Reckoning

Whenever Magda travels for work, she calls her parents and tells Peter—whose father never showed affection—that she loves him. Magda and Peter’s long-distance conversations become more and more raw until one night, when calling Peter after a day of filming Dr. Plonk in Adelaide, Magda feels that she is talking to a different man—Peter’s 16-year-old self. This is the kind of conversation Magda has been dreading and craving her whole life, and she wonders how she’ll react if Peter tells her something that she can’t bear to hear. After hanging up the phone, Magda sets aside the notes she took during the conversation, planning to transcribe them the next day. In the morning, she can’t find the notes anywhere. Magda hits her head, berating herself for her carelessness. 

When Magda gets home from Adelaide, she writes down as much of her and Peter’s conversation as she remembers: Peter talked about radiotherapy treatment, and Magda—feeling an impulse to mother Peter since he’d lost his own mother—comforted him. Peter said that he’d turned to tennis because he had lost his youth. Magda tried to tell Peter that she forgave him for his attitude toward tennis. Peter also said that, during the war, he’d had girlfriends all over and that sex workers had always been kind, offering places to hide.

Peter couldn’t stand watching what happened to the Jews; once, Peter saw a German let a little Jewish boy drag a bag of potatoes through a barbed wire fence before picking him up and shooting him. Magda sobbed so hard that her heart pounded; when Peter revealed that he’d shot that German when he’d recognized him later in the war, Magda commended him. Peter said that he is not a hero and is neither proud nor ashamed of his past actions; he’d had a “lust for guns”; at just 15, he’d killed some boys to obtain a coveted German pistol. Magda’s mind then went blank, and she and Peter entered a “traumatic fugue state.”

Two months after this talk, Peter dies. It takes Magda years to figure out what Peter meant when he said he always feared one of his kids would grow up to be a “traitor.”