“Nor am I. In their place I would do the same. Still, it is tiresome. I have told you how guns play upon my nerves. From where I am sitting, I can see a blackened gun barrel at the mouth of a knothole in the wall behind you. Do not turn, the idiot might shoot. I wish I were in Savnik.”
We nursed that pot of tepid tea for three quarters of an hour. Then the woman came out and led us into yet another back room and down a flight of stairs to a dank basement. There she turned us over to a very young man wearing a very false beard. “You will come with me,” he said, and an accurate prediction it was, for we did.
He led us through a maze of subterranean tunnels that led me to conclude that the word “underground,” in Krakow, was taken very literally. We emerged either half a mile away or right back where we started – it was impossible to guess, with all the twists and turns the tunnels had taken. We went up a short flight of steps, down a hallway, up two more flights of steps, and paused in front of a door upon which our false-bearded escort duly knocked.
The door opened, and there was Tadeusz.
In good, clear American he said, “Evan, you son of a bitch, it’s really you, isn’t it?” and pulled me inside, and motioned Milan in after me, and nodded reassuringly to our escort, and closed the door, and punched playfully at my shoulder, and without further preliminaries filled three small glasses with clear Polish vodka.
“To Poland,” he said, “citadel of culture, home of Chopin and Paderewski and Copernicus, land of beautiful lakes and forests, and to all the stupid Polacks all over the world, long may they wave.”
We drank.
He was a most unusual man. He was, in appearance, the sort of tall, gaunt, blond, dreamy-eyed young Pole who plays upon the piano in a Swiss mountain resort while quietly dying of tuberculosis. Appearances could hardly be more deceiving. I had met him in New York, where he appeared occasionally on fund-raising and propaganda missions that took him to Polish communities throughout the world. For three weeks he lived in my apartment, sleeping in my bed, sometimes alone, more often with any of several Negro and Puerto Rican girls with whom he would fall hopelessly in love for two or three days, after which time his love would burn out and the girls would return to the streets from whence they had come.
He was a fervent Polish Nationalist who despised the overwhelming majority of his countrymen. He was a Christian who hated churches and clergymen, a Socialist who loathed Russia and China, a devout pacifist with an astonishing capacity for ruthless violence. He smoked several packs of cigarettes a day, drank enormous quantities of vodka, and fornicated whenever given the opportunity.
He said, “Evan, how many Polacks does it take to change a light bulb? Five – one to hold the bulb and four to turn the ladder. Evan, how do you tell the groom at a Polish wedding? He’s the one in the clean bowling shirt. Evan, how do you keep a Polish girl from screwing? Marry her!”
He roared, I laughed, and Milan stood around looking politely puzzled. Tadeusz told half a dozen more Polish jokes, then came abruptly to a halt. “But you have been traveling and need refreshment. Are you hungry?”
“We ate at the cafe. But we need to bathe and shave, and I will also need fresh clothing for both of us and a roll of adhesive tape.”
“Of course,” Tadeusz said.
After the bath and the shave, after I’d used fresh tape to affix the silly packets once again to various portions of myself, after I had dressed again in clean clothing, I felt, if not like a new man, at least like a much-improved version of the old one. While Milan bathed I sat in the front room with Tadeusz and we talked about friends in America.
“So,” he said at length, “you have come to Krakow. Business in Poland, or is this merely a way station?”
“Precisely that.”
“You will want transportation, eh? Where do you go next? West Germany, perhaps?”
“No. Lithuania.”
His eyebrows shot up. “You are taking Milan Butec to Lithuania?”
“How… how-”
“Evan, please. Even a dumb Polack can count past ten without taking off his shoes. I know the man has left Yugoslavia. I know what he looks like. I know a wig when I see one, especially so crude a wig. It’s as obvious as the beard on that young moron who fetched you here. You don’t have to worry about me. Why, he was one of my boyhood heroes! And I respect him now more than ever. But Lithuania! Polacks are stupid enough, but you would take him among the crazy Litvaks?”
He poured another vodka while I gave him the briefest possible explanation of my trip to Latvia. Tadeusz, as it happened, was just the right sort of person for this story. It made perfect sense to him that someone would go to all this trouble just to reunite two lovers. Politics was politics, and a good cigar was a smoke, but love, after all, made the world go round. His words, not mine.
He drank his vodka down, lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the old, flipped the old into the fireplace, poured himself more vodka, and sighed the languid sigh of the tubercular pianist he wasn’t.
“I understand and sympathize,” he assured me. “But.”
“But what?”
“But it would suit my avowedly selfish purposes more if you were going directly to the West.”
“It is difficult to enter Lithuania?”
“No, that I can readily arrange. And in return, if you please, you will do me a favor. A great favor.”
“What?”
He dug his hands into his jacket pockets. He drew them out again, and in each hand he held a flat black cylinder about half an inch thick and three inches in diameter.
“Two of them,” he said. “One for New York, one for Chicago. Microfilm. Vital that it gets there. You know the people and you know how to get around. I’ll get you to Lithuania, you’ll get this crud back to the States. Fair enough?”
At which point Milan emerged from the bathroom, nattily dressed, neatly shaved, with his wig on backward.
I sat down and started to cry.
Chapter 11
“If nothing else,” Tadeusz had said, “this government of ours makes the trains run on time.” The same left-handed compliment had been paid to Mussolini’s regime in Italy, where it may or may not have been true. It was indisputably true in Poland. After a little more than twenty-four hours in Krakow, during which time we toured Wawel Castle, walked the banks of the Vistula, and roamed extensively through the old quarter, during which time Milan caught up on his sleep and I sidestepped Tadeusz’s constant offers of feminine companionship, and during which time identity cards were carefully prepared for us and routes arranged – after this fruitful and pleasant twenty-four hours of rest and relaxation we boarded a night train for Warsaw. The conductor looked in on us, examined our tickets, mutilated them professionally with a ticket-punch, examined our identity cards, returned them unmutilated, and then left us happily alone in our compartment. Milan went immediately to sleep. I had acquired a handful of paperbound books from Tadeusz, all of them safely apolitical, and I settled myself in my seat and set about reading them.
My name, according to the folding leatherette-bound card I carried, was Casimir Miodowa. Milan had been rechristened Jozef Slowacki. The cards would pass all but the most rigorous sort of inspection and, Tadeusz assured me, ought to get us over the border into the Lithuanian S.S.R. with no difficulty whatsoever.
We looked less like peasants now and more like minor business or government functionaries of one sort or another. We wore suits, crudely tailored but new and clean, with neatly knotted neckties. We carried small suitcases containing only clothing and personal articles, suitcases that could be opened for inspection without the slightest risk of their disclosing anything compromising, suitcases that I intended to discard forever once we were across the frontier. In the meantime they helped establish our role as middle-class members of the Polish classless society.