by Sue Gee
Back in the bedroom, she held Jerzy’s damp head over the bowl, under towels. Across the room, Ewa was giggling.
‘He looks like a ghost.’
The towels twitched, irritably.
‘Poor little ghost. He’ll be better soon.’
But it took a long time for Jerzy to stop gasping, and fall back on to the pillow, and by that time Ewa was sound asleep. Anna sponged his face, gave him a drink, tucked him up.
‘There now … you snuggle down.’
‘Thanks, Mama.’
She kissed him and crept back to bed, where she slept uneasily.
Jan woke her at seven.
‘What’s going on? There’s no breakfast – I’ll be late.’
‘Sssh! Jerzy’s not well, a bad chest. We were up half the night.’
‘I didn’t hear anything. You should have woken me.’
‘Never mind. But can you phone the doctor as soon as you get to work? Ask if he’ll come and look at him this morning – I don’t want to take him out to the surgery.’
‘All right.’
‘Thank you.’ She hurried to the kitchen, and began to prepare breakfast. The sky beyond the windows was dark with rain; when she went to look at Jerzy he was still asleep, his face clammy.
It rained all morning. Anna waited until half-past twelve, but still the doctor did not call, and at last she left Babcia in charge while she went out to the phone box in the next street. The windows streamed with condensation.
‘Dr Watkins’surgery.’
‘Hello … I am sorry … I expect visit, but doctor is not coming …’
The receptionist sighed. ‘What name is it, dear?’
‘Prawicka. Mrs Prawicka. My husband telephone this morning …’
‘Just let me check the list of calls. Pra … would you spell that for me, dear? And the address? No, the doctor’s not got you on his list.’
‘But …’ Anna could not believe that Jan had not phoned. ‘It is my little boy, Jerzy. He has chest pain, temperature …’
‘I’m sorry, dear, but I can’t get in touch with the doctor now; he’s on his rounds. Can you try and bring your little boy to the evening surgery? We open at five. If he’s really not well enough to come, ring again, and we’ll see what we can do.’
At half-past three, Anna collected Ewa from school. At half-past four, she left her with her mother-in-law and dressed Jerzy in trousers, two jumpers, coat, scarf, hat and gloves. She put him in the pushchair, covered him with a knitted blanket and set off down the wet, lamplit streets to the surgery.
The waiting room was crowded and smelt of damp clothes and, faintly, disinfectant. A small gas fire sputtered and popped; a young girl with combs in her hair and scarlet lipstick sat next to it, reading Woman’s Own and swinging a foot. Anna took one of the last two wooden chairs and held Jerzy on her lap; he leant against her, thin legs dangling, heavy head pressed against her collar. She rocked him as they sat, not really aware of doing so. Every few minutes the door opened and someone else arrived, registered with the receptionist and stood against the wall, and the air grew damper and warmer, and Anna felt herself begin to nod.
Her head filled gently with a soft cloud of wool; distantly she could hear the low voice of the receptionist and, intermittently, the ping of the surgery bell. Jerzy breathed heavily; she pressed her face against his woollen hat and closed her eyes.
‘Mrs Prawicka? Mrs Prawicka?’
She jerked herself awake and slid Jerzy to the floor. He swayed, tearful. ‘It’s all right, we have to see doctor now.’ She led him on unsteady feet into the surgery.
‘Hello, young man, and what’s the matter with you? Sit down, sit down. Mrs … Prawicka, isn’t it?’
Anna nodded, and sat, overpowered as usual by Dr Watkins’ indifferent joviality.
‘He has temperature … last night he can’t breathe … lot of pain. My husband phone for visit this morning, but …’
‘Well, well, let’s take a look at him, eh? Come on, up on the couch, young man, I want to have a little listen to your chest with this thing. Know what this is?’ He waved his stethoscope; Jerzy shrank. On the high narrow couch he squirmed and cried when Dr Watkins tried to lift his layers of clothes.
‘Now, now, no need for any of this …’
‘It’s all right, Jerzy, doctor is going to make you better now. Just let him …’
‘No, no!’
Eventually Anna calmed him enough for Dr Watkins to run his hands quickly over his chest and listen.
‘Mmm, bit of a wheeze there, touch of asthma, I should think; bit of an infection.’
Jerzy slid off the couch; she tugged down his vest and jumpers.
‘He’s rather thin,’ Dr Watkins went on. ‘You … er … you managing all right?’
Anna blushed. ‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Good, good, I’m sure you are. Well, now, I’ll give you a prescription.’ He pulled his pad towards him on the desk. ‘M & B, these things are called – he might have a bit of a reaction, but they’ll clear it up. Keep him in the warm. How’s the rest of the family? All well? Good, good.’
He scribbled on the pad. ‘Here we are, you can get this at the chemist on the corner.’ He smiled at Jerzy. ‘Soon be starting school, I expect, won’t you?’
Jerzy stared at him.
‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘He will start in January.’
‘St Mary’s?’
‘Yes.’ She buttoned him into his coat.
‘Excellent. How’s his English coming along?’
Anna blushed again. ‘I am teaching him a little.’
‘Well done. Don’t want him too far behind when he starts. All the best to you now.’ He smiled at Jerzy again, and struck the bell on his desk. ‘Bell. This is a bell. Can you say “bell” for me, young man?’ Jerzy stared. ‘Never mind. Off you go now, and be good.’
Anna bundled her son out of the room and into the pushchair. She changed the prescription at the chemist and hurried home, tucking Jerzy back into bed with a hot-water bottle. In the bathroom, she burst into tears.
She tried to imagine saying to Dr Watkins: ‘My father was a doctor, you know. He was highly respected. If it had not been for the war, I should have gone to medical school.’ She heard him answer: ‘Splendid. Splendid.’
Jan came home after eleven.
‘What happened?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The doctor. The phone call …’
‘The doctor. Oh, God, I forgot. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Don’t look at me like that.’
The house where Polish school was held stood back from the road behind a laurel hedge. It was a large, square, late Victorian building, one of many on a broad road between Clapham and Wandsworth. The ground between the hedge and the front door was scuffed mud and thin gravel, and there were narrow paths on either side of the house to a large plain garden at the back. The house had been bought by members of the Polish Educational Society, and during the week it was used for meetings and discussions; but on Saturday mornings the children of twenty or thirty families met in the classrooms.
It was the best day of Ewa’s week. Dziadek walked at his usual regular pace down the road from the bus stop, carrying his briefcase, but she ran ahead, and pressed the china bell beside the front door, almost always the first to arrive.
‘Dzień dobry – good morning, Ewa.’ Pan Mazur, the caretaker, swung open the door and she stepped inside, her feet echoing on the bare floorboards as she crossed the hall. A wide uncarpeted staircase led to the shadowy upper floor; down here, there were two classrooms on the left, with a cloakroom, and on the right a narrow passage led to the kitchen, and Pan Mazur’s flat. Ewa spun on her toes and breathed deeply, smelling the particular mingling of wood and chalk, polish and dust and, from the kitchen, coffee.
On the wall plaque facing you as soon as you were inside the front door, the white Polish eagle glared in profile from beneath his crown. Sometimes Ewa went to stand beneath him, gazing up at the
white feathers on their red background – the national colours – at the proud cruel beak and eye. Lech, the legendary founder of Poland, chose him as the nation’s emblem because a rare, beautiful white eagle had appeared in the sky one day when he was travelling alone – she had learned that here. And the eagle wore a crown because the people of Poland would never recognize that he had lost it, when the Russians came. Sometimes, if Pan Mazur had disappeared, and Dziadek not yet arrived, Ewa would close her eyes and stretch out her arms like wings beneath the plaque, standing on tiptoe, poised to soar above the world. Then she would hear Dziadek’s step on the path outside and go quickly to the cloakroom and take off her coat and scarf. Soon, the other children began to arrive and, within the next ten minutes, other teachers, their parents.
Ewa’s classroom held sixteen small double desks and chairs, and a large raised teacher’s desk beneath the blackboard. Three tall windows divided the wall on the left; through them you could see only the path and privet hedge separating them from the house next door. The wall on the right held a hissing brown radiator and an enormous map of Poland – ‘przed-wojenne – pre-war, children, pre-war’. Ewa had stood beside Dziadek many times, watching his pointer move from place to place: Lwów, now deep in Russia, was where he had been born – ‘a great walled city’; Wilno, also taken by the Russians; Warsaw, where Mama and Tata had been in the Uprising against the Germans in 1944 – though they didn’t know each other then; Kraków, where the castle of the Polish kings stood, near a beautiful church, all blue and gold inside. The Black Madonna lived in Czȩstochowa, and hundreds of pilgrims went to visit her each year. In Poland it was so cold in winter that the men’s moustaches had icicles on them; in summer the peasants made hay in boiling sun, and the children rode home on the very top of the waggons, with geese waddling after them. Ewa had seen them, in a book.
Some of the books at school came all the way from Poland, and some came from the teachers’homes and had to be very carefully looked after because they, too, were przed-wojenne. Sometimes, parcels of books arrived which made Dziadek and the other teachers angry, and they sent the parcels back unopened. When Ewa asked why, Dziadek said that they had been sent by the Polish Embassy in London, by the communists.
There was another place on the map which he had pointed out to the children on a bright summer morning two years ago, when all the teachers had arrived grim-faced, and some of them crying; Poznań, in the west, where the milicja had fired on ordinary working people, rioting in the streets because they could not afford the food prices in the shops: more than fifty people had been killed. Ewa found it difficult to fit these two pictures of Poland together in her mind: the place where everyone at home had grown up, and the place which wasn’t their home any more, and where they could never go back.
At nine-fifteen the class assembled. Ewa sat next to her friend Myszka; like her, Myszka wore her hair in plaits, but her clothes were nicer, somehow – they seemed softer, and fitted very well. Her father was a doctor, and she had a doll with four changes of clothes. ‘Dzień dobry – good morning, chidren.’ Dziadek stood smiling beside the teacher’s desk.
‘Dzień dobry, Panu.’
‘This morning, as usual, we shall begin with our history lesson, then you will study the Polish language with Pan Dábrowski. After break you will have the pleasure of Pani Dábrowska playing the piano for the dancing class upstairs. We shall conclude the morning with our Christmas carols. Now, will you please get out your exercise books and pencils.’
There was a rustling and murmuring, the woody smell of pencils being sharpened, neat little curls of shaving trimmed with yellow falling into the ink gutters at the top of the desk. Thin winter sunlight lit the polished brass vase of Michaelmas daisies on the teacher’s desk, and Dziadek surveyed the upturned faces before him. Each Saturday, at this moment, Ewa felt the delicious sense of belonging, of readiness and purpose. Neatly she spread open her exercise book, and wrote down the heading which Dziadek dictated.
‘The Reign of Zygmunt I Stary, 1506–1548. I shall spell Zygmunt … You all have that? Now, you will recall that last week we spoke a little of the reign of Kazimierz, 1444–1492. I should like one of you to refresh our memories with the main events of those years. Yes, Maciek?’
Maciek Sokolowski, eight years old, built like a grasshopper, with a pale, earnest face, reminded the class of the Peace of Toruń and partition of Prussia, of the founding of the printing press in Kraków, and the establishment of the two-chambered sejm.
‘Excellent,’ said Dziadek. ‘Now, will you please write: When Zygmunt I Stary came to the throne, he had lived for many years in the court at Buda …’
After geography, and the morning break, Pan Dąbrowski arrived. He was a short, square man with a head like a bullet, and he instructed the class as though in a military camp.
‘Good morning. Sit. Books on the table. Open at page thirty-six. Stanisław Malinowicz, please stand and conjugate the verb pamiȩtać.’
Always, the children felt a tremor of insecurity as the kindly shape of Pan Prawicki, Ewa’s grandfather, disappeared, and Pan Dąbrowski arrived. Once, he had lost his temper with a boy who had not done his homework, and hit his hand with a ruler, but that was a long time ago, and perhaps there was no real need to be uneasy. They bent over their exercise books and copied down today’s vocabulary.
From the floor above, the first bars of a Chopin nocturne drifted down the stairwell: Pani Dąbrowska was enjoying herself, before the dancing class. Ewa paused in her copying of the word weidza, knowledge, and gazed out of the window. The music and the moment were inseparable: all her life, from the radio, from the concert platform, from a half-open window on a rainy street, those melancholy bars would instantly transport her to a morning in December, when she was eight years old, and sitting in the warm classroom of Polish school in Clapham.
At break, in good weather, they all went into the garden, but the leafless tress and bare flowerbeds were uninviting now, and it was too cold. They drank their bottles of milk in the hall, and ran about.
Then, at twelve o’clock, Ewa and Myszka climbed the stairs with fourteen other children, and entered the huge bare room reserved for the dancing class. Chairs lined the walls; over the plaster mantelpiece hung a vast mirror spotted with mildew. The piano, with Pani Dąbrowska overflowing on the stool, stood in the corner by one of the tall windows, where the pattern of bare branch and rooftop stretched into the distance under a leaden sky.
Pani Dąbrowska clapped her hands. ‘Good afternoon, children. Will you please take your partners, and we shall go over the steps of the Krakowiak folk dance. Piotr and Myszka, would you be so kind as to step into the centre of the floor for us? No giggling, please!’
There was the soft dry movement of feet in socks on floorboards, as the children copied the steps to the tapping of Pani Dąbrowska’s little stick on the top of the piano.
‘Dobrze, dobrze – good, good. And so now with the music …’ She settled back on to the stool like a hen upon her eggs. ‘And a one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four – very nice, Ewa and Stanisław – dobrze, dobrze …’
And the children rose and dipped around the room as the winter sky grew darker, and Pan Mazur slipped in quietly to switch on the lights and stand for a moment, watching.
At the very end of the morning, the two halves of the class came together again, and all the teachers stood round the piano, leading the Christmas carols. Afterwards, walking with Dziadek in the cold street to the bus stop, Ewa’s head still hummed with singing. Her feet tapped along the pavement, but in her mind she was still in the brightly lit music room, and the words of the last hymn, chorused by thirty voices, rose into the air and followed her all the way home:
Oh, God, in your power and glory
For centuries you have watched over Poland.
Before your altar we beg you:
Return a free homeland to us …
Wigilia. Christmas Eve. Traditionally, they must all be at the ta
ble with the first evening star. Anna stood at the window of the front room and gazed at the sodium-orange, starless London sky. She drew the curtains and took a last look at the room; in a few moments she must collect the children from the grandparents, where they had been since midday.
Two white candles stood in saucers in the centre of the table, laid with the embroidered cloth. The tree was on a low stool in the window, the presents hidden in the kitchen. The best present of all was locked in the bathroom, after spending the night with Dziadek and Babcia: by a miracle he had been concealed from the children since his arrival yesterday afternoon. They could not afford him, Anna knew, but he would bring so much pleasure, and he needed a home. She went to the mirror over the fire, saw a thin intense face with dark shadows under the eyes stare back as she put on her lipstick. Then the key turned in the front door and she turned to see Jan, holding flowers.
‘Here.’ He crossed the room and awkwardly put them in her arms, forced early daffodils wrapped in cellophane and tied with white ribbon. ‘Wesołych Swiąt. Happy Christmas.’
‘Thank you. Beautiful…’ She carefully undid the wrapping, and bent to smell them, then raised her head to look at him.
He smiled, touched her hair. ‘Very pretty. Very tired, Anna …’
‘Yes?’
‘We will try … I will try …’
‘Thank you,’ she said again. ‘Shall we call the children now?’
The daffodils, in a cut-glass vase borrowed from Babcia, stood between the two lit candles, now the shimmering heart of the room. Pale with cleanliness and excitement, Ewa and Jerzy stood by the fire as Dziadek took from a small dish on the table a wafer of optałek, the host, made from embossed rice paper and sent from Poland by Mama’s Aunt Wiktoria. He passed it to his son. There was one for each member of the family, to break and exchange with each other, wishing all that was good for the coming year, and then to eat.
‘Look!’ Ewa whispered to Jerzy. ‘Mine has angels on it.’
