They shook hands, his father settled himself at the table, noting the rough wood with hearts and initials carved in it, the water glass of vodka, wilted beet slices on a plate, and a saltshaker. “How’ve you been?” he asked.
De Milja smiled. “Not so bad. You?”
That was ignored. “Most thoughtful of you, that package. We ate the sausage, and sent the aspirin and the needles on to your mother and sister. They are in Hungary, I believe Sonya told you. Near Eger, in a sort of tumbledown castle—decrepit nobility wearing earmuffs at the dinner table, very Old World, I’m sure.”
“I think you should join them.”
“Me? What would I do for a library? Besides, I still have students, a few anyhow. As long as they show up, I will.”
“But Hungary is safe, you think.”
The professor hesitated. “Yes. They’re just now Germany’s great friends. Maybe later it will turn out they loved England all along. In their secret heart, you see.”
“And the house?”
“Cold as a donkey’s dick.” A sly smile bloomed for a moment— shocked you, did I? “I’ve got newspapers stuffed in every crack, but it doesn’t seem to help.”
“Look, why don’t you let me find you an apartment—”
The professor cut him short. “Really, you needn’t bother.” Then he leaned closer and lowered his voice. “But there is something I want you to do.” He paused, then said, “Am I correct in assuming you’ve been recruited into the underground? That you remain under military orders?”
De Milja nodded yes.
“Are you anything important?”
No reaction, at first, then a slight shrug: important?
But the professor was not to be fended off. “Don’t be coy. Either you can talk to the leadership or you can’t.”
“I can.” De Milja felt his ears getting warm.
His father searched his face, then decided he was telling the truth— it really was some other boy who’d thrown the chalk—reached into his briefcase and surfaced with three pages of densely written pen-andink script. “For the right person, this would be of consequence,” he said.
“What is it?”
“A study.” His father stared at it a moment. “The research is thin. I merely talked to a few of my old students, had a coffee, a little gossip. But they’re smart—that I know for a certainty because I made them prove it more than once—and well placed. Not at the very top of the civil service but just below it, where they actually read the paper and make the decisions and tell the boss what to say. Anyhow, it’s the best that I could do, an outline, but useful to the right people.”
He paused for effect. “The point is, I’d like to be asked to do more.” He met de Milja’s eyes. “Is that clear? Because what I have in mind is far more ambitious, an ongoing study that—”
A sudden commotion interrupted him; two of the local princes had reversed their pool cues and were snarling at each other while friends held them back. When de Milja looked back at his father he caught him with a particular expression on his face: irritation, disappointment, why did he have to see his son in places like this? Why wasn’t it a faculty dining room or an intellectuals’ café? The response was irrational—he would have admitted that—but it was the truth of his heart and for a moment he’d forgotten to hide it.
De Milja took the papers from his father’s hand. “I can only promise that it will be read.”
“Well, naturally. I don’t expect more than that.”
De Milja glanced at his watch. “I’d like to spend more time, but if you’re going to get back home before curfew . . .”
His father stood quickly. “You’ll be in touch?” he said.
“Through Sonya.”
They said good-bye; it was awkward, as their time together always was. They shook hands, both started to say something, shook hands again, then parted. At the door, his father turned and looked back; de Milja started to wave but he was too late. The raincoat and briefcase disappeared through the doorway, and de Milja never saw him again.
It was cold in Warsaw that night, there was ice in Captain de Milja’s basement room; a rust-colored stalactite that hung from a connection in the water pipe that ran across his ceiling. A janitor had once lived here, his church calendar—little girls praying with folded hands—and his French movie star torn from a magazine, a Claudette Colbert look-alike, were still stuck on nails in the wall. Cold enough to die, the captain thought. Wondered how cold that actually had to be. He wore an army greatcoat, a scarf, and wool gloves as he sat on the edge of a cot and by the light of a candle read the report his father had written.
He read it twice, then again. The writing was plain enough, and the facts were not obscure—just a listing of things governments did on a daily basis; a few administrative procedures, some new policies and guidelines. Really, not very interesting. But look again, he told himself. Principles of the German Occupation of Poland: 10 December 1939. There wasn’t anything in the report that Colonel Broza and the directorate didn’t know—all his father and his informants had done was to gather up what was available and synthesize it. Three pages. Four principles:
1) Calculated devaluation of the currency. 2) Replacement of the judiciary. 3) Direction of labor. 4) Registration. That was all—the real, arid horror of the thing lay in its simplicity. The essential mechanics of slavery, it turned out, weren’t at all complicated. With registration you knew who and what and where everyone was—a Jew or a metallurgical engineer, it was all filed for future reference. With the direction of labor they worked where you wanted, and had to meet production norms you set. With your own judiciary, you controlled their behavior with their own police. And with devaluation of the currency you “bought” everything they owned or produced, and then you starved them to death.
De Milja passed the report to Colonel Broza in Room 9. The colonel put on his reading glasses and thumbed the pages over. “Yes,” he said, and “mmm,” and finally “thank you.” That was all.
But there was something much more troubling on the agenda that day: the man who had printed the RAF leaflets had been arrested in his shop by the Gestapo. “Find out about it,” Broza said. “Then see Grodewicz.”
He went to visit the printer’s wife. They lived in a quite good neighborhood—surprisingly good for a man with a small job shop— broad avenues with trees, solid apartment houses with fire-escape ladders on the alley side, toilets in the apartments instead of the usual privies in the courtyard, and a building superintendent, a heavy woman in a kerchief, polite and not a bit drunk. De Milja asked her about the family. She took notice of his warm coat, and heavy, well-made shoes and raised her palms to heaven: didn’t know, didn’t want to get involved.
The apartment was on the seventh floor, the top of the building. De Milja trudged up the endless staircase, the marble steps gray from years of scrubbing with Javel water. He stopped to get his breath at the door, then knocked. The wife was a small woman, tepid, harmless, in a faded apron. They sat at the kitchen table. “I don’t know what he did,” she said.
“What about the neighbors?”
“Mostly they only knew me. And I never made an enemy, Mister.”
He believed her. “And him?”
“He was away, you know. Here and there. Some wives, they know when their husband breathes in, when he breathes out. Not me. You couldn’t do that with him.”
“What did you imagine?”