people on the line. Fragments of the roof went flying through the air, raining in a clatter on the street and on nearby buildings. Then, even as he and Jastrow stood, they saw the whole facade of the synagogue come sliding down like a descending curtain, disintegrating as it went with a rumble and a gathering crash. By now the queue of people had run out of danger. White dust boiled up, and through this cloud, which the breeze thinned at once, Byron could the marble pillars and carved wooden doors of the holy ark untouched on the far wall, looking naked and out of place in the pale smoky sunshine.
Berel slapped him sharply on the shoulder. “Go, go! Don’t stay here. Go now. I have to help.”
Jewish men and boys were already groping into the new ruin, where many little fires were flickering. Little as he knew of Judaism, Byron understood that they meant to save the scrolls.
“All right, I’m going back to Natalie.”
“Good. Thank you, thank you. A safe journey to both of you.”
Byron left at a trot. The uncovering of the holy ark to the sunshine had shocked him like a piece of powerful music. Jogging back through the Jewish quarter of Warsaw, he saw these smashed rows of gray and brown houses, these cobbled streets and dirt alleys, these shabby courtyards and mews hung with drying laundry, these crowds of orderly Jews in beards and broad hats, these dark-eyed cheerful children playing under the bombs, these dogged tired street vendors with their carts and baskets, these kiosks laden with newspapers, magazines, feuilletons, and paperbound books, this smoke-filtered sunshine, these overturned trolleys, these dead horses — he saw all this in superbright detail, each picture printing itself on his mind as though he were a painter.
Without surprise or fear, he noticed thick V’s of German planes soaring out of the north. The sight had grown ordinary. He continued to trot, a little faster, through the emptying shell-pitted streets toward the embassy. People around him glanced at the sky and took shelter. The first waves were Stukas, diving down and spitting out black smoke, and Byron heard the irritated answering rattle of the weak rooftop machine guns of the Poles. One plane dove toward the street where he was running. He jumped into a doorway. Bullets went chattering down along the cobblestones, with a great whing-whang of ricochets. He watched the plane zoom away, then he trotted on, muttering the usual obscenities about the Germans.
Byron was developing a sense of invulnerability to the worst the Germans could do. To him they were contemptible bungling butchers. He was sure that the United States was going to rise in its wrath in short order, cross the Atlantic and knock the hell out of them, if the British and the French really proved too decayed or too scared to do it. The events around him must be making gigantic headlines in America, he thought. He would have been stupefied to know that the Polish war, its outcome clear, was already slipping to the back pages of United States papers, and that people were ignoring even the supposed “great debate” in the Senate over revising the Neutrality Act, because of the tight National League pennant race.
He loped through the embassy gate very much out of breath. The marine sentry gave him a salute and a familiar grin. Inside, in the big dining room darkened by window braces and blackout curtains, some fifty or so Americans caught in Warsaw were lunching at long trestle tables lit by oil lamps, making a loud clatter. Slote sat with Natalie, a small dark man named Mark Hartley, and some others at the ambassador’s polished dining table. Panting from the long run, Byron told Natalie about his meeting with Berel. He did not mention the destroyed synagogue.
“Thanks, Briny! God help them all. Sit down and eat something. We have marvellous breaded veal cutlets, by some miracle.”
Slote said, “Did you come here through the streets during this air attack?”
“He has duck feathers for brains,” Natalie said, giving Byron an affectionate look.
“Byron is all right,” Hartley said. He was a fourth at bridge with Natalie, Byron, and Slote, when they whiled away long night hours in the cellar. Mark Hartley’s name had once been Marvin Horowitz, and he liked to joke about the change. He was a New Yorker in the importing business.
Byron took an empty seat beside Natalie and helped himself to a cutlet. It had a rather gamy, sticky taste, but after a week of canned sprats and sausages it seemed delicious, and he was famished. He downed it and forked another onto his plate. Slote smiled at him, and glanced around with satisfaction at the Americans happily consuming the cutlets. “By the way, does anybody here object to eating horsemeat?”
“I most certainly do,” said Natalie.
“Well, that’s too bad. You’ve just eaten it.”
Natalie said, “Aagh!” and choked into her napkin. “My God. Horse! I could kill you. Why didn’t you warn me?”
“You need nourishment. We all do. There’s no telling what’s going to become of us, and I had the chance to buy up this lot and I did. You’ve been dining on one of the great breeds of Poland. The mayor ordered the slaughter of a thousand of them yesterday. We were lucky get a share.”
Mark Hartley took another cutlet from the platter. Natalie said, “Mark! How can you? Horse!”
He shrugged. “We got to eat. I’ve eaten worse meat in kosher restaurants.”
“Well, I don’t claim to be religious, but I draw the line at horses. I’d as soon eat a dog.”
Byron pushed away his plate. The awareness of horseflesh heavy in his stomach, the gluey taste of horse in his mouth, the remembered smell of fly-blown dead horses on the Jewish streets, blended in his consciousness as one thing — war.
Chapter 14
Four days later, early in the morning Natalie came scampering out into the embassy back yard hair and skirt flying, and pounced on Byron, who was burning passport blanks and visa application files. The embassy had hundreds of the maroon passport booklets, which went up slowly and smokily; in German hands they could be used for smuggling spies and saboteurs into the United States. The stacks and stacks of visa requests, because they identified Jews, were also high on the burn-list. Byron had given up riffling through the files for the American currency often clipped to application forms. His job was to reduce the stuff to ashes as fast as he could; he was burning money and didn’t care.
“Hurry. Come with me.” Natalie’s voice had a cheerful, excited ring.
“Where?”
“Just come.”
In a chauffeured black limousine at the front gate, Slote sat next to a plump, pink, gray-headed man. “Hi there, Byron!” Slote too sounded surprisingly cheerful. “This is the Swedish ambassador. Byron Henry’s father is our naval attache in Berlin, Ambassador. It might be well to take him along, don’t you think?”
The ambassador rubbed the side of his bulbous nose with a small neat hand, and gave Byron a wise look. “Very much so. Yes indeed. And he should perhaps take notes.”
“Just what I thought. Hop in, Byron.”
A blood transfusion could not have changed Slote more. Byron had talked to him an hour earlier; the familiar gray, dour, slumped Slote, who had been glooming around the embassy, talking medicines, snapping short answers, and spending hours locked in his office. Ever since a bomb had fallen on the building next door, killing ten Poles, Slote had been like that. Byron figured the responsibility was wearing the charge down. But now his face had color, his eyes were bright, and the very plume of blue smoke from his pipe looked jaunty.
As Byron got into the back seal, Natalie blurted to the ambassador, “Can I come along? Byron and I are travelling together.”
With an annoyed grimace, Slote shook his head. The ambassador looked her up and down, with masculine amusement. Natalie wore a green silk dress and an old pink sweater, an atrocious getup pulled from her suitcase without thought. It made her look vulgarly sexy. “But, my dear, wouldn’t you be frightened?”
“Of what?”
“The sounds of guns. We’re going to inspect the safe-conduct exit route.” The ambassador’s slow British speech was almost perfect. His small pink hand, resting on the open window, was manicured to a gleam, siege or no siege. “We may come rather close to the front.”
“I’ve heard guns.”
The ambassador smiled at Byron. “Well, shall we have your friend along?” He moved to make room for her
