“Sure.”
“Tell me, Briny,” Natalie said, “are you still having fun?”
He looked around at the noisy, crowded evil-smelling ward, where the Polish women were helplessly bringing new life into a city which was being dynamited to death by the Germans, going through unpostponable birth pangs with the best care the dying city could give them. “More fun than a barrel of monkeys. Be careful going back to the embassy, will you? There’s a big burning church on Franzuski and they’ve got the street blocked off. Go around by the museum.”
“All right. You’ll probably find Berel in that gray building, you know, where the Jewish council works. He’s on the food committee or something.”
“I guess I’ll find him.”
Byron came out in a back alley where two men were loading dead people from the hospital onto a two- wheeled cart, much like the one he had bought to carry the water. Bodies lay on the cobblestones, and one man wearing a red-smeared white oilcloth apron was taking them up one by one in his arms and thrusting them at the other man, who stacked them in the cart — large rigid horrors with open mouths and fixed eyes — like dead fish in a market. The man tossed up the light body of a scrawny old woman, whose gray pubic hair showed through the pink rag still hanging on her.
Hurrying down Marshal Pilsudski Boulevard toward the Jewish section he heard the thumping of heavy guns, and nearby explosions like the blasting at a building site. Byron muttered routine curses at the Germans. He had spent a week in Germany after defecting from the University of Florence. They had seemed odd but no more so than the Italians; foreigners, but human enough, with a boisterous sense of fun and very polite manners. Yet here they were, surrounding the Polish capital, pounding it with explosives and flying steel, breaking the water mains, killing the children, turning living people into stiff glassy-eyed dead stacked garbage to be carted away and disposed of. It was really the most amazing outrage. To call it “war” was not to make it any more understandable.
This peculiar and horrible state of affairs in which he accidentally found himself was nevertheless far more colorful and interesting than “peace,” as Byron remembered it. Delivering water to the United States embassy was the most satisfying thing he had done in his life. He loved the job. He was willing to be killed doing it. But the odds were all with him. This was the novel thing he was finding out. Most of the people in Warsaw were still alive and unhurt and going about their business. The city was far from destroyed or even half-destroyed. As he made his way to Nareiskaya district he passed through many a block of brown three-story houses which stood undamaged, peaceful, and quiet, looking exactly as they had before the German attack.
But in the Jewish quarter itself there were no such undamaged blocks. It was one broad smoky ruin. Clearly the Germans were raining extra shells and bombs on this district — a pointless course, since the Jews of Warsaw could not compel the surrender of the city. Such a deluge of fire and explosion concentrated on the city’s vitals — power, water, transport, bridges — instead of on the Jews, could break Warsaw much faster. The bombardment of the Nareiskaya was an irrational wasteful assault by a powerful army against sad unarmed paupers.
The JUDEN VERBOTEN signs Byron had seen on park benches in Germany had been too bizarre to seem real. This bombardment of the Nareiskaya district first drove home to him the queer fact that the Germans really had murder in their hearts for these people. Trolley cars lay on their sides, burned out. Swollen dead horses stank in the streets, in clouds of fat black flies that sometimes settled stickily on Byron’s hands and face. There were dead cats and dogs, too, and a lot of dead rats scattered in the gutter. He saw only one human body, an old man crumpled in a doorway. He had noticed before how quick the Jews were to remove their dead, and how they treated the corpses with respect, covering the loaded carts with cloths and following them in silent mournful straggles through the streets.
But despite the smashing up of the houses, the continuing fires, the smoke, the rubble, this quarter still abounded in eager crowded life. On one corner, outside a ruined schoolhouse, boys in skullcaps sat with their bearded teacher on the sidewalk chanting over enormous books; some of the boys were not much larger than the books. Kiosks were still festooned with dozens of different newspapers and journals printed in heavy Hebrew lettering. He heard someone in a house practicing on a violin. The vendors of wilted vegetables and spotted stunted fruit, of tinned food and old clothes, stood along the sidewalks or pushed their creaky handcarts amid crowds of people. Work gangs were clearing rubble from bombed houses off the streets and the sidewalks. There were plenty of hands for the work. Byron wondered at this, for in the past weeks Jewish men and boys — perhaps because they were so recognizable — had seemed to erupt all over Warsaw, digging trenches, fighting fires, repairing mains. One bent old graybeard in skullcap and kaftan, wielding a shovel in a trench, gave a Jewish look to a whole work force. Nevertheless they did appear to be pitching in everywhere.
Berel Jastrow was not in the council building. Wandering through crowded, dark, dingy corridors lit only by flickering thick candles, Byron chanced on a man whom he had once seen conferring with Berel, a little, neat, bearded Jew with a glass eye that gave him a walleyed stare. Talking a mishmash of German and Yiddish, the man conveyed that Berel was inspecting the community kitchens. Byron set out to hunt him down, and came on him in a huge Romanesque synagogue of gray stone, undamaged except for a broken stone Star of David in a round glassless window. Jastrow stood in a low hot anteroom where people were lined up for a strong-smelling stew ladled out by kerchiefed perspiring women from tubs on wood-burning stoves.
“The Russians!” Berel stroked his beard. “This is definite?”
“Your mayor came to the embassy with the news.”
“Let us go outside.”
They talked out in the street, well away from the food queue. The raggedly dressed people in line stared at them and tried to hear the conversation, even cupping hands to ears. “I must report this to the central committee,” Berel said. “It may be good news. Who knows? Suppose the two robbers cut each other’s throats? Such things have happened. The Russians could be messengers of God.”
He was taken aback when Byron offered him Natalie’s wallet. “But what is she thinking?” he said. “I have money. I have dollars. She may need that herself. She isn’t out of Warsaw yet.”
Byron was embarrassed. It had not occurred to him that Jastrow might be offended, but now the reaction seemed natural. He said the Americans expected to leave Warsaw soon under a flag of truce.
“So. We won’t see you or Natalie again?”
“Possibly not.”
“Ah. Well, if the Germans let all you Americans out together, she should be safe. She told me an American passport says nothing about religion. Tell her I thank her, and I’ll put the money in the food fund. Tell her —
A shell whistled down and exploded some distance away, making Byron’s ears ache. Berel spoke hurriedly. “So, they are coming back to this neighborhood again. They shell by a system, the Germans. Yesterday was Yom Kippur, and all day the shells fell on us, they never stopped. Now, you will be seeing Arele?” He smiled wryly at Byron’s blank look. “Dr. Aaron Jastrow” he said, mimicking English pronunciation.
“I guess so.”
“Tell him,” Berel said, “
“
“Very good. You’re a fine Hebrew student.”
“What does it mean?”
“Get out.” Berel gave a worn white card to Byron.
“Now, will you do me a favor? This is a man in New Jersey, an importer. He sent a bank draft in August for a large shipment of mushrooms. It came too late. I destroyed draft, so there’s no problem, but — what are you smiling at?”
“Well, you have so much to worry about. And yet you think of this.”
Jastrow shrugged. “This is my business. The Germans, they’ll either come in, or they won’t. After all, they’re not lions and tigers. They’re people. They’ll take our money. It’ll be a very bad time, but a war always ends. Listen, if the Russians come they’ll take our money, too. So” — he held out his hand to Byron — “so, God bless you, and —”
Byron heard the noise of a shell very close, the unmistakable sloppy whir and whistle. It went splintering through the synagogue roof. The stunning explosion came a second or two later, giving him a chance to clap his hands over his ears and fall to the ground. Strangely, it did not blow out the front wall, and this was what saved the
