Wartime Lies

by Louis Begley

  AND so Tania went as usual to see Komar and sell their bimber. I took the cows to the pasture. A headache came upon me that kept on throbbing, and although it was again very cold and felt like snow, I was hot and sweating and had to keep unbuttoning my layers of coats to let the air cool my skin. In the evening, Tania felt my head and said I had a big fever. She said my eyes were strange and she could hear a noise in my chest she didn’t like. At once she told Kulowa I would have to stay in the house under the feather bed until she was sure I was well; she would pay for having Stefa take out the cows. My fever didn’t go down, although Tania made me take aspirin she brought from W., and I remained on my mattress till I lost count of the days, the kitchen turning around me, Kulowa giving me water while I sweated and shook. Tania was sharp with Kula when she came home in the evenings; then she would give him bimber and even vodka to make up.

  One night she got drunk with him and Tadek; through my headache, I heard them singing and banging on the table with their glasses to keep time. I kept having strange half dreams; Tania told me it was the fever, she was sure I had pneumonia. There was nothing to do but keep quiet and very warm. On Christmas day, Nowak came with another scarf for Tania and lemon hard candy for me. He was calling her now by her first name only; perhaps saying Pani was too much trouble. The whole family was in the kitchen, eating the ham Kula had kept for the holiday. The smell made me sick. All at once, I heard Tania shouting at Nowak that he must never again touch her arm, never again forget his place, the war was ending and so was her acquaintance with louts like him.

  A few days later I was still weak and dizzy but no longer felt hot. Tania came back to the house after the evening meal; she said she had eaten with Komar. When she lay down beside me, she said she did a terrible thing when she insulted Nowak. Komar had just explained to her how Nowak was going to get his revenge. Apparently, Nowak was convinced we were Jews. He had already told the Polish police in W.; it wasn’t a question of money because the Polish police didn’t want to have anything to do with Jews anymore. Instead they gave the information to the Germans. The Gestapo would come to get us. When she protested to Komar that we weren’t Jews at all and that she could show him our papers, Komar asked her not to be stupid, it was all the same to him: he would help us because she was his friend. He would come with his cart and two horses while it was still dark and drive us to the train in Rawa. She trusted him; he even settled his accounts with her. In a moment, she would wake up Kulowa and tell her we were going. She would say there was such a rasping in my lungs that she had to take me to the city to a doctor, even if it meant traveling in this terrible cold.

  VII

  WE WERE in Kielce, where the first train we were able to board in Rawa had taken us. The front was approaching. The drumming of the artillery never stopped; Tania said the Russians were only twenty kilometers away. My fever had returned and with it the headache. Tania and everything else around me seemed uncertain and shifting, like pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope, every turn of which brought a new hurt. A doctor came, listened to my lungs, and said the pneumonia was over. Now I had pleurisy; it would probably pass. I should take more aspirin. He was able to sell Tania some.

  Once again, we were living in a rented room, in the apartment of a woman who took lodgers. Once again, Tania had found her through the buffet in the station. The apartment was long and brown, our room was brown and greasy; the overhead lamp, useless because there was no electricity, swayed with each wave of shelling. Sometimes a little plaster fell.

  In bed Tania lay by my side all dressed. I could not bear to have her under the quilt next to me. I was too hot. We both slept very deeply for short periods. Then I would begin my horrible coughing, and if she did not wake up, I would shake her and ask for milk. But there was no milk left in Kielce. Instead, Tania would heat water with sugar on the little Primus stove and try to get me to drink it, always with more aspirin.

  I thought that the bed and my body had grown extraordinarily long. To cool myself, I would stretch my legs on top of the quilt. Far away were my feet. Between the toes I could discern dark bushes crawling with life. Tania put cold, wet cloths on my head. She said these things were as unreal as my old giant; the Russians were before Kielce, in a few days I would be in a clean bed of my own in a large sunny room; she would give me oranges and chocolates. When I wasn’t coughing too much, Tania sang to me. There was an old song: Maciek is dead, laid out on a board, but if the music plays he will dance some more…. What a polite boy he was…. What a pity he couldn’t live forever….

  Bombs and artillery shells began to fall on Kielce. They were louder than anything we remembered from Warsaw. Late one afternoon, the glass in our windows shattered, and a furious wind began to blow through the room. The landlady came to say everyone was going to the cellar. She did not think we should remain in the room; I could go down wrapped in a feather bed. The cellar would not be colder than the room without windowpanes.

  It was like the cellar in Warsaw, only colder and even wetter. A naphtha lamp lit the space and the people inside it, some sitting on crates, some on chairs they brought from their apartments. They all seemed to talk in whispers. The explosions were very near now. There was also the noise of rifles and machine guns. Some of the men went out to look. They said there were soldiers running and shooting at one another in the street; a tank was stopped at the corner, its cannon firing shell after shell. Was it German or Russian? Tania had a bottle of water. She gave me little sips from it. I fell asleep in her lap. An enormous explosion awakened me. The cellar was now full of dust, a part of the ceiling had collapsed, someone was shining a flashlight at the cracks spreading from the hole. The house had been hit. Then there was another, stronger bang and cries for help. The door to the cellar had disappeared in a torrent of crumbling bricks. We were buried. The old woman who had cried out was being helped out from under the stones. Her head and legs were bleeding. Tania stood up and said loud enough to be heard over the din that everybody should try to keep calm, she knew how to clean and bandage wounds. When she finished, and the old woman was just whimpering quietly, somebody asked, Why doesn’t this Pani lead us in prayer? So Tania began to sing. She sang the most holy of Polish hymns to the Virgin. We all sang with her, begging the Mother of God to bring us a time of goodness.

  Late the next day, the guns fell silent. There were some shovels in the cellar. The men dug a passage to the outside. We climbed out into a street where other figures like us were moving about: gray human-sized insects. It was snowing. We learned we were in a no-man’s-land. The Russians had overrun Kielce, then the Germans had pushed them back, and now the Germans were gone or were lying low, but the Russians had not returned. It would all begin again. Tania and I followed some others from our cellar. They were looking for shelter in a building two or three stories high that had not been hit and where they would know somebody. Finally, they found such a place. After much beating on the gate, it was opened. Those inside recognized the people we were with and agreed to let us come into their cellar. They said that the entrance was barricaded against the Russians; when Russians attacked, drunk Tartar battalions were always in the first wave, sent on purpose to kill, torture and rape. We would regret the Germans.

  I still had my quilt with me. We settled down on it near a wall. Tania asked for some water. We were handed a bucket; she filled her bottle and began to wash my face. Then, in this dimly lit place, a familiar, kind voice was speaking to us, insistently, calling Tania and me by name. I recognized before us the portly figure of Pani Dumont, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, a little disheveled, but otherwise unmistakably herself. The cellar was in her family’s building; her Belgian passport had saved her in Warsaw from the deportation train; she had managed to get to Kielce. When she had finished kissing Tania and me and we had hugged her to her heart’s content, the necessary introductions were performed. Then she fed us, and I finally went to sleep. Hours of bombardment and gunfire followed, the cellar trembled, and once again o
utside there was silence. Some men went out to reconnoiter: the Russians were everywhere in Kielce; they seemed to be ordinary troops; there were no Asiatic faces in sight.

  Pani Dumont, Tania and I came out of the cellar into a blinding January morning. It was no longer snowing. In the street, there were Russian army trucks and armored cars. Soldiers in felt boots lounging near them waved at us cheerfully, offering bread and big lumps of sugar. Pani Dumont was weeping, she said from happiness. All that time in Warsaw she had prayed for us and for Pan Władek, and with God’s help, now she knew that at least Tania and I were saved.

  VIII

  Raz dwa, raz dwa, one two, one two, turn right, turn left, cross hands with your partner, head high, all wheel, Maciek is dancing the krakowiak. He is wearing brown tweed knickers and brown argyle socks, his matching tweed coat has a little belt on the back, in the best postwar fashion. It’s all a bit too new and uncomfortable. The tummy has grown bigger and rounder again: with the oranges and the chocolates came sardines and goose-liver sausage and babka, the tastiest of Polish cakes—for one pound of flour, one pound of butter. His hands are crossed in the most correct position. They hold the deliciously moist hands of a pink-faced doll with flaxen pigtails, straight from the Cracow gimnazjum for girls. The beat is steady, the dancing teacher easy to follow, the accordion first-class.

  And is Maciek’s name again Maciek? Has the unmentionable Jewish family name been resumed? Certainly not; the visor was not lifted in Kielce; it will not be lifted in Cracow. Maciek has new Aryan papers and a new Polish surname with not a whiff of the Jew in it. Believe me, it is just as well. Tania and he had barely arrived in Cracow, with the plaster of Kielce cellars still in their lungs, the war just ended, when their new neighbors set about holding a pogrom, the first in liberated Poland. Not the old-fashioned kind, to be sure, with aged Jews in black caftans and round hats running around on all fours, youngsters astride their backs, giddy-up horse; you can’t find Hasidic Jews anymore. The behavior of our police was first-class: absolutely neutral, hands-off, yet how their fingers must have itched on the truncheon handles! Later in that week some Jews in Polish army uniforms, you wouldn’t call them soldiers, pushed and pummeled our boys—pure provocation—on the pretext our Polish boys had beat up Jews rocking and praying at their synagogue. Naturally there was a scuffle, and one or two Jews were sent to rest with Abraham still wearing their shawls. The next day every żydłak, every yid in Cracow was in the street parading with a huge sign; utterly shameless. Just like before the war—what do they care if they embarrass the Nation at a time when it needs all the help it can get from the West? Hitler didn’t teach them a thing. As for extermination, the Germans could no more get that job done than win the war. They had to leave it to us Poles to clean out the country, as though we had not suffered enough. For instance in Kielce, when the good people there, right behind Pani Dumont’s back, finally organized a pogrom—one year after the war ended—they still found more than forty Jews to kill! Can you imagine it?

  Tania and Maciek have learned their lesson and do not march to protest pogroms. They have their new names and new lies, except that Tania has gone back to being a maiden aunt. Are these lies still useful? Is anyone taken in? You would not think so. After all, it’s true, there are Jews all over Cracow, crawling out from every hole. The worst are the ones just back from Russia, arrived with Russian troops, like lice on their uniforms, only they are again Pan Doctor this and Pan Engineer that, living in the same fancy apartments as before. Other Jews spent the war in comfort too, right among us, eating our food, usurping good Polish names, putting their neighbors in danger, because, of course, we all knew; one could tell those Jews at a glance even if they called themselves Sobieski. And please, how many of them did we keep in a back room for just a pittance, with them always complaining they had nothing left, as if money mattered when you turn into black smoke going up the chimney?

  Yes, there are Jews in Cracow again, besides the ones who have returned from Russia: a few like Tania and Maciek who bought their life with a lie and a few who paid to be hidden and were not sold. Some of them have gone back to being called Rosenduft and Rozensztajn and think no one cares. But Tania and Maciek know better: Pan Twardowski and Pani Babińska care very much. These half-forgotten ghosts, with odious names and a look about them that’s not quite right, the time will come again and again to put them in their place, even if some people never seem to get it in their heads that they are not wanted. So, the wise Jew’s name still ends in “ski” or something like it, even if he isn’t fooling anyone who is truly sensitive. Perhaps the ladies with whom Tania has coffee and napoleon pastries in the afternoon are not precisely of Sarmatian stock, but the way they live and their names present a better appearance. They try not to offend.

  Maciek’s father has returned. He too has a new name, one that fits Maciek’s, and lies to go with it; he is learning fast. He has brought home a mistress: this buxom obstetrician, deported from Łódź by the Russians, beguiled his cares in Siberia. He will marry her soon; Maciek is lucky: he will have two mothers. Pani Doctor Olga has a man’s sincere grip when she takes one’s hand to shake it up and down. According to Tania, it’s just as well: Can you imagine her hand being kissed?

  The grandparents’ apartment has been requisitioned by the new political police; Tania says it’s like the refrain of a song; in T. the Gestapo, in Cracow the Bezpieka. A different large apartment with no memories is offered in compensation: the police know who is who. Maciek has his own bedroom again and so does Tania. Pan Doctor and Pani Doctor share the third. Maciek’s father attempts an embarrassed explanation; he is offended by Maciek’s response. He tells Maciek stories about the Urals and Siberia; Maciek cannot answer questions about the war, however gently his father probes.

  Maciek is attending a gimnazjum. He has his first real friend. The friend’s name is amusing: Kościelny, which in Polish means “sacristan.” Together, they serve at Mass, for Maciek is at the head of the religion class and Kościelny is the boy the priest likes the most. Mass is at seven in the morning. Kościelny wants to look after Maciek; he waits for Maciek in front of Maciek’s apartment building, since Tania doesn’t want him to come upstairs so early and Tania still rules over the household. They walk to church very fast in the morning mist, swinging their leather schoolbags. Picking Maciek up, Kościelny says, is the only way to make sure Maciek will be on time. He doesn’t know that Maciek has a will of steel and is always on time and that it just suits him to make Kościelny run halfway across Cracow and stand in the street in the cold. They dress the priest, help him with the holy vessels, swing the censer, ring the bell at the elevation, and wash up afterward. Kościelny’s heart yearns for the sacrament; they take Communion. Maciek knows he is again behaving despicably—it is always like the first time in Warsaw—but what is he to do? He cares for Kościelny and needs him and he cannot and will not reveal himself. If Kościelny learns that Maciek is a Jew, he will despise him, especially after the sacrilege, although Maciek is always first in every subject. Yes, Maciek’s penis is still his old penis, different from the others, but he has learned that one can avoid urinating in public places or otherwise displaying that telltale member.

  Meanwhile, Kościelny cares for him too. Kościelny is tall and very strong. He has tiny ears, deep-set eyes and a small, straight nose with paper-thin nostrils. His father is an assistant railroad station chief, just like Zosia’s. Tania teases Maciek about that. Maciek doesn’t know how to play games during recreation, but Kościelny excels at them all and picks Maciek for his team. Then it does not matter that Maciek cannot catch the ball or throw it hard or gets winded when he runs. Kościelny is always there and makes it all right. But Maciek declines nouns and conjugates verbs from memory and by instinct, because he knows how they must change, and parses sentences at a glance; these things must be taught to Kościelny with infinite patience, and Maciek teaches him. They take long walks in the park. Kościelny is as chaste as he is strong; when the
y talk about their bodies, Maciek lies. Kościelny wouldn’t understand the truth.

  Maciek has a dog. It’s a German shepherd that his father obtained from the police school. The dog is barely an adult, perhaps a year old. Maciek thinks they sold the dog to his father because the dog is too stupid for police work. Maciek names him Bari, for one of the stations their new radio is supposed to catch but cannot, because Italy is too far away. Does the dog know that Maciek is afraid of him? They go to the park every afternoon when Maciek returns from the gimnazjum. It’s late November; the park is empty. Maciek lets the dog run; if he gets enough exercise, he will not be bad tempered. The dog knows how to come to heel when Maciek whistles. One afternoon, the dog heels, but instead of wagging his tail and jumping to put his paws on Maciek’s chest to be petted, he is coiled like a spring and growling. His ears are laid back; he bares his teeth. Maciek thinks that when the dog leaps he will go for his throat. Fortunately, the leash he is holding in his hand is very heavy. When the dog does leap, Maciek hits him hard, in the face. They continue, leap and parry, for what seems a long time. The dog becomes calmer. Maciek turns his back on the dog and slowly walks away. The dog follows; Maciek hears him in the rustling of dry leaves. He whistles. The dog obeys, and Maciek forces himself to put him on the leash.

  Some months later, the dog is hit by a car, directly in front of Maciek’s apartment building. An august personage of the new regime lives in the building and there is always an armed guard inside the entrance gate. Maciek is chatting with the guard, who is his friend. They see that the dog is dead. Maciek pleads with the guard to shoot the driver. Tania will later tell her friends at the café the story of Maciek’s grief and broken heart, that if he could have taken the rifle from the guard anything might have happened. The truth is Maciek is glad the animal is dead. He tells Kościelny that truth. He takes the risk that they will stop being friends.