Necessary Lies by Eva Stachniak

Author:Eva Stachniak [Stachniak, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, FIC000000
ISBN: 9780889242951
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2000-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

There are no radio-taxis outside the cemetery gate so Anna hails an ordinary taxi and asks to be taken to the Old Town. She will walk from there to the Marriott, she decides.

This taxi-driver is silent and pensive. When the ride is over he asks her for the equivalent of fifty dollars. When she protests that a radio-taxi would cost her no more than five, he shrugs his shoulders and tells her she should have made sure of the price before getting inside. He is an independent taxi-owner. This is capitalism, in case she hasn’t noticed. He charges what he pleases.

“Are you going to pay or do you want me to call the police,” he asks her.

“Don’t bother,” Anna snaps and gives him what he wants. He takes the thick wad of Polish currency with a broad smile of a winner.

She slams the door of the taxi so hard that flakes of rust fall off. The driver honks and drives off, leaving a puff of black smoke behind him.

The winding streets of the Old Town are paved with cobblestones. Anna walks slowly, stopping at the displays of jewellery stores, trying to restore her calm. The incident with the taxi-driver has made her hands shake. This, too, is an old feeling from here, she recalls, the impotent rage at such small acts of cruelty. At being cheated, pushed, told to go to hell, not to put on airs and expect God knows what. She wants to forget such feelings. She would rather remember the heroic resistance of which there are so many reminders. Flowers against the walls still mark the spots of street executions. The best and the brightest, her mother would say.

“Thirty-four,” she reads as she passes. “Thirty-four Poles died at this spot, executed by the Germans.” The flowers, red and white carnations, are wilted. The letter P with its base turned into an anchor, the symbol of resistance, is made of brass. Her brother wrote to her once that hours after martial law was declared, these signs appeared on the walls in every Polish city.

In one of the stores in the Old Town Anna buys an amber necklace and a pair of earrings for Marie. Two drops of amber on long silver rods.

“Do they really look the same way as they looked before the war?” she had asked her mother once about these reconstructed façades, the winding streets and cobblestones.

“Yes,” her mother said, her voice hardening already, warning her not to doubt her conviction. “They do.”

Flashes of afternoon light manage to break through low clouds, shed beams of warmth onto the walls of buildings. Anna is on Krakowskie Przedmiecie now and these are yellow walls with a shade of pink. Nuns walk out of the Church of the Visitation, in long black robes and white wimples. They walk in groups, slowly, whispering among themselves, bending their white, pensive faces. Anna takes out her camera. The flash goes off; so there is not enough light, after all.

Nothing here, she thinks, is like it was.

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