Читать книгу The Dangerous Places - Louis Golding - Страница 5

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“Help!” came a muffled cry from among the rubble that had been Kupieçka Street. “Help!” And a young man, dodging mortar-fire, making for cover, heard the desperate sound. In addition to the German arms he had looted, he now carried a message to the next man he met.

“Hallo, chaver!” a voice cried. “Oh, it’s you, Feivel! That’s a good haul you’ve made there! Let me have one of those rifles, will you?”

Another young man had come up out of some hole in the ground. The face was as black as smoke.

“Lend us a hand, Shmul!” the first said urgently. “There’s a woman alive in the ruins of Post Sixteen!”

“The poor soul! I’m with you, Feivel!”

They picked their way back into Kupieçka, and into the jagged chaos that had been Post Sixteen, till they came up against the lumps of wall behind which the woman called so desperately. The young man called Shmul switched on his torch and thrust his arm through a gap. “Put your hand out to me! Can you reach?” He waited for some moments, then a hand rough as a cat’s tongue seized his convulsively. “Wait! I’ve a drop of brandy here! Take a sip! Give some to your daughter!” He took a flask from his pocket and thrust it through.

But the outstretched hand did not move. It remained frozen there. The woman herself was suddenly rigid. Not a sound was on her lips. Some time passed.

“Do you hear, woman?” Feivel asked testily. “There’s no time to lose.”

Then he felt the gritty hand release his own. It fumbled till it found the flask in his other hand. Then the woman spoke. Her words came curiously slow and hushed.

“For my daughter,” the woman whispered.

She had never felt herself so wildly, so gloriously flattered in all her life before. Your daughter, he said, your daughter. Princes and high statesmen had in her time uttered to her the most immoderate compliments. Her pulses had not quickened. There, in the stench and darkness, Elsie Silver blushed hot with joy. She had never wanted a child, and had been careful enough to see she had none. But she had not wanted a child because the concept Elsie Silver, mother, was just too silly, too farcically out of the question. It was against nature, as it is against nature for a homosexual, or a eunuch, to have a child. And yet, accredit either of these with maternity or paternity, though there may be an embarrassed snigger on the lips, in the heart the compliment rocks like a peal of bells.

“What a fool you are!” a voice whispered in Elsie Silver’s head, while her heart rioted. “Any slut has a baby, any sow in a sty has ten. Besides, she’s got nothing at all to do with me, this little homeless ghost from God knows where. Both of us homeless ghosts from God knows where.”

“Don’t worry,” a voice within her countered. “If any two creatures ever were mother and daughter, it’s you and this one.” She placed the brandy to the girl’s lips, a drop or two coursed down the throat. The girl coughed and shivered. She might live, if these men had them out in time.

“Won’t you get on with it?” Elsie begged them.

“Give yourself a drop too,” ordered Shmul. “Then you can both have a swig of water to wash your mouths.” She lifted the brandy flask to her lips. The brandy in her throat lit up a thought in her with a rush and a whistle, like a match flame at a gas jet.

“I’m going to take her away ... outside, away from here,” she explained, as if the idea were to get the girl out of a stuffy cinema. “Thank you.” This was for the water. The girl’s lips nuzzled the bottle like a lamb at a sheep’s udder.

“Yes,” said Shmul quietly, “you’ll take her away.”

“Of course,” confirmed Feivel. “Outside, away from here.”

They both thought the idea farcical. At this stage one did not get away from the Warsaw ghetto, and certainly not very far. Shmul wanted to laugh. He had been on the verge of hysteria more than once during the last day or two. It was as if the sole of his foot were sticking out of bed and someone came up now and again to tickle it with a feather. His muscles twitched now, but he did not laugh.

It was the same with Feivel. He, too, thought the idea of this woman getting herself and her daughter out of the ghetto was chimerical. But there was another thought in his head. How wonderful it would be if the impossible happened and they got away somehow, to England, to America, perhaps even to Palestine! Hadn’t Israel’s God and the people of Israel always specialized in the impossible? So let us say the miracle happened. Perhaps the two women some day would remember him, and the mitzvah, the holy deed, he had done on their behalf. For to save life is a mitzvah, which has preference over all other mitzvahs. It would be good to think of someone remembering him over there in Eretz Israel, at the foot of Mount Zion, or against Rachel’s Tomb, maybe, among the silver olive-groves. His family had been wiped out a year, two years, ago. He had never married. There would never be children to light candles for him, for in a few days, if not sooner, he would be dead.

Perhaps this mother and this girl would light candles for him, Feivel. He looked round, flashing his torch. There was an iron bar sticking out of a heap of rubbish a few feet away. He tugged at it and it came loose.

“This will be useful, Feivel,” he said. He tapped a large block by his foot. “We’ll start here, eh?”

It was a curious business, sitting there in the darkness, with the girl in her arms, and the two men groaning and grunting as they heaved away, and the mortar shells popping and the siege-guns booming, and now and again a bomb dropping like a lump of a small planet. On the physical plane she knew that it was difficult for any female creature to be so wretched as she was. Despite the gulp of water, her mouth was again as dry as soot. She ached in every limb. Above all, she detested the feeling of grit in her hair, biting on itself like teeth. She had always been one to keep her hair smooth as petals. Even lately, as Channah, down here amid the cellar damps and the sewers, she had kept her hair decent. She felt, she told herself, like hell.

Yet, despite all this, she was more happy and serene than she had been in all her life before. The girl lay in her arms, abandoned to her, as completely hers during these minutes, this half-hour, as a new-born child is completely its mother’s and lies snuggling against the warmth of her breast. For this half-hour at least, or for a few hours, or for a half-day, she could say she was responsible for the breath of life in the girl exactly in the same degree as the mother could say it of the new-born child, torn from another kind of womb by another kind of doctor. She could tell herself before she died, as she was quite likely to do quite soon, that she had known once, for a brief time, the totally selfless love of motherhood.

“How does it go, young men?” she asked many minutes later.

“It will be well!” they said.

So she sat in the darkness, she and the strange daughter in her arms, till the stones at last were rolled away, and the young men took them out, with immense labour, to Post Four, which was still in some sort of going order.