Necessary Lies (17 page)

I went to dinner with a rather too willing and confused friend of Rainer who got drunk and made a few passes at me, at first rather to my amusement and then much to my growing boredom. I've heard the first nightingale this spring, right in the Tiergarten, and you will be happy to know that I slept alone.

Dearest, I know what I'm talking about. Once you said that with you I would change, but I know I would only bury it all, and I would hate you for it. Perhaps I'm not that different from Marilyn, after all. We would have turned love into hate, and I don't want hate, not here, not in this country. You can be both guilty and wronged, Willi, nicht wahr? U.

She shouldn't be going through this alone, Anna thinks. But Marie is in Prague. Marie, who would put a bottle of wine on the table, fetch the glasses, put a fresh box of Kleenex in front of Anna, and start her interrogation. “So who is she? How long did he know her? How often did they meet? Where?” Sharp, pointed questions, tracing the logistics of betrayal. But Anna wouldn't know what to say.

In William's study, books take up the whole wall. These are mostly hardcover; he hated cheap editions that would fall apart before he finished reading them.

“I hate jealousy,” he kept telling her. “It's not the way to live.” How convenient, she tells him now. How very convenient for you. I hate to be lied to, does
this
matter?

She starts by opening the desk drawers, one by one, yanking the papers out. She holds the white sheets to the window as if they could contain some hidden marks, some traces of invisible ink. Why would Ursula be the only one? Why not other women? Students? Colleagues? Friends? She looks for hiding places, empties each file. She opens books, upsets the even rows on the shelves, leafs through the pages in search of evidence. When she finds a folded sheet, she pounces on it, heart fluttering. On one there are a few musical notes. On
another Julia's childhood drawings of giant smiling heads on spidery legs, with arms sprouting from the ears. The books land on the carpet, one by one, and when she walks back to the desk she trips over them.

She has found a whole stack of last year's birthday cards,
Happy 50
^th
Birthday, Many Happy Returns of the Day
. She is surprised William kept them. She had needed to hoard keepsakes, theatre programs, tickets, old calendars. Stash them away “like a hamster” he laughed, but now even this discovery hurts. What else did he keep away from her? She deciphers all the signatures. Malcolm, Jerry Dryden, Leanore. Old friends, everyone beyond suspicion. “Support the arts, kiss a musician,” Malcolm's card says, letters dancing over a figure of a bass player, surrounded by floating notes. No card from Julia, the lingering disappointment of that otherwise splendid day.

The computer starts with a hum of the hard drive, the beeps of files loading. Anna stares at the screen, viewing the content of each file. Official letters, “On behalf of the editorial board of the
Musical Quarterly…,”
an unfinished article on the German performances of Beethoven's Ninth in the last one hundred and fifty years, grant proposals, reports.

Nothing. Not that she really hoped she would find anything. He wouldn't keep things here, not where she could've stumbled onto something by chance. Even now she has a feeling that William has prepared himself for this invasion, that he has foreseen her moves. Everything in this room is in order, everything can be accounted for.

“Liar!”

She pounces on the pile of telephone bills: Germany 20 minutes, Germany 10 minutes. Among his calls to London, Amsterdam, Moscow always the same Berlin number. The last call was on New Year's Eve, only weeks before he died. Two minutes, enough for a short message on the answering machine. Ursula wasn't home?

At night Anna wakes every hour, but manages to fall asleep again and again. The dreams are shallow and jittery, impossible
to connect. She is walking through a field of grass and flowers, so high that they reach her face. She has to spread the grass with her arms, but even then each step is a struggle. Her legs get tangled in the roots, the blades of grass beat her face.

Ursula, her voice multiplied by echoes, shouts something to her from a long maze of tunnels. Someone laughs at Anna from afar, the laughter coming closer and closer. At dawn, William appears. He is standing over the bed telling her that nothing has really happened, that it is all just a bad dream from which she will soon wake. “I promise,” he says and when she does wake up, for a split second she believes him again, until her hand touches the empty space in her bed. Then she begins to sob, pounding the bed with her fists until she has no strength left.

In the morning, at William's desk, Anna takes out a clean sheet of paper.
How could you…
. she starts and crosses it out,
Why couldn't he…. You owe me an explanation... Can you even try to explain why…..
She crumples the sheets into balls and throws them on the floor.

I have found your letters to my husband
, she finally writes.
I know he was your lover. If he were alive I would ask him why he lied to me, but now I have to ask you
. She catches the glint of her wedding ring as she writes. She slides it off her finger and throws it into an open drawer.

She licks the long white envelope, and the glue leaves a bitter taste on her tongue. She copies the Berlin address, and takes the letter to the mailbox across the street. Only when the envelope drops inside she wonders if Ursula knows of William's death. If she does, who has told her.

Her conversation with Julia is a short one. “I've found Ursula's letters,” Anna says. The silence on the phone is already a sign.

“Where were they?” Julia asks. She is not surprised but her voice is lower, deeper than a minute before.

“What does it matter where they were?” Anna snaps. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“Where did you find them?”

“In his office. Why didn't you tell me?”

It is the tone of Julia's voice that maddens her. Slow, deliberate, calm. The voice of the social worker her stepdaughter has become. “It's not so simple. You have to understand my position.” A voice so different from the sobs she treated William to, the late night calls for help.

“No, I don't have to,” Anna says to that voice. “I don't have to do anything I don't want to. Isn't that what you always believed in?”

“I've paid my price,” Julia says.

“You were not the only one. But why am I saying it? You never cared for anyone but yourself.”

Why should she let Julia forget the silence, the unanswered letters, the years of absence from their lives.

“That's not true,” Julia says, still calm, still sure of herself. “You know it's not true.”

“You told her he was dead, too. I shouldn't be surprised, should I? You are
his
daughter, after all.”

Anna slams the receiver, silencing Julia's protests. This may be just a small substitute for revenge, but it gives her pleasure.

The phone rings for a long time afterwards, but Anna doesn't pick it up.
Sorry, we are not available to take your call. Please leave your name and number or call us again
, she hears her own voice, calm, carefree. She has forgotten that the answering machine switches itself on if one waited long enough.

“Anna … Anna, please … I have to talk to you,” she hears Julia's voice. “You can't cut me off like that.”

Marie arrives from Prague with the most recent instalments of the Eastern European drama. “Central European,” she corrects herself. “I keep getting corrected, but they are right. Vienna
is
east of Prague.”

“I'm so glad to see you,” she murmurs, giving Anna a hug. Her eyes slide over Anna's rusty red shirt, her brown jacket. Anna has not worn black since the day she found Ursula's letters.

“You look better,” Marie says, fingering the silk of the shirt. “I like it.”

They are standing in front of the Roddick Gates, the entrance to McGill, on Sherbrooke Street.

“You should've gone with me, Anna,” Marie squeezes Anna's hand.

Anna thinks that with her black hair tied back into a bun Marie's face seems thinner, lighter. Her days in Prague have made her stop at the street curbs and look with suspicion at the drivers. She says she has seen people scurry in fright at pedestrian crossings.

“Walk at your own peril,” she remarks, “anywhere east of the Oder.” In Prague she helped an elderly woman get on a subway escalator. Held her hand and steadied her as the speeding stairs pushed them off, into the platform. “Why do they make them go so fast, Anna,” she still marvels. “It's not a damn roller coaster, is it?” Her Czech friends only laughed at her bewilderment. For them it was yet another lingering proof that Communism was designed for able-bodied workers. “If you were old, or frail — tough luck.”

They cross the street and walk east, past the verandah of the Ritz Hotel.

“Isn't it incredible, though?” Marie asks. “It's not just Poland and Czechoslovakia, Anna. The Russian Empire has already begun to crumble. In Vilnus the KGB crushed a peaceful demonstration with tanks. Concrete walls have been erected to protect the parliament buildings in Talinn and Riga. The Kremlin panics.”

She reminds Anna that only two years ago the demonstrators who gathered on Prague's Wenceslas Square placed lit candles on the ground were attacked and beaten by the police. The whole country shook in outrage. After a few dazed, smoke-filled days of strikes and protests, Václav Havel, the king of Czech dissidents, was brought to the Hradcany Castle.

This has only been a beginning, now almost forgotten. Marie is still shaken by what her Czech friends have told her of the
lustrace,
the national hunt for former Communist collaborators. Lists of suspected security agents have been published in Prague papers, often without proof. “It is not Communism but our old habits that are our greatest enemy,” Havel has warned his countrymen, but no one is listening. A rumour or an informer's report is enough for a condemnation. “They are all going mad,” Marie says, “This is a hysteria of vengeance.”

She is uneasy about revenge, however well founded, Marie says. Her Czech friends, former dissidents themselves, are also terrified and appalled. There is no way to defend oneself, they have told her, even a record of persecution, years spent in prison, the courage it took to sign petitions when no one else dared to, do not guarantee forgiveness. Rudolf Zukal is rumoured to have spied on American students in Vienna in the 60s and this is enough to make him an “ideological collaborator,” and drive him out of Parliament in disgrace.

Is that enough, Marie asks, to condemn Zukal? The man whose full name and address appeared on every petition since the Prague Spring, with carbon copy to the government? The man who lost his job as a University vice rector just because he refused to endorse the Soviet invasion? Who went to work as a bulldozer driver for twenty years? Lived in trailers, was crippled by industrial accidents, had three heart attacks? Whose children were denied higher education?

The man who, in the files of the Secret police, was listed as Czechoslovakia's 265
^th
most wanted dissident? Is there no forgiveness for youthful fervour, for an old mistake tenfold repaid?

Those who judge him now, Marie says, are the same people who didn't dare to protest. Who went home to their families after work, drank their beer and congratulated themselves on their caution and common sense. Who said there was no point in becoming a martyr.

All of it is happening right now, in beautiful Prague, with tourists descending on the newly discovered jewel, a forgotten city. Marie has seen whole groups of Western teenagers treading through
Václavské namestí,
the Old Town,
Karluv most
. Feeding the swans on the
Vltava,
dropping coins into the upturned hats of street musicians, smoking marijuana and singing about wearing flowers in their hair.

“Why?” she asks Anna as they turn south, down Rue de la Montagne, past Anna's first Montreal apartment. The Hungarian restaurant has since closed. There is a new restaurant there now, Terra Mare, a seafood place. The windows of her old apartment are opened, but the curtains are drawn. The mustard coloured curtains, with frayed edges have not been replaced. Anna's mind drifts to the past, to the time when William stopped the car to tell her that he loved her.

“I thought people had decided to start a new life,” Marie's voice breaks through her memories. “After all, no one was without sin.”

“What do you expect?” Anna asks. There is irritation in her voice for which she has no excuse. Marie is right, and yet Anna goes on. “That they all instantly forget? Just like that?”

Marie gives her a cautious look.

“I mean amnesty, not amnesia, Anna,” she says, taken aback. “I'm not saying it is easy.”

Quickly, before she loses courage again or can change her mind, Anna opens her purse and takes out the envelope with Ursula's letters.

“Here,” she says. “I've found them in William's office.”

“What?” Marie asks, stopping abruptly, making the young couple behind them swerve to avoid bumping into them.

“Letters,” Anna says. “From William's lover.”

“From
whom?”
Marie fixes her eyes on Anna's face, not sure she has heard right.

“From William's lover,” Anna repeats and swallows to ease the burning feeling in her throat.

They find a café to sit. There is only one table free, plastic plates piled up on it. Marie throws them into the garbage bin. The table is still littered with croissant flakes.

“I found letters from his lover,” Anna says. With her left hand she is gathering up flakes on the table surface, neatly, into a pile. Small and compact. When the pile is perfect, she scatters it all up and begins again. Her voice is slow, subdued, still calm, but Anna knows how precarious that calm is, and she hurries. “William had a lover in Berlin.”