When they found it, the apartment was almost empty, save for a heap of broken glass in the living room, a pile of books, and a few photographs of a man with a swastika on his arm. The photographs were pierced with a knife. The place was filthy. Rotting rags stuck to the floorboards, the large wooden table was split in half with an axe, the walls were smeared with excrement, a jar of marmalade was emptied over a pile of books. Her father thought that soldiers must have camped there. “Maybe,” he said, “that's why the apartment was still empty.”
It took her parents a whole week to wash the walls and scrub the floors clean. They slept on the floor in the big room to the right, and in the morning carried down the rubble they had cleared and left it by the curb of the street.
The bombs had left parts of the houses intact, and from these teetering caverns her parents rescued the bright yellow curtains now hanging in the big front room, and the little rosewood table with a marble top that stands in the study. They took whatever they could find, the round table they ate on, oak chairs with leather seats, white iron beds, white china plates, a mahogany clock with an eagle perched on top, and Anna's favourite, a
Scherenschnitt,
a paper cut-out still hanging on the kitchen wall in her parents' apartment. How she loved to stare at the black silhouettes of a man with an umbrella, of two little boys, and of a dog struggling with wind and rain. One of the
boys in the picture watched how his umbrella turned over, another ran after a blown off cap. Only the dog plodded along, pretending not to mind.
Babcia
did not like the curtains, the table, the brown leather armchairs with head-rests. She would have preferred her daughter to have the family furniture, if only she could have it back. “These are so heavy,” she complained, “so German.” She did not mind when they gathered chips and bruises, and shrugged her shoulders when Yan and Anna jumped up and down on the beds, until the springs moaned.
“I didn't want to come here,” she said. “This is not where my grandchildren should have been born.” The world Anna and Yan were supposed to inherit, like the Warsaw store, was destroyed, and now they were destined to live their lives among someone else's things, in this poor substitute for real Poland. “Robbed and betrayed,” she said, her face locked in a grimace.
There were so many things her grandchildren should never forget. The frozen Siberian fields in Kolyma, where prisoners' bodies were so well preserved that when the time came, even hundreds of years from now, future generations would be able to see the last expressions on their faces. Gulag-bound ships where the smallest sign of discontent brought swift death, decks with protesters flooded by water and left to freeze into one solid block of ice. Those who had returned never said a word about the past but stared at the world with wide, empty eyes.
“Yes, Anna, it was better not to know.”
Those who started this most terrible of wars, she would say, the Germans, laugh at them now from their new, opulent homes in West Germany, rebuilt with American money, laugh at them, caught behind the Iron Curtain, lining up for scraps of meat and loaves of stale bread.
Anna did not like when
Babcia
spoke like that, for her voice rose, tensed and then dissolved into sobs. Nothing Anna could say would bring any comfort. It was better to stay silent, to look down, and to wait until the wave of bitterness passed.
“What kind of life is it, I ask you!”
“What's the use,
Mama.
Thank God we are all alive,” the
pleading voice of Anna's mother was meant to soothe. She, too, was made uneasy by so much pain.
It is the smell of perfume that Anna remembers now.
Soir de Paris,
a soft, luxurious smell mixed with the scent of face powder wafting into her nostrils when her mother leaned over her bed to place a soft kiss on her cheek.
Soir de Paris,
Anna whispered long afterwards, evening in Paris, thinking of the small bottle the colour of a ripe plum with a chrome cap. It kept the soft memory of the scent long after the perfume was gone.
Her mother was leaving for a New Year's ball. Her high heels clicked on the floor as she hurried around the room in her new taffeta dress, in which golden threads intertwined with brown and beige. The dress had a full skirt and a strapless bodice from which her mother's soft arms emerged like a statue trying to free itself from the tight embrace of stone. Her hair was pinned high, held in place with a wooden clasp. Father, dressed in his best black suit, was standing in the corner, his eyes following her with the amazement that Anna understood so well. For once again her mother had transformed herself in front of them; she was so confident and so beautiful, laughing at their muffled gasps, turning around to give them one more look before she covered her arms with a shawl. Soon she would put on the beige gloves that reached up to her elbows, slip her arms into the long furcoat Father was holding for her, and pick up a small purse. “Bedtime is at nine,” she would chime. “No moaning.” With her gloved fingers she would blow them the last kiss before closing the door, and they would hear the clicks of her heels descending the stairs.
Babcia
had made the dress herself. For weeks the three of them had eyed the newspapers and magazines for the slightest hints of changing fashions. With a magnifying glass they had examined snapshots of actresses and diplomats' wives from small, unfocused photographs that sometimes appeared in magazines. They had noted the cuts of dresses, the shapes of heels.
Babcia
didn't need much else. She could copy any dress they set their mind on. The taffeta ball gown had a Marilyn Monroe feel to it, quite unusual, for
Mama
had an eye for simple but dramatic patterns, contrasting fabrics, lines that made the most of her narrow waist and shapely legs.
Soir de Paris
?
.
Over
Babcia's
protests they had made a trip to the hard currency store filled with Max Factor face creams, Colgate toothpaste, French perfume, and American cigarettes, whisky and blue jeans.
“What if something happens?”
Babcia
had said, angered by such extravagance, “What if you have no food to give the children?”
“A little bit of luxury,”
Mama
had whispered into Anna's ear, as if to excuse herself, having extracted green dollar bills from a leather pouch she kept hidden somewhere in the study.
Dziadek
gave it to her before he died, the result of some transactions he had hung on to. “Buy yourself something nice with it,” he had said. “You only live once.”
Anna loved to watch her mother on evenings like this.
Babcia
eyeing her creation, spotting a hanging thread or a forgotten pin, pulling the dress on one side, making
Mama
stand still for just one second to make sure the hem was even. In her student days,
Mama
told them, nothing would stop her from dancing. Once when her heel snapped off one shoe, she slipped off her shoes and stockings and danced barefoot. When the dance was over, she snapped off the other heel and wobbled home.
These were the kinds of stories Anna liked best, but she had to ask for them, plead against her mother's preoccupied silence. Sometimes, when Anna asked often enough and when they were away, on vacation perhaps, far away from her mother's work, she might even hear of her parents' courtship â the most favourite story of them all â for it foreshadowed her own existence, involving her in such a wondrous way. That's when her mother would smile this half-smile, poised between pride and joy and say, “I never even noticed him, at first. I always had so many friends, but he had already been watching me for months.”
It was in these stories that Anna's father emerged from the crowd of
Mama's
admirers slowly, winning her by his steadfast patience and determination. He would slip funny notes in between the pages of her books, wait in line to get a dance with her. Once, he brought her a cluster of gypsum roses, white crystalline balls closing like rosebuds in a tight bouquet. This he
bought at the
szaberplatz,
the black market of Breslau treasures. It must have come from the geological museum, he would later say, for that was not an ordinary find. He skipped dinners for a whole week to afford it, but
Mama
wouldn't know that for months. “How beautiful,” she had said simply when he placed the rocky flowers into her hands. The gypsum roses are still standing on the shelf of her parents' study and have to be dusted very carefully not to break; the delicate petal-like formations.
“He was so funny, then,”
Mama
would say at times like that, smiling.
Tata
only blushed when she talked to him and stammered some silly apologies, as if unprepared for such luck.
In the photographs from that time
Tata
is tall and handsome with a high forehead and round wire glasses. Anna has his curly hair, his smile, shy but winning, and his quiet persistence. That's what her mother always said, “Daddy's daughter.”
How attracted he must have been by her mother's boundless energy, Anna thinks now, by her mercurial spirit. By the tenacity with which
Mama
refused to be weighed down by the ruins, the lost store. That wasn't enough to stop her, not more than a broken heel of her dancing shoe. Alone in the world, Father needed that kind of strength, his only hope for permanence. Soon her mother could not imagine an evening of dancing without his quiet presence, his patient waiting for her, when tired and so very happy she needed to lean on his shoulder and let him escort her through the dangerous Wroc aw streets to her student room. “I had nothing but my hamnler,”
Tata
would sometimes add to these stories, the same pointed hammer with which he split the rocks.
There was one reason why
Mama
had little time for them, why the best of stories came rarely and had to be begged for, why dressing up for the ball seemed such a wondrous transformation for them all. Her work. She was a chemist. At that time she was completing her PhD research, her mind absorbed by her experiments in surface tension, which Anna understood only vaguely. It had something to do with particles of minerals suspended in water, rising to the surface by bubbles of air. Her mother was trying to separate the ones she wanted, find ways of recovering them. The laboratory smelled of solvents and burning
gas, and on the shelves Anna could spot jars labelled with human skulls and crossed bones. “Don't touch anything,”
Mama
would warn her. This wasn't the place for children, she would say, ushering Anna outside, quickly, anxious to get back to her work.
Babcia
did not approve of her daughter's occupation. “Not a job for a woman,” she would say to Anna as they sat in the kitchen peeling potatoes for dinner, her lips pouting with disgust. “She will blow herself up or drag some poison home.”
Babcia
was dubious of her daughter's ability to keep the family safe. She would make sure
Mama
changed her clothes as soon as she came home and would wash them separately, rinsing them a few more times than she would anything else.
“Her place is here, with you. What is she going to do when I die?” she would ask Anna and Yan, pleased that they had no answer for her.
The train enters the giant glass-and-steel hangar of Central Station. There is a smell here Anna remembers, soot mixed with steam, the smell of a railway. How German it still looks, Anna thinks. Forty-five years later the German
genius loci
is in the shape of metal columns that support the roof, in the classical ornaments, the pale ivory tiles on the walls. What has changed, to her, is the size of it. The station seems smaller than she remembers it, and later, she will have to fight the persistent feeling that the whole city has shrunk in her absence. Her throat is dry, as if all moisture has evaporated, leaving her cracked open, like parched, barren ground.
Her brother waits on the platform, by the little round kiosk, to the right. Anna knows it is him long before he has recognised her. His eyes scan the train, trying to spot her. In some ways he has not changed at all. He is still large, with wide shoulders and a head that seems too small for his body. “He is stooping,” Anna thinks, “I don't remember him stooping so much.” When he notices her, he throws his arms up and shakes his head, taken aback. It must be her black leather coat, Anna thinks; her brother does not remember her dressing like this. Before she left Poland, she had a preference for loose, flowery
dresses of cheesecloth â the hippie style. She feels his arms around her, squeezing her, pulling her toward him.
“Anna,” he says, “Anna. Good Lord! Good to have you here.” He does not mention William. He does not know how.
“Yes,” she murmurs. “Good to be back. I haven't thought I ever would.”
He leans back, his hands still on her shoulders.
“You look swell,” he says looking at the cut of her hair, the ash-blond highlights. “American!”
She doesn't, really. She avoids mirrors for her face is still pale and drawn, aged by sadness, but now she smiles and is pleased by her brother's words.
“Thank you,” she says, and realises that this is not what he expects her to say. If anything he would expect her to protest, to say how tired she is from the journey, how crumpled her clothes are, and then he, too, would protest, complimenting her even more. So now, puzzled, he watches her closely, looking for other clues how the years away must have changed her. They were not too good at corresponding. Her letters were short and general, and often left unanswered for months. She tried to call him, but these were just excuses to hear his voice, for she knew her brother well enough. He was no expert at hurried conversations.
Under martial law her brother joined an underground dissident cell, delivering leaflets, preparing safe houses, carrying messages, lecturing clandestine groups on the legal means of active opposition. In Canada she knew little of these activities, except for vague hints in the letters smuggled out of the country and mailed outside the reach of censors. Her mother did not write about him, either.