Necessary Lies. Eva Stachniak

him. He was so proud of his own strength. He had never had the flu in his life, never knew what back pain was. He could still beat younger men at tennis. She went out to do the shopping, took her time chatting with Pauline, her neighbour, who was shovelling snow next door, her morning exercise, she said, her cheeks rosy from the cold.

      Back home she didn’t suspect anything. The kitchen smelled of cinnamon and baked apples, and she thought that William got tired of waiting for her and must have warmed a slice of pie in the microwave. She opened it and the pie was there, forgotten, enveloped in a shroud of plastic wrap. This by itself was not unusual. When he was composing, William would often leave things mid-way. He didn’t like to be interrupted. “By anyone,” he had told her once and she had learned to deflect telephone calls, avoid stepping on a squeaking board.

      The kettle was still hot. His mug was beside it with a tea bag steeping inside. She put a brown paper bag filled with groceries on the kitchen counter and only then she noticed that the door to his study was half opened. That was unusual. “William?” she asked softly, half expecting an angry grunt of warning, but he didn’t answer. “Your tea is getting cold, Darling,” she said softly, and started unpacking the brown paper bag as quietly as she could. Cold cuts and cheeses went on the top shelf of the refrigerator, red peppers on the bottom. She was still in her coat, her purse over her arm. He would laugh, if he saw her like that. “Why can’t you ever finish one thing before starting another?” he would ask, and help her take off her coat.

      It was only when she had placed the warm croissants on a wooden tray by the toaster, that the silence began to bother her. “William?” she asked again, and then, only then, she did push the door to his study open and saw him, on the floor, face buried in his hands as if he were hiding from her in some childish game.

      She could feel her purse slide off her arm as she knelt beside him, its contents spilling on the almond boards of the floor. Her keys, her wallet, a compact powder fell out, a lipstick tube rolled under the desk and stopped. William’s face when she touched it was still warm, but a chill was already setting in, as if he had just returned from a brisk walk in the cold. Her hands shaking, she called the ambulance, cried into the receiver, begged the woman at the other end to hurry, to please hurry, for God’s sake. “Oh, my God,” she prayed, “Please, please, don’t punish me.”

      “This pain in the shoulder area,” the doctor said, kindly, “could’ve been the first sign.” He gave Anna a quick look as she was getting up from the examination table, dizzied, her feet cautious and unsure, testing the firmness of the ground. “But you can’t blame yourself. It was easy to miss.”

      He gave her a sedative that made her head swim, a small, white, oblong tablet.

      “It couldn’t have been the first one,” he said. “There was scar tissue on his heart. For all we know it could have been hereditary.”

      “What?” she asked, uncomprehending.

      “Heart failure that strikes like that. It often runs in the family. How did your husband’s father die?”

      “I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows for sure. He died in the war,” she said, slowly. It seemed to her that the lining of her mouth had lost all its moisture and something bitter in her throat was crawling toward the tip of her tongue.

      At five in the morning the bedroom in the Westmount townhouse is still dark. Anna wakes up and lies motionless, terrified by the thought that the borderline between what is still possible and what is already lost is so thin, so easy to cross.

      Once she had awakened to murmurs reaching her from his study; a low hum of his voice, breaking through her sleep. She kept her eyes closed, waiting for William to come back to bed. She heard him tiptoe through the room, freezing with a hiss as he tripped, trying not to wake her up. And he, thinking her asleep, sat down beside her. “I love you,” he whispered, his hand gently smoothing the curls of her hair. She held her breath, as he bent over to kiss her cheek.

      Now she closes her eyes and imagines that he is still with her, lying flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, and she can almost hear the rhythm of his breath. Imagines he has just woken up, and rolls over toward her, his eyes heavy with sleep, and she extends her hand to smooth the hair on his chest. He locks her hand in his, and kisses the tips of her fingers. Shaking his head he smiles at her, a cheeky smile that softens his handsome, weatherbeaten face. At fifty-one his grey hair is no longer a statement.

      “You dyed it? Why?” she asked him, once, just a few months after they met.

      “To look older than my age?” he tried to laugh it off. “To make pretty women wonder?” His voice teased her, made her laugh with delight. “You do like it, don’t you?”

      “Come on, seriously,” she wasn’t going to give up.

      “Do all Polish women always have to know everything or is it just you?”

      “Just me,” she said. They were walking up the Mountain, past the trees covered with ice, bending under its weight. He stopped. His eyebrows rose, deepening the lines of the forehead.

      “Let’s say I’m not too partial to the Aryan look.”

      She squeezed his hand and pulled him forward, and then she felt a surge of blood rising to her face.

      In her mind she lets her eyes wander to the mound of ashen curls between his legs. “Hi there, sunshine,” he murmurs, and begins to hum as he swings his legs to the rug.L’ amour est un oiseau rebelle… she hears the phantom words. He is in the bathroom now, leaving the door half-open, vanishing into the vapours of a hot shower, emerging from the mist with a towel across his shoulders and she watches him directing an imaginary orchestra, bending over the green marble counter, stopping to inspect his face, to trim unruly hairs from his nostrils, and then, his voice rising to a crescendo of the finale, bending in a deep bow, waiting for her applause.

      The feeling that death is an illusion, that nothing ever ends overwhelms her. Her heart begins to race. The soles of her feet tingle. If she hurries she can still catch him, bent over his desk, a steaming mug of coffee in his hand. In her father’s stories elves and fairies could be caught like that. All that was needed was to surprise them, to snatch something they cherished, without which they couldn’t remain invisible.

      But death is no illusion. On her kitchen calendar January 26, 1991, is circled with a thick black marker. “At noon,” she wrote that day in her diary. It is already the first week of April. A few hours later, on the front lawn Anna will spot the first, shy patches of melting snow, revealing yellowed grass, last year’s uncut growth.