Necessary Lies(82)
“They hate your guts,” she tells Ursula.
“What else is new,” Ursula says. “At least they don’t hide it.”
“Why are you doing it?”
“What?”
“Coming here, like this, to hire them. It’s not legal, is it?”
“Maybe it’s my atonement?” Ursula says. The car is speeding again and Anna clutches at the handle above the window. “They need money. I have an assignment. Lots of heavy stuff to drag around. Andrzej tells me they need the money to buy apartments in Poland, to start a business. Their families send them here. That’s the only way to end the life of five to a room, or chasing jobs that pay next to nothing and threaten to disappear.”
“Andrzej?”
“A guy who brought me here first, a filmmaker from Wroclaw. He used to sleep here with them, in his car. He has a good eye,” she laughs. “We might do a film together.”
Anna is relieved when they enter the city, when empty suburban streets with their lambent glows are left behind. The car turns into a tree-lined street and stops in front of a heavy, brownish building. Ursula turns her head to Anna, a slight twist, a half-turn.
“Come upstairs, to my place. I don’t want you to leave like that.”
“Please,” she adds, seeing that Anna lingers. “Do come!”
They climb the wide stairs with metal lace in between the steps. The stairs William climbed, Anna reminds herself as she follows Ursula past a spotless landing with its palm tree in a brown terra-cotta pot. But curiosity has already taken over, softened her.
The ceiling in Ursula’s apartment is high, stuccoed, like the Wroclaw apartment of Anna’s parents; but, here in West Berlin, there was no lack of money to care for it. “You know how Marx’s Capital got divided?” she remembers her father’s old joke, “The West got capital, we got Marx.” There are no cracks, no crude coats of paint over hardwood, the passage of time is camouflaged, muted. In Ursula’s living room, magazines and papers cover wide leather sofas. Ursula kicks off her shoes and walks into the long, narrow kitchen in which Anna glimpses the brown surface of wood cabinets and black tiles.
“Make us some room on the sofas,” Ursula says and Anna folds a newspaper, stacks a few magazines, enough to clear two spots, one for herself and one for Ursula who is moving swiftly, amid the clinking of glass.
This is a large room with walls almost empty but for two enormous photographs placed on the opposite ends of the room. One is a picture of a treetop, its green leaves dappled by the setting sun, its trunk hiding behind a concrete fence, behind the coils of barbed wire. On the opposite wall a carved quotation: So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.
There is not much of the furniture here apart from two sofas, just a few shelves, a wooden chest of drawers and a big television set — black, taking up the whole corner. Ursula comes in with a tray on which she has placed a green teapot in the shape of a pear, two cups, two glasses and a black bottle of Courvoisier.
“William,” Ursula says, “couldn’t look at it. I could see he always sat in such a way that he wouldn’t have to face it.”
“The quote? It is from Revelations, isn’t it?” Anna asks, looking at the picture of the carving, but even now she is wrong about him.
“The other one.” Ursula points to the one of the treetop. “I took it in Auschwitz,” she says. “From inside.”
Ursula settles cross-legged on the spot Anna has cleared for her, with her feet bare. Her toenails are painted bright red. She pours brandy into big glasses for both of them. A Yoga posture, Anna thinks. The beginning of all moves. She fixes her eyes on Ursula’s small frame, muscles stirring under the skin as she bends over to hand Anna the brandy. Gaze like that makes people uncomfortable, but Ursula seems oblivious to it, lighting a cigarette, drawing the smoke in, exhaling. Anna cannot stop thinking about the men in the parking lot, their eyes filled with contempt. One of them had a tiny gap between his two front teeth, just like Ursula’s. They still make her uneasy, the way they spat behind them as they walked back to their cars.
“Look here.” Leaning over the low coffee table Ursula spreads a pile of photographs that were lying on the side, black and white shots of pale, angry faces, raised fists with chains wound up around them.
“This is G?rlitz,” Ursula points to the shots of the demonstrators. “And Zgorzelec.” She pronounces the Polish name flawlessly, Anna thinks. Andrzej must be a good teacher.
A city split in half she tells Anna, by the post-war borders. When it was divided, the Germans got the town hall, the station, all municipal buildings, the zoo, the theatre, and main churches. The Poles got Oberlausitzer Gedenkhalle and the gas station. Tram tracks that led through bridges were poured over with concrete.
“I got a hint that that’s where World War III was brewing. When Poland opened its borders, four thousand ultra-right German youths descended on G?rlitz. The plan was to light the German ‘fires of warning,’ and then cross the border with the flames and light the fires in front of the Gedenkhalle. The German side was blocked with armoured cars and antiterrorist squads. They couldn’t get through,” Ursula says. “I went there with Andrzej. We filmed the whole scene. I tried to talk to them. It was like talking to ghosts. ‘German blood has been spilt into this land,’ the guy in a black shirt screamed right into my face. His chin was shaking.”