For a couple of decades, however, things were not bad. Karol was diligent and reliable, and the throughput of customers was fairly constant, if never overwhelming. He was moderately content. He earned enough for a single man who lived in a two-room apartment and had no vices. However, in order to sustain himself he had to spend most of each day, and most of most evenings, in his workshop, with the result that his social life was limited. He’d had no serious romance, in fact, before the middle of his fourth decade, when he married Mary – ‘his one true love’, as he was liable to declare, in company, taking his wife’s hand and pressing it to his heart. More than ten years his junior, Mary worked as a typist in an insurance office two doors down the street from Karol’s shop. She had been employed there for more than a year before she and Karol spoke to each other. Before that, they would acknowledge each other with a wave, but the sharply trimmed red beard and the crown of wiry red hair made him slightly frightening, and his face often gave the impression that he was on his way to or from an argument. But one evening, having worked late, she stepped out into the snow at exactly the same moment as Karol, whereupon she found herself walking alongside him, and discovering that she had allowed herself to be misled by his demeanour, because in fact he was a very interesting man. He loved the snow so much, he said. He loved the soft shapes it made, and the look of the city when it was all white and black. Coldness, he thought, kept the mind in good condition. Hot weather made the brain misfire, whereas the cold kept the circuits clean and running smoothly. He had ‘snow in the blood’, he told her.
And Mary in turn, though they walked only four or five blocks together, told him things about herself that made him want to know more: that she was born in the depths of Saskatchewan, for example, and had known from an early age that she was in the wrong place. Life – real, full-blown life – was going on elsewhere, in the cities, she’d come to feel, and by the time she left school she was determined she was not going to become a farmer’s wife like her mother and her older sister – which was not to say that her sister wasn’t perfectly happy to live in a place where the horizon was a day’s ride away, and sometimes had not a single body in front of it. (The sister, Jane, remained on her farm all her life and was always happy, as far as Mary could tell; Jane visited her in Toronto just once, for a week, and spent the entire time with a headachy look about her eyes, as if the chaos of the city were something she had to bear, without complaint, for the sake of her sibling.) So Mary had come to Toronto, and her only regret was that she could not afford to visit her parents as often as she would like. (Janina was hardly to know her grandparents. Karol’s parents died within a month of each other, when she was still an infant. The maternal grandparents she met half a dozen times before the age of ten: she remembers them hazily as an amiable and silent old couple, both of them shod in men’s shoes; they cooked side by side in a kitchen that was huge and had bare wooden floors and smelled of vinegar; the whole house groaned when it was windy and creaked at night.) ‘Our families are very stretched,’ Karol remarked as they parted, as if to say that a meaningful affinity had been revealed.
One thing led quickly to another. Mary was soon describing Karol to her workmates (and to Karol himself, giving him great pleasure) as a romantic and a thinker. On their first date he talked about the exploration of space, and how humans would be living on Mars in the next hundred years, but most of all he spoke about the homeland he had never seen (and would see only once, aged sixty-seven – a pilgrimage of which Janina knows nothing more than was related on a single postcard from Krakow). Throughout his life, Karol liked to present himself as a man in exile. To his daughter it seemed that he was reading Fire in the Steppe and The Teutonic Knights in perpetual rotation. (Janina was obliged to read them too – this is the source, she explains, of her unshakeable antipathy to novels.) Chopin was the official composer of the household and bison grass vodka the official drink of the household’s head. There was a print of the Black Madonna in the bedroom, and when John Paul II was elected pope you’d have thought it was a favourite uncle who’d got the job. (Karol’s faith had been tested to the brink of destruction by his experiences in the war: thrown overboard when a torpedo struck, he had seen his closest friend drown just out of reach, and heard the screams of the men who had been locked into the burning engine room and left to die there; he had seen things so terrible they could never be described, he said – and he never attempted to describe them. Immediately after the war he had believed, at best, in a God who was not quite as vigilant a proprietor as he had been brought up to imagine, but in time his faith flowered anew, as strong as before. Marriage and fatherhood had opened his eyes again, he told Mary, who took to accompanying him to church on Sundays, though Janina – who was forced to come along as a child, before absenting herself as a teenager – was convinced that her mother’s attendance was prompted primarily by the belief that life would be a good deal worse for her if she didn’t comply.) When Gierek was removed from office Karol celebrated mightily, but also lamented (as though he had no family to consider) that he was now too old and too foreign to return (as he put it) to Poland. When martial law was imposed, he punched the radio. A few months later, his daughter left for London, thereby furnishing further proof of the unaccountable hostility of Fate. (It was never quite clear to Janina how this regularly invoked concept was to be squared with a faith in the all-loving, all-seeing and all-powerful deity.) Other men had been allotted children who honoured them; Karol had been given a monster of ingratitude.
Saying goodnight on a freezing November evening, Charlie asked Janina, for the first time, why she had left Canada. Her reply, as she buttoned his coat against the wind, was that it was simply too cold there for too much of the time. She had no snow in her blood, she said. (Later, she’d tell him that she’d once said the same thing to her father, and he had reacted with the fury of a man ridiculed in front of friends, though nobody else was present.) The following week she told Charlie that she’d wanted to live in London because in London you had people like Elvis Costello and The Clash and Adam Ant, and you’d not find many boys like those in Toronto. (Celia’s consternation upon discovering Janina’s copy of London Calling buried in the midst of Shania Twain and Simply Red was that of a palaeontologist unearthing the bones of a bird amidst ammonites and fossilised worms. And if you were to see a photo of Janina circa 1979, you too would instantly be inclined to categorise her as an Eagles or Supertramp type of girl. Shown such a picture (Janina at an ice rink: tight pink sweater, white jeans, hair as bouncy as a cheerleader’s), Celia remarked on the notable absence of safety pins or any other kind of punkish paraphernalia. To which unembarrassed Janina replied, with surprising and (as Celia admitted) admirable aplomb: ‘Exactly. That’s my point.’) Also, she explained to Charlie, Canada was just too big: she liked the idea of living in a place where you didn’t have to take a plane to reach the edge. (Janina made the most of dwelling on a narrow island. For half a year she lived in a tatty bedsit above a newsagent’s shop, cooking meals that cost no more than a pound to put together (a skill learned from her mother), never staying for more than one drink when she went out with the girls from the office, limiting cinema evenings to one per month, putting aside a sizeable portion of her wages so that, when work finished on Friday night, she could take a coach or train to a town she hadn’t yet visited, where she would explore the streets as assiduously as a cartographer. She’d seen more of England in six months, said Charlie, than he’d seen in his whole life.) Then, in reply to his asking her a question about her parents (at this point he knew only that they existed, and where), she confessed (it was more of a plain statement than a confession) that she didn’t care for her father and mother very much. (They were crossing Hungerford Bridge, and were going to spend the night together for the first time. Not that Charlie knew this as they walked across the bridge; it’s possible, however, that Janina had decided how the evening was to end, and that the statement about her relationship with her parents was th
e one last important disclosure she had to make before she could take him to bed.) ‘By “not care for them” I mean “don’t like”,’ said Janina, not with any animosity, but rather as if her only concern were to remove any ambiguity from what she had said. And when she said, ‘That’s one other reason I’m here,’ it did not seem to Charlie that they had now at last reached the ultimate truth, the one essential fact which only now could Janina bring herself to reveal – no, it seemed rather that her dislike of her parents was, as she said, merely one additional factor to be considered, a factor no more or less significant than the terrible winters and the impossible dimensions of the territory.
(Whereas some people, Charlie was already aware, might find Janina a little too cool, to him this coolness was crucial to her allure. In public she conducted herself as if every gesture were being judged for its economy and sureness. She knew precisely what she was going to say before she spoke. She was never hurried, never visibly disconcerted. Janina, in short, was more composed than any young woman Charlie had ever met, and yet she kissed him as if she wanted to weld herself to him. (‘She’s a tiger,’ Charlie later confided, eyes widening in gleeful alarm as he poured one last drink for each of us. This would have been a week or two before their wedding. ‘She’s fantastic, I tell you,’ he said, passing a glass to me, and he looked me in the eye, to elicit a promise that I would always know that this was a fact, no matter what anyone else might say – and by ‘anyone else’ we mean primarily Celia, whose misgivings about Janina (‘The North Pole’ she called her – not in Charlie’s presence, of course) he foresaw hardening into antipathy, and vice versa.)
Over the morning-after breakfast, Charlie returned to the subject that Janina had abruptly closed on the bridge, when she’d declared that they should talk about his parents instead, because the senior Brennans were more interesting. Her mother, Janina now told Charlie, loved her husband ‘for all his faults’ and was dismayed (to put it mildly) that her daughter could not find it in her heart to forgive him his imperfections, because the truth of the matter was that he loved them both very much and was wearing himself out to support them, and he had a sadness in his heart that he could never get rid of. He could never get rid of it, according to Janina, because he could never stop thinking about himself and the better life he believed was owed to him. Vast self-pity was one of the many paternal imperfections now enumerated by Janina, entirely without emotion. ‘When he’s sober he gets angry at the slightest thing; he’s even nastier when he’s drunk; he’s drunk a lot of the time, because he drinks vodka like water,’ she recited, and she might have been saying: ‘His hair is red; he is left-handed, he is five-foot-six.’ Charlie learned that Karol had often, after a glass or three, struck his wife. When Janina was a girl, he used to slap her too, because she had a bad attitude to school, or a bad attitude to her mother, or – above all – a bad attitude to him. At around the time of her fourteenth birthday she cut her hair short with the kitchen scissors and he screamed at her that she’d made herself look like a homosexual boy, and when she responded with a comment he didn’t like he smacked her across the face so hard that his wedding ring cut the bridge of her nose. ‘You won’t ever hit me again,’ she told him (he did, though), then she locked herself in her room; he punched the door so hard that his knuckles left four little hollows in the wood. ‘You are not my daughter,’ he would bellow at her; the accusation, she thinks, was first used when she refused to continue to struggle through the second-hand Polish textbooks he brought home for her. (Nowadays she can comprehend little more than some rhymes that her father had recited to her at bedtime when she was small – the same five or six verses, repeated over and over and over again.) Her mother did nothing to stop him. His rages, she’d have her daughter believe, were the eruptions of a mind as restless and troubled as a poet’s; he was powerless to prevent them, and the anguish they caused him was as great as theirs. There were, it’s true, sessions of extravagant weeping and bouts of extra church attendance, which his wife took as evidence of deep contrition, and Janina saw as play-acting and self-indulgence. Janina herself, her mother told her, was partly to blame, because she was always goading him. ‘One of us has to stand up to him,’ Janina retorted, for which she was banished to her room for the rest of the day. It was ridiculous: her mother was a hefty woman and her father was just a little runt – she could have flattened him with one blow, and if she’d done that, right at the beginning, the first time he raised his hand to her, their lives might have been completely different.
In the eighteen months between leaving Canada and meeting Charlie, Janina had spoken to her parents just once and written to them three or four times. They did not come to the wedding: a card arrived, in which her mother had written a message of just four words: ‘We wish you happiness’. It did not accord with Charlie’s notion of the rightful order of things that he and his parents-in-law had never set eyes on each other, even if Mr and Mrs Kasprzyk were as difficult as Janina portrayed them, as he was of course sure they were. In sending them a selection of wedding photos with their Christmas card (Janina vetoed a message expressing regret that they had not been able to attend), Charlie was hoping to create the conditions for a rapprochement. The immediate response was not very positive, but Charlie chose to take encouragement from the fact that they had signed the card ‘Karol’ and ‘Mary’ rather than ‘Mother and Father’, and had appended the line: ‘Thanking you for the photographs.’ Charlie was in favour of sending best wishes to the parents on their birthdays – they did, after all, acknowledge Janina’s. Pointing out that a mere acknowledgement of the anniversary was all it was, Janina refused to tell Charlie when their birthdays were. Before long, however, Charlie had an undeniable occasion for resuming contact. He dispatched a brief letter and a single picture, bearing on the reverse the following text: ‘Peter James Brennan, born 7.09 a.m., July 1st 1985, 7lbs 8oz.’ A fortnight later a parcel of baby clothes was delivered; on the inner wrapper Mary had written: ‘We send you congratulations and we hope that we will see Peter one day.’
The perpetual round of cooking, shopping, washing and sleeping in two-hour instalments (Peter the future whizz-kid was not an easy baby) seemed to have no detrimental effect on Janina. On the contrary: whereas Charlie (though absolved of responsibility for household chores) looked as if he were in need of a blood transfusion, Janina was effulgent with well-being. She was, in Celia’s opinion, changed very much for the better – and Janina, in return, believed that aunthood had effected something of a transformation in her surprisingly supportive sister-in-law. Judging that, in her fog of maternal contentment, Janina might be less than absolutely hostile to the idea, Charlie suggested that perhaps they might, one day, introduce their son to his Canadian grandparents. ‘Maybe,’ said Janina, as if humouring an impossible whimsicality, along the lines of: ‘Perhaps one day we’ll live in a castle beside an Italian lake.’ He took it upon himself, on Mary’s birthday (Janina had softened enough to reveal the date), to send her a letter, giving news of the infant, with pictures enclosed. Eventually a card came back: the boy looked lovely and very much resembled Karol, Mary wrote. (He didn’t resemble Karol in the slightest, said Janina.) Though Janina’s name was nowhere in the message, this was nonetheless an advance, and Charlie persisted with his quiet campaign, reviving the notion of a visit to Canada once every two or three months, but never pressing the point. Further exchanges of cards occurred, sporadically; more clothes arrived for Peter (high quality, Janina conceded). On September 9th 1986, at 1.01 p.m., Frederick Charles Brennan was born. A parcel of clothes was received; the card exchange intensified; Charlie began to make plans for the expedition to Toronto. When he suggested that he could of course take the boys and Janina could stay in London if she really couldn’t bear the idea of coming, he knew, from the way she said ‘I suppose so,’ that sooner or later he was going to prevail. ‘Just think about it,’ he said, and left it at that. They flew to Toronto a few months before Peter’s second birthday. If they’d
delayed any longer they’d have had to pay full price for three seats, and Janina wasn’t having that.
A husk of a man – that was Charlie’s description of Karol Kasprzyk. The eyelids made a particularly strong impression: the upper lids drooped like waterlogged awnings, and the lower sagged so much that they had turned halfway over, showing a thick red crescent of wet flesh. His hair, grey and thin and long, had been dyed a hazelnut colour, streakily; his cardigan would have accommodated an extra twelve inches of girth. Just as Janina had said, he held himself like a man who was proud of the dignity with which he was facing perpetual adversity. When Charlie shook his hand, it was like taking hold of a leather glove stuffed with broken chopsticks. His wife – twice her husband’s width – had clear grey eyes which frequently blazed adoration in the direction of her husband, but also suggested to Charlie, once or twice, the image of a prisoner in whom the hope of release has not yet been wholly extinguished. They sat around the table in the kitchen, to eat a cake that Mary had baked in their honour and drink extremely strong coffee from heavy old mugs. Taking Freddie from his father, Mary manoeuvred the child stiffly on her lap, like a doll, and smiled at her daughter as if accepting an unspoken apology. Most of the talking was done by Mary, and for most of the time it was Charlie she was talking to. ‘So you are in business,’ she said, in a way that implied that no guest could be more welcome than a businessman. She questioned him on the subject of the family firm as thoroughly as a bank manager assessing the risk of a loan, while Janina picked at the band of plastic that ran around the edge of the custard-coloured table, and her father squinted at Charlie, taking the measure of the man who had accepted the challenge of his daughter. When the world of domestic tiling could be made to yield no more conversational material, Karol smiled broadly, evidently satisfied with what he’d observed. Two small tumblers were filled to the brim with bison grass vodka. ‘The Rogalin Oaks?’ ingratiating Charlie enquired, raising his glass in the direction of the faded picture above the door, and Karol, immensely pleased by his son-in-law, confirmed that this was correct, and gave the oaks the sort of look one might give the photograph of a close and senior relative who had been decorated for bravery. Before they left, Karol showed Charlie the bedroom that had been Janina’s; it was as tidy as a long-unoccupied hotel room, exactly as it had been on the day that Janina left. Her father shook Charlie’s hand as they stood in the middle of the room and said solemnly: ‘I hope she will respect you.’ Janina had stayed at the kitchen table; Charlie could hear only Mrs Kasprzyk, babbling at the boys.
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