Necessary Lies. Eva Stachniak

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