Necessary Lies (36 page)

“Moni, my daughter, she knows all this. I told her all about it, and she says we have to bear our punishment. Perhaps she is right. Johann was a prisoner in Russia, but he was released in 1947. He, too, didn't want to speak about what he had seen. He said we had to be grateful for what we had. Käthe made me promise I would never tell Willi. I never did. But I want you to know. You were his wife, after all. You should know.”

“Mutti”
Monika says, softly.
“Mutti
, it's all right.”

Frau Strauss begins to fold the Breslau albums. Her eyes narrow and her lips fold inward.

“It's good Käthe is in Canada,” she says slowly. “This is a cursed land. People are afraid of the past here, afraid to love their country, afraid to be proud of it. No matter what the young ones do, the world will never forgive the German people. Käthe was right to go away with Willi. Please, tell Käthe I said that. She will know what I mean.”

Frau Strauss shakes her head as she says it and looks up to the stuccoed ceiling, to the rosettes and meanders of white plaster ornaments.

Anna has underestimated Ursula's persistence. Next evening, by the time she is back at the hotel, her feet aching and swollen from the march through the city, Frau Herrlich has already chatted with the proprietor of the pension, and he has brought
her cappuccino to the lounge, to the low table by the marble fireplace. He is now motioning to Anna to hurry there, to meet her distinguished guest. “Four times,” he says. “Frau Herrlich has been here four times. I saw her on television just a few days ago. But you never left a message for her, did you?”

“No,” Anna says. “I didn't.”

Ursula rises from her chair, points to the coffee cup, and waves to Herr Müller, a thank-you he acknowledges with a beaming smile. She has tied her hair in the back, straightening the grey curls. Only one unruly strand keeps falling over her eye. Without lipstick her mouth looks smaller and pale, but the lines cutting into her lips are deeper.

“I've been trying to find you,” she says.

The anger that seized Anna when she rushed out of the café, ignoring Ursula's plea, has evaporated.

“I've been sightseeing,” Anna says. “My flight doesn't leave until Saturday.”

“Good,” Ursula smiles. “I want to show you something, too.”

Anna hesitates.

“Please,” Ursula says. “We shouldn't part like this. I want you to see it.”

Ursula walks fast, her heels clicking on the pavement, and Anna follows, each step an effort for her swollen feet.

Ursula's car is parked nearby, a red BMW with a black interior, and Anna sits down with relief, stretching her legs as far as they will go.

“You can move the seat all the way back,” Ursula says. “It'll give you more room.”

She drives fast, taking sharp turns and stopping with a screech of tires, and Anna leans back in the seat. “I know how it must hurt you,” Ursula says. “I've thought about it. It was such a terrible time to find out. When you can't grab him by the collar and scream. And William cannot explain, cannot mend anything.”

There is so much intensity in Ursula's voice. So much passion. Is she defending William, pleading for him? Her hands are clasped tight on the steering wheel. Anna can see the muscles hardening, stretching under the skin.

“William is dead,” she says.

“But he is still hurting you,” Ursula says.

“It'll pass. I'll forget.”

They drive by the streets, empty but for cleaners who sweep away the discarded fliers, confetti, and cigarette butts.

“When the Wall fell, the longest line-ups were in front of porno shops,” Ursula says quietly. “The bouquets of flowers we greeted the
Ossis
with did not last. A few days later you could hear the first jokes: Why should we envy the Chinese? — They still have their wall!”

They drive out of the city, past long rows of one storey prefab buildings, empty at this hour. It is getting dark fast. Anna watches it all, silent.

“You won't forget,” Ursula says. “I won't either.”

The car pulls up to what seems to Anna like the end of the road, but is only a lowering of the terrain, a big empty lot where she sees a herd of small cars, parked all over the place. When the engine stops, Ursula leaves the lights on and blinks them three times. Slowly, one by one, the little cars light up, doors open, and men come out, disentangling themselves from their sleeping bags. Soon a whole group of them circles the car, and Anna is uneasy. She would have locked the car doors, driven away, but Ursula waves her hand.

“Hi, guys,” she says. “Is Andrzej around?”

“Tomorrow,” a tall, heavy man says in German.
“Jutro”
he repeats in Polish. It is only then that Anna realises that all of these men are Polish. She should have guessed it from their faces, broad and tanned, from their moustached lips. Or from the shape of the small Polish Fiats, with their steel shells filled to the brim with soft human bodies.

The men give Ursula quick, suspicious looks, and exchange a few words among themselves. She has opened the doors of the BMW, and is standing up, her foot resting on the chassis. They seem nervous, unsure of themselves, their hands awkwardly looking for something to do. One of them, the heaviest, with short greying hair, lets a load of saliva gather in his mouth and spits it on the ground with a swishing sound. He is calmer than the rest; he has obviously seen Ursula before.

“Your friend,” the man asks, pointing at Anna. “She too, looking for workers?”

“You can ask her yourself,” Ursula says. “She speaks your language.”

The man slowly turns to Anna, and she sees in his look a mixture of embarrassment and anger.

“You speak Polish?” he asks. The question is not a polite inquiry. The man does not call her
Pani
, but uses a direct form,
“Mówisz po polsku?”
Anna does not like his directness, the unwanted familiarity, the underpinning of contempt.

“Tak,”
Anna says. The sound of this one word gives her away, tells him that she does not merely speak the language, but is Polish.

“From Warsaw?” he keeps asking.

“No,” she says quickly. “From Wroclaw.”

He gives her a questioning look. What is she doing here, then, with this German woman in her tight black dress, her red vest, the air of some actress?

“You work with her?”

“No,” Anna says. “Just visiting.”

“Ah,” he says and leans on the BMW, toward her. “Enjoying the sights?” The contempt in his voice makes Anna blush. “Checking us out?” He gives a loud, piercing whistle and Anna, quickly, turns her head away.

“Can we go now?” she asks Ursula.

The men are beginning to leave, one by one. They have already decided that their prospects of getting a job from these two women are slim, not worth giving up a few hours of sleep. Only three of them are still standing around the car, stepping from one foot to another, waiting for something to happen.

Ursula takes out a piece of paper with directions. “I need five for next week,” she says. Five, she signals with her palm. The heavy man grabs the paper before she has the time to extend her hand and stuffs it into his pocket.

“Ya, ya,”
he says. “You German whore,” he mutters in Polish, loud enough for Anna to hear him.
“Danke schön.
We come.”

“Gut!”
Ursula says, gets into the car and starts the engine.
“Auf Wiedersehen!”

In the headlights the men seem weightless, dancing in the beams of light, like moths. They look back as they walk away, their white faces distorted and suddenly, Anna notices it now, drawn from exertion.

“They hate your guts,” she tells Ursula.

“What else is new,” Ursula says. “At least they don't hide it.”

“Why are you doing it?”

“What?”

“Coming here, like this, to hire them. It's not legal, is it?”

“Maybe it's my atonement?” Ursula says. The car is speeding again and Anna clutches at the handle above the window. “They need money. I have an assignment. Lots of heavy stuff to drag around. Andrzej tells me they need the money to buy apartments in Poland, to start a business. Their families send them here. That's the only way to end the life of five to a room, or chasing jobs that pay next to nothing and threaten to disappear.”

“Andrzej?”

“A guy who brought me here first, a filmmaker from Wroclaw. He used to sleep here with them, in his car. He has a good eye,” she laughs. “We might do a film together.”

Anna is relieved when they enter the city, when empty suburban streets with their lambent glows are left behind. The car turns into a tree-lined street and stops in front of a heavy, brownish building. Ursula turns her head to Anna, a slight twist, a half-turn.

“Come upstairs, to my place. I don't want you to leave like that.”

“Please,” she adds, seeing that Anna lingers. “Do come!”

They climb the wide stairs with metal lace in between the steps. The stairs William climbed, Anna reminds herself as she follows Ursula past a spotless landing with its palm tree in a brown terra-cotta pot. But curiosity has already taken over, softened her.

The ceiling in Ursula's apartment is high, stuccoed, like the Wroclaw apartment of Anna's parents; but, here in West Berlin, there was no lack of money to care for it. “You know how Marx's
Capital
got divided?” she remembers her father's old joke, “The West got capital, we got Marx.” There are no cracks,
no crude coats of paint over hardwood, the passage of time is camouflaged, muted. In Ursula's living room, magazines and papers cover wide leather sofas. Ursula kicks off her shoes and walks into the long, narrow kitchen in which Anna glimpses the brown surface of wood cabinets and black tiles.

“Make us some room on the sofas,” Ursula says and Anna folds a newspaper, stacks a few magazines, enough to clear two spots, one for herself and one for Ursula who is moving swiftly, amid the clinking of glass.

This is a large room with walls almost empty but for two enormous photographs placed on the opposite ends of the room. One is a picture of a treetop, its green leaves dappled by the setting sun, its trunk hiding behind a concrete fence, behind the coils of barbed wire. On the opposite wall a carved quotation:
So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

There is not much of the furniture here apart from two sofas, just a few shelves, a wooden chest of drawers and a big television set — black, taking up the whole corner. Ursula comes in with a tray on which she has placed a green teapot in the shape of a pear, two cups, two glasses and a black bottle of Courvoisier.

“William,” Ursula says, “couldn't look at it. I could see he always sat in such a way that he wouldn't have to face it.”

“The quote? It is from
Revelations
, isn't it?” Anna asks, looking at the picture of the carving, but even now she is wrong about him.

“The other one.” Ursula points to the one of the treetop. “I took it in Auschwitz,” she says. “From inside.”

Ursula settles cross-legged on the spot Anna has cleared for her, with her feet bare. Her toenails are painted bright red. She pours brandy into big glasses for both of them. A Yoga posture, Anna thinks. The beginning of all moves. She fixes her eyes on Ursula's small frame, muscles stirring under the skin as she bends over to hand Anna the brandy. Gaze like that makes people uncomfortable, but Ursula seems oblivious to it, lighting a cigarette, drawing the smoke in, exhaling. Anna cannot stop thinking about the men in the parking lot, their eyes filled with contempt. One of them had a tiny gap
between his two front teeth, just like Ursula's. They still make her uneasy, the way they spat behind them as they walked back to their cars.

“Look here.” Leaning over the low coffee table Ursula spreads a pile of photographs that were lying on the side, black and white shots of pale, angry faces, raised fists with chains wound up around them.

“This is Görlitz,” Ursula points to the shots of the demonstrators. “And Zgorzelec.” She pronounces the Polish name flawlessly, Anna thinks. Andrzej must be a good teacher.

A city split in half she tells Anna, by the post-war borders. When it was divided, the Germans got the town hall, the station, all municipal buildings, the zoo, the theatre, and main churches. The Poles got Oberlausitzer Gedenkhalle and the gas station. Tram tracks that led through bridges were poured over with concrete.

“I got a hint that that's where World War III was brewing. When Poland opened its borders, four thousand ultra-right German youths descended on Görlitz. The plan was to light the German ‘fires of warning,' and then cross the border with the flames and light the fires in front of the Gedenkhalle. The German side was blocked with armoured cars and antiterrorist squads. They couldn't get through,” Ursula says. “I went there with Andrzej. We filmed the whole scene. I tried to talk to them. It was like talking to ghosts. ‘German blood has been spilt into this land,' the guy in a black shirt screamed right into my face. His chin was shaking.”

The young men in the photographs have clean-shaven faces and short blond hair.

“William thought I shouldn't have filmed them. I was only giving them free publicity, he said. It was better to let shit like that die out on its own.”

She waits until the smoke has formed a curl and vanishes into the air. She sniffs her brandy before taking a sip. William's favourite drink, Anna thinks, the one she has never learned to enjoy. There is a bottle just like it in her living room in Montreal.

“Do you also think I'm obsessed? That I should stop watching?” Ursula has stubbed her cigarette half-finished, but
there is still enough smoke in the air; it irritates Anna's eyes.

“No,” Anna says. “I don't think you should stop.” How could she say anything else? These are her own obsessions, too. Here, in this part of the world, they have all been marked for life.