The Children's War (132 page)

“So, what was this owner guy like?”

“What was he like? I’ll tell you.” Peter then regaled them all with story after story of Karl’s idiocy. An occasional rearrangement of events, speaking words out loud that were only thought, providing a voice-over type of narrative, forgetting the pain—a portrait of Karl emerged: venal, petty, vain, stupid, lazy. The list of Karl’s flaws and foibles made for good anecdotes.

“So what did you do then?” the other guest, a model named Arieka, asked. She had been laughing so hard tears were streaming down her face as Peter recounted some of his discoveries during his first days on the job.

He took a swig from his fourth cup of coffee and answered, “What could I do? I tied his shoes. I mean, you make the simple assumption that a grown man knows how to tie his own shoes and . . .” Peter made a face and threw his hands up. “But I should have known better,” he continued in between the laughter. “After all, he
was
in the government.”

“Now that sounds familiar!” the host chimed in. The audience roared.

Arieka lit a cigarette and offered the pack around. Itto accepted and on an impulse Peter did as well.

“Oh, now that’s interesting,” Winston observed, “I was under the impression you didn’t smoke.”

“Oh, I don’t usually,” Peter replied with deceptive honesty. “For most of my life it’s been illegal or unavailable.”

“Illegal?” Arieka asked. “Do they have the same registration of smokers?”

“No, not at all. When I said illegal, I meant illegal for me. You see, I had no rights—not even the right to smoke myself into an early grave.” The audience laughed at the absurdity. “I would guess I was the only person in the Reich who wasn’t legally permitted to kill me.”

“So it wasn’t concern for your health?” Arieka asked disingenuously.

“I don’t think so.” Peter winked at her. He quite liked her—she had helped him out on a number of his stories, offering the obvious straight lines or leading questions like an unrehearsed double act. “In any case, I certainly inhaled a lot. You see,
mein Herr
had me light his cigarettes—apparently his mother told him not to play with matches either”—Peter paused to let the laughter quiet down—“and every time I’d light a cigarette for him, he blew smoke at me. I just thought I’d find out what it was like to smoke a cigarette from the filtered end.”

Something in Peter’s whimsical tone of voice and studiously overcasual atti-
tude made the audience roar with laughter. He himself marveled that he could be so humorous about things that had hurt so very much.

“I blow smoke at a man to turn off unwanted sexual advances,” Arieka admitted.

“Now there’s something I bet you hadn’t considered,” the host offered.

“No, I hadn’t.” Peter drew deeply from the cigarette—not at all like a curious novice.

“What about the women? Did you get it on with any of them?” Itto asked.

“You’d have to see his wife to believe her.” Peter shook his head in mock horror.

“Probably not unlike mine,” the host joked. The audience gasped appropriately. “Oops, did I say that?” the host responded, then turning toward the camera, made a mad plea to be forgiven by his spouse. When he had finished, he turned toward Peter. “But certainly that’s a long time to go without! Maybe a daughter?”

“There is a difference between dying to have sex and being willing to die for it,” Peter answered somewhat seriously. “Besides, a well-raised German girl would never have considered tainting herself by mixing with an inferior such as myself. I was, to them, a lesser being,” he added, a note of bitterness creeping into his voice. He caught his error as he noticed the look on his host’s face, so he quickly added, “As you would be as well.”

“Me?” Winston asked with what sounded like genuine astonishment. “But you don’t know anything about me!”

“Your decadent behavior betrays your low origins,” Peter stated dryly.

Expertly following Peter’s cue, Winston asked, “Decadent? What do I do that’s decadent?”

“Ah, what don’t you Americans do?” Peter answered casually, pleased that he could make it clear to his audience that he was not, by their standards, an exception. Of course, it wasn’t quite true, but it was close enough, and he began, without hesitation, to list off typically American behavior—actions of which they would normally be quite proud—and explained how each could be interpreted as decadent, disruptive, or insufficiently deferential. “Your First Amendment alone is proof to them of an incorrigible lack of discipline in this society,” Peter stated as part of his list. “You’re so disorganized, you let people name their children anything they want to—no book of names for you! And your marriage laws—or lack thereof—show a complete disregard for racial purity!” he concluded, nicely bringing the topic back to where it had started.

“Phew! Do you think they actually bought into that?” Itto asked.

“Clearly.”

“But the sex thing. It sounds confusing, how do they keep track?”

“For the average citizen, believe it or not, there are actually posters explaining what is and is not allowed. In particular, sex with a non-Aryan would not only have been immoral, it would have been akin to treason.”

“We have something similar where I came from,” Arieka said. “I lived in the city before the civil war, before I fled to America, but back in the village, if you mixed with the neighboring people, you would be shunned—even killed.”

“Were they white?” the host asked.

Arieka raised an eyebrow in obvious disbelief. “In the middle of Africa? No, they were black, like me.”

“How could you tell the difference?” Itto asked naively. He had been hammeringthe coffee as well.

Peter snickered into his hand. Arieka laughed outright. “How do Europeans tell each other apart? Tribal hatreds always find a way.”

Winston veered the conversation away from such serious topics, and it continued for some time in a lively and generally lighthearted manner. After his third cigarette, Peter decided he had pushed the curiosity idea far enough and he refused more. At a break in the topic, the host pointed at Peter’s left hand and said, “I notice you’re not wearing a wedding ring. Does that mean the young ladies in the audience have a chance? Or is there a Mrs. Halifax out there?”

Peter thought it would be amusing to say there was no “Mrs. Halifax,” only a deadly colonel, but he had trained himself to respond differently and he dutifully replied, “I cannot comment on my personal life. Too many other lives would be put at stake.”

“Oh, just a hint,” Arieka begged.

Peter shook his head.

“Well, what about your handler? Information is that a member of the Polish government in exile is handling most of your trip. How in the world are you mixed up with them?” the host asked.

“A coalition of interested parties representing a wide variety of European nationalities sponsored my trip here,” Peter lied, “and they elected one member as their representative. It was quite arbitrary.”

“Are you going back?” Itto pressed.

“I can’t comment.”

“Will you be staying in America?” Itto cleverly rephrased the question.

“I can’t comment.”

“The man has survived Gestapo interrogations, Itto,” Arieka chided. “Do you think you’re going to trick him now?”

“Why in the world would anyone go back to such an awful place?” Winston asked, breaking his own rule.

“Perhaps to fight for his homeland,” Arieka said, saving Peter from answering. She looked directly into Peter’s eyes and predicted somewhat sadly, “You will go back.”

“I can’t comment,” Peter replied with a rueful smile.

“You will go back, and you will fight,” Arieka insisted. “We all saw you on the news this evening—you will fight. And even if you won’t say it, I will.” She turned toward the audience and admonished, “You should support him. He fights for
freedom and justice in this world! There is too little of that, and we should support these people wherever they are. He will give his life; at least you can write a check!” She turned toward Peter and said, “Whom do you recommend?”

Peter considered for a moment, then allowed himself the rare pleasure of answering truthfully. “My personal favorite is the Home Army. Their American fund is registered at 666 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan F.C. Send your checks there.” He was mindful of the furious English response he could expect from that, and it might also give the Nazis a hint as to his current location. Oh, well, he thought, somewhat drunkenly, to hell with them. None of the English contingent had bothered to say so much as a word to him yet. The Armia Krajowa, the Home Army,
was
his favorite; after all, they paid his salary, such as it was.

59

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Peter went to his in-laws for a late breakfast. For the first time since his arrival, he noticed that he was being tailed. He wondered if he had been followed all along and had only just noticed now or if it had just started. Either way, he felt disgusted by the Underground’s lack of trust in him. As he jumped off and back onto a subway, finally losing the fellow, he thought that perhaps the Underground had been concerned for his safety after his encounter with the Nazi sympathizers and he was frustrating them by losing his bodyguard. Serves them right for leaving him in the dark, he thought as the train sped out of the station.

Joanna jumped on him at the door and would not let go, wrapping herself tenaciously around him. He held and hugged her and kissed her repeatedly as he watched Anna mix up the pancakes. It was an American recipe she had picked up, and he thought he might add it to his repertoire. Anna assured him, though, that the essential ingredient was the maple syrup that would be poured on afterward, and since that was completely unavailable back home, there was little point in learning how to make them. Nevertheless he watched; it gave him an excuse to stay away from the table and not converse with either Alex or Zosia. He suspected both were somewhat miffed by his performance on the late-night show, and that no one had mentioned it yet added to this suspicion.

“So what did you think of last night?” he finally prompted.

“Great job,” Alex enthused.

“Great,” Anna agreed.

“Yet another personality, eh?” Zosia muttered somewhat incongruously.

He frowned at her, but before he could ask what she meant, Joanna chimed in with, “I thought you were wonderful, Dad!”

“You stayed up?”

“Of course!” she giggled.

Alex ground out his cigarette and urged, “Why don’t you sit down, boy, you look tired.”

“You’ve registered as an addict?” Peter asked.

Alex studied the smoldering butt and replied, “Yeah, we both did. They have special waiver forms for ómigrós to make registration easier. We get to skip all the ‘smoking will kill you’ classes. They figure we’re all a lost cause.”

“You registered, too?” Peter asked Anna.

She nodded as she added some more flour to the batter. “Yes, but I’ve quit. Alex uses up my allotment.”

“Two packs a day, eh, Alex?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, don’t tell me about it. Anyway, I give some of Anna’s away. Makes me look generous.”

“You shouldn’t smoke in here,” Zosia said between yawns as she stared sleepily-into her coffee cup.

“No,” Anna agreed, “I’ve asked you not to, at least not while Zosia’s here. And Joanna.”

“Okay, all right,” Alex groaned, getting up. “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes. Peter, why don’t you come out with me?”

Peter considered Alex’s invitation. He did not want to talk to Alex, but on the other hand a cigarette would be really nice. After smoking almost a pack the previous night, he had been craving them all morning. “All right,” he agreed, setting Joanna down. “I’ll just be a minute,” he assured her.

They leaned against the wall of the hallway near the door. It was not legal to smoke in the hallways, but to go down and out to the street would take too long what with the pancakes already on the griddle. Alex offered Peter a cigarette and lit it for him, then lit one for himself.

“Well, what do you want?” Peter asked abruptly.

“Hey, maybe I was just being friendly. Don’t get much chance to talk to you, old boy.”

“Tell me, do the other Brits here speak with your accent?” That awful, whiny, stilted accent.

“Yeah, the old ones do. The young ones—their kids—have a sort of American twang to it all. Sounds really odd.”

“I can imagine.”

“Course, some of the new arrivals sound like you. Is your accent common in England now?” Alex asked without mentioning how low class it sounded. It grated on him terribly.

“Can’t say. It seems to be ubiquitous in London,” Peter answered, then added just to annoy Alex, “We’re all the same now, same lack of rights, same low
Nichtdeutsch
classification, same accent. Those clever Germans have managed to solve a thousand-year-old class problem in just a couple of decades.”

“Replaced, rather than solved. It’s the Normans all over again.”

“Let’s hope not. Can you imagine grammarians, a thousand years from now, chiding schoolchildren for the vulgar habit of
not
putting prepositions at the end of their sentences? Anyway, what did you want to ask me?”

Alex sighed. Was he that obvious? “All right. I wanted to know exactly how truthful you’ve been about that messy business with your arrest and your friends’ deaths.”

“Why?”

“I’ve been keeping in touch with our English friends here—the ones who paid for your trip—and, well, either no one recognizes you or they’re keeping quiet about it. Even after you laid out the details on that show.”

“So?”

“So after your performance last night—by the way, good job on that plug at the end. Did you set it up with that woman?”

“No. It was spontaneous.”

“It was great. We sent somebody posthaste to the office in the middle of the night to take calls after that, and it was just as well. The phones have been ringing off the hook ever since.”

“Thanks. So, you were saying?”

“Oh, yeah. Well, our friends were a bit upset at being excluded.”

Peter shrugged. “She asked for one name.”

“Oh, I don’t blame you.” Alex ground out his cigarette on the wall, flicked the end onto the floor, and lit another cigarette. “In fact, I was very pleased. No, it’s not that. They just seemed to realize that they’ve been snubbing you. They were afraid of the negative consequences of being associated with your visit, you know, divisiveness, et cetera. Now, as the money is rolling into our office, they’ve realized that might be a mistake. So, they’ve invited us all to a reception at England House. I wanted to check with you before I said yes or no. I wanted to give you a chance to back out without Zosia knowing just in case there’s something you’re not telling her.”

Peter stooped down and picked up the end that Alex had dropped.

“Oh, there’s a cleaning person here.”

“So that requires you to act like a pig?” Peter asked rather quietly as he shoved the end into his pocket. As he straightened, he answered Alex’s question, “I’ve told you everything I know about what happened then. If they know more, I’d be glad to hear it.”

“So you really have no idea what happened?”

Peter shook his head.

“Okay then. Do you want to go?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I don’t care if they know me. I have nothing to hide. It should be obvious by now that I wasn’t the one who ratted us out. There’s just one thing.”

“What?”

“No cameras, no press, no publicity. I’m tired. Just an evening out. Okay?” Peter pleaded.

“I’ll make that a condition of your acceptance.”

“Thanks. Let’s get some food.”

“Sure.”

Over breakfast they talked about how Alex and Anna were adjusting to their new home.

“Your third homeland, huh, Alex?” Peter asked between mouthfuls of Anna’s delicious pancakes. She was right, he thought, the syrup was essential.

Alex nodded pensively. “I’m getting used to it.” He added philosophically, “I guess you get used to anything.”

Zosia glanced at Peter as if expecting him to react badly to that comment, but he did not. Instead he said, “Life here certainly seems to be agreeing with you.”

Alex patted his stomach and laughed. “Yeah, it took me a while to get used to so much food, but I’m learning to control myself now.”

“I was more commenting on your other changes. You look quite different.”

“Quite deliberately. I got rid of some of the gray and acquired these.” He pulled off his glasses and contemplated them. “Spectacles. Didn’t realize I was missing so much before!”

“Ah. Why the hair dye? Do you think it makes you more American?”

“No. You remember, we were Ryszard’s parents in Göringstadt, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, he was sure to have been observed throughout that time. We think we’ve purged all the photographs of him and Kasia with us, and with you and Zosia, by the way, but we can never be sure. So, now that I’m a public figure, it’s best if I don’t look like that fellow that may turn up in a photograph in some security file on Ryszard. You can imagine how disastrous it would be if at some future date someone stumbles across a photograph of Ryszard in the company of a current member of a government in exile.”

“Yes, I can.”

“So, I do what I can to minimize that danger, however remote.”

“Makes sense. How are you fitting in otherwise?” Peter asked. Zosia looked at him, as if surprised by his question.

“Well enough. Better than the last time I changed homelands.” Alex laughed.

“How old were you when you were deported?”

“By the time I actually landed in the General Gouvernement—eighteen. Prior to that we spent a number of years in an internment camp.”

“Who’s we?”

“My family, my mother included, though by no stretch of the imagination could she be considered foreign. But she had married an immigrant, so . . .” Alex’s voice fell off as he reminisced.

“What happened to them?” Peter asked.

Alex shrugged. “I got pulled out at eighteen. That’s the last I saw them. Never was able to trace them.”

“I’m sorry,” Peter responded softly.

Joanna looked up from her food. “You lost your mommy and daddy?” she asked her grandfather.

Alex nodded. To try to lighten the mood for her sake, he said, “I don’t know what happened to them. Maybe they lived happily somewhere.”

Joanna nodded in agreement, determined to accept the unbelievable in order to cheer up her grandfather.

“What happened when you arrived on the Continent?” Peter asked, trying to gently veer the subject away from Alex’s missing family.

“I suppose I was being sent to work somewhere. There was a huge transport of us and it was terribly disorganized. We were marched all over the place. At some point, I realized I was near to where my father said he had come from, so I just walked away from the march. Walked into the woods and disappeared. Stumbled across some partisans.”

“And?” The ending was not obvious to Peter.

“Oh, I guess I looked bedraggled enough that they took pity on me, and I knew a few words of Polish. They knew there was a transport of English deportees, so they had no trouble believing my story, and they let me stay with them. They thought my language abilities would be useful. I fought a bit with their group, then moved on and into the city.”

“Kraków?”

“Yes. Moved up in the Home Army, and, well, you know the rest.”

“Vaguely. But how did you manage to learn German without an English accent? You were quite old.”