The Children's War (85 page)

“Hopefully, irrelevant ones,” Zosia chimed in, apparently giving up on her onesided conversation with Ryszard. She had switched to English as well, and Ryszard noticed that she now spoke it with a confidence that was greater than his own.

“By then, the question will be, are they
them
or
us?”
Ryszard suggested, switching the conversation back to Polish so that the others could join in.

They did, and the discussion ebbed and flowed around the room, eventually settling on the question of whether the Warsaw uprising should ever have been allowed to take place. Some said that if they had only thrown open the city from the
first to the German invaders, perhaps it would have been spared the way Paris was. Others said nonsense, Hitler had always been intent on destruction—and besides Paris was a backwater sleaze joint for Party officials now. It was pointed out that whatever the French had saved by giving away Paris, they had lost in pride. Someone responded that pride was a bit pointless when you were dead. Olek opined that an uprising would have occurred sooner or later whether or not it was sanctioned, and at least a sanctioned uprising was organized. That was answered with a derisive “Organized suicide! Big deal!” Nearly the entire leadership had been wiped out and it took decades to rebuild, Marysia reminded everyone. Zosia noted that it had at least brought the world’s attention to what was going on, but then countered her own opinion with the observation that it had not changed anything as far as she could tell. And why should it have? her father asked. They then veered off into international politics and why any country should risk its own security to protect another. General human rights, national integrity, the trickiness of presenting an aggressive foreign policy to a voting public—all went into the soup.

Only Peter remained silent, with that intense look of one trying desperately to understand what was being said. He rose suddenly and went over to Zosia and said something into her ear.

“No problem. Just don’t get lost,” Zosia answered cheerfully.

“I won’t,” he laughed and headed toward the hall. There was a sudden silence, which caused him to turn around at the door and look questioningly back at them all.

Ryszard was wondering what exactly to say when Kasia interrupted the awkward moment by putting down the cheese tray she had brought into the room, saying, “Wait for me, I’ll go with you. I can use a break.”

Ryszard stood and accompanied them into the hall. As Kasia changed her shoes, Peter opened the box of cigarettes that sat on a little table in the hallway. “Do you count them?”

“Heavens! Why would I do that?” Kasia looked up to reply.

“Just wondered.”

“Help yourself,” Ryszard suggested.

“Thanks.” Peter gingerly selected one. He lit it, then held it out and spent a long time contemplating it.

“Is there something wrong with it?” Ryszard was finally driven to ask.

“Funny how life changes. If I had done this just over a year ago . . . Well, never mind.”

As Ryszard closed the door behind them and returned to the sitting room, Olek and Stefi, sensing that they were better off elsewhere, made a quick excuse and hurried upstairs. Alex took a deep breath, fixed Zosia with a stony look, and said in a low, angry voice, “What the hell was that all about?”

Zosia shrugged. “We said we trusted him.”

“Not with all our lives!” Ryszard replied.

“What other sort of trust is there?”

“Why do you insist on taking reckless chances? Why did you bring him here?” Anna asked.

“Because I trust him,” Zosia hissed angrily.

“Then risk your own damn life—not my wife and kids! My God, now he knows all of us and where we live and everything!” Ryszard yelled. “Twenty years of my life I spend building up this position, and you mindlessly go and bring any random stranger in here to destroy me!”

“And letting him go out alone. Are you mad?” Alex added.

“Apparently,” Zosia agreed, undaunted. “You all didn’t trust Tadek either, and now he’s one of our best.”

“Tadek was different. We could check on him and learn his history. We knew there was no indication of any collaboration or connection whatsoever between him and the Nazis,” Anna explained patiently to her daughter. “But this fellow, even he admits no one in Britain would vouch for him, and the only living name he could dredge up, that of his brother, is a goddamned Nazi!”

“A what!” Ryszard exclaimed.

“I see you’ve done your research,” Zosia accused bitterly. “I told her,” Marysia said.

“You!” Zosia charged. “I thought you agreed with me about him! You helped me defend him!”

“Yes, I think he’s genuine,” Marysia admitted. “Not only that, but I like him as well. The trouble is, Zosia, we still must be careful; we don’t know who he is. We can’t be blind to the risks. And doing this without clearance! You
lied
to me!”

“I’ve never been wrong in my instincts yet,” Zosia reminded them.

“Yes, Zosia, your instincts are good. But you only have to be wrong once, and with such carelessness, we’d all be dead,” Alex pointed out.

“Joanna certainly loves him,” Anna said, apparently relenting a bit. “She came in the kitchen and told me all about him.”

“So now we’re basing our security on a four-year-old?” Ryszard asked angrily. “You should never have brought him here. He had no need to know!”

Zosia shook her head sadly, pushed her hair back. “Well, he’s here now, there’s no getting around that. I can finish my business tomorrow, and we can leave the day after. That’ll solve your problem.”

“Zosiu, child, the damage is done. He knows us now. There’s no point your leaving early,” Anna pleaded.

Zosia went to stand by the window, pulling the drapes back so that she could see out into the street and watch for Peter and Kasia’s return. In a low voice she said, “All right, maybe it was a mistake. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought him here. But it wasn’t his fault—he didn’t ask to come, I asked him. And I told him he would be welcome.”

The others listened but did not comment.

Zosia continued, not looking at her family, rather keeping her eyes on the
street and the front door, “He’s not stepping out to make contacts or to betray us, he just needs to get out and about, especially in the evenings. I think you might understand why if you get to know him better. Anyway, you can keep an eye on him if you want. For God’s sake, just don’t let him know.”

Ryszard ran through his available options. The damage was done, there was no point in anger. And he seemed to recall from what he had heard of Zosia’s conversation that she had some use in mind for the Englishman. “All right,” he agreed for them all. “We’ll take it in turns and try to be subtle.”

“And I want you to be hospitable. Your suspicions are only that and they are unwarranted. It’s important he feel accepted. Very important.” She sounded so intense, they wondered what she could mean, but none dared ask.

So it was agreed, they would allay their fears by never letting him out of their sight—whatever that took—but they would also assume the best under all other circumstances and treat him accordingly. Alex had only two conditions—the first was that Peter not meet Zosia’s other siblings; the second was that Alex wanted to talk to Zosia, alone, later in the week.

They seemed settled when Ryszard suddenly smacked his hand against the table in exasperation. “Shit!”

“What?” Anna asked for them all.

“The telephone.” Ryszard got up and went to his study where the phone was kept. Telephones were not only unusual, they were rarely kept anywhere but in a small, separate, and well-insulated room. Thus, even though the lines were invariably tapped—especially for Party officials—at least the telephone itself was not an easily accessible microphone for listening into the rest of the house. He unscrewed the bottom of the receiver and removed the microphone. He thought he might just detach one of the lead wires, but then realized any moron would be able to fix that, so instead he just put the bottom back on without replacing the microphone diaphragm.

He returned to the sitting room holding the microphone in his hand. “I removed this so you’ll be able to hear anybody who calls, but you’ll have to put this back in if you want to speak. I’ll leave it with Kasia since she’s here during the day.”

“I thought your study had a lock,” Zosia noted bitterly.

“It does, but it’s not very good and he can pick locks, can’t he?” Zosia admitted tiredly that he could.

Peter and Kasia returned, and shortly thereafter Zosia said that she was ready to retire. Kasia looked uneasily at Alex and Anna before explaining to Zosia and Peter, “I only have two spare rooms, and with the servants, well, it would look odd if you two didn’t share . . .”

“I could sleep on the floor, if you wish,” Peter offered halfheartedly.

Zosia laughed. “Nonsense! We’ll be cozy. Don’t worry about it, Kasiu!” Zosia kissed her sister-in-law and waved good-night to the rest of the room. “Are you coming up now?” she asked Peter, motioning with her finger.

Ryszard saw the look on Peter’s face and knew immediately: he was hopelessly in love with her!

14

“J
UST AS WELL
we never removed the major from their files. You pass easily as my husband!” Zosia said, pulling her dress off over her head. Peter was sitting on the edge of the bed, digging into the satchel that he had packed, the one he had stolen from Karl. She noticed how he stopped looking at what he was doing and fumbled mindlessly in the bag, his eyes unable to leave her. His hand reached absently into a side pocket of the satchel, and she was surprised to see it emerge holding a tiny bundle of hair.

“What’s that?” she asked, coming over to look.

He stared at it, obviously as surprised as she was. “Hair,” he answered at last. “I accidentally pulled it out of one of the Vogels’ chairs.”

She bent to examine it and took it into her hand. “Is it human hair?”

“I think so.”

“I suppose you don’t have to kill someone to steal their hair.”

“No, you don’t. But they did, didn’t they?”

“Yes. I would guess the owners were murdered.” She handed it back to him, treating it with careful respect.

“I thought as much.”

“Why did you keep it?” she asked as she placed her suitcase on the bed and opened it.

“I don’t know. Maybe it was the way Elspeth reacted to it.”

“How was that?”

“She demanded that I put it back, then she walked away and ignored it. Seeing her so able to shut it out of her mind, I guess made me determined not to do likewise. So I kept it.”

“Are you ready to throw it away now?”

“No. I’ll never be ready to do that”—he ran his fingers over the soft hairs— “but maybe someday I’ll be able to bury it. Until then, I think I’ll just tuck it back into this pocket.”

She nodded. She did not know what to advise, and it seemed as good a solution as any. Too much had happened in the twentieth century to ignore it all, and too much had happened to remember it all. Perhaps a small memorial like Peter’s made sense. She reached into her suitcase and pulled out a small, locked case. From that she removed her gun and, sitting on the edge of the bed as well, began inspecting and cleaning it.

“An assassination?” Peter had stopped unpacking and was watching her with undisguised curiosity.

“Yes,” she answered tersely.

“Who?”

“Nobody special,” she responded cautiously. She became aware of a prolonged silence and looked up from her work to study his expression. He gave her one of his fleeting smiles in response. There was no accusation in his eyes, just a realization that his curiosity had strayed too far.

“Can I ask what he’s done?”

It was a genuine question. She reminded herself that Peter was unaware of yesterday’s conversation, and there was no reason he should view her professional discretion as insulting. “Yeah.” She smiled. “A blackmailer. Turned in some of our own to the Gestapo. He’s unimportant, it will be trivial.”

“How are you going to do it?”

Again she studied him. His curiosity was genuine and only that. She was sure of it, yet the warnings of her parents and her brother echoed in her head. Oh, to hell with them, she thought, and said, “A stiletto should do the trick. It should be a clean job.”

She pulled out a piece of jewelry and showed it to him. The oblong, silver pendant flared slightly at one end and had filigree running along its length. She pressed against a bit of the pattern and a thin, sharp blade leapt out of the end— straight out.

He started. “I never realized that was a weapon!”

“Usually I carry it in my purse, but, as you know, sometimes I wear it around my neck. Of course, the blade is a bit shorter than usual so that the handle is not recognizable as such.”

“Is the short blade a problem?” he asked, touching it.

“No, I just put it here.” She reached around his neck and placed her fingers at the base of his skull. “If one gets the right angle, it makes it so quick that they rarely even bleed much.”

“Will you have to sleep with him?”

She laughed: that was certainly not the typical concern of a spy! He ducked his head, embarrassed by his presumptuousness, so she reached over and gave him a hug and a kiss. She could feel him quiver as the soft material of her slip brushed against his skin.

“Be careful,” he murmured.

“Don’t worry. I always am. Everybody agrees I’m overcautious,” she said as she laughed inexplicably.

Zosia returned unharmed and successful from her endeavors, and the followingday, when Ryszard went into work, she and Peter hitched a ride into the centerof town. She gave Peter a tour of the city, and they laughed in their sleeves at the Nazi monuments, each more grotesque and tasteless than the last. In the
afternoon it began to rain, so they decided to visit the museums. They started with art and walked through the wretched exhibits with good humor. After viewing enough heroic sculptures of work and war heroes to last a lifetime, they wandered into the wing with painted art. There the workers were even brawnier, the invariably blond women had children nearly dripping off their hips, and the sun never stopped shining.

They tried an archaeology museum next, sure that that would be more immune from the effects of propaganda, but the main display was pottery shards and jewelry, circa 200
B.C.,
dug up in the region of Göringstadt. Of course, all the shards and all the jewelry could clearly be labeled as Aryan and specifically Germanic in nature. Neither of them knew enough archaeology to determine if the artifacts were real or to offer up alternative explanations, but both were well enough trained in logic to spot the inconsistencies, and they amused each other by pointing out paradoxes in the little historical paragraphs that accompanied the displays.

After that they wandered into the natural history museum. There they discovered an entire floor devoted to the development of races and an explanation of why the Aryan race, as exhibited in the modern German nation, was the pinnacle of this development. They moved on to the exhibits of dinosaur bones and ancient fossils, but these displays were poorly labeled and badly presented, as if the curators could not decide—or had not been authoritatively told—whether the idea of dinosaurs walking the earth without Nazi guidance was sacrilegious.

Since the natural history museum was so disappointing, they had about an hour before closing to peruse the science museum to see if they wanted to return to it later in the week.“Now what,” Peter asked, “can they do to science?” He need not have asked. The biology wing explained all about blood and racial mixing through bloodlines and how tainted blood produced inferior beings—a twoheaded calf and a deformed lamb carcass being the main evidence offered. Chemistry was somewhat better: it stuck to noncontroversial topics, although there was a penchant for crediting German scientists with every discovery from the periodic table onward, as well as a good bit of alchemy before that.

Physics was disappointing—the only genuine amusement provided was when Zosia read the subtitle under the great “German” astronomer Copernicus. She snorted so loudly that a number of the patrons gave them a curious glance. They wandered into the section on modern physics, curious to see how that was presented. The German-speaking Jews who had worked on modern physics in the beginning of the twentieth century were nowhere mentioned. Indeed, modern physics, with all its technological wonders and horrors, got rather short shrift. Clearly the regime was still of two minds about this wild, uncontrollable, and yet powerful tool. It had been derided as Jewish voodoo science in the beginning of the twentieth century, but the nuclear weapons it had produced were all too enthusiastically used in the middle. The love-hate relationship was clearly more than the curators could handle, and they offered only a few of the acceptable
figures of modern physics as paragons of German logic and intelligence. Mathematics was similarly muddled, and since the museum was closing, Peter and Zosia left, deciding that there was little point in returning later.

The rain had stopped with the coming of dark, and they walked in the park. Now and then a snowflake drifted down from the clouds, but otherwise they were alone. They walked to the river Vistula—a river that, like so many other places, had more than one name. The water flowed lazily past the city; here and there cinders floated on the surface. Zosia said that on bad days, when the wind was high in the southeast, where the ruins of Warsaw lay, then the river would run black with ash. She told Peter the myth of Syrenka, the mermaid of Warsaw, and he laughed and asked how an inland city had a mermaid as its symbol.

She explained, as a marine biologist might, about freshwater and seawater mermaids and their various habits, concluding, “Clearly, from the evidence at hand, some mermaids swim in rivers.” They both laughed lightly. He hugged her and they held each other against the chill breeze and looked out over the almost tranquil river.

Zosia took care to go slowly as they climbed the steps back up the embankment to the paved path that ran along the river. At the top she stood still to rest, waiting patiently, trying not to notice how Peter winced with pain. A small group of SS Jugend came jogging by, their hair cut bristly short, their faces covered in sweat despite the evening chill. Courteously, they gave Zosia and Peter a wide berth, sprinting agilely onto the grass in an overzealous show of deference. Peter watched them as they passed, turning his head to stare bitterly after them as they ran off into the distance. Zosia looked at his expression—it was a study in pure hatred. She felt slightly disconcerted and tugged on his arm to distract him, leading him over to a bench to sit down.

They sat in silence for a moment, then without preamble she asked, “Do you ever dream about the
Kommandant?”

“No,” he answered almost too quickly.

“I wonder why not.”

“Maybe because it never happened,” he said without inflection.

She snapped her head around to look at him. He was staring down the path, his head turned away from her.“Never happened?”

“No, never,” he replied, still not looking at her. From some distance away, a young couple walked along the path toward them, and he seemed to be intent on them. “I made it up to gain your sympathy. I didn’t expect you would tell everyone. Now you can tell them all it never happened. Okay?”

“I’m sorry.” Zosia remembered Tadek’s cruel remark. “I had to tell them in order to . . .”

“Well, it never happened, so we don’t ever need to discuss it. Right?” His voice came out of a distance.

“What about your reeducation?”

“What about it?”

“Do you ever dream about that?”

“No.” He was watching the approaching young couple as if mesmerized. The woman was pretty; she leaned her head in toward the young man as he said something. They were obviously enamored of each other.

“You know, you’ve told me about the first month, but you never told me what happened after the officer visited you,” Zosia prompted.

“I don’t remember.”

“Three months of your life? None of it?”

“None of it.”

They fell silent as the couple came within hearing distance. Zosia looked at the woman Peter was watching so intently—she had a provocative sway to her walk. He turned his head to watch the couple as they passed by the bench, and eventually his eyes fell upon Zosia’s face. He smiled wanly at her. “You don’t want to go down that path,” he said, then his eyes strayed back to the retreating couple.

Zosia thought for a moment whether she should continue, then she decided to try a more direct approach. “Why is it that of all your experiences, you seem to think about the Vogels the most?”

He pulled his attention away from the couple and looked at her for a moment as though he would disdain to answer, but then he seemed to reconsider. “I’ve thought about that and I think it’s because of everything that I saw or experienced, they were the most disconcerting. In prison or in a prison camp one expects a level of insanity. One believes that if there are sadists or nuts, then they will naturally gravitate to positions of authority, so nothing comes as a shock. Torture and death, it’s all part of the natural order of things. But you sustain yourself by believing that out there, out among normal people, it is different. You like to think, if only they knew, if only they could see it with their own eyes! But when it’s all transplanted to a nice home in the suburbs with a happy, healthy family of children, a back garden with flower beds and trees and birds . . .” He shook his head. “You learn, firsthand, how violence can permeate a whole society, and even in a room of pretty floral wallpaper and delicate glass figurines, it’s easy to feel terrified.”