Necessary Lies (31 page)

Anna's mother looks up. “I can still see her here, by the sink,” she says. They all know whom she means. The kitchen was
Babcia's
place. That's where she would sit in the dark, after all the work was done, looking through the window at the ruins across the street. If Anna came in and switched on the light, Babcia would look at her, startled, as if Anna were a ghost.

When Anna is making her bed, folding the old quilt, fluffing up the oversized pillows, her mother knocks at the door. She looks at Anna's suitcases, packed, ready and sits at the edge of the bed.

“When shall we see you again?” she asks.

“Soon,” Anna says. “It's not that far, now. A few hours on the plane.”

“Yes,” her mother says. “But it's not the same. You are not here anymore.”

“How is he?” Anna asks. They can both hear how her father is clearing his throat, hacking up phlegm.

“I don't know,” her mother says, and Anna can hear fear in her voice. “Maybe this new doctor will tell.”

“If you need any help . . .” Anna has already offered to check with her Canadian doctor. Once she knows what it is, there might be drugs she could send.

“I'll let you know,” her mother whispers, as if Anna's father could overhear them from the kitchen. “Before you came he told me he would like to be buried here, in Wroclaw. He said he knew this land inside out. He didn't want me to take him to Warsaw. Do you think it's all right?”

“Of course it is,” Anna says.

Now her mother is smoothing the folded quilt with her fingers. Then, quickly, she takes hold of Anna's hand and closes it on a coral necklace that once belonged to
Babcia.

“I want you to have it,” her mother says. “Now. Not when I'm gone.”

The corals are smooth and hard, and Anna presses her fingers on the beads, murmuring her thanks. They are capable of changing colour,
Babcia
always claimed. They know your mood. They grow pale when you get sick, brighten when you get better. But, for that, one had to wear them close to the skin.

“I didn't want to hurt anyone,” Anna says, sitting down beside her mother. “I
had
to stay in Canada. I couldn't return. Do you understand?”

Her mother is smiling gently, waving her hand at all these reasons, at the urgency in Anna's voice. This is not what she is here for. “No, I don't understand,” she says. “But it doesn't matter, now. I miss you. Every day — I know you are not here.”

She is still holding Anna's hand in hers. “Can I ask you something?” she asks.

“Yes,” Anna says, “of course.”

“Were you happy with William?” This is a question that she must have carried in her for a long time, for her voice is hoarse and slightly uneasy when she says it.

Surprised, Anna stays silent for a while. Her heart speeds up; she can hear blood pounding in her ears.

“You don't have to tell me if you don't want to,” her mother is ready to withdraw her question, to let things go unsaid — their old, preferred way.

“I was happy,” Anna says, too quickly. “We were happy.”

When she begins to cry, her mother takes her in her arms, as she did many years ago. Anna feels the warmth of her hand, gently stroking her hair, but the old childhood comfort is not there.

“You are still a young woman,” she hears her mother's voice. “You have to start a new life.”

“Tak, Mamusiu,”
Anna says. The childhood sealing of a promise, the hardest of them all.

It is almost midnight and the Wroclaw Central Station is badly lit, parts of it drowning in darkness. The Plexiglas ceiling over the platforms is yellowed, the colour of nicotine stains. The Berlin Lichtenberg train is waiting already.

Anna is a bit teary after the warm goodbyes, the promises to write, to come back more often, but she is also calmer. As she was leaving, her father turned his head away from her to hide his red eyes.

The train is almost empty, so Yan leaves Anna at the platform with the luggage and scouts the compartments to find one with someone in it, and, as he has stressed, someone who is not going to get off before Berlin and leave her alone, an easy target.

When he waves to her from an open window, he is three cars away. He has found a woman in her late fifties, obviously relieved to have someone in the compartment again. Three gentlemen got off in Wroclaw, she says and she was afraid she would be alone. So now there will be two of them, two women travelling together. This is not the best choice, but better than being on her own.

“I'll be all right,” Anna says, impatient with all this fuss.

“Your brother is right,” the woman says. She is wearing a pair of black pants and a pink angora cardigan. “This is no joke. I have heard they spray sleeping gas into the compartment, and then steal all the luggage.”

They have a berth to lie down and stretch their legs, the woman says. It's not too bad. She has been taking this train three times a year, for the last five years.
“Idzie wytrzyma
,”
she says. It can be endured.

Before he left, Yan gave Anna a roll of newspapers and magazines to read.
My Style
again, with its glossy photographs.
“Like in the West, see,” he tells her, mockingly. The magazine is the creation of General Jaruzelski's daughter who, under the martial law her father imposed, smuggled Solidarity leaflets in her father's chauffered limousine.

“That's real Poland for you,” Yan says.

In the train Anna leafs through an interview with a Polish actress, photographed in her mansion outside Warsaw, with her two children, her antiques, treasures salvaged from old barns and restored to their shining selves. “My husband travels a lot,” the actress confesses, “and only when he comes back the house is a home again. The children feel it; the dogs feel it. That's when we are a true family.”

Anna tosses the magazine away from her. It falls on the floor, but she doesn't pick it up. She opens a newspaper, her eyes stopping on a small note in the corner.
Washington has removed Eastern Europe from its list of possible nuclear targets.
Perhaps she should have left straight for Montreal. Her mother was right; it's time to get on with her life. Time to forget.

Anna's companion clears her throat. Her feet in white nylon slippers look swollen. She stretches them on a brown blanket. Her back hurts, she says. She has been to a few doctors, but they are no good.

“One should not transplant old trees,” she says, staring at the ceiling where a lamp protected by a metal grid is dimmed. She is lonely in Berlin, in her nice apartment. “My sister, all my neighbours are in Katowice. I see them only three times a year, now. Before, I saw them every day. In Germany neighbours don't want to know you.”

The German route of the Polish exodus, Anna thinks, the hardest of them all. Ethnic Germans returning to their native land, often with just a few words of the
Muttersprache
, desperately searching for a translator, digging up family documents to find proof, any proof of their German origin. In the 70s and 80s even family shame — a father in the Wehrmacht, a grandfather's name on the
Volksdeutsch
list — could become the chance of a lifetime. Old certificates were sewn into underwear or folded and placed inside hollowed heels, hidden from the prying eyes of the Polish border guards.
Volkswagendeutsche
, their Polish neighbours called them, but the name had an envious ring to it, a dose of bitter understanding.

“I shouldn't have listened to him,” the woman sighs. “To my son,” she adds for Anna's benefit.

Anna has heard of weeks spent in German camps, on squeaking beds, six to a room, filling out forms, answering questions, and then, waiting for the verdict on the sufficiency of bloodlines, on the merits of having been born in
Schlesien, Pommern, Ostpreussen, Breslau, Osterode, Katowitz.
All of it amid whispers about Neo-Nazi attacks, Molotov cocktails thrown into the barracks.
Aussiedler aus Polen
killed and wounded to celebrate Hitler's birthday, and to remind them that blood doesn't lie.

The woman on the train is telling Anna a joke she heard in Berlin. “A Norwegian, a Russian, a German, and a Pole are in a train,” she begins in a flat monotone. She must have repeated the joke many times. “The Norwegian takes out a piece of smoked salmon, takes two bites, opens the window and throws out the rest. ‘Don't be surprised,' he says to his companions. ‘It's really good salmon. But in Norway we have too much of it.' The Russian takes out a tin of caviar, eats a few spoonfuls, and throws the rest out of the window. ‘It's wonderful, but we have too much of it at home,' he says.”

She takes a deep breath and gives Anna a telling look; the ending is coming and Anna would like to shrink, evaporate. “Then,” another suspension of voice, a pause, a deep breath for more effect, “the German opens the window and throws the Pole out.”

She looks at Anna, waiting for her reaction. Neither of them is meant to laugh, that is easy to tell. A nod of the head will suffice. A few moments of silence.

“Why did you leave?” Anna asks what is expected of her.

“Why?” the woman asks. “Why? I listened to my son. He was the first one to emigrate. Then he came to visit and kept telling me to sell everything and go to Germany. Why live like an animal, he said. Why line up for scraps of meat? You will be like a queen in Berlin. You will walk into a store, get whatever you want. Now he is too busy to see me. Work, work, work.
Everybody works. Nothing else matters.” The woman gives another big sigh.

“Why are
you
going to Berlin?” she asks now. It really is an invitation to confess or to explain, but Anna stalls. She says she is only visiting.

“Family?”

“No, a friend.”

“That's nice,” the woman says, still hopeful that this is just the beginning of a story. She is disappointed when Anna doesn't continue. “A Polish friend?” she tries to prod her, but Anna closes her eyes and listens to the pounding of the wheels.

When Anna wakes up it is six thirty in the morning, and she is already in Berlin. Her companion has woken up, too, and she is stretching her arms. She must have forgiven Anna the disappointment of the evening for she is smiling now, asking if Anna needs any help getting to her friend's apartment. “Oh, no,” Anna says, moved by the concern in the woman's voice. “I'll manage. Thank you very much.” The woman nods and wishes her a good and safe journey.

Anna has made reservations in an old
Jugendstil
Hotel-Pension near the Tiergarten thinking that she would prefer the marble entrance and the cobblestone street outside over another Marriott. But whatever pleasure the curved lines of the hotel's façade give her, dissipates fast. Yes, she should have gone straight home, to Montreal, she thinks. There is still time to get a few courses to teach for September. A friend at Concordia University urged her to apply. In Wroclaw there were moments, more and more frequent, in which she could see flashes of her new life. Not much yet, an ordinary walk along St. Catherine Street, a dinner party, a drive to the Laurentians. She should go back home, to her classes, her friends. To the trunk filled with emigré stories, her hopeless, unfinished quest for the patterns of escape. No, not the patterns, she corrects herself angrily. Justifications. Redeeming insights, epiphanies of flight.

Why spoil it all now, why scratch at the closing wounds?

“You are
not
running away” she tells herself, in her hotel room with a view of a Berlin street where she could, with great ease, imagine the ruins she has seen in the countless documentaries of the final victory. Soviet tanks rolling through the ruins, a red flag with hammer and sickle perched on the Brandenburg Gate. “Not now, not from here!”

This is the last of Ursula's letters to William:
They were fools, these hard working, silent men from the Sudeten Mountains. The land was poor there, stones and barren soil, and they worked it for centuries, holding to it as they held to their German language. They were fools, for when Hitler came and promised them work and money, paradise on their stony earth, when he told them how they had been abused and neglected, they believed him. “Look at yourselves,” he said. “You who have been driven from your Fatherland only to become the germ from which this nation that now tries to claim you has emerged. Without your sweat and blood nothing would grow here. Look at yourselves. You are not like Slavs and Jews! You do not belong to this small, weak country. Not you, not the Giants of the Sudetenland.”

“Your real fight,” their Führer told them, “is not for some puny parliamentary rights for the German minority, these monstrous children of barren democracies. You and all Germans who live outside the Reich are now the most important part of the German nation. What I want for you is to conquer the land you live in, to rule it as you were always meant to do. Your loyalty is to your nation, not to the country you live in. Protest, demonstrate, riot. Demand to be returned to Fatherland,” he kept saying. “And you will not be forgotten.”