Necessary Lies(6)

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 because this is where they got their jobs. There always had to be reasons, reasons to come here and ever better reasons to stay.

“I got into trouble,” Piotr said. He told her how, with his two friends, he went to the country and bought a pig. “Then,” he said, leaning toward her, his eyes still sparkling at the thought, “we painted it red and let it out. During the May First parade. Right underneath the tribune, all their fat party leaders standing at attention.”

“You did what?” she asked. She couldn’t stop laughing. He watched her, smiling, pleased with himself, so very much pleased.

“Wasn’t easy, you know. We had to bribe the peasant with a bottle of vodka to sell it. He said we didn’t look like the types who would know what to do with a pig. Then we had to bring the beast to Kraków, in Father’s old car. But, ah, it was worth it. The looks on people’s faces! You should have seen it!”

She wished she had. It was a story she loved to hear, the picture filling out with each retelling. The pig squeaking, running in circles. The stinking car that had to be washed and aired for days. The red faces of the “pompous fools” on the tribune.

“How did they find out it was you?”

“Someone squealed,” he said, winking at her. Someone saw them, heard the noise. The police found the paint in his room. They were blacklisted, thrown out of Jagiellonian University.

“My father had to pull a few strings to get me to school here,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

That’s what attracted her then, this recklessness that seemed to know no fear. “As if there were no tomorrow,” her grandmother would have said, with a sigh.

Now, Piotr’s father was telling her of his vigil in front of the Party secretary’s office. Of his pleas to let his son continue with his studies. Of biting his tongue when he was lectured on how badly he had brought him up.

She told Piotr’s father all she knew. About Daniel. About the leaflets. About the nights spent at the Politechnika. Dr. Nowicki listened and nodded. Sometimes he asked questions. He asked, for instance, if Daniel was likely to testify.

“Daniel is all right,” she said. “Nobody interrogated him.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

No, she wasn’t sure, but Daniel never said anything about any interrogation. Never seemed worried or upset at school.

“Good,” Piotr’s father seemed relieved, too. He asked for Daniel’s phone number, though, and she gave it to him. That, too, would later make Piotr very angry. She had no right. She broke the first rule of conspiracy. “I gave it to your father, Piotr,” she said.

“You shouldn’t have,” he said. “Not even to my father.”

The results of Dr. Nowicki’s visit were visible within a few days. Piotr was interrogated, but he was never beaten. His file was quietly shelved. A plain clothes policeman gave him a stern lecture on his responsibilities toward his fatherland, a warning not to get mixed up again with the wrong crowd.

“Fuck you, Pig,” Piotr said.

The policeman chose not to hear him. “Kiss your father’s hand when you see him,” he said. “To thank him that your mouth is still on your face.”

That was his second humiliation. It was the one that almost killed their love.


After his release, Piotr went to Kraków for a few weeks, then returned. When she called him he said that he had no time. She was already a first-year student when he came up to her in the Uniwersytecka library. He looked pale and gaunt. She could smell vodka on his breath. When he whispered her name, tears welled up in her eyes.

That’s when he told her this joke: “Two friends meet. You know what, Maniek, one asks. Something terrible is gonna happen. - What do you mean? Maniek asks. Another war? -No! - Germans will invade again? - No! - The world will end? - No! - So what will happen? - Nothing! We will always live the way we live!”

They walked together, slowly, along Szewska Street, to the Town Hall. Piotr talked incessantly. Of new proofs of callousness, stupidity, and vicious lies. Of Polish troops in Prague, helping to extinguish the Prague Spring. “Welcomed with flowers by the grateful citizens of Czechoslovakia,” the papers wrote, “helping to preserve freedom.” Of corruption, sloth, pilfering. Of the viciousness of anti-Semitic attacks that were making Poland a laughing stock of the civilized world.

“I still love you, Piotr,” she said. “There is no one else.”

She did love him. There was no one else. She never thought there could be.

He asked her to marry him. Right there, by the monument of Alexander Fredro that had been lugged here all the way from Lvov to replace Frederick Wilhelm III. Plucking a flower from the flower bed, shaking off the earth from its roots. His eyes shining with joy. With love. With hope.