Necessary Lies(50)
The names of the children all started with H. Hedda, Heide, Helga, Helmut, Hilda, Holde.
On May 6th 1945, a single engine plane left the newly constructed airstrip behind the Kaiserbrücke in Breslau, the city below exploding, street by street. Karl Hanke, reports say, was killed by Czech partisans a few weeks later.
The train from Warsaw to Wroclaw is slowing down again. It was in no hurry to begin with, the wheels hitting the rails leisurely, moaning when the train-cars were pulled out of their inertia, forced into movement. Perhaps, if she closed her eyes, the rattling of metal against metal would quiet her thoughts, put her into a shallow sleep. What a moving story of motherly love! Ursula has scribbled across the margins. And all these Breslau touches! Perfect for you, my love, as you wallow in self-pity, isn’t it? Should give you some consolation.
The day is sunny and quite warm but there is a cool draught of air coming through the door that won’t close. Anna picks up a sweater and covers her shoulders. This is not the way to return, alone, unsure of forgiveness, chased by the words of another woman. The train picks up speed only to slow down again.
Anna travelled in such trains many times in her childhood. Long train journeys marked the beginnings and ends of all her summers, two leisurely months spent in a rented room at the seaside, away from the hot and dusty city. “To breathe in iodine from the sea,” Babcia said, hoping that this year, unlike all the previous ones, the cure will work and Anna will not fall sick. Anna remembers staring at the plume of smoke from the steam engine and the loud, long whistles cutting into the sleepy rattle of wheels, making her sit up and ask for a drink out of a red thermos bottle full of sweet, lemony tea.
There were always people around, pushing, coughing, clearing their throats, swearing. The throngs of people at the stations, storming the trains, rushing in to grab their seats. Young men with hard suitcases rammed their way through the crowds. “Taken,” they yelled, when Mama pushed Anna and her brother past closed compartments where those who managed to get in spread their hands on the empty seats, saving them for their own families.
There was never enough room, but Mama always managed to get a seat for them, always found the way, spotting young, strong soldiers travelling alone, smiling at their clean-shaven faces long before the train rolled into the platform, holding Anna and Yan up, their plump innocence and her flattery securing their protection. What words she used Anna does not remember, but she remembers being lifted up into the air and carried — “like a princess” her mother would later say — right above the heads of the crowd into a seat by the window. She remembers the touch of green woollen fabric of the soldier’s uniform against her cheek, rough and prickly, and her mother settling comfortably right next to her, her face beaming. Babcia is slowly crossing herself, muttering a short prayer to the Virgin Mary to take care of them on this journey. Pulling out sandwiches from her big shoulder bag, hard-boiled eggs, red apples peeled and cut into thin wedges. Giving Anna a brown paper bag full of sweet cookies and asking, in a whisper, to offer them first to these nice young men who helped them, and then to everyone else.
Among all this, there is never a memory of her father who stayed behind in the city, and who, as always, would join them later when they were already settled in their one-room lodgings in a seaside village, Ustka or Leba, where Babcia would make a shade out of an old newspaper to cover a naked bulb, and where Anna and Yan would sleep in one bed, on a prickly straw mattress, smelling of the fields.
Now Anna is grateful for the unhurried pace of the wheels, grateful for the few hours of time. The train is almost empty and, in Warsaw, she passed a number of compartments before choosing this one. When she called her brother from Warsaw and told him she would take a train, Yan asked her to make sure not to be alone in a compartment. It was not even a warning, just a reminder, necessary only because she was coming from her soft and protected life in Canada.
On the train no one speaks to her, no one shows any interest in her affairs. After a short “good morning” followed by a quick look at her black leather coat, the young woman opposite her, whose pale and narrow face is carefully made up, resumes reading colourful magazines. Your Style, Success — Anna can make out the glossy titles.
The woman has taken off her high heels and has put on a pair of fuzzy, pink slippers. The two young men, who, without being asked, briskly helped Anna put her bag and suitcases on the metal shelf above their heads, do not start a conversation either. They both wear grey sweaters and corduroy pants, are slightly overweight and pale, and talk about business in low, quiet voices. “Someone dunked a lot of money in sugar,” Anna hears. Someone else had great plans but sank in the Russian markets. The KGB is into business debt collecting now. For a mere five percent. The idioms are easy to figure out, but they no longer sound familiar. Anna is glad they do not pay attention to her. She would rather be invisible.
The conductor who comes by to check their tickets assures her that the train will be in Wroclaw on time. Anna half-expects him to say something like, “Thank you and have a nice journey,” but this is asking for too much, too soon. She should be satisfied with a smile.
Wroclaw, Breslau. When Anna was growing up just pronouncing the word Breslau made the children uneasy, as if recalling a secret, silenced but still dangerous. A Polish city without the past. A Polish city filled with German ruins.
Footpaths led into these ruins, she remembers. Paths weaving like trails through mountains, up and down, over precipices and valleys, through the mysterious caverns of half-buried cellars and low concrete bunkers, smelling of rot and wet, crumbling plaster. They played there, all the children in the street, and she remembers the tightening of muscles, a contraction between her legs, the anticipation of the unexpected. They were warned that people could still vanish here, told that not so long ago a walk in these streets after dark was a death sentence. That the nights in Wroclaw belonged to prowlers, hot on the trail of anything that could be stolen or robbed. That in the mornings, corpses stripped of clothes were found among broken bricks.