Necessary Lies(47)
“Your Great-Uncle,” she said. “Lived there once. He was a pre-war lawyer.”
The colonial store was hit by a German bomb in August 1944, in the first days of the Warsaw Uprising. “What’s gone is gone,” Dziadek said and refused to see it, but Babcia went to take one last look, right before they were marched out of Warsaw by the Nazis. “I shouldn’t have,” she said. Broken glass and shards of wood cracked under her feet. She thought she would take something with her, something to remember, but there was nothing to take.
During the Uprising, her grandparents hid in the cellar, the city above them burning to cinders. For years Babcia was to remember the damp mattress on which she lay day and night. Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sinned against us. Now and in the hour of our death, she prayed. She had heard the cries of people burnt alive in the church of the Sisters of the Visitation.
People crowded in these cellars, listening to the sounds of planes, the howl of falling bombs, the explosions. A few blocks away. Next door. The end was easy to imagine. The cellar doors could open at any time. The last thing you would hear in this life was the blast of grenades. When children wailed, mothers said, “Don’t cry, you will die soon.”
“What a human soul will endure!” Babcia would tell Anna.
Yet there were miracles, too. In one of them, Babcia said, they were reunited with Mama, in a relocation camp after the war. Their daughter who had turned into a Home Army soldier, who had cut her hair short, and who refused to talk of what she had done or seen.
It was then that Dziadek decided they should all go to Wroclaw, to the newly regained territories, Stalin’s consolation prize for the lands lost in the east. The Germans were fleeing west, leaving their homes and businesses behind. There, forever an optimist, he was sure they would be able to find an abandoned store. Soon they would be back on their feet again. When Babcia objected, he asked if she had other ideas on how they might survive. If she knew of anyone in the world willing to take them in. Feed and clothe them. Educate their daughter. Make sure she would have a chance in life.
In Wroclaw, Dziadek found a corner store with the name of the German owner strewn with bullets. Cigarettes and food gone, the store was in a good shape, nevertheless, with solid wooden shelves in the back, cherry wood counter, marble floor, and some inventory. In the boxes stacked in the back of the store Dziadek discovered carved pipes and bundles of pipe cleaners. In the ruins he found boxes of buttons and sewing needles, a good supply of candles and matches. Not much, but something to start with.
In the back of the store, there was a small apartment. From the destroyed store next door Dziadek salvaged some sturdy iron bars that he installed in all the windows. At night, he and Babcia pushed the heavy oak table against the front door. Every night they heard gunshots and screams. When someone pounded on the door, to be let in, they would hold their breath and wait until the pounding stopped. There were so many stories about this city that curdled their blood, stories they read about in the papers. A man had his eyes slashed with razor blades for a pair of shoes. A woman traveller stepped into a factory to ask her way to a friend’s house; one by one the workers raped her and then pushed her out of the second storey window to the concrete pavement, below. That’s what the war did to people, Babcia said. Freed the worst in them.
For the next two years, the Wroclaw store prospered. Soon Babcia was wearing a fur coat, wrapping a fox collar around her neck. She still had a good figure, she would catch herself thinking. At forty-five she could still turn heads in the street. Make men smile with pleasure when they raised her gloved hand to their lips. Her daughter was in a private school, catching up with her schoolwork, getting ready for university.
“I might still know what happiness is,” she liked to think then.
In 1947 a man in a trench coat came to the Wroclaw store and asked Dziadek for two hundred grams of chocolates. Dziadek rolled a bag for him from a square piece of brown paper and weighed the sweets. The man paid and left. Half an hour later he was back with a policeman, accusing Dziadek of overcharging him. Dziadek was arrested on the spot, and the store was sealed. “Bloodsucking capitalists,” Babcia was told, “had to be stopped form cheating the working class.” In a judge’s verdict a few months later the store was declared state property and Dziadek was sentenced to six months of hard labour and socialist reeducation. Released, he was ordered to work in his old store, as an assistant, for a state salary. “The Communist Battle for Trade” was won.
For years, Dziadek spent all afternoons with his ear plastered to the radio speaker, sifting through the jamming noises to hear the daily news from Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. The same Radio Free Europe Tata switched off when he gathered enough courage to ask for Mama’s hand. “I had to,” he laughed. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t have heard what I had to say.”
Dziadek died a few years after his granddaughter, Anna, was born, quietly, after a routine hernia operation that went wrong. “He liked his vodka,” the doctor said to explain the internal haemorrhage noticed too late. “There was nothing we could do.”
Babcia did not say anything. Wife or widow, she had stopped expecting anything from life.
There are no radio-taxis outside the cemetery gate so Anna hails an ordinary taxi and asks to be taken to the Old Town. She will walk from there to the Marriott, she decides.
This taxi-driver is silent and pensive. When the ride is over he asks her for the equivalent of fifty dollars. When she protests that a radio-taxi would cost her no more than five, he shrugs his shoulders and tells her she should have made sure of the price before getting inside. He is an independent taxi-owner. This is capitalism, in case she hasn’t noticed. He charges what he pleases.