Wartime Lies

by Louis Begley

  Tania’s most extended, elaborate dissimulation involves sex; Maciek’s involves religion. She has a German lover; he is about to make his First Communion as a supposed Catholic. Absent all duress, Tania and Reinhard would almost certainly not be a couple, and Maciek would not be taking instruction from Father P. Are they deceiving others or deceiving themselves?

  LB: Perhaps I should go back to your question about the grandmother and Bern. At the top of the very next page Maciek relates how Tania responded to the grandmother: “Tania looked very tired and very calm. After a while, she turned to my grandmother and said, You don’t know yet what is shameless, you don’t know yet what we will do, just wait, you will see before you die.” Of course, Tania is right, because worse is yet to come, including—although she cannot possibly foresee it specifically—her liaison with the good German, Reinhard. However understandable and justifiable, that is the ultimate disgrace, and a reader who follows carefully Maciek’s report of Tania’s and his own existence in Lwów will see how that aspect of her condition is present in her mind. This leads me to think that you are right in your assessment: To love Reinhard—possibly she really thinks she does—makes her case less sordid, even if it doesn’t exculpate her. I believe also that she is likely to think that telling the little boy that she loves Reinhard will make it easier for him to accept the searing fact of their ménage.

  I agree that something similar is at work when it comes to Maciek’s catechism class and taking Communion. According to Maciek’s rules of decency, what he is doing is despicable. He will do it nevertheless, because he has no choice, but he will perform the defiling act as cleanly and respectfully as possible. An absurd notion? Perhaps. But I think that is the psychological truth.

  JM: And that subtle psychological truth is, I gather, what you want the reader to understand, whether the reader excuses it or not. Earlier in this conversation, you called Dante a “connoisseur of evil.” Perhaps only a connoisseur of evil would see Tania’s interaction with the begging Jew, Hertz, as bringing her to a point “so degraded, that she had no trust left and no pity.” A coarser mind might think that sleeping with a German soldier had degraded her worse. But this is not how she sees the matter, and the aftermath of her encounter with Hertz is evidently one of those moments in the writing of this book that were so intense for you in the writing that you had to, as you say, “pause for breath” in the interlude. Would you care to comment?

  LB: Yes. Once again, I must go back to the grandmother, and her outburst about the shamelessness of Bern’s talk. As I have said, I think she has in mind the shattering of solidarity among Jews.

  In the passage you have now referred to, Tania’s sees further and more deeply. I believe that she takes her fear and distrust of Hertz to be signs of the shattering of all human solidarity, a vaster, and, for me, an unbearable vision.

  JM: “I was chained to the habit of lying, and I no longer believed that weakness or foolishness or mistakes could be forgiven by Tania or me”. This seems to be a moment of bleak truth for Maciek corresponding to the one mentioned just above for Tania. The reader is prepared to forgive the two of them almost anything and wants to believe that their integrity will emerge unscathed from their ordeal. They themselves seem not to share this belief. They do not see moral integrity and psychological deformity as mutually exclusive. Innocent though they are, their experience has left them in some sense morally damaged. It must be both emotionally and conceptually difficult to speak of this damage and yet pointless to speak of the experience at all without speaking of this aspect of it. Does this explain why “Our man avoids Holocaust books and dinner conversation about Poland in the Second World War”?

  LB: I do not think that the man with “sad eyes” would agree that he has—except for his skin being “intact and virgin of tattoo”—escaped unscathed, and I doubt that he thinks that Tania has had that good fortune. On the contrary, “he believes that he has been changed inside forever, like a beaten dog …”. He expresses no view about Tania but I think that if he were to do so it would turn out to be the same. He avoids “Holocaust books” and conversations about wartime Poland for complex and somewhat contradictory reasons. As for conversations, there is first of all his pudor, his sense of decency: he does not want to desecrate this subject by loose talk. Books either do not come close enough to the truth as he understands it and, therefore, their effect may also be a form of desecration, or, on the contrary, when by the force of their emotional truth they put him face-to-face with his memories, they are unbearably painful to read.

  There must be in all developed religions and in secular ethics permission to lie in self-defense, in order to avoid gruesome death. I doubt that the man with “sad eyes” is concerned about lies told in order to survive or other deceptions or even the devastating need to take Communion. But innocence and moral integrity? I am not religious, but if I were I wonder whether I would think of either Tania or Maciek as “innocent.” What do we make of Maciek’s sexual longings and his nascent sadism?

  I tend to think of the world described in Wartime Lies as a world where everyone bears a burden of guilt. However, no amount of guilt that Maciek or Tania or the grandparents or any other Jews I mention may bear justifies, so far as I am concerned, the punishment visited upon them by Dante’s somma sapienza e ’l primo amore.

  JM: “The highest wisdom and first love….” God is ultimately the guilty party, but neither Tania nor Maciek ever brings the indictment. There are moments when the indictment would be justified, but it is as if they have no room for it in their minds, no energy left to drag Him into court.

  There is actually one prayer in the book, a borrowed prayer, the man with “sad eyes” quotes the prayer of Catullus, “Grant me this, O gods, for my piety’s sake” (O di, reddite hoc mi pro pietate mea). Catullus was a connoisseur of love, as Dante of evil, but of the afflictions and perversions of love no less than of the joys. In another line that echoes in the man’s memory, Catullus says, “Myself, I yearn to heal and to shed this foul morbidity” (Ipse valere opto et taetrum hunc deponere morbum). Can he not love with a joyous, youthful spontaneity?

  During the years covered by the novel, Maciek has a degree of physical access to women unusual for his age (six to twelve). There is nothing feigned or falsified about his attraction to them. It is, on the contrary, the most honest and authentic part of his life. Why, then, does the man who remembers this boyhood sexuality repeat a borrowed prayer for recovery? Or do I misread him? Is his prayer rather to have just that kind of intimacy back again?

  LB: In part you may have misread me; in part you have put your hand on something very important.

  The references to Catullus are neither an indication that “the man with sad eyes” cannot love joyfully or spontaneously—except as his childhood experiences may have made him in all respects less joyous and spontaneous than someone whose childhood was such as he imagines Catullus’s, filled with sunlight and pleasures—or with our man’s precocious sexual awareness and longings. That is, in any event, what I think.

  One reason why our man dwells on Catullus is that he feels that Catullus’s need to “shed this foul illness,” taetrum hunc deponere morbum, is the same in its dynamics and is equally doomed to fail as his own attempts to heal. Of course, the etiology of the two illnesses is different: desperate and betrayed love in the case of Catullus, and the hurt of war for our man. And that leads him to borrow Catullus’s prayer, although, as he notes, the gods will not cure what ails him and, unlike the poet, he has no good deeds to look back upon that might be recompensed. He might have added that he has no gods to pray to.

  A more profound reason is my personal obsession with the poet’s O di reddite mi hoc pro pietate mea, O gods, grant me this for my piety’s sake. I used to repeat those words to myself over and over, thinking about my father and about how little good came to that kind man in return for all the good he had done.

  JM: You endow literary quotation with an almost liturgical effect. Whe
n you quote Catullus, it is as if you acknowledge the legitimacy of the wish and, to that extent at least, assuage the pain of its unfulfillment. Quotation as minor catharsis….

  Hearing this regret about how little recompense your father had for his kindness puts me in mind of Tania’s grief when she learns that her father, Maciek’s grandfather, has been murdered. This was, Maciek says, “the worst day in our lives”.

  Autobiographical fiction, on those rare occasions when one can see it from the inside, so often seems to work this way. What was in real life a son’s prayer for his father becomes in the novel a son’s prayer for himself. What was the grief of a son for his father becomes the grief of a daughter for hers, and so forth—all in service to the larger truth that the fiction attempts to convey.

  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 w
ell as a moving literary achievement.

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  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?