The Children's War (83 page)

Zosia shrugged. “Did it work?”

“Did what work?” Peter asked, still thinking of Terry and Allison.

“Did you find out what they were doing?”

“Oh, yes. I think we had a pretty good view of the entire establishment. We had people inside who stole documents, and we sat on the outside and analyzed it all and passed it on to the Americans. And that’s it, that’s all I did, I gathered intelligence and I never killed anyone.”

“Maybe you should have,” Zosia suggested. “Perhaps it would have purged you of your dreams.”

“What an odd idea. But the dreams came later.”

“I suppose they did,” she conceded. “Well, maybe you should talk to someone about what happened to you. Maybe that would help.”

Even though it was dark, she could see the sharpness of the look he gave her. “I did. I told
you,”
he replied evenly. “That was quite enough.”

“I meant someone else. Anyone. Maybe—”

“I’m not ever repeating what I told you, not to anyone,” he insisted somewhat brusquely.

“But if you told your story to other people, maybe it would not only make you feel better, maybe it would even help our cause, you know, show what’s going on—”

“Enough!” He did not raise his voice, but it was clear he was furious. “I’m not going to speak with anyone else! No one! Is that clear or are you stupid?”

Zosia pressed her hand to her lips to keep from saying anything. They remained silent for a moment, and she could hear him breathing deeply as he
tried to gain control of his anger. Finally she said softly, “I was only trying to help.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” Quickly he added, “Now, enough about me, what about you, have
you
ever killed anyone?”

“I was hoping you’d say you had.” She turned her attention to covering her toes.

“Why?”

“Because then you wouldn’t think less of me,” she whispered.

“So, you have?”

“Oh, yes.”

He waited, hoping she would expand on her answer. When she didn’t, he finally asked, “Why?”

She smiled at him. “What a silly question! I’m a soldier! Don’t I look the part?” She shimmied comically from side to side so her breasts jiggled provocatively under her nightshirt.

He smiled at her teasing. “Well, then, when? How many?”

“Oh, I’m afraid I’ve lost count.” At the look of surprise on his face, she added, “All the kids who are raised here work guard duty patrolling the mountains, and then later, of course, we become group leaders to the partisan encampments: keep them pointing their guns at the right people, as you know. Our policy is simply, nobody uninvited ever reemerges. Of course, we don’t have prisons, so . . .” She gestured helplessly.

“Haven’t they ever done an all-out assault?”

“Against whom? We’re not officially here. These mountains are officially conquered, and you know the Germans, they are a very literal folk. They haven’t seriously tried since 1970. Anyway, it’s not all that easy to capture and control every inch of ground, especially territory like this. You should know that.”

“Yes, I guess I do,” he answered, distracted by her proximity. The dim light made her look all the more ephemeral, like the vision of an angel who had come to visit him. The thought of her patrolling against invading soldiers just didn’t seem to fit.“How old were you?”

“I started at fourteen. I stayed at it for twelve years, on and off. Of course, I did other things as well, training and such. Just like your Barbara and Olek, too.”

“Yes, of course.” Peter had a sudden image of sweet little Barbara blasting away some hapless foot soldier, then wandering back to the office to help with some data entry. And if he had not personally had Olek point a gun at him, he would have had just as difficult a time imagining that fresh-faced kid shooting at anyone. He suddenly felt very ignorant of the people and events around him. He rubbed his eyes and face to try to soothe a growing sharp pain in his temple.

“It’s not as bad as that,” Zosia responded perceptively to his frown. “The soldiers know our boundary and they know better than to cross it. Only the fools or would-be heroes who insist on following orders rather than, er, prevaricating get caught out.” She paused to rearrange the covers more securely over her feet. “I
must admit, though, it was rather unsatisfying: all I ever shot were poor dumb privates. I never really aimed at a genuine target—you know, someone truly evil.”

“I can’t imagine you aiming at anyone,” he said somewhat despondently.

Zosia looked at the shadows that hid his expression. She felt dismayed by his tone. Clearly, it was time to shatter some illusions; indeed, she had obviously waited far too long. Perhaps, she thought, she had enjoyed being the woman he had created in his mind. She had tried subtly throughout the year to enlighten him, but his illusions had been sturdy. She was the woman who had saved his life, defended him to the Council, fallen asleep in his arms on his first night of freedom. The doting mother, the caring friend. He had not wanted to know more, but now it was unsustainable. He could not remain in ignorance forever, no matter how much he wanted to.

She forced herself to sound cheerful, tried to recall the callousness of youth, tried to impress on him that she was not the kind and gentle creature he had invented in his mind. She plunged in: “I started patrolling at fourteen. I did my first lone patrol at fifteen and killed my first victim a month later. It was a difficult kill; I screwed up and wounded him. There was no time to go get help so I had to track him down to kill him before he got out. He was shot in the leg. He ran, I followed. After what seemed an eternity, he collapsed. I came up close—didn’t want to mess up again—and looked him in the eyes. He begged me to spare him. He pleaded with me. He was crying. Then I shot him in cold blood.”

“What else could you do?” he responded to her story mechanically, without sympathy. He hoped she had finished, but she had only paused.

“I got much better at it after that; I realized that wavering was worse than doing nothing. There were times when we didn’t see anyone for months, then there were other times when somebody got zealous, and we had to drop them like flies. Patrols would be sent in and the idiots would actually come in! Five, six at a time. We’d have to pick them off, one by one. Shoot and disappear. They’d respond with a barrage of fire, but we’d be gone. Then, the next kid, a kilometer away, would pick off another until there was one desperate fellow running to get out of the woods. We’d make sure he never made it.”

He nodded. What he felt and what he wanted to say conflicted so badly that he was left speechless. Zosia continued, driving her point home, dispelling his last stubborn doubts.

“That’s how Adam and I got to really know each other. We’d keep score and try to outdo each other. Later, when we got older, we’d make love anytime we made a kill, right then and there, as close to the body as was safe. It was fantastic. The adrenaline rush was so incredible, you can’t imagine what it felt like.”

“Please stop.”

“It was, though, after a time, unsatisfying. Not personal enough. So Adam and I moved to assassinations. We worked as a team. We’d get sent out to remove
somebody, do the job, and if we could, we’d fuck right there in the room with the corpse.”

“Please stop.”

“I still do it, Peter. What do you think I do on all those missions? Do you think they need someone to lug along a computer every time? Why don’t you ever ask anything about me?”

“Zosia, please stop!”

She did, abruptly. There was an awkward silence as he tried to think of something to say. She glared at him. “You want to know me?”

“Yes, I do.”

“But not the real me!”

“No, it’s not that.”

“You think I’m horrid, don’t you.”

“No, no, I don’t. It’s not that.” He struggled to find the right words, to clarify nebulous concepts. It was too much though: to process the information, filter it through his thoughts, and then explain what he felt in a few seconds. How could he hope to tell her what he felt when he himself didn’t even know?

“What then?”

“Why are you trying to provoke me like this?”

“You’re an idiot,” she hissed in reply.

“Mommy!”
Joanna’s plaintive cry drew them both up. She stood in the doorway holding her ragged stuffed bear.

Zosia stood up, threw a last, unreadable look at him, and then went to her daughter. “Let’s go back to bed, honey. Sorry we woke you.” She herded Joanna back into the bedroom and shut the door tightly behind them. As she climbed back into bed with Joanna, she pulled the covers up close around them and tried to sound reassuring as she said good-night, but when she put her head back against the pillow, tears rolled silently down the sides of her face, puddling uncomfortably in her ears.

Peter remained in the armchair, stunned into paralysis. It was just as well Joanna had interrupted them, he would almost surely have answered Zosia’s brutal comment with anger. Why in the world had he asked such a stupid question? What had he expected her answer to be? No—of course. She had been right; the moment she had said yes, he had not wanted to hear any more. Or he had wanted to hear an apologia. Her life didn’t fit his script, and so he had wanted her to rewrite it.

His head ached with a brutal fury. He buried it in his hands, tried to claw the pain out with his fingers. It hurt as it had when Elspeth used to hit him and hit him and hit him all day long. It was probably her unabated pummeling, her continuous, insatiable displeasure that caused him such pain now, that threatened his sight. Yet, he had never believed she was cruel; though she was the one who had pounded at his face every day of those first weeks, he had always blamed Karl. Why had he done that? Why had he rewritten Zosia’s life for her? He should
have known, should at least have asked. Why had he been so determinedly blind to the real woman?

He thought about Zosia—the real woman this time—and realized that he had failed her miserably. She had wanted to tell someone her story, had wanted someone to understand the actions of her youth, the necessary compromises of her life, maybe even give her a context in which to forgive herself. All the times she had listened to him, all the times she had soothed his memories! And the one time she had opened up to him, he had asked her to stop! Maybe she had told her story so brutally because she was bothered by it. Maybe she had been afraid of his reaction and so she had presented herself as cold and hard and unhurtable. And he had wanted to know why she was provoking him! God, she was right, he was an idiot.

11

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
when Zosia emerged into the room, she found Peter still in the armchair, sound asleep. She nudged him and he woke up and smiled uncertainly at her.

“I’m sorry about last night,” she said flatly, then turned away and busied herself-in the kitchen section before he could even respond. It was, he realized, the first time he had ever heard her apologize for anything, and unusually, since Joanna was not around, she had spoken German. Her choice of language was an unambiguous insult and the words held little conviction—it was as though she had decided to say them only in the interests of keeping things running smoothly in the tiny flat. With her back to him, she asked a bit too cheerfully, “Do you want some tea, or should we have coffee?”

“Zosia . . .”

“What?” She almost snapped the word—almost but not quite. Clearly she was trying hard not to be angry. She still had her back to him, so he could not read her expression.

“Zosia, I don’t know how to say this.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t.” Again her voice carried a tension—as though she hoped he might take her response as a joke, though it clearly was not.

“Zosia—”

“Would you stop repeating my name?” she grated, thoroughly exasperated.

“Sorry.” It was one of those useless, meaningless apologies. His thoughts digressed for a moment on how harmful they were—worse than not apologizing at all, perhaps.

“Anyway, I’m sick of German. Why the hell can’t you speak Polish yet?”

“That’s not fair. You know I’m trying. It’s not like I get much help here . . .”

“You always blame someone else.”

Tadek’s perpetually snide rebukes of his attempts came to mind, but rather than dispute her assertion, he chose to ignore it. “I’m sorry. I really am trying, it just takes time. We can speak English.”

She responded in Polish.“No. If you can’t say it in Polish, I don’t want to hear it right now.” She managed to slam the knife down on the counter as she was chopping at something. He wondered what it was she was pretending to make for breakfast. Chopped onions?

He paused. Now, she really was provoking him, but he decided not to be waylaid. He ran through his vocabulary, struggled to construct a sentence that would convey at least the gist of his rather complex thoughts, but it was hopeless. Every time he started a sentence, he ran into a word or a phrase he couldn’t translate. And even if he knew all the words, he never knew what order to put them in, what endings the nouns should have—dative? Locative? Should he use a perfect or imperfect verb, and what was the masculine firstperson past tense? All he had available to him were phrases that he had memorized syllable by syllable—and none of those would do. If he wanted to express an original thought, he would have to construct the sentence from scratch and risk sounding extremely stupid. Exasperated, he tried to simplify what he wanted to say even further. At this rate, he thought grimly, we’ll both die of old age before I say anything.

Zosia clearly had the same idea. If he could have seen her face, he would have seen that she was smiling. Gently she said, “I can hear the cogs grinding from over here.”

He didn’t understand half the words, but he guessed the phrase from context. That’s it, he thought, I don’t care how simply or stupidly I have to say it, I’m going to speak! So, without groping for any further subtlety, he simply announced,
“Kocham cie, bardzo, bardzo mocno,”
which he hoped meant, “I love you, very, very much.”

She spun around to look at him, her mouth slightly open with surprise.
“Kochasz . . . du liebst . . .
you love . . . ,” she gasped in a confusion of languages.

He plunged in, mindless now of the grammatical niceties of her complex language. “You don’t have to say anything. I know you don’t love me, not yet. So, please don’t worry.” At this point he was stuck. Even butchering the language wasn’t sufficient to convey his thoughts, so he switched to English to continue, “I don’t expect a response. I don’t expect anything. I know that I haven’t given you any reason to love me—I’ve been too self-involved. But I promise, if you give me a chance, I promise there will be something to love. Just give me a chance to prove myself to you.”

She smiled slightly. Then wetting her lips, she lowered her head. When she looked up again, she seemed to have come to some decision, but she did not say anything. She walked over to where he sat and set herself down on the arm of the chair and stroked his hair.

He pressed his head against her shoulder and wrapped his arm around her waist. Embarrassed by his admission, he said,“Do you know you’re my best friend?”

She laughed lightly. “The competition for that position doesn’t seem to be all that fierce.”

“No. But you still manage to come through for me—even without having to compete.”

“Well,” she said, swinging her legs like a little girl, “you’re my best friend, too.”

They sat together quietly. He was enjoying the moment, but when he looked up at Zosia, he saw she was staring at the framed wedding photo of her and Adam on the wall. His face fell, but then he remembered how he had failed her the night before, and gathering his courage, he asked, “You grew up together?”

“Yes.”

“He was always there for you.” It was not quite a question, he knew the answer.

“Yes,” she whispered, still staring at the picture.

Peter stood and went to the picture, looking at it closely. She seemed to be wearing a gown made entirely of lace. “Where did you get the dress? You got married here, didn’t you?”

“Oh, that!” She giggled. “Yes, we had a little ceremony here in the woods. I wore a white dress that Marysia loaned me—it’s held on with a belt. And then I wrapped my granny’s lace curtain around it and over my head. Pretty campy effect, isn’t it?”

“You look beautiful.”

“White was hardly an appropriate color.”

“It’s always appropriate when you’re in love.”

“And that we were. Sometimes I think he was the only one who—” She stopped abruptly.

“The only one who really understood you?”

“Yes,” she admitted quietly.

He turned to look at her, saw tears running silently down her face. He turned back to the photograph and contemplated the happy couple for a moment, then in a low voice said, “Zosia, if I could, I’d take his place. I mean—my life has been an utter waste. If I could have died in his place and he could have come back to you, I’d have made that trade—just to know you and Joanna were happy.”

“Peter . . .”

“I mean it, Zosia. It’s not a bunch of empty words. I know it sounds hopelessly romantic, but I don’t say things like that. I’ve never said or felt anything like that. I just know that it would have given more meaning to my life than I ever had.”

She fell silent. He walked over and stood next to her, putting his arm around her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable. And whatever I wish, I can’t trade places with him, so I guess it was stupid of me to even say that.

I just wanted you to know you can feel free to talk about Adam. I won’t be jealous, I won’t be hurt. I promise.”

She slid off the arm of the chair into his arms and buried her head in his shoulder. He felt her crying and held her as she sobbed quietly, “Oh, Peter, I miss him so!”

“I know,” he said, holding her and stroking her hair. And I love you so much, he thought.

He could not think of anything else to say, so he just held her closer. They stayed that way a long time, then Zosia shook herself free and walked over to the photographs and pictures on the wall. She stood in silence contemplating a watercolor of Warsaw’s
Stare Miasto
—the old town. Peter came up behind her and gently placed his hands on her shoulders. He could feel the warmth of her skin through the fabric of her nightshirt. He had an intense desire to feel the softness of her skin, to move his hands forward under the fabric, but he knew it was not the right moment. He distracted himself by looking at the picture.

“It’s quite beautiful. Was it really like that?”

“I guess so,” Zosia replied as if from another world. “At least that’s what everyone says.”

“Funny, isn’t it?”

She thought that the way he held her felt nice; he did not lean on her like some men did, bearing their weight carelessly down on her small frame. Indeed, in all his gestures, he seemed to have that rare talent of understanding their relative size difference. His touch was always light, his presence, even in the tiny apartment, never overwhelming, never obtrusive. Of all the men she had known, none had ever achieved that level of comfort with her, not even Adam. She realized she had not responded, so she asked, “What’s funny?”

“You and me, and those like us. We live in a world of illusions, a world of other people’s memories, it’s like we don’t really exist. Photographs from other people’s worlds, watercolors of cities that are no more. Yearning for, fighting for, things that have long disappeared, things we never knew: freedom, tolerance, peace. Peoples have disappeared, cities lie in ruins, and we have never known anything else. Your world and mine is concrete and ruins, guns and uniforms. Our lives are lies.”

“Or maybe our lives are hopes.” Zosia leaned back into him. “It’s happened before. Dreams can resurrect realities.”

“Were those realities really so good?”

“They were better than what we have now,” she sighed. “I wonder if the people-then appreciated what they had.”

“I don’t know.” Did
they
appreciate not being in an even worse world? Did he fully appreciate not having been thrown into a concentration camp? Surviving that industrial job? Being allowed to live more than the three days he had asked for? “I guess it depends on whether or not they believed things could be different.”

“I believe it
can
be different. I believe there does not have to be perpetual war. I believe—” She stopped abruptly.

“What?” Tenderly he massaged the tension from her shoulders.

“I believe there could be a world where it would seem unnatural and wrong for me to kill another human being.”

“A world where death is not the penalty for every infraction against the state . . .”

“Or the penalty for being born on the wrong side of a border . . .”

“Or with the wrong name . . .”

“Or . . .” She stopped their mantra, asked instead, “What does London look like? Was it spared?”

“Oh, the initial destruction was not too bad, but over the years, section after section was taken hostage for various reasons and deliberately destroyed. What was left has fallen into ruin. All but the German residential and office areas.” He sighed as he thought of some photos he had seen. “The parks are gone: the trees were either removed through official vandalism or died from age and neglect. Nothing new was planted. The Gestapo built a huge prison in Green Park—I was held there for a time. Outside the prison they had an execution ground. Very grand.”

“What about the theaters? My father used to mention them all the time.”

Though she couldn’t see him, he just shook his head. The theater district was an utter shambles. Still, that did not prevent the regime from putting on productions for the benefit of the people: comedies, dramas, musicals. All with the same theme: National Socialism triumphs over evil. How many different ways they could present the same awful idea! He had seen—been forced to attend—dozens of productions at school. Always the same shit.

Only once had he seen something truly different. When he was eleven, after his brother had been drafted, his parents treated him to a Shakespeare play. It was a rare production, held in a warehouse in a seedy district south of the river. He had been overjoyed at the prospect, had studied the play for so long in advance he could quote whole passages verbatim.
King Lear.
How could he ever forget? The magical night arrived, they filed into the theater and took their seats, and finally the curtain was raised.