The Children's War (45 page)

“She was married to someone else.”

“Oh.” Ulrike paused as if considering the implications of that. “If you could go back now, would you be able to marry her? I mean, would she divorce her husband for you?”

“I don’t know what she would have done. You see, she loved him, too, but in
any case, it doesn’t matter; I have no life other than this one and I will never be allowed to return.” He hoped that would sidestep the messy issue of what had happened to her, but he was wrong.

“What happened to her? Is she waiting for you somewhere?”

“No.” Again he paused, considering what his answer should be. Just how much should he tell her? “She’s dead.”

“Dead?”

“Yes. Killed.”

“How did she die?”

He sighed. “Ulrike, please don’t ask me to explain any more.”

“Please tell me, Peter! How can I believe everything else you tell me if I don’t know anything about you or where you come from? You’re my
only
connection with this other world you describe. You make it real. Just tell me how she died and I promise I won’t ask any more.”

He looked at her for a moment. Softly he said, “She was killed by the Gestapo, as she was being arrested.”

“Arrested! Killed! What for?”

“Shh!” he hissed worriedly, glancing back at the door, then answered, “I don’t know.” It was close enough to the truth. She may have been arrested for any number of offenses real or imagined. He could hardly tell her that he and Allison were in the English Underground.

“But surely she must have done something!” Ulrike almost pleaded for a reason.

He leaned over her, hissing in her ear. “You haven’t been listening to me, have you? What do you think I’ve been telling you? Fairy stories? Do you think the people I’ve been talking about weren’t real? Do you think the mass murders of the forties and fifties were for a
reason?
That babies and toddlers
did something?”

She stared at him, stunned. She had never seen him angry; indeed, he rarely showed any emotion at all. She had sort of assumed that he had no emotions or at least nothing profound. “I didn’t mean . . . ,” she stammered.

He stopped, gained control of himself. It wasn’t her fault; she had nothing to do with it. It was his own disbelief that angered him. Why had it taken so long for him to accept the truth, to believe all the evidence he had seen? How could he fault her, she did not even have one photograph—she had nothing but his word. The word of a person who had been branded as traitorous, criminal, beneath contempt, not even really human. Breathing deeply, holding the edge of her desk to steady himself, he continued in a more measured tone, “Ulrike, believe me, people who have done absolutely nothing wrong have been arrested, tortured, and killed. Others, whose only crime is that they want to stop the murder, are dragged from their homes never to be heard from again. Your wonderful founding fathers set up human slaughterhouses—extermination camps—where they carried out the systematic murder of millions of people: men, women, children, old and young.”

She shook her head. “It never happened.”

“You must have heard rumors or stories, jokes and innuendos,” he said quietly, hoping somehow to offer evidence other than his own suspect word. He had himself always had difficulty accepting the worst of the whispered history he had heard as a partisan—he had never questioned it aloud, aware as he was that propaganda was a necessary tool of both sets of combatants, but he had privately wished that the Resistance would use more believable propaganda. After all, what merit was there in using stories about millions upon millions of people killed in extermination camps if no one could believe them? Who could believe whole peoples were slaughtered, entire religions destroyed, nations kept in semistarved slavery, death camps, medical experiments, gruesome tortures . . . Surely it was too much.

“No.” Her head continued to shake as though she could not stop it.

“Yes, it happened! For all we know, it may still be going on.”

“Have you seen any of this with your own eyes?”

“No, but I’ve seen pictures, heard reports . . .” He had seen some photos that had made him shudder, had heard stories which made his guts ache, had experienced enough state terrorism in his own family to know his enemy was ruthless and soulless, but still his mind had resisted acceptance of the reported grotesqueness and scale of the insanity. And despite his determination not to be naive, he had harbored a vague hope that the stories were just that, nothing more than anti-Nazi propaganda manufactured by overzealous partisans or perhaps by the Reich’s own propaganda machine for the purposes of instilling terror in the subject peoples.

“They’re lies!” Ulrike spoke the words that he had always wanted to believe.

“Ulrike, where do you think all those people went? Look at the numbers before and after. Work it out. Look at old pictures: the names of shops and their owners. Where did they go? Why did so much land open up for colonization?”

She stared at him but did not say a word.

“There’s a place in the East called Auschwitz, it’s just one of many. They murdered so many people there that they couldn’t even bury the bodies. They tried dumping them into the earth, but the swampy ground sent the decaying corpses back to the surface, so, they ended up burning them.”

“No! You don’t know that!”

“Corpses emerging from the fields! Do you know what burnt flesh smells like? You can’t hide that sort of thing!”

“No! It’s not true. It’s just lies made up by your people. Evil people, jealous people! There was a war—people died, sometimes innocent people. You dropped bombs on our cities! Firebombs! Atomic bombs! But it wasn’t like you say, it’s all made up and you believe it. You haven’t seen it yourself because it’s not true!”

“You’re right, I haven’t seen it. Those who saw it are dead, what can they say? But I have seen other things. You yourself would see it, if only you opened your eyes.” He thought of the little bundle of hair he had collected but decided not to
pursue that at the moment. If he horrified her too much, she might simply shut him out. There was, he decided, a less terrifying and more direct approach to her disbelief. “What about me? What have I done to deserve this life?”

“You?”

“Yes. Do you truly believe I am so different from you? That I am a lesser being?”

“It’s your place to serve,” Ulrike whined. “If only you accepted that, you’d be happy with us.”

“Says who? Think about it! Listen to your conscience.” He tapped her head. “Does any of this feel right? Does it?”

“I . . . It’s . . . I don’t . . .” Ulrike reached up in confusion to touch her head where he had tapped it.

“If it was so natural to me, why did I have to be tortured into submission? Huh?”

“I don’t . . . The Fatherland . . .”

“Do you really think I deserve to be beaten for trivialities? That I deserve no freedom, no family, nothing at all for the rest of my life?”

“You’re a criminal. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you—”

“You know I’m not a criminal,” he hissed into her ear. “I’ve told you what happened, and you can even check the documents your father holds on me and see it’s the truth; you’ll see I’ve done
nothing!
The criminals are out there”—he gestured broadly—“and the crimes were committed against me! Do you want to know what they did to me and my family? Do you?”

She nodded, her eyes wide with fear. He did not know whether she was afraid of what she would hear or if she was simply afraid of him. He hadn’t meant to be so harsh. He tried to calm himself before continuing; he did not want to scare her, it wasn’t her fault, it was his for never wanting to believe.

He began, “My mother and father—” but then a sudden horror spread through his limbs. The words died on his lips. He hurled silent imprecations at himself. Idiot! Fool! Slowly, deliberately, he straightened and stood silently with his back to the door. Ulrike looked up at him, waiting for him to continue. For a brief moment he could only hope that his fear was groundless, then he forced himself to turn around.

His ears had not deceived him: someone was standing in the doorway. It was Karl. Peter read his expression in an instant and knew denials would be useless. Involuntarily, he closed his eyes, wishing the clock back five minutes. Just five minutes. He opened his eyes, but Karl was still there.

47

“I
T’S
ALL RIGHT,
it will be all right, everything will be okay, trust me . . .”
She was stroking his hair, talking soothingly in English. The voice was unknown, but
eerily familiar, as if he had known it long ago. He turned his head and looked at her. It was a young woman, again strangely familiar. English? Who would be speaking English to him? With a start he recognized her. But she was so young! Mum? What was she doing here? His brain screamed warnings at him. Stop! Don’t question! But it was too late, he knew it was a dream and it drifted away from him like sand through his fingers.

Peter remained very still, hoping to recapture some of the lost comfort. He could still feel her fingers stroking his hair, but he also felt pain creeping into every limb as his nerves awoke. He battled to hold it back, to remain numb, but it was impossible. The pain raged through him, like a conquering army, and with a groan, he surrendered to the inevitable.

He raised his hand to his head, where his hair had been stroked. Something scurried away into the darkness, and his fingers came back sticky and damp. He tasted them; it was blood. His movements had caused a shock of pain through his ribs, and he dropped his arm and lay still, fearful of provoking more misery. He tried to open his eyes but they were too swollen. He ran his tongue over his lips and felt the swelling there as well, then he touched each of his teeth in turn and counted two more lost.

Exhausted by his efforts, he rested and waited out the remainder of the night that way, lying there in the dark, taking his breath in short, painful gasps, unable to sleep for the pain. Hours later he was able to open his eyes and was greeted by the gray light of dawn filtering through the window. The light hurt his injured eyes and he closed them again, but not for long. Whatever weakness or pain he felt, he knew he had to get up and begin work if he valued what was left of his life.

Taking it in stages, he climbed carefully to his feet, swaying as the blood pounded in his temples. He held on to a roof strut as his vision faded in and out. When he felt well enough, he selected a rag from his bedding that was long enough to wrap around his chest, then, grabbing his other set of clothing, he went through the house into the cellar. He cleaned himself and washed his hair and wrapped the rag around his chest, binding up the most sensitive area with a sort of bandage. After that he put on the clean clothes and placed his old clothes in water to soak, hoping the bloodstains would come out.

He felt sick while walking to the bakery, but he had already vomited everything up the night before, so he did nothing more than heave convulsively a few times as he walked. Each time he felt sharp, jabbing pains in his chest, and he wondered if his ribs had been broken. When he reached the bakery, he waited silently in the short line at the back door, and though nobody said anything, he was aware that they were staring surreptitiously at him with those same sidelong glances that he had occasionally bestowed on others. When he reached the door, Roman, busy as usual, stopped dead, his mouth dropping open. When he finally found the wherewithal to shut it, he asked, “God in heaven! What happened?”

Peter handed over his ration card, then turned slightly to stare out across the
plaza. His vision was obscured by the dizzying sight of steps flying up at him, threatening to break his neck as he tumbled down them. The noises of the plaza were drowned out by the sound of breaking glass as he crashed into the hall table shattering the crystal cigarette lighter and Elspeth’s figurines. He could feel Karl’s walking stick as it was slammed repeatedly into his back, he smelled the alcohol on Horst’s breath as his arms were pinned behind his back so that Karl’s fist could crash again and again into his face.

“What happened?” Roman insisted.

Peter continued to stare into the distance. He wet his lips but could not say anything. And through it all, he had not resisted. He had known that to resist was to die, and so he had let it all happen.

Softly Roman said, “I’m sorry,” and went into the bakery to fill the order.

Peter returned in time to find Elspeth in the kitchen preparing for breakfast. “You’re late. Give me that,” she said as she took the bread and shoved the coffeepot at him, adding, “Hurry up, before he notices.” She disappeared into the dining room carrying the bread with her.

Setting the pot down, he shrugged off his jacket, then carried the coffee into the dining room. The table had already been set; evidently Elspeth had covered for him. He wondered momentarily if she had tended to Karl as well, or had he managed to tie his own shoes for once? Wrapped in his bitter thoughts, oblivious to everything else in his misery, he did not notice their stares as he served the coffee. He returned to the kitchen and sat down, dead tired. He could not seem to catch his breath, and every time he inhaled, his lungs ached. He also had a raging thirst, and this finally drove him back onto his feet. How in the world was he going to get through this day? It stretched before him, a vast expanse of petty commands and tasks, and at the end of it all, the coveted right to rest, to lay down his head and be alone with his pain, if only for a few hours.

Sticking to his usual schedule, after finishing the breakfast dishes, he went upstairs to clean the bathrooms and toilets. He climbed the steps slowly. Each muscle, every joint, his skin, everything hurt. He entered the bathroom, put on the light, and was confronted by his visage in the mirror. It stung him like a slap in the face. The grim image staring back at him unnerved him, but he was almost as shocked by the realization that he had not even looked at himself since the events of the night before. There it was, staring at him—a testament to the damage inflicted on his life and his acceptance of it.

Though his face was still grotesquely distended, the swelling had decreased enough for his eyes to have reemerged, red-ringed and shadowed. He had cuts around his mouth and on his forehead, but what struck him most was that half his face was bruised and discolored. Blue and purple spread across his jaw and up under his eyes and along his temples like a disease. As he stared disconsolately, he heard a sweet, happy voice in his head. “Hey, Alan, are you going to let me sketch you?”

“Why would you want to do that, Jenny?” he heard his long-ago answer.

“I like looking at you. I’m good at it, really. You’ve got marvelous lines. Sit for me, please!”

“Oh, I don’t think I could sit still that long.”

“Aw, come on. You’ve got a great face. Come on, please?”

“Okay, if you make it worth my while.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Give me something to look at while I sit for you. Get naked for me.”

“It’s a deal!” she had agreed, laughing, and began then and there peeling off her clothes.

What would his little artist think if she could see him now? Without knowing why, he reached out to touch the face in the mirror. The cold surface of the glass offered no comfort, no answers. He brought his hand unsteadily back and probed his face, trying to match sensation with image. Was it his imagination or did the darkened skin feel fragile, like old paper ready to crumble at the slightest disturbance? He looked haunted. Or hunted. Like an animal caught in a leg trap. Stay? Or gnaw the leg off? Either way the result was death.

With a sudden flash of recognition he thought, They’re killing me. They’re killing me, and I don’t even know what to do about it.

“You’ll never get anything done like that,” Elspeth stated from the doorway.

He looked at her in surprise and studied her face, but he could detect no emotions there, not pity, not regret. Nothing at all. They’re killing me, he thought, and I don’t even know what to do to stop them.