Zosia tilted her head at his sudden silence.
“I didn’t even think about it until later, when I read my mother’s diaries. I recognized some things about myself, and I realized, they did, too! They set it all up so that I fell right into my own personalized trap. And so, I became their tool.”
“Was there any other option?” she asked as a counterpoint to his vague selfcondemnation.
“Other than death? No, I guess not, but it’s not pleasant to realize one has been so effectively manipulated.”
“Was that what you felt with Frau Vogel?”
He turned his head away. “Can’t we let that drop?”
“I just wanted to know,” she pleaded.
He thought he heard something different in her tone, something less judgmental, so he risked answering, “Yes. She did not have to say one threatening word to me. I thought she had the right, and . . .”
“And?”
“And not only that, I wanted to please her as well.” He paused. “You can hate me for that if you want. I certainly do.”
She was silent, and he suddenly wished he had not said the last part, but it was too late. Now she knew, and she would always know that whatever else he had felt, buried deep within his instinct for survival had been a desire to please his masters because his life and the conditions of his life had so depended on them.
“How much do you think that still influences you?” she asked suddenly.
“Do you mean, am I a mental case?” he asked wryly. He was wary of giving her any more ammunition for later arguments. He had already supplied her with quite an arsenal.
“Don’t be so negative,” she chided.
“I’m sorry. It’s hard to discuss things like this without even a cup of coffee to start the day.”
“Don’t duck the question.”
“All right. How much does their ‘reeducation’ still influence me? I don’t know. What I do know is, it took a lot of courage for me to speak out in America, more than either you or your father may have realized. I still had that horror of being punished for crossing them and for disobeying.”
Zosia nodded in recognition. “Oh, yes, the psychiatrist warned us that it might push you to suicide. I knew that wasn’t the case though.”
“You knew,” he repeated sadly. He hadn’t known! How was it she was so sure that she had blithely risked his life?
“I knew the risk you were taking and I appreciated your courage,” she praised, oblivious to his unease.
“I didn’t escape their blackmail entirely,” he admitted, deciding to ignore the issue. “I didn’t tell you, but I had some of the worst nights of my life there, and the most awful memories. I won’t tell you how many times, in the middle of the night, I held that bottle of sleeping pills you had given me and read the warning label. . . . Yet, I spoke out anyway, and I thought for sure I had finally defeated them, that there was nothing they could hold over me anymore. The trouble is . . .” He hesitated as he realized where his thoughts were leading.
“You’ve realized that their punishments can be worse than depriving you of your life.”
“Yes. I should have known. They’ve always taken out retaliations on others, on associates, on innocent bystanders, on little . . . I should have known. I just didn’t think . . .” His voice broke with the memory. Those little fingers clawing at those massive hands, struggling to get one last gasp of life, those trusting eyes pleading with him as they glazed with pain . . .
He tried to break the memory by looking at Zosia, but she had turned her face away. Deciding that enough was enough, he asked bluntly,“Zosia! What is it? Why can’t you even look at me anymore? What have I done?”
“Nothing,” she answered unconvincingly, fingering the edge of the down quilt.
“Do you blame me for Joanna’s death?”
“Of course not. That would be stupid. It would play right into their hands,” she replied mechanically.
“Then what is it?”
“Just a contraction, dear.”
“A contraction?” he asked worriedly.
“Don’t worry, just a practice one. They come all the time.”
“You’re not in labor?”
“No, don’t worry. It’s just that the contractions make me . . . They . . . I get distracted.”
He nodded, relieved. Zosia did not blame him, everyone had assured him of that. He had assured himself of that hundreds of times. It was the contraction, that was all. He let Joanna’s image slip from his mind and leaned over to kiss Zosia and then went to make some coffee.
Zosia kept her word to skip work, and they went for a long walk in the woods. The going was rough for both of them, and they took their time walking along the more level paths.
“I wanted to go to the waterfall, but I guess we shouldn’t,” Zosia commented. “It looks so beautiful in the winter.”
“Ryszard tried to take me there last winter, but we never got to it,” Peter reminisced. “I’ve only ever seen it in the summer.”
“Oh, too bad! It really is quite different. Well, maybe before you go back, you’ll get a chance to see it all icy and frozen.”
Go back. His heart felt like lead. What had he done that was so unforgivable? Why this exile? To say something, he said, “It seems a favorite with all the kids here.”
“Yeah, it’s where they learn to smoke. The mist drowns out the fumes.”
“Yeah, I know. It used to puzzle me how so many people, despite the rules, were smokers here.”
“We find our way around the rules.”
“You never took up the habit?”
“No, not really. I learned how, for masquerading purposes, but I never really enjoyed it. When did you start? At ten?”
“Yeah, on and off. Supply was always a problem. My father blamed Erich for the missing cigarettes, and I’d steal from shops sometimes. When Erich went off to the labor camp, I was in a bit of a quandary.”
“What’d you do?”
“Stole them from my teachers at school. Over summer break, I ended upnicking some from my dad. Of course, he realized then that I had been doing it all along.”
“Did he beat you?” Zosia asked as she picked up a handful of snow and sucked on it.
“Thirsty?”
“Yeah.”
“No, he didn’t hit me.” Peter removed his sunglasses and cleaned them. “He wasn’t that sort.”
“What then?” Zosia asked, intrigued.
“Nothing really. He just seemed really disappointed that I would steal from him. He made me feel quite ashamed of myself. Up to that point, I had just thought of him as the enemy, and suddenly there he was my father, shaking his head at me, looking resigned, not saying much at all.”
They continued their walk, enjoying the silence. Zosia lowered herself carefully to the ground and made a snow angel. Peter tried to pull her to her feet, but instead Zosia pulled him down into the snow next to her. They giggled and then lay there, side by side, for a few moments, staring up into the sky, looking at the black, barren branches of the trees as they traced a pattern of possible paths upward.
“Which one would you take?” she asked.
Somehow, he understood the gist of her question. “That one there.” He pointed along a series of branches that led in a loop back home. He doubted she could tell where he was pointing, but it didn’t matter. “What about you?”
“Over there.” She pointed to the left. “See how the topmost branch touches that cloud?”
“Not from my angle.”
“It does from here. I’d just leap off the end onto the cloud and then sprint across the sky and dive into the sun.”
He laughed and rolled over to hug her. It wasn’t easy but eventually they managed to embrace and kiss. He got onto his knees so he could lean over her and kiss her face and neck and hair and tell her over and over how beautiful she was. She looked up at him with that inimitable grin, her eyes sparkling, her entire face alight with joy. His heart felt as though it would
burst with love for her.
As the snow began to melt and soak into their clothes, they decided to climb to their feet; again it was quite a job, and they congratulated each other on their nimbleness when they both managed to get up. They continued their walk, then stopped to eat the lunch they had packed and sip the mulled wine that Peter carried in a thermos. They talked of this and that and nothing at all, and every minute was unalloyed happiness.
As they were walking again, there was a natural break in their conversation and they listened enraptured to the sounds of silence, then suddenly Zosia asked, “What is it you believe?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“About God. What do you believe? Are you still an atheist?”
“Oh, I don’t know if I would ever say I was an atheist.” He wondered what had prompted the discussion.
“Why not?”
“That’s a bit too active a denial of God for me. Up until recently, all I could say is I was raised without a religion and never cared to join one or formulate a sturdy belief structure on my own.”
“Up until recently?” They had stopped walking and stood side by side on the path.
“Yes, thanks to events, I’ve thought a lot more about such things recently, and I guess I feel more sure that I believe in something. I’m just not sure what it is.”
“How can you believe in it then?”
He shrugged. “Call it a spirit. Or the divine.” He ran his hand along the bark of the nearest tree. “Maybe a tree god or some other pagan concept, except that doesn’t quite work either. I feel it’s more focused than that.”
“So you’re a theist?”
“I suppose.”
“Then why not join an organized religion?”
“Oh, it’s all the other crap that goes along with it that stops me. It’s all so irrational and foolish.”
“So,” she asked quietly, “you think I’m foolish for having a religion?”
He fell silent, wondering if she had deliberately set a trap for him. “That’s not what I meant,” he answered finally. “I can understand what you do. If I had been raised with a religion, I’d almost certainly adhere to it, at least to the extent that you do. I miss not having a structure for my beliefs, I miss the community of fellow believers. I think I even feel the absence of ritual in my life. There’s a great deal of power in . . .”
After a pause Zosia asked, “In what?”
“In belonging. I don’t think I’ve ever really belonged anywhere.” He paused and added wistfully, “No matter how hard I’ve tried.” He thought of Joanna and how much she had made him feel as if he belonged, and a smile played across his lips, but he decided not to mention her, returning instead to a theoretical discussion. “Children seem to need that structure, that belonging. As do a lot of adults. It’s clear whenever there’s a vacuum in the belief structure, a new set of beliefs or mythologies or ideologies is invented to fill the gap, and it’s usually these newer structures that are the most zealous and therefore the most dangerous.”
“Like National Socialism?”
He nodded. “Among other things, yes.”
“So, why not join something established then?”
“Joining as an adult is different from belonging since childhood: it looks like an act of approval of all that the religion entails. When something annoys you, you can shrug your shoulders and say that there’s more than dogma involved. It’s your tradition, your culture, your family, your past. It’s not worth quitting about,or you hope it will change, or even, if you’re really committed, you’ll work to change it. But for me to join, say, your church, right now, would be a commitment to things I don’t believe in.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for one, the treatment of women. I should think that would bother you more than me, but you just ignore it.”
“Ah, I assume it will change sooner or later.”
“But you see my point? If I were to accept membership, I’d be approving that policy. I’d have to lie even as I was being baptized.”
“No, you wouldn’t. There’s nothing in the statements about that! The status of women is traditionally screwed up, but it’s not in the creed.”
“There’s enough in there to cause me to feel uneasy. In fact, most of it doesn’t feel right. I find the whole Jesus thing problematic.”
There was a long silence, and he was sure he had truly offended her. Finally she said, “Oh.” After another long pause she asked, “Why is that?”
“I made the mistake of learning a bit of history. You know, the similar myths in prior religions, the timing of various bits of doctrine . . .” He hesitated as he tried to determine exactly the right words to convey his gut feelings.
Zosia stared off into the woods as if watching something. He looked to see if a deer or some other animal was in the distance, but he could discern nothing special in the direction she was staring. He continued, “I can accept a God who has awarded us free will and therefore cannot interfere; in fact, that’s the only way I can believe there is a God, what with all that has happened in the past century. What I can’t handle is the idea that there is some merit in suffering or that God in some way would encourage suffering.”
“I think the idea of the crucifixion was that God understands our suffering.”
“That strikes me as a convenient man-made fiction. It would serve well to tell the oppressed that they are doing something noble and see, look, your God did it as well!”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit cynical?”
He smiled without humor. “Forgive me if I don’t believe in the basic good nature of all humans. I found absolutely no nobility or piety in suffering.”
“But you wouldn’t have, since you didn’t believe.”
“That’s right, I don’t believe. Not in that. But if I had believed, I don’t think I would have found comfort in knowing that somebody else suffered. I didn’t want anybody else to feel what I felt! And if I were to believe that Christ’s suffering was voluntary, well, that I find utterly abhorrent.” He shook his head. “It’s all too medieval—this preoccupation with suffering and death.”
“There’s the resurrection.”
He shook his head but did not elaborate. Gruesomely murder your own child to prove a point about suffering and acceptance and then resurrect him. What sort of God did that?
There was another long silence. Zosia still did not look away from that distantpart of the woods. “It doesn’t need to matter,” she said at last in a quiet voice.
“But it does matter. I’ll accept Jesus as historical, but divine? No! If I ever voiced such disbeliefs, they would be enough for me to be excommunicated.”
“Call them concerns,” Zosia suggested. “No, not really. I imagine if you did it vociferously, you’d be excommunicated, but you don’t need to do that. Nobody will mind what you think about the doctrine; it’s not like being a priest or a theologian. Anyway, most of us don’t believe in the leadership, so as far as we’re concerned, they can’t excommunicate anyone.”
“If you feel that way, then what’s the point? Why do you belong?”
“To belong. To have that structure there when I need it. To feel that I’m part of a community of people who believe in something beyond the mundane. To pass it on to my children. Because of tradition.”
He nodded his understanding of her reasons.
“I want you to belong as well!” she implored. “Join us. You don’t need to believe anything more than what you do. It’s enough for me.”
Peter bowed his head as he considered Zosia’s request. Was this the reason for his exile? Did she feel he had rejected them by remaining aloof from their traditions? Was her rejection of him simply retaliation for that? His inability to participate in Joanna’s requiem mass came to mind. He could have learned the words, could have recited them to comfort himself and to offer Zosia the solace of his company. Yet he had rejected all that, standing aloof and apart anytime they mourned a comrade or celebrated a we
dding or baptized a child.
Would it be so difficult to have some water splashed on his forehead and recite a few words of consent? Was a piece of bread and a sip of wine so hard to swallow? If Paris was well worth a mass, wasn’t Zosia? If entire kingdoms had converted for political convenience, couldn’t he do it for love? Did he really believe deep down that the Vatican would take notice and would gleefully conclude that their patriarchal nonsense had triumphed over rationalism as the last recalcitrant Englishman gave in?
There was, he had to admit, something in the nationalism aspect to it all. It would be easier to consider the Church of England, though it held no greater theological attraction for him. He had all his life associated Catholicism with fanatics. Or the Irish. Same difference, his father would have said. In any case, it was something that he was not. Indeed, he recognized that such a perception was almost certainly propaganda from a bygone era, left over as a knee-jerk prejudice in the populace. If he had told his parents or friends that he had converted to Catholicism, they would have been horrified, yet if he mentioned that he had a Polish or French or Italian Catholic wife, they would have accepted the information with a shrug; just so long as it was not an Irish Catholic, or even worse, an English Catholic!
So, it was not so much a religion that Zosia was asking him to accept, rather,she was asking him to give up a lifetime perception of his place in the world with respect to that religion.
“Why are you asking this of me now?” he asked. “I understood before our marriage that you respected my beliefs, or lack thereof.”
Zosia looked up at the sky as if searching for answers there. Then she lowered her head and said, “Two reasons. The first is that I was wrong. I thought it wouldn’t be important to me, but it is. I want to have something we do together, something that makes us feel like a family. We do so little together. You’re not fluent in my language, you won’t dance with me when that is one of my passions, you don’t go skiing with me—”
“You know the reason for all that,” he interrupted bitterly. “I can’t help—”
The Children's War Page 148