The Children's War (79 page)

It was the only incident of the entire visit, and though it shook him to the core of his being, Zosia shrugged off his apology when he mentioned it the next morning. The couple, she assured him, would have assumed it was an eccentricity on his part, and in any case his uniform would have kept anyone from noticing anything he did. Thereafter, however, he made it a point to accompany Zosia into town whenever possible: he was not going to be wrong-footed again.

6

W
ITH THE SUMMER
the weather settled and the nights warmed and Peter began sleeping outside with some regularity. Many times, on clear nights, Zosia and Joanna joined him, and they cuddled together under the stars. Many others from the encampment had the same habit—clearly the fresh air and starry nights were preferable to the safety and claustrophobia of the bunker. On those clear nights, the woods around the entrances took on a strange quality as sleeping bodies were scattered under the trees amid desultory conversations and restless, pacing sentries.

Peter found his greatest peace out there in the forest. If Zosia and Joanna were with him, he enjoyed the warmth of their company, the feeling of belonging, the quiet buzz of conversations drifting around him. Even when the nights were chill or damp, he often slept outside; then he had the woods nearly to himself. On those nights, he was equally happy. He would retreat far from the entrances to a small escarpment and sleep undisturbed, breathing in the pungent odors of moss and wet leaves, protected from the misting rains by the rocks. After a time, the sentries learned his habits and were careful to avoid pacing too near so that he had a sense of aloneness and privacy such as he had never enjoyed in his life.

Whatever the weather and however many other people were outside with
him, he rarely slept through the night. He would awaken from uneasy dreams, listen to the breathing of those nearby or the soft rustle of the leaves, and he would invariably be drawn to his feet to walk among the pines in the embrace of the blessed darkness. At first he made a point of quietly announcing his presence to any unseen guards, but eventually they came to know his peripatetic ways, learned to recognize his slightly arrhythmic gait, and he could walk in silence, undisturbed and with the illusion of total isolation.

Sleeping outside also solved a recurring problem that he had in Zosia’s flat. Tadek had the irksome habit of visiting Zosia, spending hours talking to her in a rapid, complex, and incomprehensible Polish and staying far, far too long. Peter had initially tried to join in the conversation, but his halting attempts were sneeringly rebuffed. Then he tried simply listening, so that he could learn the language, but Tadek glared at him as though he were eavesdropping. Eventually, he simply tried to sit out the visits, reading a book or doing some work at the kitchen table, but even that felt awkward. He finally gave up and learned to abandon the flat anytime Tadek visited. Now, at least, he could leave for the entire night, and by morning he managed to suppress his irritation enough so that Zosia was unable to detect it.

He knew that Zosia’s hospitality in inviting him to live with her and Joanna had not been an invitation to run her life. He knew that with Joanna asleep in the bedroom, Zosia had no place to sit in her flat with guests other than on his bed. He tried to adhere to the necessary courtesies of close living, and so he did not groan when Tadek came to visit, and he hid his dismay when Zosia invited Tadek to dinner. He grit his teeth at the snide remarks about his “limited language abilities” and ignored Tadek’s satisfied smirk whenever the two of them returned from long walks together. He knew that whatever Zosia did with Tadek was none of his business, that it was presumptuous of him even to notice their actions, but whenever he saw them together, his eyes followed them. He could not stop himself from wondering, but he did not dare ask Zosia anything directly, and since she did not volunteer any information, he was left unenlightened.

Nevertheless, he was not averse to picking up clues about their relationship from other sources. It inspired him to work on his new language so he could better follow the encampment gossip, and for that he found a great source in his two trainees, Olek and Barbara. They were hard workers and fast learners, and though their youthful chatter sometimes irritated him, he quite liked working with them, and in between the happy laughter in the office and their dispensing gems of local gossip, they helped him clear away the backlog that had accumulated. Their routine was fairly straightforward: Peter perused all messages, and if they fell into the category of familiar, he delegated them to either Barbara or Olek to interpret. The unfamiliar ones he attacked himself. Once the gist of these became clear, Olek would help him, keeping track of the information that emerged and reporting to Wanda accordingly. If the nature of the message was
too sensitive or revealed details unknown to Peter, he was obliged to hand it over to Olek to finish the translation, using lists and code names to which Peter had no access. It was frustrating work, for Olek did not have the requisite expertise, but Peter could only offer his help by working blind—and that was inefficient. Nevertheless, despite such hindrances, the three of them worked well together and managed to do a good job.

Only one series of communications, picked up by one of their listeners in a Breslau military installation, stymied them. It was a series of intermittent and aggravatingly short messages that did not fit any of the patterns of codes they were aware of, but it was low priority, so though it remained unbroken, they did not forward it to HQ, nor did Wanda forbid Peter from working on it. So, whenever he had some free time, he puzzled over the code, musing on possible structures during walks in the woods, attacking it from different angles during the day. There was no reason to suspect the information it contained was important, so he quietly gnawed at the problem as a sort of amusement, simply curious to find its solution. It was as he was working through a paper sent from the NAU on new cryptanalysis techniques that he realized that his code did not fit the usual mode, not because of its sophistication, but because it was old-fashioned. It was the sort of code that might have been devised by someone, trained as he had been, years before, in a backward land, long before computers dominated their trade with their tedious ability to do phenomenal calculations.

This code, he thought, needed something more substantial behind it, and he began perusing the usual suspects:
Mein Kampf,
biographies of Hitler, and other patriotic texts. Then he got a break, a bit of cleartext that stated angrily: “Note!!!” followed by a number. It was the sort of frustrated mistake that a bright junior partner would make when dealing with stodgy, stupid, and uncooperative seniors. It was, he presumed, the publication number of the correct edition of the book that they were using as the base for their code, and the reason for the message was that complaints had filtered back about garbled messages, obviously due to another edition of the book. He went to the library and with the help of the librarian located the text with that publication number. It did not take long after that to break the code and to translate the texts.

The messages that he uncovered were no less perplexing than the strange code itself. They carried irrelevant information to and from scattered and apparently unrelated sources; nevertheless, he did not stop to ponder their significance but quickly relayed the information to the Council for political and military analysis.

Not long afterward, he began receiving similar coded strings from HQ. Apparently, they, too, had been picking up odd messages, and they began sending what they thought might be similarly encrypted information to the encampment for him to work on. He translated it without comment, refusing to explain the solution to his unseen counterparts. They began probing his knowledge, planting their own text within the genuine messages, so in retaliation, he only
returned bulk results, refusing to identify which bits of text came from which encrypted messages and translating as loosely as possible without compromising message integrity. It was a game both sides played with neither side admitting the game even existed. He knew that eventually he would have to lose, but for the moment he enjoyed his advantage and the obvious frustration of his Warszawa counterparts.

Without its ever being specified exactly why, two analysts were eventually sent in person to speak with him directly, “in order to exchange ideas and share information.” He was less than enthusiastic in his reception, speaking in vague terms about his work and explaining that most of what he did was by intuition. He freely volunteered to work on anything they sent him but confided that he really wasn’t able to be of any more help than that.

Zosia sat in on one of the interchanges and watched him with growing perplexity. In the evening they took a walk together, and as Joanna skipped ahead to explore a hollow log, they stood together, watching her play, in silence. It was that time of day when the sun hovered on the horizon—bright enough to irritate his eyes, yet casting too little light for him to wear his sunglasses. He took the glasses off and turned to smile at Zosia, but she did not look at him; instead she stared intently after Joanna. The silence grew heavy between them, and he waited uneasily for Zosia to say what was on her mind.

Finally, still without looking at him, she spoke. “You were lying to them today.”

“Yes, I was.”

“I think they knew it, too.”

“It doesn’t matter. They got the message.”

“And what was that?” she asked, apparently distracted by something in the distance.

“I’m not telling them anything,” he answered, following her gaze though he knew nothing was there.

“Why not?”

“Isn’t it enough that I decode the documents for them?”

“But what if something should happen to you?” she asked.

“Indeed.”

“Oh.”

Joanna had spotted another, more fascinating goal and had run on ahead. They walked after her in silence for a few minutes. Then Zosia finally asked, “Do you really think you need to do that? Don’t you think you can trust them?”

“Why should I? Why should I give away my only advantage?”

“So you think as long as you’re unique, you’ll be safer,” she guessed, kicking at a bit of sandy soil with her toe.

“I think they’ll be a little less careless with me. It won’t last all that long though. They’ll work it all out sooner or later on their own.”

“Maybe not. We’re always short of trained people, and those we have are always short of time.”

“Well, then, you’d think they’d be a little less cold toward me, wouldn’t you?”

“The world doesn’t revolve around you; maybe they have other concerns.”

“Yeah, but then I’ve got to look out for myself, don’t I?”

“Yes, I suppose you do.” Zosia’s voice had taken on a resigned and somewhat cold edge.

He felt that she was misjudging his motives. He didn’t care what any of the others thought, but he didn’t want her to think of him as selfish. He took her hand, stopped her in her stride, and turned her toward him so that she could see the sincerity in his eyes. “Zosia, it’s not like that. I mean, it is a bit, but you’ve got to understand I’ve had so many people tell me my life was worthless, that it was hanging by a thread. Even your friends were willing to just blow me away.” He sighed heavily. “Don’t you understand? I need some sense of security, some feeling that I am indispensable or . . . or at least not so easily trashed.”

It was growing dark, and in the dim light, he could not discern her expression. He added somewhat ruefully, “In any case, I’m not denying them much. It’s just a bunch of dross sent out by some conspiring officials, it’s not important. They know that, that’s why they weren’t all that upset.”

“It’s all right, you don’t have to explain.”

“Is it really all right?”

“Yes. I think I understand. And I trust you to do what’s right.”

He sighed again. What the hell did that mean?

They both stood in silence watching Joanna skip stones off a tree trunk. She went to pick up the stone she had thrown, then as if she had suddenly seen something, she broke into a run and disappeared down a slope. Zosia stared as if entranced, then gasped and ran in the direction Joanna had taken. Peter ran after her, calling to Zosia, “What’s wrong?”

At the bottom of the slope Joanna was standing stock-still. Zosia skidded to a stop just behind her. Both of them stared at a small white stone planted discreetly under a large pine.

Peter had stopped with Zosia, and he gasped quietly at the pain the sudden exertion had caused him.
“Co to jest?”
he asked softly.

“It’s Adam’s gravestone,” Zosia replied in English. Obviously she did not want to include Joanna in the conversation. She stroked her daughter’s hair as she spoke.