Necessary Lies(67)

“So what do you want me to do?” she asks.

She will have to get a lawyer, give the power of attorney to someone she can trust. He wants to do it right. She can buy the apartment off, if she wants. He doesn’t mind. It will have to be renovated soon. The old piping is giving way. Communist piping, he says. Communist paint. Communist wooden doors that are now warping and cracking.

“All right,” Anna says. She will buy it, for her brother, for Adam. She will pay whatever price he asks. It doesn’t matter.

Piotr gives her his business card, from the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Advisor, she reads. Polish on the one side, English on the other. His home address is there, too, in the left corner. Pilczyce, a wealthy suburb of white villas with red tile roofs.

“Another glass of wine, Madam?” the waitress asks.

“Yes,” Anna says, “Yes, please.”

Piotr says that he took Hanka to Bodensee for the holidays. Hanka and little Wanda, who has just turned three. Anna tries to imagine him there, in Lindau, perhaps, with its ridiculous Rapunzel Tower that Wanda would have liked. She remembers her own disappointment. After Canadian lakes, Lake Constance seemed to her tame and manicured. William agreed. They were merely passing it, on the way to the Alps.

Piotr tells her that he now lives in a house with a big garden where Hanka grows flowers.

“Violets are in bloom now.” he says, “But the crocuses are all gone.”

“So you are happy” she says. “Everything turned out all right.”

The struggle is over, she is trying to tell him. You’ve done it, Piotr, you have won your revolution. It is a different time now, a time to understand, a time to reconsider. Perhaps even forgive.

“My, how you’ve changed,” he says. On his lips, this is an accusation — as if only remaining constant mattered. Would she think like that if she had stayed here? Somehow this doesn’t seem possible, but she may be deluding herself.

He is finishing his beer, draining the last drops. When the glass is empty, he looks at her. He has been waiting for this moment for a long time. “Everything turned out all right,” her words are ringing in the air, less and less convincing with each passing second.

“What did you think?” he says, and his words are meant to hurt. “That I am still mourning your betrayal?”

“No,” she says, quickly. “No. That’s not what I mean. I’ve always hoped things would turn out fine for you.”

“And if they have?” he asks with a smile she doesn’t like, a grimace of a smile, a twist of the upper lip, somewhere on the edge of contempt and indifference. “Why should that make you feel any better?”

“I don’t have to feel sorry for you, Piotr,” she says.

He hasn’t expected it. He was sure she would take it all, in silence. She can see his face change, redden. She has made him angry. He draws the air into his lungs with a hiss.

“I used to feel so guilty,” Anna doesn’t stop. “So guilty. I thought I should beg you for forgiveness. I knew I couldn’t live here, but I could understand you. I believed that one day you would understand me. But you won’t . You won’t even try, Piotr. You think that because I live in the West nothing I’ve learned matters. Nothing.”

He leans toward her. “War makes a lot of things simpler, Anna,” he says. “In prison you lose quite a few illusions. Know who your real friends are. You’ve made your choice, so don’t come here asking for forgiveness.”

“I’m not asking for forgiveness, Piotr” she says. “But I thought you might understand.”

It occurs to her that once she has agreed that she has betrayed him, little is still possible. Maybe she was too quick with penance, she thinks, but such offerings cannot be taken back easily. She can hear him breathe; she can hear the air pass through his nostrils. She can see the deepening frown on his forehead.

“This is the real end of the war.” Piotr says. “We knocked down the Wall, and we will no longer be shoved aside. The West will have to make room for us at the table.”

She is watching him as he speaks, but he avoids her eyes.

“Chernobyls were a bit harder for the West to ignore than the Gulags,” he continues with a note of satisfaction. “The Iron Curtain could not stop the wind and rain.”

She is still silent.

“Soon you may again find yourself on the wrong side of the tracks,” he adds. “But, hey, you know how to switch sides, don’t you. You can always come back.”

She thinks: You have won, Piotr. You have been rewarded. What else do you want?

When he stands up, he takes out his wallet from his breast pocket and leaves two banknotes on the white plate, underneath the bill folded inside a white napkin.

“It’s my treat,” he says and then looks at her. He still needs her eyes to confirm his victory.

Anna watches him disappear behind closing doors. The waitress comes by to pick up the check and the folded bills. “Please, keep the change,” Anna says. It is then that she knows she will have to see Ursula, after all.


This is her last evening at home. Yan has taken Basia and Adam back to their apartment, and he will be back in an hour to take her to the station. Alone. It’s too late and too chilly for Tata to leave home and he would refuse to stay if Mama decided to go.