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the city? Didn’t care about how German it looked. Never liked Germany much. His family was not Nazi, thank God. His grandfather was executed in Berlin on Hitler’s orders, but he didn’t take much comfort in that. German acts of defiance didn’t amount to much, after all, did they?
    He must have seen her relief.
    â€œYou might have passed me by,” he laughed, suddenly taken with the thought.
    â€œWere you alone?” Anna asked. She was already trying to feel her way around. He wasn’t wearing a ring. She looked at his hand. And she knew he had noticed hers.
    â€œYes. Marilyn, ex-Mrs. Herzman, didn’t much like to rough it with the students. She was into mud spas, then. Excellent for her nerves, she said. Would
you
have been alone then?” he asked.
    â€œNo,” she said. “I wouldn’t.”
    No, not then. They were not from the same place. His Breslau was no longer there and in her Wroclaw he could only be a visitor from the West on an exotic trip to a deprived land, marvelling at how the locals could live among such squalor.
    â€œYou must have thought us all very shabby,” she said, regretting her remark at once. It wasn’t pity she wanted from him.
    But he protested. It was a fascinating world, far more exciting than anything else he had seen in years, but not because of its German past. He did notice that the old German buildings were run down, but he couldn’t make himself care. The past was not worth getting excited about, he said; it only diverted your energy from more important things. It was the present that fascinated him, the defiance of the people, their resilience, their courage.
    Anna knew this was not all together true. For wasn’t it the past, so drab and deprived in her memory, that was now making her somehow better in his eyes? Better than if she had been born here, in Montreal.
    Later that evening when a tall, pretty woman threw her arms around William and kissed him on both cheeks, Anna slipped out of the Faculty Club. “Darling, you are impossible!” she could still hear the woman’s sugary voice. “Where have you been hiding these days?”
    Anna walked home slowly, a short walk down McTavishStreet, to Sherbrooke, turn right, past the glittering veranda of the Ritz Hotel, past the crowded restaurants on Rue de la Montagne. In one of them she saw a couple, a gaunt man and a petite woman in a red dress, toasting each other at a small round table. The woman gave her a quick look and burst out laughing, tossing her head backwards. In the store windows, chic mannequins posed in thick, winter coats lined with fur — men and women, frozen in half step, elegant and poised. Carefree.
    Anna could still hear William’s voice. She half-imagined him next to her, his arm touching hers. “That’s nothing,” she kept thinking. “Someone I could’ve become friends with. Someone I’ll never see again.” The wind was cool, and Anna was feeling its bite. Was it already the first sign of winter? Canadian winter she had been warned to fear, as if no Polish winter could match it.
    At McGill Anna signed up for courses in literary theory, in which she discussed the futility of making any valid and objective statements about literary texts. Thoughts of words upon words that redouble and multiply meanings as they are read excited her. “I have so much catching up to do,” she wrote in her letters to Piotr. She wrote to him about the trappings of deconstruction, the stripping of layers of ideology from literary texts, revealing biases, contexts, underlying interests. “Nothing is innocent,” she repeated. “Nothing without its negation.”
    Piotr’s letters arrived in shabby blue envelopes, with her name in a big uneven script.
Lies, lies, nothing but damn lies
, he wrote ignoring the censors. He was angry. Angry at the betrayals, the blank pages of Polish history that, now, finally,