Читать книгу Necessary Lies - Eva Stachniak - Страница 6

Piotr would say that she was betraying Poland already.

He wouldn’t mean that Anna had become besotted by Canadian comfort, by supermarkets overflowing with food, by the glittering lights of Montreal office towers she described for him in such detail in her letters. He wouldn’t even mean the ease with which she showered her praises over the smallest things. Strangers smiling at her. Cars stopping to let her cross the street, mowed lawns moistened by humming sprinklers, a man on Sherbrooke Street bending to scoop up after his dog.

Piotr would tell her that the signs of her betrayal were far deeper and far more troubling. He would say that she had let fear creep into her heart. He would be right.

September of 1981. The time Poland was on everybody’s lips.

After the unrepentant strike of 1980 in the Lenin Shipyards of Gdask, Solidarno grew stronger in defiance. The whole world was flooded with images of the grim, determined faces of the striking workers in blue overalls, crossing themselves and kneeling at the feet of makeshift altars; above them hovered the concerned smile of the Polish Pope. Books on the Polish August, on the first independent labour union in Eastern Europe — or rather, as certain commentators knowingly stressed, Central Europe — piled up in storewindows. The triumphant smile of Lech Walsa, his hand holding a giant cross and a red pen with the Black Madonna of Czstochowa, followed Anna as she walked the Montreal streets. A thirty-seven-year-old unemployed electrician, the papers glowed, had defied the Kremlin. “We want to show the world that we exist,” he said at a conference in Geneva, and then stood patiently when hundreds of labour delegates lined up to shake his hand.

That Anna was in Montreal at all was a miracle. In Poland she taught literature in the Department of English at the University of Wroclaw. She had applied for a scholarship to England to research emigré writers, but was told to wait for her turn. The Canadian scholarship was one of these unexpected offerings from fate. “You would have to leave in August,” the Dean’s secretary said when she called Anna at home late in the evening, “they start their academic year in September.”

Piotr was looking at her from his armchair, eyebrows raised. She pointed at the ceiling in a gesture of bewilderment.

“Someone screwed up,” she heard in the receiver. “As usual. They just called us from the Embassy. They need someone from humanities, right away. Are you going?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I’m going.”

Six months in a good library was a long time. “Any good library,” she said to Piotr as he pulled her toward him, his fingers making tunnels in her thick hair, caressing the nape of her neck. She was piling up her reasons. She was already twenty-eight and had never even been to the West. Even if she saved a hundred dollars from her stipend, at the black market prices it would mean twenty times their salary. And she, too, needed a break, a few months of respite from the line-ups, the constant strikes and protests. Anyway, by February, when the winter semester started at the Wroclaw University, she would be back, wouldn’t she?

He was mouthing her name, whispering it into her ear. “Go,” she could hear him say. She felt the edge of the armchair against her hip. His lips tickled her, made her laugh. He would just miss her, that’s all.

“Couldn’t you go with me?” she asked him then, even if she already knew the answer. Now? When all was being decided? When the fate of Poland was on the line?

Anna piled up her daily portion of newspapers and magazines on a table in the reading room of the McLennan Library at McGill. The Gazette, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time. It was an oak table with metal legs, its edges polished by generations of wrists and elbows. Long commentaries in Newsweek and Time calmly analysed Polish chances, printed diagrams describing the position of Russian tanks and East German troops, and included colourful tables that listed all previous attempts to shake off Communist rule: East Berlin, the Hungarian Uprising, the Prague Spring, the Polish revolts of 1956, 68, 70, 76. All of them in vain.

She didn’t have to be reminded of that.

Yet another bloodshed? Letters quivered in front of her eyes, and she looked away. The fingers of the young man across from her who was reading Le Devoir were blackened with ink. In his last letter Piotr reminded her once again that the Communists could not arrest ten million people. That the prisons would burst at the seams.

The man, his young, square face tanned the colour of sunset, must have seen her look at his hands, for he took a crumpled tissue from his pocket and began wiping off the ink. She blushed as he smiled at her, embarrassed by the depth of her curiosity that made her stare at people here as if they were not quite real and wouldn’t mind.

“The New York Times is even worse,” he said. “You need gloves to read it.”

It was evening already, but on this side of the Iron Curtain, cities did not surrender to darkness. Even from where she was Anna could spot the glow of the store-windows on Sherbrooke Street. On her last day in Wroclaw, Piotr took her out for a drink. They parked their tiny Polish Fiat near the Town Hall and walked in darkness to the wine bar they used to go to when they were students. Piwnica -widnicka,- widnicka Cellar. They sat at a table, its top sticky with spills, the ashtray overflowing with cigarette stubs. A waitress came by, carrying bottles of beer in a wicker basket. There was no wine. The beer was warm.

Piotr demanded she clean their table first.

“I have no cloth with me,” she snarled.

“Then go and get one,” he said.

That was Piotr all over. Left to herself, Anna would have shrugged her shoulders and wiped the table. Emptied the ashtray onto the dirty plates stacked on the table next to them. Why bother? Now, the waitress would only make them wait. But Piotr never thought of consequences. There was no selection to his battles, she often thought. In streetcars he demanded to see the identification of the ticket inspector before producing his crumpled ticket. For years he wrote endless letters of complaint to the administracja, the elusive owner of the building in which they bought the permission to convert a part of the loft into an apartment. Complained about the crushed vodka bottles in the hallway. Stolen milk from outside their door. Low water pressure. Missing light bulbs in the corridors.

She admired it in him, really, thought it a far superior quality of character than her own willingness to ignore what bothered her. This tenacity, this refusal to give up when she would have waved her hand and went about her own affairs.

When she met Piotr, she was barely seventeen.

After classes, in the school washroom, she lengthened her eyelashes with black mascara, and spread a touch of lipstick on her cheeks to make them, look flushed. Her flaxen hair, always unruly, tangled when she brushed it. She unpinned the school badge from her arm. Her friends were already waiting for her on the Partisans’ Hill, where they always met to talk and smoke, looking out for teachers who would have liked to catch them transgressing. Report them to their parents. Lower their behaviour mark.

Piotr Nowicki came to meet them on Partisans’ Hill. He was a friend of a friend, Daniel said with an air of mystery about him, a law student with “political connections.” He was “to sound them out. Make sure they could be trusted.” It was January of 1968. The students were beginning to stir.

Partisans’ Hill was right by the city moult. A park with a cream-coloured pavilion and empty old fountains with rusted pipes blocked by slime. The boys bragged of knowing where the entrance was to the underground bunkers. Even claimed to have broken the chained lock once and gone in, but Anna did not believe them. On Partisans’ Hill, in 1945, when Wroclaw was still German and was called Breslau, the Nazi defence had its headquarters. When the Red Army came too close, General Niehoff moved to the basement of the University library. Festung Breslau — that fanatical Nazi stronghold, Anna was to be reminded every 6^th of May — defended itself longer than Berlin itself.

It was a cold January afternoon, the air misty and damp; they were huddling under the pillared roof, six of them — Daniel, Basia, Andrzej, Hanka, and her, Anna — smoking, waiting for Piotr. She spotted him first, walking in the wet, melting snow, past the empty fountain, his dark blond hair clinging to his forehead and to his pale cheeks. He walked slowly, hands in his pockets, whistling softly to himself. She wanted to brush the dripping curls off his face, kiss the rain off his lips. He didn’t see them yet, or maybe just pretended not to see. With the corner of her eye she saw him stop, raise his face to the sky and open his mouth to catch the falling flakes.

It was an awkward meeting. Hands were shaken, promises exchanged. He thought them all mere schoolchildren, babies with mothers’ milk smeared over their faces, playing at danger. The cigarettes were silly, he said. So was the make-up, the lipstick. “Why draw attention to yourselves over such trifles?” he asked. “How is that supposed to help?”

Daniel was the first to drop his cigarette to the ground and step on it. It sank into a melting snow. Andrzej followed suit. Hanka wiped the lipstick from her lips with a handkerchief. It didn’t quite come off. It left a red stain behind.

Piotr told them that all the Polish students wanted were the rights guaranteed in the Polish constitution, confirmed by international treaties. “For what we now have is a mockery,” he told them, in a feverish whisper, “A pyramid of lies.”

She thought: He isn’t looking at me. He doesn’t care for anything but politics.

“We have enough,” he continued. In Warsaw, the Communists closed the performance of Dziady, in the National Theatre and the milicja attacked the students who placed flowers in front of the monument of its author, Adam Mickiewicz, proving that in this “new and just Poland” even the greatest Polish romantic poet was not immune from persecution! Soon, there would be protest everywhere. Dormitories were stocking up on food and candles. Underground presses were printing leaflets that someone had to distribute. There were proofs of harassment to publish. Of unlawful arrests. Of deaths.

“These are difficult times,” he also said, his voice turning grave as if he were their teacher admonishing a warning. “There will be provocations. You have to keep your heads clear, watch out for informers. It’s not a joke.”

She thought: He will go away now, and I won’t see him again. She watched his lips as he spoke, pale from the cold.

One by one they were sworn to secrecy. Anna saw Piotr was impatient to go, looking at his watch. They were small fry, not much help could be expected of them. This meeting was more a sign of good will than real action. A groundwork for the future.

“Right,” Piotr said turning to Daniel. “I’ve got your number. I’ll contact you when I need help.”

“Wouldn’t it be safer if you called me?” she said in a moment of inspiration on which she was to congratulate herself for years afterwards. “You could pretend you were asking me for a date.”

He turned to her before she had finished the sentence and smiled for the first time. It was a funny sort of smile, the smile one gives to a child’s antics.

“Sure,” he said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

She gave him her telephone number, scribbled it on a page torn from her notebook. She went home thinking: He will call me. She wanted to sing it, to chant it as she skipped on the granite tiles of the pavement. At home she pinned her hair up and took off her glasses. Her profile, she decided, was not her strong feature. There was a slight backbite to her jaw that she did not like. She looked far better with her hair loose, curling along her cheeks.

She kissed the mirror. She baked a plum cake.

“What’s the occasion?” her father asked.

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “I had a good day at school.”

Piotr called her that same evening, far less sure of himself than he was on Partisans’ Hill. All he wanted to do, he fumbled, was to check if the number was right.

“Yes, it is,” she said and waited.

To check, he continued, if perhaps, she wouldn’t mind seeing him. To discuss things, procedures, in case there was an emergency. For a coffee, perhaps. She liked the hesitation in his voice, the hint of insecurity. Delighted at her own power, she was not going to make it any easier for him.

“What if one of my teachers sees me” she asked, her voice as casual as she could make it. “You know we are forbidden to go to cafés. Wouldn’t it be drawing unnecessary attention to myself?”

“No,” he said. “Yes. It doesn’t have to be a café,” he said.

She pressed her lips to the receiver before she put it down. Then she blew him a kiss, in the direction of the window, Central Station, the Town Hall.

For two long months they met in various places, on Partisans’ Hill, down by the statue of Cupid on a brass horse, by the milk bar in - wierczewskiego street. Piotr brought her books to read, handed them to her like treasures, like bouquets of flowers. The Plague, Caligula, The Trial, tyranny and evil exposed, observed, stripped of its disguises. Then he gave her the Parisian edition of Arthur Koestler’s Memoirs and Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind, so that she would understand the power of propaganda, the temptations of betrayal.

He fumed about Sartre then, angered at the blindness of a great mind. The gravest disappointment was when intelligence did not suffice. How could a philosopher be so blind, he asked, a man who saw so much elsewhere? How could he defend Stalinism, dismiss reports of terror and the Gulags, turn a blind eye to so much suffering?!

“Because it was happening to someone else,” she offered her explanation. “Because it was far away?”

He was not convinced. “It’s too simple, maleka, my little one,” he said, frowning. “There must have been other reasons.”

She may have wanted to kiss that frown away from his forehead, but she knew how to wait.

He insisted on walking her home, on taking her upstairs, to the doors of her parents’ apartment. When they reached the second floor landing, he made her ring the bell right away, pressing her hand to the brass button.

She thought: Why don’t you kiss me? What are you afraid of?

She waited.

He kissed her a month later. Two months later they were lovers. “This is,” he whispered, his face buried in her hair, “what I was afraid of.”

She was not afraid. For weeks she walked with a knowing smile on her lips, shrugged her shoulders when boys shot her looks at the vaulted school corridors covered with layers of beige paint. “Puppies,” she thought, her lips pouting. What was happening to her was serious. It was real love.

She had to sneak by the concierge at his dormitory, bending to pass underneath the counter, his hand tousling her hair. His three roommates would leave, obligingly, leaving their smell behind them. The sour smell of cigarette smoke, spilled beer, and something else, a strong smell of young men, restless, far away from home. All they had was two hours. Two hours to be alone, two hours for the world to shrink into a narrow bed covered with a rough grey blanket and their naked bodies. Two hours of nothing but love.

She was intoxicated with the daring that grew in her. “What’s happening to you?” her mother asked. “You should be studying. I need your help around the house.” Babcia, her grandmother, was no longer alive, there was no one to stand in lines for food, to cook and to clean. They all had to contribute now. There were no excuses.

When Dziadeky her grandfather, died, Babcia took his body to the Powzki cemetery on the outskirts of Warsaw. “That’s where I want to rest, too,” she had said. Wroclaw she didn’t trust. It felt too German to her. Too transient. Land that had changed hands could be changed again. “Who knows how long before the Germans come back to take it all away?” That’s where she was buried, too, next to her husband. In Polish soil.

Anna hurried with the dishes, whirling through the kitchen like a fury, impatient with all that could stop her. She hovered over the telephone, determined to be the first one to answer it. From time to time her father gave her a knowing smile, but she knew he would never tease or embarrass her. If at any time it was he who answered the phone, he would never ask who Piotr Nowicki was the way her mother would.

“A friend,” was all she was prepared to say. She would tell them more when she was ready. But only then.

In March, Piotr was given leaflets to take to the students at the Politechnika. This was the real beginning, he said, when Anna came to see him at the dorm. This time they hurried; there was no time but for a kiss. The leaflets were in two bundles. An explanation of the need for action, a call for peaceful protests and for a Poland-wide student strike if necessary. He put the bundles into his shoulder bag.

“Give them to me,” she said. “They won’t search a schoolgirl.”

He hesitated.

“Come on,” she said. “Give them to me.”

She washed all traces of mascara from her eyes and tied her hair into a ponytail, a thick flaxen curl between her shoulder blades. Pinned the school badge to her left arm, smoothed the sleeves of her uniform. Let her glasses slide down her nose. She could look fourteen when she wanted, innocence itself.

“Give them to me.”

He didn’t look at her when she took the bundles from his bag and pushed them into her school satchel. For the first time it occurred to her that he might be scared, but she dismissed the thought at once. Not Piotr, not him.

At the last moment she put a jar of jam and a loaf of bread into his bag. And then she rolled the newspapers that were lying on the table and added them.

“Just keep cool,” he whispered into her ear and offered her a shot of vodka. She drank it and felt nothing but warmth, not even a turn in her head. He had two shots, one after another and gave her a mint candy to disguise the smell.

The first time the milicja patrol approached them she did keep cool. They had discussed the best tactics before and Piotr was now doing his part, leaning on her shoulder, his body heavy and limp. She gave the men a helpless smile, a smile of a woman left to carry her burden, an old dance of the sexes. They had counted on that. On their laughter at his mumbling voice.

“Just don’t be angry with me, little sister,” Piotr pleaded with drunken insistence. “Can a man not have a drink in this country anymore without a woman screaming at him?”

“Wait till Mother sees you,” she yelled and gave his body a shove. “She will teach you a lesson.” That’s when the milicja men laughed.

Later, far from their sight, Piotr heaved his body straight. “Bastards,” he said and she watched his upper lip tremble. “Bloody pigs.”

The second time they were stopped, the two men in blue uniforms with set jaws in their pale faces emerged from around the corner before they had time to do anything.

“Documents!” they barked and then stood, feet apart and looked at them as they fumbled for their I.D.s. Anna handed hers first, to the shorter one. Slowly his eyes travelled from her face to the photograph in her school identification. Piotr, she had noted, handed his internal passport, not his university I.D. “What’s in this bag?” the taller one asked, pointing at Piotr’s shoulder.

“Nothing,” Piotr said. “Groceries. We’ve just done some shopping.”

“Open it up!”

The bag slid onto the pavement. Piotr kneeled to open it and took out the jam, the bread. The newspapers.

“Student?” The shorter one was taking over.

“Yes.”

“Where are your books then, Mr. Student? Aren’t we supposed to be learning? Aren’t we supposed to study hard?”

“At the dorm,” he said. “I left them at the dorm.”

“Is that so, Mr. Student? Or maybe we needed some room to carry other things than books?”

Anna stood motionless, staring at them, watching their every move. Think, she told herself. They are going to beat him up. Think! If she didn’t clear her throat, she would choke.

“A nice girlfriend. A lucky bastard, too!” the taller was looking at her now. The shorter one spit on the pavement, the white blob landing at Piotr’s feet. Glass cracked. Kicked, Piotr’s bag landed a few feet away. The milicja men laughed. Their knuckles tensed on the handles of the white night-sticks. “Let’s see how lucky you really are!”

She could see, with a corner of her eye, that the sinews in Piotr’s neck were tensing up. He would say something now, she knew it, say something that would make the men strike. Call them pigs. Moscow lackeys. Quote his constitutional rights. Then they would be arrested, searched. She had to stop it, right away. Now.

“Him!” It was the contempt in her voice that caught their attention. “He’s no longer my boyfriend. And he is no longer a student. He failed his exams.”

“Third time,” she said and laughed. “Failed for the third time.”

She was counting on the power of their contempt, on the slight chance that they might dismiss Piotr as not worthy of their effort. She was not taking into account the simple fact that she was humiliating Piotr. Such deliberations required time. She felt the men’s eyes slide up and down her face, her breasts, her belly. She was waiting, a soft smile on her lips. Anything that might tip the scales in Piotr’s favour.

The shorter man, who was holding her ID in his hands, had been staring at her picture for some time now, but did not write anything down. A golden ring on his finger glimmered in the sun.

“Shouldn’t you be at school right now?” the taller man finally said, and she knew that she had won. He was returning her school I.D.

“That’s where I’m going,” she said, taking it and putting it in her pocket. Her school was, indeed, a few streets away. “Only now I’ll be late.”

“Scram, you piece of shit!” the taller milicja man said to Piotr. “And don’t let me catch your ass around here again.”

She was so proud of herself, so relieved that it was all over, that she never noticed his silence. As soon as they turned around the corner he took her bag from her and told her to go to school right away. She tried to protest, but he said he had no time for any nonsense. It was only when he didn’t call her that evening that she realized the enormity of her defeat.

You fool, she said to herself. You damn fool. What have you done?

Anna went to Piotr’s dorm a few times, left messages with the three roommates who swore to tell Piotr she had come by. She cried so much that in the morning she had to put cold compresses on her eyes before she could face her mother, but even that did not help much. “It’s all that reading,” she lied. “Studying for the exams.”

A few days later, Daniel brought her a note, slipped it to her in the math textbook. The note was from Piotr. In Warsaw, during a protest against repressions, the students were beaten up by the milicja, right in front of the University. That was the spark they were all waiting for. Now, Piotr was inside the Politechnika. The Wroclaw students demanded to be heard. He was not going to call her, for all calls were monitored and he didn’t want to put her in danger. She was to wait and trust him. He knew what had to be done.

In the school bathroom where she went to read Piotr’s note she burst into tears. She cried again, on Partisans’ Hill where Daniel patted her on the shoulders and kept saying that Piotr would be all right. But she was not crying from fear. She was crying from happiness. Piotr had forgiven her. She had not destroyed his love.

Soon it became clear that the student revolt had turned into one more defeat, a handy excuse for the government to start another internal purge. The Communist Party had no trouble convincing the workers that the spoiled “brats” from universities were forgetting who was the ruling class in Poland. Whose sweat was paying for their education? As to their demands and criticisms — some were justified. It was not the Communist Party, however, that was at fault, but the Jews. Weren’t they responsible for the Stalinist rule? Weren’t they infiltrating the party ranks? The Jews who never truly supported Poland, never cared for her? If only they would leave, all would be better off. Poland was for true Poles only. The students were misguided at best.

When the strikes and protests were over, the interrogations began. “Why did you do it? Who told you to start it? When? Give us names, more names. That’s your only chance.” Piotr knew the questions by heart, prepared himself with answers. Rehearsed them with Anna, debated the merits of giving the names of known informers or perhaps not mentioning any names at all. Many of their friends were kicked out of the university, barred from all but the most menial jobs, and most of their Jewish friends had already been told to leave.

Newspaper columns filled with code words, foreign element, cosmopolitanism, internationalism. Suspicious words, alien, not Polish. “No one is keeping you here,” the commentaries declared. “Leave. Go to Israel. Isn’t it what you always wanted?” Piotr was interrogated and arrested. Taken from his dormitory room in hand-cuffs. Daniel called. He told Anna to write to Piotr’s father in Kraków.

This is when Anna learned Piotr’s father was not just a doctor, but a well-known heart surgeon whose skills had a price beyond money.

“Please,” he said and his voice when he called her sounded just like Piotr’s. “I have to know everything before I start asking for favours. It is absolutely essential to establish how much they know.”

She agreed to meet him. Her own parents still knew nothing of Piotr. She wanted no comments from her mother that she was still before her matura and university entrance exams, that there were eight candidates for each place at the Department of English. That if she didn’t do well, very well, her whole future would suffer.

Dr. Nowicki waited for her in the Monopol Hotel, in -widnicka street. He won her over at once, with his resemblance to Piotr in spite of the grey in his hair, with his concern for his “foolish” son, a concern, she decided, mixed with admiration.

“He is just like me,” he said, smiling, holding her hand up and kissing it. There was a smell of Old Spice aftershave around him. She knew it; her father used it, too. In her best olive green dress and with her glasses hidden in her purse, she was worthy of his son.

“Please forgive me for imposing myself on you. Piotr should have brought you to Kraków, to introduce us properly. Now, circumstances make their own demands.”

She wished she had not taken off her glasses. As he sat across from her at the table, she could not see the fine details of his face.

This was not the first time he had to come to his son’s rescue, Dr. Nowicki began. But he was not blaming Piotr. Far from it. It was all Communism’s fault, he said.

“Bullshit,” she would hear Piotr say later. “Of course he blamed me. His methods, of course, are so much more superior to mine, right? All he has to do is to cut open a few party bosses and then ask for a small favour in return.”

But that was to come later. Then, at the Monopol Hotel, Dr. Nowicki was still investigating the situation that he admitted was very unpleasant and delicate. “You see, Pani Aniu? he said, “This is not the first time I’m doing it.”

“I know,” she said.

She did know. Why would anyone, she once wondered, come to live in Wroclaw? Come here from Kraków, of all places, that rare Polish city untouched by the war, saved by a miracle that, depending on who was describing it, involved a German art-lover, a Russian marshal, or wet and sabotaged explosives. Leave a city where generations of Polish kings lay buried in the vaults of the Wawel Castle, where in St. Mary’s church a trumpeter stopped his bugle-call in mid note in memory of a Tartar arrow that pierced the throat of his predecessor, centuries ago. Leave to come here, to Wroclaw, this city without a past, where history ended with the desperate Nazi defence of Festung Breslau.

Her own parents came to Wroclaw because Warsaw was bombed and destroyed. They stayed because this is where they got their jobs. There always had to be reasons, reasons to come here and ever better reasons to stay.

“I got into trouble,” Piotr said. He told her how, with his two friends, he went to the country and bought a pig. “Then,” he said, leaning toward her, his eyes still sparkling at the thought, “we painted it red and let it out. During the May First parade. Right underneath the tribune, all their fat party leaders standing at attention.”

“You did what?” she asked. She couldn’t stop laughing. He watched her, smiling, pleased with himself, so very much pleased.

“Wasn’t easy, you know. We had to bribe the peasant with a bottle of vodka to sell it. He said we didn’t look like the types who would know what to do with a pig. Then we had to bring the beast to Kraków, in Father’s old car. But, ah, it was worth it. The looks on people’s faces! You should have seen it!”

She wished she had. It was a story she loved to hear, the picture filling out with each retelling. The pig squeaking, running in circles. The stinking car that had to be washed and aired for days. The red faces of the “pompous fools” on the tribune.

“How did they find out it was you?”

“Someone squealed,” he said, winking at her. Someone saw them, heard the noise. The police found the paint in his room. They were blacklisted, thrown out of Jagiellonian University.

“My father had to pull a few strings to get me to school here,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

That’s what attracted her then, this recklessness that seemed to know no fear. “As if there were no tomorrow,” her grandmother would have said, with a sigh.

Now, Piotr’s father was telling her of his vigil in front of the Party secretary’s office. Of his pleas to let his son continue with his studies. Of biting his tongue when he was lectured on how badly he had brought him up.

She told Piotr’s father all she knew. About Daniel. About the leaflets. About the nights spent at the Politechnika. Dr. Nowicki listened and nodded. Sometimes he asked questions. He asked, for instance, if Daniel was likely to testify.

“Daniel is all right,” she said. “Nobody interrogated him.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

No, she wasn’t sure, but Daniel never said anything about any interrogation. Never seemed worried or upset at school.

“Good,” Piotr’s father seemed relieved, too. He asked for Daniel’s phone number, though, and she gave it to him. That, too, would later make Piotr very angry. She had no right. She broke the first rule of conspiracy. “I gave it to your father, Piotr,” she said.

“You shouldn’t have,” he said. “Not even to my father.”

The results of Dr. Nowicki’s visit were visible within a few days. Piotr was interrogated, but he was never beaten. His file was quietly shelved. A plain clothes policeman gave him a stern lecture on his responsibilities toward his fatherland, a warning not to get mixed up again with the wrong crowd.

“Fuck you, Pig,” Piotr said.

The policeman chose not to hear him. “Kiss your father’s hand when you see him,” he said. “To thank him that your mouth is still on your face.”

That was his second humiliation. It was the one that almost killed their love.

After his release, Piotr went to Kraków for a few weeks, then returned. When she called him he said that he had no time. She was already a first-year student when he came up to her in the Uniwersytecka library. He looked pale and gaunt. She could smell vodka on his breath. When he whispered her name, tears welled up in her eyes.

That’s when he told her this joke: “Two friends meet. You know what, Maniek, one asks. Something terrible is gonna happen. - What do you mean? Maniek asks. Another war? -No! - Germans will invade again? - No! - The world will end? - No! - So what will happen? - Nothing! We will always live the way we live!”

They walked together, slowly, along Szewska Street, to the Town Hall. Piotr talked incessantly. Of new proofs of callousness, stupidity, and vicious lies. Of Polish troops in Prague, helping to extinguish the Prague Spring. “Welcomed with flowers by the grateful citizens of Czechoslovakia,” the papers wrote, “helping to preserve freedom.” Of corruption, sloth, pilfering. Of the viciousness of anti-Semitic attacks that were making Poland a laughing stock of the civilized world.

“I still love you, Piotr,” she said. “There is no one else.”

She did love him. There was no one else. She never thought there could be.

He asked her to marry him. Right there, by the monument of Alexander Fredro that had been lugged here all the way from Lvov to replace Frederick Wilhelm III. Plucking a flower from the flower bed, shaking off the earth from its roots. His eyes shining with joy. With love. With hope.

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 façades, 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 spätzle. 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.

In the fall of 1981, out of all her Montreal friends, Marie Chanterelle was already the closest. A journalist with Radio-Canada, equally comfortable in English and in French, Marie had been to Poland and to Czechoslovakia. She had smuggled manuscripts from Prague to Vienna, interviewed Michnik and Havel. “Trying to find out what gives them the strength to go on,” she told Anna. “Where do they get the courage not to grow bitter.”

With Marie, Anna could discuss the futility of hope, the overwhelming evidence of Eastern European helplessness. Together they listed the reasons. The bleeding Budapest of 1956 and Kadar’s show trials. Dubek’s pale face when he was called to Moscow to account for the fever in the streets, and his tears when he gave his first speech after Soviet tanks entered Prague. The unmarked graves of the workers killed in Pozna, Gdansk and Szczecin in 1956 and 1970. With Marie, Anna could pore over the maps of Poland marked with thick black arrows, the possible routes of another invasion.

“Piotr,” she told Marie then, “doesn’t want to leave Poland. Ever.”

“Are you afraid?” Marie asked her.

Anna was afraid. In spite of what Piotr might tell her, she was afraid of Russian tanks, of Piotr being killed, or even arrested, sentenced to years in prison. Of his father, now her father-in-law, not being able to help next time.

Marie squeezed her hand. For weeks she had been interviewing refugees from Poland. She got Anna’s number from a McGill friend and phoned to ask her how Polish women survived the chronic shortages, how they managed without toilet paper and sanitary napkins, how they kept clean without shampoos and toothpaste. “Can I come over to speak to you?” she had asked. “Don’t worry. I won’t use your name. No one will know.”

Anna told Marie of hours spent in line-ups, of the constant lookout for things that could be traded, of hair washed with egg yolk and teeth brushed with baking soda. It was all terrible, humiliating, she said. Nothing worked, nothing was available. Marie did not agree. Her own parents still remembered the Great Depression in St. Emile. There was nothing humiliating about resilience, she said. Nothing to be ashamed of.

From their long talk that first day, just a few clips were used in a collage of voices Marie summoned to express the feeling of the impending catastrophe among Polish refugees. In her documentary, politicians warned of military retaliation, crowds in front of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa chanted their demands for freedom. “Nothing would make me go back, now,” a man’s voice declared. “There is no hope.” Then came Anna’s voice, describing the life of shortages. High-pitched, she thought, and strained. And then a young woman’s voice, shaky, bordering on tears, “I have a three-year-old son and a husband who are trying to leave before the doors close. I’m praying every day that they make it.”

The McGill library was getting hot and stuffy. Anna shifted in her chair, her back muscles begging for relief.

Round two in Poland, she read. Warsaw puts military patrols in the streets as Solidarity resumes its rebellious national congress. Military officials were being deployed in every Polish village, amidst uneasy explanations that their sole purpose was to combat corruption. General Jaruzelski, whose hollow face and dark glasses she now saw regularly alongside Solidarity leaders, announced the formation of a Committee of National Salvation. Hopeful stories were recalled of his family estate confiscated by the Soviets in their 1939 invasion of Poland, of his family deported to Siberia, of his youth spent in Soviet camps where his eyelids cracked from burning sun, of slave labour that injured his back and took the life of his father. Was the man in dark glasses, she read, a faithful servant of a powerful master, or a man waiting for his chance?

No, Piotr would never think of leaving. No matter how long the line-ups for food, however easily whatever freedoms they still had would be crushed. Oh, yes, he would agree with her that their lives were outrageous, would fume at the necessity of nights spent sitting on folded chairs in front of stores to secure a place in a line-up for a car battery, a refrigerator, a bed. But shortages, he argued, were nothing more but another proof that Communism had failed, gone bankrupt, and would have to go.

Their last evening in Wroclaw, they drank the warm beer in widnicka Cellar and held hands across the table, the top now smelling of the rotting rag with which the waitress had wiped it. Piotr chose to ignore the foul smell and the obvious resistance of the waitress.

I’ll miss you, darling,” he whispered. “Why am I letting you go? Come back soon!”

They had been married for ten years. They had never parted for long.

“I will.”

She stopped herself from saying anything else. In the car his hand was already making its way inside her blouse, brushing her breast. She could feel her nipples stiffen, making their delicious pulsating promise.

If anyone had told her that this was the time she might fall in love with another man, she would have laughed. Friends she would make, of course, that she knew. But love?

Newcomers to McGill were all invited to an afternoon at the Faculty Club, and Anna arrived there slightly resentful of having to waste the whole afternoon she could have spent in the library. She never liked big parties and now when Canadian writers were beginning to intrigue her, she felt she had so little time left. From Poland, Canada seemed like a vast, blank sheet of prosperity. Only with its writers did the whiteness take on the first shades of colour. She read, mesmerised by what was emerging before her, the sharpening contours, the hues.

Marie I’Incarnation dreamed of walking into a vast, silent landscape of precipitous mountains, valleys and fog until she came to a small marble church. The Virgin with Jesus sat on its roof, talking about Marie and about Canada. Then the Virgin smiled and kissed her three times. It was a sign, the French nun wrote, to come here and make a house for Jesus and Mary, among the Hurons.

Anna read stories of forced conversions, of New World blankets harbouring the killer germs, decimating the Huron villages. Of French farmers clinging to their language and religion amidst a sea of English. Of being told one was only good to carry water and serve one’s betters. Of the revenge of the cradles and the Quiet Revolution. Of the miracles, shrines, and protests. Of martial law and fervent, thwarted hopes for independence.

“Isn’t it just like in Poland, now,” Marie’s friends often said. Anna liked them a lot, these men with bushy long hair, chain smoking Gitanes, and the women who, hearing she just came from Poland, hugged and kissed her, assuring her the Polish people were marveilleuse and formidable. They made her admit that Le Devoir had far more coverage of the crisis in Poland than The Montreal Gazette.

“You should understand us so well, Anna! We, too, are struggling for our independence, here. For our way of life! Our very survival is at stake!”

“No, it isn’t like Poland,” she kept telling them. But only Marie would agree with her.

At the entrance to the wood-panelled hall she was given a name tag to stick to her dress. It said, Anna Nowicka, Poland. Visiting scholar. Department of English. Her resentment evaporated. She was charmed by the ease with which conversations started. “I just thought I would come up and say hello,” was all that was needed.

“No, my husband couldn’t come with me,” she tried to explain if anyone asked. Passports were not easily given to families, and, besides, Piotr couldn’t really just leave. He was teaching civil law at Wroclaw University, he was a legal adviser to a local Solidarity chapter. No, of course it wasn’t the best of solutions, but what else could they do.

“A girl from Breslau!” That was William’s voice, raised in amazement. “Where are you from in Poland?” he had asked, and she said, “Wroclaw,” prepared for the need to explain once again the shifting borders of post-war Europe, the story of the territories gained and lost in which a German city became part of Poland. But he did not ask her for explanations.

“A girl from Breslau!” he repeated. “What a coincidence!”

“Wroclaw,” her mother would protest, each syllable a distinct, resonant beat. Vro tswav! That’s how she would say it, Vro tswav, her face locked in a tense grimace of mistrust.

William’s eyes narrowed with pleasure as he smiled at Anna. He was wearing a black turtleneck under an open shirt — yellow and red patches twirling on the fabric as if spun by a juggler’s hand. His beard, trimmed short, made her think of the plumage of some rare silver bird. He had brought her a glass of wine, and she was holding it so tightly that the shape of the stem imprinted itself on the palm of her hand.

She knew he liked her, felt it in his eyes, in his smile, in the growing intensity with which his blue eyes took in the curls of her hair, the movements of her head. As if, with every move, with each simple gesture, she was accomplishing something truly extraordinary, something no one else, ever, could have done.

“So you do know where it is?” she asked him, brushing her hair back, away from her face.

The days were still warm and she was wearing a loose Indian dress she had bought in a store on St. Laurent. It was a black cotton dress with purple patches, the shape of falling leaves.

“Are you surprised?”

“Yes.”

“I was born there,” he said. “When it was still Breslau, that is. So we are really from the same place.”

She was playing with the beads in her hair, turning them with her fingers and then letting them go, thinking of an old photograph she had of herself, a tiny figurine, a white dress, a halo of curly hair.

In the black and white picture, she is holding her mother’s hand. Behind her are the ruins: piles of rubble spilling into the streets, clusters of red bricks, some still paired together with mortar, slabs of concrete and granite. A sea of ruins, surrounding small islands of still-standing buildings. Bent pieces of wire stuck out of cement blocks, ripped from the foundations. Underneath the crumbling plaster of what used to be walls of apartments, a wicker lattice revealed itself like a web of veins under the skin. Some of the houses were cut in half, gutted, with discoloured patches on the walls where balconies had fallen off. Where rooms had been — living rooms, bedrooms, studies — the walls betrayed the decorating tastes of their now departed inhabitants, mosaics of greens and blues, walls papered or painted. Streets, too, had been ripped apart by explosions; big craters cut through stones and sand, through the granite blocks of pavements. Some of the streets led to neighbourhoods that no longer existed, deserted valleys in between mountains of debris. Smooth, steel tramway tracks still cut through them, ending in the piles of rubble, disappearing in grass and weeds.

“That’s nothing,” her parents told her. In 1945, when they arrived, it frightened them to walk past the abandoned shells of walls, of houses gutted and burnt. The city was empty, so terribly empty that for months after they would fight tears at the sight of a child in the street, the first, fragile promise of permanence. By the time Anna was born, the Baroque houses of the Old Market Square had been restored, their façades painted white, beige and pale yellow. By the time her parents took her for walks by the Gothic Town Hall with its brightly painted sundial or the majestic towers of the Cathedral on the Oder Island, it was almost possible to believe that the war had passed them by.

“When did you leave Breslau?” she asked William that evening.

“In 1945, in January,” he said. “I was five. But we came to Canada before I turned seven.”

The walnut panelled room of the Faculty Club was beginning to grow too noisy and too hot. Anna could feel people pushing her from behind, murmuring their apologies and moving on. She had to strain her ears to separate his voice from the noise around her.

The thought that he was German, even if his German childhood might be nothing more than a few memories of the war, cautioned her to be careful of the things she said. She didn’t want him to think she was expecting expressions of guilt, feelings of contrition for the crimes of another generation. But in truth she was. She needed to put him in a safe zone, for she was already aware of how much he could mean to her.

“I don’t really remember much,” he said.

Later she was to learn that it wasn’t true. All she had to do was to discover the right question. But at that time she didn’t know about Käthe, did not know that she should have asked him about his mother.

And yet, even then, he did remember something. In his Breslau street, as in the Wroclaw street she grew up on, there was a row of acacia trees, covered in pale white flowers. In the spring the whole street looked as if it were sprinkled with creamy snow. When he sucked the tips of the flowers they gave up a faint taste of sweetness and wilted under his fingers.

“Nothing else?” she asked. He must have heard the disappointment in her voice for he told her of the long wait for the train that was to take his mother and him out of the city, the smell of heavy coats, of sweat, the suffocating feeling of having nowhere to escape to. “I’ve never been so afraid in my life,” he said. “And I don’t think I ever will be again.”

He had calmed himself by staring at the spirals and mazes of cracks on the ivory tiles lining the tunnel of Breslau Hauptbahnhof. Every single one of them different. He had traced these cracks with his finger, the little cells and cobwebs made by the frost and the pounding pressure of heavy trains passing above.

“Have you ever gone back?” Her throat was dry and her voice came out trembling, losing its self-assurance.

In 1975 or 76, he wasn’t quite sure of the year, he had toured Poland with the McGill student choir and Wroclaw was one of the stops. Wratislavia Cantans, he remembered the name of the festival. Had had a beer near the Wroclaw Town Hall and watched the crowds. The women were gorgeous. He liked the way they walked, their bodies swaying in a rhythm almost forgotten on this side of the Atlantic. And the city? Didn’t care about how German it looked. Never liked Germany much. His family was not Nazi, thank God. His grandfather was executed in Berlin on Hitler’s orders, but he didn’t take much comfort in that. German acts of defiance didn’t amount to much, after all, did they?

He must have seen her relief.

“You might have passed me by,” he laughed, suddenly taken with the thought.

“Were you alone?” Anna asked. She was already trying to feel her way around. He wasn’t wearing a ring. She looked at his hand. And she knew he had noticed hers.

“Yes. Marilyn, ex-Mrs. Herzman, didn’t much like to rough it with the students. She was into mud spas, then. Excellent for her nerves, she said. Would you have been alone then?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t.”

No, not then. They were not from the same place. His Breslau was no longer there and in her Wroclaw he could only be a visitor from the West on an exotic trip to a deprived land, marvelling at how the locals could live among such squalor.

“You must have thought us all very shabby,” she said, regretting her remark at once. It wasn’t pity she wanted from him.

But he protested. It was a fascinating world, far more exciting than anything else he had seen in years, but not because of its German past. He did notice that the old German buildings were run down, but he couldn’t make himself care. The past was not worth getting excited about, he said; it only diverted your energy from more important things. It was the present that fascinated him, the defiance of the people, their resilience, their courage.

Anna knew this was not all together true. For wasn’t it the past, so drab and deprived in her memory, that was now making her somehow better in his eyes? Better than if she had been born here, in Montreal.

Later that evening when a tall, pretty woman threw her arms around William and kissed him on both cheeks, Anna slipped out of the Faculty Club. “Darling, you are impossible!” she could still hear the woman’s sugary voice. “Where have you been hiding these days?”

Anna walked home slowly, a short walk down McTavish Street, to Sherbrooke, turn right, past the glittering veranda of the Ritz Hotel, past the crowded restaurants on Rue de la Montagne. In one of them she saw a couple, a gaunt man and a petite woman in a red dress, toasting each other at a small round table. The woman gave her a quick look and burst out laughing, tossing her head backwards. In the store windows, chic mannequins posed in thick, winter coats lined with fur — men and women, frozen in half step, elegant and poised. Carefree.

Anna could still hear William’s voice. She half-imagined him next to her, his arm touching hers. “That’s nothing,” she kept thinking. “Someone I could’ve become friends with. Someone I’ll never see again.” The wind was cool, and Anna was feeling its bite. Was it already the first sign of winter? Canadian winter she had been warned to fear, as if no Polish winter could match it.

At McGill Anna signed up for courses in literary theory, in which she discussed the futility of making any valid and objective statements about literary texts. Thoughts of words upon words that redouble and multiply meanings as they are read excited her. “I have so much catching up to do,” she wrote in her letters to Piotr. She wrote to him about the trappings of deconstruction, the stripping of layers of ideology from literary texts, revealing biases, contexts, underlying interests. “Nothing is innocent,” she repeated. “Nothing without its negation.”

Piotr’s letters arrived in shabby blue envelopes, with her name in a big uneven script. Lies, lies, nothing but damn lies, he wrote ignoring the censors. He was angry. Angry at the betrayals, the blank pages of Polish history that, now, finally, could be brought to light. What was the true extent of repressions after the 1968 student revolt? Who started the anti-Jewish campaign and why? Who signed the orders to shoot at the workers in Gdynia in 1970? Who had connived with Stalin at the show trials? We have to find the whole truth, he wrote. Uncover every treachery. Otherwise there will be no new beginning. She put his letters back in their envelopes and placed them on the night table, next to the photograph of the two of them, on a hike in the Tatra Mountains. In that photograph Piotr was making a V sign with his hand, and she was resting her head on his arm.

William called her two days later. She thought he might and prayed he wouldn’t.

“Anna? William here. William Herzman.”

She had forgotten how warm his voice was. There was music in the background, the soft chords of a piano concerto, coming from another room.

“Where did you hide? I turned my back and you disappeared. The clock hadn’t even struck midnight!”

He had looked for her, she thought. He had found out where she lived.

“I had to beg the Chairman of English to give me your phone number. Made a complete fool of myself.”

With her fingers she was straightening the black coils of the telephone cord, trying to disentangle them.

“There is so much I want to show you here. You must let me take you around Montreal.”

Infatuation, that’s what she called it then. Harmless, she told herself. Less than love, fleeting, ephemeral, easy to forget. If she didn’t stir, it would pass by.

Each morning, her hand trembled slightly as she blackened her eyelashes and drew a thin line along her eyelids. She imagined running into William at the library or in the campus bookstore. “What a coincidence!” he would say, smiling, “Would you care for a cup of coffee?” and she would smile back and say yes, and they would go across the street to a small bistro and she would sip her coffee slowly, hoping it would never end. A thought like that could make her laugh aloud; she could imagine him next to her, his arm around her shoulder, and then she would stop and tell herself not to be silly. “Utterly silly, insane,” she would say, and her hands would touch the spines of books on outdoor stands, the rough surfaces of the walls.

It was the time when she began her long walks through Montreal. She couldn’t stay in one place then, too impatient, too eager to know what would happen next. Something would have to happen and only time itself had to be pushed forward. Faster, faster, she hurried past the tree-lined campus, past the white townhouses of Milton Street, and then up Avenue du Parc, onto the Mountain.

On one such walk, at a fruit stall, she bought a handful of red cherries and as she walked she took them out of a plastic bag, pairs of fruit joined together at the stems. If she were little she would wear them like earrings, carry them with her for a long time, before she would allow herself to taste such a treat. But now, laughing, she pushed a whole handful into her mouth and greedily chewed the red sweet flesh until only the smooth stones remained.

“Oh, my God! What am I doing?” she would ask herself when she stopped, out of breath, her heart pounding.

“I can’t be in love,” she repeated to herself, smiling, already pleased with the thought. “It’s impossible. It can’t be.”

“All about you,” he said. “I want to know all about you.”

She laughed. “You want to know all my secrets?”

“Yes. All your secrets.”

She wanted to bury her face in his chest.

He took her for a drive to the Laurentians. The summer had been dry and the fall colours were already beginning to show. Browns and golds of oaks and maples, flaming red leaves of the sumacs. He took so many pictures of her that afternoon, by the fallen tree, in front of a red barn, waving to him from the edge of the lake, petting a country cat, its speckled eyes narrowing with pleasure. “Smile,” he kept saying. “We are all very unthreatening here.”

She thought: Then why am I so scared?

The country roads were almost empty of traffic. “What’s that?” Like a child she pointed to things she had not seen before, farm silos, communication towers flashing their mysterious lights. She wanted to know so much about him, but she promised herself she wouldn’t ask, so she was watching him instead, his hands gripping the steering wheel a little too tight. On his black sweater she saw the glimmer of silver, the hairs shed from his beard that she had an urge to pick.

Only later, when they were crossing the bridge back to the city, she broke her own promise.

“Didn’t your parents want to go back with you?” she asked. “To Breslau,” she added, as if he could doubt what she meant.

“To Wroclaw?”

It pleased her that he observed the politics of geography. He paused, as if the question required his thought.

“Yes.”

“I’ve never known my father,” he said, slowing the car down and she thought that he, too, began counting the minutes before they would have to part, “and my mother never wanted to see Breslau again.”

Montreal spread before them. Among the warm fall colours of the Mountain the green dome of St. Joseph’s Oratory was almost invisible. She was thinking that in his voice she could hear some old, recurring arguments.

He had no patience with nostalgia, he told her then. He was tired of old Breslauers he sometimes met, suspicious of their stories. All this talk of the perfect city, prosperous, safe, well planned! Bourgeois heaven!

“Youthful amnesia, that’s what they all claim now,” he said, his lips pouting, “but in these border towns they all voted for the Nazis. These glorious defenders of the German soul!”

Didn’t she, too, find it was always so? he had asked her as he drove off the sun-lit highway, into the downtown streets filled with strolling crowds. Wasn’t the past always presented that way? As better? More mysterious? More meaningful? Even the worst, most guilty past, he added, and his shoulders rose in a shrug. It seemed to her then that he was reading her thoughts, anticipating her questions, answering them before she was even aware they were there.

They were two blocks away from her apartment. One more turn and she will be alone again.

“Did you see your old house?” she didn’t want him to stop talking. This city she had left with so little regret, where she never felt at home — Wroclaw — had now begun to intrigue her. “Is it still there?”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s still there.”

“Did you get in?”

“No.”

He had driven past it in a taxi. He hadn’t even asked the driver to stop, just to slow down, so that he could take a quick look without drawing anybody’s attention. As the car passed by, he remembered that his Oma had buried a box with family silver in the back yard, right before leaving for Berlin. Under the hazel bush.

“And you never even tried to get it back?” she asked.

There was never any parking space on Rue de la Montagne. He had to stop in mid-traffic to let her out.

“No,” he said as she freed herself from the seatbelts. “Of course not. Why disturb the new owners, remind them of the old hatreds, stir up the past?”

She had to agree with him. Why, indeed?

“A new friend of mine,” Anna told Marie, then, “a composer from McGill.” She had the overpowering need to speak of William, then, to confirm his existence.

“What’s his name?”

“William. William Herzman.”

“Never heard of him,” Marie said. “What has he written?”

In the music library Anna had found a recording of William’s oratorio, Dimensions of Love and Time. On the back of the record was a photograph of William from fifteen years before. He was sitting in an empty room, on a carved antique armchair, looking away from the camera. His face was longer, she thought, with a touch of austerity about it she had never noticed. It must have been the absence of beard, she thought.

William Herzman is one of the most promising Canadian composers of the decade. His music draws its inspiration from the act of questioning. It rings with the profound distrust of the sacred. It allows for no comfort, no escape; it demands the suspension of emotional involvement as we seek to understand the essence of the human experience.

She ran her finger along the contours of his face.

“Anything else?” Marie asked. “Has he written anything else?”

Anna said she didn’t know. “It doesn’t matter, anyway,” she said, lightly. “I just thought you might have heard of him. At Radio-Canada. That’s all.”

A week later, he was waiting for her in front of the Arts Building on the McGill campus, sitting on the stone ledge, looking at the city below. She could see him from afar, motionless, hands folded on his lap, in his beige coat and a brown felt hat. A fedora. In her grandmother’s stories of pre-war Warsaw, men wore fedoras and foulards, they lifted their hats to greet women. He looked at his watch. She was late, but not too late yet, not beyond hope.

“I can still turn away,” she thought, “There is still time.” It was getting dark already, and the beam of light circled the sky over the downtown office towers. “We can be friends,” she kept telling herself. “Just friends.”

There was nothing wrong in seeing him, she decided. They liked to talk, that’s all. They liked the same books, the same movies. For hours they talked of Elias Cannetti, Günter Grass, Apollinaire. “You absolutely have to see it,” he would say and take her to all his favourite films. In the red velvet seats of the Seville Repertory Cinema she laughed at The Life of Brian. With amazement she watched the rituals of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, when at the cue from the screen the audience threw rice, lit cigarette lighters or squirted water. William took her for evening drives up the Mountain to show her the lights of the city. They lined up for hot bagels on St. Viateur, had late dinners in restaurants along Prince Arthur. When they walked, they were still careful to keep a distance between their bodies, conscious of every swerve that could bring them closer together. All that time he never asked her about Piotr.

He smiled when he saw her approaching, a smile of relief.

“Dinner?” he asked.

She loved these long, unhurried dinners, with dishes arriving one by one, filling her with delicate flavours. For the first time in her life she tasted escargots, black bean soup, the pink flesh of grilled salmon, green flowers of broccoli. She was insatiable, always looking hungrily at the colourful plates, eating far too much, as if to make up for lost years.

She nodded. If there was already something irreversible about this evening, something that made it different from all the others, she was trying not to think about it.

“So,” he asked when they sat down, the flame of a candle wavering between them. The day before she had promised to tell him why she was so fascinated by her emigré writers, stories scattered in emigré papers, thin volumes of poems printed by the small presses of London, Chicago, Montreal. As if the mere act of leaving anointed people with some mystical, unexplainable superiority. As if they could see more.

“Isn’t it a prisoner’s dream?” he asked.

The question troubled her. In Poland she would never think of the need to defend the importance of these exiled voices from abroad. Her interests might be declared suspect or embarrassing to her department, dangerous perhaps, but they would never be questioned like that.

“Dangerous?”

“Of course! After all,” she said, “they defected.” He waited for her to continue.

“And yet,” she added, “for us they were never absent.”

If they pined after Poland as they were scrubbing capitalist floors or committed suicide by jumping from their New York windows, she told William, then such writers could count on scraps of official memory. They were of use to the Communist government; their failure scored points against the West, poisoned the illusions, proved that happiness on the other side of the Wall was a mirage. If they denounced the crimes of the post-war years, kept alive the memory of Stalin’s betrayals, their words were smuggled into the country in the pockets of travellers and reprinted in the underground presses.

“In Poland it wasn’t easy to get to them,” she said.

She had to get letters of recommendation from her research supervisor and a special permit from the censor before she was allowed to open yellowed copies of emigré newspapers in the Wroclaw library. Provided she did not make photocopies of the material that the old wrinkled librarian grudgingly placed on her table.

But, there, in Poland it was all a ruse. An excuse to get facts for Piotr’s bulletins. In the 1930s ten million Ukrainian peasants were starved to death on Stalin’s orders. In the Soviet Gulag, before the guards could stop them, prisoners devoured the frozen meat of a mammoth. In orphanages, the children of dissidents were taught to worship the great Stalin, their true and only father. Near Katy, Charkov, and Pver, the Soviet NKVD executed fifteen thousand Polish officers, prisoners of war, and, when in 1943 the mass graves were discovered, blamed the crime on the Germans.

Here, in Montreal, she sank into the descriptions of the lost Eastern lands, the sandy banks of the Niemen river and the depths of the Lithuanian forests. It was a forced exodus. When the post-war borders moved westward, the Polish inhabitants of Vilnius and Lvov had to leave or become Soviet citizens. She read of the trek of the displaced that ended in the former German lands, in Wroclaw and Szczecin, in the villages of Lower Silesia and Pomerania. A flood of people, tired, defeated, humiliated, mourning their dead, remembering the minute details of houses left behind, the creaking floors, the holy pictures. These people whose towns and villages were cut off by the borders of barbed wire and ploughed fields became her Wroclaw neighbours. “Where are you really from?” they began all conversations, “How did you get here?”

“I was lucky,” Babcia would say. She had left Tarnopol, a small town east of Lvov, in the 20s. Her parents were still buried there. On All Souls Day there was no one to light candles on their graves.

Her immigrant scribblers, William used to call her emigré writers, tending their marble graves. “Have you noticed,” he kept asking Anna, “that whether written in London, Toronto, Sydney or Geneva, the tunes of lament are always the same? Is there nothing out there but what you’ve known before?”

That’s what Anna tried to explain to William that night. “They are remembering the forbidden,” she said. “That’s what I am trying to do, too.”

“What if nothing is forbidden?” he asked. “What then?”

She thought about it, sipping her wine, making little circles on the tablecloth with her fingernails.

“I can’t imagine it yet,” she said.

The wine was beginning to soften her tense muscles. She took a bite of bruschetta the waitress placed between them on the white tablecloth.

“You do love your husband, don’t you?” William asked her.

She saw that William looked away when he said it. So she, too, only permitted herself to stare at his hands. Tanned, slim hands, long fingers softly folding a dinner napkin, or tracing the shape of his beard. She was playing with the strands of wax dripping from the candle. She must have shivered then, for he put his hand over hers, and, quickly took it away.

“I’m starving,” she said and took another bite of bruschetta. The piece of tomato slid from the bread and fell on the tablecloth. She picked it up and tried to soak the stain with her napkin.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said and poured more wine into her glass.

When the world whirled in front of her eyes, she tried to stop it by staring in one direction only. She took a sip of water. In the morning she had passed by his McGill office in the Music Building. Second floor, third door to the right. The corridor was empty and the floorboards creaked under her feet. Quickly she touched the brass knob of his door and walked away before anyone could see her. She thought about borders. The dangers of crossing them. Of finding herself on this other, forbidden side. Of the point, still hidden to her, from which there would be no turning back.

“You are changing, Anna,” she heard William say, his voice so warm, so full of concern for her. “Your new needs are as real as your old ones.”

“Are they, really?” she asked, thinking of Piotr, trying to remember the touch of his lips.

William drove Anna back home. There was no place to park the car, and, as soon as he stopped in front of her apartment, she released the latch of the seatbelt, ready to flee.

“I’ve fallen in love with you,” he said then. Blood rushed to her cheeks. “You know that, don’t you?” The car behind them honked. The driver leaned out of the window. “Hurry up,” he motioned to them and flashed his headlights.

She opened the door and dashed out. She didn’t even turn around to look at him. Inside her apartment she didn’t switch on the light. She sat on the floor, back to the wall, and held her knees. She rocked her body, until the phone rang.

“I’m sorry,” William’s voice on the phone was quiet, almost shy. “I shouldn’t have said it. You have enough problems without me.”

She was sobbing into the black receiver.

“Anna,” she heard. “Anna. My darling. Are you all right? Am I hurting you?”

She didn’t answer.

“If you tell me to go away, I will. Tell me to go away.”

“I love you,” she whispered, and then waited in the dark, tears and laughter mixing together. She heard the soft knock at the door and let him in, his face white and drawn. He bent to kiss her, and she stood there, still crying, feeling his soft lips on hers, both happy and terrified of what she had done.

“I’ll go mad,” she kept saying. “I’ll go mad. I’m so happy I want to die.”

In the bedroom she watched him kneel on the floor and kiss her hands, and bury his face in them. She felt her skirt lift, rise above her knees. She was shedding her clothes like skin, like another, inferior version of herself. She no longer wanted to resist. That she allowed herself to be so besotted was a sign in itself. This love was like a new life, too strong to oppose.

“Anna,” he whispered, “my darling.” She knew then that she would never go back to Poland, to Piotr, but the thought didn’t hurt yet. Gently she licked the tips of his fingers as they moved over her lips. His hand slid down her neck onto her naked breasts, down between her legs. “Oh my God, please don’t punish me. I’ll be better, I promise. With him, I’ll be better, I’ll understand more,” she prayed, closing her eyes.

She repeated the words he whispered to her, the English words his voice gave new meanings to, “My precious darling, my love.”

“I don’t want an affair,” she said. “I won’t lie about you.” And then, her eyes still closed, with the pores of her skin she felt the warmth of his lips. “I’m thirsty,” she said.

He walked barefooted to the kitchen and poured her a glass of cold water. She was shaking when she drank it all, gulp after gulp, a cold snake entering her, filling her insides. He kissed the glass, licked the drops of water from her chin. They laughed. Through the window they watched the roofs of houses, the lights of lampposts, of passing cars. Across, in the distance, was the giant cross on the Mountain, erected by a city grateful for being spared from a flood, now long forgotten. He pulled her toward him again, her hair tangled, her body ready for him. It occurred to her that she should check the balance of desire. That it was dangerous to love too much, to be that insatiable. Before she had completely formed the thought, she was ashamed of it.

There was moonlight in the room where they lay, entangled, still hungry for each other. The furniture was grey — all shadows, dark, indistinguishable. There were layers to their bodies, whole territories to explore. The soft outer layer of his skin wrinkled when she pushed it. The veins were like underground tunnels criss-crossing the body. She breathed in the smell of his hair, a vague scent of wood smoke and the wind. “Are you making sure I’m real?” he had asked, capturing her hand, and she laughed in response. A teasing laugh, a challenge.

Her first dream of him must have been a nightmare. She woke up in the middle of the night and found her flat, narrow pillow wet with tears. She could not remember the dream, just the feeling that he had been there in it, the centre of everything, and that she, in some dreamy, bodiless form, was being dragged away from him. The emptiness that descended on her took away her will to live.

Still crying, she sat up in bed. She embraced her legs, drew them tighter and rested her chin on her knees. The room was cold, and she was shivering. The air coming from the open window was thick with the smells of cooking, stale food and last night’s garbage, the smell of downtown alleys, wet from the rain.

In the apartment on Rue de la Montagne Anna could spot Piotr’s letters in her mailbox before she had opened it, blue envelopes showing through the brass slits. They all had blurred ink stamps on them — EKSPRES— underneath her address, an attempt to speed them up.

She walked slowly upstairs with his letter in hand. She examined the stamp, an aeroplane rising over the newly reconstructed Warsaw castle, the last, missing part of the Old Town, rebuilt from pre-war records, paintings, and photographs. She let the letter lie, unopened, on the table while she was rearranging bottles of creams on the bathroom shelf, wiping off specks of dust. Upstairs someone was moving furniture, scraping the floor. In this building the apartments did not keep their tenants for long. There was no lease to sign; all the landlord asked for was a deposit and a month’s notice.

She pulled on the flap of Piotr’s letter. It came off at once; the glue on Polish envelopes did not resist. Inside, on an onionskin sheet of paper, rows of uneven, small letters. She would have to read them slowly, word by word, for Piotr had used both sides of the paper and the writing showed through, like an inverted echo.

Darling! The word startled her. She had already begun to read his letters as if they were meant for someone else, as if she were eavesdropping on intimacies that could only embarrass her. Piotr was thanking her for a postcard of St. Joseph’s Oratory, asking what else she had seen, complaining that her letters took too long, that they arrived sealed in a plastic bag with a stamp, THE LETTER ARRIVED DAMAGED, a telltale sign of censorship.

It was pointless, she thought. There was no sequence to their writing, no order. When a letter finally reached her she would find him answering questions she had already stopped asking. The express postage must have helped this time, for this letter had been mailed only a week before, on the 25^th of November, 1981. We don’t much plan for the future, here, or speculate what might or might not happen. Or calculate our chances, he had written. We cannot all leave and let the Communists take over, we cannot let them win. Someone has to stop the madness, this perverted lie. Besides, is there enough space on earth to take in the whole nation? Or would you rather I said, “to hell with the whole nation, I’m interested in myself alone.”

She tossed the letter away. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said aloud. She had already given the landlord her notice, taken down the photographs from the wall.

I have read and reread your last letter many times. Darling! I don’t understand what you are trying to say. What has Polish ethnocentrism to do with anything? Who is self-centred, unable to see beyond the horizon? And what about this “inability to forgive” you are so worried about? You are very cryptic in your letters, which must make the censors as bewildered as I am. Not that I care much about the censors! Forgive whom? For what?

His life consisted of meetings, evenings spent alone, frustrated, angry. There was a package of Earl Grey tea he got from some smart British guy who interviewed him for the BBC and knew what they really needed. This cup of tea, some cheddar cheese and some crackers was his definition of luxury. He had reminded her of the evenings they spent together, of the poems by Herbert he read to her. Remember Mr. Cogito’s message? he had asked: Do not forgive in the name of those who were betrayed at dawn. She read on, unable to stop, but no longer listening.

I know you would agree with me. That you agree with me now. You wrote that you have changed, but surely change does not have to mean that you have forgotten what we both believed in? For if it does, darling, maybe this is the time to stop changing.

Carefully she folded the thin sheet and put it back into the envelope. To Marie, over a soft peak of cappuccino sprinkled with chocolate, she said later, “Damned country. You can’t even leave your husband without feeling that you’ve betrayed your fatherland. Nothing is private there. Not even my damned letters to him. Nothing.”

There were more letters from Wroclaw. Her mother wrote of empty stores, of growing line-ups for meat. There was no bread, no flour. Try to see as much as you can and eat well. Don’t worry about saving any money. Who knows how long we will be allowed to travel, when you will have such a chance again. William helped her make food parcels, filled with corn flour, flour, raisins, almonds, baking powder, gelatine, boxes of cereal, and, together, they took it all to the post-office. Her Christmas present, she thought.

There was nothing she could say that would make them understand what she was about to do.

In a liquor store she picked up cardboard boxes and began packing her things. Books, notes, copies of articles on her emigré writers. She folded her new dresses, a pair of jeans, loose cotton shirts. Five cardboard boxes joined the suitcase with which she had flown into Mirabel “Is that all, darling?” William said. “My, you do travel light.” He helped her carry them to his car; all of her possessions fit into his trunk.

In William’s place, which Anna slowly learned to describe as “our Westmount townhouse,” she was still like a rare and distinguished visitor. He told her he had bought it for nothing, half of its real value when, at the time of the Quebec referendum the real estate prices collapsed. That’s how it was here, he said, in spite of what she might have heard from her crazy French friends. The French Canadians kept a knife at Canada’s throat and nothing would satisfy them but the breakup of the country. For now, it may all seem settled, but he wouldn’t hold his breath for the future.

Anna loved the house, its red brick walls, oak woodwork. There were stained glass transoms over the doors and a bay window in the living room. She moved through the rooms carefully, listening to the creaks in the floors, learning the views from each window. Her own things melted into the house without a trace. Her cheap paperbacks lay unpacked.

Her clothes took just a few hangers in William’s closet.

She loved watching William move through the kitchen in his red apron, among the scents of food, adding herbs to the steaming pots, pouring wine into them, setting the timer, turning the roasts, lighting cognac on steaks. Foods had their own chemistry, he said, there was a science of mixing tastes, a sensitivity to the palate that had to be trained and then indulged.

She touched the lids of his musical boxes, with their brass, ebony and mother-of-pearl inlay, turned the brass keys to listen to the tunes of Weber, Mozart, Bellini. He had repaired them all, she learned, big and small, fascinated by the simplicity of their mechanisms. All that was necessary was a spring, a cylinder with steel pins that would lift and suddenly release the tuned steel teeth, and a brake of sorts. “Mechanical music, a challenge for the human mind. Clarionas, multiphones, hexaphones, Violano-Virtuosos.” His eyes sparkled when he showed her his treasures, opened the boxes to point to the perforated paper roll, the Geneva stop-work that prevented the springs from overwinding. These air brakes as he called them had parts with funny names, the governor, the butterfly, the flyer, the worm.

“Play them for me,” she asked and he walked around the room winding them for her. The bells, the chimes, the soft tunes filled the room, and she laughed and clapped her hands, delighted. When he was away, she would open his violin and touch the strings, the black pegs, the smooth black hollow where he rested his chin. He had told her that violins remember, that when they were played with mastery for a long time the wood captured the exquisite sounds within itself, kept them for the future. “Nothing else matters, nothing but love,” she whispered into the resonance holes and laughed.

In the evenings, lying in bed, hands behind his head, William watched her as she moved around the bedroom in her ivory lace nightgown, one of the many presents he gave her. “You are so beautiful,” he murmured and she felt a pulsating, throbbing warmth rising inside her, crouching between her legs. After they made love, when his muscles tensed and when his head fell against her neck, she listened to his breath, shortened and raspy, broken by the sighs of pleasure, and then she listened to the beating of his heart.

“It will hurt,” William told her. “It always does. But we will be all right, won’t we?”

“Yes,” she said. “We’ll be all right.”

She did not think of it much until then, the pain of parting with Piotr, breaking up her marriage. With William beside her she was happy, blissfully happy.

In the first week of December she dictated Piotr’s number to the operator. By the time he picked up the phone her heart stopped a million times, a torrent of little deaths. Her palm was sweaty, and she gripped the receiver too hard. She was to remember this for a long time afterwards, the spasm, the tingling of her hand.

Piotr didn’t understand. “You’ve met someone? You are not coming back?” he asked, as if she were talking of something entirely impossible, ridiculous even.

She had to repeat, for the connection was poor, the buzz of static overwhelming, and then there was the echo that made her hear her words as if they were spoken into a vacuum, returned to her before she had finished speaking. It humiliated her that he didn’t understand. In her mind she had already altered the past, made him expect her desertion, and his surprise was an affront, a slap on the cheek. How could he not understand? How could he not see it coming? Did she pretend so well? Feign her happiness with him, her love? For she must have feigned it. If she truly loved Piotr, she would not be in love with William now. Would she?

Marie, of course, did not think so. “You are not the first woman, darling, to discover you can love two men at the same time.” But Anna could not believe it.

Now, with Piotr at the other end of the receiver, Anna did not know how to find words sharp enough, words that would make him hear, that would make him understand.

“Please. Try to forgive me,” she said. “I didn’t think it would happen, and I can’t explain it. It’s all my fault. I’m sorry.”

William was in the other room when she made the call. They were still unsure of their territories, still learning to judge what could be demanded and what should be left unsaid. He paced the living room floor. He could hear her speak, but he could not understand what she was saying. Her voice, he would tell her later, seemed to him all consonants, sharp, whistling, a shiver.

Piotr must have understood finally, for he told her to suit herself. “I haven’t really known you, have I?” he asked, and then she heard a muted curse and a slam of the receiver.

She wept the whole evening. She let William rock her to sleep, give her a tall glass with gin and tonic. She drank hastily. Sleep was an escape, long, deep, incoherent, filled with the images of the world disconnected, hands, knees, the warmth of someone’s skin. Wetness. The pillow was wet when she woke up, in the middle of the night, alert.

She slipped out of the bedroom, quietly not to wake William up. In the credenza drawer there was an old packet of cigarettes she had spotted a few days before, a leftover from an old, discarded habit. The window in the living room had a stained glass panel, and she sat in the wicker armchair, legs curled up, staring at the grey patterns of squares and circles. The taste of smoke surprised her; she had not smoked since that day, thirteen years ago when she met Piotr on Partisans’ Hill. It hit her lungs with a force she had forgotten. Her brain swirled. She inhaled the smoke deeply and let it out. Another long drag, the glowing tip sparkling and fading in the dark. She sat like that for a long time. Cars passed, the lights made patterns on the ceiling, flashes of light, one chasing another. She did not move. In the morning William found her with her head resting on her arm. Asleep.

On December 12, 1981, they gave their first party to celebrate their coming together. Marie brought Anna a bouquet of red roses and hugged her for a long time before she let her go. “Just take care of yourself,” she whispered in her ear. William’s friends came with good wishes and curious glances. “Long time, no see,” she heard voices in the hall as William greeted them, “You lucky man. How do you do it?” Her extended hand was squeezed and shaken as William introduced her to his colleagues, former students, their wives and girlfriends.

She was asked how she liked Montreal, if she had already been to Place des Arts, to the Laurentians. “William is a great guy,” she was told in conspicuous whispers. She was nodding her head, smiling, recounting all the trips they had already taken. No one asked her about Poland any more; she was no longer a visitor, and it was now tactless to mention what she had left behind.

By degrees the living room became too warm, too smoky, and she found herself drifting off, unable to fend off the thoughts of her mother who must, by then, have learned about her and Piotr. In her big, dark Wroclaw apartment, among the mismatched pieces of furniture and threadbare carpets her mother and father were getting ready for Christmas. There would be tears at Christmas Eve supper, and an empty plate at the table where she would have sat.

“Are you all right?” William asked. “You look pale.”

“It’s nothing, love,” she said. “I’m fine.” It pleased her so much to call him love, to hear the concern in his voice. To exchange little smiles of understanding across the room. She thought she should hide her pain from him, keep the old life away from the new.

There were too many people she didn’t know to make her feel comfortable. Marie was busy talking to a tall, handsome man who was sitting cross-legged on the floor. She was kneeling opposite him, making large circles in the air with her hand. The black strap of her silk blouse kept falling off her shoulder. From where she stood, Anna could hear Marie’s laughter, see her thick, black hair tossed back. She did not want to interrupt.

Anna walked to the window to open it a bit more, to let in fresh, cold, wintry air. Outside, the world was covered in a white snowy blanket. Thick caps formed over street lamps, fire hydrants, parked cars. Enormous white flakes danced in the light. She wanted the party to end, to stop the growing noise, the laughter, the stories of events that had no resonance for her yet, memories of the lost referendum, absurdities of the French language policy, upcoming constitutional wrangles.

“Lévesque was stabbed in the back,” she heard a fierce whisper. “Once again!” Someone hummed a few notes of a song. “Oh, come on!” she heard. “Stop it!” By candlelight the faces of the guests looked long and lean. No, not frightening, but strangely distant.

Piotr she dismissed when he appeared to her then. It was not an easy decision, but she had the right to make it. Even if she did go back, she told herself, how long would it be before she started to blame him for every day that went wrong. How long before she would make his life miserable. It all made perfect sense. She could betray either him or herself; there were no other choices to make.

On the morning of December 13, Anna woke up in what she still, in her mind, called William’s bed. In his light pine bed, on a thick, springy mattress, between his smooth white sheets. He was quite conservative that way, she had discovered, linen, towels, tablecloths had to be white, snow white, without a blemish.

She thought she should get up and start cleaning up after the party. They had both been too tired to do it in the evening. A pile of dirty dishes had been left soaking in the sink. Even in the bedroom, with the window opened a crack, there was the faint smell of cigarette smoke and wine.

William was still asleep beside her, snoring. She smiled. She wanted to shake him gently, to make him turn on his side, but knew she would only wake him up. It moved her to discover these little things about him, to learn of his habits. Piotr wouldn’t have woken up even if she switched on the radio or talked to him. She didn’t feel like getting up, not yet. The alarm clock was set for nine o’clock. There were still a few minutes left.

This is the CBC news. Our top story. Last night Polish troops took over control of the country. General Jaruzelski went on national television and announced the imposition of martial law. There are unconfirmed reports that the Solidarity leader, Lech Wal? sa, was arrested last night, together with the entire leadership of the First Independent Trade Unions.

“Shit!” William said and sat up, wide awake at once.

“What?” it was Anna who kept asking, as if the words she had heard made no sense to her. “What’s happened?”

“Martial law,” William said. “Oh, God. Bastards!”

The first images on the ABC morning news showed the Polish TV screen. General Jaruzelski, his eyes hidden behind his dark sunglasses, was sitting at his desk, behind him a huge Polish flag. “Citizens of the Polish People’s Republic!” he was saying in a strained but steady voice. “I turn to you as a soldier and the chief of government! Our fatherland is on the verge of an abyss!” When the speech ended, and before it was repeated, the screens showed pictures of flowery meadows, still background for the music of Chopin.

The state of war was declared at night. The declarations posted on street corners were printed in the Soviet Union — American and Canadian commentators stressed — to preserve the secrecy of the operation. Poles were informed that all schools, theatres, movie theatres were closed, that public gatherings of any kind were forbidden, that no one could leave his place of residence without official authorisation.

Anna kept switching the channels, hoping to learn more. By midday came the first shots of grey tanks slowly rolling in the Polish streets. One shot, in particular, appeared over and over again, at every television station, the neon signs of the Moscow cinema in Warsaw announcing “Apocalypse Now.” The tank that stood by the entrance had its turret aimed at the street.

Anna walked around the room, in circles, avoiding the stacks of plates, leftovers of the party. She noticed that someone had spilled beer on the beautiful art book William kept opened on the coffee table, and now the pages were swollen with dampness. A feeling of panic, so strong that she had to stop herself from rushing somewhere, anywhere, spread all over her body. Her hands were cold and she had to sit down to catch her breath. William followed her into the living room, silent, picking up the plates, emptying ashtrays, taking them all to the kitchen, grateful to have something to do. He had run to the store and brought her papers, The Gazette, The New York Times, Le Devoir, but the news seemed all the same to her.

“It’s still too early,” he tried to calm her down. “We’ll have to wait.” He brought her a glass of water and a piece of toast, but she only shook her head. Then he began making coffee, and she shuddered at the grinding noise of the coffee mill. The phone rang. “Yes,” William said. “I will. You can imagine how she feels. Yes. Thank you. I will.”

She dialled the operator.

“Sorry, Ma’am. All lines to Poland are cut off. I’m really sorry. Please try again later.”

In the evening, exhausted from crying, her mind unable to sift through reports that called the events in Poland everything from utter betrayal to the choice of a lesser evil, she let William take her out to dinner. She was silent the whole evening, staring beyond him, her eyes aimlessly recording the shapes of wainscotting, the maze of squares on the wallpaper. He looked at her, and then looked away. “I don’t know what to say,” he said.

She didn’t say anything. William’s face seemed to her too sharp, too finely chiselled, the way the world looked on the days in her childhood when a fever hit her. Trees had sharp, spiky branches, clouds stood out from the blue of the sky, the stocky, dark houses had sharp roof tops and red wavy tiles. Now it was William’s face she saw as if cut out of paper; the edges, if she ran her fingers over them, capable of slashing her finger, a thin shallow wound painful to heal.

“Don’t cut me off like that,” he pleaded.

It was her own body she concentrated upon, following the trajectory of each shiver, hands folded, pressing against her thighs. The food she had forced herself to swallow lodged itself against the walls of her stomach, a hard, sour lump, refusing to dissolve. She was trying to steady another surge of panic, the urge to stand up and run, blindly, fast, the fastest she could. She took a long breath and drank the wine William placed in front of her. She thought that the force of her pain disappointed him; the resurgence of old ties diminished the new. She didn’t care.

He ate fast, watching her all the time. He tried to reason with her, to plead for her patience, for time. “It won’t be too bad. At least it’s not the Soviets, Anna. Communists won’t dare to do anything too drastic. They can’t afford it.” She nodded but did not listen. “Tell me what you are afraid of,” he asked, but she only shook her head. How could she tell him about shame? About blaming herself for her selfishness. In the last four months she had come to believe that she had the right to think of herself. Thought herself brave, even. Until the moment when she saw the images of tanks in Polish streets, telling her that what she did had nothing to do with her new freedom. It wasn’t courage, she thought, it was betrayal “I haven’t really known you, have I?” Piotr had asked.

“You cannot change anything, darling,” William kept repeating. “Would you rather be there now? How would that help?”

“I want to go home,” she said, and rushed out of the restaurant. The door swung behind her. William’s car was parked nearby, but she kept walking through the streets, her feet slipping on the frozen pavement. She didn’t even turn back to check if he followed.

The news flew fast. There were accounts of massive arrests of Solidarity activists; the lists, rumours had it, had been prepared months ahead. There were reports of strikes, of tanks crushing the entrance gate of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdask. Striking miners were dying in the Wujek coal mine, in a losing battle with the ZOMO forces. The arrests of Walsa, Kuro, Michnik were confirmed; Frasyniuk was reported to be on the run. On the walls, defiant graffiti, “Winter may be yours, but spring will be ours.”

It was not hard to imagine how it would go: Loud knocks at the door. The old, worn platitudes. You’re under arrest. Don’t try any tricks. Piotr would flash his defiant smirk, lips folding as if he were getting ready to spit in their faces. Would she love him more for it had she stayed? Would nothing else matter to her, too? Anna didn’t know any more. She had lost the certainty of her judgments. She was floating in between worlds, unanchored, weightless. Could it be that her love for William was nothing but an infatuation after all? Love misplaced, uncertain, already tainted by her shameless desire for peace, for comfort. What had she done then?

William, she thought at times, was getting tired of her tears. She could hear him slip out of the house in the morning. “Do what you want,” she whispered to herself, “Why would I care?”

She spent her days waiting for news, flipping through TV channels, listening to short wave broadcasts. Her eyes were permanently swollen; there were red, sore patches on her nose and face. At night she turned her back to William and stayed close to the edge of the bed. She watched him with suspicion, collecting all signs of his indifference. He frowned when he looked at her. He locked himself in his study for the whole afternoon. He put a record on too loud, to drown the static of the short waves. She was provoking him, too. She left him to do the dishes, shopping, laundry. “You go,” she said when they were invited over to Christmas parties. And all the time, she watched what he would do. He waited.

The Christmas cards that arrived a few days later, forwarded to her from Rue de la Montagne, had been mailed before her call to Piotr. We wish you a Happy Christmas, your first so far away from us. We love you and think of you all the time, her mother wrote. Words that by now, she was sure, would have been taken away. Piotr scribbled his wishes in rows of small letters. I miss you. It will be a sad Christmas, and the last one apart. I shouldn’t have let you go. From now on it is either together or not at all, right? I’ll be thinking of you on the 24^th. Love you, Piotr.

She sat down on the living room sofa and let the cards fall on the floor. William was away that morning, and the only sound that reached her was a distant noise of a passing plane. She examined the veins on her wrists, running her fingers along them, absorbed in the realisation of how delicate, how thin were these outer reaches of her body. William must have walked into the house then, but she hadn’t even heard him.

“You still love him, don’t you,” he asked. “If you tell me to go away, I will.”

Startled, she looked up and saw that there were tears in his eyes, swelling, rolling down his cheeks, one transparent drop chasing another. He didn’t try to hide them, to wipe them off.

He just stood there, looking at her, letting the tears fill his eyes and flow. It was with these tears that he won her again.

She did love him; it was not an illusion. She stood up and threw her arms around him. His lips touched hers, whispering her name, between kisses. “Anna,” she heard, “Oh, Anna,” and he buried his wet face between her breasts. Running her fingers through his soft, silver hair, she felt his tears soak through her blouse. His hair smelled of the winter air, crisp and fresh.

The repressions were not as bad as they could have been. The worst — those who managed to leave Poland stressed — was the overwhelming sense of hopelessness. William helped Anna make more parcels. She packed the food into cardboard boxes, and he wrapped them up in brown paper, tied them tightly with string and carried them to the post office. It was a good sign, he stressed, that the post still accepted parcels, for this was all she could do to make her parents’ lives easier.

When the first letter from Poland came in, two months later, it had the word CENSORED stamped across it. Dear Daughter, her mother wrote. She must have hesitated for a long time what to call her. Piotr was in Warsaw on the night of the 13^th, and that’s when he was arrested. He was now in an internment camp in Bialolka. Her brother was fine, and so was her father. Yes, her parcels arrived, and they all thanked her, but asked her not to bother again. They would survive as they had survived before. Distance, her mother wrote in her even, round letters, blurs the real picture. We all hope that you will find happiness and peace.