Wartime lies - Louis Begley [72]
A few days later I was still weak and dizzy but no longer felt hot. Tania came back to the house after the evening meal; she said she had eaten with Komar. When she lay down beside me, she said she did a terrible thing when she insulted Nowak. Komar had just explained to her how Nowak was going to get his revenge. Apparently, Nowak was convinced we were Jews. He had already told the Polish police in W.; it wasn’t a question of money because the Polish police didn’t want to have anything to do with Jews anymore. Instead they gave the information to the Germans. The Gestapo would come to get us. When she protested to Komar that we weren’t Jews at all and that she could show him our papers, Komar asked her not to be stupid, it was all the same to him: he would help us because she was his friend. He would come with his cart and two horses while it was still dark and drive us to the train in Rawa. She trusted him; he even settled his accounts with her. In a moment, she would wake up Kulowa and tell her we were going. She would say there was such a rasping in my lungs that she had to take me to the city to a doctor, even if it meant traveling in this terrible cold.
VII
WE WERE in Kielce, where the first train we were able to board in Rawa had taken us. The front was approaching. The drumming of the artillery never stopped; Tania said the Russians were only twenty kilometers away. My fever had returned and with it the headache. Tania and everything else around me seemed uncertain and shifting, like pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope, every turn of which brought a new hurt. A doctor came, listened to my lungs, and said the pneumonia was over. Now I had pleurisy; it would probably pass. I should take more aspirin. He was able to sell Tania some.
Once again, we were living in a rented room, in the apartment of a woman who took lodgers. Once again, Tania had found her through the buffet in the station. The apartment was long and brown, our room was brown and greasy; the overhead lamp, useless because there was no electricity, swayed with each wave of shelling. Sometimes a little plaster fell.
In bed Tania lay by my side all dressed. I could not bear to have her under the quilt next to me. I was too hot. We both slept very deeply for short periods. Then I would begin my horrible coughing, and if she did not wake up, I would shake her and ask for milk. But there was no milk left in Kielce. Instead, Tania would heat water with sugar on the little Primus stove and try to get me to drink it, always with more aspirin.
I thought that the bed and my body had grown extraordinarily long. To cool myself, I would stretch my legs on top of the quilt. Far away were my feet. Between the toes I could discern dark bushes crawling with life. Tania put cold, wet cloths on my head. She said these things were as unreal as my old giant; the Russians were before Kielce, in a few days I would be in a clean bed of my own in a large sunny room; she would give me oranges and chocolates. When I wasn’t coughing too much, Tania sang to me. There was an old song: Maciek is dead, laid out on a board, but if the music plays he will dance some more…. What a polite boy he was…. What a pity he couldn’t live forever….
Bombs and artillery shells began to fall on Kielce. They were louder than anything we remembered from Warsaw. Late one afternoon, the glass in our windows shattered, and a furious wind began to blow through the room. The landlady came to say everyone was going to the cellar. She did not think we should remain in the room; I could go down wrapped in a feather bed. The cellar would not be colder than the room without windowpanes.
It was like the cellar in Warsaw, only colder and even wetter. A naphtha lamp lit the space and the people inside it, some sitting on crates, some on chairs they brought from their apartments. They all seemed to talk in whispers. The explosions were very near now. There was also the noise of rifles and machine