by Sue Gee
‘Would you?’ Ewa glanced at the caption. ‘He’s a murderer.’
‘Oh.’
They both laughed, weakly. ‘It’s not funny,’ said Stefan.
‘I know.’
‘Then why are you laughing?’
‘I feel a bit better,’ said Ewa, and went on laughing, slightly hysterically, feeling herself about to cry.
‘Oh my God,’ said Stefan, seeing it also. ‘You are a nervous wreck. I can see I shall have to look after you while I’m here.’ He pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket and passed it across to her. ‘Do you need something to eat?’ he asked kindly. ‘Would that help?’
‘Possibly.’ Ewa took the handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘What sort of food do you like?’
‘I have been living in a hostel on steak and kidney pies,’ said Stefan. ‘Made by Walls? Before that, as I expect you know, we had some little problems with food in Poland.’
They laughed again, helplessly. ‘There’s a place near Goodge Street,’ said Ewa, ‘a sort of trattoria place. We could go there, I’ll treat you.’
Stefan bowed. ‘That would be extremely kind, but unacceptable. But let’s go there. What exactly is a trattoria place?’
Ewa pulled her briefcase out from under the table. ‘Just a little Italian restaurant. But very good. Delicious in fact.’
‘Lead on,’ said Stefan, and they walked out of the pub as at ease as if they had known each other for years.
‘You realize we are very near the Embassy?’ said Ewa, as they turned into Cavendish Square. Pigeons and starlings were settling for the night in the trees and on window ledges; every now and then, in a lull in the traffic, they could hear faint twitterings, or the sudden flutter of wings.
‘I do,’ said Stefan. ‘At the moment, as you guessed, I’m more concerned about the Home Office.’
‘Is it all very difficult?’
‘It’s okay. I’m not supposed to work, but –’ He lightly took her arm as they tried to cross Portland Place and a taxi raced towards them. ‘But everyone is doing it. It’s not for long, after all. I’ve applied to have my visa extended; I expect they know very well what’s going on.’
‘Suppose they don’t renew it again? Look, it’s all right to cross now.’ They ran, and on the other side walked slowly along Mortimer Street, which was clogged with traffic.
‘If they don’t renew it,’ said Stefan, ‘I might have to go back, but that’s another reason to go to classes. If I become a student, they may let me stay a little longer. In any case, I don’t intend to stay more than six months or so.’
‘No, of course not,’ said Ewa. ‘Look, that’s our place, over there.’ She pointed to a restaurant covered in creeper, where the windows were bordered with small lights, just switched on with the summer dusk.
Stefan stopped. ‘But – my clothes. Will this – trattoria? – will it allow in builders?’
‘Oh, I’m sure. It’s not so grand.’
‘It looks very nice. I’d better take them off.’ He grinned. ‘I do have something on underneath, it’s just that I’m wearing very old clothes these days because of course they’re more suitable –’ He stepped into the doorway of a shop and began swiftly to unbutton his overalls. ‘Stand guard, okay?’
‘I thought you said you had on something underneath,’ said Ewa, giggling.
‘Did I?’ He pulled out the front and peered inside. ‘Oh yes, I think I can see something. Okay, here we go.’ He pulled down first one sleeve and then the other, lightly humming ‘The Stripper’. ‘You think we are unsophisticated in Poland? I tell you, we are up there with the best of them.’ He slipped down the overalls over his hips, and struggled with the legs. ‘Is that the expression? Anyway, usually I put my boots on afterwards. Oh God, I’ll have to take them off.’ He slid down the wall and sat on the step, the overalls round his ankles as he unlaced each boot, waving each foot, still humming. Ewa laughed until it hurt.
‘Et voila!’ He leapt to his feet and bowed, a ludicrous figure in check shirt, flared trousers, and socks, his overalls and boots beside him. ‘Unfortunately, my suit is in the dry cleaners; otherwise, naturally, I should be escorting you in more appropriate style.’
‘Naturally.’ Ewa was wiping her eyes. And a nice change to be doing that because I’m laughing, she thought. You silly, silly girl, what have you been afraid of, all this time?
‘Do I look so odd?’ he demanded, bending to tie up his bootlaces again.
‘No, no. It’s a pity about the flares, but –’ She took a deep breath, and pulled herself together.
Stefan picked up his overalls. ‘And what do I do with these, I wonder? Wear them round my neck?’
‘I’ll put them in my briefcase,’ said Ewa, and unclicked it, took them and folded them up. She stuffed them between a book of poems and the Polish Solidarity Campaign newsletter. Stefan watched her, shaking his head.
‘Do you often put strange men’s clothes into your briefcase?’
‘Only from time to time.’ Ewa felt as if someone had slipped a thick, heavy black cloak from round her, and thrown it away, leaving her light, almost airborne. ‘Et voila,’ she said, and raised an eyebrow. ‘Shall we go?’
They walked towards the open doors of the restaurant.
‘Are the flares really dreadful?’ Stefan asked.
‘Yes, but rather – endearing, with the boots. Anyway, what does it matter? I’m surprised at you, caring.’
‘I’ve had a lot of very serious things to think about for a long time,’ he said, and sounded serious. ‘Just for once, it’s pleasant to think about things that don’t matter.’
Ewa looked at him. ‘Of course. I’m sorry …’
‘Don’t be. Let’s just enjoy ourselves.’
They had reached the open doors, and went inside. A waiter approached, smoothly, taking in at a glance Ewa’s cream jacket and well-cut cotton trousers, and Stefan’s dusty hair, the crumpled shirt, the flares, the boots.
‘Yes, please?’
‘A table for two,’ said Ewa firmly, and he led them through to the back, well away from the other diners.
He pulled out chairs, lit the candle in the centre of the table, gave them each an enormous menu and departed, smiling. Stefan leant forward and lit a cigarette from the candle.
‘I’m sorry – you want one?’
‘No, not yet, thanks.’ Ewa was looking at the menu. ‘How hungry are you?’
‘Very. Ravenous.’ His eyes travelled quickly down the prices. ‘But also on a budget.’
‘I’ve told you, I’ll treat you. Anyway, it’s not very expensive.’
‘Isn’t it?’ He shook his head. ‘It looks it to me, and it doesn’t feel right.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ She blushed. ‘If it makes you feel better, you can always do the same for me one day, when you’ve made your fortune.’ And would have been astonished at her own temerity, except that she knew, without having to think about it, that they would see each other again.
‘Well, certainly,’ said Stefan. ‘There is always that possibility.’
‘Good. Shall I translate?’
‘Please.’ He looked at the menu again. ‘I think the choice is pasta or pasta?’
‘More or less.’
The waiter returned; she ordered red wine, cannelloni, salad.
‘Na zdrowie,’ said Stefan again, when the wine had appeared, and they raised their glasses. He took a long sip. ‘My God, that’s better.’ He looked around at what they could see of the restaurant, at the candles, the flowers, the tanned, relaxed faces of the people at other tables reflected in the mirrored walls. He caught sight of his own reflection, and shook his head. ‘The first thing I do when I make my fortune is to buy clothes,’ he said, and turned back to her. ‘Have you visited Poland?’
‘No,’ said Ewa. ‘Jerzy and Elizabeth have.’
‘Did they tell you that a lot of us are walking around wearing crap? Perhaps not so much in Warsaw, but in the provinces – my God!
’ He drew on his cigarette, angrily. ‘Excuse me. It makes me feel ill at ease being here. I know I shouldn’t let it, but –’
‘Do you want to go?’
‘No, no. Of course not.’
Ewa felt awkward and embarrassed. How could she have been so thoughtless? They should have just gone somewhere cheap and cheerful, but there weren’t many places round Oxford Street, only Macdonald’s, and – well, perhaps they should have gone to Macdonald’s.
The waiter was beside them again, smiling at Ewa, putting down plates and flourishing an enormous pepper mill. ‘My God,’ Stefan said again, recovering, ‘what’s that?’
Ewa laughed. The waiter retired, and they began to eat.
‘That’s better, too,’ said Stefan. ‘I really was hungry, it always makes me irritable, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right, I understand.’
‘But do you know,’ he said, ‘that in some of the so-called fashion magazines, they’ve been known to print photographs of people in the West wearing what you wore five or six years before? To try to make us think that the styles our factories are still churning out are what you are all rushing to buy?’
‘They haven’t.’
‘They have. Our daily life consists of that kind of stuff all the time.’ He took another mouthful. ‘I should say, of course, that that is what it was like before. Solidarity is changing all that, it has been – fantastic.’ He put down his fork and refilled their glasses. ‘Thank you for all this. Now tell me why you’ve never been to visit us.’
‘It’s just always been a point of principle. My parents have never gone back, they don’t have passports because they refused to take British citizenship.’ She took another sip of wine. ‘They are stateless persons, lost souls,’ she said lightly. ‘We are a very principled community, the Polonia. I can remember when I was little, at Saturday school, where my grandfather taught, the teachers used to receive parcels of books from the embassy, to use with us. They were all sent back, unopened.’
‘And they were probably the books we were using in school,’ said Stefan. ‘I expect we both learned, though, how the British and French let us down, at the beginning of the war.’
‘Oh, yes. But I imagine your version of what happened at the end was rather different.’
‘We were liberated by the magnificent generosity of the Red Army,’ he said, and reached for the salad bowl. He helped her to a pile of watercress, apples, orange, walnuts. ‘This looks very nice.’ He put down the spoon and fork. ‘I am trying to imagine you as a little girl, going to – Saturday school? You must have been extremely pretty. Did you blush all the time then, too?’
‘I can’t remember.’ Ewa put her hands to her cheeks. ‘I hate it.’
‘You shouldn’t. As you kindly said about the flares, it’s – endearing. You’re not eating, I’ll change the subject. Tell me about your brother. Did he go to Saturday school? Is he older or younger? I guess older.’
‘Younger. He’s a photographer, a dreamer, really. He was the one who really was a lost soul – I mean, it was worse because there was no reason for him to be, he hadn’t lost anything, he should have been all right …’ She stopped, feeling she was gabbling. ‘Anyway, I think he is all right now. I think. What about you? Do you have brothers or sisters?’
‘No,’ said Stefan, ‘I’m an only child.’
‘What was that like?’
He shrugged. ‘Okay. I had my friends, my parents were very good about that, they were always in and out.’
‘And do you live with them now?’
‘With my parents? No.’ He looked at her carefully. ‘I live with my wife.’
Ewa put down her fork.
‘She is called Krystyna,’ he said slowly. ‘We have a little boy.’ He reached for the cigarettes. ‘I’m sorry – even though we have only just met, I feel I should have told you earlier.’ He leaned forward, lit a cigarette from the candle, and made to give it to her. Their eyes met, and she saw in his an expression of apologetic tenderness. Then she looked down, ignoring the cigarette, and stared at her plate.
There was a long, humiliating silence.
‘Ewa?’
She couldn’t speak.
‘Look at me.’
She shook her head, knowing that she was making it all infinitely worse, but she couldn’t look at him. The murmur of voices from other tables was broken every now and then by laughter.
‘Please.’
She raised her head, addressing the mirror behind him, seeing the dusty back of his head, and her own face, which was not blushing, but very pale, as if she were cold, or shocked. ‘You should have told me,’ she said. ‘I know we have only just met, and that it is nothing to do with me, but even so –’
‘I know.’ He reached across the table and took her hand. ‘We have only just met, and I –’ He drew a deep breath. ‘And I am married, but even so. There is something between us, isn’t there?’
She bit her lip. His hand was warm, and roughened; he held hers as if it were only natural that he should, because he wanted to comfort her, and more than that, because, after all, there was something between them. ‘I – I don’t know.’ She looked at him, and blushed. He gently took his hand away and reached out to touch her cheek, and as he did so he knocked the candle, and a burning drop of wax fell on his hand.
‘Ouch!’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, yes.’ He shook his hand in the air, and knocked the candle again. Wax flew. ‘Oh, my God, what is the matter with me?’
Ewa began to laugh. Stefan rubbed his hand against his lips, and then carefully picked the wax off and dropped it into the ashtray, where it caught the lighted end of his cigarette and spat.
‘Is everything all right?’ The waiter was beside them, smiling but a little reproving.
Stefan grunted. ‘Fine.’ He looked at Ewa. ‘Shall we have a coffee?’
‘Would you like to?’
‘Yes.’
‘Two coffees, please,’ Ewa said to the waiter. ‘And perhaps we could have another ashtray?’
‘Of course.’ He picked up the one with bits of wax in it, and the plates, and took them away.
‘You don’t seem in the least neurotic when dealing with waiters,’ said Stefan.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Ewa ran her hands through her hair. ‘You talk to me as if you were my brother. Correction. Not my brother, but as a brother might talk.’
‘You think so?’ There was a brief, unbrotherly pause. Then the waiter was rattling cups, and pouring coffee.
‘You like it black or white?’
‘Black, please,’ said Ewa.
‘Black,’ said Stefan, and when the waiter had gone, leaving a clean ashtray, he said, ‘I’ve hardly had a good cup of coffee for months without paying a fortune for it. We were living on weak tea, without lemon.’
‘Were you?’ said Ewa, wondering if by ‘we’he meant his family, or the whole of Poland. She thought how impoverished English pronouns were, that there was only ‘you’, with no indication as to whether it meant one person, or two. In Polish, she had not used ty, meaning Stefan, but wy, meaning Stefan and Krystyna. Or the whole of Poland. ‘Don’t you miss your wife?’ she asked abruptly.
‘Of course. Of course I do. And Olek, very much.’
‘That’s your little boy?’
‘Yes. Well, he’s still a baby really, not even two.’ He hesitated. ‘Would you like to see a photograph?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘No.’ He lit another cigarette, from the candle, carefully. ‘But –’ He drew on it, and coughed. ‘But I have to say that they seem very far away. I mean in my mind. It’s not how I imagined – you mind if I talk like this?’
‘No.’
‘You live with someone for years, you know, every day, and you don’t even need to think what it might be like to live alone, and you have a child, and it is impossible to imagine how you lived without him, or how you could ever live without him now, and then
– puff. You are away, and sometimes it seems as if you never had a child at all. Sometimes I miss him so much I think I’ll have to take the next plane home, and sometimes I forget all about him.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it is me saying these things. Or even being here.’
Ewa watched him, thinking that he talked more like a woman than a man, and perhaps that was one reason why she had felt so safe with him, so soon. Also, that despite that, he was very male. She reached for her cup, spilling coffee in the saucer, and taking all her courage to ask as lightly as she could: ‘And what about your wife? Do you forget all about her, too?’
He looked at her. ‘It’s not the same. I do, but – I am here because of her and Olek, because I want to take money home to them, to make things easier for her. She didn’t want me to come, but … there is nothing there at the moment, I am not needed by Solidarity, or let’s say I am a little disillusioned at present. So – I’m here, and that is why I’m working, and not buying clothes, and so on. Even when I forget all about her, there’s a part of me that knows she is always there. With Olek, because he is so small, I suppose, it is as if I can blink and he might have disappeared for ever. I am ashamed to realize that, but it’s true.’
She shook her head, not really understanding, not knowing if that was her question answered.
‘So – I come here to make the family fortune. And then – then I meet Ewa,’ he said slowly, and reached across the table for her hand again. ‘And she seems very important, very quickly.’
His hand was so warm, with the touch of a lover and a friend who you knew you could trust. She wanted to take her own hand away, to stop the trembling inside her, and she wanted to leave it there, to feel him begin to stroke her fingers, gently, tenderly.
At last she said: ‘You are a long way from home in a strange country. It’s not that I am important; you – need someone. It’s natural, I suppose. But it could be anyone.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Stefan. ‘I really don’t think so. Do you?’
They sat in silence, looking into each other’s eyes, no longer laughing.
