De Milja and the supervisor climbed the steps into the coach. The captain’s flashlight lit up the aisle; wooden floorboards, buckled and gray with age, frayed wicker seats—once yellow, now brown— chicken feathers, a forgotten basket. From the other end of the car came a deep, heavy growl. What are you doing here? de Milja thought. “Come,” he said.
There was a moment of silence, then another growl. This time it didn’t mean prepare to die—more like not yet.
“Come here.” You know you have to.
A huge head appeared in the aisle, thrust cautiously from a hiding place behind a collapsed seat. De Milja masked the flashlight beam and the dog came reluctantly, head down, to accept its punishment. To have deserved what had happened to it the last few days, it reasoned, it must have been very, very bad. De Milja went down on one knee and said, “Yes, it’s all right, it’s all right.”
It was a male Tatra, a sheepdog related to the Great Pyrenees. De Milja sank his hands into the deep hair around the neck, gripped it hard and tugged the head toward him. The dog knew this game and twisted back against de Milja, but the man’s hands were too strong. Finally the dog butted his head against the captain’s chest, took a huge breath and sighed so deeply it was almost a growl.
“Perhaps you could find some water,” de Milja said to the supervisor.
His family had always had dogs, kept at the manor house of the estate in the Volhynia, in eastern Poland. They hunted with them, taking a wild boar every autumn in the great forest, a scene from a medieval tapestry. The Tatra was an off-white, like most mountain breeds, a preferred color that kept the shepherd from clubbing his own dog when they fought night-raiding wolves. De Milja put his face into the animal’s fur and inhaled the sweet smell.
The yard supervisor returned, a bowl filled to the brim with milk held carefully in his hands. This was a small miracle, but “he must be hungry” was all he had to say about it.
“What’s your name?” de Milja asked.
“Koski.”
“Can you keep a big dog, Mr. Koski?”
The yard supervisor thought a moment, then shrugged and said, “I guess so.”
“It will take some feeding.”
“We’ll manage.”
“And this kind of coach?” The captain nodded at it. “Have you got six or so?”
“All you want.”
“Same color. Yellow, with red around the windows.”
Koski tried to conceal his reaction. The middle of a war, Germans at the outskirts of the city, and this man wanted “the same color.” Well, you did what you had to do. “If you can wait for daylight, we’ll freshen up the paint.”
“No, it’s good just like that. We’ll need a coal tender, of course, and a locomotive. A freight locomotive.”
Koski stared at his shoes. They had improvised, borrowed parts, kept running all sorts of stock that had no business running—but freight locomotives were a sore subject. Nobody had those. Well, he had one. Well and truly hidden. Was this the moment? “Six red-andyellow coaches,” he said at last. “Tender, freight locomotive. That it?”
De Milja nodded. “In about, say, an hour.”
Koski started to shout, something like can’t you see I’m doing the best I can? But a covert glance at de Milja changed his mind—he wasn’t someone you would say that to, much less shout it.
De Milja looked to be in his late thirties, but there was something about him, some air of authority, that was much older than that. He had dark hair, cut short and cut very well, and a pale forehead that people noticed. Eyes the color—according to his wife—of a February sea, shifting somewhere between gray and green. His face was delicate, arrogant, hard; people said different things. In any event, he was a very serious man, that was obvious, with hands bigger than they ought to have been, and blunt fingers. He wore no insignia, just a brown raincoat over a gray wool sweater. There was a gun, somewhere. He stood, relaxed but faintly military, waiting for the yard supervisor to agree to make up his train in an hour. This man came, Koski thought, from the war, and when the war went away, if it ever did, so would he and all the others like him.
The supervisor nodded yes, of course he could have his train. The dog stopped lapping at the bowl, looked up and whined, a drop of milk falling from his beard. A yellow flame burst from the hillside above the yards and the flat crump of an explosion followed. The brush burned for a few seconds, then the fire died out as smoke and dust drifted down the hill.
Koski had flinched at the explosion, now he jammed his shaking hands deeper into his pockets. “Not much left to bomb here,” he said.
“That wasn’t a bomb,” de Milja said. “It was a shell.”
17 September, 3:50 a.m. Freight locomotive, coal tender, six passenger cars from a market-day local. The yard supervisor, the Tatra by his side, watched as it left the railyards. Then it crossed Praga, a workers’ suburb across the Vistula from Warsaw, and headed for the city on the single remaining railroad bridge. Captain de Milja stood in the cab of the locomotive and stared down into the black water as the train clattered across the ties.
For a crew, Koski had done the best he could on short notice. A fireman, who would shovel coal into the steam engine’s furnace, and a conductor would be joining the train in Warsaw. The engineer, standing next to de Milja, had been, until that night, retired. He was a sour man, with a double chin and a lumpy nose, wearing an engineer’s cap, well oiled and grimed, and a pensioner’s blue cardigan sweater with white buttons.
“Fucking shkopy,” he said, using the Polish word for Germans equivalent to the French boche. He peered upriver at the blackened skeleton of the Poniatowski Bridge. “I had all I wanted of them in ’17.”
The Germans had marched into Warsaw in 1917, during the Great War. De Milja had been sixteen, about to enter university, and while his family had disliked the German entry into Poland, they’d seen one positive side to it: Russian occupiers driven back east where they belonged.
The firebox of the locomotive glowed faintly in the dark, just enough light to jot down a few figures on the iron wall. He had to haul a total of 88,000 pounds: 360 people—43,000 pounds of them if you figured young and old, fat and thin, around 120 pounds a person. Sharing the train with 44,530 pounds of freight.
So, 88,000 pounds equaled 44 tons. Figuring two tons to a normal freight car, a locomotive could easily pull twenty cars. His six passenger coaches would be heavy, but that didn’t matter—they had no suspension to speak of, they’d roll along if the locomotive could pull them.
“What are you scribbling?” The irritation of an old man. To the engineer’s way of thinking, a locomotive cab wasn’t a place for writing.
De Milja didn’t answer. He smeared the soft pencil jotting with his palm, put the stub of pencil back in his pocket. The sound of the wheels changed as the train came off the bridge and descended to a right-of-way cut below ground level and spanned by pedestrian and traffic bridges: a wasteland of tracks, signals, water towers, and switching stations. Was the 44,530 correct? He resisted the instinct to do the figures again. Seven hundred and twelve thousand ounces always made 44,530 pounds, which, divided into five-pound units, always made 8,906. It is mathematics, he told himself, it is always the same.
“You said Dimek Street bridge?”
“Yes.”
The steam brake hissed and the train rolled to a stop. From a stairway that climbed the steep hillside to street level came a flashed signal. De Milja answered with his own flashlight. Then a long line of shadowy figures began to move down the stairs.