by Sue Gee
Anna took Jan’s hand. ‘See you soon.’
‘Yes.’ He dropped her hand, nodded to Ewa and Stefan, and walked away from them, down into the underpass.
Ewa put her other arm through Anna’s. ‘Come on, Mama. Don’t let him upset you.’
Anna’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I wish … I wish …’
Stefan coughed, and lit a cigarette.
Then they all followed the endless river of people. There was no shouting, no chanting, not even for the television cameras mounted high up on the buildings at Oxford Circus.
‘It must be the quietest demonstration in London for years,’ said Ewa.
A petition was to be delivered at the Embassy, demanding the release of the detainees – four thousand people arrested and interned. The petition demanded an end to martial law, and the restoration of trade union rights, according to the Gdansk Agreements.
It took almost an hour to walk the mile or so to the Embassy; on the way, they passed a little group of people, waiting in the cold with placards: ‘Czechs support the Poles!’ Ewa remembered, suddenly, the long-ago summer afternoon when she had watched the Russian tanks moving into Prague, and she looked at Stefan, and looked away.
By the time they all got near the Embassy, and found the streets cordoned off by police, the petition had long since been coldly refused. Those who presented it were told by the officials who appeared at the door, for just a few minutes, that the ‘state of war’ had been declared in order to prevent a coup by Solidarity.
In a mine near Katowice, in western Poland, thirteen hundred miners were refusing to come to the surface until martial law was lifted, and the interned Solidarity leaders freed. They had been down there for a week, supplied at first with food by their families and supporters; now, the police had stopped all that. Four days ago, seven striking miners, at the pit head of another colliery nearby, armed with crowbars and pickaxes, had been shot by the police, in ‘self-defence’. It was freezing cold down the occupied mine, the men huddling together at night, but they weren’t coming up.
Elizabeth, in her studio, with the radio on all day, heard about the occupation at Katowice almost every hour. At first she had stood listening, imagining the darkness, the cold, the wives talking to the men down the pit telephone, the circle of police at the top of the shafts, waiting. Now she was aware of it as a background, much as individual killings over months in Northern Ireland blurred into a single death: a nineteen-year-old private from Glasgow; or a man in his forties, with a wife and two children, driving along a country road home after visiting his brother, stopped, dragged out, murdered, his body left in the long grass on the verge. They had become archetypes. Elizabeth switched back and forth between Radio Three and Radio Four, filling the studio with the news, the World at One, concerts from Manchester, the afternoon play, carols, The Archers, Bach and Haydn. She took in hardly any of it.
Yesterday, she and Jerzy had been going to get married.
Today, she had left the house when he was still asleep, when it was still dark. Tonight, she supposed she was going back there.
The wedding had been called off in a very low key. It had, after all, been only a quiet one planned – her parents and family down, meeting all Jerzy’s family in the register office, and Stefan, perhaps, and Delia, who rented out the studio. It was intended to be small, but a celebration, nonetheless, going out for a meal afterwards, and a honeymoon planned for New Year.
‘How can we celebrate anything?’ Jerzy had asked, on the night of the thirteenth. In Poland they were calling it not martial law, nor a state of emergency, but start wojenny – state of war. Jerzy was in his own state of war, restless and withdrawn, suffering from nightmares. Fifteen thousand people had attended a rally in Hyde Park today, and marched to the Polish Embassy. Anna had gone, and Ewa, and Stefan. Even Jan was there. Why hadn’t Jerzy gone? She would have gone with him. He wouldn’t talk to her, so she came down here and painted, half-listening to the radio.
She was painting a sickbed, it made her feel as if she were living a hundred years ago. She had sketched in a child, half-propped up against the pillows, her eyes closed. The room was very dark – you were to see the curtained windows, and fire, and a woman moving towards the bed, holding a glass. By the bed was a table, and on the table a night-light burned.
Elizabeth had never been close to anyone who had died. But there had been, years ago, the sitter at art school, the woman whose portrait they had all wanted to paint, and who had died of cancer. Elizabeth had known for a long time that the woman was ill, she had been expecting to hear of her death – but still, when she did hear the shock was as great as if she had been run over by a bus. It was as if a night-light had been burning very dimly for a long time, getting lower and lower, the wax almost gone – when at last, in a single moment, it went out, you realized that what you had thought of as darkness had been lit up, always. Now, there was nothing.
Elizabeth knew the night-light in the painting was going to go out, and that the little girl was going to die. She was painting it because of what had happened in Poland, whose life seemed as if it were always going to be bound up with Jerzy’s, and therefore hers. They had all known that something terrible was going to happen – and still, when it came, the shock was as great as a death. You could never, really, prepare yourself for a death.
Outside the studio windows it had been dark for a long time. The concert on Radio Three came to an end, and the quiet voice of the announcer began to speak. Elizabeth looked at her watch and found it was after six. She was hungry, nothing but coffee and cheese all day; she wanted to go home and find Jerzy recovering, the fire on and the table laid for supper. She packed up her paints and brushes, pulled on her coat and turned out the lights, calling goodbye to Delia as she went down the stairs.
Delia appeared in her upstairs sitting room doorway, dark hair done up in a knot, earrings swinging. ‘Come and have a drink.’
‘I ought to get back.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake. It’s almost Christmas, forget about the Poles for a minute and have a drink. I’ve been wrapping presents all afternoon while the kids are out, I need a bit of sanity.’
Elizabeth took off her coat and went into the sitting room. There was a pile of exquisitely wrapped presents on the table, and the room was very warm, all faded pink sofas and beige carpet, and prints and oils by friends on the walls. The kids weren’t really allowed in here.
‘Where are they?’ asked Elizabeth, watching Delia pour out whisky.
‘With their father, having a pre-Christmas treat before he abandons us all for the south of France and his new lady.’
‘You didn’t tell me there was a new lady.’
‘There’s always a new lady. Here.’ Delia passed her a cut-glass tumbler and flopped on to the sofa. ‘Cheers. Happy Christmas. What are you painting?’
Elizabeth hesitated.
‘That means it’s something dark and meaningful. Don’t tell me, I don’t want to hear. How’s Jerzy? Do I want to hear how he is? Are you feeling bloody?’
Elizabeth drank. ‘Not as bloody as I was, thanks. Cheers.’
‘Are you going to leave him?’
‘Delia … No, of course not.’
‘Why?’
‘How can I?’
‘Well, I don’t mean just before Christmas.’
‘Christmas hasn’t got anything to do with it. I don’t want to leave him.’
‘In spite of everything, you love him still.’ Delia had lit a cigarette; she described an elaborate gesture with it in the air.
‘Yes, I suppose that’s just sentimental nonsense to a hardened cynic like you.’
‘You mean crap. On the contrary, I find it deeply touching.’ She took another puff and eyed Elizabeth. ‘And what about Ewa? Isn’t her lover from Poland? What’s going to happen to them?’
Elizabeth sipped her whisky. ‘I don’t know. You know he’s married.’
‘The nice ones always are.’
�
��Well – I expect they’re going through hell. It isn’t really so funny, Delia.’
‘Don’t be so bloody pi, I never said it was. It’s all highly … operatic. Have another.’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Cow.’
Elizabeth got up. ‘Have you been drinking all afternoon?’
‘I can’t remember, Probably. Oh, well, off you go, darling. Will you be dropping in on us again before Christmas?’
Elizabeth pulled on her coat and bent down to kiss her. ‘You know I will. Who else brings me down to earth like you?’
‘There’s plenty of us about,’ said Delia. ‘Christmas is full of us. Oh, well, bugger off then, the kids’ll be back any minute anyway, I must be turning my mind to din-dins. Any ideas?’
‘Not really,’ said Elizabeth, ‘but I’m starving. Thanks for the drink.’
‘Any time.’
‘Bye.’
‘Bye.’
She ran down the stairs and out into the street, pulling out her woolly hat from her pocket, pulling on her gloves. She hurried to the main road, looking for a bus, but there wasn’t one, so she walked, very fast, thinking about Delia, and her divorce, and Christmas with the kids. She turned into their street, and found herself thinking of the night Danuta had come to supper. She must be dreading Christmas now, too. They ought to ring her. Then she remembered standing at the window of their flat, watching for her and Jerzy, walking together down the road to the station, and found herself wondering, as she had briefly wondered then.
She reached their front door, and pulled out her key, fumbling with it in her woollen gloves. The hall was unlit. She felt for the time switch and went quickly upstairs. What had Jerzy been doing all day, without her? At the top, she unlocked their own front door, and opened it on to darkness.
‘Jerzy?’
There was no answer.
‘Jerzy!’ She switched on the hall light, and felt how cold the flat was. She went to the bedroom, found the curtains drawn, with a look about them as if they hadn’t been pulled back all day, and the bed unmade. She went to the sitting room, still calling.
The lights were off, the curtains drawn, she could see that from the hall light. Jerzy was sitting in an armchair by the unlit fire, wrapped in a blanket.
‘Jerzy!’
‘What?’ he said flatly, and did not look up.
Elizabeth almost hit him. ‘What do you mean, “what”? Didn’t you hear me calling you? Of course you did.’
He shrugged.
‘What’s the matter?’
He shook his head.
Elizabeth crossed the room, and lit the fire, shivering. ‘You gave me a terrible fright,’ she said angrily. ‘What are you playing at? I thought something – something had happened.’
‘Well it hasn’t. I just feel bloody awful, that’s all. Don’t you ever feel bloody awful?’
Elizabeth sat by the fire in her coat and closed her eyes. I can’t live with this any more, she thought. I just can’t, and that’s all there is to it. She knew, then, that the best thing was to say nothing, but she was so angry, and so hungry, and Delia’s mocking tone was still ringing in her ears, and she said:
‘How do you think Stefan is feeling now? Don’t you think that perhaps he has just a tiny bit more right to indulge in all this melancholia and self-pity?’
‘Don’t preach! I do not want to have a bloody sermon.’
‘Why didn’t you answer me? Why? Didn’t you think for even a minute of what I might be thinking?’
‘I didn’t answer because I knew you were going to come in here and preach.’
‘Oh, my God.’ Elizabeth got up, and went out to the kitchen. Still in her coat, because the kitchen was always cold, she lit the oven, and turned it up to 9 and left the door open. She banged furiously in drawers and cupboards, and threw together a meal of sweet corn and scrambled eggs on toast and coffee. She ate it alone at the kitchen table, reading yesterday’s paper, and then she went to run a bath, and make the bed, and fill a hot-water bottle. She lay in the bath, waiting for Jerzy to come in from the sitting room and say he was sorry, and make it up, but he didn’t come, and she went to bed alone and fell asleep almost at once.
In the light from the platform, in the lights along the track, the rails gleamed, wet with frost melted by the last train, already beginning to freeze again, crystals glistening. In the watery yellow lakes of light along the embankment he could see stiff grass and weeds, rime-encrusted, winter’s graveyard, then darkness. His breath streamed into the cold as he paced up and down, past the damp wooden seats, the posters, the graffiti.
In Warsaw, in Gdańsk, in Kraków and Bydgoszcz, in cities and obscure small towns all over Poland, they were creeping out at night with hoarded paint, and secretly printed, thin posters, as they had done in thepwar. Then, they had scrawled an anchor out of the letters PW – w – you could do that at lightning speed and run, leaving the message: Polska Walcząca. Fighting Poland. Now, the anchor swung from beneath the S of Solidarność. To chalk or paint that on a street corner wall, to scribble swiftly: Winter is yours, spring will be ours – just to do that, they were risking everything.
Here, there was nothing to risk, no freedom to lose or fight for, and they played with aerosols, spraying the wall with obscenities, the phone numbers of prostitutes. No – sometimes there was something else, another two letters: NF. Once, a swastika. He had tried to cross that out, but it was done in thick black spray, and was impossible. Let it stay – let them find out here what it was like to live in an occupied country, to wake to find the phone lines cut, hear of arrests in the night, see from your window the tanks, crawling down the street.
He was at the foot of the steps leading up to the bridge, the ticket office and the Christmas lights in the shop windows beyond, and he heard voices. He turned abruptly, walked for the hundredth time back towards the end of the platform, and the warning: Passengers Must Not Go Beyond This Point. The last train of the evening was due in a few minutes: then they would close the barrier at the top of the steps, and no one else would come down.
He had been here for perhaps an hour. The raw air had seeped into his shoes, his coat and gloves; his feet and his face were almost numb, and he was glad. Over there, they had been herded into camps by the thousand; they stood stamping frantically in the snow, interned like criminals, like cattle, all the energy and hope of the summer of 1980 crushed and spat upon. Why should he be spared?
The line hummed, and he heard behind him the rattle of the southbound train. More footsteps came pounding down the steps, doors slammed, the train moved slowly past him and swung, carriage by carriage, into the distance. The last alighted passenger walked away; on the bridge, someone was drunkenly singing ‘Jingle Bells’. Then there was only the sound of the traffic, and no voices. He stood looking along the gleaming rails, and saw again the thousands of figures, stamping behind snow-covered barbed wire, and himself outside it, free, undeserving of freedom, belonging neither with them, in a doomed country, nor here, in a country of exile.
Above him the barrier creaked, and was slammed shut. The neon strips over the platform flickered and went out; then the light in the ticket office. A few stinging flakes of snow began to fall into the blackness – it did not feel as if it were going to be a generous fall, but perhaps, by tomorrow, the heath would be blanketed. He walked slowly along the platform, hearing his own steps as if, already, they did not matter, or were made by someone else who did not matter, and he made out the telegraph pole, and the outline of the notice. When he reached it, he used it to hold on to for a moment, to feel his way on to the slope of concrete leading down. It was only a short slope, and then he could feel gravel and frozen earth, before he stumbled over the first rail, and out on to the track.
Stefan? No.
Jerzy? No.
Jan.
For a while he just picked his way over the cold concrete sleepers between the first two rails. Within yards of leaving the platform, the track was lit only int
ermittently, by the street lamps and houses in the roads running between South Hampstead and Gospel Oak; he could hear himself panting, as he negotiated each sleeper, as if he were afraid, though he didn’t feel afraid, not out here. He felt driven. Beside him, the electrified rail stretched out like an uncoiled snake, a companion, ready for him when he chose. He didn’t choose yet. He stopped and felt in his pocket for his cigarettes and lit one, the tiny flame of the lighter very bright. He snapped it shut, and stood smoking, and went slowly on.
After the rally, unable to bear his wife and daughter watching him, worrying about him, any longer: unable to stand Stefan, the Pole from Poland who was sleeping with his daughter, observing him, baffled; unable to bear his own feelings, or to be among the crowd, with anyone, any longer, he had gone down into the tube and found a press of people queuing up at the ticket machines, pouring on to the platforms. He almost turned back, then, but there were people everywhere, above, below. He bought a fifty-pence ticket, just to get through the barrier, and walked blindly in the crush to a platform, he didn’t notice which.
He thought: I don’t have to go home, I don’t have to go to the office, I don’t have to go anywhere. But he had to go somewhere. He thought: I have no one to talk to, not without frightening them, or seeing them pity me. He caught the first train that came into the platform.
He stood in a smoker, jammed up against the handrail, dozens of people all round him, as the train moved into the tunnel. It was very hot, the heating on full blast, and airless, and the train moved slowly, creaking. Everyone was talking about the rally: why weren’t they all on the march? He strained to hear a Polish voice, and could not.
At Bond Street, more got on, forcing him back and away from the doors. If he wanted to get out now in a hurry, he couldn’t. He began to sweat. At Oxford Circus the doors could hardly open for the people already in the carriage: on the platform, another wave surged forward, pushing and elbowing – people who’d already been to the Embassy, perhaps, and who now were going home. Jan coughed thickly, feeling for his cigarettes, just to be sure. The train moved off again, even more slowly; it felt as if it were being dragged down by the weight of all the passengers, too many, far too many; if there were an accident, or if for some reason they simply had to stop …
