Necessary Lies(10)

“When did you leave Breslau?” she asked William that evening.

“In 1945, in January,” he said. “I was five. But we came to Canada before I turned seven.”

The walnut panelled room of the Faculty Club was beginning to grow too noisy and too hot. Anna could feel people pushing her from behind, murmuring their apologies and moving on. She had to strain her ears to separate his voice from the noise around her.

The thought that he was German, even if his German childhood might be nothing more than a few memories of the war, cautioned her to be careful of the things she said. She didn’t want him to think she was expecting expressions of guilt, feelings of contrition for the crimes of another generation. But in truth she was. She needed to put him in a safe zone, for she was already aware of how much he could mean to her.

“I don’t really remember much,” he said.

Later she was to learn that it wasn’t true. All she had to do was to discover the right question. But at that time she didn’t know about K?the, did not know that she should have asked him about his mother.

And yet, even then, he did remember something. In his Breslau street, as in the Wroclaw street she grew up on, there was a row of acacia trees, covered in pale white flowers. In the spring the whole street looked as if it were sprinkled with creamy snow. When he sucked the tips of the flowers they gave up a faint taste of sweetness and wilted under his fingers.

“Nothing else?” she asked. He must have heard the disappointment in her voice for he told her of the long wait for the train that was to take his mother and him out of the city, the smell of heavy coats, of sweat, the suffocating feeling of having nowhere to escape to. “I’ve never been so afraid in my life,” he said. “And I don’t think I ever will be again.”

He had calmed himself by staring at the spirals and mazes of cracks on the ivory tiles lining the tunnel of Breslau Hauptbahnhof. Every single one of them different. He had traced these cracks with his finger, the little cells and cobwebs made by the frost and the pounding pressure of heavy trains passing above.

“Have you ever gone back?” Her throat was dry and her voice came out trembling, losing its self-assurance.

In 1975 or 76, he wasn’t quite sure of the year, he had toured Poland with the McGill student choir and Wroclaw was one of the stops. Wratislavia Cantans, he remembered the name of the festival. Had had a beer near the Wroclaw Town Hall and watched the crowds. The women were gorgeous. He liked the way they walked, their bodies swaying in a rhythm almost forgotten on this side of the Atlantic. And the city? Didn’t care about how German it looked. Never liked Germany much. His family was not Nazi, thank God. His grandfather was executed in Berlin on Hitler’s orders, but he didn’t take much comfort in that. German acts of defiance didn’t amount to much, after all, did they?

He must have seen her relief.

“You might have passed me by,” he laughed, suddenly taken with the thought.

“Were you alone?” Anna asked. She was already trying to feel her way around. He wasn’t wearing a ring. She looked at his hand. And she knew he had noticed hers.

“Yes. Marilyn, ex-Mrs. Herzman, didn’t much like to rough it with the students. She was into mud spas, then. Excellent for her nerves, she said. Would you have been alone then?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t.”

No, not then. They were not from the same place. His Breslau was no longer there and in her Wroclaw he could only be a visitor from the West on an exotic trip to a deprived land, marvelling at how the locals could live among such squalor.

“You must have thought us all very shabby,” she said, regretting her remark at once. It wasn’t pity she wanted from him.

But he protested. It was a fascinating world, far more exciting than anything else he had seen in years, but not because of its German past. He did notice that the old German buildings were run down, but he couldn’t make himself care. The past was not worth getting excited about, he said; it only diverted your energy from more important things. It was the present that fascinated him, the defiance of the people, their resilience, their courage.

Anna knew this was not all together true. For wasn’t it the past, so drab and deprived in her memory, that was now making her somehow better in his eyes? Better than if she had been born here, in Montreal.

Later that evening when a tall, pretty woman threw her arms around William and kissed him on both cheeks, Anna slipped out of the Faculty Club. “Darling, you are impossible!” she could still hear the woman’s sugary voice. “Where have you been hiding these days?”

Anna walked home slowly, a short walk down McTavish Street, to Sherbrooke, turn right, past the glittering veranda of the Ritz Hotel, past the crowded restaurants on Rue de la Montagne. In one of them she saw a couple, a gaunt man and a petite woman in a red dress, toasting each other at a small round table. The woman gave her a quick look and burst out laughing, tossing her head backwards. In the store windows, chic mannequins posed in thick, winter coats lined with fur — men and women, frozen in half step, elegant and poised. Carefree.

Anna could still hear William’s voice. She half-imagined him next to her, his arm touching hers. “That’s nothing,” she kept thinking. “Someone I could’ve become friends with. Someone I’ll never see again.” The wind was cool, and Anna was feeling its bite. Was it already the first sign of winter? Canadian winter she had been warned to fear, as if no Polish winter could match it.