While Still We Live (39 page)

“I’ll follow your results with interest,” he said. “Your report on your success at Korytów will of course be forwarded to me by Hofmeyer.” About Dittmar he said nothing, but Sheila felt that Dittmar was the real reason why her hand was being shaken so enthusiastically. Dittmar was no longer so dangerous as a rival, because Engelmann knew his danger and, knowing that, could guard against it.

Sheila nodded and tried to smile, tried not to look at the file of men encouraged with harsh words and gratuitous blows to enter this ministry of new education. It seemed incredible that one removal van could hold so many human beings. She turned her head away sharply, and walked quickly through the gate. Engelmann strode along beside her. “You can leave everything
to the man who is driving. He knows your destination,” were his final words to her.

To the dark-haired, dark-eyed man in corporal’s uniform who was standing very erect beside an open army car. Engelmann said, “Fräulein Braun will give you any further instructions, Treltsch.” He had changed back to his official manner. The confiding air was gone. His salute was brisk. He walked quickly towards a row of parked cars.

The first thing Sheila did was to take one long, deep breath. And then she glanced at her wrist watch. It was scarcely three o’clock. She had been less than an hour in that place. In one hour she had felt ten years of her life surely slip away.

AMBUSH

The journey to Korytów had begun. So quickly, so strangely, that for the first five minutes Sheila’s thoughts and hopes and fears had become one huge jumble inside her brain. The rigid control with which she had defended herself in Streit’s office could relax in this car; but she seemed to have lost all power of arranging her thoughts in a logical order. She had had to think too tensely; now she couldn’t think at all. Then a panic seized her; the journey in this high-powered, smooth-running car with the efficient driver at its wheel would be short; but all she could do now was to keep repeating to herself, “I’ve so much to do, I’ve so much to do.” The more she tried to think how she should try to plan, the more she thought how much there was to plan.

Strangely enough it was the Germans, the cause of this panic, who now helped her out of it. The car was halted after it left the city. As the driver gave his brief answers, Sheila suddenly
saw her face reflected by some oblique ray of sunshine in the windshield before her. She didn’t look afraid. She didn’t look worried. Her face was quite expressionless. It was like a portrait done by an artist more interested in line and texture than in emotions. Where did I learn all this? she wondered. She stared coldly at the image of quiet assurance. Her mind became as calm as the face she saw in the windscreen. The car moved on. The image in the glass disappeared. The wide road and wider fields were all she saw ahead now, but this feeling of calm stayed with her.

There was no sense of triumph when she thought of the last hour. She had been partly lucky, partly careful, and partly trying very hard. She had never been so hard-tried in her life. But this journey, this car, the snub to Dittmar, gave her no sense of triumph. All she had done was to let herself be entangled more deeply in the Nazi web. When she returned from Korytów, Hofmeyer would have to start disentangling her. One Gestapo interview, even a friendly one, was quite enough for one lifetime. She could never manage another. There was a limit to the length of time an amateur juggler could keep his eyes fixed on three balls at once. If Streit had detained her just five minutes more, she would have been lost. She might as well admit that, now. Heroics only gave you a false idea of yourself. Heroics would only land her firmly trussed in the centre of the web.

But one thing she had accomplished as well as Korytów. Now she could warn Hofmeyer that Dittmar
was
suspicious, and she could have Olszak warned that Dittmar had a theory about the little-known Kordus. That was at least something. Having allowed herself that crumb of comfort, she began to plan the method of approaching Korytów and the manner of
leaving the village. The chief problem was to warn the peasants to leave Korytów without their escape being linked up with her visit. She watched the wide road and fields and thought of a story with which to safeguard herself. She frowned as she concentrated.

“Terrible country, isn’t it?” the corporal said suddenly as if in, agreement with the frown. “Give me the mountains, every time.” His tone was polite, deferential.

“Where do you come from? Bavaria?” she asked. She regretted her question instantly. It always had been one of her weaknesses to respond to pleasantness. Now it was obvious that she was in for a spate of conversation.

“Franconia is my part of the world.”

“Oh.”

“I know it’s flat, too, miss. But the towns and villages are all neat. Look at
that!
” He waved to a line of houses stretching along the road to form a village. Sheila looked and saw the trampled gardens, the blue-painted walls of the cottages cracked and blackened by smoke, the burned thatch roofs, the pitted fields.

“Of course,” Treltsch added generously, “there’s been heavy fighting around here.”

“Yes.”

“But just take a place where there hasn’t been fighting, and what do you get?”

“What?”

“Nothing that can equal our towns or villages. We Germans are neat and we work hard. We are thorough.”

“Yes,” Sheila said. She thought of the people of Korytów who had seemed never to stop working. She thought of the
village, rebuilt after the last war. She thought of the German towns and villages which had never known destruction and pillage as Poland had known them for almost two centuries. She looked at the fields. Hardly one of them was empty. Each had its heaps of what seemed rags or old clothing, lying where they had fallen scattered under the machine-gun bullets. Wrecks of carts and skeletons of horses still edged the ditches.

“Glad I don’t live here, anyway. It’s a desolate pigsty.”

Sheila didn’t answer. All she wanted to say was, “It was pleasant enough before you came here. Those who lived here didn’t ask for any change. If you hadn’t come, it wouldn’t look either desolate or a pigsty.”

“It just proves everything.” Treltsch said with great conviction. “The Poles are a shiftless lot. It just shows you some people have no right to govern. They just spoil everything.”

“They’ve had a long history of war,” Sheila couldn’t help saying and then bit her lip. Fortunately for her, her voice was too tired to sound either indignant or sympathetic. Fortunately for her, the man obviously thought she was criticising the Poles as troublesome neighbours.

The man nodded and then, as if he thought that one word had been too generous to the Poles, he said, “‘History’!” He laughed. “What history? What real history have
they
ever had?”

Sheila didn’t answer. Treltsch’s schoolbooks would never have mentioned Poland as a nation. The Germans hadn’t even bothered to publish a Baedeker Guide to Poland.

“What history?” the man insisted. The word was staying with him: his laugh hadn’t chased it away after all. Sheila looked at the youthful face, at the frank brown eyes so intent on the road before them. This man was not setting a trap for
her. He was honestly ignorant. He just did not know, he really didn’t believe that anything good existed outside of his own country. He was willing, alert, obedient; he was smug, stupid, short-sighted.

Sheila was very casual, almost bored.

“I have heard that the University of Cracow is nearly six hundred years old,” she suggested, keeping purposely silent about the defeat of the Teutonic Knights by the Poles. One of the oldest in Western civilisation, she wanted to add: older than Heidelberg. Treltsch’s amazement was obvious. So was his disbelief. What would he have looked like if she had told him that the French Huguenots had appealed to their king for freedom from persecution in the sixteenth century and had cited Poland as an example of religious tolerance? Or if she had told him that the Poles had saved Vienna from the Mohammedan invasion; if they hadn’t, there would be mosques and veiled women in Austria, perhaps even in Germany, just as these reminders of Islam remained in Serbia to this day?

“Six hundred years old,” Treltsch said with a laugh. “That’s what the
Poles
say, I bet. You can’t trust a Pole. You should have seen the way they fought us! They were like demons. They aren’t human. The Führer was right. If we had let them get strong, they would have overrun our country. We were wise to attack them first. It was the only way to win.”

“But Germany would never be beaten. No country can beat us. We are invincible.”

“You’re right there, miss.” Treltsch looked happy again: she was speaking of the things he knew.

Then why on earth are you afraid of being attacked? Sheila thought bitterly. If you are invincible, then you need fear no
attack. But Treltsch, unaware of the inconsistencies in his logic, was whistling cheerily as the car speeded on.

“Hope you didn’t mind me talking, miss,” he said. “It’s real good to talk to a German woman, again.” And then he was whistling, softly, tunefully once more.

They slowed up as they passed a cluster of houses. In the lifeless stubble of a long-harvested field, a line of men were digging a trench. A group of women and children, closely huddled, were standing near them. The women’s bright kerchiefs matched the autumn leaves at the edge of the field. Facing them were green-uniformed soldiers setting up their machine guns. Two officers in massive field-coats were smoking cigarettes as they watched the shallow trench grow deeper. At the sign of the village inn, a man was hanging. He had been hanging there for some time. Treltsch halted the car beside the wooden table and bench in the inn’s side-garden which bordered the road. Two soldiers patrolling this end of the empty village came forward. Treltsch answered their questions rapidly with the same formula which had brought them through the last patrol. Sheila stared at the calm image of her face in the windshield, tried to forget the creaking of the inn’s sign just behind her.

“More sniping?” Treltsch asked as the soldiers relaxed, and nodded over his shoulder in the direction of the field.

“No, they cut
him
down last night.” The soldier who answered jerked his thumb towards the hanging body. “He got his for food-hoarding. Told us lies about what he had, and then gave food to a couple of refugees. He’s been up there for four days. Orders. But last night they cut him down. Buried him in a grave, too. But we found him. And he’s back where he belongs.”

“They’ll all soon be where they belong,” the other soldier said with a laugh.

Sheila glanced at her watch. “The light fades quickly, now,” she said to Treltsch. “We ought to hurry.”

The soldiers pulled themselves erect, returned the corporal’s salute. The laughing one, serious now, called after the car, “Go carefully. There’s been trouble round here when it gets dark.”

Treltsch was silent for so long that Sheila, looking curiously at the man’s pleasant face, wondered if he felt some pity for the condemned village. She smiled sadly, thinking that perhaps he was beginning to understand why this countryside should be so depressing.

He smiled too. Sympathetically, it seemed to her. And then he said, “You know, miss, I was just thinking: wouldn’t it be funny if one of them was sent to my house?”

He noticed her bewilderment.

“One of these women,” he explained, his eyes on a more difficult part of the road. The trees were thickening now; no longer sparse or isolated, their gay autumn colours formed small masses of shaded reds and yellows. “You see, miss, I’ve got my name down for a Polish worker. My wife always wanted help. Half the day she used to complain about having so much to do. She’s young, you know. So I put my name down on the list. That ought to keep her happy. She can take it easy for a bit and let the Pole do the hard work. It will cost us nothing, not even in food or bedding.”

“But the Pole will eat and sleep, won’t she?”

“Table scraps and a heap of straw out in the shed. That’s almost nothing. It’s what the Poles are used to, miss. Treat swine as swine, that’s what we say in my part of the country.”
The man’s voice was casual, friendly. He was simply repeating his creed.

“What happens if—the woman dies?” she heard her voice ask.

“Oh, they’re strong. They aren’t human. They are like animals. Besides, there’s plenty more. Thirty-five million of them. Yes, when I looked at that bunch of women I thought, ‘You’ll be setting out for Germany, I bet, as soon as the shooting’s over.’ And then I thought, ‘What if I were to see that big, strong yellow-haired girl scrubbing my doorstep the next time I go home?’ Sounds a bit fanciful, now that I put it in words. But there’s the way things happen. It’s a small world, that’s what I always say.”

“Wouldn’t it be dangerous?” Sheila said in a low voice. “I mean, if a Polish woman, like the—the yellow-haired girl you mentioned, were separated from her children and sent to work for you, might not that be dangerous? For your wife and children?”

Treltsch was serious now. All the amiability left his pleasant face. “Just let any Pole try it. Just let them!” he said with unexpected depths of anger.

Then his face cleared as he remembered the solution, and the voice was easy once more. “They won’t try it. Not with relations left in Poland, not with their children in our camps. No, miss, don’t you worry about the wife and baby. We’ll look after them. The first thing the Pole will be told will be just what will happen to her family if she tries any tricks. No, don’t you worry, miss.”

Sheila nodded and pretended to study the woods, now spreading widely over the flat fields.

When Corporal Treltsch spoke again, it was to say, “Nearly there, miss. Four miles to go. We’ve made it in good time.”

“Excellent,” Sheila agreed and looked at her watch. “Now, I don’t want you to bring this car into the village. Drop me there, so that I can enter the village on foot.”

“Shall I wait for you there, to take you back?”

“I wish you could. But my problem is difficult. I have to bring three Poles back to Warsaw, without their knowing that we are responsible for taking them. They think I am pro-Polish.”