effect, they handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler and said, ‘Here, boy, leave us alone and go smash Russia.’ Now Stalin’s done a Munich in reverse. ‘No, no,
“Is it going to come?” Natalie asked.
“Why, I thought you and Aaron were the authorities for the view that it won’t.”
“I’m not ready to panic. It just seems to me that Hitler will get what he wants, as usual.”
Slote’s face turned pinched and sombre. He pulled at the pipe, sucking in his pallid cheeks. “No. The Poles now have the signed British guarantee. Very gallant; very irrational, very belated, and probably futile. To that extent we’re back in 1914. Poland can plunge the world in by standing firm. It’s all up to Hitler. If he wants to arm some more first, the crisis will subside, and that seems to be in the wind at the moment. But for all we know, he’s already given the order to march. That’s why I’m being such a pill about Medzice. Down there, in the next two weeks, you have a fifty-fifty chance of being captured by German soldiers. I do think that’s a bit risky, dear.”
After dinner Slote drove them to another part of town: street after street of old brick houses of three and four stories, with shops everywhere at ground level. Here indeed were Jews by the thousands, strolling on the sidewalks through narrow cobbled streets, looking out of windows, sitting in shop doorways. On the street corners knots of bearded men argued with loud voices and sweeping gestures, as on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Many of the men wore kaftans, or else the boots, blouses and caps of the countryside. There were men in ankle-length black coats and black hats, and a few youngsters in army uniforms. There were some prosperous people, too, smooth- shaven men wearing bowlers and well-groomed women looking much like the Warsaw Gentiles around the Europeiski. Children darted about at their street games, boys in caps and short trousers and girls in neat colored frocks, and their mothers gossiped as they watched them.
I thought you said they were all storming the embassy,” Byron remarked to Slote.
“There are three hundred and fifty thousand of them, Byron. Maybe one in a hundred has foresight. That puts three or four thousand hammering at our doors. The rest believe what they want to believe and vaguely hope for the best. The government keeps telling everybody there won’t be a war.”
Natalie was looking around with an absent, pleased expression at the horse-drawn wagons and handcarts in the streets, and at an old trolley car clanking by. “My parents described all this to me when I was a child,” she said. “It seems not to have changed.” People stopped and looked after the embassy car as it passed. Once Slote halted to ask directions. The Jews came clustering around, but gave only vague cautious answers in Polish. “Let me try,” Natalie said, and she began to talk Yiddish, causing an astonished outbreak of laughter, followed by a burst of warm, friendly talk. A chubby boy in a ragged cap volunteered to run ahead of the car and show the way. They set off after him.
“Well done,” Slote said.
“I can hack out Yiddish after a fashion, if I must,” Natalie said. “Aaron’s a master of it, though he never utters a Yiddish word.”
Natalie and Slote got out at a gray brick apartment building with tall narrow windows, and ornate iron door, and window boxes of blooming geraniums. It overlooked a small green park, where Jews congregated on the benches and around a gushing fountain in noisy numbers. Curious children ran from the park to ring Byron in the American car. Under their merry stares, as they freely discussed him and the machine, Byron felt somewhat like an ape behind glass. The faces of the Jewish children were full of life and mischief, but they offered no discourtesy, and gave him shy smiles. He wished he had gifts for them. He took his fountain pen from his pocket, and through the open window offered it to a black-haired girl in a lilac dress with white lace cuffs and collar. The girl hung back, blinking wary dark brown eyes. The other children encouraged her with shouts and giggles. At last she took the pen, her little cool fingers brushing his hand for a moment, and ran lightly away.
“Well, wouldn’t you know. He’s not there,” Natalie said, returning to the car with Slote a few minutes later. “Gone to Medzice for his son’s wedding, with the whole family. Just my luck. Aaron told me he deals in mushrooms, but can that be such a good business? He’s evidently well off.”
“Unusually so.” Slote was starting the car. “This must the best apartment house around here.”
The little girl in lilac reappeared, leading her parents, the father in a knee-length gray frock coat and a wide-brimmed gray hat, the mother kerchiefed, wearing a German-tailored brown suit, and carrying a baby in a pink blanket.
“He’s thanking you,” Slote said to Byron, as the father gravely spoke in Polish through the window, holding the fountain pen, “and he says it’s much too expensive, and please take it back.”
“Tell him the American fell in love with his daughter. She’s the most beautiful girl in the world, and she must keep it.”
The father and mother laughed when Slote translated. The little girl shrank against her mother’s skirt and shot Byron an ardent look. The mother undid from her lapel a gold brooch with purple stones, and pressed it on Natalie, who tried to decline it, speaking in Yiddish. Again, this caused surprise and a cascade of jocund talk, the upshot of which was that she had to keep the brooch. The little girl kept the pen, and they drove off to shouted farewells.
“Well, I wasn’t on a looting expedition,” Natalie said. “Here, Byron. It’s beautiful. Give it to your girlfriend, or your sister, or your mother.”
“Keep it, it’s yours,” he said rudely. “I could consider staying in Warsaw and waiting for that girl to grow up.”
“Not with those parents,” Slote said. “She’s for a rabbi.”
“Steer clear of Jewish girls anyway, they’re bad joss,” Natalie said.
“Amen,” said Slote.
“Natalie was pinning the brooch on her jacket. “I guess I’ll see Berel in Medzice, then. Too bad, Aaron said he was very clever, and could show me things in Warsaw that nobody else could. They used to study the Talmud together, though Berel was much younger.”
At the mention of Medzice, Slote despairingly shook his head.
Chapter 8
Natalie telephoned Byron in his room at seven o’clock one morning, after they had stayed up till well past three, touring nightclubs with Slote; dismal Polish imitations of Paris dives. In a nervously merry mood, she had pushed them on from one club to another, ignoring Slote’s show of collapsing fatigue.
“Hi, Briny, are you dead?” From her chipper note, she might have had ten hours’ sleep. “This is playing sort of dirty, but I have two seats on the plane to Cracow, and it leaves at eleven. I bought them yesterday. If you’d rather sleep and just stay here, okay. I’ll be back in a couple of days.”
Half awake, Byron said, “What? Slote’s got us on the plane to Rome tomorrow, Natalie, and those reservations are mighty hard to come by.”
“I know. I’ll leave him a note. Maybe I’ll phone him from the airport. If you come, we won’t have to return to Warsaw at all. We’ll go straight on to Rome from Cracow, Saturday or Sunday, after I visit my family.”
“Have you got reservations from there?”
“No. But Cracow’s a hub. There are half a dozen ways to get out. We’ll buy our tickets — plane or train or bus — as soon as we arrive there. Well? Byron! Have you fallen back asleep?”
“I’m thinking.” Byron was weighing the advantage of leaving Warsaw and Slote, against these harebrained travel arrangements. The war crisis seemed to be abating. The Poles in the nightclubs had acted gay and carefree, though Slote had remarked on the absence of foreigners, especially Germans. The streets were as calm as ever, and there were no visible preparations for war. Byron had taken to gauging the state of the crisis by the tone of
