Love Among the Single Classes (20 page)

‘Here, Monty, what you doing for Christmas? Going home for a little holiday, are you? See the family?'

When I say no, I cannot do that, I shall be in London for Christmas, they are concerned.

‘Won't be on your own, will you? Shocking thing, on your own at Christmas. Here, Monty, want me to have a word with my Missus? Can't have you on your own, like.'

No, I have told them, I shall be among friends from the Polish community. We will celebrate in our traditional way. They are relieved. One of them squats down and kicks his legs clumsily forward, roaring and toppling over, and the others laugh.

‘Be a drop of the old vodka going round, will there? What do you lot eat at Christmas? Turkey?'

The carp … the roast carp of my childhood!

‘No, he eats fish don't you Monty? Yeah, I knew a Swedish girl once … gawh! … She said they ate fish at Christmas. Some funny fish.'

‘Yes, mostly we had fish. When times were not too bad.'

They drink their tea and stub out their fags and turn their attention away from me to a young woman dispatch rider who has come down to pick up a Red Star parcel. They will spend two minutes talking to her and ten minutes after she has gone speculating about her. The general view is that women who take jobs like dispatch rider or bus driver are lesbians. This belief doesn't stop them propositioning her.

I make the hours pass by burrowing deep into my memory and recreating days in great detail. I may decide to recall a December day of ten years ago. I start by remembering my morning routine: what time exactly I needed to get up; how long it took to shave; what clothes I could select; what we would all have for breakfast; and then the walk to the bus stop. I remember the news-stand where I bought a paper; the shops I passed, the names above the shops, the faces of the shopkeepers. Sometimes I manage to recall the faces of regulars in the bus queue. I retrace the route to Narntowicza Street and the university; then walk in, past the porter's cubby hole, past the message board, past the crowd of students. I pause to remember some of them, and on a clear day I can wipe out Marina's London face and replace it with
her rounder, softer face of ten years ago. If I am left alone to concentrate, I can follow my own path through the day till I am almost hallucinating. Once I even answered in Polish when one of the men spoke to me. This skill is the same that prisoners use, and it may be invaluable to me one day, even more so than now.

The streets of Lodz are dingy compared to those of London, the shop windows drab, with old-fashioned lettering, often painted with gold outlines on glass and unchanged for fifty years or more. I miss my fur hat, the one with the earmuffs. I had not realized how much colder the wind blows on a head of thinning hair.

These fantasies have the drawback of all fantasy. They give me the power to edit my past. I have tried to imagine a day when I argued with Alina or, more likely, Henryka, but I find I can't do it. The thought, I wish I had been less hard, keeps breaking in and will not allow me to play out the argument accurately. Because of these hours in which I control events I find the present less satisfactory. I can't make a real effort with Constance after a day filled with thoughts of Katarzyna. My Katarzyna. My wife. I miss you more than my hat!

They look at me, so probably I have a face. Of all the faces known I remember least my own. Here I live in a world of strangers. I have no family friends, no neighbours. The shopkeepers and newspaper sellers do not know me. But then, I no longer buy a daily paper. I am invisible, a citizen of nowhere except Poland: and not the real Poland, but the Poland inside my head. It is growing like a tumour. It fills my head and swells my brain cells. Perhaps it is a malignant growth? It may be. I will live inside my head. My food is bought in the shops at Lodz, even if it means queuing for an hour or more. It is cooked by my wife, so that I can eat stuffed cabbage with beetroot pickle, or apple and cinnamon cake. Being invisible and anonymous makes me wicked. If nobody notices me or talks about me, if I have no face to maintain among my colleagues and neighbourhood, there is nothing to stop me from doing as I please: in real life, just as
in my fantasies. Here in London I have no conscience. My only constraints are those of energy and money. I walk the streets like an invisible man in an American movie, passing spectrally through the crowds. No head turns to recognize me, nobody smiles. I am powerless and lonely. In Lodz, a network of gossip surrounded me. People I didn't even know noticed me: comrades of Katarzyna; schoolfriends of the girls; students from my classes. A thousand, maybe five thousand, sets of eyes monitored my progress. Necessity kept me faithful, on the whole, to my wife. The risks, when I dared them, were all the sweeter. One late afternoon in the classroom, the sun slanting across the wall and over the wooden battens pinned on to the wall, and on the floor between the desks, the labouring young body of Anna, or Kika, who frowned in just the same way whether it was over her work or my orgasm. In Lodz I paid for my pleasures with danger, itself a pleasure. Here, who cares? I squander half my wages in Soho and who gives a damn? I take Constance to bed one night, and Joanna the next, and no-one is any the wiser. Exile makes me wicked, but wrong-doing without risk or guilt loses its sting. My clothes don't matter any more, as long as they're clean and comfortable. In Poland, where what most people wear – of necessity – is shabbily uniform, I took pride in being smart, but here where everyone except the tramps is smart, I am shabby. Why waste money on clothes for strangers? Where is my self-respect, my grandmother would ask; and the cheeky boy who still lurks inside this grown man would reply, not in the cut of my shirt and trousers! Would that make her laugh, or would she clip me round the ear for it?

Grand'mère was kinder to her little dog than she was to me. The dog would sit on her lap, and her pearls would fall and mingle with his smelly fur, as his curly tongue stretched up to lick her face. But if ever I tried to give her a hug, apart from the formal salute at morning and bedtime, she would push me off sternly. Two! Be a little gentleman!' she would say, and then perhaps extend one small grey hand at arm's length for me to kiss. That fragile tyrant. She would
die of mortification to see me packing in this basement disguised as Monty.

Mortification will not kill me, but it gnaws all the same.

Another Ewa wrote:

Be careful of your thoughts
Which will leave you suddenly
Catapulting from the burning surface of your brain.

My brain burns, my thoughts leapfrog. Am I still normal? What would Alina say? Father, you have changed. You seem more savage and more inward than before. That would be astute. The animal in me hunts alone. The human mind in me thinks in silence more often than it speaks. I summon up pictures of myself as the focal point of a white lecture hall, rows of students before me taking notes, rapt with admiration at my audacity. How nimbly I leapt from theory to demonstrative fact! Did I? Were they?

Christmas is coming, and the fellows at work say, ‘Coming for a booze-up down the pub tonight, Monty? Celebrate the festive season?' The management, our benevolent employers, put an extra ten pounds into this week's wage packet, with a note saying, The management of Fordyce Music wishes all its staff the compliments of the season. December 23rd-26th inclusive may be taken as public holidays. Please report for work punctually on all other days.' I spend my Christmas bonus at the pub with the other post-room workers, and a couple of trim typists from upstairs. They giggle and flirt, and tease young Kevin, the postroom junior, who does weight-lifting at the gym in his lunch hours. I could tell them that they are wasting their time. We stay until the pub closes. Two of the lads have spent the last half hour with their arms round the waists of the typists, hands brushing their breasts as they leaned across the bar towards the next drink, and these four leave together, triumphant. Tomorrow the whole day will be spent exaggerating, or denigrating, the outcome. I walk more rigidly than usual to the tube station. In the morning my
head aches. An ordinary hangover is almost a relief.

Katarzyna writes to say that my Christmas parcel has arrived safely. Three years and 900 miles apart, my wife and I are thinking along the same lines, for she writes:

Iwo, my dear husband,

You would smile wryly to yourself if you knew how I miss you. This will be a surprise to you, as indeed it is to me. Even an old enemy can be preferable to a new friend! Well, this is a harsh way to begin a letter of thanks for your generosity. The woollen things which you sent are very welcome, and their Western elegance is much admired! The food also arrived intact, I think. Good that you put an itemized list with your letter: I am sure it stops the customs officials from stealing. The girls are both well. I see them nearly every week. Alina's pregnancy is well advanced and I still can't get used to the sight of her, swollen with motherhood. She still seems like our teenage daughter to me, and I wish you were here to tell me this is nonsense. She must take care not to over-exert herself, so we shall have Christmas with Henryka and Stanislaw. We will toast you and hope you are celebrating among friends. If you have time, I wish you would consider the future. This letter is in no way meant to dissuade you from your desire to formalize the end of our marriage. Yet I would not want you to believe that I think of you coldly. I often think back over the years and wish I had been warmer to you. Well, the past is the past. May the Infant Jesus and His Holy Mother bless you at this time. From your Kasia.

I have brooded over this letter. Kasia, a proud woman, is telling me that she still loves me and would like me to return. This after two years with almost no letters, and years before that when we were unwilling prisoners in the same cell. Is it because she is older and needs company? But if she were lonely she could go and live with one of the girls. Does
she want a man to warm her bed, and will settle for me if I'm all she can get? I wish I could know. If it is truly me she wants I will return. What will they do to me, if I go back? I am not afraid of risk, but of boredom. Are Katarzyna and I now both so old that we will settle for grumbling at one another until we die?

Why should I stay here? If ever I believed the West would make me rich, famous, contented, or bring recognition for my work, opportunities to meet other economists and travel the world attending academic conferences – ye gods, how wrong I was! The West has given me a new understanding of myself, true. It is a self pared to the bone for survival, not fattened on luxury. And women. Can I build over the rubble of my past and make a start again with – whom? Constance would have me and so would Joanna; but do I want to be a husband again? Marina is too young, or I would set up home with her, and not leave her to that rat-faced young bigot. Her youth would warm my old age, and we share many memories. But my wife would laugh and my daughters would be ashamed. Nor am I sure she would have me. I am tempted to try. It is the thought of the ridicule of my former colleagues and her former class-mates in Lodz which stops me. An old man with a young wife is always a fool, and usually cheated.

Well, how about Constance? One, she wouldn't cheat me. Two, she is not stupid. Three, she has a comfortable home. Four, she or her friends would find me a better job. Five, the Home Office would get off my back. Now I am an outsider, and Constance would enable me to be an insider. Six, she loves me. Too much. I would be gobbled up by that hungry heart.

My life is a chess-board and I plot several moves ahead without seeing the clear strategy for a win. Both the queens are after me. I shall temporize and castle. From the safety of my room I will wait and see what move the others make. I still haven't written to my wife, and the empty bed is colder than ever. It snows outside my window. I am freezing, catatonic. Only my tumour throbs. I am a man in a block of ice,
visible to the outside world, perfectly preserved, a lifelike specimen, but cold.

Constance rings, her voice tense with excitement. I am to join her family Christmas, no, she insists, I must. Very well then, I say passively, so be it. I will. She is happy and full of plans.

Joanna rings, her voice relaxed with false indifference. I love artifice in women. Joanna believes she must stalk me subtly, so that I do not notice. I am supposed to think I am pursuing her. My dear and desperate Joanna, your stratagems, and those of Tadeusz, were obvious the first time we met. A good Polish Catholic – oh yes you are! – does not sleep with a man unless she has plans for him. I am content to embrace all those who offer themselves to my surprised arms. I am grateful to them and to all the women who have let me enter their lives and their bodies. Does any man ever feel he has slept with
enough
women? The man who married his first love and has never been unfaithful to her, perhaps? Even he must be curious. I have not slept with enough women yet, and life wouldn't be worth living if I thought there were no more to come. Would I renounce all other women for my wife? Kasia, at this moment I would say yes: but I know that if we were together again I should do just what I did before! The interplay of glance with glance, the brushing of hand on thigh, the moment when I allow my erection to nudge, as if unconsciously, a woman's body, and feel by centimetres whether she moves towards me or away – Iwo don't kid yourself: you can't live without this!

I am to join Joanna's Christmas as well. Why not? I can eat two Christmas lunches; only I wish that
la veille de Noël
were with Joanna in the Polish way and Christmas Day with Constance, rather than the other way round. I can't have everything. I can't see the shape of my pregnant daughter, swollen with my first grandchild, my posterity, the child who will make me immortal. The blood of the Zaluskis in the veins of a Party worker's son! What difference does it make? So long as they give the boy a happy childhood – let him be loving and confident and feel himself cherished. Not
like me.
I will not think of Grand'mère
, nor of
le grand seigneur
, proud and pitiless. I will think back instead to the little boy they broke, myself, when he was trying to be happy.