Necessary Lies Read Online Free Page A

testify.
    â€œDaniel is all right,” she said. “Nobody interrogated him.”
    â€œAre you sure?” he asked.
    No, she wasn’t sure, but Daniel never said anything about any interrogation. Never seemed worried or upset at school.
    â€œGood,” 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œFuck 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 topreserve freedom.” Of corruption, sloth, pilfering. Of the viciousness of anti-Semitic attacks that were making Poland a laughing stock of the civilized world.
    â€œI 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.
    At the McGill library the man with ink-stained hands rose to leave. He asked Anna if she cared for his paper or if he should take it back to the rack.
    â€œPlease leave it,” she said. “And thank you.”
    â€œYou are welcome,” he said.
    Solidarity gets tougher. It defies Moscow with a call for free unions in the Eastern Bloc and free Polish elections
, she read. The newspaper columns grew more and more alarming. Military hospitals were being put up on the Soviet-Polish border. Troops were kept on standby alert, guns were loaded and routes to the Polish border were mapped out. The Warsaw Pact started its military exercises,
Zapad 81
— West 81 — in the Gulf of Gdask. The deafening noise of a few hundred thousand soldiers, of tens of thousands of tanks, aircraft, and ships was heard for miles. The commentaries pointed out that Brezhnev’s words,
We will not leave Poland alone to suffer
, left no illusions as to the Soviet intentions. The Polish situation was threatening to the Warsaw Pact.
Newsweek
printed pictures of workers gathered around Walsa, their raised fingers forming the sign of a V; on the opposite page there