A Different World (10 page)

‘I cannot marry you, you know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘But that does not mean you have to manage alone. I will look after you.’

‘Oh, Jan.’ The tears she had not shed when she was being beaten, rolled down her cheeks.

‘Cuddle?’ he queried with a lopsided grin.

‘Yes please.’

Tenderly he took her in his arms and they lay down together. She turned on her side to face him. ‘Jan,’ she said tentatively. ‘Will you mind being a father?’

‘Mind, my sweet? I shall love it, as I love you.’

‘Do you? Really? But what about your wife? What about Rulka?’

‘Rulka was my first love. I thought she would be the only one, until I met you. Now she has drifted away into the clouds where I cannot reach her. Just as your Tony has.’

‘You think she is dead?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps.’ He paused, dwelling on that thought for a moment, then set it aside. ‘We must decide what we are to do.’

‘I shall keep my job as long as I can, but as soon as I begin to show, I’ll have to leave.’

‘Will you stay in Cottlesham?’

‘I’d like to. It depends on whether Jenny will have me and if I can afford to.’

‘Money is not a problem. I will make you a regular allowance, and if anything happens to me, I will make sure you and our child are provided for.’

‘You don’t want me to have it adopted?’

‘Certainly not! You do not want it either, do you?’

‘No, but some people might think I should.’

‘Then they have no heart.’ He paused. ‘Shall we stay here tonight? Tomorrow you will be better able to face your friends in Cottlesham.’

‘I haven’t got a toothbrush.’

He produced two from his pocket. ‘I bought them in the chemist when I bought the ointment.’

She laughed. ‘Oh, Jan, I do love you.’

‘I think it’s time you disappeared,’ Lech murmured. It was not a good idea to speak too loudly, even in the hospital. ‘The Gestapo are getting too close for comfort.’

‘I’m not leaving. I’m needed here and I’ve nowhere to go in any case.’ Rulka, never very robust, was thin as a rake, but her small frame concealed a courage and determination which would not have shamed a gladiator.

‘You could go to the grave,’ Lech said, looking down at the body of the girl who had just died in spite of their efforts to save her. ‘She’s about your size. I’ll sign the death certificate in your name. Then you can disappear.’

‘You are not serious, are you?’

‘Yes, I am. The Germans have rounded up hundreds of innocent people since that ammunition train was sabotaged two days ago. Is it any wonder one of them told all she knew and the name Rulka Grabowska was mentioned? Simply trying to lie low will not be enough. The only way they’ll give up looking for you is if you are officially dead.’

The Germans had instituted what they called ‘collective responsibility’, which meant the whole community was punished for the deeds of the few and any acts of sabotage brought on merciless reprisals which they hoped would deter the resistance. Rulka found it heartbreaking, but if they stopped their work, it meant that the occupiers had won and that could not be allowed to happen. ‘How do you know all this?’

‘I know someone on the inside. I won’t tell you his name …’

‘No, don’t.’ She knew Lech was allowed into the Pawiak prison to treat the prisoners, not that there was much he could do for them, but no doubt his information had come from someone there.

‘You haven’t any family to mourn you, have you?’

Rulka looked down at the girl in the hospital bed. She was no more than skin and bone. Brought into the hospital with pneumonia, her emaciated body had had no resistance and she had soon succumbed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Except Jan. When he comes back, it is to Warsaw he will come. I must be here so that he can find me.’

‘Do you even know if he is alive?’

‘No, I don’t. How could I? But until I am certain he will never come back, I will continue to wait for him.’ She had not heard from Jan since that brief letter sent from Romania told her he was going to France. Whether he arrived there, she did not know or whether, having arrived, he had been rounded up by the Germans when France fell or managed to escape, she had no idea. She liked to picture him, free and happy, flying aeroplanes, and like her, doing his bit to win the war so they could be reunited. It was that hope and her gritty determination not to admit defeat that kept her going.

Lech sighed. ‘You have to face facts, Rulka, and the facts are
that life will never be the same as it was before the war, even if the Allies win, which is looking more and more unlikely. Save your own skin, no one else will.’

‘My skin is not important, the fight for freedom is.’

‘You cannot fight for freedom or be reunited with your husband if you are dead, can you? If and when the war ends and you are still alive, then is the time to worry about the name you use.’

It was not as if changing identities was something unheard of. She knew it happened frequently. Taking the identity of a dead person had its risks because of the chance that relatives or people who had known them would turn up, but it was a risk the underground deemed worth taking in certain circumstances. A safer method was to use birth certificates of dead babies from twenty-odd years before. Priests in sympathy with the underground, and that was most of them, would find suitable ones in their registers and pass them on and with these a new identity was forged, work permits and ration cards obtained. Some underground workers had two or three of these, providing them with extra rations and different addresses, to which they could move in the event of searches.

‘What is her name?’ she asked.

‘Krystyna Nowak.’

‘What about her family?’

‘All dead. She was brought in by the janitor of the building where she lived. Her mother and sisters died in a bombing raid at the beginning of the war and her father was shot in a round of reprisals last year, so the man told me. She was living alone in the cellar which is all that’s left of the building.’

Rulka knew what that was like. Ever since she had buried her parents, she had lived in the bombed-out cellar of their home. There was no gas or electricity but thankfully the chimney still stood above the ruins of the building and she could light a fire in
the grate, burning furniture and odd pieces of wood, not only what had been in the house but what could be dragged from elsewhere. Keeping warm was a major concern as well as keeping fed. The hospital, though damaged, still functioned and she availed herself of the opportunity to have a bath in the nurses’ quarters while she was there. Sometimes she was given food, sometimes she queued for hours for half a loaf of black bread.

‘What about the underground? You are not suggesting I should stop that work, are you?’

The Polish underground was the most organised of any of the occupied countries. It was a state on its own, answerable to the government-in-exile in London. It had a political wing, an army with a proper military hierarchy, medical staff, schools and university. Afraid of an educated population who could challenge them intellectually, the Germans had shut the schools, retaining only those producing skilled manual workers who could be useful to the Reich as labour. The Ministry of Education building in Szucha Street had been turned into the Gestapo headquarters. Nevertheless, the young people of Poland were being educated, usually by teachers and lecturers who had been turned out of their jobs. But the most important function of the underground army was sabotage, propaganda and the collection of intelligence to pass on to the Polish government in London. Communication between Warsaw and London was difficult, though not impossible, and agents, money and supplies had been parachuted in, but not nearly enough. Lech and Rulka had been involved from the start.

‘No, but how many of them know your real name anyway?’

‘I am not sure that any do. They know me as Myszka.’ Everyone used a code name without a surname for security’s sake and she had chosen Jan’s pet name for her: Mouse. Apart from one’s immediate superior there was no upward contact. No one at
the lower level knew who was really running things. ‘How did my real name come to be mentioned?’

‘I don’t know. You have lived in Warsaw all your life, so perhaps someone recognised you on that last operation, an infiltrator or someone terrified out of their lives.’

‘Do you know who?’

‘No, but if it was an infiltrator, he or she will be rooted out and dealt with.’

She shuddered, knowing what that meant. ‘What about my job here? We’re short-staffed as it is.’

‘You can be replaced. Your life is more important.’

‘Very well.’ She sighed. ‘Rulka Grabowska dies and Krystyna Nowak lives – for the moment.’

He signalled to someone waiting outside the room to come in and take the body away and quickly filled in the death certificate. ‘Pneumonia’, he wrote as the cause of death, refraining from adding ‘starvation’. The little cortège had no sooner disappeared along the corridor than a new patient was wheeled in.

Why Rulka went to the mortuary when she went off duty she did not know; sympathy, she supposed, because there was no one else to mourn the girl and she was taking something precious from her. She found old Father Karlowicz kneeling beside Krystyna’s body, praying. Rulka dropped to her knees beside him, as he intoned a prayer for the dead.

‘Amen,’ he said, when he finished and crossed himself, but he did not immediately stand up. ‘Someone came to my church for confession this morning,’ he went on in the same sing-song murmur he had used to pray. ‘He needs help.’

‘Who is he?’

‘A British prisoner of war. He ran off from a stalag work party. He has been hiding in the forest.’

‘Are you sure he is genuine?’

‘I think so. Can you help him?’

‘What makes you think I can do anything?’

‘I don’t, but I hoped you could, or would know someone who can.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I’ve hidden him in the crypt.’

‘I will come this evening after I have taken advice about what to do with him. Seven o’clock.’

‘Come to the confessional. I will be waiting.’ The confessional box was the safest place to talk; so far the Germans had respected it.

‘Father, I am not ready to confess my sins, though they are many. At a time like this it seems an irrelevance.’

He sighed. ‘More relevant than ever, I think, but never mind, we will forgo it for the sake of helping the young man.’ He crossed himself again, rose and blessed her, then left.

Rulka followed a minute or two later and set off through slushy streets heaped with the rubble of half-demolished buildings. It was strange, but the starkness of the ruined cityscape, with its covering of snow, was almost beautiful. Mounds of snow-covered earth and little wooden crosses dotted along the verges marked burials and on a corner near the station the paving stones had been torn up to make a mass grave for the soldiers who had died defending the city. In summer it had been covered with flowers and visited daily by people who knelt to pray. It had infuriated Ludwig Fischer, the German governor, who ordered the bodies to be dug up and buried in the cemetery, but that had not deterred the people who still came to the spot to pray. Rulka paused to cross herself, then turned up a side street where Stanisław Roman, her immediate superior in the underground movement, lived.

He was in his thirties, a thickset man going prematurely bald but with a large drooping moustache. He was, according to his papers, an undertaker, someone so necessary to the functioning of the city he was usually left unmolested to get on with his work. It was he who hid guns and ammunition in his coffins, whose men dug graves all over the city that contained more than just bodies, who decided on who was going to sabotage what. He was fanatical, uncompromising and courageous. But he was also very careful and a stickler for security. Rulka was one of the few people who knew what he did and she worked for him as assiduously as she did for Lech at the hospital, but even so, she was reluctant to disturb him at an unscheduled time.

He answered the door himself. ‘Did anyone follow you?’

‘No. I came by a circuitous route.’ It was something they were all trained to do and he did not really need to ask her.

‘Come in.’ He opened the door wider and led her into a comfortable sitting room. There was a crumpled newspaper, a glass and a bottle of vodka on a small table beside an armchair. ‘Sit down.’ He motioned her to take another chair and fetched another glass from a cupboard to pour her a measure of the spirit. ‘What brings you here?’

‘A young girl died in the hospital today with no one to arrange her funeral and I thought I would do it for her and thought of you.’

He knew perfectly well she would not do such a thing; unclaimed bodies were disposed of with little ceremony but, though she knew his wife had been killed in the bombardment in the early days of the war, she was unsure if he were alone in the apartment. Until that had been established she could not speak openly.

‘Very well,’ he said, returning to his seat. ‘Now tell me the true reason. You have intelligence?’

‘No. There is an escaped prisoner of war hiding in the crypt of the Church of the Holy Cross. He is asking for help.’

‘Is he Polish?’

‘No, according to Father Karlowicz, he is British. He ran away from a stalag work party and has been hiding in the forest.’

‘Why did he come into the city? The forest is by far safer.’

‘I don’t know. Looking for help to go back to England, I assume.’

‘What do you expect me to do?’

‘You know how other escaped prisoners have been helped.’

He was thoughtful for a moment. ‘He’ll have to be thoroughly checked. There have been Nazi infiltrators. And I do not want him here. Take him home with you. Does he speak Polish?’

‘I do not know, but I speak a little English. Jan taught me.’

‘I will send Boris Martel to you at ten o’clock. Don’t open the door to anyone else. I assume you are still living in Jasna Street?’

‘Yes, but my official residence is still Zabowski Street. I go there now and again to make sure everything is as it should be.’

‘Don’t go there anymore. It is the first place they will look for you.’

‘Oh, you know—’

‘That there is a search on for you, yes. I told Dr Andersz to warn you.’

‘He did. He suggested I should change names with a dead patient.’

‘What was her name? What do you know of her?’

Rulka told him what she knew which was little enough. ‘I have no idea of her background at all,’ she said. ‘Dr Andersz knows where she was living but as far as he could tell she had no surviving family.’

‘How many of your neighbours know who you really are?’

‘None that I know of. The original tenants of neighbouring
houses, who might have known my parents, were all killed in the bombs that destroyed the street.’

‘Good. Leave it with me.’

He saw her to the door and looked up and down the street carefully before letting her out. On the way to her cellar home, she queued up for bread, a single skinny sausage and beetroot with which she could make 
ć
wikła
. It was little enough to feed her, let alone a hungry escaped prisoner, but it was all she could find. Since Germany had invaded Russia, the food situation had become worse; the Reich needed all the supplies they could get to feed their hungry army battling the Russian winter as well as the stubborn Russians, and if it meant starving the Poles, so be it, they were only
Untermenschen
, after all.

Before the war, Jasna Street had been the home of exclusive shops and expensive apartments. Now it was a heap of broken stone, splintered wood and shattered furniture. She clambered over the rubble to what appeared to be a broken door, but which was the entrance to a staircase. She felt her way down, then stopped at the bottom to light an oil lamp. It lit a room furnished with a table, a cupboard, a couple of upright chairs and a sofa salvaged from the wreckage of the house above her. In a bowl on a small table in an alcove were the plate and cup left from her breakfast. She washed them up, using water from a standpipe, which Lech had set up for her when she first moved in. It was connected to the boiler in the next room which was fed from the mains, although the boiler didn’t work anymore. Then she tidied the room and prepared a camp bed in the boiler room, fetched an old overcoat of Jan’s from the room where she slept, and set off for the church.