Necessary Lies (10 page)

William, she thought at times, was getting tired of her tears. She could hear him slip out of the house in the morning. “Do what you want,” she whispered to herself, “Why would I care?”

She spent her days waiting for news, flipping through TV channels, listening to short wave broadcasts. Her eyes were permanently swollen; there were red, sore patches on her nose and face. At night she turned her back to William and stayed close to the edge of the bed. She watched him with suspicion, collecting all signs of his indifference. He frowned when he looked at her. He locked himself in his study for the whole afternoon. He put a record on too loud, to drown the static of the short waves. She was provoking him, too. She left him to do the dishes, shopping, laundry. “You go,” she said when they were invited over to Christmas parties. And all the time, she watched what he would do. He waited.

The Christmas cards that arrived a few days later, forwarded to her from Rue de la Montagne, had been mailed before her call to Piotr.
We wish you a Happy Christmas, your first so far away from us. We love you and think of you all the time
, her mother wrote. Words that by now, she was sure, would have been taken away. Piotr scribbled his wishes in rows of small letters.
I miss you. It will be a sad Christmas, and the last one apart. I shouldn't have let you go. From now on it is either together or not at all, right? I'll be thinking of you on the 24
^th
. Love you, Piotr.

She sat down on the living room sofa and let the cards fall on the floor. William was away that morning, and the only sound that reached her was a distant noise of a passing plane. She examined the veins on her wrists, running her fingers along them, absorbed in the realisation of how delicate, how thin were these outer reaches of her body. William must have walked into the house then, but she hadn't even heard him.

“You still love him, don't you,” he asked. “If you tell me to go away, I will.”

Startled, she looked up and saw that there were tears in his eyes, swelling, rolling down his cheeks, one transparent drop chasing another. He didn't try to hide them, to wipe them off.

He just stood there, looking at her, letting the tears fill his eyes and flow. It was with these tears that he won her again.

She did love him; it was not an illusion. She stood up and threw her arms around him. His lips touched hers, whispering her name, between kisses. “Anna,” she heard, “Oh, Anna,” and he buried his wet face between her breasts. Running her fingers through his soft, silver hair, she felt his tears soak through her blouse. His hair smelled of the winter air, crisp and fresh.

The repressions were not as bad as they could have been. The worst — those who managed to leave Poland stressed — was the overwhelming sense of hopelessness. William helped Anna make more parcels. She packed the food into cardboard boxes, and he wrapped them up in brown paper, tied them tightly with string and carried them to the post office. It was a good sign, he stressed, that the post still accepted parcels, for this was all she could do to make her parents' lives easier.

When the first letter from Poland came in, two months later, it had the word CENSORED stamped across it.
Dear Daughter
, her mother wrote. She must have hesitated for a long time what to call her. Piotr was in Warsaw on the night of the 13
^th
, and that's when he was arrested. He was now in an internment camp in Bialol
ka. Her brother was fine, and so was her father. Yes, her parcels arrived, and they all thanked her, but asked her not to bother again. They would survive as they had survived before.
Distance
, her mother wrote in her even, round letters,
blurs the real picture. We all hope that you will find happiness and peace.

Sometimes, in Anna's dreams, William is still alive and he laughs at her red, puffy eyes and tears that leave salty trails on her cheeks. “I'm still here, darling,” he tells her in the voice she is beginning to forget. “Can't you see?” And then he laughs, a hollow laugh that echoes through empty rooms. “Not a thing has changed,” he says, and she touches his hands and laughs, too, cautiously at first, but then louder and louder, until the sound of her own laughter wakes her up.

William's grave is a block of black granite with nothing on it but his name and the two dates in brass letters: William Herzman, 1940-1991. There is space on the lower half of the stone for other names. “Mine,” Käthe said, when Anna brought her here a few days ago. In the nursing home William's mother is silent and tense; for hours she can stare out of the window but then, Anna is told, she walks around the room and has to be given a sedative to keep her from exerting herself.

Her bones are brittle; she may fall.

Anna recalls the deep hole of the grave, and the coffin slowly lowered into it. A pile of soil, half covered with flowers, lined the site. Someone handed her a trowel, an ordinary garden trowel like the one she had used to transplant flowers in her garden, and she let a clump of soil fall on the coffin. There was a soft, dull thump when it fell.

“I'm a widow now,” she thinks.
Wdowa
, the Polish word echoes, an ugly, black word she would like to recoil from. On All Souls Day in her childhood, flickering candles lit the sky over the Warsaw cemetery where her grandfather was buried, and she would spot this luminous orange glow from far away,
growing brighter with each step she took. The cold November air was filled with the smell of paraffin. By the graves, women in heavy black coats muttered the prayers for the dead. They polished the headstones, fussed over the chrysanthemums in terra-cotta pots, pulled the weeds from the graves. “It's the loneliness that gets you,” they would say. Her grandmother never protested. “Doesn't get any easier,” she would add. “Ever.”

Spring is late in Montreal. The ground is still frozen, and the wind makes Anna shiver. William has been dead for thirty-six days and she has felt the weight of every single one of them. At his grave she crosses herself, just as she crossed herself at the hospital.
Wieczne odpoczywanie racz mu da
Panie
, she whispers — grant him eternal rest, Oh Lord — the only prayer she remembers for the rest of the soul.

“But he was always so strong!” He played tennis, he swam, he lifted weights. She hadn't imagined all that. There were proofs, indisputable, solid. His tennis rackets in the closet, his exercise bike still standing in their bedroom.

“There was nothing we could do. It was a quick, merciful death,” the doctor said. “Like a stroke of lightning … Believe me, I know.” He was a young man, nervous, unsure of how to talk to her, where to look. He couldn't have done that sort of thing too many times, she thought, not enough to develop a procedure, to detach himself from death. “Please, believe me.”

She wished it for William, such an absence of pain. In a private hospital room on the first floor, she had leaned over his body hidden under white sheets and a blue blanket, trying not to look at the livid tips of his fingers, the purple frames around his nails. These were the signs of struggle, and she wanted to remember the peaceful stillness in his face.

Death made him look older. It must be the lips, she thought, frozen into a rueful smile, so cold when she kissed them. “Why have you done it, baby?” she murmured her reproach, smoothing his silver hair, half-hoping for a reply, for his eyes to open and wink at her, delighted at the success of this incomprehensible joke.

When the doctor took hold of her wrist, to check her pulse, she just kept staring at the assortment of objects in his little office. A jar with cotton pads, another full of tongue depressors, a box of latex gloves with one half pulled, a model of a human ear with the red and blue cords representing veins and arteries. She registered it all, but hazily, as if an invisible cottony gauze was thrown between her and the world. Outside the narrow window of the doctor's office, a woman in a pink dress walked by, her head crowned with an unruly mop of dreadlocks, a folded cardigan over her arm. Stopping, she looked around as if deciding where to go, her soft, overweight body wobbling on the pointed heels of her black shoes.

“I didn't know,” Anna said. “I didn't notice anything was wrong.”

She had missed the signs of danger. On their last evening together she let her mind drift away, her eyes grow heavy. What was she thinking of? Laundry. The croissants she would buy in the morning. Student essays she would have to mark. She could have looked at him, instead, at his chin pressing the violin to his neck, at his right hand so perfectly in tune with the vibrations of the strings. His fingers, she often thought, possessed their own intelligence, quite separate from him, inexplicably fast, free of false moves. It wasn't just the violin; he was like that with everything he touched. Rolling up phyllo pastry, fixing the cylinder pins and vibrating teeth of the musical boxes he brought home from auctions to restore. “Little miracles,” she used to think, but even miracles wane and pale with time.

She liked the piece he played that night, Bach's
Chaconne in D Minor
, an ancient dance, its slow and solemn melody transformed each time it is repeated. But, unlike his, her mind could never stay long with the sequence of sounds alone. It was slipping away, unaware of what was already taking place. For there was still time to get him to hospital, to keep him with her. If only for a few more years, months, or even days.

“Are you all right?” the doctor asked.

She nodded.

“He flinched as he was getting up in the morning,” Anna's voice cracked when she started to speak and she swallowed to
soften the lump in her throat. “Then he rubbed his left shoulder.” The numbness that started around her heart began to spread. It crawled down her spine, to the soles of her feet. Like fear, it made her shudder.

“It's nothing,” William had said, annoyed by the concern in her voice. She didn't have to mother him all the time. He could take care of himself.

“It'll go away.”

She believed him. He was so proud of his own strength. He had never had the flu in his life, never knew what back pain was. He could still beat younger men at tennis. She went out to do the shopping, took her time chatting with Pauline, her neighbour, who was shovelling snow next door, her morning exercise, she said, her cheeks rosy from the cold.

Back home she didn't suspect anything. The kitchen smelled of cinnamon and baked apples, and she thought that William got tired of waiting for her and must have warmed a slice of pie in the microwave. She opened it and the pie was there, forgotten, enveloped in a shroud of plastic wrap. This by itself was not unusual. When he was composing, William would often leave things mid-way. He didn't like to be interrupted. “By anyone,” he had told her once and she had learned to deflect telephone calls, avoid stepping on a squeaking board.

The kettle was still hot. His mug was beside it with a tea bag steeping inside. She put a brown paper bag filled with groceries on the kitchen counter and only then she noticed that the door to his study was half opened. That was unusual. “William?” she asked softly, half expecting an angry grunt of warning, but he didn't answer. “Your tea is getting cold, Darling,” she said softly, and started unpacking the brown paper bag as quietly as she could. Cold cuts and cheeses went on the top shelf of the refrigerator, red peppers on the bottom. She was still in her coat, her purse over her arm. He would laugh, if he saw her like that. “Why can't you ever finish one thing before starting another?” he would ask, and help her take off her coat.

It was only when she had placed the warm croissants on a wooden tray by the toaster, that the silence began to bother her. “William?” she asked again, and then, only then, she did
push the door to his study open and saw him, on the floor, face buried in his hands as if he were hiding from her in some childish game.

She could feel her purse slide off her arm as she knelt beside him, its contents spilling on the almond boards of the floor. Her keys, her wallet, a compact powder fell out, a lipstick tube rolled under the desk and stopped. William's face when she touched it was still warm, but a chill was already setting in, as if he had just returned from a brisk walk in the cold. Her hands shaking, she called the ambulance, cried into the receiver, begged the woman at the other end to hurry, to please hurry, for God's sake. “Oh, my God,” she prayed, “Please, please, don't punish me.”