“Who is that?” the mayor said, pointing a fat thumb at the couch.
“Just a boy. Dead to the world. He doesn’t understand Polish. I can send him out.”
“Never mind, never mind.” Starzynski waved both hands high and sat in the chair to which Slote gestured. He rested his thick hands on his knees and blew out a long breath, looked around at the large well-furnished room, and ran his fingers along the polished desk. “Well. You seem in good condition here. Is there anything we can do for you? Are your people all right?”
“We’re fine. We’re consumed with admiration for the Varsovians.”
“Yes? The Germans have a bone in their throat, eh? We drove them back in the north last night. Berlin Radio says it’s over. We’ll see.” The mayor was red with pride. “Our forces are only twelve miles away this morning from a join-up with the Modlin garrison! Then the world will see something! We’ll have a battle line again, not a siege.”
“That’s wonderful news, Your Honor.” Slote ran his fingers caressingly over the warm bowl of his pipe, and tried to smile with a gladness he did not feel.
“Yes, but the other news is not so good.” The mayor paused, looked Slote in the face, and said dramatically, “The Russians have marched. The Soviet Union invaded our country at dawn. They are pouring over the border by the millions! Their excuse is that they want to protect their nationals in Poland from the Germans. It’s a crude disgusting lie, of course, but the Russians never change. They have already taken Tar-nopol and Baranowicze, and Rowne will fall in an hour, if it hasn’t already fallen. We have no forces in the east. We have been sacrificing everything to hold off the Germans in the west, waiting for the Allies to march. And now the Russians are coming. There is nothing to oppose them between the border and Warsaw.”
Slote burst out laughing.
The mayor stared at him, eyes bulging. “What is the matter, sir? Don’t you believe me? I tell you the Russians have pounced on Poland from the rear in her agony. It is a historic treachery. I have a message for your President!” He pulled a paper from his breast pocket, unfolded it, and slapped it on the desk before Slote. “If you have suggestions on the phrasing they will be welcome, but the highest speed is now a matter of life and death.”
Slote could scarcely translate mentally the Polish words on the gray official paper. All he could think of was the Soviet tanks and soldiers approaching Warsaw. He could see the crawling machines and the Slavic faces. Perhaps they were coming to claim their part of the evil bargain, nothing more. Perhaps they would engage the Germans in battle and turn Warsaw into Armageddon. Perhaps they would bring up the famed Russian artillery and help the Germans pulverize the Polish capital twice as fast. This news seemed to him the authentic end of the world, and he was not aware of laughing. He peered at the paper swimming before his eyes. “I understand the situation is extraordinary,” he managed to say, surprising himself with his own reasonable glibness, “but a communication from the head of a municipality to a head of government is awkward. An approach from President Moscicki, or Marshal Smidgly-Rydz, somebody in the national government, might prove more fruitful.”
“But sir, our national government has crossed the border into Rumania. They are probably under house arrest by now, and the Germans will have them by the neck before the week is out. There’s only Warsaw, but we are unafraid and we are fighting on. We want to know what we can hope for.”
Slote got hold of himself and scanned the dispatch: familiar, pathetic rhetoric of appeal, like all the messages from Radio Warsaw to France and England during the past weeks. In fact the mayor was talking very much in his broadcasting style. “I’m not sure how fast I can get this out, sir. Lately I’ve been encountering twelve-hour delays and more via Stockholm.”
“I guarantee you immediate transmission. You can send this in plain language. Let the whole world know,” the mayor shouted, waving a fist,
“that the people of Warsaw are fighting on despite the Russian treachery, and that we are calling on the great American President for a word of hope. If he speaks the Allies will listen. They’ll march before it’s too late. The Germans can still be smashed from behind. All their power is in Poland. The Allies can roar to Berlin in two weeks. Let the President only speak, and they will march!”
“We can encode it very rapidly, Your Honor. I think that’s more prudent. We’ll be ready to transmit in half an hour.”
In a more businesslike tone Starzynski said, “Call my office, and we will arrange direct voice communication for you with Stockholm or Berne.” He stood up and glanced around the room. “A peaceful oasis. The Luftwaffe respects the American flag. Very wise of them. How soundly the boy sleeps.”
“He’s exhausted. Mr. Mayor, how about the evacuation of neutrals? Did you discuss that with the Germans yesterday?”
“It was not the moment. They came under a flag of truce to ask for our surrender. General Dzuma wouldn’t accept the message. The German officers wouldn’t discuss any other subject. They said they would reduce us to rubble!” The mayor’s voice rose to broadcasting pitch. “They’re dropping leaflets all over the city this morning with the same threat, but where are the ‘swarms of airplanes’ and the ‘hurricanes of shells’ they talk about? The Germans are already throwing at us everything they’ve got. They have nothing to add but words. They’ve been doing their worst for two weeks, and here we are still! Let President Roosevelt only speak out, and civilization can still see a historic victory on the Vistula.” His voice dropped; the exalted glow left his face. “I did mention the problem of the neutrals. Their emissary indicated that something would be worked out soon.” The mayor gave Slote a cool look and added, with a smile that twisted his moustache, “We don’t expect you to stay on and share our fate.”
“You understand that we have nineteen women here,” Slote said, feeling under the weight of this smile a need to apologize.
“Men, women, what’s the difference? You’re neutral.” The mayor held out his hand. “Please send the message. I must broadcast it eventually. I want to give your great President the courtesy of a period for private consideration of his reply.”
Slote grasped his hand. “We Americans here are awed by the stand of Warsaw, of that I can assure you. We will never forget it, and when we get home we will tell the story.”
The mayor seemed moved. “Yes? The Germans are not supermen, you see. Warsaw has already taught that to the world. Some Germans are personally fine people, but as a nation they are swine. It is a matter of deep national immaturity and feelings of inferiority. A very complex question. They have the machines, the railroads, the factories, but we are not afraid of them. All we ask is a chance to keep fighting them.”
“I will certainly convey that to my government.”
“We need help. I am going from here to dig a trench.” The mayor theatrically showed his blistered palms, and left.
Slote scrawled at his desk for several minutes, then summoned a coding clerk.
“Byron, wake up!” He shook Byron’s shoulder, smearing his hand with brick dust. “Come on, get up. All hell is breaking loose.” Byron turned over and opened dull eyes. “The Russians are coming. God knows when they’ll be here. They invaded Poland this morning. Go and call Natalie.”
With an elastic movement, Byron came erect and awake. “The Russians? Holy cow. This thing’s getting interesting.”
“Interesting? Byron, look, Warsaw will probably become the no-man’s-land between the German and Russian armies. The city can be blown to atoms! Get Natalie and tell her she’s to come here and stay here. Working in a belligerent’s hospital is damned questionable anyway, and now—” Slote walked to the door, putting a fist holding the pipe distractedly to his head. “What a mess. So much to do.”
Byron yawned and rose. “But what’s the rush? How far is the Russian border from here, two or three hundred kilometers? Their army can’t possibly get to Warsaw for a week.”
Slote laughed. It had not occurred to him that
the Russian armies needed several days to advance three hundred kilometers, but it was true, and very obvious. He took out his pouch and packed the pipe slowly to calm himself, saying, “Of course, but the point is, this development changes everything. There’s never any predicting what the Russians or the Germans will do next. There may be dogfights over Warsaw today. The Germans may decide on half an hour’s notice to let the neutrals out of here.”
“Well, I’ll try to get her, but you know Natalie.”
“Please tell Natalie it’s not a message from me,” Slote said in a tight ragged tone, his hand on the doorknob, his head pounding, “but an official notice from the United States Government. We can no longer be responsible for the safety of anybody outside the four walls of this building. If we suddenly get packed out of here under a flag of truce—and it can happen any time—and she isn’t around, I can’t delay five minutes. We’ll go, and she’ll be the only foreigner left in Warsaw, and if by some freak she survives the bombs and the Nazis she can write a book. Tell her that, will you?” He closed the door hard.
By now Byron knew the route to the hospital well. It went through a part of the town which the Germans had been pounding hard. Sooty heaps of rubble pockmarked the way; there were craters in the streets, broken sewer pipes, torn cable conduits, downed telephone poles, uprooted trees, and endless piles of broken glass, masonry, wood, and rubbish. Children played on the heaps and in the ruined buildings. Women were washing clothes in the open, or cooking over pale fires of splintered wood in the bright sunshine. Work gangs were digging in the fallen houses, clearing twisted wires from the street, and shovelling and bulldozing debris. Almost everybody appeared cheerful and matter-of-fact; that was the remarkable thing, though Byron was getting used to it. He passed no funerals or other traces of the dead. Leaping, climbing, laughing in the destroyed houses, the children seemed to be finding war an amusing novelty, and school was evidently out. Here and there black-shawled women sat with bowed heads on chairs or stones. Some bared breasts to sucking babies. Many people with blank faces wandered amid the rubble and stared, or fumbled to find things. No fires were burning. The destruction was capricious. One block would be undamaged; the next half razed, as though an airplane had dumped all its bombs at once. Over jagged slanting half-walls, rooms like stage settings hung in the air, their different wallpapers or paint colorfully and pathetically exposed. Byron saw a broken piano hanging half out of one room.
He made his way through the entrance hall of the hospital. Here Warsaw’s surprisingly cheerful air gave way to a pitiful and disgusting scene. Wounded people were piled and crowded helter-skelter along the marble floor awaiting help; mostly in rags, all dirty, greenpale, groaning or crying or in a faint, men and women, Poles and Jews, blood-smeared, unbandaged, with clothing ripped, with faces torn open, with arms and legs gashed, with an occasional red stump of limb blown away and terrible white bone showing. The children were piled separately in a big anteroom, where a sad chorus of wailing and screaming rose, mingled with some incongruous laughter. Byron hurried past the open door and down the curving stone staircase, into a long low basement area much warmer than the floor above; here the stink of faultily burning oilstoves was even stronger than the smells of medicine.
“Is he crazy?” Natalie exclaimed. “How can I leave? I just came on duty. Look!” She swept her arm around at the women in the jammed-together beds, moaning and shrieking in Polish, at others sitting up dolefully on beds or low stools, with fat white breasts and brown nipples bared to infants, at the three pallid sweating doctors moving from bed to bed, at the hastening nurses, some in soiled bloodstained white dresses like herself, with hair bound in white cloths, some in dark gray nun’s habits. “There are five of us down here and we counted eighty-two women this morning! It’s the only maternity ward left in Warsaw now. The Germans bombed out Saint Catherine’s last night. They say it was unspeakably horrible, pregnant women running around on fire, newborn babies burning up—”
“The point is, Natalie, with the Russians coming—”
“I heard you! They’re hundreds of miles away, aren’t they? Go away, Briny, I have to work.”
A stoop-shouldered doctor with a big nose, a square red beard, and sad filmed eyes was walking past. He asked Natalie in German what the problem was, and she told him.
“Go, by all means go,” he said, in an exhausted voice. “Don’t be foolish, you must leave with the other Americans. If the embassy sends for you, you must obey.”
“Oh, the embassy! Nobody says we’re leaving yet. This young man can come and fetch me in five minutes if they do.”
“No, no, that’s a risk you can’t take. You’re not a Pole, you’re not supposed to risk your life. And you’re Jewish, you’re Jewish.” The doctor put his hand to her head and pulled off the white cloth. Her loose hair fell thick, curling, dark. “You must go home.”
Tears ran out of Natalie’s eyes and down her face. “The woman with the twins is hemorrhaging. Did you see her yet? And the baby with the bad foot—” she gestured jerkily at a bed nearby.
“They’re all on the list. Go back to the embassy right away. Thank you. You’ve helped us. Have a safe journey.” The doctor shuffled away.
She turned on Byron. “Leslie Slote is a selfish bastard. He just doesn’t want to have me on his mind. One thing less to think about.” Suddenly she raised her skirt to her hips. The gesture gave Byron a shocking little thrill, though in point of fact the heavy gray bloomers coming down to her knees were considerably less sexy than the white skirt. She must have gotten those gruesome bloomers from the nuns, he thought. “Here,” she said, pulling a thick wallet from her bloomers and dropping the skirt. “I’ll go back to the goddamn embassy. But just in case, I want you to go and find Berel, and give him this. It’s all my American money. Will you do that for me?”
“Sure.”
“Tell me, Briny,” Natalie said, “are you still having fun?”
He looked around at the noisy, crowded, evil-smelling ward, where the Polish women were helplessly bringing new life into a city which was being dynamited to death by the Germans, going through unpostponable birth pangs with the best care the dying city could give them. “More fun than a barrel of monkeys. Be careful going back to the embassy, will you? There’s a big burning church on Franzuski, and they’ve got the street blocked off. Go around by the museum.”
“All right. You’ll probably find Berel in that gray building, you know, where the Jewish council works. He’s on the food committee or something.”
“I guess I’ll find him.”
Byron came out in a back alley where two men were loading dead people from the hospital onto a two-wheeled cart, much like the one he had bought to carry the water. Bodies lay on the cobblestones, and one man wearing a red-smeared white oilcloth apron was taking them up one by one in his arms and thrusting them at the other man, who stacked them in the cart—large rigid horrors with open mouths and fixed eyes—like dead fish in a market. The man tossed up the light body of a scrawny old woman, whose gray pubic hair showed through the pink rag still hanging on her.
Hurrying down Marshal Pilsudski Boulevard toward the Jewish section he heard the thumping of heavy guns, and nearby explosions like the blasting at a building site. Byron muttered routine curses at the Germans. He had spent a week in Germany after defecting from the University of Florence. They had seemed odd, but no more so than the Italians; foreigners, but human enough, with a boisterous sense of fun and very polite manners. Yet here they were, surrounding the Polish capital, pounding it with explosives and flying steel, breaking the water mains, killing the children, turning living people into stiff glassy-eyed dead stacked garbage to be carted away and disposed of. It was really the most amazing outrage. To call it “war” was not to make it any more understandable.
This peculiar and horrible state of affairs in which he accidentally found himself was nevertheless far more colorful and interesting than “peace,” as Byron remembered it. Delivering
water to the United States embassy was the most satisfying thing he had done in his life. He loved the job. He was willing to be killed doing it. But the odds were all with him. This was the novel thing he was finding out. Most of the people in Warsaw were still alive and unhurt and going about their business. The city was far from destroyed or even half-destroyed. As he made his way to Nareiskaya district he passed through many a block of brown three-story houses which stood undamaged, peaceful, and quiet, looking exactly as they had before the German attack.
But in the Jewish quarter itself there were no such undamaged blocks. It was one broad smoky ruin. Clearly the Germans were raining extra shells and bombs on this district—a pointless course, since the Jews of Warsaw could not compel the surrender of the city. Such a deluge of fire and explosion concentrated on the city’s vitals—power, water, transport, bridges—instead of on the Jews, could break Warsaw much faster. The bombardment of the Nareiskaya was an irrational wasteful assault by a powerful army against sad unarmed paupers.
The JUDEN VERBOTEN signs Byron had seen on park benches in Germany had been too bizarre to seem real. This bombardment of the Nareiskaya district first drove home to him the queer fact that the Germans really had murder in their hearts for these people. Trolley cars lay on their sides, burned out. Swollen dead horses stank in the streets, in clouds of fat black flies that sometimes settled stickily on Byron’s hands and face. There were dead cats and dogs, too, and a lot of dead rats scattered in the gutter. He saw only one human body, an old man crumpled in a doorway. He had noticed before how quick the Jews were to remove their dead, and how they treated the corpses with respect, covering the loaded carts with cloths and following them in silent mournful straggles through the streets.
But despite the smashing up of the houses, the continuing fires, the smoke, the rubble, this quarter still abounded in eager crowded life. On one corner, outside a ruined schoolhouse, boys in skullcaps sat with their bearded teacher on the sidewalk, chanting over enormous books; some of the boys were not much larger than the books. Kiosks were still festooned with dozens of different newspapers and journals printed in heavy Hebrew lettering. He heard someone in a house practicing on a violin. The vendors of wilted vegetables and spotted stunted fruit, of tinned food and old clothes, stood along the sidewalks or pushed their creaky handcarts amid crowds of people. Work gangs were clearing rubble from bombed houses off the streets and the sidewalks. There were plenty of hands for the work. Byron wondered at this, for in the past weeks Jewish men and boys—perhaps because they were so recognizable—had seemed to erupt all over Warsaw, digging trenches, fighting fires, repairing mains. One bent old graybeard in skullcap and kaftan, wielding a shovel in a trench, gave a Jewish look to a whole work force. Nevertheless they did appear to be pitching in everywhere.