Speaking of old age, I’ve been stopping by to see Mum every day recently. She’s not doing very well at all. Seems like her mind is always in the past. All of a sudden she seems so old and frail. Niklaus is very helpful whenever he’s home, running errands for her and even visiting when I’m at work to cook her meals and clean for her. In one of her clearer moments she thanked him and he told her it was the least he could do since she had always been there for him. (So that’s the thanks I get for my years of effort!)
Niklaus and I talked some more as we walked home from Mum’s together. He even told me a bit about school. Not much, but it was different from the usual rubbish, so I guess it was the truth. I hinted that maybe it was all for a purpose but didn’t say more, mostly because I had no idea what I was talking about, just the inkling of an inspiration.
Peter found himself grinning. So it hadn’t been his imagination or just wishful-thinking! No wonder he was so confused about his parents’motives: they had been confused! He read on as Catherine described how her husband began more and more to agree with her point of view. He did not attend any of the meetings for fear of discovery and denunciation, but he listened eagerly to her reports of what the Underground had to say and what they were doing.
With each page, Catherine reported more of her mother’s deterioration. As Peter read the words, he shared again his mother’s sadness. It had been a painful time for him as he saw the one person who had supported him throughout his childhood slowly and irreversibly failing. It was equally painful for Catherine as she could not communicate to her mother the turnaround in her own beliefs. One day, Catherine’s mother walked out into traffic and was killed by a car. It was a mercifully quick death, but one that left the family stunned by their loss.
Erich could not come home for the funeral, but Niklaus was there. He only made it in time to meet us at the graveyard, and it was one of the rare times I’ve seen him in his school uniform. Usually he changes out of it before he even reaches home—God only knows where—but this time, there he was all properly dressed with his neat suit and tie and the school’s insignia and swastikas. I used to think that uniform looked quite handsome on him.
Niklaus didn’t say much but I could tell he was really heartbroken. She was always so good to him and I think she taught him a lot. My sister Emily and her children were there, but as usual we didn’t have much to say to each other; just the usual courtesies that strangers exchange on such occasions. She had a man with her and she introduced me, but I didn’t bother to remember his name, though who knows, maybe this one will stick around for a while.
I tried to talk a bit more to Niklaus afterward as we started the long walk home, but when he saw a bus heading west, he said he had to hurry and catch it because he had not, after all, gotten permission to leave, so he had just skipped out, and the sooner he got back, the less severe his punishment would be. He was gone before we could ask him what he meant by that. He seemed to think we would know. What, in God’s name, do they do there? Why hadn’t he got permission to come home for his grandmother’s funeral? Charles even called from his office about it yesterday.
It was simple spite, Peter thought to himself. The master had called him to the office and coldly told him of his grandmother’s death, then added that he would not be allowed to attend the funeral because he had not been sufficiently deferential over the past several weeks, so how could he possibly pay his respects to the dead when he did not even show a proper attitude to his betters? There had been no argument, he had simply waited until early morning, had climbed the wall, and had hitched a ride to the cemetery, arriving only just in time. On the way back, he had hopped a series of buses and run several miles, managing to scramble over the wall even as his name was being called over the loudspeaker with the command that he report to the main office. It was not the first time he had been called that day, and he did not even bother to pretend that he had been on campus; he simply accepted the caning as the price for saying good-bye to his grandmother.
“Hey, you still up?” Barbara’s sleepy voice broke into his reverie.
He gave her a gentle smile and nodded, asking, “What’s wrong, can’t you sleep?”
She yawned, came to sit down next to him, and curled up so that her head was on his shoulder. Peter was eager to read more of his mother’s words, but Barbara seemed to need his company, so he patiently closed the book and set it down. “What’s up?” he asked, stroking her hair away from her eyes.
She sighed and pressed herself closer to him. After a long while, she said softly, “I wanted to apologize for reading your letter.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that.”
“I don’t want you to think you can’t trust me. I respect your privacy.”
“It’s all right, little one,” he soothed, still stroking her hair. Like Joanna after a bad dream. “Why don’t you go back to sleep, you sound tired.”
“I’m not like that, you know.”
“I know, don’t worry. It really is all right. I’d already forgotten about it.”
She looked up at him suddenly, as if insulted by his last phrase. She didn’t say anything but her expression asked, Am I so forgettable?
He sighed and continued to stroke her hair. Then he leaned over and kissed the top of her head. “I take a lot of comfort in your being here, Barbara, I really do.”
She leaned back against him and closed her eyes, obviously unwilling to leave him, obviously afraid of saying more. He held her until she fell asleep, then he picked her up and carried her back into the bedroom. It was unlikely that she slept through being moved, but she did not open her eyes, perhaps enjoying the sensation of being a child in his arms. He laid her on the bed and covered her, and indulging her in her feigned sleep, he stroked her hair back from her face again and kissed her cheek, whispering, “Sleep well, child.”
He sat for a few moments by her side, watching as genuine sleep reclaimed her, then he sighed heavily. He was tired and every page he read was one less page in his mother’s life. With deliberate patience, he decided to prolong her life for atleast one more day. He returned to the sitting room to place the last diary safely on a shelf and turn off the lamp, then he went to join Barbara in their bed.
31
FEELING THAT HE WAS REALLY PUSHING his luck by not finishing the diaries when he had a chance, Peter went into work with Barbara the next morning as usual. Despite his premonitions, nothing untoward happened; they worked their usual shift in the bookstore, then after they had eaten their meal and Barbara had retired for the night, he began reading again. With Catherine’s prodding, Charles decided to turn his disillusionment to good use and, through his wife, offered his services to the Underground.
The local leadership has a hard time believing we don’t want money for this stuff—that just makes us seem more suspicious to them. I guess they’ve never heard of people having a change of heart or being disillusioned before. Anyway, they’re beginning to trust us, but now they’re expressing disappointment at the low-quality information that Charles can get his hands on. I’ve tried to explain that it is not caution on his part so much as the fact that nothing else is really available to him. I hope that is the truth. I feel thoroughly fed up with this regime and am ready for a revolution of any sort, but I think Charles is still maybe acting more out of bitterness and revenge against those who have made his progress so difficult.
The Pure German faction has gotten more brazen recently and there have been minor incidences against “foreign” Party members and even Charles has been harassed a bit. He knows who is behind it, but there is no proof against them and it’s not clear that, even if he had proof, any of it would be taken seriously by the higher-ups.
Peter read his mother’s words again, trying to determine which of their two dangerous games would eventually cause their deaths. It seemed obvious now that their arrests had not been as accidental as had seemed. Clearly, if it was known that Charles was feeding information to the Underground, then he co
uld be arrested outright, without the need for a charade, but perhaps there was only a suspicion, or perhaps there was some political reason to keep his indictment secret, such as the fear of providing ammunition to the Pure German movement. Under those circumstances, being arrested for allegedly hiding his wanted son might be enough to set him on the path of a long and deliberately deadly interrogation. It would not be unusual for the Party to dispose of a troublesome member in such a fashion.
Still, if Charles had been suspected of treason, it seemed unlikely that the Party would have had the patience to wait for such a coincidence as his son’s being denounced. How could they have known that the son would not be at home and that both his parents would be at the moment they decided to arrest him? They would not have waited for such accidental luck when they could easily have manufactured something more straightforward. Only if the timing had just happened to coincide with their suspicions, or maybe if Charles or Catherine had said something unexpected while under investigation, would it make sense.
That last thought was rather scary. He reread his mother’s words. Ready for a revolution of any sort. Had she said something like that to her interrogators? Had it all been just bad luck and Erich’s denunciation up to that point? Though the end result was the same and long in the past, he somehow hoped it wasn’t true, for then the root cause of their deaths would be his old gang membership and the conversations he had had with his mother.
Ready for a revolution of any sort. It was a direct quote from him. He had used it in his younger days, quoting the more radical elements of the freedom movements. The implication was that a reasonable approach had failed to produce results and that change, any change achieved in any manner, was preferable to the current state of affairs. It was naive, of course; a bloodbath was not really preferable, and the Gestapoland imposed out East was easy proof that life for the native Britons could have been much worse. Nevertheless, it was a common sentiment, usually not reflecting a genuine philosophy, but rather frustration.
Peter turned his thoughts to the Pure German faction and their possible complicity in his parents’ deaths. The movement clearly did not wield enough power to act openly, but they might jump at any opportunity to purge “foreign” elements from the Party and the bureaucracy. A chance arrest of the parents of a wanted boy would provide them with the perfect opportunity. Charles’s death might then have been either deliberate or the accidental consequence of an intention to scare him out of government. In either case, his wife would have had to be silenced to keep her from pursuing a vendetta or exposing their crime to the authorities.
The latter scenario fit in slightly better with what little he knew. Due to its apparent lack of political power, the Pure German faction would be dependent on dumb luck to put one of their enemies into their hands, and the secretiveness that followed Catherine’s and Charles’s arrests seemed more in keeping with what their methods would have to be. Everyone would know what had happened, and all the English could read the writing on the wall, but nobody could be held accountable as it had been an accidental death under interrogation.
Peter read on. There were more hints that the Pure German movement was making trouble, and as his parents’ involvement in the Underground deepened, Catherine worried about her son’s future:
Our initial plans for Niklaus were that if we got him into a good university, he could get a deferment or even carry out German-style service. Now, of course, I doubt we could talk him into the military for two years, especially since I get the impression he would not be welcomed among his comrades (I’ve heard there are a lot of deaths from hazing). Recently, I’ve been thinking of withdrawing him from that horrid school and letting him finish his schooling locally and then eventually he could work with the Underground, but then he’d have to go through those six years in the labor draft.
Now, there is another possibility. One of the locals suggested they could use him when he’s finished schooling. Their plan would be for our son to disappear and for Niklaus to reemerge with a new identity which would allow him to infiltrate directly into the security services or some other branch of government. It seems amazingly long-term thinking, for they could not possibly hope for him to achieve anything for at least a decade, but I guess after all these years, we’re in for the long haul.
Charles and I have debated the pros and cons endlessly. On the positive side, Niklaus could do something useful for his country and I think he would like that, also he would not have to be drafted (they said they could handle that though they didn’t say how). The negatives are fairly obvious: we would almost certainly lose all contact with him, he might not want to pretend to be a German or Volksdeutsch, and it would be dangerous.
There’s one more thing I really didn’t like: we’ve talked about him a lot to the Underground, discussing his fluency and his suitability and his talents, but they never asked what he would want. They seem to assume he’s sort of our commodity to do with as we please! I know that we have pushed him into certain things, like his school, but we’ve always had his best interests at heart. This is different, they only seem to view him as someone to be used. I’ve mentioned that he’s a very independent-minded boy, but they brush that aside. They seem so hungry to have him that I’d worry about how they might treat him.
Peter thought back to that moment when that unknown man had put his hand on his shoulder and said, Come with me. Clearly they had heard Catherine’s words and heeded her warnings, for they had waited a full month, letting him know hunger and terror, before they had offered him their assistance. He had been led to believe that they had only happened to observe him wandering the streets and their assistance had been completely altruistic. They had expressed surprise at his background and schooling, marveled at his fluent, unaccented German, and presented their plan for his future as if it had materialized out of thin air. They had also maintained a stony silence about his parents, insisting that they had no information whatsoever. Doubtless, as far as they were concerned, the unfortunate demise of his parents was a boon for they no longer had to negotiate to get their hands on him.
A burning sensation spread through his body as he remembered how he had been overwhelmed with gratitude and a desire to please them once they had so mercifully rescued him from the streets. His gratitude had carried him through excruciating interrogations, preventing him from betraying anything—not one name, not one location, not one code word, ever left his lips. Even after Graham and his superiors had let him and his friends serve as bait for a trap, he had maintained loyalty to them! Even now, he used the name they had given him then in preference to the one his parents had given him.
It had all been a farce. They had used him from the start, like a well-trained chimpanzee. Like a commodity. It was true, he consoled himself, whatever their motives, they had saved his life. Still, they could have treated him as a human being, they could have told him what they knew, they didn’t have to treat him like that. Or had they been so poisoned by the society around them that they, too, no longer knew how to trust anyone?
He reread his mother’s words, feeling the love and concern in them that she had so often denied him in his youth. It made up for a lot, it made up for much of what she had written earlier, and as he continued reading, he felt comforted. She had not been the perfect mother, nor had she been an idealist all her life, but neither was she heartless or relentlessly collaborating. And, she had loved him after all. That was worth something.
Catherine’s words continued to outline her worries about harassment at Charles’s workplace, about anonymous poison-pen letters, and she continued to debate with herself the merits of the Underground’s plans for her son. Around Winterfest, she seemed to take a break from it all and wrote about other things— about the price of sugar and the renaming of streets, about how her in-laws were faring and news from Erich; still her mind was never far from her problems, and buried in the middle of a description of that year’s Winterfestmarkt was the line Peter had found before:
> I don’t know what to do about Niklaus. I’m worried he won’t know what to do if something happens. I wish I could tell him, but Charles insists I don’t—at least not yet. Says he’s still too young. What am I to do?
The thought had slipped out of her pen as if of its own accord, and she determinedly changed tack again and wrote more about the weather and what they had had for dinner that evening, detailing things as if to preserve forever a memory of normalcy. On the following page, she allowed herself to return to her troubles and came up with a tentative solution:
I thought my diary might be of help to Niklaus if something accidental should happen to us. Trouble is, I don’t think he’d find it and I can’t tell him where I hide it, at least not yet. I’ve decided to sing a little song to him that maybe someday will make sense. It’s all so wild an idea, I feel a bitsilly, but if Charles and I are taken in for something or if we just disappear or whatever, well, maybe he’ll be inspired to look for a reason and maybe my words will lead him to this book. If so, Son, I want to tell you I’m sorry about the mistakes we’ve made in your life, and I want you to know that we both love you dearly. I can’t give you any names or useful information, but maybe with the background that I’ve written, you’ll be prepared to accept help if it’s offered, and you might have a better idea of why things happened the way they did.
The Children's War Page 138