The Children's War (91 page)

22

“Y
OU’REWORKING TOO HARD,”
Zosia said as she pulled a glass out from a basket, filled it with wine, and set it in front of Peter. “Look, I’ve brought a picnic.” She gestured toward the freshly baked bread, cheese, and ham that filled her basket.

Removing the reading glasses he had recently acquired and rubbing his face tiredly, Peter agreed. There was, however, no way around it—a large volume of coded material had been seized and had to be interpreted as quickly as possible. He was in the middle of a preliminary sort, and the stacks of files towered in unstable heaps around the office.

“Is there any way that I can help?” Zosia asked. “I’m not doing much right now that the New Year festivities are over.”

“Maybe, but first let’s enjoy this lunch you packed. One of your better cookingefforts,” he teased.

“Oh, Marysia made the bread.”

Peter laughed. “I would have never guessed!”

They ate there in the office. He leaned back in his chair and, being careful not to topple any of the stacks, put his feet up on the desk. “So, any news?” he asked.

“The paperwork on your commission has gone through.”

“Ah, what’d I get?”

“Captain. Just like I requested. And the salary has been approved. Back pay and all.”

“Great.”

“I also talked with my parents today,” Zosia said between bites.

“Ah, how’s everything there?” he asked with feigned casualness. His behavior on the last day of his visit had tactfully been ignored ever since they had returned, although he suspected everybody at the encampment had heard about it anyway. Nevertheless, Zosia had warmed to him considerably since that visit, so he felt that it had not been a dead loss.

“Well, Mom’s worried about the move to America. She doesn’t want to give up her work here, but she doesn’t want Dad to have to go it alone there. And she’s worried about leaving Ryszard and Kasia alone—especially with their upcoming move to Berlin. But Olek should be happy.”

“Olek? Why?”

“Oh, with Ryszard and Kasia moving to Berlin and Mom and Dad going to

America, Stefi’s decided to move here.”

“America,” Peter repeated. What a strange place it must be. Alex and Anna would now simply emigrate there and become part of the government in exile. Alex had won a seat in the cabinet and now had to leave the land he had lived in since his youth, but his children and grandchildren would stay behind, carrying on the fight. Zosia might never see her parents again once they moved, and Joanna would grow up without her grandparents. It made Peter think of his own family, and he was tempted to ask a question that had bothered him for some time now. The problem was, did he really want to know the answer?

“Zosia,” he began in a tone that let her know he was heading into dangerous territory, “why was Tadek so sure at my trial that my brother was a Nazi?”

“Oh, you don’t want to rehash that, do you? It was so long ago!”

Peter ignored her protest. “Given that he knew about your brother, why was he, why were you all, so sure he was not doing what your brother is doing?”

Zosia picked a bit of bread out of her teeth. “Oh, we didn’t know anything for sure. Tadek just used that to goad you into a reaction.”

“Ah.” What a charming man he is, Peter thought.

“He wanted to know if you were genuine.”

“Okay then, why was my name on the arrest warrant, but not Erich’s? Presumably he has a clean slate as far as the government is concerned—after all, he was able to get Party membership.”

“Yes, it does look like he wasn’t tainted by whatever affected your parents and you. Perhaps because he wasn’t at home at the time.”

“That’s what I thought at first, but it really doesn’t make sense.”

“Doesn’t it?”

Without knowing exactly why, Peter knew then, she was lying to him. He had suspected it for a long time. If his parents had been arrested and he had been picked up as a matter of course, then that would not be unusual. But if his name had been on the warrant as well as theirs, then the whole family was suspect, and Erich had not been gone long enough to be disassociated from whatever they were suspected of. So why had Erich been left off the warrant? “Why are you lying to me?”

Zosia sighed. “Do you really want to know this?” She waited while he decided; then, when he nodded his head, she said, “Are you sure?”

“I can’t believe it could be worse than what I might imagine.”

Her silence was not reassuring.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Zosia, tell me!”

“You don’t believe in God.”

“Don’t try to change the subject. What haven’t you told me?”

She sipped her wine, then looking into the glass rather than at him, she said, “You were the only one on the warrant.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“What did I do?” he asked, rather stunned.

“Was there some sort of street gang?”

“Oh, that. Yes, but I had been kicked out by then.”

“Well, that might have been the ostensible reason. It’s not clear.”

“But none of the other gang members were arrested.”

“Perhaps the informant didn’t know their names.”

“But why were my parents taken?”

“Presumably, they did not tell the arresting officers where you were—so for noncooperation if nothing else.”

“But they didn’t know! I just went out for a walk.” He had a vivid memory of how his mother had tried to console him, how he had rejected her explanation and stormed out of the flat. He could still hear the door slam behind him. And then when he had returned home, his life had been changed forever.

“That wouldn’t matter.”

“But how did the informant know my name? Why would they want me?” He felt a growing sense of panic as he relived the terror and abandonment of that time of his life.

“If you knew the other gang members, you could be made to give their names, so from their point of view, you had reasonably useful information.”

“But they were just kids!” he argued plaintively.

Zosia looked at him somewhat sorrowfully. Peter realized what a stupid assertion that had been and said, “I know. When have kids been spared?” So, that stupid gang he had joined had cost his parents their lives. They had saved him. Deliberately or not, they had saved him and died in his place. Zosia was right, he probably did not want to know that. He looked at her, saw there was something more. “Who was the informant, Zosia?”

“Peter . . .”

So she knew. They had known all along. He had assumed that the informant was anonymous, but they had known all along. “Who?” he insisted.

“Peter,” she repeated helplessly. “You don’t want to know. It’s gone and in the past. Forget it, there’s nothing you can do.”

“Who?”
The neighbors? One of the kids? A schoolmate? A teacher? Had he confided in somebody? He could not remember. Had he condemned himself with a thoughtless story or joke?

“It was your brother,” Zosia whispered.

“My brother? But that’s nuts! He loved Mom and Dad! And he— It would have looked bad for him!” But Erich had hated him and everything he did. It
was
conceivable—especially if Erich was naive enough not to realize that such a denunciation would put their parents at risk as well.

“He probably didn’t realize what the fallout would be. He probably thought all you’d get was a good scare. And he could curry favor by turning you in.”

“There’s no doubt? This isn’t conjecture?” Zosia shook her head. “No, his name was listed as the informant. I can think of no reason why the files would have been falsified.” She waited a moment as the reality of her news sunk in, then asked, “Are you all right?”

He nodded but could think of nothing to say. His brother. The bitterness of it left a foul taste in his mouth. “Anna was the lucky one,” he finally said.

“Anna?” Zosia was momentarily confused, thinking of her mother.

“My little sister. She died before we could tear each other apart. We would have destroyed her, too. She’s the lucky one.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Peter.”

“No, but I didn’t help. I provoked Erich. I joined that stupid gang. I never took any of it seriously. It was all a big joke. I didn’t think I was risking their lives . . .”

“You were a kid, how were you supposed to know?”

“I was old enough to cause their deaths.”

“Peter, it wasn’t your fault!”

“No, it wasn’t. Could you go now, Zosia? I have loads of work to do.”

“Peter . . .”

“Really, I’ve got so much to do, I’m simply swamped. I’ll see you this evening.”

She realized that she wasn’t going to change his mind, so she gently kissed him and left. His back was to her as he lowered his head over his work. She watched for a few minutes from the doorway, but he did not look up and his pen scanned across the lines without interruption. Zosia walked away, leaving him to his thoughts. She stopped by a bit later and watched him from the doorway, but he was immersed in his work. An hour later she checked again, but he was still completely absorbed. She shrugged and decided that he would have to deal with it in his own time.

Olek came in shortly thereafter. Peter greeted him with a muted hello, but did not look up from what he was doing. When Barbara showed up for work a short time later, Olek gave a subtle shake of his head to Barbara’s buoyant greeting. Recognizing the cue, she quietly began work, entering the data that had been set aside for further analysis. So the three of them worked; occasionally Olek and Barbara exchanged a comment or two, but essentially they worked in silence.

Thus, Olek and Barbara both nearly jumped out of their skins when Peter stood and in one swift motion knocked stacks of files off his desk onto the floor. The carefully sorted stacks landed in a heap, which Peter then kicked across the room. His own brother! As the mess of papers floated back to earth, Olek and Barbara stared in stunned silence.

“Shit,” Peter swore quietly as he realized he had just undone hours of work. His own brother. He sighed and went over to the mess to put the papers back into their file folders and try to reconstruct the priority assignments. It reminded him of his life. Anytime he thought he had put everything back together, some ill wind from the past stirred it all into a mess again.

Without even asking what had provoked his outburst, Olek and Barbara came over to help him, and together they reconstructed the stacks.

“I can’t tell from where it was lying—was this low or high?” Barbara asked, holding out a file.

Peter took it from her and scanned the cryptic notes he had written in the columns. “Low,” he replied, handing it back to her. Olek handed him another, and he scanned it and remembered that it had been rated low as well. Both files had been one of a number that had puzzled him. Statistics about animals. Now why was farm data encrypted in the first place? And whose farms? He had not taken the time to translate them properly. There was so much else to do, so many other documents that had not even been perused, that he felt uneasy at the thought that while he puzzled out the farm data documents, important information could be moldering on a stack.

Nevertheless, the documents nagged at him; there was something there, a coincidence of some sort. He jogged his memory but could not quite find the connection; then as Olek questioningly placed another file under his nose, it suddenly hit him. He jumped up and consulted his atlas. It was the place-names!
Many of them were near to ones he had encountered in that strange code he had translated a half year before, the code that still trickled in now and then. Irrelevant meetings between nonentities on the one hand, and stacks of meaningless information on the other. Could they somehow be connected? It was, at this point, nothing more than intuition, but he decided to play his hunch.