Necessary Lies(19)
She spent her days waiting for news, flipping through TV channels, listening to short wave broadcasts. Her eyes were permanently swollen; there were red, sore patches on her nose and face. At night she turned her back to William and stayed close to the edge of the bed. She watched him with suspicion, collecting all signs of his indifference. He frowned when he looked at her. He locked himself in his study for the whole afternoon. He put a record on too loud, to drown the static of the short waves. She was provoking him, too. She left him to do the dishes, shopping, laundry. “You go,” she said when they were invited over to Christmas parties. And all the time, she watched what he would do. He waited.
The Christmas cards that arrived a few days later, forwarded to her from Rue de la Montagne, had been mailed before her call to Piotr. We wish you a Happy Christmas, your first so far away from us. We love you and think of you all the time, her mother wrote. Words that by now, she was sure, would have been taken away. Piotr scribbled his wishes in rows of small letters. I miss you. It will be a sad Christmas, and the last one apart. I shouldn’t have let you go. From now on it is either together or not at all, right? I’ll be thinking of you on the 24th. Love you, Piotr.
She sat down on the living room sofa and let the cards fall on the floor. William was away that morning, and the only sound that reached her was a distant noise of a passing plane. She examined the veins on her wrists, running her fingers along them, absorbed in the realisation of how delicate, how thin were these outer reaches of her body. William must have walked into the house then, but she hadn’t even heard him.
“You still love him, don’t you,” he asked. “If you tell me to go away, I will.”
Startled, she looked up and saw that there were tears in his eyes, swelling, rolling down his cheeks, one transparent drop chasing another. He didn’t try to hide them, to wipe them off.
He just stood there, looking at her, letting the tears fill his eyes and flow. It was with these tears that he won her again.
She did love him; it was not an illusion. She stood up and threw her arms around him. His lips touched hers, whispering her name, between kisses. “Anna,” she heard, “Oh, Anna,” and he buried his wet face between her breasts. Running her fingers through his soft, silver hair, she felt his tears soak through her blouse. His hair smelled of the winter air, crisp and fresh.
The repressions were not as bad as they could have been. The worst — those who managed to leave Poland stressed — was the overwhelming sense of hopelessness. William helped Anna make more parcels. She packed the food into cardboard boxes, and he wrapped them up in brown paper, tied them tightly with string and carried them to the post office. It was a good sign, he stressed, that the post still accepted parcels, for this was all she could do to make her parents’ lives easier.
When the first letter from Poland came in, two months later, it had the word CENSORED stamped across it. Dear Daughter, her mother wrote. She must have hesitated for a long time what to call her. Piotr was in Warsaw on the night of the 13th, and that’s when he was arrested. He was now in an internment camp in Bialolka. Her brother was fine, and so was her father. Yes, her parcels arrived, and they all thanked her, but asked her not to bother again. They would survive as they had survived before. Distance, her mother wrote in her even, round letters, blurs the real picture. We all hope that you will find happiness and peace.
PART II
MONTREAL 1991
Sometimes, in Anna’s dreams, William is still alive and he laughs at her red, puffy eyes and tears that leave salty trails on her cheeks. “I’m still here, darling,” he tells her in the voice she is beginning to forget. “Can’t you see?” And then he laughs, a hollow laugh that echoes through empty rooms. “Not a thing has changed,” he says, and she touches his hands and laughs, too, cautiously at first, but then louder and louder, until the sound of her own laughter wakes her up.
William’s grave is a block of black granite with nothing on it but his name and the two dates in brass letters: William Herzman, 1940-1991. There is space on the lower half of the stone for other names. “Mine,” K?the said, when Anna brought her here a few days ago. In the nursing home William’s mother is silent and tense; for hours she can stare out of the window but then, Anna is told, she walks around the room and has to be given a sedative to keep her from exerting herself.
Her bones are brittle; she may fall.
Anna recalls the deep hole of the grave, and the coffin slowly lowered into it. A pile of soil, half covered with flowers, lined the site. Someone handed her a trowel, an ordinary garden trowel like the one she had used to transplant flowers in her garden, and she let a clump of soil fall on the coffin. There was a soft, dull thump when it fell.
“I’m a widow now,” she thinks. Wdowa, the Polish word echoes, an ugly, black word she would like to recoil from. On All Souls Day in her childhood, flickering candles lit the sky over the Warsaw cemetery where her grandfather was buried, and she would spot this luminous orange glow from far away, growing brighter with each step she took. The cold November air was filled with the smell of paraffin. By the graves, women in heavy black coats muttered the prayers for the dead. They polished the headstones, fussed over the chrysanthemums in terra-cotta pots, pulled the weeds from the graves. “It’s the loneliness that gets you,” they would say. Her grandmother never protested. “Doesn’t get any easier,” she would add. “Ever.”