Barbara nodded, turned to him, and asked matter-of-factly, “Shall we go?”
He nodded and they stood and brushed each other off. He put his arm around her, happily using her shoulders to steady himself as they continued their descent. When they approached the entrance, he requested that she and Olek please keep the information they had discovered a secret until he had told Zosia. “I mean a real secret, not even gossip. And tell Olek not to tell Stefi either.”
“No problem. I’m sure Olek will keep his mouth shut. Especially around Stefi.”
“Why especially?”
“Haven’t you noticed?”
“No, are they on the outs?”
“No! He’s just mortified of her seeing him with his face all pimply! He’s been avoiding her like the plague.” Barbara giggled.
He laughed, “Ah, the unsolvable problems of the world.”
41
HE RETURNED TO their flat and poured himself a drink. It was still quite early, Zosia would not be back for hours from her interminable meetings, and Joanna would not be back from her classes for another hour or two. He drank the whiskey and poured himself another. What if Zosia decided she could not bear this latest revelation? What if she decided that she wanted someone who could father a child, someone who had not been defiled by medical experiments? Could he blame her? He finished the glass of whiskey and went to see Marysia.
She was not home yet, but as he was writing a note asking her if she would watch Joanna for the evening, she returned. She greeted him with a kiss, then exclaimed, “Good Lord! Have you been drinking again?”
“Don’t worry, I’m not a drunk.”
“One would be hard-pressed to tell the difference.”
“There’s a reason.”
“There always seems to be.”
“If you feel that way, why not have the Social Welfare Committee sanction me?” he suggested caustically. “Cut off my supplies.” They had indeed already issued an unofficial warning, or as they called it, a “friendly suggestion.” He had efficiently dealt with their concerns by supplementing his ration with expensive, bootleg vodka made in some of the villages to the south.
“I don’t want that. Come on, I’m just trying to help. You know alcoholism is a problem in all the Undergrounds. Didn’t the British have antialcohol campaigns?”
“All the time,” he sighed, exasperated. “Preached at us continually. Sort of ironic since drug-running was one of their major sources of money. But you know, it’s not alcohol or drugs that’s the problem, they’re just the effect. The problem is stress, you know that.”
“I know,” Marysia agreed. “And I know how devastating its effects are, especially on you young people. You children of the war are stress junkies. Addicted to killing, drugs, alcohol . . .”
“You forgot sex.”
“How in the world you’ll ever establish a stable society . . .”
“I seem to remember when we first met, you held me at gunpoint, forced me to strip, searched me, marched me bound and barefoot through the woods, and threatened to kill me.”
“Those were all necessary precautions!” Marysia objected.
“So is preserving our sanity any way we can. Now, if you don’t mind, can we drop the bogus philosophy, I’m not in the mood for this right now. I just wanted to know if you could watch Joanna for me this evening. I need to talk to Zosia alone.”
“Fighting again?”
“Not yet.”
Marysia gave him a critical look. “What is it now?”
“I think Zosia needs to know this first, before anyone else.”
“That bad?”
“Could be.” He turned away so she could not see his face. How could they have done that to him? How could he have not even suspected? “Could be.”
“Oh, Peter. What is it?” Marysia asked, suddenly very worried.
He shook his head. “I really have to talk to Zosia.”
“All right. Bring Joanna over whenever you want, she can stay the night here.”
“Thanks.”
“And, son . . .”
“Yes?”
“Lay off the whiskey. If you’ve got something serious to discuss, you should stay sober.”
He nodded and almost laughed. “All right, Ma.”
He returned to their rooms and decided to follow her advice, capped thewhiskey, and put it back into the cupboard. He paced a bit, tried to read, looked around to see if anything needed doing. All to no avail. Barely an hour had passed. Continuously the thought pounded his mind: What if she did not want him anymore? Finally he gave in and went back to the cupboard to pour himself a drink. Before he began to pour, though, Joanna returned from her classes. She bounced into the room full of her usual stories and smiles, and he hugged her in greeting. His dear, wonderful daughter—Adam and Zosia’s child.
“Are you all right?” Joanna asked perceptively, squirming uncomfortably.
He released her. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to squeeze you, sweetie.”
“Is Mommy yelling at you again?” Joanna asked, pulling back so she could see his face.
He shook his head no, wondering why everyone seemed to think they fought all the time.
Joanna was looking at him questioningly. “Do you want me to go to Busia ’s tonight?” she asked with a calm maturity that both he and her mother seemed to lack.
He nodded. “If you don’t mind, honey. I have something important I need to discuss with your mother.”
“Shall I go now?
“No, let’s wait until your mother gets home. She’ll want to see you first.”
Zosia seemed annoyed that he had arranged a tÍte-·-tÍte for that evening, especially without warning her first; nevertheless, she sat at the table as he requested and waited as he set out two glasses and began to pour drinks.
She waved hers away. “What’s so important that it couldn’t wait until Joanna was asleep?” she asked impatiently.
“I found out something today. Olek and Barbara already know, so it’s only a matter of time before the entire place knows about it. I just wanted to make sure you heard it from me and not from whispers.”
“What already?”
“You know the lists that we acquired from the lab—the medical experiments to induce sterility?” he said carefully.
“Yes.”
“We’ve been translating them in the office, and Barbara found some with human subjects listed.”
“Human subjects?”
He nodded.
“If we could find one of these people, they could talk about their experiences, and they wouldn’t be connected to us,” she said, thinking aloud. “We’d be off the hook! That’d be . . .” Her eyes lit up. “Great!”
He nodded noncommittally, looking down into his glass. “I guess so.”
She looked more closely at him, tilted her head in anticipation, but he did not break the silence. “So what’s the problem?”
“I’m on the list,” he answered without looking up.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, and then repeated much more softly, “Oh.”
“What do you want to do?” he asked after a moment had passed.
“What do you mean?”
“I might not be able to father a child, Zosiu. We haven’t managed it yet.”
“Oh, that—we haven’t even tried!”
“It’s been months without success,” he argued forlornly.
“Not really—we’ve been busy all this time with the wedding and Joanna. Hell, we’ve certainly not gone at it every day. We probably just missed the crucial days.”
“Probably?” he asked, astonished that she wouldn’t know.
“Well, definitely.”
“Definitely? Zosiu, I thought you wanted a baby. Have you been deliberately avoiding getting pregnant?”
She glanced around the room as if looking for something.
“Zosia?”
“Well . . .”
“Well what?”
“Well, I’v
e been waiting for a reasonable period of sobriety on your part to coincide with fertility on my part.”
“Sobriety? I don’t get drunk!”
“No, your tolerance is phenomenal, but you do drink a lot.”
“You know why.”
“Yes, I do, and that’s why I haven’t said anything. But don’t worry, if you abstain and we really try, I’m sure I’ll get knocked up.”
“What if you don’t? What if they succeeded with their little test?”
“Was there any indication what was tested?”
“Not that I know of. Maybe Olek or Barbara found something out since this morning.”
“Well, then, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”
“Zosia!”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Peter. Why should we panic now?”
“I was experimented on!”
“I know, darling, and I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry.”
“But what do you want to do? I mean, if they have succeeded? If I’m . . .”
“I don’t understand what it is you’re asking me. What can we do?” she asked in confusion. “Do you want me to track them down and assassinate the bastards?” “No! I want to know! Will you want a divorce?”
“A divorce?” She stopped and shook her head slightly. “A divorce?” She stood, pulling him to his feet. When he continued to look down, she gently placed her hand beneath his chin and lifted his face until he looked into her eyes.
“I thought I would lose you.”
She embraced him, held him close, stroking his hair affectionately. “No,you’re not going to get rid of me that easily,” she whispered soothingly. Then she maneuvered him to the sofa and they sat down together. She stroked his face, ran her fingers through his hair, kissed him gently. When he seemed calm enough, she asked, “Do you have any idea what was done?”
“No. I remember being injected. I don’t remember if I bothered to tell you about it. I told the physician, and he said they had not detected anything unusual in my blood.”
“Yeah, you told me about it. It’s one reason I set up the appointments for you with the doctors in the first place.”
“Oh.”
“Well, you were an unknown quantity then,” she explained, her hand trailing gently along his chest. “I didn’t want you introducing some deadly diseases into our community.”
“Oh, I thought those exams were for my benefit.”
“That, too,” she comforted, her fingers tracing an indiscernible pattern as she spoke. “Anyway, as far as we know, they could have been testing just about anything. There’s no reason to suspect they were successful.”
He gave a short laugh. “Perhaps not, but with my experiences, I’m not exactly an optimist.”
“I’ve noticed,” she agreed somewhat sadly. “Anyway, one thing we can do is get you tested by the physician . . .”
He did not respond.
“Or,” she added suggestively as she began undoing his buttons, “we can do our own tests . . .”
He smiled at her with a glimmer of lust.
“. . . and let nature take its course.” She paused as he reached up to touch her face. She brought his hand to her lips and kissed it. “However, there is one thing we should do in any case.”
“What’s that? Assassinate someone?” He had been touched by her earlier offer. She was thoroughly professional, and the fact that she had offered to kill his tormentors, illegally and against all her military training, had moved him— though even in the depths of his despair he had recognized the extremely black humor of such a valentine.
“Well, if you want. But what I was thinking was that we should make your adoption of Joanna legal.”
“What? You’d go against Adam’s wishes?”
“Adam’s dead,” she replied rather coldly. “It was unfair of him to ask such a thing and stupid for me to agree. After all, I had no right to determine Joanna’s fate like that. It should be her choice, and she has already made her opinion abundantly clear.”
“Oh, Zosiu, that would mean so much to me!” He hesitated. “But are you sure you want to defy Adam’s wishes? After all, Joanna and I sorted it all out for ourselves.”
“Yeah, I heard. But it’s important we make it legal whatever you and Joanna think. During the wedding, when I was talking to my parents, I realized that they would be very likely to take Joanna to the NAU if something happened to me. They assumed it would be the best thing for her, you know, a normal life, a family, et cetera. I mentioned that she should stay here with you and Marysia, and they were rather dismissive of that idea. I think they think raising their kids here was a mistake—maybe I’m to blame for that—and they would want to remove Joanna from this environment.”
“Oh, God, I hadn’t thought of that. I just assumed she would stay here with me. Or at the least with Marysia.”
“Yeah, I sort of assumed the same. But what with my father in government there—well, he’d be sure to get his way. The only way to make sure they don’t get custody is for you to adopt Joanna legally. Then if I get wasted on a mission, she can stay with you. And that, I’m sure, would be Adam’s preference as well—he would have never guessed that she might be taken away to another continent because of his stupid request.”
“It wasn’t stupid. I understand what he must have felt.”
“Stupid or not, it’s currently impractical. So, unless you have a problem with it, I think we ought to make the adoption legal.”
“No problem. No problem at all,” he responded happily.
Zosia reached out and touched his cheek. “You know, we have a whole evening and a night to ourselves, and I haven’t noticed any empty bottles recently.”
“I haven’t needed any recently.”
“And I’m probably fertile, ready to be plowed, so to speak.”
He smiled in response, but the smile faded as a last bitter thought disturbed him. “You’re not afraid to be with me? I mean, I feel pretty polluted, Zosiu. I’d understand if you were a bit put off.”
In answer to his question she crawled on top of him and began unbuttoninghis shirt as she kissed him, starting at his forehead and working her way down.
Two weeks later, Barbara and Olek were beginning to comment openly about Peter’s frequent absences from work. They had not found out anything more about the test done on him, but he seemed reasonably unconcerned—certainly he did not work late trying to unearth more information. Indeed, he barely found time to work at all. He would leave midmorning and sometimes return before lunch, then he would leave again in the middle of the afternoon and sometimes he came back to finish the day, sometimes not. Whatever he was doing, it seemed to leave him in a thoroughly jovial mood. He joked and laughed and folded the coded documents into paper airplanes, which he sent skimming over their heads, then he would get up, stretch, mutter something about having something to do, and would disappear again.
Zosia was suffering from similar illnesses or appointments and was unable to attend meetings, turned down two assassinations that would have taken her out of the encampment, and never did quite get around to hacking out some data that she was supposed to unearth. Her dereliction of duty seemed to leave her in similar high spirits, and the two of them were often seen strolling arm in arm through the woods, calf deep in mud and slush, grinning giddily like two lovesick teenagers.
Several days before the expected onset of Zosia’s menses, Peter began asking as soon as she awoke, “Anything yet?” The answer was no, not yet.
Half a week later when he asked, Zosia said, “Apparently not,” with something bordering on hope.
Three days later both of them were walking around with an air of expectation: Peter would simply raise his eyebrows in query and Zosia would simply shake her head. With each passing day, she shook her head more emphatically and smiled a broader smile.
By the time she was a week overdue, neither of them could contain their hopes any longer, and Zosia went to see the physician. It was the gnomelike fell
ow with the nervous habits. He reported the news to them without any apparent idea of its significance: Zosia was pregnant. They accepted his brief congratulations with a dignified thank-you and left his office to go celebrate properly and in private.
They spent the weeks following their good news in a state of ostentatious happiness. They had dinner parties and invited their guests over to hear their news in person—gossip was such that it was unreasonable to expect anybody not to have already heard, but they had fun making a presentation of it in any case. Even Tadek had a wonderful meal cooked for him—and it wasn’t that Zosia had suddenly learned how to cook. Peter was feeling that great about the world.
42
EAT IT, the voice intoned. This time he did not hesitate, he knew better than that. He immediately grabbed the capsules and threw them into his mouth, forcing himself to swallow before he could lose his nerve. Rough hands grabbed his face, forced his jaw open, and probed expectantly. He retched involuntarily and someone hit him for that. Don’t you dare! the voice warned. The fingers found nothing, he had indeed swallowed the pills, whatever they were, and now he waited in dismay for the inevitable effects, whatever they would be.
Peter opened his eyes to the soft darkness of their bedroom. He cast a longing glance at Zosia and Joanna as they slept undisturbed, then with a sigh of resignation,he rose from the bed and went into the kitchen to pull out a bottle of whiskey. His abstinence over the past weeks had cost him dearly in terms of sleep, and he did not hesitate now to pour himself a tumblerful and end the charade. However happy his state of mind during the day, there was still only one way he could face the nights, and as he drank the fluid, he felt the nightmare dissolve back into the past where it belonged.
“Good morning.” Zosia yawned from the doorway. “Rough night?” she asked, glancing at the bottle and his glass.
“It’s all right now.” Peter studied her as she leaned sleepily against the jamb. It had been only three weeks since the doctor had confirmed her pregnancy, yet already he could not help but look at her and see their child within. Their little miracle. It would be nearly six weeks old—a minuscule lump with tiny arm and leg buds. Visible fingers probably, the brain just beginning to develop. He glanced up at the clock. “You’re up early.”
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