The Children's War (37 page)

40

“H
OW
WILL THE HOUSEWORK
get done? And the garden? For the first time in years it looks presentable!” Elspeth fumed. She stopped her angry pacing in front of the window and looked out at the emerging greenery. Spring! Planting, weeding, trimming, cleaning! There was so much work to do! “I simply will not go back to doing without adequate help!” she huffed.

“You don’t have to. It’s all arranged: he’ll only be on an eight-hour shift, so he’ll still be available to you eighteen hours a day,” Karl answered.

“Sixteen.”

“What?”

“Sixteen. Eight and sixteen makes twenty-four,” Elspeth explained patiently.

“Oh, yeah. Of course. Anyway, you know what I mean. He’ll start at eight in the evening and finish at four in the morning. So, there will be plenty of time to finish the supper dishes, serve up our drinks, then out to the Krupp factory. He won’t be around in the evening, but he doesn’t do much then anyway.”

Elspeth disagreed. “He finishes up a lot of the day work then.”

“Well, he’ll just have to work faster during the day. I’m not here, and I suspect you just don’t push hard enough,” Karl responded with growing irritation.

“I don’t let him slack off,” Elspeth retorted.

“Hmm.”

“What about when we have guests? It will look bad if we have to do everything ourselves in the evening!”

“If they’re important, he can stay here that evening; if not, well, those guests don’t pay the bills!” Karl replied sharply.

“Is it really worth it?”

“Definitely. If he starts immediately, we can get a jump on the price increases. They’re not slated to be instituted until May first. His wages will not only make up for the extra cost of his rations, we’ll even make a tidy little profit. About time, too.” Karl’s tone indicated that the debate had concluded.

Elspeth nodded, concerned but unwilling to carry the argument further.

So it was the next day Peter was informed of his new responsibilities. He listened with growing dismay to the brief description of his schedule. His precious nights! His clandestine meetings! His sanity! All would be lost. Quietly, hoping Elspeth might intervene, he said,“But,
mein Herr,
there won’t be any time for . . .”

Karl raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips in a gesture of exaggerated interest.
Peter recognized the violence implicit in the expression, but he was desperate. “If I leave work at four in the morning, I won’t have any time to sleep!”

“Ach, you’ll manage,” Karl growled.

“Mein Herr,
please . . .”

Karl stood and Peter fell silent. Karl walked up to him to ask, “Are you questioning my orders?”

“No, of course not,
mein Herr.
Just please, please reconsider,” Peter begged.

Karl slugged him for that. “Nobody questions my orders!” he growled, then walked away to return to his armchair. “Get me a cigarette.”

Swallowing blood, Peter glanced at Elspeth, furious at her silence. His eyes strayed to Karl, but there was no point in saying anything more, so he went to get the cigarette.

At half past seven, he made his way to the industrial estate that he passed whenever he went to get his rations. Because it was evening and he did not regularly walk this route, his papers were checked three separate times en route. Karl had flung a special permit at him, grunting that he’d need it to get to and from work. Indeed, it permitted exactly that: to be on the precise route between the house and the factory just before and just after his shift for the duration of one calendar month. That and nothing more.

He arrived at the plant a few minutes past eight, his papers were checked, he was given some coveralls, an identification tag was pinned to his uniform, and he was promptly led to a work site. The foreman there casually pointed to a sawedoff broomstick that rested in the corner by his chair and said tersely, “Don’t be late again.” That was his entire introduction and initiation to the plant.

His job involved unloading large drums that were filled with a foul-smelling chemical—fertilizer, it was said—off a production line and loading them onto a small truck that carried them to some unspecified destination. That was it, nonstop, for eight backbreaking hours.

Within the first half hour, any novelty value in the new job had been completely eroded. He had studied every strut of the warehouselike roof, estimated the number of rivets in each steel I-beam, memorized the pattern of stains and cracks on the concrete floor, and ascertained that no other worker ever came within speaking distance. As he worked, he tried to amuse himself by remembering the work he used to do, the analyses that had at one time been second nature to him, but somewhere along the way he had lost crucial facts, had let slip the fine connections. He scoured his brain but they seemed to be missing. Maybe it was hunger or exhaustion or the utter desolation of his existence, but something interfered with his ability to think clearly.

As the night passed, the growing ache in his muscles, the weariness creeping into his bones, slowed his thoughts further and he began to daydream about simpler and simpler concepts. About food, about rest. How the rough wool of his blanket would feel when he drew it up to his face, how that potato would
taste when it had been boiled and generously salted. A persistent, sharp pain in his right temple began to make even those musings difficult to pursue, and as he let himself slip into a robotic semisleep, he spared one last thought for what this job would eventually do to his brain: the work was quite literally mindnumbing.

There was one minor break in the routine: when he had finished loading the small automatic trolley, the foreman informed him he should throw a lever to send it forward and allow the next empty cart to approach. He fixated on that simple action as his last connection to a human decision-making process. A machine would not get to decide when to pull that lever! A machine would not enjoy the sensation of the sudden rest for some muscles, the sudden use of others. A machine . . . He stopped that line of insane thought—what had begun in the evening as a joke had by early morning taken on a grotesque seriousness.

By the end of the first shift, he felt he had been assigned to a slow death by overwork. Every muscle in his legs, back, and arms ached, and his hands cramped from the awkward grip he was forced to use on the slippery, dirty drums. Whatever leaked from the seams of the drums not only had a foul, caustic odor, but it irritated his bare hands, and by the end of the night they felt as though they were on fire. At four in the morning, a whistle blew, he turned in his tag and the filthy coveralls, and then, along with all the other nonresident workers, he was free to leave and return home.

As he walked the long path home along the quiet streets, his head echoed with the continuous ringing and pounding of the factory. His papers were checked several times, but the special permit seemed to satisfy all inquiries. Finally, he reached the relative safety of the house and quietly entered through the back door. They had been obliged to give him a key to this door as Elspeth had not wanted to keep it unlocked for the night, and clearly, no one would be up to let him in.

From what she had said when he left, he knew Elspeth apparently harbored some insane belief that he would clean up the evening’s mess before retiring for the night. He took time only to wash his burning hands in the kitchen sink; the cool water relieved the pain a bit, but the sensation did not disappear altogether. He realized that he was staring at his hands, unable to recall what he had just been thinking. The water was running so he turned it off. No, that was not it, something else. Oh, yes, Allison. She might have known what the chemicals were; maybe she could have guessed what they were used for. He was clueless. All he knew was that they hurt him. And he missed her. That hurt, too.

He dried his hands carefully and gave a short laugh as he looked around at the dishes and spills and detritus that had accumulated. He left it all and went into the hall. Ignoring the drinks glasses in the sitting room with their hardening glaze of sickly sweet liquid, he pointedly stepped over the toys strewn about the hall and the stairs. It would all have to wait. In this instance at least, he would simply have to disappoint Elspeth. Dimly aware that he had just over an hour to
sleep, he climbed the steps to the attic and collapsed into his bed thoroughly exhausted.

An hour or so later he awoke. His muscles were so sore, it was actually a relief to get up from the hard floor. As he stood up, he retched and spat up a handful of foul-smelling, rust-colored mucus. Disgusted, he wiped his hand on a rag and threw it into a corner. Since he had not eaten, he assumed it was hunger that had inspired his brief nausea. He yawned expansively and stretched to try to wake himself. Though he was tired, it was more the aching soreness of his muscles that bothered him, and he gave himself a rudimentary neck rub before venturing out to purchase the family’s breakfast.

At the best of times, he never felt thoroughly rested, and with this, his first night of near sleeplessness, he felt slightly stunned. It was as though he were almost drunk. He had energy enough to carry out his work—clearly he was drawing on his reserves—but he felt oddly detached from everything around him. It was as though he were inhabiting someone else’s body, and though he was somewhat unfamiliar with it, it worked well enough.

The daytime routine was tedious but not particularly taxing. Now and then he realized that he had simply stopped whatever he was doing quite without meaning to; he would wake from his daze to find himself standing, staring sightlessly, his hand resting on a bookshelf or a piece of furniture. He would blink, look around, and then with a sigh, remember what he had been doing and continue doing it. As the day wore on, the realization that he would return to the factory in the evening gained reality, and he began to dread the night.

His second night at work was worse than the first. By the time he staggered home in the early-morning chill, he was barely able to do more than mindlessly put one foot in front of the other. His muscles felt like lead; each move required a concentrated effort of will, and as he climbed the steps to his bed, he grabbed for air in painful little gasps. He collapsed into his bed aware of the pounding of his heart, aware that even closed, his eyes ached, but aware of little else.

Elspeth had to wake him in the morning and she was furious. She knew that this stupid idea of Karl’s would mean nothing but trouble for her, and she vented her anger with well-placed kicks and a stream of incomprehensible invective. He rolled away from her kicks, struggled to his feet, and began offering apologies he barely understood when he was interrupted by a fit of coughing that ended in him spitting up a handful of rust-colored mucus. Horrified, he stared at it. It was the same color as the chemical he carried. Was he ingesting it somehow? Or was it blood giving the vomit that strange color?

Elspeth was equally horrified, but for different reasons. “That’s disgusting! Clean it up!” she ordered.

He found the rag he had used the day before and wiped his hand on it.

“You’re filthy and you stink. You’re utterly revolting,” Elspeth added by way of commiseration.

He nodded, apologized, and promised to clean himself up. Elspeth stomped off and he began another grueling day. He muddled his way through his routine as if in a sleepwalk: all the muscles in his body hurt—they were stiff and sore and responded with a disturbing clumsiness. His hands felt as if they were on fire, the cramping in them had spread to his arms, and there were painful spasms in his back as well. His eyes burned as though he were looking into a furnace, and he could barely fight the urge to close them.

He felt sure that he would drop dead that very evening, but when he returned to his job that night, he found his body already beginning to adapt. It had been more than two years since he had been required to do strenuous physical labor, but his body recognized the work, and over the next several days, his muscles strengthened, his hands hardened, and he ceased to feel like death was stalking him. He also worked at coping with his new schedule: he noticed that the bakeries were open by the time he was let off, so he began taking the morning ration card with him to work and purchasing the family’s breakfast on his way home. This allowed him some extra time to sleep in, and with the children beginning to go on their summer schedules, he was able to add a few more precious minutes to his night’s sleep.