Tensions between Poland and Germany ebbed and flowed throughout the summer of 1939, but the spirits of the Polish people remained high. The phrase “Remember, Adolf! Poles are NOT Czechs!” was oft repeated, and maps appeared at kiosks showing the Polish flag flying over German cities such as Danzig and Stettin. At the bottom were emblazoned the words, “We are not looking for war! But if war is forced on us, we shall take back all the ancient Polish territories!”
Polish radio announced a public subscription to build a thousand warplanes. The radio also reported France and Britain had prevailed upon Warsaw not to order a general mobilization, lest it “aggravate” tensions.
Abrienda stopped at a kiosk where an unusually large crowd had gathered to buy newspapers and discuss the headlines.
“Good morning, young lady,” said a distinguished-looking gentleman beside her. Abrienda returned his greeting and saw he wore the lapel pin of the Polish Legion that fought alongside Austro-Hungary against the Russians during the Great War.
“You speak Polish?” he asked with a slight surprise.
“Yes, but l am Czech.” Abrienda replied.
“Forgive me,” he said, and after Abrienda replied there was nothing to forgive, he pointed to one of the maps adorned with Polish flags. “What do you say to that?”
“That Germany is a criminal nation and I hope it comes to pass,” she answered.
“So do I,” he said, gazing at the maps.
“You don’t sound very confident.” She noticed what she believed to be a distinct German accent. “Are you from Silesia?”
The man smiled. “Qui voulez-vous qui vive?” he replied accompanied by a short laugh. “You are most observant. Yes, my family is Polish but from German Silesia. I joined the Pilsudski’s Polish Legion and moved my family to Polish Silesia. So, I suppose you could say we are both foreigners here…”
He stopped and smiled again. “To some extent.”
“Vous avez mes excuses, monsieur,” Abrienda replied.
“Not at all. As for being confident, our conversation has reminded of something our late general and president Piłsudski once said. ‘To be defeated and not submit is victory; to be victorious and rest on one’s laurels is defeat’.” The man doffed his hat.
“It’s been a pleasure, young lady,” he said and continued his stroll along the street.
Abrienda was heading for a 2 pm meeting with representatives of the as yet unrecognized Czechoslovak Government in Exile located in Paris. She chose to walk to the meeting through the old city from her suite in the Imperial Hotel, its glass and brass décor being associated in her mind with cleanliness and modernity.
Nika had stayed in Krakow two weeks longer than Viktor had originally allotted, telegramming Viktor she was deadly ill and must stay longer to recover, a deception Sergei helped by endorsing her story when he returned to Budapest. Nika was thus able to delay her return to Hungary until the middle of May when Viktor ordered her to return for a special assignment in Romania.
Having regained the lands lost to Czechoslovakia twenty years before, the Hungarians now longed to take Transylvania back from Romania. Viktor was confident Germany would oblige Regent Horthy’s in this but first required Nika to deal in her immutable way with a government official sent by Bucharest to speed up the integration of Transylvania into the Romanian polity.
Nika left Krakow for Budapest in the first week of June. Abrienda had not heard from her since.
The venue for Abrienda’s afternoon meeting was a hotel nearby. When she arrived and gave the room number where the meeting would take place, Abrienda asked for a porter to escort her so there so would be someone who witnessed her being greeted at the door and entering the room. Though she had powerful friends in Poland, the people she was meeting were Czech and decidedly unfriendly.
Throughout their history, Czechs had shown a proclivity for eliminating their political enemies by throwing them out of windows located several stories above ground and Abrienda did not put defenestration past the men she was to meet. Accordingly, along with a small attaché case, she had thought to bring a Czech vz.24 pistol resting securely in the left pocket of her suit jacket, a weapon she considered inelegant but extremely useful in this sort of situation due to its small size.
When they came to the door, Abrienda asked the porter for his name and requested his return in thirty minutes and that he not leave without her. The porter agreed but when she went to tip him in advance for this service he demurred.
“Sorry, lady, but you offend me even though I am sure without meaning to do so,” he replied. “I would gladly do it regardless. If you think the people inside might do you harm, even more so.”
“You married? Have children?” Abrienda asked, and when he nodded, put the 50 złoty note in his hand.
“Take it for them, as my small tribute to Polish gallantry.”
“A quality equally the pride and curse of our nation,” he replied, accepted with a slight bow of the head and knocked on the door.
The door opened and Colonel Janos Hlavatý of the former Czechoslovak army greeted Abrienda and invited her into the room where she joined two other men, Konstantin Paleček, a youngish lawyer from Moravia, and the Socialist politician Bořek Schovajsa, all three men being long-time friends of Beneš. Abrienda had expected the men in the room to be political enemies and was not disappointed, two of them being extremely bitter ones.
Abrienda chose a chair beside a small coffee table. She now knew the meeting had little chance of success and decided to get in the first blow. Opening the case she withdrew three sheets of paper laying them neatly one upon the other on the table.
The uncomfortable silence was broken by Colonel Hlavatý.
“We are pleased to see you, Miss de Soza. President Beneš sends you his regards and heartfelt congratulations on your escape.”
“Beneš isn’t with you? Ah yes… too busy grading exams in the safety of his office in, ah yes, I remember, the University of Chicago, U. S of A?” Abrienda scoffed.
“President Beneš has returned to Europe,” Schovajsa said. “He wishes…”
“Ex-president,” Abrienda interrupted. “Beneš resigned and fled to England and then America instead of returning to lead the people he betrayed at Munich. Sadly, the hundreds of thousands of people whose ancestral homes he negotiated away and instantly became refugees inside their own country didn’t have that choice.”
“He is in Paris, organizing a Czechoslovak government in exile.” Colonel Hlavatý continued, but Abrienda interrupted again.
“But the French are proving difficult, no? Still, I’m glad he’s made it back at least as far as France. He can finally greet the 3,000 or so Czech and Slovak soldiers who, after making their way to Poland under much less comfortable and far more dangerous conditions than their former president in the hopes of creating a new Czechoslovak Legion were shipped to Marseilles on freighters kindly provided by France so they could be enlisted in their Foreign Legion and fight not Germans but the Berbers in Morocco, who haven’t been done us much harm lately.”
She desperately wanted to smoke but decided she needed to keep her hands free.
“We’re no longer a country. We’re a comedy.”
“You were always remarkably well-informed, Miss de Soza,” Paleček said. “How is it you came by this information?”
“It was simple, really. When the Germans sent a delegation to take over our consulate here, the staff being real patriots refused to surrender the building. When they ran out of money, I started paying their salaries in honor of my father’s tenure as Consul until other arrangements could be made. It turned out to be very much like having my own diplomatic reading library.”
Abrienda took the first document from the table. “For example. I was able to discover exactly how much military equipment Germany gained when they demobilized our army. In total, the German army acquired 2,175 artillery guns, 469 tanks, 500 anti-aircraft guns, 43,000 machine guns, 1,090,000 rifles, 114,000 pistols, about a billion rounds of ammunition and three million anti-aircraft shells, enough to arm half the Wehrmacht and every bullet and vehicle paid for with the tax money of the Czechoslovak people now under German occupation.”
She returned the paper to her case and took up the second. “This one is somewhat more personal. Let me read. ‘Miss de Soza’s single-handed ’rescue’ of our consulate in Krakow is a continuing embarrassment for to us. She has always been a woman of headstrong disposition, whose Fascistic political sentiments coupled with the fortune stolen by her father render her a permanent, lurking menace to the Republic. A reputed morphine addict stemming from her friendship with Hermann Göring, Miss de Soza possess such dubious moral values she counts mercenaries and brigands like General Gajda (with whom she was romantically involved when she was as young as sixteen) amongst her closest friends, sold her two homes to the German military attaché in Prague, met with her family friend Captain Pavlik just before he decided to resist the German occupation of the Čajánek’s Barracks, then crossed the Polish border moments ahead of the German army aided by two White Russians, one of whom being the arms dealer and mercenary Ilairy Dementyev, and a woman of equally dubious character who is most probably an infamous Hungarian agent but most certainly her illicit lover…’ and so on and so on. The document is signed ’Edvard Beneš.” Abrienda returned the paper to her case.
“You are right, gentlemen. I am remarkably well-informed. Money buys information. I also I am corrupt by nature, making it easier for me to corrupt others. I must say, dear Edvard’s opinion of my character might have stung had it come from somebody who had a worthwhile character of his own. While he was being feted in Chicago, I was still in our country dealing with the fact I was number 13 on the German arrest, or rather, death list. I see he calls me a ‘Fascist’, but he’s done that before and not worth answering. What I find interesting is that his feline condemnations of me are much harsher than anything he has ever said about Jozef Stalin or any of his henchmen, such as that loathsome toad acting as Stalin’s ambassador to Great Britain.”
Abrienda lifted the third page from the table.
“Then again, there may be a reason for such reticence. According to the recorded minutes of a meeting he had with Ambassador Maisky at some posh hotel in London, the future Czechoslovakia he hopes to lead must have ‘a common border’ with the Soviet Union and is willing to give away the province of Ruthenia to insure it does.”
She pretended to scan the paper. “Ahh… here it is. ’The future existence of Czechoslovakia can be secured only based on a close and inseparable liaison with the Soviet Union, such as in a federation. To bring this about, it is indispensable that Czechoslovakia have a common border with the Soviet Union by ceding Ruthenia. We must become Russia’s neighbors and the Republic’s borders pushed eastwards!“
Abrienda placed this last document in her attaché case and closed it. “‘Federation with the Soviet Union?’ Czechoslovakia will one day be freed from the Germans so it can become a ‘republic’ within the equally monstruous Soviet Union.? I wonder what Paris might sat to that?”
“We came here to offer you the privilege of serving your country as a member of the Czechoslovak government in exile,” Paleček declared sententiously. “I see now we came in vain.”
“Completely in vain,” Abrienda responded. “I have no intention of joining a clique of gangsters that plan to hand over part of our country to a foreign power allied to the one currently occupying our capital!”
“Your decision suits me,” snarled Schovajsa. “I don’t care to ally myself with Fascists!”
“Nor I with Communists,” she shot back.
“I am a Socialist,” Schovajsa retorted.
Abrienda’s upper lip curled in disgust. “As my father would have said, ‘A distinction without a difference.’ Good day, ‘gentlemen’.”
“You are welcome to leave, but without that last document,” said Colonel Hlavatý. “Insist on taking it, and you leave us no choice.”
He started to rise, but Abrienda leapt up, knocking the table over with her knee, drew her gun and pointing it at the colonel. “Vous voyez, chéri? I now leave you with a choice.”
“You’re making a big mistake,” Hlavatý replied.
There was a knock at the door. Abrienda smiled.
“Not as big as the one you nearly made!” She picked up her case, slowly backed up towards the door and opened it to reveal the porter standing outside.
“Good afternoon, lady,” he said. “Exactly thirty minutes, as you requested.” He viewed the tableau before him and motioned to the gun. “I don’t think you’ll need that now.”
Major Hlavatý was incredulous. “You’re going to let this woman pull a gun on us and do nothing?”
“I think, yes. ‘Ładnemu we wszystkim ładnie!’“ he said, again giving Abrienda a short bow of his head.
“Thank you, sir,” she acknowledged, still holding the gun on the others. “That means, ‘Someone pretty looks pretty in everything’!”
“We know what it means!” Schovajsa snarled. “Congratulations! You managed to shove us into your pocket today, but next time you won’t be so lucky… Asian whore!”
Abrienda felt her grip on the gun tighten. She waited a few beats, then smiled and stuck the gun back inside her suit pocket. “Au revoir, messieurs, but not goodbye! If we ever get our country back, it will be because of people like me, and I leave you to guess what will happen to people like you then?”
She turned to leave with the porter, but turned again at the doorway and pointed at Schovajsa.
“The next time we meet, I will kill you.”
“Be so good as to send someone else to Romania the next time you want a problem there to disappear.”
“That is maybe the fifth time you asked me that,” Viktor said. Nika closed her eyes.
“I know… doesn’t seem to get me anywhere, does it?”
Nika was tired, though her recent assignment in Romania had been a success. King Carol’s minister and right-hand man, Armand Călinescu, was a strong supporter of both the monarchy and its alliance with France and Poland. This was anathema to Romania’s pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic Iron Guard, who tried and failed twice to assassinate Călinescu. One morning, an ethnic Hungarian living in the city of Timisoara travelled to Budapest with word of yet another plot on Călinescu’s life, which he would happily betray in return for money and asylum in Hungary. Viktor met with Admiral Horthy, who reasoned the only way Hungary would ever regain Transylvania was if Romanian remained aligned with Germany’s enemies, and so it was in Hungary’s best interests to prevent the pro-German Iron Guard from taking power. With no trust between Budapest and Bucharest and seeing no advantage in sharing what they knew with Berlin, the Regent ordered Viktor to send someone to derail the attempt.
Though married the plot’s ringleader, Cosmin Ardelean, was a notorious philanderer and did not take Nika long to attract his attention. After two weeks of being romanced Nika at last appeared to give in and Cosmin invited her to the countryside villa his position in the Iron Guard entitled him.
One of Cosmin’s bodyguards drove Nika from her hotel to the villa and Cosmin greeted her at the door with flowers. He escorted Nika upstairs while his bodyguards went to the kitchen to drink, play cards and make off-color remarks about what thought was happening upstairs.
“Soon, Nika, I will be the first man in Romania!” Cosmin boasted.
“That would be something of an achievement,” Nika replied and let Cosmin kiss her deeply.
“First man!” he continued, raising a finger for emphasis.
Nika removed her shoes and went into the bathroom. “Cosmin… may we have some music?”
Cosmin sat on the bed and started undressing. “Unfortunately, the band just left for a prior engagement!” he replied with a laugh.
“That’s a pity… only I do so enjoy making love to music,” Nika called from inside the bathroom, then stood in the doorway wearing what appeared to be only a robe. “It so relaxes me… I’m not sure I can get in the proper mood without it.”
“My goddess wants music, my goddess shall have music!” Cosmin pulled on his pants, opened the door, and took a few steps down the stairway.
“Hey! You cowherds down there! Turn on the radio—my lady wants music!”
He listened for the radio to come on, returned to the bedroom and closed and locked the door. “I hope that’s loud enough for you, darling.”
“Thank you,” Nika called from behind the bathroom. “Open the door… it’s not locked. I have a surprise for you.”
“I do so love surprises,” Cosmin said as he opened the door. “Especially from beautiful…” but his train of thought derailed when he saw Nika pointing a gun at him, a silencer attached. She put four bullets into his chest in rapid succession.
Nika looked at the slightly longated barrel. She had never used a silencer before and decided the sound of the gunshots was like someone softly clapping their hands. “Impressive,” she said and stepped over Cosmin’s body. She mussed up her hair, screamed twice, opened the door and clutching at her robe flew down the stairs.
“Help me! Cosmin is on the bathroom floor! He’s foaming at the mouth!”
The bodyguards leapt up and ran towards Nika, who acted confused and frantic. “Get out of our way, slut!” they snarled and ran past her up the stairs.
Nika pulled the gun from inside her robe and put a bullet into the back of each bodyguard. The first one dropped and didn’t move, but the second, further up the stairs, stopped and slowly made a half turn towards her. Nika put a further two rounds into him and he slowly crumpled and fell atop his comrade. She ran to the door and flicked the switch to the outdoor light on and off three times. Sergei drove up less than a minute later and Nika jumped into the backseat where she found a change of clothes. One of the bodyguards was able to crawl to the telephone and called the police, but when they arrived the dying man could only give a vague description of the girl who shot them. By then, Sergei and Nika were safely across the border into Hungary.
The assignment in Romania came hard upon Nika’s adventures near the Czech-Polish border for which Viktor apologized.
“Umm,” Nika murmured as she lit a cigar. “I was careless. I should have made certain of the bodyguards. Tell me I’ll never have to see Romania or Romanians again, and I’ll forgive myself.”
“An easy request to fill.” Viktor reached into his desk and pulled out a wanted poster, block letters in Romanian, and a likeness of Nika in the middle. He handed it to her. “Considering you are now too famous on that side of the border to pay a return visit any time soon.”
Nika studied the wanted poster. “It’s a bad likeness, fortunately. ‘Wanted for Murder.’ Well, the price of fame is high, but worth every pengo if it means I can never set foot there again.”
Viktor took the poster and stuck it back in the desk drawer. “I’ll keep it for your scrapbook. When you and little Madame Chiang Kai-shek are older, you can sit together and contemplate it as you warm yourselves before the fire.”
“Anything else, Viktor?” Nika asked. “I’m exhausted.”
“Yes, but only good news. First, another grade promotion for accomplishing your mission and in particularly for getting out alive. It would have been very embarrassing for me if you hadn’t. Second, as there is no longer a Czechoslovakia for you to subvert and need a new stage upon which you may ply your peculiar talents, Poland seems the obvious choice.”
“I see.” Nika answered in a flat tone of voice, suppressing her joy and excitement so as not to give Viktor too great an advantage. He leaned forward and poured her a glass of peach brandy.
“Oh, please, please Agent Molnar, don’t become embarrassingly grateful for placing you within fucking distance of your lover! It’s only because I found we had enough agents protecting our country’s interests in the Dutch East Indies. where I originally planned to send you.”
“Thank you, Viktor,” Nika said. “And I am grateful.”
“It was nothing. In fact, Miss de Soza’s presence in Krakow, where she has taken over the former Czechoslovak consulate single-handed, is the primary reason you’re going. Your homuncular lover has important contacts in the country and the ear of Minister Beck, who once offered her Polish citizenship in return for services yet unknown to us… and yes, since you were just about to deny it, sources there say they were romantically involved a few years before you arrived on the scene.”
“She has also met the Duke of Windsor several times and was in the same city and even building as Mussolini’s son-in-law. Why not add those two to your list of her of secret lovers?”
Viktor grabbed a pen and pretended to write. “Count… Ciano… Duke of… Windsor.’ I would have thought the Duchess of Windsor would be more to her tastes?”
“With me around? You joke.”
“In all seriousness,” Viktor continued. “Your lover has influential friends in Poland. Indeed, she’s closer to the centers of power in Poland than she was in her own country. Her remarkable English friend Carton de Wiart also lives there.”
He leaned back in his chair. “The Regent is extremely worried about a possible German-Polish war. Hitler requested passage rights through Hungary in such an event and Horthy refused. The Regent would like nothing more than to mediate a settlement between our strongest ally and our closest friend, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards. He also fears a Polish-German conflict will trigger another European-wide war and the destruction not only of Hungary but all Central Europe and the final triumph of Communist Russia. Accordingly, we must deploy every asset we have to keep ourselves informed. You now happen to be one of them.”
Viktor consulted his desk calendar. “Come back Friday at ten. I’ll brief you and have your papers ready. Can you be in Krakow by Monday morning, September 1?”
“You’re kidding me, right?” She hurried to the door but came back and kissed Viktor on the cheek. “Thank you again!”
Nika went to Café Gerbeaud to celebrate. There she wrote a long letter, and in the late afternoon took a cab to the main post office. Envelope in hand, she asked the chief clerk, “What’s the fastest way I can send this to Krakow?”
On the morning of August 25th, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein paid a ceremonial visit to the Free City of Danzig. The city was long coveted by the Polish Republic so that she might gain a seaport on the Baltic. Germany strongly objected and when the issue was turned over to the new League of Nations in 1920 Danzig as proclaimed a self-governing city to which both Poland and Germany would have certain rights and access.
The battleship moored some 160 yards away from the Polish fortifications facing the city on the Westerplatte Peninsula. The German invasion of Poland, code named Case White, was scheduled to begin next day at 4:45 am.
However, on March 25 Great Britain signed a military alliance with Poland. Now both Britian and France would come to Poland’s aid if Germany attacked. Hitler decided he needed time to review the new situation and called off the attack for the time being.
Not every German unit poised along the Polish frontier received the order. On August 26th at 4 am an elite unit German soldiers attacked the small railway station at the town of Mosty and seize the railroad tunnel at Jablunkov Pass that led through the Carpathian Mountains. The German troops were dispersed by Polish forces and made their way back across the border with two wounded.
The commander of the German 7th Infantry Division General Eugen Ott apologized profusely to his Polish counterpart, alleging the attack was undertaken by a madman acting entirely on his own.
Negotiations between Germany and Poland continued until August 30th when Hitler decided nothing would come from them and rescheduled Case White for 4:45 am, September 1. Wishing to make it appear like a German response to Polish aggression, the SS under Unterobergruppenführer Reinhardt Heydrich staged an attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz on the Polish border. The supposed attackers stormed the station, stayed just long enough to broadcast a brief anti-German speech in Polish and return to Poland. Sprawled around the station lay the bodies of a local farmer with Polish sympathies and several inmates from Dachau concentration camp dressed by the SS in Polish army uniforms then drugged and shot, their faces mutilated to prevent positive identification. At approximately 4:47 on the morning of Friday, September 1, 1939 the Schleswig-Holstein. commissioned to fight in the First World War, fired the opening shots of the Second.
To Abrienda, the mood of the people she encountered on Krakow’s streets that Friday morning seemed undaunted. They fully expected the prowess of their forces, supported by France and Britain, would bring victory over Germany.
The church’s Abrienda passed during her customary walk to Café Noworolski were well attended and she planned to later attend a mass to entreat the Virgin Mary, patron saint of Poland, for victory against those who were undeniably her enemies on earth, something Abrienda would pray for as earnestly as any Pole.
Just as she had been invited to pray for it at the Old Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of Kazimierz the day before.
Rabbi Shmuel Shmelke Kornitzer’s father had been the chief rabbi of Krakow and a close friend of her father during his tenure as Czechoslovak consul. Abrienda’s business that day was to hand deliver the yearly financial donation begun by her father to help Polish Jews emigrate to British Mandate Palestine.
She also had a favor to ask.
“There is an important document I would like to place in your care. At the moment, I lead a somewhat peripatetic lifestyle and need a safe place to keep it.” “You mean hide it,” the Rabbi said.
“Yes, actually,” Abrienda replied. “It is a document that will affect the future of my country once the Germans are driven out. Will you keep it for me until then?”
“Of course,” Rabbi Kornitzer replied. “Would you care to recite the Shema Yisrael in the synagogue?”
“I know the words, rabbi,” she replied. “And I may speak to them anywhere that is clean, true? However, it has not been appropriate in my family to do so, regardless of place, for over three centuries.”
The rabbi nodded. “You are a good daughter of Rome, yet though your ancestors left us generations ago, to us you still carry Israel inside you, and forever will. Come, Abrienda.”
In the morning as Abrienda was about to leave her hotel room, the concierge rang to inform her a letter had arrived special delivery from Hungary and asked if she would like it brought up to her suite. Abrienda said not to bother and ran out the door. She composed herself in the elevator enough to accept the letter without undo emotion and left for the café with it clutched firmly in her hand.
Abrienda’s café of choice in Krakow first opened its doors in 1910. She adored the Art Nouveau style of the café interior, the beautiful oval windows fronting the city square, the gleaming brass, wall mirrors, and brown, burnt orange and cream color scheme. Nothing could replace Café Slavia in her heart but looking out the window at the old city square, in the meantime this would certainly do.
As with the churches, the cafe was unusually crowded, since many felt the need to seek the emotional reassurance the company of people can bring. Abrienda had never felt that need yet understood it so was only mildly perturbed to find her usual window table taken and took a small one across from where the café’s pianist, an older, distinguished gentleman with a full head of white hair, thick white moustache and wearing a black tuxedo, had just taken his seat.
Comrade Lenin frequented the café during his years in exile when Krakow was part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. He would sit far in the back, away from the windows, pondering as he read the morning papers how Russia could have possibly failed to acknowledge a man of his genius until the Germans finally did and helped him return to Russia to oversee the deaths of one out of ten of its people. Abrienda could hardly hold that against the café, especially after she was told by older members of the staff he was not welcome as he stayed overlong, was ill-groomed and ill-tempered while his advocacy on behalf of the proletariat never included leaving a tip.
The mood in the café mirrored that on the street but the pianist made an unusual choice with which to start—From Olden Times, Op 21, by Anatoly Lyadov.
Abrienda ordered and while waiting engaged in some long-distance eavesdropping.
“There is little on the radio from the front, yet how can we lose with the French and British standing beside us?” a man a couple of tables away from her confidently asserted.
“France has the largest army in the world and the most tanks,” another offered. “With the bulk of the German army fighting us, the French can easily break through, retake the Rhineland, capture the Saar and advance into Germany while the British navy shells the entire German coast!”
Abrienda glanced into the great arched mirror at the end of the café that allowed her to see all the way back to the entrance and noticed in the reflection the former Legionnaire she with at the newspaper kiosk the day before. Apparently, he had seen her already for he raised his glass in a sort of combined greeting and salute. Smiling, Abrienda gave a half-wave in return. The café was popular and near where they’d met, and still believed in coincidence.
If not, was this gentleman spying on her, or protecting her?
“The war will be over in two weeks! It will be little more than child’s play!”
“Ja! Kinderspiel!” the other responded mockingly in German, and both men laughed.
Not the war nor the possibility of being spied upon could rob Abrienda of the joyous thrill she felt as she laid Nika’s letter on the table, smoothing it flat and starred lovingly at the sweeping cursive writing in purple ink and Budapest postmark. She was patient enough to wait until her coffee arrived to tear open the envelope, then suddenly was more afraid of what it might contain than she had been of the Freikorps outside the door in Varnsdorf.
Darling,
I finished my assignment in Romania, and upon returning, Viktor assigned me to “ply my trade” in Poland! He believes through you I can learn whatever it is he thinks important regarding Polish affairs.
He is mistaken. When I come, I will be ready to go with you wherever in the world you wish. Life without you, to not hear your voice, touch your skin, kiss your lips, or feel your small hands on my body would be a tear-filled hell on earth. I would rather die than live even a single day, knowing we would never be together.
I have some money saved, not a lot, but I hope you will think it enough to make a fair contribution to our future. If not, I will gladly sell flowers in the street or scrub floors if, at the end of the day, I can be with you.
Forgive me for not accepting your offer of a life together that night five months ago. It was my pride that answered you. You have so much, I have so little. Now I understand have nothing if I don’t have you with me for the rest of my life. I want to leave behind all the sadness and tragedy Europe seems intent on reliving for others to enjoy, without us.
I will be in Krakow on September 3rd and will come to your hotel. Please be there for me.
I love you, Nika.
PS,
Yes, Ivan the Terrible will be driving me. N.
Abrienda ordered a cognac, lit a cigar, and leaned back in her chair. She wanted to thank God but was unsure how such a prayer would be received. In any event, the coming war could now be someone else’s concern. “Where should we go?” she wondered aloud. “Spain? South America? The United States?” She smiled. “Zanzibar?”
At the start of each hour, four trumpet calls sound from Krakow’s Basilica of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Tradition holds that in 1214, as the armies of Genghis Khan invaded Poland, a trumpeter climbed to the taller of the Basilica’s two towers to sound the fire alarm, known as the hejnal, only this time it was meant to warn the people of the enemy’s approach. He sounded the alarm to the north, east, south, and west until he was at last silenced by a Mongol archer. Thus, the final call ends abruptly, never to be completed yet ever since, it has sounded every day to reassure the citizens of Krakow they and their city were safe.
For the past thirteen years, the man who performed this duty was Adolf Śmietanas. Each hour he would climb the 239 steps to his position atop the north tower of the Basilica and sounded the hejnal, a task that was a part of the invisible warp and woof that bind a people, a culture and a nation together. He sounded the trumpet north, then west, yet when he faced south, he saw in the distance what appeared at first a great flock of black birds approaching the city.
Once he realized what they truly were, he sounded the heynal louder than he ever had before.
The waiter brought Abrienda’s cognac as the first Heynal played. “There it is,” she said, cocking her head and pointing a finger upward, as if to silence all other sounds. “Such a wonderful tradition.”
“You are Czech?” the waiter asked.
“Yes, but I lived here many years as a child.” She moved Nika’s letter to a place of safety. “Pity, I thought my Polish accent was better!”
The waiter laughed. “It’s not that. We have a regular clientele, and the style of your dress is like the understated fashion of the ladies I’ve seen in Prague. I also mentioned it because the family of the trumpeter playing the heynal is Czech.”
“Just like the original trumpeter, who was also Czech and killed by an arrow to his throat from a Mongol archer,” Abrienda replied.
“Bravo, madame!” he replied. “You know our city’s history well. If you need anything else, please call on me.”
“Excuse me, waiter, but what is that sound?” a Swedish lady seated nearby inquired. “I don’t mean the trumpet. I mean that low, humming noise?”
Another waiter stood by the door, empty coffee tray at his side, listening.
“Waiter, what is it?” her husband asked.
The sound grew louder. Abrienda rose and went outside to look. Others hurriedly retrieved their coats and hats. Most sat petrified, unsure what was happening or what to do.
“So… here we are,” the pianist said with finality. He straightened his bow tie, pulled at his tux and with a flourish began playing Chopin’s Polonaise Opus 40 No. 1 in A major “Military”.
The air filled with a sound like the screeching of a thousand children’s whistles. Abrienda pivoted on her heel, dove under a table and five seconds later the entire square exploded in yellow flames bursting through the doorway and windows of the café.