Wartime lies - Louis Begley [50]
The lawyer laughed and asked that Tania call her by her first name; she used a diminutive, Pani Helenka. Let Pani put herself in the janitress’s place, she said. Now these people have three armies to hate: the Wehrmacht, because it is German; Armia Krajowa, because it started this accursed uprising; and the invading army of the homeless, yourself, your son and me and all the others who have been thrust into their midst by bad luck—happening to be on Piwna at the wrong hour of the wrong afternoon. And we all want their mattresses and their food! Pani Danuta and many of the others here see that there is something wrong with this uprising—while the Russians were winning and the Germans were running away our A.K. warriors passed out pamphlets and perhaps shot a German here and a collaborator there. Then just as the Wehrmacht managed to stop the Russians, the boys began their war! Is that the coordination with the Russians and the English they were promising? If they planned to have all of Warsaw destroyed, like Stalingrad, they could not be doing a better job. In any case, the woman means no real harm; Pani isn’t from Warsaw and can’t know this class of people. Among them a sharp tongue is often the sign of a soft heart.
Pani Helenka had short, curly gray hair, a round face with round brown eyes, and a round little body. Her gray silk sleeveless blouse was stretched tight over a large bust thrust forward and fortified by a corset I could glimpse under her arms when she gesticulated. She liked to talk; as she warmed up to her subject, she stroked Tania’s hair. It was the first time I had seen a stranger be so familiar with Tania. It did not surprise me that Tania submitted; we were in no position to offend Pani Helenka. But it was also the first time since we left Lwów that I heard Tania express her real feelings about anyone except to my grandfather and me.
The cellar was dank; the walls, floor and wooden support beams were all wet to the touch. Pani Helenka bought a salmon pink quilt on credit from her corset maker. All three of us could huddle under it at night, sleeping fitfully, Tania whispering that I must not be afraid when we heard bombs and gunfire approach. During the day, Pani Helenka presided over a bridge game with Tania and a childless couple who moved their mattress so that it faced ours. I watched their hands. When they weren’t bidding, we listened to Pani Helenka. Her own apartment, where she also received clients, was in Mokotów, not far from my grandfather’s. She had a telephone, but there was nobody to answer it so it was quite useless: we couldn’t get a message through to him even if the line weren’t down. She had let her secretary go a long time ago. There are no more clients, she laughed, just the black market. She blamed the A.K. not only for having started the uprising when it was unprepared and outnumbered, but especially for having attacked in the afternoon of a working day, so that Warsaw’s working people were away from their homes—unless, of course, like her corset maker they worked where they lived. Don’t think just of people like yourself and your boy, you were out enjoying the good weather—thank God you are together—or an old maid like me with nobody to care about who decided to have a fitting for some oversized bras, she said addressing Tania. Think of all the mothers who were at work and left their children unattended, children who were sent to play with friends in some park, old people left behind locked doors of their room while whatever niece takes care of them went to work or to shop, all of them lost in a city that has become a bombing-practice