No one should be down here for MONTHS, let alone a—But here he’d trailed off, eyes skittering from Kotzeleh’s calm, blue-grey stare, leaving her to fill in the blank herself: A woman? A girl? So sweet, so pretty and educated, so Aryan-looking, made for more than a stinking corpse-mouth hole full of people like you? Like me?
If Marek knew, he’d begun again, finally. Kotzeleh cut him off.
Marek’s dead, she told him. Then: Do you have bullets for us, or not?
Now she sits and watches the rats squabble over their own dead, thinking: That’ll be us, before long. Remembers how fast a man named Okun died from eating just one, then remembers the burnt-meat smell from the squad’s last manhole foray—two down one after the other, bang and bang, the rest dancing and screaming as they found the oil-filmed water suddenly alight from Fat Chavah’s dropped Molotov—and feels her mouth start to water. Bites her cheek ‘till she tastes blood, then stops . . . because it tastes too good, and she doesn’t have any left to spare.
Down here, the cleanest things they ever see are Nazis. And she’s already killed five this week without finding even one whose boots were small enough to fit her peeling, bleeding, sewer-sodden feet.
* * *
It’s a set routine, even now: Back and forth along this trackless warren of dark water and dripping pipes, with only an occasional thin fall of barred sun, klieg-lights or street-fires to tell their way by. Kotzeleh and her crew work blind more often than not, avoiding traps by touch, memory and luck alike, marking whatever fresh ones they’ve tripped with braille-subtle scratchings, chalkmark scrawls like scat or spoor. From Old Town right along the main sewer under Kracowskie Przedmiescie, and out again at Warecka; check each station ‘till they find someone left alive, make report, then double back again down into the dark, the wet. The long and pungent miles of echoing silence.
“Hell has seven levels, did I ever tell you that?” Lev the Rabbi asks—in a gasping whisper—as they slip free from the tangled knot of rusty barbed wire blocking their path, once a perfectly useable shortcut between storm-drains. “They go down like a ladder, rung by rung: Gehenna, Sha’are Mawet, Sha’are Zalmawet, Be’er Shahat, Tiit Ha-Yawen, Abaddon, Sheol—but that’s not all, no. Because below even that, even further, you have the sea of Genesis, of first Creation: Tohu Yi’ Bohu.”
A harsh name like salt on the lips, warm and rough and weirdly familiar. That uterine sea we all swim in at least once, forgotten long before we know to try and remember its safely rocking waves, its full and buoyant embrace.
Pure Kabbalistic crap, of course—mystical babble like half of everything else Lev spouts, most times seemingly at random. He cut his sidelocks back when the fighting started, so he’s probably damned now, and knows it. Still, the gesture also put him long past the point where fear of potential pollution might stop him from chattering on to Kotzeleh about anything Torah-related that slips into his head, under any circumstances; Katarczyna Mendesh
, the least Jewish-looking Jewess in Warsaw, barely raised with a sense of her own heritage that extends beyond a lingering taste for gefilte fish and matzoh-ball soup.
Old habits really do die hard, she thinks. Then: A good enough way TO die, if you had to pick one.
But at least Lev’s monologues help pass the time, as the rest of the group have already come to appreciate; give them something to take their minds off the muck around them, if only for a moment. Distract them from fixating on the little nagging details like that something slimy which hangs, caught, in the middle of the wire-bale they’ve just dodged past—ragged, half-submerged, some long-gone child messenger’s discarded coat, maybe. Or maybe . . .
. . . something more.
Dead from hunger, sickness, a bullet in the back left too long untreated. Or smothered and cooked bone-black by that thing the surface troops keep warning is on its way, von dem Bach’s famous Taifun-gerat, the Nazi storm-starter: A portable engine made just small enough to seal over manholes, pumping gas down into all the relevant nooks and crannies; one brief touch of a match, one stray spurt from a flame-thrower’s nozzle, and all the scurrying in the world won’t save you from the blast.
Like roaches from a burning butcher’s shop, Kotzeleh thinks, unable to stop herself. While Lev adds, at the same time—right in her ear, already stinging with potential lockjaw where a stray strand of wire must have nicked her lobe—
“Everything starts over at the bottom, you see. Like in alchemy. Albedo out of nigredo, the gold out of the dungheap. The Philosopher’s Stone, pretty girl; true paradise, regained.”
Kotzeleh squints hard against the dim light, sniffing long and loud. “This doesn’t smell much like paradise,” she says.
A laugh, impossibly dry: “No, it doesn’t, does it?”
Up ahead, Fat Chavah gives a warning hiss—footsteps, jackboots, passing by above. Lev and Kotzeleh freeze, rooted in the murky eddy, feeling for their triggers. But it’s a false alarm, “like always” . . .
Except when it isn’t.
“Could be we just haven’t gone down far enough yet,” Lev suggests, finally—trying to sound like he’s joking, probably. And failing.
* * *
A day later, loaded down with new-won weaponry and making straight for Home Army headquarters—Ochota, 80 Wawelska Street, the last Old Town building left both standing and occupied—Kotzeleh and her companions run straight into that same chatty contact who sold them bullets sloshing back the other way, a straggly crocodile of fellow refugees in tow. The sound of their guns cocking in the dark makes him jump and freeze, ‘til he takes a hesitant half-step further into the light and realizes who’s leading the pack.
Relaxing: “Oh, so it’s you, dumpling.”
And now with the charm.
“As you see,” Kotzeleh says—stating the obvious, studiously bland. “You should tell your people to walk quieter from now on, if they don’t want to run into company; there’s two patrols a mile ‘til you get to the suburbs.”
“Ah, yes.” The contact leans closer, lowers his voice, assuming an intimacy Kotzeleh finds vaguely grotesque. “And you know why, of course.”
“To kill us.”
“Partly.” A beat. “They got Radoslaw this morning.”