Necessary Lies (20 page)

In the underground passage that leads from Central Station to the Marriott, new stores have taken over the once-uniform interiors. In front of them, a Gypsy child in a torn cotton dress is kneeling on a folded piece of cardboard, a hand-written note on her chest.
Please help poor girl. I am mute. Please give money for hospital operation and I will pray for you to Blessed Virgin Mary. She give you what you want most of all.
Seeing that Anna has stopped, a young Gypsy woman with long black braids
quickly moves toward her and adds her whining voice to the child's mute plea, pulling at Anna's skirt, muttering something so fast that the words drown and lose meaning.

“Just look at her,” Anna hears a hiss right behind her. “So young and only interested in begging.”

“How can they live like that,” an elderly man in a brown hat joins in. There is anger in his voice, mixed with contempt. “These poor, dirty children. What do they teach them?”

“They drug them, you know,” a woman's voice adds. “That's why they can stay still like that, for hours.”

“Go back to Romania!”

“Thieves!”

She should keep on walking, Anna thinks, but instead she opens her purse and takes out a few Polish bills. “Don't give them anything,” the elderly man snaps at her. “You only make things worse.”

Anna drops the money into a tin can, which has a few bills in it, already. The Gypsy woman gives the crowd a defiant look, bows her head down, and loudly asks Our Lady to bless the kind
Pani,
to give her happiness, to take care of her in her time of sorrows.

Back in the hotel Anna calls her parents to tell them she has arrived safely.

“How do you feel?” her father asks. He picks up the phone as soon as Anna has finished dialling the Wroclaw number. He must have been waiting by the phone.

“Fine,” she says, but she knows he wants to hear more than that.

“So how do you like Warsaw now?” he asks.

“It has changed,” Anna says. She cannot think of anything else to say. “I like it very much.”

“Have you seen the bazaar?” he keeps asking. “The shop windows?” He urges her to acknowledge at least some sense of surprise, and she humours him.

“Yes, I have. It's hard to believe!”

“I never thought I would live to see it,” he says.

“I never thought I would, either,” she echoes.

“We are all waiting for you,” her father says. He wants to finish this conversation. It's a long-distance call and he is conscious of every minute that passes. “It doesn't matter,” Anna has tried to tell him so many times before. “I have enough money. It's not really that much.” But for her father there is never enough.
Scarcity is a state of mind,
Marie likes to say. Her parents were like that, too, having grown up during the Great Depression. Wouldn't take a taxi even if they had to crawl home.

“We'll talk more when you come here. We are both waiting,
Mama
and I.”

“I'm coming. It's only two more days now.” It seems to her that she can hear her mother's sobs, in the background. Tomorrow Anna will visits her grandparents' graves and the following day she will take a morning train to Wroclaw.

“Good bye.” He puts down the receiver so fast that she hears the click of the disconnecting line.

For a short while Anna sits motionless on the double bed. Then she switches on the television. On Warsaw One, she catches the beginning of a discussion on the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Three panellists, two men and a woman, are sitting around a low table. Forty-seven years have passed since that August afternoon of 1944. The cost was staggering: the whole city destroyed, hundreds of thousands dead or deported. Now, when Warsaw is finally free, there is no better time to ask the fundamental question: Was it worth it?

“Look at Prague, now,” the younger of the two men begins. He is in his late thirties, and he waves his hands as he speaks. “The Czechs were right to just wait the war through. It is more important to protect the fabric of the nation than to spill blood.”

“How can you say things like that!” the older man interrupts. He is breathing hard, his face is red with anger. “Without the Uprising you would've been born in the Soviet Republic of Poland.”

“With the Uprising Hitler was able to finish off the Home Army, which was exactly what Stalin wanted,” the younger man doesn't give up. “Let me remind you that the Russians watched
the slaughter from the other side of the river. They got Hitler to do their dirty job for them.”

The third panellist, a tall bony woman in her sixties, is listening in silence. The moderator has introduced her as an American professor of Slavic Studies from California. When she begins to speak the men quiet down. In her muted, halting voice she tells them how, in 1944, pregnant with her daughter, she saw her twenty-one-year-old husband for the last time, as he turned back to wave to her. In this Uprising she lost her husband, her brother, and two cousins. After the war she was arrested by the Communists on drummed up charges and spent seven years in prison, one in solitary confinement, while her daughter was placed in an orphanage and told her mother was “an enemy of the people.” Her daughter is a doctor now, in Boston, and has three children. They all speak Polish, but they are American.

“We lost the best people then,” she says, quietly. “I think we'll never know if we paid too much.” The camera closes on her face. Her blue eyes are dry. All that Anna can see in them is loneliness.

In the bathroom, Anna pours herself a glass of water from a bottle of Vittel. “Marriott tap water has been filtered and it is safe to drink,” she reads a printed note. “But for those of our guests who would rather drink bottled water we are happy to provide it.” The note is in English. The water is lukewarm and tasteless, but it does soothe her throat.

Ursula's letters are now spread on the Marriott bed. On the one side Anna puts all the evidence of betrayal, love letters read and reread until Ursula's words have been etched into her memory and cannot fade. These she ties up and hides at the bottom of her suitcase, underneath the sweaters. On the other side she puts the articles, book reviews, accounts of Ursula's travels. In Montreal she has just skimmed through them, impatient with anything she decided did not concern her. Now, she is no longer sure.

She opens one of these articles and begins to read.

Unity Valkyrie Mitford, a real golden-haired lady, was the fourth daughter of Lord David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford. “I don't believe in your God,” she said to her religion teacher at
St. Marie School, and on the blackboard she drew a naked pair in a passionate embrace. She was expelled. In 1933 she went to Nuremberg. Among cheering crowds, men in brown shirts marched at night in the light of torches. Beams of light shot into the sky. Swastika banners billowed in the wind. “I want to meet him,” she said to her sister Diana after she had heard the Führer speak. “There is no one else I can be with.”

In Munich, day after day, Unity sat at a table in Osteria Bavaria, watching Hitler dine with his companions, order his favourite vegetarian dishes. Since he did not approve of makeup and smoking, she wore no lipstick. On the 9th of February, 1935, a miracle happened. The Führer noticed her unfailing presence; his eyes paused on her blue, lively eyes, her shiny blond hair.

“It was the most beautiful day of my life,” Unity Mitford wrote to her father. “His aide-de-camp came up to me. 'Madam, the Führer wants to speak with you.' When I approached His table He rose and shook my hand and asked me to sit next to Him. I told Him He should come to England, and He said, 'I would be afraid to, for I could start a revolution! Then, Rosa, the waitress, came to ask if I wanted a postcard for Him to sign, and I said yes. Not that I approve of American customs, but He asked for my name and signed the postcard for me, and invited me to Bayreuth. He told me that we should not allow international Jewry to divide two Aryan nations, and I said that, soon, we will be allies, fighting the same war. I am so happy. I must be the happiest girl on earth. There is nothing left for me now but to die of happiness.”

To her mother, she wrote: “What really struck me was His great simplicity. He was so natural that my shyness evaporated. It is a true miracle that this most powerful man on earth is so humble and straightforward.”

She followed him everywhere. Into the flap of her black suit she pinned a swastika with his signature underneath. Hitler's aides called her Mitfahrt, a fellow traveller, always at his side when he wanted to see her, in Munich, Bayreuth, Berlin, Nuremberg, Breslau. She sat on the marble dais at party rallies and at the Olympic Games, rushed for breakfasts at his hotels, tea and walks at the Berghof. “I have two fatherlands,” she said.
“Germany and England. And I love them both” In 1939, she wrote in the Daily Mirror that Hitler would never make England his enemy. She could guarantee that.

When on the 3
^rd
of September 1939, England declared war on Germany, Unity Valkyrie took her most cherished presents, the Führer's portrait in a silver frame and a swastika with his signature, wrapped them up and returned them with a letter. “I cannot bear the thought of war between Germany and England. I choose suicide.” In the Englischer Garten she shot herself in the head. She didn't die, but the bullet was too firmly lodged in her head to be removed. Paralysed, she lay in a private clinic, waiting for death. When the Führer came to visit, he brought her a bouquet of red roses. Her suicide attempt did not surprise him. Wasn't she only a woman? Influenced by an emotional longing for a force that would complement her nature? “I want to go back to England,” Unity said, looking at him. The roses, dried, went with her.

In England she refused to see anyone. Alone, half-alive, unable to move, she waited for the news of German victory. She died on May 28,1948.

Hunger wakes Anna in the morning, a painful, gnawing knot in her stomach. Breakfast is served in a room called
Lila Weneda,
the only Polish name she has seen anywhere in this sterile, glittering hotel. She can vaguely remember the Polish romantic play from which the name is taken, its pure-hearted peaceful people and their vicious invaders. A curious choice of a name, the thought has crossed her mind, a play by a poet who chastised Poland for being
the peacock and parrot
of other nations.

As she rides downstairs to the breakfast room, Anna watches herself in the elevator mirrors, her face multiplied by smokey panels, surrounding her on all sides. Two American men enter the elevator on the third floor. Clean-shaven faces, black, freshly pressed suits.

“Gee, these cats here are tough,” one of them says. “They sure know what they want.” He bends down and pulls up his socks. “Free market. That's what it was all about, wasn't it?”

“That's right,” the other man answers and they laugh.

In
Lila Weneda,
under stainless steel domes there are scrambled eggs, pancakes, sausages and bacon. On the opposite side an arrangement of cheeses, fruit, cold cuts, small jars of marmalade and jams. Anna piles slices of smoked salmon on her plate, adds a few capers, a spoonful of cottage cheese. She eats slowly, glancing out of the window at the grey square building of Central Station. She has slept the whole night through, in spite of the time lag. It must be the low pressure, she thinks; outside wet snowflakes are getting thicker. Her father was right.
Kwiecie
-plecie
,
the braiding winter and summer.

A young waitress avoids Anna's eyes, flashing her a smile of fearful submission. When Anna tries to open the lid of a coffee thermos jar, she rushes forward and does it for her. “Allow me, Madam,” she says in English.

In one of Anna's old dreams of return they would have come here together, with William, for a concert tour. William would be given an enthusiastic reception. Every evening, she would watch him bow to the cheering audience, and then look at her. She shrugs her shoulders and takes another sip of coffee. Today she will take another look at Warsaw, and tomorrow she will be on the way to Wroclaw, on her way home.