While Still We Live

  They passed other peasants, mostly walking. The lumbering carts were few. When German motorcyclists or a Nazi car approached, Jan would slip from the driver’s seat and stand holding the horse’s uncertain head, as if all he had to worry about was the frightened animal. Sheila, clinging to the edge, of the shallow cart, still unsure if it really was going to remain upright, felt that the rearing horse couldn’t be any more terrified than she was. But the Germans passed with mud hissing out from under their tires, and Jan took his perch once more on the rough board across the front of the cart; and the hammock-like wicker basket, its sides supported by wooden slats, rolled along on its four shaky wheels.

  Once Sheila said, “This takes a long time, Jan.”

  And Jan, turning round to look down at her and Stefan jolting about with the remains of cabbage leaves, wisps of hay, goose feathers, cucumber rinds, poppy seeds, had grinned and said, “Those they are looking for won’t travel slow.”

  And once on a lonely stretch of straight road, which went on and on until it hit the blue autumn sky, she said, “What happened last night, Jan? At the wood?”

  This time, Jan didn’t turn around. He said, his eyes fixed on the long road in front of him, “The wood was surrounded. The Germans had called up reinforcements. The shooting was over before I got there. I saw Dutka. Dead on the road. So was our man who went back with that spy. At the edge of the wood, there was another body. The cars’ headlights were on it. It was our scout. And then I met one of our men just outside Dutka’s village. He had been there to warn Dutka’s wife and boy. It was an idea of his own, but it worked. They got away.”

  “The captain? Thaddeus?”

  “The Germans were still searching when I left. The searchlights had been brought up.”

  “There’s a chance, isn’t there, Jan?”

  “There’s always a chance.” But his voice was heavy, and his shoulders drooped.

  Sheila’s next question about Korytów was stifled by Jan’s expressive back, by Stefan’s dark face. They would tell her when they wanted to. Stefan, now that the excitement of being in a guerrilla camp was over, now that they were faced with a tedious and ignominious journey, had relapsed into heavy gloom. Nothing Sheila could say would pull him out of it. He sat with his arms round his hunched knees, swaying to the rough rhythm of the cart, staring ahead of him with unseeing eyes.

  He altered that position only once, and that was when they were stopped by a patrol on the outskirts of one of the larger villages. And then he turned his eyes on the Germans with such burning hate in their black depths that Sheila was afraid. Surely the Germans would notice it, and Jan’s explanations would be useless. But the Germans, after a quick search for weapons on the three stiffly held bodies, after a look into the dirty cart, seemed satisfied. Possibly they had come to think that the look which Stefan gave them was a natural one for a hard-faced, glowering Pole. The main thing, anyway, was kept secret: Jan’s gun, jammed between the wicker cradle of the cart and one of the supporting slats of wood, had not been discovered.

  Sheila, in her nervousness as the examination ended and they were still free, missed her foothold on the cartwheel and slipped. The soldiers laughed. Perhaps it was funny. She picked herself up from the ground and shook down her wide skirts. She bent her head to hide her scarlet cheeks. The Germans thought that still funnier. Jan waited patiently, stupidly, until the soldier who had been holding the horse’s head let it go at a signal from the sergeant. The soldier gave the horse’s nose one last pat.

  “I’m fond of horses. Even an old nag like this,” he said. The soldiers, now that they had found these three peasants harmless, stood in an amiable group in the middle of the road. Well clothed, well fed, they looked at the poorly dressed Poles and their ramshackle cart and their ancient horse. There was nothing here to be commandeered. They could indulge themselves in the very pleasant feeling of being so vastly superior. Their mockery was generous. Their humour was broad.

  Ian urged the horse forward. As soon as the Germans had started to discuss the girl in particular terms, he had felt it was indeed time to be moving. Many a joke had ended in earnest, before now.

  A car, travelling quickly towards them out of the village, was the deciding factor. The half-dozen soldiers formed up neatly, the sergeant saluted, and by that time Jan’s efforts had driven the horse into the beginning of the village.

  From the branches of the trees in front of the Posting House were suspended four bodies, hands tied behind their backs, toes pointed, heads drooping forward.

  Sheila turned her head away quickly. She said in a hard, strange voice, “I’m fond of horses. Even an old nag...”

  Jan’s back was as rigid as Stefan’s eyes.

  28

  TO THE FOREST

  At Rogów, they left the horse and cart. They also left Jan’s revolver—after a short, bitter argument.

  “It’s a good gun,” Jan said, “It’s fought bravely.”

  “You’ll get as good a gun where you’re going,” Sheila replied obstinately. (She still broke into a cold sweat when she thought of the casual way Jan had hidden it in the cart.) And Stefan, rather unexpectedly, supported her mutiny, perhaps because Jan had made him discard his penknife before they started the journey.

  “All right my lady,” Jan said at last and pointed out the revolver’s hiding place to the man who had taken charge of the horse and cart. “Five good bullets,” he added slowly. And these were the last words he spoke for the next three hours. Even after they were stopped and searched to the south of the village, he still conveyed by his gloomy silence that he would have hidden the gun, that he could have fooled a German any day.

  But apart from this obstinacy, he was as cunning and careful as Sheila could have wished. They avoided any village where, as the peasants warned them, a German garrison was quartered. Jan had no desire to test his story, of travelling to the nearest town to register for work, before a group of officers. And he also avoided any repetition of the cart incident, when the soldiers had shown signs of interest in Sheila. For as soon as they left the village of Rogów, he shouldered her into a ditch. When she struggled out of it, not only were her legs and hands covered with its filth, but her clothes were liberally clotted. Even her face was streaked, and her hair at the temples was splashed with its nauseating mud. She tried to brush it off. That only made matters worse: it would have to dry first. She looked at Jan angrily. “You would choose the ripest part of that ditch,” she said bitterly, but he merely stared stolidly back at her. “I gave up my gun,” his eyes were saying. “You can give up looking pretty.” Stefan was no consolation. But at least, Sheila thought, we’ve made him laugh: that’s something. He’s a boy again. Her anger changed to self-pity, and the journey continued in silence.

  But Jan had been clever enough in his own peculiar way. Certainly, the German soldiers who stopped them after that seemed to take little pleasure in searching a disreputable peasant girl.

  “Careful of lice, there,” one of them even warned his comrade, watching her from a safe distance, in disgust. “God in heaven, what a race of filthy pigs!”

  * * *

  For a day, a night, and a day they travelled. Travelled like three restless ghosts, without proper food or sleep or warmth. Jan was determined. He refused low-voiced invitations to rest overnight in the little villages they passed; and the food which was offered them—a piece of hard black bread, a slab of cold sausage—he would thrust in his pocket. Later, when he allowed them one of their brief ten-minute rests in some small cluster of trees, they would swallow the cold hard lumps of food, and wash them down with water from a stream. Sheila’s mouth seemed to taste permanently of the leaves which floated on the water. An earthy taste, bitter, sharp, neither sweet nor sour.

  Jan wouldn’t let her try to wash off the mud. It had dried, but it still stained her clothes and skin. Its smell still clung to her. She seemed to be living in a state of permanent nausea. “No,” he said sharply, towards the end of the firs
t day, when she tried to scrub her face and hair. “That is why we don’t stop with the villagers. They’ll be cleaning us up, making us look respectable. They’ll start talking. They’ll be wanting news. They’ll keep us late.”

  Sheila looked at Stefan, propped wearily against a tree. He never complained. If a boy could do it, so could she. She had to content herself with a mild “Must we hurry quite like this?”

  Jan nodded.

  She looked at him accusingly. “You are trying to win that bet, Jan. That’s the reason.” Later, when and if they reached safety, she would perhaps be able to smile at the expression on Jan’s face at that moment.

  “I’ll win it all right,” he said. “I’ll get you there before the others arrive...

  “It’s safer anyway,” he went on after a pause, as if to excuse his determination. “If we stay in one place, the Germans will start asking questions about us. If we are going to town to look for work, as we say, we wouldn’t be sitting beside someone’s fire. We’d be going to the town.”

  Jan was already on his feet. “Come. The time for resting is over,” he said. “We’ve twenty miles to cover before day breaks.” And they covered the twenty miles or more before dawn. As a reward, in the bitter hours before sunrise, when a rising wind cut through their thin clothes, Jan let them have an hour’s sleep under a neatly thatched haystack in a field of harsh stubble. They slept huddled together for warmth, Jan sheltering the two smaller bodies from the wind with his broad back. But before dawn came with its cock-crow from the nearby village, Sheila and Stefan were shaken awake. Looking at Jan’s haggard face, Sheila knew he hadn’t slept. He had been their guard as well as their shelter. Her annoyance faded; she forced herself wide awake, and they walked on.

  That was the last sleep they were allowed. The occasional ten minutes of rest were granted more sparingly, and only whenever they reached a fringe of thin wood. But in the open country, they kept their steady pace. Except of course, when they came to a wayside cross or a little shrine. Then Jan would take off his cap and kneel. So did Stefan. Sheila forgot her Presbyterian conscience. Religious differences didn’t matter, now. At first she had welcomed the kneeling in the soft mud of the road as a chance to rest. And then she found she was praying, and she felt better. She felt stronger and better. There is no evil in man’s mind when he prays; and it seemed as if the shrine before which they knelt had kept something of the good will and hope which had flowed into it from the hearts of the simple peasants who had prayed there. It seemed as if the shrine’s symbol had been given, by their honest faith, the power to encourage all those who knelt there.

  As they managed to pass two more German patrols, Sheila’s confidence revived. But she still had one fear. She mentioned it at last, as they rested (ten minutes by Jan’s idea of time; he owned no watch, but he seemed to have been born with a clock in his brain) towards the evening of the second day.

  “Jan, what if we were ever to meet the same patrol twice? What if they heard we were going to look for work in a town which had changed its name since they last questioned us?”

  “What’s to be will be. If we meet the same Germans twice, moving at the rate we move, then God never meant us to reach the Reapers’ camp.”

  Sheila couldn’t be quite as philosophical as that. But she comforted herself with the thought that it would be a rare chance if a patrol left its appointed district. Patrols were like sentries, with their own beats to watch. The Germans were methodical, thank Heaven. Looking at Jan and Stefan and what she could see of herself, she could believe the story which the German road-patrols accepted. They really looked as though they were a family who had lost everything in the war, and now, hearing that people were being registered for work, were trying to reach the nearest town.

  “What papers do you keep showing them, Jan?” she asked curiously. They couldn’t be German documents and permits, for the countryside hadn’t been fully registered yet. It was only in the larger cities that the Germans had been able to satisfy their bureaucratic instincts, so far. In a few weeks, no doubt, the villages would be under card-index control. Then Jan, if ever he made another journey like this one, would have to change his story.

  Jan took his papers out of an inside pocket of his ragged jacket. That was where he kept his blunt stub of pencil, a piece of string, two small coins. Sheila could see them all spread out on a broad German palm, could see them thrown on the road, could hear the soldiers laugh as the Polish pig rooted in the mud for his possessions.

  She took the papers silently. They were much folded, stained, and thin at the edges. They almost tore as she opened them.

  “Have a care,” Jan said, anxiously.

  The writing was faint sharply angled, brown. The seals and flamboyant signatures still looked imposing.

  “What are they?” she had to ask.

  Jan said, very seriously, “Communion certificates. Certificate of merit for the cow I showed at the autumn county fair. Birth certificate.” He folded them carefully, and replaced them in the inner pocket. Sheila was reminded of the reverent way in which he offered his papers for the Germans to see. The Germans were never interested: as often as not the papers followed the pencil stub and string and coins into the mud of the road. But the papers had an effect all the same. Together with Jan’s emphasis on the word “work,” they stamped him as a harmless serf willing to accept authority. When the inevitable search, thorough and methodical, revealed neither weapons nor possible loot, then Jan was classed as a negligible, indeed. Let him go to the town and be shipped into Germany for work. If he went without having to be driven, so much the easier for the Germans. They had plenty to do rounding up the ones who wouldn’t go even with a bayonet behind them.

  “We’ll be moving,” Jan said. “There’s a storm coming.”

  “What town are we supposed to be going to now? We’ve left Lodz to the north of us,” Sheila said.

  “What town, now?” Jan asked Stefan. “Where’s that geography of yours?”

  Stefan’s brow wrinkled. “Let’s say Radom. It’s in the next province, but that’s the direction we’re travelling in now. Or if you want a town farther west, there’s Piotrków. That’s almost due south of Lodz, as far as I can remember.”

  “Better keep to the one province. Piotrków it is,” said Jan.

  “I feel like one of the Three Sisters,” Sheila said, and Stefan laughed.

  “What’s that?” asked Jan.

  “They kept saying they were going to Moscow, but they never did get there.”

  “Keep moving,” Jan said. “God preserve us from reaching any of the towns we’ve been travelling to. But if we don’t keep moving, we’ll never reach that forest.”

  As Sheila stumbled after him, she thought: the first twenty miles were painful, the second twenty miles were hell, but the third twenty miles are such agony that I’ve stopped even feeling them.

  “We’ll be there before dawn,” Jan said cheerily. “If we keep moving with no more asking for rests,” he added, looking pointedly over his shoulder at Sheila.

  * * *

  Jan was right. Well before dawn, they came to a small village, and in the distance, stretching along the whole horizon, as far as they could see, was a heavy blot of darkness. Under the clouded moonlight, it was like a ribbon of black velvet joining flat grey fields to a threatening night sky. “Yon’s the forest,” Jan said.

  Sheila, too tired to be able to say “I hope so,” just looked. Trees, many of them, stretching for miles, so dense that they formed one wall, one unit, almost a world.

  Jan left her and Stefan under a hazel tree. He was going to the cluster of houses by himself. “That storm’s been threatening all night. It’s following us,” he said. “You’ll be safe here, if it breaks. Lightning never struck a hazel tree.”

  Then he was gone. Sheila, crouching close to Stefan, tried to follow him with her eyes. But after the first few minutes, she couldn’t see him.

  He was gone far longer than she liked. Even Stef
an had become impatient. The storm had something to do with their nervousness. It struck cruelly at the cowering houses and the moaning trees. Sheila glanced uncertainly at the branches overhead.

  She said, “Let’s get into the open.”

  Stefan whispered, “But this is a hazel tree. Jan chose it specially. All you have to do is to pray to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The hazel tree sheltered them on their flight to Egypt. It will never be struck by lightning.”

  “Do you believe that Stefan?”

  “All the country people do.”

  Sheila hesitated, and then started to edge her way into the open. But a white flash lit the earth in front of them as clearly as any searchlight and she stopped, lowering herself onto her elbows, and then flat onto the ground. On the road beyond the field she saw two cars. The angry voice of the storm had hidden the roar of their engines. They were rushing towards the village. Then the flash was gone, and the cars vanished into the stormy dark.

  She pulled herself back under the shelter of the long grasses round the hazel tree’s roots. She would have to trust the peasants. In any case, she’d rather face a bolt of lightning than a car full of Nazis.

  Jan came when the sheets of white light no longer played over the fields. The thunder rolled away farther to the south. The rain alone remained. Cold and heavy, it lashed their shoulders and whipped their legs as they followed Jan along the windbreak of trees.

  “Germans in the village,” Sheila whispered, as Jan paused to steady her over the treacherous roots.

  “Aye. The storm brought them. They’ve stopped for shelter. I had just found our Jadwiga. She keeps the inn. She’s serving them with drinks now. She had to send her son to guide us, instead.”

  “Were you in the inn when they came?”

  “I got out the back window. It was a near thing. I could do with one of those warm drinks they are swilling.”

  “So could I,” Sheila said feelingly, and brushed the rain from her eyes.

  Jadwiga’s son was waiting for them at the last tree. They joined him silently, without pausing, and silently they followed the thin small figure, slowly crawled with him across the open field, crouched as he did while they hurried through thin fringes of bush or tree. And the rain slashed at their brows and blinded their eyes, cut their hands and legs, flailed their hunched shoulders. There is a time in the state of human discomfort when additional miseries suddenly cease to be counted. At first Sheila had kept saying to herself, “This is not me. This can’t be me.” Now, her body moved and stopped in obedience to the shadow ahead of her, but she had passed the stage of amazement, of useless anger, of self-pity. She didn’t even try to protect herself any more. When her feet sank into deeper mud, she let them sink. When a branch whipped towards her face, she didn’t even turn her head aside.