Necessary Lies(65)
In the shoebox she opens now, lie the smaller, more personal things. Her old notebooks, an autograph book with a mountaineer’s head carved on the black, wooden cover, and her letters to him. All of them. The oldest letters are those she used to leave for him at the dorm, and letters from Canada, from the first weeks, when she still didn’t know what she would do. These she opens eagerly to read her own words — pleas, it turns out, for Piotr to come to Montreal. Only now, I see how life could be like, she wrote then. Without the daily humiliations we have to go through. You would have no problems finding a job here or in English Canada. I have made many friends already who would like to help. She is surprised that she was so open in her letters, and so desperate.
I’m afraid, she reads in another letter, I’m afraid of having to go back, of blaming you for the hopelessness of our lives. I don’t want the world to close for me. I know I will only grow bitter with each day spent on these little meaningless victories we have learnt to expect from life, a pair of shoes, a bar of soap. I can’t return to life led to a script written by others, always by others, never by ourselves. How can I ever discover who I might become? How could I ever know who I am?
What did Piotr think when he read it? These incomprehensible, American questions? Did he think her spoilt, callous, ridiculous with these newly discovered needs?
Among her old letters she spots a Montreal postcard with a view of St. Joseph’s Oratory. On the other side there are two lines of a poem she quoted for Piotr in her own defence: We don’t have history/ We have moments of wasted life, and a short line she has added underneath: Maybe because of that past we have hardened our hearts so much, and now we have forgotten how important it is to forgive.
She wrote the postcard in October of 1981, already thinking of William, already in love. She remembers letting the postcard slide into a red mailbox on Peel Street and then rushing to the small corner bistro across from McGill. William was waiting for her in his tweed jacket and black turtleneck, bent over something she couldn’t see.
What else is there in the box? A few photographs of the two of them, together, smiling, locked in an embrace. They both looked so young then, faces smooth, laughing, hands twined. A tiny samizdat imprint of Parisian emigré magazine Kultura, ideal for smuggling into the country. March 1981: Elena Bonner talks about her dissident husband, Andrei Sacharov, and his life in Gorky where no one but her is allowed to visit him.
The phone rings in the hall. Her mother picks it up, listens for some time and then calls her name. “It’s for you,” she says and closes the kitchen door.
“Piotr Nowicki,” Anna hears in the black receiver, as if she could have forgotten his name.
“It’s me,” she answers. “Anna.” She waits. She doesn’t ask him how he is. She doesn’t think it appropriate.
“I can see you today,” Piotr says. He sounds calm, almost businesslike. “This afternoon.”
“Can you hold?” she asks and takes a deep breath, covering the mouth of the receiver. She doesn’t want him to hear the uneasiness of her voice. She clears her throat.
“Sorry about that,” she says. He doesn’t say anything.
She could meet him in a downtown café, on the second floor of Dwór Wazów, right near the Town Hall. They could talk there, if that’s all right.
“That’s fine,” he says. His voice is not how she remembers it. But then, maybe she doesn’t remember it at all — not anymore.
“At two, then.” He puts the receiver down so fast that she hears the click right in her ear.
The truth is that she doesn’t quite know how she feels about him. There were times, right after his arrest, when she tormented herself with guilt. Each night, before falling asleep, she prayed for him, negotiated feeble but elaborate deals with fate in which good things would happen to him and erase the memory of her betrayal.
Her hand shakes when she puts on her makeup. The line she draws along her eyelids is too thick, smudgy. She has to wipe if off and start again. In the bathroom mirror her face looks frightened and compliant, and she doesn’t like it.
Anna notices Piotr at once, his blond curls, as thick as she remembers. He is sitting with his legs slightly apart, at a low marble table, staring at the floor. She watches when he raises his head and snaps his fingers in the air, summoning a waitress who arrives promptly. He says something to her and turns around to see who is coming in through the door. He looks strikingly handsome in an old-fashioned way — a black woollen jacket, scarf around his neck. Anna watches as he turns around, slowly looking over the faces of the passing women, discounting them one by one.
She has lived without him for so long that sometimes he hasn’t seemed altogether real. In Montreal, with William, she began to doubt that she had ever even loved him. It was easier to think of Piotr as part of her that she had outgrown. Now, when he is so close, she has to admit it was a cheap trick. Of course she had loved him once, of course he mattered. He still does.
He cannot see her; she is standing behind the enormous flower arrangement in the window, a high cupola of pale daisies with pink centres, which she, at first, believes artificial. She can’t stop herself from touching the pale petals. She lets his eyes wander away from the door and only then walks in. When he looks in her direction again, she waves her hand.
Piotr nods, but doesn’t smile. He stands up to greet her, and they shake hands. His hand is strong and dry, hers trembling and cold. He likes that, she can tell from a slight twist of his lips.