The Civilian War

The lesson that does not exist begins at four o'clock, in a third-floor flat off Krasińskiego Street, in December 1939. Ten children arrive one at a time, minutes apart, the way she has taught them. What the schoolmistress wants is exact: to take these ten through the whole forbidden syllabus — the history, the geography, the poetry — before spring, because nobody can tell her how many springs this will take.

At the primary school where she still teaches mornings, the wall map came down in October and the readers were carted away in November. What is left is permitted Poland: sums, German phrases, obedience by rote. So the real school has moved here. Mickiewicz lives behind the stove, wrapped in a tea towel. The map of the old country is drawn from memory each week and burned each week, because a printed one is evidence.

The drill is rehearsed until it bores them, which is the point. Boots on the stairs: poetry under the floorcloth, exercise books open at arithmetic, voices up — seven eights, eight eights — in German. Twice a knock has stopped her heart. Twice it was the coal merchant's boy. The radio she buried in the allotment in October; her diploma is under the henhouse; the fear she keeps somewhere she has stopped looking.

This afternoon the stairs stay quiet. 'Where were we?' she asks. The smallest girl, six years old, has it by heart and gives it back to her — Lithuania, my homeland, you are like health — and for the length of a poem the flat is the largest country in Europe.

By the third morning she has stopped counting kilometres and counts water instead. A seamstress from the rue Daguerre with two children and a pram — the younger boy at one end, the sewing machine that is their living at the other — she left Paris on the eleventh of June, when word ran through the quartier that the government had slipped away in the night. What she wants is simple and enormous: the far bank of the Loire, where everyone says the army will stand.

Everyone says. That is the only newspaper on this road. The column moves at the pace of its slowest cart whatever you drive, past cars dead in the ditches with their mattresses still roped to the roofs. The bridges are blown; the bridges are open; the English have landed; nobody has seen a working wireless since Étampes. At one farm gate a man sells water by the glass. At the next a woman gives it away with bread and will not be paid.

The aeroplanes come twice, low, the length of the column, and twice she lies over her sons in the wheat and studies the stitching of her own sleeve until the engines fade. Afterwards a suitcase lies burst open in the road, and nobody comes back for it. She resettles the machine, the child, the direction. Walking is the entire plan now: walking, and not thinking one metre past the river.

At dusk, a gendarme at a crossroads — the first uniform in two days. 'Is the bridge at Orléans open?' He looks down the road as if it might answer. 'Madame, I know what you know. Keep the children's names in their pockets.' She does not tell him the names are already in their collars, sewn flat in her own thread, done at the kitchen table the night before they left.

On the evening of the fifteenth of July 1942, in a long room above the courtyard of the Préfecture de Police, a typist wants one thing: to reach the bottom of her tray without reading it. The tray is names. For two days she has been copying them from the card index onto the arrest lists — name, address, staircase, floor — sorted by team, because at four tomorrow morning the teams go out.

The circular is dated the thirteenth and pinned where the calendar used to hang. She has typed its sentences so many times they have stopped meaning anything, which, she is beginning to understand, is what such sentences are for. Operations to be effected with the maximum speed, without pointless speaking and without comment. Gas and electricity to be turned off. Keys left with the concierge. The children go with their parents. Hourly totals to be telephoned in, as if the city were taking a census of itself.

Card after card, and then a card with a birth date of April 1936. A girl of six. Her fingers know the address before her eyes finish it: the building where her mother buys thread, two streets from her own door. She types it. That is the whole of the act — she types it — and the carriage return sounds no different from any other.

After midnight she walks home the long way, which she has never done before. The building two streets from her own is dark except for the concierge's window. It is a short street. She stands on the far side of it for a long time, learning exactly what she is willing to carry. Then she crosses.

The set is a people's receiver, cheap bakelite, built so that Germany comes in loud and the world comes in faint. At a quarter to ten on a Tuesday in March 1943, in a blacked-out kitchen in Kreuzberg, a tram conductor's widow moves the dial the width of two fingernails and wants one thing on this earth: her son's name — missing at Stalingrad since January — spoken aloud by the enemy.

A paper tag hangs from the tuning knob, tied there by order, reminding her that listening to foreign transmitters is a crime against the security of the nation. She listens under a blanket, volume at the level of breath. Across the landing, Frau Berger knows: she heard her own nephew's name in February and has said nothing since, which is how the widow knows she listens too. On the stairs they discuss potatoes. It is a fluent language — what is not said, and to whom.

The quarter-hour comes: prisoners' messages, names and home towns, read slowly. Hamburg. Breslau. A boy from Kassel sends love to his mother and asks after the dog. Not her son. Not tonight. She sits in the dark a while, the warning tag between two fingers.

On Sunday there is a mass for the Winkler boy, read out three weeks ago — alive, in a camp east of Moscow. His mother will kneel through it with the face of the bereaved, because cancelling it would tell the whole parish where the news came from. Half the street will kneel behind her, careful as churchgoers can be. Grief, on this street, is worn even after it has been lifted. Anything else is evidence.

The news goes up the Rohais in a bicycle basket, folded into a seed catalogue, on a wet Thursday in late November 1943. Five copies, typed on flimsy: last night's nine o'clock bulletin from London, taken down in the dark from a wireless that officially does not exist. The grower's daughter pedalling it has one decision to make before the harbour: whether the new man who has asked to join her round should ever see a copy.

The rules were never written down; that is the first rule. Read it, pass it on or burn it, and never say where it came from. The wireless sets went over the counter at the constables' office in June of last year; her father built a crystal set into a biscuit tin by Christmas. Since the deportations of September '42 the island has learned its own size — small enough that every secret is a loan, repayable on a neighbour's word. They say a copy reaches the Bailiff with his morning post. That one she believes.

The new man is waiting near the vinery at her last call, pleasant, patient. 'You're the girl with the catalogue,' he says, which is one sentence too many. Nobody who reads it calls it anything; nobody who matters knows her bicycle from any other. She smiles the smile she keeps for Germans and hands him the catalogue's honest pages — bulbs, seed potatoes, prices — and pedals on with the fifth copy flat against the tomato lists.

Her own copy she reads twice by the stove that evening and burns, holding it to the last corner. Kiev has fallen to the Russians; Berlin is burning; none of it can be said aloud tomorrow except to the right face, in the right doorway, at the right pitch. She banks the fire and decides the new man will wait a long time. On this island, that is what winning slowly looks like.

The watch is his father's, and his father cannot come to sell it: railwaymen who struck in September do not walk about in daylight. So it is the boy, eleven years old, and his aunt and the handcart on the sanded road south out of Haarlem, one iron-grey morning in February 1945. What he wants has been said plainly at home: something in the cart by dark that his mother can turn into dinner.

The road is full of city people pulling city things — a pram of table linen, a bicycle with wooden tyres, a mirror nobody will want. Behind them the town is eating itself: stair rails and door frames gone into stoves, a pint of grey soup a day from the central kitchen. In September the flags came out because the radio in hiding said the armies were a day away; by evening his mother had made him take theirs down. Since then she rations rumour like everything else — half a hope, once a week.

The farmer at Hillegom turns the watch over once. 'Silver,' says the aunt. 'Plate,' says the farmer, and the aunt does not argue, which tells the boy what the morning has cost her. Into the cart go seed potatoes, beets, and a sack of tulip bulbs. 'Brown skin off, yellow heart out,' the farmer says, not unkindly. 'Fry them and they'll pass for onions. The heart is bitter.'

Twelve kilometres back, the boy counts lampposts to keep his legs going. At the door his mother weighs the sack with her eyes and does not cry, which he has learned is her way of crying. The neighbour with the hidden set says the Rhine next, says March. She tips the bulbs into the pan. 'We'll hear it when we hear it,' she says — which, this winter, on this street, is what faith sounds like.