Spring Will Be Ours

by Sue Gee

  In the bathroom she pulled down her pants and saw the bright, reassuring bloodstain. She had been spared. For a brief moment, as she felt for the box of tampons in her bag, she saw Leo’s sunburnt face, his beautiful smile, and was pierced by a stab of hurt and disappointment. Then she thought: I hate you. I hate you. When she had finished, she went out and down the corridor to the sitting room, where Mama and Jerzy were motionless before the television, as an enormous tank crawled across the screen, past tall, beautiful buildings.

  ‘What on earth …’ said Ewa, and then knew. ‘Czechoslovakia. That’s Prague. They’ve invaded.’

  ‘Yes. This morning.’ Mama was sitting as if transfixed, her face white. Another tank moved along the street, then another, pushing through a furiously shouting crowd. Young men and boys in helmets, carrying guns, looked down on them from the tanks, bemusedly. Then Dubček’s face was flashed on to the screen, a photograph taken a little while ago: at the sight of his smile, unassuming, almost vague, his eyes avoiding the camera, Ewa began to cry, and then to howl.

  ‘Ewa … kochana …’ Mama was out of her chair. ‘It’s terrible, but please … don’t cry like that … what is it? Something has happened to you? Stop it, stop it …’

  ‘I thought I was pregnant,’ Ewa sobbed. ‘I thought I was pregnant, and I’m not, I’m not …’

  ‘Oh, my poor darling. My poor, poor darling.’

  Years later, when Ewa looked back on that summer, she could remember nothing, really, after that day, when she had seemed to cry for everything, all at once: when history lessons at Saturday school, Mama’s stories, all the feelings for Poland she had dismissed or buried filled her with a sudden and overwhelming sense of loss and anger, as painful and acute as her own, furious frustration: with Leo, with her father, for whom she felt the first glimmer of understanding; with herself. She let her mother rock her like a baby, while Jerzy went to fetch a handkerchief, a glass of water. Then she dried her eyes and sat down, feeling very cold, still watching the television screen, as the tanks rolled into Prague.

  8. London, 1970s

  1976 ‘I should like to order a wreath,’ said Anna.

  ‘A wreath. Yes, dear, just let me find my book … And what name is it?’

  ‘Prawicka,’ said Anna. ‘Mrs Prawicka. Shall I spell it?’

  ‘If you would, dear.’

  She spelt it, gave her address.

  ‘Right,’ said the woman. ‘And what flowers would you like?’

  Anna looked round. It was a Saturday morning, early still, and she was the only customer, although out on the main road the pavements were filling with shoppers. The florists’ was full of chrysanthemums, of tight yellow roses without scent; in the window, beneath the leaping god on the Interflora sign, were white china hands, and christening baskets trimmed in blue or pink nylon lace.

  ‘Take your time, dear,’ said the woman at the counter. She began sorting out a sheaf of invoices, tidying away spools of shiny lick-and-stick ribbon.

  Many of the flowers were arranged on shelves and stands, but there were also bucketfuls on the floor. Anna looked at the masses of carnations, pink and white and crimson. Why was she deliberating?

  ‘Carnations,’ she said. ‘I should like white and red carnations.’

  ‘White and red …’ The woman retrieved her book and wrote it down. ‘Just the carnations, was it? Or anything else? A little touch of green?’

  ‘No, no, thank you. The flowers on their own will be quite sufficient.’

  She bent down for a moment and breathed in their sharp, spicy smell. Beyond the plate-glass window the hum of Saturday morning traffic in Clapham faded: she was in another shop, boarded and shuttered, where an old woman in an apron and flattened slippers shuffled across the floor and lifted dripping bunches from bucketfuls of black water, thrusting them into her arms. From a distant part of the city they could hear gunfire; she ran through the early morning street holding the wet flowers close to her, to the house where her brother’s body lay waiting.

  There was another grave, a mass, terrible grave, beneath freshly planted pine trees.

  ‘And when is it for, dear?’

  Anna stood up slowly. ‘For September 18th,’ she said.

  ‘September 18th …’ the woman wrote it down.

  ‘That’ll be six pounds, then. Do you want it delivered, or … is there a funeral parlour looking after it all for you?’

  ‘It’s not for a funeral,’ said Anna.

  ‘Pardon, dear?’

  ‘It’s for a memorial – well, a monument. My father – my father died a very long time ago.’

  ‘What a shame,’ said the woman. ‘In the war, was it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘It was in the war.’

  Cars and coaches lined the roads round the cemetery. At the entrance, on a main road roaring with traffic, a throng of people moved slowly through the tall iron gates between brick pillars: whole families in black, many men in uniform, small children carrying bunches of flowers. They made their way down the broad gravel path between the graves, between ranks of Polish Scouts and Guides bearing standards, between row upon row of Polish Ex-Combatants in uniform, wearing their medals. At the far end of the path, on either side of shallow white steps, stood more standard bearers, their flags a sea of white and red and gold. From the centre of the steps rose a tall obelisk, shrouded in Polish and British flags.

  ‘Mama?’ asked Jerzy. ‘Are you all right?’

  Anna nodded. She was holding the wreath, collected this morning and carried on the tube, and on the main-line train to Gunnersbury station, from where they’d all walked amidst the crush. The flowers still looked fresh; the card was in her handbag. It was growing warm, although the day had begun cloudy and drizzly; she hoped that Dziadek and Babcia were going to stand up to all this – the crowd at the end of the path was enormous. When they could move no further, they stopped, and stood together. Ewa holding Babcia’s arm, Jan and Dziadek next to each other. Anna would have liked to slip her arm through Jerzy’s, but she needed both hands for the wreath. He stood beside her, very tall, his camera round his neck; every now and again he brushed his flopping straight hair off his forehead, in a nervous gesture.

  The sun rose higher, drying the pools of water on the steps; the crowd grew. A commemorative brochure was being given out; there was the rustle of pages, feet shirting on the damp gravel, hundreds of voices talking subduedly; everywhere the scent of flowers. On the left of the steps stood tall red rose bushes; white roses flanked the other side. Behind the obelisk stood two chestnut trees. Anna stood looking at them, at the heavy chestnuts among leaves touched with the first dry gold of autumn.

  The apartment house in Praga had a chestnut tree in the courtyard. Such a short time before the war began, she had stood at the window there, listening to the rustling leaves, hearing the occasional drop of a spiky case on to the cobbles. Now, this monument was to be unveiled almost exactly thirty-seven years to the day that Poland, already invaded from the west by Germans, had been invaded by Russia from the east. On 17 September 1939 she and·Jerzy and Teresa had been holed up in the empty apartment in Zórawia … As the Russians advanced, they captured thousands upon thousands of Poles, among them the cream of the Polish intelligentsia, all the reserve officers called up from their civilian professions – teachers, lawyers, priests, civil servants, doctors. After April 1940 not a word was heard from any of the three camps in which they were held: Kozielsk, Starobielsk, Ostaszków.

  ‘They’re being released! Everyone’s been whispering about it – the Poles are being released to fight the Nazis!’ Teresa came dancing into the kitchen …

  That was a dull December afternoon in 1941; perhaps, Anna and Jerzy had thought, Tata would be home with them for Christmas.

  A spring morning in 1943; walking to work in the hospital alongside the ghetto; hearing the newsboy calling on a corner of the Square. Mass grave found by the Germans in Katyń Forest … thousands of Polish officers murdered by the Russia
ns … Later, among the long long lists of the dead, her father’s name.

  To this day, the Russians insisted that the murders were the work of the Germans, committed when they advanced into Russia in 1941, but all the evidence – the diaries of the murdered men, stopping abruptly, the pathologists’ reports, the freshly planted young pines above the graves – pointed to the Russians: deliberately, in April 1940, removing over four thousand intellectuals who might have resisted the imposition of a communist puppet government after the war. Tata, who had been held in the camp at Kozielsk, from where he had sent his only postcard, was found at Katyń the other ten thousand, from Starobielsk and Ostaszków camps, had never been found, but there was every reason to suppose that they too, for the same reason, had died at the hands of the Russians, and the monument was to their memory, also.

  In the last few months, Dziennik Polski and the British press had contained stories of the furious protests from the Russian and Polish Soviet embassies against the erection of the memorial; there had been problems over finding a site; not a single representative from the British Government was here to attend the ceremony.

  Anna touched Jerzy’s arm; he looked down at her.

  ‘Mmm? All right?’

  ‘Yes. Can you hold the wreath for a moment …’

  He took it and she opened her handbag, feeling for the plain white card, and the pin. Then Jerzy held the wreath steady as she carefully fixed it on. So much she could have written, and wanted to write, but in the end she had last night put only two words: Dla Ojca – For my father.

  Eleven o’clock. From beyond the gates came the steady drone of cars and lorries travelling west; an aeroplane climbed the sky. There was a ripple through the crowd, then a small party, including the President of the Government in exile, slowly mounted the shallow white steps, and Anna and Jerzy, Ewa and Jan, Dziadek and Babcia joined with the hundreds of voices singing: ‘Jeszcze Polska nie zgineła …’

  ‘Poland is not yet lost

  As long as we are alive …’

  As the last words died away, the Chairman of the Katyń Memorial

  Fund, Lord Barnby, stepped up to the microphone.

  ‘This ceremony we are assisting at today will become historic,’ he said slowly. ‘First because it records a victory for truth … Secondly, because it establishes a shrine which will offer comfort to the remaining relatives of the victims. But even more than that, a shrine to which future generations of Polish sympathizers may resort, from wherever they may come …’

  At the end of Lord Barnby’s speech, President Ostrowski stepped up to take the microphone. He was a short, white-haired man in glasses; like most of the others on the steps, and like Dziadek and many of the men in the crowd, he wore a heavy dark winter coat.

  ‘As President of the Polish Republic,’ he announced, ‘I solemnly accept in the name of the Polish people the ownership and custody of this monument, commemorating an inhuman crime committed against the Polish nation during the Second World War.

  ‘I express my profound thanks first and foremost to Lord Barnby, Chairman of the Katyń Memorial Fund, to the members of his committee and to all those who, moved by a sense of justice and humanity, have made it their business to remind the world that the crime of Katyń still awaits judgement …’

  When the applause had died away, the last speech was made, by Lord St Oswald.

  ‘Let it be known that from this hour forward, this hallowed plot of British soil, once it has been consecrated by Bishop Rubin, Delegate of the Cardinal Primate of Poland, will be for all time one of the most sacred, one of the most honoured and one of the most significant points in the whole land heritage of the British Isles … This monument is a beacon … very specifically a Polish beacon, pointing upward, to the better, aspiring future for which Poles have fought and striven so heroically through the centuries … The barbed wire encircling the Polish Eagle, wrought into the design, symbolizes only the present status, behind the Iron Curtain, of this nation, from whose intrepid example we have so much of value to learn. One day that cruel, criminal wire will be dismantled …

  ‘This simple obelisk commemorates, at face value, the brutal extermination of thousands of brave, irreplaceable human lives, of men who were the leaven of leadership of their nation, and who were killed deliberately on that single premise. We stand in poignant awareness that among us today are some who loved and venerated individual victims of that crime. They have been granted no other accurate or fitting cenotaph, until today.’

  Anna felt Jerzy’s arm slip lightly round her shoulders; then he at once removed it, as if embarrassed, or perhaps simply because he did not wish to intrude. She listened as the speech continued, a powerful piece of rhetoric which somehow both dignified the terrible way in which her father had died and made her own connection with him seem very small and far away.

  ‘There are some English words, perhaps too commonly quoted for so imcomparable an occasion. They were written by a young English poet, shortly before he was killed in battle in the First World War. “If I should die, think only this of me, there is some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England.” By proxy, across many thousands of miles from the place of violent death, but soon to be enshrined by Bishop Rubin, the corner to which we have all been drawn today will be for ever Poland …

  ‘We are not here only to mourn those Poles who died, defenceless and still defiant. We are here to celebrate the invincibility of that spirit of Poland for whom they died. This is not simply a memorial to the dead past. It is a pledge to the living future.’

  But do we really have a living future, wondered Anna, as he stepped aside, to wave after wave of applause. Where is the spirit of Poland now?

  Three people were mounting the steps: two other members of the Memorial Fund Committee, and a woman, widow of one of the men who had died at Katyń. There was a roll on a drum, played by a Polish Boy Scout, and then the whole crowd was silent, and Anna forgot to think or question as the shroud of flags fell away and the black granite obelisk was revealed. In the centre was engraved the Polish white eagle, encircled by barbed wire. Beneath, in gold, was the single word: Katyń, and the date: 1940. There was an inscription in gold on the plinth, but from where she stood Anna could not read it.

  The memorial was blessed and consecrated; the hundreds of voices rose again:

  ‘Oh God who for centuries has watched over Poland

  Before your altar we beg you:

  Return a free homeland to us!’

  In the press of people all around her, Anna felt herself begin to sway. Beyond the tall black column she could see a sunlit courtyard, hear another open-air congregation singing the same hymn but with a different ending; she was standing in a Warsaw street reclaimed from the enemy, in a free Poland! And outside the courtyard gate, two young boys were waiting for her, white-faced and ill-at-ease:

  ‘Is Anna Kurowska here?’

  ‘Jerzy … Jerzy!’

  ‘Mama … Mama … Don’t cry …’ His arm was round her; she leaned against him, then blew her nose, and looked up – at Jerzy, then at the rest of the family; Ewa, watching her anxiously, streaks of mascara all down her face; Jan, nodding to her as if to a stranger, but trying, she supposed, to convey that he understood; Dziadek and Babcia very grave and still. A long procession of dignitaries was climbing the steps to set their wreaths at the base of the black plinth: flowers on behalf of the Polish Armed Forces abroad; of all former prisoners of the USSR; of Polish youth; of the World Federation of Polish Ex-Combatants; of the Anglo-Polish Society …

  ‘Look,’ said Jerzy suddenly. ‘Isn’t that Churchill’s grandson?’

  Anna peered. The column moved on: wreaths from the Czechs, the Ukranians, Lithuanians, Hungarians; from the Russian Human Rights Movement … When the last of the official flowers had been laid, two Highland pipers walked slowly round, playing a lament, and Anna moved forward, joining a long, silent line of people waiting to lay their own tributes.

  At the top of
the steps she stopped to read the inscription, half covered now by the heaps of flowers:

  Sumienie Swiata Woła o Świadectwo Prawdzie Calling on the Conscience of the World for the Truth In Remembrance Of 14,500 Polish prisoners of war who disappeared in 1940 from camps at Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszków, of whom 4,500 were later identified in mass graves at Katyń near Smoleńsk

  Anna set down her circle of white and red carnations with the card: Dla Ojca, For my father, and stood for a moment, her head bowed. A flash of memory. Not of the grey morning when he said goodbye, and she and Jerzy had seen him for the last time, but of the three of them, camped in a riverside wood of birch trees, enclosed within their tent; the paraffin lamp glowed yellow, making the moths and insects bump against the canvas, as he read to them the story of the old, exiled Pole, standing on the balcony of the lighthouse where he had come to rest, watching the cone of light flung out across the blackness of the sea.

  Then she came down the steps and was on the damp gravel path again; a few moments later, as she rejoined her family, two trumpeters sounded the Last Post, and the Reveille.

  Ewa and Jerzy walked along the paths at the side of the cemetery. The grass on the verges grew higher here; daisies and dandelion clocks stood between the tombstones. From this perspective, the tower block on the road behind the chestnut trees dominated the sky: during the ceremony they had barely noticed it. A flyover soared between the other trees bordering the ground; invisible cars flew past.

  They were looking for the grave of Bór-Komorowski, leader of the Warsaw Uprising. Their feet sounded lightly on the scattered stones along the path.

  ‘Poor Mama,’ said Ewa. ‘My God, I cried. I didn’t think I was going to.’

  ‘No,’ said Jerzy. ‘Nor did I.’ He wandered over to a group of gravestones, raised his camera then lowered it again. ‘It must be here somewhere.’