Necessary Lies (30 page)

She has lived without him for so long that sometimes he hasn't seemed altogether real. In Montreal, with William, she began to doubt that she had ever even loved him. It was easier to think of Piotr as part of her that she had outgrown. Now, when he is so close, she has to admit it was a cheap trick. Of course she had loved him once, of course he mattered. He still does.

He cannot see her; she is standing behind the enormous flower arrangement in the window, a high cupola of pale daisies with pink centres, which she, at first, believes artificial. She can't stop herself from touching the pale petals. She lets his eyes wander away from the door and only then walks in. When he looks in her direction again, she waves her hand.

Piotr nods, but doesn't smile. He stands up to greet her, and they shake hands. His hand is strong and dry, hers trembling and cold. He likes that, she can tell from a slight twist of his lips.

“So what, finally, brings you back to this part of the world?” he asks.

“My husband died,” she says, and his eyes narrow at the word “husband.”

Ten years have passed. Piotr is sitting in front of her, with the signature of another woman written all over him — in his choice of tie, the cut of his jacket. His face is still smooth, but pale. His hands are manicured, cared for, she remarks. A thought, a desire comes over her, to put her hand on his, to feel the warmth of his skin, the soft cushion of hair on his hand.

She says she is back to see the end of Communism.

“I see,” he says. “Quite a pilgrimage.” His eyes wander away from her, and he leans backward in his chair. It occurs to her that if she had known of Ursula's existence ten years ago, she might have gone back to Poland — to Piotr. This, then, would be her other life.

“You look happy,” she says.

He looks at her as if checking that he has heard her right. “Do I?” he answers, his brows raised. So this, too, is the wrong thing to say. She lets it go.

The marble table is cold, and Anna crosses her arms to avoid touching it. In the back of the café, two young women in long black dresses are playing Tchaikovsky on violin and cello. William would have said something about the soulful quality of their bowing, or the accuracy of their intonation. How she loved watching his face when he listened to music, waiting for the moment when his mouth moved from a distant smile to a twitch. It never came quite at the places she expected.

The waitress asks what they would like.

“A glass of red wine,” Anna says. Oh, but she will have to choose, the waitress says and brings her a wine list. French, Italian, Spanish or Californian?
Beaujolais Nouveau is here,
a small card on the table informs her.

“Californian,” she says.

Piotr orders a beer.
Zywiec.
Polish.

She recalls that Piotr didn't say anything when she mentioned William's death. Not even a token, “I'm sorry to hear that.” He is not sorry.

She asks him about his father's Kraków practice, about his mother's health. He takes after her; his mother is still fiercely proud, impetuous, prone to anger, and ready to laugh. In one of the family stories, a party hack told her not to talk to him as if he were her father's lackey. “Then don't behave like one,” she shot in his face.

She was lucky. It was the time when people disappeared for lesser reasons. The story was repeated all over Kraków, in hushed, delighted whispers. What saved her from revenge was
an event of monumental proportion; the death of Comrade Stalin and the fearful chaos that ensued.

Kraków will have to be restored, Piotr says, after forty-five years of Communism. This vicious, premeditated destruction of Poland. The steelworks of Nowa Huta, the Communist challenge to the bourgeois Kraków, will have to go, he says. The pollution washes away the faces on the monuments, raises the rates of cancer. Anna is not sure where the anger in his voice is directed. Communism? Her?

The waitress arrives with a tray and their drinks. Anna leans back, and sips her wine. “Julio Gallo,” the waitress informs her with pride.

“It's fine,” Anna says. “Thank you.” The wine is slightly sour, but she sips it with pleasure. It gives her something to do. Piotr pours his beer, slowly, into a tall glass and watches the foam rise. His eyes are focussed on the beer glass. She remembers kissing his eyelids, sometime in the distant past, on a sun-baked meadow, on drying moss. A blade of grass in her mouth, she was leaning over him. His fingers brushed her skin when he took the grass away from her lips.

“Do you still hike?” she asks.

“When I have the time,” he says and frowns.

Piotr glances at his watch, but Anna can sense he is not really in a hurry. He has assigned this afternoon for her, with his wife's approval. Hanka is probably watching their daughter play, building a tall tower from her Lego blocks or dressing her Barbie in pink jump suits. There is an aura of smoke around him, but he hasn't made any attempts to light a cigarette. He must have thought through his every move, decided what Anna is entitled to, what she should be refused. When she asks to see a photograph of little Wanda, he shows it to her, quickly: a cascade of blond hair, a smiling, mischievous face, on the verge of laughter.

Wanda! Even his daughter's name stings her, the name of a Polish princess who preferred death to marrying a German prince. First made him promise not to seek revenge on her people and then threw herself into the Vistula river. “Follow me, if you wish,” she said. A mound to her memory has been
raised outside Kraków, high enough to be visible from every part of the city.

“You don't have children?” This sounds like a question, but Piotr knows the answer already. He has been hearing stories, too. Julia, of course, doesn't count. She is William's daughter, not hers.

“Look,” she says. “I have no claims. I'll sign whatever you want.” That's why she is here, isn't she? To dismiss all obligations. To move on.

“You can't . You own half of the apartment.”

“I don't want it.”

“How about your parents, your brother?” he asks.

“Silly,” she thinks. “Of course.” Nothing here is just hers alone. Her parents helped them quite generously with it, and her brother is living there now. She has no right to give up what has been theirs, too.

“So what do you want me to do?” she asks.

She will have to get a lawyer, give the power of attorney to someone she can trust. He wants to do it right. She can buy the apartment off, if she wants. He doesn't mind. It will have to be renovated soon. The old piping is giving way. Communist piping, he says. Communist paint. Communist wooden doors that are now warping and cracking.

“All right,” Anna says. She will buy it, for her brother, for Adam. She will pay whatever price he asks. It doesn't matter.

Piotr gives her his business card, from the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
Advisor,
she reads. Polish on the one side, English on the other. His home address is there, too, in the left corner. Pilczyce, a wealthy suburb of white villas with red tile roofs.

“Another glass of wine, Madam?” the waitress asks.

“Yes,” Anna says, “Yes, please.”

Piotr says that he took Hanka to Bodensee for the holidays. Hanka and little Wanda, who has just turned three. Anna tries to imagine him there, in Lindau, perhaps, with its ridiculous Rapunzel Tower that Wanda would have liked. She remembers her own disappointment. After Canadian lakes, Lake Constance seemed to her tame and manicured. William agreed. They were merely passing it, on the way to the Alps.

Piotr tells her that he now lives in a house with a big garden where Hanka grows flowers.

“Violets are in bloom now.” he says, “But the crocuses are all gone.”

“So you are happy” she says. “Everything turned out all right.”

The struggle is over,
she is trying to tell him.
You've done it, Piotr, you have won your revolution. It is a different time now, a time to understand, a time to reconsider. Perhaps even forgive.

“My, how you've changed,” he says. On his lips, this is an accusation — as if only remaining constant mattered. Would she think like that if she had stayed here? Somehow this doesn't seem possible, but she may be deluding herself.

He is finishing his beer, draining the last drops. When the glass is empty, he looks at her. He has been waiting for this moment for a long time. “Everything turned out all right,” her words are ringing in the air, less and less convincing with each passing second.

“What did you think?” he says, and his words are meant to hurt. “That I am still mourning your betrayal?”

“No,” she says, quickly. “No. That's not what I mean. I've always hoped things would turn out fine for you.”

“And if they have?” he asks with a smile she doesn't like, a grimace of a smile, a twist of the upper lip, somewhere on the edge of contempt and indifference. “Why should that make you feel any better?”

“I don't have to feel sorry for you, Piotr,” she says.

He hasn't expected it. He was sure she would take it all, in silence. She can see his face change, redden. She has made him angry. He draws the air into his lungs with a hiss.

“I used to feel so guilty,” Anna doesn't stop. “So guilty. I thought I should beg you for forgiveness. I knew I couldn't live here, but I could understand you. I believed that one day you would understand me. But you won't . You won't even try, Piotr. You think that because I live in the West nothing I've learned matters. Nothing.”

He leans toward her. “War makes a lot of things simpler, Anna,” he says. “In prison you lose quite a few illusions. Know
who your real friends are. You've made your choice, so don't come here asking for forgiveness.”

“I'm not asking for forgiveness, Piotr” she says. “But I thought you might understand.”

It occurs to her that once she has agreed that she has betrayed him, little is still possible. Maybe she was too quick with penance, she thinks, but such offerings cannot be taken back easily. She can hear him breathe; she can hear the air pass through his nostrils. She can see the deepening frown on his forehead.

“This is the real end of the war.” Piotr says. “We knocked down the Wall, and we will no longer be shoved aside. The West will have to make room for us at the table.”

She is watching him as he speaks, but he avoids her eyes.

“Chernobyls were a bit harder for the West to ignore than the Gulags,” he continues with a note of satisfaction. “The Iron Curtain could not stop the wind and rain.”

She is still silent.

“Soon you may again find yourself on the wrong side of the tracks,” he adds. “But,
hey,
you know how to switch sides, don't you. You can always come back.”

She thinks: You have won, Piotr. You have been rewarded. What else do you want?

When he stands up, he takes out his wallet from his breast pocket and leaves two banknotes on the white plate, underneath the bill folded inside a white napkin.

“It's my treat,” he says and then looks at her. He still needs her eyes to confirm his victory.

Anna watches him disappear behind closing doors. The waitress comes by to pick up the check and the folded bills. “Please, keep the change,” Anna says. It is then that she knows she will have to see Ursula, after all.

This is her last evening at home. Yan has taken Basia and Adam back to their apartment, and he will be back in an hour to take her to the station. Alone. It's too late and too chilly for
Tata
to leave home and he would refuse to stay if
Mama
decided to go.

Adam has given her a farewell card he had made, with roses and tulips, red and yellow.
For Ciocia Ania,
it says. Anna detected the straight pencil lines he made and then erased, to make sure the letters stayed even. One of the corners of the card is bent.
Secret
it says. “Open it,” Adam whispered, “Open it,
Ciociu”
When she did, she saw a tiny drawing of a space ship and
Come back soon!
written right beside it.

Her mother's skin is loose, too big for her. “It's terrible,” she says, and her face takes on a look of disgust. “I've never thought that old age would be so ugly.” She pulls on the flabby flesh of her arms. Her hands have grown bony and thin.

The kitchen table is cluttered with jars, bottles, ceramic containers, some empty, some filled with oily liquids Anna cannot identify. Everything in this apartment is odd, mismatched, and haphazard — rickety chairs, sofas that sink with a moan of springs, threadbare rugs. As if another cataclysm were meant to take care of it all, and there was no point in making an effort. They have lived like this for forty-five years.

One of the cupboards, Anna has discovered, is filled with glass jars, washed, stacked one on top of another. A whole cupboard full of empty jars. “What for?” she has asked. “I'll wait until they start recycling again,” her mother has said. “We've never wasted anything. This is not right.”

The old, broken down refrigerator, Russian “Mir” Anna remembers from childhood, stands in the kitchen next to its successor, a linen tablecloth spread on its top. Inside there are used radio batteries and aluminium cans. Her mother won't throw the batteries into the garbage. “They will leak into the ground,” she says. “I know what's in them.” In one of the kitchen drawers there is a flat box full of used tramway tickets, neatly arranged in rows.

“You'll soon run out of space, if you carry on like this for too long,” Anna jokes, but she is uneasy about this hoarding. In Canada she has heard stories of old women collecting plastic bags and styrofoam trays.

“Not everything old is useless,” her mother says. “When I'm gone, you can do whatever you want with it. You can throw it all in the garbage. Then, I won't care.”

“Mamusiu!”
Anna pleads. “Please. Don't say things like that.” Her voice is quivering, sore. There is so little time left. Her father has found a dirty cup, and he takes it to the sink to wash it, glad to have something to do, something that lets him hide his face.