Spring Will Be Ours

by Sue Gee

  Jerzy and Elizabeth had stopped eating. They sat, listening.

  ‘Everyone says that old age romanticizes,’ Wiktoria said slowly. ‘That you see the past in a warm nostalgia that has nothing to do with how it really was. And of course the Poles are experts at that. Naturally the time we had between the wars, our brief independence, was not perfect, but now – the whole economy is collapsing. We are in debt everywhere, and already you can see the shortages, not just food, but flats – you have to wait for ever. Furniture, cars, clothes – everything. And perhaps none of these things would matter so much – after all, I’m sure the West is not paved with gold the way the young people here think it is – if only we were not all the time told that the past was worse, that everything wrong now is the fault of the past, that if only we will work and work and work, and never raise our heads, it will all be better. How do you work when you have no spirit left, when you are fed lies all the time about what is really happening?’

  She tapped the table impatiently. ‘You saw the Victory Square mass on television? Do you know what we saw, when we got home, and switched on the television? The Pope against the sky, as if he had dropped out of the clouds, and was almost alone. I think the cameramen were told to shoot only from below, that’s what everyone was saying, because if they did that, then you couldn’t see the crowds! Can you imagine? And when there were shots of the crowd, wherever he went in Poland, it was almost always of old peasant women, or nuns, or priests – we hardly ever saw a young face, or a family, but we knew they had been there because we were standing amongst them! Well … That’s enough, now. Forgive me. What are you going to do today?’

  ‘I thought we might try to visit Chopin’s house,’ said Jerzy. ‘But you don’t have to change the subject, Aunt. We want to hear.’ ‘No – it·makes me too angry if I talk like that too much. Chopin’s house – in Zelazowa Wola. Yes, that would be a very pleasant day for you.’

  ‘Would you like to come with us?’ Elizabeth asked. ‘We thought we might hire a car today.’

  ‘So the streets of the West are paved with gold, after all,’ said Wiktoria. ‘It’s all right, I am teasing. Yes – yes, I should like to come in that case. Perhaps you could pick me up?’

  The road out of the city was flat and lined with willow trees. There were no proper borders, and Elizabeth, driving an unfamiliar Fiat, her nerves scratched by driving through Warsaw on the right-hand side and stalling twice at traffic lights, drove slowly. They were overtaken by cars roaring down the centre of the road, twice sending them nearly into the ditch. When this was not happening they found themselves stopping to let horse-drawn waggons move slowly on to the road from a side lane, and then they travelled behind them, looking up at an enormous, swaying mountain of hay. Sometimes children were perched on the top, eating apples; the waggons turned after a couple of kilometres into another lane, followed by honking lines of white geese. There were sunflowers everywhere, and the fields full of hayricks.

  They passed women scything in the fields; a little girl in a kerchief sucked her thumb and watched them drive by; behind her a bare-chested man in a beret guided a horse-drawn cutter through the stubble. They came to a wooden church, and stopped again.

  The church was locked. They walked round to the side, to a graveyard full of trees. Early afternoon sunlight dappled the paths; ahead, in the middle of the main one, rose a plain wooden cross, perhaps twenty feet high. Birds sang; tiny red and black beetles scuttled; a rich tangle of weeds and bushes grew between the crowded graves. Here they had no one to look for, they simply walked hand in hand along the warm sandy paths, where insects buzzed in the flickering light beneath the trees. Many of the graves were large and raised, with stone borders, railings and stone crosses set high above them, and many of the headstones bore small ceramic ovals with sepia photographs of those buried there. Elizabeth stopped before one of a young girl, perhaps sixteen, with dark hair, dark eyes – she looked a little like Anne Frank. There were older men and women, sombre in spectacles, or smiling broadly; on every single grave there seemed to be fresh flowers. They stopped before a stone with a verse inscribed beneath the name of a man who had died at Auschwitz.

  Łatwo jest mówić o Polsce

  Trudno dla niej pracować

  Jescze trudniej umierać

  A najtrudniej cierpieć.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘That is a verse you will see everywhere in Poland,’ said Wiktoria, who had been walking stiffly behind them. She leaned on her stick, and brushed away a fly.

  ‘And on Polish graves in England too,’ said Jerzy, and slowly translated:

  It is easy to speak of Poland

  Hard to work

  Harder to die

  Harder still to suffer.

  They stood for a moment in silence, then went on, stopping by a low wooden railing, beyond which lay untilled ground, no graves, and the graveyard wall. Before the railing was a small stone cross, with a white·shield bordered in red nailed to the centre, an inscription: Z ołnierz W.P. – Soldier of the Polish Forces – and a name, Kazimierz Słoma. At the foot of the cross there was no plinth, and the grave was without a border, but a helmet lay there, pockmarked with six bullet holes. Lilies grew round it.

  Jerzy photographed that, too, and then they went slowly back to the car, and on to·Zelazowa Wola – ‘Or it will be closed before we get there,’ said Wiktoria.

  As they drove, Elizabeth remembered Jerzy asking yesterday morning about ‘inflicting too much death’. It was impossible to go anywhere without touching on it, even in a tiny shrine in a city street. Memories and melancholy were everywhere; she could feel it all becoming a part of her, too.

  What had Jerzy dreamt about last night?

  ‘That’s it,’ said Wiktoria, and Elizabeth turned left and down a gravel drive between tall trees, and stopped before a small whitewashed cottage, covered in creeper, with a red-tiled roof. Chopin’s house. They climbed out of the car, and saw a handful of other tourists walking into the gardens. Inside the cottage, they smelt fresh paint, and the polished tables shone. There were flowers in vases; net curtains at the windows moved gently in the breeze; the whitewashed walls were hung with prints and portraits. They moved from room to quiet room, stopping by the small piano. Elizabeth felt like an American at Stratford, but with a real sense of awe, too, as she looked quickly round, then stroked the yellowed keys.

  ‘Tch, tch, tch,’ said Wiktoria, raising an eyebrow.

  Elizabeth smiled at her, went across to Jerzy and took the guidebook out of his jacket pocket. She turned the pages. Zełazowa Wola … Chopin had lived here only in his youth, had spent most of his life in exile in Paris. She looked out of the window, saw a small boy playing in the gardens, a hundred and fifty years ago, humming.

  ‘They give concerts here,’ Wiktoria was saying. ‘On the Steinway grand in the sitting room. I came to one, once, before the war.’

  Jerzy had moved towards the front door. They followed him out into the gardens, helping Wiktoria down stone steps to a sunken lawn and a lake covered with algae and waterlily pads. Frogs and small toads hopped in the long grass at the water’s edge. It was very warm, now; their shadows fell across the still green lake, and then, from speakers in the trees, came the music, exuberant waltzes and mazurkas, and the slow, aching nocturnes, drifting out across the water.

  They found a wooden bench and sat listening, as the sunlight grew richer and more golden, and the shadows lengthened. Every now and then, in the breeze, a few yellowing leaves fell, spinning gently, to the ground.

  Wiktoria had closed her eyes. Her hands rested on the handle of her walking stick, held before her; after a while, it began to sway a little, and they realized she was asleep. They left her sitting there, and walked slowly round the lake.

  ‘What were you dreaming about?’ Elizabeth asked.

  Jerzy bit his lip. ‘I can’t remember it properly, but … I suppose it was my life, and everything I am afraid of. Not having courage. Not … l
iving up to the kind of people my father was, my uncle was. Or as I think they must have been. Jerzy was following me – when I turned and saw him, his face was my face …’

  The last notes of a nocturne hung on the air. Across the lake Wiktoria had woken, and was waving.

  ‘Do listen to this,’ said Jerzy. They were sitting in an open-air café in the Centrum, in a side street off Jerozolimskie Avenue; they had spent the morning in the State Museum of Art, and browsing in bookshops. Elizabeth was turning the pages of a book of photographs of Warsaw as it was when the Russians entered, in 1945, showing how it had been reconstructed. Jerzy was reading the text of a large glossy paperback full of colour photographs, called Poland Today.

  ‘“Whoever does not understand the nineteenth century will not understand today’s Poland,”‘ he read aloud. ‘” The constant insurrections then have created the cult of armed heroics and, at the same time, a dislike for slow, patient work whose effects will be visible after many years. The foreign authority caused a certain distrust which has now disappeared in the basic issues but is still there in matters of secondary importance.”’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘What do they want us to understand by that, I wonder?’ He read on: ‘“The years of captivity have invested Polish patriotism with suffering and sacrifice; someone has maliciously but not without reason remarked that ‘it is easier for Poles to die for their country than to live for it’.”’

  He grimaced. ‘This isn’t a tourist book, it’s a lecture to the Poles, it’s published in Polish as well. Listen: “Who knows but perhaps this excessive looking back has an adverse effect on our prospects, perhaps it would be better not to constantly hark back to war memories … Poland was left alone in the face of Hitler’s blackmail because her sympathies lay where no help was forthcoming. It was only the change in the political system and the acceptance of socialist orientation that bound us to the Soviet Union and other countries of Eastern Europe with the same political and social system. Now Poland is safe.”’

  He flicked back to the introduction. ‘“Compared with Poland’s modern history the present exceptionally long period of peace has created a mood of sunny and stable optimism, unknown to previous generations.”’ He banged the book down on the metal table. ‘Riots in Poznań, 1956. Riots in Gdańsk and Gdynia, 1970, with shipyard workers shot by the police. There were food riots and strikes here in Warsaw only four years ago, and workers were shot in Radom, then.’

  ‘Someone is watching us,’ said Elizabeth.

  Jerzy stopped. ‘What?’

  ‘Over there, two tables away. No, don’t turn round, wait. He’s reading a newspaper.’

  ‘And he’s wearing a raincoat with a turned-up collar and a hat pulled down over his eyes.’

  Elizabeth shrugged. ‘All right, don’t believe me. But he’s been listening to you.’

  Cautiously Jerzy turned. A waitress went past him, carrying a metal tray; he waited until she had gone. ‘The one in the grey suit?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jerzy shook his head. ‘I don’t think … I really don’t think he is.’

  ‘I do. Can we go?’

  ‘No. Let’s outsit him.’

  After the incident with the currency exchange on their first day, Elizabeth did not like to argue. She sat, nervous, sipping a fizzy and synthetic orange juice. The man turned the pages of the newspaper; they had bought a newspaper this morning, and read column after column of stories from factories and workplaces where production was increasing; photographs of local party officials sprinkled the pages.

  ‘He’s gone,’ said Jerzy.

  She turned to look at him, and saw the empty table beyond. ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘He’s just walking away down the street – look.’ She followed his eyes, and saw the man in the grey suit, among many other men in grey suits, walking away until he came to the intersection with the avenue, and disappeared round the corner.

  ‘I’m sure he was watching us,’ she said.

  ‘Well – even if he was. I think we’re all right. What would you like to do now?’

  Elizabeth stretched. ‘Let’s have a lazy afternoon.’

  ‘What about going to Łazienki Park? The palace is closed, but the gardens are open – we could wander.’

  They walked back into Jerozolimskie, and caught a tram down the last few blocks of Nowy Swiat, and through Three Crosses Square. ‘Where Mama was stationed,’ Jerzy said. ‘This is where she looked through her binoculars, and saw the tank, moving towards them up Ujazdowskie Avenue. Has she told you that story?’

  Elizabeth nodded. ‘Yes, I think so.’ She looked out of the window as they swung down the avenue, bordered with tall, beautiful trees, just turning yellow and gold. Beneath them, a few people walked along broad paths. The tram moved past parks and gardens. Jerzy glanced down at the map.

  ‘Here we are – we can get off and walk through.’

  The park was large, with a network of paths beneath the trees and a long, meandering lake, fed by the Vistula. They stood beneath Chopin’s monument; a great stone cloak billowed round his head. ‘They give Sunday concerts here, too, it says in the guidebook,’ said Jerzy. Swans glided slowly over the lake; it was hot, now, the yellow leaves very still. Squirrels scampered across the paths, and from the distance they could hear peacocks. When they reached the eighteenth-century palace they found the terrace before it full of tourists; families threw bread and ice cream cones to fat carp, breaking the surface of the lake. Jerzy and Elizabeth watched for a while, then walked on, passing an open-air theatre with broken columns.

  ‘Shall we stop and rest?’ Elizabeth asked.

  They lay on the grass beneath the trees; after a while, Elizabeth, her head on Jerzy’s shoulder, heard him breathing deeply. She raised her head, saw he was asleep, and lay, looking up at the branches stretched out above them.

  Jerzy seemed calmer since his nightmare – if you discounted his outburst in the café this morning, and she did discount it: better to shout about hypocrisy than brood over – over what, exactly?

  ‘I told you I wasn’t very good with people …’

  Nothing could have prepared her for the deep sense of isolation Jerzy felt, and she still didn’t know how much of it sprang from the way he had absorbed the proud Polish sense of loss and exile within the world, and how much came simply from the family and his place in it. She closed her eyes. The early flash of intuition, illumination, which had enabled her to paint the picture of the figure at the door, beyond the sleeping children, seemed extraordinary: even now, she was only just beginning to understand.

  Did she want to spend a lifetime trying to understand?

  ‘Proszę, Państwa …’

  Elizabeth opened her eyes to see a woman standing over them, telling them something. She nudged Jerzy awake.

  ‘What?’ He sat up, yawning, saw the woman, and listened. Then he pulled Elizabeth to her feet. ‘Dziękuję, Pani …’ He led Elizabeth away, half laughing, half irritated.

  ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘If you lie on the grass you’re fined three hundred złotys.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Seriously.’

  They had tea in a café in the park, then walked through the maze of paths towards the embankment. They stood, watching the sun sink beneath the broad calm waters of the Vistula, and then they went back to Wiktoria’s, to pack. Tomorrow they were leaving Warsaw, and driving south.

  ‘Would you like liver, liver or liver?’ Jerzy asked. He put down the typewritten menu on the plastic tablecloth, and they looked at each other.

  ‘Liver …’ said Elizabeth. ‘Any vegetables?’

  ‘It doesn’t say so.’

  ‘Oh well, you’d better order it.’

  Jerzy got up and walked across the campsite dining room to the counter at the far end; Elizabeth watched him, yawning. It was eight o’clock, and they’d been driving for most of the day, through an endlessly repeated scene of families harvesting with scythes and horse-drawn
haycarts under a burning sky; all the way along, plaster shrines stood on corners and grassy verges adorned with flowers and picture postcards of the Pope. Every now and then, outside small towns or villages, they passed a drunk, sprawled in the grass, oblivious to the traffic. Now, they had pitched their tent on the bank of the river Pilica; from a couple of tents away a transistor radio blared, and there was much laughter and shouting. Jerzy listened. ‘They’re Russians,’ he said after a while. There was another burst of laughter.

  Most people seemed either to have brought their own food or to have eaten already – the vast dining room was nearly empty. Bright blue shiny curtains separated it from the kitchen; the walls were painted in orange, much scuffed and covered in fingermarks; unhemmed net curtains hung at the windows, which needed cleaning. Jerzy came back from the counter.

  ‘There’s soup as well, apparently, so I’ve ordered some.’

  After a while, a waitress appeared from the kitchen, and put two dishes before them. From two battered, steaming tin mugs came a rich, meaty smell; they peered into them.

  ‘Liver soup!’

  The waitress upturned the mugs and departed. They tasted, warily. It was delicious, very rich, very substantial. A slice of stale white bread accompanied each mug.

  ‘Well,’ said Elizabeth, when they had finished, ‘I feel much better now. I thought there was a meat shortage.’

  ‘But not of liver, clearly.’

  They went out, past log tables and benches set on scuffed earth beneath pine trees, past their first sight of Polish litter, and past the camp disco, now in full swing. They stopped to go to the lavatories. In the women’s, which stank, an old woman sat on a metal chair with a few sheets of paper draped over the back. She nodded to Elizabeth, and gestured to the paper. Elizabeth took a sheet, and gave her five złotys. The paper was brown and rough; she thought perhaps the shortage was something peculiar to the campsite, but found it later in public lavatories in many places, restaurants and museums.