by Alan Furst
He found himself, not in the main square of Lvov, but at a side street entrance to the railroad station. People were running and shouting, he had no idea why. Several carts had been abandoned by their drivers, and the horses were galloping wildly up the cobbled street to get away from whatever it was, loose vegetables and burlap sacks flying off the wagons behind them. The air was full of tiny, white feathers, from where he did not know, but they filled the street like a blizzard. The drone grew insistent and he looked up. For a moment he was hypnotized. Somewhere, in some file in the house on the rue Delesseux, was a silhouette, as seen from below, identified in a careful Cyrillic script as the Heinkel-in; and what he saw above him was a perfect match of the darkened outline among the pages of what he now realized was the Baumann file.
This was one of the bombers controlled by the swage wire manufactured on the outskirts of Berlin. There was a second flight approaching, at least a half dozen of them in the clouds above the city, and he remembered, if not precise facts and figures, at least the certain conclusion: they were known to produce the virtual annihilation of every stick and stone and living thing once they released their bombs. As the planes flew in slow formation, a series of black, oblong cylinders floated away beneath them and tumbled, in a crooked line, toward the earth.
The first explosion-he felt it in his feet and heard it in the distance-startled him, then several more followed, each time growing louder. He ran. Blindly and without purpose, in panic, then tripped and fell at the base of a doorway. He lashed out at the door, which swung open, and he crawled frantically into a room. He smelled sawdust and shellac, spotted a large, rough-hewn work table, and rolled beneath it. Only then did he discover he was not alone-there was a face close to his, a man with a scraggly beard, half glasses, and a stub of pencil wedged between his temple and the hem of his cap. The man’s eyes were enormous and white, blind with terror. Szara squeezed himself into a ball as a shattering roar rocked the table above him, perhaps he howled, perhaps the man curled up next to him did-he no longer had any idea who he was or where he was, the world exploded inside his head and he forced his eyes shut until he saw brilliant colors in the darkness. The floor bucked and sang with the next explosion and Szara tried to claw his way through it into the safe earth below. Then there was another, and then another, receding, and, finally, a silence that rang in his ears before he realized what it meant.
“Is it over?” the man said in Yiddish.
The air was thick with smoke and dust; they both coughed. Szara’s throat felt as though it had caught fire. “Yes,” Szara said. “They’ve gone.” Together, and very slowly, they crawled from beneath the table. Szara saw that he was in a carpentry shop, and the man with the half glasses was apparently the carpenter. The windows were gone, Szara had to look for a long time before he discovered tiny sparkles of glass embedded in the back wall. But he could find no other damage. What had dissolved the windows had also slammed the door, and the carpenter had to pull hard before it sprang open.
Cautiously, they looked out into the street. To their left was a gap where a house had been-only a pile of board and brick remained-and the house next to it was on fire, black smoke boiling out of the upper windows. Somebody nearby shouted, “Help”-perhaps a woman’s voice. The carpenter said “Mein Gott” and pressed his face between his hands.
At the opposite end of the street from the burning house a vast crater had been torn open. They walked over to it and peered down; a broken pipe gushed water from a ragged end. “Help,” said the voice again. It came from a shop directly across from the hole in the street. “It’s Madame Kulska,” said the carpenter. The door of the shop had disappeared and the interior, a dressmaker’s workroom, had been swirled by a typhoon, bits and pieces of material were everywhere. “Who’s there?” said the voice. “Nachman,” said the carpenter. “I’m under here,” said the voice. Under here was covered by a jumbled layer of fallen bricks, Szara and the carpenter quickly cleared the rubble away, revealing the dusty back of a huge armoire and a small woman pinned beneath it. Szara took one corner, the carpenter the other. “Ein, zwei, drei,” said the man, and together they raised the cabinet until it fell back into the smashed brick wall, the door swinging open to reveal a row of dresses, of various shapes and colors, suspended from wooden hangers.
“Give me your hand, Mr. Nachman,” said the woman. They both helped her to sit upright. Szara could see no blood. The woman looked curiously at her hand, then wiggled the fingers. “Are you hurt?” the carpenter said. “No,” said the woman, her voice faint and giddy with astonishment. “No. I don’t think so. What happened?”
He heard the sound of a bell clanging. Leaving the carpenter with the woman, Szara went to the door. A fire engine had driven up to the burning building, and firemen were uncoiling a hose connected to a tank of water on the back. Szara wandered out of the shop and down the street. Two men hurried by, carrying an injured boy on a stretcher improvised from a quilt. Szara’s heart sickened. What was the point of dropping bombs on this neighborhood? To murder? Simply that? A man on a ladder was helping a young woman out of a window from which smoke drifted in a pale mist. She was weeping, hysterical. A crowd of neighbors, gathered at the foot of the ladder, tried to call out soothing words.
The next street was intact. So was the one after that. A man ran up to him and said, “There are eight people dead at the railroad station.” Szara said, “It’s terrible. Terrible.” Then the man ran off to tell somebody else. Another fire engine drove past. The driver was a rabbi with a bloody handkerchief tied around his forehead; sitting next to him a small boy conscientiously rang a bell by pulling on a rope. Szara sank to the cobblestones. Looking down, he saw that his hand still clutched the valise. He had to use his free hand to pry the fingers open. People wandered by, dazed, in shock. Szara put the valise between his feet and held his head in his hands. This is not human, he thought, to do this is not human.
But there was something else in his mind, a ghost of a thought caught up among everything he felt. The city of Lvov had been bombed by a flight of Heinkel-ins. People had been killed, houses blown up, and there were fires that had to be put out and wounded who had to be treated.
But the city was still there. It had not been reduced to a mound of smoking ashes, not at all. He suddenly understood that a dark shape he’d seen half buried in a neighboring alley was a bomb that had failed to explode. Others had fallen in the streets, between houses, in courtyards and parks, while some had destroyed rooftops but left the occupants of the building miraculously unharmed. Slowly, a realization worked its way into his consciousness. He could not believe it, at first, so he spoke the words out loud. “My God,” he said. “They were wrong.”
Poste Restante
In the dappled, aqueous dusk of the hydrotherapy room, the journalist Vainshtok cleaned his spectacles with a soiled handkerchief. He screwed up his eyes and wrinkled the bridge of his nose, producing the ferocious scowl of the intellectual momentarily separated from his glasses. “Chornaya grayaz,” he said with contempt, squinting through each lens in turn. “That’s all it was.” The slang phrase was peculiar to journalists-literally it meant gray mud-and described a form of propaganda intended to obscure an issue and cover up reality. ” ‘The pathetic state of Poland’s national minorities,’ ” Vainshtok quoted himself with a sneer. “Boo-hoo.”
“Why?” Szara asked.
Vainshtok settled the spectacles back on his nose and thought a moment. “Well, whatever the reason, they certainly did want it- they gave me the front page, and a fat byline.”
They were six miles from Lvov, at the Krynica-Zdroj, one of the more elegant spas in Poland, where the privileged had gathered to have their exhausted livers, their pernicious lumbago, and their chronic melancholia cured by immersions and spritzes, dousings and ingestions, of the smelly sulfurous waters that bubbled up from deep within the earth. And if simultaneously they chanced to do a little business, to find a husband or a wife, to consummate a love af
fair, well so much the better. Currently the spa’s clientele was limited to a handful of Soviet journalists and a horde of foreign diplomats and their families who’d fled east from the fighting in Warsaw. “As to why they wanted it, really why,” Vainshtok went on, “that seems fairly obvious.” He inclined his head and gave one of his wild eyebrows a conspiratorial twitch.
Szara almost laughed. Vainshtok was one of those people who are forever impervious to their physical presence, but he looked, at that moment, extraordinarily strange. His skin shaded green by the rainy-day gloom of the basement pool, he wriggled in discomfort on the skeleton of a garden chair-the cushions had disappeared, along with the white-smocked attendants who’d laid them out every morning-and wore, the strap crushing a hand-painted tie, a shoulder holster with the grip of an automatic protruding from it. On the wall behind him, the foam green tile gave way to a Neptune riding a sea horse in ultramarine and ocher. “It is certainly not the truth,” he said. “Those starving Ukrainians and sorely persecuted Byelorussians groaning under the heel of Polish tyranny are, in fact, as we sit in this godforsaken grotto, attacking army units as they try to set up defensive positions in the marshland. What you have are the same old Ukrainian outlaw bands behaving in the same old ways, yet Moscow requires a sympathetic view. So, what do they want with it? You tell me.”
“They’re preparing an action against the Poles.”
“What else?”
Szara stared into the pool. It was green and still. At either end stood imposing water machines, nickel-plated monsters with circular gauges and ceramic control knobs, their rubber hoseworks strung limply from iron wheels. He imagined a long line of naked, bearded aristocrats awaiting treatment-there was something nineteenth century, and slightly sinister, about the apparatus, as though it were meant to frighten madmen back to sanity.
“Meanwhile,” Vainshtok said, “the highly regarded Andre Szara goes off on a tour of the battlefields of southern Poland, misses his chance to write the big national minorities story, and in general causes great consternation.”
Szara grinned at Vainshtok’s needling. “Consternation, you say. Such a word. Why not alarms and excursions, as the English put it. In fact, with all this chaos, I doubt anybody even noticed.”
“They noticed.”
A certain tone in Vainshtok’s voice caught Szara’s attention. “Did they? “
“Yes.”
Again the note, this time a monosyllable. Not at all typical of Vainshtok. Szara hesitated, then leaned forward, a man about to ask frank and difficult, possibly dangerous, questions.
“Oh, you know how they are,” Vainshtok said hurriedly. “Just any little thing and they turn bright red and throw a few somersaults, like the king’s ministers in a children’s book.” He laughed a little.
“Someone here?”
The question was dismissed with a shrug and a frown. “Three Jews meet in heaven, the first one says-”
“Vainshtok …”
” ‘The day I died, the whole city of Pinsk’ “
“Who asked?”
Vainshtok sighed and nodded to himself. “Who. The usual who.”
Szara waited.
“I didn’t ask him his name. He already knew mine, as he no doubt also knew the length of my schvontz and the midwife who took me from my mother. Who indeed! A Cossack in a topcoat. With the eyes of a dead carp. Look, Andre Aronovich, you’re supposed to show up in Lvov. Then you don’t. You think nobody’s going to notice? So they come around looking for you. What am I supposed to say? Szara? He’s my best pal, tells me everything, he just stopped off in Cracow to buy rolls, don’t worry about him. I mean, it was almost funny-if it wasn’t like it was it would be funny. Mind you, it was the same day the Germans finally broke into Lvov: buildings on fire, people weeping in the streets, tanks in the marketplace, that fucking swastika flying over the town hall, a few diehards sniping from the windows. And suddenly some, some apparat type appears from nowhere and all he wants to know is where’s Szara. I almost said, ‘Pardon me, you’re standing in my war,’ but I didn’t, you know I didn’t. I crawled on my belly until he went away. What do you want? Remorse? Tears? I don’t really know anything about you, not really. So I told him nothing. It just took some time to get it said.”
Szara sat back in the garden chair. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “And I was in the city that day. I saw the same things you did.”
“Then you know,” Vainshtok said. He took off his glasses and looked at them, then put them back on. “All I want is to stay alive. So I’m a coward, so now what.”
He could see that Vainshtok’s hands were shaking. He took out a cigarette and silently offered it, then lit a match and held it while Vainshtok inhaled. “Have the Germans been out here?” he asked.
Vainshtok blew smoke through his nose. “Only a captain. The day after they took the city he came around. A couple of the ambassadors went out to meet him, they all put their heads together, then he came in and drank a cup of tea in the lobby. A diplomatic crisis was averted, as the old saying goes, and the SS never showed up. Myself, I didn’t take any chances.” He patted the automatic affectionately. “Somehow I get the feeling that in certain situations the Non-Aggression Pact doesn’t quite cover somebody who looks like me. ‘Oops! Sorry. Was that a Russian Jew? Oh, too bad.’ “
” Where’d you get it? “
“You met Tomasz? The caretaker? Big white eyebrows, big belly, big smile-like a Polish Santa Claus?”
“When I arrived. He told me where you were.”
“Tomasz will get you, for a small fee, whatever you want.” Vainshtok took the pistol out of the holster and handed it to Szara. It was a blued-steel Steyr automatic, an Austrian weapon, compact and heavy in his hand.
“You get to play with it for three minutes,” Vainshtok said. “But you have to give me five marbles and a piece of candy.”
Szara handed it back. “Is there anything to eat in this place?” Vainshtok looked at his watch. “In an hour or so they serve boiled beets. Then, at dinnertime, they serve them again. On the other hand, the china is extremely beautiful, and they’re actually very good beets.”
Szara slept on a wicker couch on the sunporch. The hotel was jammed with people and he was lucky to find anything at all to sleep on. At a right angle to the couch, a Spanish consular official had claimed the porch swing for a bed, while a Danish commercial attache, one of the last to arrive from Warsaw, curled up on the floor next to a rack of croquet sets. The three of them had managed a conversation in French, talking in low voices after midnight, cigarettes glowing in the dark, in general trying to sort out rumors-the prime topic of conversation at the spa. Elements of the Polish army were said to have withdrawn to the Pripet marshes with the idea of holding out for six months while French and British expeditionary forces were organized to come to Poland’s defense. A Norwegian diplomat was believed to have been interned. This was curious because Norway had declared neutrality, but perhaps the Germans intended the “mistake” as a warning. Or perhaps it hadn’t happened at all. The United States, the Dane was certain, had declared neutrality. A special train would be organized to remove diplomats from Poland. But many diplomats from Warsaw, having taken refuge in the town of Krzemieniec, in western Poland, had been casualties of a heavy bombing attack by the Luftwaffe. The Polish government had fled to Romania. Warsaw had surrendered; Warsaw still held; Warsaw had been so obliterated by bombing that there was nothing left to surrender. The League of Nations would intervene. Szara faded away without realizing it; the quiet voices on the porch and a light patter of rain lulled him to sleep.
It was a particularly golden dawn that woke him. The distant forest was alive with amber light. How hard summer died here, he thought. It made him wonder what day it was. The seventeenth of September, he guessed, making what sense he could of the jumble of days and nights he’d wandered through. The lawns and graveled paths sparkled with last night’s raindrops as the sun came up and it was, but for a fa
int buzz of static somewhere in the hotel, immensely quiet. A rooster began to crow; perhaps a village lay on the other side of the forest. He looked at his watch-a few minutes after five. The Spaniard on the porch swing was lying on his back, coat spread over him like a blanket and pulled decorously up to his chin. Beneath a lavish mustache his mouth was slightly open, and his breath hissed in and out daintily as he slept. Szara caught, for just a moment, the barest hint of coffee in the air. Was it possible? Just wishful thinking. No, he did smell it. He wrestled free of the jacket tangled about him and sat upright-oh, bones-checking to make sure the valise was under the couch where he’d put it the night before. His beard itched. Today he would find some way to heat up a pot of water and have a shave.
Some campaigner he’d turned out to be. Not anymore. He was a creature of hotels now. Someone was making coffee-he was sure of it. He stood and stretched, then walked into the lobby. Anarchy. Bodies everywhere. A woman with two chins was snoring in a chair, a Vuitton suitcase tied securely to her finger with a shoelace. What did she have in there? he wondered. The silver service from some embassy? Polish hams? Wads of zlotys? Little good they’d do her now; the Germans no doubt had occupation scrip already printed and ready to spend. He moved toward the staircase and lost the scent, then backtracked into the dining room. Cautiously, he pushed open one of the swinging doors to the kitchen. Only a cat sleeping on a stove. The static was louder, however, and the coffee was close. At one end of the kitchen, another swinging door opened onto a small pantry and two women looked up quickly, startled at his sudden appearance. They were hotel maids, he guessed, pretty girls with tilted noses and cleft chins, one dark, the other fair, both wearing heavy cotton skirts and blouses, their hands red from scrubbing floors. A zinc coffeepot stood on a small parlor stove wedged into one corner, and an old-fashioned radio with a curved body sat on a shelf and played symphonic music amid the static. The maids were drinking coffee from the hotel’s demitasse cups. After Szara said good morning he pleaded for coffee. “Just tell me how much,” he said. “I would be happy to pay.”