by Sue Gee
‘Mama! Mama!’
Ewa and Jerzy were awake. Anna swung herself quickly off the bed and went to their room on stockinged feet.
‘Such a noise!’
‘Can we go out now? Can we go to the common?’
‘Yes, in a little while.’ She sat on the edge of Ewa’s bed and shivered. Streatham had been cramped, but the heating had been included in the rent. It would be difficult to heat this flat, with the draughty corridor.
‘Did you sleep well?’ she asked.
Ewa stretched. ‘I had a funny dream – about Tata … I can’t remember.’ She reached for her book, the cartoon antics of the goat Matolek. ‘Can I read until we go out?’
‘Yes.’ Anna forced herself to stop shivering. Jerzy was getting out of bed, his feet bare. ‘Your socks, Maleńki …’
Half an hour later they were walking down the grey streets, the children’s coats buttoned up to the neck. The weather was changing. Litter blew along the pavement and the trees shook chestnuts over the path across the common. Dogs barked as their leads were unclipped, and Ewa and Jerzy ran ahead, kicking up piles of yellow leaves.
Every Sunday they went to mass, and afterwards they had lunch with the grandparents. Jerzy thought that before the move they had all gone to mass together, always. Now, quite often he and Ewa went with Dziadek and Babcia by themselves. Sometimes Tata met them afterwards, on the common, and they went with him to watch the toy boats sail on the pond. He never came with them to church. Mama used to, but not any more; when he thought about it Jerzy was a little puzzled; he had thought she liked it.
He liked it. In his grey coat and shorts, shoes stiff with polish, he walked beside his grandfather, holding his hand. Dziadek wore his dark coat now it was getting cold, and his black leather gloves. Babcia had a nice grey coat for Sundays, and wore a hat.
If it rained, they took the bus. Otherwise, they walked all the way down the main road to the church. It was an English church, Babcia explained, but permission had been given for Polish mass to be held there at one o’clock. She and Dziadek smiled and nodded to the families they knew, walking down the path, but never spoke as they took their grandchildren through the half-open door. It was time for silence.
Jerzy drew a deep breath of wax and incense, flowers and dampness, as they entered the church and crossed themselves before the Virgin, the Queen of Poland. Candles burned at her feet, and when the coughing and shuffling and rustling of prayerbooks had settled, and the priest began to speak, Jerzy somehow felt that the man’s voice was not exactly a human voice at all, but something quite mysterious, coming out of and belonging to the flames flickering in the darkness. He hardly knew that he had this feeling, but it was there, always. After a while, he would start to think of other things: of his Sunday talks with Dziadek, of lunch, of the trains – he knew several of the regular journeys now.
Occasionally there were prayers for Poland in the service, and Jerzy knew they were important, and tried to pray too. Through half-closed eyes he watched Dziadek and Babcia go to the altar rail for Communion, and wondered what it was like up there, so close to the murmuring priest, taking the host on their tongues in the candlelight. Was it really Jesus they were eating? Ewa would have her First Communion soon; perhaps she could tell him then.
After mass, people stood talking in dark knots outside the church, and the priest moved among them, smoothing down his brilliantined hair. The chidren were allowed to scamper, but not too much. Then came the walk home, and inside the green door they pounded up the echoing stairs in their loud Sunday shoes.
‘Mama! Mama!’
She stood at the door to the flat, smiling at the grandparents as they went through their own front door. Inside, the children put on their slippers, and she took them into the kitchen and gave them a hot drink.
‘Did you see Tata on the common?’
Sometimes they said yes, and that he’d taken them to the pond, and she looked pleased, and asked them about the boats. Or they said no, they’d looked for him, but must have missed him, and then she said nothing. They all went into the front room, to draw with their crayons, and wait for him to come home.
Soon afterwards, every Sunday, Jerzy got up and said: ‘I’m going to Dziadek now,’ and his mother nodded. ‘Be good.’
There was very little light on the landing between the two flats, only what filtered up through the thick starred glass of the window in the hall, far below. He stood on the shadowy square of linoleum, and knocked on his grandparents’door. When it opened, it was filled with Dziadek, smiling in welcome, and behind him it was even darker, and always felt quiet, though Babcia was preparing lunch. His grandfather led him into the front room.
After the darkness of the landing and corridor, it seemed to be filled with light. Later, when all the family was there, clatter and conversation would obscure what Jerzy somehow thought of as the real room; this time, always, it felt as still and light and silent as if it were under glass. Crimson and blue tapestries hung on the walls; Babcia made those, in the evenings. Lacy net curtains were at the windows, and when the sun shone their patterns fell on to the carpet. There were a lot of stiff green plants, and photographs of him and Ewa. Before the gas fire stood an unyielding brown sofa; on the mantelpiece a large clock ticked into the quietness.
He wandered over to the window, lifted the lacy curtain over his head, and stood looking out, across to the window opposite, and down at the street, far below. The woman in the window waved to him: she was English, and had a lot of visitors, mostly men. There were children playing in the street, kicking a football up and down, along the pavement, against the dustbins, shouting to each other. They couldn’t see him, right up here.
‘Come and sit down, maleńki.’
On the table was spread the newspaper from yesterday, Dziennik Polski, the Polish Daily, which Dziadek didn’t have time to read on Saturday mornings, because that was when he taught at Polish school. When Jerzy was a litte older, he would go there, like Ewa. Until then, this was his private school. Next to the paper was the shiny red exercise book, neatly open at this week’s page, with the sharpened blue pencil beside it. He and Dziadek sat side by side on the high-backed chairs, and slowly he copied the words for today: rzeka, river; rząd, government; z·ołnierz, soldier; bitwa, battle.
‘Tell me a story, Dziadek.’
‘What story would you like?’
‘The one about the night you crossed the frozen lake on horseback.’ It was one of the best.
‘It was the winter of 1917,’ Dziadek began, ‘and my unit was moving to a new front. All our artillery was drawn by horse, and the road we should have taken to reach our destination was blocked by a great snowdrift. In any case, it was a long way by road to the village we were making for, and we were all cold and tired and hungry. We came to the edge of a great lake, completely covered with a thick sheet of ice …’
Behind every word which Jerzy carefully copied, over and over again along the lines of the exercise book, he could see pictures: a huge dark starlit country where men with frozen moustaches galloped over snow; from the photograph album, the wooden house where Tata had been born; summery pictures of picnics under rustling trees; a prison cell. He knew that Dziadek had been in prison for a long time, but he didn’t know exactly why, just that it was during the war. His medals came from the war – was it the same war as Tata’s? Tata had a medal but he didn’t wear his, just kept it in a little box in the table drawer. Once Jerzy had heard Mama and Babcia talk about how Tata’s jaw had never properly healed – that was something to do with the war, too.
‘And so,’ Dziadek was saying, ‘what could we do? We nailed spikes to the shoes of our brave horses, and they stepped on to the frozen lake, and slowly, slowly they hauled all our cannon across to the other side.’
‘By the light of the moon.’
‘By the light of the moon.’
Jerzy gave a sigh of satisfaction.
There was a knocking at the front door and he heard
Babcia hurry from the kitchen, and the voices of his family. Tata was there! He helped Dziadek clear the table, so Babcia could lay it with the white Sunday cloth.
‘Tata!’
He ran into his father’s arms, was picked up and lightly kissed, put down again.
‘You have been good?’
He nodded, watching his father turn back to Ewa, smiling. The table laid, they could enjoy at last the best meal of the week. Babcia made meatballs in a rich gravy, with stewed beetroot and potatoes with dill. For dessert they had apple compote, and afterwards, while the grown-ups had their glasses of tea, he and Ewa were allowed to get down and take slices of babka into the kitchen, and do their drawings.
Soon it would be time to make Christmas cards. Today Jerzy began to draw a brave grey horse, with spikes on his shoes and a shining moon high above. When the three o’clock train to Folkestone roared past, he was at the window, redirecting it to Warsaw.
At half-past seven in the morning, Jan and his father left the mansion block together. It was dark and cold; in the misty light from the street lamps their breath hung on the air, and they didn’t talk much as they walked down the road to the underground station. There, when his father had bought his ticket, Jan stood at the top of the long flight of concrete steps to the platform and watched him go down. He wore a heavy black coat, a homburg and leather gloves; he made his way down slowly, his back straight; towards the bottom he reached for the handrail. Then he turned, raised his hand to Jan, and walked off along the platform, his metal toecaps loud on the concrete. It was cold even down there, with an acrid smell of stale cigarette smoke. Someone was whistling; far down in the tunnel a signal light gleamed red. There weren’t many people: the rush began nearer eight; now, it was women office cleaners with their hair in rollers, West Indian men travelling to London Transport bus depots, factory workers. For a few moments Jan stood watching his father pace up and down among them. Then the light in the tunnel changed to green, and the northbound train rattled out and stopped. The sliding doors drew apart, his father got on with the other passengers, and they closed again; the train moved into the next tunnel, taking him towards Tottenham. Twenty years ago, Major Prawicki had commanded a division of the Polish Army. Now he worked on an assembly line, in a factory making surgical instruments.
Jan went out of the station, past the neon-lit window of the ticket office and on to the main road. At the kiosk he bought the Telegraph, then walked under the railway bridge and on past the closed-up shops. He could wait for his bus here, but he preferred, unless there was smog, or it was pouring with rain, to walk on a good quarter-mile, past the clock tower, so that he could wait opposite the first stretch of the common. Even though it was winter, even though it was dark, he could see beyond the diffused pools of light from the street lamps the outlines of the trees, and the gleam of the still water on the pond. He liked the exercise, and he liked it here, listening to front doors open in the tall houses behind him, the chink of milk bottles taken inside, watching the downstairs lights switched on. Footsteps hurried along the pavement, the queue behind him grew. He watched the clouds roll away above the trees on the common, and a couple of people appear, walking their dogs. Sometimes, on Sundays, he met his parents and the children, coming back from mass, and went with them to watch the toy boats with their white sails drift across the pond; he should do it more often – it was the only time he had with them, except for Sunday lunch, but if there was anyone he knew in the Polish Club he liked to stay and have a drink and a game of chess. What was the harm in that?
The lighted windows of the 118 drew near, and Jan got on. He paid his fare, opened the paper and turned to the chess problem. He had half an hour before he got to Streatham, to the engineering works, and his board in the draughtsman’s section. He didn’t mind the work too much: considering the state of things when he came here in ‘46 he wasn’t doing too badly. He was nineteen, then, with barely any English, just enough to get by on from the classes they’d run in Italy: in the first few days he’d wondered why so many places were called Ostermilk. In the freezing East Anglian camp, in the worst winter the English had known for forty years, he’d joined the Polish Resettlement Corps like everyone else, and the welfare workers had nodded when he tried to explain that his education in Warsaw had been broken off under the occupation. His skills had been in making hand grenades, building barricades … The welfare workers had understood the facts, but not what it had felt like.
But they were okay, they organized proper English classes, suggested draughtsmanship, found him a place on a course. He hadn’t done so badly, but he could have done better, he knew. It had all happened too fast: marrying so young, when he hadn’t even finished his training, the babies coming so quickly. Ewa an accident; Anna needing him to be a responsible family man when he was hardly out of his teens. That was one reason why he’d avoided too much responsibility at work: he could be training for management now, if he wanted, but he did not want. He liked the company of the few other Poles there, but he did not want to be supervising them. Certainly, he did not want to supervise English workers: he’d met and heard about enough hostility in the early days, when the press had forgotten the Polish heroes of the Battle of Britain and Monte Cassino, and was full of stories of how the Poles were taking English jobs; a lot of the trade unions had thought of them as fascists. Fascists! He’d like to have seen them in Poland in the years after the war. Now it was the turn of the West Indians: how was the bus conductor enjoying himself over here? Brixton was full of them; they were beginning to move into their street, too.
Rook takes bishop … They were almost there, and the bus was filling up. It stopped, and a crowd of passengers got on. Jan looked up, saw the sky quite light now, saw a boy moving down the aisle who reminded him of someone. He was tall and fine-featured, with fair hair; sixteen or seventeen, wearing a navy school raincoat, and a school tie. Jan watched him move in the crush towards the front, and raise his arm to hold on to the rail as the bus changed gear abruptly in the traffic. Something in that gesture, in his face … He was a bit like Paweł. Jan put his hand to his jaw, and saw again Pawer raising an imaginary rifle joyfully above his head in the hour before the Uprising began. He saw him, weeks later, in the last agonies of the Old Town, and a sharp slither of pain drove beneath his gum.
The paper and the chess problem fell to his lap. Jan, on the journey to work he made every day, looked again at the fair-haired boy in the raincoat and recalled another journey, through sewers. He stared out of the window, beyond the pebbledash and mock Tudor frontages of Streatham.
Jerzy was ill. On Thursday morning he looked feverish, and would eat nothing at lunch. Anna made him some tea and when he woke after his nap he seemed better. By five, after quarrelling with Ewa, he was scarlet-cheeked and tearful. She put him to bed with a cold flannel on his forehead, and stayed until he fell asleep.
She read to Ewa in the front room by the fire, though of course it was much cheaper to have her in bed with her dressing gown on and no need for a heater. When she, too, was asleep, Anna made supper for Jan, did two hours’ironing and went to bed.
Some time after midnight she heard Jan’s key in the lock. She lay and listened to him walk heavily to the kitchen and scrape back his chair. A little later she heard the rush of the bathroom taps and the toilet flushing. Then the bedroom door was pushed open. She lay motionless as he undressed in the dark and sank into bed beside her.
‘Anna?’
She breathed deeply, clenching her hand next to the wall.
‘Anna?’
She was tired, she was tired.
He turned away.
Wide awake now, knowing how long it would take to get to sleep again, she lay staring at the wall. A bright December moon was still high in the sky, and through the curtains a thin line of light fell across the picture rail. After a while, Jan began to snore, and Anna unclenched her hand and pulled her pillow down close to her. Slowly, with difficulty, she drifted towards sleep.
> ‘Mama! Mama!’
She sat up, saw Ewa in the doorway, nothing on her feet, no dressing gown, hair tousled.
‘Jerzy can’t breathe.’
‘What?’
‘He says it hurts.’
‘All right, I’m coming. Go back to bed and keep warm.’
‘He says it really hurts.’ She stood uncertainly.
‘Sssh!’ But there was no fear of waking Jan now. Anna slid off the end of the bed, reached for her dressing gown and hurried down the corridor, holding Ewa’s hand.
Jerzy was leaning back on his pillow, pale and dark-eyed, panting in short, shallow breaths.
‘What is it, maleńki?’ She sat down beside him, and took his hand. ‘Your chest?’
He nodded, gasping. Anna turned to Ewa. ‘Go and put the kettle on, can you do that? Quickly.’
Ewa scurried to the kitchen. Anna sat watching Jerzy’s bony chest heaving in shorter and shorter spasms. Had he caught a cold, a chest infection? She shivered in her dressing gown.
‘The kettle’s on,’ said Ewa, back again. ‘What shall I do now?’
‘Nothing, just pop back into bed. Thank you, kochana. Now keep an eye on Jerzy for me while I go and look in the medicine cupboard.’
‘Mama …’ Jerzy’s hand wavered towards her.
‘It’s all right, Ewa’s here. I shan’t be a minute. Good boy.’
The bathroom was very cold. She went quickly through the cabinet until she found the Friar’s Balsam, poured some into a bowl and hurried to the kitchen. The kettle was steaming; she poured hot water into the bowl and took a deep breath. Lovely, comforting smell.
