Necessary Lies (4 page)

“Please,” he said and his voice when he called her sounded just like Piotr's. “I have to know everything before I start asking for favours. It is absolutely essential to establish how much they know.”

She agreed to meet him. Her own parents still knew nothing of Piotr. She wanted no comments from her mother that she was still before her
matura
and university entrance exams, that there were eight candidates for each place at the Department of English. That if she didn't do well, very well, her whole future would suffer.

Dr. Nowicki waited for her in the Monopol Hotel, in -
widnicka street. He won her over at once, with his resemblance to Piotr in
spite of the grey in his hair, with his concern for his “foolish” son, a concern, she decided, mixed with admiration.

“He is just like me,” he said, smiling, holding her hand up and kissing it. There was a smell of Old Spice aftershave around him. She knew it; her father used it, too. In her best olive green dress and with her glasses hidden in her purse, she was worthy of his son.

“Please forgive me for imposing myself on you. Piotr should have brought you to Kraków, to introduce us properly. Now, circumstances make their own demands.”

She wished she had not taken off her glasses. As he sat across from her at the table, she could not see the fine details of his face.

This was not the first time he had to come to his son's rescue, Dr. Nowicki began. But he was not blaming Piotr. Far from it. It was all Communism's fault, he said.

“Bullshit,” she would hear Piotr say later. “Of course he blamed me. His methods, of course, are so much more superior to mine, right? All he has to do is to cut open a few party bosses and then ask for a small favour in return.”

But that was to come later. Then, at the Monopol Hotel, Dr. Nowicki was still investigating the situation that he admitted was very unpleasant and delicate. “You see,
Pani Aniu?
he said, “This is not the first time I'm doing it.”

“I know,” she said.

She did know. Why would anyone, she once wondered, come to live in Wroclaw? Come here from Kraków, of all places, that rare Polish city untouched by the war, saved by a miracle that, depending on who was describing it, involved a German art-lover, a Russian marshal, or wet and sabotaged explosives. Leave a city where generations of Polish kings lay buried in the vaults of the Wawel Castle, where in St. Mary's church a trumpeter stopped his bugle-call in mid note in memory of a Tartar arrow that pierced the throat of his predecessor, centuries ago. Leave to come here, to Wroclaw, this city without a past, where history ended with the desperate Nazi defence of
Festung
Breslau.

Her own parents came to Wroclaw because Warsaw was bombed and destroyed. They stayed because this is where they
got their jobs. There always had to be reasons, reasons to come here and ever better reasons to stay.

“I got into trouble,” Piotr said. He told her how, with his two friends, he went to the country and bought a pig. “Then,” he said, leaning toward her, his eyes still sparkling at the thought, “we painted it red and let it out. During the May First parade. Right underneath the tribune, all their fat party leaders standing at attention.”

“You did what?” she asked. She couldn't stop laughing. He watched her, smiling, pleased with himself, so very much pleased.

“Wasn't easy, you know. We had to bribe the peasant with a bottle of vodka to sell it. He said we didn't look like the types who would know what to do with a pig. Then we had to bring the beast to Kraków, in Father's old car. But, ah, it was worth it. The looks on people's faces! You should have seen it!”

She wished she had. It was a story she loved to hear, the picture filling out with each retelling. The pig squeaking, running in circles. The stinking car that had to be washed and aired for days. The red faces of the “pompous fools” on the tribune.

“How did they find out it was you?”

“Someone squealed,” he said, winking at her. Someone saw them, heard the noise. The police found the paint in his room. They were blacklisted, thrown out of Jagiellonian University.

“My father had to pull a few strings to get me to school here,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

That's what attracted her then, this recklessness that seemed to know no fear. “As if there were no tomorrow,” her grandmother would have said, with a sigh.

Now, Piotr's father was telling her of his vigil in front of the Party secretary's office. Of his pleas to let his son continue with his studies. Of biting his tongue when he was lectured on how badly he had brought him up.

She told Piotr's father all she knew. About Daniel. About the leaflets. About the nights spent at the
Politechnika.
Dr. Nowicki listened and nodded. Sometimes he asked questions. He asked, for instance, if Daniel was likely to testify.

“Daniel is all right,” she said. “Nobody interrogated him.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

No, she wasn't sure, but Daniel never said anything about any interrogation. Never seemed worried or upset at school.

“Good,” Piotr's father seemed relieved, too. He asked for Daniel's phone number, though, and she gave it to him. That, too, would later make Piotr very angry. She had no right. She broke the first rule of conspiracy. “I gave it to your father, Piotr,” she said.

“You shouldn't have,” he said. “Not even to my father.”

The results of Dr. Nowicki's visit were visible within a few days. Piotr was interrogated, but he was never beaten. His file was quietly shelved. A plain clothes policeman gave him a stern lecture on his responsibilities toward his fatherland, a warning not to get mixed up again with the wrong crowd.

“Fuck you, Pig,” Piotr said.

The policeman chose not to hear him. “Kiss your father's hand when you see him,” he said. “To thank him that your mouth is still on your face.”

That was his second humiliation. It was the one that almost killed their love.

After his release, Piotr went to Kraków for a few weeks, then returned. When she called him he said that he had no time. She was already a first-year student when he came up to her in the
Uniwersytecka
library. He looked pale and gaunt. She could smell vodka on his breath. When he whispered her name, tears welled up in her eyes.

That's when he told her this joke: “Two friends meet. You know what, Maniek, one asks. Something terrible is gonna happen. - What do you mean? Maniek asks. Another war? -No! - Germans will invade again? - No! - The world will end? - No! - So what will happen? - Nothing! We will always live the way we live!”

They walked together, slowly, along Szewska Street, to the Town Hall. Piotr talked incessantly. Of new proofs of callousness, stupidity, and vicious lies. Of Polish troops in Prague, helping to extinguish the Prague Spring. “Welcomed with flowers by the grateful citizens of Czechoslovakia,” the papers wrote, “helping to
preserve freedom.” Of corruption, sloth, pilfering. Of the viciousness of anti-Semitic attacks that were making Poland a laughing stock of the civilized world.

“I still love you, Piotr,” she said. “There is no one else.”

She did love him. There was no one else. She never thought there could be.

He asked her to marry him. Right there, by the monument of Alexander Fredro that had been lugged here all the way from Lvov to replace Frederick Wilhelm III. Plucking a flower from the flower bed, shaking off the earth from its roots. His eyes shining with joy. With love. With hope.

At the McGill library the man with ink-stained hands rose to leave. He asked Anna if she cared for his paper or if he should take it back to the rack.

“Please leave it,” she said. “And thank you.”

“You are welcome,” he said.

Solidarity gets tougher. It defies Moscow with a call for free unions in the Eastern Bloc and free Polish elections
, she read. The newspaper columns grew more and more alarming. Military hospitals were being put up on the Soviet-Polish border. Troops were kept on standby alert, guns were loaded and routes to the Polish border were mapped out. The Warsaw Pact started its military exercises,
Zapad 81
— West 81 — in the Gulf of Gda
sk. The deafening noise of a few hundred thousand soldiers, of tens of thousands of tanks, aircraft, and ships was heard for miles. The commentaries pointed out that Brezhnev's words,
We will not leave Poland alone to suffer
, left no illusions as to the Soviet intentions. The Polish situation was threatening to the Warsaw Pact.
Newsweek
printed pictures of workers gathered around Wal
sa, their raised fingers forming the sign of a V; on the opposite page there was a photograph of Russian missiles, pointed west.

Refugee camps in Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece and Austria were filling up. Every day more Poles jumped ship, defected, extended their holidays abroad. Tens, hundreds of cars with Polish license plates arrived at the entrances to the camps,
whole families poured out and pushed through the gates, terrified that there wouldn't be enough space, that they would be turned out, told to go back. Inside, photographed and fingerprinted, they surrendered their passports for a room, food rations, and immigration interviews. Until the day when their names would appear on the list for a flight to the United States, Canada, or Australia they would wander the streets, looking hungrily at shop windows, at supermarket shelves, at colourful stalls filled with oranges, watermelons, peaches, and grapes.

Piotr would say that the West was merely panicking. That stories like that were exactly what the Communists wanted to frighten everyone into submission. That all the West really cared for was their fat asses, their precious market shares and interest on Eastern European loans. Haven't they betrayed Poland in 1939, and then again at Yalta? She must not lose heart. Not now. Not when victory was so close at hand. When they finally, finally, had a fighting chance for a normal country.

“You are not thinking we could leave, are you? Like these cowards who beg the Austrians or the Italians to take them?”

“Are you?”

For Piotr, Anna composed her little descriptions of Montreal, the grey stone buildings of McGill, the beam of light travelling across the sky, rotating under greying clouds. Everything she saw excited her. By the time each day ended, its beginning was already a far-away memory. Transformed by the sounds of English and French, nothing around her was ordinary. Not even a simple walk along Sherbrooke Street, past chic Victorian townhouses with their art galleries and boutiques where the prices — mentally exchanged into Polish
zlotys
— multiplied into unreal, unattainable sums. Her eyes took it all in — the red brick façades, the bay windows with black frames, the stores she didn't dare to enter.

Along St. Catherine Street she felt more courageous. The carpeted interiors welcomed her with music, and she fingered the soft cotton of Indian summer dresses, asked to try on thick-soled brown leather sandals, wrapped a muslin shawl around her neck and then returned everything, guiltily, apologetic at not having the strength to curb her desires. Only on the Main,
dizzied by the bargains of St. Laurent, where signs
Two for a dollar
were scribbled in black marker, did she really let her hands dive into the cardboard boxes spilling into the street, fishing out the splashes of colour, the promising shapes from which she concocted her new look.