Mila 18 - Leon Uris [14]
The slam of the front door resounded like a cannon shot throughout the house.
“Chris, keep an eye on him, please,” Gabriela said.
Chris nodded and followed without a word.
When Chris was gone, Deborah sank into her chair, ashen-faced.
Paul Bronski, feeling contented as a Cheshire cat, soothed, “Don’t let him hurt you so, dear.”
Deborah looked up through tear-filled eyes. “He knew ... he knew. And that is what hurts. My husband is going away and I wanted to light the candles tonight like a Jewish mother—and Andrei knew.”
And all the cunning of Paul’s traps slammed in on him in an unexpected and stunning defeat and he sagged and walked toward the door.
“Paul!” Deborah ordered sharply. “See Gabriela home.”
“No, that’s all right, Deborah. Let’s you and I have another cup of tea and then I’ll find my rampaging cavalier in an hour or so. And don’t you worry about Andrei—I am the one who loves him. And sometimes, dear Lord, it is almost worth the pain.”
Chapter Six
THE REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES OF Fryderyk Rak had made it increasingly more dangerous for him to live in Poland partitioned between Russia, Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He went into self-imposed exile along with many patriots. In France he established himself as one of the leading hydroelectric engineers in Europe.
After the war, in 1918, when Poland had returned to statehood, Fryderyk Rak returned to Warsaw with his wife and daughters, Regina and Gabriela. The new Poland was filled with urgent needs. A hundred years of occupation had left it in a medieval condition. Hydroelectric projects were given an urgent priority. Fryderyk Rak was one of the few Poles with training and experience to cope with the challenge.
He gained neither great wealth nor fame, but a fair measure of each. His most impressive contribution was the part his firm of engineers played in the building of Gdynia. The Versailles Treaty had given new Poland a route to the sea through the Polish Corridor. The only port at the time was Danzig, a so-called “free city” fraught with political dynamite and largely inhabited by unfriendly Germans. Common sense made the building of a Polish seaport a necessity, and thus Gdynia was created.
In exile, he had become a rabid skiing enthusiast. With the first snow bursts of winter he would pack the Rak family off to the Alps. His doctor warned him there were slopes for thirty-year-olds and slopes for fifty-year-olds, but he indulged in his inbred stubborn Polish pride by defying the advice and finding the most dangerous, swiftest ways to get down the mountainsides. He died at the age of fifty from a heart attack at the bottom of a treacherous run called K-94, aptly nicknamed, “the butcher,” and left behind him a well-endowed widow and her two daughters.
In her bereavement, Madam Rak turned to the comfort of her only close living relative, a brother in Chicago. She came out of her period of mourning well stocked with suitors of Polish descent and saw little reason to return to the old country, never having shared Fryderyk’s passion for it. Regina, the oldest daughter, was a rather plain, rather plump girl who was completely content to marry a nice Polish boy whose family imported Polish hams and become an American housewife with a home in Evanston, within gossiping distance of Mother.
Gabriela, the youngest, was of her father’s breed; independent, stubborn, and self-centered. Fryderyk Rak had been a liberal man and an indulgent father. Her uncle, however, had taken his position as head of the family and protector of his widowed sister and her offspring with complete seriousness. He had brought with him from Poland much of the old-country traditions of family tyrant Gabriela rebelled. Warsaw and life with Father were her happiest memories. She received an impressive education from stern nuns in expensive and exclusive Catholic girls’ schools, where she prayed each night that the Virgin Mother would