by Sue Gee
‘And mine has the crib,’ said Jerzy, gazing at his square.
Then his mother was standing before him, holding out a piece broken from her own, and saying: ‘Well, kochany – darling – I wish for you the toy you most want, and a wonderful surprise, and health as you begin your first term at school. I hope you make many friends there, and study hard and grow up strong.’
He took the piece of wafer and solemnly placed it on his tongue. It began to dissolve, tasting of nothing.
‘Thank you, Mama. I wish you a very happy Christmas … and … what is the surprise?’
‘Aha.’ She winked. ‘Wait and see.’
When they had all exchanged the host, and kissed each other, they went to the window and drew back the curtains. The sky was a hazy orange, still, but a tiny point of light was just visible above the rooftops.
‘An aeroplane,’ said Jan.
‘The first evening star,’ said Anna. ‘And now for goodness’sake let’s eat.’
‘The table looks beautiful!’ said Ewa.
Babcia ladled out the bowls of barscht, clear beetroot soup with dried mushrooms floating like dark fish below the surface.
‘Excellent,’ said Dziadek.
When his mother opened the door to fetch the second course from the kitchen – a dish of baked carp – Jerzy thought he could hear a whining sound from somewhere.
‘Tata?’
‘Yes?’
‘What’s that noise?’
‘What noise?’ But all the grown-ups were exchanging glances and smiles. ‘Wait,’ said Tata. ‘Wait and see.’
Fifteen aching minutes later, Anna said: ‘Let’s have dessert after the presents. I can hardly wait myself.’
They left the table and all sat round the fire. ‘Close your eyes, children,’ Anna said softly, and they closed them, waiting for the year’s moment of magic, when Dziadek stepped outside the door and they heard the distant tinkle of a bell. ‘The reindeer sleigh,’ said Anna, and they could hear the door open again, and a rustling.
‘All right, children,’ said Dziadek. ‘Open your eyes. Let’s see what Father Christmas has brought you.’
They gazed at the little heap of presents beneath the tree.
‘The surprise!’ Jerzy begged. ‘Where’s the surprise?’
‘Close your eyes again.’
From along the corridor came the sound of claws scratching linoleum, a panting, and – ‘Mama! Mama!’ They were across the room, hugging him, huge and dark and soft, with lolling tongue and nervous eyes.
‘Gently with him, children. Let him get to know you.’
‘Good boy,’ Ewa murmured, and patted his back. ‘Good boy.’
‘What’s his name?’ asked Jerzy.
‘We must choose one,’ said his mother. ‘Come on, boy, come here by the fire.’
She patted her chair and the dog moved slowly across the room and stood, trembling.
‘Where did you find him?’ Ewa asked.
‘In Battersea Dogs’ Home – it’s a place where lost dogs, or unwanted dogs are kept.’
‘Lots of dogs?’
‘Hundreds.’
‘Why did you choose this one?’
‘Look at him,’ said Anna, reaching out her hand. ‘How could I not choose this one?’
He padded closer and stood by her lap as she stroked his head.
‘Burek,’ said Jerzy. ‘Let’s call him Burek. That’s a good dog name.’ He moved towards him and put his cheek against the great dark head.
When all the presents had been opened, they gathered round the tree for carols.
‘When the lovely Lady?’ asked Anna. ‘Shall we have that one first?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Ewa. ‘We had it at school, didn’t we, Dziadek?’
‘You can lead us, then.’
‘When the lovely Lady rocked her Son,’ Ewa sang, and they all joined in:
When the lovely Lady rocked her Son,
Full of joy she sang to him:
‘Lulla-lullaby, my little baby,
Lulla-lullaby, my lovely little lord.’
Softly, little breeze, softly, little wind from the south,
Blow softly, for the new lord is sleeping.
‘Lulla-Iullaby, my little baby,
Lulla-lullaby, my lovely little lord.’
Down in the street, voices were calling; a taxi drew up; doors slammed.
‘The shepherds came to Bethlehem,’ suggested Babcia, and they sang:
The shepherds came to Bethlehem
Merrily playing to the Child on their lyre
Glory in the Highest,
And Peace on Earth …
It was almost ten when Anna tucked Jerzy and Ewa into bed and kissed them goodnight. Ewa was holding her new doll: she had two dresses and petticoats and a winter coat and hat, with matching gloves and scarf. Anna had made them all. On the locker by Jerzy’s bed stood a small black engine with three green coaches, and a signal which went up and down when you pressed a tiny lever.
‘You like what Father Christmas brought you?’
‘Yes, Mama,’ said Jerzy. ‘And Burek is the best. How did he fit on the sleigh?’
‘He must have got very cold,’ said Ewa. ‘Can we take him for a walk in the morning. On the common?’
‘Of course. We will have to take him for a long walk every day. Go to sleep quickly now. Happy Christmas.’ And she went down the corridor to join the other grown-ups.
‘Ewa?’
‘Yes?’
‘There’s a train coming soon.’
‘Sssh! It’s too cold to get out of bed – and there won’t be trains at Christmas.’
‘There are a few. I want to watch the Night Ferry, that’s all. I’ve got my socks on.’
‘Well … just that one. Then you must go to sleep.’
He slipped out of bed and padded to the window, tugged aside the curtain, and waited. In the distance he could hear the strong, steady breathing of the Night Ferry train, moving close, down the track from Victoria. The Christmas ferry to France. ‘Come and look, Ewa – it’s such a beautiful one.’
She pushed back her bedclothes and came to stand beside him. He held his breath, and it roared towards them, the sleek silhouette of the engine with its glowing heart, and the huge coaches. People were asleep in there. There was a rush of steam, and a deep throaty whistle pierced the night. Then it was gone, gathering speed down the line, off to the dark Kent coast, and another country.
On the second Monday in January, he left the house with Mama, tightly holding her hand. Ewa walked on the other side. Every morning, until today, he had stood at the window of Dziadek’s and Babcia’s flat, watching his mother and sister hurry down the road to catch the bus to school, waving as they turned the corner. Now he was going, too.
He had often been with Mama to collect Ewa in the afternoons, so it wasn’t as though he was going to a place he’d never seen. And Ewa would be there, after all, and would look after him in the playground. But it was very cold, and his stomach was full of butterflies. On Saturday Mama had taken him to buy new shoes; they felt stiff and uncomfortable. He did like the grey sweater she had knitted especially, with his own nametape on the neckband. Jerzy Tomasz Prawicki. It was inked inside his shoes as well.
At the comer they stopped and turned. Babcia was high up at the window, waving and smiling. Beside her, Burek’s dark head and ears were just visible – Mama would take him out when she got home; he couldn’t come on the bus. It felt very strange, seeing part of his family far away up there. He waved, and tried to smile.
‘Quick!’ said Mama. ‘I can see it coming.’
They panted towards the stop.
The bus was crowded, and there were a lot of schoolchildren. He watched them teasing each other, not understanding the jokes. Last night he had been drilled by Mama and Ewa in some important words which he must remember. Toilet. Yes. No. Thank you. My name is Jerzy. What is your name?
‘It’s easy,’ Ewa had said. She spoke English as
well as anything, now. He would, too.
‘Come on,’ Mama was saying. ‘This is the stop.’
He followed her and Ewa down the aisle, bumping into satchels and bags. In the street, the other children ran ahead, shouting. He could not see their mothers anywhere.
Mama’s arm was round his shoulder as they reached the school. A high wall ran the length of the playground, and the tall iron gate was bolted open. Through it he could see hundreds of English children, scarves flying as they ran up and down, calling each other’s names.
‘That’s my classroom,’ said Ewa, pointing to a window on the first floor. ‘I feel a bit funny, coming back.’
‘Ewa …’ said Mama.
‘And that’s your classroom, Jerzy, downstairs. Come on, I’ll take you inside.’
He stared at his feet.
Mama bent down and kissed him. ‘It’s all right, maleńki. You’ll soon feel at home here. Of course it’s a bit strange today, but …’ She stood up. ‘I’ll see you here this afternoon, and you can tell me all about it. Now off you go with Ewa.’
She had left him, before he even had a chance to say goodbye. Mutely, he followed Ewa through the gate, across the playground and up the steps to the front door. They went into a long, noisy corridor; a large boy pushed past them and went out into the playground, ringing a bell. Jerzy put his hands over his ears.
‘Quick!’ said Ewa. ‘That’s for Register – we all have to be in our classes now.’ She tugged him down the corridor and stopped at a half-open door with glass panels. ‘This is Class I – it must be you. Oh yes, there’s Miss Chambers.’
A tall smiling woman came towards them. ‘Hello, Ewa. Is this the little brother? Lovely. Hello, dear. What’s your name?’
He understood, but could not answer.
‘It’s Jerzy,’ said Ewa.
‘Yer-jay. Very nice. Not as easy as Ewa, but never mind.’ She smiled again. ‘Run along now. Yerjay will be quite all right with me, won’t you, dear?’
‘Bye!’ called Ewa. ‘See you at break.’
He watched her go, and then other children arrived, each one greeted by Miss Chambers. She left him by her desk, standing quite still and staring at the floor. There was a ragged splash of ink on the boards; distantly observing it, he noticed its resemblance to a steam engine, and closed his eyes. He would travel on it, far away – anywhere, as long as it was not here. He never would be here.
2. Warsaw, 1939
The apartment house in Praga had a chestnut tree in the courtyard. From the window of their bedroom, Anna and Jerzy could almost touch the leaves; in late spring a rustling breeze sometimes sent a few white flowers drifting into the room, leaving a thin dust of pollen, a scattering of waxy petals on the desk. Now, after weeks of hot weather, the tree was just beginning to turn yellow; Anna left the rucksack open on her bed and stood watching the slow fall of one leaf then another on to the cobbles, the occasional drop of a spiky chestnut case.
The apartment was full of quiet, end-of-the-week sounds. The outer door to her father’s surgery, at the far end of the shadowy corridor, opened and closed; through his half-open window, which also faced the courtyard, she could hear his murmurs of greeting and inquiry. In the kitchen Teresa and Marta, the maid, were listening to the news on the wireless and preparing supper for tonight: the family was going to have lunch with Wiktoria, Tata’s sister, across the river; it was her Saint’s Day. Anna heard Marta chopping vegetables, the rush of water from the tap, the oven door open and shut, plates and glasses taken from the cupboard and set on the dark green tray. The door to the sitting room was ajar; sun from the casement windows facing the street fell in a thin line on to the corridor, and the tapestry kilims on the wall which Mama had made when she and Tata were first married. Jerzy was practising: he ran up and down a scale repeatedly.
‘You’re supposed to be packing,’ Anna called. The scale rose and fell again, then stopped, and he was standing in the bedroom doorway, pulling a face at the litter of shirts and shorts and socks on his bed.
‘Give me a hand.’
‘Honestly,’ said Anna. ‘Anyone would think we were going away for a year. You know Tata told us to travel light.’
Yesterday evening they had sat in the sitting room after supper, the map spread out over the walnut table. ‘We shall take the train right up here, to the north of Wilno,’ said Tata, ‘which is here, in the north-east …’ His finger led their eyes up the worn map from Warsaw, across plains, past lakes, through Bialystok. ‘As you will recall from your history lessons, Wilno is one of the most beautiful and important medieval cities in Poland.’ He raised a dark eyebrow. ‘You do of course recall it.’
Anna giggled. ‘Yes, Tata.’
‘Good. And then we shall paddle our dear old kajak all the way through these lovely lakes, here … down to the river Zejmiana … here … and all the way on to the river Willa. It is particularly lovely countryside – we shall travel by river all the way to Wilno, and there we shall catch the train back to Warsaw.’ His finger skimmed down winding tributaries, and brought them safely home. ‘By which time you will be fit! We shall paddle and swim and walk – you have both been disgracefully idle all summer.’
‘Yes, Tata.’ Jerzy and Anna winked at each other, and then there was a rattle of cups from the corridor, and they looked up to see Teresa in the doorway with a tray of coffee.
‘Ah – thank you, my dear,’ said Tata, and folded the map, nodding to them to pull back a chair for her and rise.
Last month, while Jerzy was camping with his Scout troop, and Anna with Guides, Tata and Teresa had had a little holiday by themselves. Anna didn’t know why Teresa was not coming with them now, and she didn’t like to ask, partly because she wasn’t used to questioning any decision Tata made, and partly because she wouldn’t want him to think she wanted her with them. She did not exactly dislike Teresa: she was simply, even after three years, an intrusion, and she tried too hard.
Tata still kept the photograph of their real mother on his desk in the surgery; there was another in their room, on the chest of drawers: Mama with Anna on her lap, Jerzy standing beside her, already, even at two, very dark and serious and still. Anna sometimes thought now that at fifteen he looked like the pictures of Slavic scholars she’d seen in an old book of Tata’s – thin, with cropped hair, high cheekbones, wide-set eyes: when he was reading, or playing the piano, he was lost. Quite different from Andrzej, his best friend. Andrzej was big-boned, fair-haired, athletic, a bit of a daredevil. Anna liked him, but she was also shy of him: when he came to the apartment she smiled, and went off with her drawing book.
The photographs of her and Jerzy, as small children, with Mama and Tata, were everywhere, for so long so much a part of her life that they were in its background, like the stories Tata told them, of the days when Mama was alive. In the foreground were school, and Guides; her friends Natalia and Jadwiga; her drawing. Every now and then there moved in and out of her thoughts, like a wraith, her secret sense of … displacement, as if she were not quite whole, and therefore did not quite belong anywhere, even with her friends, even in the family. Most important in her life was Tata, to whom she had tried a few weeks ago to talk about this strange feeling. He had been writing notes in his surgery after his last patient had gone; she somehow found it easier to mention it when he was half-preoccupied.
‘Tata?’ She sat on the leather couch, her legs swinging.
‘Mm-hm?’
‘I have this funny feeling sometimes …’
‘Mmm?’ His pen moved across the page, his balding head bent low. He needed glasses.
‘Don’t you need glasses, Tata?’
‘Possibly. I am trying to refer Pani Treszka to a consultant. What feeling?’
‘Oh, just … sometimes I feel as if there’s a bit of me missing, that’s all.’
‘Your head, perhaps?’ He finished writing and turned the page over on to the blotting pad, smoothing it, looking across at her quizzically.
‘
Oh, never mind.’ She slid off the couch and went to stand beside him, her arm across his shoulders. ‘Is Pani Treszka very ill?’
‘No, but you know that I should not tell you if she were. One does not discuss one’s patients with ignorant children.’
‘No, Tata.’ She smiled and leaned against him, feeling utterly safe. ‘Perhaps I’ll be a doctor one day – not quite so ignorant.’ That was all she really wanted: to be as clever, and useful, as Tata – or Mama: she’d been a doctor, too.
‘What are you trying to tell me, darling?’
But the feeling of strangeness had melted; she patted Tata’s balding head. ‘I can’t remember.’
The front door banged: Jerzy was home from the gimnazium, secondary school; it was the start of the summer holidays. What did anything else matter?
He was calling from the corridor. ‘Tata?’
‘In here.’ The surgery door opened, and he came in. They were together again.
And now the summer was almost over, and they would be together for two whole weeks. She looked at Jerzy rummaging through the clothes on his bed, stuffing shirts into his rucksack – hardly a Slavic scholar now.
‘Hopeless …’ she said. ‘Let me.’
‘Thank you. I did ask.’ He perched on the other end of the bed, watching her folding and stacking. ‘I suppose we’ll need sweaters.’
‘Of course. Have you got a clean one?’
‘I think Teresa …’ He swung off the bed, pulled out a drawer in the chest and a deep blue sweater from within it. ‘Yes, she did. Good for her.’ He examined a sleeve. ‘Darned, too.’
Anna felt a twinge of guilt in her relief that Teresa was not coming. Then the door from the surgery into the apartment was opened, and Tata called out: ‘Is everyone ready?’
The wireless in the kitchen was turned off. ‘Almost,’ called Teresa. ‘I’m just going to change.’ They heard her coming out and saying something to Tata in a low voice; he did not answer, but they went into their bedroom and closed the door.
Jerzy looked at Anna and raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s all that about?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ She looked down at her cotton skirt and sandals. ‘Do you think I look respectable enough for Aunt Wiktoria?’
