Necessary Lies (24 page)

Yet, even when the last of the rubble was cleared and carried away on trucks, children found something — flattened toys, bent silver spoons, broken knives, forks with missing tines, pieces of green and blue glass, shards of white and blue porcelain, black gothic German lettering still intact.

If William were here with her on the train, he would look out of the window and, as with all their journeys together, he would draw her attention to the strange assortment of objects
lying in people's backyards: old bathtubs, piles of rusting pipes, concrete blocks, old buckets. He would point to dogs chained to little wooden doghouses. He would notice how square the houses were, like shoeboxes perched in the middle of muddy roads, with no lawns or flower gardens, but with useful rows of vegetable plots and fruit trees. He would point to women riding black, old-fashioned bicycles, their heads wrapped in big, woollen kerchiefs. To village children standing at the railway crossings and waving at the passing trains. To groups of men in quilted work jackets and dark blue berets, drinking beer under a tree. Or he would say that forests here have only two kinds of trees, birches and pines.

Ursula's words hover over her,
It's our souls, darling. They cannot stand letting go of the other lives they could have led.
Words like a flock of birds over ploughed fields. What troubles her is their accuracy. She would rather they could be dismissed.

“You have to think about yourself,” Marie told her before they parted. “You are only thirty-eight. You have a whole life in front of you. You cannot change what has happened.” No, Anna thinks, but what has happened changes you, pushes you where you would never go. And over that you have no control.

The train approaches Wroclaw slowly, in the dusk of a late afternoon. The carriages shake and tremble in the rhythm of cluttering wheels. Cigarette smoke drifts through the doors; it is everywhere. It has already penetrated the fibres of her clothes, it has lodged itself in the pores of her skin. For a long time, Anna stands in the corridor, outside her compartment where the two men have dozed off, their heads bent backwards.

The Polish city and its German double. Filled with shadows. Hers and William's :

“What's your name, lad?”

“Willi.”

“Come here, Willi. Take a look. Take a good look. This is the end of your
Heimat.”

He hadn't liked to talk about Breslau, but some memories came in spite of this reluctance. Death fascinated him, he told her once. The absolute, motionless stillness he could not comprehend. His mother could have covered his eyes with
her hand when they passed deserters hanging in the trees, but he would wiggle away from her grip. Later, at home he would lie down on the carpet, close his eyes, and wait for something to happen.

Führer befiehl, wir folgen.
Order us and we shall follow.

“Where is my father,” he asked his mother one day.

It was a harsh winter day, and he had to wear a fur cap with flaps that covered his cheeks and that he hated with a passion. He wiggled away from Käthe when she tried to put it on. That's when he heard the sound of muted drumbeats, and a man's voice, high, serious, rising over the static of the radio.
The battle of Stalingrad has come to an end.
Then came the music, sweet, tender sounds of cellos, the
Andante con moto
of Beethoven's Fifth.

“Your father fell in the war,” his mother told him. “At Stalingrad, Willi. Your father died at Stalingrad.”

He kept looking at her, but he didn't hear what she was telling him. He was listening to the music.

As the train rolls through the outskirts of Wroclaw, Anna watches the city with suspicion. Old pre-war German houses are easy to spot, big, grey, solid, in spite of the forty-five years that have passed from the day the war ended. Old German working class districts with their red brick, soot-covered façades and tile roofs. She can tell where the ruins have been for that's where the post-war slab houses stand now, the ugly concrete constructions of Communist Poland, like scars. Whole blocks of them, sinister, beginning to crumble the day they were built.

Warm
and
kalt,
she can still remember black Gothic letters on round, white bathroom taps in the house she lived in.
Briefe
on the heavy brass flap through which the postman dropped blue envelopes and faded yellowish postcards with workers saluting their leaders on the First of May parade. Underneath the thick, yellow wallpaper she helped her father strip, the walls were pasted with German newspapers, their black, incomprehensible squiggles forming yet another layer that had to be removed and washed away.

She ran with other children through the ruins, wielding stick guns, yelling at the top of her voice, in the heat of play.
How many German words they knew then, already!
Raus, Hände hoch, schneller schneller.
Get out, hands up, faster, faster.
Polnische Schweine.
Polish pigs.

Ta ta ta ta ta taaaaaa! Deutschland Deutschland über alies, Hei li hei la! Hei li Hei la!

Drang nach Osten. Lebensraum.

She remembers a boy holding a piece of white chalk and drawing the spidery arms of a swastika on a grey, bullet-riddled wall. Then, slowly, as if to test their endurance, filling in the spaces between the lines, turning the upturned cross into four innocent little squares.

Hitler kaput!

“The Wild West,” her father said. “It was like the Wild West.” But all Anna remembers is how terrified he was to walk through the streets.

“The Recovered Territories!” he had read. “The land of opportunity.” Newspapers painted pictures of opulent villas abandoned by fleeing Germans, houses fully furnished, equipped, businesses waiting for Polish settlers, new pioneers, as if this land had no past and had to be reclaimed from nature. “Go!” he read. “Tomorrow may be too late.”

In June 1945 her father was alone and had nowhere else to go. “It took one bomb,” he said. Anna thought of the incredible luck that made him miss the last tramway home before curfew and stay with his friends. From his distant relatives who had survived the war, he had collected small pale photographs of his family — men, women and children with hard-to-make-out faces. “This here is your
Dziadek
Stanislaw. Your
Babcia
Helena.” Everyone in these pictures was someone's son, daughter, brother or sister, and everyone's fate had already been sealed. The web of relationships between the pale sepia figures seemed absolute to him, and he was always surprised when Anna and Yan mixed them up.

“How can you forget?” he asked them, ready to explain once again, but all they wanted to hear about was the story of the missed tramway, a mattress on the floor in his friend's room that had made their own existence possible.

Tata
had come to Wroclaw in a crowded train, with a
leaking roof and a broken window, sitting on the cardboard suitcase he had tied up with a leather belt. The train arrived late in the evening and he had to wait in the station until morning. He heard gunshots, screams, a wave of rattling noises, spoons and ladles hitting tin buckets and iron pans, a warning to the looters, he was told, a show of support. The city was under curfew. He was cold and wet. At dawn, he climbed into a tramway in which all the windows were broken and seats torn out and he rode a few stops along empty avenues of this strange, abandoned city, past rows of unsteady houses, still smouldering, still hot. In streets covered with red dust and littered with broken furniture, German and Russian helmets, and bundles of rags, only the rats moved without fear.

He told Anna and Yan how he had crept past fallen trees, entered emptied buildings looking for a safe place to stay. He described the motionless bodies in the streets, the overturned trams, barricades made of broken tables, chairs, credenzas and beds, the stink of the ruins — of burnt flesh. Terrified of the emptiness of the suburbs, he found a room in a sort of boarding house near the station, a bed infested with bugs. His meals came from a barrel of pickled meat with an off-smell that made his stomach turn. “I'll go back,” he thought, unable to admit that he could ever live here for long. “Soon,” he promised himself, “to Poland.”

That's what he had said: “To Poland.” For in his mind then Lower Silesia was no man's land, a magical robbers' den for the dispossessed, a haven for marauders, a chance for the politically suspect. One could disappear here,
Tata
said, but one could also die from a stray bullet or a knife in the back.

“Why? You ask me why? For the oldest of reasons, Anna. Revenge, greed, despair.”

The trains leaving the Wroclaw Central Station every day were filled with would-be settlers, one-day pioneers who took away with them whatever they could find, rob, or trade from those Germans who had not yet fled. Furs, jewellery, pots, sewing machines, lamps, typewriters, layers of white embroidered sheets, silk lingerie and dresses of Westphalian linen. Jars with
Pfeffer, Salz, Zucker
on them, Rosenthal cups, Meissen porcelain,
earthenware beer
Seidels
with tin or silver lids that could be lifted with a thumb. But the contents of these bags, bundles, and suitcases were just a drop in the general exodus of things. The Red Army, waiting for Stalin's decision on what to do with these lands, was securing its share of the spoils. Trucks leaving Silesian towns and villages for the Soviet Union were filled to the brim with the best of furniture, farm equipment, the insides of entire factories. Settlers spoke of copper wires torn out of the walls, kilometres of railroad tracks removed, buildings with holes in the concrete floor from which the machines had been torn out, where not a screw was left in place.

When he enrolled in the Department of Geology at the Polish University of Wroclaw,
Tata
was given a shovel to help clear the rubble from the classrooms. In teams, the students removed the debris from lecture halls, sorted out bricks and masonry, replaced broken glass. At night, the buildings they helped to clear had to be guarded; it was no secret that the lizards, snakes, frogs, turtles, human foetuses and organs, lining the shelves at the Natural Science Museum, were floating in precious alcohol. Before the windows of the first floor were walled up and armed guards stationed at the only entrance, night brought swarms of marauders who rummaged through the museum rooms, leaving broken jars and dried out specimens as the only evidence of their nocturnal presence.

Tata
had told Anna and Yan how, with other student guards, he was sent to bring whatever could still be salvaged from the houses of departed German professors. The abandoned suburban villas stood silent behind junipers and pines. Anna and Yan could imagine him, nervously eyeing the road behind him, in his hand a piece of paper with addresses he got from university archives. They could hear his footsteps on a gravel path. He was hoping to arrive there before the looters. Everything was priceless then, he said, microscopes, scales, sets of encyclopaedias, typewriters, supplies of paper and ink. Anything that could enrich the museum collection — rocks, fossils. But the most precious, he said, were the geological maps of Lower Silesia. The new Polish land had to be assessed for deposits and drilled.

“It was dangerous,” he said, his voice still uneasy. “One never knew then.” He had heard stories of Nazi treasures buried in the old mineshafts, in the web of underground passages where whole trains with Breslau gold had vanished without a trace. He had heard stories of
Werewolf
executions, swift death for those who saw or heard too much, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He fumbled with the locks of these solid German doors, giving them the final push, before they gave and let him into the smell of floor wax and dust. He pulled at the drawers of rosewood desks, oak secretaries; he emptied old bookcases and picked up rocks from shelves, wrapping them carefully in old German newspapers that stained his hands black. Other students helped him as he loaded these treasures on wooden carts, excited at each find, pointing their fingers at the brass instruments, at polished glass, laughing nervously as they walked. Triumphant, they brought their finds to the Polish University of Wroclaw, relieved that no one had stopped them on the way.

“And then,” Father said, as if it were a miracle he still couldn't quite understand, “I met your mother.” That's when they moved into this mutilated street, between the long prisms of ruins, into the apartment where, Anna can still remember, in each of the three rooms thick wooden poles supported the ceiling. “The structure had been shaken,” Father said, and after that, every so often, she would stop in the middle of what she was doing, stand still and watch for the first signs of tremors.

He knew about such things, she thought. He showed her the rocks he had brought from his trips to the Sudeten Mountains, rocks that looked as if someone had broken them into halves, and then put the halves back together, but not exactly at the same place. “This is a fault from here,” he said. “Look how old it is, how small. Frozen, but it can still tell you what was here before.”

She looked at the piece of rock with suspicion, ran her fingers over the rough surface. Took the rock in her hand and gave it back to him, to be put back, high on the shelf. “That's what I'm trying to do,” he told her, then. “Find out how it all happened.”

“How can you tell?” she asked.

It wasn't easy, he conceded. What was visible was deceiving. Important parts of these rocks could be missing, eroded, crumbled to dust. That's why he had to drill deep into the earth's crust, to find out.

“You can have it if you want,” he said, offering her a grey cylinder, a drilling sample. But Anna preferred the rocks that came from far away lands. The volcanic glass with its shiny black surface, the white plates of celestite, or the green, red, and blue hexagons of quartz.

The first thing her father did in the Wroc aw apartment was to install thick metal bars in the windows and three long bolts with which they barred the door every evening. The bars are still there, as if her parents never felt safe enough to remove them.