A Gestapo car, a black Grosser Mercedes with headlights taped down to slits because of the blackout, honked at them to get out of the way. They stood with their backs against the wall, faces averted, as it bumped past, the red taillights disappearing into the swirling snow.
“You see?” Chomak said, when they were walking again. “I could have flagged them down. But I didn’t, did I?”
At an arched railroad bridge, where the street dipped below the track, de Milja signaled to stop, and the three men stood by the curved wall and stamped their feet to keep warm. It was dark under the bridge and the snow was blowing right through it.
“Hell of a night for a meeting,” Chomak said, a good-natured laugh in his voice.
De Milja heard the sound of a train approaching in the distance. Bending over to protect the match from the wind, he lit a cigarette, then cupped his palm to shield the glow. “Face the wall,” he said to Chomak.
“What did you say?”
“Face the wall.”
Chomak turned slowly and faced the wall. The approaching train was moving slowly because of the snowstorm. “It’s not right,” Chomak said. “For a Jew thief. Some little sneak from the gutter. Not right.”
“Why would you do a thing like that?” de Milja said. “Were you in trouble?”
De Milja could see that Chomak’s legs were trembling, and he thought he might collapse. He looked at the operative and their eyes met for a moment as the train came closer. The sound of the wheels thundered in the tunnel as it passed overhead, Chomak bounced off the wall, then sagged back against it, his hand groping for a hold on the smooth surface. Very slowly, he slid down to his knees, then toppled over on his side. The operative straddled him and fired once into his temple.
January 1940. The French planes did not come. Perhaps, people thought, they are not going to come. Not ever. In the streets of Paris, the Communist party and its supporters marched and chanted for peace, for dignity, for an end to war. Especially this unjust war against Germany—Russia’s ally. On the Maginot Line, quartered in a schoolhouse near Strasbourg, Private Jean-Paul Sartre of the artillery’s meteorological intelligence service sent balloons aloft, reported on the speed and direction of the wind to gunners who never fired a shot, and wrote in his journal that “Life is the transcendent, psychic object constructed by human reality in search of its own foundation.”
In Great Britain, German magnetic mines had taken a considerable toll of merchant shipping, and rationing had been established for butter, sugar, bacon, and ham. Winston Churchill spoke on the radio, and told the nations of Europe that “each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured.”
As for the United States, it remained stern and unrelenting in the maintenance of a “moral embargo” it had declared against Germany.
Meanwhile, Warsaw lived in ice. The calendar froze—a winter of ten thousand days was at hand. And as the hope of help from friends slowly waned, it became the time of the prophecies. Sometimes typed, sometimes handwritten, they were everywhere and, whether casually dismissed or secretly believed, were passionately followed. A battlefield of contending specters: rune-casters and biblical kings, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa and Nostradamus, the fire at the center of the earth, the cycles of the moon, the springs of magic water, the Apocrypha—the fourteen known books and the fifteenth, only just now revealed. The day was coming, it couldn’t quite be said exactly when, but blood would flow from stones, the dead would rise from their graves, the lame would walk, the blind would see, and the fucking shkopy would get out of Poland.
At a time when national consolation was almost nonexistent, the prophecies helped, strange as some of them were, and the intelligence service of the Polish underground certainly wrote their share. Meanwhile, hiding in their apartments from winter and the Gestapo, the people of Warsaw listened—on pain of death if caught—to the BBC on illicit radios. And they also studied English. That winter in Warsaw, an English grammar couldn’t be had for love or money. Even so, the joke everybody was telling around town went like this: the pessimists are learning German, the optimists are learning English, while the realists, in January of 1940, were said to be learning Russian.
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.”