Alan Furst - The Polish Officer

Another group of Germans began firing from the coal tender, half on, half off the rails where the locomotive had dragged it, and the machine gun came back to life. De Milja heard the sharp whistle that meant it was time to break off the engagement and head back into the forest.

He ran with the others, his breath coming in harsh gasps, up a slight rise to where several young women were guarding the ponies. They left immediately on orders from Kotior, two wounded men slung sideways across the backs of the horses. A third man was shot too badly to move, and Razakavia had to finish him off with a pistol. The rest of the band rode off at a fast trot, vanishing into the forest as the railcar burned brightly in the gray evening.

“The Germans, they always counterattack,” Kotior told him. “Always.” He pointed up at several Fiesler-Storch reconnaissance planes, little two-seater things that buzzed back and forth above the forest. “This is how partisans die,” Kotior added.

They were up there all night, crisscrossing the dark sky. So there could be no fires, no smoking outside the huts. De Milja pulled the blanket tight around his shoulders and loaded box magazines. The cold made his fingers numb, and the springs, like everything Rus-sian, were too strong, tended to snap the feeder bar back into place, ejecting the bullet two feet in the air and producing a snarl of laughter from Kotior. Four hundred miles to the east, on the line Smolensk/Roslavl/Bryansk, the Wehrmacht was fighting. How the hell did they manage in this kind of cold? he wondered. And it was only October. At night the temperature fell and the puddles froze and huge clouds gathered in the sky, but it did not snow. And in the morning it was blue and sunny: winter isn’t coming this year.

At dawn, an alert. De Milja in position on the camp perimeter, aiming into the forest gloom. Somewhere south, perhaps a mile away, he could hear the faint popping of riflery, then the chatter of a light machine gun. Two scouts arrived at midday-they’d had a brush with a Ukrainian SS unit. “They shot at us,” the scout said. “And we shot back. So they fired the machine gun.” He was about fifteen, grinned like a kid. “Frantek went around and he got one of them, we think. They were screaming and yelling ‘fucking Bolsheviks’ and every kind of thing like that. Calling for God.”

“Where is Frantek?” Razakavia said.

The boy shrugged. “He led them away into the marsh. He’ll be back.”

“ Banderovsty. ” Razakavia spat the word.

He meant Ukrainian nationalists under the command of the leader Bandera, absorbed into an SS regiment called the Nachtigall. Kotior turned to de Milja and explained. “They do what the SS won’t.”

With Razakavia and Kotior he went to a town on the outskirts of Brest Litovsk. The owner of a bakery sold them milled oats and rye flour for bread. “We pay for this,” Razakavia told him as they knocked at the back door. “Not everyone does.” There was an ancient relationship in these lands, de Milja knew, between groups of armed men and keepers of granaries. Both sides had to survive, together they defined where honor might lie.

The iron door swung open and a hot wind, heavy with the smell of baking bread, swept over de Milja. “Come in,” the baker said. He had a pink face, and a big belly in an undershirt. They sat at a marble-top table, there was flour everywhere. The baker wiped his hands on his shirt and accepted a cigarette from Razakavia. Behind him the brick ovens were at work, with sometimes a lick of flame where the furnace doors didn’t quite meet. A black bread was brought over and cut up with a sawtooth knife.

Razakavia and the baker talked about the weather. The baker shook his head grimly. “All the old babas have been reading the signs. Caterpillars and geese and bear scat. Probably nonsense, but even if it is, they’re all saying the same thing: it’s going to freeze your balls off.”

Razakavia nodded and chewed on a piece of bread. He reached into a pocket and counted out zlotys he’d bought with the gold rubles. The money lay in stacks on the marble table.

“It’s in the barn in the village of Krymno,” the baker said. “You know where I mean? The same as last spring. In wooden bins.”

“I remember,” Razakavia said.

“You want to take care on the roads, over there.”

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. Somebody goes out and doesn’t come back. Somebody else has to give up a horse. People moving around in the forest.”

“A partisan band?”

“Who knows? These days it could be anything.” He nodded at de Milja. “Who’s your friend?”

“One of us. He’s from down in the Volhynia.”

“Polish?”

“Yes,” de Milja said.

“One of my grandmothers was Polish,” the baker said. “Crazy, she was. All with spells and potions and times of the moon, but good to us. Always jam or a little cake.” The baker’s face softened as he remembered. He put out a hand and de Milja shook it. “Times change, maybe we can have something to drink,” he said.

De Milja smiled. “Better have it now,” he said.

The baker laughed. “Well,” he said.

The dirt track back to the forest went through a little settlement called Gradh. They smelled smoke a mile away, walked the horses in a wide circle around the village. Near the old Jewish cemetery was a great scar of newly packed earth, they saw a lost shoe and a bloody shirt. Above the village, ravens circled in a haze of dirty gray smoke.

“It was a Jewish town,” Razakavia said.

The weather. At first you didn’t notice. A leaf fell. You put on a jacket, took it off later. Then suddenly it tried to kill you, you hid from it as best you could but it seemed to search, to seek you out. In the swamps and woodlands there was mist, snow showers, a freeze, a thaw, heavy rain; then impossible, unimaginable mud. Like dull-minded peasants, de Milja and Frantek would stand by the road-the “road,” the “Moscow highway”-and stare at the German columns. Some days the equipment could move, some days it ground the lightly frozen earth into the mud below, and sank. At night they could hear the panzer tanks-every four hours the engines had to be run to a hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit, which took about fifteen minutes. Then they had to move the tanks around, to use the transmissions-because the oil was of too low a viscosity to protect the gears. Razakavia’s forest was well behind the front lines, a night attack was unlikely. But the Germans could not be sure, and the Soviet air force sent over a plane to harass them now and then, to stir up the defenses on icy nights.

The partisans attacked a repair train the following week. This time Bronstein’s bomb derailed all seven cars, and some of the railway workers tried to surrender, as did a Wehrmacht railroad officer. But every German was shot down, as well as most of the Poles and Ukrainians who worked on the track. The partisans looted the train, taking tools and coal and cigarettes and ammunition. One of the Polish laborers, lightly wounded, pleaded for mercy. Frantek worked the bolt on his rifle, but de Milja stepped between them. “Leave him to me,” he said.

The man fell on his knees and tried to wrap his arms around de Milja’s legs. “Mercy,” he said.

De Milja took him by the shoulder of his jacket and hauled him to his feet. “Stop it,” he hissed in Polish. The man wept. “I have children,” he said. “Four children, little girls.”

De Milja saw Razakavia staring at him coldly: take him as a gift, but don’t ask for another. “It’s all right,” de Milja said. “You can come with us.”

All around him, in the smoking wreckage of the repair train-a tangle of coaches with smashed windows, a flatcar with a crane bent at right angles-single shots rang out as the crew was finished off.