Necessary Lies(7)
At the McGill library the man with ink-stained hands rose to leave. He asked Anna if she cared for his paper or if he should take it back to the rack.
“Please leave it,” she said. “And thank you.”
“You are welcome,” he said.
Solidarity gets tougher. It defies Moscow with a call for free unions in the Eastern Bloc and free Polish elections, she read. The newspaper columns grew more and more alarming. Military hospitals were being put up on the Soviet-Polish border. Troops were kept on standby alert, guns were loaded and routes to the Polish border were mapped out. The Warsaw Pact started its military exercises, Zapad 81 — West 81 — in the Gulf of Gdask. The deafening noise of a few hundred thousand soldiers, of tens of thousands of tanks, aircraft, and ships was heard for miles. The commentaries pointed out that Brezhnev’s words, We will not leave Poland alone to suffer, left no illusions as to the Soviet intentions. The Polish situation was threatening to the Warsaw Pact. Newsweek printed pictures of workers gathered around Walsa, their raised fingers forming the sign of a V; on the opposite page there was a photograph of Russian missiles, pointed west.
Refugee camps in Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece and Austria were filling up. Every day more Poles jumped ship, defected, extended their holidays abroad. Tens, hundreds of cars with Polish license plates arrived at the entrances to the camps, whole families poured out and pushed through the gates, terrified that there wouldn’t be enough space, that they would be turned out, told to go back. Inside, photographed and fingerprinted, they surrendered their passports for a room, food rations, and immigration interviews. Until the day when their names would appear on the list for a flight to the United States, Canada, or Australia they would wander the streets, looking hungrily at shop windows, at supermarket shelves, at colourful stalls filled with oranges, watermelons, peaches, and grapes.
Piotr would say that the West was merely panicking. That stories like that were exactly what the Communists wanted to frighten everyone into submission. That all the West really cared for was their fat asses, their precious market shares and interest on Eastern European loans. Haven’t they betrayed Poland in 1939, and then again at Yalta? She must not lose heart. Not now. Not when victory was so close at hand. When they finally, finally, had a fighting chance for a normal country.
“You are not thinking we could leave, are you? Like these cowards who beg the Austrians or the Italians to take them?”
“Are you?”
For Piotr, Anna composed her little descriptions of Montreal, the grey stone buildings of McGill, the beam of light travelling across the sky, rotating under greying clouds. Everything she saw excited her. By the time each day ended, its beginning was already a far-away memory. Transformed by the sounds of English and French, nothing around her was ordinary. Not even a simple walk along Sherbrooke Street, past chic Victorian townhouses with their art galleries and boutiques where the prices — mentally exchanged into Polish zlotys — multiplied into unreal, unattainable sums. Her eyes took it all in — the red brick fa?ades, the bay windows with black frames, the stores she didn’t dare to enter.
Along St. Catherine Street she felt more courageous. The carpeted interiors welcomed her with music, and she fingered the soft cotton of Indian summer dresses, asked to try on thick-soled brown leather sandals, wrapped a muslin shawl around her neck and then returned everything, guiltily, apologetic at not having the strength to curb her desires. Only on the Main, dizzied by the bargains of St. Laurent, where signs Two for a dollar were scribbled in black marker, did she really let her hands dive into the cardboard boxes spilling into the street, fishing out the splashes of colour, the promising shapes from which she concocted her new look.
That’s where she bought white, green, and yellow beads which, in the morning, she carefully braided into her long hair. That’s where she found the mauve cotton dress and black leather sandals with steel studs. Wire glasses, a round, grandmotherly type, gave her what she liked to think of as an artistic appearance. It suited her. It drew looks.
You would not believe it, darling, she wrote. It’s a world straight from pre-war Poland I thought I would never see. I heard haggling over prices, in Yiddish, and Polish. They still sell pickled herring, here, from barrels, wrapped in old newspapers! Measure out fabric with wooden rulers! Yesterday I saw Hassids in black coats and hats, their beards untouched by scissors and it was as if I were transported right into my grandmother’s Warsaw. They walked with their eyes cast down, to avoid temptations.
She rented an apartment on the corner of De Maisonneuve and Rue de la Montagne, right above a Hungarian restaurant that served spicy goulash and sp?tzle. Marie pointed out to her that the location was perfect. Anna could walk to McGill. Across the corner was a small Czech patisserie where she could have her morning coffee. Didn’t she just love the sweet pastries displayed on paper doilies, folded over glass shelves? The Czechs were Marie’s friends; she had interviewed them once for one of her radio programs. The owner defected in 1968, after the Russians invaded Prague and was now dividing his time between Montreal, the Laurentians, and Florida. To Marie he confessed that he no longer needed to bear the cold nor the humidity. Let the next generation sweat it out. He could afford his escapes.
Anna’s apartment consisted of a tiny kitchen, a bathroom, and two small rooms, furnished with an old sofa-bed, a dresser, a couple of bookshelves, and a grey Formica table with two plastic-covered chairs. In the closet Anna found a cardboard box with a rusted frying pan, a few books in Arabic with pages swollen from dampness, and a small coin with a square hole in it. The first day she made the mistake of leaving an opened cereal box on the counter, and found it swarming with cockroaches. This was a detail she did not include in her letters home.