Necessary Lies(60)
“I froze,” Basia says. “Someone in the store just started to laugh. They thought it was funny. So I laughed, too. But my legs were so soft I could hardly walk.”
The dishes are done, dried and stacked in piles. “We’ll leave the rest to Mama,” Basia says. “She has her own way of putting them away. Don’t even try to mess it up.”
Anna nods and they both laugh.
“How did I manage?” Basia returns to Anna’s question. Anna will remember her like this for a long time, recall this moment over others. Basia, her hands alongside her body, her face turned to Anna, pensive, serious, just like Adam’s .
“You know, I’d just look at my son. At his tiny lips, opening up to me, so totally dependent on what I would do. I’ve brought this baby to the world, I thought. I’m responsible. All these police vans all over the city, troops throwing canisters of tear gas, tearing our posters from the walls, painting them over. It all seemed so ludicrous, so utterly insane. I knew it couldn’t last. I wanted to do something to change it.”
Anna watches as Basia waves her hand in a dismissive gesture. “Nothing, really,” she adds. “I’m much more confused now, with all the politics. Everybody is quarrelling. Everyone accuses everyone else of betrayal, of taking bribes. It frightens me to listen to the kind of Poland some of our own friends want now. You know, Poland for Poles only, for Catholics... Sometimes our old enemies make more sense than they do. I don’t even know who I support.”
They sit down on the rickety stools in the kitchen. Basia has poured some mineral water into small glasses.
“What are you going to do, now?” she asks Anna. “Will you stay with us for a while?”
Anna takes a sip of water, the tiny bubbles rising to the surface, exploding into mist. She shakes her head.
“I’ll be all right,” she says and manages a reassuring smile. It is not a lie.
Shrieks of laughter reach them from the living room, Adam is having a good time. Anna would like to sit like this for a little while longer. Basia must feel the same, for she makes no effort to stand up and leave the kitchen. It’s Yan who finds them there, silent and content.
When Yan and Basia leave, taking Adam with them — Adam who reminds Anna of their promised trip in the morning — it is hard to fill the emptiness that is left. Mama sighs and goes to the kitchen to put the plates away. Tata gathers the cards he took out of the desk drawer to show Adam some tricks. As in Anna’s childhood, they ended up playing her once-favourite game, scattering cards on the table, building a house on them and trying to remove the cards from the base without making the house collapse. She was always too impatient with it, pulled too hard, too fast. Her father remembers that, too.
“You always wanted to play it,” he says. “Every evening.”
“I know” Anna says, smiling at the memory. The cards are now in their separate boxes, and Anna puts them where they’ve always been, in the second drawer of her father’s desk.
“But you didn’t like to lose. You’d cry for the whole evening, if you did. You’d bite your lip and cry,” her father says, gently. “So I always tried to let you win.”
Mama comes into the room, quietly, and listens. The whites of her eyes are bloodshot from exertion. She can’t have been getting enough sleep.
“How is your friend?” she asks about Marie.
“Fine,” Anna says. “She sends her greetings. Still remembers her visit here. During martial law.”
Her mother nods her head. She liked Marie’s warm enthusiasm, her compassion. She recalls how Anna’s friend sat right here, on the red sofa, clenching her fists. There was a store she saw that afternoon, a store full of nothing but sugar at the time when their ration cards allowed them a kilogram per month. She thought it cruel, blatantly cruel.
“But for us it seemed normal,” Mama says, and then, adds her old, well-tried explanation. “Takie byty czasy. “Such were the times.”
At night, even with the door to her room closed, Anna can still hear the once-familiar noises. Swish goes the water, flowing down the pipes from the apartment upstairs. The boards squeak, the refrigerator in the kitchen switches on and off. Distant trains go by, and at times Anna can hear the echo of the announcements from the speakers at Central Station.
She hears whispers in the kitchen, louder now for her parents are hard of hearing. She hears Piotr’s name mentioned, and then William’s . She cannot make more out of it, just the grave tone, the murmurs, the concern. The room is chilly. The thick solid German walls take long to warm up.
When she was little, she lay in this room listening to Mamas steps, her hushed voice. “Sh . .. you will wake up the children,” and the low whispers that followed. What were they talking about, she wondered. Another war? Babcia lived through two world wars, Mama through one, why would Anna think she might be spared?
She assessed her chances of survival. Wardrobes were treacherous, she thought. Bottom boards could squeak and reveal her presence. Dogs could sniff her out. The walls of the pantry could crumble, and suffocating smoke would find its way through the layers of goose down covers. She remembers knowing that her mother was the only person in the whole world who could save her at a time like that. Her mother’s strength was her only chance.
Only with William beside her, her hand in his, could she laugh at such an addiction to catastrophe, such persistent expectations of the worst. To him only could she speak mockingly of Eastern-European fatalism, perennial pessimism, this Slavic melancholy of the soul that has touched her forever, made her fearful of the future, doubtful, suspicious of good fortune. He would laugh, and she, the traitor, would laugh with him.