Necessary Lies(46)
Quickly, Anna lays the wreaths on the marble slate and lights her candles. Then, kneeling on the marble ledge at the graveside, she says her prayers for the dead. From the two oval photographs on the headstone her grandparents look at her. Time has paled their sepia faces, lighted their contours. She tries to remember them the way they were, but all she can think of are the two black spots on her grandmother’s lower lip. When she was little, she watched Babcia cover them up with lipstick. Two layers, always two layers, so they wouldn’t show.
In September 1939, after the first German bombs fell on Warsaw, Babcia packed two of her most sturdy suitcases and decided to go back east, to her parents. She took her daughter with her. Dziadek refused to leave the store. The Prezydent of Warsaw was appealing to everyone for calm, he kept saying. Britain and France had declared war against Hitler.
Babcia did not want to listen. Her daughter was only eleven, she said, too young to die. They were in a column of refugees when a German Messerschmidt dived right over them and this was when Babcia bit her lip. She said the plane dived so low that she could see the pilot’s face. His square jaw, the shining buckle on his leather cap. Then she heard the sounds of machine-gun fire and saw people fall down dead. With bullet holes digging into their chests, exploding inside their heads.
“We were nothing to them but prey,” she said. “You can’t forget that, Anna.”
Babcia had been sent to Warsaw, in 1922, to live with a distant aunt who, after much coaxing, agreed to look after her. Her parents did not trust the new world order. True, Poland had just been made free after 123 years of partitions, but the Germans called it the “Seasonal State,” and for the Russians it was “the bastard of Versailles,” a “persecutor of the working class.” Borderlands were never safe. Such calculations were always important, here: the constant reassessment of which territories had a chance to survive and which would most likely succumb. Babcia was 23 years old, with long auburn hair and almond-shaped eyes. Her parents thought she would be better off in the capital.
In Warsaw, in her Aunt’s house, for seven long months Babcia waited for a husband. She imagined herself charming a handsome army officer, or one of the young lawyers in her Uncle’s chambers. Her Aunt laughed at the dreams of a poor relation, really no better than a servant. “Sausage is not for the dogs,” she had said, “a pretty face is not enough.” Time was running out. Picky women were left alone in the world, stale buns on the shelf.
Dziadek owned a small corner store in Podlaska street and above it, on the first floor, he rented a three-room apartment. He liked the shy, pretty woman he saw praying in church, pressing a lace handkerchief to her full red lips. Liked her enough to make inquiries about her position and prospects through one of her Aunt’s servants. Enough to pursue her for weeks, to send her flowers, cakes, a pair of kid gloves. She tried to return the gloves, but they came back accompanied by another bouquet of red roses. Her Aunt smiled approvingly, called Dziadek a respectable young man and asked him to come and have tea in the best parlour. He sat there stiffly, playing with a silver teaspoon, elaborating on the prospects of his colonial store and his need for a woman who would not be afraid of work. One afternoon, when Babcia was in church, praying for deliverance, he proposed. It was the Aunt who was given the mission of persuading Babcia to accept him, hinting at the hardships of having another mouth to feed. “And you, my dear, are not getting any younger.”
They were married three months later. To Anna, Babcia often said that she knew of a wife’s duties. Of the vale of tears this life was supposed to be. She knew of all her sins for which she deserved her lot in life. But one thing she couldn’t do. She couldn’t learn to love the man who ignored her pleas to leave her alone.
To Anna the existence of Dziadek’s grocery store has always been something of a mystery. “A colonial store,” Babcia said, and the word had something delicious about it, but also hard to imagine. For it was hard to believe that the pre-war customers could choose between brands of produce, have their shopping delivered to their homes. No line-ups, no shortages, no pushing and shoving. It was in the rented apartment above this grocery store, after three miscarriages and a baby boy who died a few days short of his first birthday, that Anna’s mother was born.
“They always quarrelled,” Mama said about her parents. “Something was always wrong.”
A beloved daughter, the apple of her father’s eye. Spoilt with the gift of a gold watch for her First Communion, Belgian lace for her dress. Visits to Blikle café, carefully hidden from her mother, where she was allowed to order and eat as many cakes as she wanted. When they came home, giggling and swearing to keep it all their secret, she would be served her supper and she would not be able to eat it. It was then, after expert questioning, that the truth would be revealed, and her parents would quarrel again. Over her, over the sweets, over the future of a daughter brought up in such indulgent manner. The same daughter whose freedom Babcia would one day buy from the Gestapo when, arrested in a street tapanka, Anna’s mother would be taken with other passers-by to witness a street execution and told she would be sent to Germany for forced labour.
Mama recalled bars of chocolate on the counter of the store, oranges and lemons wrapped in delicate tissue paper with pictures on them, the smell of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, the scent of soap, the taste of exotic teas. But she also remembered how the children at school teased her, a shopkeeper’s daughter. Once on their way to Lazienki Palace she pointed out the second floor windows of an apartment in Aleja Ró to Anna.