The Children's War

by Stroyar, J. N.

  “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 thatnumber 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.

  He felt woozy and considered how he could rearrange himself so that he could sleep without waking Zosia. Before he could move, though, he heard someone approaching the sentry outside the tent. Words were exchanged and then a man ducked under the entrance and faced Peter. He took in the scene in asecond, scowled at Zosia’s sleeping form, and muttered something. He was tall and lean with dark brown hair and icy gray eyes. He had a look of unquestioned authority, and without the slightest gesture of greeting he nodded toward Zosia and said, “Wake her up.”

  “Who are you?”

  The man did not answer. Avoiding looking at Peter, the man leaned forward and nudged Zosia.

  “We need you now.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Zosiu, wake up! We need to discuss matters with you.”

  Zosia looked up. “Oh, Tadziu, it’s you.” She looked around, confused. “Good Lord, did I sleep here all night?”

  “You’ve slept about half an hour,” Peter replied. “It’s dawn.”

  “Oh my God, I had no idea. Is Joanna okay?” Peter had learned during the night that Joanna was Zosia’s three-year-old daughter.

  “She’s fine, Marysia’s watching her now.” Tadek sounded less than approving; he said something abruptly to Zosia in Polish, then he turned and left with the clear intention that Zosia should follow.

  Zosia looked at Peter, and as she stood, she said gently, “I have to go. I’ll see you soon.”

  “Wait. What did he say to you?” Peter asked, standing up as well.

  Zosia looked embarrassed, then said quietly in English,“He said that my husband is hardly cold in his grave and here I am falling asleep in a stranger’s arms.”

  Peter desperately did not want her to leave, so he grabbed at the first question that came to his mind to hold her just a few seconds longer. “What does kur-vah mean?”

  Zosia looked at him sharply. “Kurwa?” “Yes.”

  “Did he call me that?”

  “Yes. I think. Why, what’s it mean?”

  She walked to the entrance of the tent, and as she was leaving, she turned and answered cryptically, “It is not complimentary.”

  The tent seemed empty without her. Peter sat as though stunned on the edge of the cot, then wrapping the blankets around him, he lay down and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  69

  SOMEBODY SHOOK HIM INTO wakefulness. It was still early morning; the sun, barely visible over the horizon, streamed into the tent, momentarily blindinghim. Grunting with incomprehension, he shielded his eyes and struggled to understand what was being said to him.

  “Come with me. The Council wants to talk with you.”

  He got to his feet, stretched, and groaned. The young face of a wide-eyed boy stared at him expectantly. Clearly a response was in order, but Peter could barely remember his own name. Finally he managed to ask in a hoarse whisper, “Why?”

  “Just come. They’re waiting for you.”

  “Why? What do they want? Have they made their decision?”

  “I was told to bring you.” The boy was either adamant or ignorant.

  Peter shook his head in vague disgust. What now? He tried to rub the sleep from his eyes. The sunlight seemed excruciatingly bright—why did he feel so ill? Oh, yeah, vodka, no sleep, life and death, all that. Yeah, that would do it.

  Zosia appeared at the entrance. She looked tired and almost apologetic. “Sorry to wake you.”

  “How long have I slept?”

  “It’s been a little over an hour since I left you.”

  “Ah.” That at least explained the exhaustion.

  Zosia clearly had something more to say. She looked at the boy, said, “I want to talk with him,” and nodded toward the door. The boy saluted and left quickly, but Zosia remained uneasily silent.

  Peter sat on the edge of the cot, trying to rub some life into his face. Eventually, he felt awake enough to hear what he knew must be bad news. “What is it?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.”

  “I see.”

  “The vote was six to four against. Marysia and I, well, I think we convinced everybody that you’re okay. Your story basically checks out. The problem is excess caution.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s not who you are—I mean, we know that Halifax existed, and we’re fairly sure that you are that man, or at least look a lot like him—it’s your motives. What was your motive for coming here?”

  “But I told you, I had no idea you were here!”

  “Then how did you know to turn off the main road, just before our roadblock?”

  “I didn’t.” Peter shook his head helplessly. “I didn’t. And I was stopped anyway, wasn’t I?”

  “Yes, but no one expected you to go there. That’s why Olek was alone. Except for Marysia, of course.”

  “I told you what I was doing. I told Marysia,” Peter moaned. “It was random chance!”

  “And that’s unprovable,” Zosia sighed. “If there was any reason the government could convince you to work for them, that’s exactly the story you woulduse. I, personally, don’t think that’s the case, but . . . It’s just that the tiny chance that you are an infiltrator . . . Well, it would be disastrous for all of us. There are so many lives at stake. And you’re only one . . .”

  “And a stranger.”

  “Yes.”

  “And not even the right nationality.”

  “No. That doesn’t help,” Zosia agreed. “It all boils down to the fact that we don’t know why you came here.”

  Peter closed his eyes. He had to
swallow a lump of anger in his throat as he realized that nobody would accept the reality of randomness in the universe. The foundation of all modern science was insufficient to save his life. When he was able to look at Zosia again, he had accepted his fate. “Yeah, I understand. I can’t really blame them. But”—and at this he smiled without humor—“do forgive me if I take it personally.”

  “But . . .”

  “Is there any chance of my escaping?”

  “No. You’d be dead before you got ten meters.”

  “Ah, well, at least it would be quick,” he said stoically.

  “There is still a hope.”

  “What? Prayer?” he asked sarcastically. They had spoken of religion the previous night, and he meant his remark to sting. He was angry, and even though he did not want to be, he felt annoyed with Zosia for having led him to believe he had a chance.

  “That’s not what I meant, though it wouldn’t hurt for you to have a bit of humility,” she shot back angrily. She paused, took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. Look, the Council—”

  “Perhaps you could keep me in some sort of quarantine? I don’t need to meet that many people.”

  “For how long? The rest of your life?”

  Was one life worth so much trouble? It felt to him as if it was, but how could he convince them of that? “Well, then just escort me out of here. Watch me from a safe distance. You’ll see that I’m no threat to you.”

  “You already know too much. And where would you go?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know.” Without even noticing what he was doing, he ran his right hand up along the numbers printed on his left forearm and then back down again so that the left hand could circle the band on his right wrist. It was a gesture he had done a thousand times before, and every time there was a vague amazement in the back of his mind that the numbers did not rub off, that the band did not unclasp its hold on him.

  “You see, we have to make a decision now.”

  “And you’ve made it.” He looked at Zosia, had a sudden image of troops raidingthe mountain camp, dragging her off to a prison to be tortured and killed. He imagined Joanna screaming, torn away from her mother; if she survived,maybe she’d be adopted, like Frau Reusch’s son. The image chilled him. They were right, he was asking too much of them.