Alan Furst - The Polish Officer

The man de Milja had saved was, by trade, a cobbler, and spent his first days in the encampment sewing boots and improvising repairs of all kinds. De Milja took him, late one afternoon, to a village near the forest, where a young widow sold vodka. If you paid a little extra you could drink it in a toolshed behind her house-she would even supply a few sticks of wood for the stove.

“My family is from Rovno, south of the Pripet marsh,” the man explained. “Life wasn’t so bad. The Poles had to watch it down there, but there was plenty of work, the police protected us, we had everything we needed. Maybe a little more.”

He took a pull from the vodka bottle, wiped his mustache with his fingers. Outside it was growing dark, and rain drummed on the roof of the shed. “Then, September of ’39. The Russians came and occupied the town. We were working people, didn’t put on airs, and we’d always been decent to the peasants, so when the commissars appointed a council of workers, they spared us, and let us go on with our lives. Very honestly, a lot of them had boots for the first time-it was the deportees who went barefoot-so they needed us and they knew it.

“Still, some of my family didn’t fare so well. One of my sisters was a nun, she disappeared. Another sister was married to a clerk in the district administration-they were sent east in freight cars. Gone. Door of the house banging in the wind, dinner rotting on the table. Make your heart sick to see it. My brother was a sergeant in the army. He’d been captured in the first days of the invasion, but maybe that was better for him. At least he wasn’t arrested, and he came from a unit that had laid down their guns when the Soviet troops said they’d arrived to fight the Germans.

“So him they sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, an NKVD camp called Ostashkov, not far from Smolensk. They really didn’t seem to know what they wanted to do with them. The officers-mostly reserve officers; engineers, teachers, doctors-they took them away, rumor was to a camp in the Katyn forest. Stefan, that’s my brother, and the other enlisted men, they just sat there and starved. Finally, they sent him to Moscow.”

“ Moscow! It’s true?”

“It’s true, I swear it. What happened to Stefan was, the Russians thought he was one of them. Almost by accident-but then, that’s how he is. He’s not like me, doesn’t matter what I try it goes wrong. But Stefan’s not like that-if the world had gone on like it always did, he’d be doing very well now.”

The cobbler took another pull at the vodka. He looked off into the dusk, watching fondly as his brother did well.

“What happened?” de Milja said. “At the camp.”

“Oh. He befriended one of the NKVD men.”

“A political officer?”

“No! Nothing like that-a sergeant, just like him. This man had a hunting dog, a spaniel bitch, and his pleasure was to go into the marsh with this dog and perhaps shoot a duck or two and the dog would go into the reeds and bring them back. But the dog got hurt, and it wouldn’t eat, and it was dying. Stefan found out about it, and he told the NKVD man what to do, and the dog got better. And that was the end of it-except that it wasn’t. One day the man came to where he was kept and said, ‘You’re going to have a choice. Everybody here is going to a new camp, in the Katyn forest. For you, it’s better to tell them that you want to go to school, in Moscow.’ And that’s what Stefan did.”

“And then?”

“Well, he came home.”

“Just like that?”

The cobbler shrugged. “Yes.”

“A free man?”

“Well, yes. For a time, anyhow.”

“What happened?”

“Poor Stefan.”

“Another drink? There’s a little left.”

“Yes, all right, thank you. I owe you my life, you know.”

“Oh, anyone would have done what I did. But, ah, what happened to Stefan?”

“Too strong, Stefan. Sometimes it isn’t for the best. He went into the town, I don’t know why. And some German didn’t like his looks, and they asked for his papers, and Stefan hit him.”

“In Rovno, this was?”

“Yes. He managed to run away-a friend saw it and told us. But then they caught him. They beat him up and took him off in one of those black trucks, and now he’s in Czarny prison.” The cobbler looked away, his face angry and bitter. “They are going to hang him.”

“He has a family?”

“Oh yes. Just like me.”

“Name the same as yours?”

“Yes. Krewinski, just like mine. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Don’t get angry.”

“Shameful thing. It’s the Russians’ fault, they won’t leave us alone.” He paused a moment, took another sip of vodka. “You think there’s hope? I mean, we’re told to pray for this and for that. We’re told there’s always hope. Do you think that’s true?”

De Milja thought it over. “Well,” he said at last, “there’s always hope. But I think you ought to pray for his soul. That might be the best thing.”

The cobbler shook his head in reluctant agreement. “Poor Stefan,” he said, wiping the tears from his eyes.

Kotior commanded the unit sent off to Krymno to retrieve the grain. He was accompanied by Frantek, his fellow scout Pavel, an older man called Korbin, de Milja, and two Ukrainian peasant girls who drove the farm wagons. The rifles were hidden under burlap sacks in the wagons.

They rode all morning, along a track that wound through water meadows, fields of reeds rustling as they swayed in the wind, the air chill and heavy. The village was no more than fifteen miles from Brest but it lay beyond the forest, some distance into the marshland along a tributary of the river Pripet. A few wooden huts, a farm with stone barns, then reeds again, pools of black, still water, and windswept sky to the horizon on every side.

The farm dogs snarled at them as they rode up and the peasant who tended the farm came out of his house with a battered shotgun riding the crook of his arm. The man spoke some form of local dialect de Milja could barely understand but Kotior told him to call the dogs off, dismounted, and explained slowly who they were and what they had come for. Then they all went into the barn-warmed by a cow, smelling of dung and damp straw, the dogs drinking eagerly at pools of water where grain stalks had fermented.

“Where is the rest?” Kotior asked, standing in front of empty wooden bins.

The peasant, agitated now, seemed to be telling Kotior a long and complicated story. Kotior nodded, a reasonable man who would accept whatever he was told, then suddenly barred a forearm across the peasant’s throat and forced him back against a wall. A Russian bayonet-four-edged, it made a cross-shaped wound-had appeared in his hand and he held the point under the man’s chin. The shotgun dropped to the floor. The dogs went wild, but Frantek kicked one and it ran away with the rest following.

The peasant didn’t struggle, his face went passive as he prepared to die. Then Kotior let him go. “He says the grain was taken away. By a detachment of partisans. He thinks they intend to come back for the rest of it.” After some discussion they decided to wait, at least until morning. They pulled the wagons into the barn, posted Frantek and Pavel at the two ends of the settlement, and took turns sleeping.

They came at dawn. Pavel sounded the alarm in time for them to set up an ambush. At Kotior’s direction, de Milja was in the hayloft of the barn, the Simonov covering the road below.

The column appeared from the gray mist, silent but for the sound of hooves on the muddy road. There were forty of them, well armed. He saw several automatic rifles, several pepechas -Russian submachine guns-a few weapons he could not identify. Otherwise they looked like the Razakavia band. They wore wool jackets and peaked caps and boots, sometimes a military coat or trousers. The leader, de Milja guessed he was the leader, had a pair of binoculars on a strap and a holstered pistol.