Berel Jastrow was not in the council building. Wandering through crowded, dark, dingy corridors lit only by flickering thick candles, Byron chanced on a man whom he had once seen conferring with Berel, a little, neat, bearded Jew with a glass eye that gave him a walleyed stare. Talking a mishmash of German and Yiddish, the man conveyed that Berel was inspecting the community kitchens. Byron set out to hunt him down, and came on him in a huge Romanesque synagogue of gray stone, undamaged except for a broken stone Star of David in a round glassless window. Jastrow stood in a low hot anteroom where people were lined up for a strong-smelling stew ladled out by kerchiefed perspiring women from tubs on wood-burning stoves.
“The Russians!” Berel stroked his beard. “This is definite?”
“Your mayor came to the embassy with the news.”
“Let us go outside.”
They talked out in the street, well away from the food queue. The raggedly dressed people in line stared at them and tried to hear the conversation, even cupping hands to ears. “I must report this to the central committee,” Berel said. “It may be good news. Who knows? Suppose the two robbers cut each other’s throats? Such things have happened. The Russians could be messengers of God.”
He was taken aback when Byron offered him Natalie’s wallet. “But what is she thinking?” he said. “I have money. I have dollars. She may need that herself. She isn’t out of Warsaw yet.”
Byron was embarrassed. It had not occurred to him that Jastrow might be offended, but now the reaction seemed natural. He said the Americans expected to leave Warsaw soon under a flag of truce.
“So. We won’t see you or Natalie again?”
“Possibly not.”
“Ah. Well, if the Germans let all you Americans out together, she should be safe. She told me an American passport says nothing about religion. Tell her I thank her, and I’ll put the money in the food fund. Tell her—Vorsicht!”
A shell whistled down and exploded some distance away, making Byron’s ears ache. Berel spoke hurriedly. “So, they are coming back to this neighborhood again. They shell by a system, the Germans. Yesterday was Yom Kippur, and all day the shells fell on us, they never stopped. Now, you will be seeing Arele?” He smiled wryly at Byron’s blank look. “Dr. Aaron Jastrow,” he said, mimicking English pronunciation.
“I guess so.”
“Tell him,” Berel said, “Lekh lekha. Can you remember that? It’s two simple Hebrew words. Lekh lekha.”
“Lekh lekha,” Byron said.
“Very good. You’re a fine Hebrew student.”
“What does it mean?”
“Get out.” Berel gave a worn white card to Byron. “Now, will you do me a favor? This is a man in New Jersey, an importer. He sent a bank draft in August for a large shipment of mushrooms. It came too late. I destroyed the draft, so there’s no problem, but—what are you smiling at?”
“Well, you have so much to worry about. And yet you think of this.”
Jastrow shrugged. “This is my business. The Germans, they’ll either come in, or they won’t. After all, they’re not lions and tigers. They’re people. They’ll take our money. It’ll be a very bad time, but a war always ends. Listen, if the Russians come they’ll take our money, too. So”—he held out his hand to Byron—“so, God bless you, and—”
Byron heard the noise of a shell very close, the unmistakable sloppy whir and whistle. It went splintering through the synagogue roof. The stunning explosion came a second or two later, giving him a chance to clap his hands to his ears and fall to the ground. Strangely, it did not blow out the front wall, and this was what saved the people on the line. Fragments of the roof went flying through the air, raining in a clatter on the street and on nearby buildings. Then, even as he and Jastrow stood, they saw the whole façade of the synagogue come sliding down like a descending curtain, disintegrating as it went with a rumble and a gathering crash. By now the queue of people had run out of danger. White dust boiled up, and through this cloud, which the breeze thinned at once, Byron could see the marble pillars and carved wooden doors of the holy ark untouched on the far wall, looking naked and out of place in the pale smoky sunshine.
Berel slapped him sharply on the shoulder. “Go, go! Don’t stay here. Go now. I have to help.”
Jewish men and boys were already groping into the new ruin, where many little fires were flickering. Little as he knew of Judaism, Byron understood that they meant to save the scrolls.
“All right, I’m going back to Natalie.”
“Good. Thank you, thank you. A safe journey to both of you.”
Byron left at a trot. The uncovering of the holy ark to the sunshine had shocked him like a piece of powerful music. Jogging back through the Jewish quarter of Warsaw, he saw these smashed rows of gray and brown houses, these cobbled streets and dirt alleys, these shabby courtyards and mews hung with drying laundry, these crowds of orderly Jews in beards and broad hats, these dark-eyed cheerful children playing under the bombs, these dogged tired street vendors with their carts and baskets, these kiosks laden with newspapers, magazines, feuilletons, and paperbound books, this smoke-filtered sunshine, these overturned trolleys, these dead horses—he saw all this in superbright detail, each picture printing itself on his mind as though he were a painter.
Without surprise or fear, he noticed thick V’s of German planes coming out of the north. The sight had grown ordinary. He continued to trot, a little faster, through the emptying shell-pitted streets toward the embassy. People around him glanced at the sky and took shelter. The first waves were Stukas, diving down and spitting out black smoke, and Byron heard the irritated answering rattle of the weak rooftop machine guns of the Poles. One plane dove toward the street where he was running. He jumped into a doorway. Bullets went chattering down along the cobblestones, with a great whing-whang of ricochets. He watched the plane zoom away, then he trotted on, muttering the usual obscenities about the Germans.
Byron was developing a sense of invulnerability to the worst the Germans could do. To him they were contemptible bungling butchers. He was sure that the United States was going to rise in its wrath in short order, cross the Atlantic and knock the hell out of them, if the British and the French really proved too decayed or too scared to do it. The events around him must be making gigantic headlines in America, he thought. He would have been stupefied to know that the Polish war, its outcome clear, was already slipping to the back pages of United States papers, and that people were ignoring even the supposed “great debate” in the Senate over revising the Neutrality Act, because of the tight National League pennant race.
He loped through the embassy gate very much out of breath. The marine sentry gave him a salute and a familiar grin. Inside, in the big dining room darkened by window braces and blackout curtains, some fifty or so Americans caught in Warsaw were lunching at long trestle tables lit by oil lamps, making a loud clatter. Slote sat with Natalie, a small dark man named Mark Hartley, and some others at the ambassador’s polished dining table. Panting from the long run, Byron told Natalie about his meeting with Berel. He did not mention the destroyed synagogue.
“Thanks, Briny! God help them all. Sit down and eat something. We have marvellous breaded veal cutlets, by some miracle.”
Slote said, “Did you come here through the streets during this air attack?”
“He has duck feathers for brains,” Natalie said, giving Byron an affectionate look.
“Byron is all right,” Hartley said. He was a fourth at bridge with Natalie, Byron, and Slote, when they whiled away long night hours in the cellar. Mark Hartley’s name had once been Marvin Horowitz, and he liked to joke about the change. He was a New Yorker in the importing business.
Byron took an empty seat beside Natalie and helped himself to a cutlet. It had a rather gamy, sticky taste, but after a week of canned sprats and sausages it seemed delicious, and he was famished. He downed it and forked another onto his plate. Slote smiled at him, and glanced around with satisfaction at the America
ns happily consuming the cutlets. “By the way, does anybody here object to eating horse-meat?”
“I most certainly do,” said Natalie.
“Well, that’s too bad. You’ve just eaten it.”
Natalie said, “Aagh!” and choked into her napkin. “My god. Horse! I could kill you. Why didn’t you warn me?”
“You need nourishment. We all do. There’s no telling what’s going to become of us, and I had the chance to buy up this lot and I did. You’ve been dining on one of the great breeds of Poland. The mayor ordered the slaughter of a thousand of them yesterday. We were lucky to get a share.”
Mark Hartley took another cutlet from the platter. Natalie said, “Mark! How can you? Horse!”
He shrugged. “We got to eat. I’ve eaten worse meat in kosher restaurants.”
“Well, I don’t claim to be religious, but I draw the line at horses. I’d as soon eat a dog.”
Byron pushed away his plate. The awareness of horseflesh heavy in his stomach, the gluey taste of horse in his mouth, the remembered smell of fly-blown dead horses on the Jewish streets, blended in his consciousness as one thing—war.
14
FOUR days later, early in the morning Natalie came scampering out into the embassy back yard, hair and skirt flying, and pounced on Byron, who was burning passport blanks and visa application files. The embassy had hundreds of the maroon passport booklets, which went up slowly and smokily; in German hands they could be used for smuggling spies and saboteurs into the United States. The stacks and stacks of visa requests, because they identified Jews, were also high on the burn-list. Byron had given up riffling through the files for the American currency often clipped to application forms. His job was to reduce the stuff to ashes as fast as he could; he was burning money and didn’t care.
“Hurry. Come with me.” Natalie’s voice had a cheerful, excited ring.
“Where?”
“Just come.”
In a chauffeured black limousine at the front gate, Slote sat next to a plump, pink, gray-headed man. “Hi there, Byron!” Slote too sounded surprisingly cheerful. “This is the Swedish ambassador. Byron Henry’s father is our naval attaché in Berlin, Ambassador. It might be well to take him along, don’t you think?”
The ambassador rubbed the side of his bulbous nose with a small neat hand, and gave Byron a wise look. “Very much so. Yes indeed. And he should perhaps take notes.”
“Just what I thought. Hop in, Byron.”
A blood transfusion could not have changed Slote more. Byron had talked to him an hour earlier; the familiar gray, dour, slumped Slote, who had been glooming around the embassy, taking medicines, snapping short answers, and spending hours locked in his office. Ever since a bomb had fallen on the building next door, killing ten Poles, Slote had been like that. Byron figured the responsibility was wearing the chargé down. But now his face had color, his eyes were bright, and the very plume of blue smoke from his pipe looked jaunty.
As Byron got into the back seat, Natalie blurted to the ambassador, “Can I come along? Byron and I are travelling together.”
With an annoyed grimace, Slote shook his head. The ambassador looked her up and down, with masculine amusement. Natalie wore a green silk dress and an old pink sweater, an atrocious getup pulled from her suitcase without thought. It made her look vulgarly sexy. “But, my dear, wouldn’t you be frightened?”
“Of what?”
“The sound of guns. We’re going to inspect the safe-conduct exit route.” The ambassador’s slow British speech was almost perfect. His small pink hand, resting on the open window, was manicured to a gleam, siege or no siege. “We may come rather close to the front.”
“I’ve heard guns.”
The ambassador smiled at Byron. “Well, shall we have your friend along?” He moved to make room for her beside him as he spoke. Slote said nothing, but gnawed his pipe in an annoyed way.
The car started off on a rough, zigzag ride toward the river. Warsaw had been crumpling in the past four days. A strong wind was blowing away the smoke, and beautiful morning sunshine gave a mocking peaceful look to the streets. But smashed buildings met the eye everywhere. Thousands of windows had been blown out and patched with bright yellow plywood. Warsaw was becoming a place of smoke, broken masonry, and yellow patches. The sidewalks and gutters were broken and cratered, and spiky tank traps and barricades cluttered main intersections. Glowering nervous soldiers at these intersections stopped the car with raised machine guns, their fingers at the triggers. Few other people were in sight. Far off, cannon drummed and thumped. Each time that a soldier lowered his gun and waved them on, Slote laughed boisterously.
“What I find so incredible,” he said, as they came to a long stone bridge over the Vistula, crowded with carts, trucks, and bicycles, “is that this thing is still standing at all. Haven’t the Germans been bombarding it for two weeks?”
“Well, you see, they are just not quite as devastating as they would have us believe,” the Swedish ambassador said. “Nor as accurate.”
The car drove out on the bridge, over the broad brown river serenely flowing between Warsaw and its eastern suburb, Praha, a place of low houses and green woods. Behind them in the sunshine, under a soft smoky blue sky, Warsaw at this distance looked surprisingly unharmed: a broad metropolis with wide avenues, baroque church domes, tall factory chimneys, and many climbing columns of black smoke. It might almost have been a manufacturing city on a busy day in peacetime, except for the yellow fires billowing up here and there, the flashes like summer lightning all around the horizon, and the distant whumping of the artillery. Several busloads of singing and joking soldiers went past the car. Some waved at Natalie and shouted. Many soldiers were also heading the same way on bicycles.
“Where are they all going?” Natalie said.
“Why, to the front,” said the ambassador. “It’s quite a war. They leave their guns and go home for lunch or dinner, or perhaps to sleep with their wives, and then they take a bus to the front again and shoot at the Germans. Madrid was rather like this when I was there during the civil war.”
“How far do we go?” Slote said. Here over the river the gun booms from Praha were louder.
The ambassador pursed his lips. “I’m not sure. We have to look for a schoolhouse with a stone goose in the front yard, a hundred yards or so past a wayside shrine.”
On the other side of the river, they found a scene of ruin. Broken houses, burned tree trunks, and fallen trees lined the narrow tarred road, which was so torn up by shellfire that the car had to detour time and again on dirt tracks. A camouflaged heavy Polish gun in the woods suddenly went off as the limousine bumped along one of these paths. The driver swerved and brushed a tree, the passengers leaped in their seats. “My God!” Slote said. The car steadied up and drove on through the wooded flat land of Praha. They passed a house with its roof ablaze, and the family outside dolefully watching. Loud explosions went off around them, two or three a minute. Sometimes they saw flames from gun mouths in the woods, though the guns themselves were invisible. Sometimes through the trees they could observe Polish gun crews feverishly moving about. It was all novel and exciting, at least to Byron, and they seemed to be enjoying this wartime sightseeing in perfect safety, despite the unpleasant bumping along grass and dirt to avoid the shell holes. But then a German shell burst near the car, throwing up a geyser of dirt which rattled and tinkled on the limousine roof.
Slote said, “Christ Almighty! We’re at the front right now!”
“Yes, the schoolhouse must be right past that next curve,” the ambassador said. But past the curve they saw only four log houses around a dirt courtyard, where several pigs trotted here and there, bewildered by the gun noise. Beyond, the straight tar road continued into leafy woods and smoke, and visibility ceased.
Slote said, “Please stop the car.”
The ambassador glanced over his shoulder at him, rubbed his nose with a pink hand, and spoke to the driver. The car pulled to the side o
f the road.
“I didn’t in the least understand from you,” Slote said, gesturing with the pipe clutched in a fist, “that we were going into the actual zone of fire. Are you sure that we haven’t missed a turn, and that we aren’t behind the German lines right now?”
The ambassador pushed out his lips. “I don’t believe we’ve come more than three miles from the bridge.”
Slote burst out laughing, and jerked the pipe at Natalie and Byron. “These young people are my responsibility. I can’t expose them in this way.”
Two loads of soldiers came along in lumbering old street buses with route numbers still displayed in front and faded movie advertisements on their sides. The soldiers were singing, and some waved out of the window at the halted limousine, or gave good-humored yells in Polish.
“Clearly we’re not yet behind the German lines,” said the ambassador.
“Nevertheless we’ll have to take these civilians back to Warsaw,” Slote said. “I’m sorry, you and I misunderstood each other.”
Natalie exclaimed, “But why? There’s no reason on earth to take us back. I’m perfectly all right.”