Spring Will Be Ours

by Sue Gee

  ‘Falling in love seemed so simple,’ Elizabeth said at last.

  ‘It feels simple now,’ said Jerzy, straightening up. ‘Easier for me now, to love you, than it was then. Easier to tell you.’

  ‘I wonder why.’

  ‘I feel safer, I suppose. I do feel loved.’ He sat on the grass, and looked up at her. ‘You do still love me? What do you mean, it seemed so simple? Why isn’t it now? What’s happened?’

  She laughed. ‘Nothing. Nothing.’ She sat quickly down beside him, put her arm round his shoulders. ‘You look like a worried little boy.’

  ‘I feel it.’

  ‘Don’t. I only meant it was simple because nothing was known. There was just the feeling, the certainty that I loved you, without having to try, or do anything.’

  ‘Then you found out what I was really like.’

  She leaned against him.

  ‘Yes. Perhaps I love you even more, now, after our dramas. I remember having this strange feeling when we met, that I’d never really know myself, until you began to know me.’

  ‘And has that been true?’

  ‘Yes, in a way. I don’t think I’d be painting with such – concentration now, if you weren’t there to see it.’ She turned to kiss his cheek.

  They walked home hand in hand, carrying the blackberry box in a string bag. The sun was beginning to sink behind the line of the hill, where a few kites still soared, and the light across the grass and through the trees was golden, casting rich deep shadows. They stood for a while watching it sink still lower.

  ‘The light leaving the world,’ said Jerzy. ‘Our lord deserting us.’

  Elizabeth took her hand away. ‘How can you say that? I was thinking quite the opposite: that it’s like a benediction.’

  ‘It is,’ he said, taking her hand again. ‘I was joking.’

  ‘No you weren’t.’

  ‘Half joking.’

  She shook her head.

  Inside the house, they climbed the dusty stairs to their front door; when they unlocked it, they saw the sun still at the windows of the sitting room, making the flowers in the vase translucent. The room felt stiflingly hot; Elizabeth crossed the room and pushed the windows open.

  ‘I don’t know why we shut them. It’s not as if any burglars could get up here.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Jerzy was by the television. ‘I just want to watch the news, to get the headlines. Do you mind?’

  He had already pressed the button, and was turning up the volume. The theme tune sounded; the voice-over announced:

  ‘The Six o’Clock News from the BBC: Poland’s striking shipyard workers sign an agreement to return to work as the Polish Government appears to give way to their demands.’

  ‘My God, they’ve done it,’ he said. ‘They’ve done it!’

  ‘The agreement, signed in the Baltic ports of Szczecin and Gdańsk, is subject to government ratification in Warsaw. If approved, it gives the strikers the right to free trade unions and strike pay … Tim Sebastian reports.’

  Tim Sebastian and his brown moustache seemed to have been living with them for weeks. As he appeared on the screen again they could hear a constant clapping in the background. Then the camera flashed to Wałęsa, flanked by endless men in suits, flourishing an outsize ballpoint pen in the smoke-filled hall of the Lenin Shipyard.

  ‘The signing of an historic agreement between workers and government … the end, it appeared, to a strike that brought economic and political chaos to Poland. The workers here say they’ll be back at the shipyard on Monday … If the assurances over the trade unions are implemented, they’ll be the first of their kind in the communist bloc. The men, at least, seem to feel they’ve won a victory.’

  They were back in the studio.

  ‘Fantastic,’ said Jerzy. ‘Amazing. I can’t believe it.’

  ‘The people of China have heard for the first time that their Prime Minister, Chairman Hua, is to step down.’

  He moved over and turned down the sound. ‘I must ring Ewa.’ He went quickly to the phone, and began to dial. His fingers were trembling slightly; they slipped, and he banged down the receiver and tried again; Elizabeth watched his thin, excited face. ‘Engaged,’ he said. ‘Probably talking to my mother.’

  ‘Or trying to phone you.’

  ‘Might be. I’ll just try the grandparents.’ He dialled again, and was answered almost at once. ‘Dobry wieczór, jak Dziadek się ma? Tak! Tak … telewizja …’

  Elizabeth got up and went out to the kitchen. There was half a bottle of wine in the fridge, left over from a couple of nights ago. She uncorked it and found two glasses in the rack above the sink. As she poured, she could hear the murmur of the television, and Jerzy talking rapidly in Polish, fluent and assured. When she went back he was laughing; as soon as he had said goodbye and put down the phone it rang again.

  ‘Słucham? Ewa!’

  Elizabeth put the glasses down on the table beside him. She scribbled on a piece of paper: ‘Can I talk to her?’ and pushed it towards him. When he didn’t turn to look at it, she scrunched it up, and threw it into the wastepaper basket by the fireplace. Then she picked up her glass again, and sat in front of the television, watching the news from the rest of the world, turned down.

  Warsaw, 30 August 1980 ‘They’ve done it! They’ve done it!’ In the courtyards of the School of Planning and Statistics where the students had spent all morning listening to the radio, they were shouting and jumping up and down, hugging each other, waving newspapers. Danuta found herself kissed by her thesis supervisor. He was a thin, balding man in his fifties, who wore spectacles and usually looked hurried and tense. Now, he was jubilant, crazy, ten years younger overnight, grabbing her hands and whirling her up from the low wall round the courtyard.

  ‘They’ve done it!’ A kiss right on the lips.

  She burst out laughing, hugging him back.

  Someone was talking about a party – Piotr, he was always ready for a party, and now he was inviting everyone – Basia, Hania, Jan, Staszek, Danuta, all of them chanting: ‘So-li-dar-ność! So-li-dar-ność!’, spilling out of the building, on to the hot, dusty pavement, running under the trees, past the sunlit Vistula, past the flower-sellers and the newspaper kiosks where people were snatching up the papers.

  ‘They’ve done it!’ On the housing estate outside the city, Stefan was racing up the stairs of his block, bursting into his own apartment, where Krystyna and her parents, and his parents, and the family from down the corridor were all crammed into the living room, chinking glasses, as the television in the corner showed, almost despite itself, Lech Wałęsa, carried through the shipyard shoulder high.

  Stefan pounced on Krystyna, hugged her, took her off her feet. ‘Isn’t it fantastic?’ He put her down, took a glass and a bottle of vodka from the table, and suddenly remembered. ‘Where’s Olek?’ Everyone laughed. And Krystyna said:

  ‘He’s asleep. Can you imagine?’

  ‘He can’t be. Wake him up!’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Can’t a nation share its triumph with her sons?’

  ‘You’re drunk already. Was everyone getting drunk at work?’

  ‘What do you think? Where’d you get the vodka?’

  ‘Tata brought it.’

  ‘Well, good for Tata.’ Stefan raised his glass to his father-in-law, standing across the room in his shirtsleeves, broad peasant face grinning from ear to ear.

  ‘Na zdrowie!’

  ‘Na zdrowie!’

  ‘Za Solidarność!’

  And everyone raised their glasses. ‘Za Solidarność! Za Solidarność!’

  Warsaw, 3 October 1980 At midday the factory sirens had sounded: all over Warsaw, all over Poland. Under a mild, cloudy sky, Stefan stood at the gates of his factory, wearing a white and red armband, holding the Polish flag. They were on strike again, just for one hour. A warning.

  On 1 September, the Baltic coast shipyards went back to work. ‘We all know what that date reminds us of,’ said Wa�
�zęsa – it was the eve of the German invasion of Poland, in 1939. Within days, Gierek had collapsed with what was announced as a ‘malfunction of the heart’and been rushed to a Warsaw hospital. There were rumours that he was wandering the grounds in his hospital gown, a pale drawn figure, telling anyone who would listen that his hands were innocent of the blood of Polish workers. He was replaced by Stanisław Kania, jowly and corpulent, an ex-police chief, once in charge of relations between church and state, approved of by Moscow. He and his Prime Minister, Józef Pińkowski, both made speeches promising major reforms.

  ‘Our most important task is to restore public confidence,’ Kania declared in his opening address to the parliament, the sejm. There was also a warning: ‘Our anti-socialist adversary wants to exploit the conflicts that have arisen … We shall act decisively against cases of disruption of order.’

  In the third week of September, rooms in the Hotel Morski, a rundown seamen’s place, became the Gdańsk headquarters of a national union: Solidarity represented thirty-five unions, members drawn from workplaces all over the country. Now, in the squalid little rooms grudgingly allotted to them by the provincial authorities, the newly formed branches were fighting to establish themselves, without cars, telex machines, telephones or money, with battered old duplicators and typewriters and, as always, insufficient paper. They had registered three million members. Three million! Everywhere you saw the armbands, the badges: each region had its own, but the centre was always the same, the Solidarity logo which the whole world now seemed to know, the flag flying from it defiantly. Krystyna said she’d seen an old man yesterday wearing a badge with the Polish eagle re-crowned.

  The Warsaw branch had quickly become one of the most active and most radical. It was called after the historic name for the central flatlands of Poland: Mazowsze. Chaired by Zbigniew Bujak, a worker in the Ursus tractor factory, the Mazowsze region had its headquarters in rooms at the top of a narrow flight of stairs in a house in Szpitalna Street. It was near where the walls of the Jewish ghetto had been, and, ironically, almost opposite the old Trade Union Council building. There was a good coffee house round the corner.

  Stefan had already climbed the narrow stairs quite often, flattening himself against the wall to let others come down, the buckles of his canvas shoulder bag pressing into his back. Boots tramped up and down all day. At the top, the yellow-painted rooms were a hubbub: foreign journalists came and went, two ancient Roneo machines were on the go all day, the air smelt of cigarettes and printer’s ink. Stefan stuffed the canvas bag with flysheets, They were talking about producing a weekly paper, Niezalez·bulletins. ność – Independence: in Gdańsk, Solidarność was sold out in minutes. There was a time when he had used his bag to smuggle copies of KOR bulletins into the factory; now, there was no need to smuggle: he could distribute information sheets openly – at work, on the estate. Their living room was full of paper – posters on the walls, bulletins on the table, a banner Krystyna had painted at the window. Just occasionally, when Stefan carried the shoulder bag down the concrete paths or echoing corridors of the apartment blocks, or turned at the top of a stairway, he looked over his shoulder. Occasionally, he wondered if everyone who took a copy was what they seemed, an ordinary worker, or housewife, or pensioner. Then he stopped himself, angrily – he shouldn’t be thinking like that any more: since August, everyone was out in the open, talking in shops, at work, in cafés and clubs, in the food queues, in queues outside cinemas. Last month, while his mother babysat, he and Krystyna had stood in a queue outside the Relaks, in Marszałkowska. They were showing Woody Allen, in Manhattan, but that was not why everyone was queueing. There was a black and white sequence in the middle of a news film about the August strikes: for the first time, the beating and killing of the workers on the Baltic Coast in the 1970 food riots were shown to the people. To think that you could go to a cinema and see that! Something suppressed for over a decade.

  And yet – and yet. In the midst of all this, the union itself, while registering hundreds of thousands of new members each day, had still not yet received the authorities’official recognition. Last week Stefan had stood among the crowds lining the pavement outside the Provincial Court, cheering with everyone else as Wałęsa and his colleagues arrived in a bus – almost a triumphal chariot, covered in flags and an enormous Solidarity banner. ‘Leszek! Leszek! Leszek!’ Little Lech, our Lech – it was like a football chant, as he climbed out, grinning, waving the papers in his hand, the statutes of the union, and climbed the steps to the court, giving the victory sign before he disappeared.

  They were all still waiting for the formal registration.

  They were waiting for a lot. The strikers on the Baltic coast had made twenty-one demands, supposedly answered in the August Agreement. He had torn out the page from the Bulletin of 23 August in which they were published, and pinned it up on the wall of the living room. Demand for free trade unions, independent of the Party; demand for the right to strike; for freedom of speech, publication and the press – ha! Elimination of privileges of the police, the security services, the Party apparatus – ha! Many of the responding clauses in the Agreement were cautious: they spoke of discussion, of outlines of principles to be presented to the provincial authorities by the end of the year. But Clause 8 dealt with wage rises: 2000 złotys a month, as compensation for the recent price rises. ‘These increases will be introduced gradually,’ the Agreement read, ‘worked out through agreements in individual factories and branches … put into effect between now and the end of September.’ By the end of September, in many places, negotiations had not even begun.

  And so – a one-hour warning strike. Muscle-flexing: preparing for another confrontation? For a long hard winter?

  Behind him, the siren sounded once again: the hour was over. Stefan picked up the flagpole and carried it from the factory gates down the concrete path to the main entrance; from inside he could hear cheers, and he saw the workers walking back to their places at the machines. An orderly demonstration completed – as Wałęsa said later: ‘We showed we knew how to call a strike, and how to call it off.’ Stefan felt a sudden rush of happiness, and quickened his pace towards the doors. If the flagpole had been a baton, he might have twirled it.

  Warsaw, Autumn 1980 It grew colder, the leaves swirling from the trees on to the broad paths of the avenues, on to the parks, the lakes. The mornings were darker: it was dark when Krystyna took Olek to her mother’s, and only beginning to grow light when she caught the tram to work; Stefan left long before then. The afternoons were sometimes hazy, sometimes lit by a clear, golden sun, pouring through the branches, through the windows of the library, where she took in books and reshelved them, thumbing through yellowing card indexes. The queues outside the shops where she waited afterwards were no shorter, and what you could buy when you reached the top was no more than before, but she didn’t mind them quite so much. The atmosphere had changed: people were expectant, recharged, on the alert.

  They had to be: they were jolting from crisis to crisis. Three weeks after Stefan had stood outside his factory gate in the one-hour warning strike, the Provincial Court had refused to register the statutes of Solidarity. The clause relating to the leading role of the Party, foremost in the Gdańsk Agreement, was not in the statutes, and the court, without notice, inserted it. Wałęsa refused to accept it, he argued that since Solidarity was an independent, apolitical union, there was no need for it. First Secretary Kania insisted that there was. The debate on the radio, the wrangling between lawyers, lasted well into November.

  Winter was coming. The golden afternoon light faded to grey skies, threatening snow. Like a beacon, the news came that the exiled writer Czesław Miłosz, living in New York, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The head of Krystyna’s library was a reserved man; he spent his lunch hour in his tiny office eating sandwiches and listening to the radio. When he came into the main room to tell them about Miłosz he was smiling as if he himself had been awarded the prize. Hurr
ying to her tram stop at the end of the day, Krystyna saw many of the people in the queues at the newspaper kiosks talking as excitedly as they’d done when they heard about the Pope two years ago. On the window of her tram, someone had stuck a placard: ‘We demand the registration of Solidarity! No modification of the statutes!’

  ‘Our star is on the ascendant,’ she said to Stefan that night, putting a wriggling Olek into his pyjamas. ‘John Paul, Solidarity, Miłosz …’

  ‘… Olek,’ said Stefan, looking up from the paper, and she smiled.

  ‘Olek, of course. To think that this baby is almost fifteen months.’

  ‘Time to start another,’ said Stefan, turning the page.

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Stop saying that all the time – was I joking when I asked you to marry me?’

  ‘Probably.’ She did up the last button at the back, and plonked Olek on his knee. ‘Hold him while I get the bottle.’

  ‘Tata. Say Tata,’ Stefan commanded.

  ‘He’s not a budgie.’ Krystyna disappeared into the kitchen.

  ‘Tata,’ said Olek, banging his fist in Stefan’s face.

  ‘There! You see?’ Stefan took the fist and punched it gently against the baby’s own cheek; he began to giggle. ‘Just like Mama,’ said Stefan. ‘Nice to think I can make my family laugh. Do you want a little brother? A sister?’ He punched the fat cheek again. ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘Not now,’ said Krystyna, returning. ‘No, not now.’

  He pulled a long face. ‘Poor little lonely only …’

  ‘You have one then,’ she said, giving him the bottle. ‘I’m too tired. And anyway, who knows what’s going to happen? It’s hard enough to feed and clothe this one.’

  ‘You just said our star was rising.’ Stefan rocked the baby, who was sucking like a vacuum cleaner.

  ‘You know what I mean. You know perfectly well.’

  ‘We have seven million members now,’ said Stefan. ‘Seven million and one since your father joined. That’s well over half the working population.’