Alan Furst: The Polish Officer

“The Russian divisions have crossed the border,” Vyborg said. “They may not reach your area for a day or so, but it’s hard to predict. The Germans are headed west-giving up territory. We believe there’s a line of demarcation between Hitler and Stalin, and the Russians will move up to occupy the new border.”

“Does that change anything for us?”

“No. But German aircraft have been attacking the line south of you. The railroad people say they can keep it open another twenty-four hours, but that’s about it. Still, we think you ought to find cover, then continue after dark. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All the roads out of Warsaw are now cut. This office is closing down, so you’re on your own from now on. Consider that to have the status of a written order.”

“Understood, sir.”

“So, best of luck to you. To all of us.”

The connection was broken.

A corporal in the Geographical Section had made a specialty of hiding trains. Using his hand-drawn map, de Milja directed the engineer to a branch line south of Pulawy that wound up into the hills above the Vistula. There, twenty miles west of Lublin, a gypsum mining operation had gone bankrupt and been shut down some time in the 1920s. But the railroad spur that ran to the site, though wildly overgrown, was still usable, and a roofed shed built for loading open railcars was still standing. Under the shed, with the engine turned off, they were very close to invisible.

17 September, 8:25 P.M.

Over the years, the abandoned quarry had filled with water, and after dark de Milja could see the reflection of the rising moon on the still surface.

The engineer had patched the hole in the firebox, using tin snips, a tea tray, and wire. A big kid, about fifteen, from a farm village volunteered to work as the fireman-what he lacked in skill he’d make up with raw strength. Nowak took the opportunity to sight-in four rifles, which, with a few boxes of ammunition, had been hidden behind a panel in the last coach. He chose four men: a mechanic, a retired policeman, a student, and a man who didn’t exactly want to say what he did, to be armed in case of emergency.

There wasn’t much else they could do. The engine moved cautiously over the old track, heading east for the ancient city of Lublin, the countryside dark and deserted. The passengers were quiet, some doubtless having second thoughts about being cast adrift in a country at war. Maybe they would have been better off staying in Warsaw.

They reached Lublin a little after ten. Warehouses along the railroad line had been blazing since that afternoon, and the city’s ruptured water mains meant that the fire department could do little more than watch. The train crawled through thick black coils of heavy smoke, the passengers had to wet handkerchiefs and put them over their noses and mouths in order to breathe. A brakeman flagged them down. De Milja went up to the locomotive.

“We’ve been ordered to get you people through,” the brakeman said, “and the crews are doing the best they can. But they bombed us just before sunset, and it’s very bad up ahead.” The brakeman coughed and spat. “We had all the worst things down here; wool, creosote, tarred rope. Now it’s just going to burn.”

“Any sign of Russian troops?” de Milja asked.

“Not sure. We had a freight train disappear this morning. Vanished. What’s your opinion about that?”

It took forever for them to work their way through Lublin. At one point, a shirtless work crew, bodies black with soot, laid twenty-five feet of track almost directly beneath their wheels. The passengers gagged on the smoke, tried to get away from it by taking turns lying flat in the aisle, rubbed at the oily film that clung to their hands and faces, but that only made it burn worse. Farther down the line an old wooden bridge had collapsed onto the track and the huge, charred timbers were being hauled away by blindfolded farm horses. A saboteur-identified as such by a sign hung around his neck-had been hanged from a signal stanchion above the track. A group of passengers came to the last coach and pleaded with de Milja to get off the train. Nowak got the engine stopped, and a small crowd of people scurried away down the firelit lanes of the old city.

And then, once again, the war was gone.

The train climbed gently into the uplands east of the Carpathians. Warsaw, a northern city, seemed a long way from here-this was the ragged edge of Europe, border land. They ran dark, the lamps turned off in the coaches, only the locomotive light sweeping along the rails where, as the night cooled, land mist drifted through the beam. Beyond that, the steppe. Treeless, empty, sometimes a few thatched huts around a well and a tiny dirt road that ran off into the endless distance, to Russia, to the Urals. Now and then a village-a log station house with a Ukrainian name-but down here it was mostly the track and the wind.

De Milja stood beside the engineer and stared out into the darkness. The boy who’d taken the fireman’s job fed coal to the firebox when the engineer told him to. His palms had blistered after an hour of shoveling, so he’d taken his shirt off and torn it in half and tied it around his hands. When he stepped away from the furnace he shivered in the night air, but he was a man that night and de Milja knew better than to say anything.

At some nameless settlement, the train stopped at a water tower, the engineer swung the spout into position and began to fill the tank. It was long after midnight, and deserted-only the sigh of the wind, moths fluttering in the engine light, and the splash of water. Then, suddenly, a girl was standing by the locomotive. She was perhaps sixteen, barefoot, wearing a soiled cotton shift, head scarf, and a thin shawl around her shoulders. She was the most beautiful girl that de Milja had ever seen. “Please, Your Excellency,” she said-the dialect was ancient and de Milja barely understood her-“may I be permitted to ride on the train?”

She raised her hand, opened her fingers to reveal a pair of tiny gold earrings resting on her palm.

De Milja was speechless. The engineer, standing atop the front of the locomotive, stared down at her, and the boy stopped shoveling coal. The hem of the shift was spattered with mud, her ankles thin above dirty feet. She is pregnant, de Milja thought. She stood patiently, her eyes not quite meeting his, a sign of submission, her other hand clutching the shawl at her throat. But when de Milja did not speak, she looked directly at him and, just for an instant, her eyes lit up green fire as they caught the light, then she hid them away.

“Please, Excellency?” The earrings must not be worth what she thought; her voice faded in defeat.

“You do not have to pay,” de Milja said.

Her face hid nothing, and it was plain how she had struggled, all her life, to understand things. She had never been on a train before, but she knew one or two people who had, and she had asked them about it, and one certainly had to pay. Atop the locomotive, the engineer swung the water spout away so that water splashed on the ground beside the tracks until he shut it off.

De Milja waited for her to ask where they were going, but she never did. “You may ride on the train,” he said.

Still hesitant, she closed the earrings in her fist and held them to her throat. Then turned toward the passenger coaches. Did he mean what he said? Or was he just making fun of her? No, he meant it. Before he could change his mind she ran like a deer, climbed cautiously onto the iron step of the first coach, peered inside, then vanished.

Past Lvov, then Uzhgorod.

Sublieutenant Nowak took the watch for an hour, then a little after four in the morning de Milja returned. Now the train was climbing a grade that ran through a pine forest, then past Kulikov, then deeper into the mountains that marked the southern border of Poland.