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Authors: Eva Stachniak

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Necessary Lies

BOOK: Necessary Lies
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N
ECESSARY
L
IES

N
ECESSARY
L
IES

Eva Stachniak

Copyright © Eva Stachniak 2000

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

Editor: Marc Côté

Proofreader: Julian Walker
Design: Jennifer Scott
Printer: Webcom

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Stachniak, Eva, 1952-

Necessary lies

ISBN 0-88924-295-X

I. Title.

PS8587.T234N42 2000 C813'.54 C00-931770-8

PR9199.3.S683N42 2000

We acknowledge the support of the
Canada Council for the Arts
and the
Ontario Arts Council
for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the
Government of Canada
through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program, The Association for the Export of Canadian Books,
and the
Government of Ontario
through the
Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit
program.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.

Printed on recycled paper.

www.dundurn.com

Dundurn Press
8 Market Street
Suite 200
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M5E 1M6

Dundurn Press
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Headington, Oxford,
England
OX3 7AD

Dundurn Press
2250 Military Road
Tonawanda NY
U.S.A. 14150

To the memory of my father, Jerzy Jerzma
ski,
and to my mother, Anna Jerzma
ska.

PART I
M
ONTREAL 1981

Piotr would say that she was betraying Poland already.

He wouldn't mean that Anna had become besotted by Canadian comfort, by supermarkets overflowing with food, by the glittering lights of Montreal office towers she described for him in such detail in her letters. He wouldn't even mean the ease with which she showered her praises over the smallest things. Strangers smiling at her. Cars stopping to let her cross the street, mowed lawns moistened by humming sprinklers, a man on Sherbrooke Street bending to scoop up after his dog.

Piotr would tell her that the signs of her betrayal were far deeper and far more troubling. He would say that she had let fear creep into her heart. He would be right.

September of 1981. The time Poland was on everybody's lips.

After the unrepentant strike of 1980 in the Lenin Shipyards of Gda
sk,
Solidarno
grew stronger in defiance. The whole world was flooded with images of the grim, determined faces of the striking workers in blue overalls, crossing themselves and kneeling at the feet of makeshift altars; above them hovered the concerned smile of the Polish Pope. Books on the Polish August, on the first independent labour union in Eastern Europe — or rather, as certain commentators knowingly stressed,
Central
Europe — piled up in storewindows. The triumphant smile of Lech Wal
sa, his hand holding a giant cross and a red pen with the Black Madonna of Cz
stochowa, followed Anna as she walked the Montreal streets. A thirty-seven-year-old unemployed electrician, the papers glowed, had defied the Kremlin. “We want to show the world that we exist,” he said at a conference in Geneva, and then stood patiently when hundreds of labour delegates lined up to shake his hand.

BOOK: Necessary Lies
7.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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