“In Poland it wasn’t easy to get to them,” she said.
She had to get letters of recommendation from her research supervisor and a special permit from the censor before she was allowed to open yellowed copies of emigré newspapers in the Wroclaw library. Provided she did not make photocopies of the material that the old wrinkled librarian grudgingly placed on her table.
But, there, in Poland it was all a ruse. An excuse to get facts for Piotr’s bulletins. In the 1930s ten million Ukrainian peasants were starved to death on Stalin’s orders. In the Soviet Gulag, before the guards could stop them, prisoners devoured the frozen meat of a mammoth. In orphanages, the children of dissidents were taught to worship the great Stalin, their true and only father. Near Katy
Here, in Montreal, she sank into the descriptions of the lost Eastern lands, the sandy banks of the Niemen river and the depths of the Lithuanian forests. It was a forced exodus. When the post-war borders moved westward, the Polish inhabitants of Vilnius and Lvov had to leave or become Soviet citizens. She read of the trek of the displaced that ended in the former German lands, in Wroclaw and Szczecin, in the villages of Lower Silesia and Pomerania. A flood of people, tired, defeated, humiliated, mourning their dead, remembering the minute details of houses left behind, the creaking floors, the holy pictures. These people whose towns and villages were cut off by the borders of barbed wire and ploughed fields became her Wroclaw neighbours. “Where are you really from?” they began all conversations, “How did you get here?”
“I was lucky,” Babcia would say. She had left Tarnopol, a small town east of Lvov, in the 20s. Her parents were still buried there. On All Souls Day there was no one to light candles on their graves.
Her immigrant scribblers, William used to call her emigré writers, tending their marble graves. “Have you noticed,” he kept asking Anna, “that whether written in London, Toronto, Sydney or Geneva, the tunes of lament are always the same? Is there nothing out there but what you’ve known before?”
That’s what Anna tried to explain to William that night. “They are remembering the forbidden,” she said. “That’s what I am trying to do, too.”
“What if nothing is forbidden?” he asked. “What then?”
She thought about it, sipping her wine, making little circles on the tablecloth with her fingernails.
“I can’t imagine it yet,” she said.
The wine was beginning to soften her tense muscles. She took a bite of bruschetta the waitress placed between them on the white tablecloth.
“You do love your husband, don’t you?” William asked her.
She saw that William looked away when he said it. So she, too, only permitted herself to stare at his hands. Tanned, slim hands, long fingers softly folding a dinner napkin, or tracing the shape of his beard. She was playing with the strands of wax dripping from the candle. She must have shivered then, for he put his hand over hers, and, quickly took it away.
“I’m starving,” she said and took another bite of bruschetta. The piece of tomato slid from the bread and fell on the tablecloth. She picked it up and tried to soak the stain with her napkin.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said and poured more wine into her glass.
When the world whirled in front of her eyes, she tried to stop it by staring in one direction only. She took a sip of water. In the morning she had passed by his McGill office in the Music Building. Second floor, third door to the right. The corridor was empty and the floorboards creaked under her feet. Quickly she touched the brass knob of his door and walked away before anyone could see her. She thought about borders. The dangers of crossing them. Of finding herself on this other, forbidden side. Of the point, still hidden to her, from which there would be no turning back.
“You are changing, Anna,” she heard William say, his voice so warm, so full of concern for her. “Your new needs are as real as your old ones.”
“Are they, really?” she asked, thinking of Piotr, trying to remember the touch of his lips.
William drove Anna back home. There was no place to park the car, and, as soon as he stopped in front of her apartment, she released the latch of the seatbelt, ready to flee.
“I’ve fallen in love with you,” he said then. Blood rushed to her cheeks. “You know that, don’t you?” The car behind them honked. The driver leaned out of the window. “Hurry up,” he motioned to them and flashed his headlights.
She opened the door and dashed out. She didn’t even turn around to look at him. Inside her apartment she didn’t switch on the light. She sat on the floor, back to the wall, and held her knees. She rocked her body, until the phone rang.
“I’m sorry,” William’s voice on the phone was quiet, almost shy. “I shouldn’t have said it. You have enough problems without me.”
She was sobbing into the black receiver.
“Anna,” she heard. “Anna. My darling. Are you all right? Am I hurting you?”
She didn’t answer.
“If you tell me to go away, I will. Tell me to go away.”
“I love you,” she whispered, and then waited in the dark, tears and laughter mixing together. She heard the soft knock at the door and let him in, his face white and drawn. He bent to kiss her, and she stood there, still crying, feeling his soft lips on hers, both happy and terrified of what she had done.
“I’ll go mad,” she kept saying. “I’ll go mad. I’m so happy I want to die.”
In the bedroom she watched him kneel on the floor and kiss her hands, and bury his face in them. She felt her skirt lift, rise above her knees. She was shedding her clothes like skin, like another, inferior version of herself. She no longer wanted to resist. That she allowed herself to be so besotted was a sign in itself. This love was like a new life, too strong to oppose.
“Anna,” he whispered, “my darling.” She knew then that she would never go back to Poland, to Piotr, but the thought didn’t hurt yet. Gently she licked the tips of his fingers as they moved over her lips. His hand slid down her neck onto her naked breasts, down between her legs. “Oh my God, please don’t punish me. I’ll be better, I promise. With him, I’ll be better, I’ll understand more,” she prayed, closing her eyes.
She repeated the words he whispered to her, the English words his voice gave new meanings to, “My precious darling, my love.”
“I don’t want an affair,” she said. “I won’t lie about you.” And then, her eyes still closed, with the pores of her skin she felt the warmth of his lips. “I’m thirsty,” she said.
He walked barefooted to the kitchen and poured her a glass of cold water. She was shaking when she drank it all, gulp after gulp, a cold snake entering her, filling her insides. He kissed the glass, licked the drops of water from her chin. They laughed. Through the window they watched the roofs of houses, the lights of lampposts, of passing cars. Across, in the distance, was the giant cross on the Mountain, erected by a city grateful for being spared from a flood, now long forgotten. He pulled her toward him again, her hair tangled, her body ready for him. It occurred to her that she should check the balance of desire. That it was dangerous to love too much, to be that insatiable. Before she had completely formed the thought, she was ashamed of it.
There was moonlight in the room where they lay, entangled, still hungry for each other. The furniture was grey — all shadows, dark, indistinguishable. There were layers to their bodies, whole territories to explore. The soft