The Miernik Dossier - Charles McCarry [43]
“So all through our childhood,” Zofia said, “there was Sasha, with candy and books and stories of his journeys. He always traveled. A long time would go by sometimes. Where is Sasha? We’d look out the window for him. Then, one day, up the walk would come Sasha, buried under a mountain of dolls for me and soldiers for Tadeusz.”
“Books for Tadeusz,” Kirnov said. “For Tadeusz, always books.”
“Then one day when I was very small, Sasha came to live with us. We woke up one morning, and Mother took us into the sitting room to tell us that Sasha was in the house. But we must never tell that he was there. We knew the Germans were in Warsaw. They wanted to kill Sasha because he was a Jew. So Sasha was going to live in our attic and we would keep him alive. From now on, we could never take any children upstairs. There were many rules, all to keep Sasha from being killed. He remained in the attic for four years, and that’s when he taught me to play the guitar.”
“I’ll tell you an amusing story about that,” Kirnov said. “One day in 1943, when I had already been upstairs for more than two years, I was giving Zofia a guitar lesson. It was early evening, just getting dark. You could always tell in those days when it was dusk, even if you had no windows in your room—and of course I had no windows. At dusk the air was filled with the smell of turnips cooking. In a thousand houses, turnips were in the pot—that was all anyone in Poland had to eat. So I smelled the turnips while Zofia tried to learn to play the guitar. I owed her a great deal—she came upstairs every day to see me. And she did other things. It’s indelicate to tell you this, but it will give you an idea of what the times were like. For a man in hiding there is always a problem— he cannot go downstairs to the toilet. One used a newspaper. So each day, Zofia would take a package on her bicycle as she rode to school, and each day put it in a different trash can along her route. For four years, the little packages. This long-haired blond girl on her bicycle with her books.
“Back to the guitar lesson. Zofia is playing. I am correcting her mistakes. We are laughing, I am singing the notes for her to follow. Then—a horrendous banging at the door downstairs. Germans shouting. Where is the Jew?Zofia’s father and I had made a hiding place between the partitions of the wall. No other Jew in Poland could have fitted into this tiny space, but for Sasha Kirnov it was all right. ‘Keep playing. Don’t be afraid of the Germans. Don’t look at the hiding place,’ I told Zofia. I got into the space between the walls. Under my feet was a carpet of rat droppings. A strong smell of rats. I had a pistol, just a small one—not for the Germans but for myself. I held it against my temple, standing between the walls, ready to shoot myself if I was discovered. I heard Zofia playing her guitar. Then the boots of the Germans on the stairs. They burst into the attic and found a little girl playing the guitar, but no Jew. Naturally we hid all traces of my presence during the day—blankets into the trunk, cups and saucers downstairs, and so on. For an hour they searched, pounding on the walls, trying to find a secret hiding place. They failed, as you can see. They had never heard of a man hiding between the walls. After they went away, I came out. I was shaking. I can tell you. Little Zofia took the gun out of my hand. I remember just what she said: ‘Sasha, look at you! You have dirt all over your face, even right on top.’ I always told her that a bald man was lucky because his face never stopped like other people’s—it went right over the top of his head.”
Kirnov, chuckling, relit his cigar. Zofia’s face was wreathed in a smile. “Sasha,” she said. “I had never seen you dirty before.”
They were as cheerful over this memory of fifteen-year-old danger as they seemed to be concerning the hazards of crossing the frontier a few hours hence. They were proud of each other, a sly old fellow and a beautiful young girl who between them