Mila 18 - Leon Uris [205]
“Very well,” Funk agreed, “very well.”
Andrei’s eyes fluttered open. He was in a bunker cell somewhere. Someone hovered over him. It was Simon.
“My gun!”
“It’s under the cot. No ammunition left mind you, but the gun is there.”
Andrei closed his eyes. He tried to separate the blur of events that all ran together. He remembered seeing Kutler fall in the street parts of the agony in the rafters, snatches of things that might have been dreams or might have happened. Simon fed him a drink of water. Half of it spurted out of his mouth, unable to penetrate the thick dry caking lining his throat. He sipped again.
“What happened?”
“We put on quite a brother act. We make a colorful pair.”
“Where is everyone?”
“Scattered in a half dozen bunkers.”
“Did Alex get away?”
“He’s in the cell across the passage.”
“My sister?”
“At the Franciskanska bunker with the children.”
“Chris ... Wolf ...”
“They are safe.”
Andrei forced himself up on his elbows. He ached all over. He pushed himself to a sitting position on the edge of the cot and was stricken with a spell of dizziness. He lowered his head between his legs to let blood circulate.
Simon moved a small crude table beside the cot and placed a bowl of gruel on it with a hunk of stale bread. It was the first food Andrei had eaten in nearly five days. His stomach growled and his hand trembled as he sloshed the bread in the bowl to soften it. The food was taken slowly, carefully.
“Where am I? At your bunker?”
“Yes.”
“How did I get here?”
“I scraped you off the sidewalk. You fell short in your one-man effort to annihilate the entire German garrison, but not too bad, eleven SS killed, two Ukrainians. You’re the rage of the ghetto.”
Andrei felt his pain-racked body. “Did I get hit?”
“Grazed. The doctor said that normally it wouldn’t have stopped you from playing soccer an hour later, but combined with hunger, exhaustion, and a few other discomforts, you fainted.”
“Fainted? What a ridiculous thing to do. Only women faint.” He mopped the bread around in the bowl more rapidly, cleaned the dish, and licked his fingers. Simon was acting strangely, he thought. His voice rang with bitterness and he was avoiding Andrei’s eyes. Simon never did that. He could win most of his arguments by his penetrating look alone.
“One of our people didn’t make it,” Simon said. He set a familiar notebook on the cot beside Andrei. Andrei recognized it as a volume of the Good Fellowship Club’s study. Simon laid a pair of thick-lensed glasses on top of the book.
“Ervin?”
“Yes. Stray bullet. He lived long enough to tell me where he had hidden this volume. It was the one he was working on. We went to the Mila 19 bunker immediately to find it. Rest of the bunker is destroyed, but we were able to find many hidden things. We salvaged all the arms stores.”
Tears welled up in Andrei’s eyes. “You would think that we would get used to our friends dying after a time. I loved Ervin. Lot of years together.” Andrei bit his lip, but the tears fell anyway. “Quiet, gentle little man. Believed in what he was doing without shouting, breast-beating. He just stayed in the cellar month in and month out, working on the archives. He never said why. He just did it because somebody had to. Ever see how swollen his hands were from the damp? Blind as a bat, but he stayed and kept working after they took Susan. He stayed and went about his business ... never raised his voice.”
The cot groaned as Simon sat beside Andrei. Simon picked the book up, opened it, and turned the pages, then pulled the candle on the table directly to him. “This was his last entry.” He read, “ ‘When will we fight? Or will we fight? Who among us will dare to fire that first shot against them? Who?’ ” He closed it and set it down. He hunched his massive frame forward and rubbed the knuckles of one hand against the palm of the other. “I don