Necessary Lies(43)

“Just look at her,” Anna hears a hiss right behind her. “So young and only interested in begging.”

“How can they live like that,” an elderly man in a brown hat joins in. There is anger in his voice, mixed with contempt. “These poor, dirty children. What do they teach them?”

“They drug them, you know,” a woman’s voice adds. “That’s why they can stay still like that, for hours.”

“Go back to Romania!”

“Thieves!”

She should keep on walking, Anna thinks, but instead she opens her purse and takes out a few Polish bills. “Don’t give them anything,” the elderly man snaps at her. “You only make things worse.”

Anna drops the money into a tin can, which has a few bills in it, already. The Gypsy woman gives the crowd a defiant look, bows her head down, and loudly asks Our Lady to bless the kind Pani, to give her happiness, to take care of her in her time of sorrows.


Back in the hotel Anna calls her parents to tell them she has arrived safely.

“How do you feel?” her father asks. He picks up the phone as soon as Anna has finished dialling the Wroclaw number. He must have been waiting by the phone.

“Fine,” she says, but she knows he wants to hear more than that.

“So how do you like Warsaw now?” he asks.

“It has changed,” Anna says. She cannot think of anything else to say. “I like it very much.”

“Have you seen the bazaar?” he keeps asking. “The shop windows?” He urges her to acknowledge at least some sense of surprise, and she humours him.

“Yes, I have. It’s hard to believe!”

“I never thought I would live to see it,” he says.

“I never thought I would, either,” she echoes.

“We are all waiting for you,” her father says. He wants to finish this conversation. It’s a long-distance call and he is conscious of every minute that passes. “It doesn’t matter,” Anna has tried to tell him so many times before. “I have enough money. It’s not really that much.” But for her father there is never enough. Scarcity is a state of mind, Marie likes to say. Her parents were like that, too, having grown up during the Great Depression. Wouldn’t take a taxi even if they had to crawl home.

“We’ll talk more when you come here. We are both waiting, Mama and I.”

“I’m coming. It’s only two more days now.” It seems to her that she can hear her mother’s sobs, in the background. Tomorrow Anna will visits her grandparents’ graves and the following day she will take a morning train to Wroclaw.

“Good bye.” He puts down the receiver so fast that she hears the click of the disconnecting line.

For a short while Anna sits motionless on the double bed. Then she switches on the television. On Warsaw One, she catches the beginning of a discussion on the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Three panellists, two men and a woman, are sitting around a low table. Forty-seven years have passed since that August afternoon of 1944. The cost was staggering: the whole city destroyed, hundreds of thousands dead or deported. Now, when Warsaw is finally free, there is no better time to ask the fundamental question: Was it worth it?

“Look at Prague, now,” the younger of the two men begins. He is in his late thirties, and he waves his hands as he speaks. “The Czechs were right to just wait the war through. It is more important to protect the fabric of the nation than to spill blood.”

“How can you say things like that!” the older man interrupts. He is breathing hard, his face is red with anger. “Without the Uprising you would’ve been born in the Soviet Republic of Poland.”

“With the Uprising Hitler was able to finish off the Home Army, which was exactly what Stalin wanted,” the younger man doesn’t give up. “Let me remind you that the Russians watched the slaughter from the other side of the river. They got Hitler to do their dirty job for them.”

The third panellist, a tall bony woman in her sixties, is listening in silence. The moderator has introduced her as an American professor of Slavic Studies from California. When she begins to speak the men quiet down. In her muted, halting voice she tells them how, in 1944, pregnant with her daughter, she saw her twenty-one-year-old husband for the last time, as he turned back to wave to her. In this Uprising she lost her husband, her brother, and two cousins. After the war she was arrested by the Communists on drummed up charges and spent seven years in prison, one in solitary confinement, while her daughter was placed in an orphanage and told her mother was “an enemy of the people.” Her daughter is a doctor now, in Boston, and has three children. They all speak Polish, but they are American.

“We lost the best people then,” she says, quietly. “I think we’ll never know if we paid too much.” The camera closes on her face. Her blue eyes are dry. All that Anna can see in them is loneliness.

In the bathroom, Anna pours herself a glass of water from a bottle of Vittel. “Marriott tap water has been filtered and it is safe to drink,” she reads a printed note. “But for those of our guests who would rather drink bottled water we are happy to provide it.” The note is in English. The water is lukewarm and tasteless, but it does soothe her throat.

Ursula’s letters are now spread on the Marriott bed. On the one side Anna puts all the evidence of betrayal, love letters read and reread until Ursula’s words have been etched into her memory and cannot fade. These she ties up and hides at the bottom of her suitcase, underneath the sweaters. On the other side she puts the articles, book reviews, accounts of Ursula’s travels. In Montreal she has just skimmed through them, impatient with anything she decided did not concern her. Now, she is no longer sure.