by Sue Gee
‘Please what? Please bloody what? It’s all right for you to moan and groan in cathedrals and walk out on me when I’m almost fainting, but it’s not all right for me to show you up in some dreary awful café where no one’s even looking at us? You want me to leave you alone? All right – I’m going to, and you just see how you like it.’
She turned, pushed her way through the tables, tears pouring down her face, and banged into an enormous blue-overalled workman coming in at the door.
‘Proszę, proszę …’ he said mildly, stepping aside.
She pushed past him, and out into the half-lit street. Now where did she go? Could she remember the way back to the hotel? She stood looking wildly up and down the street, still crying. Which way had they come? She stumbled towards a lamp post and leaned against it. I don’t care if I never stop crying, she thought, and I don’t care who hears me. As for Jerzy – I wish I’d never met him.
‘Elizabeth? Darling, darling, come here …’
He was standing beside her, trying to pull her into his arms, and she pushed him violently away.
‘You self-centred bastard – don’t you dare start saying sorry. You’ll only do it all over again, I know you will. You don’t care about anything, except your precious psyche and your precious Poland. You want to know what I thought about in the park yesterday? I’ll tell you. I thought it would take me for ever to try to understand you, and I wondered if it was really worth it. If I loved you enough to make it worth it. Well, I don’t. You know why? Because you don’t love me. You keep saying you do, but you couldn’t really give a fuck –’
‘Stop it! Stop it, that isn’t true.’ Jerzy was crying, now; they stood under the street lamp like orphans who had lost everything, and now each other.
‘I can’t bear it,’ Elizabeth sobbed. ‘I’ve tried so hard, and all you do is push me away. I’m leaving you when we get home.’
‘No!’
‘Yes! Yes, bloody yes, yes, yes. Now go away!’ She began to run down the road, following the intermittent lights ahead until she was back on the main street, and could work out where the hotel was from there. She slowed, wiping her eyes. Behind her, she could hear Jerzy, keeping his distance – at least, she supposed it was him. She walked on, feeling completely drained.
At the door to the hotel, he came up right behind her, and took her hand. ‘Please. Let’s just go to sleep now. We’ll talk tomorrow – I’ll make it better, I promise.’
She was too tired to argue. Inside, they climbed the stairs in silence; in their room they undressed without looking at each other, and fell into separate beds, exhausted.
They woke to a dull grey sky, and when they went out in search of breakfast saw that the factory chimneys were belching clouds of black smoke over the town. A short queue stretched from a greengrocery shop, and no women they had ever seen in any London street had looked so tired. They were grimy with tiredness, standing in cheap coats and headscarves, holding plastic shopping bags, not speaking. Boxes inside the shop held wrinkled carrots, onions, tomatoes, jars of gherkins. A single red cabbage stood on the counter, there was a small box of lemons, weighed on purchase. They could see nothing else. On the way to the empty restaurant they’d visited last night they saw more slogans in giant red and white: HARDER WORK MEANS A BETTER LIFE FOR OUR FAMILIES. WE WORK FOR THE GOOD OF THE PEOPLE. Above the blown-up painted faces of local party officials hung a single word: SOCIALISM!
The restaurant offered tea with lemon, hard white bread and a mixed fruit jam, very red. They fell upon it. Outside the window, a man in an open-necked shirt, very drunk, staggered past. It was just after nine.
They walked back over the cracked pavements to the car, found a filling station and drove out of the town. The black factory smoke drifted after them into the outskirts, where half-completed breeze-block housing estates stood on a wasteland of mud and scrubby grass. A peasant with his horse and cart stood waiting near one of the blocks, a few yards from an idle Ursus tractor.
‘This is Poland,’ said Jerzy bitterly, pointing to the book of photographs they’d bought in Warsaw, which was poking out of the glove compartment. ‘This is Poland.’
‘I know it is,’ said Elizabeth. ‘And where are we going now?’
‘Kraków. Anywhere that isn’t here.’
‘But we’ll stop and camp on the way?’
‘Yes – we’ll find somewhere to make up for this. And for last night.’
‘And then you’ll talk to me?’
‘Then I’ll try to talk to you.’
A meadow of tall grass, of scarlet, blue, white and gold wild flowers nodded beneath a hot, cloudless sky. It stretched from the untended border of a thin road, winding upwards, to distant clumps of trees; beyond rose forested limestone cliffs. Butterflies danced, birds sang, among the nodding flowers they could hear the busy scrape of grasshoppers. Elizabeth sat on the rug with her watercolours and paper; beside her, Jerzy was stretched out, watching.
‘You should have painted Zawierce, too.’
‘I know. I probably would have done if things hadn’t been so bad between us.’
From behind them, on the other side of the road, they could hear water: the stream at the top of the hill, where they had put up the tent, ran down here through rocks, and there was a spring. They were near a little town called Ojców, about twenty-five kilometres north of Kraków.
Elizabeth’s eyes flicked up and down from the paper to the warm stillness of the meadow; her hand moved quickly, in washes and sprinkled dots of colour. Beside her, Jerzy yawned. ‘This is heaven.’
‘I take it you’re feeling better,’ she said drily. ‘I suppose this is really not the moment to ask you to account for yourself.’
‘Too hot. Much too hot.’ He fell asleep.
Elizabeth unclipped the paper and set it to dry on the grass beside her. She clipped in another sheet, and moved away a little, so that Jerzy was not so much on top of her, and then she began to sketch him, lying outstretched on his stomach, his head on one side, thin features partly obscured by flopping hair, long legs reaching out beyond the edge of the rug. The sun rose still higher; an occasional car drove past them, down the hill; from somewhere in the woods beyond the water she could hear a bleating goat. A butterfly settled on the rug, then fluttered off as Elizabeth moved her hand. Jerzy’s chest rose and fell. After a while, it began to grow so hot that she could see trickles of sweat running down his cheek. She put away her materials and gently shook him awake.
‘Mmm? What …’
‘You’ll get sunstroke if you stay there.’
He reached up an arm and tried to pull her down beside him. ‘Lie down with me.’
‘No. Come on.’
He groaned, and got to his feet, yawning.
They crossed the road to the spring and drank and drank, splashing their faces. Then they walked slowly through the cool woods, crossing the stream by a wooden footbridge, passing two boarded-up, dilapidated wooden houses, and a thatched cottage with peeling blue paint and sunflowers in the garden. The bleating goat sounded from the back; bees buzzed in and out of a hive. A hutchful of rabbits stared at them from behind rusty netting.
Footsteps came along the path, snapping twigs. An old peasant man in a beret carried a stick, and a polythene bag with something dark inside. He nodded to them as they drew near each other, and held up the bag: they saw four or five large flat field mushrooms, with thick stalks.
‘Dzień dobry.’
‘Dzień dobry.’ He assumed immediately that they were not Polish, and simply raised the bag again inquiringly, and rubbed his fingers.
‘We’ve nothing to cook them with,’ said Elizabeth, and Jerzy explained. The man nodded again, and walked on.
‘What a pity. Will he sell them in the town?’
‘I expect so. Let’s stop, now, and have our picnic.’
In Ojców they had bought some supplies: bread, apples, curd and gouda cheese, a tin of pilchards, and a tin of fresh orange juice, which fizzed.
They spread the rug under the trees, and leaned against each other, tearing off hunks of bread.
‘This is where we should dig Dziadek’s Polish earth,’ said Jerzy suddenly. ‘Remind me to bring the jar.’
‘All right. You really think this is the place?’
‘I think it’s perfect. I read in the guidebook while you were in the shop that there’s a cave somewhere in these woods. Seventy families lived down there with all their animals for a month, some time in the First World War. Dziadek would like that.’
‘Yes, I’m sure he would.’ Elizabeth reached for an apple. ‘Now – explain yourself.’ The dizzying heat of the flowery meadow below them, and the coolness here, had already pushed the memory of Zawierce into the distance. The idea of leaving Jerzy now seemed like a horrible dark thing best forgotten quickly. Which perhaps was foolish.
Jerzy was shaking his head; he spread his hands. ‘What can I say that I haven’t said already? Perhaps all the feelings are more acute here, that’s all.’
‘Because you expected so much.’
‘I must have done. I suppose I thought that I’d feel I belonged here, that at last I’d be in the right place … But it hasn’t happened. I don’t.’ His foot scraped the dark earth and leaf mould.
‘You keep on saying that I don’t understand,’ said Elizabeth, ‘but I do. I realized almost as soon as we got here that I was waiting for you to – find yourself here.’
‘And did you imagine that things would be easier between us then?’
‘I suppose I did, yes.’
‘Well, I’m sorry.’
‘So you keep saying.’
‘Don’t.’
Insects rose and fell on the bars of sunlight pouring through the trees. From below, behind the cottages, the little goat still bleated.
‘The picture of the Pope,’ said Elizabeth. ‘When you talk about your – lostness – are you talking about not being wholly Polish? Or about God?’
‘Both, I suppose.’ His foot was wearing a runnel in the earth. ‘Doesn’t God trouble you?’
‘No. Not in the way you are troubled, I don’t think.’
‘Before I met you,’ Jerzy said, ‘after the Katyń Memorial Service, I remember telling Ewa I didn’t believe any more. It wasn’t true, not exactly. I don’t believe – and then everything seems meaningless and empty. And if I take a step towards believing I find the very idea of a God quite … terrifying. Either way, I can’t let it go. It gnaws at me, like a rat.’
‘All the time?’
‘A lot of the time.’ He ran his hands through his hair. ‘I’ve rationalized it by thinking it was tied up with Polishness, and the grandparents; and going to mass when I was little. But Ewa has all these things as a part of her, too, she even went to a convent, and I don’t think she feels like this at all. Anyway – now you see why I got so uptight about the idea of going to mass as soon as we got here.’
‘But perhaps … perhaps you really should talk to a priest. Or a psychiatrist?’
‘No! I wouldn’t trust either of them.’
‘Then you’re condemning yourself.’
‘I know.’ He was breaking small twigs, dropping them one by one into the furrow of earth.
‘And perhaps you’re condemning us, too. Supposing I can’t cope with all this?’
Jerzy brushed the earth over the twigs and turned to look at her. ‘What can I say? Truly, truly, I’m sorry for hurting you so much yesterday. Do you still want to leave me?’
‘No. But perhaps it’s just the sun.’
He bit his lip and she put her arm round him and kissed his cheek. ‘Perhaps you should leave me – perhaps I’m simply not the right person to help you.’
‘You are. You do. I thought when I met you that everything was going to fall into place then. And now I’m just afraid I’ll drive you away.’
‘So am I. But not at the moment.’
In the nearby undergrowth a bird was hopping, pausing every now and then, scratching among the twigs. From somewhere near the cottages came the peaceful inquiring voices of hens.
Elizabeth ran her hand down Jerzy’s chest, his stomach. ‘Make love to me.’
‘Here?’
‘Here.’
‘What about the old man?’
‘I’m sure he won’t come back.’
‘But someone else might …’
She gave a long sigh. ‘Puritan. Faint heart.’
‘What have I been telling you?’ He stood up, and pulled her to her feet, then bent to pick up their bags. ‘You bring the rug – we’ll go deeper into the forest.’
They stayed in Ojców for three days, resting and walking. On the third day, they packed the car again, and set off towards Kraków. The landscape was hillier, now, the fields on either side of the road sloping gently towards distant mountains, and full of endless rows of stooks. Steam trains puffed along winding tracks across the valleys. In many of the villages the cottages were painted a mauvey-blue; there were window boxes full of geraniums; everywhere they stopped to let lines of ducks and geese waddle across the road. In one village the children were just coming out of school, running home for lunch, the little girls in scarlet stockings.
‘I should think this must be the best sort of place to grow up in in Poland,’ said Elizabeth, watching them.
‘Yes. I’d love to live here.’
A few miles from Kraków, they passed three waggons loaded with straw, stopped by an enormous rusting threshing machine, which wasn’t working. The horses stood tossing their heads, flicking flies.
‘Stop a minute,’ said Jerzy. ‘I’d like some photographs.’
Elizabeth drew in and reversed. She followed him towards the waggons, and the men standing with their arms folded, talking. From the doorway of a cottage a woman and child were watching; behind the cottage were square brick houses, with flat roofs. A pylon soared above the apple trees. Jerzy walked over to the men, and began talking. He photographed them, waiting for the machine to start, and then it did, without warning, and they jumped, ran towards it and began loading the straw into the chute. Hens picked their way amongst the dusty piles of chaff. Jerzy and Elizabeth stood watching for a while, then went back to the car.
‘They said the machine had stopped working at midday,’ said Jerzy, as they drove off. ‘It’s now after six? Six hours, waiting … the machine is collectively owned, and apparently there are power cuts without warning almost every day. Three hundred hectares of land was taken by the Party last year, and the wheat in their fields is just rotting, unharvested. To think that Poland used to be a great agricultural country. One of the men said: “They show us on the television how much there is of everything – where is it? There’s no beer or orangeade to drink when we come in from the fields, sometimes there’s not even anything for the evening meal.”’
Half an hour later, they were on the outskirts of Kraków. They followed the guidebook directions for the campsite: it was very large, and stood high above the city, dominated bizarrely by an enormous cross. Litter scattered the scuffed grass between the tents; there was not a single pitch to be had. They drove off again, down into the city centre; the tourist office was still open, and two smiling girls with long shining hair recommended a tourist hotel some ten minutes’drive away, and booked them a room.
By now it was quite dark. There was not a single working street light; they drove very slowly, across intersections without working traffic lights. In the intermittent glow from a café or shop window, they could see that many of the pavements were badly cracked, or had slabs or half-slabs missing; as in Warsaw, there were few people about.
The hotel was at the top of another hill, reached by a twisting road. They thought of Zawierce, and prepared themselves. This hotel was different. On the forecourt of what might once have been very good officers’barracks stood a number of foreign cars; the women who came out of the front doors were so expensively dressed that Elizabeth felt like an unwashed scruff in her jeans and tee-shirt. They carried the
ir bags inside, and were eyed by a brisk waiter in a cream jacket. The receptionist was a blonde, very pretty girl, who gave them their key and pointed out the restaurant. Elizabeth thought suddenly that they might not be able to afford it.
Their room was on the ground floor, spacious, with two soft beds and tall windows overlooking a garden at the back. But even here, the furnishings had a look of making do about them, and the lights were very dim.
‘I must have a shower,’ said Jerzy.
‘Me too.’
The shower was a little way along the corridor. They padded past expensively suited foreign businessmen, clutching their spongebags. Naked, they stood in the chipped bath, and turned on the shower-head. There was a gush of scalding water.
‘Ouch!’
Quickly they turned the tap towards cold; a few lukewarm drops were spat out, then stopped. They turned again, and waited, standing back. Nothing. Ten minutes’irritated twiddling of taps and knobs yielded only drips and spluttering in the pipes. They gave up, washed in the basin, dressed again, and went out.
At the door to the restaurant they skimmed through the menu. It was indeed very expensive, and they were fairly sure, by now, that few of the dishes would actually exist.
‘Let’s go and see some night life. There must be something.’
There was a large open-air café near the main square, where musicians in folk costume played violins all round the candlelit tables. They ordered a bottle of red wine, and sat drinking; every now and then, one of the violinists came over and played especially for them, before playing for the middle-aged Americans at the next table. Most of the other tables seemed to be taken by tourists; the waitresses wore checked aprons and a lot of make-up; they moved swiftly, taking orders indifferently. Later, Jerzy and Elizabeth walked through the streets looking for their car. They passed large nineteenth-century apartment blocks, tenements, where dimly lit flights of stone stairs curved upwards and inwards past peeling plaster walls.
Elizabeth yawned, and almost tripped over a broken paving stone.
‘Are you safe to drive?’ asked Jerzy.
‘I don’t think so. Are you?’
