Necessary Lies(48)
“Are you going to pay or do you want me to call the police,” he asks her.
“Don’t bother,” Anna snaps and gives him what he wants. He takes the thick wad of Polish currency with a broad smile of a winner.
She slams the door of the taxi so hard that flakes of rust fall off. The driver honks and drives off, leaving a puff of black smoke behind him.
The winding streets of the Old Town are paved with cobblestones. Anna walks slowly, stopping at the displays of jewellery stores, trying to restore her calm. The incident with the taxi-driver has made her hands shake. This, too, is an old feeling from here, she recalls, the impotent rage at such small acts of cruelty. At being cheated, pushed, told to go to hell, not to put on airs and expect God knows what. She wants to forget such feelings. She would rather remember the heroic resistance of which there are so many reminders. Flowers against the walls still mark the spots of street executions. The best and the brightest, her mother would say.
“Thirty-four,” she reads as she passes. “Thirty-four Poles died at this spot, executed by the Germans.” The flowers, red and white carnations, are wilted. The letter P with its base turned into an anchor, the symbol of resistance, is made of brass. Her brother wrote to her once that hours after martial law was declared, these signs appeared on the walls in every Polish city.
In one of the stores in the Old Town Anna buys an amber necklace and a pair of earrings for Marie. Two drops of amber on long silver rods.
“Do they really look the same way as they looked before the war?” she had asked her mother once about these reconstructed fa?ades, the winding streets and cobblestones.
“Yes,” her mother said, her voice hardening already, warning her not to doubt her conviction. “They do.”
Flashes of afternoon light manage to break through low clouds, shed beams of warmth onto the walls of buildings. Anna is on Krakowskie Przedmiecie now and these are yellow walls with a shade of pink. Nuns walk out of the Church of the Visitation, in long black robes and white wimples. They walk in groups, slowly, whispering among themselves, bending their white, pensive faces. Anna takes out her camera. The flash goes off; so there is not enough light, after all.
Nothing here, she thinks, is like it was. Every reconstructed building in this city is a defiant cry to the people beyond the Oder. Nothing happens here without being tied in the most profound and visceral way to this other presence, the presence of Germany. These buildings stand here because Germans said they wouldn’t. There is no forgiveness.
In the Marriott room, the light cream bedspread with green flowers has been turned down to reveal snow-white sheets. There is a Sweet Dreams chocolate in a black envelope on her pillow. In the bathroom, Anna lowers herself into scalding water, slowly, inch by inch, until her skin absorbs the heat and allows her to go deeper, taking away some of the tension that is still mounting in her.
It must have been a Christmas present. The bag of sweets, she remembers, was tied with a red ribbon; the entire room smelled of spruce and resin. Chocolate acorns were wrapped in golden foil, which, later, she would smooth carefully with her fingernail into a thin leaf and hide between the pages of her books. There were bonbons with dark, wet interiors that spilled onto her tongue, covering it with the bittersweet taste of coffee. Crispy wafers with rich hazelnut filling. There were two of these bags, one for her and one for her brother.
“Poczstuj nas” her mother reminded her of her duty to share whatever it is she has, and she held the bag to them and expected that, as always, they would take one small piece each, or even decline the treat with a smile and the words she has been waiting for. “No, that’s all for you, love. Chocolates are for the children.” But this time something was wrong. Mama took the whole chocolate bar with round hazelnuts buried in it. Tata picked another bar. Babcia said, “I think I would like a few of these acorns,” and she took a whole handful. Anna held back her tears, not knowing what to say. She had made her offering, and it had been accepted. How could she complain? Why would she want to cry?
A few minutes later, even though to her it seemed that hours had passed, she heard her mother’s voice. “I think that’s enough,” she said, her voice solemn and quiet, and they all nodded and said that they agreed. Yes, this was enough. “Good girl!” she heard. “What a brave little girl you are!” They were proud of her. “We are so very proud of you. You have passed the test.”
Through tears she watched how the sweets, untouched, were returned to her bag, how all was restored. She felt her father’s hand on the top of her head, heavy and warm. “Our sweet girl. Wasn’t she brave! Tears in her eyes, but she kept going.” Slowly the heaviness in her chest began to lift and she smiled, too, convinced of her own courage, the generosity of her heart. Her lips closed on a chocolate acorn and she waited for the moment in which the warmth of her tongue would melt the chocolate and release the soft, nutty filling inside.
The curtains of her hotel room are drawn. Through a narrow slit she can glimpse the lights of Warsaw. She closes the curtains tight, and pretends she is suspended in the air, nowhere in particular.
PART IV
WROCLAW 1991
“He is German”, Anna recalls her mother’s voice, a phone conversation from long ago she would like so very much to forget. “So what did his father do in the war?”