by Herman Wouk
“Right.”
“Can you give me an idea of what you’re after?”
Dr. Kirby took from his breast pocket a typewritten sheet.
“Well, no problem here,” Pug said, scanning it. “I know most of these people. I imagine Colonel Forrest does, too. Now, Mrs. Henry has a dinner laid on for you, Thursday evening. As a matter of fact”—Henry tapped the sheet—“Dr. Witten will be one of the guests.”
“Won’t your wife prefer to call it off? I’m not really much on dinner parties.”
“Neither am I, but a German’s a different person in his office than he is at a table after a few glasses of wine. Not a setup, you understand, but different. So dinners are useful.”
Kirby smiled, uncovering large yellow teeth and quite changing his expression to a humorous, coarse, tough look. He flourished the trade journal. “They don’t seem to be setups, any way you look at them.”
“Yes and no. I’ve just come from the Reichstag. They’ve sure been a setup for this character Hitler. Well, let me take you across the hall to Colonel Forrest. It may be he and Sally will host the dinner. We’ll see.”
Driving home through the quiet Berlin streets Pug thought less about the summons to Washington than of the immediate problem—Rhoda and how to handle her, and whether to disclose that Byron was missing. The trip to the United States might well prove a waste of time; to speculate on the reason for it was silly. He had been on such expeditions before. Somebody high up wanted certain answers in a hurry—answers that perhaps did not exist—and started burning up the wires. Once he had flown three thousand miles during a fleet exercise only to find, on his arrival aboard the “Blue” flagship in Mindanao, that his services were no longer required, because the battle problem had moved past the gunnery scoring.
She was not at home. By the time she got back, he was strapping shut his suitcases. “NOW what on earth?” she said breezily. Her hair was whirled and curled. They had been invited to an opera party that evening.
“Come out in the garden.”
He told her, when they were well away from the house, about the strange Washington summons.
“Oh, lord. For how long?”
“Not more than a week. If the Clippers keep flying, I should be back by the fifteenth.”
“When do you go? First thing tomorrow?”
“Well, by luck, they’ve got me on a plane to Rotterdam at eight tonight.”
“Tonight!” Vexation distorted Rhoda’s face. “You mean we don’t even get to go to the opera? Oh, damn. And what about that Kirby fellow? Is that on or off? How can I entertain a person I haven’t even met? What an aggravating mess!”
Pug said the Forrests would be co-hosting the Kirby dinner, and that the opera might not be on.
“On? Of course it’s on. I saw Frau Witten at the hairdresser’s. They’re planning a marvellous supper, but naturally I won’t be there. I’m not going to the opera unescorted. Oh, hell. And suppose England and France declare war? How about that, hey? That’s going to be just peachy, me stranded alone in Berlin in the middle of a world war!”
“Rhoda, I’ll get back in any case via Lisbon or Copenhagen. Don’t worry. I’d like you to go ahead with the Kirby thing. BuOrd wants the red carpet out for him.”
They were sitting on a marble bench beside the little fountain, where fat red fish disported in the late sunshine. Rhoda looked around at the close-clipped lawn, and said in a calmer tone, “All right. I’ve been planning cocktails out here. Those musicians who played at Peggy’s tea are coming. It’ll be nice at that. Sorry you’ll miss it.”
“Bill Forrest said nobody in this world puts on dinners like you.”
Rhoda laughed. “Oh, well. A week goes by fast. Berlin’s interesting now.” A pair of black-and-yellow birds darted past them, swooped to a nearby tree, and perched carolling. “Honestly, though, would you believe there’s a war on?”
“It’s just starting.”
“I know. Well, you’ll see Madeline, anyway. And be sure to telephone Warren, that rascal never writes. I’m glad Byron’s up in the Italian hills. He’ll be all right, unless he shows up married to that Jewish girl. But he won’t. Byron seems much crazier than he is.” She put her hand in her husband’s. “Inherits it from his mother, no doubt. Sorry I threw my little fit, dear. You know me.”
Clasping her hand tight, Victor Henry decided not to upset Rhoda further with the news of Byron’s disappearance. She could do nothing about it, after all, but fret vainly; and he guessed that whatever pickle Byron was in, he would get himself out of it. That had been the boy’s history.
Pug flew off on schedule that evening to Rotterdam. Tempelhof Airport was transformed. The shops were dark. All the ticket counters save Lufthansa were shut down. On the field, the usual traffic of European airliners had vanished, and squat Luftwaffe interceptors stood in grim shadowy rows. But from the air, Berlin still blazed with all its electric lights, as in peacetime. He was pleased that Rhoda had decided to dress up and go to Der Rosenkavalier, since Frau Witten had found a tall handsome Luftwaffe colonel to escort her.
11
BYRON was changing a tire by the roadside when he was strafed. He and Natalie were out of Cracow and heading for Warsaw in the rust-pitted Fiat taxi, together with Berel Jastrow, the bridal couple, the bearded little driver, and his inconveniently fat wife.
Cracow on the morning of the invasion had smoked and flamed here and there, but the picturesque city had not been much damaged by the first German bombardment. Byron and Natalie had had a good if hurried look at its splendid churches and castles and its magnificent old square like Saint Mark’s in Venice, as they drove around in cheery sunshine trying to find a way out. The populace was not in panic. The Germans were more than fifty miles away. Still, crowds moved briskly in the streets, and the railroad station was mobbed. Berel Jastrow somehow obtained two tickets to Warsaw. Byron and Natalie would not use them, hard as Berel tried to persuade them to, so he shipped off his wife and twelve-year-old daughter. Then he adroitly took them to one office after another, through little streets and unused doors and gates, seeking to send them safely away. He seemed to know everybody, and he went at the job with assurance, but he couldn’t get Byron and Natalie out. Air traffic was finished. The Rumanian border was reported closed. Trains were still departing at unpredictable times, eastward toward Russia and north to Warsaw, with people hanging from windows and clinging to the locomotives. Otherwise there were the roads.
The bearded taxi driver Yankel and his wife, poor relatives of Berel, were willing to go anywhere. Berel had managed to get him an official paper, exempting the cab from being commandeered; but Yankel had small faith that it would work for long. The wife insisted on driving to her flat first, picking up all the food she had, her bedding, and her kitchenware, and roping them onto the car top. Berel thought the Americans should head for their embassy in Warsaw, three hundred kilometers away, rather than chance a dash to the border in the path of the German army. So this odd party set forth: seven of them jammed in an ancient rusty Fiat, with mattresses flapping on the roof, and copper pots rhythmically banging.
They, stopped at night in a town where Jastrow knew some Jews. They ate well, slept on the floor, and were off again at dawn. They found the narrow tarred roads filling with people on foot and horse-drawn wagons laden with children, furniture, squawking geese, and the like. Some peasants drove along donkeys piled with household goods, or a few mooing cows. Marching soldiers now and then forced the car off the road. A troop of cavalry trotted by on gigantic dappled horses. The dusty riders chatted as they rode, strapping fellows with helmets and sabres glittering in the morning sun. They laughed, flashing white teeth, twirling their moustaches, glancing down with good-humored disdain at the straggling refugees. One company of foot soldiers went by singing. The clear weather, the smell of the ripening corn, made the travellers feel good, though the sun as it climbed got too hot. There were no combatants in sight on the long black straight road through
yellow fields when a lone airplane dived from the sky, following the line of the road and making a hard stuttering noise. It flew so low that Byron could see the painted numbers, the black crosses, the swastika, the clumsy fixed wheels. The bullets fell on people, horses, and the household goods and children in the carts. Byron felt a burning and stinging in one ear. He was not aware of toppling into the dirt.
He heard a child crying, opened his eyes, and sat up. The blood on his clothes surprised him—big bright red stains; and he felt a warm trickle on his face. Natalie kneeled beside him, sponging his head with a sodden red handkerchief. He remembered the airplane. Across the road the crying girl clutched a man’s leg, looking down at a woman lying in the road. Between sobs she screamed a few Polish words over and over. The man, a blond barefoot Pole in ragged clothes, was patting the child’s head.
“What’s that, what’s she saying?”
“Are you all right, Byron? How do you feel?”
“Sort of dizzy. What’s that little girl saying?”
Natalie looked strange. Her nose seemed pinched and long, her hair was in disorder, her face was livid and dirty, and her lipstick was cracked. She had a little of Byron’s blood smeared on her forehead. “I don’t know. She’s hysterical.”
Berel stood beside Natalie, stroking his beard. He said in French, “She keeps saying, ‘Mama looks so ugly.’”
Byron got to his feet, propping one hand against the car’s hot fender. His knees felt watery. “I think I’m okay. What does the wound look like?”
Natalie said, “I don’t know, your hair is so thick. But it’s bleeding a lot. We’d better get you to a hospital and have it stitched.”
The driver, hastily tightening the bolts of the jacked-up wheel, smiled at Byron. Sweat rolled off his pallid nose and forehead into his beard. His wife and the bridal couple stood in the shade of the car, a look of shock on their faces, gazing at the sky, at the road, and at the crying girl. All down the road, wounded horses were plunging and screaming, and fowls from overturned carts were scampering helter-skelter, chased by children making a great noise. People were bending over the wounded or lifting them into carts, with much excited shouting in Polish. The sun burned down white-hot from a clear sky.
Byron walked uncertainly to the crying girl, followed by Natalie and Jastrow. The mother lay on her back. She had caught a bullet straight in the face. The big red hole was an especially bad sight because her fixed eyes were undamaged. Berel spoke to the father, who had a stupid, gentle face and a bushy yellow moustache. The man shrugged, holding the little girl close. Yankel’s wife came and offered a red apple to the child, whose sobbing almost at once died away. She took the apple and bit it. The man sat by his dead wife, folding his dusty bare feet, and began to mutter, crossing himself, his shoes dangling around his neck.
Natalie helped Byron, who was very dizzy, into the car. They drove on; Jastrow said there was a good-sized town three miles away, where they could tell the authorities about the wounded on the highway. The bride, who out of her wedding clothes was just a freckled girl with thick glasses, started to cry, and cried all the way to the town, repulsing her wan-faced husband and burying her face in the huge bosom of the driver’s wife.
The town was undamaged, and the hospital, a small brown brick building beside a church, was quiet and cool inside. Several nurses and nuns went off in a truck after Jastrow told his story. Byron was led to a white-painted room full of surgical equipment and buzzing flies. A fat old doctor in a white jacket and patched canvas trousers sewed up his head. The shaving of the hair around the wound hurt worse than the actual stitching. He suggested to Natalie, when he came out, that she get her knee taped, for she was limping again.
“Oh, hell,” Natalie said. “Let’s go. We can still reach Warsaw tonight, Yankel says. I’ll get it fixed there.”
What with the tablespoon of pain-killer the doctor had given him, general weariness, and the aftermath of shock, Byron dozed. He did not know how much time had passed when he woke. On a broad cobbled square near a red brick railway station, two soldiers, rifles in hand, had halted the car. The station and a freight train were on fire; flame and black smoke billowed from their windows. Several buildings around the square were smashed or damaged; two were in flames. People were crowding around shops, passing out merchandise, carrying it off. Byron realized with surprise that this was looting. Across the square, men were pumping water at the burning railroad station from horse-drawn fire engines, such as Byron had not seen except in old silent movies. A crowd was watching all this as it would any peacetime excitement.
“What is it?” Byron said.
One of the soldiers, a big young blond fellow with a square red face marred by boils, walked around to the driver’s window. A conversation ensued in Polish between the soldier, Yankel, and Jastrow. The soldier kept smiling with peculiar unpleasant gentleness, as though at children he disliked. His scrawny companion came and looked through the yellow glass, coughing continually over a cigarette. He spoke to the big one, addressing him repeatedly as Casimir. Byron knew by now that Zhid was a Polish epithet for “Jew”; Zhid was occurring often in this talk. Casimir addressed the driver again, and once reached in and gave his beard a caress, and then a yank, apparently displeased with his answers.
Jastrow muttered something to Natalie in Yiddish, glancing at Byron.
“What is it?” Byron said.
Natalie murmured, “There are good Poles and bad Poles, he says. These are bad.”
Casimir gestured with his gun for everybody to get out.
Jastrow said to Byron, “Dey take our automobile.”
Byron had a rotten headache. His ear had been nicked by the bullet, and this raw patch burned and throbbed, hurting him more than the stitched head wound. He had vague cramps, having eaten odd scraps and drunk dirty water in the past two days, and he was still doped by the medicine. He had seldom felt worse. “I’ll try talking to Redface, he seems to be in charge,” he said, and he got out of the car.
“Look,” he said, approaching the soldiers, “I’m an American naval officer, and I’m returning to the embassy in Warsaw, where they’re expecting us. This American girl”—he indicated Natalie—“is my fiancée, and we’ve been visiting her family. These people are her family.”
The soldiers wrinkled their faces at the sound of English, and at the sight of Byron’s thick blood-stained bandage. “Amerikanetz?” the big one said.
Jastrow, at the car window, translated Byron’s words.
Casimir scratched his chin, looking Byron up and down. The condescending smile made its reappearance. He spoke to Jastrow, who translated shakily into French, “He says no American Navy officer would ever marry a Jew. He doesn’t believe you.”
“Tell him if we’re not in Warsaw by tonight the American ambassador will take action to find us. And if he’s in doubt let’s go to a telephone and call the embassy.”
“Passport,” Casimir said to Byron, after Jastrow translated. Byron produced it. The soldier peered at the green cover, the English words, the photograph, and at Byron’s face. He spoke to his coughing companion and started to walk off, beckoning to Byron.
“Briny, don’t go away,” Natalie said.
“I’ll be back. Keep everybody quiet.”
The smaller soldier leaned against the car fender and lit another cigarette, hacking horribly and grinning at Natalie.
Byron followed Casimir down a side street, into a two-story stone building festooned outside with official bulletins and placards. They walked past rooms full of files, counters, and desks to a frosted glass door at the end of the hall. Casimir went inside, and after about ten minutes poked his head out and beckoned to the American.
A pudgy man in a gray uniform, smoking a cigarette in an amber holder, sat behind the big desk at the window; an officer, to judge by his colored tabs and brass ornaments. The passport was open before the man. He sipped tea from a glass as he glanced at it, and tea dripped on Byron’s picture. In the narr
ow grimy room, metal files and bookshelves were shoved in a corner, with dirty legal tomes tumbled about.
The officer asked him if he spoke German. That was the language they used, though both were bad at it. He made Byron tell his story again and asked him how an American naval officer happened to be mixed up with Jews, and how he came to be wandering around Poland in wartime. When his cigarette was consumed to the last quarter inch, he lit another. He queried Byron hard about the head injury, and smiled sourly, raising his eyebrows at the account of strafing on the highway. Even if this were all true, he commented, Byron had been acting foolishly and could easily get himself shot. He wrote down Byron’s answers with a scratchy pen, in long silent pauses between the questions; then clipped the scrawled sheets to the passport, and dropped them into a wire basket full of papers.
“Come back tomorrow afternoon at five o’clock.”
“I can’t. I’m expected in Warsaw tonight.”
The officer shrugged.
Byron wished his temples would stop throbbing. It was hard to think, especially in German, and his vision was blurry, too. “May I ask who you are, and by what right you take my passport, and by what right this soldier tried to take our car?”
The unpleasant smile that Casimir had displayed—Casimir stood by the desk all through the interview with a wooden look—now appeared on the officer’s face. “Never mind who I am. We have to make sure who you are.”
“Then telephone the American embassy and ask for Leslie Slote, the political secretary. That won’t take long.”
The officer drank off his cold tea and began signing papers with a mutter in Polish to Casimir, who took Byron’s arm, pushed him out of the room, and led him back to the car.
The station and freight cars were pouring steamy white smoke, and a smell of wet burned wood filled the street. The looting was over. Policemen stood in front of the wrecked shops. The faces of the three women looked out tensely through the yellowed car glass at Byron. Casimir spoke to his companion, who caused the bride to shrink from the window by knocking on the glass and winking at her; then they went off.