by Sue Gee
It was mid-afternoon, the cemetery almost deserted except for a man in overalls raking the grass on the far side, and an old couple in black, walking arm in arm past the graves beyond the memorial. After the ceremony, the family had all gone out to lunch; then Anna and Jan went home on the train from Gunnersbury, with the grandparents.
‘Come with us,’ Anna said, but Jerzy wanted to go back and take more photographs of the cemetery when everyone had left, and Ewa said she’d go with him, since she didn’t see much of him these days. Perhaps they would both go home tomorrow.
‘Here it is,’ said Jerzy suddenly, and they stopped, by a flat dark square of granite, lying on the ground at the edge of the path, surrounded by a nest of Polish graves. The granite was bordered by four short lengths of grey stone, and the whole grave was slightly slanted, tipping over towards the left where the earth must have sunk a little beneath its weight.
Gen Dywizji Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski
1.6.1895 – 24.8.1966
Dawódca Armii Krajowej Naczelny Polskich Sił Zbrojnych
Leader of the Home Army, Commander-in-Chief of the Polish
Armed Forces
Ewa stood by the ragged grass bordering the path, and looked down at the inscription. Ten years ago, she and Jerzy had come to the cemetery with their Guide and Scout troops to attend Komorowski’s funeral: a hot, late-summer day of which she could recall little except the fact of their presence, the crowds, the sombre faces and the flags. Now she thought of what she had since learned about the Uprising, directed from beleaguered outposts of the city by this man: of the books she had read, the stories her mother had told her. Bór’s widow must have been at the funeral – Ewa thought she remembered her, but perhaps it was imagination which placed her at the graveside, a figure in black supported by her sons. Two years later she was buried beside her husband.
Irene Lamezar-Salins Tadeuszowa Komorowska
14.5.1905 – 22.10.1968
Zołnierz Armii Krajowej
Soldier of the Home Army
Soldier of the Home Army – Irene had been separated from her husband during the sixty-three days of the Uprising; their first son, Adam, was still a toddler, and she eight months pregnant on the night when she and her maid were given ten minutes to get out of their house before it was set on fire. They ran through the burning streets of Warsaw, taking it in turns to carry the child, ordered on by SS men over fallen barricades and dead bodies. ‘I was afraid that it would probably end with the firing squad. I cannot say I felt any fear for myself. I thought of you, that when you were told of the plight of the civilians it might break your heart. However, I kept faith in your inflexibility …’
It had not ended with the firing squad. She had written that letter to him after the war, and in the autumn of 1945 they were reunited in London. Now they lay here together, and in a corner of the granite was a small raised circle of glass, engraved with the symbol of the Rising: PW, forming an anchor: wp: Polska Walczaca. Fighting Poland.
‘What’s underneath?’ Ewa asked, and they bent down. Sealed beneath was a brown leather pouch, and a scroll of paper. On the mildewed metal encircling the glass was another inscription:
Ziemia Polska z Terenów Walk Armii Krajowej – Polish earth from the battlefields of the Home Army.
Traffic roared on the arc of the flyover beyond the trees. Ewa and Jerzy knelt by the gravestones, lightly touching the circle of letters.
‘I’d forgotten about this,’ said Ewa.
‘Perhaps we didn’t see it on the day,’ said Jerzy. ‘Or perhaps it wasn’t here then. I can’t remember much.’
‘Nor me. Too many people.’
‘Yes.’ Jerzy straightened up, walked a few steps across the path and raised his camera. ‘Stay there. No, don’t look at me.’
She looked at the pouch of Polish earth, and heard the camera click. Then she got up, and they walked together along the path, and round the circle at the end until they were standing once more at the foot of the white steps of the memorial. Scores of wreaths lay against the plinth; the afternoon air was full of the scent of roses and carnations. Birds sang from the chestnut trees and then a lawnmower started up, somewhere in the grassy stretch on the far side of the cemetery, where no graves had yet been dug.
Jerzy slowly climbed the steps and took one more photograph: the white and crimson flowers reflected with the sky in the last pools of water. Then he came down, and Ewa slipped her arm through his.
‘You don’t come home any more,’ she said.
‘Yes I do.’
‘Not often.’
They paced beneath the trees.
‘Babcia and Dziadek miss you terribly,’ she said. ‘All the time you were away at university they looked forward to the holidays, and now you’re back in London and they still hardly see you.’
‘It used to be you,’ said Jerzy. ‘Avoiding them.’
‘I know. I suppose I don’t want to any more.’
‘You don’t need to avoid them – you’re at home with yourself.’
Am I? thought Ewa. Aloud she said: ‘Not really.’
‘But you’re established, settled – look at you: you have a career, your own flat, you have English friends …’
Ewa laughed. ‘If I have English friends, I must be all right.’ She thought of her desk by the window in the translation agency behind Oxford Street, the desk at the window of her beautiful Blackheath flat, and of the journey made each day between the piles of papers, books and dictionaries, leaving alone and coming home alone.
‘You have a life that has nothing to do with the family,’ Jerzy was saying. ‘You can go home to them as your own person.’
The lawnmower went back and forth, back and forth; they could smell faint petrol fumes and grass.
‘And what about you?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you have a life?’
He smiled down at her, and she said: ‘You’re very good-looking now, you know. And clever. Your photographs are wonderful. I wish you were happy.’
‘I’m all right. The photographs are my life – I never thought they would be; they just slid into the centre and stayed there.’
‘I once thought perhaps you’d be a priest.’
Jerzy was silent. Then he said: ‘I don’t believe any more.’
‘Is that why you’re unhappy?’
‘I don’t know.’
It was growing cold, the air no longer filled with the scent of flowers or grass but the dampness of an early autumn evening. The lawnmower stopped; above the trees the sky was streaked with darkness. They walked up the long path to the gates.
Afterwards, they went their separate ways, parting when the mainline train from Gunnersbury stopped at Hammersmith. Ewa went to catch the tube to Charing Cross, and then the train to Blackheath, and her attic flat; Jerzy stayed on the train, watching the surburban gardens alongside the track grow dark, and fill with squares of light from back kitchens, upper windows. At Hampstead Heath he got off and walked slowly up the hill, a busy road, with Saturday night traffic speeding past him, and the pubs full of people. He moved off the pavement, and up the slope of the grass a little way, then did the rest of the walk on the heath itself, past the trees. Near the top, he crossed the road, feeling in his pocket for the keys to the front door of a large shabby house divided into many flats; inside, he climbed the stone stairs to the last door at the top, and let himself in.
Inside, he could hear his landlady’s television, and her children playing; Jerzy did not know how long they had lived there, or even if the flat was theirs, but she and her husband let off rooms in the attic. The stairs were carpeted in worn yellow and mauve flowers; he went up, past the family’s living room, and the other tenant’s room, past the shared bathroom, up the last flight to the top landing. There was a kitchen here, six by six with sink and gas stove, which overlooked half London; as he filled the kettle and put it on the stove, he could see the Post Office Tower, winking in the distance.
Across the landing was the little
room he used as a darkroom; at the end was his bedroom. He let himself in, switched on the light, and put his camera down on the bed. It lay beneath the sloping eave; on the other side of the room was a desk, set into a corner, with a lamp; the floor was bare boards, with a rug Ewa had bought him from Heal’s; the window at the far end overlooked the heath, and his armchair was there, with low bookshelves along the wall. When the kettle boiled, he made a cup of coffee, then came back; it began to rain, and he opened the window at the bottom and sat in the armchair listening to it fall, pattering, on to the roof, on to the trees on the heath across the road; a car swished down the hill, parting the slanting fall with the headlamps’beams. Jerzy lay back against the armchair and closed his eyes. He found himself thinking of lines from an English poet he’d read at university – not Rupert Brooke, quoted this morning, but another who had died in the First World War:
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon …
Dziadez, not the Dziadek he knew, but the one he would never know, had been rained upon in a mass grave; somewhere in Warsaw was the grave of Jerzy’s namesake, unvisited.
… here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be for what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
Was he in love with death? Or with the image of those in his family who had had something to die for? From the switch on the skirting board, Jerzy turned off the lamp. He sat in the darkness, listening.
1977 The people in the house changed from time to time. Jerzy had come here three years ago, by chance: a summer walk across the heath, with university behind him, and bewilderment as to what he might do once his results came through; a coffee afterwards on South End Green, and a browse through advertisements in a shop window. Rooms to let, a call from a phone box, an Irish voice answering, and he was up the hill again to view them, just vacated by a visiting American writer. He had taken them at once.
He moved in, put his books in the low bookshelves; he pinned black and white photographs on the walls: steam engines puffing through sunlit valleys, the shadows of clouds drifting over the hills; the railway line behind the house in Clapham empty at night, the light of a distant train approaching. Mama sewing at the table, Tata with his back to her, looking out on to wet slate rooftops; Ewa reading, watched by Dziadek; Babcia gardening on the balcony above the track, Burek panting beside her – that was the last picture before he died. Next to them Jerzy pinned the photographs he had inherited: from the war, from before the war, all the pictures which had watched over his childhood, and it came to him then, with the simplicity of a gift, that he was meant to go on doing this.
When his results came, he found he had a very good degree in geography and geology, but by then it did not matter. He had found a part-time job in a commercial photographer’s studio off the Finchley Road, two stops away on the overground train. Three days a week he retouched transparencies of magazine cover girls, sold to Honey, or Cosmopolitan; he helped to light still-lifes of Christmas trees and candles, and chocolate-box photographs of kittens and baskets of flowers. The rest of the time he spent behind his own camera, or in the darkroom: the American writer had kept her clothes in here, but he put up shelves for developing fluid and trays; and for boxes of negatives, and bought a third-hand enlarger through an advertisement in the Ham and High. He stayed up late into the night, watching the day’s prints sharpen into focus from the blur beneath the water. Halfway down the stairs, he could hear the other tenant cough, and the chink of bottles.
The other tenant was a nameless man in his fifties, who did not work and rarely spoke. Occasionally he left his door half open, when he went to the bathroom, or to see if his giro had come; Jerzy glimpsed row upon row of washed milk bottles, half filled with water, all round the room. He had speculated on this, but found no answer. Sometimes a woman came to stay, younger, but with puffy eyes, and they quarrelled violently; when she and Jerzy met on the stairs she smiled as if nothing had happened.
It was a house of people passing each other in doorways, or on the flight of stone steps that ran all the way down it. The walls on the stairway were cold plaster, divided by a dado into dark green, at the bottom and dingy cream at the top, like school walls, where fingerprints were not allowed to show. There were at least three other flats before you reached the bottom, and the opening and closing doors, and the feet on the steps echoed up and down all through the house. Outside, there was an area of cracked paving, and then another short flight of steps, descending behind a low wall to a rambling basement: it was here that the tenants changed most often, in and out of the single rooms. Since Jerzy’s arrival he had nodded to an assortment of Irishmen living alone, to students and summer tourists, to couples looking for somewhere permanent. They came for a while and went when they had found something better: it was damp down there.
At the back of the house was a large untended garden. Neglected apple trees bore tiny wrinkled fruit which dropped into the long grass; the beds were full of stones and a tangle of self-seeded wallflowers, forget-me-nots, hollyhocks and foxgloves, half-choked by a convolvulus which crept all over the broken fence, by dandelions and groundsel. At the back of the garden was a row of garages; they were rented by people who did not live here, who crunched along the flint path to take out their cars. Amidst all the money in Hampstead, the boutiques and restaurants, the film stars’and rich writers’homes, the shabby tenanted house was an anachronism, a reminder.
It was late September. The leaves of the trees along the Vale of Health, and all across the heath, were turning to yellow and russet; in the misty morning air a few swirled gently on to the grass. Jerzy’s landlady took the children to school and swept up the piles which had begun to drift over the road, and up round the doorway. On a day when Jerzy did not have to go to the studio he walked into the village for milk and the paper, and when he came back he stopped to watch her.
‘Nice morning.’ She poked the broom into a comer by the drainpipe, and brushed out summer dust. A long line of commuters’ cars moved slowly down the hill.
‘Very,’ he said, and felt the sun on the back of his neck. ‘I think it’s going to turn out hot again.’
‘Do you now? After this summer we’ll all be glad of a drop more rain. Wouldn’t you say so?’
‘Mmm.’ He scanned the headlines, then looked up as the door of the basement banged shut and a girl he hadn’t seen down there before came up the steps. She nodded to the landlady, and glanced at Jerzy, in his jeans and T-shirt, leaning against the wall with the paper and carton of milk.
‘Good morning. Lovely day.’
‘Isn’t it now?’ The landlady swept leaves and dust and cobwebs into a heap. ‘That’s it. Better get the dustpan.’ She pushed open the front door and went inside.
Jerzy put down his paper. ‘Have you just moved in?’
The girl nodded. ‘Two days ago. Do you live …’
‘In the attic.’
‘Oh.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I must go. I expect I’ll see you …’
‘Yes.’ He stepped back a little, although she was already on the pavement and there was no need for him to move. He watched her walk up the hill towards the main road leading into the village: she was slender and fair; she wore faded
jeans, and a loose shirt, with a sweater across her shoulders, and espadrilles. She carried some kind of home-made cotton shoulder bag and her walk was graceful.
The landlady came out with her dustpan and brush; she bent down to sweep up the pile. ‘There now, that’s one job done for the day.’ She straightened up, and looked at Jerzy, looking at the girl. ‘And what might you be thinking about?’
He laughed, and followed her into the house.
He saw the girl again, several times over the next couple of weeks. She came up the basement steps as he left for work, and they said hello, or remarked on the weather, before she went up the hill and he went down, to catch the main-line train to Finchley Road. Once he saw her ahead of him, going down, and wanted to catch up with her, but felt it too important a conversation to get wrong, and was sure that he would. He thought he might see her again on the station platform, but he got there just as a northbound train pulled out, and didn’t know whether or not she was on it. He crossed the bridge to the southbound platform, and walked irritably up and down amongst the other commuters.
On a Friday he came back from the studio tired. The evenings were drawing in; when he reached the house he saw the light from her window glow behind drawn curtains. He stood at the top of the steps, hesitating, then went down; he was about to ring the doorbell when he heard voices from inside. He climbed the steps again, and went up to the attic. He telephoned Ewa on the landlady’s phone, but she was out.
On Saturday he went to an exhibition at the Serpentine, and then rang Ewa again, and met her for a drink. He wanted to tell her about the girl downstairs, but he didn’t. When he came back to the house again it was dark; he walked from the tube station in the village through the quiet expensive side streets, hearing the church clock strike nine. He came out on the main road and looked to see if there was a light in her window, but there wasn’t. Later, reading in his armchair at the window, he found himself listening to the footsteps on the pavement below, waiting to hear someone stop, go down the basement steps, and open the door. It grew late, and the only sounds were the landlady’s television, the traffic on the hill, and the voices of strangers in the street. He went to bed, and turned the light off. Just as he drifted into sleep he thought he heard a door bang to, but it could have been anywhere.
