Necessary Lies. Eva Stachniak

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.