Necessary Lies(37)
Why should she let Julia forget the silence, the unanswered letters, the years of absence from their lives.
“That’s not true,” Julia says, still calm, still sure of herself. “You know it’s not true.”
“You told her he was dead, too. I shouldn’t be surprised, should I? You are his daughter, after all.”
Anna slams the receiver, silencing Julia’s protests. This may be just a small substitute for revenge, but it gives her pleasure.
The phone rings for a long time afterwards, but Anna doesn’t pick it up. Sorry, we are not available to take your call. Please leave your name and number or call us again, she hears her own voice, calm, carefree. She has forgotten that the answering machine switches itself on if one waited long enough.
“Anna … Anna, please … I have to talk to you,” she hears Julia’s voice. “You can’t cut me off like that.”
PART III
WARSAW 1991
Marie arrives from Prague with the most recent instalments of the Eastern European drama. “Central European,” she corrects herself. “I keep getting corrected, but they are right. Vienna is east of Prague.”
“I’m so glad to see you,” she murmurs, giving Anna a hug. Her eyes slide over Anna’s rusty red shirt, her brown jacket. Anna has not worn black since the day she found Ursula’s letters.
“You look better,” Marie says, fingering the silk of the shirt. “I like it.”
They are standing in front of the Roddick Gates, the entrance to McGill, on Sherbrooke Street.
“You should’ve gone with me, Anna,” Marie squeezes Anna’s hand.
Anna thinks that with her black hair tied back into a bun Marie’s face seems thinner, lighter. Her days in Prague have made her stop at the street curbs and look with suspicion at the drivers. She says she has seen people scurry in fright at pedestrian crossings.
“Walk at your own peril,” she remarks, “anywhere east of the Oder.” In Prague she helped an elderly woman get on a subway escalator. Held her hand and steadied her as the speeding stairs pushed them off, into the platform. “Why do they make them go so fast, Anna,” she still marvels. “It’s not a damn roller coaster, is it?” Her Czech friends only laughed at her bewilderment. For them it was yet another lingering proof that Communism was designed for able-bodied workers. “If you were old, or frail — tough luck.”
They cross the street and walk east, past the verandah of the Ritz Hotel.
“Isn’t it incredible, though?” Marie asks. “It’s not just Poland and Czechoslovakia, Anna. The Russian Empire has already begun to crumble. In Vilnus the KGB crushed a peaceful demonstration with tanks. Concrete walls have been erected to protect the parliament buildings in Talinn and Riga. The Kremlin panics.”
She reminds Anna that only two years ago the demonstrators who gathered on Prague’s Wenceslas Square placed lit candles on the ground were attacked and beaten by the police. The whole country shook in outrage. After a few dazed, smoke-filled days of strikes and protests, Václav Havel, the king of Czech dissidents, was brought to the Hradcany Castle.
This has only been a beginning, now almost forgotten. Marie is still shaken by what her Czech friends have told her of the lustrace, the national hunt for former Communist collaborators. Lists of suspected security agents have been published in Prague papers, often without proof. “It is not Communism but our old habits that are our greatest enemy,” Havel has warned his countrymen, but no one is listening. A rumour or an informer’s report is enough for a condemnation. “They are all going mad,” Marie says, “This is a hysteria of vengeance.”
She is uneasy about revenge, however well founded, Marie says. Her Czech friends, former dissidents themselves, are also terrified and appalled. There is no way to defend oneself, they have told her, even a record of persecution, years spent in prison, the courage it took to sign petitions when no one else dared to, do not guarantee forgiveness. Rudolf Zukal is rumoured to have spied on American students in Vienna in the 60s and this is enough to make him an “ideological collaborator,” and drive him out of Parliament in disgrace.
Is that enough, Marie asks, to condemn Zukal? The man whose full name and address appeared on every petition since the Prague Spring, with carbon copy to the government? The man who lost his job as a University vice rector just because he refused to endorse the Soviet invasion? Who went to work as a bulldozer driver for twenty years? Lived in trailers, was crippled by industrial accidents, had three heart attacks? Whose children were denied higher education?
The man who, in the files of the Secret police, was listed as Czechoslovakia’s 265th most wanted dissident? Is there no forgiveness for youthful fervour, for an old mistake tenfold repaid?
Those who judge him now, Marie says, are the same people who didn’t dare to protest. Who went home to their families after work, drank their beer and congratulated themselves on their caution and common sense. Who said there was no point in becoming a martyr.
All of it is happening right now, in beautiful Prague, with tourists descending on the newly discovered jewel, a forgotten city. Marie has seen whole groups of Western teenagers treading through Václavské namestí, the Old Town, Karluv most. Feeding the swans on the Vltava, dropping coins into the upturned hats of street musicians, smoking marijuana and singing about wearing flowers in their hair.