The Children's War (172 page)

“Oh, that is good news. What do you do?” she asked, accepting the glass Tadek handed her.

“I write letters to you,” he answered while walking to his satchel to pull out the stack of letters to show her.

“Goodness!” she exclaimed as if alarmed. “I’ll never have time to read all that! You don’t want me to read it all, do you?”

“No.” He shook his head. “No, I didn’t figure you would. I just wanted to show them to you.”

“Vodka?” Tadek interrupted to ask. Peter nodded.

“Wasn’t it dangerous carrying them with you?” Zosia asked as she struggled to get her shoes off.

Peter walked over and knelt down and removed them for her. “I didn’t think so.”

“Ah,” she sighed happily, “thanks.”

He went over to the cabinet, opened a drawer, and placed the stack of papers in it. “I made a space for them here. Don’t throw them out. Please?”

“Oh, I’d never do that,” she assured him, wiggling her toes, sounding relieved.

Tadek handed Peter a glass and he sipped the vodka, wondering if Zosia would remember her promise long enough to keep it. “And I found three diaries my mother wrote,” he offered as his other major bit of news.

“Uh-huh.” She picked up one of her papers. “This is the document that I think Katerina was referring to,” she said to Tadek. “What she didn’t tell you . . .” Zosia looked up at Peter. “What did you say?”

“I located some diaries my mother wrote.”

“Oh! Goodness! How did you do that?” she said, finding the appropriate response like a coin under a sofa cushion.

“They were hidden in our old flat,” he explained without feeling. “It was being torn down.”

“Oh.” She turned her attention to the papers. She paged through them as if trying to find something.

“I’m putting them in this drawer as well. They’re very important to me. Don’t throw them away.”

“Sure. Here it is.” She waved the document in Tadek’s direction.

“Did you hear me?” Peter pressed.

“Yes, of course, don’t throw them away. Of course I won’t,” she dutifully parroted. “Well, are you going to make dinner? I’m famished.”

“Of course,” he sighed, and went over to the kitchen. He boiled some beets and potatoes, fried some onions, and set aside some sour cream to make a borscht. Then as that cooked, he chopped up the rabbit, cooked it on the stovetop to speed things up, added some onions, potatoes, and carrots to try to give the pathetic bits of meat some substance, mixed up a wine sauce, threw that in, and tossed the concoction into the oven, rather indifferent to how it might taste. The entire time he cooked, Tadek and Zosia conversed about their day’s work. They debated the merits of an appeal that had been filed by a district, requesting to have their taxation reorganized in recognition that they had not produced anything that autumn. The German authorities had already seized their seed corn for the spring, and they were facing possible starvation over the winter.

Tadek argued that the region had already been terribly hard hit by the recent upheavals and they should not be taxed, but Zosia countered that the Underground had to extort its fair share in order to avoid setting a terrible precedent.

“Why not collect the taxes,” Peter suggested, “then give them a grant to see them through the winter. You could make the grant contingent upon their being discreet.”

Zosia and Tadek both looked up at him in alarm. “Peter, I’m sorry,” Zosia said. “You’re not cleared for this. I didn’t realize you were listening in!”

Listening in? This was exactly the sort of thing they had always talked about! How many times had he read and analyzed reports for her? How many times had he suggested solutions that she had later claimed as her own? Angry words leapt to his lips, but he glanced across the room at Tadek and let them die away unspoken. Listening in, she had said. In his own home. “I’m not,” he finally assured her, and turned his back to finish the soup. “Could one of you set the table?”

As they ate the borscht, Peter told them about his time in London and what the city was like now. The conversation flowed smoothly, and though he had not planned to have a guest that evening, it was still quite enjoyable. After the soup, he got up to pull the casserole out of the oven and distribute it onto three plates. Zosia and Tadek began discussing Council business again, but as Peter returned to the table with the plates, Tadek gave Zosia a meaningful look.

“Oh, yes,” she agreed, “we should discuss this later.” She turned to Peter and smiled.“Maybe you could go for a walk or visit someone after dinner?”

Without answering, Peter set a plate in front of her, then the other in front of
Tadek. Zosia raised her eyebrows, waiting for an answer. He set his own plate in the center of the table. “I’ll go now. There’s really not enough food for three in any case, and I’ve been eating well recently. Go ahead and split my portion.” He went to the door to pick up his boots, then sat down and began to pull them on.

“Peter! Don’t go now, I said
after
dinner!” Zosia called out.

He ignored her and stood to pull on his coat.

Tadek stood. “Look, I’ll go. We’ll talk about this later, okay?”

“No, Tadek, don’t run off so quickly! Stay a bit. Finish your meal!” Zosia pleaded. “Both of you! Stay!”

Tadek glanced at Peter, who stood silent and unmoving by the door, ready to leave. “I don’t think so,” Tadek answered.

“You must at least have a drink,” she insisted.

“I think you two need to be alone right now,” Tadek replied, obviously uneasy.

“Nonsense! Tell him, Peter.”

“Nonsense,” Peter repeated without inflection.

Zosia glared at him, turned helplessly back toward Tadek. “Please . . . ,” she began, but did not know what to say.

“Thanks for the soup, it was delicious, but I really must go.” Tadek headed toward the door.

“Tadek!” Zosia followed him to the door pleading, but he was already gone. She turned back toward Peter. “That was so damn rude! What the hell is your problem?”

“Why did you invite Tadek this evening?”

“Did I need your permission?” she asked pointedly.

“No,” he answered carefully, “I just wanted to know why tonight, before we’ve even had a chance to be alone.”

“We were in the middle of important discussions. I forgot you were back. But it shouldn’t matter, I’m not going to ignore everyone just because you’re here.”

He stood there looking at her, feeling the same sensation down his right arm that he had felt the night before: the sudden shock of aloneness. Alone with another person, with a body that breathed air and said words but was not really there. Alone with a stranger.

Zosia shook her head at his silence. “I would think that with all your acting ability, you’d be able to act gracious to my guests!”

“I was myself,” he answered, his heart aching with an undefinable sadness.

She shook her head. “For Christ’s sake, what do you want from me? I have a life, there are important things going on!” she almost cried. “As soon as you’re here, you want me to be something I’m not, and you sabotage every aspect of my life that isn’t centered on you.” She burst into tears. “Everything becomes so impossibly complicated!” she moaned between sobs. “It’s you, you’re impossible!”

“So I’ve heard,” he replied as he removed his coat.

Later that night, he awoke to find her missing from their bed. By the time he walked into the living room, she was at the door.

“Been to the loo.” She belched. “Oh, God, what I’d give for a night without all this indigestion. I’m so tired and my stomach is just churning!”

“Why don’t you sleep in tomorrow and not go to work.”

“Good idea. We can go for a walk. Would you like that?”

“You know I would.”

“Great, it’s a date,” she said, yawning.

“Zosia?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry about this evening.”

She looked at him as if annoyed by his words. She said nothing though, just stared at him. He cocked his head, curious as to why she had not responded. Was he forgiven? Unforgiven? Did she understand her part in it all? He watched with growing hurt as she said nothing, then she shook her head and disappeared wordlessly into the bedroom.

No point in arguing, he thought. They were past that now—there was no point in arguing because there was nothing left to save. She was just biding her time in silence until he was gone again, until she could be rid of him. He stood staring into the gloom for a long time. Eventually she emerged from the bedroom and tugged at his arm. “Come to bed,” she whispered. So he did.

42

T
HE NEXT MORNING
he woke late after a good night’s sleep. No dreams or nightmares or anything that he could remember. It left him feeling irrationally optimistic, and as he watched Zosia sleeping, he reviewed his interactions with her and decided that he had been somewhat harsh. She was tired, distracted, burdened with weight and water and hormones and expectations. She was not the excitable sort in any case, and if she had not fallen all over him in welcome, perhaps it meant nothing more than that her mind was on other things. It had been unfair of him to be so overly sensitive to her suggestion: business was business, his clearance wasn’t as high as hers, and he should have taken that walk and left her to do her job. He had, after all, ostensibly returned to be helpful; he was not a guest, he was her husband and the father of their child.

Even as she slept, he could see the baby kick and squirm beneath her stomach. It looked crowded in there and he wondered if Zosia felt a lack of space and privacy. She was so independent, so self-contained. He mused about what it must feel like for her to be inextricably bound to another being for so long.
Inseparable. For months they were inseparable; if one hiccuped, the other knew about it.

Zosia’s eyelids fluttered and she blinked awake.“Hi, there.” She smiled at him.

“Hi, beautiful. How are you doing?”

She moaned and stretched and burped noisily. “Well enough. And how are you?”

“I had a dreamless night.”

“Great!” She contemplated him as he sat there bent over her. She reached up, touching his unfamiliar dark brown hair, stroking some loose strands off his forehead, letting her hand stray across his face and then down along his back, her fingers skimming lightly over his scars. “Do you ever think of killing them?” she asked as she pulled her hand away.

He tilted his head in surprise at her question.“Not often,” he answered at last.

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “That’s the way I was programmed.”

“You think they programmed you?”

“I know they did.”

“But you always insisted—”

“I was wrong.”

“But if you didn’t even know they did it, how did they manage it?”

“Remember, I was a research project.”

“Yes, I know.”

“They probed for my weaknesses and went right for them.”

“Which weaknesses?”

“Oh, things unique to me,” he answered evasively. “They would have done something different to someone else, I guess. There were all those interviews, and I never credited their techniques, but I think they were rather clever—I think they learned exactly where to hit me. It wasn’t the physical torture—that was fairly straightforward; it was the direction they pushed me in with that torture, and with the drugs. The words they used, the concepts they forced on me . . .” Worthless, he thought, unwanted, unimportant. Obliged to earn a right to live. He sniffed in amusement at how familiar it all was!

Zosia tilted her head at his sudden silence.

“I didn’t even think about it until later, when I read my mother’s diaries. I recognized some things about myself, and I realized, they did, too! They set it all up so that I fell right into my own personalized trap. And so, I became their tool.”

“Was there any other option?” she asked as a counterpoint to his vague selfcondemnation.

“Other than death? No, I guess not, but it’s not pleasant to realize one has been so effectively manipulated.”

“Was that what you felt with Frau Vogel?”

He turned his head away. “Can’t we let that drop?”

“I just wanted to know,” she pleaded.

He thought he heard something different in her tone, something less judgmental, so he risked answering, “Yes. She did not have to say one threatening word to me. I thought she had the right, and . . .”

“And?”

“And not only that, I wanted to please her as well.” He paused. “You can hate me for that if you want. I certainly do.”

She was silent, and he suddenly wished he had not said the last part, but it was too late. Now she knew, and she would always know that whatever else he had felt, buried deep within his instinct for survival had been a desire to please his masters because his life and the conditions of his life had so depended on them.

“How much do you think that still influences you?” she asked suddenly.

“Do you mean, am I a mental case?” he asked wryly. He was wary of giving her any more ammunition for later arguments. He had already supplied her with quite an arsenal.

“Don’t be so negative,” she chided.

“I’m sorry. It’s hard to discuss things like this without even a cup of coffee to start the day.”

“Don’t duck the question.”

“All right. How much does their ‘reeducation’ still influence me? I don’t know. What I do know is, it took a lot of courage for me to speak out in America, more than either you or your father may have realized. I still had that horror of being punished for crossing them and for disobeying.”

Zosia nodded in recognition. “Oh, yes, the psychiatrist warned us that it might push you to suicide. I knew that wasn’t the case though.”

“You knew,” he repeated sadly. He hadn’t known! How was it she was so sure that she had blithely risked his life?

“I knew the risk you were taking and I appreciated your courage,” she praised, oblivious to his unease.

“I didn’t escape their blackmail entirely,” he admitted, deciding to ignore the issue. “I didn’t tell you, but I had some of the worst nights of my life there, and the most awful memories. I won’t tell you how many times, in the middle of the night, I held that bottle of sleeping pills you had given me and read the warning label. . . . Yet, I spoke out anyway, and I thought for sure I had finally defeated them, that there was nothing they could hold over me anymore. The trouble is . . .” He hesitated as he realized where his thoughts were leading.

“You’ve realized that their punishments can be worse than depriving you of your life.”

“Yes. I should have known. They’ve always taken out retaliations on others, on associates, on innocent bystanders, on little . . . I should have known. I just didn’t think . . .” His voice broke with the memory. Those little fingers clawing at those massive hands, struggling to get one last gasp of life, those trusting eyes pleading with him as they glazed with pain . . .

He tried to break the memory by looking at Zosia, but she had turned her face away. Deciding that enough was enough, he asked bluntly,“Zosia! What is it? Why can’t you even look at me anymore? What have I done?”

“Nothing,” she answered unconvincingly, fingering the edge of the down quilt.

“Do you blame me for Joanna’s death?”

“Of course not. That would be stupid. It would play right into their hands,” she replied mechanically.

“Then what is it?”

“Just a contraction, dear.”

“A contraction?” he asked worriedly.

“Don’t worry, just a practice one. They come all the time.”

“You’re not in labor?”

“No, don’t worry. It’s just that the contractions make me . . . They . . . I get distracted.”

He nodded, relieved. Zosia did not blame him, everyone had assured him of that. He had assured himself of that hundreds of times. It was the contraction, that was all. He let Joanna’s image slip from his mind and leaned over to kiss Zosia and then went to make some coffee.

Zosia kept her word to skip work, and they went for a long walk in the woods. The going was rough for both of them, and they took their time walking along the more level paths.

“I wanted to go to the waterfall, but I guess we shouldn’t,” Zosia commented. “It looks so beautiful in the winter.”

“Ryszard tried to take me there last winter, but we never got to it,” Peter reminisced. “I’ve only ever seen it in the summer.”

“Oh, too bad! It really is quite different. Well, maybe before you go back, you’ll get a chance to see it all icy and frozen.”

Go back.
His heart felt like lead. What had he done that was so unforgivable? Why this exile? To say something, he said, “It seems a favorite with all the kids here.”

“Yeah, it’s where they learn to smoke. The mist drowns out the fumes.”

“Yeah, I know. It used to puzzle me how so many people, despite the rules, were smokers here.”

“We find our way around the rules.”

“You never took up the habit?”

“No, not really. I learned how, for masquerading purposes, but I never really enjoyed it. When did you start? At ten?”

“Yeah, on and off. Supply was always a problem. My father blamed Erich for the missing cigarettes, and I’d steal from shops sometimes. When Erich went off to the labor camp, I was in a bit of a quandary.”

“What’d you do?”

“Stole them from my teachers at school. Over summer break, I ended up
nicking some from my dad. Of course, he realized then that I had been doing it all along.”

“Did he beat you?” Zosia asked as she picked up a handful of snow and sucked on it.

“Thirsty?”

“Yeah.”

“No, he didn’t hit me.” Peter removed his sunglasses and cleaned them. “He wasn’t that sort.”

“What then?” Zosia asked, intrigued.

“Nothing really. He just seemed really disappointed that I would steal from him. He made me feel quite ashamed of myself. Up to that point, I had just thought of him as the enemy, and suddenly there he was my father, shaking his head at me, looking resigned, not saying much at all.”

They continued their walk, enjoying the silence. Zosia lowered herself carefully to the ground and made a snow angel. Peter tried to pull her to her feet, but instead Zosia pulled him down into the snow next to her. They giggled and then lay there, side by side, for a few moments, staring up into the sky, looking at the black, barren branches of the trees as they traced a pattern of possible paths upward.

“Which one would you take?” she asked.

Somehow, he understood the gist of her question. “That one there.” He pointed along a series of branches that led in a loop back home. He doubted she could tell where he was pointing, but it didn’t matter. “What about you?”

“Over there.” She pointed to the left. “See how the topmost branch touches that cloud?”

“Not from my angle.”

“It does from here. I’d just leap off the end onto the cloud and then sprint across the sky and dive into the sun.”

He laughed and rolled over to hug her. It wasn’t easy but eventually they managed to embrace and kiss. He got onto his knees so he could lean over her and kiss her face and neck and hair and tell her over and over how beautiful she was. She looked up at him with that inimitable grin, her eyes sparkling, her entire face alight with joy. His heart felt as though it would burst with love for her.

As the snow began to melt and soak into their clothes, they decided to climb to their feet; again it was quite a job, and they congratulated each other on their nimbleness when they both managed to get up. They continued their walk, then stopped to eat the lunch they had packed and sip the mulled wine that Peter carried in a thermos. They talked of this and that and nothing at all, and every minute was unalloyed happiness.