Necessary Lies. Eva Stachniak

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СКАЧАТЬ 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?”

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