Necessary Lies (19 page)

“Oh, but that was
their
life,” she said, lightly. “We lived our own. You must have heard that Poles are notoriously hard to occupy.”

“I've heard that,” he said, smiling.

But that's not what she wanted. She wanted him to be moved by her stories. Promise her that now, when she had escaped such drabness, he would show her the world, take her with him to Paris, to London, to Rome — all place names she pronounced with such religious fervour, as if they were not real cities but fairy lands. Hug her and tell her that he was her reward, that he would make things right for her, make up for the ruins, the squalor, and the fears.

A fool!

Anna must have fallen asleep, for when the sounds of applause for the smooth landing wake her up, the plane has already touched down. She has missed the approach to Warsaw, the slow descent through the milky clouds. She has not expected to be this nervous. Her stomach is now pushing against her ribs, a sour lump burning inside. “Your parents will be so happy to
see you, Anna,” Marie kept telling her. “Nothing else will matter. I know that.”

Perhaps they will; Anna would like to believe it. Her parents never visited her in Montreal. It was her mother that always came up with excuses. But tragedy and loss, Anna thinks, is the surest way to buy compassion, a semblance of forgiveness. If nothing else works, she can always count on that.

As soon as the plane slows down, the passengers rise to pick up their luggage. The stewardesses on the LOT flight are all young and pretty, their skin still immune to the scarcity of sleep. One of them now points to the signs that the seatbelts are to be fastened, that the plane is still in motion, that standing up at this time is dangerous, but no one is listening. Angered, the stewardess stares at the man in front of her, who is trying to get his bag from the compartment above. “Sit down,” she tells him. “Sit down this minute.” The man looks around, shrugs his shoulders to indicate that she will never get anyone's attention now, but he sits down and watches, amused, as she turns to someone else, a lost battle, for the plane is already coming to a stop.

On the bus, which ferries Anna from the plane to the airport, the level of excitement rises even more. Most of the passengers speak Polish; Anna listens to the strained jokes, the excited whispers comparing the lengths of absence. Ten, fifteen, twenty years have passed since they left, and, now, allowed to come back, they will see for themselves how much their country has changed. The mood is sceptical, weary. “First they kill the fish,” the short man to her right announces, “and now they drop it back into the water, hoping it'll learn to swim. How can it ever work?”

Anna registers muted, uneasy laughter, and a few unconvincing protests. “Stranger things have happened,” someone says and waits for a response.

The passengers line up at passport control, which goes briskly. The passports they hold in their hands testify that they are American, Canadian, Australian, British. The woman officer who checks these passports makes an effort to smile. It
is a strained smile; her muscles have yet to become accustomed to such expressions of civility.

The tiny, single terminal is filled with families and friends, necks craned above the crowd, hands waving, bouquets of flowers wrapped up in cellophane. “Anna!” someone screams, and she turns toward that scream only to see an elderly woman hugging a younger one, perhaps her daughter. There are tears, smiles of anticipation, relief.

The thoughts of Piotr are hard to hide from; his pale, handsome face, as she remembers it last — a bit worried, unsure. Looking at his watch because he had to catch the Odra express train to Wroclaw if he were to make it for the next day's meetings. She had urged him to go, to leave her, but he wouldn't. He wanted to wait until the very last moment, send her off with his kiss on her lips. She still remembers his hand waving a white handkerchief as she was passing by security, right here.

For years she has kept her memories of him wrapped up in layers of resentment and doubt, but she no longer can. In the last weeks there have been terse requests for the sorting out of affairs. Of course she will see him, she wrote back. This is the least she can do.

From her mother's letters she knows that he married Hanka a month after he was released from the internment camp. Hanka whom Anna can vaguely remember, tall and slim, with dark bangs and a warm, bewildered smile. There is a child, too, a daughter. “Very beautiful,” her mother wrote, “with hair just like yours when you were little.” Piotr made a shrewd career move; he became an expert in environmental law. He is a parliamentary advisor now, negotiating community and business rights. No one else, her mother wrote, can understand the post-communist legal mess as well as he does. Big German and American companies have already approached him for his legal expertise. In her mother's letters there are hints of money and travels: Berlin, New York, Brussels.

In spite of her nap Anna is beginning to feel the effects of a sleepless night. The waiting area seems hot and cold in turn, and she pushes though the crowd, avoiding eye contact with short, stocky men who hope to sell her a taxi ride or a hotel
room. “Look for a radio-taxi or call one ,” her brother told her on the phone. “This is a regular Mafia, the guys at the airport. Watch out.” He insisted that he would come to Warsaw to pick her up, but she refused. “I'm not a child,” she said, and even managed a little laugh. “I'll call for a radio-taxi. I'll be all right.”

“They'll still charge you three times what they would charge me,” he said.

“That's all right. Lots of airports are like that. It's not just Warsaw. I'll be careful.”

Outside of the terminal building she spots a radio-taxi that has just deposited a man in a light trench coat, with a black leather briefcase. Yes, the radio-taxi is available and she gets into it with relief, not lost on the driver who gives her a reassuring look. The driver is fat and jovial. He picks up her two suitcases, as if they were filled with feathers. Inside, the black interior of the taxi is pasted up with photographs of pinup beauties in scanty bikinis, a collage of breasts and smooth bums. Wound around the rear-view mirror is a black rosary, a tin cross dangling from one end. The driver, who has just finished placing her suitcases in the trunk, sits in front, a lit cigarette in his mouth.

“From Canada?” he asks in a friendly voice. He must have noticed the red maple leaf of old Air Canada tags on her canvas bag. A mistake, she thinks, she should have replaced it with LOT ones. Cigarette smoke fills the inside of the car and makes her dizzy.

“Yes,” Anna says. Her brother would have given her a nudge, here. She is already breaching security, making herself vulnerable. And yet, with all the warnings, she doesn't feel threatened at all.

“I have a brother in Toronto,” the driver says. “Drives a taxi, too.”

“Have you been to visit?” Anna asks, determined to keep up the conversation. She considers briefly if she should ask the driver not to smoke, but decides against it. She rolls down the window, instead, and looks at the streets.

“No, not yet,” the driver says wistfully. “But I'd like to. I want to see Niagara Falls.”

“You will,” Anna says, and sees that the driver smiles with satisfaction. He takes her words as if they were a prediction, as if she had the power to make his dreams possible. Is it her proximity that suddenly makes Canada so close or the arrival of capitalism, awaited with so much fervour?

“Everything is still falling apart,” the driver informs her. “The Commies have just painted themselves over; now they are capitalists.” Later he will tell her the latest joke: If General Jaruzelski ever gets together with Electrician Wal
sa, they will form General Electric.

“Nothing has changed,” he says.

But that's not quite true. The city is changing, in spite of the pervasiveness of grey. As they approach the centre, Anna sees makeshift stands everywhere, on street corners, along passageways. Stands made of camping tables, folded beds, on which colourful packages pile up. Passers-by crowd around them, peer over each other's shoulders.

“Oh, that's nothing,” the driver laughs, seeing her curious looks. He has forgotten his pessimism of a moment ago, and is now eager to point out the newly freed penchant for trading. “You should see what's happening around the Palace.”

That's
Palace of Culture and Science,
Stalin's gift to Warsaw, a giant monument to the superiority of the Soviet system. All over Poland children learned about it at school, about its thirty floors and 3288 rooms, about its exhibition halls, theatres, cinemas, a swimming pool, and a Congress Hall. Around it, the architects left concrete space, an enormous empty square designed to accommodate endless parades, prescribed displays of power. “Where do you get the best view of Warsaw?” the joke went. “From the thirtieth floor of the Palace! —Why? —Because you can't see it from there!”

It is where, the driver informs her with glee, Warsaw's greatest bazaar takes place.

“Uncle Joseph must be spinning in his grave,” he chuckles. Anna smiles with him.
“Ruscy
have their stands there, too,” he says. He'll not call them Russians, as if the word was too good for the people who brought Communism here.

“You should see what these
lords of the earth
sell,” the taxi-driver pouts his lips in contempt. “The junk of the Empire.”

A few hours later, Anna walks near the grey palace, with its sculptures of muscled workers. This is her first walk from the Marriott hotel where she is staying. She has chosen the hotel deliberately; its international anonymity promises to be a refuge, if memories prove too much.

In April 1991 Warsaw is damp and chilly. The taxi driver was right; it is a true bazaar, a maze of stands overflowing with Turkish leather, silk blouses from Hong Kong, electronics from Taiwan. Young men in jean jackets guard packages of American cigarettes, French perfume, German soaps and shampoos. The prices are ridiculously low. Cigarettes go for a dollar per pack, for ten dollars she can have a bottle of
Channel
# 5 or Yves St. Laurent's
Rive Gauche.

Anna holds her purse tightly under her arm as she passes by the stalls. “Come on, have a look,” the sellers call to her. She walks to the edges of the square, to the Russian stands. Two middle-aged men with broad, tired faces lean against a tree, chain-smoking. The cigarette smoke has a sour, thick smell to it, the lingering smell of cheap tobacco. The sight of their missing teeth, the nicotine stained fingers, and the ill-fitting clothes, crumpled from the long cross-border journey chokes her throat.

She is sorry for them. That's all she feels.

The Russians have spread their wares on a grey blanket. A teaspoon, a thermos flask, a camera, a kitchen mixer, which, although brand new and still in its original packaging, looks as if it were straight from the sixties, with its turquoise colour and
faux
leather case. No one seems to be interested in the offerings, even at the prices made possible by the rates of exchange. The mixer would go for an equivalent of fifty cents, a thermos flask for ten. Only the older man in the corner, in a tight blue cardigan with missing buttons, seems to be doing some business. He is selling penknives and auto parts. Three young men are squatting next to his blanket, weighing a shiny pump and a coil of wires.

All she can feel is sorrow for this city, this country, all these people. But that's not right. No one here needs her tears. She wouldn't have needed them, either, if she lived here.

“You want to run away and hide,” she recalls Piotr's old arguments. The irritation in his voice. Impatience with her pleas.

“I don't want to live like that.”

“Then let's change it.”

“Nothing will ever change, here, Piotr. Not in our lifetime. We have tried. You know that.”

“Do you really think that people in the West are better? That they are any different from us? That they care about our problems? Come on, Anna. Don't be so naïve!”

“Is leaving really such a betrayal?” she kept asking him. “Don't we also have a right to a normal life?”

But then, for Piotr, these were meaningless questions. Mere excuses to make
her
feel better.

She quickens her step, pushes through the throngs of pedestrians, past more stalls, camping tables, old cardboard boxes. She has never seen Warsaw so dirty, but promises herself not to mind. She is only a visitor here, she tells herself, she has no right to judge. Crushed pop cans, plastic bottles, cigarette butts, and mounds of soggy boxes lie in the corners of the underground passage. The sour smell of urine is everywhere. “Garbage collectors are on strike, Madam,” the concierge at the hotel has explained, adding, “We are truly sorry for the inconvenience,” with an apologetic, embarrassed smile. The Marriott staff has kept the marble slabs around the hotel shiny and spotless, and it is easy to see the line where the hotel property ends. Beyond it, the pavement is covered with a sticky film of dirt.