The Children's War

by Stroyar, J. N.

  Zosia and Tadek exchanged a look. “He’ll come with us then,” she said while Tadek glanced back at Peter and rolled his eyes. Peter did not know if Tadek was expressing exasperation at him or the rules, nor did he care.

  The dinner was held in an ornate dining room with the major and his wife, and the mayor of the local village and his wife. A crystal chandelier sent splinters of light dancing around the room. The table was intricately carved and richly set with candles and china and silver. Heavy draperies muffled the noise of the howling wind and the pounding rain; the thick carpeting gave the room a warm, isolated atmosphere. Peter stood uneasily near a wall listening to the soft strains of music that came from the cleverly hidden speakers. Everything—from the drapes to the warmth to the music—reminded him of the Kommandant, and he shuddered with revulsion. He knew Zosia had thought she was defending his interests when she had insisted that he accompany them, but he would really have preferred to be elsewhere, anywhere else. As personal property, he was sure he would have been well treated, and he might have been able to engage his guard or some kitchen help in conversation. Now, he was stuck here, bored beyond belief, tortured by the smells of the food, watching everybody else eat as his own hunger gnawed at him.

  The conversation covered the usual range of topics, and Peter forced himself to listen to everything the major had to say in order to learn as much as he could about the man’s knowledge base. Several times during the evening, Zosia or Tadek subtly tried to turn the conversation to security or computers or codes, but the major was determinedly intent on his anecdotes and jokes and did not seem to notice their attempts. He talked at length about his experiences in England and about his musical interests, his family, and his dog. He seemed to have a wonderful time with his attentive guests, and he suggested that they have dinner together the following evening.

  “That would be absolutely wonderful,” Zosia replied, then looking at Tadek, asked, “Do you think we’ll be back in time, dear?”

  Tadek nodded. “I don’t think my family expects that I’ll be able to visit for very long. They understand that duty comes first. And I would certainly view it as a duty to enjoy another of your wonderful meals, Major!”

  “Good, good! We’ll be eating a bit later tomorrow, and there will be more guests as well—I’m sure you’ll enjoy meeting them! Oh, it really is a bit hard having such a difficult job!” the major joked, and downed the last of his wine. “And speaking of work—we’ll need to look at that data you brought tomorrow. I’ll send someone around for you in the morning so that we can transfer it to my system.”

  “Yes, of course.” Tadek smiled and nodded.

  They relocated to the drawing room for after-dinner drinks, but Zosia, mercifully, pleaded fatigue and had Peter accompany her back to the room. Once they got there and had the door shut behind them, she groaned and kicked off her shoes and threw herself down on the couch in a display of exasperation. Peter waited until she looked up and then mimicked eating.

  “Oh, yes, of course!” Zosia leapt up and went to the door, but no one was there. She went to the phone and tentatively picked up the receiver.

  “Yes?” the operator inquired.

  “Yes, this is Frau Móller. Could you send up some food for”—she squinted at Peter’s frantic shaking of his head, nodded her comprehension, and finished, “me. I’ve grown hungry.”

  Once she had set the receiver down, she inquired with a look why she should not order food directly for him. Was he supposed to not eat? Peter mimicked his answer: “Yes, but it would be appalling food!” Zosia shrugged almost as if she didn’t believe him, but let the subject drop. In any case, a hearty snack for her arrived a few minutes later, and he ate it gratefully in silence.

  The following morning Tadek was called away to work with the major. Zosia was entertained by the major’s wife, who planned to give, at her guest’s request, an impromptu tour of the mansion. Peter and Zosia arrived in the main hallway at the appointed time and were greeted by Frau Rattenhuber. At the dinner the major’s wife had eyed Peter up and down, and now she repeated this maneuver. Suddenly, without preamble, she spoke directly to him. “You speak German, don’t you?”

  “Of course, gnädige Frau.”

  She scowled at his rudeness but did not comment. “I know that some of you don’t understand very well—stupid I guess.”

  He did not respond.

  “Do you understand me?”

  “I understand, gnädige Frau.”

  “My brother went out East, to where your people still are.” She emphasized still as though this were an indication of some sort of failure.“He settled a farmstead out there.”

  Again Peter did not respond.

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yes, gnädige Frau.”

  “Do you know what happened to him?”

  “No, gnädige Frau.”

  “He was murdered! By your people!”

  “I’m sorry, gnädige Frau.”

  “Don’t give me that! You’re all alike, you’re all filthy swine. Murderers! He had three children! We should have destroyed each and every one of you when we had the chance.”

  Zosia shifted uneasily. “Are you sure it was the, er, natives?”

  “Of course. It was a robbery attempt, as he was coming home. Who else could it have been? German resettlers would never do such a thing!” Frau Rattenhuber looked as though she were ready to spit on Peter.

  “Of course not.” Zosia smiled tightly.

  Frau Rattenhuber turned to her, said, “I would never trust him in my house!”

  Coolly, Zosia replied, “Oh, he’s very well trained. Been with my family since he was a young child—completely trustworthy, loyal, and well behaved. We’re very lucky to have him.” Then, with a superior little toss of her head she added, “And besides, we’re the master race. Certainly, we can handle them.”

  “I suppose.” Frau Rattenhuber shrugged and decided to change the subject. She indicated the pendant Zosia was fingering and commented, “That’s an unusual piece of jewelry. I noticed you wore it last night as well.”

  “Yes, it was my poor, dear departed mother’s. It reminds me of her and I’m never without it,” Zosia confided with a rueful smile.

  “Ah,” Frau Rattenhuber agreed, then decided to add, “It’s lovely. I see it matches your ring.”

  Zosia held up her hand so her heavy silver ring with its black stone was more visible. “Yes, it’s a set.”

  “Charming. But come now, I’ll show you the house. It came into government hands in 1936. Before that it belonged to a merchant, I’ve forgotten his name . . .” she droned on as she led them through the vast halls past the portraits of political figures and into the dining room.

  “Phew, I can’t believe I didn’t belt her one!” Zosia exclaimed. They had driven away from the mansion on their planned visit to see relatives. En route they had stopped in a village to eat, and then they had decided to take a stroll in the local cemetery.

  They maintained a sensible order: Zosia and Tadek hand in hand walking in front, Peter walking deferentially behind, but there was no one within earshot and Zosia had angrily relayed the story of Frau Rattenhuber to Tadek.

  “But if she lost her brother, you can understand why she is so upset,” Tadek suggested diplomatically.

  “Understand? Understand? What the hell was he doing there in the first place! He knew that he was settling land that belonged to someone else, someone who had almost surely been murdered to make way for him.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t know. Perhaps she doesn’t know.”

  “Well, she should! And she’s so sure that it wasn’t his own compatriots! How could she know that!”

  “You must admit, the chances are if he was deaded, it was by one of ours.”

  “And damn right, too!” Zosia exclaimed.

  “But what if it really was only robbery, would you approve of murder then?”

  “If it gets the job done.”

  “You
know, if he wasn’t specifically targeted, then his murder accomplishes nothing except to promote hatred,” Tadek argued coolly.

  “She didn’t care about specifically targeting anyone—murder them all, she said!”

  “But she does not define us,” Tadek reminded her.

  “No, but she defines them! We ought to murder all of them!” Zosia retorted.

  “Zosiu,” Tadek soothed. He said something to her in Polish that Peter could not understand. She nodded, replied quietly, and then sobbed slightly. Peter watched with growing jealousy as Tadek put his arm around her and held her as she cried. He had realized long ago that Tadek carried a torch for Zosia and that only his sense of decency had kept him from revealing his feelings immediately after Adam’s death. And then it had been too late—Peter had stumbled into Zosia’s life and destroyed everything. No wonder Tadek hated him. That was understandable, even forgivable, but what truly hurt was watching how close Zosia was to Tadek, how she held on to him, how she took comfort in his words, in his ability to speak her language fluently, in their shared history. And in their common belief in a God.

  As they skirted around a small chapel, Peter fell back a few steps so they could have a bit of privacy. His eyes danced from gravestone to gravestone, each with its flowers and weeds, each with a name that was important to someone but meant nothing to him. The barren, rain-soaked limbs of willows and chestnuts arched gloomily overhead. He so much wanted to hold Zosia and comfort her that his arms ached with the effort of restraint. He replayed the words in his head that Tadek had said to her. He had not heard it clearly, and the wording had been too complex for him to understand, but he thought he recognized at least one word—the word for God. Had it been a prayer? Or had Tadek simply comforted her with some trite religious reassurance?

  The sodden ground sucked at Peter’s feet as if trying to put even more distance between him and Zosia. He felt ashamed of himself. If what Tadek had said had comforted Zosia, wasn’t that enough? Didn’t that, in itself, prove that it wasn’t trite? Was it only jealousy of Tadek that had led him to think that, or was it his own inability to understand what it was they both believed? On the rare occasions he felt that there was a God, it was only because he thought he had heard a mocking laughter from the heavens.

  Zosia would have rejected that outright. She was no stranger to misfortune, she was not blind to the troubles that beset the world, and she was not naive. No, she did not believe that God would magically intervene and remove all pain, butshe also did not believe in a God that enjoyed the suffering of creation. He had once suggested to her that God must enjoy suffering, since the world had been set up in such a way that it seemed to lead to nothing but misery, but she had shaken her head vigorously at that and had gone on to expound upon the gift of free will and the constraints that it would place on even a deity. He had then asked about the constraints her Catholicism placed on her. She had laughed and given him a little speech about just wars and Saint Augustine, then added that since she wasn’t in any case particularly dogmatic, it was irrelevant to her what the “old farts” in the Vatican said. They had, she said, quite clearly abrogated all rights to spiritual leadership of her church when they had been so accommodating in the face of Nazism and had so completely abandoned her people, all of them—gentile and Jew alike, she emphasized—to their cruel fate. The conversation had been marvelously freewheeling, influenced, not a little, by a blackberryflavored vodka, and now he regretted that he had never seriously pursued her line of thought.

  Zosia stopped and, detaching herself from Tadek, wiped away her tears. She noticed that Peter had fallen back out of earshot, and she waited for him to catch up, then, speaking German so that she could be sure he understood, she said, “I’m sorry about that. Sometimes, I just get . . .” She shook her head slightly. “I just get, you know, upset.” She glanced up at the sky, at the lowering clouds, then down at the drizzle that had accumulated on her shoulder. She brushed the drops off her coat and sighed. “I guess it’s about time we get down to business.”

  28

  THAT EVENING THEY all attended the major’s little dinner party. Of course, they were there in different roles, and Peter stood unobtrusively near a wall while Zosia and Tadek ate and drank and laughed and joked. The obnoxious little mayor and his wife were there again, and some local Party officials and their wives as well. Having seen Peter the night before, the mayor had managed to bring a member of his personal staff to stand in wait as well. The young woman stood near Peter, perplexed as to exactly what her function at the gathering was. They did not talk to each other or even look in each other’s direction; they stood bored and hungry, keeping their silence and their thoughts to themselves.

  Eventually all the innumerable courses had been served, the multitude of wines tasted and the after-dinner brandy consumed. The hostess suggested they all retire to the drawing room for further drinks and chocolates and the guests gladly complied. All but Zosia. She confessed to having drunk more than she wasused to and asked the forgiveness of her hosts as she made her way, woozy and flustered, out of the room.

  Initially Tadek made to accompany her, but she assured him with expansive words and gestures that her boy would be sufficient to see her back to the room, and that Tadek should stay and enjoy himself as long as he wished. He, protesting ever so slightly, eventually consented, and she staggered genteelly out of the room, rejecting the idea of hanging on to the arm that her servant offered, but clinging instead to the cloth of his shirt for support, apparently convinced, as were the other guests, that this was proper etiquette.

  Only when they were back in the room did she lose her stagger. Quickly and without exchanging a word, they assembled their equipment into her generous handbag. Zosia opened the door and peered out—all was quiet. She motioned to Peter, and together they slipped down the hall to the stairs. They descended quietly down one flight, past the merrymakers starting yet another round of drinks and beginning to sing good German Lieder , down another flight and into a hallway. They passed the kitchen with its overworked staff struggling to prepare the next set of snacks and drinks while cleaning the dishes from dinner, slid down a corridor, and then pressed themselves into a doorway to wait for the guard to do his rounds.

  The door they were aiming for was in a short hallway, just around the corner: the hallway formed a part of a long complex that a single private patrolled. He paced his round methodically: down the short corridor, turn a corner, down a long corridor that was out of sight of the door they needed to get through, turn again, down another longish corridor, turn around and walk back. Tadek had observed and reported on the routine, and they had debated the merits of knocking the guard out, but decided that since the guard was changed every two hours, an unobserved intrusion would give them the greatest amount of time to do their work. No bodies, no missing guards, no questions. So now Peter and Zosia pulled out a stopwatch and timed his rounds.

  Peter nodded at her. From the description of the lock that Tadek had given them, Peter felt he could easily open the door before they were detected. Zosia nodded in return. Together they listened to the private’s steps. As he left the near corridor and turned the corner, they sprinted into action. Silently, they entered the little hallway and Peter dropped down in front of the lock. Zosia stationed herself nearby, handing him his tools and watching the stopwatch.

  Peter worked feverishly. As he heard the private’s precise footsteps enter the distant corridor, the lock gave way. He dropped the duplicate keys and tools into Zosia’s bag and was ready to turn the handle when they heard footsteps approaching from the way they had originally come—they were trapped between the approaching footsteps and the pacing guard! Peter stepped back from the door and looked up in time to see a young private rounding the corner. He glanced quickly behind himself and realized that Zosia, with all the damning equipment and the computer, had disappeared. She must have ducked into thelong corridor, but there were only seconds before the guard on duty would be turning into
that very same hallway and he could not fail to see her.

  Knowing he only had seconds to clear the way for her, Peter strolled brazenly past the young man and around the corner leading back to the kitchen. The surprised private watched him as he walked by, his mouth gaping in surprise. After all these months of boring guard duty, finally, something had happened when he wasn’t even patrolling! Peter had smiled so casually at him that it took him a moment to remember to pursue him down the hall. He raised his gun, pointing it at Peter’s back, and demanded, “Stop! Hands up!”

  Peter complied, turned to face the boy, and volunteered cheerfully, “I’m sorry! I seem to have stumbled down the wrong corridor. Could you tell me where the drawing room is?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I guess I’m lost. I was looking for the major’s party.” Peter noticed the gun was shaking in the boy’s hand.

  The boy stepped backward so he could glance back down the hall Peter had been in. Nothing there, nothing at all. He heard the guard’s precise steps approaching, and he waited until his comrade was in sight before he asked him, “Have you seen this fellow here before?”

  “Who?” The guard was nonplussed. “What’s up?”

  “I found this boy skulking around here.”

  “I was lost,” Peter amended patiently as the guard broke his precise routine to peer around the corner into the section of the house that was not on his route.

  “Nope, never seen him.”

  “I said, I was looking for the major’s party. I was sent with a message,” Peter repeated helpfully.

  “Hmm.” The guard seemed somewhat less excited than his young colleague—perhaps because he had not spotted the intruder himself. “Take him upstairs and check his story. They’re all in the dining room, or the drawing room,” he suggested, then realizing he had left his route unguarded for seconds longer than usual, he turned precisely on his heel and strode back along his wellworn path.