Panting from the little climb, the ambassador and the officer talked volubly, gesturing at the church spires. The ambassador scrawled notes and translated bits to Byron. On the terms of the cease-fire, he said, the neutral refugees would cross unescorted from the Polish to the German lines, heading for the farthest church, where Wehrmacht trucks would meet them. Colonel Rakowski feared that some refugees might wander on the poorly marked dirt roads, head for the wrong church, and find themselves between two fires when the truce — for which the Germans were granting only two hours — was ended. So he had asked the Swedish ambassador to come out and study the route beforehand.
“He says,” the ambassador observed to Byron, closing his notebook, “that the best view is from that observation tower. You can make out the different roads, all the way to the Kantorovicz church.”
Byron looked at the spindly wooden tower erected close by in the school’s play yard. A narrow ladder led to a square metal shielded platform, where he could see the helmet of a soldier. “Well, I’ll go up, okay? Maybe I can make a sketch.”
“The colonel says the tower has been drawing quite a bit of fire.”
Byron managed a grin.
With a paternal smile the ambassador handed him the notebook and pen. Byron trotted to the ladder and went up, shaking the frail tower as he climbed. Here was a perfect view of the terrain. He could see all the roads, all the turnoffs of the brown zigzags across no-man’s-land, to the far church. The soldier on watch glanced away from his binoculars to gawk, as the young American in an open shirt and loose gray sweater sketched the roads in the ambassador’s notebook, struggling with the pages as they flapped in the wind, marking all the wrong turns with X’s, and crudely picturing the three churches in relation to the route. The soldier nodded when Byron showed him the sketch, and slapped his shoulder. “Ho kay,” he said, with a grin of pride at his mastery of Americanese.
Natalie leaned in the open doorway of the cottage, arms folded, as the limousine drew up. She hurried to the car, followed in a moment by Slote, who first said good-bye at the door to a kerchiefed old woman in heavy boots. As the car drove back toward Warsaw, the ambassador recounted their visit to the front including Byron’s venture up the tower. Meantime Byron worked on the notebook in his lap.
“Think four copies is enough?” he said to the ambassador.
“Plenty, I should think. Thank you.” The ambassador took the notebook. “We may have time to run off some mimeograph copies. Very well done.”
Natalie clasped Byron’s hand and pulled it to her lap. She was sitting between him and Slote. She pressed his fingers, looking seriously at him, her dark eyes half-closed.
Through her light green dress, he felt the flesh of her thigh on the back of his hand and the ridge of a garter. Slote repeatedly glanced at the two hands clasped in the girl’s lap as he calmly smoked, looked out of the window, and chatted with the ambassador about assembling and transporting the refugees. A muscle in Slote’s jaw kept moving under the skin of his white face.
In the embassy all was scurry and noise. The mayor’s office had just sent word that the cease-fire was definite now for one o’clock. Polish army trucks would take the Americans to the departure point, and each person could bring one suitcase. The rush was on. The Americans still living outside the embassy were being summoned by telephone. A smell of burning paper filled the building, and fragments of black ash floated in the corridors.
Mark Hartley occupied the cot next to Byron’s in the cellar, and Byron found him sitting hunched beside a strapped-up suitcase, head in hands, a dead cigar protruding from his fingers. “Ready to go, Mark?”
Hartley uncovered a drawn face, the eyes frightened and bulging. “Horowitz is the name, Byron. Marvin Horowitz.”
“Nonsense, how will they know that?” Byron pulled from under the cot his old torn bag with the sprung hardware.
Hartley shook his head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I must be crazy. I never once pictured that anything like this would happen. I don’t know what I thought. Maybe that Roosevelt would fly us out in Army planes. Something like that. I’ve never been so goddamned scared in my life. We’re going to the Germans. The Germans.”
“Put that in your bag,” Byron said, tossing a worn black book to him as he packed. “And cheer up. You’re an American. That’s all. An American named Hartley.”
“With a Horowitz face and a Horowitz nose. What’s this? The New Testament? What’s this for?”
Byron took the book, which had a gold cross stamped on the binding, and carefully tore out the flyleaf with his own name written on it. “Make a good Christian of you. Here, put it away. Don’t sit around and worry. Go help Rowlandson burn papers.”
“I wish I had my own Bible or prayer book,” Hartley said dully unstrapping his bag. “I haven’t been inside a synagogue since my bar mitzvah. An old smelly Hebrew teacher made me memorize a lot of gibberish. I did it to please my mother, but that was the end. I never went back once. Now I wish I remembered the prayers. Any prayers.” He glanced around at the bustling cellar. “So help me, this hole looks to me now like home sweet home. I’d give anything if I could just stay here. Do you think we’ll ever play bridge again one day, the four of us? In New York, maybe?”
“Sooner than you think.”
“From your mouth in God’s ears. That’s what my mother used to say.”
The army trucks came snorting and rattling up to the embassy at half past eleven; loose wobbly old machines so caked with mud and rust that their gray paint was scarcely discernible. At their arrival, more than a hundred Americans milling inside the fence on the lawn, set up a cheer and began singing “California Here I Come” and such ditties. The Poles of the staff, mostly girl secretaries, were sadly passing out coffee and cake.
“They make me feel ashamed,” Natalie said to Byron. Two of the Polish girls bearing trays had just gone by with fixed forced smiles and glistening eyes.
“What’s the alternative?” Byron, famished, bit into the coarse gray cake and made a face. It tasted of raw dough and paper ashes.
“There’s no alternative.”
Byron said, “Mark Hartley is scared stiff of the Germans. How about you?”
Natalie’s eyes flashed. “What can they do to me? I have an American passport. They don’t know I’m a Jew.”
“Well, don’t tell them. I mean don’t become all brave or defiant or anything, okay? The idea is just to get the hell out.”
“I’m not an imbecile, Byron.”
A Polish officer shouted, the gate opened, and the Americans began piling into the trucks. Some people were too old to climb up, some were trying to take extra luggage, the Polish drivers and officers were urgent and short- tempered, and nobody was in charge. Yelling, complaining, weeping, and fist-waving went on, but most of the people, hungry and uncomfortable though they were, felt so happy at starting out that they continued to sing and laugh. The trucks clanked off in single file. A black Chevrolet with American flags on its fenders brought up the rear, carrying Slote, his three highest-ranking assistants, and the wives of two of them. Outside the gate the Polish secretaries stood and waved, tears running down their faces. Byron and Natalie jolted along in a truck, clasping each other’s waists. Slote had offered her a place in the Chevrolet. She had shaken her head without a word.
The bombardment was going on as heavily as ever: the distant HRUMP! HRUMP! HRUMP! of the artillery, the blasting explosions of bombs from three small V’s of German planes passing slowly in the hazy midday sky, and the popping and stuttering of the Polish antiaircraft guns. The convoy crawled, stopped, and crawled through the shattered streets, the canyons of yellow-patched structures, careening up on sidewalks to avoid holes and tank traps, once backing out of a boulevard blocked by a newly fallen building.
At the bridge across the Vistula truck convoys flying various embassy flags were converging. The bridge was jammed to a standstill with refugee trucks. There were more than two thousand neutral nationals in Warsaw, and every one of them evidently meant to get out. Byron kept glancing at his watch. The traffic started to move again, but so slowly that he feared they might not reach the departure point by one o’clock. German shells kept whistling by, and splashes like geysers boiled up in the river, sometimes showering the bridge and the trucks. The Germans clearly thought it all in the game if they killed nine-tenths of the neutrals on the bridge, fifteen minutes before the ceasefire.
The convoys ended in a stupendous pileup at the schoolhouse with the stone goose. Colonel Rakowski and the Swedish ambassador stood together in the road, shouting instructions to each truckload of descending
