Count Tarkowski was holding his nose. He and his wife had been down in the Belsize Park tube shelter for some five hours. They had found a corner spot and had made themselves reasonably comfortable with the blankets that they had brought with them, but as the hours had gone by the shelter had filled up and they had been hemmed in by the press of bodies. The stink of sweat, urine and other bodily fluids had become almost overpowering. To his immediate right was a very fat mother with a screaming baby and two out-of-control toddlers. To his left, next to his wife, an old man in some sort of uniform he did not recognise lay snoring away, alternating this with a regular breaking of wind. In front of him, a well-dressed couple tried to comfort their teenage daughter, who was having hysterics and who had vomited at least twice. A few yards away was the tube railway line and when he had stood up briefly to stretch his legs a while back, he had seen a gang of rats massing in a corner. A couple of them had somehow made their way up to the platform and he watched them darting between prostrate bodies, fortunately away from where he and his wife were.
He sat up and attempted yet again to read his book. He had read Sienkiewicz’s great trilogy about seventeenth-century Poland many times. With Fire and Sword, the first volume, told the story of the Polish Commonwealth’s resistance to a great Cossack uprising. He removed his hand from his nose and pointed the torch. Hard as he concentrated, the words floated meaninglessly in front of his eyes. He looked over at his wife, who amazingly was fast asleep. He wished he’d brought a sleeping draught with him. In the distance he heard raised voices as someone squabbled with someone else about encroaching on his space and others told them to pipe down.
He wondered for the hundredth time whether he should have moved everything. It should have been safe in the office, but then was it really safe in his house? And then there was that young maniac pestering him about it and Voronov hovering around. The one helpful thing the Germans might do would be for them to land a bomb neatly on them both. That would make life a little easier. The uniformed man farted particularly loudly and Tarkowski turned away. He closed his eyes and forced himself to think of something pleasant. He pictured the estate near Bialystok. There was a small stream running down from the Bialowieza Forest into the fields. He remembered bathing naked in it with his brothers. One day, two pretty, young peasant girls from one of the villages had come upon them. His younger brothers had laughed unconcerned, but he had been shy and had rushed to hide behind some bushes. One of the girls had come and tried to pull him out. He had resisted and then she had smiled and lifted her dress above her head and beckoned to him. Ah yes, that had been very pleasant. His eyelids drooped and sleep came.
*