Necessary Lies (18 page)

“When did you find out?” Marie asks.

“Right after you left. When I started clearing his office.”

“How long did it go on?”

“They met when he was still married to Marilyn. But they've always been lovers. Until he died.”

“Are you sure?” Marie asks.

Anna nods. The envelope is lying on the table. Unopened.

“What a jerk,” Marie says, frowning. “I could've wrung his neck. Men are all like that. They think they can tramp on you if it suits them ” Her black hair falls over her eyes as she shakes her head. “Oh, God, Anna. How could he do it to you?”

“I didn't see anything,” Anna says. “I was blind.” She doesn't like the sound of her voice, it's too plaintive, too hurt.

Marie is calculating something in her head, putting together what she has just heard.

“Does she know he is dead?”

“Yes,” Anna says. “Julia phoned her. They all knew it, for years. Marilyn and Julia. I was the dumb one.” Her voice hardens when she says Julia's name, when she tells Marie about her last conversation with her stepdaughter. She might as well say everything that bothers her. Get it over with. She wants to hear she has the right to feel the way she does.

“Oh, God, Anna. You have to understand her, too,” Marie's voice quivers when Anna has finished her confession. “What else could she have done?”

“I don't
want
to understand,” Anna says with such force, pulling at the sleeves of her jacket, that Marie lets the matter drop.

“All I want to know is why he did it. It's the deceit I mind.” Anna's voice is breaking down, “the lies.”

Marie remains silent.

“That's all there is to it,” Anna says, regretting her outburst already. She was hoping she could talk about her own feelings with more detachment. She really would like to know what Marie thinks. But now she has pushed herself into a rut, begging to be consoled. “I was his second-best,” she says.

“I don't think so,” Marie says softly and holds her hand across the table. “William knew how to be a complete asshole at times, but I saw the way he looked at you.”

Anna's eyes well up with tears. “I could do with a coffee,” she says.

Marie stands up and goes to the counter. She returns with two cheesecakes and two cups of coffee. The cakes, rich and soft, have a mound of whipped cream and a chocolate stick on a layer of breadcrumbs. Marie takes a bite of hers. “Shit,” she says, stirring her coffee with a white plastic spoon, swallowing. “What a mess! What a bloody mess!”

The comfort Marie offers is not too elaborate, a touch of her hand, a sweet bite of the cake, and Anna is again filled with gratitude.

“Ursula,” Anna says. “Her name is Ursula Herrlich. I wrote to her and she wrote back. Said I should go to Berlin, to see her.”

There is nothing wrong with being consoled. That's what she has longed for, hasn't she?

“Will you go?” Marie asks.

“Why?” Anna answers with a question. She doesn't want to admit how many times she has imagined picking up the phone and dialling the Berlin number. “Ursula Herrlich,” she would hear from the other end. “Anna Herzman” she would say, but then her imagination fails her. What would Ursula say then? How could she reply?

“Are you afraid to see her?” Marie asks.

“No,” Anna says. “I'm not afraid.” But this is a lie. Of course she is afraid.

“So why don't you go to Berlin?”

“Why should I?”

“To see things as they really are,” Marie says. “To stop thinking of her all the time.”

“I don't,” Anna says. “I'll go to Poland. To see my parents,” she says. “I have to see Piotr, but I don't have to see her.”

“All right,” Marie says. “You'll do what you want.”

Anna can tell her friend is not convinced. She will try to keep calm, Anna tells Marie. Go through what she has to go through and then, maybe, she will know what to do next. Travelling is good that way, lets one see things in a different way. She will see her family, and come back to Montreal. Forget the past. Forget her humiliation. Forget her defeat. There will be a new life. There always is.

With that Marie agrees.

Since her discovery of Ursula's letters Anna has lived in a frenzy. She has invented chores, filling her days up to the last minute until the evening when she falls asleep too tired to think. In this frenzy she took William's suits off the racks, folded his sweaters and shirts, his beige coat she had helped him choose. She put all of his clothes into garbage bags and dropped them off at the Salvation Army. Then she spread her own clothes on the rack to fill the empty space. She called Malcolm and asked if he would take William's exercise bike and his tennis rackets. “I don't care what you do with them,” she said, shielding herself from his surprise, “I want them out of here.” She cleared the pantry of anything that might go bad. She had her hair cut and had ash-blond highlights put in. She made a list of presents she wanted to buy. Some were easy, like the ones for her brother and his new family she was yet to meet. But she kept returning what she had bought for her mother — a silk scarf was too dark, she decided, a mohair sweater too small. She didn't like the picture frame, either.
Finally she settled for an angora shawl, salmon pink. For her father she bought the most expensive wallet she could find.

Now she is pushing the thoughts of William away from her. He betrayed her and he doesn't deserve her pain, she tells herself. But Ursula is another matter. She cannot be silenced, her letters are always close by, speaking to a William Anna will never know. Echoes of old quarrels, reproaches, rebukes. In this exchange William is the silent one.

OK my farsighted lover! So I am vain, egotistical, self-serving. I get on my high moral horse, as you have so nicely put it, and have a solution to all your problems. I have no right to sound so damn superior. What else? There is another me, without illusions that I have any other way of getting at this world. That's all there is, and that's who I am. But you know where we differ? To me the world is incredibly beautiful. Visually beautiful, even in its pain. And I have given myself the right to disregard everything else. So I'll pay my price, whatever it is going to be. I don't bite anyone else if I hurt.

Darling, If you were here, with me, you would see that I'm wearing a black dress with a white lace collar and white cuffs and I'm in my nunnish mood. I'm fasting, too, to get back some of the tastes I have dulled. Sometimes this works much better than indulgence.

You want to block the past, William. You want to forget. When payment is demanded, you sulk or fly into a rage. You want to be cuddled, nursed through your moods. You know what? You might just manage, but you will ultimately not feel enough. And if you keep doing it, your music will never be any good. So don't ever tell me that you are not involved, that you are above it all! Oh, damn it, Willi, why do I have to tell you that?

Have I ever told you of Hitler's bunkers? We were taken there during the air raids, in the last months of the war. We were given food and a place on bunk beds, and told that our Führer loved all the German children. Once a woman who looked after us brought us some soup to eat, cabbage and carrots in greyish, greasy water. Nobody liked it, but we were too scared to refuse. It was really awful, and I said I wasn't going to finish it. “You will eat it” the woman screamed, “or no one will go to sleep until you do.” I can
still remember her face, red with fury. She seemed so big to me. I was four-years-old, and I really thought it was her scream that made the lamp swing. So I finished the soup, but I couldn't hold it and vomited it all over the plate. She made me eat the same soup again, to teach me a lesson, she said. I guess I'd learnt it, because when I vomited again, I did so all over her, and no one went to sleep that night.

It's the middle of April, still cold and bare in Montreal, but in Poland, Anna's father said on the phone, the forsythia is already in bloom. A few hot summerlike days, and then snow flurries, typical April weather.
Kwiecie
-plecie
,
the month of rapid changes, braiding summer and winter days. “Don't forget to take some warm clothes.”

In one of Anna's oldest memories, her mother is sitting by the window, her auburn hair lit up by the dusty rays of the sun coming through the lace curtain. She is feeding Anna's little brother. The baby is cuddled in her arms, pink and wrinkled, his eyes closed, and Anna can see the shape of her mother's breast, bulging, full. There is a little black mole on it, a little button she would like to press. Sometimes, when her brother stops sucking, she can see the pink nipple, swollen and long, slipping out of his tiny lips, but then the hungry mouth snaps at it again, and she hears his soft, whimpering sounds of contentment.

This is when Anna picks up a pair of big steel scissors lying on the lowest bookshelf in front of her. The metal blades, heavy and sharp, feel cold in her hand, and with all the force she can muster, she hits the edge of the table. Bang!

“Mother of God! Anna!” Her mother's scream pierces her ears and makes her jump, as if Anna hasn't expected it. The baby has bitten her mother's nipple, and is now crying, too, his little face red and wrinkled, locked in the recurring spasms of anger and fear.

“How could you?” her mother asks.

“You wicked, wicked child,” she says, and Anna watches her mother's face change into a grimace.

“My own daughter?” she asks in that voice of hers Anna hates the most, raised, shaking, admitting to helplessness, to resignation. “No. That I can't understand. I can't!”

Her mother shakes her head again, and this is when Anna breaks into tears. She is too big to behave this way, she is told. How can she torture them all with her outbursts of blind, suffocating anger, her wailing cries, her constant checking, even in the middle of the most absorbing play, if her mother still has her slippers on. Afraid of new babies coming home, Anna watches her mother like a hawk.

Sometimes her vigilance works. Her mother stays home, plays with her, shows her how to change the baby, how to tickle his little pink heels, how to laugh at the monkey faces he makes.

“See, he likes you,” she says, “Look, he is smiling at you,” and Anna begins to believe her. But most often her mother says, “I have to go to work, to the Institute,” and Anna begins to cry so loudly that she has to be held back by her nanny, for this is still before the time when her grandmother moved in with them. Her nanny murmurs, “Shame on you, such a big girl!” and leaves her alone in the room.

Her nose pressed to the cold windowpane, Anna watches her mother from above, walking quickly across the street until she disappears. If her nanny let her, she would stay right there, for the whole day, on the wide window sill, staring at the same spot where her mother has vanished so swiftly around the corner, waiting for the moment when her slightly bent, familiar figure would appear again. But her nanny will not let her. She has to eat or, rather, sit in front of a full plate, with food in her mouth, filling her up, gagging her. Then she has to go for a walk, her hand holding the baby's carriage, and listen to what the neighbours have to say. Her morning “concert” is described in detail to anyone who wants to listen, and stout, ruddy women lean over to tell her that she is too big for such silliness. “Shame on you! Your mother has to go to work,” they say, and her nanny nods, hoping that all these sensible comments will make Anna see the foolishness of her crying, of her eyes, locked into the spot where her mother's figure disappeared behind the corner.

“You had a nanny?” William had asked. “In Communist Poland?”

“Yes,” she said, slightly piqued at his amazement. It was the time when she was not yet sure what she wanted, to be part of the world in which nannies were possible, or to be pitied for the deprivations, the drabness of her past.

She could always amaze him with the vestiges of the proper middle-class existence her family managed to pull off. That's what he said, “pull-off,” as if it were all a magic trick, an elaborate cheating game in which Anna had her summer holidays in the country, her first communion in a long white dress, her English lessons, her nannies, her long hours at the piano practising scales. All of it happening among the ruins, right under the nose of a Communist government with its five-year plans, parades of iron-fisted workers, holding the portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and right behind them, the portraits of their current successors.