East Past Warsaw by Diana Deverell

Author:Diana Deverell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Sorrel Press
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

17

I let my mind wander through the likely scenarios I might encounter in Lublin. I reviewed what might go wrong and how I’d react to each crisis. I imagined Jerzy going through the same exercise and I factored in all the ways he could foul up my plan. Neither of us relaxed during the two-and-a-half hours it took to cover the fewer than two hundred kilometers to Zambrow.

Jerzy’s favorite stacja benzynowa turned out to be a gigantic truck stop on the north side of the highway connecting Warsaw to the Baltic states. It was seven o’clock and Jerzy filled the tank hurriedly before dashing inside to pay. We weren’t yet half way to Lublin and time was running out. I waited in the car, nervousness eased by the familiar thrum of idling diesels parked haphazardly across the lot. The scent of spilled fuel was comforting in this foreign place.

I told myself we’d make better time on the highway. Our slow going was due to the back roads, not our vehicle. Daewoo had designed the Tico to capture the Polish market. Jerzy’s car was half-again the size of the crackerbox Fiat 125p, surprisingly roomy inside, propelled by a jazzed-up four-cylinder engine designed to compete with Volkswagen. Locally manufactured and priced right, the Tico had taken over the number one spot among Polish car-buyers.

Pressed for time, neither Jerzy nor I suggested taking a dinner break. Thanks to the basket hastily assembled by Pani Jola, we didn’t go hungry. While Jerzy drove, I shared out the food between us. Pierogi eaten cold were sublime, the dough tender, the filling of potato and onion a balm. And the portions were hearty. I managed to wash down only three with coffee strong enough to qualify for a list of dangerous drugs. I was fortified and alert at nine-fifteen when Jerzy’s determined driving brought us to the outskirts of Lublin, a sprawling city of three hundred and fifty thousand.

The highway tunneled between gloomy concrete-and-glass housing blocks. Factories sprouted among them, interspersed with unkempt patches of straggling grass. The rain had stopped, but the clouds hung low. I spread the atlas across my knees but I couldn’t read the small print until lights became more numerous at the center of town. As Jerzy turned onto the central artery, I said, “The street we want should be coming up in another three blocks.”

“At the traffic signal,” he replied. “I remember.”

My hand slipped into the sweatshirt’s belly-pocket and closed around the revolver’s grip. I stared uneasily out the window. On my right was a bar mleczny, a cafeteria specializing in cheap, usually meatless, meals. The three-story building beyond it sported the more up-scale name restauracja. The word was spelled out in the old-style neon script of Cold War Poland. I imagined other relics inside, tasteless food and surly waiters. Down the street, I spotted the familiar colors of a hamburger chain and the brightly-lit logo for a pizza parlor. The modern service economy marching in from the West.

At the traffic signal, Jerzy turned left.

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