The Children's War (17 page)

“I’d soon put a stop to that,” Karl bragged. “You can’t be too soft on them. Got to beat sense into them, that’s what my father did, that’s what I’ve done. Uwe and Geerd, well, I didn’t spare the strap, and they’ve turned out to be real men.”

“Yes, well, without you around, I need something else, some—”

“Just look at that!” Karl interrupted to point excitedly at the television. “Our boy’s got one in on that nigger!”

“What are you watching?” Julia asked, turning her head to notice for the first time that the television was on. Two men, one white, one black, were boxing.

“Ach, a title fight. That’s our boy there beating the crap out of that Angolan. Those niggers might be strong, but they have no brains, no brains at all. Can’t think, so they can’t fight well.”

“Yes, of course.” Julia swirled her cognac and wondered how long she should wait to pick up the conversation.

“Would you like a cigarette?” Karl asked as he lit one for himself.

“How is it you’re lighting your own cigarettes?” Julia asked, glancing around the room for traces of another presence. “Is it the servant’s night off?”

“You know I prefer tied help,” Karl said, referring to his unwillingness to pay for waged labor. “One lump sum and you get a lease for months.” He gave Julia a cigarette and lit it for her.

“Ah, yes. Always the clever businessman!” Julia agreed, exhaling a stream of smoke heavenward. “But then, where is he, or is it she?”

“Back in Berlin. Elspeth shrieked when I said I wanted to bring the girl with me. Said she couldn’t do without help for two months, not with five kids at home.”

“You have five children now?”

“Seven, but Uwe went off to the SS and Geerd’s in the army.”

“Ah. Your sons are not only fine men, but true patriots, just like you. The Fatherland certainly appreciates such loyalty.”

“Tell that to the damn Labor Ministry,” Karl mumbled. He went to the side table and refilled his glass. “Here’s to getting what one deserves!” he toasted somewhat sourly.

“What’s the matter?” Julia asked, a look of sympathetic concern on her face. She moved her hand slowly up her thigh, absently pulling her skirt a few inches upward with it.

It took some time and some drinks to get the entire story out of Karl, but eventually he confided that one of the laborers he had leased from the government
had met with an unfortunate demise. The Labor Ministry had assessed a fine that had eaten into his salary and was only recently completely paid off. “The goddamned bastards! It’s not like it was a person. He was subhuman scum, from a race of pigs, what did they expect? These lesser beings, you’ve got to keep them disciplined and in line, but just make a little mistake and those bureaucrats are on your arse talking about replacement costs and lost services!”

“Oh, that is unfortunate!” Julia agreed with heartfelt sympathy, leaning her head against Karl’s chest as he sat next to her. “So how do you have a girl now?”

“A subordinate of mine loaned her to me for a few months. I’ve been tucking away some sums.” Karl’s arm was around her shoulder; his other hand reached up cautiously to finger the material of her dress just below the neckline. “I’m fed up with these bureaucrats—I’m going to purchase a contract, then they can’t harass me about my treatment of my own property!”

“Good idea!” Julia enthused, raising herself slightly so that Karl’s hand slipped down naturally to her breast. She quickly ran through the typical cost in fees and bribes for purchasing a lifetime contract on a forced laborer, then converted it to dollars at the preferential rate that Karl would be able to get using his position in government. It would be enough. It would be enough!

17

“I
T’S
MORE THAN ENOUGH!”
Maria assured him with quite surprising civility. “Such gifts! No one has ever celebrated my birthday before! I didn’t even know it was in September until you read it in my papers!”

“There are some advantages to education,” Peter agreed quietly.

They sat on his bed, side by side, and sipped wine as she opened each little gift and squealed her delight. He accepted her thanks with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, but he did not feel particularly cheerful. Of all the days in the year, her birthday would have to be the same day that Allison had been murdered! He did not tell Maria about that and she did not detect his grim mood as he commemorated the sad fifth anniversary in lonely silence. In fact, she was sufficiently unaware of his frame of mind that she decided it was time to present him with a proposition.

“I have a wonderful surprise to give you in return,” she said while lighting one of the cigarettes he had acquired for her.

“What’s that?” he asked as he picked up and lit one of the cigarettes he had just given her.

“Hey!” Maria protested. “You gave those to me!”

Peter raised his eyebrows in contemptuous disbelief.

Maria decided not to push the point. She continued with her original intent. “There’s a new worker at the bakery—a French girl . . .”

“Uh-huh.” He had, by this time, acquired a habit of nodding and agreeing without really listening. He enjoyed the cigarette. It was his first in a long time— since one of his torturers had given him one. Maybe he could afford to start smoking again. Maybe Frau Reusch was sufficiently dependable that he would not be left readdicted and stranded without a supply.

“. . . I want you to break her in.”

That, at least, got his attention. “What are you talking about?”

“She’s not had a man yet. I told her you’d do it.”

“Are you nuts?”

“No, don’t worry, I won’t be jealous.”

He shook his head at her misinterpretation, but she did not notice, instead continuing unabated, “You’ll be perfect for the job.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he finally managed to say.

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to sleep with a girl, and I doubt she wants to sleep with me.”

“Oh, she wants to—believe me!”

“How old is she?”

Maria hesitated. “Sixteen.”

“That’s too young.” He laughed with mild self-deprecation. “At least for me.”

“No, you’ve got to! She needs to be taught!”

“Why? Why not wait until she finds somebody she likes?” He wanted to say that sex should be more than fucking, but he realized how hollow that would sound given their relationship. He tried changing tack. “We’re not . . . ,” but he realized he could not think of any way to finish that phrase without sounding like some Nazi pamphlet denouncing the corrupt habits of
Untermensch.

“Look—what are her alternatives? She’s going to be noticed by some man— or boy—sooner or later. Do you want her first experience, maybe her only experience, to be that?”

Peter lowered his head into his hands. Of course, a lifetime of rape. And it wasn’t even a crime. For a German woman to have sex with an inferior was criminal—possibly a death sentence for the inferior-race man, but for a German man to force sex on an inferior woman was nothing at all.

He looked up at Maria: Was her near addiction to mindless sex rather more an addiction to voluntary sex? Was it a reasonable compensation for the continuous threat of rape? It would explain why she had risked seducing the young boy at her previous employer’s—it gave her a measure of control over her fate: seduce him while he was still too young to coerce or force her into sex. Once again, he found himself wishing that she had been more forthcoming in her thoughts about the world—but perhaps it was not a thought-out strategy on her part. Perhaps it was the instinctive response of a little girl who had been thrown into a terrifying and brutal world with nothing but her own determination to survive to guide her.

“All right,” he sighed, “let me meet her.”

Maria kissed him happily. “I knew you’d say yes, and I know you’ll be gentle and teach her well.”

“I only said I’d meet her,” he replied dejectedly.

The next night a slight young girl, her shift hanging loosely from her tiny form, awaited him at the newspaper display case. In the dim light, he could barely discern that the uniform was quite different from Maria’s. It was a gray pinafore dress over a simply cut, pale yellow blouse; it looked like a tasteless school uniform and was meant to indicate that she was an apprentice. So, they were instituting the rumored change: the apprenticeships were to start at a young age and require a tuition that could then be paid off via a lifetime of service—in other words, the system had not changed at all but the words had.

It was a step toward normalcy; during the years of perpetual war, forced labor conscription was no more barbaric than forced military obligations and could in fact be viewed as a sort of conscientious objection to soldiering, but now there was an acknowledgment that the world recognized this class of workers as nothing more than slaves, and this was the latest effort to combat that. There would still be criminal convictions and other reasons for the life-sentence forced labor, especially of adults, and all those who already wore gray-blue would probably continue to do so as they aged and died in their jobs, but now the ranks of the servant class would also be filled with these apprentices and indentured servants. It would dilute his number with different uniforms, different attitudes, and different rules; perhaps they would even gain some civil rights. It would also bring the Reich into line with all the other countries of the world where debt, rather than legal standing, kept people bound.

The girl stepped back as he approached, pressing her back into the plate glass. Above her head, behind the glass, he could read the headline: “1,000 Partisans Hanged in District of Neustadt!” He did not know where this Neustadt was; he presumed it was in the eastern colonial region—there nearly everything had been renamed from the original Slavic to a “Neu-this” or a “Neu-that.” The German frustration at not having been able to press farther east, into the great open expanses of the Soviet empire, had relieved itself in a brutal occupation of the lands that they had conquered: the Central European countries that had lain between them and their ultimate and unachieved goal. Previous inhabitants of these lands had been driven from their homes into “townships” of forced labor pools or had systematically been murdered to make way for the new colonists. By all accounts, the slaughter there was still continuing.

He looked down into the ashen face of the frightened young girl. He smiled at her, but her expression did not waver. It was not a safe place to stand for any length of time, so without saying anything, he gently grasped her hand and led her back to the store. Once they were inside his room, he guided her into a chair and then asked if she wanted a cup of tea. She shook her head.

“Well, I’m going to have one, so I’ll put the kettle on.”

She watched his every move, her mouth set in determined silence. Only one chair was in the room, so he sat on the edge of the bed, across from her.

“My name’s Peter. What’s your name?”

“Emma,” she whispered. She was gaunt and pale and looked younger than her sixteen years.

“Pleased to meet you, Emma.”

“It’s not my real name. That’s just what they call me. They said my own name was too fancy.”

“What is your real name?”

“Jacqueline.”

“That’s a beautiful name.”

She nodded sadly as though its loss weighed heavily on her.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Thirteen,
mein Herr.”

He smiled at her honorific as well as at Maria’s deception. Thirteen—that looked more like the right age.

“You don’t want to do this, do you?” he asked gently.

“Maria says I have to.”

He shook his head.“No, you don’t.”

“She says that it’d be better for me to get it over with—with someone who won’t hurt me too much.”

“You don’t have to do anything, little one. And I think it’s better that you don’t.” He did not mention that at this point it was probably moot: her scared, wan, thirteen-year-old face was more effective than a freezing-cold shower at dousing whatever desire he might have had. “I’ll make you a cup of tea, and we can just chat a bit. Okay?”

“Maria will yell at me.”

“She doesn’t have the right to tell you what to do.”

“I can’t go back and tell her that nothing happened. She’ll kill me!”

“Then lie to her. I’ll tell you what to say.”

She looked relieved, and for the first time a small smile appeared on her face. “Would you do that?”

“Sure. Someday, when you’re ready, the information might be useful to you.” He hoped that it would be when she was ready, not when somebody else decided she was ripe, but he could do nothing to protect her for the rest of her life, and there seemed no point in dwelling on unpleasant future possibilities.

So, they drank tea and he told her what men and women did together and how it could be a beautiful and loving thing. She listened, intrigued, her eyes dancing with possibilities. At one point she got up from the chair to sit next to him on the bed. He kissed her hair and told her she was beautiful and intelligent and that someday she would make someone very happy, but that as long as she had a choice, she must not do anything she did not want to do.

He wanted to stop there, with the vague superstitious belief that if he did not mention rape, then perhaps she would be spared, but he felt almost a fatherly responsibility toward her and decided that he should at least discuss the grim realities of her life. But he did not know what to say. He did not understand the mind-set of the type of man who would do such a thing, and his own experiences with violence offered no reassuring insights. In the end, he decided to say very little. “Finally, if someone attacks you—whatever form their violence takes—remember to love yourself and don’t blame yourself. If they commit indignities, it reflects on them, not you.”

Emma nodded solemnly as she listened to his words and put them in a safe place in her heart, but she was more intrigued by what he was doing as he spoke. She noticed that the fingers of his left hand clawed at his identification band as if trying in vain to shift its position. She grinned impishly at him, and saying, “Watch this!” she folded her thumb against her palm and gently slid her band over her hand and off her wrist.

Peter stared, stunned by envy, at the loose metal circle that she held triumphantly in the air. Wasn’t it enough that she did not have to wear a permanent tattoo on her arm?

“I guess they made it loose so I could grow into it,” she explained. “But they don’t know I can take it off.”

He nodded, unable to say a word. The extent of his sudden jealous rage horrified him. Where had it come from? What had he become?

“Yours looks tight—is it uncomfortable?” Emma asked innocently.

With an effort he turned his attention away from the band she so casually flipped from one hand into the other and answered her question evenly. “Yes, very. It was put on after months of near-starvation rations. Since then I’ve had a much more normal diet and so I’ve regained the lost weight. Unfortunately, that has made this thing uncomfortably tight.”

“It bothers you to see mine off?”

He did not want to admit to being so petty, but since it was undeniable, he nodded.