Necessary Lies(69)

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” her mother is ready to withdraw her question, to let things go unsaid — their old, preferred way.

“I was happy,” Anna says, too quickly. “We were happy.”

When she begins to cry, her mother takes her in her arms, as she did many years ago. Anna feels the warmth of her hand, gently stroking her hair, but the old childhood comfort is not there.

“You are still a young woman,” she hears her mother’s voice. “You have to start a new life.”

“Tak, Mamusiu,” Anna says. The childhood sealing of a promise, the hardest of them all.





PART V





BERLIN 1991



It is almost midnight and the Wroclaw Central Station is badly lit, parts of it drowning in darkness. The Plexiglas ceiling over the platforms is yellowed, the colour of nicotine stains. The Berlin Lichtenberg train is waiting already.

Anna is a bit teary after the warm goodbyes, the promises to write, to come back more often, but she is also calmer. As she was leaving, her father turned his head away from her to hide his red eyes.

The train is almost empty, so Yan leaves Anna at the platform with the luggage and scouts the compartments to find one with someone in it, and, as he has stressed, someone who is not going to get off before Berlin and leave her alone, an easy target.

When he waves to her from an open window, he is three cars away. He has found a woman in her late fifties, obviously relieved to have someone in the compartment again. Three gentlemen got off in Wroclaw, she says and she was afraid she would be alone. So now there will be two of them, two women travelling together. This is not the best choice, but better than being on her own.

“I’ll be all right,” Anna says, impatient with all this fuss.

“Your brother is right,” the woman says. She is wearing a pair of black pants and a pink angora cardigan. “This is no joke. I have heard they spray sleeping gas into the compartment, and then steal all the luggage.”

They have a berth to lie down and stretch their legs, the woman says. It’s not too bad. She has been taking this train three times a year, for the last five years. “Idzie wytrzyma,” she says. It can be endured.

Before he left, Yan gave Anna a roll of newspapers and magazines to read. My Style again, with its glossy photographs. “Like in the West, see,” he tells her, mockingly. The magazine is the creation of General Jaruzelski’s daughter who, under the martial law her father imposed, smuggled Solidarity leaflets in her father’s chauffered limousine.

“That’s real Poland for you,” Yan says.

In the train Anna leafs through an interview with a Polish actress, photographed in her mansion outside Warsaw, with her two children, her antiques, treasures salvaged from old barns and restored to their shining selves. “My husband travels a lot,” the actress confesses, “and only when he comes back the house is a home again. The children feel it; the dogs feel it. That’s when we are a true family.”

Anna tosses the magazine away from her. It falls on the floor, but she doesn’t pick it up. She opens a newspaper, her eyes stopping on a small note in the corner. Washington has removed Eastern Europe from its list of possible nuclear targets. Perhaps she should have left straight for Montreal. Her mother was right; it’s time to get on with her life. Time to forget.

Anna’s companion clears her throat. Her feet in white nylon slippers look swollen. She stretches them on a brown blanket. Her back hurts, she says. She has been to a few doctors, but they are no good.

“One should not transplant old trees,” she says, staring at the ceiling where a lamp protected by a metal grid is dimmed. She is lonely in Berlin, in her nice apartment. “My sister, all my neighbours are in Katowice. I see them only three times a year, now. Before, I saw them every day. In Germany neighbours don’t want to know you.”

The German route of the Polish exodus, Anna thinks, the hardest of them all. Ethnic Germans returning to their native land, often with just a few words of the Muttersprache, desperately searching for a translator, digging up family documents to find proof, any proof of their German origin. In the 70s and 80s even family shame — a father in the Wehrmacht, a grandfather’s name on the Volksdeutsch list — could become the chance of a lifetime. Old certificates were sewn into underwear or folded and placed inside hollowed heels, hidden from the prying eyes of the Polish border guards. Volkswagendeutsche, their Polish neighbours called them, but the name had an envious ring to it, a dose of bitter understanding.

“I shouldn’t have listened to him,” the woman sighs. “To my son,” she adds for Anna’s benefit.

Anna has heard of weeks spent in German camps, on squeaking beds, six to a room, filling out forms, answering questions, and then, waiting for the verdict on the sufficiency of bloodlines, on the merits of having been born in Schlesien, Pommern, Ostpreussen, Breslau, Osterode, Katowitz. All of it amid whispers about Neo-Nazi attacks, Molotov cocktails thrown into the barracks. Aussiedler aus Polen killed and wounded to celebrate Hitler’s birthday, and to remind them that blood doesn’t lie.

The woman on the train is telling Anna a joke she heard in Berlin. “A Norwegian, a Russian, a German, and a Pole are in a train,” she begins in a flat monotone. She must have repeated the joke many times. “The Norwegian takes out a piece of smoked salmon, takes two bites, opens the window and throws out the rest. ‘Don’t be surprised,’ he says to his companions. ‘It’s really good salmon. But in Norway we have too much of it.’ The Russian takes out a tin of caviar, eats a few spoonfuls, and throws the rest out of the window. ‘It’s wonderful, but we have too much of it at home,’ he says.”