her throat, she would choke.
“A nice girlfriend. A lucky bastard, too!” the taller was looking at her now. The shorter one spit on the pavement, the white blob landing at Piotr’s feet. Glass cracked. Kicked, Piotr’s bag landed a few feet away. The milicja men laughed. Their knuckles tensed on the handles of the white night-sticks. “Let’s see how lucky you really are!”
She could see, with a corner of her eye, that the sinews in Piotr’s neck were tensing up. He would say something now, she knew it, say something that would make the men strike. Call them pigs. Moscow lackeys. Quote his constitutional rights. Then they would be arrested, searched. She had to stop it, right away. Now.
“Him!” It was the contempt in her voice that caught their attention. “He’s no longer my boyfriend. And he is no longer a student. He failed his exams.”
“Third time,” she said and laughed. “Failed for the third time.”
She was counting on the power of their contempt, on the slight chance that they might dismiss Piotr as not worthy of their effort. She was not taking into account the simple fact that she was humiliating Piotr. Such deliberations required time. She felt the men’s eyes slide up and down her face, her breasts, her belly. She was waiting, a soft smile on her lips. Anything that might tip the scales in Piotr’s favour.
The shorter man, who was holding her ID in his hands, had been staring at her picture for some time now, but did not write anything down. A golden ring on his finger glimmered in the sun.
“Shouldn’t you be at school right now?” the taller man finally said, and she knew that she had won. He was returning her school I.D.
“That’s where I’m going,” she said, taking it and putting it in her pocket. Her school was, indeed, a few streets away. “Only now I’ll be late.”
“Scram, you piece of shit!” the taller milicja man said to Piotr. “And don’t let me catch your ass around here again.”
She was so proud of herself, so relieved that it was all over, that she never noticed his silence. As soon as they turned around the corner he took her bag from her and told her to go to school right away. She tried to protest, but he said he had no time for any nonsense. It was only when he didn’t call her that evening that she realized the enormity of her defeat.
You fool, she said to herself. You damn fool. What have you done?
Anna went to Piotr’s dorm a few times, left messages with the three roommates who swore to tell Piotr she had come by. She cried so much that in the morning she had to put cold compresses on her eyes before she could face her mother, but even that did not help much. “It’s all that reading,” she lied. “Studying for the exams.”
A few days later, Daniel brought her a note, slipped it to her in the math textbook. The note was from Piotr. In Warsaw, during a protest against repressions, the students were beaten up by the milicja, right in front of the University. That was the spark they were all waiting for. Now, Piotr was inside the Politechnika. The Wroclaw students demanded to be heard. He was not going to call her, for all calls were monitored and he didn’t want to put her in danger. She was to wait and trust him. He knew what had to be done.
In the school bathroom where she went to read Piotr’s note she burst into tears. She cried again, on Partisans’ Hill where Daniel patted her on the shoulders and kept saying that Piotr would be all right. But she was not crying from fear. She was crying from happiness. Piotr had forgiven her. She had not destroyed his love.
Soon it became clear that the student revolt had turned into one more defeat, a handy excuse for the government to start another internal purge. The Communist Party had no trouble convincing the workers that the spoiled “brats” from universities were forgetting who was the ruling class in Poland. Whose sweat was paying for their education? As to their demands and criticisms — some were justified. It was not the Communist Party, however, that was at fault, but the Jews. Weren’t they responsible for the Stalinist rule? Weren’t they infiltrating the party ranks? The Jews who never truly supported Poland, never cared for her? If only they would leave, all would be better off. Poland was for true Poles only. The students were misguided at best.
When the strikes and protests were over, the interrogations began. “Why did you do it? Who told you to start it? When? Give us names, more names. That’s your only chance.” Piotr knew the questions by heart, prepared himself with answers. Rehearsed them with Anna, debated the merits of giving the names of known informers or perhaps not mentioning any names at all. Many of their friends were kicked out of the university, barred from all but the most menial jobs, and most of their Jewish friends had already been told to leave.
Newspaper columns filled with code words, foreign element, cosmopolitanism, internationalism. Suspicious words, alien, not Polish. “No one is keeping you here,” the commentaries declared. “Leave. Go to Israel. Isn’t it what you always wanted?” Piotr was interrogated and arrested. Taken from his dormitory room in hand-cuffs. Daniel called. He told Anna to write to Piotr’s father in Kraków.
This is when Anna learned Piotr’s father was not just a doctor, but a well-known heart surgeon whose skills had a price beyond money.
“Please,” he said and his voice when he called her sounded just like Piotr’s. “I have to know everything before I start asking for favours. It is absolutely essential to establish how much they know.”
She agreed to meet him. Her own parents still knew nothing of Piotr. She wanted no comments from her mother that she was still before her matura and university entrance exams, that there were eight candidates for each place at the Department of English. That if she didn’t do well, very well, her whole future would suffer.
Dr. Nowicki waited for her in the Monopol Hotel, in -
“He is just like me,” he said, smiling, holding her hand up and kissing it. There was a smell of Old Spice aftershave around him. She knew it; her father used it, too. In her best olive green dress and with her glasses hidden in her purse, she was worthy of his son.
“Please forgive me for imposing myself on you. Piotr should have brought you to Kraków, to introduce us properly. Now, circumstances make their own demands.”
She wished she had not taken off her glasses. As he sat across from her at the table, she could not see the fine details of his face.
This was not the first time he had to come to his son’s rescue, Dr. Nowicki began. But he was not blaming Piotr. Far from it. It was all Communism’s fault, he said.
“Bullshit,” she would hear Piotr say later. “Of course he blamed me. His methods, of course, are so much more superior to mine, right? All he has to do is to cut open a few party bosses and then ask for a small favour in return.”
But that was to come later. Then, at the Monopol Hotel, Dr. Nowicki was still investigating the situation that he admitted was very unpleasant and delicate. “You see, Pani Aniu? he said, “This is not the first time I’m doing it.”
“I know,” she said.
She did know. Why would anyone, she once wondered, come to live in Wroclaw? Come here from Kraków, of all places, that rare Polish city untouched by the war, saved by a miracle that, depending on who was describing it, involved a German art-lover, a Russian marshal, or wet and sabotaged explosives. Leave a city where generations of Polish kings lay buried in the vaults of the Wawel Castle, where in St. Mary’s church a trumpeter stopped his bugle-call in mid note in memory of a Tartar arrow that pierced the throat of his predecessor, centuries ago. Leave to come here, to Wroclaw, this city without a past, where history ended with the desperate Nazi defence of Festung Breslau.
Her own parents came to Wroclaw because Warsaw was bombed and destroyed. They stayed