The Polish Officer
by Alan Furst

  In Room 9, Agata leaned back from the committee table, ran long fingers through her chopped-off hair, blew savage plumes of smoke from her nostrils, and said, “Next. The eastern zone, and the need to do something about the Russians. As of yesterday, a courier reported six more arrests by the NKVD.”

It had been a long meeting, not a good one, with too many problems tabled for future consideration. Colonel Broza did not respond—he stared absently at a map of Poland tacked to the green wall, but there was certainly little comfort for him there.

“The efficiency of the NKVD,” Agata went on, “seems only to increase. They are everywhere, how to say, inside our lines. In the professions, the peasantry—there is no social class we can turn to. People in the Russian zone have simply stopped talking to their friends—and I can’t imagine anything that hurts us more than that. The fear is on the streets, in the air. Of our top echelon, political and military, nothing remains; those who are alive are in the Lubianka, and out of contact. From the officer camps in the Katyn forest it’s the same thing: no escapes, no letters, silence. So, since it is Poland’s great privilege to play host to both the NKVD and the Gestapo, it’s time to admit we are not doing all that badly with the Germans, but have not yet learned how to operate against the Russians.”

Broza thought about it for a time. “Why?” he said.

“Why are the Russians better at it?” Agata said.

“Yes.”

“Oh, tradition. A thousand years of espionage, the secret police of Ivan the Terrible—is that what you want to hear?”

Broza’s expression was grim, almost despairing—wasn’t there perhaps a little more to it? No? Maybe?

Agata tapped a pencil eraser against the open page of a notebook. “There is a difference,” she said slowly, “that interests me. Say that it is the difference between nationalism and, ah, what we might call social theory. For the Germans, nationalism is an issue of race, ethnicity. For example, they accept as their own the Volksdeutsch—descendents of German colonists, many of whom do not even speak German. But their blood is German blood—these Teutonic philosophers really believe in such things. Cut a vein, listen closely, you can hear the overture to Lohengrin—why, that’s a German you’ve got there! The Bolsheviks are just the opposite—they recruit the mind, or so they like to pretend. And all the world is invited to join them; you can be a communist any time you like—‘Good heavens! I just realized it’s all in the dictatorship of the working class.’

“Now as a practical matter, that difference serves the purposes of the NKVD very nicely. We all accept that every society has its opportunists—criminals, misfits, unrecognized geniuses, the pathologically disappointed—and when the conqueror comes, that’s the moment to even the score. But, here in western Poland, the only job open is collaborator—you can’t just get up in the morning and decide to be German. On the Soviet side, however, you can experience insight, then conversion, and you’ll be welcomed. Oh, you may have to tattle a little, tell the NKVD whatever you happen to know—and everybody knows something. You can invite your former friends to join you in conspiracies, you can inform on your enemies. And what are you then? A traitor? No, a friend of peace and the working class. And, if you turn out to have a bit of a flair for the work, you can be a commissar.”

Agata paused a moment, lit a new cigarette. “And if that’s not bad enough,” she said, shaking out the match, “the NKVD is very shrewd, and never in a hurry. They follow the spirit of resistance like a hidden current running through an ocean: they detain, interrogate, torture, turn a few to work for them, shoot the rest, and start over.”

Colonel Broza nodded slowly. “Tyranny,” he said, “has become a science.” He turned to de Milja. “What do you think we can do, Captain.”

De Milja was in no hurry to answer. “Perhaps, over time, we’ll prove to be stronger than they are. But right now, I would say the important thing for us is to hammer at the links between the Germans and the Russians. For us, in this room, the worst would be if NKVD methods were to spread to the Gestapo.”

“We know they’ve been meeting in Cracow,” Grodewicz said, “but the Russians aren’t sharing much. They cooperate by handing over German communists who fled to Moscow in the thirties, but they don’t talk about methods.”

“That is because,” Agata said, “they are going to fight.”

“Yes. They must, eventually,” Broza said. He thought a moment, then his eyes met de Milja’s. “Take some time and a few people, Captain. See if you can get a sense of when that might be.”

A week later, he left the freezing basement. Life immediately improved, was certainly warmer, better in a number of ways. He moved to a room in the Mokotow district, down a long hallway in the apartment of a former customs official, now a clerk in a factory office and a great friend to the resistance. Since the occupation authority had closed the schools—Poles, as a slave race, needed only to understand simple directions and to count to twenty—the official’s wife taught at a secret school in a church basement while the children attended classes.

That left de Milja alone in the apartment for much of the day. Alone, except for Madame Kuester. Fortyish, probably a little older, a distant cousin of one side of the family or the other, she had met and married a Dutch engineer—Herr Kuester—who had gone off to work on a bridge in Kuala Lumpur in 1938, then vanished. Madame Kuester, childless, had then come to stay with the family. Not quite a servant, not quite an equal, she had worked in fashionable women’s shops before the war, lived quietly in her room, proud of not being a burden to anyone. The title “madame” was a survival of the world of the shops, where she had been, evidently, a bad-tempered and difficult supervisor to a generation of young assistants.

Given the hours of proximity, a love affair seemed inevitable. But the captain resisted. A deep, almost haunted longing for the wife who wasn’t there, a nominal—and sometimes not so nominal—Catholicism, and ZWZ security procedures: everything was against it. Including the attitude of Madame Kuester, haughty and cold, clearly meant to discourage familiarity between two people forced by war into the accidental intimacies of apartment life.

She was, de Milja came to understand, a snob to her very marrow. She set herself above the world, looking down on its unrefined excesses with small, angry eyes set in a great expanse of white brow. Her mouth was mean, down-curved, she wore her coarse hair elaborately pinned up, went about the apartment in gray blouse and long wool skirt—the prewar uniform of some of the better shops—that hung shapeless over a thick, heavy figure, and her walk, hard and definitive, told the world all it needed to know: you have left me alone, now leave me alone.

But it was cold, always cold.

The February snow hissed against the window, the afternoons were silent, and dark, and endless. Captain de Milja was now subject to increased ZWZ security constraints; stay out of the center of Warsaw, where police patrols were abundant, try not to be on the streets during working hours—use the morning and evening travel periods as cover for getting around the city. He had to hold agent meetings as he probed for German intentions toward the U.S.S.R., but he scheduled them early in the morning and late in the afternoon, always in public places—libraries, railway stations, the thicker the crowd the better he liked it. But for much of the day he was a prisoner in the Mokotow apartment.

Where he discovered that he was keeping track of Madame Kuester by the sound of her presence: the scrape of the match as she lit the stove for midmorning tea, the rhythm of a carpet sweeper rolled relentlessly back and forth, the polite slam of a firmly closed door as she retired to her room for a midday rest, the creak of the bedspring as she lay down to nap.

Every afternoon at about 2:35, that was. She rather believed, he sensed, in the idea of routine, consistency. It was the way her sort of people—never defined, yet always with her—chose to live. After lunch she would sit primly in the corner of the sofa, then, after forty-five minutes of reading, rise majestically and disappear into her room. On Sunday, with the family present, everything was different, but six days a week her habit never varied, never changed.

Well, perhaps just once it did. On an otherwise unremarkable day in the middle of the week, she forgot her book. Ha! What absurdly spiteful joy he felt at such a lapse. He was immediately ashamed of himself, but there it lay, open, facedown on the arm of the sofa, protected by the blue paper cover she fussily wrapped her books in. Curious, he had a look. French. Well, of course, he should have known. A French novel, the very thing her sort of people would amuse themselves with.

De Milja scanned the page to see what kept Madame so occupied that she hadn’t a thought for the rest of the world. “. . . dans une position en lequel ses places ombrées étaient, comme on dit, disponibles, mais c’était le sens de la caresse de l’aire sur elles, ces ouvertures, qui faisait battre fort son coeur . . .”

What?

In pure astonishment and disbelief he slipped the cover off the novel: La Belle Dominique. Written by that well-known and time-honored author, Vaguely Saucy Nom de Plume. The French novel was a French novel! He flipped the pages, and read some more, and flipped the pages, and read some more. It was the sheer contrast of the moment that struck his heart. The dying, ice-bound city, heavy with fear and misery and the exhaustion of daily life, set against these brittle pages of print, where gold passementerie was untied and heavy drapes flowed together, where pale skin flushed rose with excitement, where silk rustled to the floors of moonlit chambers.

De Milja’s eyes sought the door to Madame Kuester’s room, which, in defiance of her cherished routine, stood open a suggestive inch. He opened it the rest of the way and stepped inside. A small room in a Warsaw apartment, winter light yellow behind the drawn shade, an old steamer trunk used as a wardrobe, a shape curled up on a cot beneath a wool army blanket.

As in a dream, she drew her knees up, arched her back like a yawning cat, then rolled slowly onto her stomach and nestled against the bed. One hand snaked out of the covers and smoothed the loose hair off the side of her face. Now he could see that her eyes were closed, but she smiled a little smile for him; greedy and bittersweet and sure of itself all at once. And if, somehow, he still didn’t get the point, she breathed a soft, interrogatory sigh. He stepped to the side of the bed and lowered the blanket to her bare heels. She moved a little, just the signature on an invitation, took the pillow in both hands, and slid it under her body until it rested beneath her hips. Which elevated her, he thought as he undid his belt, “to such a position that her shadowed places were, as it is said, available, but it was the feeling of the touch of the air upon them, these openings, that made her heart beat hard.”

They never spoke of it, not ever. One doesn’t—that was her unspoken law and he obeyed it. So she remained, in the daily life of the apartment, as remote and distant as she had always been. He spent the middle part of the day with his notes and papers, mostly numbers and coded place names, while she, nose in the air, dusted, and ran the carpet sweeper over the rugs. She read every day after lunch, sitting properly in the corner of the sofa. Then, at 2:35, she went to her room. He followed a few minutes later, and found each time a different woman. In this bed, for this hour, everything was possible. It was as though, he thought, they owned in common a theater under a blanket where, every afternoon, they rehearsed and performed for an audience of themselves. Only themselves. The city would not know of it—at the conclusion of each scene she stuffed the blanket into her down-curved mouth and screamed like a Fury.

Wizna, on the Narew River, 7 March 1940. Encampment of the Nineteenth Infantry Division, Grenadierregiment, Wehrkreis XIV, Kassel. 5:30 A.M. The floodlights were turned out and the dawn fog pooled at the bases of the barbed-wire stanchions. The Russian troops were camped on the other side of the river; when they ran the engines of their tanks, the Wehrmacht soldiers could hear them.

Each day at dawn the garbage cans were brought out to the regimental dump on hand trucks; the contents spilled out with a spirited banging, the garbage detail working in shirtsleeves despite the bitter cold, cigarettes stuck in their mouths to mask the smell. First the dogs came, trotting, heads down, silent—precedence had been established in the first days of occupation and there were no more fights. Next came the old Polish women in their black shawls and dresses, each holding a stick to beat the dogs if they got too insistent.

Oberschützen Kohler and Stentz, the two privates first-class on guard duty, stood and watched the Polish women, dark figures in the morning fog, as they picked through the mounds of garbage. This guard duty was permanent, and they did it every morning. They didn’t like it, but they knew nobody cared about that, so they didn’t, either.

At the age of nineteen, though, it was a sad lesson. These women, fated to spend this early hour picking through the garbage of a German garrison in order to have something to eat—could they be so different from their own mothers and grandmothers? Kohler and Stentz were not barbarians, they were Wehrmacht riflemen, not so different from generations of infantry, Swedish or Prussian or Corsican or Austrian—the list was just too long—who had stood guard at camps on these Polish rivers back into the time of the Roman legions.

Kohler looked around, made sure there were no officers in the vicinity, then he tapped Stentz on the shoulder. Stentz whistled a certain clever way, and the crone showed up a few moments later like she always did. Her face, all seamed and gullied beneath wisps of thin, white hair, never stopped nodding, thank you, Excellency, thank you, Excellency, as she moved to the edge of the barbed wire. She reached out trembling hands and took the crusts of bread that Stentz got from a friend in the camp kitchen. These vanished into her clothing, kept separate from whatever was in the burlap sack she carried over her shoulder. She mumbled something—she had no teeth and was hard to understand, but it was certainly thankful. It wished God’s mercy on them. Heaven had seen, she was certain, this kindness to an old woman.

Later that morning she walked to the edge of her village to meet the man who bought rags. For him too she thanked God, because these were not very good rags, they were used, worn-out rags with very little rubbing and cleaning left in them. Still, he paid. She had gasoline-soaked rags from the motor pool, damp, foul rags that had been used to clean the kitchens, brown rags the soldiers used to polish their boots, a few shreds of yellow rag they used to shine brass with, and some of the oily little patches they used to clean their rifles.

The rag man bought everything, as he always did, and counted out a few coppers into her hand—just as he would for all the other old ladies who came to see him throughout the morning. Only a few coppers, but if you had enough of them they bought something. Everybody was in business now, she thought, it was always that way when the armies came. Too bad about the nice boys who gave her the bread. They would die, pretty soon, nice or not. Sad, she thought, how they never learned what waited for them in Poland.

7 March 1940, Budapest. The offices of Schlegel and Son, stock and commodity exchange brokers based in Zurich. Mr. Teleky, the brisk young transfer clerk, took the morning prices off the teletype just before noon and wrote them in chalk on a blackboard hung from the oak paneling in the customers’ room. Behind a wooden railing a few old men sat and smoked, bored and desultory. War was bad for the brokerage business, as far as Mr. Teleky could see. People put their money into gold coins and buried them in the basement—nobody believed in the futures market when nobody believed in the future.

Still, you acted as though everything would come out for the best—where would you go in the morning if you didn’t go to work? Mr. Teleky printed the morning numbers in a careful hand. A few customers were watching. Gottwald, the German Jew, trying to make the money he’d earned selling his wife’s jewelry go a little further. Standing next to him was Schaumer, the Austrian Nazi party functionary, who came here to speculate with money stolen from Viennese Jews. Then there was Varski, the old Polish diplomat who walked with a cane, proud and poor, earning a few francs one day and losing them the next. Mr. Teleky privately wondered why he bothered, but you couldn’t talk to the Poles, they were hardheaded and did what they wanted, you might as well argue with the sea.

So, what did he have for these august gentlemen? Cairo cotton was up a point, Brazilian coffee unchanged, London wool down a quarter and so was flax, iron ore had gained half a point, coal was off an eighth. Trading in manganese was suspended—the Germans meddling, no doubt. Mr. Teleky went on and on, rendering each symbol and number carefully, for whoever might want to come to the Schlegel offices and witness the fluctuations of world trade. Gottwald turned on his heel and left, then Schaumer. Varski the Pole stayed until the bitter end, then stood, nodded politely to Mr. Teleky, and went on about his daily business.