Necessary Lies(53)
When he enrolled in the Department of Geology at the Polish University of Wroclaw, Tata was given a shovel to help clear the rubble from the classrooms. In teams, the students removed the debris from lecture halls, sorted out bricks and masonry, replaced broken glass. At night, the buildings they helped to clear had to be guarded; it was no secret that the lizards, snakes, frogs, turtles, human foetuses and organs, lining the shelves at the Natural Science Museum, were floating in precious alcohol. Before the windows of the first floor were walled up and armed guards stationed at the only entrance, night brought swarms of marauders who rummaged through the museum rooms, leaving broken jars and dried out specimens as the only evidence of their nocturnal presence.
Tata had told Anna and Yan how, with other student guards, he was sent to bring whatever could still be salvaged from the houses of departed German professors. The abandoned suburban villas stood silent behind junipers and pines. Anna and Yan could imagine him, nervously eyeing the road behind him, in his hand a piece of paper with addresses he got from university archives. They could hear his footsteps on a gravel path. He was hoping to arrive there before the looters. Everything was priceless then, he said, microscopes, scales, sets of encyclopaedias, typewriters, supplies of paper and ink. Anything that could enrich the museum collection — rocks, fossils. But the most precious, he said, were the geological maps of Lower Silesia. The new Polish land had to be assessed for deposits and drilled.
“It was dangerous,” he said, his voice still uneasy. “One never knew then.” He had heard stories of Nazi treasures buried in the old mineshafts, in the web of underground passages where whole trains with Breslau gold had vanished without a trace. He had heard stories of Werewolf executions, swift death for those who saw or heard too much, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He fumbled with the locks of these solid German doors, giving them the final push, before they gave and let him into the smell of floor wax and dust. He pulled at the drawers of rosewood desks, oak secretaries; he emptied old bookcases and picked up rocks from shelves, wrapping them carefully in old German newspapers that stained his hands black. Other students helped him as he loaded these treasures on wooden carts, excited at each find, pointing their fingers at the brass instruments, at polished glass, laughing nervously as they walked. Triumphant, they brought their finds to the Polish University of Wroclaw, relieved that no one had stopped them on the way.
“And then,” Father said, as if it were a miracle he still couldn’t quite understand, “I met your mother.” That’s when they moved into this mutilated street, between the long prisms of ruins, into the apartment where, Anna can still remember, in each of the three rooms thick wooden poles supported the ceiling. “The structure had been shaken,” Father said, and after that, every so often, she would stop in the middle of what she was doing, stand still and watch for the first signs of tremors.
He knew about such things, she thought. He showed her the rocks he had brought from his trips to the Sudeten Mountains, rocks that looked as if someone had broken them into halves, and then put the halves back together, but not exactly at the same place. “This is a fault from here,” he said. “Look how old it is, how small. Frozen, but it can still tell you what was here before.”
She looked at the piece of rock with suspicion, ran her fingers over the rough surface. Took the rock in her hand and gave it back to him, to be put back, high on the shelf. “That’s what I’m trying to do,” he told her, then. “Find out how it all happened.”
“How can you tell?” she asked.
It wasn’t easy, he conceded. What was visible was deceiving. Important parts of these rocks could be missing, eroded, crumbled to dust. That’s why he had to drill deep into the earth’s crust, to find out.
“You can have it if you want,” he said, offering her a grey cylinder, a drilling sample. But Anna preferred the rocks that came from far away lands. The volcanic glass with its shiny black surface, the white plates of celestite, or the green, red, and blue hexagons of quartz.
The first thing her father did in the Wroc aw apartment was to install thick metal bars in the windows and three long bolts with which they barred the door every evening. The bars are still there, as if her parents never felt safe enough to remove them.
When they found it, the apartment was almost empty, save for a heap of broken glass in the living room, a pile of books, and a few photographs of a man with a swastika on his arm. The photographs were pierced with a knife. The place was filthy. Rotting rags stuck to the floorboards, the large wooden table was split in half with an axe, the walls were smeared with excrement, a jar of marmalade was emptied over a pile of books. Her father thought that soldiers must have camped there. “Maybe,” he said, “that’s why the apartment was still empty.”
It took her parents a whole week to wash the walls and scrub the floors clean. They slept on the floor in the big room to the right, and in the morning carried down the rubble they had cleared and left it by the curb of the street.
The bombs had left parts of the houses intact, and from these teetering caverns her parents rescued the bright yellow curtains now hanging in the big front room, and the little rosewood table with a marble top that stands in the study. They took whatever they could find, the round table they ate on, oak chairs with leather seats, white iron beds, white china plates, a mahogany clock with an eagle perched on top, and Anna’s favourite, a Scherenschnitt, a paper cut-out still hanging on the kitchen wall in her parents’ apartment. How she loved to stare at the black silhouettes of a man with an umbrella, of two little boys, and of a dog struggling with wind and rain. One of the boys in the picture watched how his umbrella turned over, another ran after a blown off cap. Only the dog plodded along, pretending not to mind.