Necessary Lies(58)
In Montreal, for the last ten years, Anna opened her mother’s letters with growing uneasiness. At first they were short, very short. Reports on her father’s deteriorating health, on Basia whose good humour won everyone’s heart, even if she so obviously “lacked ambition” and dropped out of university.
But then her mother began remembering the war. Anna could almost see her, writing, bent over the paper, smoking a Carmen cigarette from which she has torn off the filter. That peculiar, scented smell was what always struck her as she opened the lined white pages filled with stories she refused to tell Anna for years, stories that made her voice break.
She wrote to Anna about Babcia finding ways to buy back her daughter’s freedom from forced labour, thankful for someone’s penchant for good whisky, for her daughter’s innocent looks, her ability to recite the poems of Goethe in German that amazed someone important enough. She wrote of the Warsaw Uprising, of daily descents to the sewage canals to carry orders from one unit to the other. She recalled how she helped carry a wounded soldier on her back, her legs immersed in sewage up to her knees. The soldier was crying. He was thirsty, hurting, but he clung to her neck. He begged her to give him a drink. I don’t have any water, she said, and he tried to lower himself to drink the water from the sewage, but she wouldn’t let him. All she had was a sugar cube, so she gave it to him, and he quieted down and only moaned and grew hotter and hotter on her back. When they got out, he was taken away on a stretcher. I don’t even know what happened to him, she wrote.
Inside the underground tunnels explosions were dulled, muted. She remembered the texture of the red bricks and concrete ledges on both sides where she saw blankets, rucksacks, jars with lard — all abandoned in desperation. The feeling of something soft getting entangled around her feet. Funny, she wrote, how I don’t remember the smell. Their noses must have given up in those days, dulled by the burning smoke, the rotting flesh of the city. As they walked, they kept an eye on open manholes, in front of which they crouched and waited in absolute silence. That’s where, she wrote, the SS threw grenades to get to us. That’s how we were meant to die.
How hard it was, she wrote, with regained sense of smell, to wash away the stink of the sewers. She threw away all her clothes, then, soaked her hands in hot soapy water until she thought the skin would peel off. My hair was the worst, she wrote. Sticky. Nothing helped. I had to cut all of it, and I had nothing but a pair of blunt scissors.
When the Uprising fell, the survivors were marched in long columns out of Warsaw, on a warm, sunny October day. The columns took the whole width of the street. The Germans were surprised that so many of us survived.
Why did Anna have to cut herself off from Poland, her mother asked. Had she not thought of funerals? She may not need her parents, but her parents were not immortal; they may have need of her. Give me a reason, her even, rounded handwriting insisted. Give me one good reason why.
Anna was thinking of a glass case with a mummy of a small girl she saw in a museum once, wads of greyish bandage hiding the body. It was better that way. Better not to see what’s inside. To her mother she wrote of her health, of Montreal, of Canadian weather. There was no telling what would be unearthed if they let themselves go.
“Tell us,” her father says. “Tell us about Canada.”
But it is they who talk, who tell her what happened when she was away, in Montreal. About the cut off phones, Chopin’s music on all radio stations, tanks in the streets. About a prison guard who confiscated Piotr’s Bible with its dedication So that Truth will always be victorious.
“A Russian invasion we would have understood, yes, but not the coup. Not our own people,” her father says. “This was the hardest to accept.”
“On TV,” Yan joins in, “the announcers had military uniforms. They read lists of offences punishable by death.”
“We had curfew,” her father adds, “couldn’t go anywhere without permissions. But just a few days later you could get permissions by the dozen. Stolen from the offices, already stamped.”
They want her to know that even at the height of martial law the spirit of the nation was not doused. It strikes her that they are explaining all of this as if she had never lived here. They use phrases like “geopolitical situation,” “general conditions,” “historical position,” talking all at once, talking as if she never stood in line-ups with them, as if she never huddled in front of the radio, waiting for the news, tuning in to Radio Free Europe, listening past the buzzing noises and whistles of the jamming towers. “I was away for ten years, only” she says, and they nod as if this only confirmed the need for such explanations.
The doorbell rings with a shrill, piercing sound. “Here they are,” Yan says and rushes to open the door. For the last half an hour, he has been checking his watch anxiously. “It’s all because of Basia’s mother,” he explained. “She has asked them to come and help her.” This, he wants Anna to know, is the only reason why his wife and son are not here yet to greet her.
“That’s all right,” Anna responded. The apologies seem to her excessive. What is there to explain?
She can hear her brother’s reproaches and a woman’s soft, humming voice. “I couldn’t . . . you know how she is . . . she wants my attention.” And then Anna hears a child’s voice. “I can?” and the sound of footsteps.