Wartime Lies (23 page)

LB:
My ideal reader is attentive and blessed by the gifts of sympathy and imagination. You will note that I am going back in this reply to what I said in answer to your first question. Provided the reader has those qualities, all I want to do is to withdraw, to get out of the way and let the reader make of my work what he or she wishes.

That being said, I believe that if I were the reader I would think of myself as Maciek; I would crawl into his skin. I also believe that I would not be able to keep out of my mind the questions raised by the passage in which the adult man remembers what may have been his own childhood: What is such a man like? How does one grow up after a childhood that has been similarly blasted?

It may interest you that my working title for
Wartime Lies
, which I abandoned with some reluctance, was
The Education of a Monster
.

JM:
That title strikes the ear as a slap strikes the face. I wince at it. But even
Wartime Lies
, as a less confrontational alternative, has something hard and unflinching about it. “Lies?” the reader thinks; “Don’t you mean
disguises?
Or maybe
ruses?”
But what were objectively disguises or ruses were subjectively lies. To give the matter a very innocuous formulation, Maciek acquired some bad habits, thanks to Nazism and Polish anti-Semitism. When wartime Poland was behind him and he could finally drop the ruse and shed the disguise, those bad habits may have lingered.

Something in the reader, as this theft of childhood takes place, wants you to go a little easier on Maciek—one might even want you to like him a little better. But during the war, Maciek dared not go easy on himself or, so to speak, sweet on himself. A single moment of self-indulgence, and all would have been lost. This may be the wartime attitude—I do not call it a lie—that lingers most powerfully into this book about his experiences.

Perhaps Maciek’s “education,” in the dark sense of your
abandoned tide, when just after a Jewish visitor, Bern, has left the house, Maciek’s grandmother gives a bitter little speech, repudiating her daughter and her husband at a stroke and linking them by emotional association to, of all things, a pogrom she witnessed as a girl. This is shocking enough, but then she says that as bad as that was, what Bern has said is worse: … never, in all that time, or anytime until now, had she heard anyone talk as shamelessly as Bern.” What is so utterly shameless about what Bern has said? How could it possibly be worse than a pogrom?

LB:
Here’s why. Bern, after musing about how in the town of T. the Germans have already imposed on Jews the obligation to wear the armband and the yellow Star of David, goes on to say that “If the Jewish community offices acted responsibly, and our dear café intellectuals for once avoided provoking the Poles, perhaps we could remain as we were.” Of course, this is nonsense and goes to prove—if additional proof is needed—that Bern is a fool. The disasters befalling Polish Jews have nothing to do with whether they “act responsibly” by collaborating with the Germans or with whether Jewish intellectuals “avoid provoking” the Catholic Poles. They are instead irreversible steps being taken by the German occupying forces on the road to the final solution.

The grandmother is not as bright as Tania and does not seem capable of the deep, fearless insights of the grandfather. But she has her common sense which makes her understand the shameful reality that lies behind Bern’s chatter: Bern is identifying himself with the enemy, and adopting the enemy’s point of view, probably because the German
enemy is overwhelmingly strong and the Catholic Poles who abet the enemy are so dangerous. He is deserting his own side, if I may use that metaphor, although he does this for a short while only: Soon afterward he flees to the forest to join a group of partisans. Something rather similar happens to Maciek when he kills bedbugs in the various rooming houses in Warsaw and when, in the games he plays with lead soldiers, he decides that his best troops are the Wehrmacht and the SS because “they looked like winners”. Perhaps today one would conclude that Bern and Maciek suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.

Why is what Bern said worse than a pogrom? I suppose because the pogrom that the grandmother remembers did not shatter the solidarity of Jews in the face of their tormentors. Now she perceives the possibility that Jews may be turning against other Jews.

JM:
Let’s talk about some more complex and costly desertions. Maciek says “Now [Tania] thought she loved [Reinhard, a German soldier who had become her lover and the family’s protector], probably as much as she had ever loved anybody.” Am I right to link this to, “The day of my first Communion came. Tania offered to give me breakfast on the sly in our room, but I refused. I wanted to be clean inside, just as Father P. had directed?”

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. When 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.