Free Wartime Lies by Louis Begley Page A

funny box on two legs. My shoes, which laced over the ankles, were a separate center of shame. Somehow, there was a shortage of long shoelaces in T. and Lwów that even Reinhard could not overcome. As a result, I had to tie my shoes with laces that had been broken in many places and tied together, and I could either wear my shoes laced only to the middle, which I thought made me look like a beggar, or I could lace them to the top after a struggle with the hideous knots that took forever to push through the eyelets. I knew that everyone saw these knots; they showed I was an outcast.
    Tania talked to me now a great deal, and not just about manners or to scold. She wanted me to understand about Reinhard. It was very important that I be affectionate when he came to see us. He was a good, simple man. He liked, above all, to have a good time, but he had got into a situation where the only good time he had was with her. She hoped she could make that be enough. When she began, it was just to make things easier in T.; she had not yet realized Reinhard would save us. Now she thought she loved him, probably as much as she had ever lovedanybody. It was hard to make comparisons: 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. In the beginning of her life with my father and me in T., she had thought that she might get to love my father or anyway to make him fall in love, but she found that he measured everything out with an eyedropper—time, affection, money. He had been a perfect match for my mother who took after grandmother and had done nothing very right or very wrong in her short life. After a while, she, Tania, settled for being the perfect aunt, with only Bern sometimes there to remind her that one could have fun. But the war had opened for her an even grander career. She could be the perfect, selfless aunt who became a courtesan to save her little nephew, a sort of small-town, small-scale Esther.
    We began to be more regular about lessons. Tania didn’t want me to go on making mistakes in German. It embarrassed her to have Reinhard correct me. We could not speak German on our walks, but we promised to speak nothing else at home, except when we were working on other subjects. Tania didn’t like arithmetic; she pretended she had forgotten the multiplication table. I could do the exercises in the book by myself and keep them for Reinhard to review. He was good at it, and it was good policy to have him explain things to me. She had also forgotten geography. But Tania knew and loved Polish literature and, especially, Polish poetry. She thought declamation was at the center of understanding; only if one spoke a poem could its value be revealed, andeven then only if the verse was spoken well. She also believed that poetry had to be revisited often. Therefore, poems should be memorized. If one really knew a poem by heart, one could recite, barely moving one’s lips, like a priest reading his breviary, as one walked about, or got dressed, or waited to fall asleep. It would fill unused voids in one’s mind.
    Tania especially admired Mickiewicz, for style and content. She decided we would read his medieval epic,
Konrad Wallenrod;
the subject was subversive, made for us. I soon saw why. Konrad has recently become the all-powerful master of the Teutonic Knights who have conquered all of East Prussia and are threatening the destruction and enslavement of pagan Lithuania. The time has come for a final onslaught against the Lithuanians. The knights are impatient and seemingly invincible; nothing can prevent the victory of the Germans and the cross. But Konrad, like us, is a fraud: his name is not Wallenrod; he is not German; he is Lithuanian. The knights kidnapped him when he was a child and brought him up as their own, and now he will betray them. He will so bungle the campaign that the Order will be mortally wounded, the knights humiliated, and Lithuania