While Still We Live (29 page)

“I assure you it must be destroyed.”

His quiet voice prompted her. She placed it in his outstretched
hand.

“Now, Fräulein Braun, tell me the story of your life.”

Sheila looked startled, but Mr. Hofmeyer was waiting. She began, “Born in Munich, May 1916. Fifteenth May, 1916. Parents Ludwig and Frieda Braun, later Mühlmann of Cologne...” When she ended, he nodded sympathetically.

“The only slips were with the English names, strangely enough. Repeat it all, once more.”

This time he said, “Good. Don’t worry about how you spent your London years. Now that the war is on, the Germans don’t have the same facilities for inquiries there. But they have no doubt checked on Miss Leigh in Switzerland. However, I have sent her full explanations. Even photographs which she can produce of Anna aged two, Anna aged six, and Anna aged twelve. Miss Leigh’s brown hair is almost white now, by the way. And she stoops slightly when she walks. That’s how you saw her last, in 1938. And you need not worry either about the house where you were brought up. We placed it especially in a row of houses which has since been torn down to make way for Party offices and barracks.”

Sheila’s eyes widened. She had better stop feeing surprised. She had better concentrate. There were questions she wanted to ask, questions which even now were slipping away from her just because she wanted to ask them so much.

“What if I am questioned?”

“Both the Gestapo and the AO have their lists of secret German agents. They will not question you. If you get into any difficulty with the military, all you do is show them that AO card, and refer them to me. You may never have to face questions on the story I have just given you. But to keep it alive
in your memory I suggest that you send yourself to sleep each night by repeating your life story to yourself.”

“I shall end by believing I
was
born in Munich.”

“Good.” Hofmeyer smiled encouragingly. “Frankly, I don’t expect you to meet any complications. You are responsible only to me. You are a secretary on my staff. You were chosen for your assured loyalty to Germany and your special qualifications. But actually you will do no spying. I will give you only routine work to do. You see, I intend to keep you alive. Your uncle would never forgive me if I didn’t.”

Sheila’s sense of elation faded. “You mean...?” she began incredulously.

“I mean that you will leave Poland safely when the time is suitable.”

She flushed with annoyance. “Mr. Olszak didn’t lead me to expect this.”

“Mr. Olszak doesn’t know your uncle personally.”

“But he knew my father.”

Hofmeyer came over to her and took her hands in his. Sheila, looking at the kindly face with its worried eyes, felt her emotions smooth out. “So did I,” Mr. Hofmeyer said.

There was a pause. “You wish I had left Warsaw before the war began,” Sheila said with a very small smile.

“Well, I can imagine other things I might have been doing in the last week, instead of worrying about Anna Braun.”

Sheila looked down at the guide-book which lay on her lap. She slipped it into the remaining free pocket of her coat as she rose to her feet.

Mr. Hofmeyer said, “Read your Baedeker, remember your catechism, and if you can find a typewriter, practise some
fingering. You are supposed to be a secretary, you know.”

Sheila smiled wryly. “
Ja, Herr Hofmeyer
,” she said.

He was looking at her almost sadly. It is so easy to disappoint the young, he was thinking; they expect so much. He followed her with his light step to the doorway into the hall. “One last order,” he said. “Positively no bright ideas, positively no heroic gestures.”

Sheila tried to smile. But that was the unkindest cut of all.

* * *

In the guest room, there were only Professor Korytowski and Stevens. Olszak had gone, and Sheila felt cheated of a last court of appeal. And yet, on second thoughts, perhaps it was just as well that she had been cheated. Hofmeyer was her boss, now, and there was nothing else to do but accept his plan of strict non-intervention and say nothing. Mr. Hofmeyer was the serious professional and he wasn’t going to trust any amateur performance. And that was that.

She sat on the bed. Korytowski sat on the hard, spindle-legged chair. Stevens paced the room. An hour ago she had sat here like this and watched the other two as they waited for Olszak. Then she had been confidently Sheila Matthews; now she was this strange Anna Braun, so strange and yet somehow so incredibly real. The blend of fact and fiction had been convincingly measured. Mr. Hofmeyer had taken an actual couple, who had been childless. He had given them a daughter, and reasons for her life with Miss Leigh. Miss Leigh had been an actual person, too, and she was a friend of Hofmeyer’s obviously willing to back the Anna Braun legend. Miss Leigh was probably in Mr. Hofmeyer’s own line of “business.” And all the rest had been invented, except of course the firm of
Matheson, Walters, and Crieff. No doubt, by this time, Uncle Matthews had been informed of Anna Braun and had given instructions to his firm that any innocent questions from strangers about a Sheila Matthews, a foreign correspondent, would be satisfactorily answered. She smiled suddenly, partly in admiration of Mr. Hofmeyer’s powers of invention, partly because she now felt confident. It was a pleasant feeling, for a change.

“But what are you going to do?” Stevens was asking Korytowski.

“I’ll stay here. Why shouldn’t I? I have no fine paintings or
objets d’art
to attract German collectors. Even my books wouldn’t be of any value to their libraries, and they wouldn’t find my manuscript interesting. It is quite unpolitical. Besides, my students know they can find me here, and some of them may need my help. Those I know well, I can direct to Jan Reska.”

“Reska? Here in Warsaw?” Sheila asked in surprise.

“In hospital. He escaped from the Russians and came back through the German lines to Warsaw. He is in charge of Department Number Thirty-two, by the way. I recommended him; I know his worth. He will be able to leave the hospital tomorrow.”

“I suppose he made his way back to Warsaw because he knew Barbara would be here,” Sheila said slowly. “Does he know? About Barbara?”

“Yes.”

“Does Madame Aleksander know?”

“Yes.”

There was silence. Stevens stopped his nervous pacing.

“How is she?” Sheila asked at last.

“She is still working at the hospital, but she will be leaving in a day or two. She’s—Well, I think it would be a very good thing if Sheila would look after her for some time. She needs someone like you, Sheila; someone who is young enough to make Teresa think
she
is needed. She always gathers strength if she thinks someone needs her.” Korytowski smiled half sadly. “I offered her a room here, but as soon as she heard that you were living alone at Stevens’ flat with a pack of men, she was horrified. She accepted Olszak’s idea that she should go there, as soon as she heard that.”

“I was very thankful to be allowed to stay there,” Sheila said. “Steve and his friends took good care of me. Didn’t you tell Madame Aleksander that?”

“I tried to,” Korytowski said, so ruefully that both Sheila and Stevens wanted to smile.

“It is so like her,” Sheila said, “to have time to worry about me, when she herself has suffered so many blows.”

“And they are heavier than we thought,” said Korytowski with deceptive quietness. Suddenly, his hand went over the scar on his brow, and tightened on it as if the agony of his soul required his body to suffer, too. “Korytów was in German hands when Wisniewski and his men passed near there in their effort to get to Warsaw. The house was standing. But a scout found that German officers were quartered there, that there had been some trouble in the village. We don’t know where Marta or the children are. Wisniewski’s own house had been burned to the ground along with the village houses. His father had defended the village along with the peasants. They were all executed as snipers. There was nothing left except some half-crazed women and children searching in the black ruins.
And yesterday,” he paused, speaking with increasing difficulty, “yesterday we learned that Andrew is missing. One of the men in his battalion met Teresa in the hospital. He said that Andrew had fallen, wounded; he said that the German tanks had advanced over the wounded men lying before them, but that Andrew probably escaped death because he had rolled into a ditch. After that, he didn’t see Andrew any more, but the Germans had captured that district and those who were wounded and had escaped the tank treads must be prisoners.”

“Andrew!” Sheila said. “Andrew, too.”

Stevens smashed his fist at a piece of bulging plaster on the wall. His face was rigid.

Sheila rose and went over to Professor Korytowski. “I’ll look after Madame Aleksander,” she said with difficulty, and gave him her hand. His blue eyes looked up at her with real affection. She turned away swiftly and hurried out of the room. She heard Stevens’ feet running to catch up with her.

They joined the city’s silence, and made the slow, heartbreaking journey back to Frascati Gardens.

INSPECTION

For some strange reason, the Germans postponed an immediate entry into Warsaw. Perhaps they were afraid of a city where there was no water, no light, no food; where there were graves along the public streets and bodies still buried under piles of rubble; where buildings still collapsed with a sigh as if they were glad that the mockery of their hollow walls was at last ended.

Sheila argued the point: whether the Germans were afraid of looking at the chaos they had created, or whether they were afraid of being torn apart by angry hands in dark streets.

Russell Stevens supported the latter view. “These boys aren’t squeamish over destruction,” he pointed out. “If they were, they wouldn’t have trained so enthusiastically for ‘battles of annihilation.’ The term is theirs: they invented both it and ‘total war.’ God, I hope I see the day when they learn the meaning of these phrases.”

“Sometimes I wonder—” Sheila’s voice faltered.

“Wonder what?”

“Whether any of us here will be alive...then.”

Steve said quickly, “That’s the first time you’ve said a thing like that. And it’s the last.”

“Sorry. I think it’s this waiting. Have you heard from Olszak?”

“No. After all, it’s only two days since the meeting.”

“Two days.” Two months, two years. She forced herself free from this paralyzing gloom. She said, with a pretence of lightheartedness, “How is your new home with Schlott’s friends? I feel I’m as bad as a Nazi, the way I’ve taken over your flat.”

“Oh, that’s all right. You and Madame Aleksander and Casimir will just about fill it. There wasn’t going to be much room for Schlott and me. Or Bill.”

“Have you seen Bill since...?” She paused, tactfully.

“Since that dust-up two nights ago? No.” Steve’s face took on his stubborn look.

“I’m sorry,” Sheila said.

“Guess all our tempers were a bit frayed by the end of the siege. Bill will come round to seeing it my way: when he stops drinking he will know he shouldn’t have brought that girl round here.”

“After all,” Sheila said, “if I am here, I expect Bill saw nothing wrong in bringing Lilli, too. I was sorry for the girl.”

They were both silent, remembering Bill’s noisy entrance with his arm round a large-eyed girl, his voice repeating in English, “Come on in, Lilli, Liberty Hall. Come on in. Liberty Hall.” The girl hadn’t understood, but Bill’s confident arm had
pulled her into the middle of the room. Even then, the girl had sensed that something wasn’t right. She had looked at Sheila, and then at Casimir teaching the dog to walk on its hind legs, and then at Schlott’s brick-red face. Only Bill was oblivious to the sensation he was causing. “Liberty Hall,” he kept repeating rather thickly and determinedly. When the girl had tried to leave Sheila had risen and said, “Do come in.” The smile she gave the girl only caused Lilli’s embarrassment to deepen.

“No room,” Schlott had said with an angry glare at the impercipient Bill.

“Nuts to that,” Bill said.

Steve had spoken, awkwardly, worriedly, “Sorry, Bill. No room.” And then Bill’s temper had flared. There was the beginning of a first-class fight, for Schlott was equally aroused. Steve got between them in time, and the girl had seized the chance to back out of the room. Bill decided to abandon the fight and follow the retreating girl. His good-natured face was puckered with anger as he gave his last opinion of them. And then they had heard him calling, “Lilli. Hey! Wait! Lilli!” as his feet slipped and stumbled on the stairs.

Stevens now broke their silence. “Pity it ever had to happen,” he said. “Bill should have had more sense.”

“I was sorry for the girl. Perhaps she
had
no place to go.”

“Perhaps.” Steve half-smiled. “I wonder what’s keeping Madame Aleksander. She should be here by this time.” He glanced at his watch with a frown. He was regaining the old habit along with his new clothes. During the siege, time had meant nothing.

“Smart suiting, Mr. Stevens,” Sheila said gravely. “Are the big shops open?”

“Not yet. Those that weren’t destroyed are being kept closed by German orders. I got this from a friend of Schlott’s who knew someone who knew someone. There’s a lot of sidewalk trading starting.”

“I wonder why they aren’t open. The large stores, I mean.”

“Loot for the master race. First pickings for them,” Steve said bitterly. Sheila looked down at her dress which no amount of sewing or brushing would make decent. She sighed.

“You always look fine. Don’t worry,” Steve said, paying her the most maddening compliment that man can pay a woman.
You always look fine,
as if that were going to make her stop feeling like a scarecrow.

“Before Madame Aleksander and the Professor arrive, I’d like to get one point cleared up,” Steve said. He was nervous in spite of his quiet voice.

Sheila braced herself. She hoped it wasn’t going to be what she thought it might be. I hope he keeps off that subject, she thought miserably. Like Bill’s visit the other night, it would be better if the point were never brought up. She was very fond of Steve, and then she groaned inwardly at the damning phrase. He was what he himself would call a swell guy. But she wasn’t in love with him. He probably only thought he was in love with her. The strain of the siege had made most people more urgent in their emotions, had quickened the tempo of all human relationships. Acquaintances became friends overnight. Marriages had increased in terrific numbers. People felt they had to get the best out of life before they died so soon. She looked at Steve, and her eyes said, “Please, Steve, don’t. You’ll be hurt and I’ll be miserable. Please don’t.”