Field Study (17 page)

– Deutschmarks for our boys.

The florescent tubes hum over the long tables, the rain falls steadily, soft against the dark skylight. Ewa watches Marek, hands working, a constant motion in front of his soft belly. The skin under his eyes is loose, hairline receding. When she and Adela got a bit older, fourteen,
fifteen, Feliksa had told them about him, sitting around the kitchen table on their after school afternoons. A shared cigarette, a half-glass each of something strong and tales of what it was like to sleep with Marek, what she missed now he was gone, and what she didn’t. That he had cried in front of her, the night the phones went dead and the message came that the other union men were being arrested. Now, as she works and watches him, Ewa thinks how frightened he must have been, how perverse it was, that she had thought it romantic. But they had been her ideal: Lonely Feliksa, Absent Marek. The sacrifices they made in the hope of a better life for all of them.

Feliksa works now, taught herself bookkeeping, took a correspondence course in computing, and Marek seems to like being at home to take care of their young ones. Ewa collects Jacek from them sometimes, if he goes home with Konrad after school, and she enjoys being in the familiar flat again, likes the way Marek cooks dumplings, much better than the ones she and Adela made for Feliksa in the same kitchen, all those years ago. Back then, she often tried to imagine what the better life would look like, after the sacrifices were over. And she smiles now, because she knows this picture would never have occurred to her: she and Marek sitting in a German barn together, sorting asparagus into bundles.

Ewa doesn’t see the farmer come in, only notices him when he stops at the trestle opposite. Marek stands, and they shake hands and talk to each other, partly in German,
partly in Russian. Ewa listens to them: grown men speaking a language they learnt at school, both Eastern Block children once, both about the same age perhaps. She watches the two men talking, smiling, and remembers something Adela told her: that the farmer always asks for Marek personally now, when he applies for seasonal workers at the employment service.

– It is late.

The farmer is looking at Ewa, he says it in Russian and it takes Ewa a couple of seconds to understand, to hear the words through his German accent. She smiles, nods, has not spoken Russian since her final exams: tries.

– This morning in bed. So I work now.

– You want to go to Berlin?

Ewa blinks. Wonders who told him, if he saw her go, perhaps. His tone is neutral, he doesn’t seem angry about the missed day’s work, but Ewa thinks it best to make sure he understands.

– I left my paper blank yesterday. No pay.

– Yes, yes, I know.

He waves a dismissive palm.

– From tomorrow the weather will be good again so we will cut lots this week, I think.

– Yes.

– So then we can all have a day off perhaps. At the
weekend. Marek can drive you to the station. You should get a train to Berlin from there, it is better than hitching.

__

The farmer is right. The days are warm and clear, they work long hours, the sun shines on into the evenings and Ewa gets freckles across her nose and on her forearms. Piotr always liked them, and she hopes the hot weather holds, so they are still there when she finds him.

Getting used to the cutting routine, bodies adjusting, they are less tired, stay up later after they have eaten. Ewa plays chess sometimes, with Adela’s cousins, and with Artur, another cutter from Silesia, ex-miner, old colleague of Marek’s, from his union days. They set up the boards on a rickety table out in the yard and the late spring evenings are warm, moths battering themselves against the electric light on the side of the barn. Marek’s friend is a good chess player, but she doesn’t like the conversations they have afterwards. He tells her he worked on a bigger farm last year where the pay was better.

– Should have gone back there, shouldn’t have listened to Marek.

– Marek says it’s much nicer here.

– Nice is cheaper. They cook us some lunch, we get to know their kids, they make a show of working with us, and then complaining about the wages starts to seem rude, doesn’t it?

– They work just as hard, Artur, it’s not a show.

– Yeah, yeah. And the farmer tells Marek how much he likes us Poles, the way we stick together, haven’t sold our souls for freedom. Patronising bullshit, and Marek falls for it.

– I think he’s alright, the farmer. It’s alright here.

– We’re cheap labour, Ewa, from across the border because their own people get more on the dole.

– You’re not telling me anything I don’t know.

Ewa tries to deflect Artur’s cynicism with some of her own, but it gets to her all the same, makes the early mornings even more difficult, the long hours harder to take. Ewa does without the chess games, spares herself the aggravation, stays in the dormitory, after the evening meal, talking: most often with Adela and Paula.

– She says she grew up near here, and they used to get days off school to help with the harvest. Potato fights in the fields in the autumn.

Adela lies on her back on the bed, translating what Paula tells them, smoking, eyes closed. Paula sits straight-backed on a chair by the open window, Ewa standing behind her, winding Paula’s hair around her fingers, the heated tongs, as she has watched her sister do to so many women over the years.

– She moved to the West with her husband after reunification, but they are divorced now.

Ewa smells the hair heating up, the oil and perfume in the mousse rising into the air. She can’t do it as well as Dorota, but she tries, and she feels Paula relaxing, the hum of her voice, the stop-start rhythm of Adela’s translation. Life stories told in the last hours before sleeping.

– She thought she might look for permanent work, try to come back to live here with her children, but says she won’t. The other farms here stayed in the collective, privatised now, with the same people running them, only half the workers. All her friends have gone, the place feels empty. And there are no jobs here anyway.

The evenings are over too quickly and no matter how she spends them, Ewa always ends them thinking about Piotr. Legs stretched long against each other under the blanket, skin to skin. Three years together in a single bed, no moving apart, even when she was pregnant. Piotr’s sleeping breath on her shoulder, Jacek stirring and turning, getting comfortable under her skin.

Ewa knows she is being sentimental. Forces herself awake in her dormitory bed, correcting her own picture with memories of food prices out of control, and unpaid wages, the far too small flat shared with his parents. This was after Jacek was born, after the changes, and she remembers Piotr sitting on the edge of the bed, telling her things would get much, much worse before they had a hope of getting better.

– We have no privacy, nothing to look forward to.

He said this to her so often she had been stupid not to see it coming.

__

Sunday and they are all sleepy. The day is bright hot and blue and most of the cutters bring their breakfasts out into the yard, standing with eyes closed, chewing, faces tilted to the sky. Ewa washed her jeans last night, has the envelope from her father-in-law stuffed into the still-damp back pocket. Some of the others plan a trip to the lake to swim, Marek says he will drive Ewa to the station.

– Just one more coffee.

The car rattles over the cobblestones in the town and Ewa holds her door closed to keep the noise down a little. The Sunday streets are empty, all strong light on pale stone. Marek squints and yawns as he drives, eyes still puffy, he doesn’t say much. She has been told such a lot about his marriage over the years, doesn’t know what he knows about her own. That Piotr is in Berlin is common knowledge: when she found out, Ewa had the feeling that most people knew it already. And she thinks the reason for this little trip must be obvious to Marek; but if he is curious, he doesn’t show it, and Ewa is grateful.

He comes into the station with her, helps her find the next direct service on the yellow timetable on the wall, a couple of potential times to come back on the white, and then he buys her a ticket.

– I’ll pay you back.

– You don’t have to. But I want you to use the return half, okay?

__

Jacek goes to church with Dorota and Tadeusz, a reassuring part of his normal routine. Even when his mother is at home, she doesn’t go, but because all his school friends do, his aunt ended the arguments between him and Ewa by picking him up on Sunday mornings after breakfast, walking him there sometimes alone, sometimes with his uncle. Jacek enjoys the hushed echoes under the high roof; muffled coughs under the intonation of the sermon; shuffling coats in the line before communion; anticipating the swift, light touch of the priest’s fingers.

Ewa used to take him to the church when he was younger: never to the service, but on weekday afternoons when it was quiet and empty. This was before he started school and he was still quite small then, remembers how she used to sit him on one of the dark cushions in the pews along the side aisle, by the confessional. He could hear the low exchange after she went inside, but not the words spoken: soft pattern of murmur and silence making him sleepy.

Often, when he opened his eyes again, he would be in his mother’s arms, and she would be walking. Out on the
street, in the daylight, on the way somewhere else, and it would be good to be out of the dark and dust of the empty church, but still he remembers the shock of waking. She had come and lifted him away while he was dreaming, and then it always took a while to adjust, to get comfortable with his changed surroundings.

Sitting between aunt and uncle now, he remembers waking on one such afternoon. Not walking this time, but sitting on his mother’s lap in the pews. She held him still when he wanted to move, one finger raised to touch her lips to warn him from talking. In front of them was a crying man, kneeling before the statue of St Jude. He was close, but didn’t seem to have noticed them. He mouthed the words of his prayer on and on, eyes closed, tears falling, dropping from his chin, and Jacek sat leaning in to his mother’s chest with her arms close around him.

– Don’t move, sweetheart, no noise. We don’t want to disturb him.

Her own eyes swollen, the skin a light red tone around them.

__

The train comes into Berlin through the eastern suburbs. Past high-rise blocks painted mint green, egg yellow, along the wide expanses of track, past rusty sidings, weeds flowering white and lilac, growing tall between the sleepers. Ewa gets out at the first mainline station, as Paula
told her to: she had recognised the postcode in Piotr’s address, said it was in former East Berlin. But the Hauptbahnhof is not at all as she had described it: the surfaces in the wide concourse are all new, clean plastic and metal. Paula said they rebuilt it just before the wall came down, pride of the East German railway. Probably didn’t know it was being rebuilt again, with a new entrance hall and a two-storey shopping centre added. Most of the new shopfronts still stand empty, and Ewa wanders past them to the far end where the renovations continue. Temporary signs and arrows direct the passengers through the dust and noise to alternative exit points. Ewa doesn’t know where she should go, follows the largest stream of people to the main exit and out onto the street.

A wide road crosses here, and at the corner, she finds a newspaper kiosk selling maps. Standing, flicking through the booklet to the index, Ewa looks up for a street sign, to orient herself. She is on Mühlen Strasse, broad and roaring with traffic, and a long, high wall runs the full length of the pavement opposite. Covered in graffiti. Painted scenes, colours once bright, now peeling. Slogans, exclamation marks, symbols of peace and politics, flags and doves, reaching hands. Ewa stares at the flaking concrete, can’t quite believe what she is seeing.

Turning the folds of the map, she finds a dotted red line which zig-zags its way along and across the streets, cutting a path from north to east, then encircling the south and
west of the folded paper city. Ewa recognises enough of the words in the English legend at the front of the booklet: run of the former Berlin Wall. The dotted line cuts along the wide boulevard she is on, too, between the road and the wide river behind, so she thinks this must be it. A remainder, maybe 200 metres of it. There are hardly any pedestrians here and the cars drive fast past the painted concrete façade, no stopping or looking. Further down the street, though, Ewa can see a large coach, heavy, of the air-conditioned variety, and a couple of people standing awkwardly, laughing: one pretending to give the other a leg up over the wall, while a third takes a photo.

Ewa can’t watch. She looks instead in the index, finds the grid code, and then Piotr’s street on the map. It is over the next fold, and she follows the train lines with her fingers. Sees she will have to change once, twice. She goes back into the station.

__

A quiet street of scraggy trees and five-storey tenements, crumbling and blackened façades, familiar from home, her visits to Adela when she was working in Krakow. Ewa crosses the road to number fourteen. The entry system is broken, wires hang from the wall, but Ewa tries the handle and the front door is open. She climbs the stairs, looking at the names on the buzzers; doesn’t have a flat number on the note from her father-in-law. There is scrawl on the walls, but the floors are clean, still damp, and
the stairwell smells of bleach and warm water, Sunday cooking.

Jerzy, the name Ewa tries, is Polish, and the woman who answers the door is too. She listens while Ewa explains why she is there, holding the door half-closed across her body.

– There is no one called Piotr living here.

– I got this address from his father.

The woman shrugs, looks briefly past Ewa down the stairwell, then back at her face.

– I’m not from the police or anything. I’m his wife.

The woman’s eyes flicker a moment.

– Piotr never said he had a wife.

– Yes, well, he has a son, too.