Necessary Lies(40)
This is when Anna picks up a pair of big steel scissors lying on the lowest bookshelf in front of her. The metal blades, heavy and sharp, feel cold in her hand, and with all the force she can muster, she hits the edge of the table. Bang!
“Mother of God! Anna!” Her mother’s scream pierces her ears and makes her jump, as if Anna hasn’t expected it. The baby has bitten her mother’s nipple, and is now crying, too, his little face red and wrinkled, locked in the recurring spasms of anger and fear.
“How could you?” her mother asks.
“You wicked, wicked child,” she says, and Anna watches her mother’s face change into a grimace.
“My own daughter?” she asks in that voice of hers Anna hates the most, raised, shaking, admitting to helplessness, to resignation. “No. That I can’t understand. I can’t!”
Her mother shakes her head again, and this is when Anna breaks into tears. She is too big to behave this way, she is told. How can she torture them all with her outbursts of blind, suffocating anger, her wailing cries, her constant checking, even in the middle of the most absorbing play, if her mother still has her slippers on. Afraid of new babies coming home, Anna watches her mother like a hawk.
Sometimes her vigilance works. Her mother stays home, plays with her, shows her how to change the baby, how to tickle his little pink heels, how to laugh at the monkey faces he makes.
“See, he likes you,” she says, “Look, he is smiling at you,” and Anna begins to believe her. But most often her mother says, “I have to go to work, to the Institute,” and Anna begins to cry so loudly that she has to be held back by her nanny, for this is still before the time when her grandmother moved in with them. Her nanny murmurs, “Shame on you, such a big girl!” and leaves her alone in the room.
Her nose pressed to the cold windowpane, Anna watches her mother from above, walking quickly across the street until she disappears. If her nanny let her, she would stay right there, for the whole day, on the wide window sill, staring at the same spot where her mother has vanished so swiftly around the corner, waiting for the moment when her slightly bent, familiar figure would appear again. But her nanny will not let her. She has to eat or, rather, sit in front of a full plate, with food in her mouth, filling her up, gagging her. Then she has to go for a walk, her hand holding the baby’s carriage, and listen to what the neighbours have to say. Her morning “concert” is described in detail to anyone who wants to listen, and stout, ruddy women lean over to tell her that she is too big for such silliness. “Shame on you! Your mother has to go to work,” they say, and her nanny nods, hoping that all these sensible comments will make Anna see the foolishness of her crying, of her eyes, locked into the spot where her mother’s figure disappeared behind the corner.
“You had a nanny?” William had asked. “In Communist Poland?”
“Yes,” she said, slightly piqued at his amazement. It was the time when she was not yet sure what she wanted, to be part of the world in which nannies were possible, or to be pitied for the deprivations, the drabness of her past.
She could always amaze him with the vestiges of the proper middle-class existence her family managed to pull off. That’s what he said, “pull-off,” as if it were all a magic trick, an elaborate cheating game in which Anna had her summer holidays in the country, her first communion in a long white dress, her English lessons, her nannies, her long hours at the piano practising scales. All of it happening among the ruins, right under the nose of a Communist government with its five-year plans, parades of iron-fisted workers, holding the portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and right behind them, the portraits of their current successors.
“Oh, but that was their life,” she said, lightly. “We lived our own. You must have heard that Poles are notoriously hard to occupy.”
“I’ve heard that,” he said, smiling.
But that’s not what she wanted. She wanted him to be moved by her stories. Promise her that now, when she had escaped such drabness, he would show her the world, take her with him to Paris, to London, to Rome — all place names she pronounced with such religious fervour, as if they were not real cities but fairy lands. Hug her and tell her that he was her reward, that he would make things right for her, make up for the ruins, the squalor, and the fears.
A fool!
Anna must have fallen asleep, for when the sounds of applause for the smooth landing wake her up, the plane has already touched down. She has missed the approach to Warsaw, the slow descent through the milky clouds. She has not expected to be this nervous. Her stomach is now pushing against her ribs, a sour lump burning inside. “Your parents will be so happy to see you, Anna,” Marie kept telling her. “Nothing else will matter. I know that.”
Perhaps they will; Anna would like to believe it. Her parents never visited her in Montreal. It was her mother that always came up with excuses. But tragedy and loss, Anna thinks, is the surest way to buy compassion, a semblance of forgiveness. If nothing else works, she can always count on that.
As soon as the plane slows down, the passengers rise to pick up their luggage. The stewardesses on the LOT flight are all young and pretty, their skin still immune to the scarcity of sleep. One of them now points to the signs that the seatbelts are to be fastened, that the plane is still in motion, that standing up at this time is dangerous, but no one is listening. Angered, the stewardess stares at the man in front of her, who is trying to get his bag from the compartment above. “Sit down,” she tells him. “Sit down this minute.” The man looks around, shrugs his shoulders to indicate that she will never get anyone’s attention now, but he sits down and watches, amused, as she turns to someone else, a lost battle, for the plane is already coming to a stop.