Wartime Lies Read Free

received, when he took mefor an evening stroll, were apt to be on my Polish, truly blond Sarmatian look. The Aryan look had not yet come into fashion in T. Nostalgia was directed to the Black Sea, whence came the Sarmatian warrior hordes, swords in hand, to settle our sainted Poland. Besides, the nurse’s position was vacant again, and the surgeon had a candidate ready to start immediately.
    Zosia was the oldest daughter of the assistant station-master in Drohobycz, a town some fifty kilometers from T. This functionary had been a corporal in the surgeon’s battalion and later his patient. Having finished the first classes of
gimnazjum
, Zosia was helping out in a pastry shop. She needed to be placed.
    Her golden beauty filled me with wonder; I think that something literally moved in my heart. To be sure, Tania was taller, her hair almost the same amber color. I loved the smell of Tania’s perfume and powder, her furs that she was always happy to explain to me and let me play with and the softness of her hands that ended in long pale fingernails. But Zosia was soft and hard all at once and laughed with her head thrown back at everything that she or anyone else said. As soon as we were left alone—her interview must have been conducted days before she arrived, since it turned out that her little suitcase and bundles were already installed in her room—she swung me onto her shoulders, told me to hang on to her pigtails and set off at a run to inspect our garden. The raspberry bushes were heavy with fruit. She stuffed her mouth full and then mine and told me they were the sweetest she had eaten that summer. She thought the birds must be very respectfulof my father to leave such fine berries alone and laughed her silver laugh when I informed her that they were covered with muslin except when the cook was ready to pick them.
    From then on, it was understood that I would ride on her shoulders and hold her pigtails, which she would let down for me from the coil around her head as a reward for certain good actions. These included eating more than a third of what was served, especially if she helped just a little, chasing her at full gallop around the lawn, hanging by my knees from the jungle gym in the yard, not crying after my nap and being cleanly dressed and ready when my father offered to take me with him for an evening walk or to take Zosia and me on his round of house calls after office hours.
    My father always used the same horse cab. He had confidence in the driver, who kept his carriage particularly clean and had a pair of horses capable of a sustained trot if we were going to a patient in a village outside T. I would sit with my father, holding his hand. Zosia would be on the jump seat, next to my father’s black instrument bag, facing me, my knees squeezed between hers. When we arrived at a peasant’s house, while my father was busy with the patient, she would ask for a glass of fresh buttermilk. If I drank it, my reward was a visit to the barn and a talk with the cattle and the hens. That was how I learned to caress the cheeks of a cow very slowly to make her my friend, to scatter grain for chickens correctly, and never to get within the reach of a chained dog.
    For more important matters, there were other pacts andother rewards. The giant now came into my room to lean over me almost every night. I feared going to bed. Tania, if she was not going out, read to me; often she refused early invitations so that she could read a chapter she had promised to finish. Then, after Tania left, I would call Zosia. She left the door open that separated her room from mine, and she could hear me immediately. I listened for the sound of her bare feet with exultation. She would sing for me, and if I promised to be asleep after ten of her songs, she laughed, undid her pigtails and let me play with her loose hair. She sat on one of my little chairs, her head on the bed, hair spread over my quilt. I could run my fingers through it or