by Sue Gee
She finished the letter and got up, paying for the coffee. No need to buy a roll these days – they gave her a good meal at the restaurant, down in the kitchen with the other evening staff. She walked back through the little street on to the Charing Cross Road, where she used to work, passing the eating house near the tube, and crossed into the network of streets leading to Covent Garden, full of tourists window-shopping, drinking at the tables in the piazza, listening to the evening street musicians, wandering arm in arm, well dressed, secure.
The manager of Danuta’s new restaurant was English, the chef was Spanish. Many of the staff, working on morning, afternoon and evening shifts, were Australian or New Zealanders, passing through, nearing the end of the summer vacation and talking about the journey home through Europe. There were also the Poles, a Czech woman who had lived here since 1968, a sprinkling of French students, Scandinavian students. When Danuta arrived, it was still early and quiet, a lull before the evening rush began. She hung up her jacket, and went to eat with the other girls. ‘Did you see the papers?’ she asked Maria, as they sat down.
Maria was the girl from Warsaw. She was large and fair, and had been studying history. ‘Oh, yes.’ She reached for the mayonnaise, and piled spoonfuls on to a mountain of tuna fish salad.
‘And do you think they’re right? Do you think there’s going to be an invasion?’
‘It’s possible, isn’t it? We’ve always known it was.’
‘But I mean now, soon.’
‘I’m trying not to think about it,’ said Maria. ‘I work, I send my parcels home, I write to my family and tell them not to worry.’
Danuta laughed. ‘So do I.’
‘Of course, we all do. Can you pass the bread?’
They finished their meal. The restaurant upstairs began to fill. Danuta and Maria and the rest of the evening shift gulped down cups of coffee, and hurried up there. It began, very soon, to get busy; Danuta grew hot and tired, moving between the tables in the smoke, carrying trays from the hatch which led down to the kitchen, going through the menu with the customers in English. A couple in the corner beckoned her over. The woman was fair, wearing a bleached cotton shirt; the man was tall, with flopping brown hair; he had a camera on the table beside him. He smiled at Danuta, almost with diffidence. ‘We should like to order …’
‘Of course.’ She pulled out her notebook and pen, smiling back at him. ‘What would you like?’
‘Trout and green beans.’ He nodded towards the fair-haired woman. ‘That’s right?’
‘Yes. Fine.’
‘And I’ll have the kidneys.’
Danuta looked quickly over his shoulder at the menu. He had an old one, last week’s. ‘I’m not sure if we have kidneys now … Can you wait a moment, please?’ She turned away, saw Maria going past with a trayful of starters, and asked quickly in Polish: ‘Maria? Are we serving kidneys this week?’
Maria nodded. ‘Yes. I’ve just taken an order.’
‘This customer has last week’s menu …’
‘Give him this week’s then. But the kidneys are on anyway. Revolting, how can anyone eat such things?’
Danuta turned back to her table, and saw that the man was laughing.
‘You’re Polish. And your colleague.’ He nodded towards Maria.
Danuta flushed. ‘I’m sorry – you speak Polish? She didn’t mean to be rude.’
‘It’s all right, it’s quite funny. May I ask how long you’ve been over here?’
‘Just a few months, I came at the end of April. And – and you?’
‘Oh, I was born here. Well … I’ll have the revolting kidneys, if your friend doesn’t mind too much. And we’d like to order wine.’
‘Of course.’
‘We’re celebrating,’ said his girlfriend, smiling – or was she his wife? – and spread her hands as if in deprecation.
‘Oh.’ Danuta didn’t know quite what to say. ‘Very nice.’
She took the order for wine, and went to send the food order down the hatch. She could hear the chef shouting, he reminded her of poor Enrico. Was he back in Colombia now? She went into the little lobby at the far end of the restaurant, where the wine racks were, found the Médoc, very expensive, and thought: they must be celebrating. But they seem rather nice, those two.
During the evening, when she had time, she watched them. They talked a lot, at one point it seemed almost as if they might quarrel, but next time she looked they were holding hands. When she went to give them their bill, she said in Polish: ‘I hope you have enjoyed your celebration.’
‘We have,’ said the man, in Polish, and then translated for his companion, who smiled again.
‘May we ask your name?’
‘Danuta,’ she said. ‘I’m from Warsaw.’
‘Really? We visited Poland in 1979, we spent some time in Warsaw.’ He pulled out a wallet, and put notes under the bill, on the saucer. ‘My name is Jerzy Prawicki,’ he said. ‘This is Elizabeth – today is the anniversary of our meeting. Hence the celebration.’
‘Oh. Congratulations.’
‘Thank you. We wondered – would you like to come and have supper with us one evening?’
Danuta was astonished. ‘Yes. Yes – I would. Thank you.’
‘Where are you living?’ asked Elizabeth.
‘Oh – in a hotel in Bayswater. I work there.’
‘As well as working here?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘You must get very tired.’
She shrugged.
‘Well …’ Jerzy had written down their address on the back of the bill, and their phone number. ‘Do phone us.’
‘Yes, I will.’
They got up, and she went with them to the door. Some of the lights in the shop windows had been switched off now, but there were still plenty of people about. It felt cold, after the warmth of the restaurant; she saw Elizabeth shiver, and Jerzy put his arm round her.
‘Come on.’ He smiled briefly at Danuta. ‘Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye, and thank you.’ She hurried back inside.
Londyn
28 September, 1981
‘Kochana Krysia,
‘Forgive me for not writing for so long. I have something to
tell you, and I don’t know how to tell you.’
No. He couldn’t do it straight away, just like that at the beginning of the letter. He lit a cigarette, and crossed out the last sentence, going over each word so that there was only a thick black line. He drew on his cigarette, and sat staring out of the café window. He was in a little sandwich bar, not far from the Embassy, not far from the BBC; there were a few tables, with sauce bottles and metal ashtrays. Outside, people in suits, in their lunch hour, walked quickly past, hailing taxis. The light was autumnal, golden, it reminded him of this time last year in Warsaw, when Krysia had been full of the news about Miłosz, and the Nobel Prize. He remembered seeing a
bus driver in a Solidarność armband being hustled and pushed
by the police as he climbed up into the driver’s seat. He
remembered a lot of things, and none of them had anything
to do with Ewa, or what he was trying to say now.
Forgive me for not writing for so long. Forgive me for what I am about to tell you. No.
‘Since I last wrote, the papers have been full of horror stories
about Solidarność, the Congress, the reaction of our neighbours
on the border. There is an organization here, a campaign supporting
Solidarność, they have a magazine.’
And through it I met … No.
‘I haven’t joined it yet – it is all run in English, and anyway,
I’m afraid that if anything should happen, it wouldn’t be a
very good idea for me to have my name linked with it.’
Were they censoring letters, yet? Would this reach Krysia
unopened? If it was opened, would she think all the lines
crossed out were crossed out by the
censor?
‘Anyway, I hope nothing is going to happen, and that I’ll
soon be home. My passport is in the Home Office, I am waiting
for an extension. I think of you and Olek, and wonder how
you are, and I miss you both very much.’
He did, he did miss them, though he couldn’t tell Ewa that.
And there were, still, times when he forgot them utterly, and
he couldn’t tell Krysia that.
‘I have been working pretty hard. The house is almost
finished, and we expect to be paid a bonus. Did you get the
parcel? Since I last wrote, I have moved. I’m not in the hostel
any more, it was rather unpleasant there, I’m staying with
friends.’
I am staying with a woman called Ewa. In a way she reminds
me a little of you: she is dark, like you, and beautiful, like
you, though I know you never believed I really think that
about you, Krysia. She is very emotional, and lonely, not like
you, and I think I love her. No. No, no, no.
‘If you want to write to me, I think it’s best if you go on
writing to the poste restante in William IV Street. There are
a lot of people in this new place, it’s almost as bad as the hostel, and letters go missing.’
Liar. Shit.
But perhaps he was giving her the chance to read behind that lie, if she thought about it, and realize for herself, without him having to tell her.
Coward. It wasn’t just cowardice – absurd, he wanted to be with her, when she read it.
‘I’ll write again soon. My love to the parents, both sets. And I hold you and Olek, and kiss you both with all my heart.
Stefan’
He stubbed out the cigarette, sealed the envelope, got up quickly and paid at the counter, and walked back to work, fast, dropping the letter in the pillarbox on the way, and trying, after that, not to think about it.
A few weeks later, Danuta went to supper with Jerzy and Elizabeth. She sat on the edge of their sofa, feeling shy, and looking through Jerzy’s photographs, while Elizabeth was in the kitchen. Over supper, they asked her questions. She told them, mostly in hesitant English, occasionally appealing to Jerzy and speaking Polish, for him to translate, about what it had been like in Poland, before she left. She told them about the first hotel, and the Home Office raid; about Enrico being arrested and Franco jumping out of the window. She told them about the eating house and the persistent manager; about her new hotel, where she served breakfast and lunch; she told them about the restaurant, and Maria, and all the Polish girls she’d met since she came here – Basia, who she’d seen again last week, and who was going to marry her Frenchman, though she didn’t think she loved him, and the girl from Wrocław, who had also been questioned in the raid. She didn’t say anything about the possibility of finding an English sponsor. She found that once she’d started to talk, she couldn’t stop: no one else had listened to her since she came – she had abandoned Halina and her cat Henryk, named after her dead husband: Halina didn’t want to know about her difficulties. She told them about the visit to the Polish refugee place, and the posters on the wall, Christ walking through the ruins of wartime Warsaw, and she realized they hadn’t spoken for a long time, and fell silent, embarrassed at talking so much, realizing she knew nothing about them, at all.
‘Excuse me – I talk too much.’
‘No you don’t,’ said Elizabeth. ‘You have had a difficult time, of course you must talk about it.’ She pushed back her chair. ‘Would you like coffee? Jerzy? Would you?’
‘What?’ He was sitting with his elbows on the table, his head in his hands.
‘Are you all right? I asked if you wanted coffee.’
‘Oh. Yes, please.’ He pushed his hair off his forehead. ‘You know what I’m thinking about?’
‘The poster.’
‘Yes.’
‘I knew you would be.’
Danuta watched them, not really understanding.
Jerzy spread his hands again, in that deprecating gesture. He said to Danuta: ‘I know what that poster must have looked like to you – an anachronism, yes?’
‘Excuse me?’
He translated.
‘Oh. Yes. It was very moving, of course, but –’
‘I understand. But to me –’ He turned and looked at Elizabeth. ‘It speaks to me in the same way as your painting did. Even without seeing it.’
She nodded, and took his hand.
Danuta looked at them, and looked away, taking in the paintings, the one on the easel at the far end of the room, a half-finished portrait of an old man with a very Polish face, and the ones on the walls, more portraits, still-lifes, summer landscapes, landscapes full of snow, a watercolour of a street in Warsaw, in the Old Town. She and Mama had coffee in that street sometimes.
‘However,’ Jerzy was saying to her, ‘all this does not help you, now.’ He and Elizabeth dropped their hands, and Elizabeth said: ‘Sorry. Couples can be rather stifling.’
Danuta shook her head. ‘It is very nice to see people who are happy.’
Elizabeth laughed. ‘We have our moments.’
‘When are you getting married?’
‘At Christmas. We’ve only just decided that – it’s just going to be a register office affair, nothing grand. Now – do you want some coffee?’
‘Yes, please. Can I help you?’
‘No, no – you do quite enough waitressing as it is.’
Danuta yawned. ‘And I must go soon, I have to work in the morning.’
‘Poor you. We must think of something.’ She took the tray out to the kitchen, saying to Jerzy: ‘I take it you want one.’
‘Yes. Thanks.’ He looked at Danuta, sitting at their table with her hands in her lap. She had short, shining dark hair, a pale face with circles under her eyes; she wore a sweater which was much too thin for this time of year.
‘How do you think we could help you?’ he asked in Polish.
She shook her head. ‘It’s kind of you – I’m all right.’
‘Have you made many friends since you came here?’
‘Just the hotel girls, the ones I told you about.’
‘And how long do you think you’ll stay here? Do you have anything to go back to in Poland – anyone?’
‘My parents, that’s all, really. My friends, of course, but – I want to stay here if I can. There is nothing there, and I can help my parents more by being here. I hope perhaps they’ll come over here next year.’
‘If nothing happens.’
‘Well –’ She swallowed, thinking of last month’s headlines. ‘Perhaps … things are quietening down for the winter. Perhaps next year things will be easier.’
‘I hope so. Anyway – in the meantime, if there is anything we can do for you, you must say.’
‘Thank you. There’s just one thing –’ Wasn’t it too much to ask that, on a first meeting?
‘What’s that?’
‘Well – it’s just that some of the girls have talked about finding a sponsor. Especially if they don’t extend my visa, or if – if anything happened. I would need someone who could act as a sort of intermediary, with the Home Office, reassure them that – I’m sorry, this seems rather dreadful, to ask, but reassure them that financially I’m all right. That I have somewhere to live, a permanent address.’
Elizabeth was coming back, with a tray of coffee. Jerzy explained to her, in English. Danuta thought: It feels rather odd, that he and I speak the same language, and she doesn’t. We could keep something from her, if we wanted to.
Jerzy turned back to her. ‘I don’t think that would be a problem for us at all,’ he said. ‘You can use this address if you need to. If they want a letter from me, from either of us – that’s all right. The only thing is, I don’t think we can actually afford to support you –’
‘No. No, of course not. I didn’t mean that �
��’
‘No. So – there we are, anyway. No problems.’
‘Thank you. Thank you.’
Elizabeth was passing coffee cups. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘when we were in Poland, apart from Jerzy’s aunt, we spoke to no one. I mean no one like you, who might need us one day. Now, suddenly, we have two Poles from Poland in the family – you and a fellow called Stefan, who’s living with – staying with – Jerzy’s sister. He was very involved in Solidarity, he must have come over about the same time as you, I think.’
‘After Bydgoszcz.’
‘Yes. And Jerzy likes him, too, don’t you? He hardly used to like anyone.’
Jerzy frowned. ‘For heaven’s sake …’
‘Sorry. I’m only teasing.’
‘I shouldn’t think it’s very interesting for Danuta.’
Danuta thought: There’s something about these two. They’re not so happy. Or they move to extremes too quickly. Or something. I don’t know. She said: ‘I don’t mind. Anyway, I must be going.’ She swallowed the last of her coffee. ‘Thank you again, so much. It has been lovely meeting you.’
‘And you,’ said Jerzy.
‘Come again,’ said Elizabeth.
‘Thank you, I will. I like your paintings.’
‘Good.’
They saw her downstairs, to the dusty hall. Jerzy pulled open the front door, and a gust of cold wind blew in. Elizabeth looked at Danuta’s thin sweater, and cotton trousers. ‘You can’t go home like that, I’ll lend you a sweater. Hang on –’
She turned, and ran up the stairs. Jerzy shut the door again, and they waited. The hall was rather bleak, it reminded Danuta of the atmosphere in the first hotel, in the basement. She looked up at Jerzy, and said: ‘Do you think of yourself as Polish?’
