Another Green World (43 page)

T
he Varian Fry Brigade—its numbers reduced, provisions exhausted, maps destroyed, plans out the window, leadership divided and training irrelevant—nonetheless crossed from Czechoslovakia into Poland in better shape than when it had touched down a week and a half before.

Item. Eddie's Polish had sharpened. He practiced in sporadic, occasionally useful chats with the partisan Petra.
What are those small buildings, in that field?
That is a peasant's hut with a chicken coop. Say this:
Peasant's hut. Chicken coop.
We will go there now and ask for food. Say this:
Give us eggs, please, or we will shoot you.

Item. Tamara had grown proficient with her weapon, a Simonov automatic rifle cribbed from a dead partisan. Once, on the single-fire setting, she shot a rabbit. Then she wept over it.

Item. Martina had gone from shock at Timo's act of unprovoked brutality to a state of chronic, low-level anger. It was progress.

Item. Bloom had recused himself from quarrels over the Brigade's next course of action and settled down to the business of soldiering. Which narrowed the contest to Grabsteen versus Martina.

Item. There were days when Stu would keep his mouth shut for several hours at a stretch.

On the debit side, however: if Martina didn't get a bath soon, she was going to die of bodily self-loathing.

Just across the border, an obstacle—an elevated railbed. The line had been cut through a pine forest, the cleared space perhaps seventy meters wide, the embankment five or six meters above the surrounding ground level.

Getting across was no problem, except that while clambering up one side and down the other you would be clearly visible, even by starlight.

The Germans patrol these tracks constantly, Petra warned. They've built little lean-tos, like hunters' blinds, just inside the tree line, where they have wide, unbroken fields of fire. You never know you're being watched until the shooting starts. “A German machine gun,” she said, her voice that of a tour guide repeating a line that never fails to interest schoolchildren, “makes a sound like ripping canvas.”

So they paused there for a while, on a hill with a partly obstructed view of the railbed, thinking things over.

“We're down to two cans of Spam,” Stu announced. “Shall we have ourselves a little feast? Or save it for the other side?”

“If you wait,” said Timo, “you might not have to split it so many ways.”

Martina stood beside Petra, long past caring about things like dinner. Furtively, she glanced at Harvey Grabsteen, who stood not far away staring down the shadowed hill toward the glimmer of silver iron amid yellow grass. As though sensing her attention, he turned to catch Martina's eye. Here it comes, she thought.

“That's one of them,” he said. “Right down there.”

When she didn't get it, he spelled it out: “A feeder track. They run north and south over the mountains, between the big east–west trunk lines. These are the tracks they bring the Jews on, from Hungary, Macedonia— the few places they haven't cleared out. The junction is up around Ostrava, and from there the main line runs east all the way to Lwów. Birkenau has a feeder of its own, like this one.”

For some reason, she looked down at her feet—the forest litter,
the very ground I'm standing on.
It was hard to believe she was here, so close, so infinitely powerless. “We
wanted
to bomb them,” she said. “The Secretary himself signed the memo—the planes could've made it here from Trieste. It got as far as Marshall's office. Then McCloy squashed it.”

“I heard.” Grabsteen's voice was soft, by his standards; his stare lacked its usual antagonism. “What else could you have done? At least you tried.”

“Something, maybe. Talked to Eleanor. Written to the papers.”

“Believe me, there's been no shortage of people writing to the papers. Rabbi Silver has seen to that.”

“You know Rabbi Silver?”

His expression soured. Back to the old Grabsteen. “We've crossed swords with the AJC on many occasions. A bunch of timid old aunts, scared to death of offending anybody. They might as well be Episcopalian.”

“I don't know—I've known some pretty offensive Episcopalians. Did you ever go to one of their weddings? Twenty minutes from the
Book of Common Prayer
followed by eight hours of heavy drinking. Then the cuff links come off.”

Grabsteen laughed. He seemed to surprise himself by doing so. Martina guessed he hadn't laughed for a while, no more than she had.

“So what now, Miss Panich?” he asked, in a tone that seemed almost a self-parody, ostentatiously goading her. “What do you recommend at this juncture?”

“I'd say the usual. Yell at each other for a while, then shoot ourselves in the foot. Then, a break for processed meat.”

Anyhow, it was obvious enough. They would wait for dark, then go over the tracks. The waning moon wouldn't rise until after midnight. Wisps of cloud were moving swiftly off the Northern European plain. Good Blitzkrieg country, up there: a thousand kilometers of open, sandy ground for panzers to race across. Down here, south of Kraców, the land was better suited to mules, wood grouse, ravens prowling for carcasses, the rarely spotted but persistently rumored lynx. And partisans, of course, and SS Jäger, and other creatures of the night.

It was eerie, stepping out of the black woods into dimensionless half-light. The embankment was very near yet crossing the narrow strip of cleared ground seemed to take forever. It felt like a dream of swimming, the night air as dense as water, as dangerous to fill your lungs with. The slope was unexpectedly steep—out of everything, you hadn't expected
that
to be a problem. Martina repeatedly lost her footing, gravel came loose and fell with a sound like rain, somebody was saying
Shh, shh—
annoying, and ineffective—then a rough hand grabbed her by the sleeve, hoisting her up.

She crouched for a few moments at the top, the shining rail an arm's length away, a faint smell of pine tar, staring at Timo's dark eyes. Not into them; they were hard and reflective, obsidian. She would not forgive him. Yet in another part of her mind, a separate filing tray, lay the knowledge that a man like this, who could kill without thinking, pull a trigger as easily as scratch his nose, was useful to have along.

My God
, she thought.
Look where I am, look what I'm doing.

To prove it to herself, she placed a hand on the cold iron. She expected to feel something like an electric shock—an instant of contact with all the souls that had passed over this spot on their coal-fired passage into hell.

There was nothing. Emptiness, the night, whispers of her comrades, the voice going
Shh, shh.

Nothing: a void. Something you fall into. That was the worst thing of all.

Down the opposite slope, west of the tracks now. A different territory, from the feel of it, the ground marshy where it wasn't frozen. They waited inside the tree line for the moon to rise behind them.

Not far into the woods they heard rustling sounds, first in one direction, then another. There was no time even to be frightened. They were already surrounded; they had walked into a trap.

Martina grabbed at her tommy gun, expecting to be shot. But no shots came. Only footsteps, and then faces—swarthy, shadowed by hat brims, wrapped in scarves, too many to count. So close you could hear them breathing. The gun breeches were tiny black holes in your peripheral vision.

One of the dark figures stepped forward. He removed his hat so they could look at him. Fearless, a narrow face with dark hair thrust sideways off the brow. He spoke loudly in Polish, the words terse and formal-sounding. Then he stopped and peered at them, his eyes moving from face to face—trying, Martina guessed, to pick out the leader. Good luck, she thought.

From behind her Eddie murmured, “He says we're trespassing. He says this place is controlled by the AK, whatever that is.”

“Armija Krajowa,” said Petra.

Martina racked her memory. All these Polish factions—London Poles, Lublin Poles, the Committee of Polish National Liberation, she'd read all about them, briefing papers by the dozen, but the names were a blur of strangely placed consonants.

“English?” said the narrow-faced man. His turn to be surprised now. Something about Martina attracted his notice; he addressed her in a heavily accented voice. “By authority of General Bór, I order you to identify yourselves and to state your reason for coming here.”

Armija Krajowa—she had it now. Largest of the non-Communist resistance groups. Ties to the British. Big noise in Warsaw. Probably friendly. “Tell him we're the good guys,” she said to Eddie. “Tell him we're Americans.”

“American?”
The man stared at her. “This is a lie. No Americans are here. Also, you do not look like Americans. You look like Zhidy. Like the
ZOB, only more…more flesh on you. The Russians must be feeding you good.” He turned to a man standing nearby and said something in Polish.

Eddie translated: “He thought we were all dead.”

“Not quite,” said Martina. “Not yet.”

Apparently a decision was required, but the man's authority, conferred by General Bór, was not so great as to enable him to make it. Martina could empathize.

Please, he said, would the Varianoviks follow in this direction? (For some reason, learning the Brigade's name gave him a certain satisfaction.) Also please, to keep their hands off the weapons, otherwise there will be unhappiness.

Not even Harvey Grabsteen wanted to argue. No more unhappiness, not just now. Martina was tired but traipsed along in reasonably good spirits. She doubted anything really bad was going to happen. Whatever the Armija Krajowa might be, it was not the SS.

They crossed half-frozen swampland where stretches of broken reeds and cattails alternated with stands of river birch. As the moon floated higher it began to pale in the approaching sunrise. At the center of the swamp, the land rose into a stony hillock overgrown with twisted, needled, spiny scrub like a witch's pincushion. If you stepped off the path, a hundred thorns would snag your clothing and hair until you were effectively immobilized. The only way through was a kind of tunnel, low enough to make you crouch, with a machine gun staring back at you from about thirty meters in. Beyond that, the real defenses began.

Martina couldn't make out what kind of fort it was. Certainly the guerrillas hadn't built it; the stonework was too massive, too enduring. It might have stood here for centuries, slowly subsiding into the wetland. Yet it had none of the scale, the towers, the high walls of a traditional fortress.

As they walked by, the long-faced man patted a stone. It was squarish, half a meter to a side, crusted with mustard-colored lichen. “These were cut for the Teutonic Knights,” he said. “They rounded up Slavs to do the work, in exchange for their families' lives. A big man, some
aristo
, built a keep out here, but he could not defend it. So it was empty for a long while and the local headmen carried off what they could. The ruins lay under all this puszcza—jungle, I think?— until a Hungarian artillery officer rode by. He saw these big rocks and thought, Why don't we hide some guns in here? The Russian hordes, you see”— pointing into the trees—” were expected to come swarming through the Moravian Gap up there, making
for Prague. It didn't happen like that, but still, the Austrian engineers rebuilt the place. And now it belongs to the AK.”

A tidy summary, Martina thought, of centuries of bloody warfare. Of which the outcome remained in doubt. “Don't the Germans know you're here?” she said.

“They bombed us, once or twice, when they still had petrol for their aircraft. And they send their thugs out—though not so much these days, with the problems they've got. We can see them coming, we've pre-sighted mortars to cover the approaches. As for the bombs, they don't do much, only shift a few rocks around. It was a ruin to start with.”

They turned a corner, then another. The place was built like a maze, each twist providing a new sight line for defensive gunners. At last they entered a sort of courtyard, at one end of which stood a concrete blockhouse the size of a very heavily built two-car garage. A doorway was cut into this, and through it stepped a man in formal military garb, complete with gold epaulets. In a curt voice he gave what sounded like an order.

The long-faced man saluted, then turned around. “Captain Borojsza will speak to the leaders, one at a time.”

Grabsteen stepped forward. Martina cleared her throat.

But the Pole pointed to Petra. “First, you.”

Petra hesitated, giving Martina a look that blended resentment and resignation.
This is all your fault—but what does it matter?
Then she allowed herself to be led into the blockhouse. Martina surveyed the courtyard, trying to gauge whether she and her comrades were guests or prisoners here. Is that what Captain Borojsza was about to determine? They had not been asked to give up their weapons—that was good. But overlooking the courtyard were sentries in pillboxes built into the walls—you could just see their heads, sometimes the tip of a weapon. Not so good.

After several minutes, from the blockhouse, came a woman's sharp cry, an outburst of pain. Not good at all.

It was another half-hour before Petra emerged. One side of her face was puffy, and a stream of blood ran down from her temple. Yet she didn't appear to be in pain, and a worm of doubt tickled at Martina—perhaps it was a little
too
obvious. A scream, a trickle of blood.
Between us Poles, let's put one over on the Yanks, what do you say?

The uniformed man stepped smartly through the door. He barked out a question, two syllables.

Petra pointed to Grabsteen. Two syllables in reply.
That one.

The long-faced man said, “Now you, please.”

*    *    *

By the time Martina's turn came around, Captain Borojsza was in a benevolent mood. He sat behind a map table made of heavy wood that looked like a relic of the Franz-Josef regime. The blockhouse was lit by tiny windows high in the wall and a brace of tallow-burning lamps mounted in such a way that Martina's face was illuminated while his remained in shadow. On the table, Grabsteen's canvas bag lay with its seam sliced open, a considerable pile of Swiss-denominated currency spilling out. The captain pointed a sausage-shaped finger at Martina and said something in jovial-sounding Polish. He looked like a man who would be fat if only he could get enough to eat.