Szara could tell she was screaming, but he could not hear any sound at all.
He was taken first to a hospital in the city of Tarnow. There he sat in a corridor while the nursing sisters cared for the injured. By then, most of his hearing had returned. By then his valise had miraculously reappeared, brought down the corridor by a soldier asking if anyone knew who it belonged to. By then he had heard that Germany had attacked Poland sometime after four in the morning. Polish soldiers, the Germans claimed, had overrun a German radio station at Gleiwitz, killed some German soldiers, and broadcast an inflammatory statement. This was no more than a classic staged provocation, he believed. And now he knew what had become of the Polish uniforms stolen in Paris. When his turn finally came, he was seen by a doctor, told he’d possibly had a concussion. If he became nauseated he was to seek medical assistance. Otherwise, he was free to continue his journey.
But that was not quite the truth. Outside the examining room a young lieutenant politely informed him that certain authorities in Nowy Sacz wished to speak with him. Was he under arrest? Not at all, the lieutenant said. It was only that someone at the hospital had notified the army staff that a Soviet journalist had been injured in the attack on the Cracow-Lvov line. Now a certain Colonel Vyborg earnestly wished to discuss certain matters with him at the Nowy Sacz headquarters. The young lieutenant had the honor of escorting him there. Szara knew it was pointless to resist, and the lieutenant led him to an aged but functional Czechoslovakian automobile and had him safely in Nowy Sacz an hour later.
Lieutenant Colonel Anton Vyborg, despite his Scandinavian surname, seemed a vestige of the old-fashioned Polish nobility. Szara fancied the name might date from the medieval wars between Poland and Sweden, when, as in all wars, families found themselves living on the wrong side of the lines. Whatever the story, there was something of the Baltic knight in Vyborg; he was tall and lean and thin-lipped, in his forties Szara thought, with webbed lines at the corners of his narrow eyes and pale hair cut short and stiff in the cavalry officer style. Like a cavalry officer, he wore high boots of supple leather and jodhpur-cut uniform trousers. Unlike a cavalry officer, however, his uniform jacket was hung over the back of his chair, his collar was unbuttoned and tie pulled down, and his sleeves were folded back. When Szara entered his office he was smoking a cigar, and a large metal ashtray held the stubs of many others. He had a handshake like steel, and looked hard at Szara with very cold blue eyes when they introduced themselves. Then, having made a rapid and intuitive judgment of some kind, he grew courtly, sent his orderly scurrying for coffee and rolls, and presented what was likely, Szara thought, the genial half of a sharply two-sided personality.
While he waited for his orderly to return, Colonel Vyborg smoked contentedly and stared into space, apparently at peace with the world. He was alone in this, however, since officers were rushing past the open door with armloads of files, telephones were jangling continuously, and the sense of the place was frantic motion, just barely below the level of panic. At one point, a young officer stuck his head in the door and said, “Obidza”-which could only have been the name of a small town. Colonel Vyborg made the merest gesture of acknowledgment, a polite, almost ironic inclination of the head, and the man wheeled and trotted off. Szara heard him somewhere down the hall, “Obidza,” telling someone else the news. Vyborg blew a long stream of cigar smoke into the air, rose abruptly, walked to the window, and stared down into the courtyard. The office-obviously temporary; the sign on the door read Tax Assessor-was in the Nowy Sacz city hall, an imposing monstrosity dating from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when Galicia had been a province of Austria. Vyborg stared onto the courtyard for a long time. “Now we burn files,” he said.
He looked meaningfully at Szara and cocked an eyebrow, but did not seem to want to hear what a journalist might think about such events. He settled himself back at the desk and said, “I think perhaps we ought to start our discussion without the coffee-nothing is really going to go smoothly today, and that includes my orderly’s trip to the bakery. Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” Szara said.
“Now a Soviet journalist, if he’s survived the last two years, can be no fool. You certainly know who you’re talking to.”
Szara had assumed from the beginning that Vyborg was the director or the deputy of a military intelligence unit. “An, ah, information bureau,” he said.
“Yes. That’s right. You’re legally a neutral, Mr. Szara, since last week, 23 August. As a Soviet citizen you are officially neither a friend nor an enemy of Poland, so I’m going to offer you an accommodation of mutual interest. For our part, we’d like to know what you’re doing here. Your papers are all in order, we assume you’ve been assigned a specific task. We’d like to know what’s of such interest that
“That’s the offer. You can certainly refuse to accept it. The Germans’ promise of nonaggression no doubt extends to you personally, and you may feel you want to take them up on it. If so, you needn’t move very far, you may stay right here in Nowy Sacz-in two or three days they’ll come to you. Or even sooner. On the other hand, you may want to leave right away. In that case I’ll have my aide drive you to the railroad station-or as close to it as the crowd will permit. Thousands of people are milling around down there, trying to get out any way at all, and the trains don’t seem to be running. Still, you can take your chances if you like. So, how shall it be?”
“Seems a fair offer,” Szara said.
“You’ll tell me, then, the nature of your assignment in Lvov.”
“They want to know something of the daily life of national minorities in eastern Poland: Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Jews, Lithuanians.”
“The assignment, Colonel Vyborg, is not that. I’d like to point out that I was asked to make this journey some weeks before any pact was announced between the USSR and Germany. They did not, in other words, send me into the middle of a war to write a story about the lives of tailors and farmers. I don’t really know what my editors had in mind-they send me somewhere and I do what I’m told to do. Maybe they didn’t have very much in mind at all.”
“Jolly anarchic old Russia-the right hand never knows what the left hand is doing. Something like that? “
“What can’t be said about Russia? Everything is true, eventually.”
“You are, in fact, a Pole.”
“A Jewish family from Poland, in Russia since I was a teenager.”
“Then I’ll revise my statement-a typical Pole.”
“Some would say not.”
“Some certainly would. But others would answer them by saying horseshit.”
Vyborg drummed his fingers on the table. A studious-looking man in an exceptionally rumpled uniform, a sort of shambling professor with spectacles, appeared in the doorway and stood there hesitantly, eventually clearing his throat. “Anton, excuse me, but they are in Obidza.”
“So I’m told,” Vyborg said.
“Well then, shall we …”
“Pack up our cipher machines and go? Yes, I suppose. I’ve asked Olensko to organize it. Tell him to begin, will you? “
“With you commanding? “
“I’ll find you in Cracow. First I’m going to take our Russian war correspondent to see the front.”
“Russian war correspondent?” The man was amazed. “So soon?” He stared at Szara without comprehension. “Will they print a dispatch from this war?” the man finally asked, disbelief in his voice. “Fifty German divisions attack Poland? My, my, no. Perhaps ‘Some German units bravely defend their borders thirty miles inside Poland.’ “
Vyborg laughed bitterly by way of agreement. “Who knows,” he said with resignation, “it may give old Kinto something to think about.” The word he used for Stalin meant a kind of singing bandit, a merry figure from Georgian folklore. Szara grinned at the remark. “You see?” Vyborg said triumphantly. “He’s on our side.”
*
Speeding southwest in an open military command car, Szara and Vyborg sat grimly in the back seat. Vyborg’s driver was a big sergeant with close-cropped hair, a lion tamer’s mustache, and a veinous, lumpy nose that was almost purple. He swore under his breath without pause, swinging the big car around obstacles, bouncing through the fields when necessary, hewing a path through the wheat stalks. The road was a nightmare. Refugees walked north, their possessions on their backs or in little carts. Some drove their farm animals before them or led them on
