The Children's War (120 page)

“It was leaking!”

“Kasia should have called a plumber.”

“Kasia should have! Do you have any idea what state your wife is in? Do you have any idea what it is like inviting complete strangers into the house? The security precautions? Do you even have any idea how difficult it is to get hired help under normal circumstances? You should know better than that!”

“Well, then go ahead and show them your trades,” Ryszard agreed haughtily. “Fix broken panes of glass and unstick windows and whatever the hell else it is you’re always doing!”

“If you’re not competent at the simple jobs associated with living in a house,” Peter responded with equal vitriol, “then perhaps you could find some other way to talk to them. Try taking a walk with one of them! Or is using your two hind legs beyond your technical competence as well?”

“Fucking
Untermensch!

You haven’t a clue what my life is like.”

“Yes, I do,” Peter replied calmly, reminding himself that he was trying to help
Ryszard’s sons, not win an argument. “I know what it is like to become a completely different person and live that lie day in and day out. I did it for survival, you’re doing it for a cause. Otherwise, it is the same.”

“It is not,” Ryszard replied weakly.

“So you don’t feel like a prisoner?” Peter asked, remembering Ryszard’s one unguarded moment months before.

“I don’t . . .” Ryszard fell silent.

“You have three wonderful boys and a marvelous little girl here who need a father. Don’t abandon them,” Peter pleaded. “Maybe you want to feel distant from them in case something happens, but don’t do that. They need you and they need you now, not later when you reach some distant goal.”

“I just don’t have time to fool around with all this . . .” Ryszard waved his hand to indicate the house and his children.

“Ryszard! You need to have a life! It is the only thing that will save your soul. For God’s sake, each and every day you don the most unfeeling persona, you deal with the most heartless people in one of the cruelest ministries of an evil government. It’s a poison! You can’t do that to yourself and not have an antidote.”

“I’m afraid,” Ryszard said quietly.

“Of what?” Peter asked. There was so much to be afraid of!

“I’m afraid that if I relax a bit here, I’ll slip up out there. And then we’ll all be dead.”

“There are other deaths to avoid.”

Ryszard fell silent, perhaps thinking about what his brother-in-law had said. After a moment, he picked up the newspaper again, saying,“All right, you’ve said your bit.”

Peter sighed. Was that it? He sat and watched as Ryszard read, then making a decision to interfere just once more, he went to the cabinet and pulled out a deck of cards.

“Here,” he said, shoving them at Ryszard. “Go play poker with your kids. I’ve taught them the game.”

“You
what?
” Ryszard asked, confused, as he stared at the deck of cards under his nose.

“Joanna regularly takes me to the cleaners. Watch out in particular for Jan— he has an excellent poker face.”

“What?”

“And I think Joanna has passed on some of her tricks to Genia—so don’t be surprised if you’re out of pocket by the end of the evening.”

“What?” Ryszard could not stop saying.

“Just do it. Whoever is home. Call them downstairs, suggest a game,” Peter ordered, pushing the cards into Ryszard’s hand.

Ryszard stared at the deck for a good long time, then, closing his hand around the cards, he stood up and went into the hallway to call his children down.

48

“H
ERE,
I
THOUGHT THIS
might interest you.” Ryszard tossed the heavy, spiralbound notebook onto the coffee table.

Peter was sitting, in uniform, with his feet up on the coffee table reading the Party newspaper. He had been ready for duty in the event that Ryszard arrived home with someone, but as he had seen him walking up the path alone, Peter had not bothered to get up or interrupt his reading. Still, he welcomed the diversion from the endless printed garbage and pulled his feet off the table to lean forward and look at the book. “What is it?”

“Oh, the rules and regulations governing domestic workers. There’s a huge section devoted to you and your ilk,” Ryszard answered absently as he lit a cigarette. “Want one?”

“Yeah, sure.” Peter accepted the cigarette, began paging through the heavy book. “Do they provide this to every owner?”

“Naw. It’s property of the Morality Ministry. I just borrowed it. I guess the average owner is just supposed to know intuitively what all the laws and regulations are.”

So, as he had so long ago suspected, there was a book! He read the paragraphs. Even obsessive Elspeth had been unable to comply with most of the regulations. They appeared to be listed chronologically, and though there was an index, it was not particularly useful. Within minutes Peter found several regulations that were inconsistent with each other and several more that were not indexed. It all depended on which page one looked at! He laughed scornfully.

“What’s so funny?” Ryszard asked as he poured himself a whiskey. “Do you want one?”

“I should be getting that. Yeah, I’d like one.”

Ryszard handed him the drink, and Peter explained the source of his amusement. He continued paging through the book, and his eyes landed on some fee list for several years prior. “What about these? Is this what I cost?”

Ryszard scanned the page.“More or less.”

“One hundred thousand NRM,” Peter read the appropriate category with something like dismay. There it was, his price, published in a book. “What do you make?”

“Annually, I have a base salary of about a million.”

“Base? What, do you earn overtime?”

Ryszard laughed. “You could call it that.”

“So my lifetime labor cost one-tenth of a year’s base salary?”

“Well, yes, but I am well paid. A very well-paid laborer only makes about a hundred grand.”

“So even a worker could afford to buy me on one year’s salary?” Peter felt a sudden shock of . . . what was it? Bitterness that his price was so low? Wasn’t that a ridiculous thing to feel outraged about?

“No, a worker could never afford you,” Ryszard answered. “Those are the official fees involved in transferring the contract from the state to a private individual. They could even be waived altogether. Where the money comes into the picture is getting that contract transferred in the first place. You have to have some political muscle, or an overriding social need or a really good bribe.”

“What sort of bribe?”

“Varies with availability. Could be up to a million, usually much lower. In your case, I’d guess Karl didn’t pay a pfennig—just hounded the Reusches into signing you over.” Ryszard paused, then added with unnecessary callousness, “I would guess your birthrights were sold for less than a pack of cigarettes.”

Peter ignored the comparison. “And the Reusches?”

“I would guess they were being bought off to keep quiet about their son’s death. They probably paid a minimal amount and maybe even had the fees waived.”

Peter vaguely remembered something about “in lieu of the usual fees . . .” Why, he wondered stupidly, did he feel so insulted?

“You almost certainly went cheap,” Ryszard said.

“What makes you say that?”

“You were a test case, so to speak. That reeducation bit had only just been introduced, and placing you with a family was risky. I had you pegged for a powerful family—”

“You?”

Ryszard laughed. “Took me a while to recall the event, but after I perused your file—”

“You?”

“Yes, I arranged your release. I thought you’d make trouble so I suggested a politically powerful family as your placement.”

“
You
were responsible for what I went through?”

“No, not me. I was just on an inspection tour.”

“Who was, then? What’s his name?”

Ryszard shook his head.

“What’s his name!”

“No need to thank me for saving your life; it was, after all, just a joke,” Ryszard said pointedly. “In any case, they obviously did not feel comfortable about letting you out to someone important. The Reusches were nobodies. Maybe they deliberately chose someone they didn’t care about, so if you slit their throats in the middle of the night, it’d be no great loss.”

Peter breathed deeply trying to control his fury. There was no point in asking Ryszard again, so instead he asked, “So how did I end up with the Vogels? Wasn’t he valuable?”

“Depends on who you ask. But I think he just wanted someone on the cheap, and there you were, owned by politically weak people who had committed a minor crime. Plus, by then, I guess you had proven yourself, if he even bothered to take such things into account. He is, about certain things, rather thick.”

So am I, Peter thought. He took a moment to swallow all the information Ryszard had so casually passed along. Ryszard knew who had tortured him, Ryszard had organized his release, Ryszard had saved his life. As a joke. A joke. Peter blinked away the bitterness he felt and to distract himself scanned through a few more pages. On one was a list of regulations for subletting workers to industry, and it prompted him to ask,“How much do you think I earned for Karl in that factory job?”

“Did they feed you?”

“No.”

“Full day?”

“No, just eight hours.”

“Seven days a week?”

“Yes.” Day in and day out without a break. Work at home all day, work in that god-awful factory all night. Breathe those foul fumes, walk home barely able to put one foot in front of the other. Two hours of sleep, naps whenever Frau Vogel wasn’t looking. God, it had nearly killed him.

“It has gone up, but I’d guess at the time you probably pulled in about three thousand a month.”

“Three thousand?” Peter could not believe his ears. “One hundred per day?”

“Yeah, that’d be my guess. I suppose I could ask him, but”—Ryszard grinned—“for some reason he doesn’t enjoy talking about you—except of course to grumble.”

“A pack of cigarettes per day,” Peter translated, using Ryszard’s scale. “They nearly killed me for a fucking pack of cigarettes a day.”

“Which he no doubt smoked without thought.”

“How much are rations?”

“For you, they’d have been . . .” Ryszard looked pensive. “What class of rations did you have?”

“I didn’t realize there were classes.”

“Oh, yeah, there are. What color was your card?”

“Blue.”

Ryszard laughed. “The cheapest! I could have guessed. Those run about two hundred a month. So you bought your food with two days’ work. Add another day for clothing and the rest was pure profit.”

“It nearly killed me,” Peter said rather sadly. He did not expect Ryszard to understand and he had not meant to say it out loud.

“How so? Was it the chemicals?”

“Partly. But mostly it was that I was expected to continue to do everything at home as well. I was getting two hours of regular sleep then.”

“Well, in any case, it couldn’t have lasted more than a week or two. Still, I suppose two weeks with such a schedule would be devastating.”

“Two weeks! Try”—Peter counted silently—“nearly five months!”

“What? Five months!” Ryszard laughed. “I’m amazed he got away with it for that long!”

“Why not? I wasn’t dead; that seemed to be the only criterion,” Peter answered bitterly.

“No, no! It’s against the rules, look for yourself.” Ryszard pointed at the book. “If anyone had caught him pulling that sort of stunt, Karl could have lost you back to the state. You weren’t supposed to be used for personal profit; after all, if it’s factory work they wanted you to do, it’s the state that should have made the profit.”

Peter felt a sudden chill.

“But, of course, you didn’t know that,” Ryszard said, interpreting Peter’s expression.

Peter shook his head.

“He didn’t either. Not until I told him,” Ryszard guessed. “I think, if I remember-correctly, he had you quit that very night.”

“You
told him?”

Ryszard grinned. “Yes. Seems I saved your life a second time.”

Peter nodded numbly.

“Though almost too late, judging from how you looked then. You seemed pretty shattered.” Ryszard paused as if remembering, then asked, “You don’t even remember my visit there, do you?”

Peter shook his head, mouthing the word
no.

“And it was all unnecessary. Illegal even,” Ryszard added.

That was true, and the fact he had suffered so unnecessarily was indeed a bitter-pill, but even more so was the knowledge that he had been grovelingly grateful-to Karl for having finally ordered him to quit. He felt sick at the memory of how he had reacted to Karl’s alleged mercy. It had not been mercy at all!

“Not that I expect gratitude, or anything,” Ryszard said jokingly.

Peter could not even respond; he had an urge to vomit.

“Are you all right?”

Peter shook his head as he stared at the smooth, pale, damaged skin of his hands.“No,” he breathed.

Ryszard did not know what to do with that answer, so he left his brother-inlaw alone with his thoughts while he went to unpack his briefcase and change out of his suit.

“Why the gloomy look?” Zosia asked as she walked into the room several minutes later.

Peter jerked his head in the direction of the regulations. As Zosia began to peruse it, Joanna burst into the room.“Hi, Ma! Hi, Dad!” She bounced across the room, giggling the entire way, and at the last bounce threw herself up and onto
Peter’s lap and wrapped her arms around him to hug him while still giggling. He joined in her laughter and stood up while holding her so that he could spin her around before dropping her back down to continue her bouncing. She bounced around the room one more time, then stopped and announced breathlessly, “Genia wants to show me the park. Can I go with her?”

“Sure, if you promise not to fool around, not even a tiny bit,” Zosia answered, trying to maintain a stern air.

“I will, Ma.”

“This is serious!” Zosia emphasized. “Not one wrong word. Remember everything I’ve told you and do everything I’ve taught you. Do you promise?”

“Of course!” Joanna sounded offended at the repetition.

“And only if Genia’s mother thinks it’s okay,” Zosia added as an afterthought.