Friend of My Youth

from October to May? Does the snow actually reach to the windowsills? Can one drink the well water without boiling, or is there a danger of catching typhoid fever? What kind of trees, cut down, will provide the best heat in the stove?
    Murray could not remember afterward which questions came the first day, or if there was ever a boundary between the practicalquestions and the more general or personal. He didn’t think there was—they came all mixed up together. When Victor wondered about anything, he asked. When were those buildings put up? What is the people’s main religion and are they very serious about it? Who is that important-looking man, that sad-looking woman? What do the people work at? Are there agitators, freethinkers, very rich people, Communists? What sort of crimes are committed, when was the last time there was a murder, is there a certain amount of adultery? Did Murray play golf, did he own a pleasure boat, did his employees call him sir? (Not much, and no, and no.) Victor’s blue eyes continued to shine with pleasure, whatever the question, whatever the answer. He stretched his long legs out of the coffee-shop booth and clasped his hands behind his head. He luxuriated, taking everything in. Soon Murray was telling him about how his grandfather threw coins down into the street, and about his father’s dark suits and silk-backed vests, and his own notions of becoming a minister.
    “But you did not?”
    “I lost my faith.” Murray always felt he had to grin when he said this. “That is—”
    “I know what it is.”
    When he came to find Murray at the store, Victor would not ask any of the clerks if he could see him but would go straight up to the office, up the ramp to the little cage. It had wrought-iron walls around it, about as high as Murray was—about five-nine. Victor would try to come up stealthily, but of course his presence would have already disturbed the store, stirring up ripples of attention, misgiving, excitement. Murray usually knew when he was coming but pretended not to. Then Victor, for a surprise, would rest his gleaming head on the top of the wall, his neck held between two of the pointed, decorative spikes. He grinned at the idiotic effect.
    Murray found this inexpressibly flattering.
    Victor had a history of his own, of course. He was ten years older than Murray; he had been nineteen when the war brokeout. He was a student then, in Warsaw. He had been taking flying lessons, but did not yet have his pilot’s license. Nevertheless he went out to the airstrip where the planes of the Polish Air Force were sitting—he and some of his friends went out there almost as a prank, on the morning of the German invasion, and almost as a prank they took some of the planes into the air, and then they flew them to Sweden. After that, he got to England and joined the Polish Air Force, which was attached to the Royal Air Force. He flew on many raids, and was shot down over France. He bailed out; he hid in the woods, he ate raw potatoes from the fields, he was helped by the French Underground and made his way to the Spanish border. He got back to England. And he found to his great disappointment that he was not to be allowed to fly again. He knew too much. If he should be shot down again and captured and interrogated, he knew too much. He was so disappointed, so restless, he made such a nuisance of himself, that he was given another job—he was sent to Turkey, on a more or less secret mission, to be part of a network that helped Poles, and others, who were escaping through the Balkans.
    That was what he had been doing while Murray and his friends had been building model airplanes and fixing up a kind of cockpit in the bicycle shed at school, so that they could pretend to be bombing Germany.
    “But do you believe all that stuff, really?” Barbara said.
    “They did fly Polish planes to Sweden before the Germans could get them,” Murray said stubbornly. “And people did get shot down over France and escape.”
    “Do you think anybody as conspicuous as Victor could escape? Do you think anybody that conspicuous would ever get sent on a secret mission? You have to look more like Alec Guinness to get sent on a secret mission.”
    “Maybe he’s so conspicuous he looks innocent,” Murray said. “Maybe he’d look like the last person on earth to be sent on a secret mission and that would be the very reason nobody would suspect.”
    Perhaps for the first time, he thought that