The Silver Sword (8 page)

“It’s a good thing Bistro took himself off,” said Ruth, who had returned to her mattress.

“Jan would have saved us if he hadn’t,” said Bronia.

“Where is Jan?” said Edek.

Jan’s mattress was uninhabited. They looked for him, but he had vanished.

Later that week, in the sitting-room of a Berlin house which had been commandeered for him, a British officer was writing home to his wife. It was the officer whose jeep had so nearly knocked Jan over outside the station.

“Dearest Jane,” he wrote. “My unit’s been in Berlin a week now — we’re here to meet the Russians. You never saw such a place. Other cities were badly blitzed, but not on this scale. I’ve seen pictures of it as it used to be — one of the world’s great capitals. Now it’s more like a moon landscape, craters everywhere, mountains of rubble. The Reichstag and the Kaiser’s Palace are roofless, Unter den Linden piled with wreckage. And the queerest things keep happening. How’s this for one? — I’ve been attacked by a chimpanzee. Don’t worry — I’m quite O.k., not hurt at all.

“On Wednesday I was sitting in the jeep with my driver, studying a map. I had a cigarette in my mouth and was about to light it, when a hand slid over my shoulder, clapped on my lips and tweaked the cigarette out. I looked round and saw a chimpanzee jumping up and down on the back seat, with the cigarette in his mouth. You never saw such a revolting creature — huge arms, hairy chest as broad as mine, deep-set evil eyes, and the face of a heavy-weight boxer. He could have knocked the pair of us into the middle of next month, but we didn’t stay to let him. We streaked out of the door and left him to his dancing.

“Quite a crowd was gathering — they kept their distance, of course — and I heard someone say the chimp was called Bistro, and he’d escaped from the zoo, or what was left of it after the bombing. He had a chain round his neck, and it kept clanking against the tailboard as he jumped. He seemed to be in a rage because he hadn’t any matches — or because he’d swallowed the cigarette and it was making his belly ache. When he was tired of jumping, he sat down in the driver’s seat and started fiddling with the controls.

“That put the wind up me. There was a goodish slope on the street, and fifty yards ahead a bomb crater big enough to swallow a church — and cordoned off with only a bit of rope and a plank or two. If the jeep took a header down there, I should be answerable.

““Come on, Jim,” I said to my driver. “We’ll have to do something about this.” But my knees were like jelly, and I think Jim’s were too.

“Then the strangest thing happened. A boy stepped out of the crowd, one of the thousands of urchins that abound in the ruins here — about 11 or 12 years old, I should say, but you can never tell with these kids, they’re so undernourished.

“I shouted to him in German to come back, but he didn’t understand. He was a Pole and his name was Jan, though I didn’t know that till afterwards. But I recognized him as a boy we’d nearly run down in the street the day before.

“He walked right on, quite unafraid, and when he was alongside the jeep he said in a gentle voice, “Hello, Bistro.”

“The chimp gave him a dirty look, but Jan only grinned. He fished something out of a small wooden box he was carrying, and it made the chimp curious. It was a cigarette and matches. He handed over the cigarette. Then the matches.

““OOOO, Warro … umph,” said Bistro, and he lit up at once, and flung away the matches. He sat back in the driver’s seat, inhaling, puffing out clouds of smoke from his nose, and all the while keeping his eyes fixed on Jan. Quite suddenly Bistro stood up and held out a soft pink-palmed hand for the boy to shake. Then he climbed over on to the back seat and lay down, his legs crossed, and puffed away.

“It may have been my imagination, but I swear that the jeep began to move. Like a fool, I tiptoed up behind and called out in my best German, “Sonny, put the brake on — she’s beginning to shift.” He didn’t understand. I pantomimed the action.

“But Bistro didn’t like me. He sat up and screamed. Then he opened the tool-box, which Jim had been far-sighted enough to leave on the floor, and flung the wheel brace at me. It made him mad to see me duck, so he generously made me a present of the whole tool-box plus contents in one almighty fling. It hit the pavement, scattering the crowd. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him leap over the back and shoot after me.

“I don’t know what happened next. I ran like hell, and it was all rubble and dust and scramble up here and slide down there. I ran behind a wall, panting. Then I realized I wasn’t being followed any more, and I heard the boy’s shrill voice, scolding.

“I peeped out, down into the street.

“The boy had got a stick from somewhere and was standing with it raised above his head. Bistro lay in the dust at his feet, his face and head covered with his long arms, whimpering. I don’t know whether the boy had struck him or not. I expect not, for I guess it would have been about as effective as trying to knock down Nelson’s column with a fly whisk. But there was no doubt about the scolding he gave. When it was all over, Bistro sat up cautiously and started to pick a few fleas out of his chest and eat them. He offered one to Jan as a peace offering.

“Then Bistro did something to Jan that would have killed me dead of fright if I’d been in his place. He took the boy’s hand in his, lifted it to his mouth, and bit his finger. Jan stood as still as a rock. Some sixth sense which most people don’t possess must have whispered to him what the chimp was up to. It wasn’t a real bite, only a nip — and a token of friendship between the two. So the keeper explained afterwards. When Bistro gave his hand to the boy in return, Jan knew what to do. He gave it a friendly nip with his teeth.

“Next thing I knew, Jan was leading him down the street by the chain. Only Bistro didn’t wear it like a prisoner’s chain, but with pride and glory, as if it were a chain of office.

“That’s not quite the end of the story. Jim had fixed up the jeep and braked it properly. Now he was picking up the scattered tools, and I saw he had the boy’s wooden box, too. I strolled over to help him — or rather, to direct operations, as it doesn’t do for an officer to go down on his hands and knees. I felt a fool in front of all those people. I knew they were laughing at me.

“Then I saw a small silver sword — sort of paper-knife — lying in the dust. It hardly looked worth bothering about, but I got Jim to pick it up.

“Two keepers had arrived by now and were leading Bistro away. We found Jan, and Jim handed him his wooden box. Seeing the lid was loose, the boy checked through the contents in great agitation, then burst into tears. I tried to ask him what was the matter — then I remembered the silver sword and, showing it to him, asked him if he’d lost it. The cloudburst ended abruptly and out came the sun again. He seized it greedily, wrapped it up and popped it into the box amongst the other treasures. It didn’t seem to me worth all the fuss he made, but evidently he attached some importance to it.

“I invited Jan round to my lodgings for dinner — he looked as if he hadn’t had a square meal since he was born — and he turned up promptly with three other Polish children as skinny as himself. Luckily Frau Schmidt’s larder with its army rations was equal to the occasion. One of them, a sixteen-year-old lad named Edek, with a cough like a deep-sea foghorn, spoke some German, so I learnt all about them.

“They’re on their way to Switzerland to find their parents — started from Warsaw last month — and they don’t mind footing it all the way if they have to. Jan doesn’t really belong at all. Ruth, the eldest (about seventeen), picked him up on a slag-heap half dead and adopted him. She’s a remarkable girl, quiet and self-assured, with the most striking eyes — they have a deep serenity, a sense of purpose and moral authority quite unmistakable. No wonder they look up to her as a mother, and a leader, too.

“Edek is brave and intelligent and looks as if he had suffered a lot — he spent nearly two years slaving for the Nazis. You can see it in his face — a kid’s face oughtn’t to be creased and pinched like his. I wonder if he’ll hold out. Switzerland’s a long way.

“The one that took my fancy most was Bronia, the youngest. Blue eyes, very fair hair, seemed to live in a dream world — like our own Jenny, as I remember her on my last leave. I didn’t understand a word Bronia said, and she didn’t understand a word I said, but we got on fine together. If they don’t find what they’re looking for in Switzerland — and I’m afraid it may be only a mirage — I was wondering if perhaps we … But it’s no use thinking that way. I’m sure Ruth wouldn’t part with the child, and quite right, too.

“I scrounged some clothes and army rations for them, and they left in the afternoon, singing at the top of their voices. It went right to my heart. Tomorrow they start on the next stage of their long journey 750 miles. …

“That’s all, dear. More next week.

“My love to you, and a special hug for Jenny.

MARK

“P.s. Frau Schmidt had the cheek to wake me up in the night to tell me some of her silver was missing, and she accused those Polish children. I couldn’t have cared less. They could have walked off with half the house for all I minded. Really, these Germans! They spend five years looting Europe and then come crying to you in the middle of the night because someone’s pinched a jam spoon.

“We found the missing silver in the letter-box next morning. I bet my bottom dollar it was Jan who pinched it — you never saw such a mischievous face — and Ruth who made him take it back. She’s got as firm a hold over that family as Jan had over the chimp.”

“Take the Potsdam road and follow your noses,” the family were told, and off they went, singing a gay song, with their heads in the air. If they had gone due west towards Belgium, they might have travelled more quickly, for this was the general direction of the traffic. Fewer refugees were moving south, so lifts were scarce and they were on their feet most of the time.

They crossed the Elbe near Rosslau by a bridge that had not been too badly damaged for the Russians to repair. Here they were held up for half a day by a spearhead of the Russian army bound (so rumour had it) for Prague, to drive the Germans out of Czechoslovakia.

Never before had Ruth seen so many soldiers. First came the tanks to clear the way. Next, column after column of marching soldiers, tired and dirty in their ragged uniforms. They came from the Ukraine and the Tartar republics, from the Ural mountains and the Caucasus, from the countries of the Baltic, from Siberia, Mongolia. Over the bridge they poured in their thousands, while everyone else stood by to let them pass.

“I know that song,” cried Bronia, as she caught a snatch of a Cossack song from a group of soldiers. “Father taught it to us. Do you remember?”

“Yes, I remember,” said Ruth. “It was the summer we spent by the Dunajec River. We were on a raft, floating downstream between the wooded peaks.”

She sighed, and the tune was lost in another burst of singing. Standing there, they heard many songs, some of them bright and jolly, some of them slow and poignantly sad.

The family squeezed over the bridge behind the last of the marching columns.

They were hardly across when screaming horns announced the arrival of the staff cars, most of them Mercedes and Horchs which had been taken from the Nazis. Next, cars with secretaries; cars with war booty — fur coats, textiles, carpets, looted china; lorries with furniture, radios, refrigerators; food lorries with tons and tons of Russian delicacies — caviar, sturgeon, vodka, Crimean wine; lorries bearing proud posters — WE WELCOME THE LIBERATING ARMY.

More marching columns.

Columns of women and girls in grey-green uniform, with tight blouses and high boots. They had come to do the cooking and washing, to help in the hospitals and look after the sick. Tagged on to them were clusters of small boys picked up from the woods and burnt-out villages. They had come because they were hungry and the Red Army was ready to feed them.

“The whole world’s gone by today. Surely there can’t be any more people left?” said Bronia, as the dust began to subside.

But there was still the rearguard to come, and soon the dust was flying again under the wheels of hundreds of small light carts drawn by low Cossack horses.

“Now for a lift!” cried Jan, as a grey old man, whip in hand, came rattling by in a cart with a canvas roof. And before Ruth could stop him, he had hauled himself up over the tailboard.

“We’ll never catch him up — the carts are all full,” cried Ruth.

But soon an open cart, with nothing in the back but a heap of straw, some fodder and a leg of smoked pork, picked up the three of them. It was an anxious ride, for the cart was travelling more slowly than Jan’s, and what with the dust and the overtaking and the spreading out into fields on either side of the road, they quickly lost sight of Jan.

Jan was perfectly happy. He had landed on a pile of straw as comfortable as a feather bed, beside a sick soldier and a pen with a squawking goose. And if it was not worth his while to make the acquaintance of the soldier, he thought quite differently about the goose.

All afternoon Ruth and Edek kept a look-out for Jan’s cart. As it happened, their vigilance proved unnecessary, for the whole caravan halted at dusk to camp for the night. Fires were kindled, stock replenished from nearby farms, and there was eating and drinking and singing. Jan was quickly found and forgiven.

Next day their ways parted, and the family cut across country in the direction of Bitterfeld and Halle.

Before they left Berlin, the British officer had provided them with ration cards, and with the money he had given them they were able to buy food. For recapturing the chimp Jan had been rewarded with a hundred marks. He entrusted this to Ruth and did not question how she chose to spend it. When at last the money ran out, they were dependent on what they could beg or work for. Work was difficult to find, for the factories were idle and farms had absorbed the first prisoners of war to be released. Some villages refused to admit them, having neither food nor shelter for any more refugees. But for the most part they met with kindness and were not refused food if it could be spared.