The Polish Officer Read Online Free PDF Page A

Milja that he’d fought the Bolsheviks in 1921, and was prepared to send a significant number of Germans straight to hell if he got the opportunity.
    As the train chugged through the Polish countryside, the conductor went from car to car and made a little speech. “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please. Soon we will be stopping at Pilava; those who wish to get off the train are invited to do so. However, this train will not be returning to Warsaw, it is going all the way to Lvov, with brief stops at Lublin and Tomaszow. The military situation in the south is unclear, but the railroad will take you as far as you wish to travel. Passage is without charge. Thank you.”
    From the last car, de Milja watched the crowd carefully. But the reaction was subdued: a number of family conferences conducted in urgent whispers, an avalanche of questions that God himself, let alone a train conductor, couldn’t have answered, and more than a little head shaking and grim smiling at the bizarre twists and turns that life now seemed to take. The Polish people, de Milja realized, had already absorbed the first shock of war and dislocation; now it was a question of survival; ingenuity, improvisation, and the will to live through catastrophe and see the other side of it. So when the train stopped at Pilava, only a few people got off.
The farther from Warsaw the better—
what consensus there was among the passengers seemed to follow that line of reasoning.
    For a time, the countryside itself proved them right. South of Pilava there was no war, only a rainy September morning, a strip of pale sky on the horizon, harvested fields, birch groves, and tiny streams. The air smelled of damp earth and the coming October. The leaves a little dry now, and rustling in the wind.
    De Milja’s mother was the Countess Ostrowa, and her brothers, known always as “the Ostrow uncles,” had taken it upon themselves to teach him about life; about dogs and horses and guns, servants and mistresses. They were from another time—a vanished age, his father said—but his mother adored them and they lived hard, drunken, brutal, happy lives and never bothered to notice they were in the wrong century.
    His father was an aristocrat of another sort: second son of a family occupied for generations with polite commerce, senior professor of economics at Jagiello university. He was an arid man, tall and spare, who had been old all his life and who, in his heart, didn’t really think very much of the human mammal. The vaguely noble name de Milja, pronounced
de Milya,
he shooed away with his hand, admitting there was a village in Silesia, some forty miles from where the family originated, called Milja, but the aristocratic formation he ascribed to “some Austro-Hungarian nonsense my grandfather meddled with” and would never say any more about it. Exiled to the top floor of the family house in Warsaw, he lived by the light of a green-glass lamp amid piles of German periodicals and stacks of woody paper covered with algebraic equations rendered in fountain pen.
    So de Milja’s world, from its earliest days, had a cold north and a hot south, and he spent his time going back and forth; as a boy, as a young man, maybe, he thought, forever. The uncles laughing and roaring downstairs, throwing chicken bones in the fire, grabbing the maids’ bottoms, and passing out on the sofas with their boots on the pillows. Up two flights, a family of storks nested among the chimneys on the opposite roof and his father explained spiders and thunder.
    They’d married de Milja off when he was nineteen. The families had known each other forever, he and Helena were introduced, left alone, and encouraged to fall in love. She probably saw the wisdom of all this much more clearly than he did—gazed at his belt buckle, kissed him with swollen lips and a hand on his jaw, and he was hers. Two weeks before the wedding, his favorite Ostrow uncle had taken him into a disused parlor, the furniture