While Still We Live (18 page)

“Talks,” the American concluded. He was laughing again. This is mad, he thought. The bombs are falling, and I’m laughing and I haven’t much to laugh about; this evening isn’t going to end as I had planned at all. And I’m laughing. “You loved Andrew Aleksander like a brother, and you love me like a father confessor. What’s wrong with you anyway? Or should I ask what’s wrong with Andrew or with me? Sorry: I see I’m embarrassing you. But some day I’d like to know.”

Sheila searched for one glove which was, as usual, under the table.

“I’d like to know, too,” she said in a low voice and accepted the glove from Stevens. There was a loose thread in its thumb. If she pulled it, there would be a hole. It would be nice to outwit that rule, she thought. She pulled the thread. “Perhaps,” she said, “I want to be quite sure. The way Barbara and Jan Reska were quite sure. I’d rather be alone all my life than not sure.” Her thumb came through the opened seam.

“Stop doing that!” Stevens said. “You’re ruining it.”

She obeyed, much to her own surprise. And she suddenly knew what she had missed in Andrew: she wanted someone who could say “stop doing that” now and again. She stared at Russell Stevens and thought, if I could mix you and Andrew together, I’d be sure for the rest of my life.

“That was a big one,” Stevens said, listening, “not far from here either.”

Sheila listened, too. The long, dull roar from the east gathered intensity. She was suddenly afraid. Not for herself, not for the people round her. She rose, clutching her opened powder box
and lipstick. She jammed them into her bag as they were. “I must go,” she said.

“Hey, wait. The check,” Stevens called to her, and then as he saw her reaching the door, he threw down some notes and coins on the table and started after her. He caught her arm as she stood hesitating in the doorway. Together they looked out into the street, dark under its black ceiling of smoke, as if they were reconnoitring. It didn’t take long to develop little habits for self-preservation when you lived in a beleaguered city.

“Must we?” Stevens shouted.

Sheila nodded. We must, she told herself as she shrank from the noise and desolation of the street. She tried to shake herself free from the terror she had suddenly felt inside the restaurant. Someone called my name, someone called me, she was thinking. She tried to tell that to the serious face beside her, but she couldn’t. Stevens thought she was mad enough already. Perhaps she was.
Sheila, Sheila!...
How could she have heard that, inside the restaurant? How could anyone hear anything in this noise? The attack was more to the east of the city, over towards the banks of the Vistula. The black smoke above the buildings became lined with orange. Somewhere there was fire. The American was looking down at her face. His grip tightened on her hand.

“Keep to the doorways. One at a time. When I say dodge, dodge,” he shouted, his mouth close to her ear. And then they were out into the street, into Marszalkowska Avenue which had once been Warsaw’s gayest. The smart clothes, and the laughing voices, and the music and flowered window boxes, were gone. Only the trees still stood untouched in their neatly spaced circles of earth. A gaily striped awning flapped pathetically
over a boarded window. The solid buildings stared across the avenue at each other’s wounds. The names over the shops and night clubs and cafés were meaningless. On the roadway were fragments of bodies instead of taxicabs and red tramcars. On the pavements were broken slabs of concrete, like the crushed remains of a huge ice floe ruptured by its own force. The people who walked there, now, were people with urgent heart-twisting business. They walked quickly, dark figures moving through a nightmare of sound. There was the constant thunder of the encircling guns, the scream of plunging shells, the angry bark of planes, the whistle of dropping bombs, the roar of explosions, the staccato crescendo of machine-gun fire as a plane swept contemptuously low. Then suddenly there would be a terrifying blank of silence; a short lull to be counted only in moments, before the dentist’s drill plunged once again into the naked gum.

“Where?” Stevens asked in one of these moments.

“The children’s hostel,” Sheila had time to answer, and only time. For Stevens pushed her violently into the slight alcove of a boarded doorway and stood behind her, pinning her flat against, almost into, the wall. Then she heard the planes’ sudden roar as they swooped low, heard the sound of heavy hail on the pavement behind her. It was over before she had even grasped the coming of danger. In the street others were now stepping away from the walls, or were rising from the ground where they had flung themselves. Two women remained on their knees to finish decently the prayer they had begun. Some bodies didn’t rise.

Stevens was staring at the sky beyond the University buildings which they were now approaching. The children’s hostel, Sheila had said. And the children’s hostel lay over there. Sheila was
staring too. The low-hanging smoke clouds and the coming of night made it difficult to see clearly. And then the flames broke loose, leaping higher than the black clouds. Stevens pointed suddenly to the north and centre of the city. Flames all round were growing. The fires had begun. The clouds became scarlet. Sheila, remembering how Warsaw had been set on fire with incendiaries three nights ago after the water supply had been blasted into uselessness, gripped Stevens’ arm in desperation. Five hundred fires three nights ago. Tonight, how many? They cast all caution aside, and broke into a run towards the once pleasant garden and the once quiet square of houses.

“It’s the hostel,” Sheila kept saying. Stevens couldn’t hear her, but he knew, too. They were near enough to realise now that it could only be the hostel or one of the buildings beside it.

They reached the open square flanked by well-spaced, modern houses. One of the buildings was already being devoured by flames.

“It’s the hostel,” Sheila said again.

A warden shouted “No nearer: the walls are dangerous.” He pulled them roughly to a halt. “Help with the sandbags,” he yelled over his shoulder as he rushed towards a group of firemen who were entering the other buildings. The incendiaries were just beginning their work on these houses. Fire fighters, already on the rooftops, were silhouetted against the knee-high fence of dancing flames. They were emptying the sandbags, which had once protected the buildings’ foundations from blast, over the greedy tongues. No water, Sheila remembered—no water. Stevens was already lifting a bag of sand onto his shoulders.

“Stay back,” he shouted to her. “You’ve been ill. You can’t manage this.” He pushed her towards a woman who had
paused to wipe the streams of soot-stained perspiration out of her eyes. “She’s been ill,” he yelled in Polish, and plunged into the stream of people carrying the sandbags towards the doorways of the buildings. At the doorways, they were met by others who came down the stairways to seize the bags and carry them up to the roof. The procession of old men, women and boys never halted. Some of the younger men had found ladders and climbed, with their load of sand, like flies against the face of the buildings.

The woman pulled Sheila back roughly as she tried to lift a load of sand.

“It takes strength,” she said not unkindly, and pointed towards the centre of the square, towards the huddle of figures on the grass and flowerbeds. “Help there!” She herself lifted a bag of sand and joined the moving stream as Stevens had done. Sheila looked towards the women lying on mattresses and blankets in the middle of the broad gardens. They must have been evacuated from the maternity hospital across the square. Nurses were with the women; ambulances were already arriving to take them to new quarters. A young girl, too young to be able to lift a sandbag, was dragging it slowly over the grass. The desperation on her face decided Sheila. She caught the other end of the bag. Singly you and I aren’t much good, she thought, but together we can help. And to help with the fire-fighting, now that the people inside the buildings had been evacuated, seemed the most important thing to her. Stevens passed them as he returned for another load. He saw Sheila and the girl. He shook his head, but his face relaxed for a moment.

On one of the roofs, the fires had been extinguished. There was a sigh of relief from the crowd, almost swelling to a shout
of triumph. But the neighbouring house had suddenly five little crowns of fire, and the people’s work was all to begin over again. Other houses were less lucky: there the flames were higher, but they were still fought. It was then that Sheila heard the increased drone of planes, like a mosquito’s hum mounting at her ear. The planes were so low that the flames, leaping above the pall of smoke, lighted their shark-like bellies. Some swooped even down between the flames. Machine guns added their noise to the crackle and roar of fire. And the firemen, fighting their desperate battle on the rooftops, suddenly ceased to be black silhouettes: there was nothing left but the orange flames. A woman cried out in helpless anger. Looking at the tense faces, blackened with smoke, wet with sweat, Sheila saw the woman’s impotent hate repeated in the bloodshot eyes as they stared at the sky.

Other fire fighters had climbed to the roofs to replace those who had been murdered. And again, just as they seemed on the point of controlling the flames, the planes roared down. Again the machine guns levelled at them with the precision of scythe strokes in a cornfield. Only two of them were left standing. The flames roared higher in triumph. Sand was useless now.

Stevens came to Sheila, pulled her hands from her eyes, and led her away from the building across the grass. “It’s no good,” he kept repeating, “it’s no good. Damn and blast them all to hell.” They sat down on an upturned barrow which one woman had trundled until the flames had shown them all that it was useless. He kept his face turned away from Sheila, and Sheila, weeping openly, looked towards the big building which had been the first to flare up. The red walls were now crumbling, falling like a row of children’s red and yellow blocks.

“That was where we were,” she said at last. “I wonder where Barbara took the children. Perhaps to the shelter?” She looked at the dark hump in the middle of the grassy square. She rose, unsteadily. Her back felt as if it would never straighten, her feet were heavy, her hand throbbed. She looked at it curiously. It had a raw, shiny look. It began to throb and burn.

Stevens rose too, and then he looked at her and said, “What’s wrong?”

“I seem to have got my hand blistered. I can’t think when... We’d better find Barbara. She will be with the children.”

He took her arm, and they walked towards the dark mound of earth. There was no one sheltering there. There were only two nurses who had come with some first-aid equipment. A line of injured women and men began to form. But the stock of medical supplies was low, and only the worst cases were being treated. The most desperate, of these (“I told them the building was going to fall,” an exhausted warden was repeating to everyone who would listen) were being taken to the emergency hospital cars which were now arriving.

“I’ll take you to the apartment. I’ve got some Vaseline there which will cover your hand. Hold it up. Don’t let the blood run down into it.” He turned away from the crowd of exhausted, worried, suffering people, and led her away from the shelter.

“Barbara,” Sheila kept repeating. “We must find Barbara.” Everyone kept repeating his words, as if by saying them over and over again other people might understand, as if he hadn’t heard himself speak and thought other people hadn’t heard him speak, as if... Sheila stopped thinking, for even her thoughts were repeating their words.

Stevens took her back across the plots of earth and grass
towards the few people now left on the scene. There was no Barbara among them.

“She will have taken the children to some safe house,” he said. “They will be far from here, by this time.” But his eyes still searched among the small groups of people. He felt Sheila tug his arm suddenly, and she was looking at a slender fair-haired girl standing silently beside an air raid warden. Sheila’s heart leapt with relief. Stevens was smiling, too. They hurried over. Just as they reached the fair-haired girl she turned round to face them. It wasn’t Barbara. Sheila’s relief turned to fear.

Stevens was saying to the silent man, “We are looking for a girl, blonde like this young lady with you here. She was one of the volunteer nurses with the refugee children. This evening, there were three nurses and the children in that building which is almost burned out now. Where did they go? Do you know? Or where could we find out?”

The warden didn’t answer. His exhausted eyes were fixed on the American’s. He seemed to be trying to speak his sympathy but no words came.

“They...?” began Stevens, and stopped. Sheila was a statue beside him.

The man shook his head slowly, sadly. The girl beside him suddenly said in a frightening voice, “My sister was a nurse there. She was there.” The hopelessness and anguish in her face were answer enough.

Sheila turned away, and began walking blindly towards the street.

“I’ll see you home,” Stevens said as he followed her, “and then I’ll come back and look. To look until I find her. They don’t know what they are talking about. I’ll find her.”

They walked towards the centre of the town in silence. Stevens had slipped his arm around Sheila’s waist and that helped to steady her. A first-aid car halted beside them on a ragged street.

“Any help needed?” the driver was saying. “I’ve room for one more.”

“Going south? Anywhere near Frascati Gardens?”

“As far as the Bracka Emergency Hospital.”

“That’s fine. Thanks.” Stevens jammed Sheila into the car on the front seat beside a sleeping man. “Stay at my apartment. I’ll be back as soon as possible. Medicine cabinet is next to the radio shelf.” He didn’t wait for them to drive off. He was already running back to the ruins of the children’s hostel.

The car plunged on, avoiding the holes in the road as if by a miracle. Sheila didn’t look at the people crowded into the rear seats of the car; she could hear them. She rested her throbbing, left hand up against her shoulder, and tried to avoid lurching into the sleeping man. Once, the car twisted suddenly round the edge of an unexpected crater, and the man’s head fell sideways against her. She knew then that he wasn’t sleeping. She stared into the orange-streaked darkness and listened to the middle-aged driver, his good-humoured face puckered into fury, giving vent to his overcharged emotions with a constant stream of descriptive adjectives to fit the Germans.