Alan Furst - The Polish Officer

The peasant came out of the barn and raised his hand. The column stopped. The leader-de Milja had been right-climbed off his horse and led it forward. De Milja sighted on him. He was perhaps forty, a Slav, clean-shaven, something of the soldier in the way he held his shoulders. He talked with the peasant for a time. Then Kotior came out of the barn and joined the conversation, eventually signaling to de Milja that he should come down.

They were joined by another man, who the leader referred to as politruk. The conversation was very tense. “He has told me they are taking the grain,” Kotior said evenly. “Requisitioned,” the leader said in Russian. “For partisan operations.”

“We are also partisans,” Kotior said.

“Not bandits, perhaps?”

“Polish partisans.”

“Then we are friends,” the politruk said. “Poland and the Soviet Union. Allies.” He wore a leather coat, had cropped fair hair and albino coloring. His hands were deep in his pockets-de Milja could almost see the NKVD-issue Makarov in there. “This matter of the grain, a misunderstanding,” he said.

Kotior and de Milja were silent.

“Best to come back to our camp, we can sit down and talk this out.”

“Another time, perhaps,” de Milja said.

The politruk was angry. “War doesn’t wait,” he said.

De Milja saw no signal, but the mounted partisans shifted, some of them moving out of de Milja’s line of sight.

“I think it would be best. .” The politruk stopped in midsentence. De Milja watched his eyes, then turned to see what he was looking at. One of the wagons was moving slowly out of the barn, the pair of shaggy horses trudging through the mud. The Ukrainian girl held the reins in the crook of her knee and was pointing a rifle at the two Russians. The leader made a gesture- enough, let it go. Frantek rode up, pistol in one hand, face pinched like an angry child. In his other hand, the reins of de Milja’s and Kotior’s horses. When he spat, meaningfully, down into the dirt, the politruk blinked.

De Milja put a foot in the stirrup and swung up on the pony. The politruk and the leader stared without expression as the unit rode off, walking the horses at wagon speed. The skies over the marsh were alive, broken gray cloud blown west, and a few dry flakes of snow drifting down.

“We’ll need a rear guard,” de Milja said to Kotior as the settlement fell behind them.

“Yes, I know. You stay, with Frantek.” He paused. “I can understand most Russians when they speak, we all can in this place. But what is a politruk ?”

“It means political officer. ”

Kotior shrugged-that was to raise life to a level where it only pretended to exist. “We’ll need an hour,” he said, gesturing at the wagons. “At least that.”

“You will have it,” de Milja said.

There wasn’t much cover. Frantek and de Milja rode at the back of the column until they found a low hill with a grove of pine trees that marked the edge of the forest east of Brest. There they waited, watching the dirt road below them, the cold working its way through their sheepskins.

Frantek seemed, to de Milja, to have been born to the life he lived. His parents had gone to market one Saturday morning and never come home. So, at the age of twelve, he had gone to the forest and found Razakavia. The forest bands always needed scouts, and Frantek and his friends knew it. Now he leaned back against a tree, folded his arms around his rifle and across his chest, and pulled his knees up, completely at rest except for his eyes, slitted against the snow, watching the approaches to the hilltop.

“Do you like the life in the forest?” de Milja asked him, tired of listening to the wind.

Frantek thought it over. “I miss my dog,” he said. “Her name was Chaya.”

The Russians came thirty minutes later, four scouts riding single file. One of them dismounted, squatted, determined that the horse droppings were fresh, and climbed back on his horse. They moved slowly, at wagon speed, waiting for the band to leave the steppe and enter the forest.

“Do not fire,” de Milja said to Frantek as they flattened out behind the pine trees. “That is an order,” he added.

Frantek acknowledged it-barely. To him, de Milja seemed cautious, even hesitant, and he’d killed enough to know how attentive it made people. But he’d also come across many inexplicable things in his short life and he’d decided that de Milja was just one more.

De Milja sighted down the Simonov at four hundred yards. Ping. That animated the Russians and drew an appreciative chuckle from Frantek. They leaped off their horses and went flat on the ground. Disciplined, they did not fire their rifles. They waited. Ten long minutes.

“Mine is on the far left,” Frantek said, squinting through his gunsight.

“Not yet,” de Milja said.

One of the Russian scouts rose to one knee, rifle at his hip swinging back and forth across the axis of the road. Then he stood.

“Now?” said Frantek.

“No.”

The scout retrieved his horse. Climbed up in the saddle. Ping.

At first, de Milja was afraid he’d miscalculated and killed him, because he seemed to fly off the horse, which shied and galloped a few yards. And the other three scouts returned fire, including a long staccato rattle, at least half a drum of pepecha rounds. Some of it in their direction-a white mark chipped in a tree trunk, the sound of canvas ripping overhead-but not the sort of enthusiastic concentration that would mean the scouts knew where they were. Then the man de Milja had fired at moved, changed positions, scuttling along low to the ground and throwing himself flat.

De Milja’s greatest worry was Frantek, an excellent shot with young eyes. But discipline held. De Milja extended his left hand, palm flat, fingers slightly spread: hold on, do nothing. Frantek pressed himself against the earth, outraged he had to endure this insulting gunfire but, for the moment, under control.

The wind rose, snowflakes spun through the air, swirling like dust and whitening the dirt road. It saved their lives, Razakavia said later. “Russians read snow like priests read Bibles.” Or, perhaps, that day, nobody wanted to die.

The Russians mounted their horses, slow and deliberate under the eyes of the unseen riflemen, and rode back the way they came.

De Milja had been ice inside for a long time-there wasn’t any other way for him to do what he had to do-but Rovno scared him. The Germans had it all their own way in Rovno. The SS were everywhere, death’s-head insignia and lightning flashes, a certain walk, a certain smile. The Einsatzgruppen came through, on the way to murder Jews in another ghetto somewhere, there were Ukrainian SS, Latvian SS, and German criminals, alley killers the Nazi recruiters had quarried from the prisons since 1927. As well as those ordinary Germans, always liked by their neighbors, who, given the opportunity, turned out to be not so very mild-mannered after all. They were the worst, and one taste of blood was all it took.

De Milja met their eyes in Rovno. He dared not be furtive. So he returned the stares, trudged along in the snow, cold and absentminded and absorbed in his business. And armed. It went against the current wisdom-one street search and you were finished. But he would not be taken alive. The cyanide capsule sewn in the point of his shirt collar was the last resort, but the VIS snugged against the small of his back gave him at least the illusion of survival.

The ZWZ secret mail system operated all over Poland, mostly out of dress shops, with couriers carrying letters from city to city. De Milja had used it to report the Russian contact and that had produced a request-delivered in a park in Brest Litovsk-for a meeting in Rovno. With Major Olenik, his former superior in Warsaw and, now that he was no longer under the direct orders of the Sixth Bureau in London, his superior once again.