Necessary Lies(42)
“Nothing has changed,” he says.
But that’s not quite true. The city is changing, in spite of the pervasiveness of grey. As they approach the centre, Anna sees makeshift stands everywhere, on street corners, along passageways. Stands made of camping tables, folded beds, on which colourful packages pile up. Passers-by crowd around them, peer over each other’s shoulders.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” the driver laughs, seeing her curious looks. He has forgotten his pessimism of a moment ago, and is now eager to point out the newly freed penchant for trading. “You should see what’s happening around the Palace.”
That’s Palace of Culture and Science, Stalin’s gift to Warsaw, a giant monument to the superiority of the Soviet system. All over Poland children learned about it at school, about its thirty floors and 3288 rooms, about its exhibition halls, theatres, cinemas, a swimming pool, and a Congress Hall. Around it, the architects left concrete space, an enormous empty square designed to accommodate endless parades, prescribed displays of power. “Where do you get the best view of Warsaw?” the joke went. “From the thirtieth floor of the Palace! —Why? —Because you can’t see it from there!”
It is where, the driver informs her with glee, Warsaw’s greatest bazaar takes place.
“Uncle Joseph must be spinning in his grave,” he chuckles. Anna smiles with him. “Ruscy have their stands there, too,” he says. He’ll not call them Russians, as if the word was too good for the people who brought Communism here.
“You should see what these lords of the earth sell,” the taxi-driver pouts his lips in contempt. “The junk of the Empire.”
A few hours later, Anna walks near the grey palace, with its sculptures of muscled workers. This is her first walk from the Marriott hotel where she is staying. She has chosen the hotel deliberately; its international anonymity promises to be a refuge, if memories prove too much.
In April 1991 Warsaw is damp and chilly. The taxi driver was right; it is a true bazaar, a maze of stands overflowing with Turkish leather, silk blouses from Hong Kong, electronics from Taiwan. Young men in jean jackets guard packages of American cigarettes, French perfume, German soaps and shampoos. The prices are ridiculously low. Cigarettes go for a dollar per pack, for ten dollars she can have a bottle of Channel # 5 or Yves St. Laurent’s Rive Gauche.
Anna holds her purse tightly under her arm as she passes by the stalls. “Come on, have a look,” the sellers call to her. She walks to the edges of the square, to the Russian stands. Two middle-aged men with broad, tired faces lean against a tree, chain-smoking. The cigarette smoke has a sour, thick smell to it, the lingering smell of cheap tobacco. The sight of their missing teeth, the nicotine stained fingers, and the ill-fitting clothes, crumpled from the long cross-border journey chokes her throat.
She is sorry for them. That’s all she feels.
The Russians have spread their wares on a grey blanket. A teaspoon, a thermos flask, a camera, a kitchen mixer, which, although brand new and still in its original packaging, looks as if it were straight from the sixties, with its turquoise colour and faux leather case. No one seems to be interested in the offerings, even at the prices made possible by the rates of exchange. The mixer would go for an equivalent of fifty cents, a thermos flask for ten. Only the older man in the corner, in a tight blue cardigan with missing buttons, seems to be doing some business. He is selling penknives and auto parts. Three young men are squatting next to his blanket, weighing a shiny pump and a coil of wires.
All she can feel is sorrow for this city, this country, all these people. But that’s not right. No one here needs her tears. She wouldn’t have needed them, either, if she lived here.
“You want to run away and hide,” she recalls Piotr’s old arguments. The irritation in his voice. Impatience with her pleas.
“I don’t want to live like that.”
“Then let’s change it.”
“Nothing will ever change, here, Piotr. Not in our lifetime. We have tried. You know that.”
“Do you really think that people in the West are better? That they are any different from us? That they care about our problems? Come on, Anna. Don’t be so na?ve!”
“Is leaving really such a betrayal?” she kept asking him. “Don’t we also have a right to a normal life?”
But then, for Piotr, these were meaningless questions. Mere excuses to make her feel better.
She quickens her step, pushes through the throngs of pedestrians, past more stalls, camping tables, old cardboard boxes. She has never seen Warsaw so dirty, but promises herself not to mind. She is only a visitor here, she tells herself, she has no right to judge. Crushed pop cans, plastic bottles, cigarette butts, and mounds of soggy boxes lie in the corners of the underground passage. The sour smell of urine is everywhere. “Garbage collectors are on strike, Madam,” the concierge at the hotel has explained, adding, “We are truly sorry for the inconvenience,” with an apologetic, embarrassed smile. The Marriott staff has kept the marble slabs around the hotel shiny and spotless, and it is easy to see the line where the hotel property ends. Beyond it, the pavement is covered with a sticky film of dirt.
In the underground passage that leads from Central Station to the Marriott, new stores have taken over the once-uniform interiors. In front of them, a Gypsy child in a torn cotton dress is kneeling on a folded piece of cardboard, a hand-written note on her chest. Please help poor girl. I am mute. Please give money for hospital operation and I will pray for you to Blessed Virgin Mary. She give you what you want most of all. Seeing that Anna has stopped, a young Gypsy woman with long black braids quickly moves toward her and adds her whining voice to the child’s mute plea, pulling at Anna’s skirt, muttering something so fast that the words drown and lose meaning.