Alan Furst - The Polish Officer

The policeman whistled through his teeth, a couple of colleagues joined him, and the little man was quickly retrieved, virtually carried through the crowd by the elbows and hoisted up to de Milja in the locomotive cab.

“Better go,” the policeman said.

De Milja signaled to the conductor, who swung himself up onto the train. The engineer worked his levers and blew a long blast on the whistle as the heavily laden train moved slowly out of Gdansk station.

“Thank you,” said the little man. He was somewhere in his forties, de Milja thought, with the face of a Jewish imp. “I am Vladimir Herschensohn.” He extended his hand, and de Milja shook it. Herschensohn saw that de Milja was staring at his battered violin case. “I am,” he added, “the principal violinist of the Polish National Symphony Orchestra.”

De Milja inclined his head in acknowledgment.

“So,” Herschensohn said. “We are going to Pilava.” He had to raise his voice above the chuff of the locomotive, but he managed a tone of great politeness.

“South of there,” was all de Milja said.

At the 9:15 meeting with Colonel Vyborg, de Milja had brought up the issue: what to tell the passengers. “What you like, when you like, you decide,” Vyborg had said.

Vyborg’s room had been crowded-people sitting on desks, on the floor, everywhere. De Milja knew most of them, and what they had in common was a certain ruthless competence. Suddenly the days of office politics, family connections, the well-fed wink, were over. Now the issue was survival, and these officers, like de Milja, found themselves given command and assigned to emergency operations.

The agenda of the meeting was long and difficult and devoted to a single topic: the dispersion to safety of the national wealth. War cost money and Poland meant to keep fighting. And there wasn’t that much. A country like Great Britain had a national wealth of two hundred million dollars, but Poland had only been alive as an independent nation since 1918-this time around-and owned barely a tenth of that.

Stocks and bonds and letters of deposit on foreign banks were going to leave the port of Gdynia on a Danish passenger liner. British pounds, French francs, and American dollars were to be flown out at night by one of the last remaining air-force transports, while millions of Polish zlotys and German reichsmarks were being buried in secret vaults in Warsaw-they would be needed there. Senior code and cipher experts, the cream of Polish intelligence, had already left the country. And it was de Milja’s job to take out the gold reserve, carrying it by train to Romania, where another group would move it on to Paris, the time-honored host to Polish governments-in-exile.

From Gdansk station they traveled slowly through the central districts of the city, where crews were filling bomb craters and repairing rail by the light of fires in oil drums. They crossed the railroad bridge back into Praga, then turned south on the eastern bank of the Vistula. Soon the city was behind them, and the track left the river and curved gently southeast, toward the city of Lublin.

The conductor who’d gotten on the train at the Dimek Street bridge was a man of old-fashioned manners and grave demeanor, with a droopy mustache, a conductor’s hat one size too large, and a limp from wounds received when his train was dive-bombed in the first hours of the war. When he’d reported to de Milja at the bridge, he had stood at attention and produced from his belt a 9 mm Parabellum pistol-a 1914 cannon-and informed de Milja that he’d fought the Bolsheviks in 1921, and was prepared to send a significant number of Germans straight to hell if he got the opportunity.

As the train chugged through the Polish countryside, the conductor went from car to car and made a little speech. “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please. Soon we will be stopping at Pilava; those who wish to get off the train are invited to do so. However, this train will not be returning to Warsaw, it is going all the way to Lvov, with brief stops at Lublin and Tomaszow. The military situation in the south is unclear, but the railroad will take you as far as you wish to travel. Passage is without charge. Thank you.”

From the last car, de Milja watched the crowd carefully. But the reaction was subdued: a number of family conferences conducted in urgent whispers, an avalanche of questions that God himself, let alone a train conductor, couldn’t have answered, and more than a little head shaking and grim smiling at the bizarre twists and turns that life now seemed to take. The Polish people, de Milja realized, had already absorbed the first shock of war and dislocation; now it was a question of survival; ingenuity, improvisation, and the will to live through catastrophe and see the other side of it. So when the train stopped at Pilava, only a few people got off. The farther from Warsaw the better- what consensus there was among the passengers seemed to follow that line of reasoning.

For a time, the countryside itself proved them right. South of Pilava there was no war, only a rainy September morning, a strip of pale sky on the horizon, harvested fields, birch groves, and tiny streams. The air smelled of damp earth and the coming October. The leaves a little dry now, and rustling in the wind.

De Milja’s mother was the Countess Ostrowa, and her brothers, known always as “the Ostrow uncles,” had taken it upon themselves to teach him about life; about dogs and horses and guns, servants and mistresses. They were from another time-a vanished age, his father said-but his mother adored them and they lived hard, drunken, brutal, happy lives and never bothered to notice they were in the wrong century.

His father was an aristocrat of another sort: second son of a family occupied for generations with polite commerce, senior professor of economics at Jagiello university. He was an arid man, tall and spare, who had been old all his life and who, in his heart, didn’t really think very much of the human mammal. The vaguely noble name de Milja, pronounced de Milya, he shooed away with his hand, admitting there was a village in Silesia, some forty miles from where the family originated, called Milja, but the aristocratic formation he ascribed to “some Austro-Hungarian nonsense my grandfather meddled with” and would never say any more about it. Exiled to the top floor of the family house in Warsaw, he lived by the light of a green-glass lamp amid piles of German periodicals and stacks of woody paper covered with algebraic equations rendered in fountain pen.

So de Milja’s world, from its earliest days, had a cold north and a hot south, and he spent his time going back and forth; as a boy, as a young man, maybe, he thought, forever. The uncles laughing and roaring downstairs, throwing chicken bones in the fire, grabbing the maids’ bottoms, and passing out on the sofas with their boots on the pillows. Up two flights, a family of storks nested among the chimneys on the opposite roof and his father explained spiders and thunder.

They’d married de Milja off when he was nineteen. The families had known each other forever, he and Helena were introduced, left alone, and encouraged to fall in love. She probably saw the wisdom of all this much more clearly than he did-gazed at his belt buckle, kissed him with swollen lips and a hand on his jaw, and he was hers. Two weeks before the wedding, his favorite Ostrow uncle had taken him into a disused parlor, the furniture covered with sheets, where they fortified themselves with Armagnac, and his uncle-scarlet face, shaved head, glorious cavalry mustaches-had given him a premarital lovemaking lesson with the aid of a dressmaker’s dummy. “You’re not a bull, dammit!” he’d bellowed. “You don’t mount her when she’s at the kitchen stove.”