The Sudeten Germans listened. They demonstrated against Prague. They broke windows in Jewish stores and fought in the streets. They cheered when, on the Nuremburg dais, Hitler demanded their right to self-determination. And they were rewarded.
On the 29 of September 1938, at the Munich conference applauded by the deluded Europe, Sudetenland became part of the German Reich and Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten
German Party, its Gauleiter. The Giants of Sudetenland. This was the time of rewards, work and money, slave labour from the conquered lands in the East. A few years of prosperity, until the bodies of their dead started coming back from the front.
In 1945 the Czechs did not even wait for the international treaties to take their revenge. “You have to go,” they said. “All of you. You started the war. Your treachery destroyed the Czechoslovak Republic. Why should we allow you to live in a country you helped to kill?”
Revolutionary Guards put on their arm bands and moved into Sudetenland to take their revenge. Well before the allied forces agreed to the expulsion of Germans from the East, “wild deportations” drove away 600,000. The death marches and pogroms that ensued were payment for the delusions of one generation. They were all Germans; they were all guilty; they had to go.
In May of 1945 the people of Sattel gathered in their church for the last mass. It was dark and they lit the candles, but no one was able to say a word. So the priest led their silent prayers and the whole congregation, head touching head, responded in their hearts, without words. A few hours later that priest was killed by the guards; he was trying to smuggle the chalice.
In Weckelsdorf, the guards ordered all Germans to go away. They did. They left their houses, their furniture, their clothes, their china, and went, only to be turned back at the border. Without proper papers, without the international treaties that would give them a place to live, no one wanted them. “Go back where you came from and wait,” they were told. But when they got back to Weckelsdorf, now called Teplitz, their houses were already taken; their clothes and silver divided among those who moved in. So embarrassed the new owners were by this unexpected and unwanted return, that the Revolutionary Guard rounded the Germans up and took them away from the town, to the forest. When the guards got back into Weckelsdorf no one asked them what had happened. No one wanted to know. Only when a few months later relatives from Germany began their search, when through Red Cross they started their frantic inquiries, the mass grave in the forest was unearthed. And when the good judges from Nachod looked at the body of a small girl,
crowning the heap of corpses, her stiff hands still raised, still pleading to be spared, they did not know what to say.
The villages of the Sudeten Germans are empty now. There is nothing left there but broken fences. Grass is growing through the floor boards of abandoned houses. Wood, when it is left outside, becomes grey and brittle from the sun and rain. The graves and the fields are overgrown with nettle, wild raspberries, and thyme. Some of the tombstones have crumbled, but you can still make out some names on them. Pohl, Honig, Navottny.
Anna folds the letter back, carefully. This is the day in which she will take things easily. A walk in the Tiergarten, a long, hot bath. She will be kind to herself, gentle. She needs all her strength now. Ursula is waiting for her.
The lower half of the café window is covered by a white lace curtain, suspended on a brass rod. Inside, Anna can see a ceiling fan making its endless rounds, brass lamps on the walls, and her own pale reflection. It is ten o'clock in the morning. She is standing in front of the milky glass doors of the
Vamos
café, waiting for a whiff of courage to take her in. “The waiter will tell you where I am,” Ursula's message read. “Just ask to be seated at my table.”
Anna takes a deep breath of the air still moist from the morning rain. Walking has made her blood flow faster, but the residue of a headache is still there, the throbbing pressure in her forehead. At night she slept badly, waking every hour, dozing, waking up again. She was screaming at someone in her dream until her throat hurt. She was pushing at a grey, shapeless body that gave way under her hands, as if she were trying to move air.
Before coming here, she went through her clothes carefully, discarding them one by one. The jacket was too formal. The brown sweater too loose. It angered her that she was taking so long. “Does it really matter how you look?” she asked herself in front of the mirror, tossing her hair back, pinning it into a bun. All I want is to see her, she kept thinking. I know everything I want to know. I'm not like Piotr. What has happened, happened. I'll get over it. To Marie, when she called her from Wroclaw, she
even said that she had forgiven William. “He loved both of us,” she said. “At the same time.” It sounded very simple then, but words like these don't mean much here.
“Just one look at Ursula,” she thinks, “and I'll go home.”
Finally, she settled for a black wraparound skirt and a salmon-pink blouse with a black embroidered pattern that added warmth to her skin. And
Babcia's
coral necklace. She let her hair loose again. It did matter, whether she wanted to admit it or not. It mattered to look her best. Now, as she is straightening her skirt, pulling on her blouse to smooth the front, she catches her own reflection in the glass window. The coral necklace coils around her neck, and she touches the smooth surface with the tip of her finger.
“Come this way, please. Frau Herrlich is waiting for you.” A waiter has a thin-lipped smile. He is swarthy and well built, and he gives Anna a knowing look, as if he guessed more than he was letting on, a thought that Anna dismisses as utter nonsense.
Frau
Herrlich. A line from one of Ursula's letters flashes in Anna's mind.
I feel married to you in the most profound sense of the word.
The woman in a red crocheted vest who steps forward to greet her has a bushy mop of greyish curls; her thin face is flushed and drawn. She is rather short, shorter than Anna, even in her high heels. In her late forties, perhaps early fifties. William's age. There is fatigue in the corner of her lips, a tiredness to her skin. Her mouth is too wide, her lipstick too dark.
“It's good you've come,” she says in a raspy voice, turning away for an instant, to motion for the waiter. Her English is flawless, but Anna can detect a slight undertone of German. Right there, in the vowels that are a fraction too full, too rounded.
William, darling, you once said that only the extraordinary and the exaggerated interest me. That I have ceased to believe in ordinary human beings. Is this why you love me so much?
“So how do I measure up?” Ursula asks. The irony in her voice stings Anna, makes her take another look. There is a shadow of a smile on Ursula's face, and something else, something intriguing, something that won't be so easily
dismissed. “Plain, but striking,” Anna's mother would call it, and there would be, in her voice, however strained and reluctant, a layer of admiration for the force that could turn a plain face into a statement. It must be the eyes that do it, Anna thinks, hazel brown, watchful, and slightly haughty. Or the feline intensity that Ursula pours into each of her movements, the self-assured alertness of every turn.
When the waiter comes by, he says something funny, for Ursula laughs, a throaty, warm laugh. Her laughter is a challenge, an overture. The waiter gives her an admiring look. William must have loved that about her, the power to draw looks like his. Anna knows how he liked to have his desires confirmed.
Ursula asks for a coffee and a shot of vodka. “What do
you
want?” she turns to Anna, and Anna asks for a glass of red wine. It really is much too early for a drink, but she might need it. The edges of her eyelids hurt and when she blinks a thin, foggy veil appears between her and Ursula. She keeps blinking until it goes away.
When the waiter leaves them, silence is broken only by the snap of metal against metal. Ursula opens and then closes the shiny brass lock of her purse. She opens it again and this time she takes out a red packet of Dunhills. She holds a cigarette in her hand without lighting it.
The café has booths with soft upholstered seats; high panelling separates them from people sitting at other tables. The voices that reach Anna's ears are sharp, decisive. She would like to be able to understand them, but William had always discouraged her whenever she talked of learning German. “It's French you need here. Look what's happening around you.”
“I still can't believe William's dead.” Ursula tosses her head backwards, looks at the ceiling. Her voice cracks, softens. She is hot; she takes off the red crocheted vest and sits in her black silk blouse, fanning her neck. “You don't smoke, do you? Do you mind?” she asks, and then lights a cigarette and takes a long, hungry drag, smudging the brown filter with her lipstick.
“No,” Anna says. “I don't mind.”
The waiter brings a white coffee-pot and a cup on a tray, and makes room for them on the table. Vodka arrives in a short
greenish glass, beside a peace of dark pumpernickel bread with butter on a small plate. Ursula drinks her vodka in one gulp and bites into the bread. This is the way men drink in Poland, Anna thinks, with a grimace â a shiver as the burning liquid goes down â followed by a smile of relief. Vodka loosens the tongues, they say. Shows your true nature. The wine Anna ordered has a rich ruby colour, and it slides down her throat with ease she is grateful for.
“I learned to drink vodka in your country,” Ursula laughs. She pours cream into the coffee and stirs it fast. There is a paper doily between the cup and the saucer, and Anna watches as it slowly absorbs the drops of coffee that spill from the sides.
A Polish woman and a refugee, Willi? Isn't she another one of your atonements?
“I haven't come here to blame you.”
Anna has rehearsed this sentence a hundred times until she could say it smoothly, without hesitation. This is what she decided on, back in Wroclaw. Earlier, when she was still bitter, she was to say other things, “I have come to understand. I want to know why he lied to me and why you went along with his lies.” But she has changed, now. Unlike Piotr, she has put
her
past behind her, and she is ready to forget.
There are freckles on Ursula's hands, light brown spots Anna stares at. She can feel the shape of the chair imprinting itself on her back as she leans backward. She has an uneasy feeling that Ursula is studying her, that with each glance of her hazel eyes she knows her twice as well as she had a minute before, that soon Anna will have nothing to hide.
She can picture them together, this woman who is sitting in front of her, her eyes reddened by strain, and William, in Berlin, Munich, London, the Alps. William in his tweed jacket with suede patches on the elbows, Ursula's hand brushing hair out of his eyes. They are laughing, drunk on stolen time, on weeks of scheming, imagining what they would say to each other when they meet, going over each precious minute. Weeks brightened by furtive phone calls, notes scribbled fast, lips pressed to pieces of paper before they were slipped into white envelopes. In the Alps Anna can imagine Ursula and William skiing, trying to
overtake one another in the powdery plume of snow. Or making love in a wide pine bed, in one of the Bavarian houses with their stained wood balconies, garlands of flowers painted around windows, steep red tiled roofs. William's hand caressing Ursula's breasts, her nipple between his fingers. So long; it went on for so long. Marilyn? What was she doing then? What was she thinking? And Julia?
“Why would you want to blame me?” Ursula asks.
With all her rehearsals, Anna hasn't prepared herself for that. She doesn't quite know what to say. Ursula raises her voice slightly.
“He made his own decisions. Why would I be responsible?”
“So it didn't matter to you that he had to lie?” There is an edge to Anna's voice, now. “First to Marilyn, and then to me.”
“He didn't have to lie, Anna.” Ursula's fingers tap on the table when she says it. “I certainly never asked him to. He was a coward. I loved him in spite of it.”
Now she is extinguishing the cigarette stub, pressing it with her thumb to the bottom of the glass ashtray.
This is another disappointment. Somewhere, however unacknowledged the desire, Anna was expecting a reward for what she considers her magnanimity. She has come here promising herself that there will be no more accusations, and now she is being diverted, led back into the apportioning of blame.
“Listen,” Ursula says. “I don't want to keep hurting you. There is no point.”
She bends down and takes a manila envelope from a plastic bag that was lying on the seat beside her. “This is what he left behind. I meant to mail it to you, but...”
Anna has seen such notebooks before. There are a few of them in William's study. Some black, some navy-blue. Imported from California. William used to buy them in the small stationery store on St. Catherine Street whose limping owner addressed him as Professor Herzman, accenting the second syllable, making it float. William's favourite kind for jotting down compositions, notes that mean nothing to her. She can't read music.
The notebook Ursula has brought with her is almost filled, and Anna leafs through it. There are no words in it, apart from a few titles:
Another Dimension, Lament, Sonata for Solo Violin, Foray.
Abstract, enigmatic titles William favoured. She puts the notebook back into the envelope and presses her fingers to her cheeks. The fingers are cool, soothing.
“Are you all right?” Ursula asks, leaning toward her.
“Yes,” Anna says, backing away. “I'm fine, perfectly fine,” but she doesn't like the sound of her own voice, the plaintive note, the quiver. In the silence that follows, she waits for the time until the heaviness of her body lifts, allowing her to take a fuller breath.