Necessary Lies(22)
So often for the last ten years Anna has tried to find the connection between William and this small drying body, the pursed, thin lips, the mouth set back into the skull. William whom, in her blindness, she has thought so strong. Indestructible. There was little resemblance, she has decided, almost none. Perhaps a shadow, in his lips, in the shape of his fingers.
There is a patch of sun on the lawn, in front of K?the’s window. Dappled, swaying in the wind, moved by the branches of an old oak tree. “Victory oak,” K?the had said when they brought her here for the first time. “Like the ones in Breslau.”
Anna remembers them too, old, gnarled trees commemorating the Prussian victories of the last century. Black bark, leaves smaller than on Canadian oaks. One of them stood on the First of May Square in Wroclaw, with its twin monuments of Fight and Victory, on the left a naked man wrestling a lion, on the right, the same man, now triumphant, straddling the conquered beast. The oak tree was cut down in the seventies, sliced into slabs the size of a table to make room for a pedestrian crossing underneath the intersection, linking the city core with newly constructed districts. Wroclaw was bursting at the seams then, its narrow streets crowded with cars, the Jugendstil buildings blackening from the soot and diesel fumes, dissolving in acid rain. The streets paved with pre-war, smooth grey stones were slippery, treacherous, but the back asphalt with which some of them were covered was not much of an improvement. As it melted in the sun, it took in the shapes of car tires and stiletto heels, its black, sticky surface releasing the sickly smell of tar.
“The tree wouldn’t have survived in this air,” Anna has heard, but now she doubts such explanations. Because of something William once said, she went to the library and found out that, deprived of the means to stand up and leave, trees have developed formidable defences. Oak trees step up seed production every few years to support the extra population of mice that would feed on gypsy moth larvae. When attacked by fungi, some conifers can subdivide themselves into compartments, walling the infection in. Trees may seem slow, she read, insentient, brooding, but they have simply exchanged drastic and immediate responses to danger for a subtler strategy of survival.
“It’s cold here,” K?the murmurs, and Anna spreads a brown chequered rug over K?the’s knees. The nurse has dressed her in two pairs of thick stockings and a pink angora sweater. When she walks, K?the’s feet shuffle, slowly, one after another, on the vinyl floor of her room. She knows she can no longer have rugs, for she can trip over them. The wires have to be neatly tucked against the walls and fastened with silver tape. She has to take precautions against falling. Her bones are thin and brittle, refusing to take any unexpected pressure, to bend more than absolutely necessary. She has broken her hip once already, and even her shuffle is unsteady, heavier on the “good side.”
K?the turns to the window and watches a squirrel, his thin, scrawny body shaking as he digs a hole in the lawn.
“The squirrels are cheeky, here,” she says. “Black, not red. I could never believe that there were no red squirrels in Canada. When I came here, with Willi, after the war, he thought they were rats, and he was scared.”
It was William’s decision to bring K?the here, after that November afternoon, a year ago, when Anna spotted her mother-in-law on her knees, climbing the steep flight of stairs to St. Joseph’s Oratory. She had never told William her own reason for going there. It was not a secret, just an omission. Her little Polish ritual, like slipping a layer of hay underneath the tablecloth on Christmas Eve or crossing herself every time she boarded a plane, quickly so that no one would notice. William would only tease her at times like that, say something about the bloodlines that ran that deep. It was the anniversary of her grandmother’s death and she lit a candle for her and prayed for her soul.
She had just come out of the Oratory, when a lonely woman pilgrim on the stairs caught her eyes. At first she only saw a loose, black coat, then she could make out the shape of the wobbly figure. Curious, she came nearer; the middle stairs were to be climbed on the knees, but Anna had never actually seen anyone doing it. In her black coat and hat, the woman looked like a giant ant surveying an unfamiliar path, probing the air in front of her before making the next step.
The sky was grey. Anna felt a drop of rain on her face and it was then that she recognized that the kneeling pilgrim was her mother-in-law. “She shouldn’t be here in this weather,” she thought. “She’s had such a bad year.”
K?the had had a bad year. Her once strong body, which could withstand 36-hour shifts of nursing, was giving in. She’d had pneumonia in the spring. In late September, a fever that wouldn’t go away, painting the tops of her sunken cheeks with reddish hue. Anna visited her often, then, helped her around the house, stocked her fridge with groceries.
They got along fine, without William around. A thought like that was a sore spot, and Anna tried to ignore it. K?the’s stories of her nursing days was what kept their conversations going.
Homo homini lupus, K?the liked to begin, her lips twitching slightly, a grimace of disgust. People were like wolves to each other. A pack of predators, ruthless in pursuit. They left their traces behind, the trail of the hunters imprinted in the flesh of their prey. Bruises, torn muscles, broken bones.
Once she summoned a surgeon back to the hospital, dragged him from his New Year’s Eve party, because she didn’t like the paleness of her patient’s cheeks. “She was only a young girl, ya?” she would tell Anna in her thick German accent. “I knew she was bleeding to death.” The doctor tried to reason with her, but K?the stood her ground. “What’s with you,” she asked, shaking with anger. Wasn’t it his duty? His sacred duty he swore to uphold? She had been right. The girl did have an internal haemorrhage and she, K?the, had saved her life.