Necessary Lies. Eva Stachniak

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