Dark Star

along to the house,” she called up to him. “I’ll give you coffee.”

She hobbled away without waiting for an answer, the dogs romping around her, sniffing the bushes, lifting a leg, pressing the earth with their extended forepaws to have a morning stretch.

On the way to the farmhouse, Szara saw that she’d left two large, wooden buckets by the well and, like any tramp worth his salt, he knew she wanted him to bring the water in. First he took off his Paris shirt, worked the squeaky pump handle, and splashed himself with surges of icy water from the spout. He shivered in the early morning air and rubbed himself dry with the shirt, then put it back on and combed his wet hair back with his fingers. When he rinsed his mouth, the cold water made his teeth ache. Next he filled the buckets and staggered into the kitchen, absolutely determined not to slop water on the floor. The farmhouse was an old drystone building with a low ceiling, a tile stove with a large crucifix on the wall above it, and glass windows. The smell of the coffee was strong in the close air of the kitchen.

She brought it to him in a china cup-the saucer was apparently no more-that must have been a hundred years old. “Thank you, matrushka,” he said, taking a sip. “The coffee is very good.”

“I always have it. Every morning,” she said proudly. “Except when the wars come. Then you can’t get it for any money. Not around here, you can’t.”

“Where am I, exactly?”

“Where are you? Why you’re in Podalki, that’s where!” She cackled and shook her head at such a question, made her way to the stove, and, using her skirt as a potholder, withdrew a pan of bread from the oven. This she placed by the side of his coffee, went off to the pantry and returned with a bowl of white cheese covered with a cloth. She put a knife and a plate before him, then stood by the stove while he ate. He wanted to ask her to sit with him, but he knew that such a request would offend her sense of propriety. She would eat when he was done.

He sawed off the heel of the bread and covered the steaming slab with white cheese. “Oh, this is very good,” he said.

“You must be on your way to the city,” she said. “To Czestochowa.”

“I’m on my way to Lvov.”

“Lvov!”

“That’s right.”

“Blessed Mother, Lvov. You’re a long way from there,” she said with awe at the distance he contemplated traveling. “That’s a Ukrainian place, you know,” she told him.

“Yes. I know.”

“They say it’s in Poland, but I don’t think so, myself. You’ll want to watch your money, over there.”

“Have you been there, matrushka?”

“Me?” She laughed at the idea. “No,” she said. “People from Podalki don’t go there.”

When he was done with the breakfast he put a few zloty under the rim of the plate. Back in the barn loft he spread his map out on the hay, but the village of Podalki wasn’t to be found. One of the Tass men from Paris who’d been on the plane with him had a much more detailed map, but they’d become separated at the railroad station in Warsaw. He found Czestochowa easily enough. If that was the next town of any size, he’d crossed the river Warta the day before. The man driving the cart had called it something else, and it was just a wide expanse of water, sluggish and shallow at summer’s end. The man in the wagon had driven up a tiny path, and Szara was taken across the river by an old Jewish ferryman with a patch over one eye. He had a wooden raft and pulley system, hauling on a rope until they were on the other bank. The ferryman told him that the little road would, if he were patient and lucky, eventually take him to Cracow. “From there you can go anywhere at all, if you want,” the man had said, pocketing the tiny fare with a shrug that questioned why anybody bothered going anywhere at all.

Szara folded the map, returned it to his satchel, put his soft felt hat on, and slung his jacket over his shoulder. When he came out of the barn, the old lady and her dogs were taking the cow out to pasture. He thanked her again, she wished him a safe journey, made the sign of the cross to protect him on his way, and he headed down the narrow, sandy road in the direction of Podalki village.

Twenty minutes later he was there. It wasn’t much. A few log houses scattered on both sides of a dirt street, a man with shaven head and cavalry mustache, sleeves rolled up on the hot day, thumbs hooked in suspenders as he lounged in the doorway of what Szara took to be the Podalki store. There was a tiny, Jewish ghetto on the other side of the village: women in wigs, a Hasid, yarmulke pinned to his hair, chopping wood in the little yard of his house, pale children with curly sidelocks who watched him, cleverly, without actually staring, as he went past. Then Podalki was no more, and he was alone again on the broad Polish steppe, amid endless fields that ran to the forest on the horizon.

He walked and walked, the sun grew hotter, the valise heavier; he started to sweat. The fields on either side of the narrow road were alive; insects buzzed and whirred, the black, moist earth had a certain smell to it, rotting and growing, sweet and rank at once. Sometimes a clump of white birch stood by a small stream, the delicate leaves flickering in the slightest breeze. From this perspective, his life in the city looked frantic and absurd. The intensity of his work, the grating, fretful anxiety of it, seemed utterly artificial. How strange to care so deeply about such nonsense-codes and papers, packages exchanged in movie theaters, who had lunch with who at a hotel in Berlin. It was madness. They spun around like the blindfolded It in a children’s game. In early August someone had broken into a dry cleaning plant on the outskirts of Paris and stolen the uniforms of the Polish military attache’s staff. A great hubbub ensued: meetings, wireless messages, questions without answers, answers without questions.

But that was nothing compared to what came next, on the twenty-third of August, the Hitler/Stalin pact was announced. Oh and hadn’t there been just every sort of hell to pay! Weeping and moaning and gnashing of teeth. It had been just as Goldman had predicted-the idealists wringing their hands and beating their breasts. Some people were quite literally stunned-walked about the streets of Paris and were heard to make doleful and solemn declarations: “I have determined to break with the party.” There were even suicides. What, Szara wondered, had they thought they were playing at? Philosophy?

He heard the creak of cart wheels behind him and the clop of hooves. A wagon driven by a young boy overtook him, a vast load of hay mounded in the bed. Szara moved to one side of the road to let it pass, stepping between furrows at the edge of a field. “Good morning, pan,” said the boy as the cart drew up beside him. Szara returned the greeting. The smell of the old horse was strong in the heat of the day. “A pretty morning we have,” said the boy. “Would you care to ride a way?” The wagon didn’t actually stop, but Szara hauled himself up and perched on the wooden rim next to the driver. The horse slowed perceptibly. “Ah, Gniady, now you mustn’t be like that,” said the boy, clucking at the horse and flapping the reins. They rode for a time in silence; then a tiny track, two ruts wide, opened up between fields and the boy chucked the left rein to turn the horse. Szara thanked the boy and dismounted. “Walking once again, he thought, Now there’s the job for me. Sometimes he saw men and women at work in the fields. The harvest was only just beginning, but now and then the flash of a scythe would catch the light. The women worked with skirts tucked up, their bare legs white against the wheat or rye stalks.

Somebody, Szara realized, was going to be very annoyed with him for dropping out of sight like this, but that was just too bad. Let them go to hell and rage at the devils. He was tired of their threats-he had rejoined reality, as it happened, and they would have to get along in their dream world as best they could. Above him, the sky spread out to heaven, the morning blue growing pale and hazy as the day wore on. Well to the south there rose a low, dark shape, a distant mountain range, with white cloud building slowly above it, a thunderstorm for the humid evening to come. This was what existed: the steppe, the enormous sky, the wheat, the packed sand of the little road. For a moment he was part of it, simply a fact of nature, no more, no less. He didn’t even know what day it was. He’d left Paris on the thirtieth of August, though he’d thought of it as the twenty-ninth, since it was three o’clock in the morning, still “last night,” when he’d taken a taxi to Le Bourget airport. The long day of meandering through eastern Poland had been, in fact, the thirtieth. That made it the very end of summertime.

Summer would actually continue, he realized, for a long while yet, well into September, when the harvest would occupy almost everybody in the countryside, when people would sleep in the fields in order to start work at first light. At night they’d sit around and talk in low voices, they’d even have a small fire once a field was cleared, and couples would go off into the shadows to make love. Still, for him, the summer had just about run its course. He had a schoolboy’s sense of time, and the end of August was the end of liberty, just as it had been in childhood, just as, he supposed, it always would be. Strange, he thought, that he found himself once again free as the summer ended. 31 August 1939-that was the official date. He reckoned once again and made sure. Yes, that was it. By