Necessary Lies(39)
“Are you afraid to see her?” Marie asks.
“No,” Anna says. “I’m not afraid.” But this is a lie. Of course she is afraid.
“So why don’t you go to Berlin?”
“Why should I?”
“To see things as they really are,” Marie says. “To stop thinking of her all the time.”
“I don’t,” Anna says. “I’ll go to Poland. To see my parents,” she says. “I have to see Piotr, but I don’t have to see her.”
“All right,” Marie says. “You’ll do what you want.”
Anna can tell her friend is not convinced. She will try to keep calm, Anna tells Marie. Go through what she has to go through and then, maybe, she will know what to do next. Travelling is good that way, lets one see things in a different way. She will see her family, and come back to Montreal. Forget the past. Forget her humiliation. Forget her defeat. There will be a new life. There always is.
With that Marie agrees.
Since her discovery of Ursula’s letters Anna has lived in a frenzy. She has invented chores, filling her days up to the last minute until the evening when she falls asleep too tired to think. In this frenzy she took William’s suits off the racks, folded his sweaters and shirts, his beige coat she had helped him choose. She put all of his clothes into garbage bags and dropped them off at the Salvation Army. Then she spread her own clothes on the rack to fill the empty space. She called Malcolm and asked if he would take William’s exercise bike and his tennis rackets. “I don’t care what you do with them,” she said, shielding herself from his surprise, “I want them out of here.” She cleared the pantry of anything that might go bad. She had her hair cut and had ash-blond highlights put in. She made a list of presents she wanted to buy. Some were easy, like the ones for her brother and his new family she was yet to meet. But she kept returning what she had bought for her mother — a silk scarf was too dark, she decided, a mohair sweater too small. She didn’t like the picture frame, either. Finally she settled for an angora shawl, salmon pink. For her father she bought the most expensive wallet she could find.
Now she is pushing the thoughts of William away from her. He betrayed her and he doesn’t deserve her pain, she tells herself. But Ursula is another matter. She cannot be silenced, her letters are always close by, speaking to a William Anna will never know. Echoes of old quarrels, reproaches, rebukes. In this exchange William is the silent one.
OK my farsighted lover! So I am vain, egotistical, self-serving. I get on my high moral horse, as you have so nicely put it, and have a solution to all your problems. I have no right to sound so damn superior. What else? There is another me, without illusions that I have any other way of getting at this world. That’s all there is, and that’s who I am. But you know where we differ? To me the world is incredibly beautiful. Visually beautiful, even in its pain. And I have given myself the right to disregard everything else. So I’ll pay my price, whatever it is going to be. I don’t bite anyone else if I hurt.
Darling, If you were here, with me, you would see that I’m wearing a black dress with a white lace collar and white cuffs and I’m in my nunnish mood. I’m fasting, too, to get back some of the tastes I have dulled. Sometimes this works much better than indulgence.
You want to block the past, William. You want to forget. When payment is demanded, you sulk or fly into a rage. You want to be cuddled, nursed through your moods. You know what? You might just manage, but you will ultimately not feel enough. And if you keep doing it, your music will never be any good. So don’t ever tell me that you are not involved, that you are above it all! Oh, damn it, Willi, why do I have to tell you that?
Have I ever told you of Hitler’s bunkers? We were taken there during the air raids, in the last months of the war. We were given food and a place on bunk beds, and told that our Führer loved all the German children. Once a woman who looked after us brought us some soup to eat, cabbage and carrots in greyish, greasy water. Nobody liked it, but we were too scared to refuse. It was really awful, and I said I wasn’t going to finish it. “You will eat it” the woman screamed, “or no one will go to sleep until you do.” I can still remember her face, red with fury. She seemed so big to me. I was four-years-old, and I really thought it was her scream that made the lamp swing. So I finished the soup, but I couldn’t hold it and vomited it all over the plate. She made me eat the same soup again, to teach me a lesson, she said. I guess I’d learnt it, because when I vomited again, I did so all over her, and no one went to sleep that night.
It’s the middle of April, still cold and bare in Montreal, but in Poland, Anna’s father said on the phone, the forsythia is already in bloom. A few hot summerlike days, and then snow flurries, typical April weather. Kwiecie-plecie, the month of rapid changes, braiding summer and winter days. “Don’t forget to take some warm clothes.”
In one of Anna’s oldest memories, her mother is sitting by the window, her auburn hair lit up by the dusty rays of the sun coming through the lace curtain. She is feeding Anna’s little brother. The baby is cuddled in her arms, pink and wrinkled, his eyes closed, and Anna can see the shape of her mother’s breast, bulging, full. There is a little black mole on it, a little button she would like to press. Sometimes, when her brother stops sucking, she can see the pink nipple, swollen and long, slipping out of his tiny lips, but then the hungry mouth snaps at it again, and she hears his soft, whimpering sounds of contentment.