Necessary Lies (6 page)

“So you
do
know where it is?” she asked him, brushing her hair back, away from her face.

The days were still warm and she was wearing a loose Indian dress she had bought in a store on St. Laurent. It was a black cotton dress with purple patches, the shape of falling leaves.

“Are you surprised?”

“Yes.”

“I was born there,” he said. “When it was still Breslau, that is. So we are really from the same place.”

She was playing with the beads in her hair, turning them with her fingers and then letting them go, thinking of an old photograph she had of herself, a tiny figurine, a white dress, a halo of curly hair.

In the black and white picture, she is holding her mother's hand. Behind her are the ruins: piles of rubble spilling into the streets, clusters of red bricks, some still paired together with mortar,
slabs of concrete and granite. A sea of ruins, surrounding small islands of still-standing buildings. Bent pieces of wire stuck out of cement blocks, ripped from the foundations. Underneath the crumbling plaster of what used to be walls of apartments, a wicker lattice revealed itself like a web of veins under the skin. Some of the houses were cut in half, gutted, with discoloured patches on the walls where balconies had fallen off. Where rooms had been — living rooms, bedrooms, studies — the walls betrayed the decorating tastes of their now departed inhabitants, mosaics of greens and blues, walls papered or painted. Streets, too, had been ripped apart by explosions; big craters cut through stones and sand, through the granite blocks of pavements. Some of the streets led to neighbourhoods that no longer existed, deserted valleys in between mountains of debris. Smooth, steel tramway tracks still cut through them, ending in the piles of rubble, disappearing in grass and weeds.

“That's nothing,” her parents told her. In 1945, when they arrived, it frightened them to walk past the abandoned shells of walls, of houses gutted and burnt. The city was empty, so terribly empty that for months after they would fight tears at the sight of a child in the street, the first, fragile promise of permanence. By the time Anna was born, the Baroque houses of the Old Market Square had been restored, their façades painted white, beige and pale yellow. By the time her parents took her for walks by the Gothic Town Hall with its brightly painted sundial or the majestic towers of the Cathedral on the Oder Island, it was almost possible to believe that the war had passed them by.

“When did you leave Breslau?” she asked William that evening.

“In 1945, in January,” he said. “I was five. But we came to Canada before I turned seven.”

The walnut panelled room of the Faculty Club was beginning to grow too noisy and too hot. Anna could feel people pushing her from behind, murmuring their apologies and moving on. She had to strain her ears to separate his voice from the noise around her.

The thought that he was German, even if his German childhood might be nothing more than a few memories of the war, cautioned her to be careful of the things she said. She didn't want him to think she was expecting expressions of guilt, feelings of contrition for the crimes of another generation. But in truth she was. She needed to put him in a safe zone, for she was already aware of how much he could mean to her.

“I don't really remember much,” he said.

Later she was to learn that it wasn't true. All she had to do was to discover the right question. But at that time she didn't know about Käthe, did not know that she should have asked him about his mother.

And yet, even then, he did remember something. In his Breslau street, as in the Wroclaw street she grew up on, there was a row of acacia trees, covered in pale white flowers. In the spring the whole street looked as if it were sprinkled with creamy snow. When he sucked the tips of the flowers they gave up a faint taste of sweetness and wilted under his fingers.

“Nothing else?” she asked. He must have heard the disappointment in her voice for he told her of the long wait for the train that was to take his mother and him out of the city, the smell of heavy coats, of sweat, the suffocating feeling of having nowhere to escape to. “I've never been so afraid in my life,” he said. “And I don't think I ever will be again.”

He had calmed himself by staring at the spirals and mazes of cracks on the ivory tiles lining the tunnel of Breslau
Hauptbahnhof.
Every single one of them different. He had traced these cracks with his finger, the little cells and cobwebs made by the frost and the pounding pressure of heavy trains passing above.

“Have you ever gone back?” Her throat was dry and her voice came out trembling, losing its self-assurance.

In 1975 or 76, he wasn't quite sure of the year, he had toured Poland with the McGill student choir and Wroclaw was one of the stops.
Wratislavia Cantans
, he remembered the name of the festival. Had had a beer near the Wroclaw Town Hall and watched the crowds. The women were gorgeous. He liked the way they walked, their bodies swaying in a rhythm almost forgotten
on this side of the Atlantic. And the city? Didn't care about how German it looked. Never liked Germany much. His family was not Nazi, thank God. His grandfather was executed in Berlin on Hitler's orders, but he didn't take much comfort in that. German acts of defiance didn't amount to much, after all, did they?

He must have seen her relief.

“You might have passed me by,” he laughed, suddenly taken with the thought.

“Were you alone?” Anna asked. She was already trying to feel her way around. He wasn't wearing a ring. She looked at his hand. And she knew he had noticed hers.

“Yes. Marilyn, ex-Mrs. Herzman, didn't much like to rough it with the students. She was into mud spas, then. Excellent for her nerves, she said. Would
you
have been alone then?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I wouldn't.”

No, not then. They were not from the same place. His Breslau was no longer there and in her Wroclaw he could only be a visitor from the West on an exotic trip to a deprived land, marvelling at how the locals could live among such squalor.

“You must have thought us all very shabby,” she said, regretting her remark at once. It wasn't pity she wanted from him.

But he protested. It was a fascinating world, far more exciting than anything else he had seen in years, but not because of its German past. He did notice that the old German buildings were run down, but he couldn't make himself care. The past was not worth getting excited about, he said; it only diverted your energy from more important things. It was the present that fascinated him, the defiance of the people, their resilience, their courage.

Anna knew this was not all together true. For wasn't it the past, so drab and deprived in her memory, that was now making her somehow better in his eyes? Better than if she had been born here, in Montreal.

Later that evening when a tall, pretty woman threw her arms around William and kissed him on both cheeks, Anna slipped out of the Faculty Club. “Darling, you are impossible!” she could still hear the woman's sugary voice. “Where have you been hiding these days?”

Anna walked home slowly, a short walk down McTavish
Street, to Sherbrooke, turn right, past the glittering veranda of the Ritz Hotel, past the crowded restaurants on Rue de la Montagne. In one of them she saw a couple, a gaunt man and a petite woman in a red dress, toasting each other at a small round table. The woman gave her a quick look and burst out laughing, tossing her head backwards. In the store windows, chic mannequins posed in thick, winter coats lined with fur — men and women, frozen in half step, elegant and poised. Carefree.

Anna could still hear William's voice. She half-imagined him next to her, his arm touching hers. “That's nothing,” she kept thinking. “Someone I could've become friends with. Someone I'll never see again.” The wind was cool, and Anna was feeling its bite. Was it already the first sign of winter? Canadian winter she had been warned to fear, as if no Polish winter could match it.

At McGill Anna signed up for courses in literary theory, in which she discussed the futility of making any valid and objective statements about literary texts. Thoughts of words upon words that redouble and multiply meanings as they are read excited her. “I have so much catching up to do,” she wrote in her letters to Piotr. She wrote to him about the trappings of deconstruction, the stripping of layers of ideology from literary texts, revealing biases, contexts, underlying interests. “Nothing is innocent,” she repeated. “Nothing without its negation.”

Piotr's letters arrived in shabby blue envelopes, with her name in a big uneven script.
Lies, lies, nothing but damn lies
, he wrote ignoring the censors. He was angry. Angry at the betrayals, the blank pages of Polish history that, now, finally, could be brought to light. What was the true extent of repressions after the 1968 student revolt? Who started the anti-Jewish campaign and why? Who signed the orders to shoot at the workers in Gdynia in 1970? Who had connived with Stalin at the show trials?
We have to find the whole truth
, he wrote.
Uncover every treachery. Otherwise there will be no new beginning.
She put his letters back in their envelopes and placed them on the night table, next to the photograph of the two of them, on a hike in
the Tatra Mountains. In that photograph Piotr was making a V sign with his hand, and she was resting her head on his arm.

William called her two days later. She thought he might and prayed he wouldn't.

“Anna? William here. William Herzman.”

She had forgotten how warm his voice was. There was music in the background, the soft chords of a piano concerto, coming from another room.

“Where did you hide? I turned my back and you disappeared. The clock hadn't even struck midnight!”

He had looked for her, she thought. He had found out where she lived.

“I had to beg the Chairman of English to give me your phone number. Made a complete fool of myself.”

With her fingers she was straightening the black coils of the telephone cord, trying to disentangle them.

“There is so much I want to show you here. You must let me take you around Montreal.”

Infatuation, that's what she called it then. Harmless, she told herself. Less than love, fleeting, ephemeral, easy to forget. If she didn't stir, it would pass by.

Each morning, her hand trembled slightly as she blackened her eyelashes and drew a thin line along her eyelids. She imagined running into William at the library or in the campus bookstore. “What a coincidence!” he would say, smiling, “Would you care for a cup of coffee?” and she would smile back and say yes, and they would go across the street to a small bistro and she would sip her coffee slowly, hoping it would never end. A thought like that could make her laugh aloud; she could imagine him next to her, his arm around her shoulder, and then she would stop and tell herself not to be silly. “Utterly silly, insane,” she would say, and her hands would touch the spines of books on outdoor stands, the rough surfaces of the walls.

It was the time when she began her long walks through Montreal. She couldn't stay in one place then, too impatient, too eager to know what would happen next. Something would have to happen and only time itself had to be pushed forward. Faster, faster, she hurried past the tree-lined campus, past the white townhouses of Milton Street, and then up Avenue du Parc, onto the Mountain.

On one such walk, at a fruit stall, she bought a handful of red cherries and as she walked she took them out of a plastic bag, pairs of fruit joined together at the stems. If she were little she would wear them like earrings, carry them with her for a long time, before she would allow herself to taste such a treat. But now, laughing, she pushed a whole handful into her mouth and greedily chewed the red sweet flesh until only the smooth stones remained.

“Oh, my God! What am I doing?” she would ask herself when she stopped, out of breath, her heart pounding.

“I can't be in love,” she repeated to herself, smiling, already pleased with the thought. “It's impossible. It can't be.”

“All about you,” he said. “I want to know all about you.”

She laughed. “You want to know all my secrets?”

“Yes. All your secrets.”

She wanted to bury her face in his chest.

He took her for a drive to the Laurentians. The summer had been dry and the fall colours were already beginning to show. Browns and golds of oaks and maples, flaming red leaves of the sumacs. He took so many pictures of her that afternoon, by the fallen tree, in front of a red barn, waving to him from the edge of the lake, petting a country cat, its speckled eyes narrowing with pleasure. “Smile,” he kept saying. “We are all very unthreatening here.”

She thought: Then why am I so scared?

The country roads were almost empty of traffic. “What's that?” Like a child she pointed to things she had not seen before, farm silos, communication towers flashing their mysterious lights. She wanted to know so much about him,
but she promised herself she wouldn't ask, so she was watching him instead, his hands gripping the steering wheel a little too tight. On his black sweater she saw the glimmer of silver, the hairs shed from his beard that she had an urge to pick.

Only later, when they were crossing the bridge back to the city, she broke her own promise.

“Didn't your parents want to go back with you?” she asked. “To Breslau,” she added, as if he could doubt what she meant.

“To Wroclaw?”

It pleased her that he observed the politics of geography. He paused, as if the question required his thought.

“Yes.”

“I've never known my father,” he said, slowing the car down and she thought that he, too, began counting the minutes before they would have to part, “and my mother never wanted to see Breslau again.”

Montreal spread before them. Among the warm fall colours of the Mountain the green dome of St. Joseph's Oratory was almost invisible. She was thinking that in his voice she could hear some old, recurring arguments.