The Girl from Krakow (19 page)

He was packed at 6:00 a.m. the next morning and still waiting at the adjutant’s tent at eleven o’clock when his orders were finally cut.

Detached from this command. Major Romero will present himself at Polish Military headquarters, Moscow, for reassignment
.

And now he had been promoted to major. Perhaps Volodin didn’t want Gil to remember what the colonel had said—“another stupid waste of manpower”—just before the commissar had mentioned the Lubyanka prison.

A major didn’t have to ride “hard class” to Moscow, though it did involve three changes. There was no rush. His orders were undated, and so long as he wore the uniform, he could eat at officers’ messes along the rail route, stay warm in officers’ waiting rooms, and even get a
musjik
to carry his bag along the platforms from one train to another.

Taking maximum advantage of his situation required some thought and some information too. Arriving in Moscow on November 24, Major Romero showed his orders at Paveletsky Terminal, received a billeting order, and checked his bag. He would explore Moscow on foot long enough to stretch his legs. Turning to look at the station’s vast structure as he left the building, Gil caught a glimpse of old Europe in its Baron Haussmann-like proportions, its rounded black mansard roof, and its entry arches, three levels high. The reminder of the D’Orsay Station beside the Seine in Paris made him feel worldly for the first time since he had left Barcelona.

Late November 1941 was hardly the moment for sightseeing. The Germans were rapidly approaching, and much of Moscow’s industrial capacity had already moved east. Romero didn’t know it, but
babushkas
, grandmothers in head-scarves, were digging tank traps in the western suburbs. There were suggestions that the Politburo was clearing out. These rumors Gil would not believe when he heard them a few days later. But there seemed to be an absence of NKVD in the railway station, traffic was thin on the streets in front of the terminal, and none of it seemed to be heading in the direction the street signs marked toward Red Square.

But people were moving, walking rapidly through the station and out of it. Moscow was the largest city he had been in since he left Barcelona. He was thrilled at the anonymity it afforded him. A snow squall began as he turned right out of the lofty station onto a double-laned boulevard, still lit by high streetlamps against the winter gloom. Gil began looking for a café or bar, someplace where he could have a drink and perhaps begin to figure out the lay of this new land. The almost complete absence of shops, stores, and businesses immediately struck him. How did a city of millions function without them? It couldn’t. So, where were they hidden?

He found himself walking across the Moscow River, or at least a canalized section of it. The snow squall had stopped, and the heat of the traffic made the pavement glisten. Here he saw men and women striding purposefully in both directions over the bridge—some carrying briefcases, others sheaves of documents, still others empty-handed—each, including the women, striding manfully, apparently on a war-urgent mission. None appeared to need the watchful eye of a security service to make them do their utmost. This was something entirely new in his short experience of Soviet life. Never in the vast tail of logistics that stretched endlessly away from the front lines had anyone ever worked hard when no authority was around. Until this very morning in Moscow, he had no idea how Russia could win the war. Now he was reassessing his pessimism. Suddenly he wanted to be part of something larger than himself.

The next morning Gil found himself the only person seated in a waiting room inside one of those vast courtyard blocks only a few streets from his billet and the station. The room was warm with men coming and going, and it was awash in Polish. Some of the men entering and leaving were dressed in Polish uniforms badly the worse for wear, others in the enlisted men’s garb of the Soviet army, and a few seemed to be dressed in cleaned-up prisoners’ coveralls. All were thin, some scrawny, but they carried themselves with an unreasonable élan.

A door opened, and someone shouted in Polish, “Major Doctor Romero.” Gil rose and took four steps into a smaller room with a desk, behind which sat an officer in one of the weather-beaten Polish uniforms, one of those absurd four-pointed cavalry officer’s caps from before the war hanging on a coatrack behind him.
Probably a prop
, Gil thought. The officer took Gil’s heavy woolen greatcoat, hefted it, and smiled, putting it on the coatrack. “Handy in this weather. Wish I had one of those, major.” Gil suppressed the urge to try barter. “I’m Colonel Radetksy.” He offered his hand, then looked at Gil’s papers spread out before him on the desk: Soviet identity, military orders, Polish residency papers, statements from the hospital director in Lvov, medical certificates from Marseille and Barcelona. “So, you want to join the Polish Eastern Army.” He looked at the papers again. “You’re not a Pole.”

“Is that a problem?” It was one Gil could solve by opening up a seam in his medical case and pulling out his real papers—Tadeusz Sommermann, Polish citizen.

“Not really. You’re not Russian, so you’re covered by the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement. But all that did was make anyone who became a Soviet subject when they invaded along with the Germans in ’39 a Polish subject again as of July ’41. You’re free to join the army General Anders is organizing or not. If you don’t, you can take your chances in Russia as a civilian.”

The option surprised Gil. “I see. What happens if I join up?”

“You go east to Totskoye in Orenburg and wait. Maybe you get to fight with the Russians against the Germans; maybe you sit out the war. Maybe Stalin changes his mind and re-Sovietizes us. Maybe he sends us back to the POW camps. That’s where most of us came from. Maybe we fight our way out of the country. The Czech Legion did it in 1920—twenty thousand men, all the way from the Eastern Front across to Vladivostok.” Gil knew of this feat of arms. He had met a few of its veterans in Spain, still seeking adventure in late middle age. It didn’t interest him except as a footnote to history.

Radetsky read Gil’s silence correctly. “It’s not for you, is it, our little Polish army? Frankly, we want willing volunteers, Poles who are ardent for the nation. We’ve already lost a fair number of recruits, men who took one look at Totskoye and decided it wasn’t for them. General Anders has issued orders that they are not to be stopped. It’s not a cause for the national minorities.” This, Gil understood, was code for Jews. “Poland was never really for the minorities. And you are really a minority—a Spaniard in Poland!”

“I think you understand, Colonel Radetsky. What do you suggest?”

“Well, I’ll give you enlistment papers. They should be enough to get you out of the Soviet medical corps. Then come back and we’ll cancel them. You’ll have papers that should keep you out of trouble as a civilian, to the extent that’s possible in this country.”

“How can I thank you?”

Radetsky merely shook his head while taking Gil’s extended hand to shake. However, the answer to his question immediately suggested itself to Gil.

A week later a package arrived at the Polish Eastern Army headquarters. It was labeled
Attention: Colonel Radetsky
. When he opened it, he was surprised and pleased to find a best-quality military greatcoat, shorn of all its Soviet military insignia.

By the time the battle of Moscow was over, Guillermo Romero was hard at work at Maternity Hospital Number 6, Moscow’s oldest and best lying-in clinic.

With the German offensive roaring into the suburbs, Gil reckoned he could be choosy. Fainthearted physicians had suddenly found pressing business to the east, leaving vacancies urgently to be filled. Childbirth did not take a holiday either for Christmas or the Wehrmacht’s timetable. Thus he reasoned, and found his way to City Maternity Hospital Number 6, on Miusskaya Street. It was still called the Apricot by porters and orderlies, after a local chocolate factory, an unpatriotic name that was still undetected by the state security organs. The building took up the better part of a city block, three stories high, a turret on each corner connected by bays of nine windows, and surrounded by mature trees, leafless now in winter. When the spring came, a lovely garden would bloom within the building’s quadrangle.

Finding an apartment on Miusskaya Ploshchad overlooking the broad square behind the hospital was not difficult for Gil either. Lots of important bureaucrats “called away” beyond the Urals to the east were eager to have the concierge sublet their flats.

He had been right to think that Moscow would be held. Gil prided himself on his powers to predict these matters on which life, and comfort, for that matter, depended. By the time the house staff returned after the battle of Stalingrad a year later, he had made himself indispensable. Gil would ride the war out here very nicely, thank you.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

F
inishing his examination, Dr. Romero snapped off his rubber gloves. “You may dress now, Comrade Madame Malov. Then please come in and sit down.” Gil turned and moved back to his consulting room.

After several months supervising midwives on the delivery floors, Gil had found his métier in the gynecology department, just as he had in Lvov. It was a combination of his skills, his way with female staff—a willingness to listen—and his manner. The romance of his name and his exotic history did not hurt either. But mostly, he thought, his advantage was that he liked women, including the young woman now seated before him. She was only a few years out of the Komsomol, her red skirt over a white blouse practically an homage to her time in the league of young party members.

“Can you tell me when your last menstrual period was, comrade?”

“I have missed two cycles, Comrade Doctor.” Most women in Moscow could recall such matters exactly. Hunting for sanitary products had been a monthly task even before the war. Now it was a mission, and women noticed when a month had gone by without having to find some.

“My congratulations. You are pregnant.”

Comrade Madame Malov choked slightly. “That’s what I feared.”

“Feared?” Gil had seen enough patients not to be surprised.

“It’s not convenient, Comrade Doctor. It’s worse. It will devastate my husband, ruin my marriage, harm a friend for life
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
What can I do, Doctor?”

They both knew perfectly well what she was really saying. Only a few years before, it would not have been an issue. For a long time after 1917, abortion was a matter of women’s reproductive rights. Contraception was widely available, and the double standard was condemned as a vestige of bourgeois morality. But as the five-year plans took hold, sexual freedom began to seem too revolutionary, almost Trotskyite. Then in 1935 the Supreme Soviet had passed strict prohibitions, largely, it was said, to accelerate population growth.

“I can’t help you, comrade. We both know the relevant laws.”

“Doctor, listen. My husband has been out of Moscow for eight months, first in the Far East and now at the Leningrad front. He is almost forty, much older than I am, professional military, and very senior, a division commander. I made a mistake with a young friend from the party. If I have the child, everything will be ruined. My husband’s subordinates will find out and laugh at him, his superiors will condemn him, my friend will be ruined in the party, and my husband will repudiate the child. Please, you must help me.” It didn’t seem to be working. The doctor was not even looking at her anymore. Instead, he was writing something out on a pad.

She decided to change her approach. Breathlessly she said, “Doctor, I’d be very grateful,”
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
and she began to unbutton the white blouse beneath its flag-red scarf.

“Stop that at once, young lady. I have just conducted an examination of your uterus. Do you think I also need to conduct one of your breasts?”

Now she was in tears, beating her chest and beginning to moan so loud Gil expected a nurse to barge in.

“Quiet down. My dear, I am going to help you. I don’t know why. Call it an act of patriotism.”

“Thank you, Doctor. Thank you. I will find the money to pay you.”

“No money, please.”

She misunderstood his demurrer. “Well, then,
valuta
 
.
 
.
 
.”

Did she have access to gold in coins, in foreign currency? This was a worse crime in the Soviet Union than abortion. How deep was he sinking into danger, helping young Comrade Madame Malov?

“No. I don’t want anything. I am going to help you, and you are going to give me only gratitude in return, do you understand?” One never knew when gratitude would be useful, especially if you were keeping the secret of a party member married to a division commander. Influence, access, protection were more valuable than gold. He handed her the piece of paper on which he had been writing. It was his home address and a date a week hence.

It would take a week to organize matters. Things were in such short supply Gil could only take small quantities of what was required—a bit of ether, gauze, and some disinfectant. He had the speculum and curettes he needed in his personal medical kit bag at home. There was a sturdy dining table under a bright light in the apartment that would enable him to conduct the procedure. He had done a simple D and C many times before, in Barcelona and Lvov, to deal with a variety of women’s complaints, and, discreetly, abortions.

Madame Malov—he couldn’t think of her as comrade, though it was the only acceptable style of address—knocked on his door at the stroke of 8:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Gil opened the door. “I assume that you have nothing planned the rest of the day. I am going to insist on your remaining long enough to be sure there are absolutely no complications.”

When he was finished twenty minutes later, he helped his wobbly patient into his bedroom and supported her as she lay down on a towel spread across the bed. “Please don’t move around. Take a nap.” He closed the shade on the window against the gray sky and tiptoed out.

In the late afternoon, Gil was just turning on the lamps against the impending gloom when Madame Malov appeared at the bedroom door.

“How do you feel?”

“Well, thank you, Doctor. You have never called me by my name. Do you know it?”

“Yes, it’s on your record. Irena Yaraslova.”

“Please call me that. No more Comrade Madame Malov.”

“Very well, Irena.” He did not add the patronymic. He never did. Not doing so was part of his Spanish persona. “Now, you may go. Bathe when you wish, but no intercourse for a week.”

“Not for a year.”

“As your gynecologist, I cannot advise such abstinence. But I can provide you with something that will prevent a recurrence of your problem. Come to my office next week.”

“Without fail,” she said, pulling on her winter coat. But Gil was not listening. Writing the note to himself to secure a diaphragm, there came a stab—Rita’s face, that last afternoon in Lvov, as he handed her the diaphragm. Rita. Rita. Rita. A score of images all expressed themselves in that one word sounding silently across his mind. What had become of her?

Gil knew enough about what had happened in Karpatyn after the Russians came. He understood the fate of his parents. The letters, addressed
poste restante
to Marseille and forwarded to Lvov, had stopped early in 1940. When he saw what became of the bookshops and their owners in Lvov, it became obvious what had happened in Karpatyn. He knew he was not going to do himself any good by making inquiries. But Rita? Where was she? Alive, dead, escaped
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
He decided to think about something else. Comrade Madame Malov’s breasts, for example.

Daily life in Moscow was difficult, but never boring, even exciting for a time. Once the immediate German threat had receded, people began again to feel they had a future to look forward to. Later they became more guarded, reticent, suspicious, much more careful about their opinions. But in the first flush of realizing they would not be defeated after all, Muscovites felt almost free. War news was grim, especially that spring of ’42 when Germans began their second full-scale offensive across the entire Eastern Front. But the catastrophes of the first summer—635,000 encircled at Bryansk, 650,000 surrendered at Kiev, 300,000 at Bialystok—were not being repeated. With the English bombers holding down a million Wehrmacht soldiers on antiaircraft duty and the Americans finally in the war, expressions of confidence in the outcome were no longer made just to keep security organs off one’s neck. There was enough straight reporting in the newspapers so that people knew what was really going on. Boredom was not possible.

Even after people and supplies came back to Moscow, there was little to choose from in the shops when it came to food, cigarettes, or liquor. Gil finally began to recognize the retail stores—rare, small, and bare, hidden in corners, beneath railway underpasses, on sleepy backstreets, their shelves a disorderly array of the few goods on offer. Most people survived on what they were fed at work and what they could bring home from canteens for their families. No one left for the day without carrying a “just in case” shopping bag. Almost everything that was worth eating, wearing, buying, or smoking could, of course, be secured under the table, “
nalyevo
”—on the left—for a price beyond the reach of most people.

But money couldn’t secure nearly as much as did a strategic location in the intersecting webs of party, military, and government. That was just where Gil found himself now. His maternity hospital was in the center of the old city, known since before the revolution for the excellence of its care. Its semiofficial, accepted name was the Krupskaya, after Lenin’s estimable widow (still alive and hard at work building socialism). It turned out to be a node in all three of these networks of special treatment. When the Krupskaya lacked for anything, you could be sure the commodity was really in short supply. And when it came to the wives of the vanguard of the proletariat, their newborn infants, and those who cared for them, creature comforts could always be found somehow. So, most days Gil ate well in the canteen, wore a freshly starched white coat, remained warm in his consulting rooms, read his newspapers on wood spools each morning in the doctors’ lounge, had real coffee with his colleagues, served in prerevolutionary china, and could tipple from a sideboard of Georgian brandies and liquors—gifts from grateful husbands.

In spite of the privations and shortages, he would later look back on wartime in Moscow as the best years of his life. He knew he was part of something important and good—like being with the Spanish Republicans, but this time winning. Now when he heard the words of the International again—now in Russian, not Catalan—again he found himself wanting to sing along. He did sing along!

Gil was bringing examination records up-to-date one morning when his phone rang. “Ministry of Foreign Affairs for you, Comrade Doctor.” Before he could clear his throat, a strident voice was speaking all too rapidly and loudly down the line from
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
from where? Probably the Kremlin. “Third secretary Dalglashin here, Doctor Romero. I need to see you urgently at the ministry. Can you come now?” Gil looked his diary, but before he could respond, the voice went on, evidently speaking to someone else. “I see, I see.” Then, evidently, to Gil again: “Not now after all, comrade. This evening? I will send a car for you at the hospital. Shall we say 21:00? Good-bye.”

Gil had not said a word, not one word. How could this man—what was his name, Dalglashin?—even been sure he had the right party?

Could he find out who this person was? There was certainly no directory he could consult, and inquiries might be treated as suspicious. What had he done, anyway, to attract the attention of the foreign ministry? Surely the Spanish NKVD’s search for Tadeusz Sommermann in 1938 could not be a concern to the Soviet foreign ministry in 1942.