Necessary Lies (7 page)

He had no patience with nostalgia, he told her then. He was tired of old Breslauers he sometimes met, suspicious of their stories. All this talk of the perfect city, prosperous, safe, well planned! Bourgeois heaven!

“Youthful amnesia, that's what they all claim now,” he said, his lips pouting, “but in these border towns they all voted for the Nazis. These glorious defenders of the German soul!”

Didn't she, too, find it was always so? he had asked her as he drove off the sun-lit highway, into the downtown streets filled with strolling crowds. Wasn't the past always presented that way? As better? More mysterious? More meaningful? Even the worst, most guilty past, he added, and his shoulders rose in a shrug. It seemed to her then that he was reading her thoughts, anticipating her questions, answering them before she was even aware they were there.

They were two blocks away from her apartment. One more turn and she will be alone again.

“Did you see your old house?” she didn't want him to stop talking. This city she had left with so little regret, where she never felt at home — Wroclaw — had now begun to intrigue her. “Is it still there?”

“Yes,” he said. “It's still there.”

“Did you get in?”

“No.”

He had driven past it in a taxi. He hadn't even asked the driver to stop, just to slow down, so that he could take a quick look without drawing anybody's attention. As the car passed by, he remembered that his
Oma
had buried a box with family silver in the back yard, right before leaving for Berlin. Under the hazel bush.

“And you never even tried to get it back?” she asked.

There was never any parking space on Rue de la Montagne. He had to stop in mid-traffic to let her out.

“No,” he said as she freed herself from the seatbelts. “Of course not. Why disturb the new owners, remind them of the old hatreds, stir up the past?”

She had to agree with him. Why, indeed?

“A new friend of mine,” Anna told Marie, then, “a composer from McGill.” She had the overpowering need to speak of William, then, to confirm his existence.

“What's his name?”

“William. William Herzman.”

“Never heard of him,” Marie said. “What has he written?”

In the music library Anna had found a recording of William's oratorio,
Dimensions of Love and Time.
On the back of the record was a photograph of William from fifteen years before. He was sitting in an empty room, on a carved antique armchair, looking away from the camera. His face was longer, she thought, with a touch of austerity about it she had never noticed. It must have been the absence of beard, she thought.

William Herzman is one of the most promising Canadian composers of the decade. His music draws its inspiration from the act of questioning. It rings with the profound distrust of the
sacred. It allows for no comfort, no escape; it demands the suspension of emotional involvement as we seek to understand the essence of the human experience.

She ran her finger along the contours of his face.

“Anything else?” Marie asked. “Has he written anything else?”

Anna said she didn't know. “It doesn't matter, anyway,” she said, lightly. “I just thought you might have heard of him. At Radio-Canada. That's all.”

A week later, he was waiting for her in front of the Arts Building on the McGill campus, sitting on the stone ledge, looking at the city below. She could see him from afar, motionless, hands folded on his lap, in his beige coat and a brown felt hat. A fedora. In her grandmother's stories of pre-war Warsaw, men wore fedoras and foulards, they lifted their hats to greet women. He looked at his watch. She was late, but not too late yet, not beyond hope.

“I can still turn away,” she thought, “There is still time.” It was getting dark already, and the beam of light circled the sky over the downtown office towers. “We can be friends,” she kept telling herself. “Just friends.”

There was nothing wrong in seeing him, she decided. They liked to talk, that's all. They liked the same books, the same movies. For hours they talked of Elias Cannetti, Günter Grass, Apollinaire. “You absolutely have to see it,” he would say and take her to all his favourite films. In the red velvet seats of the Seville Repertory Cinema she laughed at
The Life of Brian.
With amazement she watched the rituals of the
Rocky Horror Picture Show
, when at the cue from the screen the audience threw rice, lit cigarette lighters or squirted water. William took her for evening drives up the Mountain to show her the lights of the city. They lined up for hot bagels on St. Viateur, had late dinners in restaurants along Prince Arthur. When they walked, they were still careful to keep a distance between their bodies, conscious of every swerve that could bring them closer together. All that time he never asked her about Piotr.

He smiled when he saw her approaching, a smile of relief.

“Dinner?” he asked.

She loved these long, unhurried dinners, with dishes arriving one by one, filling her with delicate flavours. For the first time in her life she tasted escargots, black bean soup, the pink flesh of grilled salmon, green flowers of broccoli. She was insatiable, always looking hungrily at the colourful plates, eating far too much, as if to make up for lost years.

She nodded. If there was already something irreversible about this evening, something that made it different from all the others, she was trying not to think about it.

“So,” he asked when they sat down, the flame of a candle wavering between them. The day before she had promised to tell him why she was so fascinated by her emigré writers, stories scattered in emigré papers, thin volumes of poems printed by the small presses of London, Chicago, Montreal. As if the mere act of leaving anointed people with some mystical, unexplainable superiority. As if they could see more.

“Isn't it a prisoner's dream?” he asked.

The question troubled her. In Poland she would never think of the need to defend the importance of these exiled voices from abroad. Her interests might be declared suspect or embarrassing to her department, dangerous perhaps, but they would never be questioned like that.

“Dangerous?”

“Of course! After all,” she said, “they defected.” He waited for her to continue.

“And yet,” she added, “for us they were never absent.”

If they pined after Poland as they were scrubbing capitalist floors or committed suicide by jumping from their New York windows, she told William, then such writers could count on scraps of official memory. They were of use to the Communist government; their failure scored points against the West, poisoned the illusions, proved that happiness on the other side of the Wall was a mirage. If they denounced the crimes of the post-war years, kept alive the memory of Stalin's betrayals, their words were smuggled into the country in the pockets of travellers and reprinted in the underground presses.

“In Poland it wasn't easy to get to them,” she said.

She had to get letters of recommendation from her research supervisor and a special permit from the censor before she was allowed to open yellowed copies of emigré newspapers in the Wroclaw library. Provided she did not make photocopies of the material that the old wrinkled librarian grudgingly placed on her table.

But, there, in Poland it was all a ruse. An excuse to get facts for Piotr's bulletins. In the 1930s ten million Ukrainian peasants were starved to death on Stalin's orders. In the Soviet Gulag, before the guards could stop them, prisoners devoured the frozen meat of a mammoth. In orphanages, the children of dissidents were taught to worship the great Stalin, their true and only father. Near Katy
, Charkov, and Pver, the Soviet NKVD executed fifteen thousand Polish officers, prisoners of war, and, when in 1943 the mass graves were discovered, blamed the crime on the Germans.

Here, in Montreal, she sank into the descriptions of the lost Eastern lands, the sandy banks of the Niemen river and the depths of the Lithuanian forests. It was a forced exodus. When the post-war borders moved westward, the Polish inhabitants of Vilnius and Lvov had to leave or become Soviet citizens. She read of the trek of the displaced that ended in the former German lands, in Wroclaw and Szczecin, in the villages of Lower Silesia and Pomerania. A flood of people, tired, defeated, humiliated, mourning their dead, remembering the minute details of houses left behind, the creaking floors, the holy pictures. These people whose towns and villages were cut off by the borders of barbed wire and ploughed fields became her Wroclaw neighbours. “Where are you really from?” they began all conversations, “How did you get here?”

“I was lucky,”
Babcia
would say. She had left Tarnopol, a small town east of Lvov, in the 20s. Her parents were still buried there. On All Souls Day there was no one to light candles on their graves.

Her
immigrant scribblers
, William used to call her emigré writers, tending their marble graves. “Have you noticed,” he kept asking Anna, “that whether written in London, Toronto, Sydney or Geneva, the tunes of lament are always the same?
Is there nothing out there but what you've known before?”

That's what Anna tried to explain to William that night. “They are remembering the forbidden,” she said. “That's what I am trying to do, too.”

“What if nothing is forbidden?” he asked. “What then?”

She thought about it, sipping her wine, making little circles on the tablecloth with her fingernails.

“I can't imagine it yet,” she said.

The wine was beginning to soften her tense muscles. She took a bite of bruschetta the waitress placed between them on the white tablecloth.

“You do love your husband, don't you?” William asked her.

She saw that William looked away when he said it. So she, too, only permitted herself to stare at his hands. Tanned, slim hands, long fingers softly folding a dinner napkin, or tracing the shape of his beard. She was playing with the strands of wax dripping from the candle. She must have shivered then, for he put his hand over hers, and, quickly took it away.

“I'm starving,” she said and took another bite of bruschetta. The piece of tomato slid from the bread and fell on the tablecloth. She picked it up and tried to soak the stain with her napkin.

“Don't worry about it,” he said and poured more wine into her glass.

When the world whirled in front of her eyes, she tried to stop it by staring in one direction only. She took a sip of water. In the morning she had passed by his McGill office in the Music Building. Second floor, third door to the right. The corridor was empty and the floorboards creaked under her feet. Quickly she touched the brass knob of his door and walked away before anyone could see her. She thought about borders. The dangers of crossing them. Of finding herself on this other, forbidden side. Of the point, still hidden to her, from which there would be no turning back.

“You are changing, Anna,” she heard William say, his voice so warm, so full of concern for her. “Your new needs are as real as your old ones.”

“Are they, really?” she asked, thinking of Piotr, trying to remember the touch of his lips.

William drove Anna back home. There was no place to park the car, and, as soon as he stopped in front of her apartment, she released the latch of the seatbelt, ready to flee.

“I've fallen in love with you,” he said then. Blood rushed to her cheeks. “You know that, don't you?” The car behind them honked. The driver leaned out of the window. “Hurry up,” he motioned to them and flashed his headlights.

She opened the door and dashed out. She didn't even turn around to look at him. Inside her apartment she didn't switch on the light. She sat on the floor, back to the wall, and held her knees. She rocked her body, until the phone rang.

“I'm sorry,” William's voice on the phone was quiet, almost shy. “I shouldn't have said it. You have enough problems without me.”

She was sobbing into the black receiver.

“Anna,” she heard. “Anna. My darling. Are you all right? Am I hurting you?”

She didn't answer.

“If you tell me to go away, I will. Tell me to go away.”

“I love you,” she whispered, and then waited in the dark, tears and laughter mixing together. She heard the soft knock at the door and let him in, his face white and drawn. He bent to kiss her, and she stood there, still crying, feeling his soft lips on hers, both happy and terrified of what she had done.

“I'll go mad,” she kept saying. “I'll go mad. I'm so happy I want to die.”

In the bedroom she watched him kneel on the floor and kiss her hands, and bury his face in them. She felt her skirt lift, rise above her knees. She was shedding her clothes like skin, like another, inferior version of herself. She no longer wanted to resist. That she allowed herself to be so besotted was a sign in itself. This love was like a new life, too strong to oppose.