Necessary Lies (22 page)

“Your Great-Uncle,” she said. “Lived there once. He was a pre-war lawyer.”

The colonial store was hit by a German bomb in August 1944, in the first days of the Warsaw Uprising. “What's gone is gone,”
Dziadek
said and refused to see it, but
Babcia
went to take one last look, right before they were marched out of Warsaw by the Nazis. “I shouldn't have,” she said. Broken glass and shards of wood cracked under her feet. She thought she would take something with her, something to remember, but there was nothing to take.

During the Uprising, her grandparents hid in the cellar, the city above them burning to cinders. For years
Babcia
was to remember the damp mattress on which she lay day and night.
Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sinned against us. Now and in the hour of our death,
she prayed. She had heard the cries of people burnt alive in the church of the Sisters of the Visitation.

People crowded in these cellars, listening to the sounds of planes, the howl of falling bombs, the explosions. A few blocks away. Next door. The end was easy to imagine. The cellar doors could open at any time. The last thing you would hear in this life was the blast of grenades. When children wailed, mothers said, “Don't cry, you will die soon.”

“What a human soul will endure!”
Babcia
would tell Anna.

Yet there were miracles, too. In one of them,
Babcia
said, they were reunited with
Mama,
in a relocation camp after the war. Their daughter who had turned into a Home Army soldier, who had cut her hair short, and who refused to talk of what she had done or seen.

It was then that
Dziadek
decided they should all go to Wroclaw, to the newly
regained
territories, Stalin's consolation prize for the lands lost in the east. The Germans were fleeing west, leaving their homes and businesses behind. There, forever an optimist, he was sure they would be able to find an abandoned store. Soon they would be back on their feet again. When
Babcia
objected, he asked if she had other ideas on how they might survive. If she knew of anyone in the world willing to take them in. Feed and clothe them. Educate their daughter. Make sure she would have a chance in life.

In Wroclaw,
Dziadek
found a corner store with the name of the German owner strewn with bullets. Cigarettes and food gone, the store was in a good shape, nevertheless, with solid wooden shelves in the back, cherry wood counter, marble floor, and some inventory. In the boxes stacked in the back of the store
Dziadek
discovered carved pipes and bundles of pipe cleaners. In the ruins he found boxes of buttons and sewing needles, a good supply of candles and matches. Not much, but something to start with.

In the back of the store, there was a small apartment. From the destroyed store next door
Dziadek
salvaged some sturdy iron bars that he installed in all the windows. At night, he and
Babcia
pushed the heavy oak table against the front door. Every night they heard gunshots and screams. When someone pounded on the door, to be let in, they would hold their breath and wait until the pounding stopped. There were so many stories about this city that curdled their blood, stories they read about in the papers. A man had his eyes slashed with razor blades for a pair of shoes. A woman traveller stepped into a factory to ask her way to a friend's house; one by one the workers raped her and then pushed her out of the second storey window to the concrete pavement, below. That's what the war did to people,
Babcia
said. Freed the worst in them.

For the next two years, the Wroclaw store prospered. Soon
Babcia
was wearing a fur coat, wrapping a fox collar around her neck. She still had a good figure, she would catch herself thinking. At forty-five she could still turn heads in the street. Make men smile with pleasure when they raised her gloved hand to their lips. Her daughter was in a private school, catching up with her schoolwork, getting ready for university.

“I might still know what happiness is,” she liked to think then.

In 1947 a man in a trench coat came to the Wroclaw store and asked
Dziadek
for two hundred grams of chocolates.
Dziadek
rolled a bag for him from a square piece of brown paper and weighed the sweets. The man paid and left. Half an hour later he was back with a policeman, accusing
Dziadek
of overcharging him.
Dziadek
was arrested on the spot, and the store was sealed. “Bloodsucking capitalists,”
Babcia
was told,
“had to be stopped form cheating the working class.” In a judge's verdict a few months later the store was declared state property and
Dziadek
was sentenced to six months of hard labour and socialist reeducation. Released, he was ordered to work in his old store, as an assistant, for a state salary. “The Communist Battle for Trade” was won.

For years,
Dziadek
spent all afternoons with his ear plastered to the radio speaker, sifting through the jamming noises to hear the daily news from Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. The same Radio Free Europe
Tata
switched off when he gathered enough courage to ask for
Mama's
hand. “I had to,” he laughed. “Otherwise, he wouldn't have heard what I had to say.”

Dziadek
died a few years after his granddaughter, Anna, was born, quietly, after a routine hernia operation that went wrong. “He liked his vodka,” the doctor said to explain the internal haemorrhage noticed too late. “There was nothing we could do.”

Babcia
did not say anything. Wife or widow, she had stopped expecting anything from life.

There are no radio-taxis outside the cemetery gate so Anna hails an ordinary taxi and asks to be taken to the Old Town. She will walk from there to the Marriott, she decides.

This taxi-driver is silent and pensive. When the ride is over he asks her for the equivalent of fifty dollars. When she protests that a radio-taxi would cost her no more than five, he shrugs his shoulders and tells her she should have made sure of the price before getting inside. He is an independent taxi-owner. This is capitalism, in case she hasn't noticed. He charges what he pleases.

“Are you going to pay or do you want me to call the police,” he asks her.

“Don't bother,” Anna snaps and gives him what he wants. He takes the thick wad of Polish currency with a broad smile of a winner.

She slams the door of the taxi so hard that flakes of rust fall off. The driver honks and drives off, leaving a puff of black smoke behind him.

The winding streets of the Old Town are paved with cobblestones. Anna walks slowly, stopping at the displays of jewellery stores, trying to restore her calm. The incident with the taxi-driver has made her hands shake. This, too, is an old feeling from here, she recalls, the impotent rage at such small acts of cruelty. At being cheated, pushed, told to go to hell, not to put on airs and expect God knows what. She wants to forget such feelings. She would rather remember the heroic resistance of which there are so many reminders. Flowers against the walls still mark the spots of street executions. The best and the brightest, her mother would say.

“Thirty-four,” she reads as she passes. “Thirty-four Poles died at this spot, executed by the Germans.” The flowers, red and white carnations, are wilted. The letter P with its base turned into an anchor, the symbol of resistance, is made of brass. Her brother wrote to her once that hours after martial law was declared, these signs appeared on the walls in every Polish city.

In one of the stores in the Old Town Anna buys an amber necklace and a pair of earrings for Marie. Two drops of amber on long silver rods.

“Do they really look the same way as they looked before the war?” she had asked her mother once about these reconstructed façades, the winding streets and cobblestones.

“Yes,” her mother said, her voice hardening already, warning her not to doubt her conviction. “They do.”

Flashes of afternoon light manage to break through low clouds, shed beams of warmth onto the walls of buildings. Anna is on Krakowskie Przedmie
cie now and these are yellow walls with a shade of pink. Nuns walk out of the Church of the Visitation, in long black robes and white wimples. They walk in groups, slowly, whispering among themselves, bending their white, pensive faces. Anna takes out her camera. The flash goes off; so there is not enough light, after all.

Nothing here, she thinks, is like it was. Every reconstructed building in this city is a defiant cry to the people beyond the Oder. Nothing happens here without being tied in the most profound and visceral way to this other presence, the presence
of Germany. These buildings stand here because Germans said they wouldn't. There is no forgiveness.

In the Marriott room, the light cream bedspread with green flowers has been turned down to reveal snow-white sheets. There is a Sweet Dreams chocolate in a black envelope on her pillow. In the bathroom, Anna lowers herself into scalding water, slowly, inch by inch, until her skin absorbs the heat and allows her to go deeper, taking away some of the tension that is still mounting in her.

It must have been a Christmas present. The bag of sweets, she remembers, was tied with a red ribbon; the entire room smelled of spruce and resin. Chocolate acorns were wrapped in golden foil, which, later, she would smooth carefully with her fingernail into a thin leaf and hide between the pages of her books. There were bonbons with dark, wet interiors that spilled onto her tongue, covering it with the bittersweet taste of coffee. Crispy wafers with rich hazelnut filling. There were two of these bags, one for her and one for her brother.

“Pocz
stuj nas”
her mother reminded her of her duty to share whatever it is she has, and she held the bag to them and expected that, as always, they would take one small piece each, or even decline the treat with a smile and the words she has been waiting for. “No, that's all for you, love. Chocolates are for the children.” But this time something was wrong.
Mama
took the whole chocolate bar with round hazelnuts buried in it.
Tata
picked another bar.
Babcia
said, “I think I would like a few of these acorns,” and she took a whole handful. Anna held back her tears, not knowing what to say. She had made her offering, and it had been accepted. How could she complain? Why would she want to cry?

A few minutes later, even though to her it seemed that hours had passed, she heard her mother's voice. “I think that's enough,” she said, her voice solemn and quiet, and they all nodded and said that they agreed. Yes, this was enough. “Good girl!” she heard. “What a brave little girl you are!” They were proud of her. “We are so very proud of you. You have passed the test.”

Through tears she watched how the sweets, untouched, were returned to her bag, how all was restored. She felt her father's hand on the top of her head, heavy and warm. “Our sweet girl. Wasn't she brave! Tears in her eyes, but she kept going.” Slowly the heaviness in her chest began to lift and she smiled, too, convinced of her own courage, the generosity of her heart. Her lips closed on a chocolate acorn and she waited for the moment in which the warmth of her tongue would melt the chocolate and release the soft, nutty filling inside.

The curtains of her hotel room are drawn. Through a narrow slit she can glimpse the lights of Warsaw. She closes the curtains tight, and pretends she is suspended in the air, nowhere in particular.

“He is German”, Anna recalls her mother's voice, a phone conversation from long ago she would like so very much to forget. “So what did his father do in the war?”

“I don't know, Mother. William doesn't know, either. He has never even seen his father.”

“That's what they all say, now.”

“I don't care, Mother. I love him.”

“But I care, Anna. And so should you.”