Necessary Lies(13)
He smiled when he saw her approaching, a smile of relief.
“Dinner?” he asked.
She loved these long, unhurried dinners, with dishes arriving one by one, filling her with delicate flavours. For the first time in her life she tasted escargots, black bean soup, the pink flesh of grilled salmon, green flowers of broccoli. She was insatiable, always looking hungrily at the colourful plates, eating far too much, as if to make up for lost years.
She nodded. If there was already something irreversible about this evening, something that made it different from all the others, she was trying not to think about it.
“So,” he asked when they sat down, the flame of a candle wavering between them. The day before she had promised to tell him why she was so fascinated by her emigré writers, stories scattered in emigré papers, thin volumes of poems printed by the small presses of London, Chicago, Montreal. As if the mere act of leaving anointed people with some mystical, unexplainable superiority. As if they could see more.
“Isn’t it a prisoner’s dream?” he asked.
The question troubled her. In Poland she would never think of the need to defend the importance of these exiled voices from abroad. Her interests might be declared suspect or embarrassing to her department, dangerous perhaps, but they would never be questioned like that.
“Dangerous?”
“Of course! After all,” she said, “they defected.” He waited for her to continue.
“And yet,” she added, “for us they were never absent.”
If they pined after Poland as they were scrubbing capitalist floors or committed suicide by jumping from their New York windows, she told William, then such writers could count on scraps of official memory. They were of use to the Communist government; their failure scored points against the West, poisoned the illusions, proved that happiness on the other side of the Wall was a mirage. If they denounced the crimes of the post-war years, kept alive the memory of Stalin’s betrayals, their words were smuggled into the country in the pockets of travellers and reprinted in the underground presses.
“In Poland it wasn’t easy to get to them,” she said.
She had to get letters of recommendation from her research supervisor and a special permit from the censor before she was allowed to open yellowed copies of emigré newspapers in the Wroclaw library. Provided she did not make photocopies of the material that the old wrinkled librarian grudgingly placed on her table.
But, there, in Poland it was all a ruse. An excuse to get facts for Piotr’s bulletins. In the 1930s ten million Ukrainian peasants were starved to death on Stalin’s orders. In the Soviet Gulag, before the guards could stop them, prisoners devoured the frozen meat of a mammoth. In orphanages, the children of dissidents were taught to worship the great Stalin, their true and only father. Near Katy, Charkov, and Pver, the Soviet NKVD executed fifteen thousand Polish officers, prisoners of war, and, when in 1943 the mass graves were discovered, blamed the crime on the Germans.
Here, in Montreal, she sank into the descriptions of the lost Eastern lands, the sandy banks of the Niemen river and the depths of the Lithuanian forests. It was a forced exodus. When the post-war borders moved westward, the Polish inhabitants of Vilnius and Lvov had to leave or become Soviet citizens. She read of the trek of the displaced that ended in the former German lands, in Wroclaw and Szczecin, in the villages of Lower Silesia and Pomerania. A flood of people, tired, defeated, humiliated, mourning their dead, remembering the minute details of houses left behind, the creaking floors, the holy pictures. These people whose towns and villages were cut off by the borders of barbed wire and ploughed fields became her Wroclaw neighbours. “Where are you really from?” they began all conversations, “How did you get here?”
“I was lucky,” Babcia would say. She had left Tarnopol, a small town east of Lvov, in the 20s. Her parents were still buried there. On All Souls Day there was no one to light candles on their graves.
Her immigrant scribblers, William used to call her emigré writers, tending their marble graves. “Have you noticed,” he kept asking Anna, “that whether written in London, Toronto, Sydney or Geneva, the tunes of lament are always the same? Is there nothing out there but what you’ve known before?”
That’s what Anna tried to explain to William that night. “They are remembering the forbidden,” she said. “That’s what I am trying to do, too.”
“What if nothing is forbidden?” he asked. “What then?”
She thought about it, sipping her wine, making little circles on the tablecloth with her fingernails.
“I can’t imagine it yet,” she said.
The wine was beginning to soften her tense muscles. She took a bite of bruschetta the waitress placed between them on the white tablecloth.
“You do love your husband, don’t you?” William asked her.
She saw that William looked away when he said it. So she, too, only permitted herself to stare at his hands. Tanned, slim hands, long fingers softly folding a dinner napkin, or tracing the shape of his beard. She was playing with the strands of wax dripping from the candle. She must have shivered then, for he put his hand over hers, and, quickly took it away.
“I’m starving,” she said and took another bite of bruschetta. The piece of tomato slid from the bread and fell on the tablecloth. She picked it up and tried to soak the stain with her napkin.