The Children's War

by Stroyar, J. N.

  “I guess so. I don’t know,” he replied quietly, glad that she had not probed further in the other direction.

  “Or possibly you made a mistake . . . but I am sure you’ve already considered that possibility.”

  “I certainly did. I spent weeks examining every detail of what I had done or said. As you know, with hindsight, mistakes are usually quite obvious—but I could find none.”

  “So, as I thought, you had nothing to fear.”

  He nodded though he did not agree. Nothing to fear? No, he had lots to fear; all she had done was let him know that they had nothing to tell him. But that was a mercy and he appreciated her gentleness. He smiled and said, “Thanks for telling me. I really appreciate it.”

  “There is one minor disconcerting thing.”

  He tensed. “What?”

  “Yardley is listed as arrested, convicted, and executed.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  “That makes it look like I did it! Like they were covering my trail for me!” he exclaimed, horrified.

  “To some.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “The records may have been amended years later; perhaps when they were computerized. Either someone was covering up their mistakes or they had given up on finding you and hoped that that little entry would be discovered by your own people. If it were, you would then be rendered ineffective.”

  “Or killed.”

  “That is one way of being made ineffective. It’s not unusual for them to do something like that.”

  “Is that why the Council did not weigh it against me?”

  Marysia nodded noncommittally, then refilling their glasses, asked,“Do you want to stop by for dinner tomorrow? I’m just making some soup, but there’ll be plenty.”

  “Ah, thanks, that sounds wonderful, but I already have an engagement!”

  “You? Who?”

  “Zosia’s invited me over for dinner.”

  “Zosia?” Marysia repeated with something like alarm.

  “Yes. Why?”

  Marysia shook her head and broke into laughter. “Could you please tell me what is so funny?”

  Marysia could not bring her laughter under control. She was giggling so hard her face had turned beet red and she was obviously having trouble gasping for enough breath.

  “Marysia! What’s so funny about a dinner invitation?”

  “How often have you visited her?” she finally managed to ask.

  “Oh, you know, I’m always stopping by. She was especially helpful after my talks with that idiotic psychiatrist.”

  “And did you ever eat anything there?”

  He shook his head. “She’d put out bread and cheese sometimes, with our wine or vodka. It was freshly made so I know she can bake.”

  “You mean like that loaf there?” Marysia pointed to a loaf of bread cooling on her counter.

  “Well, yes. Exactly like that,” he answered, his face growing slowly warmer.

  Marysia burst into laughter again. She spent a moment dabbing at the tears that ran down her cheeks, swallowing her giggles into her throat so that all he heard were strangled little squeaks as he watched her body shaking with mirth.

  So, he was not altogether unprepared for the mess he found in Zosia’s kitchen the following evening. “It’s a nice assortment of ingredients you have here,” he said, prodding the rabbit meat with a fork. “What do you plan to do with it?”

  Zosia shrugged. “I was hoping maybe you had an idea?”

  After they had finished the meal that he had prepared, Zosia carefully wiped her mouth with her napkin, sipped some wine, and then said, “Excellent! Now, I have a proposition for you.”

  He looked up with alarmed delight.

  “I was thinking that maybe you could move in here.”

  “Move in?” he asked, looking around the apartment in confusion. Though Zosia’s two rooms were considered to be quite luxurious, there was only one bedroom.

  “Yes, this place is for a family, and with just me and Joanna here, I’m afraid I’ll get reassigned unless I move someone in.”

  “Where would I sleep?” he asked, still glancing around.

  “Well, you know, Joanna shares the bed with me, so you could have the foldout couch. Look, there’s even a partition we could put up when you want privacy.” Zosia gestured toward a series of panels that lay on the floor under the couch.“Hey, I’ll even dig out Adam’s clothes—you’re about his size and it would do for you to have something more to wear. I should have given all that stuff away long ago, but somehow it didn’t seem right.”

  “And it does now?”

  She paused, then slowly nodded. “Yes, it seems right now. You belong here, you’re one of us.”

  “And in return for all this?” he asked, somewhat disappointed but even more embarrassed by where his thoughts had momentarily taken him.

  “In return? Nothing! Just your company. I mean, if you want to help out, well, that would be useful.”

  He nodded his agreement and looked around at his new home. “You have this place nicely decorated, you’d almost think there were windows, what with the curtains and all.”

  “Oh, that was done years ago!”

  “What about Joanna?”

  “She already adores you. She said she’d love to have you here. You know, sometimes I’m a bit busy and don’t give her the time she deserves.”

  “Sometimes!” he laughed.

  Zosia smiled wanly. “It’s hard being a lone parent. And she misses her father so much. I think she believes she’s reincarnated him. She prayed every night for him to come back, and then you showed up.”

  “You know, I’m not Adam,” he said worriedly.

  “Oh, yes, I know! But you do resemble him a great deal, and not just physically.”

  Peter felt disconcerted by her words. He knew inevitably that the comparison would break down, and he felt intuitively that at that point he would not be able to compete with a dead man.

  Zosia seemed to understand his unease. “Peter, please don’t worry. I like you for who you are.”

  “But what about Joanna? Do you think she’s in danger of being terribly disappointed?”

  “No. She knows he’s dead. She just finds you very lovable—again, just for who you are.” Zosia sipped her wine and her eyes took on a distant look.“No, the only one who is being replaced is Adam. It’s unfair to his memory, but shortly she won’t really know him anymore. It’s you who is the reality.”

  Peter thought of Allison. It had been a long time since he had thought of her—possibly for the same reason: Zosia was the reality. In the end, death was terribly personal, and for all the times over the years he had thought of Allison, he had not died with her. She was dead, long gone, and life went on; the living made their peace with the past and moved on.

  5

  MOVED ON AND settled in. Quite comfortably, in fact. Peter sat out the last of the winter in Zosia’s apartment, and now with the spring rains pounding down outside, he felt particularly warm and cozy as he lay on the couch, reading. He had, herealized, made a home for himself. He owed a lot to the people around him, to all the people who had made it possible, and in his own way, he had tried to thank each of them. Sometimes, as with Marysia, words alone sufficed. She instinctively recognized how much her gestures of friendship had meant to him, and she dismissed his attempts at repayment with a wave of her hand and the advice that he should pass kindness down the generations,“where it is needed.” For the Council members who had accepted him, he recognized that words would never serve the purpose: they had no use for words, they needed hard work and discipline. And so he worked diligently and obediently, never questioning an order, never turning his back on any job, no matter how unrelated to his own. But the one person he could not thank enough was Zosia. He owed her everything, and though he gave everything he could to her, it never seemed enough.

  He set down the technical journal he had been trying to read. It was
useless, his thoughts kept turning to Zosia. She was due back today, and any minute now she would be coming through the door.

  As if reading his thoughts, the door opened and Zosia came in. “I’m back!”

  “I’m so glad to see you! Been back long?”

  “Long enough to see Joanna and to chat with Marysia.” She tossed her raincoat on a hook and came over to sit on the arm of the couch. “Thanks for taking care of Joanna while I was away.”

  “Thanks for trusting me with her.” He paused, then asked, “By the way, did you tell Marysia to check up on us every five minutes, or was that her own initiative?”

  Zosia laughed. “You can’t blame her for being nervous. You know, she’s used to caring for Joanna during my absences—it was a big step for all of us, having you do the job.”

  “I appreciate your trust, I really do,” he said with heartfelt gratitude.

  “I heard from Marysia, you were more than adequate to the job. I believe the word she used was doting, comically so.”

  “Sorry. I just go mad with worry when you’re away. I tried to keep it from Joanna.”

  “Indeed, I heard from her that even she told you not to worry.”

  “Yes, ‘Don’t worry, Mommy will be back soon’ is what she said as I was tuckingher in, trying to find some comforting words,” he said with a laugh. Once Zosia returned, he always felt giddy with relief and happiness, and all his worries evaporated into the mist. This time, with Joanna entrusted to his care, his worries had been even greater, as if he would somehow be held responsible if Zosia did not return.

  Even worse, though he did not say so, were the times that Zosia took Joanna with her. On those occasions, Tadek would accompany the two of them so that they could form a nice family group. They carried excellent papers and did little more than visit a few shops or a zoo or eat in a restaurant in order to familiarize Joanna with the society around her. Peter understood it was an essential part of Joanna’s education, but still whenever they left, his chest tightened with a fearbordering on panic, and the feeling did not ease until they had safely returned in the evening or the next day.

  “So how did the job go?” He never asked what the job was and Zosia never said.

  “Well enough. Hey, I brought you a little present. A reward for all your efforts with my daughter.”

  “Eh? What?”

  “These.” She slid a set of documents out of a folder and placed them on his chest.

  He studied the first leaf of the papers. “An SS major, very impressive. So what about them?”

  Zosia waited patiently until he had paged a bit further.

  He came to the photograph and studied it momentarily. “Adam, I presume.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that his real date of birth?”

  “No, but close to it.”

  “He was younger than me.”

  “A bit. But that doesn’t matter. We don’t need to change anything except the photograph and then they can be yours.”

  “I don’t want them.” He handed the papers back to her.

  Zosia studied the photograph. “Actually, the photos on these things are such bad quality, we don’t really even need to change it.”

  “I don’t want them.”

  “But I suppose we should, it’s safer that way.”

  “I said, I don’t want them.”

  “Nonsense,” she finally replied. “You have to have a set for emergencies. These will do fine.”

  “Can’t I have something a little less”—he considered which word was appropriate, finally settling on—“obnoxious?”

  “Nope. You need a very good, safe identity when you come to town with me and Joanna.”

  “Town?”

  “Yes, the place with all the big concrete buildings.”

  “Zosia,” he moaned at her idea of humor, “I don’t want to go into town.”

  “You need to, Peter. You can’t stay cooped up here. It has been months since you arrived. Winter’s past, spring’s well under way, it’s time.”

  “No, it’s not,” he answered grimly. “It’ll never be time. I’m not going back out there.”

  “You have to! We need you to!”

  “How so? I do good work here. Why do you need me to go out there?”

  “It’s . . . Well, it’s for your sake. You need to confront them. It’s unnatural staying-here, cloistered.”

  “Pray tell, which part of my life out there was natural? Prison? Torture? Slavery?” He raised his eyebrows as if expecting an answer, then added, “I’m happy here. I have everything I want. Can’t I just stay put?”

  Zosia sighed. “It’s not good for you to withdraw like this. I know you have nightmares, I see the way you hit the bottle. Everything’s not all right. You’ve got to confront that fact.”

  “I said, everything is fine.”

  “Peter,” she pleaded with him to understand, “you don’t act fine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, for instance, when we argue, you flinch if I wave my arms around, as if you think I’m going to hit you.”

  That seemed a thoroughly unfair comment to him: they did not argue—he was far too satisfied to have many complaints, and the ones he did have did not seem worth emotional turmoil; any and all yelling was done by Zosia as she would explode whenever she was upset. Her fury passed quickly and her boisterous and happy side more than compensated for these outbursts, but during them, he hardly thought it unnatural that he should avoid her wildly flailing arms. He decided not to raise these points, though, and said instead, “I don’t do that. And anyway, our interactions here are hardly relevant to my walking normally down a street in town.”

  “But there are other things as well.”

  “Like what?” He felt faintly disgusted that she had been observing him so clinically.

  “You don’t defend yourself. You always take the blame for everything, whether it’s your fault or not. You always give way. Have you noticed how in the narrow hallways, you always give way?”

  He stiffened. “That’s just politeness.”

  “Every time?”

  “It’s just courtesy.” His voice had grown cold. “Every time,” she repeated, emphasizing the syllables.

  “You’re acting like I’m not quite human, Zosia. Like I’ve been programmed.”

  “No, it’s you—you act like you’re not quite equal.”

  “I freely choose how I behave.”

  “You seem to be strongly influenced—”

  “I am not an Untermensch —my personality has not been molded to fit their ideal! And I resent you—”

  “Peter! You must be able to see—”

  “I don’t see anything!”

  “—how much you’ve been changed,” she hurried on, determined to finish her thought.“And I know why that is: I know that you’ve been conditioned for years—”

  “Cut the psychoanalytic crap. You have no idea—”

  “—but you can overcome that. You just need to practice a bit—”

  “I’m not like that!”

  “—and you’ll be your old self.”

  “What do you know of that?” he finished bitterly. They had been talking at such cross-purposes that they had hardly heard each other.

  Zosia sighed. “Please come into town with me and Joanna. She’d like you to come to celebrate her birthday. She’ll be four—”

  “I know that.”

  “She wants to show you the zoo and eat in a restaurant with you and act grown-up.”

  He looked down at the floor, so she could not see his expression. She reached out to touch his hair and felt the slight movement of his head as he flinched at her touch.

  He was silent for a long moment, as if considering her request, then he said quietly, “Zosia, I’m afraid.”

  She noticed he was trembling. “I know. You have every right to be.”

  “They hurt me,” he said simply.

  “I know.” She stroked his hair. “I know,�
�� she repeated quietly.

  The next day Zosia convinced him to have Adam’s uniform tailored to fit him. It did not take many adjustments, and even the tailor noted the similarities between the two of them. Peter stifled a scathing remark: he was sick of hearing the comparison, sick of Adam, sick of his heroism, sick of his renowned levelheaded, cold-blooded confidence. Lot of bloody good it did him when it came to the crunch, Peter thought uncharitably, then immediately regretted the sentiment. Still, he felt rather melancholic that no one knew him when he was younger—before all the unpleasantness. Then, he, too, had been brilliant and strong and unflinching and confident; now, he was a wreck, and despite his denials, he knew it.

  The papers were reprocessed to carry the new photo—dutifully out of focus and weathered—and he began the tedious learning of yet another life history with all its interminable details. A week later the little family group was ready for its outing. The night before, Peter spent restlessly; whenever he managed to fall asleep, he was beset by nightmares that centered around horrific fantasies of his getting them all arrested through some stupid indiscretion. He gasped out Zosia’s and Joanna’s names as they were dragged off to some terrible fate, and then he awoke panting and drenched in sweat.

  Finally the clock told him it was morning and he could walk away from his dreams. He dressed in the uniform he was to wear that day. He put a lighter and a new pack of cigarettes in the jacket pocket and then, after a moment’s debate, decided to carry one of Teresa’s handkerchiefs. Of the three, two had become rather bloodstained, but he had kept one in reserve, and so it had remained pristine, the little swastikas still dancing along the edge in the purest Aryan white. It would go well with the uniform, and Teresa would probably approve the subtle irony.

  That done, he left the bunker. Near the entrance, he asked one of the sentries if the uniform would be a problem—he was assured that they would not mistake him for an enemy and he could wander freely.

  The chill dawn air was filled with mists, and the trees were shrouded in grayshadows. As he wandered, he felt he had entered a world that was truly apart from all else. His footsteps were muffled, his thoughts blanketed by the fog. As the sun began to lift some of the fog, he realized he had been gone quite a long time and he should probably head back to the encampment. As he turned and strode purposefully in that direction, suddenly, out of nowhere a bullet sped past his head and he heard the report of a rifle. Instinctively, he threw himself to the ground.