Necessary Lies by Eva Stachniak Read Free Book Online

of the lake, petting a country cat, its speckled eyes narrowing with pleasure. “Smile,” he kept saying. “We are all very unthreatening here.”
    She thought: Then why am I so scared?
    The country roads were almost empty of traffic. “What’s that?” Like a child she pointed to things she had not seen before, farm silos, communication towers flashing their mysterious lights. She wanted to know so much about him,but she promised herself she wouldn’t ask, so she was watching him instead, his hands gripping the steering wheel a little too tight. On his black sweater she saw the glimmer of silver, the hairs shed from his beard that she had an urge to pick.
    Only later, when they were crossing the bridge back to the city, she broke her own promise.
    â€œDidn’t your parents want to go back with you?” she asked. “To Breslau,” she added, as if he could doubt what she meant.
    â€œTo Wroclaw?”
    It pleased her that he observed the politics of geography. He paused, as if the question required his thought.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI’ve never known my father,” he said, slowing the car down and she thought that he, too, began counting the minutes before they would have to part, “and my mother never wanted to see Breslau again.”
    Montreal spread before them. Among the warm fall colours of the Mountain the green dome of St. Joseph’s Oratory was almost invisible. She was thinking that in his voice she could hear some old, recurring arguments.
    He had no patience with nostalgia, he told her then. He was tired of old Breslauers he sometimes met, suspicious of their stories. All this talk of the perfect city, prosperous, safe, well planned! Bourgeois heaven!
    â€œYouthful amnesia, that’s what they all claim now,” he said, his lips pouting, “but in these border towns they all voted for the Nazis. These glorious defenders of the German soul!”
    Didn’t she, too, find it was always so? he had asked her as he drove off the sun-lit highway, into the downtown streets filled with strolling crowds. Wasn’t the past always presented that way? As better? More mysterious? More meaningful? Even the worst, most guilty past, he added, and his shoulders rose in a shrug. It seemed to her then that he was reading her thoughts, anticipating her questions, answering them before she was even aware they were there.
    They were two blocks away from her apartment. One more turn and she will be alone again.
    â€œDid you see your old house?” she didn’t want him to stop talking. This city she had left with so little regret, where she never felt at home — Wroclaw — had now begun to intrigue her. “Is it still there?”
    â€œYes,” he said. “It’s still there.”
    â€œDid you get in?”
    â€œNo.”
    He had driven past it in a taxi. He hadn’t even asked the driver to stop, just to slow down, so that he could take a quick look without drawing anybody’s attention. As the car passed by, he remembered that his
Oma
had buried a box with family silver in the back yard, right before leaving for Berlin. Under the hazel bush.
    â€œAnd you never even tried to get it back?” she asked.
    There was never any parking space on Rue de la Montagne. He had to stop in mid-traffic to let her out.
    â€œNo,” he said as she freed herself from the seatbelts. “Of course not. Why disturb the new owners, remind them of the old hatreds, stir up the past?”
    She had to agree with him. Why, indeed?
    â€œA new friend of mine,” Anna told Marie, then, “a composer from McGill.” She had the overpowering need to speak of William, then, to confirm his existence.
    â€œWhat’s his name?”
    â€œWilliam. William Herzman.”
    â€œNever heard of him,” Marie said. “What has he written?”
    In the music library Anna had found a recording of William’s