Necessary Lies(3)

He turned to her before she had finished the sentence and smiled for the first time. It was a funny sort of smile, the smile one gives to a child’s antics.

“Sure,” he said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

She gave him her telephone number, scribbled it on a page torn from her notebook. She went home thinking: He will call me. She wanted to sing it, to chant it as she skipped on the granite tiles of the pavement. At home she pinned her hair up and took off her glasses. Her profile, she decided, was not her strong feature. There was a slight backbite to her jaw that she did not like. She looked far better with her hair loose, curling along her cheeks.

She kissed the mirror. She baked a plum cake.

“What’s the occasion?” her father asked.

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “I had a good day at school.”

Piotr called her that same evening, far less sure of himself than he was on Partisans’ Hill. All he wanted to do, he fumbled, was to check if the number was right.

“Yes, it is,” she said and waited.

To check, he continued, if perhaps, she wouldn’t mind seeing him. To discuss things, procedures, in case there was an emergency. For a coffee, perhaps. She liked the hesitation in his voice, the hint of insecurity. Delighted at her own power, she was not going to make it any easier for him.

“What if one of my teachers sees me” she asked, her voice as casual as she could make it. “You know we are forbidden to go to cafés. Wouldn’t it be drawing unnecessary attention to myself?”

“No,” he said. “Yes. It doesn’t have to be a café,” he said.

She pressed her lips to the receiver before she put it down. Then she blew him a kiss, in the direction of the window, Central Station, the Town Hall.


For two long months they met in various places, on Partisans’ Hill, down by the statue of Cupid on a brass horse, by the milk bar in - wierczewskiego street. Piotr brought her books to read, handed them to her like treasures, like bouquets of flowers. The Plague, Caligula, The Trial, tyranny and evil exposed, observed, stripped of its disguises. Then he gave her the Parisian edition of Arthur Koestler’s Memoirs and Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind, so that she would understand the power of propaganda, the temptations of betrayal.

He fumed about Sartre then, angered at the blindness of a great mind. The gravest disappointment was when intelligence did not suffice. How could a philosopher be so blind, he asked, a man who saw so much elsewhere? How could he defend Stalinism, dismiss reports of terror and the Gulags, turn a blind eye to so much suffering?!

“Because it was happening to someone else,” she offered her explanation. “Because it was far away?”

He was not convinced. “It’s too simple, maleka, my little one,” he said, frowning. “There must have been other reasons.”

She may have wanted to kiss that frown away from his forehead, but she knew how to wait.

He insisted on walking her home, on taking her upstairs, to the doors of her parents’ apartment. When they reached the second floor landing, he made her ring the bell right away, pressing her hand to the brass button.

She thought: Why don’t you kiss me? What are you afraid of?

She waited.


He kissed her a month later. Two months later they were lovers. “This is,” he whispered, his face buried in her hair, “what I was afraid of.”

She was not afraid. For weeks she walked with a knowing smile on her lips, shrugged her shoulders when boys shot her looks at the vaulted school corridors covered with layers of beige paint. “Puppies,” she thought, her lips pouting. What was happening to her was serious. It was real love.

She had to sneak by the concierge at his dormitory, bending to pass underneath the counter, his hand tousling her hair. His three roommates would leave, obligingly, leaving their smell behind them. The sour smell of cigarette smoke, spilled beer, and something else, a strong smell of young men, restless, far away from home. All they had was two hours. Two hours to be alone, two hours for the world to shrink into a narrow bed covered with a rough grey blanket and their naked bodies. Two hours of nothing but love.


She was intoxicated with the daring that grew in her. “What’s happening to you?” her mother asked. “You should be studying. I need your help around the house.” Babcia, her grandmother, was no longer alive, there was no one to stand in lines for food, to cook and to clean. They all had to contribute now. There were no excuses.

When Dziadeky her grandfather, died, Babcia took his body to the Powzki cemetery on the outskirts of Warsaw. “That’s where I want to rest, too,” she had said. Wroclaw she didn’t trust. It felt too German to her. Too transient. Land that had changed hands could be changed again. “Who knows how long before the Germans come back to take it all away?” That’s where she was buried, too, next to her husband. In Polish soil.

Anna hurried with the dishes, whirling through the kitchen like a fury, impatient with all that could stop her. She hovered over the telephone, determined to be the first one to answer it. From time to time her father gave her a knowing smile, but she knew he would never tease or embarrass her. If at any time it was he who answered the phone, he would never ask who Piotr Nowicki was the way her mother would.

“A friend,” was all she was prepared to say. She would tell them more when she was ready. But only then.