The Children's War (110 page)

Peter took a breath and then exhaled carefully.

“Maybe talking about it would help you heal. Maybe it would help stop your dreams.”

He shook his head. “You know better than that.”

Zosia contemplated the stars. Peter followed her gaze upward and they stood in silence together. “It’s important to us,” she said quietly.

“I know. I wouldn’t even consider the idea otherwise.”

“So you’ll do it?”

“I need some time to think about it.”

“What’s to think about? Didn’t you hear what Ryszard said? Don’t those people-matter to you?”

“And didn’t you hear what I said? I’m not so sure he’s right. I’m not so sure that it will do any good at all,” Peter replied. A shooting star drew a fiery line across the sky and then disappeared forever. “What I do know is that it may well destroy me.” He waited for Zosia to respond to that, to say that she now understood what a difficult decision she was asking him to make. He waited for her to echo the words of her question, to say that not only all those anonymous people mattered to her, but he did as well. When she said nothing at all, he added, “I don’t know what motivates Ryszard, but I know what makes your father tick. What he wants out of this is political advantage, money, and weapons. He doesn’t want to help people like me, he’s just using our misery to buy guns. I’m not sure I want to be used like that.”

“You owe it to us,” Zosia whispered to the firmament.

“I know. I owe you my life, I owe you everything. I owe you all a debt of grat-
itude that I will carry to my grave. I’ve tried hard to repay you, but I know it will never be enough. Still, I will beg one more favor of you.”

“What’s that?”

“Allow me the dignity of making this decision for myself. Release me from my debt, just this once.”

Zosia brought her gaze down from the heavens to study his face. She looked at him a long time, her mouth working its way back and forth between a smile and a frown. She bit her lower lip and seemed to come to some decision.

“What is it?” he asked.

She wrapped herself around him, burying her face in his coat, then suddenly she pulled back and looked up at him again. “Do you love me?” she asked tenderly.

“With all my heart.” Stroking her hair back from her face, he kissed her.

“Would you do it for me?” she asked breathlessly. “As a wedding gift?” He narrowed his eyes as he studied her, but he could not quite grasp the significance of his nebulous suspicions. She looked up at him, her face suffused with love, and his heart melted. “All right, as a wedding gift.”

38

T
HE LARGEST ROOM
available was too small, so the ceremony took place outside under the pine trees in knee-deep snow. Everybody was bundled up against the bitter cold, and the wind carried their words away before they had even finished speaking each sentence, but it was, nonetheless, a beautiful exchange of vows. Peter had chosen Olek as his best man, and in a fit of matchmaking, Zosia chose her niece Stefi. Zosia and Peter removed their warm leather gloves long enough to put the rings on each other’s finger. The ring Zosia had worn for Adam was an heirloom, so Peter agreed to use it again and placed it on her finger in the certain knowledge that it represented far more to her than simply their wedding vows: it was for her a symbol of her current marriage, her previous marriage, and her ties to family and cause. In contrast, he had no heirlooms, no previous marriages, and if, by some chance, he had ever owned a gold ring, it would have been taken from him by force long ago. So, she presented him with a new ring that she had bought, and as she placed it on his finger, it represented only his marriage to her, and that, he felt, was enough.

The priest, who had traveled to the encampment for the ceremony, was convinced by the biting cold to limit his advice to the happy couple to just a few brief words. An altar boy held a small crucifix mounted on a staff to one side so that the couple could be married in the presence of Christ. The lonesome, agonized figure on the cross looked incongruous in the snow under the pines, and Peter
eyed it wryly, remembering his comment to Zosia on his first day at the encampment. He listened as the congregation repeated the Latin phrases of the mass in a jumble of meaningless syllables, watched as most of them took a bit of bread and a sip of wine, and sighed his relief when the incomprehensible ceremony finally came to an end.

The reception was held inside the bunker, spread out among rooms and hallways with food in one area, dancing in others, and people milling happily about the hallways drinking and conversing. Initially Peter and Zosia stayed in the largest room, but Zosia eventually felt obliged as a hostess to mingle and greet each guest. She tried to convince him to do likewise, but since she declared it “silly” to march around as a couple, he steadfastly refused, opting instead to sit with Joanna on his lap or idly drinking and watching the festivities as though through a window. He chose a chair in a corner of a room where there was dancing, placed a full liter of vodka on the floor nearby so it was available as necessary, and let his thoughts drift through the haze of conversation and music and dimly lit faces.

Zosia returned to him several times during the evening to try to convince him to take his duties as host seriously, and by the third attempt she seemed somewhat annoyed by his unwillingness to actively socialize. “Could you not be so rude!” she pleaded angrily.

“I’m not rude, I’m talking to everyone who cares to chat with me!”

“You should go out and greet them! It’s your duty to make the guests feel at home here,” she insisted, leaning over his chair so she could speak quietly.

“They’re
your
friends and family, Zosia, and they feel more at home here than I do. I don’t feel comfortable talking to people I don’t even know—it’s not something I’ve ever done.”

“Can’t you do it anyway? You’re embarrassing me!”

“And can’t you just get off my back!” he snapped. “I said it makes me uncomfortable!”

Zosia opened her mouth to say something to that, but decided better of it. She stood looking at him for a long moment. He gave her a hopeful smile, but she did not respond. He tried to find the words to soften what he had said, but she turned and walked away before he could say a word.

He watched her leave, unable to decide what to do. He thought maybe he should make the effort of circulating and chatting to people he did not know, painful as that would be, to show Zosia that he did care, but by the time he had decided to move, Barbara came over to chat with him for a bit, then Olek and Stefi did likewise. Halina and eventually Teodor spent some time with him nattering about business and the troubles they were having with their computing needs. Eventually the priest who had conducted their ceremony sat down, uninvited, in the chair nearest to him and began a one-sided conversation.

There were two priests who visited the encampment with some regularity. Although Peter could not fathom the hierarchy, one seemed to outrank the other,
and it was the lower-ranked of the two who had performed their ceremony. Peter had met the senior priest on a previous occasion and had decided he was a venal and uninspired man. He expected nothing better from this junior colleague.

“. . . have remained outside the church despite your marriage to Zofia,” the priest was saying when Peter finally decided to listen.

“Do you have a problem with that?” he asked the priest without any interest in the reply.

“Not on my account, no,” the rather young man replied. “I just thought you looked like someone who needed something in his life.”

“Not what you have to offer.”

“No? I’ve talked with others like you, people who have endured much. Always, it is the believers who are able to best sustain themselves, to find themselves afterwards.”

Peter turned his head with exaggerated care to look at the priest. “I would think that the essential characteristic of a believer is believing. Now, how exactly does one get around that? I can’t force myself to believe in something that I don’t believe in, now can I?”

“You can open your heart to the possibility.”

“I’d prefer opening a bottle,” Peter retorted, reaching for his vodka and filling his glass.

“Maybe someday you should come and talk. I think you’d be surprised.”

“Sure. And when you feel like discussing the wrongs of religions throughout the centuries, you can come and talk to me, eh?” Peter replied, perhaps rudely.

“I’d like that,” the priest surprised him by responding. “You have no idea how much I enjoy a good discussion!” Then, suddenly growing quite serious, the young man asked, “Do you believe governments have been without evil?”

“No. Of course not.”

“But you are not an anarchist, are you?”

Peter sighed, seeing the obvious connection. “No. It seems a necessary evil to have some structure in our lives.”

“So, the manipulations of men which have fouled religion in the past are not necessarily proof that God cannot be found in those same religions!” the priest trumpeted, jumping ahead a few steps in the desultory debate.

Peter paused long enough to down a bit of his drink before replying. “It’s entirely possible that your views contain the truth of the universe,” he said to his annoying guest, “but I, for one, shall never know.” He then turned his attention back to the room and refused to be drawn further into debate.

Later in the evening Katerina joined him and sipped some of the vodka he offered her. Despite both their best attempts, they began to talk business as he tried to convince her that he needed a higher security clearance—it was nonsense his working with such a low priority! Katerina agreed that it did not make his job any easier and that it was somewhat confusing, but was adamant that without a better vetting, he had no hope of getting a proper clearance.

“How can we show you sensitive material,” she asked in her usual matteroffact tone, “when we still don’t know who you are?”

“But you must see that I can be trusted. For Christ’s sake, I know all your names and faces and the location of this place and so much more—it’s stupid denying me access to files that I need to do my job!”

Katerina shrugged. “We’ll be the judge of that.”

“But didn’t everything that happened at the laboratory prove I’m not one of theirs?”

“Prove?” Katerina looked at him skeptically. “No. The evidence is in your favor, but it could have all been set up to secure your position here.”

“Isn’t that just a little bit paranoid?” he asked, exasperated.

“Before 1942,” she said solemnly, “I believed in paranoia.” She looked away, waited a moment as he digested that thought, then, still without looking at him, stated, “They’d give away laboratory information, they’d risk your life a million times over to get at us. If you were truly devoted to the Fatherland, you would have suffered your injuries gladly to prove your case.”

“I think,” he responded quietly, “that it is quite clear I don’t suffer them gladly.”

“Even if that were clear, it doesn’t prove anything.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No. I can come up with many reasons you might obey their commands, whatever they’ve done to you. You have yourself admitted a tendency toward collaboration. What haven’t you admitted?”

“Nothing!”

“I don’t know that.” Katerina finally turned back to look at him. “But let me suggest a scenario—just one of a multitude. Let’s imagine that everything you said was true and that you lived your life as a lonely
Zwangsarbeiter
in Berlin. You meet a woman, a
Zwangsarbeiterin,
and you fall in love. She becomes pregnant, there is a child, and you love the child as well.”

Peter sighed heavily since it was obvious where she was going with the story, but he did not interrupt.

“Of course, such an event cannot remain hidden, and the woman is arrested and eventually implicates you.”

“No, I go to the police voluntarily, out of love for her.”

“Fine. In any case, they help you escape, pointing you in our direction. They know it is a difficult, dangerous task, but they have nothing to lose—just your life, which is worthless to them. They give you plenty of time, say three years—”

“Make it five.”

“Yes, five years. If you haven’t returned by then—”

“Enough already! If that’s how you feel, why are you letting me go to America? Why not forbid it?” He didn’t mention that he would be rather relieved if she did.

“Because Alex managed to get the entire encampment behind the idea.” She breathed deeply and added almost reluctantly, “And because I basically do trust you.”

Peter looked at her in surprise. “Then why can’t I get the sort of clearance I need to do my job properly? Why do I have to hand everything over to Olek as soon as I stumble across sensitive information? Don’t you know how inefficient that is? Why hamper my work?”

“Because if I am wrong, as it stands now, you will cost us dearly. You might help them pinpoint the location of Szaflary, you would cost Ryszard his life, and you would prevent many people here from ever infiltrating again—but the one thing you would not be able to do is destroy us entirely! You know nothing of Warszawa, you know nothing of our deterrents or the agents who maintain them. As it stands now, you could harm us, but you could not exterminate us.” She looked away from him to scan the room and her expression softened. Without looking back at him she repeated softly, “As it stands now, you could not exterminate us.”

He followed Katerina’s gaze to watch Joanna skidding across the floor between the dancing couples. She was in a competition with some other children to see who could slide the farthest. It hurt to see her like that: so adorable, so vulnerable. He felt cheated by fate. Katerina was right and there was no argument he could use to prove he was genuine: it was not enough that he knew he was. He had spent years in
their
hands, months of it under torture and reeducation; he was tainted and it could never be undone. He had survived, but in some ways they had killed him.

After Katerina wandered off, Alex joined him. “So, you’ve agreed to come and speak for us after all!” he enthused, seating himself in the chair Katerina had just vacated. “That’s great, that’s just fine. And Katerina has approved your absence— so everything’s all set. I’ll get you more information about what your schedule will be and the arrangements . . .”

Peter ignored him, watching instead as the dancers whirled around with complete abandon. Zosia was among them—going from partner to partner, but eventually ending up in Tadek’s arms. She looked incredibly happy and flushed as they finished executing a series of complicated maneuvers—the result of years of practice and natural grace. Peter reached for the bottle he had placed near himself, unintentionally interrupted Alex to offer him a shot, then poured himself a generous serving and turned his attention back to the dancers as they held each other so closely, so intimately.