The Children's War (94 page)

“In view of these?” he asked, holding up his arm. “Or is it in view of the fact that the Council still doesn’t really trust me?”

“Both, I guess.”

“They want to make sure I’m in a position to be closely watched!”

“Perhaps.”

“Admit it!”

“Yes, there were some words to that effect; after all, you never have been completely vetted. You know we can’t reorganize everything around your being a special case. It would be irresponsible,” she defended herself tiredly.

“Then why not send someone else altogether? Why put me in there at all?”

She sighed. “There is no one else we could get. Politically, it’s important that the Szaflary group manages to handle this on its own; we’ve been losing too much authority to Warszawa. We predate them, yet now we have to ask them for permission to do anything! But that’s not the point, it’s more than that: you’re good at what you do, creative, intuitive. Brilliant. We need that.” Her voice had dropped as she spoke, and she ended by staring at her feet and mumbling something.

“What?”

She looked up at him, repeated softly, “And I need you. I specifically asked for you.”

He stood up and paced the room. He stopped at the lace curtain hanging on the wall and ran his fingers along it. It was long and wide and intricately made with a fine pattern of flowers and leaves running the length of it. Zosia’s grandmother had hung it on a balcony window of her town house, which overlooked the market square. Zosia had worn it at her wedding. Now it hung, a forlorn reminder of better days, against a damp, underground, concrete wall.

He spoke so quietly she had trouble hearing him. “All right, I’ll do it. We’ll need to change my numbers—they’ll be checked when we travel. And we should change my nationality. Polish is good, I know enough words now, and besides, I shouldn’t have to speak it.”

She nodded even though he couldn’t see her; he was still staring at the lace, his back to her.

“When do we leave?” he asked, his fingers still tracing along the leaves of lace.

“We take the overnight train tomorrow from Neu Sandez to Berlin. We’ll leave Berlin on Thursday morning.”

“So we’ll be staying a day there?”

“We have a safe place,” she assured him.

“That doesn’t give us much time.”

“I know.”

“What about Schindler? You said he heads up this laboratory. He’ll recognize me, if he sees me.”

“Don’t worry, he’s in London now. There is no reason to believe he’ll make a surprise inspection tour. And if he does,” she added before Peter could debate that point, “we’ll keep you out of sight. It’ll be easy—he’ll have no interest in meeting my servant.”

“No, I don’t imagine he would,” Peter agreed. He suddenly laughed.

“What?”

“Oh, I just realized, I was being an idiot! Schindler’s such a racist, I’m sure
the only thing that he ever saw was what was on my shoulder. If we change that, he won’t have a clue who I am. I could spit in his face and he wouldn’t recognize me!”

“The son might be there—do you think he’ll recognize you?”

Peter really didn’t know the answer to that question. If he told Zosia that Schindler’s son would recognize him, then he would have an excellent excuse for not taking part in the mission. And he would disappoint her as well. With a conviction he did not feel, he answered, “No, I probably saw him once, years ago. I can’t remember what he looks like, I see no reason why he’d remember me. Still, it might be safer, if he’s around, to keep me in the room, or whatever.”

“We’ll do that,” Zosia assured him. “Any other concerns?”

“I’ll need to practice an appropriate accent—I’ll need your help with that.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll prepare everything.”

Peter turned and gave her a look that conveyed his doubts. “And will you prepare Tadek enough that I could turn my back on him?”

“You shouldn’t be so hard on Tadek.”

“Hard? The man wanted to
kill
me!”

“He didn’t know you—he is trustworthy. Believe me.”

“Of course.” Not for the first time, the question of Tadek’s place in Zosia’s heart worried him.

Zosia’s eyes were drawn from Peter’s strained face to the lace curtain he had been fingering. Unlike it, she had never known another home other than the heavy, damp concrete walls around her. What would her grandmother have thought? What would it be like to live unafraid in a town, windows open to the daily passage of life? “I wonder what the world would have been like if we had won. Or if the war had never happened,” she said dreamily.

“I can’t imagine. It’s funny, isn’t it? Whatever the reality is—it seems so set in stone, as if all of history led to this point. Yet, there must have been a point, in the thirties or forties maybe, when a few different decisions could have changed everything.”

“Do you think so?”

“Logically, yes. What if Hitler had never been born? Were the forces at work in Germany at the time strong enough to have produced another leader just like him? Or what if Hitler had attacked the Soviet Union? They say he really wanted to—only his astrologer stopped him. Or what if the German nuclear program had been less successful? What if the Nazis hadn’t believed in it wholeheartedly? Maybe . . . But you know, in my heart, it’s hard to believe things could have happened differently. The world is what it is.”

“So you believe in fate?”

“No.” He paused, shook his head for emphasis. “No. I think the future holds any number of possibilities. And I really do think history could have been different—it’s just hard for me to truly believe it here,” he finished, tapping his chest. “What do you think?”

“I think believing in other possible pasts opens up a terrifying door for most humans—for if all of history wasn’t working to this point, this particular present, then who can guarantee that they would themselves have existed? It’s scarier than death, because with death you can believe in immortality, but how do you counter the possibility of nonexistence? Better to believe things had to be the way they are—then you know, deep down, that you had to exist and you had to be the person you are. It still leaves room for any possible future—until, of course, the future becomes the past.”

Peter nodded. When he was younger, he could never have imagined his current situation and all the experiences he had had in between, but now, he felt that this point in his life had been inevitable. As the infinite possibilities of his future had been narrowed to one past, he had set it in stone. He wondered how Zosia’s belief in God tied in with her perception of the past and future. Did having an immortal spirit mean that you were sure to have the same personality no matter what circumstances you were born into?

Before he could phrase the question, Joanna interrupted them by running into the room. She had been playing in the woods with some of the other children, and she came in flushed and excited. Peter smiled at her and took Zosia in with the same glance. How could he believe that he might never have met them? It seemed impossible to imagine life without them now.

Joanna tugged at his sleeve. “You’re home!” she exclaimed in Polish. “Are you staying?”

He felt slightly guilty at his abandonment of her over the past week. “I’ve been here, little one,” he said in careful Polish, “you’ve just been asleep!”

She made a face, then asked, “What are you making for dinner?”

“Perhaps your mother is cooking tonight,” he teased.

“Yech! You cook better! It’s been awful without you!”

Zosia laughed. “Well, I guess that’s decided! Anyway, I’ve got work I have to do.”

“All right,” he conceded; the rest of the files would wait until his return—if he returned. He stood and grasped Joanna’s outstretched hand. “Let’s go see what we’ve got.”

24

T
HEIR TRAIN APPROACHED
the outskirts of Berlin at dawn. Peter had been unable to sleep for the last several hours of their journey, and he had finally abandoned the
couchette
compartment he shared with Tadek and Zosia and gone to stand in the aisle. The conductor spoke to him deferentially, the occasional
Zwangsarbeiter
skirted nervously around him. Funny what the color of a
uniform can do, he thought, looking down at the ridiculous insignia and medals on the neat black cloth. The clothes he would wear tomorrow, that other uniform, waited safely tucked away in the safe house along with the papers and wristband and other paraphernalia they would need for the job ahead. He pushed his hair back and leaned against the cold glass of the window. The train slowed as it approached the city, and he watched with a fascinated dread as suburb after suburb passed by. He had checked the railway maps and ascertained that they would pass nowhere near where the Vogels had lived, but still the tidy houses and trim lawns of the infrequent well-to-do suburbs evoked a visceral reaction in him.

Zosia stepped out of the compartment, yawning sleepily. Her dress was rumpled and she had not even straightened her hair. “Are we almost there?” she asked between yawns.

He nodded.

She came up to him, put her arm around his waist.“Don’t worry. It’ll be okay. We won’t be here long.”

They arrived at the pension without difficulty, having changed taxis several times en route to make sure they were not followed. After they registered and had their papers stamped, the elderly gentleman led them into a back room. There they were joined by an old woman, and Zosia greeted her warmly and asked them if they had swept recently. When they assured her everything was secure, she hugged and kissed them both. They greeted Tadek by name—they clearly knew him, albeit less intimately than Zosia—then they turned to Peter and greeted him without saying a word.

The three of them were led into a private dining room, and there they settled down to a hearty breakfast and exchanged news and gossip in whispered Polish. Peter studied the old couple who ran the pension—they looked thoroughly exhausted and they confirmed this with their own words.

“Oh, it is so difficult, Zosia—we don’t know how much longer we can put up with it,” the woman whispered in a singsong accent as she poured another cup of tea for Peter.

The old man nodded his agreement. “We are so lonely. It is so hard to live like this. We’ve got to go back.”

Zosia consoled them, assured them that they were essential, needed, appreciated. She begged them to be patient, to wait until there was an adequate replacement. They sighed and looked at each other wearily.“Ah, but what are we doing, complaining like this to you?” the woman sang.“We should be welcoming you. And you have suffered so much—we have heard about Adam! We are so terribly, terribly sorry.”

Zosia bit her lip and nodded mutely.

Then the woman turned toward Peter and asked the question that had clearly been bothering her since she first set eyes on him. “But who is this? And why are you so silent?”

Peter had been able to follow almost all the conversation, but had not felt
comfortable interjecting any comments. He noticed Tadek had been silent as well and was surprised by the woman’s almost accusatory question.

Zosia, however, understood. “He’s not a ghost, Auntie. Your memory of Adam is flawed; he does not look that much like him. Say something, Peter—that will dispel her doubts.”

“Say something” was exactly the sort of command that guaranteed an almost moronic inability to say anything in a foreign tongue, and Peter found himself momentarily stymied.

“He’s not Adam,” Tadek filled the silence, “he’s just a cheap, imported replacement model.” The joke carried a note of bitterness that even the old couple could not fail to notice. They looked at Peter all the more curiously.

Compelled to say something, he finally managed to say, “This is a very fine breakfast.”

Noting his accent, the old man turned to Zosia and asked, “He is German?”

“No. I’m English.” Peter could think of nothing else to say, so he turned his attention back to his plate and continued eating.

The old couple looked at Zosia and she replied to their unspoken question by saying, “We’ve vetted him completely—he’s quite safe.”

“Yes,” Tadek added, “we all agreed, didn’t we?”

Zosia shut him up with a look.

Peter chewed his food, thinking, And tomorrow I’ll be in a position where he can easily get me killed. Oh, God, what have I let myself into?