Wartime Lies

by Louis Begley

  Zosia was the oldest daughter of the assistant station-master in Drohobycz, a town some fifty kilometers from T. This functionary had been a corporal in the surgeon’s battalion and later his patient. Having finished the first classes of gimnazjum, Zosia was helping out in a pastry shop. She needed to be placed.

  Her golden beauty filled me with wonder; I think that something literally moved in my heart. To be sure, Tania was taller, her hair almost the same amber color. I loved the smell of Tania’s perfume and powder, her furs that she was always happy to explain to me and let me play with and the softness of her hands that ended in long pale fingernails. But Zosia was soft and hard all at once and laughed with her head thrown back at everything that she or anyone else said. As soon as we were left alone—her interview must have been conducted days before she arrived, since it turned out that her little suitcase and bundles were already installed in her room—she swung me onto her shoulders, told me to hang on to her pigtails and set off at a run to inspect our garden. The raspberry bushes were heavy with fruit. She stuffed her mouth full and then mine and told me they were the sweetest she had eaten that summer. She thought the birds must be very respectful of my father to leave such fine berries alone and laughed her silver laugh when I informed her that they were covered with muslin except when the cook was ready to pick them.

  From then on, it was understood that I would ride on her shoulders and hold her pigtails, which she would let down for me from the coil around her head as a reward for certain good actions. These included eating more than a third of what was served, especially if she helped just a little, chasing her at full gallop around the lawn, hanging by my knees from the jungle gym in the yard, not crying after my nap and being cleanly dressed and ready when my father offered to take me with him for an evening walk or to take Zosia and me on his round of house calls after office hours.

  My father always used the same horse cab. He had confidence in the driver, who kept his carriage particularly clean and had a pair of horses capable of a sustained trot if we were going to a patient in a village outside T. I would sit with my father, holding his hand. Zosia would be on the jump seat, next to my father’s black instrument bag, facing me, my knees squeezed between hers. When we arrived at a peasant’s house, while my father was busy with the patient, she would ask for a glass of fresh buttermilk. If I drank it, my reward was a visit to the barn and a talk with the cattle and the hens. That was how I learned to caress the cheeks of a cow very slowly to make her my friend, to scatter grain for chickens correctly, and never to get within the reach of a chained dog.

  For more important matters, there were other pacts and other rewards. The giant now came into my room to lean over me almost every night. I feared going to bed. Tania, if she was not going out, read to me; often she refused early invitations so that she could read a chapter she had promised to finish. Then, after Tania left, I would call Zosia. She left the door open that separated her room from mine, and she could hear me immediately. I listened for the sound of her bare feet with exultation. She would sing for me, and if I promised to be asleep after ten of her songs, she laughed, undid her pigtails and let me play with her loose hair. She sat on one of my little chairs, her head on the bed, hair spread over my quilt. I could run my fingers through it or pile it over my face. Her hair was very thick. It smelled slightly of soap. Zosia’s own smell was a mixture of soap and fresh sweat; she teased me because I seldom sweated and would show me how wet her armpits became after our garden races. If I could not keep my promise, I told her. Zosia would sigh and kiss me, and sigh again or laugh. She would tell me I was her own cretin monster, her own nightmare, and let me bargain with her for more songs or caresses. If I chose caresses, I could touch her neck and ears. Then she would put her hands under my pajamas and stroke my chest, my stomach and my legs until I finally fell asleep, all the while sighing and laughing because I was so thin and because I was so ticklish and because I loved her too much.

  My father had grown very concerned about the nightly apparitions. Was I hearing the Erlkönig’s melodious blandishments? We decided that we should search for the giant and confront him. Together, we loaded the Browning pistol my father kept in his locked desk drawer. He showed me how to put a bullet in the chamber. So armed, we visited each room in the house. The wardrobes were opened; we poked behind coats and dresses and turned the linen in the drawers upside down. The smell of mothballs made us sneeze. There was no telling what shape the giant took in the day and where he might roost. To inspect the tenants’ wing seemed too embarrassing; besides, it would not do to frighten them as well—our situation was already difficult. There remained only the cellar, with its barrels of pickles and sauerkraut, bins of potatoes and beets, and huge, empty leather trunks. These we examined one by one, I shining the flashlight, my father with his gun at the ready. Tania, who had declared at the start that we would find nothing, remained in the garden and read. Once again, she was right; in the day, the giant was invisible. My father felt my forehead and asked Zosia to keep me very quiet. It was the beginning of the fever that in a few days turned into whooping cough.

  SINCE my birth, the Jewish holidays were the occasion of my maternal grandparents’ annual visit to T. This autumn the holidays fell very early. My grandparents had not yet returned to Cracow for the winter from their property near S., a town to the north of T. Metternich once spent a night in S.; in his memoirs it is recorded that his enjoyment of the admirable natural beauty of the site and the surrounding countryside was spoiled by the large number of Jews living there. To relieve Tania of some of her responsibilities and to spend more time with me, they decided to come to us directly from the country, although my father had assured them I was not in danger. I was allowed to get up from bed to welcome them at the door. They arrived in their old, broad, open carriage. The coachman, who was my friend, was on the box. A wagon pulled by two horses followed with their luggage. As we had no stable, the horses would return to S., which made me cry with disappointment. My grandfather, rubbing his mustache against my face, patting me on the back, and crying a little himself, said that a man like me really needed his own carriage, that Jan would bring the horses back as soon as I was well enough to keep them busy going out every day; if I liked, I could even learn to drive the carriage myself.

  Very tall, very straight, always dressed in black, with a mustache that was still black and white hair cut short in the “porcupine” style then favored by Polish gentry, my grandfather had a way of opening a world of infinite possibilities. His daughter Tania was his favorite; in her eyes, he was the paragon of men. On a word from him, she would bend consecrated rules governing my schedule and manners. As for my cautious, methodical and tender father, in his heart of hearts he thought of his father-in-law as a sort of benevolent centaur. In fact, the old gentleman was happier in the saddle than on the ground. Fondness for the myth (it was my father’s habit to think of people closest to him as characters out of books, so that my grandmother, preoccupied with confitures and jams, was for him Countess Shcherbatskaya, and Bern, egging Tania on to some indiscretion, Rodolphe) and family piety eased the acceptance of my grandfather’s very personal notions of hygiene in our modern and scientific household. My father was confiding his little Maciek to Chiron.

  So it happened that, as soon as I was allowed to go out of the house again, grandfather introduced me to the delights of miód, a Polish liquor made of honey and thought by him to possess unique restorative properties. His carriage would wait before the gate. We would climb in, he reclining in the vast black leather seat, bareheaded (which was against the custom), a yellow cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and I on the box. Jan cracked his whip, and we would roll along to the first of my grandfather’s favorite drinking cellars. He was of the view that miód could not be properly enjoyed elsewhere, certainly not in a café, that the steamy air of a good cellar, rich with odors of food, pickles and beer, in itself cleared one’s lungs, and that his treatment was already working. He would ord
er a carafe of miód and two glasses and pour a thimbleful for me. The idea was that we shared the work: I drank a sip and he took care of his glass and what was left in the carafe. There was another part of the deal: we ate two pairs of steamed sausages, work again being divided so that I ate one sausage while my grandfather polished off three. He showed me that both miód and steamed sausages went down faster if accompanied by horseradish—the red kind, mixed with beets, for me, and pure white, which made one’s eyes water, for him. In the second and third cellars our system was the same, except that sometimes he would take herring and vodka for himself. In such a case, I could have a hard, honey-flavored cake to dip in my glass of miód.

  As I was indeed becoming stronger and hardly coughed anymore, grandfather kept his promise about teaching me to drive. Tania was invited to come along: he called her his second-best pupil; I was to be the best. As soon as we left T. and reached one of the straight, long, white country roads, with fields of harvested rye and wheat stretching out on either side to distant lines of trees, Jan would rein in the horses, give a few turns to the brake crank, and Tania would climb on the box beside me. Then grandfather jumped on as well, told Jan to check the harness and get in the back, handed the reins to Tania, and released the brake. Tania touched the horses with the whip, and we would travel along at a clattering trot, my grandfather commenting on the smartness of the start and the length of the horses’ gait. Finally, it was my turn. Grandfather seated me between his legs, Tania flushed and happy from the exercise was still beside us, and the horses were settling down to a walk. The secret, grandfather would say, as he handed the reins to me, was to keep the horses awake. But once the reins were in my hands, the pair usually stopped after a few steps. Jan would join in the general hilarity, then call out to the horses; they would start at a satisfactory pace while my grandfather showed me how to keep the reins off the horses’ backs, how one’s hands had to be steady and how one must never, never take one’s eyes off the road ahead. When we reached a crossroad or a village, it was time for a lesson in turning the horses or stopping. Sometimes, we bought freshly laid eggs or white cow cheese from a peasant woman in a village. She would cross herself at the sight of me driving the carriage and wish us God’s blessings.

  THE holidays were over. The season of rains was beginning. Grandmother wanted to use the last few days before their departure to set our house in proper order. She bought new clothes for Zosia, whom she called her big grandchild, inspected Tania’s furs, had a long conference with Tania about Bern and also about the cook and the cook’s dispendious ways with veal and finally turned to putting up preserves. The jams and compotes had been done directly after Yom Kippur; now was the time for pickling cucumbers and preparing sauerkraut.

  Grandmother’s views on these subjects were firm. She tolerated neither shortcuts nor excess in spices. Tranquil-faced, with long skirts that almost touched the floor, she was installed in an armchair at our kitchen table. I was in her lap. The cabbage had already been sliced and waited in white enamel vats to be salted, sprinkled with peppercorns and bay leaves, and, last of all, pressed. This was the moment I waited for. The cook heaped the cabbage into wooden barrels, layer by layer, and then Zosia and the chambermaid, because this was the task for the youngest and prettiest, hiked up their skirts above the knees, climbed in, and trod the mixture with bare feet to squeeze out the water. I often saw women’s thighs in the dignified setting of our beach, but these bodies were different from Tania’s and her friends’. Watching them, I felt a mixture of oppression and elation, as I did when Zosia let me caress her face and neck. My grandmother, whose powers of observation seldom flagged, said that I was a little rascal, that soon I would sell my grandmother and Tania for a good pair of legs, that I was the image of my grandfather, only more sly.

  In fact, Tania resembled her father, and photographs of my mother showed the same almost angular features, the same tense and erect bearing. My grandmother had been known as a beauty, but she was all roundness, different from her daughters. Her once-black hair, now completely silver, washed only in rainwater to preserve its rich color, was worn in a large bun. She had large, languid brown eyes. Her nose was small and perfectly formed; a small red mouth that had never been touched by lipstick was set in a gentle, slightly suffering smile. She wore heavy necklaces, bracelets and rings, with which I was allowed to play under her supervision. In spite of her attractions, my grandfather had been irrepressibly and indiscreetly unfaithful, his activities extending beyond the normal Cracow nightlife world to peasants on his property and, during a terrifying interval that preceded my uncle’s death, to my mother’s and Tania’s university friends. My grandmother did not pretend to be uninformed. She did not make scenes and she did not forgive. She was bitter, dignified and frequently sick. Her liver, kidneys and heart were fragile in ways that only my father fully understood. Toward Tania, she was moody and demanding. She did not wish Tania to forget that her having remained unmarried was a bitter disappointment. Secretly, however, Tania’s not finding a husband suited my grandmother: it meant she could devote her life to my father and me. Grandmother did not blame my father for my mother’s death and considered him the worthiest of husbands and fathers. She would have liked him to marry Tania, according to tradition, but could she wish such a fate for that good man? Tania was her father’s daughter, which in itself said plenty, and, to make matters worse, she was an intellectual, her mother thought. My grandmother was not very intelligent; intelligence, even if it was Tania’s, made her nervous.

  My grandfather used our last days together to train me in two new pursuits: jumping over fires and throwing a jackknife. Zosia played an important part in the fire game. Under grandfather’s direction, she and I made piles of raspberry bush cuttings and dry flower stalks, carefully arranged in a straight line within a jump’s distance. My grandfather lit the piles: on his signal, Zosia and I, holding hands, would jump or run over them and collapse breathless in each other’s arms when we had finished. My grandfather waited till the flames were high. Then, having given me a hand salute, he would leap into flame after flame, emerging unscathed and triumphant.

  We played with the jackknife sedately and alone. My grandfather wanted me to treat knives with the seriousness they deserved. He would draw a square in the dirt with the point and then small circles within the square. We stood a couple of paces away from the square, legs slightly apart and well balanced, and took turns throwing grandfather’s heavy, much-used jackknife so as to make it land upright as close as possible to the center of each circle.

  I would jump over fires with my grandfather during three more autumns; the game resumed with other companions, after the Warsaw uprising, in the frozen fields of the Mazowsze. By then, violent death was stalking him. But in that golden fall of 1937, while grandmother saw to the packing of their trunks and fussed over the train schedule, I was his hope, the little man to whom he was teaching all his secrets, the heir to his farms and forests and broken dreams.

  I BEGAN to eat better. My father said such improvement often followed a long fever. New tastes appealed to me. Grandmother made little toasts in the kitchen fireplace, holding the bread over the fire with long tongs. On the toast she put a duck or chicken liver grilled by the same method. When she and grandfather returned to Cracow, Zosia took over. She would laugh and feel me for fat, like a hen at the market, as she prepared the fourth or fifth liver of the morning. My father thought it best to have my progress verified. We went to Lwów, the nearest university city, to consult a lung specialist. He wore a beard, a pince-nez and a green eyeshade. When I asked him whether he liked me, which was then my opening conversational move with strangers, he begged Tania to remind me that children were not to be heard except when replying to a grown-up’s question. The professor’s stethoscope was very cold, the auscultation interminable; then Tania and I were asked to step into the waiting room while my father received his colleague’s opinion. He emerged from the consultation room radiant. According to the g
reat man, my lungs were clear but I behaved like a spoiled girl. I should be in the fresh air as much as possible. It would make my head as clear as my lungs. In consequence, my father required that the daily schedule be changed. So long as the weather continued sunny and dry, I would go sledding with Zosia every morning. Reading, piano lessons and such like could wait until the afternoon. A season of enchantment began. On the other side of T., beyond the railroad station, was a hill sloping to the riverbank. A horse-drawn sleigh took Zosia and me and our sled there every morning and came back at noon to fetch us. We slid from the highest point, down the steepest slope, at first Zosia steering and I lying on top of her. Then she taught me to steer by leaning or dragging my boot on the snow, and she helped only if we were headed into a clump of trees. We were alone; older children had classes, and the hillside was too distant for nurses who had to pull their charges behind them. Zosia said this was our kingdom; I was the king and she the queen. We made snowmen and brought gilded paper crowns to put on their heads.

  Tania and my father were gratified by the results: I looked sturdier and I was growing. I stopped talking about the giant and after one story from Tania was prepared to say good-night and close my eyes. Exercise and good food alone were not responsible for this particular improvement. Since my fever fell, and my father no longer thought it necessary to look in on me in the night to listen to my breathing, Zosia had told me that I could sleep in her bed. She was sure that no giant would think of looking for me there. Therefore, as soon as Tania had given me the last of her sleep-well kisses, I would tiptoe into Zosia’s room. She would be laughing or growling giant noises until I slipped under her huge goose feather bed. Our old agreements still held: I could play with her hair and touch her on the face and on the neck. I could also put my arms around her, and she would caress me until I fell asleep. Then if I thought the giant might come, I would quickly awaken her. She would be all warm and wet from sleep, often her nightshirt had worked its way up, and when she pressed me against her I felt her naked legs, her stomach. She would talk to me very softly: giants and mean dwarfs were cowards. They might pick on a little boy all alone. But I was a big boy now, and, with her, I would never be alone. I would tell her I was still afraid and tug at her shirt so that as much of me as possible was right next to her, inside her smell and warmth. She would laugh. I was a little rascal and had to learn to behave, but in the meantime she would tickle me until I was quite sure the giant was not coming that night, and this worked so well that she agreed that, from then on, as soon as I came into her bed, she would pull up her shirt or let me creep under it, and I could touch her as much as I wished if I promised never, never to tickle her, even though she could tickle me as much as she liked. We honored this pact. Often, after she had fallen asleep, I stayed very quiet, with my eyes closed, and passed my hands over her breasts and her stomach. Her naked buttocks were pressed against my legs. My heart beat very fast; then I too would fall asleep. And, though the fear is still vivid in my memory when I think of the door to my father’s study and the porcelain stove beside it, the giant has never returned in my dreams again.