Wartime lies - Louis Begley [62]
We went to bed happy. For the first time in two months we didn’t have the sound of gunfire in our ears. We were in a dry warm attic above the restaurant, in a real bed. A friend was looking after us.
Our host awakened us at dawn; he wanted us out of G. before Polish police or German patrols appeared on the road leading out of the town. The peasant who agreed to take us in his cart was willing to go quite a long distance west, beyond W. He had in mind a village where he often delivered samogon, home-distilled vodka. That village turned out to be Piasowe. Like most peasant carts, his was a long contraption with four high wheels, pulled by a single horse. The bottom was made of three wide boards. The sides were ladders fixed at a wide angle to the bottom. The peasant sat on a board fixed across the ladders. There was some hay in the cart on which Tania and I stretched out. It was a very good feeling to have taken a bath and be wearing clean clothes. Our stomachs were full; we looked at fields and stands of trees slowly going past us. We were not particularly afraid. Our host had given us some bread and cheese to take along for a second breakfast. We decided to eat it right away. The peasant kept his horse going at a good pace, as though he had been schooled by my grandfather. A couple of times he stopped to urinate at the side of the road. He asked if we also wanted to relieve ourselves; Tania’s continence amused him.
We rolled on. When W. appeared in the distance, he slowed down and explained that he was going to leave the highway to avoid going through the town. He would take advantage of the detour to feed the horses and get something to eat for himself and for us. After traveling a considerable distance over lanes just wide enough for the cart, we turned into a village and then into a farmyard. A great deal of persuasion was needed to quiet the dogs so that Tania and I were able to get off and eat more bread and cheese and drink buttermilk. Our peasant talked to his friends and then lay down in the barn for a loud nap. The sun began to seem low to Tania. She roused the peasant, and soon we were on the road again. Night was falling when we arrived in Piasowe at the house of the peasant called Komar, on whom Tania concentrated all her charm. She wanted him to help us get established in the village.
Komar was the entrepreneur of Piasowe. His two sons-in-law helped with the land and left him free to run his businesses, the most important being the little shop in his house from which he sold wares like salt, matches and nails. The principal merchandise, however, was vodka, or samogon passing for vodka, or samogon undisguised. Liquor could be bought by the bottle, when a peasant felt ready to pay for a night of oblivion, or consumed more modestly by the glass on Komar’s premises in the company of neighbors. It was Komar who drove grain to the mill and brought back flour. He took potatoes, beets, butter and cheese to the market in W. and came back with town goods that he had bought or bartered on order. There were other householders in Piasowe who had horses—they used them to work their fields and also the fields of others for pay or in exchange for help with the harvest—but in addition to his pair of horses, Komar had a head for figures, and felt none of the disquiet that possessed the other peasants at the thought of trotting down the highway, away from Piasowe. For a long moment it seemed as though Komar would become our employer: