Mila 18 - Leon Uris [49]
“Andrei, Andrei,” she whimpered.
“He came to me first and asked me to come to you because ... he does not want you to look at him the way he is. Do you understand that?”
She nodded.
“Then make the room dark and I will send him up.”
She left the door open and turned out the light. There was a tiny ray from a hall light downstairs. Gabriela listened at the landing for Alexander to reach bottom. She heard Alex’s voice. She tensed, waiting for another sound. It seemed like forever. She fought off the agonizing desire to scream out his name and bolt down after him. Then ... a slow, clump, clump, clump. It labored up and up, each step seeming more painful than the last. Clump ... clump ... clump ... clump ...
Gabriela fell back into the room, her heart throbbing violently.
Clump ... clump ... clump ... Dragging and then a deep wheezing breathing.
His hulk cut a shadow on the landing. He stood wavering on his legs and fighting for his breath. He moved for the door, groping in the darkness.
“Andrei?” she whispered.
He groped into the room, stumbling like a blind man, and found the bed and crawled on it and groaned with pain and weariness.
Gabriela burst with desire to turn on the lights, but she dared not. She leaned over the bed quickly and her hand felt around his face. His eyes, his ears, his nose, his mouth. They were all there. Arms, hands, fingers, legs. All of him was there!
He smelled putrid from the smokes of battle and dried blood and sweat, and his hair was matted with dirt. He lay and groaned weakly.
And then Gabriela became calm. She sat on the edge of the bed and lifted his head to her lap and petted him gently. His face burned with fever and he gripped the bedcover and convulsed.
“It’s all right, dear, it’s all right now.”
“Gaby ... Gaby ...”
“I’m right here, dear.”
And Andrei cried. “They killed my beautiful horse,” he sobbed. “They killed Batory.”
The shrill screams of the air-raid sirens erupted from Bielany to Rakowiec and from Praga to Kolo as new flames were about to be added to the old as the rape of Warsaw heightened.
“They killed my horse ... they killed my beautiful horse ... they killed him ...”
Chapter Thirteen
Journal Entry—September 17, 1939
THE PIE HAS BEEN cut. Poland, the historic whipping boy, is again acting out its ancient historical role. Hitler has paid off in his deal with Stalin. The Soviet armies have jumped us from the rear, obviously moving to preset borders.
The German invasion has awed the most advanced military thinkers. Smigly-Rydz, the government, and the foreign legations have fled. They say some of our army has been able to escape.
Somehow Warsaw continues to hold out, but I wonder if Polish courage does not prove that the bloodless collapse of Austria and Czechoslovakia was the better way out?
ALEXANDER BRANDEL
Dateline, Warsaw
September 21, 1939
by Christopher de Monti
(Swiss News)
How long can Warsaw hold out? How long can Mayor Starzynski keep this city rallied? This is the question asked ten thousand times a day.
It is a strange battle, a commuters’ war. Soldiers and those civilians pressed into labor battalions take up their positions on Warsaw’s outer defense perimeter. When their relief comes, they catch a trolley car back to town to their homes.
Often the front lines begin where the trolley lines end. Troop movements are by red and yellow street cars, taxis, horse-drawn droshkas, and teamster wagons.
On the perimeter there is a strange conglomeration of humanity in the labor battalions digging trenches and preparing fortifications. Old bearded Orthodox Jews, secretaries, housewives in gaily colored babushkas, students in university class caps, children, bankers, bakers.
All over Warsaw long lines queue up for their ration on ever worsening shortages. Water, in some sections, is doled out by the bucketful. Water priority must go to the fire department for its round-the-clock fight to keep the city from going