Necessary Lies(41)
On the bus, which ferries Anna from the plane to the airport, the level of excitement rises even more. Most of the passengers speak Polish; Anna listens to the strained jokes, the excited whispers comparing the lengths of absence. Ten, fifteen, twenty years have passed since they left, and, now, allowed to come back, they will see for themselves how much their country has changed. The mood is sceptical, weary. “First they kill the fish,” the short man to her right announces, “and now they drop it back into the water, hoping it’ll learn to swim. How can it ever work?”
Anna registers muted, uneasy laughter, and a few unconvincing protests. “Stranger things have happened,” someone says and waits for a response.
The passengers line up at passport control, which goes briskly. The passports they hold in their hands testify that they are American, Canadian, Australian, British. The woman officer who checks these passports makes an effort to smile. It is a strained smile; her muscles have yet to become accustomed to such expressions of civility.
The tiny, single terminal is filled with families and friends, necks craned above the crowd, hands waving, bouquets of flowers wrapped up in cellophane. “Anna!” someone screams, and she turns toward that scream only to see an elderly woman hugging a younger one, perhaps her daughter. There are tears, smiles of anticipation, relief.
The thoughts of Piotr are hard to hide from; his pale, handsome face, as she remembers it last — a bit worried, unsure. Looking at his watch because he had to catch the Odra express train to Wroclaw if he were to make it for the next day’s meetings. She had urged him to go, to leave her, but he wouldn’t. He wanted to wait until the very last moment, send her off with his kiss on her lips. She still remembers his hand waving a white handkerchief as she was passing by security, right here.
For years she has kept her memories of him wrapped up in layers of resentment and doubt, but she no longer can. In the last weeks there have been terse requests for the sorting out of affairs. Of course she will see him, she wrote back. This is the least she can do.
From her mother’s letters she knows that he married Hanka a month after he was released from the internment camp. Hanka whom Anna can vaguely remember, tall and slim, with dark bangs and a warm, bewildered smile. There is a child, too, a daughter. “Very beautiful,” her mother wrote, “with hair just like yours when you were little.” Piotr made a shrewd career move; he became an expert in environmental law. He is a parliamentary advisor now, negotiating community and business rights. No one else, her mother wrote, can understand the post-communist legal mess as well as he does. Big German and American companies have already approached him for his legal expertise. In her mother’s letters there are hints of money and travels: Berlin, New York, Brussels.
In spite of her nap Anna is beginning to feel the effects of a sleepless night. The waiting area seems hot and cold in turn, and she pushes though the crowd, avoiding eye contact with short, stocky men who hope to sell her a taxi ride or a hotel room. “Look for a radio-taxi or call one ,” her brother told her on the phone. “This is a regular Mafia, the guys at the airport. Watch out.” He insisted that he would come to Warsaw to pick her up, but she refused. “I’m not a child,” she said, and even managed a little laugh. “I’ll call for a radio-taxi. I’ll be all right.”
“They’ll still charge you three times what they would charge me,” he said.
“That’s all right. Lots of airports are like that. It’s not just Warsaw. I’ll be careful.”
Outside of the terminal building she spots a radio-taxi that has just deposited a man in a light trench coat, with a black leather briefcase. Yes, the radio-taxi is available and she gets into it with relief, not lost on the driver who gives her a reassuring look. The driver is fat and jovial. He picks up her two suitcases, as if they were filled with feathers. Inside, the black interior of the taxi is pasted up with photographs of pinup beauties in scanty bikinis, a collage of breasts and smooth bums. Wound around the rear-view mirror is a black rosary, a tin cross dangling from one end. The driver, who has just finished placing her suitcases in the trunk, sits in front, a lit cigarette in his mouth.
“From Canada?” he asks in a friendly voice. He must have noticed the red maple leaf of old Air Canada tags on her canvas bag. A mistake, she thinks, she should have replaced it with LOT ones. Cigarette smoke fills the inside of the car and makes her dizzy.
“Yes,” Anna says. Her brother would have given her a nudge, here. She is already breaching security, making herself vulnerable. And yet, with all the warnings, she doesn’t feel threatened at all.
“I have a brother in Toronto,” the driver says. “Drives a taxi, too.”
“Have you been to visit?” Anna asks, determined to keep up the conversation. She considers briefly if she should ask the driver not to smoke, but decides against it. She rolls down the window, instead, and looks at the streets.
“No, not yet,” the driver says wistfully. “But I’d like to. I want to see Niagara Falls.”
“You will,” Anna says, and sees that the driver smiles with satisfaction. He takes her words as if they were a prediction, as if she had the power to make his dreams possible. Is it her proximity that suddenly makes Canada so close or the arrival of capitalism, awaited with so much fervour?
“Everything is still falling apart,” the driver informs her. “The Commies have just painted themselves over; now they are capitalists.” Later he will tell her the latest joke: If General Jaruzelski ever gets together with Electrician Walsa, they will form General Electric.