Tanner’s Twelve Swingers

Chapter 10

We saw as little of Czechoslovakia as possible. Had we seen any less, we wouldn’t have been able to stay on the road. As it was, there was only a thin sliver of moon, and we walked through almost total darkness. The road cut to the east and would have taken us out of our way, so we left it after a mile or so and cut directly north through a sparse forest of scrub pine. We heard some rifle shots off in the distance. Milan was alarmed until I suggested that it was probably just a poacher trying to get himself a deer or roebuck.

The border, when we reached it, was positively anticlimactic. Just a simple fence, perhaps six feet tall, easy to climb, and with no barbed wire at its top. The average farmer protects his fields more thoroughly than Poland and Czechoslovakia bother to guard their common frontier. The customs posts on the roads were probably thorough enough, but anyone who wanted to take the trouble to circumvent them could cross back and forth pretty much at will. Milan and I both climbed up and over and down with ease, and that, really, was all there was to it.

“Now,” I said, “we are in Poland.”

“Now I can afford the luxury of being tired.”

“Are you?”

“A bit, Evan. But let us press on for a time. And, if we are in Poland, should you not talk to me in Polish?”

“I thought you didn’t speak it.”

“Teach me.”

The more languages one knows, the easier it is to add another. We walked through the night, made our way through the woods and onto a road, and followed it in what I hoped was the approximate direction of Krakow. The ancient Polish city lay about a hundred miles to the west and was thus out of our way, but I knew people in Krakow whose assistance would be worth the slight detour. We walked along an empty road and I taught him words and phrases of Polish. He would answer back in a sort of pidgin Polish, working the new words into Serbo-Croat sentences, and then I would put his sentences into true Polish, and he would repeat them again to get them straight in his mind.

I didn’t expect that he would retain much of the language this way. But before long he would be able to follow simple conversations and make himself understood without inordinate difficulty. In the meanwhile he told me of his experiences during the war, fighting at the head of one of Tito’s small bands of partisans. He talked of ambushes, of traps laid in the night, of no quarter asked and none given. He told me how a Serbian town had looked after a detachment of Ante Pavelic’s Ustashi fascists had finished massacring the inhabitants and he told me of the revenge his men had taken upon the Ustashis.

“We took a platoon of sixty of them by night, Evan. We garroted the sentries with wire nooses and we murdered the rest of them in their beds. There were only eight of us. We used knives, long knives. One or two awoke, but none had time to cry out. We were very swift, and most of them died sleeping. We killed them all but one.

“And that one, Evan, we left alive. We roused him from his sleep and took him from bed to bed and showed him all of his dead comrades, and we told him why they had been killed and that all Ustashi murderers could expect to die. And then we crushed his hands and feet with rifle butts and we put out his eyes so that he would never be able to recognize us. But we left him alive, Evan, and we left his tongue in his head. You see, we wanted him to be able to tell others what had happened and why. And do you know, after that night, there was a great decrease in Ustashi terror in that sector of Montenegro. A great number of their men deserted.”

“And the man with the crushed hands and feet?”

“He still lives, Evan. He is in a sanitarium outside of Zagreb. He is only – let me see – not yet forty, I would say. He was a boy of fifteen when the massacre occurred.”

“Fifteen-”

“Fifteen years. A schoolboy. And yet he had murdered Serbian infants and old women. Fifteen years, and my own men and I crippled and blinded him.”

He fell silent for a moment or two. Then he said, “I have not talked of that boy for many years. I have tried not to think of him. I know that what we did that night was necessary. It saved lives, it shortened the war, it helped far more persons than the sixty who suffered in it. Yet I cannot forget that boy. It was I myself who put out his eyes, Evan.” He held out his hands and looked at them. “I myself. Do you wonder that I hate war, Evan? And governments? And large nations making larger wars?”

“You did what you had to do, Milan.”

“In a better world,” he said, “I would not have had to do it.”

We spent that night in a forest. There was an abundance of fallen half-rotted timber lying about, and I built a small fire in a clearing, and we camped around it. Milan slept while I tended the fire. He got up about the same time the sun did. He yawned and stretched and smiled. “I have not slept on the ground in more than twenty years,” he said. “I had forgotten how comfortable it is. Have we any food?”

“No.”

“Excuse me. I will be back soon.”

I assumed he was off to perform some sort of lavatory function and when he hadn’t returned after a quarter of an hour, I was certain he was either in trouble or in very ill health. But he came back beaming with a dead rabbit in one hand and a bloody knife in the other.

“Breakfast,” he announced.

The hare was a doe, nice and plump. He skinned it and sectioned it with astonishing skill. We cut a pair of slim branches from a tree and impaled pieces of rabbit meat upon them, then roasted them over our little fire. A sort of lapin en brochette, or rabbitkabob. It wasn’t the most suitable breakfast in the world, but it was tasty and filling.

I asked Milan how he had caught the hare. He shrugged as if it were the sort of thing any fool ought to be able to accomplish. “I found a place where hares were likely to be,” he said, “and I waited until this one appeared and I brained her with a rock. Then I cut her throat and bled her and brought her here.”

And later, after we had talked of other things and had quite forgotten the little doe, he said, “The only hard part is hitting them with the stone. You have to drop them on the first cast. The rest is just a matter of moving in silence and keeping one’s eyes open.”

It took me a moment to realize that he was referring to hares. My first thought was of the Ustashi sentries. Hunting is the same sort of business, I suppose, whatever the quarry.

We were in Krakow by nightfall. We spent most of our time in horse-drawn carts, which was fine with me. I was at least as bored with hiking as Milan was and equally tired of the countryside. I wanted to be in a warm house in a city where I could get a bath and a shave and clean clothes. Our dirty, unshaven faces were a good disguise – we looked entirely too disreputable to be persons of any importance – but mine, at least, was a nuisance. It itched. So, for that matter, did the rest of me, especially under the damned oilcloth packets.

We entered Krakow from the east, passing first through the new city of Nowa Huta. It had all been built up after the war to accommodate workers at the Lenin Metallurgical combine. We passed through streets laid out in neat geometrical monotony, street after street of identical rows of semidetached houses. Little boxes made of ticky-tacky. We might as well have been in Kew Gardens. The twentieth century imposes its own special brand of monotony whenever it’s given a free hand, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether the government is capitalist or socialist or fascist; either way, the end result is a sort of Levittown of the mind.

After Nowa Huta, clean and fresh and modern and sterile, Krakow was a glorious relief. The city was one of the very few in Poland to remain intact throughout the war. There were no bombings by either side. The population was largely devastated, of course – Oswiecim, which the Germans called Auschwitz, is only thirty miles to the west. But the castles and cathedrals and old buildings remain, and the city is beautiful.

I steered us through the center of the city, into the oldest section around the Jagiellonian University, a center of Polish learning for over six centuries. Copernicus studied there, and later determined that the earth was not the center of the universe. My comrades in the Flat Earth Society are inclined to dispute this and perhaps they are right. What does the movement of stars and planets have to do with the center of the universe? Milan ’s universe was centered in a Montenegrin town called Savnik. The center of the world for Tadeusz Orlowicz was indisputably Krakow, however frequently he found it advisable to leave it.

And the center of my own universe? I pondered this in silence while we walked through the narrow old streets of the student quarter. There was, I decided, no permanent center to my universe. Sometimes it was a hut in Macedonia, sometimes a cottage in Hungary, sometimes an apartment on West 107th Street. I wondered if it might be important for a man’s universe to have a center and if there was any vital self-discovery I could make through the realization that mine did not. Men have told me that they like to sleep every night in the same bed. If I slept, perhaps I would feel this way.

But self-analysis and self-absorption are subtle forms of self-destruction, leading sooner or later to what Hindi call nirvana and psychiatrists call catatonia. The center of the universe, for the moment, was Krakow, and the man at its very hub was Tadeusz Orlowicz. I did not know where he lived – he found it advisable to move frequently, and to keep his address a secret – but I did know where I might be likely to find him, or to get word of him.

We worked our way in and around the university district. In an alley off Wislna Street was a small cafe of which I had often heard in the past. It appeared to be closed, but I had been told that it almost invariably appeared to be closed. I went to the door and rang the bell, one long, two short, two long, three short. Then I waited for approximately three minutes before repeating the process.

An old woman, dressed in loose black clothing, opened the door a crack and peered out at me.

I said, “My friend and I are fond of roasted partridge and understand it is obtainable here.”

“It is out of season,” the old woman said.

“Some game is always in season.”

“One tires of game.”

“One cannot afford to tire of the game.”

It was an elaborate sequence and, I felt, rather a foolish one. It brought to mind the pudgy man from Washington and cryptic scribbles on Juicy Fruit gum wrappers. And what good did the password do? All the woman could really be sure of, after we’d gone through this silly bit of business, was that if I were a government agent, I was an exceedingly well-informed one and thus most dangerous.

She was not that deep a thinker. She opened the door wider, and I entered with Milan close behind me. She led us through one darkened room and into another. There were half a dozen tables, all of them empty. A candle glowed on one of them at the rear. She pointed us toward that table, and we took seats.

“You wish to eat?”

“Please.”

“Chlodnik? Kolduny? Tea?”

“Please.”

Chlodnik is a cold beet soup not unlike borscht. Kolduny is dumplings stuffed with ground mutton. Tea is tea. She brought food to us, and we ate.

From time to time a face would peer at us through a darkened window a few yards away. I had the feeling we were being studied by a variety of persons. Eventually the old woman returned to clear the table. She asked if we wanted anyone.

I took a pencil and wrote out a brief note. “Since there is no partridge,” I said, “you might have this given to the sparrow hawk.”

Sparrow Hawk was not exactly a code name for Orlowicz; more a nickname. She seemed to know whom I meant and to be unsurprised by the request. She went away and a while later she returned with another pot of tea.

Through all of this Milan had been nicely silent. But by now I suspect he was getting echoes of the bit of idiocy we’d undergone in Hungary. He said softly in Serbo-Croat, “If we are bundled again into the underpart of some slimy truck-”

“Do not worry,” I said in Polish.

“I am not worried, I am simply determined. At this very moment there are guns trained on us. Did you know that?”

“No, but I’m not surprised.”

“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.