While Still We Live (46 page)

“Poor souls,” the woman said to the wooden beam across the ceiling, “they’re dropping with sleep.” She lifted a candle from the table and said to Stefan, “Help your sister get the mattress. It’s next door. I’ll show you.”

In the next room, leading off the long corridor which ran the whole front length of the cottage, there was a striped mattress and a gay bedmat and high-piled pillows. But the room was cold, and Sheila changed her mind about suggesting she would sleep here after all. As she and Stefan pulled the bedding along the corridor to the kitchen, they heard the roar of motorcycles.

The woman blew out the candle, and they finished their task in darkness. The light in the kitchen had been extinguished too. The children were back in bed. The older girl sounded as if she were clearing the table of all signs of their meal. They felt their way to the stove by its warmth.

“Quietly,” the woman’s voice came through the darkness, as Sheila stumbled against a bench. “Open a shutter, Weronika.”
The girl’s footsteps crossed the floor unerringly. A shutter was gently pushed aside, just enough to let the intense blackness give way to dim shadows.

“Remember,” the hushed voice from the corner bed was saying, “you are my niece and nephew from Lowicz. Your parents are dead. Your names?”

“Sheila and Stefan.” The words were out before Sheila could stop the boy from speaking.

“Sheila? What a strange name!” Weronika said. “It doesn’t sound Polish.” She was helping Stefan to straighten the mattress in front of the whitewashed stove. Then her bare feet ran towards the crowded bed. The children exclaimed and were hushed by their mother as Weronika climbed in and pushed them over to the wall. Then there was silence.

The motorcycles had swept through the village. Now they were followed by two cars. And then there was silence once more. Sheila shivered in spite of the warmth of the kitchen. She couldn’t stop worrying. Korytów...she would need to know what had happened there. She had failed, and she wanted to know just how far she had failed.

“Stefan,” she said softly. But the boy was already asleep. Steady breathing came from the corner bed. There was a nice placid sound in the unbroken rhythm. It was warm on the floor, and more comfortable than Sheila had imagined. Her last thought was one of amazement at the discovery, and then yawning loudly, without benefit of a restraining hand, she hugged her shoulders and closed her eyes.

* * *

When she awoke, the others were all moving about the kitchen. From her mattress she could see nothing but strong legs and
bare feet.

“Well, she’s back with us,” a man’s voice said. It was Jan. She raised herself on her elbow. He and Stefan sat at the long table with their backs to the wall. They were eating again.

“It’s all right,” Stefan called. “Jan brought us some food.”

Sheila rose slowly. Cold sunlight filled the kitchen. The corner bed was stiffly neat. The woman and her children were dressed now as Sheila was, with wide black skirts and white blouses and sleeveless jackets and aprons. Like those which had been given to Sheila, their clothes were neatly patched and darned. Weronika was examining Sheila’s discarded skirt, holding it up in front of her.

“That and the jumper and the boy’s jacket should be burned,” Jan said between generous mouthfuls of food.

“Such a waste. Such good material,” the woman said. She looked at the stained and torn pieces of clothing. “If they were washed... I could alter them and the Germans would never know them.”

“Then alter them quick,” Jan said.

“They ought to be destroyed,” Sheila suggested. She looked worriedly at the others, but no one wanted to hear her.

Weronika ran happily for her mother’s carved wood sewing box. “We’ll alter them first before we wash them,” the woman decided, “and then no one can recognise them when they are on the drying line.” She looked up at Sheila, who was watching her busy scissors doubtfully. “You must eat, for you will be leaving shortly. The cart will soon be ready for the journey. Hurry.”

As Sheila ate the simple meal which one of the flaxen-haired little girls put shyly down before her, Jan was talking
to Stefan about his farm and a cow that had given him a lot of trouble. The woman added her advice on that subject as she stitched. There was only a feeling of peace in the neat room. In many ways it reminded Sheila of the forester’s hut. Only, its decorations were cleaner, its white-washed walls and ceiling were fresher. Its similar array of pictures and imitation flowers tacked along the overhead beam was brighter. And the same love of brightness and colour was in the cheap prints along the wall, in the striped bed cover and gay pillows piled high on the wooden bed. From her high place of honour, the Virgin Mary smiled down on them, in her robe as blue as the children’s wide eyes. A prayer-book had been laid neatly, reverently, so that its edges exactly paralleled the corner of the little table under the Madonna’s outstretched arms.

Jan rose suddenly. “Time to leave,” he said.

The woman gathered the new shapes of cloth together, spoke quickly to the children. They ran obediently out into the street. The girl, Weronika, stood with her fair head leaning against the door. Her blue eyes under their thick eyelashes and strongly beautiful brows were watching the children at play.

“It’s safe,” she called back over her shoulder.

The woman watched Sheila tie the yellow handkerchief round her head.

“Not that way. This way,” she said with a smile. Her tanned cheeks creased into fine wrinkles. She took the two long pointed ends of the kerchief in her thick, square-shaped hands. She knotted the scarf firmly. “Like that,” she added, and pushed Sheila gently towards the door. “Go,” she said, and then as Sheila tried to thank her, “You would do the same for me and mine.”

She was already bending to pick up the bedding from the floor as Sheila followed Jan and Stefan into the street Weronika turned back from the door, and gave them a shy sidewise smile. From the kitchen, her mother’s voice was telling her to clear the table and hurry up about it. The children in the street stared at them for a moment in the way that children do, and then remembered suddenly to go on with their game. Their high laughter was the last memory of that staunch house.

In front of the blacksmith’s open shed, an ancient horse was harnessed to a long boat-shaped cart. The blacksmith, standing well back in the black shadows of his shop, watched Sheila and Stefan climb into the low cart. Jan stooped for a moment, as if examining something beneath it, jammed his revolver quickly behind one of the slats, and lifted the reins. He gave a reassuring nod to the old man standing so silently within the shed, said quietly, “We’ll leave the horse and cart with the blacksmith at Rogów as your daughter arranged.” The old man, still silent, watched them drive away.

“He didn’t want us to take the horse,” Jan explained cheerily, “but his daughter persuaded him.”

“That was the woman who took us in, last night?”

“Yes. I knew her husband. We were in the army together.”

“Where is he now?”

“Killed. All the best men get killed.” And then with a sudden laugh, Jan added, “So I’ll live for many a day, yet.” He tilted his cloth cap forward to shield his eyes from the strengthening sunlight, and whistled quietly as the horse plodded forward.

* * *

The road they followed was broad and badly constructed. Its surface had churned into mud. It wound crazily southwards
over a flat plain of harvested fields, with thin trees marking its way. Without the trees, the road might have lost its name as well as its direction.

They passed other peasants, mostly walking. The lumbering carts were few. When German motorcyclists or a Nazi car approached, Jan would slip from the driver’s seat and stand holding the horse’s uncertain head, as if all he had to worry about was the frightened animal. Sheila, clinging to the edge, of the shallow cart, still unsure if it really was going to remain upright, felt that the rearing horse couldn’t be any more terrified than she was. But the Germans passed with mud hissing out from under their tires, and Jan took his perch once more on the rough board across the front of the cart; and the hammock-like wicker basket, its sides supported by wooden slats, rolled along on its four shaky wheels.

Once Sheila said, “This takes a long time, Jan.”

And Jan, turning round to look down at her and Stefan jolting about with the remains of cabbage leaves, wisps of hay, goose feathers, cucumber rinds, poppy seeds, had grinned and said, “Those they are looking for won’t travel slow.”

And once on a lonely stretch of straight road, which went on and on until it hit the blue autumn sky, she said, “What happened last night, Jan? At the wood?”

This time, Jan didn’t turn around. He said, his eyes fixed on the long road in front of him, “The wood was surrounded. The Germans had called up reinforcements. The shooting was over before I got there. I saw Dutka. Dead on the road. So was our man who went back with that spy. At the edge of the wood, there was another body. The cars’ headlights were on it. It was our scout. And then I met one of our men just outside Dutka’s
village. He had been there to warn Dutka’s wife and boy. It was an idea of his own, but it worked. They got away.”

“The captain? Thaddeus?”

“The Germans were still searching when I left. The searchlights had been brought up.”

“There’s a chance, isn’t there, Jan?”

“There’s always a chance.” But his voice was heavy, and his shoulders drooped.

Sheila’s next question about Korytów was stifled by Jan’s expressive back, by Stefan’s dark face. They would tell her when they wanted to. Stefan, now that the excitement of being in a guerrilla camp was over, now that they were faced with a tedious and ignominious journey, had relapsed into heavy gloom. Nothing Sheila could say would pull him out of it. He sat with his arms round his hunched knees, swaying to the rough rhythm of the cart, staring ahead of him with unseeing eyes.

He altered that position only once, and that was when they were stopped by a patrol on the outskirts of one of the larger villages. And then he turned his eyes on the Germans with such burning hate in their black depths that Sheila was afraid. Surely the Germans would notice it, and Jan’s explanations would be useless. But the Germans, after a quick search for weapons on the three stiffly held bodies, after a look into the dirty cart, seemed satisfied. Possibly they had come to think that the look which Stefan gave them was a natural one for a hard-faced, glowering Pole. The main thing, anyway, was kept secret: Jan’s gun, jammed between the wicker cradle of the cart and one of the supporting slats of wood, had not been discovered.

Sheila, in her nervousness as the examination ended and
they were still free, missed her foothold on the cartwheel and slipped. The soldiers laughed. Perhaps it was funny. She picked herself up from the ground and shook down her wide skirts. She bent her head to hide her scarlet cheeks. The Germans thought that still funnier. Jan waited patiently, stupidly, until the soldier who had been holding the horse’s head let it go at a signal from the sergeant. The soldier gave the horse’s nose one last pat.

“I’m fond of horses. Even an old nag like this,” he said. The soldiers, now that they had found these three peasants harmless, stood in an amiable group in the middle of the road. Well clothed, well fed, they looked at the poorly dressed Poles and their ramshackle cart and their ancient horse. There was nothing here to be commandeered. They could indulge themselves in the very pleasant feeling of being so vastly superior. Their mockery was generous. Their humour was broad.

Ian urged the horse forward. As soon as the Germans had started to discuss the girl in particular terms, he had felt it was indeed time to be moving. Many a joke had ended in earnest, before now.

A car, travelling quickly towards them out of the village, was the deciding factor. The half-dozen soldiers formed up neatly, the sergeant saluted, and by that time Jan’s efforts had driven the horse into the beginning of the village.

From the branches of the trees in front of the Posting House were suspended four bodies, hands tied behind their backs, toes pointed, heads drooping forward.

Sheila turned her head away quickly. She said in a hard, strange voice, “I’m fond of horses. Even an old nag...”

Jan’s back was as rigid as Stefan’s eyes.

TO THE FOREST

At Rogów, they left the horse and cart. They also left Jan’s revolver—after a short, bitter argument.

“It’s a good gun,” Jan said, “It’s fought bravely.”

“You’ll get as good a gun where you’re going,” Sheila replied obstinately. (She still broke into a cold sweat when she thought of the casual way Jan had hidden it in the cart.) And Stefan, rather unexpectedly, supported her mutiny, perhaps because Jan had made him discard his penknife before they started the journey.

“All right my lady,” Jan said at last and pointed out the revolver’s hiding place to the man who had taken charge of the horse and cart. “Five good bullets,” he added slowly. And these were the last words he spoke for the next three hours. Even after they were stopped and searched to the south of the village, he still conveyed by his gloomy silence that he would have hidden the gun, that he could have fooled a German any
day.

But apart from this obstinacy, he was as cunning and careful as Sheila could have wished. They avoided any village where, as the peasants warned them, a German garrison was quartered. Jan had no desire to test his story, of travelling to the nearest town to register for work, before a group of officers. And he also avoided any repetition of the cart incident, when the soldiers had shown signs of interest in Sheila. For as soon as they left the village of Rogów, he shouldered her into a ditch. When she struggled out of it, not only were her legs and hands covered with its filth, but her clothes were liberally clotted. Even her face was streaked, and her hair at the temples was splashed with its nauseating mud. She tried to brush it off. That only made matters worse: it would have to dry first. She looked at Jan angrily. “You
would
choose the ripest part of that ditch,” she said bitterly, but he merely stared stolidly back at her. “I gave up my gun,” his eyes were saying. “You can give up looking pretty.” Stefan was no consolation. But at least, Sheila thought, we’ve made him laugh: that’s something. He’s a boy again. Her anger changed to self-pity, and the journey continued in silence.