In the Land of Armadillos (18 page)

Why did he have goose bumps up and down his arms? “How does it end?”

“Oh, you know. Everyone lives happily ever after. When the prince finds out he's been fooled, he tricks the fake princess into coming up with her own punishment.” She was readying herself to leave, rearranging the babushka around her shoulders.

“What is it?”

“She's stripped naked. They put her in a barrel lined with nails. Horses drag her through the streets until she's dead.”

He shuddered. Those old fairy tales could really be gruesome. Her hand was already on the doorknob when he said shyly, “You know, you don't have to go.”

As she stood there deciding, Pavel moved quickly. He brought out the slivovitz, plunked down two glasses.

“Real slivovitz!” she marveled, holding the bottle up to the lamp to test its clarity. On the opposing wall, a kaleidoscope of rainbow-colored lights chased each other across the plaster.

By the light of the smoking lamp, Pavel gazed into Marina Michalowa's clear eyes and saw the world as it used to be, a world run by the seasons, not by soldiers with machine guns. With harvest dances and girls who wore flirty, flouncy skirts, singing as they spun flax in their parents' parlors. Where neighbors helped one another instead of running to tell tales, where people made an honest living working the land of their fathers, where it was against the law to kill another man's children because of how they worshipped or the color of their hair.

Over the slivovitz, she confessed: Two of her sons were fighters in the illegal Home Army, she hadn't seen them in months. She feared sleep. When she slept, she dreamed, and when she dreamed, it was always the same thing, her boys screaming, tortured by SS butchers, or torn open in a ditch somewhere, crying out her name.

This was why, when she discovered that Pavel was hiding the saddlemaker's daughter, she wanted to help. While her sons fought for Poland by stealing arms and sabotaging troop trains, her battle was waged in a two-room hut at the edge of a potato field. She would fight to keep a single Jewish child alive.

Pavel felt a pang of shame. His motive was self-interest, pure and simple; he was hiding the girl because the dark-haired partizan had threatened to burn him alive. Before Michalowa's innate altruism, he was touched by an almost religious awe. He had never met anyone who could be so good, so righteous, and still so beautiful. She was like one of the saints painted on the walls in St. Adalbert's, like the Blessed Virgin herself. Had Lidia lived, she would have been just like this, he was sure of it.

For the first time in many years, he uttered a private prayer.
May the Holy Mother care for Michalowa's sons in the same way that the widow cares for the child of a lost saddlemaker.

*  *  *

The dog barked and barked. Pavel roused himself from sleep before dawn to the sound of someone knocking at the door. It was a firm knock, an authoritative knock, the kind of knock that announced that the person delivering it would not allow himself to be ignored or denied entrance.

Panicking, Pavel glanced at the girl's crate. She was gone. “All right, all right,” he groused loudly, pulling on his trousers.

It was Hahnemeier, looking sober and upright, his hands clasped behind his back. Today his eyes were a cold cluttered gray, not unfriendly, but the eyes of a tyrant just the same. “Looks like you're a little behind with the harvest, Walczak. We expected to see your potatoes a week ago.”

“Sorry,” he said, pulling up his braces. “I'm just a one-man operation here.” Fear clawed at his heart. This could not be the real purpose of his visit. The Reichskommissar did not send Volkdeutscher officials to friendly farmers' cottages at this hour of the morning to remind them that they were late with their taxes.

“How's your dog?” Hahnemeier said. He was peering past, trying to see into the dark house.

“I don't know,” said Pavel. “I haven't seen him this morning. Probably out hunting somewhere.”

“I thought you said he has arthritis.”

“You tell a dog not to kill rats.”

“Come on, Pavel. Don't keep me waiting out here. Aren't you going to offer me a coffee?”

Reluctantly, Pavel opened the door. Hahnemeier hobbled in, his alert gaze darting here and there, oozing over each object in the room. Pavel followed every move of the small, piggish eyes, fearing the discovery of a nightshirt, a shoe, the doll. His gaze came to rest on the drain board. “An extra cup and bowl, I see!” he said jovially. “Company?”

Prickles of heat burned Pavel's cheeks. He'd never been so frightened in his entire life. Visions of a painful, violent end swam before his eyes. Would he have to dig his own grave before they shot him, like the Jews they marched off into the woods? Would he be clubbed to death, hanged? Would they drag it out or make it quick? How much would it hurt?

“Yes,” he mumbled. “I mean, no.” He felt, rather than saw, the fat, inquiring face turn toward him. His head was pounding. How much slivovitz did he have last night? He buried his face in his hands, awash in an agony of contradictory feelings.
I'm no good at this. I'm a farmer, I'm just a farmer.

“Please, Lothar. In honor of our long history as friends,” he finally blurted.

Hahnemeier drew a short, sharp breath. “I can't make promises like that. I represent the law here,” he said sternly. “What is it, Pavel? You have a guilty conscience, it's all over your face.”

The farmer swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing visibly up and down. Then he expelled a long, sorrowing sigh. “All right,” he said quietly, surrendering. “You're going to find out anyway. I might as well tell you. Michalowa—”

“Ja, ja, ja, Michalowa.” he said crossly. “My boys already paid her a visit. She was clean. You have something new for me? Communists? Partizans? Black-marketeers? Jews?”

Pavel dragged a heavy hand across his damp forehead. “Oh God, no, nothing like that. The cup, the bowl . . . ” he stammered. “They're Michalowa's. She stays over sometimes, that's all. Please don't tell anyone, Hahnemeier, I'm begging you. She's a crazy person when it comes to privacy. You know how people talk. If this gets out, it's all over. She'll kill me.” He felt sick at drawing Michalowa into his lies again, but it was all he could think of on the spot.

With a fat pinkie finger, the Volkdeutscher official went excavating inside one large, whiskery ear. “That's it? That's what has you all nervous and sweaty like a kid with his first prostitute? You have a
girlfriend
?” He saluted, clicked his heels together, made a
my lips are sealed
gesture with his right hand. “So you took my advice after all! Don't worry, Comrade Walczak, you can tell Michalowa that her secret is safe with me. Come to think of it, don't tell her anything. I know that woman. She
will
kill you. But what a way to go!”

It was another hour before he left. So that his visit wasn't a complete waste of time, Pavel fried up some eggs and sausages with tiny new potatoes, and together they had a big country breakfast. Hahnemeier had to open the top button of his trousers. While they debated this year's crops and whether signs indicated a hard or easy winter, the farmer wondered queasily about the girl's whereabouts. Was she in the toilet, just outside the kitchen door? Was she in the fields, on her way home because she smelled breakfast? Had she taken it into her head to drive the animals to pasture herself? And where was the dog?

The sun was just breaking through over the potato fields, flooding the gray landscape with tender lavender light. As Hahnemeier settled himself onto his overburdened horse, Cezar came bounding out of the barn, barking viciously, saliva flying from his black jaws.

“You don't keep your barn door locked?” he said, unperturbed. “You're too trusting, Pavel. In times like these, you really should.” The Volkdeutscher kicked his horse in the ribs and cantered off toward town.

Not until his guest had disappeared into the morning mist did Pavel whisk open the barn door. Illuminated by long slanting sunbeams, the dust kicked up by his boots flared like sparks as he hurried past the animals to the last stall.

“Reina!” he called in an exaggerated stage whisper, but there was no answering movement from the pile of hay. He realized he had never used her name before, addressing her only as
you
or
girl.
Slowly, he scratched the stubble on his chin, screwing up his face in thought. If he were a little girl, where would he hide?

Of course. The answer was right in front of him. How many times had he run from his father's rage, escaping to the cozy gabled space under the rafters? Cautiously, he climbed the creaky ladder into the hayloft and stuck his head through the trapdoor.

She was right there, her few items of clothing rolled up in a ball, huddled like a baby bird in a nest. He became aware of the presence of an unfamiliar sensation humming along his nerves and throughout his body, a rapturous tingle of well-being.

“It was very clever of you to hide here,” he said. “How did you know he was coming?”

“Fallada told me,” she said.

“You mean he barked?” He must have been really drunk if he'd slept through more than a minute of the dog's deep-chested, full-throated alarm.

“No, he
told
me,” she repeated in her lispy, hesitant voice. “He tells me things all the time. But this morning was different. When he woke me up, he said to hurry, the Deutschen were coming up the road, I had to hide in the hayloft.”

“The
dog
said that?” Earnestly, she nodded, making the orange curls bounce and shimmer. “That's impossible. Dogs can't talk.”

Her eyelashes were a pale golden color, almost invisible with the sun coming through them. “Fallada can. He told me to hide last time, too.”

Someone had filled her head with fairy tales. They would have done better to teach her something useful, like cooking, sewing, digging potatoes out of the frozen ground. “Fine, fine, Fallada tells you everything,” he grumbled. “Maybe he can make us breakfast, too. Don't just stand there, come down and have something to eat. You're safe for now, and the animals are waiting.”

*  *  *

It came that night, the banging on the door, the sound of a motor, raucous shouting in German. Terrified, Pavel leaped out of bed with a glance at the crate. Empty. How did she know? He unbolted the door to find Hahnemeier glowering on the top step, a gun in one hand, smelling of alcohol. “Where are they!” he roared.

The headlights were blinding. Pavel raised his arm to shade his eyes. “Who?”

“Your
Jews,
you fucking
polacke
! You think I'm an idiot? You're hiding them in the barn! You've been lying to my face for months.”

Outfitted like Hahnemeier with red swastika armbands on the sleeves of their civilian coats, a gang of Volkdeutscher militiamen stood on the road in front of the cottage with torches, guns slung behind their shoulders. The flames popped and crackled over the rise and fall of the crickets' song.

“What are you talking about?” Pavel shouted back furiously. Maybe he could bully his way through this. “It's me, Lothar, your friend Pavel Walczak. The Jew hater. How many times have I told you where to find their partizans? How many times have I told you which farmers were hiding Jews? You know me. I hate those filthy
zydzi
more than you do. Someone sold you a bill of goods. Forget about this. Come on in, your men, too, let's knock off the rest of the slivovitz.”

Hahnemeier turned to his men. “Set the barn on fire,” he instructed them. “Shoot anyone who comes out.”

The men touched their torches to the roof. With a whoosh, the thatch exploded into a fireball, clouds of gray smoke barreling high into the starry sky. Suddenly, the night was alive with the screams of animals, the cow bawling, the horse trumpeting its panic. “
No!
” Pavel cried, running toward the barn.

Inside, the roof was already engulfed in flames. Fiery yellow tongues lapped and sucked and gnawed at the rafters, howling like some monstrous wolf. Outside, he heard high-pitched squeals, then a gunshot, and realized they had shot the pig. He threw open the horse's gate and smacked its rump. It started forward and galloped out the door. In the next stall, the cow was paralyzed with fear, squeezed into a corner, where she remained immune to his slaps and entreaties.

Coughing, he passed an arm across his forehead. The fire was gaining on him; it had overtaken the open area where he stored the tools and feed sacks, voraciously consuming the aged wooden furnishings and the dry burlap bags.
The hayloft. Get to the hayloft.
It was only a few steps to the ladder, but the heat grew more intense at every rung. He wasn't halfway to the top when part of the roof collapsed, dropping into the cow's stall and setting the straw alight.

Flames eddied all around him now, licking at him from feed troughs and bales of hay, from the thick blanket of straw scattered on the floor. Fire bayed at him from the rafters, from the old-fashioned covered buggy with the sprung seat that had borne his parents to church and now bore only roosting chickens, from the baby crib he'd never been able to give away, from the good strong walls nailed together a century earlier by his great-grandfather's father.

The flames paused for breath, then doubled in size. A beam fell, whizzing past his head. He clenched his teeth and ascended another rung, and then he was at the top.

Through the trapdoor, he could see into the hayloft. The cozy hiding place under the rafters was an inferno, exhaling heat like the mouth of a giant furnace. Even the floor was on fire. Pavel flung one arm up to protect his face, breathing through the fabric of his sleeve, and felt for the form of a small girl near the opening.

That was when the ladder gave way, dropping him to the floor of the barn. He couldn't see; the smoke was thick and dirty, it was like breathing a physical entity into his lungs. Blinded, he groped his way forward, feeling his way along the wall until a rush of air struck his face. The doorway. With the fire shrieking like a freight train behind him, he hesitated. Hahnemeier's men were outside, he had ordered them to shoot anyone coming out of the barn, but it had to be better than burning to death. Pavel threw himself forward.