Two Ukrainians leaped on de Milja—partisans taken alive were worth gold to the Germans. He fell over backward under the weight but had had the foresight to jump with a VIS in his hand, so he shot each one in the abdomen and they rolled off him in a hurry. He struggled to his feet, saw Krewinski staggering around with blood on his shirt, grabbed him by the collar and pulled him outside.
Into a cloud of hot, black smoke from the burning farmhouse. They both went flat. The smoke made it hard to breathe, but it gave them a moment’s camouflage, a moment to think. De Milja, VIS in one hand, Krewinski’s collar in the other, decided to crawl into the farmhouse, hoping that Razakavia, or somebody, was holding out there.
It was deserted, except for Kotior. He had been wounded. Badly. He was sitting on a couch holding a light machine gun by its tripod, the feeder belt snaked around his shoulders, the barrel pointed at the front door. His face was white, he would not live much longer. “Out the back door,” he said. “They have retreated.”
“Good-bye, Kotior,” de Milja said.
“Good-bye,” Kotior said.
He dragged Krewinski toward the back door, was almost there when a shadow flew at him from behind an overturned table. He swung the VIS, then saw it was the Jewish woman who had given him tea one morning when he’d first arrived in the forest. “I ask you to shoot me,” she said formally.
He had no time to think about it. Krewinski’s weight was beginning to pull hard, not a good sign. The woman put her hands on his forearm. “Please,” she said. “I don’t want to be tortured.” She was right, the militia liked the screams of women. He pointed the VIS at her forehead, she looked at him, closed her eyes, then lifted her face.
But he couldn’t. His hand would not kill her. “No,” he said. “Come with me.” He dragged Krewinski forward and she followed, holding on to his shirt in the billowing smoke.
The truck.
De Milja had driven it a little way into the forest the night before, now it saved their lives.
The starter failed, four or five times, then he forced himself to a slow and determined effort, pulled the choke out where it belonged, and babied the truck to life. It sputtered and coughed, but it did not die. It took all his strength to ease the big clutch up slowly enough not to stall the engine, his teeth ground with effort and concentration, but he did it. The truck crawled forward, slow but steady, moving down a narrow path into the forest. Branches broke off against the windshield, the wheels climbed over downed logs and rocky outcrops. Occasionally the tires spun on the ice, de Milja let some air out and that enabled them to grip better, somehow finding traction on the frozen earth.
He saw Razakavia once more.
A few miles west of the farmhouse the forest divided—low hills rising from either bank of a small river. De Milja took the right fork, then, an hour after sunrise, found himself on a section of road where foresters had long ago built a corduroy track of cut logs. He stopped the truck to let the engine cool down and there, three hundred yards away, his horse moving at a brisk walk along the bank of the frozen river, was Razakavia.
A scout, riding well in advance of the main party, disappeared into the trees as de Milja watched. The main body of riders was strung out a long way, some of them riding double, many of them slumped over, perhaps wounded, certainly exhausted. Razakavia rode at the front, his white hair and beard stark against the gray-green forest, a rifle slung across his back.
They stopped at midday. There was still gasoline in the truck, and the corduroy track had continued without interruption. Perhaps they had happened on one of the vast estates owned by the Polish nobility in the nineteenth century, the road maintained by the count’s foresters for the use of wagons during the hunting season.
The woman he had saved had told him her name was Shura. She had, since they’d fled the burning farmhouse, tried to make Krewinski comfortable as best she could, but at last she said to de Milja, “I think now we must stop for a little time.”
He knew what she meant, and turned off the engine. “Thank you,” Krewinski whispered, grateful for a few moments of peace. The slow, jolting progress of the truck over the log road had been agony for him, though he had never once complained. When the ignition was turned off, the forest was immediately a very different place. Cold and clean, with a small wind; quiet except for the creak of frozen branches. With Shura’s help he settled Krewinski on the matted pine needles beneath a tree and covered him with an old blanket they’d found on the seat of the truck. When Shura tucked the blanket beneath his chin Krewinski closed his eyes and smiled. “Much better,” he said.
He went to sleep, and a half-hour later he was gone. There was no question of burial in the frozen ground, so they folded his hands on his chest and scratched his name on a rock and set it by his head as a gravestone.
Contrary to de Milja’s fears, the truck started, and moved forward along the corduroy road. The loss of Krewinski hurt—a life that should have continued. And de Milja wondered at the cost of the rescue when he considered the result. Nonetheless, in its own terms, the operation had succeeded. Olenik had been specific: they wanted the sergeant, but, if that proved impossible, they wanted the sergeant’s story. Well, that at least they would have, if he managed to get back to Warsaw. He was, he calculated, a hundred miles southeast of the town of Biala, and from there it was another hundred and twenty-five miles to Warsaw.
In a leather passport case he had two pairs of railroad tickets—for himself and Krewinski—along with the necessary documents for travel from the Rovno area to Biala, and from there on to Warsaw. His papers were good, and he had money in various forms. But he had no water, no food, and no gasoline. He had a pistol with three rounds, and no idea what he was going to do with the woman sitting next to him. He stared at her a moment. Wrapped in a long black coat and a black shawl, she sat up properly, back straight, bounced around by the motion of the truck.
Even wearing the shawl like a Ukrainian peasant—drawn across the brow so that it hid the hairline—she had a certain look; curved nose, dark eyes, thick eyebrows, and shadowy, somber skin. Someone who could have blended into the Byelorussian or Ukrainian population would not have been a problem, but Shura looked exactly like what she was, a Jew. And in that part of the world, people would see it. The forest bands preyed on Jews, especially on Jewish women. And the only alternative to the forest was a railway system crawling with SS guards and Gestapo. De Milja knew they would demand papers at every stop.
“Shura,” he said.
“Yes?” Her voice seemed resigned, she knew what this was about.
“What am I to do with you?”
“I do not know,” she said.
“Do you have identity papers?”
“I burned them. Better to be a phantom than a Jew.”
“A family?”
“They were forced into the ghetto, in Tarnopol. After that, I don’t know. By accident I wasn’t there the day the Germans came, and I fled to the forest with my cousin—he was seventeen. Razakavia agreed to take us in. I cooked, carried water, made myself useful any way I could. My cousin was killed a few weeks later, during an attack on a German train.”
“I’m sorry,” de Milja said. “And were you married, in Tarnopol?”
“No. And no prospects—though I suppose eventually something would have been arranged. They sent me away to study music when I was twelve years old. They thought I was a prodigy. But I wasn’t. So then, I had to do something respectable, and I became a piano teacher. A bad piano teacher, I should add. Children mostly didn’t like me, and I mostly didn’t like them.” They rode in silence for a time. “See?” she said. “I am everything you ever dreamed of.”