The Children's War

by Stroyar, J. N.

  A long silence ensued, then softly she said, “I’m sorry, Peter. I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Yes, you did,” he replied quietly, and turned over to fall asleep.

  There was a classroom. A few scattered chairs, a table, a place where he could stand and talk. Three or four students sat looking at him, waiting for him to speak. He talked about literature, about Shakespeare. The class grew noisy—he looked up and saw twenty or so students—all in neat rows of tables and chairs. He quoted from King Lear. He tried to use English, but German kept coming out. Someone asked if there was a line about serpent’s teeth and mad governments. No, he said, it was a hound’s tooth and Mozart. He heard a key scrape in a lock, began to tremble in terror. He looked up at his students. There were hundreds of them packed into a huge lecture hall. How could they have been so careless! Hundreds!

  They were all waiting for him to say something. The rusty key scraped like a razor across his raw nerves. His limbs grew heavy with dread. He began to speak again, but his voice caught in his throat. He looked up but no one was there. Hewas alone. No, not alone, for someone hit him. He sputtered as blood filled his mouth. Someone hit him again. You self-satisfied, arrogant little worm! You think you’re so damn intelligent, don’t you! He spit blood, choked, and coughed on his teeth as they swam loose in the blood in his mouth.

  “Are you all right?” Zosia was kneeling on the floor by his side of the bed, looking at him in the dim light.

  “Oh,” he moaned, then realized where he was. “Did I wake you?”

  “What were you dreaming?”

  He shook his head in answer, then got up out of bed. “I’m going for a walk.” Zosia stood, put her hand on his arm. “I’m . . . I didn’t mean . . .”

  He kissed her. “It’s all right about Joanna. She and I will work something out.” Zosia nodded.

  “And,” he continued, unsure of himself, “I’ll do what I can to help her remember”—he swallowed, forced himself to say the words—“her father.”

  “Thanks,” Zosia said quietly, and turned to crawl back under the covers.

  He pulled on his clothes, a pair of tall boots, and a long, wool coat and wandered to the exit. It was a cold, almost cloudless night. A sentry’s voice came out of the darkness. “Captain Halifax?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.” Peter peered in the direction of the voice, but could not recognize who it was.

  “I wasn’t able to come to your party, sir, but I wanted to offer my congratulations.”

  “Thank you.” Peter paused, then added,“I hope you can make it to the wedding.”

  “Sir?”

  “The wedding.”

  “Which wedding, sir?”

  “Mine and Colonel Król’s. Wasn’t that what you congratulated me about?”

  “No, sir. I didn’t know about that, sir. No, I was referring to your success on the mission. I heard how brave you were—and resourceful.”

  “Oh?”

  “We’re proud of your work, sir. Olek and Barbara came out earlier and relayed your story.”

  “They did?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh.” They had relayed his story, but they had not mentioned the engagement. He smiled to himself. “I’ll just be walking about a bit.”

  “No problem, sir.” Then pointing into the woods, the sentry said, “It’s easier going in that direction, there are some paths through the snow.”

  “Thanks.” Peter went in the direction the soldier had indicated. He walked a bit into the darkness, then brushed some snow off a rock and sat down to watch the wisps of passing clouds through a clearing in the trees. His head ached as though someone had been pounding it, so he picked up a handful of snow and held it against his eyes. The melting snow ran like tears down his face.

  34

  “TIME TO GET UP, Daddy. Shh! Don’t wake Mom!” Joanna said, nudging Peter gently. “It’s today!”

  Together they dressed warmly, gathered their candles and written vows, and slid out into the predawn darkness. It was Joanna’s simple solution to her mother’s diktat: if she could not officially be adopted, then it would be unofficially and secretly witnessed only by her friends.

  They arrived at the tree that marked Adam’s grave as the first light of dawn touched the horizon. As they dusted the snow away to find the marker, they were joined by Joanna’s classmates and even her teacher—a young woman, a teenager actually, called Basia. Peter gave Joanna a questioning glance, and she shrugged and said under her breath that it was hard to invite her classmates without the teacher noticing, so she had invited the teacher as well. “And besides,” she whispered, “she’s a good sort.”

  Joanna’s friends sat in the snow in a semicircle around the two and waited expectantly, clearly accustomed to such odd rituals. Joanna had involved her entire class in the writing of the ceremony, and it was she who led the proceedings. They lit the candles, they sang some songs, they explained to her father what they were doing and that he would not be forgotten—ever. This last promise sounded as though it had been used before on many other occasions—all the children knew the words by heart. Peter listened to their chant with a growing sense of wonder at the strange world he found himself in. Their words, their voices, were beautiful, enchanting, yet also quite terrifying—that such young children had such a certain knowledge of death, of killing, of dying as a people.

  They reached a point where he was asked to make his promises to Joanna and her family, and he did so, vowing to take care of her as best he could, vowing to love her, vowing to help her keep the memory of her father alive. So that he could say it all in Polish, he had written the words down and had Barbara help him with the grammar to be sure he had it all correct. He held the paper in front of him, but his vision had become so unfocused he could not see the words, so he said it all from memory, hoping that they would not laugh too much at his mistakes.

  Joanna made her promises as well and then the children sang again—a church hymn to their blessed Virgin, then their national anthem, and finally another song, which could only be described as pagan in its words of ancestor worship and memory. They extinguished the candles, and Joanna came over to sit on his lap and to hug and kiss him as the other children and their teacher turned to head back to their classroom.

  The two sat there awhile surrounded by the silence of the snow-shroudedwoods. Joanna leaned against his shoulder, and he stroked her curly blond locks. A shaft of sunlight made its way through the trees, illuminating her hair. It glinted a coppery gold, and he marveled at the subtleties of its color. Gently he lifted a curl and studied the complex twists and turns of the individual strands. As he held the hair, he recalled the matted stuffing he had pulled from the Vogels’ armchair. Had there been the hair of a child among those strands?

  After a long while sitting in silence, they stood, brushed the snow off their clothes, and returned to the camp. Joanna went to her class, but Peter returned to the flat. Zosia had already left for work, and he decided to take the rest of the day off and spend some time putting up some shelves. He gathered his to tools, determined what else he might need, and went about scrounging materials and equipment. Eventually he had everything he thought he might need and began trying to mount something onto the rather unyielding concrete of their flat.

  “Why don’t you just put in a work order for that?” Zosia inquired; she stood in the doorway munching an apple, looking up at him on a ladder.

  “We did—about a year ago. I’d like to have these shelves this decade.” He spoke around the bracket he was holding in his teeth. “In fact, I’d like to have them up before our guests arrive—this place looks . . .” He sighed.

  “Disorganized?” Zosia suggested as she tried to extract a bit of apple skin from between her teeth.

  He gave her a wry look.

  “Non-German?” she asked.

  He smirked.

  “Polish?”

  “I’m afraid where I came from the standard synonym for unkempt was Eng
lish.” What was it the kids at school said? Foul-smelling, disease-ridden, and thoroughly disorderly. Not unlike the English themselves. It had hurt then; at least he could smile at it now. “But is it really so awful of me to want my books up off the floor?”

  “No, I know you have this inexplicable Drang nach Ordnung,” she teased.

  He laughed and glanced down at the books that he had acquired over the past year and some—they were getting moldy sitting in their stacks on the floor, his office was full, and Zosia’s stuff already filled every other available space. Technically, the work order should have solved the problem, but somehow, and not surprisingly, the overworked maintenance crew had given the new bookshelf a rather low priority—in spite of, or perhaps because of, Zosia’s rank. So, he had decided to try his hand at installing the shelves himself. The bunker’s concrete was notoriously difficult to work with, and he did not have enough experience the feel comfortable with Zosia watching him. He thought he had solved that problem by waiting until he knew she’d be out before attempting the job, and therefore, he had been rather taken aback to see her in the doorway. She wouldn’t help, but she would offer lots of advice, even though she herself had never once done anything of the sort.

  He climbed down from the ladder and set down the tools. “How about a cup of tea?”

  “No, I don’t have much time. I just thought I’d stop by on my way back to my office.”

  “Oh, where were you?”

  “Research. I wanted to check on Karl.”

  “Did you find anything out?”

  “Yep.”

  “And I suppose you’re going to tell me at some point?” He smiled at her. “Or do I have to bribe you with a dinner invitation?”

  “Hmm. Yeah, I think a dinner invitation will do.”

  “Fine. I’ll cook tonight.”

  “Not tonight. I have to make a quick trip up north. How about when I get back?” she suggested.

  “Okay. Now, tell me what you found out.”

  “Well . . . we were right, he survived.”

  “Too bad.” Peter turned to put the kettle on for himself. “Do you think there’ll be any fallout?”

  “I don’t know. The train staff found him and took him to the hospital. Diagnosis: heart attack. I doubt he’s told them more than that—it would look rather embarrassing to have had you and lost you like that. If he did tell them, I doubt they believed him. They’d probably assume it was delirium. But even if he did tell them, and even if they did believe him, there’s no harm in it. He has no idea where you’ve gone.”

  “He’s seen you now.”

  “Oh, that was so brief, he’ll never remember me.” Zosia breezily dismissed

  Peter’s concerns. “I’m sure he was disoriented by it all. Anyway, I don’t imagine there’s any problem there.”

  “He worries me, Zosiu. He’s vindictive and now he’ll have an ax to grind.”

  “Oh, don’t fret it, he knew you were alive before this. After all, he would have been told if your body had turned up somewhere.”

  “I suppose, but now I’ve rubbed his nose in it. And he knows there’s something weird going on. He noticed I had changed nationality and numbers. It’d be worth his tracking me down just to sort that out.”

  “Not really—he would probably figure you had gotten kidnapped after your escape. Someone would just slam a nationality on your sleeve and a new number on your arm and sell you off. After all, what would you do then, complain?”

  “Does that commonly happen to escapees?”

  Zosia shrugged. “Who knows? What does happen is slaves who haven’t escaped are sometimes kidnapped—sort of like what almost happened to you.”

  “You mean those two officers at the laboratory who tried to arrest me?”

  “Yes. My bet is if those two cops had taken you, you would have never made it to the prison. En route, they’d have bundled you into another car and claimedyou escaped. Then you’d have found yourself dumped into a factory with locked gates and guards with guns. Or you’d be beaten into admitting a crime and your ‘punishment’ would be to be reassigned. They’d give you a new number, and you’d answer to whatever name they told you. You’d have no reason to disbelieve them, but even if you did, who would you turn to?”

  “Well, I would have come right back here.”

  “I know that. I meant, who would a typical Zwangsarbeiter turn to?”

  “What if someone like that does escape and informs their previous owner?”

  “I suspect that they pick politically weak owners who wouldn’t believe the story, and even if they did, they’d be too terrified to pursue any legal action. They’d be wise to just slam the door in the face of their returning chattel.”

  “Hmm. Well, maybe then Karl won’t concern himself with the details, but he still worries me. He has a long memory. As soon as he gets a chance, he’ll try and do something.”

  “But he can’t, so don’t worry about it.”

  Easier said than done, Peter thought as Zosia kissed him and turned to leave.

  “Hold on, there!” Marysia warned as she came into the apartment, her arms laden. “You’re not going anywhere, young lady, until you help me sort through all these invitations!”

  “What about Peter?” Zosia asked.

  “He’s already given me his. Handwritten as well.”

  “One of the advantages of not being so very popular as you, my little princess of the Underground,” Peter joked.

  “Anyway, he has another task,” Marysia consoled Zosia. “Here, learn this, so you know what you’re doing,” Marysia ordered, handing him a well-worn pamphlet. She seated herself at the table and began organizing stacks of paper. Zosia dutifully followed suit.

  Peter looked at what Marysia had handed him. It was a Roman Catholic missal. On the right-hand side of each page was the mass in Latin, on the left a translation into Polish. Zosia giggled when she saw the expression on his face.

  “Latin?” he asked.

  “Just the mass,” Marysia answered, all business.

  “And the vows?”

  “They’ll be in Polish,” Marysia stated with an irrefutable finality.

  He had never actually considered the practicalities of marrying Zosia within her own community. He had imagined a quick exchange of vows in front of a few friends, a big party, and that would be it. Certainly marriages in Britain were usually much less formal. The first marriage—the one that typically happened about a week before the boy turned sixteen—that was a quick affair in the registry office and then an excuse for a going-away party and a teenage brawl. The bride and groom usually left at the end of the party, sick drunk, to return to their respective parents’ flats.

  Six years later, when the boy returned from conscription, they had the advan-tage of having been on the housing list all those years. A jump on everybody else, except of course, everybody else did the same thing. So, there were a lot of young couples who knew nothing about each other and had nothing in common other than a place on a housing list. They usually stayed together—it was worth it to keep that coveted priority placement, though they often lived almost completely separate lives. Upon finally being assigned a flat, they would share it and continue to live their separate lives. Inevitably they would meet other people, and divorces and remarriages would be arranged almost simultaneously. It meant that, in the end, a first marriage was a rather casual affair. It was a slip of paper, a place on a list, a sometime partner for nights out at the pub, and little more.

  “Is there anywhere I have to say I believe in God?” he asked as he scanned through the pamphlet.

  Zosia screwed up her face in thought. “I don’t think so. Not if you don’t say the creed. If you just stick to the vows, you should be okay. But God is invoked a lot.”

  “You should be comfortable doing that,” Marysia remarked sardonically without looking up from what she was writing. “According to Olek, you invoke God all the time.”

  Ah, yes. He really should clean up
his English. “Sorry, it’s part of my local dialect. I’ll try and be more—um—circumspect, in the future.”

  “Yes, do try.”

  Zosia looked up at him, gave him a conspiratorial shrug.

  The kettle whistled and he turned to make his tea. “Do either of you want a cup?” he asked, but they both shook their heads. As he cautiously sipped the brew, he asked, “I don’t need to, er, eat anything, do I?”

  Marysia looked up at him, a look of utter disapproval on her face. “If you mean receive the host, no—it’s an honor. One you haven’t earned.”

  “Ah. Again, my apologies. I’m a bit untutored in this religion thing.” He had almost said crap but had caught himself in time. “But it is permitted for Zosia to marry me and still use your ceremony?”

  “Yes, yes, yes. We can accommodate heathens and atheists,” Marysia replied impatiently.

  “Good.” He grinned at her. “And where exactly do I get to work in my blood sacrifice to the tree gods?”

  Marysia glanced up at him sharply. “You— Oh, you’re joking.”

  Zosia laughed, said, “What I want to know is, when do we get to sacrifice a virgin? I haven’t had one in ages!”

  “No respect,” Marysia muttered shaking her head, “no respect.” She looked up at Peter again, tried to maintain a serious expression. “You know, young man, we take these things seriously, not like you British.”

  “Oh, so you’ve heard about English marriages.”

  “Yes, everyone has. The Germans point to it as proof that you’re all corrupt. Marrying to be on a housing list!” Marysia tried to sound disgusted.

  “Well, don’t the locals do that here?”

  “No,” Zosia replied, suddenly quite serious.“Marriage is essentially forbidden for Nichtdeutsch.”

  “What? You’re kidding!”

  “No, unfortunately not,” Marysia agreed with Zosia. “The law was enacted in 1942 that the only way to be legally married is to prove that it will ‘raise the racial standard of the Polish people.’ ”