Necessary Lies. Eva Stachniak

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       To the memory of my father, Jerzy Jerzma ski, and to my mother, Anna Jerzma ska.

       MONTREAL 1981

      Piotr would say that she was betraying Poland already.

      He wouldn’t mean that Anna had become besotted by Canadian comfort, by supermarkets overflowing with food, by the glittering lights of Montreal office towers she described for him in such detail in her letters. He wouldn’t even mean the ease with which she showered her praises over the smallest things. Strangers smiling at her. Cars stopping to let her cross the street, mowed lawns moistened by humming sprinklers, a man on Sherbrooke Street bending to scoop up after his dog.

      Piotr would tell her that the signs of her betrayal were far deeper and far more troubling. He would say that she had let fear creep into her heart. He would be right.

      September of 1981. The time Poland was on everybody’s lips.

      After the unrepentant strike of 1980 in the Lenin Shipyards of Gdask, Solidarno grew stronger in defiance. The whole world was flooded with images of the grim, determined faces of the striking workers in blue overalls, crossing themselves and kneeling at the feet of makeshift altars; above them hovered the concerned smile of the Polish Pope. Books on the Polish August, on the first independent labour union in Eastern Europe — or rather, as certain commentators knowingly stressed, Central Europe — piled up in storewindows. The triumphant smile of Lech Walsa, his hand holding a giant cross and a red pen with the Black Madonna of Czstochowa, followed Anna as she walked the Montreal streets. A thirty-seven-year-old unemployed electrician, the papers glowed, had defied the Kremlin. “We want to show the world that we exist,” he said at a conference in Geneva, and then stood patiently when hundreds of labour delegates lined up to shake his hand.

      That Anna was in Montreal at all was a miracle. In Poland she taught literature in the Department of English at the University of Wroclaw. She had applied for a scholarship to England to research emigré writers, but was told to wait for her turn. The Canadian scholarship was one of these unexpected offerings from fate. “You would have to leave in August,” the Dean’s secretary said when she called Anna at home late in the evening, “they start their academic year in September.”

      Piotr was looking at her from his armchair, eyebrows raised. She pointed at the ceiling in a gesture of bewilderment.

      “Someone screwed up,” she heard in the receiver. “As usual. They just called us from the Embassy. They need someone from humanities, right away. Are you going?”

      “Yes,” she answered. “I’m going.”

      Six months in a good library was a long time. “Any good library,” she said to Piotr as he pulled her toward him, his fingers making tunnels in her thick hair, caressing the nape of her neck. She was piling up her reasons. She was already twenty-eight and had never even been to the West. Even if she saved a hundred dollars from her stipend, at the black market prices it would mean twenty times their salary. And she, too, needed a break, a few months of respite from the line-ups, the constant strikes and protests. Anyway, by February, when the winter semester started at the Wroclaw University, she would be back, wouldn’t she?

      He was mouthing her name, whispering it into her ear. “Go,” she could hear him say. She felt the edge of the armchair against her hip. His lips tickled her, made her laugh. He would just miss her, that’s all.

      “Couldn’t you go with me?” she asked him then, even if she already knew the answer. Now? When all was being decided? When the fate of Poland was on the line?

      Anna piled up her daily portion of newspapers and magazines on a table in the reading room of the McLennan Library at McGill. The Gazette, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time. It was an oak table with metal legs, its edges polished by generations of wrists and elbows. Long commentaries in Newsweek and Time calmly analysed Polish chances, printed diagrams describing the position of Russian tanks and East German troops, and included colourful tables that listed all previous attempts to shake off Communist rule: East Berlin, the Hungarian Uprising, the Prague Spring, the Polish revolts of 1956, 68, 70, 76. All of them in vain.

      She didn’t have to be reminded of that.

      Yet another bloodshed? Letters quivered in front of her eyes, and she looked away. The fingers of the young man across from her who was reading Le Devoir were blackened with ink. In his last letter Piotr reminded her once again that the Communists could