by Herman Wouk
“That’s why I was born on Long Island,” said Natalie. “My grandfather got out, and a good thing.”
“What military shape are the Poles in?” Byron asked Slote. “Will they give Hitler a fight, if it comes to that?”
“A fight?” Slote sucked on his pipe, looking up into the air. His tone turned measured and professional. “Why, ask any one of them, and he’ll probably tell you they’ll defeat the Germans. After all, they defeated them in 1410! These are strange people, Byron. They can be brilliant, talking about politics and history, yet they don’t give a damn that Germany is now an industrial giant, while Poland remains all farms and Jews and castles and mazurkas. Maybe they’re right. Maybe the Polish fighting spirit will scatter the stupid unwilling cattle of Hitler. That’s the talk. There are supposed to be two and a half million Poles in uniform, more men than Hitler’s got. A highly questionable figure, but in this country, any statistics—”
“Say, isn’t that ‘Stardust’?” Natalie put in. “It sounds a bit like ‘Stardust.’ Dance with me.”
Byron thought Slote looked more like her uncle than her sweetheart, steering her clumsily around the floor. But Natalie’s clinging attitude, closed eyes, and touching cheek weren’t the ways of a niece. They exchanged a few laughing words, then Natalie said something that made Slote look serious and shake his head. They argued as they danced.
“I’ll find him without you,” Natalie was saying as they came back to the table.
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you find him. I said if you’re going to talk to him about going to Medzice—”
“Just forget it. Forget I mentioned it.”
Natalie glowered at the meat on her plate. Slote took two more shots of vodka. To lighten the atmosphere, Byron asked Slote about the workings of the embassy. Looking relieved, Slote turned on the measured voice. The alcohol hadn’t blurred his brain; it made him talkative. He sketched the organization and said that he was in the political section, but that since his arrival, he had been preoccupied with the flood of emigrants, as had everybody else.
“Were you fellows surprised by the pact?”
“Naturally. Even the Poles were struck dumb, and in their history they’ve seen everything. But nobody can predict Hitler. That’s his genius, if you want to call it that. He does have an instinct for the breathtaking.”
The cloud was clearing from Natalie’s face. “Leslie, why did Stalin go along?”
“Honey, that’s perfectly simple. Hitler offered him a piece of cake on a gold platter, and he simply said, ‘Yes, thank you!’ Stalin’s completely turned the tables on England and France now. They froze him out of Munich. In effect, they handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler and said, ‘Here, boy, leave us alone and go smash Russia.’ Now Stalin’s done a Munich in reverse. ‘No, no, here, boy, take Poland, and go and smash the West.’” With little rapid puffs of blue smoke, clearly enjoying the chance to expound, Slote went on, “Lord, how the British have been asking for this! An alliance with Russia was their one chance to stop Germany. They had years in which to do it. All of Stalin’s fear of Germany and the Nazis was on their side. And what did they do? Dawdle, fuss, flirt with Hitler, and give away Czechoslovakia. Finally, finally, they sent some minor politicians on a slow boat to see Stalin. When Hitler decided to gamble on this alliance, he shot his foreign minister to Moscow on a special plane, with powers to sign a deal. And that’s why we’re within inches of a world war.”
“Is it going to come?” Natalie asked.
“Why, I thought you and Aaron were the authorities for the view that it won’t.”
“I’m not ready to panic. It just seems to me that Hitler will get what he wants, as usual.”
Slote’s face turned pinched and sombre. He pulled at the pipe, sucking in his pallid cheeks. “No. The Poles now have the signed British guarantee. Very gallant, very irrational, very belated, and probably futile. To that extent we’re back in 1914. Poland can plunge the world in by standing firm. It’s all up to Hitler. If he wants to arm some more first, the crisis will subside, and that seems to be in the wind at the moment. But for all we know, he’s already given the order to march. That’s why I’m being such a pill about Medzice. Down there, in the next two weeks, you have a fifty-fifty chance of being captured by German soldiers. I do think that’s a bit risky, dear.”
After dinner Slote drove them to another part of town: street after street of old brick houses of three and four stories, with shops everywhere at ground level. Here indeed were Jews by the thousands, strolling on the sidewalks through narrow cobbled streets, looking out of windows, sitting in shop doorways. On the street corners knots of bearded men argued with loud voices and sweeping gestures, as on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Many of the men wore kaftans, or else the boots, blouses, and caps of the countryside. There were men in ankle-length black coats and black hats, and a few youngsters in army uniform. There were some prosperous people, too, smooth-shaven men wearing bowlers and well-groomed women looking much like the Warsaw Gentiles around the Europeiski. Children darted about at their street games, boys in caps and short trousers and girls in neat colored frocks, and their mothers gossiped as they watched them.
“I thought you said they were all storming the embassy,” Byron remarked to Slote.
“There are three hundred and fifty thousand of them, Byron. Maybe one in a hundred has foresight. That puts three or four thousand hammering at our doors. The rest believe what they want to believe, and vaguely hope for the best. The government keeps telling everybody there won’t be a war.”
Natalie was looking around with an absent, pleased expression at the horse-drawn wagons and handcarts in the streets, and at an old trolley car clanking by. “My parents described all this to me when I was a child,” she said. “It seems not to have changed.” People stopped and looked after the embassy car as it passed. Once Slote halted to ask directions. The Jews came clustering around, but gave only vague cautious answers in Polish. “Let me try,” Natalie said, and she began to talk Yiddish, causing an astonished outbreak of laughter, followed by a burst of warm, friendly talk. A chubby boy in a ragged cap volunteered to run ahead of the car and show the way. They set off after him.
“Well done,” Slote said.
“I can hack out Yiddish after a fashion, if I must,” Natalie said. “Aaron’s a master of it, though he never utters a Yiddish word.”
Natalie and Slote got out at a gray brick apartment building with tall narrow windows, an ornate iron door, and window boxes of blooming geraniums. It overlooked a small green park, where Jews congregated on the benches and around a gushing fountain in noisy numbers. Curious children ran from the park to ring Byron in the American car. Under their merry stares, as they freely discussed him and the machine, Byron felt somewhat like an ape behind glass. The faces of the Jewish children were full of life and mischief, but they offered no discourtesy, and some gave him shy smiles. He wished he had gifts for them. He took his fountain pen from his pocket, and through the open window offered it to a black-haired girl in a lilac dress with white lace cuffs and collar. The girl hung back, blinking wary dark brown eyes. The other children encouraged her with shouts and giggles. At last she took the pen, her little cool fingers brushing his hand for a moment, and ran lightly away.
“Well, wouldn’t you know. He’s not there,” Natalie said, returning to the car with Slote a few minutes later. “Gone to Medzice for his son’s wedding, with the whole family. Just my luck. Aaron told me he deals in mushrooms, but can that be such a good business? He’s evidently well off.”
“Unusually so.” Slote was starting the car. “This must be the best apartment house around here.”
The little girl in lilac reappeared, leading her parents, the father in a knee-length gray frock coat and a wide-brimmed gray hat, the mother kerchiefed, wearing a German-tailored brown suit, and carrying a baby in a pink blanket.
“He’s thanking you,” Slote said to Byron, as the father gravely spoke in Polish thro
ugh the window, holding the fountain pen, “and he says it’s much too expensive, and please take it back.”
“Tell him the American fell in love with his daughter. She’s the most beautiful girl in the world, and she must keep it.”
The father and mother laughed when Slote translated. The little girl shrank against her mother’s skirt and shot Byron an ardent look. The mother undid from her lapel a gold brooch with purple stones, and pressed it on Natalie, who tried to decline it, speaking in Yiddish. Again this caused surprise and a cascade of jocund talk, the upshot of which was that she had to keep the brooch. The little girl kept the pen, and they drove off to shouted farewells.
“Well, I wasn’t on a looting expedition,” Natalie said. “Here, Byron. It’s beautiful. Give it to your girlfriend, or your sister, or your mother.”
“Keep it, it’s yours,” he said rudely. “I could consider staying in Warsaw and waiting for that girl to grow up.”
“Not with those parents,” Slote said. “She’s for a rabbi.”
“Steer clear of Jewish girls anyway, they’re bad joss,” Natalie said.
“Amen,” said Slote.
Natalie was pinning the brooch on her jacket. “I guess I’ll see Berel in Medzice, then. Too bad, Aaron said he was very clever, and could show me things in Warsaw that nobody else could. They used to study the Talmud together, though Berel was much younger.”
At the mention of Medzice, Slote despairingly shook his head.
8
NATALIE telephoned Byron in his room at seven o’clock one morning, after they had stayed up till well past three, touring nightclubs with Slote; dismal Polish imitations of Paris dives. In a nervously merry mood, she had pushed them on from one club to another, ignoring Slote’s show of collapsing fatigue.
“Hi, Briny, are you dead?” From her chipper note, she might have had ten hours’ sleep. “This is playing sort of dirty, but I have two seats on the plane to Cracow, and it leaves at eleven. I bought them yesterday. If you’d rather sleep and just stay here, okay. I’ll be back in a couple of days.”
Half awake, Byron said, “What? Slote’s got us on the plane to Rome tomorrow, Natalie, and those reservations were mighty hard to come by.”
“I know. I’ll leave him a note. Maybe I’ll phone him from the airport. If you come, we won’t have to return to Warsaw at all. We’ll go straight on to Rome from Cracow, Saturday or Sunday, after I visit my family.”
“Have you got reservations from there?”
“No. But Cracow’s a hub. There are half a dozen ways to get out. We’ll buy our tickets—plane or train or bus—as soon as we arrive there. Well? Byron! Have you fallen back asleep?”
“I’m thinking.” Byron was weighing the advantage of leaving Warsaw and Slote, against these harebrained travel arrangements. The war crisis seemed to be abating. The Poles in the nightclubs had acted gay and carefree, though Slote had remarked on the absence of foreigners, especially Germans. The streets were as calm as ever, and there were no visible preparations for war. Byron had taken to gauging the state of the crisis by the tone of Radio Warsaw. He now knew a few key words and phrases about the crisis, and much could sometimes be surmised from the shaky or relieved accents of the newscasters. In the United States, announcers in a time of crisis tended to use sonorous doom-filled voices, to thrill their listeners. The Polish broadcasters, nearer the action, were less bent on being dramatic. In the past day or two they had not sounded quite so worried.
He said, “Have you heard any news?”
“I just got BBC on shortwave. Same bulletins as last night. Hender-son’s talking to Hitler.”
“Natalie, this would be a damned wild excursion.”
“Why? I’ll probably never have another chance to see where my parents were born. I’m here now. Leslie himself said last night that the worst seems to be over, that they’ve agreed to negotiate. Anyway, you don’t have to come. I mean that. It’ll be a bore for you, slogging around in the Polish countryside.”
“Well, I’ll have breakfast with you.”
Byron packed fast. The more time he spent with Natalie Jastrow the more she puzzled him. Her relationship with Leslie Slote now baffled him too. If they were spending time in bed together—and he had to assume that this was part of her purpose in coming to Warsaw, if not all of it—they were finding odd hurried occasions for this, or taking pains to mislead him. Night after night Slote had said his farewells in the hotel lobby. She treated Slote, when they were together, with the loving warmth of a fiancée, yet when Byron tried to withdraw from their company—for dinner, for a concert or the theatre, even for a tour of the embassy—she made him come along. It had crossed his mind, of course, that she might be using him—perhaps had even asked him along to Warsaw—to provoke Slote. If so, the tactic was failing. The Foreign Service man was cordial to Byron and appeared to take his tagging along entirely for granted. But it was hard to tell anything about Slote, except that he was weary, swamped with work, and very concerned about Natalie’s presence in Poland.
There had been more to her persistence in the journey—that was becoming clear to Byron—than desire for her lover. The Jewish streets of Warsaw fascinated her. No matter where they started an evening, they ended in those narrow byways. She had even dragged Byron (Slote had begged off) to a performance of O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! at a little Yiddish theatre in a back alley, with a stage not twenty feet wide and a ragged curtain. For him it was a bizarre and tedious experience. But the mixture of apple-pie American characters and stylized Jewish emoting in that shabby hall had much amused and moved her. “That was me, I guess,” she had said, coming out of the theatre into the warm night, in the muddy alley bordered with sagging half-timbered houses. “That exact strange mixture. I never quite understood that, and I’m still sorting it out. It’s disconcerting but exciting. Like seeing myself for the first time in a home movie.” Evidently this same fascination was drawing her to Medzice.
She was waiting for him in the restaurant. Somewhere she had bought a Polish dress, a bright flowery print with an open neck, and she had combed her heavy hair forward covering much of her forehead in an outdated American style, as the Warsaw women did.
“Will I get by? I’m so bored with all these stares, as though I had horns.”
“So long as you’ve got your passport handy, okay. Don’t go too native.”
“Oh sure, and there’s always this.” At her feet was a blue suede sack with drawstrings. “Suit, shirt, hat, stockings, girdle. I can go into a ladies’ room anytime and emerge a complete Amerikanka, full of indignation and waving dollars. Are you coming? No, of course.”
“Yes. My bag’s in the lobby.”
“Honestly? You’re as goofy as I am, Briny.” She looked at him from under her eyebrows, with a slow blink of her dark eyes, and Byron thought of the little ghetto girl in the lilac dress. “Tell me, don’t you like Slote a little better now?”
“I don’t dislike him. I’m sorry for him at the moment, he’s certainly in over his head.” The waitress put down plates of food. He said, “Well, you ordered for both of us. Fine. There’s nothing like this Polish ham.”
She said, “I’m even beginning to feel slightly guilty here, eating ham. Imagine!” Natalie cut and ate the thick pink meat with no visible remorse.
“I don’t know anything about your religion,” Byron said.
“Neither do I, and it’s hardly my religion. I dropped it before I was eleven years old—temple, Hebrew classes, everything. It grieved my father: he’s a Zionist, an officer in the temple, and all that. But our rabbi was such a boring dunce, Briny! And my father simply couldn’t answer my questions. He’s not an intellectual like Aaron, he’s a businessman. When I was eleven I’d read more books than he had.”
“But he just allowed you to drop it?” Byron said. “Like that? My father wouldn’t have, that’s for sure.”
“Possibly military men are different,” Natalie said with a skeptical smile. “Most fathers ca
n’t do much with daughters. Anyway, I was an only child, and very good, on the whole. I just wouldn’t keep up flummery that made no sense to me. Well!” She set her knife and fork down. “Coffee and then on to Medzice. Correct?”
“I’m with you.”
A rickety taxi, with thick surgical tape crisscrossing the cracked yellow windows, brought them to the airport. The lone aircraft on the sunny field looked so rusty and patched that Byron thought it might be a wreck; but as they arrived, people came out on the grass and began boarding it.
“I don’t know,” Byron said as he paid the cab driver. “Do you suppose it will leave the ground? Maybe we should have this fellow wait.” Natalie laughed and went to telephone Slote; but he was not in his apartment, nor at the embassy. The terminal was still crowded with Germans, though so few seemed left in Warsaw. Only Poles, and a few Jews, boarded the Cracow plane and took the awkward iron seats.
The plane did leave the ground, with bumps and shudders that slightly parted the metal floor plates, affording a view underfoot of green fields and admitting a jet of warm air that billowed Natalie’s skirt. She tucked it under her thighs and fell asleep. After a half hour or so the plane dived, slamming down to a stop near a barn in an open field, amid tall grass and wild flowers. Byron thought it was a forced landing, but several passengers took their valises and got off. Another hop of about an hour brought them to Cracow, the plane passing from green flatlands to low mountains, part forested, part farmed, all checkered with fields of yellow, black, and purple.
The Cracow terminal was a wooden hut inside a wire fence. Byron was glad to leave the plane, which reeked of hot iron and gasoline, and to walk out on a sunny, breezy field as fragrant as a flower garden. On either side of the tarred landing strip, kerchiefed peasant women were mowing hay in the sunshine. There were no taxis in sight, and only one mud-caked green bus. Some passengers, met by their relatives, climbed into heavy horse-drawn wagons and went creaking off.