Field Study (15 page)

– I was angry, I suppose you could say.

That someone had taken such a risk with his life. But then, he says there was little room for anger amidst all the platitudes. You were there to kill or be killed. Both, most
likely. You saw death every day, and that it was random. No reason or pattern: most died, some didn’t. He couldn’t even say for certain that they were lied to about the tanks. At most, they had been allowed to find comfort in the rumours.

– I just wanted no more part of it.

Fran sits up straight. He squints out of the window briefly and then says he had no sense of just cause, no idea at the time.

– What the Germans had been doing.

And then he shakes his head.

– Listen to me. Making excuses.

Even if he had known then, he doesn’t think it would have stopped him.

– It was a cool calculation.

If they were going to send him up a hill to die, he would find a way round it.

It got dark. Neither of them could sleep properly. Fran remembers seeing Butler standing on the terrace looking up the line of the ridge, trying to guess where their battalion was. That they filled their water bottles together at the well, took more wine for the journey.

It was just after midday when they found the camp, and the men were eating. They hadn’t talked about what they
would say, if they would try to justify or lie. He remembers Butler smiling.

– Temporarily AWOL, sir. Back now.

The look of disbelief on Ash’s face.

– Disgust, too. Like he hated us.

They were transferred, separately. North Africa, again, but not on leave this time: hard labour. Butler was court-martialled, Fran discharged, a few weeks after war’s end. Dishonourable.

Deserter. Not shot like they were in the Great War. Fran remembers the other men’s faces, when they turned up again. Is sure many of them thought they should have faced the firing squad.

– The road was mined, you see.

Five more men dead, and he and Butler had missed it by going cross country.

Fran pauses there, blinking slowly. I think he might have finished, but I don’t want to be the first to break the silence, so I wait. I can’t see behind his glasses if he is crying. I wonder if I want him to be. And then why, exactly.

– Three from the first truck, two from the second. The one I was in.

Fran looks at me. Holds his eyes steady on mine while he
tells me he is sorry they died. That he has thought of them often: when he was in prison and in all the decades since. But stronger than the regret, even now, is the relief that he wasn’t among them.

Silesia, Poland: 1996

Ewa is early. Adela said she was to wait for them on the main road out of town and they would pick her up at ten o’clock, where the concrete was laid for the service station the summer before last. Ewa has six weeks’ clothing zipped into a bag and twenty minutes to wait. Here the houses peter out into the surrounding country: heavy fields and a thin row of trees at the near horizon. The spring has been wet and the weeds grow thick, green-dark in the cracks of the unused forecourt. Few cars pass, a few people gather at the junction, watching for the morning coach that comes and then goes. The people say their goodbyes and hellos, linger in small groups, disperse. Ewa stands alone, on the other side of the road, waiting.

East of the German border now, she will be south of Berlin soon, where the ground is more sand than soil. Asparagus land. Even in the city, Ewa knows, you can feel it under your feet: the grit that blows across the back-courts and pavements, the city streets. She has not been there, but she has heard tell, has been picturing it for weeks, ever since Adela suggested the job. Spring harvest: asparagus for the German capital. Six weeks of bending and cutting. Seven days, long hours, no matter. The more work, the more money, the better. And a two-month visa.

Adela is late, Ewa sits down on her bag. At the far end of the street she sees her sister coming, and that she has Jacek
with her. Ewa groans as she sees the bicycle round the corner: Dorota pedalling, Jacek on the handlebars, sullen. Today nothing has gone according to plan.

– Adela called.

Dorota shouts as soon as she is in earshot.

– They have to change one of the wheels on the car. They’ll get here as soon as they can.

Ewa stands as her sister pulls up in front of her. She tries to catch her son’s eye, but he slips off the handlebars, keeps his face turned away. Ewa has said goodbye to him once already this morning, thinks Dorota has brought him deliberately, to make the whole thing harder.

– We wanted to keep you company.

Ewa nods and Jacek takes the bike and cycles a wide arc around his mother and aunt. Across the broken concrete of the forecourt, out into the road and back, circling. Legs too short for the saddle, he stands on the pedals, arms reaching forward and up to the handlebars. Ewa speaks to him as he turns.

– Just this month and next month, remember, then the rent is paid and I’ll come home. And you know, maybe we can even get a bicycle. A bicycle in time for summer, Je
yku.

He pedals on and on. Ewa turns to her sister and Dorota kisses her, but her grip on her arm is tight.

– I know what you are doing.

Ewa blinks. She kisses her sister back. No hiding anything from her.

– You went to see Piotr’s mother.

Ewa wonders, briefly, if it is worth denying, worth lying, and then Jacek passes.

– You went to see the old sow.

– Don’t talk about your grandmother like that, Jacek.

Ewa looks from her son to Dorota, who shrugs.

– I saw you there. This morning.

Ewa sighs.

– And so you told Jacek, of course.

– I’m not going to lie to him.

– Whose son is he?

– She’ll be my mama while my mama is in Germany.

Jacek is still cycling. Dorota blushes. Ewa laughs.

– And you told him that, too, I suppose?

The two young women look at each other. They both have red hair, dyed red-brown and grown long around their pale faces.

– I want to go, Dorota. I want to earn some money for us, for me and Jacek. And I want to go to Berlin, too. See Piotr. See what he says.

The boy cycles up and down the empty forecourt behind them. Picking up speed, slamming on the brakes, trying to make the back wheel skid out on the concrete. Every so often he succeeds and then he shouts to his mother and she waves. The rest of the time she talks or stands in silence with her sister. They share a cigarette and when they speak, they mirror each other’s movements. Shoulders shrugging in emphasis, thumbnail rubbing a lower lip.

– She wouldn’t give me his address in Berlin, the old sow. She didn’t even ask after Jacek. Just nothing, you know.

Ewa takes an envelope out of her bag, shakes it so her sister can hear the coins inside, and then describes how her father-in-law threw it down to her as she was leaving. She was on the path up to the road when she heard him whistling, saw him lean out of the toilet window in his vest.

– I didn’t even know the old man was at home. Must have been in the bathroom the whole time. The only room in that flat with a lock, you know. And now it’s just him and the old girl, I think he shuts himself away in there.

Jacek shouts, Dorota waves, Ewa smiles, opens the envelope, shows her sister: thirty-three Deutschmarks and Piotr’s address.

– I don’t think it’s a good idea, Ewa.

– I know you don’t.

__

Adela arrives, an hour later than planned. Small car loaded with suitcases and boxes, other asparagus cutters: Adela’s brother Marek and two cousins. They make room for Ewa on the back seat while she pushes her bag into the boot.

Her son stops cycling and watches her.

– I’m going now, Je
yku. Time to say goodbye again.

He stands astride Dorota’s bicycle on the other side of the forecourt, at the far edge where concrete gives way to mud, then field. Ewa waves to him but he doesn’t come over. Stock still, blue T-shirt and long pale hair. He stares and Ewa calls, laughing at first, but then saying come on, and please.

–
Jacek. Please?

There is a short silence in which they both stand and blink, mother and son. And then Jacek turns, drops the bicycle and runs. Fast, without looking back, disappearing as the road curves south into the town. Leaving Ewa with the abandoned bicycle, and the clicking, spinning motion of its upturned wheel.

__

In the car, the others are kind. Pressed together, they pretend not to notice that Ewa is crying. She stares out at
the fields passing, Poland going, Germany coming, feels the tears dry on her cheeks, tight and itchy. Only another hour or two, and they will be on the farm already, and tomorrow they will start working. She will earn some money and then she’ll go looking. In her pocket, Ewa has a Berlin address. No phone number. And it’s good that way. She doesn’t want to call him. No warning.

__

Dorota is tempted, but she doesn’t tell Jacek what his mother will do when she gets her wages. Over there, on the other side of the border. Even though it takes her two hours to find him after Ewa has gone and he shows no sign of being sorry. Even though she has to keep the salon closed all morning because of him and the customers are angry. Even when he kicks the table legs and refuses his dinner, and the already small kitchen becomes much smaller, and her husband Tadeusz picks up his plate and goes to eat standing outside in the stairwell. Even then Dorota respects her sister’s wishes and bites her tongue.

When Piotr left, he never told her, never said that he wanted to go. Dorota has never known whether to believe this entirely, but it’s what Ewa always insisted. She turned up at their place with Jacek and two bags one morning, told them Piotr had been gone for three days already.

Ewa didn’t cry, though Jacek did all the time. For weeks it was just about impossible to get a word out of her. All
she said was that he’d written a letter: the postmark was still Poland, but one of the towns at the border. Inside he told them he was gone, but not where to or how long he would stay there.

– He never said why? He never gave you the least indication?

Ewa put her hands over her face when Dorota started shouting, spoke from beneath her palms in a quiet monotone. She checked through his things, she said, while she was packing. In the wardrobe, the drawers, the laundry basket, under the mattress. She couldn’t find anything, and only one change of clothes was missing.

He’d lost his job, of course, the winter before, but then so had well over a hundred others in the town when the bottling plant closed. They hadn’t gone, at least not so soon, and at least when they did, they sent money to their families, promised to come home. It was not an easy time, not for anyone, but they’d seen worse, surely. The elections had been, they had a new government, a whole new system, and it was bound to be painful for a while, but it made no sense to her to leave. Not now that everything was changing.

Dorota tried to understand them. Not only Piotr, but also her sister: why she was so quiet, why she never asked any questions. Tadeusz found Ewa the first of a series of jobs: evenings with his brother at the bakery. And then a couple of rooms in a building nearby that weren’t too
expensive. In that first time, money was often short, and they would do their best to help her. Dorota sat for Jacek a couple of times a week, and would try to talk to her sister when she came home from work. But Ewa just used to say:

– Another time, yes? I’m tired, okay?

And then she would climb into the bed beside her boy, ask Dorota to turn the light off when she was ready to go.

It was spring then, and cool and wet, just like now. Jacek was two, they had been married nearly three years and Ewa was barely twenty.

Dorota thinks Ewa wants to know now. And she doesn’t blame her.

__

It rains the first week on the farm, almost without stopping. But it is warm and the asparagus tips push their way up through the fine soil, pale combs sprouting along the dark tops of the trenches.

It is hot work, Ewa bending, crouching, digging with her left hand, forcing the knife down into the earth with her right. Twenty of them, making their way along the rows, the farmer teaching those who are new, then working alongside them. He speaks only a few words of Polish, the necessary ones, explains methodically, by demonstration, drawing the fat yellow-white asparagus spears up out of
the sandy soil. Ewa gets faster, the stems she pulls longer: she learns to anticipate the snap and release as she works the blade through. Sweat gathers in drops on her back, underneath her breasts, mixes with the cooler rain which runs from her cheeks, down her throat, off the nape of her neck. Water inside and out. By the end of the first hour each day, her coat is wet, her jumper dry, the T-shirt beneath soaked through.