There are twenty-five rounds, and one in the chamber. The setting is for single shots, but you can move the lever behind the magazine to automatic.” He reached over and worked the bolt. “I’ve armed it,” he said. He drew his weapon, a short-barreled automatic, from its holster, and inspected it as he had the Czech rifle. “Best we stay a few yards apart but side by side-a field is a bad place for walking about with armed weapons.”
For a time they moved along the path, the colonel stopping every now and then and calling out softly. But there was no answer. The track curved upwards around a low hill and, as the sun came above the horizon, t
hey found the sergeant on the other side, some three hundred yards away from the car, at a place where the wheat stalks had been crushed and broken. His throat had been cut. He lay stretched on his stomach, eyes wide open, a look of fierce worry settled on his face. A handful of dirt was frozen in each fist. Vyborg knelt and brushed the flies away. The sergeant’s boots were gone, his pockets were turned out, and, when Vyborg reached inside his uniform jacket, a shoulder holster worn just below the armpit was empty. There was no sign of the canteens. For a time, Szara and Vyborg remained as they were: Szara standing, the rifle heavy in his hands, Vyborg kneeling by the body, which had bled out into the earth. The silence was unbroken-only the distant rumble and the sound of the wheat stalks brushing against each other. Vyborg muttered an obscenity under his breath and went to take a religious medal from around the sergeant’s neck, but if he’d worn one it had also been stolen. At last the colonel rose, the pistol held loosely in his hand. He kicked at the ground experimentally with the toe of his boot, but it was hard and dry as rock. “We have no shovel,” he said at last. He turned and walked away. When Szara caught up with him he said, “This always starts here when there’s war.” His voice was bitter, disgusted and cold. “It’s the peasants,” he said. “They’ve decided to look out for themselves.”
“How did they know we were here?”
“They know,” Vyborg said.