Necessary Lies (29 page)

Anna is trying to remember all William has ever told her about this house. Frau Knorr with her sweet smile and her daughters, Moni and Bibi. Little Jutta with her freckles and reddish locks, playing hopscotch on the pavement. “My first love,” he said, recalling polka dot dresses, and heavy coats with a herringbone pattern. Maids tied kerchiefs at the top of their heads to keep the dust out of their hair as they beat the carpets, rising clouds of grey particles that drifted with the wind. Most of all, he said, he remembered his mother's face, always tense, impatient with him, and her angry voice, “Willi! Williiiiiii! Stop it. Stop it at once!”

That's what has always happened, Anna thinks. He started telling her about Breslau, but the story always swerved and returned to his mother, to the old stubborn feelings of being watched, judged, and found wanting.

Anna is first to spot the house on Gerhart Hauptmann Weg, now Maria Konopnicka Street — a German writer giving way to a Polish one. It is a corner house, covered with ivy, with a wrought iron fence, grey columns and a narrow path that leads to the front door.

William remembered a stained glass picture hanging against
the windowpane, with a country girl climbing a rock, high in the mountains, her right hand reaching into an eagle's nest. The glass frame was made of red, yellow and aquamarine squares, and when the sun shone the glass glittered. But of course it's no longer there. Whoever walked into this house in 1945 must have found Käthe's books, clothes, photographs, preserves in the cellar, the mahogany box with William's toys. Perhaps some of these things are still here, Anna thinks, perhaps all she has to do is to be let in and she will see the carved furniture, the bookcases. Maybe even old pictures are here, hidden in the attic where the new owners have put them, thinking that maybe other people's memories should be spared. She has heard things like that happen. Refugees from the East, driven from their homes by Stalin, were not as hostile to the Silesian Germans as the Poles from Central Poland. They were known to preserve old family keepsakes and return them when asked.

The front door of the house opens and a woman appears. She is in her late thirties, wearing a tight pink dress and white clogs. She must have seen them through the window and now she is curious, wants to establish her presence. Anna feels her gaze, not unfriendly, she thinks, but cautious and she remembers the first West German cars of her childhood, slowly coming to a stop on their street. They followed these visitors like shadows, guiltily accepting handfuls of chewing gum and candy, hiding the sweet treasures from their parents. One man Anna remembers particularly well, because of the shining gold of his glasses and his bluish grey suit. He was invited inside by
Pani
Walczakowa, offered coffee and a slice of plum cake. Later she heard
Pani
Walczakowa describe how the German asked to be left alone in one of the rooms, and through the keyhole they all watched him sit there without moving.

“Why don't you ask her to let us in?” Yan says, curious, wondering what will happen. “Maybe she won't mind.” The woman waits, motionless, watching them. When Anna gathers her courage, the woman does not seem at all surprised at her story. “Your husband was born in this house?” she repeats, nodding. “Moved all the way to Canada?” She seems impressed by these words. “Come in,” she says. “Please. Come in.”

“I'm Magda Olejniczak,” she says. Her hand is soft and limp.

“Anna Herzman,” Anna says, and smiles with gratitude.

Inside, Magda points to a few pieces of furniture that, she says, have been here for as long as she remembers. “This side table,” she says, “and the grandfather clock.” She doesn't know if they were here in 1945, as she is not the first owner of the house. In fact it is her parents' house and soon they might be forced to sell it. Taxes are rising and jobs are no longer secure, she says. Her father had a good, steady job, she doesn't say where, but now he is threatened with cutbacks. Also some people don't like the fact that he didn't join Solidarity from the start. As if he did something wrong, she says, by being cautious.

“Does your husband speak Polish?” she asks, looking at Yan who stands in the door, hesitating.

“Oh, no,” Anna says. “This is my brother. My husband died. In January.”

“I'm so sorry,” Magda says, embarrassed by her mistake. “But I thought... I am sorry. I didn't mean ...”

“That's all right,” Anna says.

The rooms have been painted many times over, and are now the colour of green peas. The pictures on the wall are cheap reproductions of Polish paintings, a young peasant woman stretched on a meadow, an old peasant and a young boy watching a pair of flying storks.

Anna asks if there is anything else left that could have belonged to Käthe's family.

“No,” Magda says, there is nothing in the attic. There used to be some clothes she remembers, coats with fur trim, boxes with hats, but moths got into them and her mother had to throw them away. She remembers the clothes because when she was little she used to dress up in them, pretend she was a lady.

Anna takes out a photograph of Käthe and William and shows it to Magda who examines it. The evergreens around the house, she says, are so small. The giant fir in front is no larger than a Christmas tree.

In the backyard, underneath the hazel bush the breadbox with family silver may still be buried. Käthe's mother hid it
there before leaving for Berlin, but it was William who told her about it, not Käthe.

“Would you like to see the bedrooms upstairs?”

“No,” Anna says. “Thank you so very much.” She is beginning to feel uneasy, as if assuming a role she is not entitled to. It's not her home, after all; these are not her memories. “But I would like to see your garden,” she asks. “I love gardening,” she adds as if to explain her wish. “Your hostas look gorgeous from here.”

Magda is pleased. “I'm sorry there isn't that much for you here,” she says and suggests that maybe Anna would like to take pictures of the house. Anna nods.

“Go ahead,” Yan says, accepting Magda's offer of tea and home-made cake. As she is closing the back door behind her, Anna hears their muffled laughter at the confusion of the first moments. “Come on, do I really look German?” her brother asks.

In the garden the hostas look resplendent, next to big, bushy ferns. They must like the shade of the trees and the acidity of the soil from the needles of the big fir. The hazel bush has been pruned with care. For a split second Anna considers asking Magda if they had found the silver, but it is only a split second. What if it is still there? What if they dig it out now? She doesn't want to put this hospitality to the test of who owns what. She is sure Käthe would not want it. It's better to let things lie buried in the ground.

When she comes back into the house Magda and her brother talk about computers. That might just be a salvation, Magda says. She has been to Taiwan a few times already. Mostly she brought back clothes, but there is more money in electronics. She has managed to sell a few PCs, but what she needs is a store and service. She would have run a business out of here, God knows there is enough space, but it's too far from the downtown.

Anna is asked to join them, for a cup of tea and a slice of plum cake. She is asked which computers are the best in Canada, but her answer — hesitant and cautious, explaining that it depends so much on the individual needs and preferences — is clearly a letdown.

“We can sell the best here, too,” Magda says, “Not only hand-me-downs.”

Her brother nods. “All sorts of people with money” he says. “Big money.”

“You should consider investing here,” Magda says. “It's the time, now. Tomorrow may be too late!”

Anna hands Magda a box with maple syrup candy, one of the Canadian gifts she has brought for such encounters.

“We must be on our way,” she says. “Thank you so very much for your hospitality.”

“That's all right,” Magda smiles. “My pleasure. All the way from Canada,” she says, still amazed at the turn this day took.

The next morning Anna wakes up late, unwilling to get out of bed, to leave its softness and warmth. As in her childhood, the windows in the room are covered with white lace curtains, freshly starched and ironed. She lies staring at the ceiling, at the plaster ornaments, broken where the cord of the electric lights was added. The wiring was a later addition in this building, and so was the sewage system. Pipes and wires run over the walls. The Germans used to hide them under the wallpaper, her father said, but you can't do that with paint.

She gets out of bed and walks around the room. The floorboards have layers of paint on them, lighter patches show through reddish brown and there is a pattern to their creaks and squeaks, revealing the spots where the nails have loosened. How little has changed, she thinks.

Her parents are up. From another room she can hear her father coughing, a long recurring bout, and her mother's voice telling him to swallow something. “Just take it. For once don't argue with me.”

A white shoebox, filled with papers is lying on the table. “Piotr brought it here, after they let him out of the internment camp,” her mother said. “He told me he didn't know how he could return this to you.”

Piotr brought most of the things that belonged to her here right after the day she called to tell him about William. They are still unpacked, a whole stack of cardboard boxes in her mother's room. Anna will have to go over them in the next few
days, get rid of what she doesn't want to keep.

In the shoebox she opens now, lie the smaller, more personal things. Her old notebooks, an autograph book with a mountaineer's head carved on the black, wooden cover, and her letters to him. All of them. The oldest letters are those she used to leave for him at the dorm, and letters from Canada, from the first weeks, when she still didn't know what she would do. These she opens eagerly to read her own words — pleas, it turns out, for Piotr to come to Montreal.
Only now, I see how life could be like,
she wrote then.
Without the daily humiliations we have to go through. You would have no problems finding a job here or in English Canada. I have made many friends already who would like to help.
She is surprised that she was so open in her letters, and so desperate.

I'm afraid,
she reads in another letter, I'
m afraid of having to go back, of blaming you for the hopelessness of our lives. I don't want the world to close for me. I know I will only grow bitter with each day spent on these little meaningless victories we have learnt to expect from life, a pair of shoes, a bar of soap. I can't return to life led to a script written by others, always by others, never by ourselves. How can I ever discover who I might become? How could I ever know who I am?

What did Piotr think when he read it? These incomprehensible,
American
questions? Did he think her spoilt, callous, ridiculous with these newly discovered needs?

Among her old letters she spots a Montreal postcard with a view of St. Joseph's Oratory. On the other side there are two lines of a poem she quoted for Piotr in her own defence:
We don't have history/ We have moments of wasted life,
and a short line she has added underneath:
Maybe because of that past we have hardened our hearts so much, and now we have forgotten how important it is to forgive.

She wrote the postcard in October of 1981, already thinking of William, already in love. She remembers letting the postcard slide into a red mailbox on Peel Street and then rushing to the small corner bistro across from McGill. William was waiting for her in his tweed jacket and black turtleneck, bent over something she couldn't see.

What else is there in the box? A few photographs of the two of them, together, smiling, locked in an embrace. They both looked so young then, faces smooth, laughing, hands twined. A tiny
samizdat
imprint of Parisian emigré magazine
Kultura,
ideal for smuggling into the country. March 1981: Elena Bonner talks about her dissident husband, Andrei Sacharov, and his life in Gorky where no one but her is allowed to visit him.

The phone rings in the hall. Her mother picks it up, listens for some time and then calls her name. “It's for you,” she says and closes the kitchen door.

“Piotr Nowicki,” Anna hears in the black receiver, as if she could have forgotten his name.

“It's me,” she answers. “Anna.” She waits. She doesn't ask him how he is. She doesn't think it appropriate.

“I can see you today,” Piotr says. He sounds calm, almost businesslike. “This afternoon.”

“Can you hold?” she asks and takes a deep breath, covering the mouth of the receiver. She doesn't want him to hear the uneasiness of her voice. She clears her throat.

“Sorry about that,” she says. He doesn't say anything.

She could meet him in a downtown café, on the second floor of
Dwór Wazów,
right near the Town Hall. They could talk there, if that's all right.

“That's fine,” he says. His voice is not how she remembers it. But then, maybe she doesn't remember it at all — not anymore.

“At two, then.” He puts the receiver down so fast that she hears the click right in her ear.

The truth is that she doesn't quite know how she feels about him. There were times, right after his arrest, when she tormented herself with guilt. Each night, before falling asleep, she prayed for him, negotiated feeble but elaborate deals with fate in which good things would happen to him and erase the memory of her betrayal.

Her hand shakes when she puts on her makeup. The line she draws along her eyelids is too thick, smudgy. She has to wipe if off and start again. In the bathroom mirror her face looks frightened and compliant, and she doesn't like it.

Anna notices Piotr at once, his blond curls, as thick as she remembers. He is sitting with his legs slightly apart, at a low marble table, staring at the floor. She watches when he raises his head and snaps his fingers in the air, summoning a waitress who arrives promptly. He says something to her and turns around to see who is coming in through the door. He looks strikingly handsome in an old-fashioned way — a black woollen jacket, scarf around his neck. Anna watches as he turns around, slowly looking over the faces of the passing women, discounting them one by one.