Another Green World (45 page)

The briefing paper, as she recalled, had detailed Nazi euphemisms for
what was happening to the Jews.
Deported. Chosen for special action. Sent east. Presently employed draining swamps.
And one other that now came to mind:
The air has been cleansed.
Meaning the smells associated with Jewry— garlic, caraway, peppery chicken broth—would no longer offend sensitive Gentile nostrils.

She gobbled the tasteless bread anyway, as she had drunk the captain's vodka. Because she felt like it. And to hell with all of them.

“This is as far as I take you,” said the horse-faced man.

It was mid-afternoon and they stood beside a narrow, quick-running river.

“There is a place you can cross, only a little farther. An old bridge. I would do it in daylight, if I were you. That way, you can tell whether the bridge is being guarded. Once it gets dark …” He shrugged.

“What's on the other side?” Grabsteen asked him.

The AK man looked at him as if this might be a trick question. “Over there is Silesia. It's Polish land, but the Nazis claim it as part of Greater Germany. They have concentrated their forces, building a line of defense against the Russians. Also, there are settlers, ethnic Germans from other countries—many of the native people have been expelled. We do not operate over there. The population is hostile, the whole atmosphere is… clouded.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Grabsteen. “You mean the opposite bank of this stream—
right over there—
that's the Third Reich?”

The AK man stared, apparently unable to provide an unequivocal answer. Borders, nations, thousand-year empires—such airy constructs might or might not apply to the reality on the ground. “We do not operate over there,” he repeated. “AK territory ends where we stand.”

“Who does operate there?” Martina asked.

He gave her a canny look; he must have detected something in her voice. “There are… isolated bands. Certain individuals working against the Germans, in their own fashion. All Poles are members of the resistance, it is said.”

“Do you know anything about someone called the Fox?”

The man glanced quickly around at his AK comrades, none of whom gave any sign of comprehension.

“You're really not Bolsheviks, are you?” he said to her quietly. “I never believed it. Our captain…he is not so stupid as he might seem to you, that is mostly just a kind of performance. But I knew, these people, these
Americans… there is something more to this. Bolsheviks have their plots and cells and secret agendas. You do not seem that type. They are perhaps fools, I thought. Off on some fool's errand, trying to get themselves killed. But not Communists—something else, a thing we have not seen before. And now, the Fox!” His eyes gleamed.

Martina said, “The Fox what?”

“I don't know. It fits—only that. It is all crazy. And none of it belongs in AK territory. The captain was right—it is better you go across the river.”

They spotted the bridge less than two kilometers farther on, a simple plank-and-beam affair laid across sagging timbers and stiffened by king posts with angled braces. Near the center, above water that churned white between ice-glazed rocks, sat a vehicle that resembled a wider, unlovable version of the jeep. The machine gun mounted in back, partly shielded by armor plates, was manned by a soldier in a gray uniform whose head was too small for his helmet. Two sentries stood at the far end, talking, glancing now and then up the road into the encroaching forest. There might have been more that the Varianoviks couldn't see; they had only a narrow vantage between old cedars some distance off, at a bend in the river.

“Welcome to the Grossdeutsches Reich,” said Stu in a singsong voice. “We do hope you'll enjoy your stay.”

No one laughed; no one did anything.

After a minute, Bloom stepped away from the river and looked up at the sky. Clouds had blown in, Wehrmacht gray. “It feels like snow,” he said. “I'd rather not fight in a snowstorm. We're too likely to shoot each other.”

“What should we do?” asked Eddie. Wide-eyed, trusting: The old veteran must know.

What impressed Martina was how much it felt like being back on the chicken farm. The same matter-of-factness, the same assurance in the big man's voice. Now, we want to make this realistic. We want you to feel like you're really over there, with real Germans shooting at you. Listen carefully, here's the plan. You don't have to like it, or even understand it—you just have to do your part.

They had called him M-1, and they all had been afraid of him. Now he held their fear at bay. It was going to work: he believed it; they believed him.

“All right,” Bloom said. “Here's how I think this ought to go.”

They drew in close. He made marks in the ground with a stick. Two of them—no, make it three—would head off inland, at an angle from the river. “There's a road that way someplace. Find it, then come back carefully toward the water. Keep as quiet as you can.

“Two more—we need somebody with a good arm—start moving down the riverbank. Take a couple grenades apiece. The vegetation's thick in there, so don't go too fast or you'll make noise. Be ready to move quickly once the shooting starts.

“Everyone else, stay with me. We'll move up closer to the bridge, but hang back in the woods and wait.

“In twenty minutes, you people on the road open fire. Don't worry about aiming, just put some lead in the air.”

“Suppressing fire,” said Stu.

“That's right. You lay down suppressing fire. And if they come after you—run.

“Now you people by the water move out. You need to get within thirty-five meters, closer is better. Your job is to take out the Kübelwagen.

“The rest of us will come right through the trees. We'll keep low and fan out and open up with everything we've got. With any luck, by the time we get there, the MG'll be out of action. We'll do the mopping up, then we all run like hell to the other side and we find someplace to lay low.”

A pause. One last moment to think.

“Any questions?” Bloom said. He looked from one of them to another, meeting each pair of eyes. “All right, then. Check your watches. Twenty minutes. Starting now.”

It went as planned, more or less. Tamara, clutching her Simonov, led two others through the woods, making for the road. Eddie and Timo kept to the river. Martina stayed with the main group, and very slowly Bloom led them forward. Too slowly, she thought—the fight was going to start without them. Yet when they halted, still a long sprint from the near end of the bridge, only seven minutes had gone by.

During the time that followed, Martina felt as though every war movie she'd ever seen went flickering through her head. Even the newsreels, big guns going off on battleships, the Führer shrieking at the Sportpalast, French citizens popping corks to celebrate the liberation of some town, GIs slogging through mud, their helmet straps loose, grinning blearily at the camera. Why do soldiers wear helmets and not partisans? How did
Chaplin do that Hitler speech in
The Great Dictator—
was it improvised on camera?

The first shots, when they came, sounded fake,
pop-pop-pop
, like a radio cowboy show.

“Go!” shouted Bloom.

Martina was caught off guard. Not ready yet, time out, I'll be there in a minute. This was her first confrontation with the strange truth about war that once it gets started, there's no way to make it stop; it roars down like an avalanche until all that deathly energy is exhausted. There were screams and explosions, and the terrible hot stink of cordite nearly set your nostrils on fire. There was running, falling, a sharp rock meeting her shin, somebody yanking her upright. It was Grabsteen. His expression was fierce. He took her shoulders and turned her in the right direction. Onward and upward. The stutter of ripping canvas. And then the bridge.

Some of the planks were burning, and there was a big hole near the
Kübelwagen.
One of the vehicle's tires had dropped through, and the front bumper rested on a beam. The gunner lay all over his weapon, limbs dangling, his body having lost all solidity. Two other Germans lay unmoving nearby and a fourth was sitting with his back propped against the king post, hands in the air and a shinbone visible through the mess of his trousers. He looked weirdly calm, as if this were all happening in his imagination. Martina could empathize.

Cautiously, the Americans emerged from the cover of the trees and moved out onto the bridge decking. The blood of the dead men and of the lone survivor was a more vivid red than Martina had expected. Also, there was more of it, whole sticky puddles. She felt light-headed, like she'd stood up too quickly. She took a couple steps, unsteady, her feet disconnected— at any moment she would collapse.

Someone was there, an arm slipping under hers and around her back, taking her weight. She turned to look into Timo's dark eyes, his unshaven cheeks, narrow and wolflike. “Thanks,” she said.

He nodded. He held her until she regained her equilibrium. Other people moved around them; Bloom was demanding to know whether everyone had made it.

“So, you're alive,” said Martina, taking a step away. “I guess you've got a good arm. Where's Eddie?”

Timo looked at her. He shook his head, slightly.

She thought he hadn't heard. “I said, where's Eddie?”

Bloom shouted, “I'm only counting twelve. Who's missing?”

“Lubovich,” said Timo. His voice sounded far-off, indifferent. “Eddie
Lubovich didn't make it. They spotted him just as he was tossing the stick. He didn't have time to duck. But the grenade, it was a perfect shot.”

Silence, then. Broken by a choking sound from Stu, who began to cry unabashedly. Tamara tried to comfort him. Everybody doing their jobs.

“Where is he?” Bloom demanded.

Timo pointed.

Martina didn't look.

In war, this counts as victory.

And so, victorious, the Varian Fry Brigade buried its latest dead and administered first aid to the prisoner—Bloom having overruled a popular motion to finish him off. The German was regular Wehrmacht, not SS, and by the look of him—a stocky
Bürger
about Bloom's age—had probably been called up in a latch-ditch conscription. First aid amounted to tying off his ruined leg in a bloody tourniquet, and he looked on in seeming wonderment while Stu attended to this.

“Danke,” he said, almost blubbering—Martina couldn't tell if it was from pain or a pathetic sort of gratitude. “Danke, Herr Doktor.”

He looked surprised when Bloom responded in brusque, interrogatory German, running through, she supposed, the standard POW catechism. What is your unit? How many men? Where does this road lead? Are there villages nearby? How often do patrols come through? The German, who answered readily, might or might not have been telling the truth, but he was too frightened to keep his mouth shut.

At last—Martina understood this well enough—the man said, “Sind Sie Juden?” Are you Jews?

Bloom just stared at him.

Grabsteen butted in. “Macht's nichts, wer wir sind.” His German sounded more like Yiddish, and he turned back to Bloom. “Tell him it doesn't matter who we are. Just make sure he lets them know, when reinforcements come, what he's seen. Da wird eine Rechnung sein—there will be a reckoning. Die beginnt hier.”

A low-pressure front had been moving down from Scandinavia, scooping up moisture from the Baltic Sea, and depositing this as cold rain and damp snow over the disputed lands between the rivers Oder and Dvina—places whose names and nationalities were uncertain—northern Poland, East Prussia, the Wartheland, the western Soviet Republics. As it approached
the Tatry Mountains, this sodden air mass was thrust upward, into colder bands of the atmosphere, and the precipitating moisture turned to dry, feathery snow.

The Varianoviks followed a narrow road that unwound generally northwest. After a few kilometers they left this for an even narrower road that forked to the right, guessing it might be safer. What they could see of the countryside looked desolate: thin woods, low hills, many little streams and ponds, a good deal of marsh. The snow blew in their faces and the day grew dim, though Martina guessed they had an hour left before real dusk. Their hope was to find a barn to spend the night in.

A reordering of the landscape became gradually apparent. The streams were regimented into drainage ditches and irrigation canals. Former swampland had been reclaimed and tilled. A hillside was shorn of trees and instead sprouted the head-high poles used for stringing up grapevines. Along one shoulder of the dirt lane, hardwood saplings stood at regular intervals, steadied by stakes and ties.

As its level of organization increased, the land took on a quality of…well, not beauty, she thought, more like a determined sort of cheerfulness—the attitude of a modest flower bed doing its best in a bad part of town. You had to admire it for what it was.

Only—what was it?

Part of an estate, she guessed. Prosperous, with a large staff to manage the grounds. She kept a lookout, trudging onward, blinking snow out of her eyes, for a big house nestled on a rise somewhere. The picture was so clear in her mind that she failed to notice what was actually there, right ahead of her.

Bloom stopped walking. He thrust an arm out in front of Martina. The brigade came to a halt.

A short distance off, just discernible through swirling snow, stood a stockade fence, built of rough wooden planks and tall enough to conceal whatever lay behind it. You could just make out shingled rooftops, a few stone chimneys, here and there a wisp of smoke. The road led to a gate whose timbers were cut in the shape of a Gothic arch, surmounted by a sign unreadable at this distance. From there the wall ran perhaps fifty meters to either side, then jigged away out of sight. It seemed to describe a very large polygon, of which they could make out the nearest three faces. Martina had never seen anything like it before, except maybe the outer wall of the castle at Leuchtenburg. But that was a thirteenth-century fortress. This was, as best she could tell, a farming estate in Nazified Poland.

“What should we do now?” said Harvey Grabsteen—words Martina, for one, never expected to hear him utter.