“Oh, Christ. Blaming the
“He meant it,” Natalie said, in a wondering tone. “The man was absolutely sincere.”
With some shouting in German, snorting of motors, honking of horns, waving by the soldiers, the convoy departed from Kantorovicz, a hamlet of half a dozen wooden houses around the church, intact but abandoned. Since leaving the schoolhouse, the refugees had not seen a living Pole, nor a dead one. The trucks wound along one-lane dirt roads, passing burned-out barns, blown-apart houses, overturned windmills, broken churches, schoolhouses without windows or roofs, and much torn-up, shell-plowed ground and charred tree stumps. Still the scene was not at all like battlegrounds in movies and books of the last war: gray wastes of barren dead muck, tangles of barbed wire, dark zigzagging trenches. These fields and woods were green. Crops were still standing. Only the inhabitants were eerily absent. It was almost as though H. G. Wells’s invaders from Mars had passed through in their perambulating metal tripods, atomizing or eating the people and leaving only slight trails of their transit. The first Poles who came in sight, far behind the German lines, were an old man and his wife working in a field in late sunshine; they leaned on their implements and solemnly watched the trucks go by. As the trucks travelled farther from Warsaw, more peasants began to appear, going about their fieldwork or repairing damaged houses, either ignoring the trucks or watching their passage with blank faces. Nearly all were old people or children. In this back country, Byron saw no young men, and only two or three kerchiefed, skirted figures that from their slimness and supple movements might have been girls. Yet more striking, he saw not one horse. The horse, and the vehicles it pulled, were the trademark, the very life, of rural Poland. On the way from Cracow to Warsaw, there had been thousands of horses, clogging the roads, working in the fields, carrying soldiers, dragging heavy loads in the cities. Behind the German lines this animal seemed extinct.
The ride was too bumpy for conversation, and the refugees were still tired, and perhaps frightened by the deepening awareness of being in the hands of the Germans. Hardly a word was spoken in the first hour or so. They came out on a tarred road, narrow and primitive enough, but by comparison with the cart tracks of the back country, a glassy highway. The convoy stopped at a knoll of smooth green lawns and flower gardens topped by a brick-walled convent, and the word passed for women passengers to dismount and “refresh themselves.” The ladies happily went off, the men scattered among the trees or urinated by the roadside, and when the convoy rolled again everybody was much more cheerful.
Talk sprang up. Natalie brought back gossip from the ladies’ room. All the neutrals, she said, would be offered a choice of flying to Stockholm, or else of taking German trains to Berlin, and thence going out via Belgium, Holland, or Switzerland.
“You know,” the girl said, with a mild glint in her eye, “I’d sort of like to see Berlin myself.”
“Are you crazy?” said Hartley. “Are you absolutely crazy? You must be kidding. You go to Stockholm, baby, and you just pray they
Byron said, “Berel’s message to A.J. goes for you, too.
“
“In the name of God,” Hartley muttered, “stop with the Hebrew.”
The ride stretched out to four and five hours of grinding through farmland and forests. All traces of war faded from the landscape. Houses, churches, whole towns were untouched. The inhabitants looked and acted as they had in the peacetime countryside. There were few young people, no horses, and very little cattle and poultry. In the towns a red swastika flag flew over the main square, either on a flagpole or from the town hall, and German soldiers stood sentry or patrolled on foot or on motorcycles. But the conquered land was at peace. The absence of livestock and young folks gave it a dead look, the peasants seemed somewhat more dour and sullen, perhaps, but life was going on exactly as before, except that the Germans were in charge.
The sun sank behind the distant flat horizon in a brief glow of pale orange. The trucks rolled on into the night. The passengers quieted. Natalie Jastrow put her head on Byron’s shoulder and took his hand in hers. They both dozed.
Commands shouted in German woke them. Lights blazed. They were in a square before a wide railroad station, and people were streaming down out of the lined-up trucks. The lower half-door of their truck was still closed, but two helmeted Germans came along and opened it with a clank. “
The refugees gathered in a confused mass in the waiting room, still blinking at the light. Double doors opened at one end of the room, and soldiers shouting in German shepherded them through, bearing along Byron and Natalie. Byron carried their suitcases and Hartley clung like a child to his elbow. They entered a dining hall full of long plank tables on trestles, laden with food.
It was the most dazzling banquet that Byron had seen in his life — or so it seemed in the first thunderstruck seconds, famished as he was after the long ride and the three weeks of wretched food in besieged Warsaw. There were platters of smoking sausages and sauerkraut, there were many whole pink hams, there were mounds of boiled potatoes, piles of fried chicken, stacked loaves of fresh bread, pitchers of beer, immense whole yellow and orange cheeses. But it seemed a mockery, a cruel Nazi trick, a Barmecide feast, because the soldiers herded the neutrals along the walls away from the tables. There they stood, hundreds of them, staring at the distant food, and in the space between stood a few alert German soldiers with lowered tommy guns.
A voice spoke over a loudspeaker in clear conversational German: “
A dozen smiling blonde girls in white waitress uniforms made their entrance, almost like a theatre chorus, carrying jugs of coffee and stacks of plates. The soldiers smiled and walked out of the space in front of the tables, making inviting hospitable motions with their lowered guns. There was an awkward, shocked moment. First one and then another refugee hesitantly stepped out of ranks to cross the space. Others followed them, a few sat on the low benches reaching for food, and a noisy break and rush began.
Like the rest, Byron, Natalie, and Hartley dived for places and gorged themselves on the richest, sweetest, most satisfying meal of their lives. Almost the best of it was the coffee — ersatz though it was — hot, all they wanted, poured again and again by willing cheery buxom girls. Over the loudspeaker, while they stuffed, came a cascade of brass band music — Strauss waltzes, marches, and jolly drinking songs. Many of the neutrals began singing and even the watching soldiers joined in.
Byron himself, relaxed by the beer and carried away by ecstasy of a full belly, the lift of the music, and the outburst of relieved high spirits all around him, swung his stein and sang:
