“One of my grandmothers was Polish,” the baker said. “Crazy, she was. All with spells and potions and times of the moon, but good to us. Always jam or a little cake.” The baker’s face softened as he remembered. He put out a hand and de Milja shook it. “Times change, maybe we can have something to drink,” he said.
De Milja smiled. “Better have it now,” he said.
The baker laughed. “Well,” he said.
The dirt track back to the forest went through a little settlement called Gradh. They smelled smoke a mile away, walked the horses in a wide circle around the village. Near the old Jewish cemetery was a great scar of newly packed earth, they saw a lost shoe and a bloody shirt. Above the village, ravens circled in a haze of dirty gray smoke.
“It was a Jewish town,” Razakavia said.
The weather. At first you didn’t notice. A leaf fell. You put on a jacket, took it off later. Then suddenly it tried to kill you, you hid from it as best you could but it seemed to search, to seek you out. In the swamps and woodlands there was mist, snow showers, a freeze, a thaw, heavy rain; then impossible, unimaginable mud. Like dull-minded peasants, de Milja and Frantek would stand by the road—the “road,” the “Moscow highway”—and stare at the German columns. Some days the equipment could move, some days it ground the lightly frozen earth into the mud below, and sank. At night they could hear the panzer tanks—every four hours the engines had to be run to a hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit, which took about fifteen minutes. Then they had to move the tanks around, to use the transmissions—because the oil was of too low a viscosity to protect the gears. Razakavia’s forest was well behind the front lines, a night attack was unlikely. But the Germans could not be sure, and the Soviet air force sent over a plane to harass them now and then, to stir up the defenses on icy nights.
The partisans attacked a repair train the following week. This time Bronstein’s bomb derailed all seven cars, and some of the railway workers tried to surrender, as did a Wehrmacht railroad officer. But every German was shot down, as well as most of the Poles and Ukrainians who worked on the track. The partisans looted the train, taking tools and coal and cigarettes and ammunition. One of the Polish laborers, lightly wounded, pleaded for mercy. Frantek worked the bolt on his rifle, but de Milja stepped between them. “Leave him to me,” he said.
The man fell on his knees and tried to wrap his arms around de Milja’s legs. “Mercy,” he said.
De Milja took him by the shoulder of his jacket and hauled him to his feet. “Stop it,” he hissed in Polish. The man wept. “I have children,” he said. “Four children, little girls.”
De Milja saw Razakavia staring at him coldly: take him as a gift, but don’t ask for another. “It’s all right,” de Milja said. “You can come with us.”
All around him, in the smoking wreckage of the repair train—a tangle of coaches with smashed windows, a flatcar with a crane bent at right angles—single shots rang out as the crew was finished off.
The man de Milja had saved was, by trade, a cobbler, and spent his first days in the encampment sewing boots and improvising repairs of all kinds. De Milja took him, late one afternoon, to a village near the forest, where a young widow sold vodka. If you paid a little extra you could drink it in a toolshed behind her house—she would even supply a few sticks of wood for the stove.
“My family is from Rovno, south of the Pripet marsh,” the man explained. “Life wasn’t so bad. The Poles had to watch it down there, but there was plenty of work, the police protected us, we had everything we needed. Maybe a little more.”
He took a pull from the vodka bottle, wiped his mustache with his fingers. Outside it was growing dark, and rain drummed on the roof of the shed. “Then, September of ’39. The Russians came and occupied the town. We were working people, didn’t put on airs, and we’d always been decent to the peasants, so when the commissars appointed a council of workers, they spared us, and let us go on with our lives. Very honestly, a lot of them had boots for the first time—it was the deportees who went barefoot—so they needed us and they knew it.
“Still, some of my family didn’t fare so well. One of my sisters was a nun, she disappeared. Another sister was married to a clerk in the district administration—they were sent east in freight cars. Gone. Door of the house banging in the wind, dinner rotting on the table. Make your heart sick to see it. My brother was a sergeant in the army. He’d been captured in the first days of the invasion, but maybe that was better for him. At least he wasn’t arrested, and he came from a unit that had laid down their guns when the Soviet troops said they’d arrived to fight the Germans.
“So him they sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, an NKVD camp called Ostashkov, not far from Smolensk. They really didn’t seem to know what they wanted to do with them. The officers—mostly reserve officers; engineers, teachers, doctors—they took them away, rumor was to a camp in the Katyn forest. Stefan, that’s my brother, and the other enlisted men, they just sat there and starved. Finally, they sent him to Moscow.”
“Moscow! It’s true?”
“It’s true, I swear it. What happened to Stefan was, the Russians thought he was one of them. Almost by accident—but then, that’s how he is. He’s not like me, doesn’t matter what I try it goes wrong. But Stefan’s not like that—if the world had gone on like it always did, he’d be doing very well now.”
The cobbler took another pull at the vodka. He looked off into the dusk, watching fondly as his brother did well.
“What happened?” de Milja said. “At the camp.”
“Oh. He befriended one of the NKVD men.”
“A political officer?”
“No! Nothing like that—a sergeant, just like him. This man had a hunting dog, a spaniel bitch, and his pleasure was to go into the marsh with this dog and perhaps shoot a duck or two and the dog would go into the reeds and bring them back. But the dog got hurt, and it wouldn’t eat, and it was dying. Stefan found out about it, and he told the NKVD man what to do, and the dog got better. And that was the end of it—except that it wasn’t. One day the man came to where he was kept and said, ‘You’re going to have a choice. Everybody here is going to a new camp, in the Katyn forest. For you, it’s better to tell them that you want to go to school, in Moscow.’ And that’s what Stefan did.”
“And then?”
“Well, he came home.”
“Just like that?”
The cobbler shrugged. “Yes.”
“A free man?”
“Well, yes. For a time, anyhow.”
“What happened?”
“Poor Stefan.”
“Another drink? There’s a little left.”
“Yes, all right, thank you. I owe you my life, you know.”
“Oh, anyone would have done what I did. But, ah, what happened to Stefan?”
“Too strong, Stefan. Sometimes it isn’t for the best. He went into the town, I don’t know why. And some German didn’t like his looks, and they asked for his papers, and Stefan hit him.”
“In Rovno, this was?”
“Yes. He managed to run away—a friend saw it and told us. But then they caught him. They beat him up and took him off in one of those black trucks, and now he’s in Czarny prison.” The cobbler looked away, his face angry and bitter. “They are going to hang him.”
“He has a family?”
“Oh yes. Just like me.”
“Name the same as yours?”
“Yes. Krewinski, just like mine. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Don’t get angry.”
“Shameful thing. It’s the Russians’ fault, they won’t leave us alone.” He paused a moment, took another sip of vodka. “You think there’s hope? I mean, we’re told to pray for this and for that. We’re told there’s always hope. Do you think that’s true?”