by Sue Gee
‘I wanted to play with you.’
‘Well, you can’t,’ she snapped. ‘Haven’t you got any friends?’
‘No, not really. You two can be my friends.’
They rolled their eyes, groaning, and ran ahead.
Anna stood at the tall school gates, holding Burek’s lead. The gates were still closed, the playground empty; other mothers arrived and waited, leaning against the railings, Marks & Spencer coats and raincoats buttoned tight. A bus drove past, splashing up a puddle from the morning’s rain, and the mothers moved away.
‘Don’t care, do they?’
‘God, it’s cold.’
‘Come on, come on, what’s the matter with that bell?’
‘Your hair looks nice, Jean. Going out?’
‘You must be joking – just had it done to cheer myself up.’
‘Why, what’s he done now, then?’
‘Never came home, did he?’
‘What, not all night?’
‘Not all night.’
‘Tch. I don’t know how you put up with it. You shouldn’t, Jean, it’s not right.’
‘Yeah, but the kids … Come on, bell.’ Anna stood looking through the railings across to the lighted classroom windows, set too high up to see inside, and she listened to the voices around her as if to a play on the radio. She could never talk about Jan like that. Her feet were cold; she shifted them up and down, thinking suddenly: my other life was like a play, like a myth, even: the motherless child fighting her stepmother; the father the good man taken prisoner, murdered in an enemy country; the brother dying a hero’s death. And I am the exile, arriving on the shores of a new land with only a box of pictures.
Meeting Jan was going to be the happy ending: orphan marries handsome hero. Perhaps it had been too much to hope that he could make up for losing everything else.
Around her the group of mothers grew, and then the caretaker appeared, unlocked the school gates and swung them open. The bell jangled through the sound of the traffic, and the children came pouring out, shouting. Burek whimpered, straining at his lead; he caught sight of Jerzy and his tail beat madly against Anna’s legs.
‘Wait!’ She tugged at him sharply, then stretched out a hand to Jerzy, who bent and buried his face in Burek’s coat, laughing.
‘Dzień dobry, Mama.’
‘Dzień dobry, kochany. Where is that Ewa? Oh, there she is, let’s get home quickly now, it’s bitter.’
‘Mama!’ Ewa came running. ‘Can I go home with Janet, for tea?’
‘Oh, not today, Ewa – the grandparents have made tea. They’re waiting for us.’
She pulled a face. ‘They won’t mind, just for once. Please.’
‘And who will come to fetch you? It’s much too cold to come out again.’
‘Couldn’t Tata come, after work?’
‘I don’t know what time he’ll be back. Another time you can go.’ Anna, her ankles painfully nudged by a pushchair, caught sight of Janet’s mother, and smiled apologetically. ‘Perhaps one day next week …’
‘No!’ Ewa said furiously. ‘We want to go now.’
‘Ewa! Control yourself, please.’
‘But …’
‘Why don’t I bring her home?’ Janet’s mother suggested. ‘It’s no trouble.’
‘It’s very kind of you,’ said Anna, taking Jerzy’s hand, ‘but Ewa must learn that she cannot always do what she wants, just when she wants it. Now come along.’
She turned away, not looking to see whether or not Ewa was following, and moved through the crush on the pavement to the zebra crossing.
‘Ewa won’t play with me,’ said Jerzy as they stood waiting for her.
‘You should be playing with the other boys,’ said Anna. She turned to watch Ewa, hugging Janet goodbye, then running to catch up with them, and held out her hand. Ewa did not take it.
‘Why wouldn’t you let me go, Mama? It’s not fair.’
‘What was so special about today?’
‘She’s got “It’s Now or Never”. Her mother bought it for her.’ She glared at Anna accusingly.
‘Oi!’ The taxi driver at the crossing was leaning out into the drizzle. ‘You lot standing there all night?’
‘Oh, my goodness!’ Anna hurried them all over the road, and they walked quickly past the lighted shops.
‘I did a map today,’ said Jerzy, as they turned into their street. ‘Roman Britain. Anyway, I started it. For Dziadek – and you. It’s going to have castles on it, and a wall. I wanted to borrow the book but Mrs Thompson said I couldn’t. Can we go to the library tomorrow?’
‘Yes, I should think so. After Saturday school.’ Anna turned to Ewa, to ask what she had done today, and saw that she was crying. ‘Ewa! Surely you’re not still upset?’
‘It isn’t fair,’ Ewa said again. ‘You don’t understand.’
‘Look!’ said Jerzy. ‘There’s Dziadek!’ At the third-floor window his comforting square shape in its dark suit was silhouetted against the light from the table lamp; his hand was raised in greeting. Jerzy waved back, grabbed Burek’s lead and ran ahead, leaving Ewa and Mama to sort themselves out.
‘And what happened then, Mama?’
Rain splashed against the window panes, and above the slate roof-tops the sky was filled with heavy cloud. Lights in the windows across the street shone through the falling rain; below, every now and then, footsteps hurried past, doors banged. Anna and the children were sitting by the gas fire, which sputtered and popped; Burek lay stretched before it, dozing. A pool of light from the lamp on the low shelf beside it fell on to the rug, where Ewa sat, her back to the window, her mug beside her, hugging her knees. The side of her bare leg and her face were burning red from the fire. Jerzy was also on the floor, but leaning against Anna as she sat in the moquette chair, with its scratched wooden arms, and sewed. From down here he could see only the purple-grey sky, the rain hitting and bouncing off the wet black slates, a sluice of water fall from a place where the gutter in the opposite house had broken, and the upper panes of the windows, rectangles of yellow with an occasional figure, moving across, or staring out. Whoever was there would see the light from this room in the same way, of course, but they couldn’t see him and Ewa, down here, warm and safe and drinking hot chocolate, listening to Mama tell her stories from the war.
‘What happened then?’ Ewa asked again.
Anna bit off a piece of thread, and licked it, making a knot. Ewa had borrowed the sewing scissors once too often: she couldn’t find them anywhere now. She picked up the grey school skirt again, and went on stitching.
‘And then,’ she said slowly, ‘well … then we were prisoners.’ She saw herself standing on a road a few miles outside Warsaw, her feet in the ill-fitting shoes already blistered, stopping to rest just for a moment, and turning to look back. The air was clear and fresh, the sky a sharp, autumnal blue and yellow. Behind them, the city lay like a wounded animal, helpless and abandoned, the column of prisoners stretching endlessly out from it, a Pilgrim’s Progress bleakly swung round, leading away from everything known, and loved, and hoped for. The sound of feet, marching, stumbling, slowing down and ordered on again, scrunched and pounded in her head until it was as if the whole world were filled with it, as if life itself had been reduced to a grim, eternal walk along a road, knowing nothing of the destination.
‘Poor Mama …’ said Jerzy, from the floor.
She patted his shoulder. ‘Shall I tell you something funny? We were marched to a place called Oz·arów, about ten miles away from Warsaw, where there had once been a factory for dyes. There were great empty buildings, taken over by the Germans for use as a transit camp, with thousands of us milling about, trying to find news of friends, or relatives with whom we had lost touch during the Uprising. We were given a little bread, I think, and a few of the taps were working, so we had something to drink, and then we all tried to settle down for the night and get some sleep. The floors were bare concrete, and for some reason there were a number o
f bales of straw, and some people managed to spread that out and sleep on it, but it was a most uncomfortable night. Anyway, it was dark, naturally, so none of us could really see what we were lying on. And in the morning, when we woke up, we found that our faces, and hands and clothes were stained with deep blue dye! Can you imagine? It must have been all over the floor, and of course it was quite indelible. For weeks afterwards, even longer, it was·possible in the prison camps to tell at once who had been in Oz arów.’
‘Goodness,’ said Jerzy. ‘And were you blue?’
‘Oh, yes. All down one arm and one side of my face.’
‘And did you find out what had happened to Teresa?’ Ewa asked. ‘And Wiktoria?’
Anna shook her head. ‘Not then. When I was in prison camp a letter reached me from Wiktoria, through the Red Cross, I think.
She told me that poor Teresa had been killed in the first weeks of the Uprising – the house where she was staying was bombed.’
The rain beat against the window. Anna had stopped sewing. ‘I was so sad when I read that,’ she said.
‘Poor Mama,’ Jerzy said again.
‘No, not poor Mama. I was sad for her, can you understand – for everything she lost …’ She picked up the grey school skirt again.
‘And what about Wiktoria?’ Ewa asked accusingly. ‘She’s not dead, is she?’
Anna raised an eyebrow at her. ‘No. I can’t imagine Wiktoria ever dying.’
‘She sends us cards at Easter, doesn’t she?’ Jerzy said. ‘From Warsaw. And she sends cards at Wigilia.’
‘Yes. And you want to know what happened to her? Well, she had AK soldiers stationed in her apartment, and she looked after them all. I can just imagine it – she would have been in her element. But when the news of the capitulation came, she left it at once, and spent the last couple of days before we were evacuated trying to find news of us. If she had left a note for me to find when I went back, we might have been reunited, and left Warsaw together. As it was, we missed each other, and by the time she came back and·found my note, I think I must have been already on the way to Ozarów. She was sent to Pruszków, another camp outside the city. I think it was in Pruszków that she heard about Teresa. That was a terrible, filthy place, apparently. Anyway, Wiktoria decided then to do what Babcia – your Babcia – had done, much earlier: she took off her AK armband, and was sent as a civilian to a labour camp. She thought she had no hope of seeing me again, that when the war ended Poland was bound to fall under the Russians, and I would not want to come back. And of course she was right. She felt she was too old to start a new life outside Poland; when her camp was liberated by Russian soldiers she returned to the ruins of Warsaw, like thousands of others. Everyone helped to rebuild it, clearing the rubble, living in bomb sites … And she’s been there ever since.’
‘When I grow up, I shall go and visit her,’ said Ewa.
‘We’ll see.’
‘Can’t you go back and see her?’
‘No. Never.’
‘Why?’
Anna sighed. ‘Because I am a stateless person now. Like Tata, and the grandparents. We have only travel documents – no passports. If we went back to Poland, we should never be able to come out again. When we came here we had the opportunity of taking British nationality, and of course many people did so, but it was rather frowned upon, by people like Dziadek – he thought it was almost like being a traitor. And the – how shall I put it? – the high-ups, the people who had formed the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, they wanted us to keep our own identity, not be swallowed up and turned into English people. The English, naturally, wanted us to integrate completely.’ She thought of the resettlement camp, the kindly welfare ladies, with their orange juice, and coupons, and copies of Essential English. And then every Pole in the camp, suddenly, was talking about the Yalta Agreement, and how Poland had been betrayed. ‘All that is another story,’ she said, and got up to draw the curtains. The street lamps had been turned on, and the pavements were full of puddles: Jan would be soaked, unless he stayed at work.
Ewa and Jerzy stretched. ‘Tell us the other story, Mama,’ said Jerzy. ‘And tell us about Tata.’
‘Why doesn’t he talk to us about it all?’ asked Ewa.
Anna went to the other window to draw the curtains there, then turned to look at them. London in winter. A wet November Sunday afternoon, her children sitting in the lamp and firelight, Burek’s ears twitching as he slept, a clean pile of mending on her chair. And an empty chair, on the other side of the fire, where her husband did not sit. Other couples they knew, people they’d spent evenings with in the Polish Club in Balham – in the days when they still went to the Club together – seemed so settled here. Their Polishness, the time they spent at mass, at the Club, sending their children to Scouts, and Guides, and Saturday school: all these things were the centre of their lives, but they had English lives too, didn’t they? Anna looked at the box waiting for her across the room, by her sewing machine, a great pile of unsewn garments from the factory. She refused to sit up here doing piecework for the rest of her days! She was going to make an English life for herself! And in the meantime, Jan seemed almost as lost and angry and restless as he had done when they first arrived here. He came home late, he did overtime almost every weekend – what was it doing to the children, to have a father who was never at home? Ewa was climbing up into his chair.
‘Ow – my leg.’ She rubbed the burning skin.
‘I’ve told you not to sit so close.’ Anna crossed the room again, and sat down, putting the grey skirt on the pile of mended clothes. She picked up a white shirt from the shelf by the lamp and rummaged in a coffee tin for buttons. ‘What do you do with your clothes, Ewa?’
‘I don’t know. They just seem to come to bits.’
‘She dances in the playground,’ said Jerzy. ‘She dances up and down singing stupid songs.’
Ewa stuck her tongue out at him.
Anna’s fingers moved among the buttons. ‘I hope you’re not getting into silly company.’
‘I was with Janet! Don’t go on at me, Mama – who came top of the class last term?’
‘Being clever isn’t everything. Or conceited.’ She found a white button, checked it for size against the shirt and re-threaded the needle.
‘What other story, Mama?’ Jerzy said again.
Anna thought. ‘Where were we?’
‘Coming to England – and all about Tata.’
‘Oh, yes. Well·– quite a lot happened before we came here. So
– we were in Ozarów. And over the next few days we were taken
group by group into Germany, by train.’
Like cattle. Crammed into wooden carriages, the doors slammed shut and bolted, the only light from ventilation slits, high up on the sides, where other women, taller, helped each other up and peered through, trying to work out where we were going. A few hard black loaves thrown to us, before we left, to share, with no knives to cut them; ill-tasting water in canisters. Straw on the wooden floor, where bitter draughts chilled us as the train began to move. We took turns, lying and standing, pressed up against each other; I didn’t know any of those women. My periods had stopped, during the Uprising, or perhaps it was before, but I began again, on that journey, with nothing to use as a towel. It took – three days? I think so. Let out every now and then in bare, scrubby countryside, to relieve ourselves under the eyes of the guard. That was so we couldn’t escape, of course, but I had no thought of escaping, I just wanted some privacy.
The button on the white school shirt was stiff with thread, sewn and sewn on, over and over again. She tugged at the short piece of thread remaining, and snapped it off.
‘And then,’ she said, ‘after a journey of some two or three days, we were taken off that train, and marched to a prison camp. It was a men’s camp, but they had wired off one part of it, one barrack, for women. We spent the winter there. And there I almost lost my last possessions.’ She gestured to the photographs in frames on
the bookshelves, and hung on the wall. Her father and brother. Her mother. Teresa. Wiktoria. Jerzy and she in a snowy garden somewhere, the winter Mama died. Jerzy and Tata under the silver birch trees, by the river, the morning of the day they heard they were at war. There were more in the heavy album in the cupboard.
‘You remember that I brought all those photographs with me, when I left Warsaw? From Wiktoria’s flat?’
‘In the sweet tin,’ said Jerzy.
‘That’s right. Well, in the prison camp there was a censor – you know what a censor is? Someone who decides what you are allowed to read, or see. There is a censor for the cinema – children are not allowed to see films with a certificate A, or X, are they?’
‘But I’d like to see Gun Fight at Dodge City,’ said Jerzy. ‘Do you think Tata would take me? I did ask him, but …’
‘He might,’ Anna said lightly. ‘We’ll see. So, the censor in the German prison camp was the person who decided what we were allowed to keep. Of course, we had very few possessions, but we had to show him what we had. So I showed him the photographs. And he was going to take them away, and burn them …’
She got up, went to the bookshelves, took down the frame containing the photograph of Jerzy and Tata by the river, and began to undo it, slipping aside the little metal tags at the back.
‘I begged and pleaded and cried,’ she said, ‘until in the end he was sick of me, I think, and he threw them across the desk, and said I could keep them. But then, just as I was picking them up, he told me to wait, and from beside him he took a big rubber stamp, and a pad of ink, and made me give them back to him. And so – look …’ She had removed the cardboard backing, and carefully lifted the photograph. Craning over her arm, Ewa and Jerzy saw heavy black letters, slightly smudged. Stalag XB. ‘It is on the back of all of them,’ said Anna, ‘but I didn’t care, then. I was only overjoyed to know they weren’t going to be destroyed.’ She dropped the photograph back on the glass, clipped it into place again, and turned it over. Her brother and her father smiled at her, from a place so far away that she was not always certain, now, that it had ever existed.
