Read Online Necessary Lies by Eva Stachniak - Free Book Online

he wouldn’t hold his breath for the future.
    Anna loved the house, its red brick walls, oak woodwork. There were stained glass transoms over the doors and a bay window in the living room. She moved through the rooms carefully, listening to the creaks in the floors, learning the views from each window. Her own things melted into the house without a trace. Her cheap paperbacks lay unpacked.
    Her clothes took just a few hangers in William’s closet.
    She loved watching William move through the kitchen in his red apron, among the scents of food, adding herbs to the steaming pots, pouring wine into them, setting the timer, turning the roasts, lighting cognac on steaks. Foods had their own chemistry, he said, there was a science of mixing tastes, a sensitivity to the palate that had to be trained and then indulged.
    She touched the lids of his musical boxes, with their brass, ebony and mother-of-pearl inlay, turned the brass keys to listen to the tunes of Weber, Mozart, Bellini. He had repaired them all, she learned, big and small, fascinated by the simplicity of their mechanisms. All that was necessary was a spring, a cylinder with steel pins that would lift and suddenly release the tuned steel teeth, and a brake of sorts. “Mechanical music, a challenge for the human mind. Clarionas, multiphones, hexaphones, Violano-Virtuosos.” His eyes sparkled when he showed her his treasures, opened the boxes to point to the perforated paper roll, the Geneva stop-work that prevented the springs from overwinding. These air brakes as he called them had parts with funny names, the governor, the butterfly, the flyer, the worm.
    â€œPlay them for me,” she asked and he walked around the room winding them for her. The bells, the chimes, the soft tunes filled the room, and she laughed and clapped her hands, delighted. When he was away, she would open his violin and touch the strings, the black pegs, the smooth black hollow where he rested his chin. He had told her that violins remember, that when they were played with mastery for a long time the wood captured the exquisite sounds within itself, kept them for the future. “Nothing else matters, nothing but love,” she whispered into the resonance holes and laughed.
    In the evenings, lying in bed, hands behind his head, William watched her as she moved around the bedroom in her ivory lace nightgown, one of the many presents he gave her. “You are so beautiful,” he murmured and she felt a pulsating, throbbing warmth rising inside her, crouching between her legs. After they made love, when his muscles tensed and when his head fell against her neck, she listened to his breath,shortened and raspy, broken by the sighs of pleasure, and then she listened to the beating of his heart.
    â€œIt will hurt,” William told her. “It always does. But we will be all right, won’t we?”
    â€œYes,” she said. “We’ll be all right.”
    She did not think of it much until then, the pain of parting with Piotr, breaking up her marriage. With William beside her she was happy, blissfully happy.
    In the first week of December she dictated Piotr’s number to the operator. By the time he picked up the phone her heart stopped a million times, a torrent of little deaths. Her palm was sweaty, and she gripped the receiver too hard. She was to remember this for a long time afterwards, the spasm, the tingling of her hand.
    Piotr didn’t understand. “You’ve met someone? You are not coming back?” he asked, as if she were talking of something entirely impossible, ridiculous even.
    She had to repeat, for the connection was poor, the buzz of static overwhelming, and then there was the echo that made her hear her words as if they were spoken into a vacuum, returned to her before she had finished speaking. It humiliated her that he didn’t understand. In her mind she had already altered the past, made him expect her desertion, and his