The Children's War (68 page)

68

P
ETER HAD FALLEN ASLEEP
by the time Zosia returned, and she hesitated to wake him; instead she stood watching him as he slept. She imagined that it was Adam sleeping there, but then he stirred and smiled and the similarity evaporated. “You’re back,” he whispered in a foreign tongue.

“As promised. So what do you want to hear?”

“Anything. Everything. Tell me about yourself.”

She tilted her head to consider him, then agreed, “All right.” She sat down and removed a half-liter bottle of vodka and two glasses from her bag. She poured each of them a drink and then set the bottle down, uncapped, between them.

Years of training led Peter to reach for the cap to cover the bottle, but she
stopped him: “Old custom.” She raised her glass, said,
“Na zdrowie!”
and swallowed the shot in one gulp.

“Naz-dro-vyeh.” Peter repeated her version of “cheers,” hoping that what he said was at least approximately right, and followed suit; then, pointing to what looked like a blade of grass in the bottle, he asked, “What’s that?”

“That’s an herb to flavor the vodka. It’s grass the bison eat.” She refilled their glasses.

He noticed that the bottle had a Polish label and asked, “You make your own vodka?”

“Of course, how else would we get any?”

He wondered at this economy that seemed to function as an entire underground state, but decided not to ask anything that might seem suspicious. He didn’t fool himself—he knew she was still judging him. Instead he asked, “That other woman, Marysia?”

She nodded.

“Marysia said I reminded her of her son.”

“Adam.” She said the name in something other than a neutral tone, but he was not sure what it implied.

“Was that his name?”

“Yes. And, yes, there is some similarity.”

“So you knew him.”

Zosia laughed. “You could say that.”

“What’s so funny?” He felt slightly miffed—they seemed to laugh at him a lot.

“He was my husband.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Yes, so am I. I mean, I’m not sorry he was my husband. I’m— Oh, bugger!” She looked at Peter as though weighing up the similarities. Then, switching to German, she continued, “I hope you don’t mind, but I find speaking in German much easier than English. I’ve had more practice.”

“No, of course not. But why are you so practiced in German? I’ve hardly heard any Polish at all.”

“You must have guessed the answer. You do know that speaking Polish is essentially illegal?”

He shook his head. “I had heard rumors about some languages but . . .” He shrugged, somewhat embarrassed by his ignorance.

“Yes, well, it is and has been for some years now, as a retaliation for, um, certain actions. Anyway, speaking it in the wrong circumstances is quite severely punished. But that’s not why we speak German. We, all but a few of us, mix regularly into Reich society, and we must be able to pass ourselves off as
Reichsdeutsch.
We find that the easiest way to have no discernible accent is to speak the language from childhood. So we maintain our fluency this way. We learn our own language as if it were a foreign tongue, and we speak it only with a few select family members—that way we are never tempted to slip into it when we are under stress.”
“Stress,” Peter repeated the word. Yes, that was a good word for it. Drugs, fatigue, torture—they could all be summed up quite tidily. “But will your strategy work? Aren’t you afraid of losing your national identity?”

“As for losing our national identity, well, as long as they want to kill us for it, I doubt we’ll forget who we are.” She paused, took a deep breath as though remembering long debates, then continued, “Now as for our strategy, well, it has worked before—we sat out partition and an occupation for more than a hundred years and we managed to come back.”

“ ‘A phoenix rising from the ashes,’ ” he quoted a history text he had read. “But that was different, wasn’t it? I mean, the Prussians and Austrians and Russians at least let you assimilate, didn’t they?”

“Indeed, to some extent we could move up in society and lose ourselves entirely. That’s probably why, this time around, our early leaders took such a dogmatic line about noncooperation.”

“They were afraid?”

She nodded. “I think so. I think they thought if we accepted any of the offers of collaboration or a puppet state, then it would be too easy to slip into national nonexistence.”

“It has cost you. Was it worth it?”

“You’re right, it has cost us dearly,” Zosia agreed. “Maybe we should have done things differently. But who could have foreseen how long this Reich would last or this prolonged genocide? Of course, we have so little information, and God only knows what’s happening in the bit the Russians grabbed—”

“It’s not safe there?”

“Nowadays, that is unclear. Early on, some crossed the Bug River into the Soviet-held territories, but they were either sent back or, we are told, murdered or sent East for slave labor.”

Thinking how he had toyed with the idea of crossing that border, Peter raised an eyebrow at that. “Do they still send people back?”

Zosia shrugged. “Sometimes. It depends on politics. Anyway, it’s such a fortified border it’s almost impossible to cross it now, and for most people, there isn’t much point. There are hardly any of our people left over there, so we don’t get much information. The Soviets were much more efficient than these Nazis, and even we have trouble remembering it was the same country once.” She looked out the tent door and finished quietly, “Between the two of them, we’ve taken a beating. According to our best estimates, our population now is less than half of what it was in 1939.”

“Less than half?”
“Yes, within the first five years one in six of us was dead. That’s six million people murdered. I’m not talking about soldiers, I’m talking about the entire population: men, women, children, babies. They started with intellectuals, teachers, university students, landowners, political and religious leaders, officers . . . Any potential leaders. Then they went for the Jews. About half that
number were Jewish—nearly our entire Jewish population within the Germanheld regions.”

“And the rest?”

“The other half? Those not selectively killed fell to bombings, reprisals, executions, slave labor, starvation—”

“No, I meant the rest since those first five years.”

“The famines of ’45 and ’48 and the epidemic of ’46 probably took another sixth or so. Then there was the Warszawa uprising . . .”

What she said sounded like “var-sha-va,” and it took him a moment to match it to the German name Warschau and realize she meant Warsaw. “Oh. What happened?”

“As I’m sure you know, it was suppressed. That cost us a few people. Most of our leaders. Since then, it’s been mostly just slow attrition: starvation, disease, executions. You know, the usual.” She fell silent and Peter did not know what to say.

She looked up at him, her eyes beseeching him to interrupt her thoughts. But what could he say? Suddenly he remembered something. “You said Marysia’s son was Adam and that he was your husband, and Olek is Marysia’s grandson. So, is Olek your son?” he asked, thinking that she looked rather too young.

“No. He’s my nephew, my husband’s sister’s son. Both his parents are dead, so we’re his only family.” Zosia paused again, lost in thought. Then she looked up at Peter and said softly, “Maybe when everything has settled, we could find out what happened to your family.”

“You could do that?”

“We could try.”

“That would mean a lot to me. And there are other people I’d like to trace. And I’d like to know how we were betrayed.”

“That’s quite an order.”

“I think you can understand; as it is right now, I have no history. I need to find some connection with my past.”

“Or maybe just build a future.”

“Yes, maybe that’s enough,” he agreed.

“In any case, we’ll do what we can. Old records are often erased, many files they did not even bother to transfer, but births and deaths are usually available.”

He nodded. He felt a surge of elation just thinking about the possibilities the future held. If only they would let him live.

They talked late into the night. He learned how to spell her name, learned that what sounded, to his untrained ears, like an
sh
sound in her name and in Marysia’s was spelt with an
si,
learned some simple spelling rules—that their
j
and
w
were like the German letters, that is, they sounded like an English
y
and
v,
and that the horrendous-looking
dz
that appeared so often was quite easily approximated by an English
j.

“Our
dz
might look difficult,” Zosia pointed out, “but it is not half as bad as what the Germans use for that sound.”

He agreed. The
dsch
the Germans used did make a lot of English place names look unpronounceable. There had been enormous confusion after the spelling reform of ’59, and finally even the Germans had admitted that some English names were better off spelled with a
j
and officially mispronounced.

Zosia laughed when he explained how renaming and then respelling had failed to take. “Won some, lost some,” he remarked, remembering that the Temms had once been spelled
Thames.

“Here,” she explained, “they solved that problem by razing everything and then renaming the new structures. And besides, you can get shot for referring to a city by its Polish name. They are very touchy about that. No sense of humor.”

“Oh, I’ve heard they have a sense of humor—it’s just too serious a thing to be laughed at.” They both laughed, and as he mocked his erstwhile captors, his mind strayed momentarily to Teresa and her cheerful good humor. He apologized to her mentally but was feeling too buoyantly happy to have any further qualms.

The vodka bottle was emptied, and another, this time flavored with cherries, was brought in, along with more food. They laughed and joked and discussed the state of the world. The stars moved and the night grew cold and they huddled together, a blanket wrapped around them, to keep warm. As the graying of the dawn began to dim the stars and Zosia closed her eyes and rested her head on his shoulder, Peter stroked her hair and realized that he could think of no better way to have passed this, what might be his last, night than by being with her.

Her hair was pressed against his face, and he smelled the freshness of the pine forest in it. He had never before smelled air as clean as that of the forest, never before heard silence as intense as that which surrounded him now. He had never seen a night so dark as this one—never before had he experienced a night without the omnipresent intrusion of security lights. Zosia’s quiet breathing, the smell of the pines, and the dim light of the stars were all that he noticed. They filled his being and gave life to his soul, the soul that had lain dormant for so long.

He watched the stars growing dimmer as the blackness of the sky slowly lightened to an intense dark blue, then to a lighter shade that almost obliterated the points of light. He thought of each flicker of starlight as a spirit—some brightly shining but never seen, never understood, others lighting the way for many lost souls. He felt a sudden sadness at his own dismal life. If ever a star was overwhelmed or hidden by clouds, then it was his. He felt as though he had never influenced one person or salvaged one faint hope—all he had managed to do was survive, mindlessly stumbling from one crisis to the next, and he did not even know why.