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 25th 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