“We must stop a train going east,” the Russian said. “You’re sure of the schedules?”
“They radioed the man in Bialystok that it’s coming. Unless they change their timetables.”
They walked down the tracks, the trees pressing so close to the line that branches had been cut or the trains could never have passed. It was late afternoon and the light was changing.
We’d better hurry, Telek thought.
They rounded a bend in the track, and everyone smiled. The Lithuanian didn’t have to tell them. This was the place, a broad meadow in the heart of the thickest forest, an open space.
“Telek?” The Lithuanian called him. “You know the woods and how to use them. Put every man in position. Help them set up the guns.”
Telek moved off, followed by the others. Only the woman hesitated. She looked back at the Russian and the Lithuanian and her husband who bent over a knapsack near the train tracks. When she turned, Telek caught her eye and she stared him down.
“You,” he said to Lydka. “Get pine branches and make a wide broom. There won’t be a footprint on this meadow when the train comes.”
“But it’s coming at night. They wouldn’t see our footprints.”
Telek stopped walking and turned to the boy. “What if there are lights on the train? What if a party of soldiers comes through on foot?”
Lydka nodded, his cheeks red with shame. “I know, Telek,” he said. He ran off toward the forest, shambling in the snow as if he were truly his own nickname and a calf leaping in the field.
Telek looked around the bowl of the meadow. It was a good place. With this terrain, most of them might live to see the sun come up. He hadn’t expected so much.
Nelka tried to sit on the stool and let gravity pull the baby out of her, but the pain was so heavy it pressed her to the floor. Gretel lay on the platform, not asleep but tired. Hansel had covered his head with the blankets and his hands were pressed over his ears to try and shut out the awful noise.
“Magda,” Nelka cried. “How much longer? I didn’t know it would be so terrible.” She moaned as Magda’s hands, strong now with the memory of all the babies she had brought into the world, kneaded her belly.
“Soon,” Magda said.
“I want a daughter. They kill all our sons. Pray it’s a girl,” Nelka nearly shouted.
Magda only shook her head.
“Do you know what the baby is, Magda?” Hansel asked.
Magda smiled.
How can she know? the boy thought. But he knew Magda did.
“Ahhhhhh.” The howl was squeezed out of Nelka’s throat. She wasn’t Nelka anymore. There was none of her left. The pain had eaten all of the girl she had been.
“Magda,” she called, needing to confess it. “My husband may be alive in Siberia, and I’m in love with Telek.”
Magda said no words of absolution or comfort. She only nodded.
The Russian unwrapped the packages. He breathed lightly and handled them with hands so gentle you would have thought he was touching a woman.
The Mechanik watched and waited. He was ecstatic, squatting there beside the cold steel rails. He knew about machines, and what were bombs but a sort of machine?
The parts lay beside the track, and the Russian looked at the Mechanik. The Russian’s eyes glittered and his mouth was slightly open.
The Mechanik picked up the parts and checked them with strong fingers. He wasn’t as gentle as the Russian. It couldn’t hurt anyone until—until he made it.
It was lovely to make things. He smiled to himself, and the others moved a little away.
There were only three parts. The container was a Soviet ammunition box. The explosive was cheddite manufactured by the ZWZ, those brave men, in Poland. The fuse, the thing that made the whole thing come alive, was a compression fuse, and he checked it carefully.
There was a vial of sulfuric acid and paper. He sniffed it and caught a faint whiff of the rotten smell of the acid. He opened the second vial of potassium chloride and rolled the paper to fit inside. It soaked up the solution, and he connected the paper to the vial of sulfuric acid.
Now came the more difficult part. He thought about the best way to do the job. Lying on his stomach to examine the steel rail, he left the bomb behind him and crawled six or seven feet, staring at the rail and the space under it.
Here. The earth had worn away a little. It would be faster to dig.
He rose and pointed. “Dig here,” he said. “The hole has to be deeper than the box at first. Then I’ll adjust it. And dig out as much of the rail around it for as many feet as you can. It’ll make the rail move more when the train comes.”
The Russian and the Lithuanian took turns chipping the frozen earth out from under the rail. It took them nearly an hour before the Mechanik was satisfied. Finally it was done.
The Mechanik smiled at them and his smile was as sweet as an angel’s. “Move back to the woods. I’ll try to make sure that if it goes off too soon it tears up the rail when it explodes.”
And you with it, the two other men thought at the same time. They each shook his hand, and the Russian kissed the Mechanik on both cheeks like a brother.
The Mechanik was alone on the tracks. He placed the fuse on the bed of cheddite in the box and raised it to his eye level. It was perfect. Gently he lowered the lid, his eyes watching as it closed, the top finally going down the last half inch slowly, until he felt, rather than heard, the lid meeting the resistance of the fuse and closing.
Nothing happened. It was ready. He hummed to himself, picked up the box and carried it gently, as if it were a baby, the six feet to the perfect square hole. He put it in the hole and measured with his finger. The box had to fit tightly under the rail, and there was still space between the box’s top and the rail when he put it in the hole. He had to make the hole shallower.
It took him a while to remove the box and pack the soil so the lid of the box fitted snugly under the rail. He couldn’t force the box or it would blow up before the train came. He positioned it inch by inch in the hole, and the top touched the rail line now. It was done.
He was pleased with his work. Even if it did blow up early, the track would be broken and could be covered with snow to conceal the break. The train would derail anyway. He looked up and saw Lydka standing with his broom of pine boughs.
“I have to sweep up the footprints when you’re done,” the boy whispered.
The Mechanik kept on humming and nodded. He turned and walked toward the woods where the others waited. Lydka followed him backward, sweeping the Lithuanian’s, the Russian’s, the Mechanik’s, and his own prints away in long careful strokes of the branches.
It was odd, the Mechanik thought. The song he had been humming. He hadn’t heard it since he was a boy, but it was that song. The Mechanik laughed out loud, and the Russian waved his hand at him from the trees. The Mechanik waved back, and he laughed again. Strange the way his mind worked today. He had been humming the Kaddish exactly the way his father had. He had been humming the prayer for the souls of the dead.
It was the end now. Nelka screamed rhythmically as the pain became one long pain with no space in it to rest. Magda knelt beside her and worked. She massaged the skin with oil around Nelka’s vagina where the baby’s head was crowning.
“Good girl, good girl. You won’t tear. It’s a nice, slow, good baby.”
Nelka’s screams became deep grunts of effort ending with a shriek, and Hansel clutched his knees on the platform, tears running down his face. He hated the baby. It was killing Nelka. The dirty baby. He sobbed and his nose ran, mixing with the tears.
Gretel sat wide-eyed and watched, too amazed to be afraid. She watched and felt older and proud that she was present.
“Push,” Magda said.
“I can’t,” Nelka screamed.
“Don’t make her,” Hansel shouted from the platform. “Don’t hurt her, Magda.”
“My God.” Magda sighed. “Everyone’s a midwife today. Push
girl, when I say so. It’s past my bedtime and dark outside. We all need our dinner.”
Nelka felt the pain coming and she was terrified. It was going to kill her. She knew it would. She was dying, and no one could help.
The moon was dead and the stars gave no light through the clouds. Only the white snow of the meadow allowed them to see a little in the black night. They crouched, waiting, the cold numbing even their lice until the itching stopped and they were alone with their thoughts.
They heard it long before it got to the meadow. The silence of the forest was broken by a tiny hum that they thought was only their own nerves, and then a rhythmic hum, and then the real sound of a train. It was coming steadily, and the falling snow was too light to slow it.
Telek waited and felt his pistol inside his coat, warm against his heart. He’d get a rifle out of this if he lived.
The Russian was triumphant. It was coming from the west. The Germans on this train were going east to kill Russians. Fresh troops. Not the wounded and crippled of the last battle being hauled back to Germany.
The sound of the train was louder. The chug-chug-chug-chug came closer and the men gasped with the tension of it. Their breath went in and out as though some hand struck their chest.
Then the train was in the meadow. Coming fairly slowly. The engineers had to watch for trees fallen and lying across the tracks. Trains weren’t able to move through Poland anymore with any sense of security.
The Mechanik strained his eyes to see in the dark. Surely it was over the bomb now. Past it. Oh God, help us, he thought, the bomb has failed, and just as he thought it, the air filled with noise. The train wrenched upward, and two cars came down crooked. The six cars were shuddering and moving, the locomotive still pulling, and then it happened. The two cars in the middle fell over and the whole thing stopped.
For a second there was only the hissing of steam, and then screams began in German.
“Wait, wait, wait,” the Russian called softly. “Wait.”
The German soldiers climbed out of the cars and milled near the train. The engineer was running down the tracks.
“Now,” the Russian called.
They opened fire with the two pepechas and the rifles. Telek bared his teeth and waited. The Germans were too far away for his pistol. He would fire when they ran in to finish them off.
It didn’t take long. A stove in one of the cars had ignited the walls, and the Germans were dark targets against the red flames. They were in shock and ran toward the woods where the Lithuanian and his men had been placed by Telek.
The Lithuanian had great control. He waited until the Germans believed they were safe, almost in the woods, and then they opened fire. Soldiers fell screaming and torn to pieces, their blood making black splotches on the white snow.
Telek ran toward the train. He climbed onto the first car and peered in. There were three men lying in the car, two unconscious. Telek shot all three and moved on to the next car.
There weren’t as many soldiers as the Lithuanian had expected, and they found out why when they opened the last cars. The heavy doors slid apart, and the men laughed and pounded each other on the back. One car held a huge artillery gun on wheels. They’d have to get horses and a sled to pull it. It meant a long night and morning of work, but it was a real weapon.
And the other two cars had no soldiers either. Food. Warm clothes. Vodka. Oil for the machines. It was a treasure trove.
They counted their dead and wounded. The Lithuanian had lost two. None dead in the Russian’s group, but Lydka had taken a bullet to his shoulder and was laughing and refusing to have anyone look at it. There was vodka enough to sterilize the knife and dig out the bullet.
Telek moved from dead German to dead German until he found the rifle he wanted. He took it out of the hands of the corpse and began collecting cartridge belts.
The night was warmer now, and the falling snow had turned to a slushy rain. It was coating the trees and ground and Telek knew it could turn to ice. They had to move fast and hide the food and clothes. And there was the artillery gun. It would be a long night.
As dawn lit the sky, the woman, soaked to the skin as they all were but not feeling it yet because of the hard work and the vodka, went to Telek. Her black hair heavily streaked with white lay plastered to her head.
She worked in silence beside him, loading boxes of food onto a sled, but Telek saw she wanted to speak.
“What is it?” he finally asked her.
“You are from Piaski?”
“Yes.”
“Did two children come to Piaski? A boy seven, nearly eight, and a blond, older girl?”
Telek nodded. “A woman got false papers for them. They have ration cards and live with her. Outside the village in a hut.”
The woman looked around quickly and then whispered, “Don’t tell any of the others about the children. They’re the Mechanik’s, and he’d go and take them. They can’t live with us. They’d die, or we’d get killed. They’re better where they are.”
Telek nodded again. She was right. The children were safe for the moment, and they would die if the Mechanik tried to have them in the woods. Telek knew the Russian. Nothing was going to endanger the safety of his group, and children were too unpredictable. Children got you killed. He wondered if the woman was their mother. Probably not. She would have said so.
The woman kept on working in the rain that was beginning to freeze now. In a little while she stopped and looked at Telek again.
“I’ll tell the Mechanik later. When it’s over. Tell the woman that we’ll come and get them when the Russian front moves past the village.”
Telek wasn’t sure that he’d tell Magda anything. She might let the children know that their father was alive, and it was better not to raise hopes. Better they forget everything except living with Magda. He and the woman worked side by side as the sun rose.
Nelka heard Magda shouting at her, but her body was beyond her control. She lay and felt the pain, and her body convulsed on its own accord. She heard Gretel cry out, and Magda laugh, and then the hut was silent.
Nelka lay still.
“She’s dead, she’s dead,” Hansel sobbed. He wanted to go down on the floor and kiss poor Nelka, but he couldn’t do it.
“Wake up, you troublemaker.” Magda’s strong finger with its swollen joints cleaned the mouth of the baby lying on the floor, and then she lifted it and shook it gently. Its chest heaved and it choked and gasped. A strong wail came from its bloody face.
“It’s alive!” Gretel felt like dancing and singing.
“Of course it’s alive.” Magda shook the baby again just to clean its lungs a little more, and then she laid it on Nelka’s chest while she pulled out the afterbirth.
“I hate that baby.” Hansel jumped off the platform and threw his arm around Nelka’s neck.
“Do you want to cut the cord?” Magda asked Hansel.
He hesitated, but the knife was shiny and he was never allowed to play with Magda’s things.
“Yes.”
“Cut right where I tell you.”
Hansel took the knife and sawed the cord where Magda held it doubled up in a loop. The birth had been much bigger and messier than either of the children had expected.
“What is it?” Nelka whispered.
“Look for yourself.” Magda cut the cord closer to the baby’s belly and tied it with a twist. Then she began wiping Nelka with cloths dipped in boiled water.
Nelka raised herself on her elbows and looked down at her child. She felt the tears in her eyes, hot and relentless. She couldn’t stop them.
“Oh, Magda, I have a son.”
The amazingness of it came over her, his perfect feet and toes, the rounds of tiny penis and scrotum, the hands moving, and the eyes staring up at the ceiling, so dark blue they looked black. A perfect maleness that had come out of her female self.
Nelka’s heart felt like it was breaking. He was radiant and warm and alive and not even crying. And the
y would all try to kill him, all his whole life, because he was a man.
She sobbed over the boy, and Magda laughed.
“You can’t stop them from being born men, my dear.”
“I know. I just want him to be left alone. I love him so much.”
“Too bad he isn’t a girl.” Magda grinned.
Nelka swept the baby up into her arms and held him tightly. “He’s what I want, and they’ll never hurt him. Never.” She blew gently on his round head until the fine hair, damp from Magda’s scrubbing, turned from brown to pale golden.
Magda touched the baby’s cheek and said, “May I eat at your wedding, boy.” But her voice was sad when she said it.
Gretel watched wide-eyed and listened to the cold slush of rain hitting the roof. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen and it was also the scariest. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
Hansel shrugged. “It hurt Nelka.”
Gretel climbed down and sat stroking Hansel. She began to hum the way that Magda did. The room was quiet except for the high, clear humming of the child.
Before they left the meadow, the Russian had them take the corpse of the highest-ranking German they could find and nail him to a tree with spikes from the rail line. His right arm they nailed through the hand to the sapling next to the tree with the index finger pointing westward. The sign hung around his neck said:
BERLIN—1000 KILOMETERS
Ice Storm
The light in the hut was intense, the oiled paper of the window golden with the brightness of dawn. Gretel crept off the sleeping platform and pulled on her boots and coat. She’d get water at the creek for Magda and then look for firewood. Nelka lay curled around her baby, and Magda and Hansel were deep in dreams, their eyelids twitching in the morning light.
It was two days since the baby had been born, and Gretel was doing a lot of chores so Magda could help Nelka. Gretel opened the door, and had to blink. The forest nearly blinded her. The cold rain had gone on for hours until the darkest point of the night. The sleet covering the forest had frozen into ice on everything she saw.