The Children's War

by Stroyar, J. N.

  He closed his eyes and worked at memorizing every feature of the faces of the men who had beaten him. The officers would probably not be too difficult, but the three anonymous brutes in that room—they might require some work. Nevertheless, with duty rosters and vigilance, he was sure that someday he would track each of them down and exact an appropriate revenge. They would pay, of that he was sure.

  He shuddered a sigh and tried to rest and regain his strength. It would be easiest for their people if he were able to walk out on his own two feet. He should get up and try walking around, he thought, but before he could follow through, the door opened and a grinning young officer appeared.

  “Good day, Herr Teacher! Are you ready for another lesson?” Even as he spoke, two guards came into the room and began lifting Adam from his cot.

  “What? Wait!” Adam’s voice came out strangely and blood trickled from his mouth as he spoke.

  “Wait? Why?” the officer asked.

  “I haven’t . . . Isn’t this a bit quick? You haven’t let me think at all! I’ve just woken up! How can . . . It’s not usual procedure. Give me some time!”

  The officer motioned with his head toward the door, and the two men dutifully began dragging Adam out.

  “What’s the rush? I’ve just been . . . They’ve just . . . Give me time!”

  “Herr Teacher, you are not enthusiastic about having another lesson?”

  “No, please wait!” Adam pleaded. “Let the pain argue with me for a few hours, please! Oh, God, just a few hours!”

  They continued to pull and drag him down the hall. They ended up in an office, and Adam was momentarily reassured. They dropped him unceremoniously into a chair in front of a desk, and a few moments later the same lieutenant he had seen before came into the room and sat behind the desk. He was eating a Brötchen with slices of cheese and ham shoved in between. Adam stared at the food, but he did not bother to say anything.

  “Hungry, teacher?” the lieutenant asked.

  “I’m not a teacher.”

  The lieutenant continued eating his sandwich while shuffling through some papers on his desk. Finally Adam felt driven to ask, “Could I have some water?”

  The lieutenant looked up from his papers. “Are you in the Underground?”

  “No,” Adam sighed.“No.”

  The lieutenant sighed and went back to his papers. After he had finished his sandwich and his shuffling, he looked up again. “Are you a teacher in the Underground university?”

  Adam shook his head.

  The lieutenant looked to the guards, who had seated themselves by the wall. “I’m not in the mood for this nonsense. Take him out of here and beat some sense into him.”

  The guards approached and began to lift Adam from his chair.

  “Wait! Wait!” Adam gasped.

  “Are you in the Underground?” the lieutenant asked.

  Adam stared at the floor. Quietly he admitted, “Yes, I work in the textile factory during the day and I teach courses in the Underground university at night.”

  The lieutenant nodded. “Good, then tell me all about it.”

  Adam did. He told the lieutenant names and some addresses, he mentioned meeting locations and contacts, he described in detail the structure of the university and tried to digress on the content of his courses but was preempted. Nothing he said was true, not a word of it, but it did mean that he managed to kill two hours without being hit.

  When they reached the end of his inventiveness, the lieutenant handed him a single sheet of paper. “Sign this.”

  Adam glanced at the terse admission of guilt to a capital crime and dutifully put a signature at the bottom.

  The lieutenant collected the sheet of paper, tossed it onto a stack of papers, and said to the guards, “Get rid of him.”

  Adam sighed his relief. They would take him back to his cell, and he would wait there either until they discovered that everything he had said was false or until his trial. In either case, it gave his comrades some time to track him down. It would be difficult, he knew, since he had been separated from his papers andhad been moved out of town, but there was a good chance his comrades would locate him and he would be freed.

  He was taken to a windowless room deep in the bowels of the building. Adam scanned the room and felt a terror grow in him. There was no bed, no sink, nothing to indicate it was a cell. Something like a metal coatrack stood incongruously in the center of the room, and in the corner was a table with various objects—a crowbar, a rubber truncheon, some unidentifiable gadgets.

  Panicked, Adam turned to his guards. “I’ve confessed, I’ve told you everything!”

  The larger of the guards smiled.“We know, so now we have no more use for you.”

  As they chained his hands and feet to the coatrack, he argued with them, he pleaded to go back and tell the lieutenant more details, he offered bribes, so finally they forced a gag into his mouth.

  They used the crowbar and began with the rack upright, but when the force of their blows caused it to tumble, they let him crash to the ground and continued beating him on the floor.

  He lost all sense of time, and it was with the distance of a dreamer that he perceived they had suddenly stopped. He concentrated through the screaming agony and recognized the voice of the lieutenant.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “You said get rid of him,” a guard replied sheepishly.

  “You idiots! I meant put him back in the cell.”

  “But, sir, policy is we’re allowed to practice on condemned convicts.”

  “Not anymore, you dolts! We recycle them. He’d be a strong worker—we need laborers! We have a quota to meet and you just trashed a candidate!”

  The lieutenant walked over to where Adam lay on the floor and looked down at him. “Oh, God in heaven!” he spat in disgust. He stooped down and touched Adam’s face. “You’ve broken his jaw! What if I wanted to get more information out of him?” He then felt the bloody pulp of Adam’s legs. “Legs broken, arms smashed. What the hell are we supposed to do with this mess?”

  He stood up and returned to berating the guards, promising dire consequences for their foolishness, and then suddenly he said, “Unchain him, put him in his cell. I’ll get a doctor to look at him, and then I’ve got to work out what to do with him.”

  Adam was released from the coatrack and carried back to his cell. He was laid rather gently on his cot and left alone. As he lay there, he looked up at the window and saw it was still daylight: not even twenty-four hours had passed since they had arrested him. He replayed the lieutenant’s words about him and wondered if they were true. Though he was numb now, the pain had been such that he supposed his bones had been crushed. That would take some undoing, he thought angrily. Such a waste, such a goddamned waste. What purpose did all the destructiveness serve? Such a waste! Now he would have to spend months, maybe years, recuperating. They’d have to smuggle him out to America, he’dhave to undergo reconstructive surgery on his legs, on his arms, on his face. How would they get him out of the country? he wondered. His mind ran through several scenarios, then he thought about where they might get all the money that would be necessary. If he was going to spend that long in America, Zosia and Joanna should come with him. It would be nice having them there; it would be a good experience for Joanna to see what a normal society was like. Yes, she could gain something from it, and perhaps learn some English as well. That would be good for her future. He imagined her as an adult, giving a report to the American Congress in flawless English. He’d sit next to her, backing her up with facts and perhaps recounting that time, long in the past, when he had fallen into the hands of the Gestapo.

  He blinked his eyes to clear the red tears that were filling them. He thought about his little girl and about his mother and about his beautiful wife. They would be so happy to see him, they would help him through that difficult recovery period. He imagined his mother putting a straw in his mouth so he could drink some soup; he felt Zosia st
eadying him as he learned how to walk again; he saw Joanna encouraging him with her bright smile.

  His eyes wanted to close, but he fought the urge. He was afraid of sleep; the little death was more than that to him. As he lay there he heard music, and after a moment he recognized the waltz played at his wedding. The words had seemed innocent then. Za rok, za dzien, za chwile, razem nie beódzie nas . . . A year, a day, a moment for you and me, then together we’ll no longer be . . .

  He tried to speak but his jaw was too shattered to move the way he wanted it to. Nevertheless, he managed to whisper through the blood that filled his mouth, “Zosia . . . Zosia . . . Zosia.” He looked back up at the sky, at the blue sky that they would be looking at today as well. The blue turned red as he looked at it, and then the red darkened to black.

  59

  THE BLACK OF THE night sky slowly brightened into the red of dawn and then the blue of day. Peter watched through half-closed eyes, wishing the short summer night would last just a bit longer. He slept now on the floor of Uwe’s bedroom, on a heavy rug with blankets that he rolled up and stored out of sight during the day. His last shred of privacy, his attic bed, had been sacrificed to the unending demands of his irritable and petulant invalid patient.

  Every night since his arrival, Uwe had awakened him. Every night. He wondered momentarily if there was anyone in the world, anyone at all, who felt more miserable than he did. He sighed his exasperation and began his day, making his way out of the house and to the bakery as usual. A morning rain had only juststopped, and even though it was July, the air was thick with a cold mist. The usual collection of Zwangsarbeiter loitered near the bakery entrance, waiting for their morning ration. He joined the queue, but was too distracted by his thoughts to listen to the whispered gossip around him. He had to ask Roman to yet again convey his apologies to everyone. There was no way he could leave the house with Uwe there. It was impossible.

  Eventually he reached the head of the line and looked into the bakery to greet Roman with a smile. A strange face returned his look. The young man was thin, pale, and looked thoroughly harassed by both his bosses behind him and the customers in front of him. Quickly, Peter dug through his papers to find all the appropriate documentation that the man would need. As the order was being filled, he worriedly scanned the interior of the bakery. Roman was nowhere in sight. He turned to the boy in line behind him. He did not recognize him but asked anyway, in a subdued voice, “What happened to Roman?”

  The boy ignored him; he wore the uniform of an apprentice, and it would, no doubt, debase him to acknowledge someone of a lower strata. Peter turned back toward the window; the young man presented him with his order and turned his attention toward the next customer.

  “Wait,” Peter insisted, probably a bit too loudly.

  The man glared at him. “What do you want?”

  “Where is Roman?”

  “Who?”

  “The man who used to work here.”

  “Oh, him. Gone.” And with that the young man pointedly turned to the boy. The boy gave Peter a shove as he elbowed his way forward.

  Peter scanned the line of waiting people, but none of them returned his look. A lone policeman lounging a few meters away, leaning against a wall and smoking a cigarette, caught his eyes. The policeman seemed to interpret the direct look as a challenge and, throwing down the cigarette, launched himself off the wall and began to walk slowly in Peter’s direction. Realizing he had lost any opportunity to find out what was going on, Peter turned and walked away as unobtrusively as possible. The policeman did not bother to follow.

  This was an unexpected and unwelcome turn of events! What with his reassignment to sleep in Uwe’s room, what with Uwe never leaving the house and demanding attention at any hour of the day or night, he had lost every last chance of contact with all the others. He had become a prisoner of the house and of his patient. His once-a-day visits to the bakery and his chats with Roman had been the sole outlet left to him. And now Roman was gone as well!

  Maybe, he thought, as he changed the sheets on Uwe’s bed, maybe it was good news. Maybe Roman had found a chance, had learned of someplace to go and taken the opportunity available to him. The thought buoyed him, at least a bit, but whatever had happened, no matter how good the news for Roman, it was a devastating blow for him. He missed his friends terribly, he was excruciatinglylonely, and he was extremely annoyed that Uwe’s sleeplessness had so effectively imprisoned him in the house and denied him any chance of meeting with anybody for the foreseeable future.

  Uwe slumped in the chair next to the bed as Peter changed the linens and watched his every move with an unnerving intensity. Once the fresh sheets were laid on the bed, he helped Uwe back into a reclining position. His patient was neither light nor cooperative, and as usual, he had a difficult time getting Uwe back into bed safely without straining himself. After he had finally deposited his irritable patient onto the bed and lit another cigarette for him, he finished tucking in the corners.

  “Tell me about yourself,” Uwe said suddenly.

  “Not much to tell. I serve my betters loyally.”

  Uwe laughed at that. “Well, then, tell me about a woman.”

  “I don’t know any.”

  “Surely you must have fucked someone! Tell me about the last woman you fucked.”

  “I’ve never had sex,” Peter replied with a straight face.

  “Liar!”

  “No, never.”

  “You’re not human!”

  “So you all constantly tell me,” Peter countered. He moved from one side of the bed to the other.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. Tell me about your childhood then.”

  “Nothing much to say. Pretty average.”

  “Did you graduate school?” Uwe asked, his eyes closed as if contemplating the great secrets of the universe.

  Peter struggled to remember if he had ever answered that question. Yes? No? He supposed the answer must have been that he hadn’t. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I guess education just isn’t important to my sort.”

  There was a moment of silence and Peter wondered if Uwe had fallen asleep. He thought he should pluck the glowing cigarette from Uwe’s immobile hand, and he was just about to reach over when Uwe broke the silence.

  “What about your parents?”

  “What about them?” Peter answered irritably, momentarily forgetting that he was supposed to be a foundling.

  “What did they do?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “You’ll show proper respect at all times!” Uwe warned, his eyes snapping open to survey his servant.

  “My humblest apologies. Forgive me for my uninteresting life. I seek only to serve,” Peter replied with undisguised sarcasm.

  “Pff!” Uwe huffed. “All right then, if your life is uninteresting, tell me about your thoughts.”

  “I have none.”

  “Come now.”

  “I don’t have time to think. And as you are so fond of pointing out, I’m not really capable of rational thought in any case.”

  “I asked about your feelings, not your thoughts.”

  “Feelings? Oh. In that case, absolute loyalty. And gratitude, of course,” Peter snapped, more annoyed by Uwe’s blatant lie than he should have allowed himself to be.

  “Gratitude?”

  “Oh, yes, that my life is given a purpose.” Peter finished tucking in the sheets. He turned to leave.

  “Hey, I’m not done.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Don’t take that tone with me!” Uwe growled.

  “So sorry, mein Herr. How can my most lowly self be of service to my most gracious one?”

  “Don’t think I haven’t noticed your attitude.”

  Peter raised an eyebrow in response. “Attitude?”

  “You think too highly of yourself.”

  “My humblest apologies, mein Herr.” “You shouldn’t be here. It’s as simple a
s that,” Uwe stated incongruously.

  Peter gave Uwe a long, hard look. Where did Uwe think he belonged? In a work camp? Deciding to deliberately misinterpret, he made another attempt at escape and said, “If that’s how you feel, I’ll leave. There are other things I’d be better off doing.” He started for the door.

  “Don’t you dare!” Uwe thundered. “I’m not through with you!”

  Peter stopped in the doorway. Staring forlornly into the hallway, he agreed, “No one ever is.”

  “What? What was that?” Uwe asked petulantly. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing, mein Herr,” Peter replied, half turning to be sure Uwe heard him. “I really must go, though.”

  “No, come back here!”

  Peter could hear Elspeth approaching up the steps. Trapped as he was, he gave up and returned to Uwe’s bedside. “Yes, mein Herr?”

  Uwe wagged a finger at him. “I’m going to catch you out, boy. Just you wait, and when I do . . .” Uwe made a violent snapping motion with his fist. “Your neck, boy! It will be your neck!”

  The threat sounded real enough, but Peter was distracted by the fact that Uwe was no longer smoking and the cigarette was not in the ashtray. Peter scanned the bed and finally located the glowing end on the floor. He quickly picked it up and deposited it in the ashtray, stubbing it out with a casualness that masked his annoyance at such childish behavior.

  Uwe followed his actions with mild interest, then flicking his fingers in the direction of his pack, indicated to Peter that he should light another one for him. Uwe sighed with pleasure as he inhaled from the cigarette and greeted his mother with a smile as she bustled into the room.

  Elspeth returned his smile with a look of syrupy love and undying devotion, then she glanced down at the ashtray and the collection of cigarette ends and scowled at Peter. “You know the doctor said he should not smoke!”