“Anna,” he whispered, “my darling.” She knew then that she would never go back to Poland, to Piotr, but the thought didn't hurt yet. Gently she licked the tips of his fingers as they moved over her lips. His hand slid down her neck onto her
naked breasts, down between her legs. “Oh my God, please don't punish me. I'll be better, I promise. With him, I'll be better, I'll understand more,” she prayed, closing her eyes.
She repeated the words he whispered to her, the English words his voice gave new meanings to, “My precious darling, my love.”
“I don't want an affair,” she said. “I won't lie about you.” And then, her eyes still closed, with the pores of her skin she felt the warmth of his lips. “I'm thirsty,” she said.
He walked barefooted to the kitchen and poured her a glass of cold water. She was shaking when she drank it all, gulp after gulp, a cold snake entering her, filling her insides. He kissed the glass, licked the drops of water from her chin. They laughed. Through the window they watched the roofs of houses, the lights of lampposts, of passing cars. Across, in the distance, was the giant cross on the Mountain, erected by a city grateful for being spared from a flood, now long forgotten. He pulled her toward him again, her hair tangled, her body ready for him. It occurred to her that she should check the balance of desire. That it was dangerous to love too much, to be that insatiable. Before she had completely formed the thought, she was ashamed of it.
There was moonlight in the room where they lay, entangled, still hungry for each other. The furniture was grey â all shadows, dark, indistinguishable. There were layers to their bodies, whole territories to explore. The soft outer layer of his skin wrinkled when she pushed it. The veins were like underground tunnels criss-crossing the body. She breathed in the smell of his hair, a vague scent of wood smoke and the wind. “Are you making sure I'm real?” he had asked, capturing her hand, and she laughed in response. A teasing laugh, a challenge.
Her first dream of him must have been a nightmare. She woke up in the middle of the night and found her flat, narrow pillow wet with tears. She could not remember the dream, just the feeling that he had been there in it, the centre of everything, and that she, in some dreamy, bodiless form, was being dragged away from him. The emptiness that descended on her took away her will to live.
Still crying, she sat up in bed. She embraced her legs, drew them tighter and rested her chin on her knees. The room was cold, and she was shivering. The air coming from the open window was thick with the smells of cooking, stale food and last night's garbage, the smell of downtown alleys, wet from the rain.
In the apartment on Rue de la Montagne Anna could spot Piotr's letters in her mailbox before she had opened it, blue envelopes showing through the brass slits. They all had blurred ink stamps on them â
EKSPRES
â underneath her address, an attempt to speed them up.
She walked slowly upstairs with his letter in hand. She examined the stamp, an aeroplane rising over the newly reconstructed Warsaw castle, the last, missing part of the Old Town, rebuilt from pre-war records, paintings, and photographs. She let the letter lie, unopened, on the table while she was rearranging bottles of creams on the bathroom shelf, wiping off specks of dust. Upstairs someone was moving furniture, scraping the floor. In this building the apartments did not keep their tenants for long. There was no lease to sign; all the landlord asked for was a deposit and a month's notice.
She pulled on the flap of Piotr's letter. It came off at once; the glue on Polish envelopes did not resist. Inside, on an onionskin sheet of paper, rows of uneven, small letters. She would have to read them slowly, word by word, for Piotr had used both sides of the paper and the writing showed through, like an inverted echo.
Darling!
The word startled her. She had already begun to read his letters as if they were meant for someone else, as if she were eavesdropping on intimacies that could only embarrass her. Piotr was thanking her for a postcard of St. Joseph's Oratory, asking what else she had seen, complaining that her letters took too long, that they arrived sealed in a plastic bag with a stamp, THE LETTER ARRIVED DAMAGED, a telltale sign of censorship.
It was pointless, she thought. There was no sequence to their writing, no order. When a letter finally reached her she would
find him answering questions she had already stopped asking. The express postage must have helped this time, for this letter had been mailed only a week before, on the 25
th
of November, 1981.
We don't much plan for the future, here, or speculate what might or might not happen. Or calculate our chances
, he had written.
We cannot all leave and let the Communists take over, we cannot let them win. Someone has to stop the madness, this perverted lie. Besides, is there enough space on earth to take in the whole nation? Or would you rather I said, “to hell with the whole nation, I'm interested in myself alone.”
She tossed the letter away. “It doesn't matter anymore,” she said aloud. She had already given the landlord her notice, taken down the photographs from the wall.
I have read and reread your last letter many times. Darling! I don't understand what you are trying to say. What has Polish ethnocentrism to do with anything? Who is self-centred, unable to see beyond the horizon? And what about this “inability to forgive” you are so worried about? You are very cryptic in your letters, which must make the censors as bewildered as I am. Not that I care much about the censors! Forgive whom? For what?
His life consisted of meetings, evenings spent alone, frustrated, angry. There was a package of Earl Grey tea he got from some smart British guy who interviewed him for the BBC and knew what they really needed. This cup of tea, some cheddar cheese and some crackers was his definition of luxury. He had reminded her of the evenings they spent together, of the poems by Herbert he read to her.
Remember Mr. Cogito's message?
he had asked:
Do not forgive in the name of those who were betrayed at dawn.
She read on, unable to stop, but no longer listening.
I know you would agree with me. That you agree with me now. You wrote that you have changed, but surely change does not have to mean that you have forgotten what we both believed in? For if it does, darling, maybe this is the time to stop changing.
Carefully she folded the thin sheet and put it back into the envelope. To Marie, over a soft peak of cappuccino sprinkled with chocolate, she said later, “Damned country. You can't even leave your husband without feeling that you've betrayed your
fatherland. Nothing is private there. Not even my damned letters to him. Nothing.”
There were more letters from Wroclaw. Her mother wrote of empty stores, of growing line-ups for meat. There was no bread, no flour.
Try to see as much as you can and eat well. Don't worry about saving any money. Who knows how long we will be allowed to travel, when you will have such a chance again.
William helped her make food parcels, filled with corn flour, flour, raisins, almonds, baking powder, gelatine, boxes of cereal, and, together, they took it all to the post-office. Her Christmas present, she thought.
There was nothing she could say that would make them understand what she was about to do.
In a liquor store she picked up cardboard boxes and began packing her things. Books, notes, copies of articles on her emigré writers. She folded her new dresses, a pair of jeans, loose cotton shirts. Five cardboard boxes joined the suitcase with which she had flown into Mirabel “Is that all, darling?” William said. “My, you do travel light.” He helped her carry them to his car; all of her possessions fit into his trunk.
In William's place, which Anna slowly learned to describe as “our Westmount townhouse,” she was still like a rare and distinguished visitor. He told her he had bought it for nothing, half of its real value when, at the time of the Quebec referendum the real estate prices collapsed. That's how it was here, he said, in spite of what she might have heard from her crazy French friends. The French Canadians kept a knife at Canada's throat and nothing would satisfy them but the breakup of the country. For now, it may all seem settled, but he wouldn't hold his breath for the future.
Anna loved the house, its red brick walls, oak woodwork. There were stained glass transoms over the doors and a bay window in the living room. She moved through the rooms carefully, listening to the creaks in the floors, learning the views from each window. Her own things melted into the house without a trace. Her cheap paperbacks lay unpacked.
Her clothes took just a few hangers in William's closet.
She loved watching William move through the kitchen in his red apron, among the scents of food, adding herbs to the steaming pots, pouring wine into them, setting the timer, turning the roasts, lighting cognac on steaks. Foods had their own chemistry, he said, there was a science of mixing tastes, a sensitivity to the palate that had to be trained and then indulged.
She touched the lids of his musical boxes, with their brass, ebony and mother-of-pearl inlay, turned the brass keys to listen to the tunes of Weber, Mozart, Bellini. He had repaired them all, she learned, big and small, fascinated by the simplicity of their mechanisms. All that was necessary was a spring, a cylinder with steel pins that would lift and suddenly release the tuned steel teeth, and a brake of sorts. “Mechanical music, a challenge for the human mind. Clarionas, multiphones, hexaphones, Violano-Virtuosos.” His eyes sparkled when he showed her his treasures, opened the boxes to point to the perforated paper roll, the Geneva stop-work that prevented the springs from overwinding. These air brakes as he called them had parts with funny names, the governor, the butterfly, the flyer, the worm.
“Play them for me,” she asked and he walked around the room winding them for her. The bells, the chimes, the soft tunes filled the room, and she laughed and clapped her hands, delighted. When he was away, she would open his violin and touch the strings, the black pegs, the smooth black hollow where he rested his chin. He had told her that violins remember, that when they were played with mastery for a long time the wood captured the exquisite sounds within itself, kept them for the future. “Nothing else matters, nothing but love,” she whispered into the resonance holes and laughed.
In the evenings, lying in bed, hands behind his head, William watched her as she moved around the bedroom in her ivory lace nightgown, one of the many presents he gave her. “You are so beautiful,” he murmured and she felt a pulsating, throbbing warmth rising inside her, crouching between her legs. After they made love, when his muscles tensed and when his head fell against her neck, she listened to his breath,
shortened and raspy, broken by the sighs of pleasure, and then she listened to the beating of his heart.
“It will hurt,” William told her. “It always does. But we will be all right, won't we?”
“Yes,” she said. “We'll be all right.”
She did not think of it much until then, the pain of parting with Piotr, breaking up her marriage. With William beside her she was happy, blissfully happy.
In the first week of December she dictated Piotr's number to the operator. By the time he picked up the phone her heart stopped a million times, a torrent of little deaths. Her palm was sweaty, and she gripped the receiver too hard. She was to remember this for a long time afterwards, the spasm, the tingling of her hand.
Piotr didn't understand. “You've met someone? You are not coming back?” he asked, as if she were talking of something entirely impossible, ridiculous even.
She had to repeat, for the connection was poor, the buzz of static overwhelming, and then there was the echo that made her hear her words as if they were spoken into a vacuum, returned to her before she had finished speaking. It humiliated her that he didn't understand. In her mind she had already altered the past, made him expect her desertion, and his surprise was an affront, a slap on the cheek. How could he not understand? How could he not see it coming? Did she pretend so well? Feign her happiness with him, her love? For she must have feigned it. If she truly loved Piotr, she would not be in love with William now. Would she?
Marie, of course, did not think so. “You are not the first woman, darling, to discover you can love two men at the same time.” But Anna could not believe it.
Now, with Piotr at the other end of the receiver, Anna did not know how to find words sharp enough, words that would make him hear, that would make him understand.
“Please. Try to forgive me,” she said. “I didn't think it would happen, and I can't explain it. It's all my fault. I'm sorry.”
William was in the other room when she made the call. They were still unsure of their territories, still learning to judge what could be demanded and what should be left unsaid. He paced the living room floor. He could hear her speak, but he could not understand what she was saying. Her voice, he would tell her later, seemed to him all consonants, sharp, whistling, a shiver.
Piotr must have understood finally, for he told her to suit herself. “I haven't really known you, have I?” he asked, and then she heard a muted curse and a slam of the receiver.
She wept the whole evening. She let William rock her to sleep, give her a tall glass with gin and tonic. She drank hastily. Sleep was an escape, long, deep, incoherent, filled with the images of the world disconnected, hands, knees, the warmth of someone's skin. Wetness. The pillow was wet when she woke up, in the middle of the night, alert.
She slipped out of the bedroom, quietly not to wake William up. In the credenza drawer there was an old packet of cigarettes she had spotted a few days before, a leftover from an old, discarded habit. The window in the living room had a stained glass panel, and she sat in the wicker armchair, legs curled up, staring at the grey patterns of squares and circles. The taste of smoke surprised her; she had not smoked since that day, thirteen years ago when she met Piotr on Partisans' Hill. It hit her lungs with a force she had forgotten. Her brain swirled. She inhaled the smoke deeply and let it out. Another long drag, the glowing tip sparkling and fading in the dark. She sat like that for a long time. Cars passed, the lights made patterns on the ceiling, flashes of light, one chasing another. She did not move. In the morning William found her with her head resting on her arm. Asleep.