The Children's War (81 page)

“Thank you. And do visit often, okay?”

Teodor nodded his head. “I can see why you want to stay. It’s a cozy arrangement here.”

“What’s your rank?” Halina asked as if agreeing.

“Rank? I’m a civilian.”

“Oh, heavens! Don’t do that! Get commissioned!” Teodor insisted.

“I’m averse to taking orders.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Halina insisted. “If you’re here, you take orders, and if
there’s fighting, they’ll draft you in an instant. Get a commission—you’ll get better pay and at least then you can give orders, too!”

“Pay?”

“They aren’t paying you?” Teodor asked, astonished.

“Room and board.” Peter replied, then added somewhat humorously, “And all Colonel Firlej’s old clothes.”

“Those bastards,” Halina murmured. “Demand a salary.”

“It’s that Katerina, she’s a skinflint! That tightfisted old . . .” Teodor stopped himself and grinned sheepishly. “Ah, mustn’t say that. We’re all brothers in the bond, now aren’t we?”

“And a commission!” Halina urged, ignoring her comrade. “Zosia is a big shot, she should arrange something decent for you.”

Peter considered their words and wondered why he had not thought to ask earlier for some compensation. Had he assumed they all worked for free, or was he just simply grateful not to be shot? “A salary. Money for my work!” he scoffed, mostly at his own timidity. “Sure, why not, I’ll ask.” Then with mock severity he added,“No, I’ll demand!”

“Good for you!” They smiled, sat back, and relaxed. Peter thought that though their age difference was enough for them to be father and daughter, they looked more like two peas in a pod. One plump pea and one skinny one. Peter laughed to himself as he wondered how long it would have taken Maria to pluck these two peas out. Halina consulted her watch, showed it to Teodor, and said, “What do you think?”

“Yep, I’ve had enough.”

They looked at him. “Shall we join the others now and have some vodka?” They were not strangers to the Szaflary encampment and knew about the regular parties. On Saturdays a group of the “regulars” got together along with some of the visiting or temporary staff and indulged in vodka and conversation and debates; sometimes there was singing and even dancing.

Early on, Peter had attempted to join in; nevertheless, he felt rather uncomfortable despite the general merriment and relaxed atmosphere. Notwithstanding their protocol to the contrary, the language invariably switched to Polish as the evening progressed, and anyone who then bothered to converse with him was clearly doing so only to be polite. And if there was dancing, then Zosia made an impression on the floor as she whirled around gracefully with her partner. Not only did he not know how to dance, but the lingering pain in his legs had made him awkward and self-conscious when he had tried to learn, and eventually he had given up. He simply sat back and watched, usually drinking far too much vodka, envious of the man dancing with Zosia, aware that all too often it was Tadek and that the two of them looked painfully natural together.

He shook his head at Teodor’s and Halina’s questioning look. “You go ahead, I have some work to do.”

8

“N
OW WHAT THE HELL
did I do with it?” her victim muttered. She stood there carelessly with her back to the open door, shuffling papers and mumbling to herself in confusion.

Stealthily Stefi crept up on her, her arms poised for action. When the moment was right, she sprung like a cat, leaping forward to throw her arms around her aunt and shouting, “Boo!”

“Good God!” Zosia exclaimed, jumping with fright and dropping her files. She turned around even as Stefi released her hug. “You scared the hell out of me!”

“You should be better prepared!” Stefi teased. “Ever on the alert.”

“That’s a good way to have a nervous breakdown,” Zosia chided, patting her chest to try to settle her heart. “I’m at home, dear. I relax here.”

Stefi giggled. “You’re just getting soft.” She stooped down and gathered the dropped papers together.

“And you, I see, have come a long way in these four and a half years,” Zosia commented, remembering back to that traumatic day when she had helped Stefi with her first kill.

“Yes, I have,” Stefi agreed, suddenly serious. She stopped her paper gathering and looked up earnestly at her aunt. “Did you know, I had to take out Til?”

“No! That was you? Oh, I am sorry. What did he do?”

“He was a bad boy. Tried to blackmail Father,” Stefi explained.

“You liked him, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, he was nice.” Stefi stood and handed Zosia her files.

“You should know better than to get emotionally involved with anyone who might one day be a target.”

“Pff! Look who’s talking!” Stefi laughed. “Olek told me you slept with a prisoner the very night he arrived.”

“I interrogated him,” Zosia answered defensively.

“Is that what it’s called?” Stefi asked slyly.

“I was tired! I fell asleep! Anyway, I have my reasons for what I do, and it is not your prerogative to question them!” Zosia scolded, then added quickly, “I didn’t realize you were coming so soon. Why are you here?”

Stefi tapped her teeth. “Time for some dental work, if you know what I mean.”

“You’re rather old for that, aren’t you? What are you, twenty now?” Zosia asked, turning away long enough to stash the files in a drawer.

“Yes, I’m twenty, and no, this isn’t a first implant. The dentist says that my mouth is still growing and I have to come back for frequent maintenance if I don’t want the capsule to crack. I’m also due for some weapons training, and the best ranges, as you know, are here.”

“Not to mention Olek.”

“Not to mention that,” Stefi agreed with a wink.

“Are you hungry?”

“Ravenous! Where’s Joanna?” Stefi asked, glancing around the flat.

“Out playing.” Zosia wandered over to the kitchen to see if Peter had left any prepared food around. She found some leftovers and brought those out. “Do you want this?”

Stefi sniffed the casserole. “Smells good. Is Marysia still cooking for you?”

“No, I’ve acquired a housemate. The English fellow.”

Stefi giggled. “Still interrogating him?”

Zosia glowered.

“I’ve heard he’s the spitting image of Uncle Adam. Is that true?”

Zosia shook her head.“Not at all. I don’t know why everybody says that.”

“Probably to annoy you. What’s he like?”

“He’s nice. Good company. Very useful, too,” Zosia summarized. “Takes care of everything here and Joanna loves him. He’s out with her right now.”

“Is he any good in bed?” Stefi asked impishly.

Zosia raised her eyebrows at her niece. “You should know better. It has only been a year.”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. What’s he do here?”

“He’s our cryptanalyst. And speaking of which, it’s good you’re here. I need to talk to you.”

“Me? What about?”

“I’ll tell you while you warm this up.” Zosia began rooting around in the cupboards, muttering, “Where the hell are the frying pans?”

Stefi held one up in the air. “You mean this thing sitting on the stovetop?”

“Yeah, that. Do you know how to warm food?” Zosia asked, dumping the casserole into the pan.

Stefi shook her head. “Naw, that’s servant’s work. Or Ma’s.” She watched as Zosia put the pan on the stovetop. “Maybe you should put some oil in first?”

Between the two of them, they finally managed to heat up the dinner without burning it, and as Stefi sat eating, Zosia explained what was on her mind. “It’s something Peter found—this unusual code sent out from an unlikely source. We sent the results on to HQ and determined that they have also stumbled across part of this network. It seems there is a conspiracy within the security services, and the code is used more to exchange information between members of the conspiracy and to hide it from their own colleagues than to exclude us.”

“Fascinating,” Stefi mumbled as she sipped the wine Zosia had poured for her.“How do I fit into this?”

“I talked with the analysts from Warszawa, after they had talked to Peter, and they’re as baffled by the information being sent out as we are. Place names in the middle of nowhere, code names for people that we can’t match up to anything, no obvious rhyme or reason for any of it. Then it dawned on me that maybe it’s
somehow linked to that thing you’ve been pursuing—that project that Schindler had. Have you found out any more on that?”

“I’ve more or less let that drop. I got some place-names out of Wolf-Dietrich, but then he had to go back to work and I have no way to get at him there.”

“Hmm. I was hoping you could pump him for a bit more information. I’d like to see if these things are linked.”

“Well, we do keep in touch. He said he’d be in Göringstadt sometime in the near future. I could try and arrange a meeting.”

“Do it,” Zosia ordered. “I have a suspicion this is important.”

9

“I
S THIS IMPORTANT?
Can I help?” Joanna asked as she stood wide-eyed in the kitchen watching her mother pull bowls and pans and ingredients out and place them on the counter.

“Yes, I’m making dinner.” Zosia ducked her head into a cupboard and began ruthlessly rooting around, muttering imprecations to herself.

“Why don’t you get Daddy to help you?”

Zosia brought her head out and looked at her daughter with something like disapproval on her face. “Daddy?”

“Yes, he’s good at making things! I help him out all the time,” Joanna explained, oblivious to her mother’s look.

“Well, the reason I’m not asking Peter for help is, I meant it to be a surprise party for him.”

“A birthday party?” Joanna asked excitedly.

“No,” Zosia answered irritably. “It’s been a year since he came here, and I thought we should celebrate that. Especially since he made such a fuss for both our birthdays, and then I missed his altogether.”

“A party! Great!” Joanna jumped up and down and clapped her hands. “I’ll decorate!”

“Fine, sweetie. Maybe first you could tell me where the potatoes are?”

Joanna took her mother’s hand and led her two steps to the storage bin. She opened it and pointed inside. “Those are them.”

“I know that much!” Zosia growled. She picked up one and inspected it. She poked at the small eye growing out of a dimple.

After a moment of watching her mother, Joanna said, “I still think you better get help.”

“I think you’re right.”

A short while later, Zosia munched on a piece of chopped onion as she watched Peter put a pan on the stove. “I can help out now, I’m all dressed,” she offered.

“Good, chop this up.” He shoved some boned pieces of chicken toward her.

“How did you ever learn to cook so well?” She picked up a paring knife.

He handed her a cutting knife, then threw some butter into the pan. “What I want to know is, how did you ever get to this stage in your life without learning how to do even the simplest things in the kitchen?”

“It was never really necessary. And I was busy with other things,” she said, busily hacking at the chicken.

“All your life?” He raised an eyebrow disbelievingly as he twisted the pan to melt the butter evenly.

“Well, I depended on my mother until my parents moved out. After that, Marysia did a lot of the cooking for us,” she answered as he dumped the onions into the butter. As they changed from white to almost clear, he shifted them to the side of the pan, reached for the chicken, and added that to the center. The meat sizzled as it hit the hot surface.

“So, now, you’ve delayed answering long enough; where did you learn to cook so well?”

“No big secret, I’ve watched others.” He stooped down to inspect the flame and adjusted the gas accordingly. “When I was home from school, my mother taught me some basics.” He remembered how normal life had been then. She had advised him that a man should always be able to fend for himself, and that it would help him find a good wife if he wasn’t helpless in the kitchen. He turned the meat, pushed it around a bit, pensively. If they had lived, what would life have been like for him? A respectable government job, a wife, a child, a one-bedroom flat, maybe eventually even a car. Could it ever have been like that?

Zosia was looking at him questioningly. He gave her a fleeting smile and continued, “My grandmother taught me as well; I used to stay there sometimes.” Again he stopped speaking as he remembered the frail old woman who had given him so much love. “I paid her back by cooking for her when she got feeble. I was in school then, so I didn’t have much chance, but when I was home on break, I’d go over and try to help out, at least until she died.”

“So, this is all from when you were a child?” Zosia asked as if to prove she was far too old to learn.

“No, not at all. Most of what I know is from when I worked in a restaurant kitchen. Later, in the labor camp, I was occasionally assigned as kitchen staff in restaurants or industrial cafeterias. Then Frau Reusch taught me some things, and even Frau Vogel wasn’t that bad at cooking. She said her mother had never taught her anything since they always had servants, but she learned a bit from a Polish woman who worked for them.”

“A Polish woman?”

“Yeah, she was temporary. Came in a few years after Gisela was born and left a month or so before I came. I guess before that they had some man.”

Zosia made a face and Peter thought it was in response to the implication of
what that woman must have had to endure, but she dispelled that thought by saying, “She should have never cooperated! The traitor!”

“Zosia! All she did was cook! Don’t be so judgmental!”

“My goodness, aren’t we touchy!”

“That’s because I cooperated,” he muttered.

“No, you didn’t.”

“By your definition, I did. And,” he added, thinking of Maria, “I didn’t even have the excuse that I was raised from childhood as a slave.”

“That was different. What you did was different.”

“No, it wasn’t. We do what we must to survive.”

“Offering recipes is more than surviving; it’s collaboration!”

“Well, as long as there is no other option, we need to live as well.” His own uneasy guilt mixed in with thoughts of how Frau Vogel had sobbed on his shoulder after the telegram about Uwe, about how sometimes they would discuss the best way to work the garden, or how he had felt when Teresa had given him the
Winterfest
present. It was clear that if he had been more cooperative, or had cooperated earlier, his life could have been a lot better. He thought of Maria, too: she had been determined to live as happily as possible, to have needs that could be fulfilled, and to ignore those that could not. Was it so evil? Could anyone so helpless and alone really be a traitor?

Zosia was shaking her head. “Cooperation of any sort just enables the Reich to continue. It legitimizes it!”

“I’m not so sure. We failed to defend our liberty adequately during the war, and revolution seems unlikely now. Perhaps we can change the system from within. Perhaps evolution is the way out.”

“Failed to defend? Failed to defend! We fought like hell! We kept our side of the bargain—rejected Hitler’s unholy alliance, took the brunt of the first attack, but you, you French and English sat on your hands! Don’t arm, you said, don’t provoke the psychopaths! Just hold out two weeks, you said, two weeks! Ha!”

Peter rubbed the back of his neck. “I wasn’t even born then, Zosia.”

“But you talk about us not defending liberty! What was it called then? The ‘phony war’? While they were murdering us here, you laughed about this socalled
Sitzkrieg!
Hitler’s troops from the west, Stalin’s from the east! We were being slaughtered and you did nothing! Nothing when it would have made a difference to do something! When they were weak and vulnerable, you sat there!”

“I wasn’t even born then,” he repeated quietly. He had heard the excuses and explanations of those who were alive then, but he did not repeat them for her.

“So now you think we can sit it out. That the way out is evolution! They’re trying to
exterminate
us!
You
can wait for the system to evolve, you
English
”—she somehow imbued the word with as much tone of betrayal as any German had ever managed—“but if
we
wait, we’ll all be dead! No, no, that’s not the way—she should never have aided the enemy in any way!”

He did not appreciate the way his simple suggestion had been exploited to
attack his entire nation, but decided not to argue it further. It had been, after all, a rather insensitive remark given all that had happened and was still happening around them. Still, he felt a kinship with Frau Vogel’s previous servant. He understood that she had only wanted to live her life for whatever it was worth. He felt a need to justify both the woman and himself to Zosia and said somewhat deadpan, “I really don’t think handing out a recipe is aiding the enemy.”

Zosia looked at him as though reevaluating him in light of that comment. He felt discomfited by her stare and so he added, “It’s easy to be unforgiving about things one has never encountered personally. Perhaps if you people offered us an out, then you could judge us.”

“Who do you mean by
us?”
“Us. Me and that woman.”

“I’m not judging you.”

“Yes, you are.” Or was he simply judging himself and blaming her? “Well, what are we supposed to do? We’re fighting for our lives! Do you mean we don’t do enough?”

“I mean for all your activities, I never once heard of something like an underground railroad to free forced labor. You didn’t even free Tadek’s wife, did you?”

“You know I didn’t agree with that decision.” She did, though, understand the logic: if they had not only let Tadek live, but had taken the risk of trying to free his wife as well, they would have opened themselves up to a deluge of refugees and requests.

“So, once they take someone, that’s it, isn’t it?”

“What are we supposed to do?” she asked, clearly angered. “We can’t feed and house everyone!”

“How about smuggling them out to America? Or somewhere else?”

“Do you have any idea what that would involve? And do you realize how few countries are willing to accept refugees? Just try and get into America! For all their big words about freedom, they’ll throw you right back out if you show up destitute at their border!”

“I’m not judging you; I know what you’re up against. I know you can’t go saving-every poor fool like me who ends up in their hands; though I do think you could be a bit more willing to accept those of us who do make it out on our own.” He said this without bitterness, but he had not forgotten the humiliating experience of having to defend his life to the Council. Though they were ignoring it, it was the anniversary of that as well.

Zosia frowned slightly but said nothing.

He continued, “But still, I’m not judging you, and I don’t expect you to judge me either. I’m not proud of everything I did, but I know it kept me alive and sane. If you aren’t there to offer help, then don’t offer condemnation.”

“I wasn’t even talking about you!” she moaned plaintively. She watched him cook for a few minutes in determined silence, then finally ventured, “It’s nice that you learned so much. Is this a recipe from the restaurant?”
Joanna put down her book to come and stand by them; though she could not understand most of their English, her curiosity had been piqued by the varying tones of their conversation. Peter plucked a piece of tomato off the counter and handed it to her to eat, then answered Zosia in German so that Joanna would understand. “I’m just making this one up as I go along, based on the ingredients at hand. Since I’ve come here, I’ve learned to improvise—out of necessity—to keep from starving.” He gave Zosia a fleeting, hopeful smile.

“Are you complaining?” she asked lightly.

“Not in the least. I couldn’t be happier.” He leaned toward her and kissed her, then picked up Joanna and kissed her as well. He spun Joanna in his arms so that she could do a handstand, held her there as she giggled, and then let her gently down to the floor. “You have no idea what a joy it is to eat the food I’ve prepared rather than watch hungrily as someone else wolfs it down.”

“Didn’t you at least get to taste the leftovers?”

“Pff. You must be kidding! I wasn’t even supposed to touch what they threw away.”