The Polish Officer

THE FOREST

On 21 June 1941, by the Koden bridge over the river Bug, Russian guards-of the Main Directorate of Border Troops under the NKVD-were ordered to execute a spy who had infiltrated Soviet territory three days earlier as part of a provocation intended to cause war. The man, a Wehrmacht trooper, had left German lines a few miles to the west, swum the river just after dark, and asked to see the officer in charge. Through an interpreter he explained he was from Munich, a worker and a lifelong communist. He wished to join the Soviet fighting forces, and he had important information: his unit had orders to attack the Soviet Union at 0300 hours on the morning of 22 June.

The Russian officer telephoned superiors, and the information rose quickly to very senior levels of the counterespionage apparat. Likely the Kremlin itself was consulted, likely at very high, the highest, levels. Meanwhile, the deserter was kept in a barracks jail on the Soviet side of the river. The guards tried to communicate with him-sign language, a few words of German. He was one of them, he let them know, and they shared their cigarettes with him and made sure he had a bowl of barley and fat at mealtime.

Late in the afternoon of 21 June, an answer came down from the top: the German deserter is a spy and his mission is provocation: shoot him. The officer in charge was surprised but the order was clear, and he’d been told confidentially that the British Secret Service had orchestrated similar incidents all along the Soviet/German border-formerly eastern Poland-to foster suspicion, and worse, between the two nations.

The sergeant assigned to take care of the business sighed when he came to collect the deserter. He’d felt some sympathy for the man, but, it seemed, he’d been tricked. Well, that was the world for you. “Podnimaisa zvieshchami,” he said to the German. This was formula, part of a ritual language that predated the Revolution and went back to czarist times. Get going, with things, it meant. You are going to be executed. If he’d said Get going, with overcoat, without things, for example, it would have meant the man was going to be deported, and his blanket and plate should be left behind.

The German didn’t understand the words, but he could read the sergeant’s expression and could easily enough interpret the significance of the Makarov pistol thrust in his belt. At least I tried, he thought. He’d known where this all might lead, now it had led there, now he had to make peace with his gods and say good-bye, and that was that.

They walked, with a guard of three soldiers, to the edge of the river. It was a warm evening, very still, thousands of crickets racketing away, flickers of summer lightning on the horizon. The deserter glanced back over his shoulder as they walked-anything possible? The sergeant just shook his head and gave him a fraternal little push in the back-be a man. The German took a deep breath, headed where the sergeant pointed and the sergeant shot him in the back of the head.

And again, a coup de grâce in the temple. Then the sergeant signaled to the troopers and they came and took the body away. The sergeant found a stub of cigarette deep in his pocket and lit it in cupped hands, staring across the river. What the hell were they doing over there? This was the third night in a row they’d fired up the panzer tank engines-a huge roar that drowned out the crickets-then changed positions, treads clanking away as the iron plates rolled over the dirt.

The sergeant finished his cigarette, then headed back to his barracks. Too bad about the German. That was fate, however, and there was no sense trying to get in its way. But the sergeant was in its way anyhow, some instinct-the rumbling of German tanks-may have been telling him that, and he himself had less than seven hours to live.

3:00 A.M. The sergeant asleep. The sound of German boots thumping across the wooden bridge, calls of “Important business! Important business!” in Russian. The Soviet sentry signaled to the German messengers to wait one moment, and shook the sergeant awake. Grumbling, he worked his feet into his boots and, rubbing his eyes, walked onto the bridge. A brief drumming, orange muzzle flares-the force of the bullets took him and the sentry back through a wooden railing and down into the river.

The sergeant didn’t die right away. He lay where he’d fallen, on a gravel bank in the slow, warm river. So he heard running on the bridge, heard the explosions as the barracks were blown apart by hand grenades, heard machine-gun fire and shouts in German as the commandos finished up with the border guards. Dim shapes-German combat engineers-swung themselves beneath the bridge and crawled among the struts, pulling wires out of the explosive charges. Tell headquarters, the sergeant thought. A soldier’s instinct-I’m finished but command must know what’s happened. It had, in fact, been tried. A young soldier bleeding on the floor of the guardhouse had managed to get hold of the telephone, but the line was dead. Other units of Regiment 800, the Brandenburgers-the Wehrmacht special-action force-some of them Russian-speaking, had been at work for hours, and telegraph and telephone wires had been cut all along the front lines.

The sergeant lost consciousness, then was brought back one last time. By a thousand artillery pieces fired in unison; the riverbed shook with the force of it. Overhead, hundreds of Luftwaffe fighters and bombers streaked east to destroy the Soviet air force on its airfields. Three million German troops crossed the border, thousands of Soviet troops, tens of thousands, would join the sergeant in the river by morning.

Soviet radio transmissions continued. The German Funkabwehr recorded an exchange near the city of Minsk. To headquarters: “We are being fired on. What should we do?” The response: “You must be insane. And why is this message not in code?”

The sergeant died sometime after dawn. By then, hundreds of tanks had rolled across the Koden bridge because it was the Schwerpunkt-the spearpoint-of the blitzkrieg in the region of the Brest fortress. Just to the south, the Koden railroad bridge, also secured by the Brandenburgers, was made ready to serve in an immense resupply effort to fighting units advancing at an extraordinary rate. By the following evening young Russian reservists were boarding trains, cardboard suitcases in hand, heading off to report to mobilization centers already occupied by Wehrmacht troops.

Days of glory. The Germans advanced against Soviet armies completely in confusion. Hitler had been right-“Just kick in the door and the whole thing will come tumbling down.” Soviet air cover was blown up, ammunition used up, no food, tanks destroyed. Russians attacked into enfilading machine-gun fire and were mown down by the thousands. Nothing stopped the panzer tanks, great engines rumbling across the steppe. Some peasants came out of their huts and stared. Others, Ukrainians, offered bread and salt to the conquerors who had come to free them from the Bolshevik yoke.

Yet, here and there, every now and again, there were strange and troublesome events. Five commissars firing pistols from a schoolhouse until they were killed. A single rifleman holding up an advance for ten minutes. When they found his body, his dog was tied to a nearby tree with a rope, as though he had, somehow, expected to live through the assault. A man came out of a house and threw two hand grenades. Somehow this wasn’t like the blitzkriegs in western Europe. They found a note folded into an empty cartridge case and hidden in a tree by the highway to Minsk. “Now there are only three of us left. We shall stand firm as long as there’s any life left in us. Now I am alone, wounded in my arm and my head. The number of tanks has increased. There are twenty-three. I shall probably die. Somebody may find my note and remember me: I am a Russian from Frunze. I have no parents. Good-bye, dear friends. Your Alexander Vinogradov.”

The German advance continued, nothing could stop it, whole armies were encircled. Yet, still, there was resistance, and something in its nature was deeply disturbing. They had attacked the U.S.S.R. But it was Russia that fought back.

10 October 1941. 11:45 P.M. Near the Koden bridge.

The Wehrmacht was long gone now. They were busy fighting to the east, on the highway to Moscow. Now it was quiet again-quiet as any place where three nations mixed. The Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Poland. “Thank heaven,” Razakavia would say, “we are all such good friends.” People laughed when he said that-a little tentatively at first until they were sure he meant them to, then a big, loud, flattering laugh. He was tall and bony, with the blowing white hair and white beard of an Old Testament prophet. But the similarity ended there. A pucker scar marked the back of his neck-bullet in 1922-and a rifle was slung across his back. Razakavia was a leader-of outcasts, of free men and women, of bandits. It depended who you asked.

Razakavia pulled his sheepskin jacket tight around him and leaned closer to his horse’s neck. “Cold, Miszka. Hurry up a little.” The pony obliged, the rhythm of his trot a beat or two faster. It was cold-Razakavia could smell winter hiding in the autumn air, and the moonlight lay hard on the white-frosted fields. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a railroad watch. Getting toward midnight. Up ahead of him he could hear Frantek’s pony. Frantek was fourteen, Razakavia’s best scout. He carried no rifle, only a pistol buried in his clothing-so he could play the innocent traveler as long as possible, should they chance to meet a stranger on the trails they rode. Somewhere behind Razakavia was Kotior, his second-in-command, a machine gun resting across his saddle.

They had ridden these fields before. This operation had been attempted twice since the end of September. Razakavia didn’t like it, but he had no choice. The people who had arrived in the wake of the Wehrmacht-the SS, German administrators, murder squads hunting Jews, all sorts really, were not much to his taste. He was used to fighting the Polish gendarmerie, not themselves so very appealing, frankly, but a fact of life and something he’d got used to. These new lords and masters were worse. They were also temporary. They didn’t understand what was going to happen to them, and that made them more dangerous as allies than they were as enemies. So he needed some new allies.

Frantek appeared just ahead of him, his horse standing still with breath steaming from its nose and mouth. The river was visible from here, not frozen yet but very slow and thick. Razakavia pulled his pony up, twenty seconds later Kotior arrived. The three sat in a row but did not speak-voices carried a long way at night. The wind sighed here as it climbed the hillside above the river, and Razakavia listened carefully to it for a time until he could make out the whine of an airplane engine. So, perhaps this time it would work. Frantek pointed: a few degrees west of north, a mile or so from where the river Bug met the Lesna. A triangle of fires suddenly appeared, sparks flying up into the still air. Frantek looked at him expectantly, waiting for orders.

Razakavia didn’t move-always he weighed the world around him for a moment before he did anything-then chucked the reins and the three of them trotted off in the direction of the fires.

He had six men in the meadow, where the hay had been cut a month earlier. They stood with rifles slung, warming their hands over the signal fires, faces red in the flickering light. The sound of the plane’s engines grew louder and louder, then it faded and moved away into the distance. Above, three white flowers came floating to earth.

At Razakavia’s right hand, Frantek watched avidly. Such things intrigued him-airplanes, parachutes. The world had come here along with the war, and Frantek was being educated by both at once. Kotior just glanced up, then scanned the perimeter. He was not quick of mind, but he killed easily and good-naturedly, and he was remorselessly loyal.

The white flowers were just overhead now and Razakavia could see what they were. As he’d been promised, a Polish officer and two crates of explosives. It is a long life, Razakavia thought, one takes the bad with the good.

Captain Alexander de Milja was the last to leave the plane, the other two operatives-an explosives expert and a political courier-had jumped when they got to the outskirts of Warsaw. His body ached from the ride, six and a half hours in a four-engine Halifax, every bolt and screw vibrating, and the cold air ferocious as it flowed through the riveted panels. He hoped this was the right triangle of fires below him-and that the builders of these brush piles had not changed sides while the Halifax droned across Europe. He was, in truth, a rich prize: $18,000 in czarist gold rubles, $50,000 in American paper money. A fortune once converted to zlotys or Occupation currency. German cigarettes and German razor blades, warm clothing, two VIS pistols-WZ 35s with the Polish eagle engraved on the slide, and a hundred rounds of ammunition. He might very well do them more good simply murdered and stripped, he thought. No, he would do them more good that way, because he was not here to do them good.

He had been forced to wait four months to return to Poland, because the distance from London to Warsaw was 900 miles-in fact Route One, over Denmark, was 960 miles and de Milja had to go a hundred miles farther east. Route Two, over Göteberg, Sweden, was even longer. The normal range of the Halifax bomber was 1,500 miles, the normal load capacity, 4,180 pounds. With the addition of an extra fuel tank, the range increased to 2,100 miles-the bomber could now fly home after dropping its cargo-but the load capacity decreased to 2,420 pounds; of guns, ammunition, medical supplies, people: and the crew had to be reduced from nine to seven.

The airspeed of the Halifax was 150 miles an hour, thus a trip of 2,000 miles was going to take thirteen hours-discounting the wind as a factor. Those thirteen hours had to be hours of darkness, from 5:00 P.M. in London to 6:00 A.M. the following morning. And that was cutting it close. The flight could only be made when there was enough of a moon to see the confluence of rivers that would mark the drop zone. This period, the second and third phases of the moon, was code-named Tercet. So the first Tercet with sufficient darkness was 7 October-in fact it was 10 October before he actually took off. That was the moment when there was just enough autumn darkness and just enough moonlight to give the operation a chance of success.

They’d taken him by car to Newmarket racecourse, where the special services had built a secret airfield to house the 138th Squadron-British and Polish aircrews. A final check of his pockets: no London bus tickets, no matchboxes with English words. He was now Roman Brzeski, a horse breeder from Chelm. As he waited to board the plane, a jeep drove across the tarmac and stopped by his side. Vyborg climbed out, holding on to his uniform cap in the backwash from the Halifax’s propellers. The engines were very loud, and Vyborg had to shout as he shook hands. “You’ll be careful?”

“I will.”

“Need anything?”

“No.”

“Well. . No end to it, is there?”

De Milja gave him a mock salute.

“Good luck,” Vyborg said. “Good luck.”

De Milja nodded that he understood.

One of the partisans came into the hut well before dawn, nudging de Milja and the others with his boot. “Work today. Work today,” he said. De Milja got one eye open. “Move your bones, dear friends. Prove you’re not dead.” He gave de Milja, the honored guest, an extra little kick in the ankle and left the hut.

De Milja shuddered in the cold as he worked himself free of the blanket. Through the open door he could see black night, a slice of moon. There would be a skim of ice on the water barrel, white mist hanging in the birch trees. Beside him, Kotior rolled over and sat up slowly, held his face in his hands, cursed the cold, the Russians, the Germans, what women had between their legs, the guard, the forest, and life itself. De Milja forced his swollen feet into his boots, sat up, touched his face-two weeks’ growth of beard, chapped skin-and scratched his ankles where he’d been bitten the night before.

There was a small iron stove in a hut where food was cooked. A young woman handed him a metal cup of powerful, scalding tea; it warmed him and woke him up when he drank it. The woman was dark, muffled in kerchiefs and layers of clothing. “Another cup, sir?”

Educated, he thought, from the pitch of the voice. Perhaps a Jew. “Please,” de Milja said. He held the cup in both hands and let the steam warm his face. Razakavia’s band, about forty men and fifteen women, came from everywhere: a few Russian soldiers, escaped from Wehrmacht encirclement; a few Jews, escaped from the German roundups; a few criminals, escaped from Ukrainian and Byelorussian jails; a few Poles, who’d fled from the Russian deportations of 1939; a few Byelorussians-army deserters, nationalists-who’d fled Polish administration before the Russian occupation. To de Milja it seemed as though half the world had nowhere to go but the forest. He finished the tea and handed the cup back to the young woman. “Thank you,” he said. “It was very good.”

Later he rode beside Razakavia-as always, Kotior somewhere behind them. They had given him, as the honored guest, a Russian panje horse to ride. She was small, with a thick mane and shaggy coat. When the band stopped for a moment, she grazed on whatever weeds happened to be there, apparently she could eat anything at all. They had also given him, as the honored guest who brought explosives and gold coins, one of the better weapons in their armory: a Simonov automatic rifle with a ten-shot magazine box forward of the trigger guard, and two hundred rounds of 7.62 ammunition.

As they rode two by two on a forest trail, Razakavia explained that a courier had reached them with intelligence from local railwaymen: a small train was due, late in the day, carrying soldiers being rotated back for leave in Germany, some of them walking wounded. There would also be flatcars of damaged equipment, scheduled for repair at the Pruszkow Tank Works outside Warsaw. The train was from the Sixth Panzer Division, fighting 400 miles east at Smolensk.

“We watched them brought up to the line in late summer,” Razakavia told him. “A hundred and sixty trains, we counted. About fifty cars each. Tanks and armored cars and ammunition and horses-and the men. Very splendid, the Germans. Nothing they don’t have, makes you wonder what they want from us.”

At noon they left the forest, and rode for a time along the open steppe. It was cold and gray and wet; they rode past smashed Russian tanks and trucks abandoned during the June retreat, then moved back into the forest for an hour, watered the horses at a stream, and emerged at a point where the railroad line passed about a hundred yards from the birch groves. The line was a single track that seemed to go from nowhere to nowhere, disappearing into the distance on either end. “This goes northwest to Baranovici,” Razakavia told him. “Then to Minsk, Orsha, Smolensk, and Viazma. Eventually to Mozhaisk, and Moscow. It is the lifeline of the Wehrmacht Army Group Center. Our Russians tell us that a German force cannot survive more than sixty miles from a railhead.”

A man called Bronstein assembled the bomb for the rails. A Soviet army ammunition box, made of zinc, was filled with cheddite. British, in this case, from the honored guest, though the ZWZ in Poland also manufactured the product. A compression fuse, made of a sulfuric-acid vial and paper impregnated with potassium chloride, was inserted beneath the lid of the box.

De Milja sat by Bronstein as the bomb was put together. “Where did you learn to do that?” he asked.

“I was a teacher of science,” Bronstein said, “in Brest Litovsk.” He took the cigarette from his mouth and set it on a stone while he packed cheddite into the box. “And this is science.”

They dug a hole beneath the rail and inserted the mine, the weight of the locomotive would do the rest. A scout-Frantek-came galloping up to Razakavia just as it began to get dark. “It comes now,” he said.

The band settled into positions at the edge of the forest. De Milja lay on his stomach, using a rotten log for cover, feeling the cold from the earth seeping up into his body. The train came slowly, ten miles an hour, in case the track was sabotaged. It was. Bronstein’s device worked-a dull bang, a cloud of dirt blown sideways from beneath the creeping locomotive, wheels ripping up the ties, then the locomotive heeling over slowly as a jet of white steam hissed from its boiler. A man screamed. A German machine-gun crew on a platform mounted toward the rear of the train began to traverse the forest.

De Milja sighted down the barrel of the Simonov. From the slats of a cattle car he could see pinpricks of rifle fire. He returned it, squeezing off ten rounds, then changing magazines as bullets rattled in the branches above his head. One of Razakavia’s men leaped from a depression in the earth on the other side of the track and threw a bomb into the last car on the train. The walls blew out and the wooden frame started to burn. German riflemen, some wearing white bandages, jumped out of the train on the side away from the gunfire and began to shoot from behind the wheels of the cars. De Milja heard a cry from his left, a bullet smacked into his log. He aimed carefully and fired off his magazine, then looked up. A figure in field gray had slumped beneath the train, the wind flapping a bandage that had come loose from his head. De Milja changed magazines again. Some of the German soldiers were shooting from behind a tank chained to a flatcar, de Milja could hear the ricochet as gunfire from the forest hit the iron armor.

Another group of Germans began firing from the coal tender, half on, half off the rails where the locomotive had dragged it, and the machine gun came back to life. De Milja heard the sharp whistle that meant it was time to break off the engagement and head back into the forest.

He ran with the others, his breath coming in harsh gasps, up a slight rise to where several young women were guarding the ponies. They left immediately on orders from Kotior, two wounded men slung sideways across the backs of the horses. A third man was shot too badly to move, and Razakavia had to finish him off with a pistol. The rest of the band rode off at a fast trot, vanishing into the forest as the railcar burned brightly in the gray evening.

“The Germans, they always counterattack,” Kotior told him. “Always.” He pointed up at several Fiesler-Storch reconnaissance planes, little two-seater things that buzzed back and forth above the forest. “This is how partisans die,” Kotior added.

They were up there all night, crisscrossing the dark sky. So there could be no fires, no smoking outside the huts. De Milja pulled the blanket tight around his shoulders and loaded box magazines. The cold made his fingers numb, and the springs, like everything Rus-sian, were too strong, tended to snap the feeder bar back into place, ejecting the bullet two feet in the air and producing a snarl of laughter from Kotior. Four hundred miles to the east, on the line Smolensk/Roslavl/Bryansk, the Wehrmacht was fighting. How the hell did they manage in this kind of cold? he wondered. And it was only October. At night the temperature fell and the puddles froze and huge clouds gathered in the sky, but it did not snow. And in the morning it was blue and sunny: winter isn’t coming this year.

At dawn, an alert. De Milja in position on the camp perimeter, aiming into the forest gloom. Somewhere south, perhaps a mile away, he could hear the faint popping of riflery, then the chatter of a light machine gun. Two scouts arrived at midday-they’d had a brush with a Ukrainian SS unit. “They shot at us,” the scout said. “And we shot back. So they fired the machine gun.” He was about fifteen, grinned like a kid. “Frantek went around and he got one of them, we think. They were screaming and yelling ‘fucking Bolsheviks’ and every kind of thing like that. Calling for God.”

“Where is Frantek?” Razakavia said.

The boy shrugged. “He led them away into the marsh. He’ll be back.”

“Banderovsty.” Razakavia spat the word.

He meant Ukrainian nationalists under the command of the leader Bandera, absorbed into an SS regiment called the Nachtigall. Kotior turned to de Milja and explained. “They do what the SS won’t.”

With Razakavia and Kotior he went to a town on the outskirts of Brest Litovsk. The owner of a bakery sold them milled oats and rye flour for bread. “We pay for this,” Razakavia told him as they knocked at the back door. “Not everyone does.” There was an ancient relationship in these lands, de Milja knew, between groups of armed men and keepers of granaries. Both sides had to survive, together they defined where honor might lie.

The iron door swung open and a hot wind, heavy with the smell of baking bread, swept over de Milja. “Come in,” the baker said. He had a pink face, and a big belly in an undershirt. They sat at a marble-top table, there was flour everywhere. The baker wiped his hands on his shirt and accepted a cigarette from Razakavia. Behind him the brick ovens were at work, with sometimes a lick of flame where the furnace doors didn’t quite meet. A black bread was brought over and cut up with a sawtooth knife.

Razakavia and the baker talked about the weather. The baker shook his head grimly. “All the old babas have been reading the signs. Caterpillars and geese and bear scat. Probably nonsense, but even if it is, they’re all saying the same thing: it’s going to freeze your balls off.”

Razakavia nodded and chewed on a piece of bread. He reached into a pocket and counted out zlotys he’d bought with the gold rubles. The money lay in stacks on the marble table.

“It’s in the barn in the village of Krymno,” the baker said. “You know where I mean? The same as last spring. In wooden bins.”

“I remember,” Razakavia said.

“You want to take care on the roads, over there.”

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. Somebody goes out and doesn’t come back. Somebody else has to give up a horse. People moving around in the forest.”

“A partisan band?”

“Who knows? These days it could be anything.” He nodded at de Milja. “Who’s your friend?”

“One of us. He’s from down in the Volhynia.”

“Polish?”

“Yes,” de Milja said.

“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?”

De Milja thought it over. “Well,” he said at last, “there’s always hope. But I think you ought to pray for his soul. That might be the best thing.”

The cobbler shook his head in reluctant agreement. “Poor Stefan,” he said, wiping the tears from his eyes.

Kotior commanded the unit sent off to Krymno to retrieve the grain. He was accompanied by Frantek, his fellow scout Pavel, an older man called Korbin, de Milja, and two Ukrainian peasant girls who drove the farm wagons. The rifles were hidden under burlap sacks in the wagons.

They rode all morning, along a track that wound through water meadows, fields of reeds rustling as they swayed in the wind, the air chill and heavy. The village was no more than fifteen miles from Brest but it lay beyond the forest, some distance into the marshland along a tributary of the river Pripet. A few wooden huts, a farm with stone barns, then reeds again, pools of black, still water, and windswept sky to the horizon on every side.

The farm dogs snarled at them as they rode up and the peasant who tended the farm came out of his house with a battered shotgun riding the crook of his arm. The man spoke some form of local dialect de Milja could barely understand but Kotior told him to call the dogs off, dismounted, and explained slowly who they were and what they had come for. Then they all went into the barn-warmed by a cow, smelling of dung and damp straw, the dogs drinking eagerly at pools of water where grain stalks had fermented.

“Where is the rest?” Kotior asked, standing in front of empty wooden bins.

The peasant, agitated now, seemed to be telling Kotior a long and complicated story. Kotior nodded, a reasonable man who would accept whatever he was told, then suddenly barred a forearm across the peasant’s throat and forced him back against a wall. A Russian bayonet-four-edged, it made a cross-shaped wound-had appeared in his hand and he held the point under the man’s chin. The shotgun dropped to the floor. The dogs went wild, but Frantek kicked one and it ran away with the rest following.

The peasant didn’t struggle, his face went passive as he prepared to die. Then Kotior let him go. “He says the grain was taken away. By a detachment of partisans. He thinks they intend to come back for the rest of it.” After some discussion they decided to wait, at least until morning. They pulled the wagons into the barn, posted Frantek and Pavel at the two ends of the settlement, and took turns sleeping.

They came at dawn. Pavel sounded the alarm in time for them to set up an ambush. At Kotior’s direction, de Milja was in the hayloft of the barn, the Simonov covering the road below.

The column appeared from the gray mist, silent but for the sound of hooves on the muddy road. There were forty of them, well armed. He saw several automatic rifles, several pepechas-Russian submachine guns-a few weapons he could not identify. Otherwise they looked like the Razakavia band. They wore wool jackets and peaked caps and boots, sometimes a military coat or trousers. The leader, de Milja guessed he was the leader, had a pair of binoculars on a strap and a holstered pistol.

The peasant came out of the barn and raised his hand. The column stopped. The leader-de Milja had been right-climbed off his horse and led it forward. De Milja sighted on him. He was perhaps forty, a Slav, clean-shaven, something of the soldier in the way he held his shoulders. He talked with the peasant for a time. Then Kotior came out of the barn and joined the conversation, eventually signaling to de Milja that he should come down.

They were joined by another man, who the leader referred to as politruk. The conversation was very tense. “He has told me they are taking the grain,” Kotior said evenly. “Requisitioned,” the leader said in Russian. “For partisan operations.”

“We are also partisans,” Kotior said.

“Not bandits, perhaps?”

“Polish partisans.”

“Then we are friends,” the politruk said. “Poland and the Soviet Union. Allies.” He wore a leather coat, had cropped fair hair and albino coloring. His hands were deep in his pockets-de Milja could almost see the NKVD-issue Makarov in there. “This matter of the grain, a misunderstanding,” he said.

Kotior and de Milja were silent.

“Best to come back to our camp, we can sit down and talk this out.”

“Another time, perhaps,” de Milja said.

The politruk was angry. “War doesn’t wait,” he said.

De Milja saw no signal, but the mounted partisans shifted, some of them moving out of de Milja’s line of sight.

“I think it would be best. .” The politruk stopped in midsentence. De Milja watched his eyes, then turned to see what he was looking at. One of the wagons was moving slowly out of the barn, the pair of shaggy horses trudging through the mud. The Ukrainian girl held the reins in the crook of her knee and was pointing a rifle at the two Russians. The leader made a gesture-enough, let it go. Frantek rode up, pistol in one hand, face pinched like an angry child. In his other hand, the reins of de Milja’s and Kotior’s horses. When he spat, meaningfully, down into the dirt, the politruk blinked.

De Milja put a foot in the stirrup and swung up on the pony. The politruk and the leader stared without expression as the unit rode off, walking the horses at wagon speed. The skies over the marsh were alive, broken gray cloud blown west, and a few dry flakes of snow drifting down.

“We’ll need a rear guard,” de Milja said to Kotior as the settlement fell behind them.

“Yes, I know. You stay, with Frantek.” He paused. “I can understand most Russians when they speak, we all can in this place. But what is a politruk?”

“It means political officer.”

Kotior shrugged-that was to raise life to a level where it only pretended to exist. “We’ll need an hour,” he said, gesturing at the wagons. “At least that.”

“You will have it,” de Milja said.

There wasn’t much cover. Frantek and de Milja rode at the back of the column until they found a low hill with a grove of pine trees that marked the edge of the forest east of Brest. There they waited, watching the dirt road below them, the cold working its way through their sheepskins.

Frantek seemed, to de Milja, to have been born to the life he lived. His parents had gone to market one Saturday morning and never come home. So, at the age of twelve, he had gone to the forest and found Razakavia. The forest bands always needed scouts, and Frantek and his friends knew it. Now he leaned back against a tree, folded his arms around his rifle and across his chest, and pulled his knees up, completely at rest except for his eyes, slitted against the snow, watching the approaches to the hilltop.

“Do you like the life in the forest?” de Milja asked him, tired of listening to the wind.

Frantek thought it over. “I miss my dog,” he said. “Her name was Chaya.”

The Russians came thirty minutes later, four scouts riding single file. One of them dismounted, squatted, determined that the horse droppings were fresh, and climbed back on his horse. They moved slowly, at wagon speed, waiting for the band to leave the steppe and enter the forest.

“Do not fire,” de Milja said to Frantek as they flattened out behind the pine trees. “That is an order,” he added.

Frantek acknowledged it-barely. To him, de Milja seemed cautious, even hesitant, and he’d killed enough to know how attentive it made people. But he’d also come across many inexplicable things in his short life and he’d decided that de Milja was just one more.

De Milja sighted down the Simonov at four hundred yards. Ping. That animated the Russians and drew an appreciative chuckle from Frantek. They leaped off their horses and went flat on the ground. Disciplined, they did not fire their rifles. They waited. Ten long minutes.

“Mine is on the far left,” Frantek said, squinting through his gunsight.

“Not yet,” de Milja said.

One of the Russian scouts rose to one knee, rifle at his hip swinging back and forth across the axis of the road. Then he stood.

“Now?” said Frantek.

“No.”

The scout retrieved his horse. Climbed up in the saddle. Ping.

At first, de Milja was afraid he’d miscalculated and killed him, because he seemed to fly off the horse, which shied and galloped a few yards. And the other three scouts returned fire, including a long staccato rattle, at least half a drum of pepecha rounds. Some of it in their direction-a white mark chipped in a tree trunk, the sound of canvas ripping overhead-but not the sort of enthusiastic concentration that would mean the scouts knew where they were. Then the man de Milja had fired at moved, changed positions, scuttling along low to the ground and throwing himself flat.

De Milja’s greatest worry was Frantek, an excellent shot with young eyes. But discipline held. De Milja extended his left hand, palm flat, fingers slightly spread: hold on, do nothing. Frantek pressed himself against the earth, outraged he had to endure this insulting gunfire but, for the moment, under control.

The wind rose, snowflakes spun through the air, swirling like dust and whitening the dirt road. It saved their lives, Razakavia said later. “Russians read snow like priests read Bibles.” Or, perhaps, that day, nobody wanted to die.

The Russians mounted their horses, slow and deliberate under the eyes of the unseen riflemen, and rode back the way they came.

De Milja had been ice inside for a long time-there wasn’t any other way for him to do what he had to do-but Rovno scared him. The Germans had it all their own way in Rovno. The SS were everywhere, death’s-head insignia and lightning flashes, a certain walk, a certain smile. The Einsatzgruppen came through, on the way to murder Jews in another ghetto somewhere, there were Ukrainian SS, Latvian SS, and German criminals, alley killers the Nazi recruiters had quarried from the prisons since 1927. As well as those ordinary Germans, always liked by their neighbors, who, given the opportunity, turned out to be not so very mild-mannered after all. They were the worst, and one taste of blood was all it took.

De Milja met their eyes in Rovno. He dared not be furtive. So he returned the stares, trudged along in the snow, cold and absentminded and absorbed in his business. And armed. It went against the current wisdom-one street search and you were finished. But he would not be taken alive. The cyanide capsule sewn in the point of his shirt collar was the last resort, but the VIS snugged against the small of his back gave him at least the illusion of survival.

The ZWZ secret mail system operated all over Poland, mostly out of dress shops, with couriers carrying letters from city to city. De Milja had used it to report the Russian contact and that had produced a request-delivered in a park in Brest Litovsk-for a meeting in Rovno. With Major Olenik, his former superior in Warsaw and, now that he was no longer under the direct orders of the Sixth Bureau in London, his superior once again.

Rovno had always been a border city-a Polish possession, claimed by Russia, populated by Ukrainians. Narrow streets, brick buildings darkened by factory smoke, November ice, November fog, Gestapo cars with chains on the tires.

“They will yet take Moscow,” Olenik said. “Or maybe not. The Russians have introduced a weapon they call the Katyusha rocket, also known as the Stalin Organ-multiple rockets fired simultaneously from a launcher that can be towed by a truck. The Germans don’t like it. They are afraid of it-they ran away from it up in Smolensk. And the Russians have a new tank, the T-34. German shells bounce off. If they can produce enough of them, they’ll shut the panzer divisions down. There’s that, and the fact that our weather people predict December temperatures outside Moscow of sixty-five degrees below zero. We’ll see what that does to their Wehrwille.”

The word meant war will, a cherished German idea: who wants most to win, wins.

De Milja and Olenik sat in the parlor of a safe house in Rovno, a small apartment, old-fashioned, as though a couple had grown old there and never changed anything. It was all curtains and doilies and clocks with loud ticks-a certain musty smell, a certain silence. De Milja wondered what it would be like in the forest at sixty-five degrees below zero. Olenik apparently read his mind. “We expect you’ll finish up before then,” he said.

Olenik hadn’t changed. Narrow shoulders, tousled gray hair and mustache, pockmarked skin-triumphantly seedy in a worn gray cardigan, you’d walk past him and never see him on any street in the world. He rummaged in a briefcase, found a pipe, fussed with it until he got it lit, then searched again until he found a single sheet of yellowish newsprint. “Have a look,” he said.

The newspaper was called Miecz i Mlot-Sword and Hammer. It was published in Polish by the League of Friends of the Soviet Union and the PPR, the Polska Partia Robotnicza, the Polish Workers’ Party.

“It comes from Bialystok,” Olenik said. “From Stryj and Brody and Wilno. From Brest and Rovno. All over the eastern districts. Curious, with a hundred and sixty-five newspapers issued by underground presses in Poland, including every prewar party, socialist, and peasant and all the rest of it, we now see this. Reference to a communist underground in Poland. If it exists, we don’t know about it. If it exists, it does nothing but exist, but that may be just precisely to the point. Its existence will make it easier for them to say, later on, that the communist state of Poland was preceded by a communist underground.”

De Milja handed the newspaper back and Olenik returned it to his briefcase. “Of course,” Olenik said, “we’re not spending life and money to find out what the Russians think about us. They enslaved us for a hundred and twenty years. Attacked in 1920. Attacked again in 1939. And they’ll be coming back this way, pushing a wave of Wehrmacht gray in front of them. We have to decide what to do then.

“If they go all the way to the Oder, to the Rhine, we’re done for-they’ll occupy the country. It’s that simple. So what we may have to do is, at the right moment, throw the Germans out by ourselves and declare a free Polish state, recognition by the British and the Americans to follow. That means a rising, and a terrible price to pay in blood.

“The alternative: reveal Soviet intentions-stick a knife in Stalin before he can get to the conference table. Britain won’t give him Poland, but the Americans are blind to life beyond their oceans.” He stopped for a moment and seemed to drift, then spoke again in a softer voice. “If you’re a small country and you have a bully for a neighbor, God help you, because nobody else will. You’re alone. You’ll cry out in the night, but nobody will come.”

He stopped abruptly, had said more of what was in his heart than he’d meant to. He cleared his throat. “What matters now,” he went on, “are the particular and demonstrable intentions of the Soviet state. If their partisan units take food without paying for it-and they do. If those partisan units have political officers-and they do. If they are forcing Poles to fight in those units and burning down villages that resist, and we know they are doing that, too, then they are acting, according to their own rules, like people fighting in an enemy country among enemies.”

“It was certainly that way in Krymno,” de Milja said. “And we were asked-that’s not really the word for the way it was put-to follow them to their camp.”

“Two of our people, in the northern Polesian district, did just that. They believed they were going somewhere to sit down and work out an agreement. One is dead. The other, we’re told, is in the Lubianka. So we are both fighting the Germans, but we are not allies.”

He stopped a moment, considered what he would say next. “So,” he said. “We, I mean London and Warsaw, we are interested in the story of Sergeant Krewinski, the brother of the man captured in the attack on the repair train.”

“The man in Rovno prison?”

“Yes. What we want you to do now, Captain, is to force Rovno prison. Liberate Krewinski-and two ZWZ officers who are also being held there. All are going to be executed.”

De Milja met the major’s eyes, but his look was opaque and distant. There’d been three attempts on German prisons that de Milja knew about, all had failed. Then he understood: this was a committee at work, and if they assigned what was in effect a suicide mission, there was nothing Olenik could do about it.

“It’s right away, then?” de Milja said.

Olenik spread his hands: of course.

That completed Major Olenik’s work and he left the city by train the following evening. As a notional waterworks engineer, his papers allowed him to travel anywhere within German-occupied lands. He handed over to de Milja a group of code and contact procedures: ZWZ officers and operatives in the district were at his disposal. Explosives, weapons, whatever he needed was available.

De Milja returned to the forest, explaining to Razakavia what had to be done. The first step was to move the encampment, from huts in a clearing to an abandoned farm at the edge of a wood about ten miles from Rovno. The farm would serve as a reception base for the freed prisoners and some members of the attack commando. A doctor and nurse would set up an aid station at the farmhouse twenty-four hours before the attack.

Back in Rovno he made contact with a local ZWZ operative known as Vlach, a man in his late twenties, with tipped-up nose, carefully combed blond hair and a wise-guy curl to his lip. The ZWZ ran, in general, to more sober and stable personalities-Vlach had replaced one of those very gentlemen in late July. Had survived, had impressed Major Olenik; those were his credentials. At Vlach’s suggestion they met in a tearoom in Rovno’s central square, a very proper place, where German officials’ wives and girlfriends could drink tea with extended pinkies and nibble at mounds of pale-green petits fours. “Ha ha,” Vlach laughed. “Who would look for us here?”

Then he grew serious. “We can get you anything you like,” he said. “Cars, trucks, you say what.”

“How can you do that?”

“We all do the same thing here, everybody who you-know-what. See, the Luftwaffe and the panzer tanks, they can really do the job. Whatever the Russians had here is flat, gone. I never saw such a mess; staff cars on top of each other, railroad tracks peeled straight up into the air, airfields turned into junkyards. So now it’s conquered, so now it all has to be rebuilt.

“So, just about the time the Wehrmacht shot the last sniper and hanged the last commissar, the big German construction companies came in. Ho, ho-Ve gonna make money now, Fritz! The military authority told them what they needed-airfields, barracks, airplane hangars, oil-storage tanks-exactly what they just finished blowing up. Plus, as long as they were at it, roads, which they never had here.

“So, the construction companies get all these contracts, but when they finished rubbing their hands and winking at each other, it begins to dawn on them that they’re going to have to find somebody to do the work. Ah, not so easy. Can’t bring in people from Germany, either they’re building airplanes and submarines back in Essen, or they’re shooting more Russians, six hundred miles east of here. See, when you shoot a Russian, somebody puts another one down, but they haven’t figured that out yet.

“Anyhow, they’re going to have to use local labor. We started by getting one guy hired. Every German’s dream of what a Pole should be-cooperative, friendly, religious, trustworthy. A fifty-five-year-old man, a machinist all his life, Henryk. So all the Germans loved Henryk. They could count on him, he never drank, he never stole, he never answered back, and you said be at the job site at five-thirty in the morning, and there he was.”

Vlach blew out his cheeks to make a fat German face. “ ‘Henryk, mein friend, maybe you haff a cousin?’ Well, guess what, he does. He has also an uncle, an aunt, a long-lost friend, a nephew-that’s me-and about eighteen more, one way and another. We go anywhere we like, we have company trucks, two Opel automobiles. If we want to carry something that’s-unusual, you understand, we can request a Wehrmacht driver. When they’re behind the wheel, nobody even pretends to look.”

Respectable little man, tortoiseshell spectacles gave him a slight resemblance to the American comedian Harold Lloyd. Except that Harold Lloyd would have bought new glasses if he’d cracked a lens.

“The Russians put him in a camp in ’39,” Vlach said.

“How did you get out?” de Milja asked.

“I escaped,” the man said.

He sat with de Milja and Vlach in the apartment, a map of Rovno unfolded on the kitchen table. “From the central telephone exchange, which is here, there are three lines that leave Rovno.” He pointed, his hands cracked and peeling from working as a dishwasher in a restaurant. “The main line goes west, to Lutsk. Then we had a branch north, to Klesow, and one south, to Ostrog. From there a line went to Kiev-but it was often cut, or blocked. The Russians interfered any way they could.”

“And the wireless telegraph-is that something you knew about?” The man had been the regional accounting supervisor for the telephone system before the war.

“There were five stations,” he said.

“So if we disabled those, and cut the telephone lines-”

“They would use the military wireless. I don’t think you can silence them, sir.”

The prison guard had never liked his work. They paid him slave wages to sit on the lid of a garbage can, the way he saw it. But it was better than nothing, so he did what he had to do. A mean existence; everything had to be watched, saved, rationed: lightbulbs, soap, coal, meat. He’d never, not once, had a lot of something he liked. His kids were gone, had their own sorry lives. His wife was still with him, mostly the Church to thank for that, but whatever had once been inside her had died years ago. For himself, he sat in a bar after work and soaked up vodka until he was numb enough to go home. He would have liked, once he got older, to go back to the countryside where he’d been raised. Since the war you could buy a small farm, it didn’t take much, just more than he’d ever had.

So when the offer came, he didn’t say no. They’d probably watched him, the way he looked, the misery in his step. The old man who made the offer wasn’t such a bad sort. Polish, with the sharp cheekbones like they had sometimes. And educated, maybe very educated. “You’ve had enough bad weather,” the old man said. “Time to take a walk in the sunshine.” Then he mentioned an amount of money, and the guard just nodded.

“You don’t have to do anything,” the old man said. “Just draw what’s inside, the corridors and the offices and the cells, and show me how it’s numbered.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“They don’t tell me. It’s the Russians gave me this job.”

“Bandits. We have some of them locked up.”

“Just draw and number.”

“I’ll take care of it at home,” the guard said.

The old man put a sheet of paper and a pencil in front of him. “Why not right now? There’s nobody here.”

So the guard did it. And when his mind raced as he lay in bed that night-should he tell, could he sell the old man to the Germans, should he have demanded more money? — he realized that his childish drawing was as good as a signed confession. That scared him. So he hid the money under the mattress and kept quiet.

Vlach and de Milja shivered in the cold of the unheated garage. Outside the snow whispered down, the air frozen and still. Henryk was exactly as Vlach had described him, square-jawed and square-shouldered, sleeves and collar buttoned up. An honest man, not a crooked bone in his body. It just happened that he was a patriot, and the construction executives hadn’t really thought that through.

Henryk was lying on his back under a large German truck, working with a wrench. His face reddened as one of the rusty bolts refused to give, then squeaked, and turned. He pulled the muffler, laid it on the floor, and slid from beneath the truck, wiping his hands on a rag. “Start it up,” he said.

De Milja climbed into the cab and turned the key. The roar was deafening, it shook the windowpanes in the garage. Vlach appeared at the truck window, hands pressed against his ears, and de Milja had to read his lips even though he appeared to be shouting. “Turn, that, fucking, thing, off.”

In the silent apartment with the ticking clock, the sofas had been pushed back to the walls to make room on the floor. The doilies on the backs of the chairs were creased and stained where too many people had rested their heads, and the carpet, pale blue with a pattern of roses and vines, was also ruined, spotted with cosmoline and oil.

The armory was laid out on the rug: three Simonovs, three Rus-sian PPD submachine guns-the pepecha, crude and lethal, named after the rhythm of its fire. Two German machine pistols, all-steel MP34s. Known as the Bergmann, the weapon had been manufactured outside German borders to evade the armament limits of the Treaty of Versailles. There were the two VIS automatics that accompanied de Milja from London, the ones with the Polish eagle on the slide, and four VIS automatics made since the German occupation-no eagle. There were two American Colt.45s. A Hungarian Gepisztoly 39M, a very fast machine pistol that fired Mauser Export cartridges. For hand grenades, they had the variety called Sidolowki-manufactured in clandestine ZWZ workshops and named after the cans of Sidol polish they resembled-logically, since the workshops were hidden in the Sidol factory.

The brothers were nineteen and seventeen, big and broad-shouldered and towheaded. They walked around Rovno all day looking for a candidate. They saw an SS major outside the movie theater-German romantic films and newsreels of the victorious Wehrmacht on the Russian front. An SS sergeant, extremely tall and thin, leaving a restaurant. Two SS corporals, ogling girls on the bridge over the small stream that ran through Rovno.

Then, late in the afternoon, they found another SS sergeant, of medium build, looking at the stills posted on the outside of the movie theater. After some consideration, he paid and went inside. They did too. He wandered down the aisle, they took seats near the back. Not much of an audience, mostly German soldiers on their off-duty hours. On the screen, a man in a tuxedo sitting in an elegant nightclub, speaking rapid German to a blond woman with tight curls and a black dress with a white bib collar. She looked down and bit her lip, he had smooth black hair and a thin mustache. The brothers didn’t speak much German but they could tell the man was apologizing.

The woman wasn’t really sure how she felt. She kept giving the man shy glances from beneath her dark eyelashes. I’m supposed to love darling Helmut-what could be the matter with me? is what she seemed to be saying to herself. Then, a commotion at the entrance to the room, where a maître d’ stood guard over a velvet rope. A handsome fellow wearing a yachting cap wanted to go down the steps but the burly waiters wouldn’t let him, and they struggled in front of some potted palms.

The SS sergeant came up the aisle and the older brother nudged the younger. They let some time lapse, then went into the men’s room. The SS sergeant was buttoning his fly. Up close, he was bigger than they’d thought. He had several medals and ribbons, and a scar on his forehead, but the brothers were practiced and adept and they had him strangled in short order. They stripped off his uniform and left him on the floor with his mouth wide open against the stained tile, still wearing the old green tie they’d used.

The Czarny prison, on Zamkova Street. Quiet enough in the late afternoon. The weather had warmed up, leaving the cobbles awash in wet, dirty slush. The prison had been built in 1878, a series of courtyards behind a wall, ten feet high, with plaster peeling off the granite block. The neighborhood was deserted. Boarded-up clothing store, a burned-out tenement: people avoided Zamkova Street. De Milja walked along briskly, as though he had business nearby. The windows visible from the street were opaque green glass covered by steel mesh-dungeon was the word that came to mind. A sentry box with a big swastika flag stood to one side of the main gate. An old woman in black came through the door in the gate, pulling her shawl up over her head, then folding her arms around herself for warmth. A large brown truck with its canvas top closed in back came rumbling down the street and rolled to a stop in front of the sentry box. The driver joked with the guard. He was German, while the guard, they knew, was part of a Latvian SS unit used for duty outside the cell blocks. Day-to-day supervision inside the prison was managed by local Ukrainian warders.

“Hey, you, what are you staring at?”

De Milja turned to see who it was. Two Germans in black-and-silver uniforms. De Milja smiled hesitantly and started to move away when one of them kicked him in the back of the leg. He fell hard, comically, his feet flying up in the air, into the cold slush. The Germans laughed and walked off. De Milja got to his feet and limped in the opposite direction.

26 November, 4:30 P.M.

The assault commando gathered in the apartment. Group One had four men-de Milja, Vlach, and two he’d never met until that night; one with the nom de guerre Kolya, in his twenties, lean and hard-eyed, and the other called Bron, the armorer, heavier and older with a deceptively soft face. Group Two, six men, was led by a ZWZ officer who had parachuted into the Lodz area in late October, formerly an officer in a special reconnaissance unit of the Polish army. He had a full beard and was known as Jan.

They all smoked nervously, looking at their watches, talking in low voices, going over the penciled maps of the prison again and again. Bron said, “I had better get busy,” stood up and left the room. One of Jan’s men was working the mechanism of a Bergmann machine pistol, the sound of the slide and lock, oiled steel on steel, cutting through the quiet voices. “Hey, Bron,” the man called to the armorer.

Bron came out of the kitchen; he was wearing underpants, his bare legs red from the cold, had a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, and was buttoning up an SS sergeant’s tunic. “What is it?” he said.

The man worked the Bergmann bolt and said, “Is this right?”

“I had it apart this morning. It works.”

The man tried it one last time, then laid the weapon across his knees. De Milja looked at his watch, the minute hand was where it had been the last time he’d looked. His side hurt from where he’d fallen in the street the day before. Strong, that German. They liked to kick, it added insult to injury, the way they saw it, and they were good at it, probably from all the soccer they played.

“So?” Vlach said, and raised his eyebrows. He smiled a wise-guy smile, but his face was very white.

“Eleven of,” de Milja said.

Vlach didn’t answer. Somebody was tapping his foot rhythmically against the leg of the sofa. Bron came back in the room. Now in SS uniform, he put out the stub of one cigarette and lit another. De Milja stood. “It’s time to go,” he said. “Good luck to you all.” Two of the men crossed themselves. Jan adjusted a fedora in front of the hall mirror. De Milja opened the apartment door and the men flowed out quickly, automatic weapons held beneath overcoats, hats pulled down over their eyes.

One of the men in Jan’s unit patted de Milja on the shoulder as he went past and said, “Good luck.” A neighbor heard people in the hallway, opened his door a crack, then closed it quickly.

De Milja turned to look back into the dark apartment, then shut the door. On the doorframe was a pen-sized outline with two empty screw holes where something had been removed. De Milja knew that Jews often kept a metal device by their front doors, though he couldn’t remember what it was called. The people who had lived in the apartment had apparently taken it off, thinking perhaps that nobody would notice the outline where it had once been fastened.

With Bron driving, they looked like three Gestapo executives with an SS chauffeur. The Opel turned into Zamkova Street, almost dark at 5:00 P.M., an hour before the Rovno curfew, a few people hurrying home with heads down. The second Opel and the truck, Jan’s unit, continued on, heading for the entrance that led to the prison offices.

The first Opel pulled up to the sentry box. Bron opened the door, stood half in, half out of the front seat so the guard got a good look at the SS uniform. He started yelling orders in very fast German, angry and impatient and dangerous. The guard had seen such behavior before, and hastened to open the gate. The car shot through, then one of the civilians rolled out of the back and headed for the sentry box on the run. The guard was puzzled. The running man, Kolya, put an automatic pistol against his temple. “Hand over your weapon,” he said.

The Latvian guard did as he was told. Kolya emptied the chamber and the magazine and returned the rifle. “Now stand guard, do everything as usual,” he said, sitting down in the sentry box below the level of the window. He pressed the VIS against the base of the man’s spine. “As usual,” he said. The guard nodded.

The second Opel and the truck pulled into the street that ran perpendicular to Zamkova. Two ladders were taken from the truck and placed against the wall. The prison had been built to keep people from getting out-very little thought had been given to keeping them from getting in. As Jan’s unit climbed the ladders, the truck was driven fifty yards farther down the street and parked, its engine idling loud enough to cover the sound of gunfire from behind the prison wall.

The street sentry box was visible from the interior guard station, so Bron drove the Opel at normal speed, then stopped and shouted angrily in German. The guard didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. “What’s the matter?” he asked the SS sergeant. Dimly, he could see two men in civilian suits in the car-that meant important security types. Evidently the poor bastard driving the car had been bullied by his superiors-but why take it out on him? The SS sergeant sputtered and turned red. The guard shrugged and opened the gate. The car sped through, one of the men in civilian clothes got out and ran toward him.

Not right.

He went for his rifle.

De Milja readied himself, his fist tight on the door handle. The Opel jerked to a stop, he shoved the back door open and jumped out. All he could see of the Latvian guard was a pale face in the darkness. The face seemed puzzled, and faintly offended. Three paces from the sentry box their eyes locked, and everyone knew everything. The guard reacted, snatched for a rifle in the sentry box. De Milja brought the VIS up and pulled the trigger as he ran. It bent the guard in two, arms folded across his stomach. De Milja moved around him, took a moment to steady his hand, then shot him four times in the side of the head. The man dropped to his knees, then pitched forward on his face.

De Milja ran back to the car and climbed in. “All right, go to the next gate.”

Jan and three of his men climbed over the wall into the administrative courtyard of the prison. A trained commando, Jan had memorized every detail of the guard’s sketch. He looked around the courtyard and saw that each doorway and gate was where the map had said it was. A young clerk coming down the stairway from the prison office dropped an armload of files when he saw the machine pistols and the men in the hats with the brims pulled down. He choked off a yell, threw his hands in the air, stood absolutely still.

Jan opened a door at the top of the stairs. There were three more clerks-the German warden and his German assistant had separate offices at the end of the room. “Raise your hands,” Jan said. The clerks did as they were told. Two of Jan’s men pulled the Germans from their office chairs and stood them against a wall. The warden had been a Nazi streetfighter in the 1930s and the Rovno prison was his reward for faithful service. He’d put on weight since those days, and wore a fine suit, but he met Jan’s stare with defiance. “Are you Herr Kruger? The warden?” Jan asked.

“Yes.”

“Please give me the keys to blocks four and six.”

“I cannot.”

Jan raised the machine pistol so Kruger could look down the barrel. Kruger closed his eyes, pressed his lips closed, and drew himself up to his full height. The Hungarian weapon fired a heavy, high-velocity bullet; the warden was thrown back against the wall so hard the plaster cracked, and he left a long red smear as he slid to the floor.

Jan turned the weapon toward the assistant warden. “Please give me the keys to blocks four and six,” he said. The assistant trembled with fear but he would not give in. “Is that your answer?” Jan asked.

The man made a sound. Resistance? Assent? Jan shrugged and fired a long burst. The man screamed once before he died. One of the clerks yelled, “Here, here are keys. In this drawer. Take them, please.”

In a room down the corridor, a clerk hid behind a bank of filing cabinets. He heard gunfire, heard the assistant warden cry out, heard several minutes of silence, and carefully lifted the receiver off a telephone and held it to his ear, tapping the disconnect bar impatiently with his finger, but the line was dead.

A darkened courtyard bordered by cell blocks, cobblestones worn smooth by half a century of prisoners’ felt slippers. At the center, an iron grating sparkling with frost. De Milja and Vlach ran across the courtyard, bent low to the ground. They reached an entry marked South in Cyrillic and used the arched doorway as cover. Czarny prison was silent, the inmates forbidden to talk, so they could hear the jangle of keys as warders moved along the corridors, the idling truck on the other side of the wall, the high-low sirens of German and Ukrainian police in the streets of Rovno. A voice called, another answered, a third laughed-guards on one of the cell blocks. Then footsteps, three or four running men, and Jan and two others came out of the darkness.

“Everybody all right?” de Milja whispered.

Jan nodded. “We shot the wardens.”

“Keys?”

“Yes.”

Jan was breathing hard, he rummaged through a ring of keys, peering at the stamped markings. He removed two keys and handed them to de Milja. “Block four,” he said.

“Good. We go out as planned.”

“No change. See you in better times.”

“Yes. See you then,” de Milja said.

De Milja turned the key and opened the grille that led to Block Four. It creaked when it opened, then clanged shut. A warder came around the corner and said, “Tomek?” Vlach had the machine pistol pressed against his chest before he knew what was happening. He gasped with surprise, dropped a wooden club with a clatter that echoed down the corridor. De Milja pulled the man’s arms behind him and wound a piece of wire around his wrists. He’d thought at first that the warder was a fat man, but he wasn’t. The muscles in his shoulders and back were massive, and the smell of him, like stale garlic, cut through the prison odor of open drains and crumbling stone.

“Prisoner Krewinski,” Vlach whispered.

“Which?”

“Krewinski.”

“Yes, wait. It’s that corridor. Second to the last, on the left. You see, I don’t give you a problem.”

“On the floor,” de Milja said.

The guard gave a nervous laugh, went to one knee, then both. “Like this? You see, sirs, no trouble from me.”

De Milja pushed him over on his side and began wiring his ankles together. “Sirs?” The guard’s voice was very high now. “You’re going to let men out of these cells, don’t leave me tied up here, I beg you.”

De Milja didn’t answer. He ripped the keys off the warder’s belt, held them in front of the man’s eyes, and began going through them. “Yes, there,” the man said. He was fading now-drifting toward death before anyone touched him, de Milja could see it.

The prisoners, in cells lining the twilit corridor, came to their barred doors and watched with curiosity: two men with weapons, moving quickly. No uniforms, no warder. For the moment, de Milja and Vlach ignored them. In the second cell from the end on the left, a man sat on a bed-a wood frame suspended from the wall by two chains. He was tall and wiry, with a mournful face and hair shaved to a colorless stubble-a hard head and soft eyes. He was clean-shaven, but a cavalry mustache would not have been out of place. Sergeant Krewinski, de Milja now saw. The man stared at de Milja and Vlach without much interest, they were only the most recent in a long line of men with guns who’d come for him.

“Are you Sergeant Krewinski?”

“Yes,” the man said-meaning if you like.

As the three left the cell block, the keys were passed to other prisoners. In Block Six, Jan and his group freed the two ZWZ officers, a group of Russian partisans, all the political prisoners, and the women in the adjoining wing. The pandemonium was just getting started when de Milja and Vlach and the sergeant reached the Opel. Ukrainian guards running for their lives, prisoners running out into the streets of Rovno. Some would escape, and police units would be busy for days. At the Zamkova Street intersection, they saw Jan’s truck, rocking from side to side as it sped away from the prison.

The Opel wound through the back alleys of Rovno-there were sirens now, as the attack on Czarny prison began to draw in security elements. They first dropped Kolya at a hideout, a room above a pharmacy. Then Vlach, on the outskirts of the city, at a lumberyard. A few miles down the road, the Opel stopped at the edge of a small village. Bron tapped the horn three times and an ancient farm truck rolled out of a snow-covered lane. The driver of the truck joined Bron in the Opel, they waved good-bye, and drove off in the direction of Rovno. De Milja and the sergeant sat in the cab of the truck, changed into sheepskin jackets, old boots, and new identity papers.

They waited until dawn, then in first light headed for the Razakavia band in the farmhouse at the edge of the forest. De Milja never went more than twenty miles an hour-the tires were old and battered, the road ice over frozen mud, and patches of ground fog turned the windshield white. As they drove along, Krewinski told his story. “The NKVD sergeant, the man whose dog had been sick, he came to the wire one day and told me, ‘You go to Moscow, to the training school, because if you stay here, well. .’ I understood what he meant. I never saw him again, but he saved my life. The major who had run my regiment was still in the camp at that time, and he told me how to go about it. He was a reserve officer, a chemist from Lodz, an important man.

“Well, it was just like he said it would be. I asked for a book about communism, and I read it and I discussed it with a guard. A political type called me into his office, and he gave me another book. That went on for a month or two, then they moved me to a separate part of the camp, and they left a gate open.” Krewinski laughed. “I’d been told they would do that, and they did. I ignored it. Then, a week later, the provocateur. A little man that worked around the office. Came to me and said, ‘I know your game. Let’s you and me work together and get ourselves out of here.’ ”

“What did you do?”

“Went directly to the camp commandant and turned him in. And that really seemed to make a difference, that earned their trust. About two weeks later I went east.

“It was a kind of school. On Arbat Street, in an old mansion. And also at the university. A school for guerrilla fighting. Nothing like that in Poland-oh, maybe for officers, but not for an enlisted man like me. They had all kinds of people there, from everywhere in Europe-we could barely talk to one another. Estonians and Lithuanians and Hungarians, Frenchmen and Belgians. All kinds. They taught us how to blow up a train, how to ambush a column. But they also spent time on political matters-putting out a newspaper, and getting it into people’s hands; by leaving it on trains, or mailing it to addresses in the phonebook. They taught assassination. How to force peasants to fight for you, how to infiltrate organizations. Then, in August, after the German attack on Russia, they dropped me by parachute into the Tsuman forest. I was to search out a certain band, and work to bring them under the control of the Znamensky Street center-the GRU-in Moscow.”

“What happened?”

“I went home,” Krewinski said. “It wasn’t that simple or easy, and it took time and luck, but that’s what I did.”

They reached the farm at dusk, were given something to eat, the sergeant spent some time with his brother, then they were given blankets and taken to a hayloft on the second floor of an old stone stable. There they fell into a dead sleep, awakened at 5:00 A.M. when German antipartisan units and Ukrainian militia, acting on a tip from an informer, attacked the farm.

They got very close, killing the sentries silently as they came. Three hundred of them, Ukrainian militia led by a special SS unit-men imprisoned for poaching game in Germany recruited to hunt humans, partisans, in the forests of Poland.

It was a hand grenade that woke Captain de Milja.

It blew a hole in the corner of the stable and set the beams on fire. By the flickering light he saw militia running across a frozen pond. He kicked himself free of his blanket and ran to a window, Simonov in hand. Down below, on the ground floor of the stable, some of the partisans were shouting to one another, trying to organize a defense. But the guards out in the forest were lying in the leaves with their throats cut, and it was too late to organize much of anything.

The Germans had a heavy machine gun in the woods. They traversed window to window across the outbuildings, the main house, then the stable. Only Frantek’s final cry alerted de Milja to the gunfire and he dove below the sill just as it reached him. He crawled over to help, but Frantek simply stared at him upside down, eyes wide, a look of indignation frozen on his face.

Sergeant Krewinski knew how to do these things. He waited until the machine gun moved to the next building, then fired a long burst at its muzzle flare with a machine pistol. This occasioned a change of gunners-a few moments of reorganization, but nothing more. By then, the fire in the beams had taken hold and it was getting hard to see, and to breathe, on the upper floor. One of the defenders from down below rushed halfway up the stairway, yelled something, then tumbled, dead weight, back down. A moment later a rifle was poked up from the stairs and fired blind. A partisan reached down and pulled it up, a very surprised Ukrainian hanging on the other end. The sergeant shot him. Then Krewinski and de Milja exchanged a certain look-the time we always knew would come has come-and led the others on the second floor in running down the open stairway. Nobody really wanted to burn to death in a stable. Krewinski was shot, but the impulse turned out to have been a good one. There were only five or six militia gathered at the foot of the stairway. Triumphant-blood on the walls, dead militia, dead partisans-but undermanned, a successful attack that had spent its strength en route.

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.”

She let him know, without saying it directly, that he could have her if he liked, she would not resist. But that wasn’t what he wanted-a woman taken by some right of sanctuary. Still, by the time it was dark that night it was evident they they would have to sleep holding each other or die. They lay on the seat of the truck in each other’s arms, the blanket wrapped around them, the windows closed tight and clouded over with their breath. Outside, the November moon-the hunter’s moon-was full, a cold, pale light on the frozen river.

A clear night, the million stars were silver. She was warm to hold, her breath on his temple. When she dreamed, her hands moved. It brought him memories, the embrace with Shura. Long ago. The girls of his twenties. His wife. He missed love, he wondered if war had made it impossible for him. In the drift of his mind he paused on what it would be like to slide her skirt up to her waist. He sighed, shifted his weight, the springs creaked. Where the cold, sharp air touched his skin it actually hurt, and he pressed his face against her shoulder. Sometimes she slept, and sometimes he did.

The road ended.

They let the truck roll down the hill-a foot at a time, it took forever-and out onto the gray ice of the river. They managed five or six miles an hour that way, headed east of north by his calculations. They discovered a tiny settlement on the shore, pole-built docks coated with ice in the morning sun. They bought some black bread and salt from a woman who came down to the river to stare at them. From an old ferryman they bought a jar to melt ice in so they could have water. “Brzesc nad Bugiem” he said, pointing north. Brest Litovsk. He smiled and rubbed his whiskers. They were on, he told them, a tributary of the river Bug.

The gray clouds came in that afternoon and a white fog rose off the ice. Now they drove even slower, because it was hard to see. He worried about fuel, but the truck had a large tank, and a hundred miles wasn’t too much to ask of it when they could only go a few miles an hour.

Then there were no more settlements. The rise of the hills above them grew steep, the woods thicker, no trails to be seen. And the river narrowed with every mile. Finally, when it was only ten feet wide, the ice changed. The truck wouldn’t go anymore. The tires spun, the engine roared, and the back slid sideways, but that was all. Slipping on the ice, they tried to pile sticks beneath the back wheels. But the truck would not go forward. “So,” Shura said. She meant it was finished, but she was glad they had tried it. What awaited them was at least peaceful, no more than going to sleep. He agreed. For him it was enough that somebody was there, that he would not have to be alone.

He turned off the ignition. The sky was fading above the hills, night was an hour away. It was colder now, much colder. They lay down on the seat and held each other beneath the worn blanket. “I am so cold,” she said. The wind that night made it even colder, but the fog blew away, and a vast white moon rose above the hillside. A field of reeds sparkled with frost, and they saw a wolf, a gray shadow trotting along the river. It stopped and looked at them, then went on, pads silent on the ice. At last the world has frozen, he thought. A winter that would never end.

They tried in every way not to go to sleep, but they were very tired, and there was nothing more they could do. She fell asleep first, then him.

The truck stood silent on the ice. A few flakes of snow drifted down, then more. The cloud began to gather and the moon faded away until there was hardly any light at all. The snow fell heavier now, hissed down, a white blanket on the river, and the hills, and the truck.

He woke up suddenly. The window of the truck was opaque, and it was not so cold as it had been. He touched her, but she did not move. Then he held his hand against her face, and she stirred, actually managed a smile, putting her hand on top of his.

“We’re going,” he said.

She opened one eye.

He didn’t move his hand. “Shura, look at the window,” he said. “Sometimes you can’t drive on ice. But you can drive on snow.”

They drove through the war that night, but it didn’t want them just then.

They saw panzer tanks and armored cars positioned on a bridge. An SS officer, a dark silhouette leaning on the railing, watched the truck as it passed beneath him, but nothing happened. A few miles north of there a village had been burned down, smoke still rising from the charred beams. And twice they heard gunfire, machine gun answering machine gun, tracer rounds in the darkness like sparks blown across the sky.

Sometimes the snow fell in squalls; swirling, windblown. Then it cleared, the clouds rolling east, the frozen river shimmering in the moonlight. De Milja drove with both hands gripping the wheel, coaxing the truck along the ice, riding the snow that gave them traction. Shura pointed out a small road that led up a hill from the river; perhaps an abandoned ferry crossing. De Milja stopped the truck and climbed the hill. He found a well-used dirt road and an ancient milestone that pointed the way to Biala.

It took a long time to get the truck off the river. De Milja and Shura knelt by the tires and studied the surface like engineers, finally building a track of branches to the edge of the shore. It worked. Engine whining, wheels spinning, the truck lurched, swayed sideways, then climbed.

Once on the upper road, de Milja let the engine idle while he got his breath back. “Where are we?” Shura asked.

“Not far from Biala. A few hours, if nothing goes wrong.” He eased the clutch into first gear, moved off slowly on the rutted road.

Midnight passed, then 1:00 A.M. They drove through snow-covered forest, boughs heavy and white bent almost to the ground. Shura fell into an exhausted sleep, then woke suddenly as they bounced over a rock. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to abandon you.”

“I’m all right,” de Milja said.

“I should have helped to keep you awake. I can sing something, if you like.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I can discuss-oh, well certainly music. Chopin. Or Rachmaninoff.”

The engine steamed as the truck climbed a long hill. At the crest, de Milja braked gently to a stop. They were on a wooded height above Biala. Directly below, a poor neighborhood at the edge of town. Crooked one-story houses, crooked dirt streets, white with frost. Wisps of wood smoke hung above the chimneys in the still air. De Milja drove the truck to the side of the road and turned off the ignition. “Now we wait for dawn, for the end of the curfew. Then we can go into the open-air market with the produce trucks from the countryside. Once we get there we can make contact with the local ZWZ unit-our luck, it’s a good one. Very good. They’ll move us the rest of the way, into Warsaw. In a freight train, maybe. Or hidden in a vegetable wagon.”

They sat and stared out the window. It seemed very quiet with the engine off.

“Perhaps it would be best if I stayed here,” Shura said.

“You know somebody here?”

“No.”

“You wouldn’t last long.”

“No, probably not. But at least. .”

“You’d have it over with?” De Milja shook his head angrily. “No, no. That isn’t right. We’ll hide you,” he said. “Not in the ghetto-somewhere in Warsaw, one of the working-class neighborhoods. With friends of ours. It won’t be easy, but if you’re able to stay in the apartment, if you avoid people, in other words if you can live in hiding, you’ll survive. You’ll need some luck, but you’ll see the end of the war.”

“And you?”

“Me?” De Milja shrugged. “I have to keep fighting,” he said. “The Germans, the Russians. Perhaps both. Perhaps for years and years. But I might live through it, you never know. Somebody always seems to survive, no matter what happens. Perhaps it will be me.”

He was silent for a time, staring at the sleeping town. “There was a moment, about a year ago. Someone I knew in Paris, ‘Let’s just go to Switzerland,’ she said. I could have, maybe I should have, but I didn’t. I missed my chance, but I don’t really know why. I had a friend, a Russian, he had theories about these things-a world of bad people and good people, a war that never seems to end, you have to take sides. I don’t know, maybe that’s the way it is.”

He paused, then smiled to himself. “Honestly, Shura, right now I will be happy when the sun comes up. The marketplace will be full of people-there’ll be a fire in a barrel, a way to get a hot cup of coffee. It’s possible!” he laughed.

“Hot coffee,” Shura said.

“And some bread. Why not?”

They sat close together in the truck, trying to stay warm. He held her tightly, she pressed against his side. In time the darkness faded and the first sunlight hit the rooftops, a flock of pigeons flew up in the air, a dog barked, another answered.