Wartime Lies (24 page)

One might well think, though, that the “worst day” would have been that last ghastly day in Warsaw—the gang rapes, the baby dropped down a manhole, the moment-to-moment terror. What is it that makes this one death worse still? Is it just that Tania loves her father so much? Earlier, Maciek says “she claimed she had always had a heart of stone except when it came to grandfather and me,
and neither of us even knew she loved him.” Is it that at this moment Maciek discovers that, yes, Tania does at least truly love this one man? Or is it that Tania, so supremely adult on the surface, having sustained herself through everything by thinking of the father who would somehow be there to shelter and protect her after the war was over, now becomes something of a lost child herself? And is Maciek—weeping for grandfather, weeping in fear—weeping as well because he does not know whether Tania loves him as much as she loved grandfather? This is the boy, one remembers, who anxiously asked everyone, “Do you like me?” Finally, thinking of your first answer, above, is this the worst day of their lives because the grandfather has been killed by Pan Miska, his own former estate manager?

LB:
The answer to each of these questions is yes. I might add another reason: the immense weight of wartime fatigue. Those two do not think they have enough strength—never mind hope—left to go on, to keep their bizarre and desperate show on the road.

Indeed, as you have doubtless noticed, soon afterward Tania makes her first big mistake. She permits herself to insult the black market operator Nowak, who promptly denounces them to the German police.

JM:
“According to Tania, it’s just as well: Can you imagine her hand being kissed?”. Tania’s sardonic comment about Maciek’s new stepmother caught me in a surprise laugh, the only laugh in the book. It made me believe
that Tania was going to be all right, after all. She may be one of those women who only love vertically: up to father or down to child. And yet, like her father (to her mother’s annoyance), she is vivacious, sexually unabashed, and still young. One does not imagine her, years hence, quoting Catullus, as “our man” does in the opening pages, or yearning for a healing that will not come. She is still herself, right?

LB:
I am probably less optimistic about Tania. Of course, the damage to her will be different from the damage done to Maciek. She is a grown-up with a fully formed and strong personality. But memories like hers are corrosive. Also, she may never again have occasion to reach such heights of courage and resourcefulness. Will a more quiet life inevitably seem mediocre and insipid?

But that is speculation about matters that are outside my novel and I have no better information about them than you or any other of my readers.

JM:
A somewhat similar moment—a moment of sudden vigor and freedom—comes for Maciek when he defeats his rebellious dog and, later, reacts with murderous anger as well as grief when the dog is run over. But in this revival, there is no flash of humor, and in the final paragraph we read: “Maciek will not rise to dance again.” Tania may be still herself, but Maciek will always be looking for himself because the lies of his wartime fell between his sixth and his twelfth year. He will remain, beneath the surface, twisted into the shape those lies forced him to assume. Is this too much to say?

LB:
You are exactly right. That is the conclusion to which I hoped to bring the reader.

JM:
When my neighbor’s sons, now teenagers, were small, I used to hear them and their friends at play through the window of my study. What struck me—always in a happy way—was the enormous excitement and animation they brought to their games. In games, in make-believe, children are like that. Everything is a matter of utmost consequence and urgency. But children’s accounts of actual urgency, or real catastrophe, seem often to go to the opposite extreme. I have heard children in court speaking with a soft, almost affectless simplicity that was more affecting for the hearer than animation would have been. It is difficult, for example, to imagine a child bringing an indictment against God, like Goethe crying
“Mehr Licht”
on his deathbed. Do you see any connection between your decision to make Maciek your narrator for most of
Wartime Lies
and the restrained style of the work? Would you care to comment on the rhetorical range that suits this subject matter best? Where do you locate this work in the literature that the Shoah has provoked? Or do you ever think of it that way at all?

LB:
I can give a partial answer.

Clearly, the decision to have the little boy tell the story—a decision that I reached at the very outset and never put in question afterward—imposed the simplicity of the narrative style. There was also the constraint that came from my writing
Wartime Lies
in English, although everything in it was taking place in my mind in my native tongue, which is Polish.
I wanted to be somehow faithful to the strains of Polish I heard in my ear, and a certain chastity of expression was the only solution I found. You will have doubtless noticed, by the way, that I avoided direct dialogue. That was because I would not have known how to render it in English. To give you a small—but for me very important—example, I could not have borne to have the little boy address his father as “Daddy”!

You are right about the way children become almost silent when hurt or under extreme pressure. That has been, almost always, my own response.

Then there is the fact—an odd one—that when I was writing
Wartime Lies
I had in mind Madame Lafayette’s “Princesse de Clèves,” a love story set in late sixteenth-century France. The subject is clearly a world away from mine, I have only read Madame Lafayette’s masterpiece in French, and yet it is the style of that little novel, which is as pure as a diamond of the first water, that was my conscious model.

I avoid placing myself on lists of writers or my novels on lists of works by other authors. Also, I have largely avoided Shoah literature, for some of the reasons I have attributed to the “man with sad eyes” in an answer to one of your earlier questions. The most I can do is to name the authors who have written about the Holocaust I admire fervently: Tadeusz Borowski and Primo Levi.

JM:
Dante for evil, Catullus for love, and Virgil, I suppose, the third poet who presides over this work, for catastrophic defeat and noble recovery:
Sunt lacrimae rerum
. Virgil rather than Homer: Homer is for those who win their wars.

On the language question, some have seen Joseph Conrad’s style in English as mysteriously indebted to Polish. Some survivors of the Holocaust have wanted to leave their native languages behind—as have, by the way, some Germans. Some, like Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz, have gone back and forth. The subject of how and why a writer chooses to write in a second language is a large and tangled one. Perhaps English, precisely by its foreignness, enabled you to clothe memories that would have been, as it were, naked in your native language and too painful to speak aloud. Your reference to the word
daddy
is painful even to read.

I suspect, though, that among the readers most grateful for your turning this subject into fiction are those who have had comparable experiences themselves, comparable pain in speaking of how the experiences marked them, and comparable reactions to what has been made of them in others’ writings and others’ art.
Wartime Lies
has found a wide and varied international audience; but had it been written even for them alone, as a long personal letter to the members of a fraternity of pain, it would be a signal service as well as a moving literary achievement.

1. In
Wartime Lies
, the religious tension is evident from the very beginning as Maciek tells his tale. What events occur that mark the increasing tension from Maciek’s perspective?

2. The passages from the perspective of “the man with sad eyes” are meticulously placed throughout the novel. Using your “sympathy and imagination,” what links can you draw between the content of these passages and the moment in Maciek’s life they interrupt?

3. In chapter four, Maciek punches Pan Wladek in the chest. Why does he react so violently to the accusation (made most likely as a partial jest) that he has been “evil” by cheating?

4. Louis Begley mentioned that Dante could be considered “the greatest connoisseur of evil.” In what ways does Dante and his
Inferno
relate to the experiences described in
Wartime Lies?

5. Seemingly more than most young children, Maciek is somewhat obsessed with being liked. Why do you think this is? And how does this conflict with the “show” that he and Tania are constantly putting on?

6. At one point, Maciek tells us, “Tania thought she loved Reinhard, probably as much as she ever loved anybody”. Throughout the novel, how does Tania relate to men and love?

7. There are several ways in which the title,
Wartime Lies
, relates to the principal characters in the novel. What are some of those ways? And how have these lies forever changed Tania and Mayciek’s sense of ethics and morality?

8. If the world of
Wartime Lies
is one where everyone bears a burden of guilt, what guilt do Maciek, Tania, Grandfather, and Reinhard carry?

9. When Maciek must attend catechism classes, something in his perception shifts. How does Maciek feel about this experience?

10. How does
Wartime Lies
compare to other novels about the Holocaust you may have read?