The Children's War (164 page)

“So she was good enough and I’m not!” Barbara hissed angrily.

“We need to talk. Tonight,” he asserted quietly, then pointedly he turned away to continue their workday in silence.

They closed up the shop and returned to the flat. He cooked up the dinner since Barbara seemed to be in a huff. She had not spoken one word to him since the afternoon, and when they had entered their home, she had poured herself a drink without offering him one and had set herself down on the couch to stare at the television in stony silence.

A parade was on: row upon row of soldiers marched past, then rockets and missiles and tanks.
Your tax dollars at work
—Peter remembered the phrase he had seen at an American roadworks. Maybe the phrase for the Reich should be
Your wrecked economies and slave laborers paid for this!
All for the Fatherland, the omnipresent Fatherland. He felt suddenly sick with Reich fatigue and wished that he and Zosia and the baby and whoever of their friends wanted to go along could just relocate to some quiet village in the Canadian wilderness, as far from rockets and missiles and tanks and marching soldiers as they could get. They could have a little bonfire— well, a big bonfire—and burn the masses of documents and ration cards and travel permits and every worthless scrap of paper they had to carry. They could burn the uniforms and the regulation books and the endless propaganda pamphlets. The mess would keep them warm for a winter. Then they could build nice log cabins and plant crops and speak whatever language they wanted to and forget everything they had ever learned about living with institutionalized violence. They would become vegetarians so that none of them would have to kill again.

He walked over to the television and switched it off, announcing that dinner was served. They ate without speaking, the clinking of the forks on the plates incongruously loud in the moody silence. Once they had finished dinner and cleaned the dishes, he poured drinks for both of them and invited Barbara to join him on the couch.

She stood unmoving for a moment, making a face, but she relented and sat down next to him.

He sipped his whiskey while he found his courage, then he began, “Barbara, we need to straighten out what we’re doing here. We’ve got to put this relationship back on a professional level.”

Barbara did not respond. She stared at the wall, her head turned slightly away from him so he could not read her expression.

“Our marriage here is just a pretense. I not only did not marry you or ever promise anything of the sort, but I am already married and I love my wife.”

Barbara turned to look at him then. “Why?” she asked coldly.

“That’s not relevant to this discussion.”

“Why?” she insisted angrily. “She doesn’t love you! She doesn’t even pretend to! She cheats on you.”

“Do you know that?” he was drawn into asking despite his best intentions to avoid such a digression.

“Everybody knows!”

“Do you
know
that?” he repeated angrily.

Barbara hesitated, then frowning, she admitted,“No. I don’t know for sure.” She paused. “But the fact that you’re not sure shows how she treats your feelings with contempt! If she cared, she would not raise such a question in your mind. She’d . . .”

“What? What do you think she should do? Enter purdah?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s . . . Never mind. My point is, she has to work and continue to live whether I’m around or not. I don’t want to own her or control her behavior or choose her friends. I trust her—it’s part of what I want in a marriage.” He managed not to add that, at least that was the case in theory. In practice, well, things were more complicated.

“You’ll be able to trust me.”

“I know.” He sighed and stroked her hair. “I find you very attractive and a joy to live with, but I already love Zosia, and you’re too young for me.”

“I don’t believe you love her—not after what she’s done to you. That’s just a lie you tell to protect yourself and excuse your behavior. Everything you’ve done with me, the way we’ve spent our time together—that’s the truth. And the truth is you love me! You’re just too stubborn to admit it.”

“You’re too young,” he argued weakly. He did not want to debate whether he loved Zosia nor did he feel that dissecting his marriage was relevant to getting Barbara to realize he did not love her.

“I’m not. I’m more experienced than any number of older women.”

“There’s something to be said for the passage of time, little one. You still have so much to learn and so much growing to do. I don’t want to hamper that. I don’t want to spend my life always saying something stupid like, ‘In my day . . .’ I need a woman with independent life experiences, someone who has as much background and excess baggage as I do—so there’s some balance.”

Barbara was shaking her head. “No, you don’t! If you wanted that, you wouldn’t resent Colonel Król’s involvements and past as much as you do.”

Peter felt stricken by her remark. Was it that obvious? He had completely forgotten that Barbara had read at least one of his letters to Zosia and was simply mirroring his own words back to him.

Barbara continued, “You don’t want what you say. What you want is a tabula rasa so that you don’t have to compete with anything! And the stupid thing is, I can give that to you! I’d make you happy because you’d never have to guess where my love or my attention or my memories were! No saintly dead husbands, no great family ties. You would be the center of my life. And that’s what you need! Now that Joanna is dead, there is nothing to hold you back! I could be there for you in a way she never could.”

“Oh, Barbara,” he moaned, unable to answer her any other way.

“It’s embarrassing to admit it,” she sobbed, “but I not only love you, I admire and adore you. I would fill those gaps in your heart that the colonel leaves blank. I would never outrank you, I’d never one-up your experiences or knowledge, I’d never arrange your assignments behind your back. I’d simply love you. Deep down, that’s what you want. An old-fashioned wife. Not an experienced woman, just someone to look after you and care for you and love you without question and without expectation. I could do that.”

He closed his eyes tight against the temptation. God, what a blessed relief it would be. He could win every fight—or there would be no fight! He wouldn’t be known as Barbara’s husband, rather she would be known as his wife. Cooked dinners and a clean home and thoughtful little presents! No sudden surprise reassignments, no competition on knowledge. The announced winner of every future contest. Or no contests at all. She would not drag out a rusty Russian to counter his smattering of French, she would not explain about the Great Northern War when he talked of the War of the Roses. She would not claim the analyses he had carried out for her as her own, using
I
when
we,
or better yet
he,
would be more appropriate. In fact, she would probably use her valuable time to help him in his work! She would be his student and he would be her teacher, with all the wonderful confidence and restoration of his damaged ego that would imply.

He shook his head slowly. Maybe for a year, at most. “Even if you could keep up that sort of devotion—and my experience is that nobody can, not really—but even if you could, and even if I admit that it would please me now, I’m sure that it would grow wearisome for me. And I’m equally sure, you would learn to first resent me and then hate me as you realized you had given up everything to become my shadow. That’s what I mean by experience, Barbara. If you had experience, you would know that what you feel now will not last forever. It can’t.”

“So you think I’m a naive fool!” she responded furiously.

“That’s not what I said,” he argued helplessly.

“You goddamned bastard! You use me, you string me along, you let me make a complete fool of myself, and then you calmly throw away everything I have to offer!” she yelled at him between sobs. Tears streamed down her face and her voice was strained with emotion.

He remained calm. Since he did not have any strong emotions about her, it was easy to treat the entire thing rationally, and rationally he knew that she
would explode. She had invested far too much of herself in him and her dreams for their future to let go easily. She upbraided him, swore at him, tore apart everything he had ever done or said. She leapt up from the couch and paced angrily around the room, throwing off his arms as he tried to console her, slamming the door to the bedroom as she said her final word, only to reemerge a moment later to continue her scathing denunciation.

Knowing that complete silence would be interpreted as disinterest, and knowing how much more that would hurt her, he responded softly to her accusations and tried to explain how she had misinterpreted or overinterpreted. It gave her more to yell at, more fuel for her fire, but he felt it was best to let her purge herself completely. Whatever remained unsaid tonight would probably be resurrected even more painfully later. Better to let it all come out now.

Only when she tried to hit him did he stop her. He grabbed her slender wrists in each of his hands and held her arms until she ceased to struggle. Then he released her and immediately she swung at him. Again he caught her arms in an iron grip and held her fast. He would concede a lot to her pain, but not that! This time though, she did not try to trick him by ceasing to fight, instead she tried to kick him. As he realized what she was doing, he threw her away from him and she landed against the wall with a heavy thud.

“Don’t!” he ordered angrily as he saw her begin to launch herself at him. She stopped and stared at him like a leashed, raging dog. Despite her youth, she was a lot weaker than Zosia and apparently less trained, or at least less rational in her anger. Zosia would never have attacked him like that, and if she had, she would have done a much better job of it. He found himself admiring his wife’s selfcontrol even as he warily held a hand out to warn Barbara to keep her distance.

“You should know better than that,” he could not help himself from chiding. “You of all people!”

“You betrayed me!” Barbara wailed as if that excused her behavior.

“I will
not
let you hurt me! Only spoiled brats behave like that!”

Infuriated by the insult, she ran at him again, intending to scratch him. He caught her arms and twisted her around so her back was against him and her arms crossed in front of her. It effectively kept her both from hitting or kicking him.

“Stop this!” he snarled, but she was struggling so hard he was sure she didn’t hear him. He took a moment to regain his equilibrium. Her behavior was so unexpected, so unlike that of Zosia or Allison or anyone else he had ever cared about, that it had taken him completely by surprise. After a moment she began to tire and finally she stopped struggling. He did not release his hold; instead he held her and hissed into her ear, “Where’s that love now? Listen to what you called me, look at how you’ve tried to injure me. Is that love? What kind of love is it that can’t even survive one conversation? You want to build a life based on this?”

He let her go and she spun around. He flinched, but all she did was throw her
arms around him. She buried her head in his shoulder and wept as he wrapped his arms around her and held her. “It’ll be all right, it’ll be all right, little one,” he assured her over and over.

It wasn’t all right though. The next morning and for days thereafter she completely ignored him and only spoke to him when absolutely driven to do so by the necessities of their job. He bore it stoically, attempting conversation now and then, carrying out most of the daily chores, smiling encouragingly at her whenever he caught her eye. He marveled at his ability to be unperturbed; he was sure if Zosia had pulled such a stunt, it would have driven him mad with irritation, but then, he did not want to make a life with Barbara and so it was easy to set aside her weapons of rejection. Her behavior did nothing more than convince him that he had been right all along—she would never be the woman for him.

During that time Jenny got in contact with him and arranged several meetings. That kept him out of the apartment for a few evenings, and Barbara obligingly disappeared on others. After about two weeks, Barbara relented; she was tired of keeping her opinions to herself. She did not converse though, rather she limited herself to one-sentence observations, sniping at him continuously. The snide, insulting, endless comments got on his nerves, but he determinedly ignored them, refusing to take the bait and restart an argument. There was nothing to argue about—she knew his opinion and it would not change. Everything else was irrelevant. He had not tried to mislead her, but he accepted her hurt anger and would do nothing but wait until she forgave him. If, after that, she had legitimate complaints about their various duties and actions, then he would willingly discuss whatever troubled her in order to make their work easier.