From the gate. Into a room jammed with partisans. And in the crowd, sitting on a sofa with his legs stretched out in front of him, was Zbyszek, apparently already in uniform.
“For the time being, we’re sitting and waiting because we don’t have any weapons,” he said.
Somewhere near Swen’s place on Żurawia we went into a cellar. In one of the bins for coal or potatoes, Danka was sitting on a chair between two walls, manning an apparatus like the back of an exposed radio. She had earphones on. And she was connecting and disconnecting various plugs and jacks with both hands simultaneously, at a very rapid pace. She was speaking at the same time, too. Codes. For example: “Bee-vee! Bee-vee! Six! ma-ta-ha here! ma-ta-ha here! hallo, hallo, we’re transmitting, en-ka — eighteen! hallo!”
There were longer runs of code but immediately broken off for some reason.
And so on. Continuously. Rapidly. Once, after a long wait (ours), she leaned a little in our direction. Something like “Hello, what’s new?” And then again the same thing. She couldn’t break away. How could she? But we weren’t bored. Absolutely not! It was the first time I was in such a transmission center.
Once on Żurawia, either upstairs while we were still in the Szu. family’s place (they were all in the cellar) or in the courtyard — I remember that we could hear a lot of people, socializing, the clinking of forks and knives. To this day I am certain that it was a name day celebration. Which means: I’m not at all certain. That’s what it seemed like to me. And still does. But it’s strange. The more I picture it. It was afternoon. Sun. Heat. Dust. In the courtyard, a lot. Of what? Various things. Chaos. People running around. That name day party both surprised and depressed me. Even irritated me. Not just the lightheartedness. But as an incontrovertible sign that something bad. Was approaching.
Because it was approaching, approaching.
The apartment on Wilcza was splendid but we already had a place in the shelter. And it was in the shelter that we began to spend the nights. Only once we sat up through the night, or rather, we slept through the night sitting up, Halina and I, on the green plush sofa. It stood near the door to the stairs. And that’s where we remained. Because I had a longing for the luxury of space. To have it just once. And Halina, to keep me company. And because she hadn’t yet become accustomed to spending the nights in cellars. She had on a dark coat (well — a winter coat, she was wearing it in order to keep it with her). With ash-gray fur trim. On the sleeves. And on the collar. She snuggled against that fur as if it were her cats.
We had some bedding in the shelter. Something made of down. It was puffed up in the center and red on top. How many feather beds did we have? Two? We had something to cover ourselves with. What we slept on I don’t know anymore. Stools? Benches? I think a little of everything. We also snuggled up. Into the bedding. There were a lot of eiderdowns and pillows in our cellars and cubicles. They glittered. Crimsons. Vermilions. Could that have been under electric light? Probably not. Carbide lamps! Candles! There were people everywhere. In every nook and cranny. We were the only ones working on the ground floor. Though only at certain hours. And in daylight. Pani Trafna was in her own little house. But probably Pani Trafna moved into the cellar for good. Which was good. Because soon they began firing into our courtyard. Often, large-caliber guns. Persistently. Grenades. Cats (so-called), cows. Berthas. Medium-size mortars (like pestles making quick work of cinnamon sticks!). Something from overhead probably. Because the building began disintegrating from above. Little by little, in installments. First it was smashed. Then it began to grow smaller. Maybe it caught on fire. Definitely. But they always managed to put it out. Pan Stanisław ran around a lot (and he was tall). He kept an eye out. Wet rags on sheets of metal. To the point that he was lying and a little crooked, head hanging down, over the rain gutter. Is that how I pictured him to myself? Invented him?
Pani Jadwiga would scream at him in the cellar: “Don’t go! Stasiu! Don’t go!” And when he left she became distressed. And since he went at every call she was only a little accustomed to it and thus — distressed. She was a milliner. So a colleague of both Stacha and Zocha. She and Staś lived together at first for fifteen years without getting married because they were afraid of legalities, of deromanticizing. At one point, with great trepidation, they summoned their courage. Marriage. And again fifteen years went by. In marriage. It didn’t spoil anything. And later they lived in Jelenia Góra together until the end.
Pani Jadwiga preferred having her bed near us. In our cubicle. Because we made up a family. They — the two of them, that is, and Stacha, Zocha, Halina, Father, and I. Next to us, Pani Trafna. Other women, men, children. Entire herds. Past the right entrance — farther along. On the left, in the previous cellar, were the earliest occupants of spaces.
And Pani Rybkowska. The one wearing glasses, who sometimes dropped in on the ground floor. To her home. That is, to us. Very infrequently. But she had a need to check in. Once she checked to see if we’d accidentally broken glasses in the cupboard. Another time, she complained that we’d moved the cupboard. I don’t know why it was standing at an angle. That was when she was there. Another time, what she was worried about was a painting, wonder-working, of Our Lady of Częstochowa, which was behind the cupboard. A cheap little painting. Behind dusty glass. Colorless. Now she herself pushed the cupboard away and slipped in behind it. Often she would sit with us for a while on the ground floor while supper was being prepared and the stove put back together, because a cow or mortars were always knocking it over; Pan Stanisław would sit with us, too. (Zocha barely refrained from making faces at Pani Jadwiga’s constant “Stasiu, Stasiu, don’t go.” Finally it advanced to taunts about it. By both of them. A mild insult and brief. But the times weren’t conducive. They’d become close again. And address each other politely. Until after the war. But after the war they were angry at each other for good. From Gdańsk to Jelenia Góra. Until finally they made up. That was when Stasio died.)
And when Pani Rybkowska went on too long about the cupboard, the painting, and the glasses and began checking up on us, Pan Stanisław would join us in saying, “Oh no! Planes!”
“Really?” Pani Rybkowska would ask.
“Really,” we’d say.
And she’d flee to the cellar. She believed us. Why not? Once, while we were sitting on the couch (Zocha was cooking) the water barrel was hit. A fountain gushed sideways from the barrel. Then they struck here and there. Then they pounded Pani Trafna’s little house. Once. Twice. Dried-out whitewash, parapets, laths sifted down. Dust was sifting down from the apartment house, too. And plaster flew about. Window frames, too. And sheets of metal. The roofs were still made of zinc then. For the most part. Pani Trafna’s little house was growing smaller and smaller.
Also in the shelter with us, or rather somewhere near the door, because there was something about that doorway… was it drafts, quarreling? Probably so… Well, there was also a Pani de la something. A Frenchwoman, apparently. Or only the wife of a Frenchman. But a widow in any case. She lived on the fifth floor. Probably. Once, there was a scene. In the whole courtyard. A huge gathering of men. Block leaders. Half block leaders. Quarter Home Army. Reviling the surrounded, terrified Pani de la something in her threadbare coat in front of the stairwell — her stairwell and ours — because they had just caught her relieving herself on the fifth floor. In front of her own door.
But that was nothing. That, too, passed. The latrine was in the next building: 7 Krucza. I no longer remember if we went through the second courtyard first (naturally, initially through a hole in the wall). Right. To get water. And farther on was the first courtyard. Counting from Krucza. From the front. Or if immediately after the hole one entered that enormous long courtyard with an enormous pit in the center. With an entire valley dug out with shovels. From bare earth. And there in the center of the hole in an even bigger hole was a pump. There was always a line of people. Often a long one. Which wound around three times. So that it completely filled the valley. Which is also what it was for. The crowd was at its largest in the afternoon. Also toward evening. When there was hope that it would begin to grow dark. Because it was as if the planes went to sleep then.