The Children's War

by Stroyar, J. N.

  “The other set, those there.” He pointed.

  Still she hesitated, then finally handed him the papers. It was a printout of one of the innumerable decrypted data files, and as usual, it consisted of a few words and a tedious series of numbers. Barbara had attached a page of notes with a heading and had organized the numbers into a matrix with various assumed category headings.

  “My interpretation could be entirely wrong, you know,” she said worriedly. “After all, they’re just numbers.”

  He perused the conjectures she had scribbled along the sides. If she was correct in her assumptions, then it was a good find: the experimental subjects,though numbered, were almost certainly human—the ages and location would not really match anything else. “It looks good to me. I think we’re talking about real people here, the poor sods. If you’re right, then this will be excellent proof of our claims.” He smiled as he started to hand the papers back to her, but then he stopped and took another look.

  Berlin, about two years ago. Numbered subjects injected two years ago in and around Berlin. His hands shook as he scanned the list. Barbara and Olek exchanged a surreptitious glance. Peter’s eyes found what they were looking for: 1314708. There it was, just a number, a seemingly meaningless number. In the column next to it, according to Barbara’s translation, was an indication that the subject had been tested. Then his age and gender, and next to that an address zone; he recognized the postcode for the Vogels’ suburb. The next column was an assessment of the subject’s general health on a scale of one to five. After that was a column that indicated follow-up diagnosis, but there was none for that particular subject.

  Not a test vaccine. It was not a test vaccine after all. He looked up from the list of anonymous, involuntary test subjects; from a list of subjects of a medical experiment on inducing infertility; from a list that he was on. Barbara and Olek were staring at him. He did not see them, did not see the walls of the office surrounding them. He saw the white-coated technicians, the quick conversation with Elspeth, the way he had been dismissed from the room. He saw her signing papers he could not read, he felt the tourniquet, the quick injection, and then they were gone. Not a word of explanation, nothing. He was not a human, he had no rights, no feelings, no opinions, no future. The law said so; how could it be otherwise?

  “Are you all right?” Barbara asked, concerned.

  His mouth moved, but no words came out. He was shaking so hard she must have been able to see. Not a vaccine at all. It was April already and Zosia still wasn’t pregnant.

  “Is that you?” Olek asked much less subtly.

  “Are you all right?” Barbara repeated.

  He shook his head, stood, and headed toward the door. In the corridor, before he managed to walk two meters, he retched and was sick. Barbara and Olek rushed over to him as he slid down the wall into a kneeling position, and they stood helplessly nearby as he curled over himself, vomiting. He remained that way for a long time, long after he had finished being sick.

  Olek made a move to help him up, but then changed his mind. Barbara stooped down next to Peter, asking softly, “Captain Halifax, are you all right? Can I get you anything?”

  He shook his head, still not raising himself from his fetal position. If only they would go away and leave him in peace. All of them! Why couldn’t they just leave him alone? What had he done that they could toy with his life, destroy every hope and murder every dream he had ever had? Why would they never leave him alone? What had he done?

  The words he had hissed at Ulrike came back to him: Do you think the people I’ve been talking about weren’t real? Do you think the mass murders of the forties and fifties were for a reason? That babies and toddlers did something? He had really been talking to himself then, he had actually believed that somehow he was not one of them, that they were a group apart: the victims, the innocents who had known intuitively from birth what their fate was. He was not one of them. He was immune.

  “Captain?”

  He looked up to see Barbara stooping down next to him. He saw the pity in her eyes. Pity and her own immunity. Had it been that way for all of them? Had each and every one of the millions thought that they were special, that they would be exempt, that it was someone else’s fate to die? As the poison gas had filtered into the showers, had even one person thought, yes, this was my fate from birth? As the babies died in their mothers’ arms, had even one mother thought, Yes, this is why I gave birth to this child, so it could die meaninglessly?

  He answered the question in Barbara’s eyes with a brief smile, said in a shaky voice, “Would you please get me something to clean this mess up with?”

  She nodded, glad for something useful to do, and went to fetch some cleaning supplies. He watched her disappear down the hall, looked around, and noticed Olek standing a short distance away, as if guarding him. During the time he had been kneeling there, he had been aware that one or two people had wandered down the hall but had been shooed away. He closed his eyes and felt the sweat trickle down his face. He felt incredibly ill, sick to his bones. What, he wondered, had they done to him to leave him so vulnerable? What poison had they injected into his soul?

  Barbara returned with the bucket and some rags and began to clean up the mess he had made. He insisted that he do it, and they debated briefly until they compromised and both cleaned the floor. As Barbara wrung out her rag and did a last swipe over the concrete, she asked without looking at him, “Do you remember them doing it?”

  “Yeah. I had no idea what it was about. We all got injected—all the Zwangsarbeiter that is. None of us knew what it was.”

  “Do you think they . . . it had any effect?”

  “I hope not. Now that I think about it, both men and women were injected, so I’m not sure what they were looking for. Maybe just testing to see if it would kill us or cause long-term damage of an unexpected sort. Maybe it was just a base compound and not actually a test.”

  Or maybe they didn’t care what happened and they had injected women as part of their camouflage for causing chemical castration in men. Was his ability to have sex proof that nothing had been done? Or had they hoped to achieve infertility such that it would be essentially unnoticed except for an inability to make babies? And how, he wondered, were they planning to do a follow-up study? They did not test him beforehand, so how could they know what changeshad been wrought? What sort of science was it that tested arbitrary, unknown subjects?

  Lousy science, careless science, inhuman science that wasted lives as if driven to do so. Nazi science.

  “I’m sorry,” Barbara said, finally looking directly at him.

  “Yeah, so am I. My life wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said, more to himself-than to her.

  She looked confused but did not question his statement. Then shyly she asked, “Do you want children?”

  “Very much so.”

  “I’m sorry. Maybe nothing will come of it.”

  They were still on their knees in the hall. Several more people had been sent away by Olek, and Peter decided they really should move back into the office. “Maybe,” he agreed as he offered his arm to Barbara and they stood together. “In any case,” he continued as he picked up the bucket to carry it to the nearest toilet, “what’s done is done.”

  But what, exactly, had been done?

  When he returned, Barbara made him a cup of tea and the three of them settled back into the office. Peter did not feel like discussing anything, but he also did not feel well enough to leave the office. Luckily, Olek and Barbara seemed to sense his mood, and they conversed between themselves about trivialities while he stared absently at the stacks of papers and books and ran his fingers along the hot surface of his cup. When should he tell Zosia? What should he tell her? That she had received damaged goods? Would she want to annul the marriage? Was it considered acceptable grounds for an annulment? Would she do that to him? She really wanted to have another child, and that had clearly been one of her reasons for marrying him. Had it been t
he only one?

  “What a fucked-up mess,” he sighed, unaware that he had spoken aloud until both Barbara and Olek turned toward him. Seeing their surprised looks, he pointed at the piece of paper that contained his number and added rather sardonically, “There’s the real obscenity.”

  “We weren’t offended, sir,” Barbara said rather more formally than usual. “It’s just that we want to help, but we don’t know how. I wish I knew what to say.”

  Olek nodded his agreement. “Do you want us to leave?”

  Peter shook his head. “Not unless you want to. I guess I’ll take the rest of the day off though. I don’t think I’ll be much good here.” He did not move, however; he didn’t know what to do—he did not want to be alone with his thoughts.

  Barbara seemed to understand his hesitation and said tentatively, “If you like, I’ll go with you. We can go for a walk. We don’t have to talk about anything. You know, just walk.”

  They grabbed their coats and headed outside into the gloomy day. A tent was set up but they ignored that and walked off into the woods. It had been raining for days, and piles of melting snow and wet leaves made the paths slippery.Eventually they abandoned the well-traveled routes and crossed over unmelted snows heading ever upward away from everyone. The steep climb hurt his legs, but the pain felt reassuringly familiar. He slipped and fell several times. Each time Barbara helped him to his feet and held on to him for a few steps. She made it seem as though she were seeking his protection rather than guiding his steps and in this way assuaged his already battered ego.

  After a while she noticed he was panting with the pain, so they took shelter in a copse and sat on a fallen log. The leaden skies promised more rain, and as they sat there, a few drops soaked through the wool of their coats. They were silent for a few moments, surrounded by the hushed sounds of woods. Despite the thaw, the dampness made everything seem colder. He noticed she had leaned against him and seemed to be trembling, so he asked, “Are you cold?”

  She nodded and he put his arm around her to warm them both. He thought about Emma, or Jacqueline, or whatever she was called nowadays. She would be just a bit younger than Barbara now; a young woman grown to maturity in slavery. He wondered if she had been taken by anybody yet, wondered if she had slept voluntarily with a man, wondered if perhaps she was pregnant. He pushed the thought of children away. If that route had been denied him, he was going to have to accept it, he could not let this last straw destroy everything that had been reconstructed over the past year and a half. There was too much to lose.

  He thought of the dreams he had dared to set up for himself. They had been simple dreams—a wife and a family and a chance to live something like a normal life. He had not asked for vengeance, had not asked for fame or riches or even an answer to all the suffering. Just a home and a family. Was it too much? Or was simply daring to dream more than he was permitted? Was there some jealous god that ruled his life, who had determined that he could never rejoin humanity once he had been torn away? Was his god a Nazi?

  “What are you thinking?” Barbara asked.

  “I was wondering, why me?”

  She looked up at him questioningly.

  He smiled at her look, said, “I don’t think anybody plans to be the victim of oppression. When I was your age, I was invincible, just like you, and I knew I always would be. They had not gotten their hands on me yet, and therefore I felt sure they never would. These horrors that surround us, they were for someone else. Not for me.”

  “Captain—”

  “Call me Peter. You used to.”

  “I, well . . . before you were, it’s just that, since you’re the colonel’s husband . . .”

  “Ah.”

  Barbara was silent with embarrassment, then she said, “I’ve heard that that is not your real name anyway—is that true?”

  “It depends on what you mean by real. I think of it as my name, but my parents named me something else.”

  “What?”

  “Niklaus. Niklaus Adolf Chase,” he laughed.“My father and brother called me Klaus. I hated it. My mother stuck to Niklaus most of the time, but my friends— my real friends—called me Nick.”

  “Why wouldn’t your brother use Nick?”

  “Probably to annoy me. We didn’t get along all that well.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “Yeah, the last I heard he was. I haven’t looked up anything on him personally—they don’t like me snooping around, so I stay obediently uninformed about everything. And everyone.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In England. Apparently, he’s a Nazi.” Peter looked into the distance as he said,“He frenched me to the police as a kid, so I think he takes it all seriously.” He had translated the English slang for betraying someone into its literal equivalent in German, but Barbara seemed to recognize the verb anyway.

  “He turned you in? What for?”

  “Trivial stuff. A street gang. Though I doubt it was his intent, that little betrayal ruined our lives. Got my parents killed. Funny, I bet Erich didn’t even know that I had been kicked out of the gang by then.”

  “Why were you kicked out?”

  “They didn’t trust me anymore—not since my parents sent me to a school for German kids. And I guess they must have known or suspected that my father was a Party member.”

  “That must have been awful! Why did your parents send you away to school?”

  “I guess they thought I could make a place for myself as a collaborator. They at least wanted me to fit in with the Germans.”

  “Did you?”

  “I tried. For a time, I really tried.” He had tried, too. It had been made clear to him during his first year that he could be accepted, but it would be on their terms. Not for him just the slavish obedience to some older students; no, as an English boy, he had to pay an extra price: to take the absolute bottom rung of the pecking order, to deny his own heritage and ethnicity, to heap scorn on his own people, to prove superloyalty and admiration for all things German. They had wanted him to participate fully and joyously in his own denigration, to carry out his own humiliations to prove that he was appropriately grateful for being allowed into their ranks. It was more than he could accept and he had spent the rest of his years alternately harried and shunned.

  “What did your school friends call you? Klaus or Nick?”

  “The other students,” he answered carefully, “referred to me by some varient of my last name. The usual mispronunciation was ‘sha-zeh’ or sometimes ‘ shahseh’—you know, as in schassen, to kick out.” He remembered how they wouldwarn him, using his name to get his attention before they attacked. They lost nothing by giving away the element of surprise—he was always outnumbered. He had learned to fight on the streets, but he could not have prepared for the physical advantage of his tormentors. During the first months, when he had only just turned nine, he had been beaten so badly the school officials had intervened to put him in the clinic. When, even then, his parents had not visited, he had realized that he was completely on his own.

  After that, he had learned to handle himself better. When there was a gang, he usually provoked a one-on-one conflict by insulting just one member’s courage. That evened up the odds a bit, though he was never given a fair fight—if his opponent was not bigger and stronger, if he showed any signs of winning, then the boy’s friends intervened to bring him down. So, he opted for a strategy not of winning, but simply of inflicting harm, careless of his own well-being. Over time, even the bigger kids learned that they would end up injured if they beat up on him, and the attacks became less frequent.

  Once he had established himself as a loner willing to defend his small space, he had turned inward. He continued as a member of some sports teams, always careful to attend only official practices where he was relatively safe with an adult in attendance. Friendless, he had spent his time studying, excelling in virtually every subject for want of anything better to do. He was especially proficient in math and the sci
ences because it was much more difficult for the instructor to judge his answers to be inadequate or wrong. Even in his more subjective classes, he often impressed his teachers, and he was, on occasion, shown some kindness by them. But by then it was too late. He was distrustful and hurt and closed to any but the most rudimentary human interactions. If anyone had wanted to befriend him after his first year, it would have been impossible.

  “Have you forgiven him?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Your brother, have you forgiven him?”

  Peter shook his head. “I doubt he even wants my forgiveness.”

  “I’m sure he does,” she said with the conviction of youth.

  The raindrops began to fall more frequently, and Barbara suggested that they start walking back. They made their way out of the copse and down a steep, snow-covered slope. His right leg buckled under the stress and he began to fall. Barbara grabbed for him, lost her balance, and they ended up rolling down the slope together. They landed at the bottom, tangled in each other’s arms, unhurt and laughing, covered from head to toe in snow.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, trying to control his laughter.

  “I’m fine,” she giggled in reply, and unexpectedly kissed him. It lasted longer than a friendly kiss, and suddenly they both pulled apart. Barbara looked away, back up the hill.

  “I’m sorry,” Peter breathed. “I didn’t mean to . . .”

  “It’s all right,” she said without looking at him, “it was my fault.” She paused,then still looking up the hill as if trying to determine where they had stumbled, she said, “If your news . . . if Colonel Król . . .” She stopped and they sat in silence for a moment.

  He studied her profile; she was a very pretty girl.

  As if exasperated, she suddenly blurted, “If you need me, I’m here.” She paused, obviously embarrassed, then sighed and added, “Colonel Król is a very lucky woman.”

  Tenderly he brushed a bit of snow from her hair. “Yes, and I’m a very lucky man to have her. And to have a friend like you. Whatever’s been done to me, given what I have now, I consider myself a very lucky man.”