by Frank Tuohy
Half-hidden by the massive pillars that supported the vaults, five young men sat on a platform playing jazz. Abstract paintings hung on the whitewashed walls, amateurish and probably self-mocking, as though whoever painted them had not considered them anything more than a necessary gesture for the place and the time. Everything here was a gesture, the jazz, the pictures, the Western clothes and hairstyles. In recent years such things had become officially tolerated but somehow unrenewable. The students, however, were always being renewed and nearly a whole University generation had passed since the October revolt. Some of the faces in the cellar had the candour of those to whom everything here was still exciting. They had the rare charm of the young who do not pretend they have seen and done all this before, and their liveliness made you happy to look at them.
Derek gave Rose a glass of Jugoslav wine. ‘I can’t think what’s happened to old Mirek.’
In the presence of his friends, he backed away from her a little and she was left isolated with the glass of wine, trying to make it last, while the girls waited for her to manifest herself in some typical way or other. The blank-faced Wanda even came up and fingered the woollen dress Rose was wearing, at which the small group was rocked by giggles. But no conversation ensued.
After another conference with Wanda, whom Rose was beginning to regard with some antipathy, Derek asked Rose to dance. On the little dance-floor their progress was halting, because the jazzmen’s intense attitude to their task led them into self-intoxicated ‘breaks’ of great complexity. Everyone stood still and listened. During one of these interludes a tall man, with short blond hair brushed forward, came and stood beside them. He placed a large hand on Derek’s shoulder. Derek flushed with pleasure. His face always transmitted everything he was thinking.
‘Miroslaw Sypniewski.’
The young man bowed and brought his heels together. He kissed Rose’s hand.
‘This is Mirek. He speaks perfect English. Our worries are over. Let’s all go and have a drink.’
The three of them sat at a small table to drink more of the mouth-drying red wine.
‘This character here, honestly, I can tell you it was quite something to discover him in a town like this. He’s the perfect introduction to life here. If you want to know absolutely anything, Mirek’s your man. Yes, sir. He’s a real fixer. Correct?’
The newcomer did not answer. He flicked sly, rather small green eyes from one to the other, while his meaty hands were crumpled in front of his face and his body was shaken by the unvoiced giggles and breathy grunting noises which Poles emit at times of surprise and amusement.
‘But you’re a student, aren’t you?’ Rose did not want either of the young men too sure of themselves.
‘Yes, I study Sanskrit.’
‘Oh.’
‘One must continue to be a student, it is much the best way to live. The Sanskrit course is rather a long one. Perhaps also I am often failing in the exams.’
‘He thinks they’ll take his scholarship away,’ Derek said helpfully.
‘At present that does not much matter if I may stay at the University. You see, I earn by giving lessons in English. Perhaps my English is not good enough but I must work.’
He presented this as his fate: he did not think he should. With his height and looks, there was about him certainly a sort of damaged authority, as though fallen from antediluvian glory; this separated him from the others in the place who were dressed, like him, in dirty black sweaters and tubular trousers.
Derek, who was staring at them both with the pleasure of the successful go-between, now became conscious of the girl Wanda standing at about three yards distance. He shifted around undecidedly, then left them.
For a while Mirek was silent, with a stillness not of timidity but of speculation. He did not look at Rose; he was absorbing her presence by a kind of mental deep-breathing.
When at last he spoke, he was still formal. ‘I am told this is like a cave in Paris. You think so?’
‘Oh no.’
‘The students will be disappointed to hear that.’
‘The faces are quite different here. More hopeful.’
‘Is that so? I wonder why?’ He looked behind him at the dancing couples as though he expected to see something different. ‘They must be very stupid then. What can they be hopeful about?’
‘Perhaps they are glad to be students. Perhaps they wouldn’t have been students before the war.’
‘And now they are students what can they hope for? What can I hope for? Please tell me.’
She laughed. ‘You tell me. I’ve only been here a week.’
‘I can tell you. I hope for nothing at all.’
Against the blank stare with which he said this, she was silent, but since Mirek belonged to a class or a way of life which might sooner or later include Tadeusz, she felt concerned and interested.
The music stopped. Derek relinquished his partner, and came back to the table:
‘Why aren’t you dancing? Slackers!’
‘Would you like to dance?’
‘Not really,’ Rose said. ‘Please go on about the students.’
‘What’s all this about the students? I think they’re terrific.’
Mirek looked at Derek with tolerance. ‘For Mr Loasby it is very good here because of the vodka and the nice Polish girls. But Polish people are always taking this for granted even in the worst times. Not like England where you have Puritanism and are against pleasure.’
Derek nodded vigorously but Rose said: ‘That’s not really true, you know.’
‘I think so. My uncle was there in the war.’
‘Things have changed.’
‘Perhaps.’ Rose had got to know that this word expressed strong disbelief. ‘But in Poland we have drink and making love all the time. We are always looking for something which our history will not give us. We will never get it and so I think the students are stupid to look hopeful.’
‘Would you leave here if you could?’
Derek looked embarrassed at this: His eyes fled from one to the other. Mirek blew out smoke and said: ‘I cannot ever leave Poland.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I was in prison.’
Rose blushed. For her the word connected still with guilt. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t mention it.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘That is why I am older than the other students. I did not really fail some examinations.’
‘Oh, good.’
She wondered what it was correct to think, and what Derek thought. If Mirek was really his friend, he must condemn this iniquity in a place he so much approved of. But perhaps the lurid fact of gaol gave Mirek an added attraction.
‘You see why it is better for me to live here than Warsaw. In winter I am giving English lessons to my colleagues and in summer I am taking foreign visitors round factories. I am a very good guide. I have all of statistics at the tip of my tongue. I know where the canteen will be built and the washroom and the flats of workers. I know the production figures for next year—’
‘But not last year?’
‘Next year is so very much better. I tell the visitors all that and they are much interested. They return to their countries pleased and frightened a little, which is a nice feeling to have.’
‘Why can’t you tell them the truth? They’d be just as interested.’
‘This is my job. I do not wish to go back where I came from just because I tell two Dutch journalists or an English Trades Unionist something they are incapable to understand. However they try, if they try till they explode, they will never understand what it was like living under Hitler and Stalin and what it is going to be like again. This is like talking through a wall of glass. Even if our factories will work just as well as yours, do you think the wall of glass will go away?’
‘I suppose not,’ Rose said. ‘All the same, if you won’t tell the truth to Dutch journalists, how do we know you tell it to us?’
Derek squirmed again at this, but
almost at once, another of the girls appeared beside him. Mirek watched them go, laughed to himself, and then turned again his look of absorptive charm.
She was not going to be put off. ‘Well, suppose you do tell us the truth, why?’
‘Derek is my friend. He must learn.’
‘And me?’
‘You are involved a little, I think. You have relatives here. You are not dangerous.’
Rose finished her glass of wine. ‘Life here doesn’t look the same to everyone, you know.’
‘I know, I know.’ It was something he had heard too often before. He held up a large hand, placatory but at the same time repressive. ‘People forget. Or they are too young, they have nothing to compare. I am old enough. I remember how we found one day that the whole world had turned grey, grey streets, grey houses, grey faces, grey girls. The war didn’t do that and statistics will not change it. Stalin did it. It was like a bomb. It was his fall-out. We are trying to tidy up but the greyness has got into everything. I will fetch another drink.’
She watched Mirek return with two brimming glasses. In front of him the crowd separated without being asked to: you realized that in the most democratic society people must be born knowing where to put their hands and feet, possessing grace, this word for a physical thing which has always the shadow of a religious meaning.
Rose’s brother Nicholas had possessed it, and now perhaps Tadeusz. But the ambitious ones are people like Witek Rudowski who have always to struggle to make the events of a year or a moment turn out correctly.
Arguing from Witek’s side, Rose said: ‘My nephew is going to be an engineer. Surely he won’t see everything grey?’
‘Don’t you know what a dictatorship means?’
‘You think nobody can be happy. But I think he can be.’
‘Who?’
‘My Polish nephew,’ she said patiently. She wanted him to agree with her about something, it did not matter what. His reckless way of talking had been intended to attract her, and perhaps had done this, but it really was not worth his while to put himself into danger.
‘I think he can be happy,’ she said again.
‘In the mountains. The first time he has a woman. When he gets really drunk at somebody’s name-day party. Is that enough? Perhaps for the English. We had better ask Mr Derek.’
Loasby was jigging past them with a third girl. His forelock was flapping up and down and his face was radiant. It was difficult not to take him as an example of someone falling into exactly the place intended.
Rose agreed with Mirek: she wanted more than that for Tadeusz. For the last moments she had been thinking of Tadeusz here in three years’ time as one of these students, even as Mirek perhaps. But, with Tadeusz’s chances of escape, would anyone here have chosen this? Almost certainly not. But would they have been right?
Mirek watched her perplexed face. ‘Well?’
‘I think you’re very depressing.’ The inadequacy of this remark emerged charming and shrill. He accepted it with glee.
Rose’s attempt at optimism had been exactly what he wanted. She realized this now. The sort of things you could say, the sort of answers it was incumbent on you to make, were drastically limited. In the end from courtesy and kindness you were the sort of person they wanted you to be. You kept their argument going by always losing it.
‘Let’s go away from here,’ he said. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’
‘All right.’
They left. They did not say good-bye to Derek.
Chapter Fourteen
The nights are quiet in Biala Gora, which then enters the pre-industrial age. Even on Saturday nights the drunks, though ragged and fierce, are quiet as they stumble along in their happiness. A faint light hangs over the factories and occasionally blue flashes from the tram wires illuminate the lower sky, but otherwise it is very dark. When a horse and cart go by the hoofbeats echo into completely empty streets. Few people hear them. In grim last-century houses the inhabitants lie packed together in exhausted sleep, three and four to a room.
Rose and Mirek walked away from the Town Hall, rather separated and pacing rhythmically as people do who do not yet know where they are going. The night was warm with spring, but Rose shrugged her coat round her neck. Large and placid, Mirek still walked apart.
On the embankment of the river street-lamps shone through the branches of trees, and along the twigs leaf-buds were beginning to show like knots. They stopped walking. He stood, a tall shadow in a dirty raincoat, and gave off melancholy in waves. How sad that the race should still produce people like him, when what was needed was someone more compact, as it were more resilient to atmospheric pressure.
‘Let’s look at the river.’
It flowed in a gulf in front of them, black and greasy. Unhindered by buildings the wind brought a wild stench, like a blow on the face. It caught at their throats, roughened by the wine they had drunk in the Students’ Club. The girl bent her head and choked. He came towards her.
‘God, what is that?’
‘It is from the cellulose factory outside the town. By night you can smell it a long way.’
She hurried across the bridge and he followed with long strides.
‘It’s terrible. How can people live here?’
‘They are accustomed. I think it is much worse in the factory but that is one of the problems of reconstruction.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It affects their brains and they become mad. This is an important industry and we make cellulose very cheaply. We cannot afford safety devices. And you see in this country people work where they are told. The workers are in power. They cannot strike against themselves, can they? That would be ridiculous.’
He spoke with polite ferocity, as though making a quick winning move in some competitive game.
‘Has this been going on long?’
‘Some years. But you see the river is quite poisoned.’
‘Polluted. It’s awful.’
The dead stream would always be flowing through Biala Gora. Rose knew the obsession which Mirek was trying to make her share: that nothing would ever go right here, whatever they said, for hundreds of years.
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘What?’
‘About the factory.’
‘It is what people say. I do not take visitors over this factory so I cannot know.’
‘Can nobody find out for certain?’
‘If they did? We may not write it in a newspaper. If it is not written about, how can people feel anything about it? With a censorship like ours we are not permitted a sense of injustice.’
‘Someone must know the truth.’
‘Why? Truth is for Western journalists and they do very well without it. We don’t want it. We want fantasies.’
They arrived at the housing estate on the edge of the town, and the cinderpath leading to the Rudowskis’ flat.
She turned towards him with a helpless gesture.
‘Don’t worry. You do not have to stay here. And perhaps we have got used to it.’
‘Will it ever stop?’
‘Nothing ever stops.’
‘Damn.’ She was wrestling ineffectively with the key, which fitted badly into the lock. She wanted him to go away; in spite of his healthy appearance, he was ill with unhappiness.
‘Let me help.’
The lock yielded to him in one turn. He was very strong, breathing heavily there beside her in the dark. He put one hand on the corner of her shoulder.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Sorry. Good night.’
Chapter Fifteen
In the club, Derek Loasby was still dancing with Wanda. He pulled his arm tightly round her and looked down at her round head, which she had just had cropped short like a boy’s.
She and some of her friends had copied this hairstyle from an American actress in a French film. This morning at his Polish lesson, Miss Barcik had told him it reminded her of the Camps, this new generation, she wailed, was repudiating absolute
ly everything about their parents, the suffering as much as the ideals. Derek thought about this for a little without agreeing and without being able to make up his mind. Then he wondered where Miss Barcik had seen him and Wanda together. It was not important but it gave him the feeling of being watched.
He himself rather disliked Wanda’s hair. It increased her disconcerting air of detachment, and so did her sudden blank stares and the little yawns she gave, as unrepented as a cat’s. True he had possessed her (on a Sunday afternoon in the Students’ Hostel, her room-mates being at the cinema) but she still seemed only to possess herself.
Suddenly he noticed that Rose and Mirek had gone.
Derek felt deserted. All at once he was sure that he had greatly overestimated the charm and interest of the young people who surrounded him. You had to take their goodwill on trust, for all the time there were muffled giggles, comments you didn’t quite catch, and the sense that their very enthusiasm was isolating you. He held tightly on to Wanda while once again they circled the floor in and out of the stone pillars and past the squealing jazz group. He tried to think about tonight.
On his arrival at Biala Gora, he had been given a room at the Students’ Hostel. After two weeks of discomfort and good intentions, he had deserted it. Now he lodged with a lawyer, his wife, their daughters and a cousin or two: the Tulewicz family had contracted, like a crab fitting all its legs into a rock-cleft, in order to make room for Mr Derek Loasby, and he was never sure how many of them slept in the room next to his. Whenever he entered it, it was perfectly tidy, with heavily-fringed table cloths and potted plants and the usual row of divans round the walls.
Tonight he knew the flat would be empty and the stack of skis gone from the hallway, for the Tulewiczes were away in the mountains for the last of the snow. But while he was shepherding Wanda through the door he felt a qualm. It was like a blasphemy, this rape of the Catholic family atmosphere. And supposing one of the cousins should choose to return earlier? It would not seriously matter for himself but for Wanda it might.
