Necessary Lies. Eva Stachniak

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      Piotr’s letters arrived in shabby blue envelopes, with her name in a big uneven script. Lies, lies, nothing but damn lies, he wrote ignoring the censors. He was angry. Angry at the betrayals, the blank pages of Polish history that, now, finally, could be brought to light. What was the true extent of repressions after the 1968 student revolt? Who started the anti-Jewish campaign and why? Who signed the orders to shoot at the workers in Gdynia in 1970? Who had connived with Stalin at the show trials? We have to find the whole truth, he wrote. Uncover every treachery. Otherwise there will be no new beginning. She put his letters back in their envelopes and placed them on the night table, next to the photograph of the two of them, on a hike in the Tatra Mountains. In that photograph Piotr was making a V sign with his hand, and she was resting her head on his arm.

      William called her two days later. She thought he might and prayed he wouldn’t.

      “Anna? William here. William Herzman.”

      She had forgotten how warm his voice was. There was music in the background, the soft chords of a piano concerto, coming from another room.

      “Where did you hide? I turned my back and you disappeared. The clock hadn’t even struck midnight!”

      He had looked for her, she thought. He had found out where she lived.

      “I had to beg the Chairman of English to give me your phone number. Made a complete fool of myself.”

      With her fingers she was straightening the black coils of the telephone cord, trying to disentangle them.

      “There is so much I want to show you here. You must let me take you around Montreal.”

      Infatuation, that’s what she called it then. Harmless, she told herself. Less than love, fleeting, ephemeral, easy to forget. If she didn’t stir, it would pass by.

      Each morning, her hand trembled slightly as she blackened her eyelashes and drew a thin line along her eyelids. She imagined running into William at the library or in the campus bookstore. “What a coincidence!” he would say, smiling, “Would you care for a cup of coffee?” and she would smile back and say yes, and they would go across the street to a small bistro and she would sip her coffee slowly, hoping it would never end. A thought like that could make her laugh aloud; she could imagine him next to her, his arm around her shoulder, and then she would stop and tell herself not to be silly. “Utterly silly, insane,” she would say, and her hands would touch the spines of books on outdoor stands, the rough surfaces of the walls.

      It was the time when she began her long walks through Montreal. She couldn’t stay in one place then, too impatient, too eager to know what would happen next. Something would have to happen and only time itself had to be pushed forward. Faster, faster, she hurried past the tree-lined campus, past the white townhouses of Milton Street, and then up Avenue du Parc, onto the Mountain.

      On one such walk, at a fruit stall, she bought a handful of red cherries and as she walked she took them out of a plastic bag, pairs of fruit joined together at the stems. If she were little she would wear them like earrings, carry them with her for a long time, before she would allow herself to taste such a treat. But now, laughing, she pushed a whole handful into her mouth and greedily chewed the red sweet flesh until only the smooth stones remained.

      “Oh, my God! What am I doing?” she would ask herself when she stopped, out of breath, her heart pounding.

      “I can’t be in love,” she repeated to herself, smiling, already pleased with the thought. “It’s impossible. It can’t be.”

      “All about you,” he said. “I want to know all about you.”

      She laughed. “You want to know all my secrets?”

      “Yes. All your secrets.”

      She wanted to bury her face in his chest.

      He took her for a drive to the Laurentians. The summer had been dry and the fall colours were already beginning to show. Browns and golds of oaks and maples, flaming red leaves of the sumacs. He took so many pictures of her that afternoon, by the fallen tree, in front of a red barn, waving to him from the edge of the lake, petting a country cat, its speckled eyes narrowing with pleasure. “Smile,” he kept saying. “We are all very unthreatening here.”

      She thought: Then why am I so scared?

      The country roads were almost empty of traffic. “What’s that?” Like a child she pointed to things she had not seen before, farm silos, communication towers flashing their mysterious lights. She wanted to know so much about him, but she promised herself she wouldn’t ask, so she was watching him instead, his hands gripping the steering wheel a little too tight. On his black sweater she saw the glimmer of silver, the hairs shed from his beard that she had an urge to pick.

      Only later, when they were crossing the bridge back to the city, she broke her own promise.

      “Didn’t your parents want to go back with you?” she asked. “To Breslau,” she added, as if he could doubt what she meant.

      “To Wroclaw?”

      It pleased her that he observed the politics of geography. He paused, as if the question required his thought.

      “Yes.”

      “I’ve never known my father,” he said, slowing the car down and she thought that he, too, began counting the minutes before they would have to part, “and my mother never wanted to see Breslau again.”

      Montreal spread before them. Among the warm fall colours of the Mountain the green dome of St. Joseph’s Oratory was almost invisible. She was thinking that in his voice she could hear some old, recurring arguments.

      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.”

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