Despite receiving the succinct note that he was to return, he and Zosia applied to the Council to rearrange his assignment. The Council would hear nothing of it: there was too much going on for them to instigate any unnecessary disruptions, and he was finally told, politely but firmly, to leave. Any changes would have to be handled in due course.
Peter sipped the tea and wondered about Zosia’s role in his leaving. She claimed that she wanted him to stay and was working toward that end, but when his case was finally called before the Council, it was dismissed within minutes with a warning not to waste their valuable time. Zosia had remained silentthroughout, and he had left the Council room feeling humiliated and quite alone.
“Well?” Barbara pressed impatiently.
“Your family is okay,” Peter assured her.
“And?”
“And I have a baby daughter. Her name is Irena,” he announced with a surge of pride. The tiny face appeared in his mind’s eye and he smiled at the memory. It had nearly broken his heart to part from her, but he had promised her and himself he would soon return, whatever it took.
“Congratulations,” Barbara offered. “Now tell us what happened there!” She slapped the table in annoyance.
“All right,” Peter agreed wearily. “Sharing my joy can wait.”
He spent several hours telling them everything he knew about the invasion and its aftermath. He was even drawn into explaining what he was doing during the initial attack and in that way was able to celebrate the birth of his daughter. As he told them about their close encounter with the soldiers in the cabin, Barbara leaned forward, her eyes fixed on Peter’s face. Her fingers dug into Mark’s hand until he yelped and brusquely pulled his hand away.
“I thought we were all dead then,” Peter continued, ignoring Mark’s jealous look.
“What happened next?” Barbara asked, her voice nearly a whisper.
“He survived obviously,” Mark pointed out sardonically.
Peter nodded and continued the tale. He described how the soldiers had left and how he later found them dead along the trail. Then he described the lifeand-death encounter with the sole survivor of the ambush. Barbara leapt to her feet as though she could not stand sitting anymore and paced the small area near the couch.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Mark snapped. “Sit down, woman. It’s only a story!”
Barbara spun around to face him, absolutely livid. “What the hell do you know about it!” she spat at him in English. “You and your cozy little Underground here! What could you possibly understand!” Her English faltered and she slipped into Polish, denouncing Mark in words he could not understand, though he could not fail to interpret the flinging of hands and the furious looks.
Peter listened to the torrent, gave Mark a small smile when the boy looked to him for a translation, and shook his head. As soon as there was a break in Barbara’s temper, Peter concluded, “And that brings us up to the point where I’ve already told you about everything.”
Barbara stopped her tirade, stared at both of them with a look of absolute embarrassment. Peter took the opportunity to refill his cup of tea, and as he poured the water from the kettle, he heard Barbara saying softly to Mark, “I’m so sorry. It’s just that, sometimes I feel so far from home. And now, what with . . .”
Unable to procrastinate longer, Peter returned to the room. Barbara wasalready sitting next to Mark again, holding both his hands in hers. They gazed into each other’s eyes with that sickly sweet intensity that only new lovers could manage. “We have something to tell you,” Barbara cooed without looking up.
“What’s that?”
“We’re getting married,” she whispered dreamily.
“No, you’re not,” Peter answered matter-of-factly.
That got their attention.“How can you say that!” Barbara scolded.
“You have no right!” Mark threatened.
Peter sipped his tea before answering, “Yes, I do.”
It took several minutes for them to quiet down enough for him to continue. When he could finally speak uninterrupted, he explained, “As her commanding officer, I have every right to delay a marriage which would be disastrous for our mission. Besides that, she has to get clearance from the Council, and I don’t doubt that you, Mark, have someone you have to answer to. I know things have changed since I was here, but they have not changed that much.”
“It won’t be a problem to our mission here,” Barbara argued.
“I get to be the judge of that. Besides, have either of you considered the practicalities? How old are you both? Nineteen?”
“I’ve turned twenty!” Mark interjected with injured pride.
Peter ignored him. “What in heaven’s name is the hurry?”
“I’m pregnant,” Barbara announced triumphantly.
“God Almighty!” Peter howled. “You stupid, stupid children!” It was his turn to stand and pace a bit. “How far along are you?” he asked once he had gained control of his anger.
“Seven weeks,” Barbara answered.
“You’ll have to get rid of it.”
“That would be murder!” Barbara shrieked.
“Don’t be stupid, you have to get rid of it.”
“I won’t!”
Peter prevented himself from launching into a tirade of orders or threats. He could not force her, nor would he if he could. His mother’s words about her second pregnancy came back to him and he felt suddenly quite ill. He lowered himself back into the chair and breathed deeply to fight back his nausea. “Will you love it?” he asked at last.
“Yes,” Barbara and Mark both agreed enthusiastically.
“Whatever it is?”
Barbara furrowed her brow. “Of course!”
“We’ll have to pretend it’s mine,” Peter whispered.
“But it’s not!” Mark objected angrily.
“I know that, you stupid boy,” Peter snapped in reply. He had, though, been around seven weeks ago, so he added rather more gently, “She’s been faithful to you.”
Mark flushed red but looked a bit happier nonetheless. Barbara leanedtoward him and said softly into his ear, “Mark, it’s like I said, he’s never meant anything to me. He’s too old! And married! You’re the only man I’ve ever loved.” Mark had turned to face her, so he could not see the way Barbara eyed Peter as she spoke.
Peter winced at Barbara’s words, but continued in a businesslike tone, “The matter of your paternity is not in doubt, Mark; still, as far as the authorities are concerned, it will have to be mine. Or rather, Herr Jäger’s.”
“No! I won’t have that!”
“Don’t be stupid,” Peter chided. “Barbara is supposedly a married German woman almost five years your senior. If she were to claim you as the father, she could face charges of adultery and God knows, with your pedigree, they might even push Rassenmischung!”
“My pedigree? I’m pure English!”
“You’d be surprised how inappropriate ancestors can be found when it is convenient for them.”
“No, that’s impossible! Both my parents have their documented bloodlines!”
Peter smiled at the naÔvetó. “You have an arrest record, don’t you?” he guessed.
“Well, yes, a couple of misdemeanors, ages ago.”
“I hardly had worse.”
Mark looked confused.
“He’s a condemned convict,” Barbara explained reluctantly. “Numbers and all.”
“They threw in an Untermensch classification, just for laughs,” Peter added. “No blood proof, nothing!”
Barbara blushed with embarrassment, and well she might, since she took orders from him. She knew that the classification itself was enough to confirm an inferior status in almost everyone else’s eyes—even the most committed revolutionaries had difficulty ignoring a lifetime of propaganda. Only in Szaflary, among the prewar generation and the untainted native-born, and in America, where such ideas of government classification generally had no currency, had Peter be
en free of the stigma that came with the official label.
Pursuing the advantage of Mark’s fear, Peter clarified, “If you try and put your name on this child’s birth certificate, the moral outrage of one bitter bureaucrat might be sufficient to destroy your life! You could be charged as an adulterer, or reclassified and charged with Rassenmischung. That’s still a death sentence for the inferior male partner, you know.”
Mark shifted uncomfortably.
“And what name would you use? How old are you supposed to be? Do you plan to stick with one identity for the rest of your life? Have you thought out any of the details?”
They both looked a bit sullen, but neither argued with him. Peter remembered being told to “grow up” at about the same age. He imagined he had thatsame look on his face at the time. The memory dissolved his anger a bit, and he added by way of explanation, “It would all be pointless. Barbara and Niklaus Jäger are supposed to be married, therefore, any child would be considered his—I mean, mine—no matter what any of us might say. That’s the law. The only thing you would accomplish by advertising your paternity is that you’d be exposing yourself to an unnecessary risk. You don’t want to do that. You don’t want to give them any excuses to treat you the way I was treated.”
Mark bit his lips.
“All right already!” Barbara objected. “We’ll register Niklaus Jäger as the father. Maybe someday Mark can assume that identity. After you’ve returned to Szaflary.”
“He’ll have to age himself considerably and learn a fuck of a lot of German,” Peter observed.
“Still, it doesn’t matter what names are on the certificates,” Barbara consoled herself and Mark. “At least we’ll be married.”
“Presumably you’re talking about something not involving the authorities.”
“Yes.” Mark perked up a bit. “We have our own registry.”
“What about your family? What about everyone back home?” Peter asked Barbara.
She shrugged. “I don’t need their permission.”
“I’m not so sure about that. In any case, don’t you want them to be a part of your life anymore?”
“I’ll make my life here.”
“What sort of marriage is it going to be: not officially recognized, Mark living with his parents?”
“He’ll live here!” Barbara protested.
“No, he won’t,” Peter disagreed.
“He has to! How will we raise our child together if he doesn’t?”
“I don’t know, you should have thought of that before.”
“How can you possibly say no!” she nearly shouted.
“There’s no room,” he answered matter-of-factly.
“Mark and I will share the bedroom, you can sleep out here.”
“No! The couch is too small and I will not sleep on the floor so that you can play house!”
“This place is bigger than my parents’ flat,” Mark interjected.
“I don’t care.” Peter remained adamant.
“Niklaus! Peter!” Barbara seemed confused. “You have to!”
“I said no.”
“You’re jealous!”
“Oh, little girl, if only it were that simple.” Peter shook his head in exasperation. He did not bother to explain the complex motives behind his refusal; instead he said, “Whatever I’m willing to put up with is irrelevant: we are aproper German couple here and we cannot start living like the English. It would raise suspicions and I will not take that chance. That’s my final word!”
“You’re a horrid man!” Barbara seethed. She took a deep breath to arm herself-and began, “You’re—”
“Look,” Peter interrupted. “If you work with me, maybe we can arrange something. I want out of here. You want to stay. If I can get Katerina to let me return, we can concoct some abandonment story. After the appropriate period, you can divorce me; then I don’t think you’ll be harassed if you strike up a relationship with an Englishman: after all, you’ll be a lone woman with a child, and beggars can’t be choosers.”
“But it takes five years for a divorce based on abandonment! I want it quicker than that!”
“On what grounds?” Peter asked.
“Your adultery!”
“Too dangerous. You never know how they’ll react to a social crime.”
“You’ll be long gone,” Barbara reminded him.
Peter sighed. “I guess it will work. Trouble is, you’ll need proof. With me gone, and without a woman to name, I don’t know how you’ll convince them.”
“Photos. You and somebody else. We’ll just make sure she can’t be identified from the pictures,” Barbara suggested.
“Photos,” Peter groaned. He thought for a moment.“Not only would we have to hide the woman’s face, but we’d have to keep my scars out of view as well. I wouldn’t want them to link you to Halifax, after all.”
“Oh, God, no!” Barbara blanched at the dangerous thought.
“Who’s he?” Mark asked.
“Never mind,” they answered him simultaneously. A dark look came over Mark’s face, but he did not question them further.
“Perhaps,” Peter suggested, “hotel room receipts, jewelry, flowers, restaurants, you know, that sort of thing would do better.”
“I guess that would suffice.”
“It will have to. Either that, or we can drop a stack of clothes at the beach and you can get Jäger declared dead. That might be quicker,” Peter concluded while silently tabulating the number of times he had officially died.
Barbara nodded enthusiastically.
Peter ignored the irritation he felt at her response. “Of course, this is all contingent on my getting out of here. Until then, I want you both to behave. Don’t arouse any suspicions!”
“We won’t,” Barbara moaned like a teenager to an overbearing parent.
“Barbara, have you thought about what to do if you’re recalled? What is Mark going to do?”
“I’ll request a permanent assignment here. They always have trouble filling this position due to the distance, I suppose. They’ll be happy to give it to me.”
“Do you want to be stuck with a German identity, in London, for the rest ofyour life? Don’t you two realize the problems you’ll have? You’ll be completely isolated. The English will hate you and the Germans will hate him! You’ll both be considered traitors.”
Barbara shrugged. “It has been done before.”
“Why make things hard on yourselves?” Peter asked with some concern. “There are enough problems in life without setting yourself into an awkward situation from the start.”
“Awkward? Look who’s talking!” she retorted.
“Huh? What do you mean?”
Barbara went to a drawer and removed a piece of paper with a scribbled note. It was in her handwriting. “I received this the day before you arrived. I guess she couldn’t get the priority for voice communication or maybe didn’t want to ask. She must have thought you’d be on the receiving end. I’m sorry, but I let her finish before I said it was me on this end.” Barbara smiled awkwardly at him and explained, “I was curious.” Then she bowed her head and whispered in Polish, “I’m not quite over you, you know. Sorry.”
Peter took the note from Barbara’s hand, held it without looking at it.
“She took some risk sending it here. I guess it was important to her,” Barbara said as if he were unaware of such things.
“Before I read this,” Peter said,“just listen to me for one more minute. All I want to do is suggest that you two get coincident IDs. Leave and come back as someone else. Either have them make you English, or better yet see if Mark can’t get a German ID. That way you can at least move freely in one of the two societies.”
“Won’t work. I’ll never pass for English—I just don’t have enough fluency in the language. And you’ve heard Mark’s German. It stinks.”
“He can be Volksdeutsch. Have them find some relative and get him legitimized. He’ll be more useful to them that way, and
you two won’t have to fight two cross-cultural battles.”
Barbara looked hard at Peter, then switching to Polish again, said, “Okay, we’ll consider it. After all, if anyone understands how to fuck up a marriage, I’m sure you do. We should at least listen to your advice.”
“I thought we were past your snide attacks,” he answered, also switching languages.
“No, as I said, I’m still not really over you,” Barbara admitted with a rueful smile.
Mark looked in linguistic confusion from one to the other. “You’re being rude, you know,” he said to both of them. They both ignored him.
“Then do you think you should be getting married in the first place?” Peter asked.
“Yeah, I think it’s the right thing to do. I won’t be disillusioned. At least not more than I already have been,” Barbara added in a whisper.
“You’re being tough on me. You must have missed me.”
Peter then retreated to the bedroom to read Zosia’s missive in peace. It wasodd seeing Barbara’s handwriting conveying Zosia’s words, but there was no mistaking his wife’s style.
My dearest husband,
Bad news, I’m afraid. I went to Katerina directly about reorganizing your assignment and she was adamant that you stay put for a while. She won’t even bring it to a vote! It seems there is a perception that I have been using my position too frequently for personal reasons. Katerina listed, among other things, my unilateral decision to interview you the night of your arrival (actually it was Marysia’s idea, but that’s neither here nor there), my getting a special hearing for your case after the vote went against you, that trip to Göringstadt, your Berlin outing—she had heard about it from somewhere—and the way I violated security to tell you about the Hamburg data. She also pointed out how she didn’t want me to go to Ryszard’s and I got to go anyway for Kasia’s baby’s birth. She even brought up the lax security on my part which led to, well, you know.
The Children's War Page 161