‘No?’
‘You know it. It’s impossible. We must leave.’
‘But how?’
‘Just leave.’
‘Where do we go?’
‘Somewhere else.’
‘Yes?’
‘To the forest, to the sea. I don’t know. We’ll find a way.’
I looked into her eyes. I could see nothing else.
‘All right,’ I said.
11
Jerzy
I DID NOT see Jerzy until 1983.
Before that I was in Chicago digging ditches for water pipes. It was good work with good money, transistor radios sitting up on the lawns beside us playing the baseball games while we worked, cold beer afterwards in the summer nights in the taverns with the Mexicans, the college boys and the Mississippi blacks in our little team. There were a couple of young brothers from Nowy Targ there too. The housewives would go by in their little skirts looking at us out of the corners of their eyes. But the knees were troubling me. I suppose it was the damp down under the ground. And I was wearing a brace for my back. I took a soft job in a uniform reading electricity meters, going along the alleys with a Commonwealth Edison notebook from basement to basement. They smelt of damp, trapped air, washing powder and stored tins of chemicals. How is it they all smelt the same? I felt a fool in the uniform. It was the kind of work we laughed at when we were riveting girders or laying pipes. I’d feel bad about it when I woke in the morning.
After I trained they put me on a route up in Roger’s Park, a quiet, leafy place with little apartment buildings and houses made of brick, tidy lawns in the front. Everyone moved slowly through the dappled, humid air under the trees. I’d talk with the mailmen. We men in uniform. One day I called at a house with green shutters around the windows and roses running up the walls. No one answered and I made to move away, but then I saw a face looking up at me from the basement, a very pretty face full of sharp angles as if made from cut glass, neat black hair around it. She had a hammer in her hand, gold braided earrings in her ears. She was laughing at me. I was listening through earphones to a tape player I kept in my pocket and hadn’t heard her calling. Just as I saw her I caught myself singing along to a line in the song ‘That’s Amore’ by Dean Martin. I followed her in through the basement door and read the meter. She was trying to fix a light to a wall down there and was having a bad time with it, so I helped her. She gave me coffee then and we talked for so long through the afternoon in her kitchen that I had to sprint from building to building through the final hour of the working day to get through all the meters that had been assigned me. That was Maggie Collins. I found her number in the telephone book and called her and we went out for an ice-cream and a long drive along the lake shore. We kept on then through the summer, strolls around her neighbourhood, barbecues in her back yard. She took me to the opera. One weekend when her two teenaged boys were visiting their father who now lived in Columbus, Ohio, we rented a small house among trees beside a lake in Wisconsin. I cooked the breakfasts, she cooked the dinners and we put our lunch in a straw basket and took it out with us in a boat that came with the house. I couldn’t imagine her having a malign thought about anybody. How would the run of my life have been had we met at another time? I don’t know. I was very well with her. But whenever I came to see her I’d have to step around her sons’ baseball gloves and bicycles in the hall. Out ahead of me were more jobs in uniform or sweeping somewhere. I could do the jobs but when I looked at all the rest of it I didn’t see where I could fit. I didn’t say anything but she felt a turning away, I think. I regret that still. I’d see her looking out through the screen door of her kitchen as it blew in the wind, wishing she were on the other side of it for a while when the silence went on too long. We went out walking one evening to a park that had a pond and tennis courts and a little zoo with ostriches, a llama and a big black bear. We sat on a bench. It had been so easy with her that summer, the way her hand slipped into mine, the way the talk flowed, but on this evening even before they formed in my mind the words had a sour taste. They were weak, they didn’t go anywhere. They were false. I couldn’t find the way to improve them. I listened to the hisses and squawks and complaints of the animals, the ringing sound of the tennis balls being struck. I told her I’d been thinking a lot about Poland. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I missed it. It had been twenty-seven years. I owed debts to people there. There was my sister. The taste of the words grew more rancid as I spoke them. She had been looking up at me through sunglasses and now she took them off. Her green eyes were vivid and direct. I felt an ache there in the silence and in the presence of those eyes. ‘Would you like to come?’ I said. I hadn’t planned that. It just came out because I lost my nerve. It was ridiculous. She searched my face for some kind of explanation. She looked for a moment as she might have looked as a teenaged girl when faced with something her years had not prepared her for. Then her features reassembled and cleared. She smiled. She pressed my hand between hers. ‘Write to me,’ she said. ‘Will you?’
I flew into Warsaw with a single suitcase. I took a train to Krakow and called on Renata. She gave me herrings and vodka and told me that since I’d last seen her in Chicago she’d already passed through her second marriage.
‘That was something you didn’t write about in your Christmas cards,’ I said.
‘It all happened between Christmases,’ she said. ‘From start to finish.’
‘That was fast.’
‘I give thanks for that.’
‘Who was he?’
‘A little round man you wouldn’t notice. Wojtek Barski. Spoiled from birth.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Back where he came from, with his mother. He couldn’t bear to be without his mother. He was always telling me that I failed to cook in the manner of his mother. Can you imagine? That’s just the way he put it.’
‘That’s bad luck.’
‘Bad luck has nothing to do with it. It’s the way it is. If men are anywhere over forty at all and they’re alone, they’re simply ruined.’
‘Me too?’ I said.
She laughed. She poured out more vodka and we had a long night of it together, but whatever debt I had to Renata I didn’t manage to pay, not then anyway. I never gave it the time. I had more debts in the north, and I headed out by bus the next morning to Szczecin. They let us out every now and again in the little towns on the way. I had a hat on with the name of a Chicago baseball team and a walk set apart from those around me by its quickness. They have a habit of staring at you in these towns, I thought. That was something I hadn’t remembered. There were times in my years in America, slow times usually, when I’d think of the sombre colours here in Poland, the sting in the jokes, the farmhouses set among trees. These pictures would quicken into life. I’d had them on the plane all the way from Chicago. But as I moved north through land I knew well enough once I couldn’t find those things I had pictured, or at least not the way I had felt about them when I was only imagining. Things faded as I looked at them. The ground didn’t seem wholly solid. It was as if a liquid was running along underneath it. My place on it felt uncertain. You will get over this, I told myself, though it may be said that I haven’t, not even now, not altogether.
The debt I had in Szczecin was to a man named Piotr. The nature of the debt I will describe later. But I couldn’t find Piotr, not in Szczecin, nor in Miedzyzdroje either. No one knew anything of him in those places.
From Szczecin I went east to this place here, this small city from which I am now speaking, for of all the debts I carried through the years since I left the one that troubled me most was the one to Jerzy. There’d been letters both from and about him. I’d had one from his wife Marysia after they came back from Africa telling me that she didn’t think he’d quite recovered from whatever had troubled him in Moscow. She was worried. She didn’t know where to turn, she said. I’d heard this before, of course, from the General, and I had failed. I sat paralysed with a pen in my hand
over a blank sheet of paper and with Marysia’s letter beside me for the whole of a Saturday afternoon in the room I had then in Chicago. I couldn’t write a word. Finally I got something down the next morning and it was useless. ‘Be patient,’ I wrote. ‘He’s a strong man.’ Well he was a strong man, the strongest I’ve known, but not strong enough to prevent his grand and noble mind from veering out of control like a plane whose pilot has lost consciousness. Why could I not do better than that? How many times must I fail to repay something of what I owed him? I walked around the block where his apartment was three times thinking of what I would say to him before climbing the concrete stairs. How would he be? He’d sounded clear, steady, cogent when I’d spoken to him on the telephone. But what if he wasn’t?
As I stood on the landing the picture of Jerzy in Naklo with the wind rippling through his white suit before he set out for Moscow entered my mind and when he appeared it seemed he stepped directly into the frame of his younger self. For this first silent instant it was as though I was looking at a double exposure, his hair a muted white now like eggshell, the girth thicker, the clothes more sombre and practical, but his aspect still authoritative and his eyes alight with intelligence. I raised an arm to embrace him but he did not seem to see this or accept it maybe and he directed me inside with a traffic policeman’s wave. ‘Very well, very well,’ he said. ‘Come in. We’ve been expecting you.’
A small woman appeared behind him and he backed up to be at her side. She had grey and blonde in her hair, smooth, slender hands with rings on each finger, and a pale silk scarf tied under her chin, two feint jagged scars rising up from it to the tips of her ears like licks of flame.
‘This is Marysia,’ said Jerzy. ‘You’ve been hearing about her for nearly forty years and now finally she is before you.’
She extended her hand. She had a smile both warm and ironical. I thought again of the mediocrity of the letter I sent from Chicago and wondered was this the source of her irony.
She and Jerzy went into the kitchen to fill a tray with small cakes and cups of coffee. I heard doors opening and closing and water bubbling and saw them talking animatedly to each other, he with speech, she with hand signals. I moved slowly around the living room as if in a museum, looking at the patterns on the sofa, the titles of books on the shelf, photographs, wooden boxes, the way the carpet was worn before the chair I imagined he sat in, his reading spectacles on the table in front of it, a smudged thumbprint on one of the lenses, trying to see how his life was as he lived it then and wondering if I would find the right words to ask for his forgiveness. I didn’t have them yet.
Jerzy and Marysia came in then and placed the things around the table and we sat beside it for this ceremony of welcome. I saw their ease with each other, a physical thing of nods and gestures and indecipherable movements in the face, her rush of hand signals followed by his sudden explosion of laughter – a joke, it seemed, that would remain untranslated – and I saw too his reserve with me. He was too great a figure to me for me to begrudge him any of this. I asked him questions and he answered each with careful thought and economy and no more. Was this how it was to be, I wondered?
After the cups and the plates had been emptied Marysia took them away and then seemed to ask me to excuse her for absenting herself to a chair in an alcove in front of the television. She turned it on, the volume low, the blue and white light from the screen passing over her face through the afternoon shadows. Then she took up a pair of knitting needles and began to work.
‘For our granddaughter,’ said Jerzy. ‘Our third.’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘I saw her picture.’
We were alone. It was not yet time for me to speak of what I wished finally to rid myself of, yet nothing else arrived. There was a silence then but for the rolling murmur from the television and the clicking of knitting needles during which he studied my face and I felt the seconds sound within me like drumbeats in a slow march. I looked at his farm labourer’s hands, the thick fingers laced together, his legs planted before him, his great still head which looked as if it was carved from stone. I needn’t have worried about him. He was who he was, neither more nor less. It was my own insubstantiality which I could feel flaring visible as a rash over my skin.
And then maybe out of pity or curiosity he questioned me about America – the quality of the buildings, the wages of the workers, how the transport worked, the percentage of land given over to agriculture and of the citizens who voted, what way the newspapers were, what I would do on a day when I was not working – until he stopped, cocked his head, and called over to Marysia.
‘Where did that happen?’ he said.
She moved her hands, her eyes still on the television.
‘Radom,’ he translated for me, watching her. ‘A strike … state confiscation of wages … a demonstration charged by police …’ He turned to me. ‘Do they speak of these things in America?’ he asked.
‘The Poles do,’ I said. ‘Other than that, not very much. You have to look for it in the lower corners of the papers.’
‘I would have expected so,’ he said.
‘What do you think of them?’ I asked.
‘Who?’
‘The people demonstrating.’
‘I like them,’ he said. ‘It’s alive, it’s interesting. We haven’t had much of either, liveliness or interest, as you perhaps know. If that demonstration had been in Warsaw rather than Radom my youngest daughter would have been at it. She’s on a Solidarity committee at her university. I might have been there myself. In fact I have been, twice. It’s something incontrovertible, and necessary.’
‘Are you still in the Party?’
‘No. Not for more than twenty years.’ He looked at me. ‘It’s sludge. It has to be swept away. You would know this if you were here. We gave ourselves to something based on a dynamic principle which lost its capacity to renew itself. That is nothing other than fect.’
He stood up, smiled.
‘Let’s take a walk along the river,’ he said.
He led me out then through this town as yet unknown to me, past the chess players under the trees in the square, out behind the library and then along the tramline, leaves clattering along the cobblestones and around our feet. When we reached the riverbank he took my arm and reminded me of the night we got up from our beds and moved through Pan Kazimierz’s ballroom after one of the great parties there, drinking from all the glasses left behind by the guests.
‘We got drunk,’ I said.
‘You got drunk,’ he said. ‘You stood waving back and forth in front of the big mirror in the ballroom. You pointed at my reflection and you said, “That person should be called Adam.” Then you pointed at yourself and said, “And he should be called Staszek.” Then you fell down. I had to put you over my shoulder to get you to bed.’
We sat down on a bench then and looked at the river. He pointed out the steeples of churches and told me their names, a factory where beet is turned into sugar, a street where a saint is said to have halted a man’s fell from the top of a building by pointing his finger at him, potato fields, the beginnings of a forest that spread away to the north and west.
‘I fish here sometimes,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think I’d like to do that, but I do.’
Was there an invitation in what he had said? Probably not. He was too self-sufficient to issue invitations of this nature. But I felt I could be well in that place, as well there anyway as some other place. To live and to work there, to feel it growing familiar, to take a walk now and again along this riverbank with him.
‘Jerzy?’ I said.
His eyes turned towards me, but his face remained set out towards the river.
‘There is something I must say to you.’
He smiled.
‘Say it,’ he said.
‘It is an apology.’
‘For?’
‘For not helping you when you were having trouble.’
‘And when do you suppose that I was having trou
ble?’
‘When you went back to Moscow to give the lectures.’
‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘I heard that you had a bad time there, that you suffered very much.’
‘From whom did you hear this?’
‘From that general you sent to see me in Berlin.’
His eyes returned to the water.
‘There was a time when I lost faith. There was another later time when I accepted this. In between these times I struggled to prove my loss of faith to be incorrect. Suffering is too large a word for that. It was more like frustration. It is kind of you to have thought that I needed help, and to have wished to provide it, but the moment was not exceptional.’
He continued to look at the water. This, of course, was meant to bring the subject to an end. Yet I went on.
‘But Jerzy, you lost your speech. You were sick. They kept you in hospital.’
‘The General was no longer there when I gave the lectures in Moscow.’
‘I know. He was in the Crimea. He heard about you there. He was worried.’
He turned around on the bench to face me.
‘He must have been misinformed,’ he said.
He was looking directly into my eyes. He was very grave. I felt the fill weight of his being pressing down on me.
‘I see,’ I said to him finally. ‘I’m relieved to hear it.’
He turned slowly back towards the water.
It is rare that we get our day in court, or at least the one we feared, or wished for. I did not get mine there by the river with Jerzy.
12
I Go Dancing
I HAVE NEGLECTED to visit Renata on the anniversary of her husband’s death. He was a war hero named Wladyslaw Kovic she’d married in a cellar in Warsaw and then emigrated with to Chicago. There he sliced cured meat in a delicatessen. He was never right in Chicago, Renata said. He couldn’t settle. He wouldn’t learn the language. They had a little boy whom Renata called Bobby and Wladyslaw called Ryszard, but that didn’t help. He began to fear everything in that city – buses, banks, shopkeepers. He’d seen something during the war through the floorboards of an attic he was hiding in. He couldn’t be made to talk about it, but it had marked him somehow. When you looked at him you couldn’t quite see him. He was like a photograph that had been smeared while being developed. In the end he kept a vigil by the window watching for the parking attendants who patrolled the streets in their uniforms. He couldn’t understand their schedules. He thought they’d leave a paper on the window of his car which would cause him problems from which he would never escape. One day he stepped out of the window of their apartment, his pipe still in his hand. ‘The coward,’ Renata said to me. ‘And he had to wait until I was no longer pretty enough to find someone else.’
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