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Page 70.

As they usually did, Tim and Anna went for a walk, for some air, along a foggy dock or down a drizzly street. They huddled arm in arm and shivered as they made small talk. The questions tumbled out, unbidden, as they eventually must. “You are suddenly quiet,” Anna said.

“Oh, I’m just thinking about Stan. He’s like a teenager in love.”

She laughed. “Lucky boy.”

“Aw come on, Anna, we’re a strange item.”

“Honey…” There was a kindly little warning in her tone.

They walked along in silence for a time, with the Thames on their right, and barges quietly shoving along at a steady clattering pace. Occasionally, a whistle would pipe, and a response would come booming over the black waters.

“Are you growing tired of me, darling?” She clung tighter, arm in arm, as if telling him in body language she was afraid of losing him.

“No.” He thought about it. “Not sure what I’m trying to say here. I guess we speak different languages.”

“Yes, I speak Polski and you English. The sausage and the hamburger. We need to find a bun that fits the both.”

“I’m a little scared that I might just decide to give you the whole bun, Anna.”

“And what does that mean, my heroic chef?”

He steeled his courage to say what he had to. “Okay, I hope I don’t ruin everything. I think about you a lot.”

“Oh my poor darling.” She stopped and put her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes looked into his, full of worry.

“What?” he asked, taking her hands in his as if he could take charge of a life he knew, then and there—suddenly, definitively, at that moment, for the first time in a new understanding—was not his to have.

She looked worried, and had this expression as if she was about to blurt out something shocking. She played with the buttons on his coat. He waited. He hoped she would say she loved him, but when she looked up, he knew with a sinking heart that she was not thinking of saying that to him.

“Don’t—” she said.

He was too dry mouthed to ask what don’t meant. He was mindful of a play he’d seen, in the new existential, minimalist style. He pictured himself as a man adrift in the universe. He remembered his lost friends on HMS Sturmer, and those conversations about minimalist theater.

He walks onto a stage. It is pitch dark, except for one light directly above that sheds a small puddle of dim, achy light. The invisible audience watches. The man finds only a chair, a stand, and a typewriter. He sits down—

In a very careful, small, measured voice, she said: “Tim.”

Put sheet in typewriter. Clear throat. Begin memo.

“Yes, Anna.”

“Tim, if we talk now, everything will change between us. And yet, nothing will change for me, for you, for the whole world. Sometimes, darling, it’s like the war. C’est la guerre. Some things we cannot talk about, and other things we should not talk about.”

He grew angry. “I don’t know what that all means.”

“I know. And I can’t tell you, Tim. We have had moments together that I have never shared with another man. You are so very special.”

“Is that like—I love you?”

She gave him a hurt, vulnerable look. “If I say I love you, what will happen? You want me to say that, Tim, knowing that I am going to be reassigned soon. We will never see each other again.”

“You knew this?” He stepped back, almost stamping his foot in anger.

“Yes. I could have told you, and—well, now I can say it. I love you, Tim. I can’t have you, and you can’t have me.”

“This is nuts, Anna.”

“Okay.” She put her hands in her pockets. They resumed walking.

Yank sheet from typewriter. Sign in black ink. Mail memo. Nothing will ever be the same again from this moment forward.

“I was a very innocent girl who lived a very sheltered life. Very Catholic girl from a fine and wealthy family. Mass every Sunday.”

Tim walked beside her, aching and in love with her. They walked with their hands in their pockets and the river flowed ceaselessly without comment.

“I fell in love with my cousin Erek. He is five years older, very tall and handsome, university graduate, artillery officer, great hero. Beautiful looking boy. I was in love with him from the time I was a little girl. I was always so happy when his family came to visit, or we went to their palace. They are titled. I was just turning 20 when the Germans came, and I had never gone all the way with a boy. I was saving myself, you know. What can I tell you? A silly girl. I cried when he went off in his beautiful uniform. He wore his family’s great regalia as a Reserve Colonel, though only 25. He fought when the Nazis invaded my country. He escaped to France, and fought with the French in 1940 until the Germans defeated them too. He could have escaped to Spain or to England, but what did he do? He returned to Warsaw, in secret, to propose marriage to me. I said yes. I didn’t even know until then, so innocent was I, that he had been in love with me all those years but was afraid to hurt me because we are second cousins, and there would be scandal and so forth. He is very proper. We told our parents, who were shocked, of course, but it’s the war, the crazy terrible war, and they gave us their blessing. We were married secretly in his house, which is a large old palace. There were jealous servants even in our little dinner party, who betrayed him. We were supposed to secretly leave from Gdansk to Kaliningrad by night boat and then cross the Baltic Sea to Sweden, where we would be safe. He and I had five nights and five days together. It was like it is between me and you. I have never been with another man in that way, except you. We stayed under false names in a little hotel in Wislinka, and on the fifth day, we stood on the dock at Olowianka waiting for night to fall and the ferry to come from Helsingborg to take us to Lithuania and then across the Baltic Sea. A car pulled up, Gestapo got out, and we were taken away. He managed to create a diversion downtown when we were stuck in traffic, told me to run, and I did as I was told, screaming. A crowd closed around me to protect me from the Germans, and I have never seen Erek since. But I have word from him.”

Tim was too stunned at the whole story to speak.

“Erek my husband is in a prison camp near . The Germans are holding him so that I will work for them here in London. Or they threaten to kill him. He sent word to me that he is willing to die rather than let me compromise my honor, as he puts it. I, instead, went to your friend—”

“Oh no.” Tim was thinking Stan Kehoe.

“Billy Seward, the One-eye. I work for him now.” The way she said it, Tim knew she had no feelings for Seward. Was she telling the truth? Was this all some giant con game? She stopped. “Tim.”

Put sheet in typewriter. Stare at blank. Tear from typewriter and throw away.

Tim stood transfixed by the ever flowing river, loving her, loving Erek for her, loving Poland, wishing this all wasn’t so.

“Tim, I have told you something that people could die for knowing. I told you because I am in love with you. Do you understand now? It is sometimes harder to say I am in love than it is to just be silent and be in love.”

“I love you, Anna.”

She stepped close and rested her forehead against his chest. “I know you do, darling. And I—am a married woman and there is something more.”

“What?”

“I have to think about it, telling you I mean. I have to consider the life of Erek, what they will do to him back home if they learn I am seeing a man. They will know they cannot rely on me anymore for using my love of Erek. And so they may kill him.”

“I don’t want that.”

“I know you don’t, darling, because you are a very kind, principled man. That is one of the things I love about you.” She put her arm through his. “So you see. I was right. I can tell you I love you or I don’t love you, and it makes no change in the equation. Now you see why I don’t want the Poles to see us together. It was a mistake that first time, with Gostomski. I was careless.”

They walked arm in arm, almost—but never again—as they had before.