Necessary Lies

N
ECESSARY
L
IES

Eva Stachniak

Copyright © Eva Stachniak 2000

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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

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

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.