Necessary Lies(55)
It was in these stories that Anna’s father emerged from the crowd of Mama’s admirers slowly, winning her by his steadfast patience and determination. He would slip funny notes in between the pages of her books, wait in line to get a dance with her. Once, he brought her a cluster of gypsum roses, white crystalline balls closing like rosebuds in a tight bouquet. This he bought at the szaberplatz, the black market of Breslau treasures. It must have come from the geological museum, he would later say, for that was not an ordinary find. He skipped dinners for a whole week to afford it, but Mama wouldn’t know that for months. “How beautiful,” she had said simply when he placed the rocky flowers into her hands. The gypsum roses are still standing on the shelf of her parents’ study and have to be dusted very carefully not to break; the delicate petal-like formations.
“He was so funny, then,” Mama would say at times like that, smiling. Tata only blushed when she talked to him and stammered some silly apologies, as if unprepared for such luck.
In the photographs from that time Tata is tall and handsome with a high forehead and round wire glasses. Anna has his curly hair, his smile, shy but winning, and his quiet persistence. That’s what her mother always said, “Daddy’s daughter.”
How attracted he must have been by her mother’s boundless energy, Anna thinks now, by her mercurial spirit. By the tenacity with which Mama refused to be weighed down by the ruins, the lost store. That wasn’t enough to stop her, not more than a broken heel of her dancing shoe. Alone in the world, Father needed that kind of strength, his only hope for permanence. Soon her mother could not imagine an evening of dancing without his quiet presence, his patient waiting for her, when tired and so very happy she needed to lean on his shoulder and let him escort her through the dangerous Wroc aw streets to her student room. “I had nothing but my hamnler,” Tata would sometimes add to these stories, the same pointed hammer with which he split the rocks.
There was one reason why Mama had little time for them, why the best of stories came rarely and had to be begged for, why dressing up for the ball seemed such a wondrous transformation for them all. Her work. She was a chemist. At that time she was completing her PhD research, her mind absorbed by her experiments in surface tension, which Anna understood only vaguely. It had something to do with particles of minerals suspended in water, rising to the surface by bubbles of air. Her mother was trying to separate the ones she wanted, find ways of recovering them. The laboratory smelled of solvents and burning gas, and on the shelves Anna could spot jars labelled with human skulls and crossed bones. “Don’t touch anything,” Mama would warn her. This wasn’t the place for children, she would say, ushering Anna outside, quickly, anxious to get back to her work.
Babcia did not approve of her daughter’s occupation. “Not a job for a woman,” she would say to Anna as they sat in the kitchen peeling potatoes for dinner, her lips pouting with disgust. “She will blow herself up or drag some poison home.” Babcia was dubious of her daughter’s ability to keep the family safe. She would make sure Mama changed her clothes as soon as she came home and would wash them separately, rinsing them a few more times than she would anything else.
“Her place is here, with you. What is she going to do when I die?” she would ask Anna and Yan, pleased that they had no answer for her.
The train enters the giant glass-and-steel hangar of Central Station. There is a smell here Anna remembers, soot mixed with steam, the smell of a railway. How German it still looks, Anna thinks. Forty-five years later the German genius loci is in the shape of metal columns that support the roof, in the classical ornaments, the pale ivory tiles on the walls. What has changed, to her, is the size of it. The station seems smaller than she remembers it, and later, she will have to fight the persistent feeling that the whole city has shrunk in her absence. Her throat is dry, as if all moisture has evaporated, leaving her cracked open, like parched, barren ground.
Her brother waits on the platform, by the little round kiosk, to the right. Anna knows it is him long before he has recognised her. His eyes scan the train, trying to spot her. In some ways he has not changed at all. He is still large, with wide shoulders and a head that seems too small for his body. “He is stooping,” Anna thinks, “I don’t remember him stooping so much.” When he notices her, he throws his arms up and shakes his head, taken aback. It must be her black leather coat, Anna thinks; her brother does not remember her dressing like this. Before she left Poland, she had a preference for loose, flowery dresses of cheesecloth — the hippie style. She feels his arms around her, squeezing her, pulling her toward him.
“Anna,” he says, “Anna. Good Lord! Good to have you here.” He does not mention William. He does not know how.
“Yes,” she murmurs. “Good to be back. I haven’t thought I ever would.”
He leans back, his hands still on her shoulders.
“You look swell,” he says looking at the cut of her hair, the ash-blond highlights. “American!”
She doesn’t, really. She avoids mirrors for her face is still pale and drawn, aged by sadness, but now she smiles and is pleased by her brother’s words.
“Thank you,” she says, and realises that this is not what he expects her to say. If anything he would expect her to protest, to say how tired she is from the journey, how crumpled her clothes are, and then he, too, would protest, complimenting her even more. So now, puzzled, he watches her closely, looking for other clues how the years away must have changed her. They were not too good at corresponding. Her letters were short and general, and often left unanswered for months. She tried to call him, but these were just excuses to hear his voice, for she knew her brother well enough. He was no expert at hurried conversations.