Necessary Lies Read Online Free PDF Page A

corner was a small Czech patisserie where she could have her morning coffee. Didn’t she just love the sweet pastries displayed on paper doilies, folded over glass shelves? The Czechs were Marie’s friends; she had interviewed them once for one of her radio programs. The owner defected in 1968, after the Russians invaded Prague and was now dividing his time between Montreal, the Laurentians, and Florida. To Marie he confessed that he no longer needed to bear the cold nor the humidity. Let the next generation sweat it out. He could afford his escapes.
    Anna’s apartment consisted of a tiny kitchen, a bathroom, and two small rooms, furnished with an old sofa-bed, a dresser, a couple of bookshelves, and a grey Formica table with two plastic-covered chairs. In the closet Anna found a cardboard box with a rusted frying pan, a few books in Arabic with pages swollen from dampness, and a small coin with a square hole in it. The first dayshe made the mistake of leaving an opened cereal box on the counter, and found it swarming with cockroaches. This was a detail she did not include in her letters home.
    In the fall of 1981, out of all her Montreal friends, Marie Chanterelle was already the closest. A journalist with Radio-Canada, equally comfortable in English and in French, Marie had been to Poland and to Czechoslovakia. She had smuggled manuscripts from Prague to Vienna, interviewed Michnik and Havel. “Trying to find out what gives them the strength to go on,” she told Anna. “Where do they get the courage not to grow bitter.”
    With Marie, Anna could discuss the futility of hope, the overwhelming evidence of Eastern European helplessness. Together they listed the reasons. The bleeding Budapest of 1956 and Kadar’s show trials. Dubek’s pale face when he was called to Moscow to account for the fever in the streets, and his tears when he gave his first speech after Soviet tanks entered Prague. The unmarked graves of the workers killed in Pozna, Gdansk and Szczecin in 1956 and 1970. With Marie, Anna could pore over the maps of Poland marked with thick black arrows, the possible routes of another invasion.
    â€œPiotr,” she told Marie then, “doesn’t want to leave Poland. Ever.”
    â€œAre you afraid?” Marie asked her.
    Anna
was
afraid. In spite of what Piotr might tell her, she was afraid of Russian tanks, of Piotr being killed, or even arrested, sentenced to years in prison. Of his father, now her father-in-law, not being able to help next time.
    Marie squeezed her hand. For weeks she had been interviewing refugees from Poland. She got Anna’s number from a McGill friend and phoned to ask her how Polish women survived the chronic shortages, how they managed without toilet paper and sanitary napkins, how they kept clean without shampoos and toothpaste. “Can I come over to speak to you?” she had asked. “Don’t worry. I won’t use your name. No one will know.”
    Anna told Marie of hours spent in line-ups, of the constant lookout for things that could be traded, of hair washed with egg yolk and teeth brushed with baking soda. It was all terrible, humiliating, she said. Nothing worked, nothing was available. Marie did not agree. Her own parents still remembered the Great Depression in St. Emile. There was nothing humiliating about resilience, she said. Nothing to be ashamed of.
    From their long talk that first day, just a few clips were used in a collage of voices Marie summoned to express the feeling of the impending catastrophe among Polish refugees. In her documentary, politicians warned of military retaliation, crowds in front of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa chanted their demands for freedom. “Nothing would make me go back, now,” a man’s voice declared. “There is no hope.” Then came Anna’s voice, describing the life of shortages. High-pitched, she thought, and strained. And then a young woman’s voice, shaky,