Wartime Lies

by Louis Begley

  All at once, grandfather wiped his face dry, stood up very straight and said in a loud voice, My dear children, God will bring us consolation, this is His place, let us pray once more for your dear mother’s soul. He took Tania and me by the arms and led us up to the side altar. There, he pushed us down to our knees and whispered, Quick, start crossing yourselves, put your hands over your faces and pray. I knew how to do it; Zosia had taught me long ago to make the sign of the cross, and we now crossed ourselves each time we walked by a church. We remained in that position until grandfather whispered that we should cross ourselves again, stand up, and follow him. He showed us at a distance two men who had left the Cathedral and were walking toward the other end of the Rynek. This pair looked to him like real policemen, he said, not the usual trash. He had noticed them standing nearby, studying us with great interest, intently. He was surprised the prayer performance had fooled them; more likely, they didn’t want to be seen picking people up in the Cathedral even when it was half-deserted. It was his fault: he should never have allowed us to stay so long on that bench talking. It was bound to attract attention.

  By the end of the following week, we were installed at the apartment of Pani Z. in a street of Długa. This lady turned out to be the widow of a physician. Tania discovered the unfortunate coincidence of the late husband’s profession over a cup of tea; the deal to rent the room had been concluded. As soon as Tania began to try out her speech about being the wife of a doctor from Lwów and the officers’ prison camp in Russia, Pani Z. told Tania about her natural sympathy for the family of a colleague. Tania said she almost spilled her tea when she heard this news, and she continued to think the medical connection meant serious trouble.

  There was no doubt about Tania’s being able to pass for a doctor’s wife. She could display a knowledge of medicine and the honorarium structure of the profession that would do credit to any doctor’s wife or widow, as well as an appropriate capacity for instant diagnosis. But what acquaintances might this she-devil of a landlady have among doctors in Lwów, of whom she could inquire, if she felt a stirring of curiosity, about Tania’s husband? Would she attempt to look him up in professional lists? Anything like that might be fatal. To begin with, we had no idea of the profession of the man whose name appeared on our papers; that information wasn’t required to be mentioned. All we knew was that his name was Tadeusz. That appeared on my birth certificate and Tania’s identity card and marriage certificate. But we weren’t really sure that such a Tadeusz had ever existed in Lwów or elsewhere. Hertz said the papers were genuine, but he might have been sold very skillful forgeries. It was also possible that he had told Tania they were real only to give her greater self-assurance in the event we were ordered to show them to the police.

  The solution was to move, but we couldn’t do it immediately; that might arouse suspicion. We would look for another place, rent it, and leave here within two or three weeks, paying Pani Z. a month’s rent in place of notice. It was unlikely she would begin prying and get information right away; it was a risk we had to take. Grandfather agreed with this plan. He had not met Pani Z. or come to our room. If he had, his relationship to us would have had to be acknowledged: we three looked alike and it would be hard to lie about it, yet telling Pani Z. that he was Tania’s father and my grandfather was awkward, too. Her new maiden name did not match his, and he had not mentioned to his own landlady that he was looking for a room for his daughter and grandson. In fact, he had not told his landlady that his friends had rented a room from Pani Z. That was another precaution; let them talk and put two and two together if they have nothing better to do, but he was not going to make finding us through his landlady easier. He decided that we would see one another every morning, at the Cathedral if it rained, and otherwise in different parts of the Saxon Gardens we would agree on as time passed.

  In the meantime, Tania and I were learning the routine of communal apartment living, studying the street map of Warsaw, and rehearsing what she and I should and should not say at the dining table, Pani Z.’s being an establishment where eating in one’s room was frowned upon as messy and unfriendly. To make it easier for herself to stay out of Pani Z.’s salon, Tania quietly made it clear that, whenever my health permitted, she and I would be busy with my lessons in our room. This was a reason for keeping to ourselves that could not be criticized or cause undue comment, and yet it reduced our contacts with Pani Z.

  There was a special sort of social occasion, however, in addition to meals, for which we could not fail to emerge and join Pani Z. and our fellow lodgers. Since mid-April, there had been fighting in the Warsaw ghetto; at the dinner table the lodgers and Pani Z. talked of little else. Jews had actually attacked Germans, even forcing the SS unit that was sent to restore order to retreat. Some said that many of the SS had been killed. But now Germans were teaching the Jews a final lesson, and at the end of every afternoon, the weather being very mild, we all went to the roof under Pani Z.’s direction and gathered around her to watch what she liked to call our fireworks. She claimed it was the first real entertainment the Germans had provided in all this sad time. Pani Z. and her little band were not alone; it seemed that most of the tenants were on the roof, and the roofs of adjoining buildings were equally crowded. No wonder: the view from Długa in the direction of Zamenhof and the ghetto was almost unobstructed, and one could hear very well.

  People on the roof explained that the Germans were using artillery. That was why the buildings in the ghetto were exploding and crumbling. Then they set them on fire, so that black-and-orange clouds rose in the evening sky. One could not see it, but in what was left of the buildings, and in whatever other holes they were hidden, Jews were burning. The incineration process was fortunate, our neighbors said: otherwise, decaying corpses would have caused disease that rats could spread far beyond the ghetto. Occasional bets were made on how long it would be until the whole place was one black pile of rubble, and whether any Jews would be left alive inside it.

  We did not remain in the house of Długa long enough to see these wagers settled. We left Pani Z.’s according to Tania’s plan, moved twice to rooming houses for transients, and, on the day when the SS removed the surviving Jews from the ghetto, we were already living on the other side of the Saxon Gardens, in the apartment of Pani Dumont. We continued to witness the daily spectacle from the roofs of our successive abodes, including Pani Dumont’s, until it ended. All of Warsaw was watching with us, but the level of joviality was never again so high. The novelty wore off; also, the view from Pani Z.’s roof had been exceptionally good.

  PANI Dumont had met her much regretted late husband, a Walloon railroad engineer, in Kielce, directly after the end of the Great War. He had made his way there as a member of a Belgian relief and technical assistance team. Why Belgians were helping rebuild Polish railroads when their own country had been mauled by the Germans was something Tania wondered about, but that is how Pani Dumont accounted for his presence. She told us that she had learned good French in school and naturally seized the opportunity to practice it with Monsieur Dumont. Her family was hospitable. Romance and marriage followed, they moved to Liège and, after Monsieur Dumont retired, to Warsaw. There his pension went further and enabled them to live comfortably. Monsieur Dumont died in 1940; the Belgian railroad’s checks continued to arrive but now bought very little. That was why she had decided to take lodgers. In addition to us, there were living with her the aged, devout widow of a piano teacher; Pan Stasiek, who played the accordion and the harmonica; and the concave-chested, spectacle-wearing Pan Władek. I still sing Pan Stasiek’s tunes; almost everything else about him has faded from my memory. Pan Władek became my friend.

  Pani Dumont was a large, cheerful woman. All her relatives were still in Kielce; so nothing tied her to Warsaw except the apartment and the income she derived from it. Her lodgers became her substitute family. Monsieur Dumont could not have children; she told Tania that having a young mother with a boy under her roof was a blessing. Wit
h Tania’s permission, after I became less shy with her, she would teach me French, naturally without cost. Tania was glad to have a kind and apparently well-disposed landlady. On the other hand, the consequence of Pani Dumont’s vision of her lodgers was that we were in the same difficulty as at Pani Z.’s. Unless we wanted to distinguish ourselves from the others and possibly antagonize Pani Dumont, we had to spend more time in their company than Tania considered prudent. For instance, the French lessons: Would I be able to learn French from her and not get involved in conversations about Tania and me and about the past that might make me step into a trap? Should Tania ask to be present at the lessons so she could come to the rescue? I assured her that she could count on me; I really wanted to learn French, I would be careful. What about those endless conversations at the dinner table and afterward in Pani Dumont’s sitting room? One had to talk, one could not always talk about books, one had to be ready to talk about oneself. Which self? The issue was the limit of one’s inventiveness and memory, because the lies had to be consistent—more consistent, according to Tania, than the truth. And they will all be listening, she warned me, don’t forget that we are interesting, more interesting than they.

  We began to visit my grandfather in his room on Sunday afternoons, in addition to seeing him at the Cathedral, the Saxon Gardens and, later, his mleczarnia. He told his landlady Tania was the daughter of his best friend and country neighbor, now dead. There were days I could not go with Tania. I was falling sick again, with long, lingering bouts of bronchitis and, although I saw no children, those few childhood diseases I had not already had. Also, I had my lessons. Pani Dumont took the French lessons very seriously; she found Pani Bronicka to tutor me in general subjects. Unless I was sick, Pani Bronicka came every afternoon except Sunday and left huge assignments to be completed for the next day. She was a gimnazjum teacher out of work, the Germans having closed most schools above the primary level. She brought the textbooks we needed. Forming the mind of a nine-year-old who had never been to school appealed to her. She set out to impart to me information and notions of discipline with all the rigor and energy customary in a first-rate state teaching establishment. Giving private lessons was punishable by death, but Pani Bronicka was fearless and needed money. She told me it was a teacher’s duty to teach and make it possible for a boy to become an educated man. All she asked was that I keep my part of the bargain, which was to learn.

  She approved of the way Tania had taught me to read and discuss what I had read; she undertook to drill me in compositions: they were to have a beginning, a development and an end. My clumsy slowness in arithmetic appalled her. Above all, she found intolerable my weak character, by which she meant my habit of insinuating flattery. It will not do, she told me, always to be trying to make oneself liked and then to ask whether one has succeeded. She wished me to endeavor, quietly and modestly, to deserve being liked. Our model compositions were on themes from Polish revolutionary history or, because we were reading Sieńkiewicz, the long Polish struggle against Ukrainian invaders. Pan Wołodyjowski, the diminutive saber wizard, always hopelessly in love, always victorious in a duel, replaced Old Shatterhand as the hero of my daydreams, at least when I was not the colonel of my Wehrmacht lead soldier regiment. At the same time, my lead army was undergoing a degree of reorganization. There was no question that the German soldiers we saw in Warsaw were winners, but was that the reality? We were listening to BBC broadcasts with the other lodgers and when we went to see my grandfather. That was another activity punishable by death. In Smolensk, on the Dnieper, in Kiev, the Russians were beating the Germans; perhaps Stalingrad was not simply a case of von Paulus’s incompetence or treachery. I began to move some of my better regiments over to the Russian side. Pani Bronicka intensified our geography lessons. She too listened to the BBC. She brought a globe to make me understand that it was not just the Russian front that counted. We were to have no illusions, the Reich was terribly strong and dangerous, but one could see thick, heavy arrows sticking deep in its flanks; the Reich would fall, like a wild boar.

  Meanwhile, I was breaking Pani Bronicka’s heart. She wrote down my assignments in pencil in a little notebook she had given me. I would erase the page numbers and set myself lighter tasks. After a week or two she caught me: she had recorded the assignment in her own notebook as well. She said it was her duty to tell my mother. I pleaded with her, promising to make up the omitted pages; she relented. I was desperately afraid of Tania. She hated cheating, except to avoid capture; she would sense danger in the effect on Pani Dumont and the other lodgers if my behavior became known. They were all taking an interest in my progress. Pan Władek, who was a chemist, was helping me with arithmetic. But almost immediately after Pani Bronicka forgave me I began to change my assignments again, in exactly the same way. I even cut some pages out of the notebook with a razor blade. This time Tania was informed; my soldiers were confiscated and put in Pani Bronicka’s custody until further notice, Tania having somehow propitiated her to the point of agreeing to continue to teach me.

  When we were alone, Tania said scornfully that if it was my nature to be a cheat it was too bad that I was not at least original and clever at it. My disgrace was too profound, and Pani Bronicka too visibly upset, for Tania not to tell Pani Dumont. At the evening meal, my case was discussed, the lodgers offering varying assessments of my guilt. Pan Władek’s was the worst: he thought that, considering the help I had gotten from him, I was not just lazy, I was evil. He was laughing, rocking back in his chair. I punched him, in his hollow chest, with all my force. The blow threw him against the wall. He coughed; his glasses fell off his nose. It occurred to me that I had done this terrible thing not because of what he had said to me, but because he had put me to shame before Tania. But I was not altogether like Pan Wołodyjowski; I was afraid. I got down on one knee and asked Pan Władek’s forgiveness. He said I was not to worry; it was his fault. He had been wrong to tease me when I was unhappy.

  THE woman at grandfather’s apartment, Pani Basia, was definitely Jewish. Right after our first visit, Tania said she must really be Pani Sara. Her son’s name was Henryk; he was younger than I, as grandfather had supposed. I thought he was also more stupid, he was not taking lessons from a tutor, and Pani Basia didn’t work with him regularly. His collection of lead soldiers was good, better than mine. Before my soldiers were taken away, I brought them with me on my visits. Later, he shared his with me.

  We played in my grandfather’s room. It seemed to me that grandfather was getting thinner, which made his nose look big and sharp. Ever since Tania had told him about grandmother, he wore a black band on the sleeve of his black coat and only black neckties. Tania worried about how taciturn he had become; she said he talked only when I was there or if she put him on the subject of air raids. He knew the date of every major bombardment of Germany. It was best, he would say, when they came in waves, like the three attacks on Berlin in November and December; that gave them no rest. Although the Germans did not know it, they were becoming hunted animals, like Jews. But the BBC didn’t have a raid against Germany to report every day that met my grandfather’s standards. The winter wore on sadly, and every Sunday, against grandfather’s and Tania’s better judgment as to what was prudent behavior, and their promises to each other that we would not go to see him so often, we would be in his room, with a cake or cold meat or fish or whatever else Tania could find that was good and that she knew he liked.

  I was playing with Henryk and his soldiers one such Sunday in January 1944 when grandfather and Tania heard something disturbing in the corridor. The door to grandfather’s room was always closed. They told Henryk and me to be quiet; we all began to listen carefully. These were men’s voices. The landlady was answering them. Then there were footsteps going in the direction of Pani Basia’s room, then more voices, and a door being slammed.

  Grandfather said, I won’t sit here pretending I am deaf, I will speak to the landlady, the three of you stay here and try to be calm. In a moment
he returned and told us, You have to be patient. It’s the Polish police in civilian clothes; they know about Henryk’s mother. But Pani Maria told them she saw Henryk go out with his ice skates; she made sure Pani Basia could hear her. She told them nothing about us. If Pani Basia has any money and any sense, she can buy them off.

  We sat in silence, Henryk crying a little. Grandfather got out his cards and made a sign to Tania. They began a game of gin rummy. Grandfather whispered, This is just a pleasant family scene; if they come here, Henryk is our Janek’s friend, he came with Janek to visit, you are my oldest friend’s daughter, I held you at your baptism, and now stop sniveling and play with your soldiers. A long time passed, and again there were voices and steps in the corridor; Pani Basia was giggling. Grandfather opened the door, looked down the corridor and said, It’s all right, the police are gone. We went to Pani Basia’s room. The drawers and the wardrobe were open, there were clothes on the floor; they must have searched for money or jewels. She was lying crosswise on the rumpled bed. Her legs were bare; she was very pink in the face. When she saw us, she raised herself and went slowly over to Henryk and then gestured to the table, where there was a bottle of vodka and glasses. They wanted everything, money, liquor, me, she said, and they got all they wanted. They told me they won’t be back, they know I have nothing left except more of me and that’s not worth much.