by Frank Tuohy
THE ICE SAINTS
Frank Tuohy
Start Reading
About this Book
About the Author
Table of Contents
www.apollo-classics.com
About The Ice Saints
The drawing-room was entirely English. The Office of Works had provided deep armchairs, a sofa you could have slept on, though of course nobody had ever done so, and a low glass-topped table.
A young English woman arrives in the Polish People’s Republic to visit her older sister, who married a Polish soldier after the war and disappeared into a life behind the Iron Curtain. This award-winning novel of the harsh cruelties and day-to-day deprivations of life in Communist Poland is told with truth, wit and understanding.
Introduction by Neal Ascherson
To my mother
Contents
Welcome Page
About The Ice Saints
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Author’s Note
About Frank Tuohy
About the Introducer
Endpapers
About the cover and endpapers
More from Apollo
About Apollo
Copyright
Introduction
‘Today was one of the chill weeping days in the early part of May, the days of the Ice Saints, St Pancras, St Servace and St Boniface, whose arrival affords a reminder that all is by no means well with the year. If you had confidence in the Spring, your trust was misplaced; it will let you down.’
Poland in about 1960, the site of Frank Tuohy’s novel, was precisely a country where green shoots of hope had been blackened by the unexpected return of frost. In 1956, after enduring years of Stalinist terror, the Poles – or more accurately, a rebellious faction within the Communist Party – had defied a threat of Soviet invasion and thrown off direct control by Moscow. This ‘Polish October’ led into a brief, ecstatic period in which censorship was lifted, the secret police (or some of them) were disbanded, and travel to and from the Western world became easier. Left-wingers across the world hoped that other Communist parties would now take ‘the Polish Road to Socialism’, combining an enlightened Marxism with democratic freedoms.
But ‘confidence in the Spring’ was misplaced. The late fifties was the time when I first got to know Poland and when Frank Tuohy arrived from Britain as a lecturer at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. By then, the Ice Saints were hard at work. Censorship had returned, the brilliant liberalizers in the Party had lost their jobs and the secret policemen – once reduced to private-enterprise blackmail in hotel bars for a living – were back with their files and microphones. The Party, under Władysław Gomułka, was firmly in control again.
And yet the afterglow of ‘the October’ remained. Poles could now talk to Western foreigners without fear of arrest. The arts (film and theatre especially) were still bold and defiant and the press could still be critical of Soviet and Polish policies – up to a point. The Catholic Church was given back its privileges. Some attempt was made to redirect the economy away from heavy industry towards the needs of ordinary people.
All this encouraged a minority to hope, to convince themselves that things really were continuing to get better in spite of the ‘Ice Saints’ frost, that the best of ‘the October’ would reassert itself. I was one of those optimists. It took me at least another ten years to accept that Polish Communism was unreformable. Frank Tuohy never had such illusions. He seems to have held no strong political views. But he saw Poland through the eyes of an English liberal intellectual, and what he saw was a crushed society living in squalor and shortages, still traumatized by the wartime nightmares of Nazi and Soviet occupation, blocking off reality with fantasies of national self-pity, conditioned to suspect everyone as a potential informer. The fact that the Poland he encountered remained so much freer and livelier than it had been under the Stalinist tyranny did not impress him. The residue of poverty, humiliation and fear was bad enough.
And yet this novel shows that Tuohy was fascinated by the irrepressible vigour, the terrific cultural bumptiousness of the Polish spirit. He contrasts it here to the English upper class of the 1950s, presented in cruelly observed detail as arrogant, effete and hypocritical. The Ice Saints begins in the drawing room of the British Embassy in Warsaw, where two strains of snobbery are competing. The Ambassador’s frightful wife (‘Nanny’s such a fearful fascist reactionary...’) is flirting over vodka with Adam Karpinski, a handsome Polish intellectual who at once treasures the privilege of being a regular Embassy guest, and gleefully hoards the absurdities of English behaviour. Adam is himself a stack of ambiguous loyalties. He is well in with the remnants of the aristocracy; he is passionately patriotic and wittily contemptuous of the Communist regime. And yet – as the novel will reveal – he is brutally ambitious, and he is paying for his access to the Embassy in the almost inevitable way: by an arrangement with the secret police.
This is a story about two sets of blighted hope. Rose Nicholson arrives in Poland to stay with her older sister Janet, who married a Polish soldier in wartime and now lives in a grim provincial town with their son Tadeusz. Witek, the husband, comes from a poor background and is desperate to become the head of the English department at the town’s university. Suppressing doubts, he has joined the Party in order to further his career. The real purpose of Rose’s visit is to break the news that Tadeusz, a teenager, has been left a large sum of money by an aunt in England. Rose has no conception of what impact this may have in Poland. One way of reading this novel is to see it as a tale about the way that a sum of money – not a pile of cash, but a shape-shifting Golem of ever-changing implications – can destroy, confuse and obliterate as often as it enriches. It’s an insight which seems to have faded out of British literature towards the end of the twentieth century, as the possession of sudden money came to be associated only, and crudely, with greed and celebrity.
But this was 1950s Poland. The holding of unreported hard currency was a crime. Transferred foreign money would be confiscated by compulsory exchange into useless zloties at an absurdly low rate. Or it could be used at Pewex hard currency shops to buy unobtainable luxuries like Nescafé, Dutch tobacco, American chocolate or the bottle of Paris perfume which could persuade that woman in the housing office to put your name higher on the waiting list for a flat. It could even purchase a small car. On the other hand, sudden wealth could be toxic. Families could turn resentful and grasping; neighbours would grow envious and suspicious. Rose and Janet, the two English sisters, try to keep the news from Witek, but when he finds out he is panic-stricken. The Party will accuse him of illegal currency hoarding; he will lose all hopes of promotion and even his present job:‘You ruin my poor life’.
Rose believes that she can rescue her nephew Tadeusz from ‘this appalling place’, and give him a proper life in England. Witek insists that things are getting better, tries not to see the corruption around him, and trusts that his Party loyalty will be rewarded. Both will be humiliated, as both are brought to admit that their hopes are delusions. Frank Tuohy’s novel, first published in 1964, belongs to a grey mood in English fiction, as an ‘only connect’ literature of optimism about personal relationships darkened to a more ‘French’ perception: that individuals were impenetrably isolated from one another. On the last page, after the departing Rose has failed to connect with her sister, her nephew, her brother-in-law and a treacherous Polish lover, she leaves ‘a whole landscape waiting for explanation’.
And yet The Ice Saints does explain Polish landscapes, geographical and personal, with harsh accuracy. Now that Kraków is a sparkling tourist honeypot, it’s hard but healthy to remember Tuohy’s comfortless, stranded old city where cobwebby princesses clung to ancient snobberies and martyrologies. ‘We are just survivors, by mistake. Our neighbours always wanted to destroy us and next time they will do it properly.’ But with this self pity went wild high spirits, an underlying resilience. In a wonderful account of intellectuals at a party in Kraków, Tuohy remarks how these elderly figures ‘did their best to involve themselves at every opportunity with the arguments of the age... Because of this, though their lives were extremely hard, they were never bored.’
There has been no shortage of books – memoirs and fiction – about the brutality and unreason of life in Communist Europe. The Ice Saints, in contrast, is something different, rare and valuable: an outsider’s take on the compromises with power undertaken by decent people – some skilfully managed, some disgraceful or tragic. Current Polish governments affect to believe that Communist Poland was a binary thing: either you were a stainless Catholic patriot or you were a corrupt tool of the ‘foreign Bolshevik creed of hate’. Frank Tuohy knew better, which is one reason why this novel has become once more important.
Tuohy spent most of his life abroad, a British Council lecturer in English who lived in Brazil, Finland, Argentina, Portugal and Japan, as well as in Poland. He died in 1999, an aloof man who wrote much less than his admirers hoped for. The Ice Saints was not his first fiction. But it produced a critical sensation when it appeared in 1964; Tuohy was briefly ‘discovered’ as one of the most talented English writers. And yet, although it won the James Tait Black best-novel prize that year, this was the last novel that he completed, and in recent decades it has been almost completely forgotten. In part, this must be because the East European world it describes vanished so rapidly and completely after the democratic upheavals of 1989. But it is also because the way he wrote fell out of fashion.
Tuohy wrote to please himself. He had an extraordinary ear for class-inflected dialogue, a collector’s eye for the small details of a person or a place, a rare sense of the music of words. All that can be found in The Ice Saints. But he pays little attention to the orthodoxies of a modern creative writing course. When he feels like halting the flow to discuss an ethical dilemma or to categorize somebody’s motives, he does so. He changes narrator points of view and pops in and out of characters’ heads with abandon. Neither does he tie up all loose ends: for example, a character called ‘Mickey’ is twice mentioned in this novel but the reader never discovers who he is. This is not poor editing. Tuohy means the reader to be too alert to the story to stop for an answer, to see these little puzzles out of the corner of an eye and follow on.
He elides information which another writer would feel obliged to offer – especially about sex. A reviewer of The Ice Saints once complained that a crucial seduction – central to the whole narrative – is simply skipped: we see Rose on the edge of it, and then glowing with love afterwards, but nothing in between. Again, Tuohy knows what he is doing. Admittedly, it’s clear from his other fiction that he didn’t care to write about sex, perhaps for personal reasons. Instead, he is asking the readers to use imagination, indicating elegantly how they might fill the gap he has left. And it works.
A Cold War novel? The Ice Saints is much more than that. It is a severe lesson in empathy, about the impact of well-meaning strangers on the ‘unfortunates’ they propose to rescue or relieve. Witek looks at Rose’s clothes and belongings strewn about his flat, and sees that ‘these extensions of Rose into the surrounding area were what made her remarkable. Here nobody’s possessions had any personality any more, so that where you lived became no more informative than the mark of your head on the pillow’. The Ice Saints shows that Europe in those decades was divided not only by wire and walls but by a historic failure of imagination.
Neal Ascherson, 2017
Chapter One
The drawing-room was entirely English. The Office of Works had provided deep armchairs, a sofa you could have slept on, though of course nobody had ever done so, and a low glass-topped table. The only exotic things lay on this table: a bowl of arctic anemones, and three or four consecutive copies of The Times and the Guardian for a week in April, 1960. These had recently been tom from their postal wrappers and were still half-unrolled.
Between chintz curtains the windows looked out hopefully, as though on to herbaceous borders planted ready for the spring. But it was like being back-stage, where the scenery comes to an end. There was an iron fence topped with barbed wire, and a wall of yellow, unpointed brickwork, which was beginning to crumble away. The street was paved with stone and opposite stood a ruin, pockmarked by gunfire from long ago. At some distance were large grey buildings and over them a greyer sky.
The sky is enormous in those parts. Its huge arch covers the city and the great river and the flat sandy plain on which pinewoods and heath and infertile fields stretch out as far as the horizon. Patches of exactly the same landscape can be seen at intervals from Aldershot and Camberley, across Belgium and Pomerania and up to the Russian frontier. It is military country, beloved by the organizers of manoeuvres and battles. Its dry gullies are as convenient for firing squads as for lovers; its bracken and heather are more accustomed to mortar fire than to the minor conflagrations caused by picnickers, and its deadly fauna include the adder and the unexploded grenade.
Pine logs from these forests were crackling in the drawing- room fireplace and a young woman was standing in front of it, talking.
This young woman stood on the outsides of her feet with her hands clasped behind her, as though she were still obeying a forgotten governess’s injunction to straighten her shoulders. She was ungainly, badly dressed and her voice was shrill and discordant, but she had a perfect skin and a rather beautiful face. She could only have been what she was, a confident member of the British ruling class.
‘Thank God you’ve come, both of you, I must say. Because I’m here all alone until Mark comes back. He’ll be late because of this girl, this friend of his sister’s we’re looking after. Do please sit down, Miss Er – Mark’s gone to the airport to pick her up. Does that sound nasty, Adam? You speak English so much better than we all do. Does that sound nasty when I say Mark’s gone to the airport to pick her up?’
‘Alexandra, it sounds wonderful when you are saying it.’
‘Hum!’
She had asked for the clumsy compliment, yet seemed bored by it.
The man who had spoken was over middle size; he had black curly hair, a square face, with a nose which curved up like a saddle. When he smiled he showed a steel tooth, and sometimes his pale eyes gave the false impression that he wore contact lenses.
‘Look, do come nearer the fire, Miss Er—’
‘Handisyde.’
‘What are you going to drink?’
‘I’d just love a real Polish Vodka.’
‘Adam will have a dry martini because he always does.Adam, give Miss Handisyde a real Polish Vodka, will you?’ Alexandra returned to her stance in front of the hearth. ‘How have you been getting on, I’m sure Adam has been filling your ears with
all sorts of subversion.’
The guest, having got through a smoker’s cough, bowed her short-cut, greying head as though she were beginning to recite: ‘Well, this has really been a most wonderful experience. I don’t think I’ve ever met people who seem so’ – she gestured with rough hands – ‘I can’t express how much—’
Alexandra looked down at her cheerfully. ‘I know. I’m just like that. But I’m sure you’ll find it’s quite all right the moment you get back home. Look at me. When I’m here I can hardly think of anything to say at all, but the moment we got to London at Christmas the whole thing became absolutely and completely clear to me. I mean, I simply felt I was a one-girl bureau, don’t you know, of Iron Curtain affairs. Of course I do speak the language much better than Mark does, and that does help.’
‘For instance, we spent some time this morning with a really interesting man. I’m afraid I don’t quite remember his name. Adam darling, what was that man’s name again?’
Adam Karpinski was standing between the women, watching them with attention and wonder, as if they had been two fireworks, two set-pieces, which he had managed to set off in conjunction. Neither, he thought as his gaze moved from one to the other, could have fulfilled the exotic roles he had given them with more perfect timing and intonation. Only his glee at this must be always unshared, because there were few people around who spoke and appreciated English as well as he did.
‘Which man do you mean, Margaret?’
‘The man at that place we went to this morning. With those column things. They weren’t columns really,’ she said to Alexandra.
‘I’m sure they weren’t.’
‘What was that place called, Adam?’
‘Which place, Margaret?’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter really. But it was fascinating, I was most impressed. I intend in my report to emphasize most, most – You can’t believe it, when you think.’
