Necessary Lies (3 page)

He fumed about Sartre then, angered at the blindness of a great mind. The gravest disappointment was when intelligence did not suffice. How could a philosopher be so blind, he asked, a man who saw so much elsewhere? How could he defend Stalinism, dismiss reports of terror and the Gulags, turn a blind eye to so much suffering?!

“Because it was happening to someone else,” she offered her explanation. “Because it was far away?”

He was not convinced. “It's too simple,
male
ka
, my little one,” he said, frowning. “There must have been other reasons.”

She may have wanted to kiss that frown away from his forehead, but she knew how to wait.

He insisted on walking her home, on taking her upstairs, to the doors of her parents' apartment. When they reached the
second floor landing, he made her ring the bell right away, pressing her hand to the brass button.

She thought: Why don't you kiss me? What are you afraid of?

She waited.

He kissed her a month later. Two months later they were lovers. “This is,” he whispered, his face buried in her hair, “what I was afraid of.”

She was not afraid. For weeks she walked with a knowing smile on her lips, shrugged her shoulders when boys shot her looks at the vaulted school corridors covered with layers of beige paint. “Puppies,” she thought, her lips pouting. What was happening to her was serious. It was real love.

She had to sneak by the concierge at his dormitory, bending to pass underneath the counter, his hand tousling her hair. His three roommates would leave, obligingly, leaving their smell behind them. The sour smell of cigarette smoke, spilled beer, and something else, a strong smell of young men, restless, far away from home. All they had was two hours. Two hours to be alone, two hours for the world to shrink into a narrow bed covered with a rough grey blanket and their naked bodies. Two hours of nothing but love.

She was intoxicated with the daring that grew in her. “What's happening to you?” her mother asked. “You should be studying. I need your help around the house.”
Babcia
, her grandmother, was no longer alive, there was no one to stand in lines for food, to cook and to clean. They all had to contribute now. There were no excuses.

When
Dziadeky
her grandfather, died,
Babcia
took his body to the Pow
zki cemetery on the outskirts of Warsaw. “That's where I want to rest, too,” she had said. Wroclaw she didn't trust. It felt too German to her. Too transient. Land that had changed hands could be changed again. “Who knows how long before the Germans come back to take it all away?” That's where she was buried, too, next to her husband. In Polish soil.

Anna hurried with the dishes, whirling through the kitchen like a fury, impatient with all that could stop her. She hovered over the telephone, determined to be the first one to answer it. From time to time her father gave her a knowing smile, but she knew he would never tease or embarrass her. If at any time it was he who answered the phone, he would never ask who Piotr Nowicki was the way her mother would.

“A friend,” was all she was prepared to say. She would tell them more when she was ready. But only then.

In March, Piotr was given leaflets to take to the students at the
Politechnika.
This was the real beginning, he said, when Anna came to see him at the dorm. This time they hurried; there was no time but for a kiss. The leaflets were in two bundles. An explanation of the need for action, a call for peaceful protests and for a Poland-wide student strike if necessary. He put the bundles into his shoulder bag.

“Give them to me,” she said. “They won't search a schoolgirl.”

He hesitated.

“Come on,” she said. “Give them to me.”

She washed all traces of mascara from her eyes and tied her hair into a ponytail, a thick flaxen curl between her shoulder blades. Pinned the school badge to her left arm, smoothed the sleeves of her uniform. Let her glasses slide down her nose. She could look fourteen when she wanted, innocence itself.

“Give them to me.”

He didn't look at her when she took the bundles from his bag and pushed them into her school satchel. For the first time it occurred to her that he might be scared, but she dismissed the thought at once. Not Piotr, not him.

At the last moment she put a jar of jam and a loaf of bread into his bag. And then she rolled the newspapers that were lying on the table and added them.

“Just keep cool,” he whispered into her ear and offered her a shot of vodka. She drank it and felt nothing but warmth, not even a turn in her head. He had two shots, one after another and gave her a mint candy to disguise the smell.

The first time the
milicja
patrol approached them she did keep cool. They had discussed the best tactics before and Piotr was now doing his part, leaning on her shoulder, his body heavy and limp. She gave the men a helpless smile, a smile of a woman left to carry her burden, an old dance of the sexes. They had counted on that. On their laughter at his mumbling voice.

“Just don't be angry with me, little sister,” Piotr pleaded with drunken insistence. “Can a man not have a drink in this country anymore without a woman screaming at him?”

“Wait till Mother sees you,” she yelled and gave his body a shove. “She will teach you a lesson.” That's when the
milicja
men laughed.

Later, far from their sight, Piotr heaved his body straight. “Bastards,” he said and she watched his upper lip tremble. “Bloody pigs.”

The second time they were stopped, the two men in blue uniforms with set jaws in their pale faces emerged from around the corner before they had time to do anything.

“Documents!” they barked and then stood, feet apart and looked at them as they fumbled for their I.D.s. Anna handed hers first, to the shorter one. Slowly his eyes travelled from her face to the photograph in her school identification. Piotr, she had noted, handed his internal passport, not his university I.D. “What's in this bag?” the taller one asked, pointing at Piotr's shoulder.

“Nothing,” Piotr said. “Groceries. We've just done some shopping.”

“Open it up!”

The bag slid onto the pavement. Piotr kneeled to open it and took out the jam, the bread. The newspapers.

“Student?” The shorter one was taking over.

“Yes.”

“Where are your books then, Mr. Student? Aren't we supposed to be learning? Aren't we supposed to study hard?”

“At the dorm,” he said. “I left them at the dorm.”

“Is that so, Mr. Student? Or maybe we needed some room to carry other things than books?”

Anna stood motionless, staring at them, watching their every move. Think, she told herself. They are going to beat him up. Think! If she didn't clear her throat, she would choke.

“A nice girlfriend. A lucky bastard, too!” the taller was looking at her now. The shorter one spit on the pavement, the white blob landing at Piotr's feet. Glass cracked. Kicked, Piotr's bag landed a few feet away. The
milicja
men laughed. Their knuckles tensed on the handles of the white night-sticks. “Let's see how lucky you really are!”

She could see, with a corner of her eye, that the sinews in Piotr's neck were tensing up. He would say something now, she knew it, say something that would make the men strike. Call them pigs. Moscow lackeys. Quote his constitutional rights. Then they would be arrested, searched. She had to stop it, right away. Now.

“Him!” It was the contempt in her voice that caught their attention. “He's no longer my boyfriend. And he is no longer a student. He failed his exams.”

“Third time,” she said and laughed. “Failed for the third time.”

She was counting on the power of their contempt, on the slight chance that they might dismiss Piotr as not worthy of their effort. She was not taking into account the simple fact that she was humiliating Piotr. Such deliberations required time. She felt the men's eyes slide up and down her face, her breasts, her belly. She was waiting, a soft smile on her lips. Anything that might tip the scales in Piotr's favour.

The shorter man, who was holding her ID in his hands, had been staring at her picture for some time now, but did not write anything down. A golden ring on his finger glimmered in the sun.

“Shouldn't you be at school right now?” the taller man finally said, and she knew that she had won. He was returning her school I.D.

“That's where I'm going,” she said, taking it and putting it in her pocket. Her school was, indeed, a few streets away. “Only now I'll be late.”

“Scram, you piece of shit!” the taller
milicja
man said to Piotr. “And don't let me catch your ass around here again.”

She was so proud of herself, so relieved that it was all over, that she never noticed his silence. As soon as they turned around the corner he took her bag from her and told her to go to school right away. She tried to protest, but he said he had no time for any nonsense. It was only when he didn't call her that evening that she realized the enormity of her defeat.

You fool, she said to herself. You damn fool. What have you done?

Anna went to Piotr's dorm a few times, left messages with the three roommates who swore to tell Piotr she had come by. She cried so much that in the morning she had to put cold compresses on her eyes before she could face her mother, but even that did not help much. “It's all that reading,” she lied. “Studying for the exams.”

A few days later, Daniel brought her a note, slipped it to her in the math textbook. The note was from Piotr. In Warsaw, during a protest against repressions, the students were beaten up by the
milicja
, right in front of the University. That was the spark they were all waiting for. Now, Piotr was inside the
Politechnika.
The Wroclaw students demanded to be heard. He was not going to call her, for all calls were monitored and he didn't want to put her in danger. She was to wait and trust him. He knew what had to be done.

In the school bathroom where she went to read Piotr's note she burst into tears. She cried again, on Partisans' Hill where Daniel patted her on the shoulders and kept saying that Piotr would be all right. But she was not crying from fear. She was crying from happiness. Piotr had forgiven her. She had not destroyed his love.

Soon it became clear that the student revolt had turned into one more defeat, a handy excuse for the government to start another internal purge. The Communist Party had no trouble convincing the workers that the spoiled “brats” from universities were forgetting who was the ruling class in Poland. Whose sweat was paying for their education? As to their demands and criticisms — some were justified. It was not the Communist Party, however,
that was at fault, but the Jews. Weren't they responsible for the Stalinist rule? Weren't they infiltrating the party ranks? The Jews who never truly supported Poland, never cared for her? If only they would leave, all would be better off. Poland was for true Poles only. The students were misguided at best.

When the strikes and protests were over, the interrogations began. “Why did you do it? Who told you to start it? When? Give us names, more names. That's your only chance.” Piotr knew the questions by heart, prepared himself with answers. Rehearsed them with Anna, debated the merits of giving the names of known informers or perhaps not mentioning any names at all. Many of their friends were kicked out of the university, barred from all but the most menial jobs, and most of their Jewish friends had already been told to leave.

Newspaper columns filled with code words,
foreign element, cosmopolitanism, internationalism.
Suspicious words, alien, not Polish. “No one is keeping you here,” the commentaries declared. “Leave. Go to Israel. Isn't it what you always wanted?” Piotr was interrogated and arrested. Taken from his dormitory room in hand-cuffs. Daniel called. He told Anna to write to Piotr's father in Kraków.

This is when Anna learned Piotr's father was not just a doctor, but a well-known heart surgeon whose skills had a price beyond money.