The Silver Sword (2 page)

Joseph slid quietly away — to where a square shape jutted out from the road. In the dark it looked like a cart without wheels. Quickly he hid underneath.

At once he wished he hadn’t moved. A heavy crate banged down on to the boards above his head. The boards quivered and shook. Boots scraped the wood, shuffled on the snow.

There was a babble of voices — jokes and leg-pulling mixed with directions for the loading of the crates.

Joseph waited tensely while the crates were lifted in and the tarpaulin draped over them. When the soldiers were back in the road, he heaved himself over the wooden edge and under the tarpaulin.

A loud voice shouted, “Are you ready, there?”

From the other side of the dark valley came an answering call.

Suddenly Joseph realized that the wooden boards he lay on were moving. They were sliding out into the darkness, away from the road. Where was he?

As soon as he dared, he lifted the edge of the tarpaulin and looked out. He was in a kind of roofless cage. It was hung by pulleys and wire to an overhead cable and was swinging giddily from side to side. An aerial luggage lift. These were quite common in the mountains. They were driven by electricity and used for carrying goods from one side of a steep valley to the other.

Joseph sighed with relief. The giddy movement of the cage made him feel sick, but he knew that every second it was taking him further from his enemies.

Then suddenly the cage squeaked to a standstill. It began to slide back, back to the road. The voices on the road grew louder. A jerk, a rattle of pulleys, the scrape of wood on snow, and he was back where he had started. Someone leapt into the cage and lifted the tarpaulin on the other side of the crates from Joseph.

“There’s room for it alongside — hurry up!” cried the same voice.

Joseph’s hand was in his revolver holster. He meant to fight his way out if he had to. But all he could feel in the holster was a stick of chocolate.

Another crate was chucked in and kicked alongside the other pair. It banged against his foot and nearly made him scream with pain. He fell back and bit his lip, groaning.

But no one heard his groans, for the cage was already rattling out into the darkness again. While he rubbed his bruised toes, it pitched and swung from side to side. After a few minutes of climbing, a shape loomed down towards him and rattled past. It was the balance lift — the descending cage which balanced the weight of the climbing one — and it meant he had passed the half-way mark. Ahead of him was the black shape of the mountain. With every swing of the cage and every creak of the cable, it came nearer. were there soldiers on that side, too? If so, what was he to do? He could not escape discovery and he was quite unarmed.

In a flash he made up his mind.

He lifted the tarpaulin from his shoulders and sat with his back to the crates, facing the dark mountain.

The cage banged to a standstill. The light of a torch was flashed full into Joseph’s face.

“I have you covered with my pistol,” said Joseph steadily. “If you make a sound, I’ll shoot.”

A Polish voice swore.

“Be quiet. Do you want me to shoot?” said Joseph. “Hand me your torch.”

He seized it from the trembling hands and flashed the beam on to a grey-bearded peasant face. Joseph’s spirits rose. The man was Polish, a countryman of his.

Joseph spoke more gently. “Do as I tell you and you’ll come to no harm. Unload the cage.”

Joseph questioned him while he was unloading. “Is the cage worked from this end? The control is in your hands? Good. We shan’t be disturbed, then. Take me to where you live.”

The crates were safely stacked and the shed by the cage locked. The peasant had kept one crate for himself. It contained provisions and clothing from town. He lifted it on to his shoulder and then led the way along a track of beaten snow that wound upwards through pine trees. Soon they came to his home. It was a large chalet, with wide overhanging eaves. Wood was stacked at the sides.

He laid down the crate and led Joseph inside.

A wood fire was burning brightly in a wide open hearth. A large pot hung above it from a hook in the chimney. An old lady was sitting by the fire. She looked startled.

Joseph threw his cap and greatcoat over a chair.

“Here’s the pistol I almost shot you with,” he said. “It’s a slab of chocolate.”

He broke it into three pieces, giving one to each of them. They were suspicious and waited till Joseph had swallowed his piece before they ate theirs.

“I don’t understand,” said the peasant slowly. “You sleak like a Pole. You look like a Pole. But your uniform—”

At that moment a bell clanged out from the other side of the valley. It echoed among the mountains.

“That’s the prison bell,” said Joseph. “It’s a long time since it rang like that — when the last prisoner escaped.”

“You’ve come to search for him?” asked the old lady.

“I am the prisoner,” said Joseph. “I knocked out a guard and stole his uniform. Look — if you don’t believe me, here’s my camp number burnt into my arm — ZAK 2473. I want you to hide me.”

The number convinced them that he was telling the truth. They knew that if they were found hiding him they would die. But they were brave people and did not hesitate.

Joseph slept in a warm bed that night for the first time for two years.

In the morning the old man went to work the luggage lift as usual. Before going, he arranged a danger signal. If there were any soldiers coming across in the cage, he would whistle three times. And he showed Joseph a hiding place in the woodshed.

While he was away, Joseph showed the old woman the tattered photos of his family. He had taken them out of his wallet so many times to look at them that they were creased and crumpled and finger-marked all over. He spoke about his wife and children, his school, his capture by the Nazis; about the shortage of food, the destruction everywhere, and the continual fear of arrest. Every day had brought news of more families being split up.

The old woman was moved by his story. While he was speaking, she began to think of ways in which she could help him. He looked starved and needed good food. She had a little cheese and oatcakes, a side of bacon hanging in the cellar, and the remains of a tin of real coffee saved from before the war.

Suddenly there was a loud bang on the door. Was it a search party? If so, why had the old man given no warning?

A voice called out in German.

There was no time to escape to the woodshed.

“Quick — up there!” The old woman pointed up the chimney. “There’s an opening on the right, half-way up.”

Joseph dived into the hearth and hauled himself up over the iron spit. The fire was only smouldering and there was not much smoke. He had not found the opening when the door burst open and two soldiers came in. While they searched the room, he stood very still, his legs astride the chimney. He wanted to cough. He thought his lungs would burst.

Suddenly a head peered up the chimney. It was the old woman. “They’ve gone upstairs,” she said. “But don’t come down yet.”

She showed him where the opening was. He crept inside, coughing. He could see the sky through the wide chimney top above him.

He was congratulating himself on his good luck when he heard the soldiers return to the room below. With difficulty he controlled his cough.

“What about the chimney?” said a German voice. “Plenty of room to hide up there.”

“Plenty of soot too,” said the other soldier. “Your uniform’s older than mine. What about you going up?”

“Not likely.”

“Then we’ll send a couple of bullets up for luck.”

Two ear-splitting explosions. It seemed as if the whole chalet was falling down. Joseph clung on to his perch. There was a great tumbling about his ears. He clung and clung and clung — till his fingers were torn from their grip, and he fell.

When he came to his senses, he was lying on the floor. The old woman was bending over him, washing his face with cold water.

“It’s all right — they’ve gone,” she said. “The fall of soot saved you. The soldiers ran for it when the soot came down. They were afraid for their uniforms.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t have time to warn you,” said the old man. “The soldiers had hidden themselves in the cage. I didn’t see them till it was too late.”

Joseph spent two whole weeks in the chalet. The old couple treated him like a son, sharing all they had with him. They fed him so well that his thin cheeks filled out and he gained several pounds in weight. They were simple, homely folk, and in their company his mind grew more peaceful than it had been for years. In the brutality of his prison life he had almost forgotten what kindness was.

He passed his time indoors, mostly eating and resting. More than once he was tempted to go outside. The spring sun beamed down all day long from clear skies. It melted the icicles that hung from the roof; it roused the first crocuses from the bare brown patches in the snow. But there was no sense in exposing himself, and he wisely stayed indoors. The nights were freezing, and he was glad of his warm blankets.

On the fifteenth night he left the chalet on the first stage of the long journey home. The moon was in her first quarter, and it was freezing hard. He was wearing the warm woollen clothes of a Polish highlander. The old man went with him as guide for three days till they were clear of the high mountains.

On the afternoon of the second day they reached the edge of the snow line. Little rivers coursed down from under the snow. Wherever they trod, the ground was soggy and their boots squelched. But it was a joy to leave the snow behind and to see the snowdrops and crocuses everywhere. Lower down in the valleys the grass was already green, gay with primroses, violets and wild daffodils.

In the gorge where the River Sanajec tumbles down between steep wooded rocks to meet the great rivers of the plains, they said goodbye to each other. The old man took Joseph’s head between his hands, blessed him and wished him good fortune.

It took Joseph four and a half weeks to walk to Warsaw. He had lived in the city all his life and knew it well. But now, on his return, there was hardly a street he recognized and not an undamaged building anywhere. The place was as bleak and silent as the craters of the moon. Instead of proud homes, he found crumbling walls; instead of streets, tracks of rubble between mountains of bricks. Windows were charred and glassless. Public buildings were burnt-out shells.

In this wilderness people still managed to go on living. Joseph saw them wandering, pale and hungry-eyed, and vanish down paths of their own into the ruins. They had made their homes in cellars or had dug caves in the rubble. A few had even tried to make them look gay. A bomb gash in a cellar wall was draped with bright curtains. In another hole there was a window-box full of purple crocuses. Here and there a tree that had escaped blast damage sprouted with spring leaves.

But the only really lively place was the railway. The Nazis had to keep this clear, whatever the cost. Never had Joseph seen railway lines gleam as these did — eight lines of polished steel along which, day and night, the busy trains poured. Eastwards, with carriages of troops and trucks of ammunition, they carried war to Russia. Westwards they brought back the wounded to Germany, and sometimes rich plunder from the Ukraine.

Joseph spent three days finding the street where he used to live. The school and schoolhouse — his home — had disappeared.

There was a house opposite with a sign marked POLISH WELFARE. He made some inquiries there, but the people were new and could not help him. At another house he had better luck. He knew the woman who lived there — a Mrs. Krause, who had had a child at his school some years ago. In a small back room he questioned her eagerly about his family.

“The Nazis destroyed your school,” she said.

“What happened to my wife?”

“They came for her in January last year, during the night. It was just after Dr. Frank called for a million foreign workers to go to Germany. She’s in Germany, probably working on the land. I’m a member of the Polish Council for Protection and we tried to trace her, but without success.”

“And the children — did they go with her?” asked Joseph.

Mrs. Krause turned away. “I don’t know anything about them,” she said.

Joseph felt that she was hiding unpleasant news. He begged her to speak.

“I know nothing,” she said.

“That’s not true,” he said. “As a member of the Council, you must have found out something.”

At last, with a weary sigh, she told him all she knew. “On the night your wife was taken away, someone fired at the van from the attic of your house. A tyre was punctured and one of the Nazi soldiers was hit in the arm. But they got away with the van all the same. An hour later they sent a truckload of soldiers with explosives. They blew the whole place up. The children have not been seen since.”

Joseph was too dazed to grasp all this at once, and Mrs. Krause had to repeat it. She told him of the efforts made to trace them, but it was obvious that she believed them to be dead.

Without a word Joseph got up and went out into the street.

For the rest of the day he wandered among the ruins, too dazed to think. He spent the night in the burnt-out shell of a bus station. In spite of the rain which fell through the roof, he slept.

He spent the next few days searching among the ruins for his children, with a kind of hopeless despair. At night he returned to the home of the Krauses, who fed him and gave him a bed.

One night Mrs. Krause said to him, “It’s no use your going on like this. Your children are not alive. The house was locked before the soldiers left, and they must have died in the explosion. If you want to go on searching, search for your wife.”

“Germany’s a large place,” said Joseph. “What hope should I have of finding her?”

“She might escape, as you did,” said Mrs. Krause. “You must have known that something like this might happen. Did you never make any plans? Did you never fix a meeting place?”