“Rhoda, I’ll get back in any case via Lisbon or Copenhagen. Don’t worry. I’d like you to go ahead with the Kirby thing. BuOrd wants the red carpet out for him.”
They were sitting on a marble bench beside the little fountain, where fat red fish disported in the late sunshine. Rhoda looked around at the close-clipped lawn, and said in a calmer tone, “All right. I’ve been planning cocktails out here. Those musicians who played at Peggy’s tea are coming. It’ll be nice at that. Sorry you’ll miss it.”
“Bill Forrest said nobody in this world puts on dinners like you.”
Rhoda laughed. “Oh, well. A week goes by fast. Berlin’s interesting now.” A pair of black-and-yellow birds darted past them, swooped to a nearby tree, and perched caroling. “Honestly, though, would you believe there’s a war on?”
“It’s just starting.”
“I know. Well, you’ll see Madeline, anyway. And be sure to telephone Warren, that rascal never writes. I’m glad Byron’s up in the Italian hills.
Clasping her hand tight, Victor Henry decided not to upset Rhoda further with the news of Byron’s disappearance. She could do nothing about it, after all, but fret vainly; and he guessed that whatever pickle Byron was in, he would get himself out of it. That had been the boy’s history.
Pug flew off on schedule that evening to Rotterdam. Tempelhof Airport was transformed. The shops were dark. All the ticket counters save Lufthansa were shut down. On the field, the usual traffic of European airliners had vanished, and squat Luftwaffe interceptors stood in grim shadowy rows. But from the air, Berlin still blazed with all its electric lights, as in peacetime. He was pleased that Rhoda had decided to dress up and go to
Chapter 11
Byron was changing a tire by the roadside when he was strafed. He and Natalie were out of Cracow and heading for Warsaw in the rust-pitted Fiat taxi, together with Berel Jastrow, the bridal couple, the bearded little driver, and his inconveniently fat wife.
Cracow on the morning of the invasion had smoked and flamed here and there, but the picturesque city had not been much damaged by the first German bombardment. Byron and Natalie had had a good if hurried look at its splendid churches and castles and its magnificent old square like Saint Mark’s in Venice, as they drove around in cheery sunshine trying to find a way out. The populace was not in panic. The Germans were more than fifty miles away. Still, crowds moved briskly in the streets, and the railroad station was mobbed. Berel Jastrow somehow obtained two tickets to Warsaw. Byron and Natalie would not use them, hard as Berel tried to persuade them to, so he shipped off his wife and twelve-year-old daughter. Then he adroitly took them to one office after another, through little streets and unused doors and gates, seeking to send them safely away. He seemed to know everybody, and he went at the job with assurance, but he couldn’t get Byron and Natalie out. Air traffic was finished. The Rumanian border was reported closed. Trains were still departing at unpredictable times, eastward toward Russia and north to Warsaw, with people hanging from windows and clinging to the locomotives. Otherwise there were the roads.
The bearded taxi driver Yankel and his wife, poor relatives of Berel, were willing to go anywhere. Berel had managed to get him an official paper, exempting the cab from being commandeered; but Yankel had small faith that it would work for long. The wife insisted on driving to her flat first, picking up all the food she had, her bedding, and her kitchenware, and roping them onto the car top. Berel thought the Americans should head for their embassy in Warsaw, three hundred kilometers away, rather than chance a dash to the border in the path of the German army. So this odd party set forth: seven of them jammed in an ancient rusty Fiat, with mattresses flapping on the roof, and copper pots rhythmically banging.
They stopped at night in a town where Jastrow knew some Jews. They ate well, slept on the floor, and were off again at dawn. They found the narrow tarred roads filling with people on foot and horse-drawn wagons laden with children, furniture, squawking geese, and the like. Some peasants drove along donkeys piled with household goods, or a few mooing cows. Marching soldiers now and then forced the car off the road. A troop of cavalry trotted by on gigantic dappled horses. The dusty riders chatted as they rode, strapping fellows with helmets and sabers glittering in the morning sun. They laughed, flashing white teeth, twirling their moustaches, glancing down with good-humored disdain at the straggling refugees. One company of foot soldiers went by singing. The clear weather, the smell of the ripening corn, made the travellers feel good, though the sun as it climbed got too hot. There were no combatants in sight on the long black straight road through yellow fields when a lone airplane dived from the sky, following the line of the road and making a hard stuttering noise. It flew so low that Byron could see the painted numbers, the black crosses, the swastika, the clumsy fixed wheels. The bullets fell on people, horses, and the household goods and children in the carts. Byron felt a burning and stinging in one ear. He was not aware of toppling into the dirt.
He heard a child crying, opened his eyes, and sat up. The blood on his clothes surprised him — big bright red stains; and he felt a warm trickle on his face. Natalie kneeled beside him, sponging his head with a sodden red handkerchief. He remembered the airplane. Across the road the crying girl clutched a man’s leg, looking down at a woman lying in the road. Between sobs she screamed a few Polish words over and over. The man, a blond barefoot Pole in ragged clothes, was patting the child’s head.
“What’s that, what’s she saying?”
“Are you all right, Byron? How do you feel?”
“Sort of dizzy. What’s that little girl saying?”
Natalie looked strange. Her nose seemed pinched and long, her hair was in disorder, her face was livid and dirty, and her lipstick was cracked. She had a little of Byron’s blood smeared on her forehead. “I don’t know. She’s hysterical.”
Berel stood beside Natalie, stroking his beard. He said in French, “She keeps saying, ‘Mama looks so ugly.’”
Byron got to his feet, propping one hand against the car’s hot fender. His knees felt watery. “I think I’m okay. What does the wound look like?”
Natalie said, “I don’t know, your hair is so thick. But it’s bleeding a lot. We’d better get you to a hospital and have it stitched.”
The driver, hastily tightening the bolts of the jacked-up wheel, smiled at Byron. Sweat rolled off his pallid nose and forehead into his beard. His wife and the bridal couple stood in the shade of the car, a look of shock on their faces, fazing at the sky, at the road, and at the crying girl. All down the road, wounded horses were plunging and screaming, and fowls from overturned carts were scampering helter-skelter, chased by children making a great noise. People were bending over the wounded or lifting them into carts, with much excited shouting in Polish. The sun burned down white-hot from a clear sky.
Byron walked uncertainly to the crying girl, followed by Natalie and Jastrow. The mother lay on her back. She had caught a bullet straight in the face. The big red hole was an especially bad sight because her fixed eyes were undamaged. Berel spoke to the father, who had a stupid gentle face and a bushy yellow moustache. The man shrugged, holding the little girl close. Yankel’s wife came and offered a red apple to the child, whose sobbing almost at once died away. She took the apple and bit it. The man sat by his dead wife, folding his dusty bare feet, and began to mutter, crossing himself, his shoes dangling around his neck.
Natalie helped Byron, who was very dizzy, into the car. They drove on; Jastrow said there was a good-sized town three miles away, where they could tell the authorities about the wounded on the highway. The bride, who out of her wedding clothes was just a freckled girl with thick glasses, started to cry, and cried all the way to the town, repulsing her wan-faced husband and burying her face in the huge bosom of the driver’s wife.
The town was undamaged, and the hospital, a small brown brick building beside a church, was quiet and cool inside. Several nurses and nuns went off in a truck after Jastrow told his story. Byron was led to a white- painted room full of surgical equipment and buzzing flies. A fat old doctor in a white jacket and patched canvas
