Necessary Lies(71)
In May of 1945 the people of Sattel gathered in their church for the last mass. It was dark and they lit the candles, but no one was able to say a word. So the priest led their silent prayers and the whole congregation, head touching head, responded in their hearts, without words. A few hours later that priest was killed by the guards; he was trying to smuggle the chalice.
In Weckelsdorf, the guards ordered all Germans to go away. They did. They left their houses, their furniture, their clothes, their china, and went, only to be turned back at the border. Without proper papers, without the international treaties that would give them a place to live, no one wanted them. “Go back where you came from and wait,” they were told. But when they got back to Weckelsdorf, now called Teplitz, their houses were already taken; their clothes and silver divided among those who moved in. So embarrassed the new owners were by this unexpected and unwanted return, that the Revolutionary Guard rounded the Germans up and took them away from the town, to the forest. When the guards got back into Weckelsdorf no one asked them what had happened. No one wanted to know. Only when a few months later relatives from Germany began their search, when through Red Cross they started their frantic inquiries, the mass grave in the forest was unearthed. And when the good judges from Nachod looked at the body of a small girl, crowning the heap of corpses, her stiff hands still raised, still pleading to be spared, they did not know what to say.
The villages of the Sudeten Germans are empty now. There is nothing left there but broken fences. Grass is growing through the floor boards of abandoned houses. Wood, when it is left outside, becomes grey and brittle from the sun and rain. The graves and the fields are overgrown with nettle, wild raspberries, and thyme. Some of the tombstones have crumbled, but you can still make out some names on them. Pohl, Honig, Navottny.
Anna folds the letter back, carefully. This is the day in which she will take things easily. A walk in the Tiergarten, a long, hot bath. She will be kind to herself, gentle. She needs all her strength now. Ursula is waiting for her.
The lower half of the café window is covered by a white lace curtain, suspended on a brass rod. Inside, Anna can see a ceiling fan making its endless rounds, brass lamps on the walls, and her own pale reflection. It is ten o’clock in the morning. She is standing in front of the milky glass doors of the Vamos café, waiting for a whiff of courage to take her in. “The waiter will tell you where I am,” Ursula’s message read. “Just ask to be seated at my table.”
Anna takes a deep breath of the air still moist from the morning rain. Walking has made her blood flow faster, but the residue of a headache is still there, the throbbing pressure in her forehead. At night she slept badly, waking every hour, dozing, waking up again. She was screaming at someone in her dream until her throat hurt. She was pushing at a grey, shapeless body that gave way under her hands, as if she were trying to move air.
Before coming here, she went through her clothes carefully, discarding them one by one. The jacket was too formal. The brown sweater too loose. It angered her that she was taking so long. “Does it really matter how you look?” she asked herself in front of the mirror, tossing her hair back, pinning it into a bun. All I want is to see her, she kept thinking. I know everything I want to know. I’m not like Piotr. What has happened, happened. I’ll get over it. To Marie, when she called her from Wroclaw, she even said that she had forgiven William. “He loved both of us,” she said. “At the same time.” It sounded very simple then, but words like these don’t mean much here.
“Just one look at Ursula,” she thinks, “and I’ll go home.”
Finally, she settled for a black wraparound skirt and a salmon-pink blouse with a black embroidered pattern that added warmth to her skin. And Babcia’s coral necklace. She let her hair loose again. It did matter, whether she wanted to admit it or not. It mattered to look her best. Now, as she is straightening her skirt, pulling on her blouse to smooth the front, she catches her own reflection in the glass window. The coral necklace coils around her neck, and she touches the smooth surface with the tip of her finger.
“Come this way, please. Frau Herrlich is waiting for you.” A waiter has a thin-lipped smile. He is swarthy and well built, and he gives Anna a knowing look, as if he guessed more than he was letting on, a thought that Anna dismisses as utter nonsense. Frau Herrlich. A line from one of Ursula’s letters flashes in Anna’s mind. I feel married to you in the most profound sense of the word.
The woman in a red crocheted vest who steps forward to greet her has a bushy mop of greyish curls; her thin face is flushed and drawn. She is rather short, shorter than Anna, even in her high heels. In her late forties, perhaps early fifties. William’s age. There is fatigue in the corner of her lips, a tiredness to her skin. Her mouth is too wide, her lipstick too dark.
“It’s good you’ve come,” she says in a raspy voice, turning away for an instant, to motion for the waiter. Her English is flawless, but Anna can detect a slight undertone of German. Right there, in the vowels that are a fraction too full, too rounded.
William, darling, you once said that only the extraordinary and the exaggerated interest me. That I have ceased to believe in ordinary human beings. Is this why you love me so much?
“So how do I measure up?” Ursula asks. The irony in her voice stings Anna, makes her take another look. There is a shadow of a smile on Ursula’s face, and something else, something intriguing, something that won’t be so easily dismissed. “Plain, but striking,” Anna’s mother would call it, and there would be, in her voice, however strained and reluctant, a layer of admiration for the force that could turn a plain face into a statement. It must be the eyes that do it, Anna thinks, hazel brown, watchful, and slightly haughty. Or the feline intensity that Ursula pours into each of her movements, the self-assured alertness of every turn.