Wartime Lies

by Louis Begley

  Dante’s capacity for self-pity is equally colossal, although he enjoys highest-level protection. Early on, he learns on unimpeachable authority that he is only a tourist in Inferno and does not need to come back. Just in case the reader missed it, the point is made over and over again. Yet Dante never stops complaining. He alone endures the fatigue of the monstrous journey; he is undone by the stench and stunned by the local light and noise effects; he sorrows over the prediction of his future exile.

  Pity for others who are suffering in hell is generally repressed: when Dante sees the sorcerers march backward through their valley, because their faces, twisted to look over the loins, deny them the power of seeing forward, he weeps at the vision of our image so contorted. The hem of self-pity is showing. Virgil immediately administers a tongue-lashing. Who is more wicked than he that sorrows at God’s judgment? Pity for the rich and famous, although analytically no more defensible, is apt to escape censure: witness the treatment of Brunetto Latini, Farinata and Ulysses, among others. In this manner tenderhearted anti-Semites will find infinitely more pitiful the indignities or, worse yet, financial ruin suffered by a Jewish member of the upper set than the death of some little furrier from Tarnopol who was shot and then shoved into a common grave he had helped to dig. Dante’s rejoicing when he sees the hapless Filippo Argenti drowning in mud is such that Virgil cannot contain himself. Blessed is the mother, he exclaims, that bore this virtuously indignant son.

  But poetry has its own power, and a poet’s words overcome even the hardness of his own heart. In that place mute of all light, as the two poets trudge on, setting their feet on the emptiness of sufferers that seems like real bodies, sopra lor vanità che par persona, one question reverberates louder than all others: Who piles on these travails and pains, and why does our guilt waste us so? Perché nostra colpa sì ne scipa?

  ON FRIDAY, the next morning, I was in our kitchen. It was a large, bright room, painted white, with a square table in the middle. The stove, like all kitchen stoves in Poland at that time, was a black, iron box, itself not unlike a table, fired by coal. Getting it started properly with kindling, creating zones of differing degrees of heat, and then keeping the fire going from breakfast through the day were skills cooks were proud of. Tania had asked the cook in T. to teach her before the servants were let go. Now she taught me in turn. I loved lighting the stove and preparing our coffee, which was real, not ersatz. I would set the milk on the cooler part of the plaque, so that it would not boil over; cleaning burnt milk from the iron stove top to Tania’s satisfaction was not easy. I also had a hot area, on which I made toast. My special invention, of which Tania approved, was soft-boiled eggs cooked without a timer. I discovered that the equivalent of a four-minute egg could be produced, without failure, by putting eggs into cold water, bringing the water to a boil and withdrawing the eggs immediately. Tania liked breakfast in bed. When Reinhard wasn’t there, I would get it all ready and arrange it on a tray large enough for two. We would then eat it in her bed, side by side.

  I was about to take the milk off the fire when I saw, making his way with great speed down to the kindling box beside the stove, a huge spider, suspended by the thread it was producing. It was the largest I had seen, with knobbly legs he kept folding and unfolding. I had a dish towel in my hand to grasp the milk pan, but instead I reached for the spider with it. He scurried up to get out of my way, but I was faster. I squashed him against the wall. When I took the towel away, I saw that I had made a black-and-red spot. Also, the milk had boiled over and was spreading across the stove. I quickly rescued the pan, refilled it, and was beginning to clean up when Tania came into the kitchen. She had smelled the burnt milk and asked how her chef had gotten into such trouble. Her face was fresh and pink from bed; she put her arms around me. I told her about the spider. She looked at the stain and said very quietly that it was too bad, seeing a spider on Friday was bad luck; killing the spider made bad luck certain.

  For my birthday Reinhard had given me a set for making lead soldiers. It consisted of three split iron molds—one for foot soldiers, one for cavalrymen and one for horses—a little pan with a beak for melting lead, and paints and brushes. I would set up the molds on the kitchen table, melt the lead on the stove, pour it into the molds and then quickly plunge the blocks into a pan of cold water. After a few minutes, I could open the molds, and the soldiers or horses would be ready to paint. I used the set to make soldiers from new lead and also to recast broken or worn-out men. After breakfast, I decided to cast a whole new regiment that I would paint white, as camouflage for fighting in the snow. When Reinhard arrived the next day, we would set up the battle at Stalingrad. I had so many lead soldiers now that I could field both armies; before I had used cardboard cutouts for the Russians and the English. Lead soldiers made the battlefield clearer. The field gun Reinhard had also given me worked better against them. It had a spring that pulled back and shot dry peas hard enough to knock over a whole row of soldiers.

  The weather was very beautiful that day, sunny with no autumn frost yet in the air. Tania came home from shopping and said it was a pity not to go for a walk until the evening, but we should not break rules. The nicer the day, the more people would be out who might recognize us. But she would go out alone to pass by the post office; she wanted to see if the envelope was gone. She returned perplexed: it was still there.

  On our evening walk, we went first to the post office. This time, the envelope was gone. Tania said she was puzzled by her own curiosity; of course, Hertz took the money and couldn’t be expected to leave a thank-you note. We walked longer than usual, more slowly than usual, really looking at shop windows, and not just pretending so that Tania could study the street behind us. Tania said that probably this was the period of Jewish holidays; it was odd not to know on what day they began. She asked if I remembered my grandparents’ visits to T. and how grandfather was never too tired, never too dressed up to race with me on all fours or gallop around in the garden. Neither she nor my mother nor my uncle had played with him that way. She was sorry that he had never taken me to the synagogue; in better-ordered families boys even younger than I went on the holy days and sat with the men. Now I would never get to hear the ram’s horn blown for the New Year. It was the moment in the synagogue my grandfather most looked forward to. It meant that the service was almost over, and he would be able to take off his homburg and light a cigarette. All that was lost. But she would teach me what every Jew must do when his death is near: cover his head, with only his hands if necessary, and say in a loud voice, Shema Yisrael, Adonai elocheinu, Adonai echad. Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God the Lord is one. That was a way for a Jew not to die alone, to join his death to all those that had come before and were still to come.

  The next morning we expected Reinhard around nine as usual. He always left T. early to have a full Saturday with Tania, but it was nearly eleven and he had not yet arrived. Tania said she was worried, but there was nothing to be done: telephoning from the post office was unthinkable. If Reinhard had left, grandmother would not answer. If he was still there, he must have a good reason, and the telephone might ring at an awkward moment. The only thing to do was to wait patiently. She would shop later.

  The day wore on uneasily; such a thing had never happened before. She decided we would work on our Mickiewicz. I asked to do my new favorite, a poem about the young colonel of a band of Polish fusiliers fighting against the Russians. He is mortally wounded; the soldiers carry him to a humble forester’s hut. Time has come to bid farewell to his horse, belt, saber and saddle. The priest arrives with the last sacraments; peasants crowd to see the hero laid out on a rustic couch. Suddenly, the scales fall from their eyes: this beautiful face, this breast, are not a man’s. The colonel is a Lithuanian virgin! Reciting the word “breast” in front of Tania made me blush. I did not want to think about her the way I thought about Zosia and Irena, though I could not always help it. I longed to see or, better yet, touch her breast directly, not through her blo
use, as when she wanted me to hear her heart hammer. It occurred to me that Reinhard would not come to Lwów that day. In that case, perhaps she would allow me to sleep in her bed. Then I could put my arms around her and pretend that she was the virgin hero and her breast was in my hand.

  Our lesson was interrupted by a persistent ringing of the doorbell. It could not be Reinhard; he had a key. No one, except the janitress, when she came for the garbage, rang our bell. This was not her usual hour. This was danger. Tania said: Go into your room, shut the door and stay there, I was right about Hertz from the start. I heard her steps, rapid and sharp, then the front door opening, then a loud gasp and the door slamming shut. She was crying and speaking Polish. It was not the Gestapo. I opened my door just wide enough to see and hear Hertz. He was saying Panna Taniu, Panna Taniu, this is not the time to cry, this is the time to be brave and very quick. Please trust me, you have no choice, please let me help. But Tania was crying harder and harder, then she was kneeling on the floor and hitting it with her fists, and saying, I don’t want help, I want it all to end now, take the boy away, I will give you all my money, just leave me here. Hertz kept on talking and quieting her. Slowly, I understood his story.

  There was a network of the underground, mostly Jewish, in touch with Jewish partisans in the forest. He was in some way a part of it. That was how he got news, sometimes from the forest and in this case from T. Bern and the men with whom he went to the forest had been unlucky; they had wandered about, unable to find the Jewish group they intended to join. They did make contact with Polish partisans, who wanted no part of them. Some Polish units were very anti-Semitic; they preferred to have Jewish partisans fall into the hands of the Wehrmacht. In the end, Bern and his friends did little more in the forest than hide and raid neighboring farms to get food. The peasants got tired of it and helped the Germans set a trap. When they came to the usual village a few days ago, soldiers were waiting in every hut. Several partisans, including Bern, were taken alive. The Germans must have worked on them until they talked. Anyway, at dawn this morning, the Gestapo had gone to Reinhard’s apartment. They broke the door, but he was too fast for them. By the time they found him, he had already shot the old lady and then, right before them, sat down next to her on the bed and blew the top off his own head. A Polish policeman who was with them transmitted the story. So there was no immediate danger for Panna Tania and the boy; no one who knew how to find Panna Tania was left alive in T.

  All the same, Hertz thought we should leave the apartment the next day at the latest. The Gestapo might find clues when they looked in Reinhard’s papers. It was also better, for the same reason, to get new Aryan papers with different names and leave for Warsaw. One could disappear in Warsaw better than in Lwów. He asked to see our papers. They were not bad, he concluded, but if Tania could pay he would get something really excellent, real papers and not forgeries, for a mother and son. In his judgment it was a mistake for Tania to present herself as my aunt. The idea of a young aunt living alone with a nine-year-old nephew could only arouse suspicion. Was she not a Jewess who had been unable to get papers for a mother and son and invented the aunt story? It was better to be a widow with a child or, best of all, someone whose husband retreated east with the Polish army and was now either dead or in a Russian prison camp for officers. That story was good for use with Poles and Germans. It was more complicated than saying her husband was in a prison camp in Germany, but a husband in a German camp could lead to problems with the German police.

  Tania had become extremely calm. She took Hertz’s hand and kissed it; she said she had to thank him for more than he realized. We would do exactly as he advised, except that she wanted to leave the apartment that very day. The janitress was never there on Saturday afternoons. She and I would slip out with a small suitcase each. Did Hertz know where we could find a temporary place to stay? It turned out he did; there were furnished apartments, very small, in a building that was not very pleasant. They were usually rented to ladies of a special sort. Tania should say to the landlady that she had been given the address at the railroad station buffet. We had just arrived from Sambor; we were on our way to Cracow, but I had a fever, probably the beginning of measles, and she decided to interrupt the journey until the disease declared itself or the fever fell. That would give her a pretext to remain as long as necessary. With this landlady we might as well use the papers we had. But if Tania would meet him the following week at the post office, he hoped to be able to give her the new ones. He thought it was better that he not come to see us. If she was a stranger in Lwów with a sick child, why would she be receiving a visit?

  The house we went to on Hertz’s advice resembled the one we had lived in with Pan and Pani Kramer in T. It had similar interior balconies, linked by straight stairs, and a wide gateway leading from the street to the yard. There was a well with a pump in the courtyard, but it was a remnant of older times; here, we had running water in the rooms. The apartment the landlady was willing to rent to Tania was off the first balcony, reached directly from the courtyard. It consisted of a kitchen, a little living room with artificial flowers on a table in the corner and a bedroom with a large bed. The toilet flushed, and for bathing there was a brown zinc tub in the kitchen that one could fill with hot water. The windows all gave on the balcony; the entrance was through the kitchen.

  Tania had brought some bread and ham for our supper, and soap and coffee. We sat down to eat; it was our first meal since the morning. I was very hungry. When we finished, Tania said that we would go to Warsaw soon and find grandfather. Perhaps we could live with him, but we shouldn’t count on it. She and I had to get used to the idea that we were quite alone: Tania and Maciek against the world. This was not an easy lesson to learn, but probably the world would beat it into our heads. Then she said that was enough philosophy for one Saturday evening; the two musketeers needed some rest. She opened the bed. The sheets had been washed; we would not worry about what was underneath.

  That was our introduction to bedbugs. Tania felt them first. Suddenly, she sat up in bed and said that something strange was happening; she was itching all over. As soon as she turned on the light, we saw them: oblong red dots scurrying from the sheet to the recess between the bed and the headboard. Other red dots were rushing along the wall, some up to crawl behind the frame of the picture of a stag and dogs, some down to the floorboards. We knew all about fleas. They were omnipresent in Poland; when my father came home from the hospital ward or calls to certain patients, he would undress completely in the examination room and give his clothes to the chambermaid. She would beat them, right outside the kitchen, with the same bat that was used at monthly intervals for whacking away at carpets until not a mote of dust could be seen to rise. That was the best way to get fleas out of clothes that couldn’t be washed, short of catching them with one’s fingers. But it took Tania a while to identify and name these insects that bit but didn’t jump. Since they seemed to dislike the light, we decided to sleep with the light on. Tania said this was just a comical reminder: we were reaching the lower depths. If the Germans didn’t get us, lice would be next.

  THE papers were not ready the following week or the next. The season changed while we waited in that house, among its strange tenants and their furtive visitors. Tania went out as little as possible, to buy food, to meet Hertz and give him money while she accepted his excuses, trying not to be noticed, afraid of leaving me alone. I did not leave the apartment at all. At last, Hertz delivered our new papers. Although so much time had passed, once again he advised Tania to leave the city; he thought it was impossible that the Gestapo would let a matter of this sort drop; if somehow they found out about her, eventually they would look in Lwów. They surely knew that Reinhard spent Saturdays and Sundays there. Hertz also brought her a gift, two vials of cyanide. He said it was good to have it. In case of need, one just bit through the glass, which was thin, and left the Germans and all other troubles behind.

  Our departure was now a matter of precis
e timing and preparations. Tania wrote a short and vague letter to my grandfather, telling him to expect us soon, saying nothing of what had happened. The photograph of the woman in Tania’s new papers looked sufficiently like her, except that it showed very short, wavy hair. Tania went to a hairdresser and had her hair cut and curled. She bought a black coat for herself and a gray coat and cap for me. She worried about how to transport our money and grandmother’s jewelry. Hertz told her to be very careful. There were so many black-market operators on trains that Polish police and even the Feldgendarmerie frequently went through passengers’ handbags and luggage. She decided she would tape the jewelry to my stomach and chest and the bank notes and gold coins to herself. We practiced doing it so that it was all smooth and would not be noticed if we were only frisked. The jewelry had to be wrapped in cotton anyway; otherwise it would dig into my skin. In the new papers, my name was no longer Maciek, and Tania was no longer Tania; I was to be called Janek. Making sure we used the new names without fail would also require practice.

  We were ready; there was nothing more that Tania or Hertz thought we should do. Hertz offered to get our tickets and give them to Tania at the entrance to the platform. That cut down the time we would need to spend at the station. At his suggestion, we were going to take the night train; Hertz said even the Gestapo had to sleep. There was nothing left to do except wait for the afternoon to end. Tania and I sat in the kitchen, in the bleary March light, and played twenty-one for matches. Suddenly Tania stood up, drew in her breath, and pointed out the window to the stairs. Walking up were two Gestapo men in uniform and a third man in a belted civilian coat but wearing black britches and high black boots like the others. Tania put her fingers to her lips and in a whisper told me to hurry to the bedroom, leave the door open, and hide behind the door. I was to listen carefully. If they were taking her away or if they were going toward the bedroom and she shrieked, I should immediately take the cyanide. Keep it in your hand, she said, and keep your hand in your pants pocket.