The Mazovia Legacy

by Michael E. Rose

  “This is not good enough,” Stanislaw said. “These are serious matters. I have told you I do not like all of these phone calls. I didn’t think it would be like this. I need some indication of your credentials.”

  “Our credentials,” the voice said. A bitter laugh came down the line. “Yes, well, our credentials can be had easily enough. But the telephone is not for this sort of thing, Janovski, not for credentials. We must come to see you and then all will become clear.”

  “No. Impossible,” Stanislaw said. He hung up and stood breathing heavily.

  This is becoming too much for me, he thought. These are surely not the ones. It has been too long now since I first tried.

  He walked to the window and peered out carefully. The car was back. Exactly the same car, with two men in it like the other days. It must have just arrived, but already the snow was beginning to build on the hood, the roof, the trunk. The warmth from inside was clearing the windshield and moisture ran in rivulets down the outside of the glass. Stanislaw could see a dark figure on the driver’s side dialling a mobile telephone.

  Then his own telephone rang again. Stanislaw thought: They are calling from just outside my own house.

  He rushed to the door to check the lock once more and then grabbed the telephone receiver.

  “No,” he shouted into it. “You must give me a sign before I speak to you again.”

  He slammed the receiver down. Calmly, calmly, he told himself. You are a soldier.This can be managed.

  His breathing slowed. They will not come in,he thought. I will not allow them to come in. I have nothing to say to them. He looked at the old clock ticking slowly on the mantelpiece — 4:10 p.m. It will be dark soon, he thought. Not good.

  He sat in his armchair and considered the situation.

  They have been outside before, he thought. But if they are telephoning from outside, is this not an important change? Perhaps they have now decided that they will see me whether I wish to see them or not.

  This thought troubled him. But then his old face slowly took on an expression of resignation.

  I have had troubles before, he thought. Much worse trouble than this.

  He sat very still in his chair, doing nothing. As he had sometimes sat alone before a mission during the war. Then, with something decided, he moved to the telephone and sat at the small stool near the table on which it stood. He dialled a number, waited, and then began to speak slowly and at length.

  “Ah, Natalia,” he said in English. “Your famous answering machine. You know how much I despise these machines. But this time I will leave you a message. At last you will be happy. It is your Uncle Stanislaw speaking.”

  Fool, he thought, she knows this. She would know this.

  “I am sorry you are still away,” he continued. “There is something very important I need to speak to you about when you return. I wanted to tell you there is something, so you would know as soon as you get back.”

  This is not making sense, he thought. You will alarm the girl unnecessarily. You cannot make changes in these recordings once they are started. Say exactly what needs to be said.

  “I have been worrying about some important matters these past months and you yourself remarked on this, I know, before you left. So perhaps we could speak just as soon as you get in, please, if that is all right. Could you call me immediately? There are matters you should now perhaps know a little about. Yes. And, yes, I should also say, even though you know this, that I love you very much, Natalia, my dear. But you know that, I suppose. I do hope I have never hurt you with my foolish bad temper or my old-fashioned way.” Tears came, and he found it difficult to continue. “I am sorry, Natalia, for this call,” he said. “But you will understand better when we see each other at last and I can talk to you face to face. So goodbye, darling. Stanislaw.”

  He stood up. He wished he had not left his name at the end of the message, as if it had been a letter. It is a tape-recorded message, old fool, not a letter, he thought. And why call her and then tell her nothing? He wished there was some way to call again and erase the message he had left. He thought: I have mishandled this. All of this.

  Suddenly he felt very tired and very old. He was sleepy from the afternoon’s heavy meal and the beer and the warmth of his house after the cold of the streets outside. Suddenly he wished only to doze for a time on his sofa and then listen to a program on his radio before going to bed for the night. He wished for a night with no troubles.

  The telephone rang again. This time Stanislaw only sat and stared at it. It stopped ringing eventually and he waited quietly, listening to the ticking of the clock.

  When he eventually heard the sound of footsteps on the verandah and the knock that came at the door, he did not jump, he was not surprised, because he had suspected that the men outside would come. He waited, and the knock was repeated, louder this time but muffled by the glove that covered the knocking hand. He knew that the knock would come again. He had known in his heart that the events he set in motion, so long ago it seemed now, would somehow come to something like this.

  He stood up and faced the door. He thought: The war is never over.

  Chapter 2

  The pilot’s voice when it came over the speakers was businesslike, ever-so-slightly military, and jovial, all at the same time. It sounded like all pilots’ voices do when the destination airport is almost in sight after a long international trip over water. The flight from Geneva to Montreal had gone well, the voice told the passengers, and good tailwinds meant that they would be coming into Montreal Mirabel just a few minutes ahead of schedule at 8:46 p.m. The city had been suffering under a heavy snowfall and strong winds for the past three days, the voice said, and the bad weather had cleared just a few hours ago. So they were in luck. And would they all please have a pleasant weekend in Montreal, and thanks for flying Air Canada.

  Natalia Janovski was not awakened by this announcement because she rarely slept on airplanes. Instead, she enjoyed the dark mystery of narrow, silent cabins littered with bundled sleeping shapes and illuminated here and there by intense shafts of light from overhead reading lamps. She was one of those introverted people who sat for hours in darkened airplane cabins, as if under a spotlight, reading quietly, perhaps writing, perhaps just lost in the musings that enforced stillness and the presence of many strangers inspire.

  In fact, this flight, more than many in Natalia’s recent memory, had been unusually dreamlike. It had been like a long dream of travel. The dreaminess was partly to do with her fatigue, but also partly because in recent days she had been devoting all her energy to intensifying and deepening exactly this sort of introversion.

  Just as her fellow passengers were now stirring and stretching and smiling wanly to one another as the cabin lights were brightened and cabin crew began to bustle around for the final few minutes of the flight, so Natalia was beginning to come back in a more general way to her waking state, her daytime persona of a young professional woman, single and thirty-seven years old, a consulting psychologist with a life in Montreal and responsibilities to clients and to everyday matters in the world.

  For the past several weeks since Christmas, she had been able to ignore all that and to delve, with the guidance and encouragement of like-minded colleagues at the Jung Institute in Zurich, into the world of dreams. These visits to Zurich were, of course, part of the long, daylight road to certification as a Jungian analyst; but Natalia liked to think that she would have made pilgrimages there anyway, that alone in small hotel rooms she would have scribbled each night and morning in dream journals anyway. Because this inner world was where Natalia felt she was most at home.

  Each trip like this, each time she dipped further into Jung’s treasure chest of ideas, she felt her affinity for his thinking increase: that there are archetypal ways of experiencing all that is grave and constant in human life, that these archetypes manifest themselves across cultu
res and across history as symbols and dreams from the collective unconscious for those attentive to them. Such Jungian precepts had by now become articles of faith for her. The “inner work,” as the Jungians liked to call what they did, had been productive for her once again. Natalia was coming home, as always after such trips to Zurich, feeling replenished.

  But the time had been intense and so she was pleased that the journey home was a long one. Even Jungians do not always find it comfortable looking deep into their own psyches, do not always like all of what they see there. Natalia always needed something to act as a punctuation mark between the work at the institute and the resumption of her life and duties in Montreal. To move quickly, like some of the European participants in the sessions, from the rarefied atmosphere of the villa beside Lake Zurich back into their waking lives would be too much for her. She had been happy, therefore, to be able to sit dreamily in the near dark for the entire flight, turning thoughts and dream fragments and new perceptions around in her mind like treasured objects picked up on a beach holiday.

  The long journey, too, had had the effect of bringing her in touch, sometimes more sharply than she would have preferred, with the real world. No, she chided herself, as the Jungians in Zurich would most certainly have done. Not the real world, because the world of dreams and imagination is every bit as real. Not the real world but the waking world, the exterior world.

  That world had thrust itself upon her almost as soon as she had checked out of her pension in Zurich so many hours ago on that same day. The train journey to Geneva was a bracing tonic of Swiss efficiency and also, she thought with a smile, a metaphor. It forced her to sit face-to-face with a row of other human beings in the second-class carriage. She had to decide consciously whether to make eye contact, to make conversation, to make acquaintance. This dose of reality continued at the Geneva airport. Incessant public announcements of real events and necessities were forcefully delivered in several languages from loudspeakers throughout the gleaming terminal building.

  The reality therapy continued soon after the flight took off, when she was obliged to endure the mating behaviour of her neighbour in seat 46-B. A corpulent businessman of some European origin or other, tightly bound into his shirt, tie, and jacket, inquired with an oleaginous smile, which revealed a gold tooth, whether she was travelling alone, business or pleasure, been away long my dear, how wonderfully you speak German and French, and English too? My dear, would you like to have an aperitif with me after takeoff?

  Despite her psychologist’s detachment from such behaviour, despite her professional judgments and insights — this was obviously a man with low self-esteem, unconsciously projecting his anima archetype onto the first available young female in his line of psychic vision — she could not help but find such textbook zoology boring and unsettling at the same time.

  She resented, so soon after her quiet dreamy days in Zurich, the man’s intrusive gaping at her hair, her breasts, her thighs. Despite her professional training, she could not stop herself from feeling a surge of anger at this vulgar intrusion. By the time Natalia had been able to convince her would-be suitor with unmistakable facial, body, and finally, spoken messages that she had absolutely no interest in anything more than a brief pre-flight conversation with him, and by the time she had endured his petulant silence before he haughtily asked the flight attendant somewhere over Iceland if he might change seats, the spell of the days in Zurich had been badly shaken, though not entirely broken. Natalia had still been able to commune privately with her thoughts for the remainder of the flight.

  Now that the aircraft was banking and making its final descent into Montreal, those thoughts at last had to be turned fully outward, to see not just psychic phenomena, but also events in the world as they truly were. As a psychologist, she was coming to recognize the origins of her habitual reluctance to do that. Overcoming that reluctance was another matter.

  Her first thought as the plane descended slowly over the flat, white fields of rural Quebec was that she preferred to land at the city airport, at Dorval, because she could then peer out like a child and try to see her apartment building near Mount Royal or perhaps glimpse Uncle Stanislaw’s snug little house in Westmount. She had never, in fact, been able to see these places in all her landings on the domestic flights that were routed into the city airport, but she liked the game.

  Mirabel airport was far from the city centre. It was a massive, underused, and overquiet cavern of a place, and landing there required a long taxi or bus journey into the city. It was lucky, she had to agree with the pilot, that the weather had recently cleared. The endless flat fields of expropriated farmland that surrounded the airport were deeply covered in snow. In the winter darkness they glowed feebly under roadside lights and farm lights and, now, under the lights of the aircraft itself.The sudden bump back to earth of the landing was a metaphor too, she thought, for being well and truly home again.

  And so it was a woman of this personality and this set of recent experiences who paid the tired Haitian taxi driver on deserted Esplanade Street sometime nearing 11:30 p.m. this Friday evening in Montreal. She climbed alone up the steep, exterior staircase to her home in a small, renovated block of apartments across a park and playing field from Mount Royal. At least two generations of immigrants would have lived in, and been in a hurry to leave, this workers’ neighbourhood northeast of the mountain that dominates the Montreal skyline. But Natalia and many others like her had moved into these rambling places with their floors of Canadian hardwood, their high ceilings, and their fireplaces, and they had made them into inner-city homes for themselves.

  The apartment always gave her pleasure when she came into it on a cold night, especially if she had been away for some time, and it gave her this pleasure again that night. The place was warm and the radiators were cracking and groaning quietly as they did all winter. She dropped her two small bags inside the door, removed her boots, and went in. In the hall mirror she saw an angular face, somewhat pale and tired, framed by long and very black hair. She saw that the face was wearing little makeup and that the nose was somewhat thin in the bridge. She saw intensely green eyes, small ears, and skin that had never been burned by the sun. She thought: There I am. There I am at home.

  She saw the neat pile of letters and magazines that her neighbour, Gustavo, the Chilean refugee social-worker soccer-player ladies’ man, had so carefully left for her on the little umbrella stand as yet another unrequited gesture of his esteem for her. She sniffed the air of a place that had been closed for many more hours than usual. She turned on lamps. She sat in a favourite chair.

  This is what she did and what she thought just before all the calm, all the pleasure, and all the refined thoughts and memories of the previous weeks were suddenly and totally ripped away from her by the events of the next few hours.

  *

  The shock had not come in its full intensity right away, although she had soon had an intuition that something was enormously wrong. She later began to imagine that she had known even before pressing the replay button on her answering machine that it would contain bad news of some sort and that the news would have something to do with Stanislaw. But in the blur and the pain of the days that followed her return home she could not be really sure of the origin of any feeling about the series of experiences that unfolded.

  The sound of her uncle’s voice in the apartment startled her. It gave her a brief moment of pleasure, which was quickly followed by perplexity and then by fear. What is this? she thought. What is this? Uncle Stanislaw? On my tape? In English?

  She stood and listened to his rambling message and to something else that lurked below the words, far below, something she could not until much later even begin to label. She listened to the message again and then a third time, too frightened to be touched by some of the soft things the old man had said. Then she dialled his house in Westmount in dread, despite the late hour.

  No need to panic, Natali
a, she counselled herself as the telephone rang, rang, rang. He is an old man, getting sentimental. There is no reason to believe anything is wrong.

  But when the sentimental old man failed to answer his phone in the minutes before midnight on a freezing Montreal winter night, Natalia allowed herself the indulgence of fear, if not panic. And when the taxi pulled up to the old house on Chesterfield Street perhaps 30 minutes after that and Natalia saw many lights blazing in the windows, she knew that her first reactions would be more than justified.

  The path to the house was deeply covered in snow. There were no footprints on the verandah. But the lights are all on inside, she thought. Of course there was no answer at the door. Of course she felt trepidation as she fumbled in her bag for the key that she always carried for emergencies. The house, when she opened the door, was not silent. It was filled with the metallic voice of the BBC World Service coming from Stanislaw’s old short-wave set on the table near the fireplace. Too loud, too loud, too loud, she thought as she hurried to turn it off.

  The house was filled as well with a disturbing smell. Not, she would learn from the police later, the full-blown smell of an unattended corpse. It had been too few days for that, they said. But not the odour of life and vitality either. It was the hint of a smell of death, the smell of a hint of death. So as she called out for Stanislaw and looked for him, and as she hurried around the ground floor and then up the stairs to the bedrooms, she knew, as if she had already dreamed it so, that when she found him he would be dead.

  *

  She could not say that the police had not been kind or empathetic or understanding in their way. But they could not know what the sight of her dead uncle had done to her, how the sight had seared itself into her psyche. To them it was all too routine. An old man, obviously too old to be living alone, had slipped while getting into his bath and drowned.

  C’est dommage, madame, they had said. C’est vraiment dommage, but these things happen. The two young officers in their insulated blue windbreakers and their too-shiny black police boots had come quickly enough and had made the appropriate secondary radio calls and phone calls. They had even urged her to go back downstairs while they did what needed to be done and wrote things in their small leather-covered notebooks as their walkie-talkies crackled in Quebecois French.