The Children's War

by Stroyar, J. N.

  “Are you all right?” Herr Reusch asked suddenly, concerned by his silence.

  “Getting better by the minute,” he whispered, looking back to earth and wincing at his momentary blindness.

  “Somewhere in these papers . . .” Herr Reusch stopped.

  He looked at Herr Reusch expectantly.

  “I’m sure that . . .” Again Herr Reusch stopped, apparently embarrassed, then with a sudden resolve, he blurted out, “You, um, you have a name. Don’t you?”

  He stared at the old man, this man who apparently now owned him. His name. His name? His lips moved but no sound emerged. He heard a number being shouted out, he heard Allison whisper something, he heard his father’s voice, but none of those were right.

  “Your name?” Herr Reusch repeated. “Certainly you don’t want me to use this stupid number, do you?”

  It was an invitation to rejoin the world, but what was the answer? What was it? He sifted through his memories, through aliases and legends, and with an effort focused on one. That was it, the one written on his papers the day of his arrest. “Peter,” he said quietly, fascinated by the sound.

  “Peter?” Herr Reusch repeated, overemphasizing the English vowels.

  Peter nodded. “Yes, Peter.”

  “Good. Let’s use that, then. Is that okay?”

  “As you wish, mein Herr,” he heard himself reply. He was adrift in a sea of confusion. Too many things were going on in his mind: thoughts, memories, perceptions he had not had for . . . How long? An eternity. “Could you tell me just one thing, mein Herr?”

  Herr Reusch nodded agreeably.

  “What’s the date?”

  “March.” Herr Reusch sounded momentarily confused as he summoned up the exact date. “The twelfth of March. Why, did you forget?”

  “Yes,” he answered distractedly, “yes, I forgot.”

  That afternoon, he was registered with the local police and the district police. He watched with detached fascination as his old wristband was removed and another indicating his new status was affixed to his arm. He noticed that, though his number and Reusch’s name was on the band, his own name was not. He was also issued identification papers, which duplicated the information on the band but included his photograph and the details of his current life.

  After that, Herr Reusch introduced him to his new home. Everything he had gone through left him thoroughly unprepared for the Reusch household. They did, indeed, simply need someone to help out. Herr Reusch ran a small shop near a huge housing complex, and he needed someone to mind the store while he took care of the accounts or other business. Peter’s job consisted of servingthe customers by helping them locate items, stocking the shelves, unloading and unpacking deliveries, taking inventory, and even occasionally using the cash register. At night he slept in a back room of the shop and served as a guard against crime, which, of course, did not officially exist. He found it strange that Herr Reusch could trust him in such a capacity and even stranger that he wanted to be worthy of that trust.

  The shop was in an ugly, squat building constructed of gray cinder blocks; it had a flat gravel roof and tiny, useless windows along the sides. A huge window at the front of the shop was permanently darkened by posters, banners, displays, and the inescapable red-and-black flags. Around the shop loomed giant residential towers, blocking out most of the sun. The estate seemed to stretch endlessly with identical towers scattered at odd angles in some absurd attempt at Gemütlichkeit, the monstrous forms interrupted only by the shop, an elementary school, a bakery, and a few service buildings. The surrounding grounds were landscaped with packed mud, weeds, and a few hardy patches of unmown grass. Nearby was a highway, and a sheet-metal bus stop seemingly provided the only contact with the outside world.

  Despite their frightful ugliness, the apartments were in fairly good shape, and he was not too surprised to learn that their residents were considered to be rather well-off. Most tenants had apartments with two bedrooms, so the living room did not have to convert into a bedroom, and some even owned cars, which were kept in a storage parking lot on the other side of the complex awaiting the rare days their owners had enough petrol ration coupons to take them out for a drive.

  There was a bakery on the far side, but other than that, the shop was the only one in the complex and was consequently constantly busy. Herr Reusch even, occasionally, kept it open after normal shop-closing hours in order to provide his customers with essentials. This bit of illegal courtesy made him well-beloved and respected, and because he treated his worker with respect, his customers followed suit and did likewise.

  In the back room of the shop, Frau Reusch had prepared a private space for Peter with basic furnishings, and after expressing surprise at the paucity of his worldly goods, she immediately set about providing him with various personal possessions. He ate his breakfast alone in the shop, but was usually invited up to the Reusch apartment for dinner and was provided with a nicely packed supper by Frau Reusch before he returned to the store to reopen for the afternoon. She also provided him with books and magazines to keep him amused during his off hours and placed a small television in his room so that he could watch that as well.

  The shop could only be locked with a key from the outside, and so initially, when Herr Reusch had closed for the evening, Peter had effectively been locked inside. This apparently did not seem strange to Herr Reusch, and Peter hesitated to mention how disconcerting it was. Within days, he solved the problem forhimself by disabling the alarm and the lock on the emergency exit and using that to come and go freely in the evening. In his spare time, he wandered about the housing estate and even enjoyed the tiny duck pond he found near its edge. He had no reason to leave the estate—it was essentially surrounded on three sides by industry and on the fourth by a highway—so the legal hindrances to his movements off the estate did not really impinge on his sense of freedom. Also, the local patrols knew him, and although they occasionally issued the usual dire threats about walking around without a pass or a purpose, they generally left him alone. He strolled along the residential paths, watched the children playing near the school, chatted to the customers in the shop, and conversed at length with the Reusches, Frau Reusch in particular.

  She was a remarkable woman, intelligent, well-read, and full of fascinating stories and insights. She had a wonderful collection of books, even some prewar tomes in English, and she let him borrow them and gave several to him as gifts. After he had worked his way through her personal library, she began to take books out of the town library for him to read. Their discussions ranged over a wide variety of topics from ancient history to personal anecdotes; they only avoided politics, recent history, and the exact details of his past. Over time, their friendship developed further and they began to confide more and more in each other.

  “You know, there’s no one here I feel really comfortable talking to,” she said one day, waving her hand around her to indicate the residents of the apartment block. “You never know when someone has an ax to grind or something. You just can’t trust anyone.”

  He nodded. It was a familiar theme, and he knew she was simply working up the courage to tell him something. He did not press; she would tell him if and when she felt ready.

  She pulled out her cigarette case and offered him one. He accepted it, but put it in his pocket, saving it for later or as barter material.

  Frau Reusch removed one for herself, lit it, and sat silently smoking for a moment.

  “Peter”—she dropped her voice—“I never did tell you about my son.”

  “No, you never did. What was his name?”

  “Ernst. Just like his father. Maybe it was a bit silly of us, but we really wanted him to feel as though he belonged with us.”

  “Was there any doubt?”

  She set down her cigarette and sipped her tea. Suddenly, as if she had only just noticed it, she waved at the television and snapped, “Would you turn that damn thing off!”

  He went over to the set and found the
off switch; it was the first time he had been in the apartment while the television was off, and he found it extraordinarily quiet. She continued to sip her tea as he sat back down.

  Another moment passed; she glanced at the mantel clock. It ticked loudly—the only noise in the room. “We couldn’t have children. There is so much pressure to have children and we couldn’t produce even one! You can imagine what that is like.”

  Actually in England it had been rather the reverse situation. When young couples generally set up house in a parents’ living room, it was not surprising that few thought about large broods of children. Life was so unpleasant and the future so bleak that most families were hard-pressed to want to produce even one child, and the paperwork needed for a birth permit was both cumbersome and expensive. It was debated whether there was a deliberate government policy to discourage the birth of English children, but whether or not there was, that was the overall effect. The English birthrate, already rather low, had fallen dramatically after the hostilities ceased and continued to decline, for in the long run, economic hardship won out over patriotic fervor. But these things did not seem appropriate to Frau Reusch’s story, so he simply nodded.

  “So, we adopted a child. That is not all that easy, I’ll have you know, but Ernst was a veteran, decorated at that, and we had some friends in high places, and eventually a child was found for us. He was wonderful! He had the blondest hair and the most beautiful blue eyes. But that wasn’t why we loved him.” She paused, wrapped in memories.

  “He came to us when he was two or so. A scared little boy; some terrible accident had taken his parents, or so we were told. He soon learned to call us Mom and Dad, and to answer to Ernst, and to treat this place as his home. He had a wonderful personality. So kind. So loving.

  “The trouble started later, when he was about sixteen. Long before then, I began to have my doubts about where he had come from. After he first arrived, he had nightmares and would scream, ‘Don’t go, don’t go!’ and sometimes he asked us if we were going to go, or if we were going to be taken away.

  “At first I tried to believe it was simply confusion on his part. That going meant ‘dying’ or something like that. But then I also heard stories, whispered tales, about how some children were stolen from their parents. Even so, I thought, if his parents were arrested or guilty of some crime, perhaps it was better for a little boy to be raised by a good family, people who would take care of him, people who would provide him with opportunities, people who would care about him.

  “I figured, if the official story wasn’t true—and I had, have, no idea whether or not it is—well, if it wasn’t true, then perhaps I had saved him from some terrible life with drug addicts or criminals.”

  The words had come out in a rush, but suddenly she stopped and stared absently out the window. Her fingers brushed against her lips as though trying to coax words from them. Peter waited silently, remembering a quote from Himmler he had once read: We must not endow these people with decent German thoughts and logical conclusions of which they are not capable, but we must take them as they really are . . . I think it is our duty to take their children with us. . . . We either win over the good blood we can use for ourselves . . . or else we destroy that blood.

  Frau Reusch picked her cigarette back up, smoked silently for a moment, then stubbed it out with single-minded intensity. When she was satisfied that every spark had been extinguished, she spoke.

  “So I left it at that. Eventually, it was necessary to tell him that he had been adopted. I didn’t want him to find out accidentally, some other way. You know people, they do talk! So, when he was fifteen, I told him. At first there wasn’t any problem. He said that we were his parents and that was that. But a year later, he began to ask questions. He wanted to know more about his birth parents. Where did he come from? What had happened to them? What had they named him?

  “Well, although I had no official information, I was able to answer one question. Maybe I shouldn’t have. But I did. I told him that he used to answer, when asked, that his name was Jan, and that he used to say some words that I simply did not recognize. I don’t know, they could have been anything. You know how hard it is to understand children, and at the time I didn’t want to hear anything other than German. I know Jan is a Dutch name, and I think it is Czech or Polish as well. But I wanted him to be like us, so I told myself that he was German and his name had been Johann. I even thought we should use that name, but Ernst argued that it would confuse the boy to be renamed yet again.”

  She sighed, refilled the teacups, and offered him more cake.

  “Did he hear the same rumors that you had, about adopted children?” Peter inquired gently.

  “Oh, yes, and more. He heard that sometimes children were simply taken for no reason at all. That they were taken from perfectly good, perfectly loving families. He heard that villages were sometimes destroyed in retaliation for terrorist acts, that the adults were sent to their deaths in concentration camps, and that the children, especially the ones with Aryan features, were given to good German families for adoption.

  “I don’t know where he got such stories, maybe from some cleaning lady at school—those Slavs, they will tell such tales! But I couldn’t tell him whether or not they were true.” She turned away from him to look out the window and began to sob. “God knows, I had no intention of stealing somebody’s baby!”

  No, he thought, but you did accept a nameless child without a history, and you carefully avoided asking the right questions.

  She seemed to sense his unease. “You must think I’m a monster. But honestly, at the time, I had never heard of such a thing. I never suspected! I still don’t know for sure. All I knew at the time was I wanted a child, and there was a little boy who needed me.”

  She looked at him, her eyes begging him for forgiveness. “We were good to him, we loved him. We really did.”

  “I know you did. You did what you thought was right—you can’t ask morethan that of yourself,” he said, trying to console her, but his words felt empty. It wasn’t his place to offer forgiveness.

  “Well, Ernst, our son, wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to know for sure. Of course, there was no hope of an official response. He tried and tried. We tried to help. Pulled strings, asked friends. Eventually it was clear that we were annoying people and that if we kept pressing for information, there could be trouble. So we tried to talk him out of finding out anything, but he became obsessed.”

  “A past is a precious thing,” Peter offered obscurely.

  Frau Reusch studied him for a moment, a question on her lips, but then she decided better of it and continued with her story. “It occupied all his free time. He took trips, tried to track sources, tried to find any scrap of information. Eventually—he was twenty already, my how the time went by—eventually, he tried to break into a registry office. He was shot dead as an intruder.”

  Frau Reusch stopped, a hard look in her eyes. “I sometimes wonder . . .”

  He did not get to find out what she was wondering, for at that moment Herr Reusch returned from his after-dinner stroll and they returned to the shop to reopen it for the afternoon. He thought about Frau Reusch and her son throughout the afternoon, but he could not conceive of any consolation he could offer her nor could he work out the implications of her revelations for himself. No wonder they were so unusually kind to him, he was taking the dead boy’s place! It should have made him feel more secure, but instead he felt uneasy. He knew intuitively that their loyalty to him was a figment of their needs and that they would abandon him to his fate as soon as he became a liability. The question that remained unanswered was, Did that really matter?

  14

  “PUSH!”ADAMNEARLY SCREAMED in her ear. “Push!”

  “I have an idea,” Zosia said dryly between gasps.“How about one of you people-push for a little while and I’ll just take a break?”

  No one laughed. They all seemed so serious! Here she was, the one who was in pain, sweating, gaspi
ng, and groaning; straining with all her might to push that little head out of her body, and they were so serious they could not even laugh at her little joke. She felt like berating them, but then she felt another wave of pain and someone stupidly yelled in her ear to push again.

  She tried again to no avail, then she heard Marysia whisper soothingly in her ear that she should simply rest for a few moments. “Gather your strength and ignore the contractions,” she said softly.

  Zosia looked up into her mother-in-law’s round, dark eyes, looked at the lines on her face and the silver sprinkled throughout her black hair, and she feltcomforted. If Adam’s mother said everything was okay, then it was all okay. Her own mother flapped her arms in a near frenzy in the background. Judging from her nervous antics, one would never guess that she herself had borne six children, but that was typical of Anna—if it had anything to do with her children, she fretted extravagantly, perhaps making up for her husband’s famed British reserve.

  Zosia turned her thoughts to her father and wondered if his dispassion was genuine or a calculated exhibition of his determinedly English character. “Anything to stay above the fray,” her father would say, as if simply existing among so many “foreigners” was an accomplishment he could be congratulated for or as if emotion were something that could be caught from them, like a disease.

  “Okay, now,” counseled Marysia.

  Zosia threw her will into pushing, and slowly the recalcitrant head of her child emerged. She felt the sudden easing of pressure, telling her that she had succeeded, and she gasped for breath.

  “Marvelous!” Adam praised. “You’re doing great!”

  Adam held Zosia up and she peeked at the head nestled between her legs.

  “The rest will be easy,” Marysia assured her, and indeed it was.

  Only a moment later, Adam held their daughter while Marysia gently washed away the birth debris and cut the cord. The little girl squeaked and gasped and finally wheezed her way into a full-bodied cry. As Marysia cleaned the child, Adam regarded her adoringly and Anna fussed over her, stroking her hands and touching her feet. No one seemed to notice that Zosia lay exhausted on her pillow regarding the four of them as though from a distance.