They stood together awkwardly for a time, then a workman came out of the field and stepped across the track. “It’s done,” Vyborg said.
There was no train. Szara and Vyborg determined to go east, on a road that ran well to the south of the railroad station, skirting the Slovakian border, winding its way through the river valleys of the Carpathians. They joined an endless column of refugees, on foot, in carts drawn by farm horses, in the occasional automobile. German units were posted at the crossroads, but the soldiers did not interfere with the migration; they seemed bored, disinterested, slouching against stone walls or bridge abutments, smoking, watching without expression as the river of humanity flowed past their eyes. No papers were demanded, no one was called out of line or searched. Szara noticed what he took to be other soldiers in the column who, like Vyborg, had shed their uniforms and obtained civilian clothing. Among the refugees there were various points of view about the German attitude, ranging from attributions of benevolence-“The Fritzes want to win our confidence”-to pragmatism-“The less Poles in Poland, the happier for them. Now we’ll be Russia’s problem.” The road east became a city: babies were born and old people died, friends were made and lost, money was earned, spent, stolen. An old Jew with a white beard down to his waist and a sack of pots and pans clanking on his back confided to Szara, “This is my fourth time along this road. In 1905 we went west to escape the pogroms, in 1916 east, running away from the Germans, then in 1920, west, with the Bolsheviks chasing us. So, here we are again. I don’t worry no more-it’ll sort itself out.”
It took them six days to reach the small city of Krosno, some eighty miles east of the Cracow-Zakopane line. There, Szara saw with amazement that the Polish flag still hung proudly above the entrance to the railway station. Somehow, they’d managed to outdistance the German advance. Had the Wehrmacht permitted the column of refugees to enter Polish-held territory in order to overload supply and transport systems? He could think of no other reason, but that seemed to him dubious at best. Vyborg left Szara at the station and went off to look for an intelligence unit and a wireless telegraph among the forces manning the Krosno defenses. Szara thought he’d seen him for the last time, but two hours later he reappeared, still looking like a dignified, rather finely made workman in his cap and jacket. They stood together by a beam supporting the wooden roof of the terminal, restless crowds of exhausted and desperate people shifting endlessly around them. The noise was overwhelming: people shouting and arguing, children screaming, a public address system babbling indecipherable nonsense. They had to raise their voices in order to make themselves heard. “At last,” Vyborg said, “I was able to reach my superiors.”
“Do they know what’s going on?”
“To a point. As far as you’re concerned, Lvov is not currently under attack, but that is a situation which may change quickly. As for me, my unit was known to have reached Cracow, but there they vanished. Communication is very bad-several Polish divisions are cut off, mostly trying to break out and fight their way to Warsaw. The capital will be defended and is expected to hold. Personally I give it a month at most, probably less. I’m afraid there isn’t much hope for us. We do have miracles in this country, even military ones from time to time, but the feeling is that there’s not much that can be done. We’ve appealed to the world for help, naturally. As for me, I have a new assignment.”
“Outside the country?”
Vyborg’s thin-lipped mouth smiled tightly for a moment. “I can tell you nothing. You may wish me well, though, if you like.”
“I do, Colonel.”
“I would ask you, Mr. Szara, to write about what you’ve seen, if you can find a way to do that. That we were brave, that we stood up to them, that we did not surrender. And I would say that the next best thing, for us, if you can’t do that, is silence. I refer to your assignment from
“I’ll find a way.”
“I can only ask. That’s all that officers of defeated armies can do, appeal to conscience, but I ask you anyhow. Perhaps you still feel yourself, at heart, a Pole. People of this nation are far-flung, but they often think of us, it would not be inappropriate for you to join them. Meanwhile, as to practical matters, I’m told that a train for Lvov will be pulling in here within the hour. I’d like to think that you’ll be on it-you have your work cut out for you, I can see-but at least that way I’ll have kept my part of the bargain, albeit by an unexpected route.”
“Journalists are very good at forcing their way onto trains, Colonel.”
“Perhaps we’ll meet again,” Vyborg said.
“I would hope so.”
Vyborg’s handshake was strong. “Good luck,” he said, and slipped away into the milling crowd of refugees.
Szara did get on the train, though not actually inside it. He worked his way to the side of a coach, then moved laterally until he came to the extended iron stair. There was a passenger already in residence on the lowest step, but Szara waited until the train jerked into motion, then forced his way up and squeezed in beside him. His fellow traveler was a dark, angry man clutching a wicker hamper in both arms and, using his shoulder, he attempted to push Szara off the train-the step belonged to him, it was his place in the scheme of things.
But Szara availed himself of a time-honored method and took a firm grip on the man’s lapel with his free hand so that the harder the man pushed, the more likely he was to leave the train if Szara fell off. The train never managed to pick up any speed; there were people hanging out the windows, lying flat on the roof, and balancing on the couplings between cars, and the engine seemed barely capable of moving the weight forward. For a long time the two of them glared at each other, the man pushing, Szara hanging on to him, their faces separated only by inches. Then, at last, the pushing and pulling stopped and both men leaned against the bodies occupying the step above theirs. The train made the eighty miles to Lvov in six agonizing hours, and if the station at Krosno had been a hell of struggling crowds, Lvov was worse.
Attempting to cross the platform, Szara literally had to fight. The heat of the crowd was suffocating, and he shoved bodies out of his way, tripped over a crate of chickens and fell flat on the cement floor, then struggled desperately among a forest of legs in order to rise before he was trampled to death. Someone punched him in the back, hard-he never saw who did it, he simply felt the blow. Once he got to the waiting room, he fell in with a determined phalanx using their combined weight to move toward the doors. They’d almost gotten there when a crowd of frantic, terrified people came sweeping back against them. Szara’s feet left the ground, and he was afraid his ribs might break from the pressure; he flailed out with one hand, hit something wet that produced an angry yelp, and with enormous effort got his feet back on the floor.
Somewhere, only barely touching the edge of his consciousness, was a drone, but he made no attempt to connect it with anything in the real world, it was simply there. He moved sideways for a few seconds, then some mysterious countercurrent picked him up and sent him sprawling through the doors of the station-he kept his balance only by jamming one hand against the cement beneath him, gasping at the air as he came free of the crowd.
He found himself, not in the main square of Lvov, but at a side street entrance to the railroad station. People were running and shouting, he had no idea why. Several carts had been abandoned by their drivers, and the horses were galloping wildly up the cobbled street to get away from whatever it was, loose vegetables and burlap sacks flying off the wagons behind them. The air was full of tiny, white feathers, from where he did not know, but they filled the street like a blizzard. The drone grew insistent and he looked up. For a moment he was hypnotized. Somewhere, in some file in the house on the rue Delesseux, was a silhouette, as seen from below, identified in a careful Cyrillic script as the Heinkel-in; and what he saw above him was a perfect match of the darkened outline among the pages of what he now realized was the Baumann file.
This was one of the bombers controlled by the swage wire manufactured on the outskirts of Berlin. There was a second flight approaching, at least a half dozen of them in the clouds above the city, and he remembered, if not precise facts and figures, at least the certain conclusion: they were known to produce the virtual annihilation of every stick and stone and living thing once they released their bombs. As the planes flew in slow formation, a series of black, oblong cylinders floated away beneath them and tumbled, in a crooked line, toward the earth.
The first explosion-he felt it in his feet and heard it in the distance-startled him, then several more followed, each time growing louder. He ran. Blindly and without purpose, in panic, then tripped and fell at the base of a doorway. He lashed out at the door, which swung open, and he crawled frantically into a room. He smelled sawdust and shellac, spotted a large, rough-hewn work table, and rolled beneath it. Only then did he discover he was not alone-there was a face close to his, a man with a scraggly beard, half glasses, and a stub of pencil wedged
