Necessary Lies(72)
When the waiter comes by, he says something funny, for Ursula laughs, a throaty, warm laugh. Her laughter is a challenge, an overture. The waiter gives her an admiring look. William must have loved that about her, the power to draw looks like his. Anna knows how he liked to have his desires confirmed.
Ursula asks for a coffee and a shot of vodka. “What do you want?” she turns to Anna, and Anna asks for a glass of red wine. It really is much too early for a drink, but she might need it. The edges of her eyelids hurt and when she blinks a thin, foggy veil appears between her and Ursula. She keeps blinking until it goes away.
When the waiter leaves them, silence is broken only by the snap of metal against metal. Ursula opens and then closes the shiny brass lock of her purse. She opens it again and this time she takes out a red packet of Dunhills. She holds a cigarette in her hand without lighting it.
The café has booths with soft upholstered seats; high panelling separates them from people sitting at other tables. The voices that reach Anna’s ears are sharp, decisive. She would like to be able to understand them, but William had always discouraged her whenever she talked of learning German. “It’s French you need here. Look what’s happening around you.”
“I still can’t believe William’s dead.” Ursula tosses her head backwards, looks at the ceiling. Her voice cracks, softens. She is hot; she takes off the red crocheted vest and sits in her black silk blouse, fanning her neck. “You don’t smoke, do you? Do you mind?” she asks, and then lights a cigarette and takes a long, hungry drag, smudging the brown filter with her lipstick.
“No,” Anna says. “I don’t mind.”
The waiter brings a white coffee-pot and a cup on a tray, and makes room for them on the table. Vodka arrives in a short greenish glass, beside a peace of dark pumpernickel bread with butter on a small plate. Ursula drinks her vodka in one gulp and bites into the bread. This is the way men drink in Poland, Anna thinks, with a grimace — a shiver as the burning liquid goes down — followed by a smile of relief. Vodka loosens the tongues, they say. Shows your true nature. The wine Anna ordered has a rich ruby colour, and it slides down her throat with ease she is grateful for.
“I learned to drink vodka in your country,” Ursula laughs. She pours cream into the coffee and stirs it fast. There is a paper doily between the cup and the saucer, and Anna watches as it slowly absorbs the drops of coffee that spill from the sides.
A Polish woman and a refugee, Willi? Isn’t she another one of your atonements?
“I haven’t come here to blame you.”
Anna has rehearsed this sentence a hundred times until she could say it smoothly, without hesitation. This is what she decided on, back in Wroclaw. Earlier, when she was still bitter, she was to say other things, “I have come to understand. I want to know why he lied to me and why you went along with his lies.” But she has changed, now. Unlike Piotr, she has put her past behind her, and she is ready to forget.
There are freckles on Ursula’s hands, light brown spots Anna stares at. She can feel the shape of the chair imprinting itself on her back as she leans backward. She has an uneasy feeling that Ursula is studying her, that with each glance of her hazel eyes she knows her twice as well as she had a minute before, that soon Anna will have nothing to hide.
She can picture them together, this woman who is sitting in front of her, her eyes reddened by strain, and William, in Berlin, Munich, London, the Alps. William in his tweed jacket with suede patches on the elbows, Ursula’s hand brushing hair out of his eyes. They are laughing, drunk on stolen time, on weeks of scheming, imagining what they would say to each other when they meet, going over each precious minute. Weeks brightened by furtive phone calls, notes scribbled fast, lips pressed to pieces of paper before they were slipped into white envelopes. In the Alps Anna can imagine Ursula and William skiing, trying to overtake one another in the powdery plume of snow. Or making love in a wide pine bed, in one of the Bavarian houses with their stained wood balconies, garlands of flowers painted around windows, steep red tiled roofs. William’s hand caressing Ursula’s breasts, her nipple between his fingers. So long; it went on for so long. Marilyn? What was she doing then? What was she thinking? And Julia?
“Why would you want to blame me?” Ursula asks.
With all her rehearsals, Anna hasn’t prepared herself for that. She doesn’t quite know what to say. Ursula raises her voice slightly.
“He made his own decisions. Why would I be responsible?”
“So it didn’t matter to you that he had to lie?” There is an edge to Anna’s voice, now. “First to Marilyn, and then to me.”
“He didn’t have to lie, Anna.” Ursula’s fingers tap on the table when she says it. “I certainly never asked him to. He was a coward. I loved him in spite of it.”
Now she is extinguishing the cigarette stub, pressing it with her thumb to the bottom of the glass ashtray.
This is another disappointment. Somewhere, however unacknowledged the desire, Anna was expecting a reward for what she considers her magnanimity. She has come here promising herself that there will be no more accusations, and now she is being diverted, led back into the apportioning of blame.
“Listen,” Ursula says. “I don’t want to keep hurting you. There is no point.”
She bends down and takes a manila envelope from a plastic bag that was lying on the seat beside her. “This is what he left behind. I meant to mail it to you, but...”