‘Yes?’ Weizak said kindly. ‘And what is this?’
And suddenly things changed. It was impossible to say how. Except that suddenly Weizak seemed very clear to him. Weizak seemed to … to stand forth, outlined in a lovely, clear light. Every mark and mole and line on Weizak’s face stood in relief. And every line told its own story. He began to understand.
‘I want your wallet,’ Johnny said.
‘My … ?’ Weizak and Brown exchanged a startled glance.
‘There’s a picture of your mother in your wallet and I need to have it,’ Johnny said.
‘Please.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘Please!’
Weizak looked into Johnny’s face for a moment, and then slowly dug under his smock and produced an old Lord Buxton, bulgy and out of shape.
‘How did you know I carry a picture of my mother? She is dead, she died when the Nazis occupied Warsaw…
Johnny snatched the wallet from Weizak’s hand. Both he and Brown looked stunned.
Johnny opened it, dismissed the plastic picture-pockets, and dug in the back instead, his fingers hurrying past old business cards, receipted bills, a canceled check, an old ticket to some political function. He came up with a small snapshot that had been laminated in plastic. The picture showed a young woman, her features plain, her hair drawn back under a kerchief. Her smile was radiant and youthful. She held the hand of a young boy.
Beside her was a man in the uniform of the Polish army.
Johnny pressed the picture between his hands and closed his eyes and for a moment there was darkness and then rushing out of the darkness came a wagon … no, not a wagon, a hearse. A horse-drawn hearse. The lamps had been muffled in black sacking. Of course it was a hearse because they were
(dying by the hundreds, yes, by the thousands, no match for the panzers, the wehrmacht, nineteenth-century cavalry against the tanks and machine guns. explosions. screaming, dying men. a horse with its guts blown out and its eyes rolling wildly, showing the white, an overturned cannon behind it and still they come. weizak comes, standing in his stirrups, his sword held high in the slanting rain of late summer 1939, his men following him, stumbling through the mud. the turret gun of the nazi tiger tank tracks him, braces
him, brackets him, fires, and suddenly he is gone below the waist, the sword flying out of his hand; and down the road is warsaw. the nazi wolf is loose in europe)
‘Really, we have to put a stop to this,’ Brown said, his voice faraway and worried. ‘You’re overexciting yourself, Johnny.’
The voices came from far away, from a hallway in time.
‘He’s put himself in some kind of trance,’ Weizak said. Hot in here. He was sweating. He was sweating because
(the city’s on fire, thousands are fleeing, a truck is roaring from side to side down a cobbled street, and the back of the truck is full of waving German soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets and the young woman is not smiling now, she is fleeing, no reason not to flee. the child has been sent away to safety and now the truck jumps the curb, the mudguard strikes her, shattering her hip and sending her flying through a plate glass window and into a clock shop and everything begins to chime. chime because of the time. the chime time is)
‘Six o’clock,’ Johnny said thickly. His eyes had rolled up to straining, bulging whites.
‘September 2, 1939, and all the cuckoo birds are singing.’
‘Oh my God, what is it we have?’ Weizak whispered. The nurse had backed up against the EEG console, her face pale and scared. Everyone is scared now because death is in the air. It’s always in the air in this place, this
(hospital. smell of ether. they’re screaming in the place of death. poland is dead, poland has fallen before the lightning warfare wehrmacht blitzkreig. shattered hip. the man in the next bed calling for water, calling, calling, calling. she remembers ‘THE BOY IS
SAFE.’ what boy? she doesn’t know. what boy? what is her name.- she doesn’t remember.
only that)