The Children's War (80 page)

“Is he buried there?” Following Zosia’s lead, Peter had switched to English as well.

“No, of course not. I have no idea where his body is.”

“I’m sorry.”

Joanna stood quietly looking at the stone. Zosia continued to stroke the child’s hair. “We always have a service and a memorial stone for our lost ones. I had not noticed that we were so near to it—not until Joanna ran down the hill.”

“You are
sure
that Adam is dead?” he asked, perturbed by the twisting he felt in his gut. What if the answer was no?

Zosia threw him a glance that made him wish he had not been so crass. What
in the world had led him to ask something so incredibly insensitive? “Yes,” she answered finally. “His death was registered in their files. They don’t usually bother to send us formal notification,” she added sarcastically.

He had not meant his question to sound the way it had come out. Wasn’t it possible that he had wished there was hope for Adam? “What did he die of?” he asked, hoping to sound conciliatory, but realizing immediately that this question was even stupider than the last.

“A heart attack,” Zosia answered as if repeating an oft-told lie.

Joanna turned to her mother, wrapped her arms around her leg. “Can we go home?”

“Of course, dear.”

Peter picked up Joanna and they began walking slowly back to the camp. Joanna wrapped her arms around him and rested her head against his shoulder; within minutes her steady breathing told them that she was dozing. They continued walking in silence, each immersed in his or her own thoughts. Peter felt comforted by the trusting child in his arms and pressed his head against hers affectionately. He struggled to find the right words to apologize to Zosia without putting his foot in his mouth again, but Zosia interrupted his thoughts before he had decided what to say.

“What does it feel like?”

“What do you mean?”

“To be questioned. To be tortured. What did Adam feel?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you were tortured, weren’t you?”

“You know I was.” Nightmarish images flashed before his eyes. “I imagine it wasn’t the same for him though.”

“Then what do you think it was like? I mean, to be interrogated like that? Did he feel hopelessness? Despair? Did he feel abandoned?”

“I can’t say, Zosia. I’m sure it’s different for each person. For me, I’d say there was always a strong feeling of being betrayed by humanity.”

“All of humanity?”

“In a way. I think people in pain want the rest of the world to offer help, or at least sympathize, but for me the only people I saw were ones who enjoyed seeing me suffer. My pain was not only preventable, it was deliberately caused by other people. I think anyone who is used to normal human interactions finds that a bit of a shock.”

She did not say anything, so after a moment’s reflection he added, “Until one gets used to it, and comes to expect it even.” He did not add,
And comes to believe it is justified
.

“Do you think that’s what Adam felt?”

Peter shrugged. “His situation was quite different from mine; in his place, I might have been more concerned about not betraying anyone. Most of the time, I wasn’t even asked anything. Nothing relevant, anyway. That relieved any fear of
betraying anything, so in some ways I was less afraid than I might have been. And I didn’t have a family to lose, so maybe that made it easier for me to accept the thought of dying.”

Zosia walked on beside him, her face set in stony silence.

He paused, trying to recover some of what he had felt in those horrible prison cells when left alone with his pain. When he realized that she had not said anything, he turned to look at her questioningly. Suddenly it occurred to him that he was being stupid again—she wasn’t asking about his experiences at all! What must she have felt when she learned of Adam’s capture? When she knew he was almost certain to die a horrible death? He thought about what Adam must have felt and wondered what his own feelings would have been if he had known that Zosia and Joanna were praying for him. Would it have changed anything?

Carefully, so as not to aggravate the pain he knew she must be feeling, he said, “Zosia, when I said I had nothing to betray, it also meant I had nothing to hold on to. When I said that I had no family to lose, it also meant that there was no one worth dying for. I only know that my greatest fear was dying alone, unknown and unmourned. Adam had you, and even if you weren’t there, he knew he had your love. And he knew that Joanna would carry something of him into the future. Don’t worry, Zosia, you were there for him.”

She stopped walking for a moment and looked up at him. Gently he wiped the tears from her eyes.

7

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
he told the visiting analysts how to decipher the nonstandard code. They were grateful and genuinely surprised.

“It would never have occurred to us!” Teodor asserted. He was the elder of the two—short and nearly bald, looking like a somewhat belligerent gnome.

His young companion, a woman named Halina, nodded her head in agreement. She was also short, with dark hair and a tired-looking, thin face. “We’ve been working at this too long! To miss such a schoolboy’s trick!”

“Yes, yes, yes!” Teodor agreed. “We’re overbooked, that’s the problem. And one would hardly expect such a sophisticated system to be used to carry someone’s private code. Still that’s no excuse . . .” He shook his head in consternation.

“Do we know yet what their little conspiracy is about?” Peter asked.

Teodor laughed. “World domination!”

“Either that or a woman.” Halina giggled. “It’s always one or the other with these types.”

“Just as well we didn’t prod the American Security Agency into helping us,” Teodor commented. “We tried, but they ignored us.”

“They always ignore us,” Halina observed.

“They’re so incredibly jealous of their information there!” Teodor grumbled. He looked to Peter. “I don’t suppose your lot ever got any useful information out of them?”

“Yes and no.”

“Ah, now that is cryptic,” Halina said with a laugh.

“Well, ‘no’ because we rarely got any real-time information out of them,” Peter explained.“Everything seemed to be jealously guarded, and as far as I could determine, the whole Underground structure was viewed as so much cannon fodder, even the HQ staff. But ‘yes’ because we’d get some help with the training. I, for one, was tutored by an American. Not really an American—an Americanborn Brit, actually. Anyway, they’d come over for a year or two and try to make themselves useful, so they could get to know what it was all about. Then they’d go back claiming to represent us. In fact, I think it was a requirement to run for a position in the government in exile, spending time in England, that is. At least it seemed to be the custom.”

Peter reflected on the number of Americanized Brits he had seen. Each had come “back” to the “homeland” eager and enthusiastic and full of energy and ideas. By the end of their stay most were tired and disillusioned and desperate to get out. Their romantic dreams were shattered as they discovered that the heroically brave freedom fighters were nothing but a pack of ill-tempered, often drunk, chain-smoking humans who had no patience with and no respect for idealistic children playing at war. They learned the awful truth that there was no nobility in suffering through the usual government punishments, that rotting in prison for a few years was often sufficient to break a person’s resistance, that petty bureaucratic harassment and the inability to find work would silence most protesters, that those who continued the fight were often considered, quite rightly, fanatics. They were particularly horrified to discover that a good portion of the Underground’s revenues came from illegal activities such as bank robberies and drug and alcohol sales, and they were dismayed to learn that the “ unified front” that was presented with such success in the NAU was a complete sham, that hatred of the Nazis was not enough to cause Monarchists, Republicans, Socialists, Communists, and others to genuinely love each other.

“. . . same thing here,” Teodor was saying, “except it is a requirement, written into our emergency constitution, that all our representatives are born and raised in the Reich. The exiles are always trying to change that, but so far, we’ve managed to at least hold on to that much control of our government. Of course, once one of our people—usually from HQ—is called to serve, they immediately forget where they came from and start catering to their American constituency. And since we don’t get a vote, there’s not much we can do.”

“Our one great advantage—the Empire—has been turned against us,” Peter
commiserated. “Now they rule everything from Toronto instead of London and we’re just another damn colony. We don’t even get a vote. They said it was just too impractical and would be too dangerous for us.”

“I heard,” Halina added, “that there is pressure from the NAU government to keep so-called foreign influence to a minimum. They’re afraid of the Communists. They don’t want to recognize governments on their territory voted in by people who are not under their jurisdiction.”

“What a crock of shit,” Teodor commented. “The Communists have virtually no support here—which should come as no great surprise with their big brothers next door being so helpful murdering our people.”

“Oh, Comrade Teodor!” Halina mocked the singsong Russian accent. “Do you not know, they were not murdered! They went happily to their deaths in the Siberian mines to help the Soviet war effort against . . . er, who was it again? Oh, yes, that belligerent little group of nations that stood between us and the Reich!”

“Psychopaths to the left of us, murderers to the right,” Teodor sang.

“And the Reds and the Nazis always kiss and never fight!” Halina joined in the chorus.

Peter joined them as they laughed uproariously. Rubbing the tears from his eyes, he opined, “Clearly you two have worked together far too long.”

“Yeah. With no help. To get back to our original track,” Teodor agreed.

“Single though it may be, it is well beloved,” Halina chimed in.

Peter nodded. They had already told him about the perilous state of their human resources. During the first several years of their occupation, before America even entered the war, the Nazis and the Soviets had murdered nearly everyone with any higher education whatsoever, and though, over the years the Home Army had pieced together an education network and had tried to recoup their losses, the attrition rate was still appalling, and experts in any field were few and far between. However, because the regime was so brutal and murderous, there was no shortage of volunteers to carry out less specialized tasks, and it was this great army of volunteers, most of whom lived tragically short lives, that provided the backbone of their cryptanalysis: most of what they knew about the enemy’s security systems they simply stole, often at a terrible cost in young, idealistic lives.

“But to get back to what you were saying,” Peter said, “for all their political pressures, it still doesn’t explain why they can’t offer more technical assistance. Especially with espionage and analysis. We risk our fucking lives and they sit on their arses and fret about trivialities.”

“Well, you know, they never know when we’ll be infiltrated or simply crack under torture and give up all their precious secrets,” Halina offered as a diplomatic defense.

“Humph! They just can’t be bothered—they don’t give a shit if we rot here, just as long as their balance holds. They threw us all away”—Teodor included Britain and most of Europe in this statement by waving his arm in an expansive way to include Peter in his definition of
us
—“for what they call peace. Just as
long as their bloody trade deals aren’t jeopardized. I’ve seen some direct quotes from some of their politicians—essentially they say, hey, we don’t care who the Nazis or Reds murder, as long as they do it inside their own borders.”

“And quietly,” Peter added.

“Yes, and quietly.” Teodor nodded vigorously. “Some even say if it’s quiet enough, then it isn’t even happening.”

“I know,” Peter agreed, wrapped in his own thoughts. “Just a few prisoners here, a bit of judicial torture there, nothing much, nothing that can’t be dealt with. Just a few unfortunates on the wrong side of the law.”

“Yes, some minor lack of civil rights, a couple of unnecessary executions, occasional famines—all accidental, all due to mismanagement,” Teodor continued the list.

“Oh, the Americans have applied sanctions.” Halina seemed to know she had been assigned the role of devil’s advocate.

“Sanctions!” Teodor snorted. What more needed to be said! Peter had heard variants of the same conversation numerous times before, in English, in London years ago. There, it had been a particular complaint that the British government and exiles had had the rest of the Empire and, in particular, all of Canada to fall back on. After a decade or so, the suspicion grew among those left behind that the island was being consigned to the category “ expendable.” The subsequent union of Canada, Quebec, and the United States into the NAU confirmed these fears in the minds of many. The British leadership was drawn into the huge and powerful political structure of an entire continent, their children grew up there and assumed the roles of power, their grandchildren were born there and knew no other home.

The world was thus neatly divided into spheres of influence: the Latin gangster regimes, the North American democracies, the Asian patrimonies, the Russian Communists, and the German National Socialists. Only Africa seemed up for grabs—the scene of continuous skirmishes between the great powers. It was, to all intents and purposes, a stable geopolitical division of the world, and that one small island on the edge of the German hegemony should be grabbed back, at an unconscionable cost in American lives, was, in the eyes of more and more Americans, a rather unsettling and unattractive idea.

Peter had not subscribed to this view; it wasn’t clear to him that the ancestral home of the British Empire was being abandoned to its fate, but he was convinced that the political paralysis that emanated from the far side of the Atlantic was only hurting their cause. He wondered then, as he did now, at the sort of social structure and the complex international economic and political policies that were involved. There were so many contradictions between the public statements and the actions of the NAU that none of it seemed to make any sense. And information was so hard to come by: having spent his life, like the rest of them, sorting through the propaganda of a totalitarian regime, how could he ever believe anything he read or was told?

“Now they want to organize some trade deals and so they’re putting pressure on our organizations there to lay low and offer us less help,” Halina explained to no one in particular.

“They buy goods made by slave labor on one day and talk of freeing the world on another,” Teodor countered.

“I don’t think they buy anything from the Reich. I think it’s illegal. They are still, after all, technically at war,” Peter suggested.

“Oh, they buy—I know all about that—just not directly. And as for being at war, they only seem to remember that when we need something. Then their Ministry of State refuses to let information or equipment into our territory because they’re at war with the occupiers! Talk about logic!”

Peter thought about his computer: obviously there had been no exaggeration in Katerina’s assertion that they had truly exerted themselves on his behalf. He should have shown more gratitude; perhaps later he could express his thanks.

“Well,” Halina said in a conclusive tone, “whatever we say here won’t make a damn bit of difference.”

“No, it won’t. But I know what will!” Teodor agreed, looking meaningfully at Peter.

“What?” Peter asked suspiciously.

“You!” Teodor announced triumphantly. “Why don’t you come up to Warszawa? We could use you there.”

“I can’t,” Peter explained as he rolled up his sleeve and showed them his numbers. “Out there, these are a death warrant; here they don’t matter.”

“Ech. Can’t they do something about those?” Halina asked as she leaned forward to have a closer look.

“They say not.”

“Don’t believe the quacks here, get another opinion!” Teodor snorted.

“But if they’re right . . .”

“Well, then you’re right, those would be a problem,” Teodor conceded.

Peter rolled his sleeve back down, pleading, “Please, don’t get me transferred. I don’t want to leave here, it’s my home.”

They looked at each other as if communicating telepathically, then they both nodded. “It’d be a pity not to have you up there with us, but we’ll honor your wishes. We’ll tell HQ that it’s best you remain here,” Halina offered.