While Still We Live (42 page)

The captain spoke.

“Yes,” she answered. “Yes.” But she hadn’t known what he had said.

He took her arm and led her to the small wooden house which stood close up against one side of the forest clearing. A long-handled axe with its edge buried in a broad stump stood at the door. A two-handed saw with rusted teeth rested on wooden pegs driven into the house wall under the broad overhang of roof. The captain pointed to the back of the house. “There’s a stream behind these trees. You can wash there. Then you can rest.”

Sheila nodded. She passed Thaddeus, who didn’t even bother to look at her. Two other men were standing beside a wooden bench outside a small shed. They had been examining the pockets of the jackets and coats which they had taken from the Germans. The papers and documents and maps which they found were in neat groups on the wooden bench. Large pebbles were used as paperweights. These men, too, didn’t look at her.

She followed the narrow path past them. Three men still unaccounted for. They might be on guard in the forest. Well, two of them might. The third was at the stream, stripped to the waist, washing his shirt and socks. A healing wound ran its red tongue down his side. A violent bruise, brown with purple shadows, spread over his shoulder. As he turned round, she saw the small cross hanging from a silver chain round his strong neck. He rose quickly from the edge of the pool, gathered the
wet clothes in his hand, and passed her without a glance. Like the others, he had an even mixture of contempt and hate in his face. Sheila felt as a leper must feel when he approaches a village, hungry for a human word, and finds some scraps of food placed where he may reach them without contaminating others. She must learn to forget her old peacetime belief that people were innocent until you proved them guilty. In a war such as these men were fighting, everyone was guilty until proved innocent.

She concentrated on the problem of washing. She was too sleepy. She was exhausted. She hadn’t any soap, any towel. The water was too cold. Any old excuse came tumbling into her mind, anything to pretend she didn’t have to get her clothes off and scrape herself clean. She could imagine the effect if she went back to the forester’s house and asked for a towel.

“What, no towel, no bath salts, no powder for her ladyship?”

As she knelt at the edge of the bank, where the stream, flowing slowly, had been dammed to form a round pool, and tested the water halfheartedly with a finger, she remembered how in the stifling air of burning Warsaw she used to dream of a clean cool stream and water which didn’t need to be carried in a pail. Now she had the stream: it was clean, so clean that she could see the gravel in the bottom, and it was certainly cool. The pool was almost waist-deep, the bushes and trees were thick enough to give at least the feeling of privacy. Perhaps the guards, no doubt posted to make sure she wouldn’t try to escape, couldn’t see her. Then she laughed at herself, and she, felt better. It was a long time since she had laughed at herself. She undressed quickly, shaking her clothes and hanging them on the scarlet and yellow leaves around her. She slipped hurriedly into the
water before she could change her mind. It was very very cold. The morning’s frost still pierced it.

When she hurried back to the forester’s house, carrying her wet underslip which had served as an inefficient towel, she found the captain, Thaddeus and two men examining the papers and weapons which they had won. The German coats and tunics and caps were piled on the corner bed.

The captain looked up as she entered. “Why were you running?” he asked sharply.

“Cold. Trying to get warm.” It was true. Her teeth were chattering. The men lost interest in her once more.

It was, much to her surprise, Thaddeus who picked up a bayonet from the table, skewered a thick slice of sausage which lay there along with a bottle and some empty tins, and held it out towards her.

She thanked him. He looked at her with little liking in his light grey eyes, and turned once more to the table. Then he looked up again at the girl now sitting on the edge of the wooden bench in front of the unlit stove, poured some vodka out of the bottle into a tin mug and came over with it to where she sat.

“Drink this quickly.”

In her nervousness, she gulped it so that she choked and coughed. He took the mug away from her, ignored her thanks, and went back to the table.

The icy bath had chased sleep away. She was still exhausted, but her eyelids were no longer weighted down. She finished eating the hard sausage, and then spread out the wet petticoat over the bench beside her, so that it might have a chance to dry.

“Better hang it outside,” the captain said unexpectedly. He
spoke in Polish to one of the men—the man she had seen at the stream this morning—who rose and followed her to the door.

“Where are your stockings?” the captain added quickly.

“They were in shreds.”

“You left them at the brook?”

Now what have I done wrong this time? Sheila wondered. “Yes,” she said.

The captain spoke, rapidly in Polish once more. The man took Sheila silently to the stream, picked up the stockings from where she had thrown them under a bush, and then led her back to the large linden tree at the side of the house. There, round a rope strung under its thick cover, she knotted the shoulder-straps of the underslip beside the row of toeless socks. A drying shirt filled with the breeze, and swung like a fat, headless, legless man.

In the cottage, the men were now on their feet. The papers had been sorted and were being replaced in the tunic pockets.

“Did she leave anything else lying about?” the captain asked.

“No.”

“Good.” To Sheila he said, “Rest on the bed.”

“I—”

“Get over to the bed. You’ll be out of our way, there.”

Sheila went to the corner of the room where the high wooden bed stood. There was a very old, very faded striped mattress, and three equally ancient striped pillows in a hard neat pile at the head of the bed. She watched the men, sorting the clothes on the floor as if this were some kind of card game. A coat, a tunic, a cap, sidearms, here. A coat, a tunic, trousers, a cap, sidearms, there.

“We need extra ammunition, and four more trousers. That’s
all. Then we’ll be complete,” Thaddeus said with satisfaction. “We can get the trousers from the laundry-line at Brzeziny. There’s a garrison there.”

The captain nodded. He had taken her torn stockings and thrown them on a pile of rubbish. “Bury them as usual,” he said to the man beside him.

The insecurity of these men struck Sheila with renewed force. In this hidden house, with a depth of trees to give a margin of safety, there was still no security. Litter had to be buried. No fire was lit to give the warmth they needed. Everything had to be arranged so that, at the first alarm from an outpost, each man could seize his load and escape into the forest. Even the shirts washed free of bloodstains had to dry, not in the sunshine of the clearing, but carefully hidden from any passing plane under a broad tree. And none of these men sat in the sunshine: they couldn’t enjoy even that. They crossed the clearing by circling round it, keeping close to the cover of forest. Sheila looked round the ominously neat room. These men couldn’t relax, not even here at their headquarters. Their margin of safety was too narrow. She looked at the thin, tight faces, and she saw them clearly for the first time.

* * *

The hours passed slowly. The men ignored her; to them, she was either a treacherous danger or a necessary nuisance. The only words spoken to her were those telling her to eat or giving her permission to walk down to the stream. She knew she was as much guarded then—though tactfully, secretly—as when she lay on the coarse linen-covered mattress. She stared at the beam across the ceiling with its framed pictures and painted flowers. She stared at the straight row of sacred pictures on the wall in
their heavy wooden frames. She stared at the roughly carved figure of the Madonna with her blue painted gown, at the candles and crucifix on the broad ledge at the Madonna’s feet. She stared at the top of the tall whitewashed stove, followed with her eyes its simple design down from the ceiling to the bulge of cooking oven and the wooden benches fixed round it for a friendly hour on a cold winter’s night. On top of the oven, someone had spread a neat piece of newspaper: weeks ago, someone had spread it, intimating that the oven was no longer going to be used until he got back from the war. And on the newspaper, its edges neatly matching the square of the oven top, was a prayer-book. She stared at those things. She knew them all by heart, just as she knew the shape of the table with its square solid legs suddenly twisting into a soft curve as they reached the hard earth floor; or the shape of the wooden bench, built into the wall opposite the stove, with its curved end-arms and its attached footrest. She knew this house as if she had always lived here; as if she had been the one who had painted the flowers on the beam so proudly; as if she had let the stove die, and had raked it clean for a fresh start and had covered it with a newspaper headlining war, and had laid the Book on it with a prayer for a safe return.

Then, to stop thinking about the forester who had not returned, she would sit up and stare at the open door and the patch of grass, no longer whitened with dew, but warm and fading in the autumn sunlight. Sometimes, when the men were not in the room, she would rise and walk to the window, and lean on its broad sill of dark wood, and look out over the empty flowerbox at the trees, and forget everything that worried and nagged her by watching their leaves. Their rich colours, so
sharply divided and yet merging into each other, would stare back at her until she could only think of red and yellow and orange and purple and bronze and henna. It was strange that anything so violent should be so peaceful. And then the crisp air would end its deception and strike at her shoulders, bring a shiver to her spine, and she would go back once more to the high, boxlike bed. She would begin staring at the ceiling beam with its framed pictures and painted flowers.

She would think of the Aleksanders and of Uncle Edward and of Casimir. She would wonder if Steve had reached safety, if Bill and Schlott were with him. And she would think a lot about Uncle Matthews. That always brought on a bad attack of conscience. He had been more fond of her than either he or she ever admitted. He would be worried. He might sit in his anonymous office, pretending that a lost niece was just another of life’s unnecessary complications, but he would be worried. As for herself, she could now admit that she had never appreciated Uncle Matthews. She knew that now, when it was too late. Often she had used to think of Uncle Matthews as someone who was being unnecessarily dogmatic, or interfering, or boring, or embarrassing. Now she realised that she must have often seemed equally dogmatic, interfering, boring and embarrassing. But the chief difference between the old and the young was that the old knew what the young thought about them.

She thought about her father and her mother and then her father, again. When she was a child, her questions about her mother had been answered. But the discouragement given her when she asked about her father had only stimulated a greater secret interest in him. For that reason, she generally
thought more about her father when she thought of these vague nebulous characters whose only reality to her was the fact that she did exist.

* * *

Night had come, and had gone. Still there was no sign of Jan and his comrade.

This was the last day. She had until tonight. Perhaps, if the Poles followed polite convention in such matters, until dawn. She couldn’t sleep and she couldn’t think. The guard outside the door spoiled both of those attempts. It was his silence that worried her. He made no sound, and then, just as she was beginning to think that he wasn’t there, the slight shuffle of his feet, a smothered cough, a bored sigh would bring her right back to the growing idea that Jan had met with some accident. His accident would be her tragedy. Silly kind of tragedy, too. There was something ludicrous in being shot by your own side. Her father had died more efficiently than that.

She rose and went to the window once more. The soaring wall of leaves gave her courage. She looked at their brave colours and thought, nothing is inevitable, not while you have two legs and a sound body and wits still working. She had at least until tonight.

She stayed at the window, watching the fading light and the darkening leaves, until the captain came back to the house. He looked tired, as if he hadn’t been able to sleep either. He entered the room without looking at her, now obediently back in her appointed corner, threw some papers on the table, pretended to study a much-folded map.

He looked up suddenly and said, in a burst of irritation. “Why don’t you sleep?”

“If your two men don’t hurry I don’t think I’m going to need any more sleep.”

He stared at her for a moment, and then bent over the map once more.

“You said we would have plenty of time to talk here.” Sheila’s voice was calmer than she had expected. “The forty-eight hours are nearly up, and we haven’t talked more than twenty words.”

“There’s nothing you can say which interests us at the moment.”

“I had hoped to tell you about Captain Wisniewski. Now that the others aren’t here, I could tell you about what he and his men hope to do. Why don’t you join him?”

The Pole’s thin face tightened. His eyes looked at her coldly.

Sheila was silent. She wanted to say, “But this camp of yours is so impermanent. Nine men striking aimlessly, here and there. Nine men being picked off, one by one. It is merely pinpricking compared to becoming members of a larger force with real striking power. Wisniewski’s chosen a winter camp. You may be sure it will be remote enough, well-buried enough to be safe. At least, safer than this forest. This is an open part of Poland. You daren’t even light a fire. The frost is on the morning grass now. Soon you will need warm food and heat to thaw frozen clothes and bones. You are brave, and your men are brave. But that is not enough.”

But, looking at the thin, proud face she merely said, when at last she did speak, “He needs men like you.”