Читать книгу The Dangerous Places - Louis Golding - Страница 8

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In the air above Marta’s house, and in the tormented acres beyond the adjacent Wall, the Battle raged. That was the warp and woof of the fabric of things. It would have been more horrific if, suddenly, the shells had stopped screaming and the bombs thundering, for it would have meant total wilderness had been achieved, total death.

Twice a day the old woman brought their food down to her lodgers. Apart from that she made the pretence that there was no other furniture in her cellar than her washing equipment. Each day she would go out with a basket of clean linen, and come back with the dirty linen. It was strange how those confined odours of soiled clothes, bad soap, and thickening water became more nauseating than the odours of wounds and urine had been in the underground labyrinths of the ghetto. But so it was. Doubtless it was largely a subjective thing. The old woman’s clientele included some detachments of German personnel, and the closeness to the soiled vests and underpants of the enemy had an intimate horror that their actual presence might not have provoked.

But despite the tumult without, and the strain of waiting within, in these odours hardly to be borne, the nights had a strange sweetness outside all previous experience. The woman and the girl were as close to each other as they had been when trapped in the cellar; but physical pain, at least, was gone. Mila talked. Suddenly the girl was possessed of the need to get her story uttered, exhumed out of the dark places of her heart. And Elsie listened, rapt. Though the whole picture of Mila’s background did not build itself up during the next few days, a good deal of it was fairly clear by the time they went forth on the next stage of their journey. Certain terms of reference in Mila’s world were outside Elsie’s experience. It was only later that she saw them all in some sort of perspective, the town Mila was born in, her parents, the young friends here in Warsaw who had been so profound an influence upon her.

Mila had been born some fifteen years ago in the small town of Ploçk, a few hours away north-westward on the Vistula. Her father, David Cossor, had come from a family at once prosperous and pious, the leading Jews in their community, importers of fine goods from Czechoslovakia, Bohemian glass, china, wrought iron. The business had taken him regularly to Prague, where he met Mimi, a creature angelic in her beauty, as she emerged from her daughter’s spell-bound recollection of her. After Mila was born, the small family regularly spent several months in Prague, both to escape the bleak Polish winter and for the sake of its cosmopolitan culture. During these years David became a devoted ‘cultural Zionist’, as they termed it, a follower of the principles of Achad Ha’am, who envisaged the Jewish Homeland as a large-scale Hebrew University, a torch of civilization lifted high over the desert wastes of the Near East, a beacon to all mankind, as in the centuries gone by. Both in Ploçk and Prague, David Cossor had been punctilious about Mila’s education, secular and Jewish. When the Germans fell on Poland like a thunderbolt, the Cossors, like many small-town Jews, fled to Warsaw, thinking there was more chance of safety there. Either something would happen to arrest the German advance, or they would be well placed for escape towards the southeast. It was not to be foreseen that the Germans and Russians would crack Poland in two, and that on one side of the line the Jews would be at once trapped like animals in cages. David Cossor had been reading the signs more accurately than many, for he had been for some time converting his possessions into jewels, as Jews had bitterly learned how to do for many generations. When he arrived in Warsaw, he lived in comfort for a little time in an apartment in the Jewish quarter, which only began to be so disastrously overcrowded when the Germans put their Jew schemes into operation late in 1940, as they occupied one country after another and siphoned off the Jewish communities into the ghettos they progressively walled-up and sealed off. At the same time the expropriation began, and the circumstances of people like the Cossors were sorely reduced. First, David got through his stock of currency, then he started selling up the jewels, though he always managed to maintain a reserve of diamonds for whatever desperate emergency might lie ahead. Further, he demanded that this reserve should be divided up and concealed on their three persons, for it was well known that with the flash of an axe the members of a family could be separated from each other, and for ever. Meanwhile, both food and housing conditions deteriorated dreadfully. The conditions were not such that a creature as delicate as Mimi Cossor could exist in them, and late in 1941 she died. Mila had adored her mother, with her delicacy and fragile grace, but also she loved her father, and probably came closer to him, now in the time of his bereavement, than she had hitherto. She did what she could to make up for her mother’s loss, and thus brought out in herself certain qualities of resource and courage of which she was already to show evidence in the few days following Elsie’s discovery of her, stricken numb though she was by a later calamity.

While his wife was alive in the ghetto, David Cossor had not been very active in the community. He had been on several committees, and had lectured on art and philosophy to students old and young, in whom a fantastic devotion to the activities of mind and soul developed, the more insistently the trains hooted at the sidings, and the red glare of the ovens winked and flickered from the skies over Treblinka and Ausschwitz. During this period Cossor had devoted most of his energies to the task of maintaining the physical and moral fibre of his wife and daughter. After Mimi’s death he felt the necessity for manual labour to take his mind off his grief, and enrolled in the sanitary department, in good company, for a number of men distinguished in the arts and sciences were his colleagues. During this period Mila attended a ghetto school, fervidly Zionist in its outlook. Teachers and pupils filled their days and nights with the mystic dream of Zion, while, at the same time, as enlisted chalutzim, or pioneers, they studied the practical problems of colonization with the zeal of emigrants who might be receiving their permits and travel-warrants in a week or a month.

When the ghetto rising broke out towards the end of April, David Cossor and his daughter at once descended into the cellars, to do whatever might be asked of them. Cossor did not survive long. He had tried to hide his heart ailment even from himself, and then it destroyed him on the threshold of Post Sixteen, on the day the bomb fell leaving no survivors there, excepting Mila his daughter, and Elsie Silver, of whom neither would have survived if the other had not been by her side.

The days in the washing-cellar were not uneventful. On the third morning, there was a sound beyond the trap-door hidden by the mangle. After the due formalities a man emerged. He took no more notice of these two females already there than if they, too, were bundles of washing. His days and nights in the Warsaw ghetto were at an end. He disappeared. An hour later Sem arrived to take their passport photographs, his equipment hidden in his plumber’s bag of tools. He seemed rather pleased with himself. There had been a useful haul of forms from the official printing-works in Cracow. The next day Wolff turned up. He acknowledged the presence of Elsie and Mila with the flicker of an eyelid. Then he disappeared at once. It could be deduced from various directions that the long agony of the Warsaw ghetto was almost over.

Next day another thing happened. This was a screwed-up piece of newspaper that fell out of a washing-basket that old Marta was emptying on to the floor.

“A newspaper!” Elsie said to herself. “Of course! There is an outside world!” She unscrewed the piece of print. Marta went on separating the linen. Mila was polishing the shoes with a piece of sacking, though they would undoubtedly be getting other shoes soon. Der Krakauer Zeitung, Elsie read at the head of the sheet of paper. She read the date, too. May the third, 1943, the day the bomb had fallen. The newspaper was four days old now. Cracow. That was an interesting omen. The profusion of swastikas showed exactly the sort of paper it was. Then her heart started beating furiously. It seemed to her that that happened even before her eye consciously registered the man’s name. The man’s name was Heinrich Himmler.

At the head of the page there was a respectful paragraph regarding the celebrity’s movements. Herr Reichskomissar Himmler had officially pronounced himself well satisfied with the results of his inspection of conditions in Warsaw, the seat of the Gouvernement Général. He was on his way to the secret Headquarters of the Führer himself, to deliver his report in person. He had left Warsaw yesterday, that is to say, some four days before Elsie’s reading of the news item.

“That’s terrific!” she proclaimed, in English. The old woman looked round dubiously, then looked away again. Mila looked up startled, perhaps even a shade frightened.

“Please, Channah!” she murmured under her breath.

Elsie blushed.

“Yes, of course, I know. Stupid of me. I’ll be more careful in future.”

“Good news?” asked Mila.

“A gentleman I know has left town. His friends will still be around, but it makes everything easier somehow.”

“Mazel tov!” breathed Mila. “Good luck!” There was no harm in talking Hebrew. The old woman did not know one of them was English, but she must know they were both Jews right enough.

Elsie turned suddenly to Marta.

“When are you bringing us our clothes, old woman?” Her voice was firm and resonant as a schoolmistress. Marta turned her bleary eyes towards Mila.

“What did she say?” she quavered, her hand behind her ear. Mila translated. “Tell the Madame to-night or to-morrow!”

“Mila,” requested Elsie. “Tell her that won’t do. Tell her to leave her washing alone and go out at once and get our outfits for us!” Mila did as she was bid. The old woman was obviously raising objections. She was busy. She hadn’t orders. What about the money? “Tell her we’ll look after her!” Elsie exclaimed. She herself went up to the old woman, and turned her shoulders round. “Do you hear, mother of light and sweetness, you’ll be all right.” She repeated the words, always in German: “You’ll be all right.” She made the universal money gesture, the rubbing of the thumb over the fingertips. “Understand?” She clapped the old woman on the back. She chucked her under the chin. The old woman’s sooty resistance crumbled. She arched and bridled like a pleased kitten.

“At once?” she wanted to know.

“At once!”

Marta tittered, stooped down for the empty basket, then went off up the stairs, the soles of her boots flapping. She was back some hours later, grinning all over. This was a cup of conspiracy with cream on top. The lady must be no mere Jewish woman, like those wretched creatures you used to see until recently shuffling under the Wall, hollow-eyed, the yellow star on their arms and on their backs. Perhaps she was just political, perhaps even only criminal, nothing more serious than that.

The old woman removed a top layer of soiled linen, and there the stuff was: shoes, stockings, underclothes, a girl’s felt hat, a modest hat for a grown-up, two outdoor outfits, a coat and skirt for the woman, a coat, dress, and jumper for the girl. There were two hand-bags, too, even some handkerchiefs, and a few articles for the toilet.

“The stuff doesn’t look at all bad,” murmured Elsie. “There’ve been so many people around,” she said to herself, “who haven’t any use for it any more.” She picked up the coat and skirt. The style and material were good. The label was that of the Galeries Lafayette in Lyons. “Lyons!” she breathed. “Ah well, Lyons!” She shrugged her shoulders. One had learned a lot in three weeks of Warsaw. One had, for instance, bandaged a woman who had plaited a gold chain inside the leather handle of a cheap hand-bag. Another woman had sewn some jewels behind the buttons of her coat, covering them over with a little padding and lining. Elsie examined the buttons of the two coats. Her own were hollow, and could take a fair share of the jewels she now carried in the bag suspended from her waist. Mila’s buttons could be adapted quite easily, too. “Altogether more convenient!” she murmured. “So long as we always remember to change buttons if ever we change coats!”

Then she reached for the underclothes. “What are they like?” she mused. But suddenly her fingertips recoiled. “That’s all right! That’s fine!” she said aloud. Mila opened her eyes.

“I’ve got to be a German woman of good class, my dear, till we get away. And to be it, I must feel it. You, too, must feel Polish, a well-bred little Polish girl.”

“Yes, Channah, of course.”

“So we must get these things washed at once,” decided Elsie. “That’s one luxury we can allow ourselves in this guest-house. Tell her, Mila!” Mila told the old woman. The old woman nodded. It looked as if the old woman would stand on her head, if Elsie told her to stand on her head. “In the meantime, we must see how this stuff fits,” decided Elsie. “We’ll try it on.”

Mila nodded. She looked at her own things. They were too simple to go wrong. But the lining had come away from Elsie’s coat, a pocket was ripped, the skirt was too long, there were several bits and pieces that made it just not quite right, perhaps added by a later hand since it had been acquired from Lyons.

“It’s not right!” said Elsie. The suspicion of a tear was in her eye. She felt more helpless and frustrated than she had felt with a mile or two of the ghetto Wall around her, for then she felt nothing at all. “I can’t be a big-shot in this thing.”

“I can make it right,” said Mila. “She will give me a needle and cotton.”

For the next hour or two, Marta washed the underclothes, Mila worked away smartly with the needle and cotton, thimble and scissors. As soon as Marta had gone upstairs with her money, Mila set to work stowing away their jewels inside and behind the coat-buttons. She made a very neat job of it.

“You’re wonderful,” said Elsie. “Where did you learn it?”

“My mother had golden fingers,” breathed Mila.

Sem came once more, about eight o’clock on the morning of the seventh and last day in the washing-cellar. As ever, he had his bag of plumber’s tools with him. Beneath the tools, he carried the documents, inside a grubby envelope wrapped up with a sheaf of spanners and pliers in a dirty length of cloth. Elsie and Mila were wearing their new outfits. A slight deference of hand to heart indicated his awareness of their improved appearances. The Polish manners they talk of, thought Elsie, are not confined to lieutenant-colonels. He handed the papers over. They were made out in the names of Lydia Radbruch, of Frankfort, and Maria, her daughter, unimpeachably Aryan, doubtless, as far as the records went back.

“From now on you’re Maria,” said Elsie. “Understand, Maria?”

“Yes, mama, I understand. Some day I’ll be Mila again....”

“Of course, my child.”

There was obviously something more Mila wanted to say. Elsie waited.

“But whatever I call you,” muttered Mila, “you’ll always be the second mama.” She had her eyes on the ground. She did not say easily things she felt deeply.

“Yes,” whispered Elsie. She wanted to say more than that; she wanted to say that no words anyone had ever said to her had made her feel happier and prouder. But she was tongue-tied. She turned at length to Sem. “Have you worked out the train?” she asked.

“Train to Cracow is ten o’clock,” he said. “You go straight to railway station, yes? Better that German ladies should not take tram, and taxis is only four in all Warsaw.” He ticked them off on his fingers, with a smile—one, two, three, four. “Better you take ricksha. In Cracow I have address for you, nice people, will look after you good.”

“You mean we go into hiding again? But why? We’re Germans, aren’t we? We’ve got our papers! Why can’t we go to a hotel till we work out the next stage of the journey?”

He looked at her curiously, and rather pitifully. The woman had some naïve ideas.

“Even with real papers, they take people away in a moment, like this”—he snapped his fingers—“if they want to take away. It is danger everywhere, but is most dangerous in hotel. You give papers to porter, porter take papers to police. And finish. Understand?”

“Yes, I understand.” She felt like a lump of wood. “You have an address, then, in Cracow?”

“Listen.” He put his hand to his mouth, and looked up the stairway, as if to make sure old Marta was not eavesdropping. “The address is St. Philipp Street, seven,” he whispered, “by St. Florian’s Church. Say again.” She repeated the words. “St. Philipp Street, seven.” “On ground floor. Door on right. Wait.” He thought a moment. “You not speak Polish, pani?”

“I speak Polish,” said Mila.

He turned to her. “Whoever comes to the door,” he said in Polish, “you ask if Mr. Antek Rangowski lives there. If he comes, he is a man with spectacles and a black beard with a point, like this. Then you say: ‘I have come in answer to advertisement to buy a fur coat.’ He will then ask you inside. You go in after him. Repeat all that, prosze pani.” She repeated the instructions. “Excellent,” he said. He turned to Elsie again. “The girl will explain,” he said. “Is better you go now. And me”—he smiled—“I stay here to look at taps. Old woman!” he called up the stairs. “Make ready now!”

“It is ready!” the old woman called down the stairs. “They’re not going to be all day, are they?” She was getting impatient.

“Good-bye, Sem! And thank you!” Elsie said.

“Dowidzenia, panu!” said Mila. “Good-bye!”

They shook hands. “Good-bye! Good fortune!” said Sem. He turned and belaboured a tap with a hammer. If nothing was wrong with the tap now, there would be quite soon. Elsie and Mila climbed the stairs and entered Marta’s ground-floor for the first time. It was not dark, yet the things in the room were in a sort of dark haze, the unmade bed along the wall, the table, the chair, the plaster Madonna in a corner, the smudged bride and bridegroom in a frame. Their vision was directed to the window and the door and the things that might lie beyond them.

“Wait!” said the old woman. She picked up a basin of dirty water, went up to the window, opened it, and looked sharply left and right. Then she flung the water into the street. Then she turned again. “Now go!” Then the old crone’s voice softened. “The Mother of God go with you!”

“Good-bye!” they both said, went out along the front passage and for one moment stood framed in the threshold, hesitating, as one might hesitate on a beach before venturing a foot into the incalculable sea. Then Elsie banged the door behind her. They turned their heads sharp left, as by agreement, for on their right, not many yards away, was the Wall, the Wall of the ghetto, that dark and brilliant and timeless place. On their left stretched the city, which was like a gigantic time-bomb that might blow up in their faces if they made one false move.

They intended to walk warily.

The street was Luçka. The battle seemed to be holding its breath before a final horrific assault. But perhaps you could not call it a battle when only one side had the steel and fire, the other having not much more than their fingernails. There were not many people about. Apart from going to their jobs and coming back from them, and manœuvring on the daily scrounge for food on the furtive black-market corners, it was safer even for the ‘Aryan’ Pole to stay indoors. The Germans shot first and asked questions afterwards, and both police and soldiers were free with rifle-butts and hob-nailed boots.

A few doors away there was a couple of children on a doorstep, solemnly snipping away at a piece of cloth; beyond, a lanky woman wheeled a barrow cluttered with valueless oddments, and two old men stared up listlessly following the reconnoitrings of a plane in the middle sky. Luçka led into Wronia. There was more movement there. A tank waddled along the street like a hippopotamus that had emerged from a marsh and had gone out adventuring. A few blocks north an armoured car up against the pavement disgorged a crew of soldiers in grey-green. Now and again the siege guns boomed, like metal doors slamming. Nearer at hand machine-guns rattled. It was curious how slight a protection the coat from Lyons felt against all those things. The legs were hollow, Elsie realized with dismay, like cardboard cylinders. If something heavy suddenly pushed you in front or behind, the legs would give at the knee-joints. She looked sideways down at the girl. The head was up in the air. There was a flush in the pale cheeks. Her own words came back to her. “We won’t shuffle along, Mila, as if we’re apologizing for something.” Her chin thrust up. She squared her shoulders. After all, as the Jewish wife of General von Brockenburg, she had had some training in coolness and courage.

The way was sharp left into Wronia. From round the corner of Panska an S.S. man appeared and approached them. His face was familiar, those eyes, that chin. Where had she met him before? The answer came to her at once. She had met him all over Germany, in the days when the word ‘Nazi’ and the thing ‘Nazi’ was on no one’s tongue among all those turbulent millions, excepting for the tongues of a few beer-garden louts. She had loved that chin and those eyes, and for their sake had elected to stay on in Germany, forswearing all else. They had belonged to her lover and her husband. Then, one day, looking out from Herr Wolff’s window into a street in the Warsaw ghetto, she had seen an S.S. man with those same features....

At that moment the S.S. man reached them. Mila was not in his path, but he took a half side-step to send her flying against the wall. The blood roared in Elsie’s temples. The S.S. man had become something more than all Nazis and all Germans in general, he had become a specific storm-trooper, the same who had impaled the Jewish baby upon the spike. The blood roared, the fingers arched like talons. In one moment, now as she stood in Wronia, she would have thrown herself upon the man, and clawed his eyes out, as she would have done upon that earlier occasion under Wolff’s window, if two strangers had not hurled themselves from the darkness of an alley and snatched her away from the unspeakable and splendid folly.

Once again her hand stayed. Her wrist was grasped by a hand astonishingly strong, considering that it was a small girl’s hand. She looked down into Mila’s eyes, large with comprehension, severe with reproof. Her arm fell. The sweat gushed from her forehead. No harm threatened, for the man was ignorantly swaggering along, and by now more than a block away.

“I’m sorry,” Elsie’s lips went. “It won’t happen again.” She meant from now on she would not let Germany havoc her, as it had done twice lately. The first time it would not have mattered, for she had been alone, accountable to no one. Now she had an overriding responsibility. She had come close now to destroying not only herself. She would use Germany, her knowledge of the place, the people, the speech. She and the girl might be captured and shot in less than half an hour; or their fantastic impossible adventure might have a successful issue months, or years, from now. But she would never again be shocked into panic by Germany. She would be impervious to it.

They walked on towards a main street down which the loaded trams clanged and crawled. She was doing well, she thought; she was putting up a fine show of casualness. But, after all, she had been an actress of a sort, sometimes better off the stage than on. Mila, however, had not; she was only fifteen; she had been through hell for several years. She felt proud of her, it was a first-rate performance. She had the feeling that a bald, middle-aged man nearby was eyeing them suspiciously. Was he thinking Mila, and even she herself, didn’t look as Aryan as they should? Was he a genuine Volksdeutscher, one of those who had sprung up like fungi overnight when the Germans had marched in, and had since then been more rabidly Nazi than the Nazis? Or perhaps he was merely one of those men who mentally undress every personable woman they meet? He blinked, and turned his face away. At the next corner a ricksha stood up against the pavement. A blear-eyed, elderly man sat behind the contraption, hunched over the pedals. “Come!” commanded Elsie. They strode up to the ricksha. “Zum Hauptbahnhof!” she demanded. “Schnell!” The man looked left and right. What was he looking around for? “All right! Get in, both of you!” he growled. He did not like Germans. Possibly, too, there was some restriction against taking more than one passenger. He clanged his bell, and the thing turned round into Jerozolimskie Allee. The railway tracks were on their left. On their right they trundled past bombed buildings, past buildings they were speedily putting up again, past seedy men in morning suits and smart German officers gleaming like furniture polish. Some ten minutes later they were at the station square. The station buildings, so much as had survived the bombing, were new and yellow and ornate. A large hotel in the same style faced it, the Hotel Polonia, firmly announcing itself as Nur für Deutsche. Elsie and Mila dismounted, and Elsie tipped the man lavishly. The man lifted his head, stared into Elsie’s eyes, the shoulders slumped again, and with one sharp twirl at his bell, the contraption was away.

There were a frightening number of Germans in various types of uniform in the station approach. Probably there were quite as many, at least as vigilant, not in uniform. The next few minutes were going to be a little hair-raising. Could anybody with half an eye see that these clothes weren’t made for them? Didn’t their bodies, impregnated with the odours of the ghetto cellars, carry about with them an odour they could never lose till their dying day, though they bathed in vats of scent? Could the Germans fail to see they both had that impalpable Jewish something ... where is it, what is it? Is it a phantom curve of the nostrils? Didn’t Willy say it was the way the skull fitted on the neck-bones?

She clenched her fists. “Bilge!” she said aloud, in English. “Smile, Maria!” she demanded, in German. “You funny little monkey, smile!” She tweaked Mila’s ear. A wan smile spread over Mila’s face. She could hardly be expected to smile quite so soon with all her teeth. “That’s the way!” she encouraged her. “You remember when I came to little Jan’s christening and Uncle Ignaz sat in the ghoulash?”

“It was not ghoulash, mama, it was barszcz!” Mila was warming to it.

“No! Ghoulash!”

“Barszcz!”

They were approaching the ticket office now. The discussion looked like becoming quite animated, when a German patrolman on railway duty came over to them. He was a big fellow in a big helmet, his tightly drawn belt making him look a little pregnant. His leggings shone like glass.

“Papers!” he demanded.

(This was the moment. Sweet and easy, now, like a kitten in a basket.)

“Mit Vergnügen!” she fluted. “With pleasure!” He looked up. She handed over both sets of papers.

“Are you from here?” he asked. The accent was Hamburg, wasn’t it? There is such a thing as luck, after all.

“Aber, bitte!” she begged. He looked up inquiringly. “Frankfort,” she corrected him. “But I’ve spent most of my life in Hamburg.” (Carry the attack. Never wait for it.) She smiled charmingly. “That’s where you’re from, isn’t it?”

“Ja, gnädige Frau!” (Gnädige Frau! Did you get that?) “And the little one? Your daughter?” (He wasn’t even checking up on her papers.)

“Yes! A naughty young woman, too! She’s been arguing my head off! It was ghoulash, Herr Unteroffizier, not barszcz, wasn’t it? Come along now, Maria!” (Don’t overdo it. Enough is as good as a feast.) She reached her hand forward for the papers, replaced them in her hand-bag, and waited a moment, so that he should not suspect that he was being rushed into, or out of, anything.

“Guten tag, gnädige Frau! Fräulein!” The lower mouth dickered for a moment, then, he clicked his heels, bowed, and walked off. Elsie’s heart felt coiled and tense inside her, like a watch-spring; any moment it might kick and jump loose. She could not speak for a full minute. Then:

“We’ll get our tickets, Maria!” she brought out. “Then we’ll find some sort of meal.”

“Yes, mama,” agreed Mila dutifully. “And I won’t argue any more. It was ghoulash.” The tension hardly distressed Mila at all. That was fine. She had had three or four years of it. She had grown tough. They threaded their way through the mob of peasants, soldiers, and small officials that milled round and round the station. They went over to the ticket office.

“Two for Cracow,” demanded Elsie, with the hauteur that might be expected from a German lady, above all a German lady in Poland. “First Class.” The clerk handed the tickets over. So, in the old days, she might have bought two tickets for a movie on the Kurfürstendamm. “Now, Maria, dear,” she fluted. “We’ll go across and have a nice breakfast at the Polonia. Come, my dear.”

They went across. The commissaire opened the door for them respectfully. The Herrenvolk was buying its German papers at the bookstall, taking its ease in the chairs of the lobby. It was a rather faded place, billowy with brown plush. Aspidistras and palms gloomed disconsolately in large pots behind bamboo tables. There was a discreet gallery above the main dining-room.

“How charming!” murmured Elsie. “And look!” At a table close by a gentleman was helping himself to a dish of four fried eggs. They had fried eggs, quite tolerable coffee, and fairly white bread. A rich cream tart was being displayed. “Could we have that?” asked Mila incredulously. “All that, and another one!” Elsie assured her. “And I shall have cigarettes. Cigarettes, waiter!” she demanded, not at all sure it was her own voice making so peremptory a noise. He brought a packet of Mewy, the good sort. It was all very expensive, but money need not worry them, for the present, at least. There was no more serious a misadventure than a fit of hiccups, for it was a long time since Mila had had so princely a meal. “Keep the change!” demanded Elsie. The waiter almost touched the ground with his forehead. “Danke, vielen Dank, gnädige Frau.” One might almost have thought the lady to be the wife of a high-ranking officer.

There was a cursory control at the ticket barrier, but Frau Radbruch and her daughter went through to the train without the slightest difficulty. The third-class carriages were crowded to suffocation; they contained nothing but Poles. On this train all the first-class carriages were labelled: for Germans only. She saw a carriage rather emptier than the others, though a large man lifting his luggage to the rack seemed to be big enough to take four places.

“Up here, Maria!” Elsie called through the open corridor window. Mila climbed the steps and moved along the corridor. By that time the large man had sat down, and the two people sitting facing each other in the further corners became visible. They were German officers sitting upright, hands on knees, like Karnak gods with eyeglasses. There was a moment of panic, but not more than that. German officers (she told herself). That’s one type of animal that need not frighten me. Not me, that is to say, the Frau General, the one-time Frau General, to be exact. She planked herself down in the empty corner-seat before someone else took it. There was room for Mila in the opposite corner. The time for departure came. The train tarried. There was a hold-up somewhere. Perhaps some Jew had been found trying to make a getaway.

“I’ll have my magazine, darling. It’s in your bag. Thank you.” She spoke in her most beautiful German. Mila took out her magazine. They settled down to while the minutes away till the train got off. The train lurched slightly, the couplings clanked, the wheels were turning. They were leaving Warsaw. She turned to look at Mila’s face. The eyes were distended wide with incredulity. The girl raised her hands to her stomach. Elsie knew what was going on inside her. The wheels were turning round and round, as they were turning inside her, too. She hoped they would not be sick. It was actually unwise to have that rich cream tart. They were out of the station now. That was the ghetto northward, whatever was left of it, a church or two, some warehouses, some blocks of flats not yet pulverized. She saw with dismay the large tear form in the corner of Mila’s eye. It was not to be wondered at that the child’s heart was stricken. There lay the adored mother with the golden fingers, her father, her friends, the burning pallid boys and girls, whose monument of loose brick grew higher, broader, more shapeless, from hour to hour.

But a little girl named Maria Radbruch, on a visit to Cracow, must not weep because she leaves the noisy city of Warsaw behind. Elsie took out her handkerchief, and screwed a corner into a point.

“These awful smuts!” said Elsie. “Let me take it out for you! There now!” That was fine. The smuts gave no more trouble after that. They were passing through the drab suburb of Wola now. The town dwindled behind them, the bombardment ceased like a rundown clock, the planes over the airfield at Okeçie, like snuffed candles, died in the sky. The large man did accounts. One of the officers filed his fingernails. The other stared out of the window. Now and again they addressed a few words to each other, but they were not talkative.

One hour, two hours went by. The train chuffed and chugged over the flat green miles of young oats, barley, maize. On the edge of the scruffy villages the black swine rooted and charged in little inconsequent sorties. There had been rain. A hundred pools, running into each other like globules of mercury, reflected the drooping willows and the pale sky. Suddenly the landscape clotted into forest, league upon league of forest. Then as suddenly the train was out of forest again, leaving it behind like a wall of black mist. There was a restaurant-car on the train, nur für Deutsche, of course. Elsie thought it better they should go and have a meal, though their breakfast could have kept them going for days. The big man had finished his accounts and was taking a distressingly affable interest in Mila. It was doubtless only an approach to a tête-à-tête with the girl’s mother, who was really a pleasant handful of woman, now you had finished the accounts and you could sit back and give her the once-over. But it was a relief when the man came round and said luncheon was being served.

There was a pleasant Moselle on the list of wines. It was delightful. “You have a sip, too, Maria,” Elsie said. “It will do you no harm at all.” Then she lowered her voice. “We’ll stay over our coffee as long as possible,” she said. “And when we get back, we’ll be awfully drowsy, won’t we? There’s no need to encourage the gentleman, I think.”

“No, mama,” agreed Mila.

“We’re doing very well indeed, Maria. It will be all right even if there is a control. But I do not think there will be.”

“If there will be, there will be.” The girl had lived too long on a razor-edge of chance to worry overmuch. There was quite a vigorous control at Kielçe, but it did not concern them. A larger consignment of food-smugglers than usual had boarded the train at preceding stations. There were, for instance, hefty lumps of lard stuck above the wheels; there were flitches of bacon hanging from string outside the windows, ready to be dropped or raised again as exigencies of inspection demanded. The excitement died down, and Elsie and Mila sank back into their seats.

“Sleepy, Maria?” murmured Elsie. “Close your eyes, darling. There now. I’ll have a nap myself.” Soon she was sound asleep. She did not awaken again till she felt Mila tugging at her sleeve. “It’s Cracow, mama!” the girl said. “We’re nearly there!” She blinked and yawned, and gazed on the panorama ahead of her as if she had seen it a hundred times before—the pyramid of the Kosciuszko memorial plateau on her right, straight ahead the spire of the Marianski Church, and on her left the great hulk of the Wawel Castle.

They had covered one stage of their journey. But the journey had been only in space. In terms of danger they might as well be nearer to it, as further away. Danger might fell them to earth five minutes from now, or they might, for any length of time, pass through and beyond it, as easily as you pass through the spray of a waterfall.

“Have you finished your magazine, darling?” Elsie asked. “Then bring it with you.”

“Guten Abend,” the three men in the carriage said respectfully, with a click of heels.

She flashed a smile to them.

“Guten Abend. Come, Maria.” They came down upon the platform and walked towards the station exit. The place was crowded, but nobody showed the least interest in them. “You see, Maria,” she said. “We’re in Cracow.” The suggestion was that things, after all, were not terribly difficult. Perhaps the next stage of the journey would not be so terribly difficult, either. Then suddenly she remembered that for Mila it was not the first time she had been in Cracow. Was the child remembering those earlier visits? Perhaps she was, perhaps she wasn’t. Mila’s next words were clearly designed to let her ‘mama’ know that her mind, too, was devoted to the solution of immediate problems.

“Are you looking forward to your new fur coat, mama?” she asked.

“I should like the squirrel,” murmured Elsie, “and bless you.”