The Story of a Life

55

The Little Knight

In Brest I made my way to the so-called Medical Units Base – a small house overgrown with wild vines. The base was empty except for one lonely old nurse who was waiting for Gronsky, the head of the units. It turned out I had to wait for Gronsky as well since he was the only one who knew where my unit was.

The nurse was a Pole and spoke with an accent. ‘He’s such a flighty man, Pan Gronsky,’ she sighed. ‘He flies in, makes a load of noise, kisses our hands and then flies off again. You never even have a chance to get a word in. Oh, Mother of God! I’m just wasting away here for no good reason thanks to that featherbrain.’

I had already heard about Gronsky from Chemodanov. An actor with the Warsaw Comedy Theatre, Gronsky was a gallant and brave officer with many good qualities, but frivolous in the extreme. In light of this, and his diminutive stature, he was known as the ‘Little Knight’.

‘You’ll see for yourself,’ said Chemodanov. ‘It’s like he sprang from the pages of a Sienkiewicz novel.’

I washed after my journey, drank some coffee with Pani Jadwiga, the old nurse, and lay down on a camp bed. I didn’t feel like sleeping. I found a tattered copy of Sarcey’s The Siege of Parisfn1 on the windowsill and started to read. The wind rustled the vine leaves outside the window. Suddenly, a car, its engine backfiring wildly, drove up to the house. Someone jumped out, raced up the stairs, spurs clanking, and threw open the door. I saw a little man in uniform with joyful eyes, an enormous nose worthy of Cyrano de Bergerac and a bushy brown moustache.

‘My child!’ he cried in a high-pitched voice and threw himself onto the bed.

I just barely had time to get out of the way.

‘My child! I’m overjoyed! We’ve been waiting for you like manna from heaven. Romanin has been pining.’

Gronsky embraced me firmly and kissed me three times. There was the faint smell of violets on his moustache.

‘Wait!’ he cried, then raced to the window, stuck out his head and called down: ‘Pani Jadwiga! Hello! I’ve got good news. I’ve finally put together the perfect unit for you. Nothing but choirboys, all of them. What?! Would I lie to you?’ Gronsky raised his right hand to the sky: ‘Before Our Lord God and His Most Holy Son Jesus, I do swear that I shall rush you there tomorrow in this rickety Ford! All three of us will go.’

Pulling his head back in, he shouted: ‘Artemenko, come here!’

An orderly attached to the base rushed into the room, his boots making a thundering noise.

‘Let me look at your open, honest face,’ said Gronsky.

Ashamed, Artemenko tried to avoid Gronsky’s stare.

‘Where are the five tins of condensed milk? The ones that were under my bed?’

‘I have no idea!’ snapped Artemenko.

‘You son of a bitch!’ said Gronsky. ‘Don’t let it happen again. Or else you’ll be court-martialled, which will be followed by a penal battalion, a sobbing wife and children ruined for life. Now get out of my sight!’

Artemenko scrambled to the door.

‘Stop!’ Gronsky roared. ‘Bring me the box from the car. And don’t break it, you clumsy oaf!’

Artemenko sprang from the room.

‘My child, my son!’ said Gronsky, taking me by the shoulders, giving me a good shake and then peering into my eyes. ‘If only you knew how sorry I am for every single young man who ends up in this lunatic asylum, this bedlam, this inferno, this nest of lice, this damned meat grinder, this pandemonium we call war. But you can count on me. I’ll see you won’t come to any harm.’

Artemenko dragged a plywood box into the room. Gronsky kicked the lid with the tip of his polished boot. The lid flew off, but so did the sole of his boot.

‘Please do help yourself!’ said a polite yet saddened Gronsky, pointing at the box. There, tightly packed underneath some wax paper, lay stacks of chocolate bars.

Gronsky sat down on the bed, took off his boot and looked at it for a long time, a frown on his face. ‘Incredible!’ he said, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘That’s the third time in week I’ve torn the sole off. It must be some kind of portent! Artemenko! Where’re you hiding?’

‘Here, sir!’ snapped Artemenko, who was standing right next to him.

‘Take my boot to that genius of a cobbler Yakob Kur, the pockmarked scoundrel. Tell him it had better be ready in an hour. Or else I’ll hop over there myself in one boot and shred his rotten hovel with my sword and make him dance to the tambourine.’

Artemenko snatched the boot and dashed off.

‘Well?’ asked Gronsky, ‘has Pani Jadwiga pecked a hole in your head yet? The old bird. May the Good Lord give her a hundred kicks in the backside! What am I supposed to do with her? One coarse word and she rolls her eyes and practically faints. Such a prissy little thing they’ve sent me. Let’s have some tea with brandy. What do you say? And tonight we’ll go to the concert at the officers’ mess. We’re off tomorrow at dawn. That’s assuming, of course, that my driver, His Excellency Pan Zvonkovoi, has fixed the engine.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘It got shot up. At the railway crossing near Lyubartov. No idea where the bullets came from. Ha ha! You’re reading Sarcey? I prefer Zola’s L’Assommoir. I like analytical writers. Balzac, for example. But I also love poetry.’ Gronsky pulled a small book from the pocket of his coat, waved it in the air and announced with true conviction: ‘Yevgeny Onegin! I’m never without it! Never! Worlds may crumble, but the glory of these lines shall live forever!’

Pan Gronsky was making my head spin. He looked at me carefully. I could see he was concerned.

‘My son! Lie down and take a little nap before the concert. I’ll wake you up.’

I was happy to lie down. Gronsky ran off downstairs. I could hear him washing himself over the basin, snorting and whistling ‘La Marseillaise’. Then he said something, apparently to Artemenko. ‘So tell me, do you know what it means to be “taken out behind the woodshed”? No? Well, then, I can certainly show you. It’s most interesting.’

Pani Jadwiga groaned. ‘Mother of God.’

Gronsky continued: ‘I may be just a worm, but nonetheless I’m going to bust that adjutant’s face. They can shoot me for all I care. It makes no difference to me!’

At this point I fell asleep. I was awakened by a loud twang as if a taut cable had been snapped in the room. The sun had gone down, and I could see a dark green sky through the open window. I lay there and listened. Pani Jadwiga was praying loudly, and then again the same loud twang of a snapping cable. A reddish light flickered in the sky, and from somewhere off in the twilight came the faint rumble of engines.

‘Get up!’ shouted Gronsky. ‘There’s a zeppelin over Brest!’

I jumped out of bed and ran to the balcony. Gronsky and Artemenko were there already, looking up at the sky.

‘Right there!’ said Gronsky, pointing. ‘Don’t you see it? Just a touch to the left of the Great Bear.’

Staring up, I saw a long dark shadow gliding swiftly across the sky. From nearby came the crackle of sporadic rifle fire. Shrapnel exploded in yellow flames over the house.

‘Not bad!’ said Gronsky. ‘If it goes on like this, we’ll get a bullet in the head from one of our own soldiers. The German has dropped his two bombs and is leaving. The show’s over. Let’s go. Our tea is ready.’

After tea Gronsky took me to the officers’ mess. It was a long wooden barn. The windows opened onto a garden and fresh air was pouring in. I was dead tired. Half asleep, I heard a rumbling bass voice: ‘At twelve o’clock midnight, the drummer arises from the grave …’fn2

I opened my eyes. A tall, clean-shaven officer with hair parted in the centre was singing.

‘He’s a famous singer,’ said Gronsky, but I had by then fallen back to sleep and never did remember his name. I slept through the entire concert.

We left in the morning. His Excellency Pan Zvonkovoi turned out to be a snub-nosed but kind metalworker from Penza. Listening to Gronsky’s stories, he would just grin and shake his head in amazement, saying ‘Well, well!’

I remember great mounds of sand, bombed-out roads and villagers frightened to within an inch of their lives. Crawling towards us, their wheels ploughing through deep sand, were carts loaded with refugees. We left Pani Jadwiga in one of the villages. It was towards evening when we finally reached the village of Vyshnitsa, where Romanin’s unit was based. The local commander’s black and yellow flag hung over a house made of cheap planks. The dust kicked up into the air by the carts and animals hung like a dry fog before slowly settling onto the ground.

Old Jews, the armbands of the provisional army police on their sleeves, ran from house to house rounding up the villagers to go and dig trenches out beyond the village fence. The faint rumbling of an artillery duel could be heard in the distance.

It was a muggy, disturbing and chaotic night. Dozens of fires burned in the village square. Around the fires, next to their unharnessed wagons, refugees – Polish peasants – sat or lay about next to each other in rows. Exhausted mothers, their heads bare, cradled their babies, who were by now numb with hunger and turning blue. Dogs barked. Coachmen cursed as they tried to find a way through this human confusion. They lashed the people with their whips, drove their wheels over the peasants’ mounds of clothing and household goods; embroidered towels, kerchiefs and shirts dragged along behind the wagons. Women, weeping, grabbed their possessions from under the wheels and took them to the fires. But their things were already torn, smeared with pitch and covered with dirt. Old Jewish women in red wigs came out of their hovels dragging the accumulated junk of a lifetime – quilts, crockery, old sewing machines, copper basins green with age – which they had bundled up in bedsheets and blankets. I looked about but there wasn’t a single wagon or cart left to take them away.

Romanin’s unit was billeted at an old inn on the edge of the village. Four enormous cast-iron kettles placed upon solid stands simmered on the trampled ground outside. Soldiers bustled around the kettles. Romanin was standing there shouting hoarsely at an officer whose hair was grey with dust. ‘Go to hell!’ Romanin yelled. He noticed Gronsky and me, waved, and then turned back to the officer. ‘One of your cows drops dead every half-hour. You’re just throwing their carcasses on the roads. So why are you being so stingy?’

‘I need a written statement,’ the officer complained. ‘For every dead cow we write out a statement. I’m not about to risk a court martial because of you.’

‘All right, damn you, let’s go and write up a statement!’ said Romanin, taking the officer by the arm and leading him into the inn. He turned around and smiled at me: ‘I’ll be right there. I just have to finish up this ridiculous business with this cattle merchant.’

We followed him into the inn. It was empty and reeked of stale smoke. Upon seeing us, the cockroaches began scattering along the walls.

‘Have a smoke,’ Gronsky said, ‘in a minute you’ll be getting down to work. You can see what’s going on here. I’m going to give this commander of cows a good talking to.’

I sat down on a rickety bench and lit a cigarette. I could hear the women outside weeping and pleading with the soldiers for something. Cows bellowed, as if in pain, and the sound of the distant gunfire intensified. With every explosion sand trickled from a crack in the ceiling onto a hunk of black bread on the table. I pushed the bread out of the way. Three voices were now arguing on the other side of a partition. Romanin roared, the officer made an effort to fight back, and Gronsky shouted in an exasperated sing-song tenor.

‘Give me two cows and you’ll have your statement,’ screamed Romanin. ‘Basta! I’ve got nothing to feed these people. Peo-ple, human beings, get it?! Children are dying like flies, and you’re worried about a scrap of paper. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Captain!’

All was quiet behind the partition. Out came Romanin. ‘Wonderful,’ he said in a hoarse voice and then kissed me on the cheeks. ‘Right on time. I just managed to prevail over that fool. I got two cows from him. We need to slaughter one straight away, cut up the carcass and boil it in the kettles. Go and get some of the other orderlies to help. We don’t have time to let the flesh hang. The refugees haven’t eaten for two days.’

Romanin raised the greasy window curtain and looked out. ‘Just look at that!’ he said. ‘I don’t think I’ve slept in five days, but that’s nothing. Get to work. We’ll find some time to talk later.’

Gronsky had already told me on the way that since the Poles had been forced to pack up and flee, some of the field medical units, including ours, would be ordered to feed and care for the refugees. Nonetheless, I still had no idea what this meant.

‘Don’t ask anyone about what needs to be done,’ Romanin told me. ‘Just do what you think’s right. And to hell with your tact and politeness! They’ll get us nowhere and will cost dozens of lives.’

Romanin gave me two orderlies. We slaughtered the cow by the light of a bonfire in the inn’s yard. Its dry horns lay sticking out of the ground. The blood oozed and puddled around us. There was too much of it for the dusty earth to absorb. The three of us hacked the carcass into large pieces. I had rolled up the sleeves of my new soldier’s tunic, but still they were drenched with blood. We cut up the meat and hung it on a fence to let it dry a little. The clouds of dust grew thicker and thicker. The light from the bonfires became dim orange blurs. Then the old glass windows of the inn began to jingle and the whole house shook and danced.

Gronsky came out into the yard. ‘Farewell, my son,’ he said, and then grabbed me by my bloodied sleeves and gave me a kiss. ‘I’m off to the Third Unit. Things are bad there.’

‘What’s that rattling?’ I asked. ‘More carts?’

‘Those aren’t carts, that’s our artillery falling back,’ said Gronsky. ‘Well, farewell! And good luck! Don’t hold up the food, my child, that’d be dangerous.’

He kissed me again, turned and left the yard. His head was bowed, as if something were weighing on him.

We dropped the meat into the kettles. Grey scum bubbled up to the surface. We skimmed it off with large spoons and dumped it on the ground. Starving, angry dogs licked the greasy dust. The soup, if I can call it that, was ready in the early hours of the morning, and we began to pass it out to the refugees. Hundreds of shaking hands stretched out to us, holding mugs, old bowls, cups and saucers. The women, once they had received their serving, tried to kiss our hands.

The sound of crying, indistinguishable from laughter (and perhaps it really was laughter, the laughter of all those famished people, overjoyed by the smell of that hot beef), hung over the crowd. They drank the soup at once, burning their lips and mumbling. In ten minutes the kettles were empty. Romanin ordered us to fill them up again immediately.

We slaughtered the second cow and hung the meat to dry. Again, the fresh meat was soon covered by a black layer of dust and clouds of flies appeared in the dark from out of nowhere. Again, children cried, and drivers cursed in hoarse voices as they clattered past. And again, it rumbled in the distance, but not as far off as the evening before, considerably closer now.

It was almost dawn when we fed the second group of refugees. Romanin ordered us to hurry up and move on. Some of the refugees left, some remained. The dawn was misty, the sky a dull red, and the air smelled of something burning. Columns of black smoke rose along the horizon. The orderlies said the crops had been set on fire. A Cossack patrol galloped into the village and stopped in the square near the synagogue. They ran in and out of two or three houses and then galloped off. Smoke began pouring from the houses. Soon flames leapt skyward from the roofs and people screamed. A shower of sparks fell on the sleeping children. The refugees’ rags began to smoulder. The women grabbed their children and, leaving everything, rushed to the fields. The menfolk followed them.

We made our way out of the village through the smoke and fire. Our horses snorted and shied at the chaos.

‘Head back towards Pishchats and Terespol,’ said Romanin. ‘I’ll go on ahead and secure billets. Follow the ambulances and stick to the back roads. The main roads are all jammed. If you don’t find me in Pishchats, go straight on to Terespol. Okay then, so long!’

We kissed each other goodbye, and Romanin said, ‘This is no Portugal.’ He patted me on the shoulder, then grabbed the pommel, hopped on one foot, threw his leg over his horse before landing heavily in the saddle, and galloped off along the side of the road.

We travelled all day along the back roads. I often had to check our maps. Fires were burning all around us, and we were enveloped in smoke that swirled and billowed as it drifted to the east. It seemed to me that the only peaceful sound I heard the whole day was the rustling of the willows over a shallow stream where we had stopped to water the horses. We passed the refugees. Then we were passed by a string of carts and artillery. The name ‘Mackensen’ was heard spoken more and more often. The German army under this field marshal was attacking not far behind us.

Twice we stopped to bury dead bodies abandoned by the roadside. One of them was a child. He was lying on a checked kerchief that his mother had apparently taken off her head. Someone had torn up some winter cress by the roots and placed it upon the child’s breast. The other one was a young peasant woman. Her light-coloured eyes were still open, and she looked up peacefully into the sky where a yellow sun shone through the smoke. A bee, entangled in the woman’s hair, buzzed angrily. It must have been there a long time, unable to find its way out.

After we had travelled a good distance from the fresh graves, a quiet, lanky orderly named Spolokh said to me: ‘That woman we buried, sir, I think it was that baby’s mother.’

‘Why?’

‘She wasn’t wearing a kerchief. It was with the baby. So it seems to me that must have been the mother.’

‘War … she’s a mother to some, and the devil to others,’ said Gladyshchev, a thickset orderly, unexpectedly.

I had been riding all day and was tired. My teeth were gritty with sand. I thought of nothing, nothing except for one thing that I couldn’t forget, namely that I had just buried two people and I didn’t even know their names. I kept recalling the faint, pale down on the woman’s arms and the baby’s smooth, round forehead.

Whose fault was it that death had chosen them – that it had come to their little village, where the periwinkles were still in blossom and where, perhaps, the smell of warm bread still lingered in the peasant huts, to drive them from their homes, hurrying and in tears, and to finish them off in a strange land, in thick sand, on a highway, where the metal-rimmed wheels of carts creaked by just inches from their eternally resting faces?

‘Sir!’ Spolokh said.

‘What is it?’

‘You should forget about it, that’s the best thing. Listen to me, take my advice. I’ve had a year of this war.’

‘How’d you know I was thinking about it?’

‘It’s obvious. Your face gives it away.’

It was hard to believe that only yesterday I had still been in peaceful Brest, had drunk coffee at that little table with the old nurse, listened to talkative Gronsky, slept in a soft bed and breathed the fresh night air.

We arrived in Pishchats at dusk – the sand had held us up. Romanin wasn’t there. Mountains of old household wares and torn books littered the streets. I picked up a few of the books, looked at them and then threw them back. They were written in incomprehensible ancient Hebrew.

The village was deserted. Only some cats were left, crouching and then leaping from door to door. We stopped to rest in what had once been a barber’s shop. There was a sign hanging over the glass door and its jingling bell. It depicted a rosy-cheeked dandy with a black moustache, wrapped in a snow-white towel and seated in a chair, his legs in high-heeled boots stretched out in front of him. One half of his face was lathered. All by itself, without the aid of a human hand, an enormous razor hung threateningly in the air inches from this dandy’s lathered cheek. The dandy smiled happily. ‘Viennese Barber Shop. Isaak Moses and Grandson’ read the sign.

Inside, the floorboards were loose. The shop’s only mirror, cracked and splattered with dried soap bubbles, swayed with every step we took. There was the faint smell of eau-de-Cologne. On a small, three-legged bamboo table lay some dirty, tattered copies of Little Fire, World Panorama and Argus. Dazed flies buzzed against the windows. We made ourselves some tea and gruel. I wasn’t feeling sleepy. I felt like sitting in the barber’s chair, leaning back onto its worn velvet headrest, shutting my eyes and thinking. Of what? Of the endless murmur of the sea and the noise of the cicadas in the dry mountains. Of large yellow leaves drifting down from the plane trees on an autumn evening in Alushta. Of a happy girl rushing to meet me. Of poetry. And God knows what else, all manner of things equally distant from the war and equally vague.

But we had to move on. Again the stench of horse sweat, the shouting, the creaking wheels, the hard saddle, and then the sand, ever more sand. Only now, instead of tall plumes of billowing smoke behind us, we could see the crimson glow of fires and, off to one side, the brilliant glitter of stars. Yet the same metal growl of the guns continued to roll over the earth – the barren thunder of war, the voice of Krupp’s guns, made for no other purpose than to rip human bodies to pieces.

Again I began to doze, and I thought I saw shooting stars streaking across the dark sky, as if heaven had sent its scouts to earth to discover what the heirs of those great Germans Leibniz, Humboldt and Herschel were up to. That afternoon we arrived, at last, in Terespol.