She wanted to know so much about him, but she promised herself she wouldn’t ask, so she was watching him instead, his hands gripping the steering wheel a little too tight. On his black sweater she saw the glimmer of silver, the hairs shed from his beard that she had an urge to pick.
Only later, when they were crossing the bridge back to the city, she broke her own promise.
“Didn’t your parents want to go back with you?” she asked. “To Breslau,” she added, as if he could doubt what she meant.
“To Wroclaw?”
It pleased her that he observed the politics of geography. He paused, as if the question required his thought.
“Yes.”
“I’ve never known my father,” he said, slowing the car down and she thought that he, too, began counting the minutes before they would have to part, “and my mother never wanted to see Breslau again.”
Montreal spread before them. Among the warm fall colours of the Mountain the green dome of St. Joseph’s Oratory was almost invisible. She was thinking that in his voice she could hear some old, recurring arguments.
He had no patience with nostalgia, he told her then. He was tired of old Breslauers he sometimes met, suspicious of their stories. All this talk of the perfect city, prosperous, safe, well planned! Bourgeois heaven!
“Youthful amnesia, that’s what they all claim now,” he said, his lips pouting, “but in these border towns they all voted for the Nazis. These glorious defenders of the German soul!”
Didn’t she, too, find it was always so? he had asked her as he drove off the sun-lit highway, into the downtown streets filled with strolling crowds. Wasn’t the past always presented that way? As better? More mysterious? More meaningful? Even the worst, most guilty past, he added, and his shoulders rose in a shrug. It seemed to her then that he was reading her thoughts, anticipating her questions, answering them before she was even aware they were there.
They were two blocks away from her apartment. One more turn and she will be alone again.
“Did you see your old house?” she didn’t want him to stop talking. This city she had left with so little regret, where she never felt at home — Wroclaw — had now begun to intrigue her. “Is it still there?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s still there.”
“Did you get in?”
“No.”
He had driven past it in a taxi. He hadn’t even asked the driver to stop, just to slow down, so that he could take a quick look without drawing anybody’s attention. As the car passed by, he remembered that his Oma had buried a box with family silver in the back yard, right before leaving for Berlin. Under the hazel bush.
“And you never even tried to get it back?” she asked.
There was never any parking space on Rue de la Montagne. He had to stop in mid-traffic to let her out.
“No,” he said as she freed herself from the seatbelts. “Of course not. Why disturb the new owners, remind them of the old hatreds, stir up the past?”
She had to agree with him. Why, indeed?
“A new friend of mine,” Anna told Marie, then, “a composer from McGill.” She had the overpowering need to speak of William, then, to confirm his existence.
“What’s his name?”
“William. William Herzman.”
“Never heard of him,” Marie said. “What has he written?”
In the music library Anna had found a recording of William’s oratorio, Dimensions of Love and Time. On the back of the record was a photograph of William from fifteen years before. He was sitting in an empty room, on a carved antique armchair, looking away from the camera. His face was longer, she thought, with a touch of austerity about it she had never noticed. It must have been the absence of beard, she thought.
William Herzman is one of the most promising Canadian composers of the decade. His music draws its inspiration from the act of questioning. It rings with the profound distrust of the sacred. It allows for no comfort, no escape; it demands the suspension of emotional involvement as we seek to understand the essence of the human experience.
She ran her finger along the contours of his face.
“Anything else?” Marie asked. “Has he written anything else?”
Anna said she didn’t know. “It doesn’t matter, anyway,” she said, lightly. “I just thought you might have heard of him. At Radio-Canada. That’s all.”
A week later, he was waiting for her in front of the Arts Building on the McGill campus, sitting on the stone ledge, looking at the city below. She could see him from afar, motionless, hands folded on his lap, in his beige coat and a brown felt hat. A fedora. In her grandmother’s stories of pre-war Warsaw, men wore fedoras and foulards, they lifted their hats to greet women. He looked at his watch. She was late, but not too late yet, not beyond hope.
“I can still turn away,” she thought, “There is still time.” It was getting dark already, and the beam of light circled the sky over the downtown office towers. “We can be friends,” she kept telling herself. “Just friends.”
There was nothing wrong in seeing him, she decided. They liked to talk, that’s all. They liked the same books, the same movies. For hours they talked of Elias Cannetti, Günter Grass, Apollinaire. “You absolutely have to see it,” he would say and take her to all his favourite films. In the red velvet seats of the Seville Repertory Cinema she laughed at The Life of Brian. With amazement she watched the rituals of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, when at the cue from the screen the audience threw rice, lit cigarette lighters or squirted water. William took her for evening drives up the Mountain to show her the lights of the city. They lined up for hot bagels on St. Viateur, had late dinners in restaurants along Prince Arthur. When they walked, they were still careful to keep a distance between their bodies, conscious of every swerve that could bring them closer together. All that time he never asked her about Piotr.
He smiled when he saw her approaching, a smile of relief.
“Dinner?” he asked.
She loved these long, unhurried dinners, with dishes arriving one by one, filling her with delicate flavours. For the first time in her life she tasted escargots, black bean soup, the pink flesh of grilled salmon, green flowers of broccoli. She was insatiable, always looking hungrily at the colourful plates, eating far too much, as if to make up for lost years.
She nodded. If there was already something irreversible about this evening, something that made it different from all the others, she was trying not to think about it.
“So,” he asked when they sat down, the flame of a candle wavering between them. The day before she had promised to tell him why she was so fascinated by her emigré writers, stories scattered in emigré papers, thin volumes of poems printed by the small presses of London, Chicago, Montreal. As if the mere act of leaving anointed people with some mystical, unexplainable superiority. As if they could see more.
“Isn’t it a prisoner’s dream?” he asked.
The question troubled her. In Poland she would never think of the need to defend the importance of these exiled voices from abroad. Her interests might be declared suspect or embarrassing to her department, dangerous perhaps, but they would never be questioned like that.
“Dangerous?”
“Of course! After all,” she said, “they defected.” He waited for her to continue.
“And yet,” she added, “for us they were never absent.”
If they pined after Poland as they were scrubbing capitalist floors or committed suicide by jumping from their New York windows, she told William, then such writers could count on scraps of official memory. They