Wartime lies - Louis Begley [59]
Our serious business was to keep from freezing. There were no trees in the pasture and no dead branches to burn. We made fires out of a few dry cow turds and sat cross-legged around them. At noon, we would scratch a hole in the ground, put our potatoes in it, and cover them with dirt. Then we pushed the fire right over the potatoes. We would build the fire up to make it really strong, still trying not to use many turds because very dry ones were hard to find. In about an hour, the meal would be ready. Somebody always brought salt. The baked potatoes would make warmth circulate from the stomach throughout the body. They thawed out our hands. We would eat two or three potatoes and wish we had more.
We used a little hay from a nearby haystack to start our fires; it reminded me of dry flower stalks and the game my grandfather had played with Zosia and me in our garden. I told Stefa and the boys that we could make fires to jump over. They wanted to try it. The next day, we brought bundles of straw under our jackets and arranged the fires in a row, close together, so that as soon as one had jumped over a fire one had to leap into the next one. The straw burned with a quick hot flame; they liked the game, although we didn’t have enough straw to make it last long. We began to play almost every day. Running and jumping helped warm us.
I realized that jumping over fires, which I had taught them, was the only game they knew. They liked to ride the cows, to hit a crow with a stone, or to grab a cat by the tail and whirl it, but that did not seem to me to be playing; it was real teasing and hurting, more like catching a hen in the yard, holding it with one hand by the wings and, with the other, wringing its neck. I could not deny that I enjoyed watching a hen killed this way. The hen would flap its wings and try to fly and skid when it was running away and make a huge cackling sound once it was caught; even Kula and his wife, Kulowa, laughed each time they saw it. But it had nothing to do with pretending. I told Stefa and the boys about how I had played when I was little—only I didn’t say it was in T., because T. was none of their business—in the sandbox in the courtyard of our house, or on the swing and the slide that were attached to the jungle gym, or on the jungle gym itself. I drew pictures of this equipment in the dirt with my finger. Such stories made them cover their mouths with their hands and giggle; they didn’t say I was lying, they said I was crazy. Who would ever make a pile of sand for a child to throw around or pour water into? That would just make a mess. These other things, nobody had ever seen them or anything like them; there had never been any talk of jungle gyms in Piasowe.
As I told them about Warsaw, where I said we had once lived, its tall buildings, trolley cars, automobiles, electric lights and radios, their wonder grew, and so did mine. I found that only Stefa had ever been to another village, one just like Piasowe but a long walk past the line of horizon we stared at all day, because that was where her mother’s parents lived.