Dark Star

a rope halter. Four people carried a sick man in a bed. Meanwhile, Polish military units- marching infantry, horse- drawn artillery and ammunition wagons- attempted to move south. The car passed a burnt-out wagon with two horses dead in the traces. “Stukas,” Vyborg said coldly. “A terror weapon.”

“I know,” Szara said.

They were climbing steadily on the rutted dirt road that worked its way through the hills that led to the Polish side of the Carpathian mountains. The air was cooler, the rolling countryside softening as the daylight began to fade. Szara’s head ached horribly; the bouncing of the hard-sprung car was torture. He’d not survived the bomb attack as well as he’d thought. His mouth tasted like brass, and he felt as though a path of tiny pins had been pushed into the skin along one side of his face. The car turned west, into a sunset colored blood red by smoke and haze, the sort of sky seen in late summer when the forests burn. Their road followed the path of a river, the Dunajec, according to Colonel Vyborg.

“We still hold the west bank,” he said. “Or we did when we left Nowy Sacz.” He produced a large pocket watch and gazed at it. “Perhaps no longer,” he mused. “We haven’t much hope militarily. Perhaps diplomatically something can be done, even now. We face a million and a half Germans, and tanks and planes, with perhaps two thirds that number-and we haven’t any air force to speak of. Brave pilots, yes, but the planes …”

“Can you hold?”

“We must. The French and the British may come to help- they’ve at least declared war. Time is what we need. And, whatever else happens, the story must be told. When people are ground into the dirt that is always what they say, isn’t it, that ‘the story must be told.’ “

“I’ll do what I can,” Szara said softly. In the people on the road he saw sometimes sorrow, or fear, or anger, but mainly they seemed to him numb, lost, and in their eyes he could find only perplexity and exhaustion beyond feeling. He had no immunity to these refugees. His eyes held each one as the car wove among them, then went on to the next, and then the next.

“An effort,” Vyborg said. “It’s all I ask of you.” He was silent while they passed a priest giving last rites by the side of the road. “More likely, though, it will wind up with my getting us both killed. And for what. Russia will not be sorry to see the last of Poland.”

“Was a treaty possible?”

“Not really. As one of our leaders put it, ‘With the Germans we risk losing our freedom, with the Russians we shall lose our soul.’ Still, it may be in the Politburo’s interest for attention to be called to what the Germans are doing. It’s not impossible.”

When Szara heard the drone of the airplane he clenched his fists. Vyborg’s eyes searched the sky and he leaned forward and put a hand on the sergeant’s shoulder. “Slow down, Sergeant,” he said. “If he sees a staff car he’ll attack.”

The Stuka came out of a sun-broken cloud, and Szara’s heart began to beat hard as he heard the accelerating whine of the engine. “Stop,” Vyborg said. The driver jammed on the brakes. They leaped out of the car and ran for the ditch by the side of the road. Szara pressed himself into the earth as the plane closed. God save me, he thought. The noise of the dive swelled to a scream, he heard horses neighing with terror, shouts, screams, chattering machine guns, a whipcrack above his head, then the ground rocked as the bomb went off. When the sound of the engine had disappeared into the distance he sat up. There were red ridges across his palms where his fingernails had pressed into his hands. Vyborg swore. He was picking broken cigars out of his breast pocket. On the road a woman had gone mad; people were running after her into a field, yelling for her to stop.

At dusk the column of refugees thinned, then stopped altogether. The land was deserted. They sped through a village. Some of the houses had been burned; others stood with doors wide open. A dog barked at them frantically as they drove by. Szara opened the valise, took out a small notebook, and began to write things down. The driver swung around a bomb crater and cursed it loudly. “Quiet!” Vyborg commanded. Szara appreciated the gesture, but it didn’t really matter. Germans bomb civilians, he wrote. No, they would not publish that. Poles suffer after government refuses compromise. He scribbled over the words quickly, afraid Vyborg could see what he was writing. A new kind of war in Poland as Luftwaffe attacks nonmilitary targets.

No.

It was hopeless. The futility of the journey made him sad. Typical, somehow. Killed on Polish soil while making a useless gesture- an obituary that told the truth. Suddenly he knew exactly who Vyborg was: a Polish character from the pages of Balzac. Szara stole a glance at him. He’d lit the broken stump of a cigar and was pretending to be lost in thought as his writer wrote and they traveled to the lines. Yes, the defiant romantic. Pure courage, cold to the dangers of whatever passion took the present moment for its own. Such men-and the women were worse-had destroyed Poland often enough. And saved it. Either could be true, depending on the year you chose. And the great secret, Szara thought, and Balzac had never tumbled to it, was that the Polish Jews were just as bad-in their faith they were unmovable, no matter what form faith took: Hasidism, Zionism, communism. They were all on fire, and that they shared with the Poles, that they had in common.

And you?

Not me, Szara answered himself.

The driver braked suddenly and squeezed to the right on the narrow road. A convoy of three horse-drawn ambulances was making slow progress in the other direction. “Getting close to it now,” Vyborg said.

The car made its way up a wooded mountainside. Szara could smell the sap, the aroma sharp and sweet after the long heat of the day. The night air was cooling quickly, a wall of dark pines rose on either side of the road. They had very little light to drive by, the headlamps of the car had been taped down to slits. The sergeant squinted into the darkness and braked hard when, with a sudden twist or turn, the road simply disappeared. Nonetheless, their progress was observed. On two occasions a Wehrmacht artillery observer spotted the light moving on a mountain road and tried his luck: a low, sighing buzz, a flash in the forest, a muted crump sound, then the muffled boom of the German gun bouncing among the hills. “Missed,” Vyborg said tartly as the echo faded away.

Once again, he was awake at dawn.

Wrapped in a blanket on the dirt floor of a ruined shepherd’s hut, kerosene splashed on his neck, wrists, and ankles against the lice. From the hut, an artillery observer’s position in support of the battalion holding the west bank of the Dunajec, they could see a narrow valley between the water and the wooded hillside, a village broken and burned by German shelling, a section of the river, the wooden pilings that had served as stanchions for a blown bridge, and two concrete pillboxes built to defend the crossing. The observer was no more than eighteen, a junior lieutenant who’d been mobilized only three days earlier and still wore the suit he’d had on in an insurance office in Cracow. He’d managed to scrounge an officer’s cap and wore officer’s insignia on the shoulders of a very dirty white shirt-his jacket neatly folded in a corner of the little room.

The lieutenant was called Mierczek. Tall and fair and serious, he was somebody’s good son, an altar boy no doubt, and now a soldier. A little overawed at first by the presence of a colonel and a war correspondent, he’d made them as comfortable as he could. A harassed infantry major had greeted them the night before and brought them up to the post. Szara had described him in his notebook as 1914 war vintage or earlier; ferocious, bright red face; complaining he hasn’t sufficient ammunition, field guns, etc. He gave us bread and lard and tea and a piece of a dense kind of currant cake his wife had baked for him before he left for the front. He wears a complicated-Masonic? noble? — ring. Not happy to see us.

“There’s no knowing what will happen. You will have to take your chances as best you can.” They are facing elements of the XVIII Corps of the Wehrmacht Fourteenth Army under Generaloberst List. Advances from northern Slovakia have already been made through the Jablunkov and Dukla passes. Some German units advanced more than fifteen miles the first day. We may, no matter what happens here, be cut off. A delightful prospect. Polish air force bombed on the ground in the first hours of the war, according to Colonel V.

The tiny river valley in the Carpathians was exquisite at dawn. Streaky red sky, mist banks drifting against the mountainside, soft light on the slate gray river. But no birds. The birds had gone. Instead, a deep silence and the low, steady rumble of distant gunnery. Mierczek stared for a long time through a missing section of roof at the back of the hut, searching the sky for clouds, praying silently for rain. But Hitler’s timing had been perfect: the German harvest was in-the population would not suffer deprivation because farmhands were suddenly called to serve in the