Necessary Lies(54)
Babcia did not like the curtains, the table, the brown leather armchairs with head-rests. She would have preferred her daughter to have the family furniture, if only she could have it back. “These are so heavy,” she complained, “so German.” She did not mind when they gathered chips and bruises, and shrugged her shoulders when Yan and Anna jumped up and down on the beds, until the springs moaned.
“I didn’t want to come here,” she said. “This is not where my grandchildren should have been born.” The world Anna and Yan were supposed to inherit, like the Warsaw store, was destroyed, and now they were destined to live their lives among someone else’s things, in this poor substitute for real Poland. “Robbed and betrayed,” she said, her face locked in a grimace.
There were so many things her grandchildren should never forget. The frozen Siberian fields in Kolyma, where prisoners’ bodies were so well preserved that when the time came, even hundreds of years from now, future generations would be able to see the last expressions on their faces. Gulag-bound ships where the smallest sign of discontent brought swift death, decks with protesters flooded by water and left to freeze into one solid block of ice. Those who had returned never said a word about the past but stared at the world with wide, empty eyes.
“Yes, Anna, it was better not to know.”
Those who started this most terrible of wars, she would say, the Germans, laugh at them now from their new, opulent homes in West Germany, rebuilt with American money, laugh at them, caught behind the Iron Curtain, lining up for scraps of meat and loaves of stale bread.
Anna did not like when Babcia spoke like that, for her voice rose, tensed and then dissolved into sobs. Nothing Anna could say would bring any comfort. It was better to stay silent, to look down, and to wait until the wave of bitterness passed.
“What kind of life is it, I ask you!”
“What’s the use, Mama. Thank God we are all alive,” the pleading voice of Anna’s mother was meant to soothe. She, too, was made uneasy by so much pain.
It is the smell of perfume that Anna remembers now. Soir de Paris, a soft, luxurious smell mixed with the scent of face powder wafting into her nostrils when her mother leaned over her bed to place a soft kiss on her cheek. Soir de Paris, Anna whispered long afterwards, evening in Paris, thinking of the small bottle the colour of a ripe plum with a chrome cap. It kept the soft memory of the scent long after the perfume was gone.
Her mother was leaving for a New Year’s ball. Her high heels clicked on the floor as she hurried around the room in her new taffeta dress, in which golden threads intertwined with brown and beige. The dress had a full skirt and a strapless bodice from which her mother’s soft arms emerged like a statue trying to free itself from the tight embrace of stone. Her hair was pinned high, held in place with a wooden clasp. Father, dressed in his best black suit, was standing in the corner, his eyes following her with the amazement that Anna understood so well. For once again her mother had transformed herself in front of them; she was so confident and so beautiful, laughing at their muffled gasps, turning around to give them one more look before she covered her arms with a shawl. Soon she would put on the beige gloves that reached up to her elbows, slip her arms into the long furcoat Father was holding for her, and pick up a small purse. “Bedtime is at nine,” she would chime. “No moaning.” With her gloved fingers she would blow them the last kiss before closing the door, and they would hear the clicks of her heels descending the stairs.
Babcia had made the dress herself. For weeks the three of them had eyed the newspapers and magazines for the slightest hints of changing fashions. With a magnifying glass they had examined snapshots of actresses and diplomats’ wives from small, unfocused photographs that sometimes appeared in magazines. They had noted the cuts of dresses, the shapes of heels. Babcia didn’t need much else. She could copy any dress they set their mind on. The taffeta ball gown had a Marilyn Monroe feel to it, quite unusual, for Mama had an eye for simple but dramatic patterns, contrasting fabrics, lines that made the most of her narrow waist and shapely legs. Soir de Paris? . Over Babcia’s protests they had made a trip to the hard currency store filled with Max Factor face creams, Colgate toothpaste, French perfume, and American cigarettes, whisky and blue jeans.
“What if something happens?” Babcia had said, angered by such extravagance, “What if you have no food to give the children?”
“A little bit of luxury,” Mama had whispered into Anna’s ear, as if to excuse herself, having extracted green dollar bills from a leather pouch she kept hidden somewhere in the study. Dziadek gave it to her before he died, the result of some transactions he had hung on to. “Buy yourself something nice with it,” he had said. “You only live once.”
Anna loved to watch her mother on evenings like this. Babcia eyeing her creation, spotting a hanging thread or a forgotten pin, pulling the dress on one side, making Mama stand still for just one second to make sure the hem was even. In her student days, Mama told them, nothing would stop her from dancing. Once when her heel snapped off one shoe, she slipped off her shoes and stockings and danced barefoot. When the dance was over, she snapped off the other heel and wobbled home.
These were the kinds of stories Anna liked best, but she had to ask for them, plead against her mother’s preoccupied silence. Sometimes, when Anna asked often enough and when they were away, on vacation perhaps, far away from her mother’s work, she might even hear of her parents’ courtship — the most favourite story of them all — for it foreshadowed her own existence, involving her in such a wondrous way. That’s when her mother would smile this half-smile, poised between pride and joy and say, “I never even noticed him, at first. I always had so many friends, but he had already been watching me for months.”