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every afternoon when Maciek returns from the gimnazjum. It’s late November; the park is empty. Maciek lets the dog run; if he gets enough exercise, he will not be bad tempered. The dog knows how to come to heel when Maciek whistles. One afternoon, the dog heels, but instead of wagging his tail and jumping to put his paws on Maciek’s chest to be petted, he is coiled like a spring and growling. His ears are laid back; he bares his teeth. Maciek thinks that when the dog leaps he will go for his throat. Fortunately, the leash he is holding in his hand is very heavy. When the dog does leap, Maciek hits him hard, in the face. They continue, leap and parry, for what seems a long time. The dog becomes calmer. Maciek turns his back on the dog and slowly walks away. The dog follows; Maciek hears him in the rustling of dry leaves. He whistles. The dog obeys, and Maciek forces himself to put him on the leash.

Some months later, the dog is hit by a car, directly in front of Maciek’s apartment building. An august personage of the new regime lives in the building and there is always an armed guard inside the entrance gate. Maciek is chatting with the guard, who is his friend. They see that the dog is dead. Maciek pleads with the guard to shoot the driver. Tania will later tell her friends at the café the story of Maciek’s grief and broken heart, that if he could have taken the rifle from the guard anything might have happened. The truth is Maciek is glad the animal is dead. He tells Kościelny that truth. He takes the risk that they will stop being friends.

It doesn’t matter. One day soon, Tania will leave. Then Maciek and his father and Pani Doctor Olga will also go away. He will never see Kościelny again or have news from him, because Kościelny will not know Maciek’s name or what he has become. And where is Maciek now? He became an embarrassment and slowly died. A man who bears one of the names Maciek used has replaced him. Is there much of Maciek in that man? No: Maciek was a child, and our man has no childhood that he can bear to remember; he has had to invent one. And the old song is a lie. No matter how long or gaily the music plays, Maciek will not rise to dance again. Nomen et cineres una cum vanitate sepulta.

Afterword

by Louis Begley

IN order to prepare this Afterword, I reread Wartime Lies last month, for the first time since 1995, the year in which it appeared in Polish translation. Such a long absence from one of my texts is by no means unusual: I pore over them strenuously when I correct galleys, I read from the finished books when I am on reading tours that follow their initial appearances, and I review and correct translations into languages that I know. I remember vividly that reading the Polish translation, which was excellent, moved me to tears. This is what my book would have been like, I said to myself, if I had not left Poland just before my thirteenth birthday, if I were a Polish writer. When I came to my senses I told myself, more reasonably, that in truth I could not have written Wartime Lies in Polish or any other language if I had not become an exile, someone not unlike the “man with a nice face and sad eyes” who, on the opening page of my novel, broods over the Aeneid and his native town in far distant eastern Poland.

I realize that I have just concurred in the general assumption that I am not unlike that man, and I will go further and acknowledge the truth of what has seemed obvious to many readers and critics: little Maciek’s life in T. in the years before World War II was not very different from my own life during that time in a town called Stryj. T. and Stryj are located in the same part of pre-World War II Poland, and the subsequent adventures of Tania and Maciek resemble, in broad outline, my mother’s and my experiences when, using Aryan papers in Lwów, Warsaw, and the Mazowsze, we disguised our Jewish identity and so escaped capture by Germans and assassination. Nor is my own impression of Poland directly after the war dissimilar from what I portrayed as Maciek’s perception of it in Chapter