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Writer
Join Date: Aug 2005
Posts: 33
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"In the mornin', when we rise."
"in the mornin', when we rise."
This one's a piece of historical fiction set amidst the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 (one of the most tragic, "forgotten" moments of the second world war). Written as a series of episodes over two days and then intetionally left alone to keep a kind of raw, rambling and urgent tone, it's filled with plenty of run-on sentences, fragments, and other grammar no-no's. But I don't think it would work the same way as a cleaner, leaner work. The ending also feels a bit short and abrupt, but I didn't want to keep the story running too long after the resolution of the main conflict. Anyway, any thoughts are appreciated, whether they be ego-stroking or blunt, harsh criticism. Thanks.
From the outside, the building was altogether unremarkebable. Save the two inconspicuous fellows loitering suspiciously close to its entrance, it was no different from any other building on the street, which itself was little different from any other street in the city.
But on the inside, officials from the Home Army murmured to themselves, whispered amongst themselves, and busied their minds by pouring over maps and charts spread across tabletops, chairs, books, and, in some cases, the floor. They resembled squirrels munching on nuts. Behind them, telephonists and radio operators scribbled down random bits of news and information hoping to gain any advantage over a better-equipped and better-trained opponent. Farther back still, a once fat, now balding man codenamed Snail sat behind a wooden desk and supervised the entire operation through bent, gold-rimmed glasses, while sipping coffee flavoured rainwater.
A casual observer would have noticed the calm determination with which all this happened. But casual observers were extinct in Warsaw. And anyone with the time to notice the time to notice anything was already busy building roadblocks or scouting for food and medicine in nooks and crannies that multiplied by the hour to the tune of German artillery. Calm determination was merely self-preservation, and the need for that increased with every passing day. An uprising that was supposed to last a few days was now a few days into September, and help was not on the way.
A knock on the front door suddenly caught everyone’s breath and attention. Work stopped, telephones distanced themselves from their operator’s gaping mouths, and Snail rubbed his chin. After several moments dumb silence, a tall officer with a nasty shaving wound opened the door, revealing two small figures dressed in tattered clothes and holding a portable chess set. Snail motioned for the youngsters to enter. The bleeding man shut the door. The tension lifted.
“Marcin and Konrad?” said Snail as the two boys came forward and nodded. At 16, Marcin was the older but smaller and Konrad, nicknamed Kon, had a round, podgy face like Winston Churchill.
“My condolescences about your father,” Snail said sympathetically, “I hope you boys are made of the same mettle.”
Kon smiled but Marcin remained serious. “We’re here because you sent for us, sir,” he stated plainly.
Clearing his throat, Snail retrieved an envelope from his back pocket, made sure it was tightly sealed and offered it to Marcin.
“It’s vital that this reach the men in the Kampinos. Straight from Bor, from what I hear. Terribly vital order. Unfortunately, I can’t spare a single man to deliver it. Too many dead, and the rest bogged down in the Old City. Besides, who better to carry a message than a messenger?”
As Marcin took the white envelope from Snail’s outstretched hand, which was missing one whole finger and the tip of another, the general bustle in the building kicked back up to a normal din. A job was a job was a job.
When the boys turned to leave, Snail added, “I’d take to the sewers as much possible. It’s a bit like hell everywhere else.”
* * *
Back in the street, Marcin and Kon kept out of sight as much as possible. In a city where everything and everyone was smoke stained, half-collapsed and alive only through uncommon stubbornness, it was easier than in most.
They moved steadily and rarely spoke to each other while snaking through the City Centre, one of the rare areas of Warsaw still controlled by the Home Army. Sporadic sounds of distant gunfire kept their minds awake and eyes sharp. Their father had told them many times, “He who sees first dies last.” It was good advice.
Upon reaching the limits of the City Centre, Kon automatically took cover behind a pile of rubble while Marcin crawled into a bombed out building to survey the area. They had done this countless times and it had become instinctive. After several minutes, Marcin motioned for Kon to join him and they proceeded into danger.
* * *
Nestled beside his brother and looking through the second storey, glassless window of what was once a bakery, Kon saw the silhouettes of German troops moving on the horizon. Closer, a sewer entrance beckoned. However, alarmingly closer still was the dreaded German Goliath, a remote-controlled machine used to set explosives and whose only weakness was its electrical cord.
“I think we should go back,” Kon whispered.
“The closest entrance is on Leszno. It’s too far. And listen,” Marcin replied, as he pointed in the direction they had come from, where a firefight was audibly in progress.
“Then we’re surrounded. We should stay here until it clears out.”
“I think we can make the sewer entrance if I snip the Goliath.”
“We can wait,” Kon insisted.
“But the order can’t.”
With that, Marcin scrounged up the sharpest piece of rubble he could find, slid down the bakery stairs, and silently crawled outside. Kon watched from the upstairs window with dread as his older brother inched toward the small tank. As Marcin came closer and closer with each step, Kon leaned farther and farther out the opening. Finally, Marcin stopped within an arm’s length of the German robot, and Kon let out a long sigh. With a wink, Marcin began working at the thick cord. Within minutes, it was severed and the Goliath disabled.
Marcin flashed the signal that the job was complete, and started returning to the bakery when a bullet struck him down. Suppressing the urge to yell or move, Kon watched in silent, still horror as two German soldiers appeared from left of nowhere and approached Marcin’s writhing body. One calmly shot Marcin in the head, while the other reached down, ripped a gold chain from his neck and observed it in the dying sunlight, before stuffing it in his pocket.
Kon remained in the bakery until the soldiers disappeared, and then rushed down, making entirely too much noise, to his dead brother’s body. Tearfully, and without looking at Marcin’s face, he fished the white envelope, now slightly bloody, from inside Marcin’s shirt and, in exchange, took a chain from his own neck and put it around his brother’s. Then, determined and scared, he made a successful dash for a building across the plaza.
Once in relative safety, he slumped against a wall and mulled over his situation while unconsciously humming an incoherent version of the “Warszawianka”. The facts were clear enough: the road back to the City Centre was blocked, the sewers were much too dangerous to navigate on one’s own, and the order, whatever it was, still had to be delivered. The only rational solution, as irrational as it seemed, was to take an overland route through the city and into the Kampinos Forest. It had to be attempted.
* * *
Night fell slowly as Kon, keeping ever low to the ground, scurried like a rat from house to house, across streets, and always to the North. By the time his eyes started falling shut, he was in an area of Warsaw he didn’t immediately recognize, which meant that several kilometres had been covered since the evening. Feeling triumphant, and too tired to feel sorrow or fear, he was about to search out a safe place to rest when a metallic gleam caught his eye, and he hit the ground.
Covering his head and slithering toward any cover he could find, Kon held his breath and listened. Several tense moments passed, before he peeked out like a crocodile and saw nothing out of the ordinary, and no Germans. He scanned the area where the glint had been, laughed without making a sound, and walked forward, though still hunched over, toward the battered, label-less can nestled between several rocks that, with the moon, had caused him so much concern.
The can was cracked and about a third of its thick, liquid contents had leaked out, but Kon was nevertheless overjoyed at finding even a little bit of food. He had anticipated surviving on water only until reaching the Kampinos, so the discovery was a pleasant surprise. As he greedily sucked at the hole, he realized that he was most likely on the site of one of the few Allied airdrops to reach Warsaw. The thought that the food might have been Soviet almost made him spit it out. Almost.
Pressing underneath a toppled mass of concrete, his legs sore and his arms bruised, Kon promised himself that he would nap for no longer than a few hours. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
* * *
“Come on, wake up!” a voice screeched in broken Polish as a rifle butt dug into Kon’s side, causing his eyes to tear open and take in the imposing, frightful sight of the German soldier standing above him. It was morning.
Kon couldn’t force out any words, and his heart began pumping blood that he was sure was going to be leave his body entirely too soon.
“Are you stupid?” the soldier, whose dark complexion and black hair blended in with his grey uniform, barked, “Get up. Go before they find you.”
Kon hesitated, unsure if he had heard what he thought he had heard over the deafening sound in his ears. He stood up slowly, more than half convinced he would be kicked in the stomach while he did. But he wasn’t. The soldier simply watched, faintly smiled, and then pointed to what Kon believed was west.
“Go there,” the soldier said, as a bellowing cow exploded not too far away, causing Kon, and every other Pole who heard it, to shiver.
Kon nodded, still unsure if he wasn’t about to be shot in the back, turned and set off in the direction the soldier had pointed to. After several strides, he looked back and the soldier was gone. Several more strides later, shouting erupted where Kon had been sleeping mere minutes ago. Germans were coming through in numbers.
Kon quickened his step, heading west a while longer than necessary before turning north and toward his destination. On the move, he checked if the envelope was still under his shirt, which it was, smearing it with his dirty hand in the process.
As the soldiers’ voices intensified, Kon broke out into a sprint. He deftly manoeuvred through, over, and around the war debris until finding his way into c charred and an abandoned, though still very much intact, hospital. Inside, he slid around corners and hopped over fallen furniture until he came upon a small room where he could hide behind overturned bed frames. Letting his body cool down, he pricked up his ears, sensitive to the sound of marching boots, but heard nothing but a soft, weak crying.
Overcome with curiosity, and disregarding safety, he followed the sobs down a long hall with once white walls, and into a chapel where the smell of death hit him right in the jaw, accompanied by the weird sight of a mass of bodies, mostly old men and women, some eerily still, hovering in front of a reproduction of The Black Madonna. The wailing was coming from the mouth of an elderly woman whose sweaty face housed eyes that threatened to fall out of her head. The others paid her no mind. Some were praying, others resting, most dead.
Kon swatted a fly that had landed on his cheek, one of many in the chapel that created a terrible buzzing, before realizing that he could do nothing to help these people. He backed out of the room without being noticed, and exited the hospital with a dimmed hope but a renewed sense of purpose.
* * *
The transition from the untamed urban setting of Warsaw to the urbane forests of the Kampinos was startling. From a landscape of destruction, Kon had entered one of nature and life. The peace was exhilarating, and he cherished it by stretching out his arms and letting out a loud, primal yawn.
* * *
The Polish resistors, or “bandits” as they came to be called by the Soviets, in the Kampinos were surprisingly easy to find. If they wanted to be. Kon was within their midst after no more than a stroll through the forest, although he had suspected that they knew he was coming before he did.
Their commanding officer, to whom Kon was led, was a man with a leathery face, and small sharp teeth. His frightening appearance, however, hid the jovial personality and jolly mood with which he greeted Kon.
“Welcome, city friend,” he said, “Share your tidings with us!”
Kon took out the envelope, now white and red, stained with blood and mud, and pressed it into the officer’s hands, which ripped it open and carefully slid out the paper on which the order was written. The officer smiled and read it, “Simply ‘No’.”
“Your journey has no doubt been a long and treacherous one. Take a seat, and have some food and drink. And rest!”
As Kon did, the officer ordered for a field radio to be brought. The boy who did was only slighly older than Kon. The radio itself was heavily modified and looked like it was assembled from spare parts and a telephone receiver. A long cable ran from its back and disappeared deep into the forest. “Just two cans and a wire,” the officer snickered, “But it works.”
He put the receiver to his mouth and—an explosion suddenly rocked the forest floor, and chaos erupted!
Billows of dust mixed with colourful leaves consumed everything. Bodies collided with each other, running in all directions at once. A Stuka let out its hideous screech as another explosion shook the surroundings. Quickly followed by a third.
Kon rolled to the ground, his eyes on where the officer had been a few seconds ago, but where now only the radio remained.
Somewhere, a man screamed, “Where’s the messenger boy? He was followed! The traitor! Kill him!”
Moving forward with eyes burning from the dust, Kon grabbed the radio receiver and hoped beyond all hope that it was still working. It was, and a voice called through the static, barely audible over the noise all around, “Come in? Come in?”
Kon yelled into the receiver, “Kampinos Forest. We’re being attacked. Officers dead. Casualties high.”
A brief pause.
Then the voice on the other end, “Do you have the order? I repeat, do you have the order?”
Kon coughed, the dust and smoke choked him mercilessly, as he bellowed, “The order is ‘No’! The order is ‘No’!”
Another pause, followed by, “Order received... God grant you strength.”
Then the radio went dead.
Kon threw the receiver down, rubbed his eyes until they were red, and stumbled in whatever direction he was facing. He could have been going in circles. More explosions. He fell every few steps, tripping over fallen soldiers and trees, his knees and elbows scraping against teeth and branches. He knew that if he lost consciousness, he’d die. All he had to do was stay alert, stay awake, and stay alive.
* * *
Gasping for breath, Kon barely noticed when the air finally began to clear and the sounds to subside. The first sensation he felt was the blast of cool air against his skin.
Looking around through tear filled eyes, he noticed that he was alone and no longer in the Kampinos Forest. His blind scramble had brought him back to the periphery of Warsaw. The city clung to him. Stubborn like its defenders, it refused to give in to anyone. Faced with the even the direst circumstance, it answered everything thrown at it with one simple and direct word:
“No.”
Kon hopped a wooden fence and started making his way back to the City Centre.
The battle for Warsaw was not yet over.
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