Alan Furst - The Polish Officer

Speaking of the police: the gentleman on the terrace of the Niculescu is evidently of interest to at least three, one uniformed, two not, and they are in turn doubtless assisted by various barmen, drivers of horsedrawn trasuri cabs, and the rouge-cheeked girls left over from last night. Such a wealth of attention! But, frankly, whose fault is that? Poor Romania, the flood comes to its door-Jews and socialists and misfits and Poles and spies and just about any damn thing you care to name. It’s gotten so bad they’ve had to put little cards on the tables at the Plaza-Athénée. BY ORDER OF THE GOVERNMENT, POLITICAL DISCUSSION IS FORBIDDEN.

The gentleman on the terrace of the Niculescu ordered a second coffee. When it came, he took a handful of leu coins out of his pocket, then hesitated a moment, uncertain what was worth what. The waiter, the natural curl of his lip tightening just a bit, deftly plucked out the right ones and dropped them in his waiter’s saucer. Here was the land of “ saruta mina pe care nu o poti musca ”-kiss the hand you cannot bite-inhabited solely by the contemptuous and the contemptible, and those who had some doubt as to where they belonged could find instruction in the eyes of any café waiter.

If the gentleman on the terrace of the Niculescu didn’t particularly care, it was, at least in part, because his head swam with hunger. Just behind him, lunchtime lobsters and crayfish were being set out on beds of shaved ice, the Niculescu’s kitchen was preparing its famous hot-meat-and-fried-mushroom patties. Two peddlers with packs and long beards had stopped nearby to eat slices of white cheese and garlic on cold corn polenta, even the Gypsies, just across the square, were cooking a rabbit over a pot of burning tar. The gentleman on the terrace took a measured sip of coffee. Discipline, he told himself. Make it last.

The woman was stylish, somewhere in middle age, wearing a little hat with a half-veil. She arrived in a trasuri, bid it wait with a wave of a gloved hand, and accepted the doorman’s arm to descend from the carriage. The gentleman on the terrace was pleased to see her. He stood politely while she settled herself on a chair. The waiter pushed the lank hair back from his forehead and said “Service” in French as he went for her coffee.

She drank only a sip. They spoke briefly, then she whispered by his ear, and they held hands for a moment beneath the table. He stood, she rose, he took her hand, she presented her veil for a brush of his lips, said a parting word behind the back of her hand, walked quickly to her trasuri and was gone, leaving a cloud of lilac scent. “God go with you, Captain,” was what she’d said.

The gentleman on the terrace touched the pocket of his jacket, making sure of the money she’d passed to him, then strolled slowly across the square, past the policemen, uniformed and not, and their helpers, past old women sweeping the cobblestones with twig brooms, past a flock of pigeons that rose into the air with beating wings.

Captain de Milja left that night. He’d had enough of Bucharest: the rooming house, the police, and the assorted ghosts and wolves who lived in the cafés. And more than enough of Romania. The country, under German diplomatic pressure, had started to intern Polish army units crossing the border-as they had interned most of the senior ministers of the Polish government. Time to go.

He traveled under a cover he’d created for himself, using a blank identity card they’d left in his dossier the night he went to work for Vyborg. Name: Jan Boden. That made him a Silesian Pole-like his father-with a good knowledge of German and likely some German blood. Profession: Buyer of wood for coffins. That made it normal for him to travel, yet wasn’t a profession that the Germans would want to draft-not, for example, like an expert machinist-for labor in Germany. He wore a leather coat so he wouldn’t freeze, and carried a VIS, the Polish army automatic pistol, so he wouldn’t be taken prisoner. If he had to drop it quickly somewhere, he could always get another. After six years of war, 1914–1918, then the 1920–1921 campaign against the Red Army, Poland was an armory. Every barn, every cellar, every attic had its weapons and ammunition. And the Poles were not Russian peasants; they cleaned and oiled and maintained, because they liked things that worked.

He had some time to spare-the message that the courier delivered along with the money was Room 9 at Saint Stanislaus Hospital on Grodny Street by 23 October- and that probably saved his life. He took a train from Bucharest up to Sighisoara in the Transylvanian Alps, then another, going west, that crossed into Hungary near Arad. Changed again, this time going north to Kisvarda, in the Carpathians. As it grew dark, he caught a ride on a truck into a border village by a stream that fed into the Tisza, close to one of several passes over the mountains.

He entered the local tavern, ordered beer and sausage, and was approached by the local passeurs- smugglers-within the hour. He said he wished to be guided into Poland, a price was set, everybody spit on their palms and shook hands.

But soon after they started out, he realized that, contractual spits notwithstanding, they meant to kill him and take his money. It was black dark. The two passeurs, reeking of taverns, goats, and rancid fat, squatted on either side of him. They whispered, and touched his arms. Too much, as though familiarizing themselves with his physical capacity, and dissipating his protective magic. One of them had a knife in his belt-a dull, rusty thing, the idea of being stabbed with it gave de Milja a chill.

“I have to go behind a tree,” he said in Polish. Then he faded away in the darkness and just kept going. He found what he believed to be the south bank of the Tisza, then a dirt track that someone might have intended as a road, then a bridge, where he could hear the unmistakable sounds of Russian soldiers getting drunk: singing, then arguing, then fighting, then weeping, then snoring. As one of the Ostrow uncles used to say, “Here is something a man can depend on-never mind some silly ball rolling down an inclined plane.”

De Milja crossed the bridge a little after two in the morning; he was then in Soviet-occupied Poland. He walked another hour, winter cold numbing his face at the high altitude, then came upon a deserted farm-no barking dogs-opened the milking shed, kicked together a straw bed for himself, and actually slept until dawn.

By midday on the twenty-first of October, he was in the town of Kosow, where the railroad went to Tarnopol. He bought a ticket and caught the next train; his night in the milk shed had left him rumpled, unshaven, a little smelly, and thoroughly acceptable-proletarian-to the Russian guards at the railroad station. He leaned his head against the cold glass of the window as the train crossed the Dniester: yes, he was under orders to go to Warsaw, but he meant to find his wife at the clinic, meant somehow to get her across the border into Romania. Let them intern her if they liked-it was better than being at the mercy of the Russians.

In Tarnopol, the taxis had disappeared from the railway station, so he walked through the winding streets in late afternoon, found the way out of town, and was soon headed for the clinic down a rutted dirt path. He knew this country, the Volhynia, it was home to his mother’s family estates, more than three thousand acres of rolling hills, part forest, part farmland, with bountiful hunting and poor harvests and no way to earn a zloty, a lost paradise where one could gently starve to death with a contented heart beneath a pale, lovely moon.

The birch trees shimmered in the wind as night came on, butterflies hovered over a still pond in a meadow, the shadowy woods ran on forever-a fine place to write a poem or be murdered or whatever fate might have in mind for you just then. The little boy in de Milja’s heart was every bit as scared of this forest as he’d always been, the VIS pistol in his pocket affording just about as much protection from the local spirits as the rock he used to carry.