Necessary Lies (26 page)

“How is Basia,” she asks. “And Adam?”

“Oh, fine. They will come to see you later.” His wife and son, her sister-in-law and nephew, new family she has only seen in snapshots. Adam in the clothes she has sent from Montreal, sitting on a soccer ball, eyes rising to the ceiling in a gesture of exasperation. Basia, her long auburn hair plaited in an old-fashioned braid.

Yan lifts Anna's suitcases up, and leads her to his car, the
interior of which smells of gasoline and plastic seats. This is another childhood smell, Anna thinks, the smell of rare trips in a taxi, the now-forgotten curved line of the first Polish car,
Warszawa,
when she fought nausea for the sake of this tiny bit of luxury, a ride through the streets of the city, then almost empty of traffic. “My wheels,” Yan says with pride. “A bit on the old side, but still in good shape ” The car starts with a clutter and a shake, but takes off fast.

“Remember?” he asks.

“Sure,” she says, terrified of the proximity of other cars on the road, her brother's overly aggressive manoeuvres. Marie was right when she said that drivers in this part of the world accelerate and brake, as if speed or full stop were the only alternatives. But Yan laughs at his sister when she holds on to the seat.

“Relax,” he says. “I won't kill you.”

“How are they?” she asks about their parents.

“Grumpy,” he says. “They never go anywhere.
Mama
doesn't let
Tata
do anything. He cannot drink, and cannot smoke without her making a fuss. You know how he is. He'll never say boo to her. Never could.”

“But how is he?” Anna asks.

“You'll see for yourself.”

Yes, her brother looks tired; his face is sunken and grey. Partly it is the haircut, Anna thinks, too short for him, but partly it must be the life here. Too much vodka, too many cigarettes, and no desire to camouflage the passage of time. “Men do not live long in this country,” he tells her, as if he could read her thoughts. “We keel over before we are sixty-five.” He tells her this in a casual tone, as if it were gossip, something funny to tell a visitor from so far away. He uses a term that makes her shiver, “over-mortality of men,” and, all the time, gives her quick looks out of the corner of his eye.

“Listen, I'm so sorry about William.”

“Yeah,” she says, and suddenly, overcome by bitterness and loss, she chokes with sobs. Yan stops the car and lets her cry, waiting patiently until she calms down. He makes no attempt to quiet her, to comfort her sorrow, to reason with her. With all
her smug talk about the habits of the land, this is something she has forgotten, the overwhelming acceptance of pain. Her brother knows she has to go through it, and there is nothing she can do but wait for the wave to pass. When she stops crying and dries her eyes, he drives off, cautioning her about the dark stretches of the streets.

“It's no longer a safe city,” she hears. “Don't carry any big money in your purse.” He is worried that with the way she looks now, she will stand out in the crowd. “Blend,” he seems to be telling her. “Don't draw attention to yourself.” A game of survival, she thinks, and promises to try her best to become one with the crowd.

The stairs seem lower than she remembers, winding past closed, silent doors of the neighbours. Walls and doors are painted light grey, the paint unevenly spread, with drops dried midway down, like thick, frozen trails. On the first landing Anna peeks through the window into the back yard where someone has left a pile of broken boards, bricks, and chunks of concrete. A rusted bucket sits on top of the pile, splattered with remnants of white paint, and next to it lies a broken ladder, three rungs missing. A few children run across the yard, playing tag. “Got you,” cries a girl with a ponytail so light that it seems white. “Did not,” chants the other, smaller girl. “Did not!”

Anna can still remember a thick crystal glass panel with snowflake patterns in the front doors, smooth green tiles in the hall with brown outlines of chestnut leaves, carved wooden staircases, the shine of brown linoleum on the steps. The crystal panel was smashed on one of the Saturday nights when the hallway always smelled of urine and when she could hear feet pounding the ceiling above her bedroom, screams, dull thumps, things falling on the floor and rolling until they stopped. The panel was replaced first by an ordinary glass pane and subsequently by a piece of plywood. One by one, carved railings disappeared. The banister was held in place by roughly hewn pieces of wood.

In the backyard she used to play with other girls, hiding secrets in the grassy meadows, filling shallow holes with flower
petals, beads, coins and then covering them up, first with a piece of glass and then with earth, promising never to tell. In this backyard, crabapple trees yield thick, pink blossoms in the spring and small, tart red apples at the end of the summer.
Rajskie jabluszka,
the little apples of paradise was the Polish for them, and when she bit into the white flesh, it made her tongue tingle. Every spring, the children broke off thick, blooming branches and carried them home to their mothers. Every fall, the boys climbed the trees, cracked more branches under their feet, shook the trunks for the shower of crab apples, cut their initials deep into the trunks.

Tata
stands in the open doors to what was once Anna's home. His hair has thinned and there is an uneasy seriousness on his face, a mixture of apprehension and joy. He clears his throat and shuffles toward her. Anna moves forward to embrace him. He murmurs his greetings in a hoarse whisper. His breath is shallow and uneven. From their telephone conversations Anna knows that he has given up scouring the countryside in an old army jeep, drilling for deposits. The doctors were adamant in their warnings; “It's this or two metres under,” one of them said, pointing to the ground. “Make your choice.” In the last years he has been slowly finishing his geological maps of Lower Silesia, completing the webs of lines and marking levels of elevation with different colours.

“Come inside,” he says.
“Mama
is waiting.” He lets her go first and she can hear the heaviness of his breath as he follows. Her brother takes her suitcases and carries them inside.

Anna walks cautiously, listening to still-familiar sounds. The crackling of the floorboards, squeaking in exactly the same places. The gas stove in the kitchen clicking as it used to, when her brother puts the kettle on. A whiff of a sickening, sweet odour of gas. Her legs remember the elevated threshold between the rooms, the one guests always tripped over. Her hands remember the shape and feel of the brass door handles.

Mama
is standing by the living room window.

“How thin she is,” Anna thinks when she sees her, as if with each year her mother has contrived to take up less and less space. It is her face that Anna watches, searching for signs
of forgiveness. Tears flow along the deep lines on her cheeks.

“She has came back,”
Tata
says, taking
Mama's
hand in his. “I told you she would.”

“You sit down,”
Mama
says firmly to him. “He won't listen to the doctors,” she says to no one in particular as he lowers himself to a sofa covered by a thin red blanket, “He won't stop smoking. So stubborn.” She gives Anna an exasperated look and makes a face her father does not see, a face of stern resignation. “Now it's your turn. You convince him.”

There is a moment of awkward silence as they sit, everybody waiting, fumbling for words.

“Some days he can't breathe at all,”
Mama
resumes her complaints, breaking the silence.

Anna sees drops of sweat gathering on her father's forehead. He wipes them off with a chequered handkerchief and listens to his wife's denunciations with a mischievous smile on his lips as if it were all a prank, a good joke he was playing on her.

“Doctors,” he says. “What do they know?” He winks at Anna.

Yan comes from the kitchen and looks at her. They all watch her. They try to guess what she feels. They want to check how much she can recognise, how much she remembers.

Anna notices new things in the room: a brass flowerpot, a leather covered pillow, a round sewing basket covered with an embroidered cloth. The palm tree by the window has grown so much that it now almost reaches the ceiling, its spiky leaves spreading like a green, dusty canopy. Her presents from Montreal, so carefully chosen, now annoy her with their uncalled-for sleekness. They stand out in the shabbiness of the room: an art deco photograph frame with her picture in it, a set of paper boxes with flowery lids, potpourri in a crystal jar with a silver lid. These are the only things that remind her of William.

“Are you tired?” her mother asks, her voice still uneasy.

“No, no. I'm fine ” she says, quickly.

She gives them all their presents and they open the packages and thank her. Her mother wraps the shawl across her shoulders, her father smells the leather of the wallet.

From the kitchen, her brother brings in platters of food. The table, Anna notices, is covered by what has always been
Mama's
best tablecloth, freshly ironed, white linen with red cherries embroidered along the edges. The cherries have brown stems and pairs of green leaves. She knows that the colours at one side of the cloth are markedly different, the stems of the cherries are black and the leaves are of paler green. This is where
Babcia
ran out of yarn and couldn't buy more of the same colour. “You only notice it when you know,” she would say hopefully. They always agreed. The table is set with white porcelain plates, cups with wreaths of blue flowers, and silver cutlery. Platters with slices of ham, salami, roast pork take the whole centre of the table, beside a bowl of potato salad, bowls of dill pickles — marinated mushrooms, onions, herring. A basket of rye bread, thinly sliced. Slices of cheesecake and poppyseed cake, arranged on an oblong crystal platter in alternating rows wait on the side.

Anna sits at the table and lets them offer her food, taking a bit of everything. Her plate looks full, and she knows she will never be able to eat that much. They watch as she cuts a slice of ham into little bits, chews and swallows. One by one they are asking if she has missed the old tastes, if the food is good, if all is as she remembers it. “Yes,” she says. “It's excellent. It really is.”

The tea is weak and served with lemon and sugar. A glass pot with two teabags still in it sits on the table, and her mother pours the tea into the cups. Half-slices of lemon are arranged on a crystal plate.
Mama
is the only one to drink her tea in a glass, the Russian way. “It tastes better,” she says and stirs the pale liquid vigorously with a spoon, heavy, solid silver that was always kept for most important visitors.

“So many people left the country,”
Mama
says and sighs. “Young people. Another generation decimated. How long can Poland withstand this constant loss of blood.”

In Montreal, for the last ten years, Anna opened her mother's letters with growing uneasiness. At first they were short, very short. Reports on her father's deteriorating health, on Basia whose good humour won everyone's heart, even if she so obviously “lacked ambition” and dropped out of university.

But then her mother began remembering the war. Anna could almost see her, writing, bent over the paper, smoking a Carmen cigarette from which she has torn off the filter. That peculiar, scented smell was what always struck her as she opened the lined white pages filled with stories she refused to tell Anna for years, stories that made her voice break.

She wrote to Anna about
Babcia
finding ways to buy back her daughter's freedom from forced labour, thankful for someone's penchant for good whisky, for her daughter's innocent looks, her ability to recite the poems of Goethe in German that amazed someone important enough. She wrote of the Warsaw Uprising, of daily descents to the sewage canals to carry orders from one unit to the other. She recalled how she helped carry a wounded soldier on her back, her legs immersed in sewage up to her knees. The soldier was crying. He was thirsty, hurting, but he clung to her neck. He begged her to give him a drink. I
don't have any water,
she said, and he tried to lower himself to drink the water from the sewage, but she wouldn't let him. All she had was a sugar cube, so she gave it to him, and he quieted down and only moaned and grew hotter and hotter on her back. When they got out, he was taken away on a stretcher.
I don't even know what happened to him,
she wrote.

Inside the underground tunnels explosions were dulled, muted. She remembered the texture of the red bricks and concrete ledges on both sides where she saw blankets, rucksacks, jars with lard — all abandoned in desperation. The feeling of something soft getting entangled around her feet.
Funny,
she wrote,
how I don't remember the smell.
Their noses must have given up in those days, dulled by the burning smoke, the rotting flesh of the city. As they walked, they kept an eye on open manholes, in front of which they crouched and waited in absolute silence.
That's where,
she wrote,
the SS threw grenades to get to us. That's how we were meant to die.

How hard it was, she wrote, with regained sense of smell, to wash away the stink of the sewers. She threw away all her clothes, then, soaked her hands in hot soapy water until she thought the skin would peel off.
My hair was the worst,
she
wrote.
Sticky. Nothing helped. I had to cut all of it, and I had nothing but a pair of blunt scissors.

When the Uprising fell, the survivors were marched in long columns out of Warsaw, on a warm, sunny October day. The columns took the whole width of the street.
The Germans were surprised that so many of us survived.

Why did Anna have to cut herself off from Poland, her mother asked. Had she not thought of funerals? She may not need her parents, but her parents were not immortal; they may have need of her.
Give me a reason,
her even, rounded handwriting insisted.
Give me one good reason why.