– What will you say when you see him?
– I don’t know.
– Do you want to be with Piotr again?
– I don’t know.
The women in the other beds listen, tease her.
– She’s come to Germany to find a Polish man.
– Did no one tell her there are plenty in Poland already?
– Oh piss off you two. Go to sleep.
Adela stabs out her cigarette in mock annoyance, Ewa lies in the dark and smiles.
She used to make love with her husband in the bathroom, when they lived at her in-laws’ place. So she knows those four private walls, the lace curtains and what you could see through them. Piotr would sit her up on the windowsill, when Jacek was asleep, his parents out working. Afterwards she would keep her arms around him, and they would press their faces to the curtain and glass, watch the wind in the trees outside through the gaps in the net pattern. Piotr would sleep like that sometimes. Standing and leaning into her and the window. And she would watch his breath mist the pane, know the net was leaving its flowery imprint on his cheek and on her shoulder.
__
Jacek didn’t want to speak to Ewa when she called last night and so Dorota listened to her sister crying on the phone until her money ran out. She is still angry with Jacek when he comes to the salon after school. Lets him spread his own bread with jam, leaves him to get on with his homework in the small back room. Later, after she locks up, she presents Jacek with a clean rag and a bottle of vinegar to polish the mirrors. Dorota sweeps the day’s hair up, and because he is quiet, she talks to him.
– Our parents were old, so they died when we were young, you see.
– Mmm.
– I was married, but your mama was just fifteen. She knew your father then already.
Jacek sprays the mirror and Dorota doesn’t know if he is listening. She sweeps on in silence a while, not sure what she wants to say, what it is exactly she wants her nephew to understand. That Ewa was too young to know better, still is? She hears the tones of judgement in her own thoughts and flushes, jabbing at the soft grey-brown pile she has gathered with her broom. Her sister is twenty-five now, was an eighteen year old bride, and the idea still shocks her. But Tadeusz, Father Gregory, Aunt Jasia: everyone told her Ewa should marry. As quickly as possible. Piotr had just done his National Service, Ewa was still at school, but even her teachers and Piotr’s parents would call on Dorota about it. They didn’t say it, of course, but the urgency was there in their voices: before she gets pregnant. And then, when Jacek was born a little over eight months later, the same people nodded, how fortunate it was that they hadn’t waited. Dorota watches Jacek rub the vinegar smears dry on the glass and remembers crying the morning of Ewa’s wedding: relief and regret. And afterwards, that she went with her sister to the housing office to put her married name on the waiting list, for the flat they never got. Even after Jacek came along and the new government and they thought everything would get better. Ewa moved to her in-laws’ in the meantime, and then out again nearly three years later. Not long after Piotr.
– I know my father is in Berlin.
Dorota looks up.
– Do you remember him?
Jacek blinks.
– Will you cook soon or do we have to wait for Tadeusz to come home?
__
The weather turns cold, and the wind blows in hard from home, driving the rain east to west in sheets across the fields. The asparagus stops growing.
There is other work to do, washing, sorting, bunching, packing, but the farmer’s wife says there isn’t room in the barn for all of them, so they are to work in two shifts. One in the morning, the other in the afternoon: they can divide the work amongst themselves and the first group will start in two hours. Ewa dresses while the others make themselves coffee and comfortable, get back into bed for a while. She offers Paula, the German mother, her shift, says she needs a day off, and Paula giggles, puzzled, until she understands Ewa’s sign language, then she nods gladly. Adela is in the shower and Ewa pulls on her coat as she opens the door, leaving before Adela can stop her. She walks the path between the fields to the road, back to the wind, landscape ahead of her blurred. The long, parallel lines of the asparagus trenches lead her eye to grey nothingness, no horizon visible, just rain.
The farmer sits in his van, eating his breakfast roll, watching her standing where the track joins the road north, under the sign to the city, occasionally holding out her thumb. The few cars that pass ignore her, and the farmer judges from the way the trees are bending, and how she draws her hood close around her cheeks, that the rain and spray must be blowing full in her face.
Ewa stays there almost half an hour before she starts walking. And the farmer stays there, too, radio on, wind-screen misting. And when Ewa is out of sight, he looks out across the asparagus fields, the long, pale strips of polythene covering the sandy rows. Knows the stubborn white crowns are nestled somewhere beneath the surface. Unwilling to grow into the wind which has him gripping the steering wheel when it catches the high sides of the van.
__
Ewa waited half an hour, walked for two. One hour north and another hour back south again. Back to the women in the dormitory, who don’t say anything when she appears, blue-lipped and dripping, but wake her up later with coffee and biscuits, and make her cups of sweet black tea in the morning when her head hurts and her bones ache and her eyes are gummed together.
When the farmer comes to say they will do the same half-day shift pattern, Adela clears it with him in her good German and low voice that Ewa should stay in bed. He says he will get his daughter to bring some aspirin.
In the afternoon, the rain slows and the wind drops. Ewa gets up and walks across to the barn where the others are sorting. She works on into the evening, after the others have gone inside to wash and cook. Only Marek stays with her, sifting the stringy root and stalk into crates ready for planting.
Ewa has known Adela since school, her family too. Started sitting next to her in class the same year martial law was declared, when they were ten, eleven. Adela was the youngest in her family, Marek her oldest brother. She came to school on a winter morning and whispered to Ewa that he had gone, but Ewa was to say nothing. She remembers thinking how sad it was, that he had to leave then, because it was just before Christmas. Marek was married, to loud Feliksa with the grey eyes, and they already had two children. Adela’s mother would send her to help Feliksa after school, and sometimes Adela invited Ewa to go with her. They would cook or play with the babies, or go out and queue if Feliksa had had no luck at the shops in the morning. It didn’t seem sad that Marek was gone then, more exciting: a husband in the underground and later in prison. Ewa hoped, expected, that one day she’d have one of her own. Marek was a photo beside Feliksa’s pillow, a rumour that turned up in the night and was gone again: for years at a time. Ewa remembers when they heard about him being arrested, that, despite everything, it was somehow thrilling. And then later, how she’d boasted, to impress Piotr, that she knew him.
Marek was released after the amnesty. He came to their wedding a year or two later, and people said he was ill, that he had changed: unrecognisable. Adela got angry when Ewa told her, said he’d done enough, just wanted be left alone now, with his family. The democracy he had gone to prison for arrived in hard-fought stages, but he said he’d rather leave the strikes and rallies to the younger men, had three more children with Feliksa in the years after he came home. Now Konrad, the middle one, goes to school with Jacek, and Marek comes to work in Germany with his little sister and her friend from school. He stacks his completed crates on the floor, smiling at Ewa as he starts on another set.
– Deutschmarks for our boys.
The florescent tubes hum over the long tables, the rain falls steadily, soft against the dark skylight. Ewa watches Marek, hands working, a constant motion in front of his soft belly. The skin under his eyes is loose, hairline receding. When she and Adela got a bit older,
fourteen, fifteen, Feliksa had told them about him, sitting around the kitchen table on their after school afternoons. A shared cigarette, a half-glass each of something strong and tales of what it was like to sleep with Marek, what she missed now he was gone, and what she didn’t. That he had cried in front of her, the night the phones went dead and the message came that the other union men were being arrested. Now, as she works and watches him, Ewa thinks how frightened he must have been, how perverse it was, that she had thought it romantic. But they had been her ideal: Lonely Feliksa, Absent Marek. The sacrifices they made in the hope of a better life for all of them.
Feliksa works now, taught herself bookkeeping, took a correspondence course in computing, and Marek seems to like being at home to take care of their young ones. Ewa collects Jacek from them sometimes, if he goes home with Konrad after school, and she enjoys being in the familiar flat again, likes the way Marek cooks dumplings, much better than the ones she and Adela made for Feliksa in the same kitchen, all those years ago. Back then, she often tried to imagine what the better life would look like, after the sacrifices were over. And she smiles now, because she knows this picture would never have occurred to her: she and Marek sitting in a German barn together, sorting asparagus into bundles.
Ewa doesn’t see the farmer come in, only notices him when he stops at the trestle opposite. Marek stands, and they shake hands and talk to each other, partly in German, partly in Russian. Ewa listens to them: grown men speaking a language they learnt at school, both Eastern Block children once, both about the same age perhaps. She watches the two men talking, smiling, and remembers something Adela told her: that the farmer always asks for Marek personally now, when he applies for seasonal workers at the employment service.
– It is late.
The farmer is looking at Ewa, he says it in Russian and it takes Ewa a couple of seconds to understand, to hear the words through his German accent. She smiles, nods, has not spoken Russian since her final exams: tries.
– This morning in bed. So I work now.
– You want to go to Berlin?
Ewa blinks. Wonders who told him, if he saw her go, perhaps. His tone is neutral, he doesn’t seem angry about the missed day’s work, but Ewa thinks it best to make sure he understands.
– I left my paper blank yesterday. No pay.
– Yes, yes, I know.
He waves a dismissive palm.
– From tomorrow the weather will be good again so we will cut lots this week, I think.
– Yes.
– So then we can all have a day off perhaps. At the weekend. Marek can drive you to the station. You should get a train to Berlin from there, it is better than hitching.
__
The farmer is right. The days are warm and clear, they work long hours, the sun shines on into the evenings and Ewa gets freckles across her nose and on her forearms. Piotr always liked them, and she hopes the hot weather holds, so they are still there when she finds him.
Getting used to the cutting routine, bodies adjusting, they are less tired, stay up later after they have eaten. Ewa plays chess sometimes, with Adela’s cousins, and with Artur, another cutter from Silesia, ex-miner, old colleague of Marek’s, from his union days. They set up the boards on a rickety table out in the yard and the late spring evenings are warm, moths battering themselves against the electric light on the side of the barn. Marek’s friend is a good chess player, but she doesn’t like the conversations they have afterwards. He tells her he worked on a bigger farm last year where the pay was better.
– Should have gone back there, shouldn’t have listened to Marek.
– Marek says it’s much nicer here.
– Nice is cheaper. They cook us some lunch, we get to know their kids, they make a show of working with us, and then complaining about the wages starts to seem rude, doesn’t it?
– They work just as hard, Artur, it’s not a show.
– Yeah, yeah. And the farmer tells Marek how much he likes us Poles, the way we stick together, haven’t sold our souls for freedom. Patronising bullshit, and Marek falls for it.
– I think he’s alright, the farmer. It’s alright here.
– We’re cheap labour, Ewa, from across the border because their own people get more on the dole.
– You’re not telling me anything I don’t know.
Ewa tries to deflect Artur’s cynicism with some of her own, but it gets to her all the same, makes the early mornings even more difficult, the long hours harder to take. Ewa does without the chess games, spares herself the aggravation, stays in the dormitory, after the evening meal, talking: most often with Adela and Paula.
– She says she grew up near here, and they used to get days off school to help with the harvest. Potato fights in the fields in the autumn.
Adela lies on her back on the bed, translating what Paula tells them, smoking, eyes closed. Paula sits straight-backed on a chair by the open window, Ewa standing behind her, winding Paula’s hair around her fingers, the heated tongs, as she has watched her sister do to so many women over the years.
– She moved to the West with her husband after reunification, but they are divorced now.
Ewa smells the hair heating up, the oil and perfume in the mousse rising into the air. She can’t do it as well as Dorota, but she tries, and she feels Paula relaxing, the hum of her voice, the stop-start rhythm of Adela’s translation. Life stories told in the last hours before sleeping.
– She thought she might look for permanent work, try to come back to live here with her children, but says she won’t. The other farms here stayed in the collective, privatised now, with the same people running them, only half the workers. All her friends have gone, the place feels empty. And there are no jobs here anyway.
The evenings are over too quickly and no matter how she spends them, Ewa always ends them thinking about Piotr. Legs stretched long against each other under the blanket, skin to skin. Three years together in a single bed, no moving apart, even when she was pregnant. Piotr’s sleeping breath on her shoulder, Jacek stirring and turning, getting comfortable under her skin.
Ewa knows she is being sentimental. Forces herself awake in her dormitory bed, correcting her own picture with memories of food prices out of control, and unpaid wages, the far too small flat shared with his parents. This was after Jacek was born, after the changes, and she remembers Piotr sitting on the edge of the bed, telling her things would get much, much worse before they had a hope of getting better.
– We have no privacy, nothing to look forward to.
He said this to her so often she had been stupid not to see it coming.
__
Sunday and they are all sleepy. The day is bright hot and blue and most of the cutters bring their breakfasts out into the yard, standing with eyes closed, chewing, faces tilted to the sky. Ewa washed her jeans last night, has the envelope from her father-in-law stuffed into the still-damp back pocket. Some of the others plan a trip to the lake to swim, Marek says he will drive Ewa to the station.
– Just one more coffee.
The car rattles over the cobblestones in the town and Ewa holds her door closed to keep the noise down a little. The Sunday streets are empty, all strong light on pale stone. Marek squints and yawns as he drives, eyes still puffy, he doesn’t say much. She has been told such a lot about his marriage over the years, doesn’t know what he knows about her own. That Piotr is in Berlin is common knowledge: when she found out, Ewa had the feeling that most people knew it already. And she thinks the reason for this little trip must be obvious to Marek; but if he is curious, he doesn’t show it, and Ewa is grateful.
He comes into the station with her, helps her find the next direct service on the yellow timetable on the wall, a couple of potential times to come back on the white, and then he buys her a ticket.
– I’ll pay you back.
– You don’t have to. But I want you to use the return half, okay?
__
Jacek goes to church with Doro
ta and Tadeusz, a reassuring part of his normal routine. Even when his mother is at home, she doesn’t go, but because all his school friends do, his aunt ended the arguments between him and Ewa by picking him up on Sunday mornings after breakfast, walking him there sometimes alone, sometimes with his uncle. Jacek enjoys the hushed echoes under the high roof; muffled coughs under the intonation of the sermon; shuffling coats in the line before communion; anticipating the swift, light touch of the priest’s fingers.
Ewa used to take him to the church when he was younger: never to the service, but on weekday afternoons when it was quiet and empty. This was before he started school and he was still quite small then, remembers how she used to sit him on one of the dark cushions in the pews along the side aisle, by the confessional. He could hear the low exchange after she went inside, but not the words spoken: soft pattern of murmur and silence making him sleepy.
Often, when he opened his eyes again, he would be in his mother’s arms, and she would be walking. Out on the street, in the daylight, on the way somewhere else, and it would be good to be out of the dark and dust of the empty church, but still he remembers the shock of waking. She had come and lifted him away while he was dreaming, and then it always took a while to adjust, to get comfortable with his changed surroundings.
Sitting between aunt and uncle now, he remembers waking on one such afternoon. Not walking this time, but sitting on his mother’s lap in the pews. She held him still when he wanted to move, one finger raised to touch her lips to warn him from talking. In front of them was a crying man, kneeling before the statue of St Jude. He was close, but didn’t seem to have noticed them. He mouthed the words of his prayer on and on, eyes closed, tears falling, dropping from his chin, and Jacek sat leaning in to his mother’s chest with her arms close around him.
– Don’t move, sweetheart, no noise. We don’t want to disturb him.
Her own eyes swollen, the skin a light red tone around them.
__
The train comes into Berlin through the eastern suburbs. Past high-rise blocks painted mint green, egg yellow, along the wide expanses of track, past rusty sidings, weeds flowering white and lilac, growing tall between the sleepers. Ewa gets out at the first mainline station, as Paula told her to: she had recognised the postcode in Piotr’s address, said it was in former East Berlin. But the Hauptbahnhof is not at all as she had described it: the surfaces in the wide concourse are all new, clean plastic and metal. Paula said they rebuilt it just before the wall came down, pride of the East German railway. Probably didn’t know it was being rebuilt again, with a new entrance hall and a two-storey shopping centre added. Most of the new shopfronts still stand empty, and Ewa wanders past them to the far end where the renovations continue. Temporary signs and arrows direct the passengers through the dust and noise to alternative exit points. Ewa doesn’t know where she should go, follows the largest stream of people to the main exit and out onto the street.
Field Study Page 13
