The Girl from Krakow (39 page)

“With milk, madam?”

“If there is any.”

By the time she returned with the tea, the Lempkes were in heated discussion. Rita stretched out the process of preparing, pouring, and serving the tea. She needed to hear what Lempke had to say. She also had to prepare him for the surprise of seeing the kitchen maid he had last seen in Krakow.

Lempke was talking. “No. I am not going to any Bavarian redoubt, and that’s flat.”

“But if Reich Minister Frank ordered you to, you have no choice.”

“What do you mean, I have no choice? They can order, but they can no longer enforce their orders. They couldn’t even get me through the lines out of Berlin. I had to figure my own way out, traveling with filthy refugees in hard-class carriages. It took three days to get here. Coming out of Berlin, we were strafed by Russian aircraft and bombed by the RAF every night.”

“But you can’t desert. They are hanging deserters on lampposts in Mannheim, not fifteen kilometers from here.”

“I’m not in the Wehrmacht. They can’t hang me for deserting it.”

Frau Lempke stood, trembling. “But this is the time to stand with the
Führer
.”

“I am sorry, my dear. I was never a fanatic.” The word hung in the air between them. It seemed to Rita that Lempke had stopped just short of saying “a fanatic like you.” “Now that the war is lost, we need to start thinking about how to survive. Continuing to follow orders from the Reichsministerium für Finanzen is not the way to do that.”

“We cannot lose, you defeatist!” she hissed. “What about the Vengeance rockets, the secret weapons? The
Führer
will bring our enemies down with us.”

He ignored this remark and continued to try to put her in touch with reality. “I brought some papers that will help the
Amis
figure out the government finances. I am going to use them to get on the right side of the occupation that is coming.”

“But you are a party member, Heinrich. You swore a personal oath to the
Führer
.”

Lempke grimaced. “Yes, just like all those officers who tried to kill him last July.” He stopped and reconsidered. “You aren’t worried the Americans will lock me up? Look, the
Amis
and the British won’t have a choice. They will have to make use of all the
MussNazis
, and even some of the real ones, to keep the country running.” He turned to address Rita. “You’ve listened to enough of this, Fräulein Trushenko. Go back to the kitchen.”

Perhaps telling Lempke about Dani could wait a day.

But there wasn’t another day to wait. The next day Rita’s war was over.

PART VI

AFTERWARD

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

I
t was time to become Tadeusz Sommermann again, alas. In Spain Gil Romero had set him free. But now, here in Moscow, with the war about to end, Gil Romero was a death sentence. The only chance of reprieve was to turn himself back into Tadeusz Sommermann.

The death sentence to be passed on Gil Romero had many counts: he was a foreigner, he was a doctor, he spoke too many languages, he was an intellectual, he had opinions he could not suppress, he had been in Spain, where he was bound to have met Trotskyites or even to have been one himself. That he had violated the law against abortion, that he had taken bribes in gold, that he had lied about his identity—these were not the most serious problems he faced. His real problems were ones he shared with literally a million others in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Each of them had one or more mark of cosmopolitanism likely to attract the attention of the NKVD.

That Gil had compromising information about figures in the Spanish Party might put him at risk, but he didn’t think so. Enrique Lister had ended up a general in the Red Army and had long ceased feeling vulnerable enough to send Gil anything more to hide away on his behalf. In fact, the second time they had seen each other, at a dacha party in the summer of ’44, Lister had looked right through him and walked past without any sign of recognition. That was fine with Gil.

But Gil was in danger. How great a danger had been made clear by his famous writer friend Ehrenberg. When they met for the last time, it was a few days after the Soviet army had crashed through the thin line of German resistance on the Vistula. Everyone in Moscow knew the Soviet pause before Warsaw in the summer of 1944 was purely tactical. Stalin had even refused the Americans and the Brits the right to land planes dropping supplies to the Home Army in Warsaw. The Germans had done his work, disposing of any hope of noncommunist Poland. All this Gil and Ehrenberg saw clearly. Now, in November, with the Home Army crushed by the Germans, there was no reason to hold back. There was every reason to push through the rest of Poland and take as many German towns and cities as possible before the western Allies got there.

“I’m going back to the front, Gil,” Ehrenberg said. “Soon.”

“Why? Haven’t you seen enough killing?” Gil wasn’t really surprised. He knew Ehrenberg enjoyed the action and the limelight, and didn’t mind the discomfort and risk.

“I have been hearing things about German atrocities. I have got to find out for myself, and tell the world if it’s true. I’ve also got to get out of Moscow. In fact, that’s why I’m glad I ran into you.” Ran into Gil? Ehrenberg had insisted on a meeting, and in an open park, at that. He had obviously been worried about something. There was no question of this being a casual meeting. “Gil, take my advice. Get out. I saw their terror campaign before the war. Once it’s over and they feel confident again, they are going to start asking questions about educated people, tracing proletarian provenance all the way back to your grandmother’s calluses. Foreigners will be suspect. Lucky you’re not a Polish Jew. The Georgian mafia really has its long knives out for them.”

“But why, Ilya?”

“It’s true believers, and capable ones, they fear the most. All those ‘wreckers’ in the ’30s—the engineers, the agronomists—they were guilty only of being too ambitious for the success of the revolution. They were dangerous. It’s mediocrity and thuggishness that rules here, I fear. Get out. You have a passport, right?” Gil nodded. “They never took it? Good. Use it, please.”

Ehrenberg was too well connected not to take seriously. By January a temporary government for Soviet-occupied Poland had been set up in Lublin. Gil realized they would need politically reliable people, real Polish nationals. Physicians with
bona fide
Polish papers would be safe and cared for.

Gil was sitting in the Maternity Hospital director’s office, not at the desk, but facing the director across a low table between two leather armchairs. “So, you want to have some time off, Romero? Well, you deserve it. Three years now at Number 6 with no break except for that duty in the Crimea. Hardly a picnic, eh? How much time do you want?”

“Can I be spared for two weeks?”

“Take a month, Romero. Where are you thinking of going?”

“South, perhaps back to the Crimea or Odessa. Someplace on the Black Sea with a bit of sun, fresh vegetables. Someplace far from the war zones.”

“I’ll have some furlough documents drawn up. You don’t want to travel without authorization these days. And you won’t get any rail tickets without documents.”

“Very kind of you, Comrade Director.” Gil rose, and they shook hands.

It would be tricky. He would be able to make it to Kiev without much trouble. After all, that was the route to the Black Sea. But then he’d have to start moving west toward the front. He would need to find exactly the right moment to bury Gil Romero and recover Tadeusz Sommermann. He could only hope that the closer he got to Poland, the more disorganized and fluid things would be. Pulling out the valise he had carried since leaving Lvov, his hand felt the seam for his Sommermann papers. Then he packed a civilian suit, his personal gear, and the sack of a dozen gold coins he’d collected—medals for services rendered to military morale. He decided to start out wearing the uniform they’d given him for duty herding the Tartars out of their homelands. It gave him the temporary military rank of major. He deserved it, after all. He’d been a major at the beginning of the war and served loyally.

Moscow to Kiev. A long ride, but at least his documents got him a seat in first class—officers’ territory, with access to the restaurant carriage. The express didn’t stop often, but as the train slowed through stations, he could see groups of German prisoners of war working on the roadbed or clearing ruins. It was January, but many were in the remains of summer uniforms, stuffed with old newspapers, hatless, with rags wrapped around holes in their jackboots, if they had any boots at all. One morning at Bryansk, he saw a Russian on a platform toss his cigarette butt on the tracks, and three Germans scrambled for it. The sight sent a thrill through him.
Yes
, he thought,
we’ve done it. We’ve beaten them!
The feeling was so strong, so clean, so invigorating, he had to experience it again.

Getting off the train at Kiev, Gil handed his case to a porter. It wasn’t heavy, but the porter would cost almost nothing, and it did not befit an officer—a major—to carry his own luggage. He walked down the platform. On each side was a long single file of German prisoners—no officers, no noncommissioned officers, just ragged, bedraggled, unshaven, dirty, prematurely aged men with vacant eyes and chins fallen to their stoved-in chests. Gil drew a breath, expanded his chest, forced his shoulders back, and straightened his spine to give him maximum height. Then he quickened his step into a military stride and walked down the quay, every inch the victorious Soviet officer. Every few steps he raised his arm in a mock salute and announced in impeccable German,
Wir danken den Führer
! The phrase that had echoed through the thousand-year Reich—We thank the Führer. But the disheveled, hungry, threadbare conscripts on each line were too fatigued, too dispirited, too numbed by what had already been months of retribution even to look up and take in this little indignity. Gil, however, didn’t notice. He enjoyed himself right to the stairway at the end of the quay.

The train had been nothing but soldiers—replacements heading toward the front, moving with high priority to the replacement depots in Lvov. There would be no chance to become a Polish civilian yet. Perhaps none when he alighted. Lvov, he was certain, was to be Ukrainian and Soviet forever. In the war it had become Lemberg; now it would be L’viv, a thoroughly Ukrainian city.

In the great hall of the railway station, he could still see the word Lemberg bleeding through the whitewash of the walls beneath the now aggressive Cyrillic lettering. He walked out onto the open square and immediately knew where he was. He looked down one avenue toward the hospital and down another toward the building where his flat had been. Lvov, Lemberg, L’viv—it was almost untouched by war. He knew with equal immediacy that he couldn’t remain here, not if he was to become Tadeusz Sommermann again. He turned back to the station and began to stand in the line of officers queuing for space on the next train west, to their units, to the front and the Germans. It was early, and the desk was not manned. But the line was already long. It grew longer behind him.

Once the queue began moving forward, Gil consulted his mental map of what was once Poland but henceforth would be the Ukraine. He needed to get as far west of this new eastern border of Poland as he could. Briefly he considered a detour south and east 150 kilometers to Karpatyn.
Why?
he asked himself. Not his parents. They had been deported by the Russians and couldn’t have survived in Kazakhstan or beyond the Urals. Rita? If she was alive, she was not there. And the chances she was alive were so slim, he would not allow himself to fold her into his future, even in his imagination. So, west, not south. He had to move west as far and as fast as he could. He came to the head of the line. The word “Gleiwitz” entered his head. Between the wars it was the last town in Poland or the first town in Germany, depending on whether you were a Pole or a German. It had taken a League of Nations plebiscite to decide the question. It was on the German side of town that Hitler had staged the pretext—a mock attack on a radio station by Germans dressed in Polish uniforms—that began the war.

Gil put down his identity card and travel permit.

The officer looked up at Gil’s medical uniform. “Where to, Doc?”

“Gleiwitz.” He tried to say it with a combination of authority and as an offhand matter of fact.

“Gleiwitz, Doc?” The officer was skeptical. “All the frontline units went through there more than a week ago. No field hospitals or evacuation hospitals there. Besides, you’re not attached, according to these documents.”

“It’s a little delicate, sir.” The man at the desk was a captain. Technically Gil outranked him. But a little respect might smooth Gil’s way. So, “sir, you see
 
.
 
.
 
.” He lowered his voice. “You’ve seen all the women in the forces, more and more of them, even at the front, drivers, clerks, little friends for the officers. Well, not all of their medical needs are the result of war wounds. You understand.” The officer nodded, beginning both to be uncomfortable and to lose interest in this matter. Gil went on a little further; it was remarkable how little men wanted to know about women’s complaints. “I have been asked to establish a branch of Moscow Maternity Hospital number 6 at Gleiwitz for
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
well
 
.
 
.
 
.” He stopped.

The captain pulled a rubber stamp off a rack, inked it, and pressed it down on the bottom of Gil’s travel document. He then picked up a pen, wrote out his authorization, and scrawled a signature. He jerked his head toward the platforms. “Next.”