“The New York Times is even worse,” he said. “You need gloves to read it.”
It was evening already, but on this side of the Iron Curtain, cities did not surrender to darkness. Even from where she was Anna could spot the glow of the store-windows on Sherbrooke Street. On her last day in Wroclaw, Piotr took her out for a drink. They parked their tiny Polish Fiat near the Town Hall and walked in darkness to the wine bar they used to go to when they were students. Piwnica -
Piotr demanded she clean their table first.
“I have no cloth with me,” she snarled.
“Then go and get one,” he said.
That was Piotr all over. Left to herself, Anna would have shrugged her shoulders and wiped the table. Emptied the ashtray onto the dirty plates stacked on the table next to them. Why bother? Now, the waitress would only make them wait. But Piotr never thought of consequences. There was no selection to his battles, she often thought. In streetcars he demanded to see the identification of the ticket inspector before producing his crumpled ticket. For years he wrote endless letters of complaint to the administracja, the elusive owner of the building in which they bought the permission to convert a part of the loft into an apartment. Complained about the crushed vodka bottles in the hallway. Stolen milk from outside their door. Low water pressure. Missing light bulbs in the corridors.
She admired it in him, really, thought it a far superior quality of character than her own willingness to ignore what bothered her. This tenacity, this refusal to give up when she would have waved her hand and went about her own affairs.
When she met Piotr, she was barely seventeen.
After classes, in the school washroom, she lengthened her eyelashes with black mascara, and spread a touch of lipstick on her cheeks to make them, look flushed. Her flaxen hair, always unruly, tangled when she brushed it. She unpinned the school badge from her arm. Her friends were already waiting for her on the Partisans’ Hill, where they always met to talk and smoke, looking out for teachers who would have liked to catch them transgressing. Report them to their parents. Lower their behaviour mark.
Piotr Nowicki came to meet them on Partisans’ Hill. He was a friend of a friend, Daniel said with an air of mystery about him, a law student with “political connections.” He was “to sound them out. Make sure they could be trusted.” It was January of 1968. The students were beginning to stir.
Partisans’ Hill was right by the city moult. A park with a cream-coloured pavilion and empty old fountains with rusted pipes blocked by slime. The boys bragged of knowing where the entrance was to the underground bunkers. Even claimed to have broken the chained lock once and gone in, but Anna did not believe them. On Partisans’ Hill, in 1945, when Wroclaw was still German and was called Breslau, the Nazi defence had its headquarters. When the Red Army came too close, General Niehoff moved to the basement of the University library. Festung Breslau — that fanatical Nazi stronghold, Anna was to be reminded every 6th of May — defended itself longer than Berlin itself.
It was a cold January afternoon, the air misty and damp; they were huddling under the pillared roof, six of them — Daniel, Basia, Andrzej, Hanka, and her, Anna — smoking, waiting for Piotr. She spotted him first, walking in the wet, melting snow, past the empty fountain, his dark blond hair clinging to his forehead and to his pale cheeks. He walked slowly, hands in his pockets, whistling softly to himself. She wanted to brush the dripping curls off his face, kiss the rain off his lips. He didn’t see them yet, or maybe just pretended not to see. With the corner of her eye she saw him stop, raise his face to the sky and open his mouth to catch the falling flakes.
It was an awkward meeting. Hands were shaken, promises exchanged. He thought them all mere schoolchildren, babies with mothers’ milk smeared over their faces, playing at danger. The cigarettes were silly, he said. So was the make-up, the lipstick. “Why draw attention to yourselves over such trifles?” he asked. “How is that supposed to help?”
Daniel was the first to drop his cigarette to the ground and step on it. It sank into a melting snow. Andrzej followed suit. Hanka wiped the lipstick from her lips with a handkerchief. It didn’t quite come off. It left a red stain behind.
Piotr told them that all the Polish students wanted were the rights guaranteed in the Polish constitution, confirmed by international treaties. “For what we now have is a mockery,” he told them, in a feverish whisper, “A pyramid of lies.”
She thought: He isn’t looking at me. He doesn’t care for anything but politics.
“We have enough,” he continued. In Warsaw, the Communists closed the performance of Dziady, in the National Theatre and the milicja attacked the students who placed flowers in front of the monument of its author, Adam Mickiewicz, proving that in this “new and just Poland” even the greatest Polish romantic poet was not immune from persecution! Soon, there would be protest everywhere. Dormitories were stocking up on food and candles. Underground presses were printing leaflets that someone had to distribute. There were proofs of harassment to publish. Of unlawful arrests. Of deaths.
“These are difficult times,” he also said, his voice turning grave as if he were their teacher admonishing a warning. “There will be provocations. You have to keep your heads clear, watch out for informers. It’s not a joke.”
She thought: He will go away now, and I won’t see him again. She watched his lips as he spoke, pale from the cold.
One by one they were sworn to secrecy. Anna saw Piotr was impatient to go, looking at his watch. They were small fry, not much help could be expected of them. This meeting was more a sign of good will than real action. A groundwork for the future.
“Right,” Piotr said turning to Daniel. “I’ve got your number. I’ll contact you when I need help.”
“Wouldn’t it be safer if you called me?” she said in a moment of inspiration on which she was to congratulate herself for years afterwards. “You could pretend you were asking me for a date.”
He turned to her before she had finished the sentence and smiled for the first time. It was a funny sort of smile, the smile one gives to a child’s antics.
“Sure,” he said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
She gave him her telephone number, scribbled it on a page torn from her notebook. She went home thinking: He will call me. She wanted to sing it, to chant it as she skipped on the granite tiles of the pavement. At home she pinned her hair up and took off her glasses. Her profile, she decided, was not her strong feature. There was a slight backbite to her jaw that she did not like. She looked far better with her hair loose, curling along her cheeks.
She kissed the mirror. She baked a plum cake.
“What’s the occasion?” her father asked.
“Oh, nothing,” she said. “I had a good day at school.”
Piotr called her that same evening, far less sure of himself than he was on Partisans’ Hill. All he wanted to do, he fumbled, was to check if the number was right.
“Yes, it is,” she said and waited.
To check, he continued, if perhaps, she wouldn’t mind seeing him. To discuss things, procedures, in case there was an emergency. For a coffee, perhaps. She liked the hesitation in his voice, the hint of insecurity. Delighted at her own power, she was not going