Magda's Daughter (31 page)

‘To the churchyard?' he guessed.

‘Yes, to take photographs of the grave before the sun sets. I meant to do it earlier but I was so busy talking to Weronika I forgot.'

‘You'd be better off waiting for the morning.'

But Ned found himself talking to an empty chair. Helena had gone without inviting him to accompany her.

Chapter Seventeen

Ever since Helena had arrived in the village, she had constantly thought, ‘My mother walked here', or ‘My mother looked at this church, this house, this street …'

Now, as she walked towards the church, she no longer wondered what Magda had done or seen when she had lived in the village. The ties to the place were Magda's. She had none. But was there another village, town or city in Poland that she could claim as her birthplace? Or had she been taken from another occupied country? That would mean that she had no right to the Polish heritage Magda had passed on to her.

She walked across the square, swinging the duffle bag that held her camera. Ned was right. It was too dark to take photographs. She would have to come back in the morning. She knew she had hurt Ned by not asking him to accompany her, but all she wanted was to be left alone with her thoughts.

It was strange, a complete reversal of their relationship in Bristol. There, she had been the insecure one, never quite believing that handsome, smart, intelligent Ned was hers. Now she resented his attempts to protect her. It was as if by trying to keep her safe, he was suffocating her, giving her no space to think or breathe, let alone be herself – whoever that might be.

She debated whether or not to ask Ned to walk with her as far as the Niklas farm in the morning so she could take a photograph of it. Then she realised there was no point. She had no more claim to a history that connected her to the Niklas farmhouse or the Niklas family. Wiktor Niklas couldn't have made it plainer that he wanted nothing to do with her, and was intent on keeping her away from his mother and sister.

Twilight thickened around her, casting deep blue and purple shadows over the tombstones as she walked through the gate into the churchyard and around to the Janek plot. She stopped suddenly. A woman was hunched on the ground in front of Adam Janek's stone cross. A black crocheted shawl covered her head and shoulders. She was holding out her hands and her fingers moved swiftly, clicking the beads of a rosary, as she muttered the age-old, Catholic prayer: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace. Our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.'

No sooner did the woman reach the end of the prayer than she began at the beginning again, chanting as if she were hypnotized, her lips moving in synchrony with her fingers. Feeling like an interloper, yet loath to move, lest she make a noise that would disturb the woman, Helena froze.

After a few minutes the woman turned and looked at Helena.

It was only then that Helena recognised Magda's younger sister, Julianna.

‘I am sorry,' Helena apologised. ‘I didn't mean to disturb you.'

Flustered, Julianna grabbed hold of the cross to steady herself, and rose stiffly from her knees. She turned back to the grave, hurriedly crossed herself and thrust the rosary into the pocket of her voluminous dark skirt.

Helena held out her hand. ‘I am Helena, your sister Magda's adopted daughter.'

Julianna put her head down and refused to look Helena in the eye. ‘I know who you are. I saw you at the service today. Wiktor said we mustn't talk to you.'

‘Why doesn't Wiktor want me to talk to you, Julianna? The last thing I want to do is hurt you or your mother. Magda told me stories about you and her two brothers, what it was like for the four of you growing up on the farm. How you played together as children. She also told me about the cooking lessons your mother gave you girls, how she taught both of you to make cheese and butter and run a dairy, and look after the livestock.'

‘My sister wasn't your mother.'

‘So I discovered today, but Magdalena always told me that I was her and Adam Janek's daughter. And it is difficult for me now to think of her as anything other than my Mama.'

Julianna hesitated, then, still looking down at the ground, asked, ‘Was Magda happy in the West?'

‘She had a good job. She managed a cooked meat and pie shop. We lived in a busy market town, but Magda missed Poland, you and all her family. We had lots of friends, but I don't think they compensated for the people she had left behind here.'

‘You never went hungry?'

Helena knew that she shouldn't have been surprised by the question, but it illustrated the privations the Polish people had suffered during the war. ‘No, Mama – Magda – earned a good wage, and a nice apartment came with her job.'

‘And clothes? Before the war, when she lived here, Magda used to love pretty clothes.'

‘She liked to dress well, and she could afford to. We weren't rich, but there was always enough to buy a few luxuries.'

‘I must go. I shouldn't be talking to you.'

‘Why, Julianna?'

‘You know my name.'

‘I know a lot about you. As I said, Magda used to talk about you and Wiktor and her mother all the time. And she used to pray for your father and your brother, Augustyn. I have photographs that will tell you more about Magda's life in the West than I can. Please, can I visit you at the farm and show them to you and your mother?'

‘Wiktor wouldn't allow it.'

‘Then visit me in the village. My husband Ned and I,' Helena swallowed hard as she repeated the lie, ‘are staying in Anna's house.'

‘Wiktor says Anna is a bad woman. And he doesn't like me to leave the farm. I was only able to come here now because he is sleeping. He got drunk this morning and has been asleep since.'

‘I know. I saw him.'

‘The men who brought him home said he hit you.'

Helena instinctively fingered her cut, which was still covered by the cotton wool Ned had plastered over it. ‘It was an accident.'

‘Wiktor doesn't mean to hurt people but he gets angry when the collective wants too much from us, and there is only his wife, me and Mama to help him. And Mama can't do much these days. She is old and tires easily.'

‘I know Magda wrote to you. Did she ever mention me?' Helena asked.

Julianna shook her head. ‘Never.'

‘Are you sure?'

Julianna glanced nervously over her shoulder. ‘I have to go. Someone could see us and tell Wiktor, and then, drunk or sober, he would be very angry with me – and you. There's no saying what he would do to both of us for disobeying him.'

‘Who is going to see us here?' Helena looked around the deserted churchyard. When Julianna followed suit and didn't draw away, she was encouraged. ‘If we move back here behind the gravestones and close to the wall of the church, no one will be able to see us from the path.' Helena shrank back behind Adam Janek's cross and moved into the shadows. ‘Come on, we'll whisper, so no one can hear us.' She held out her hand. Julianna didn't take it, but she did move alongside her.

‘Just for a few minutes,' she conceded.

‘Magda sent you parcels every month –'

‘No, she didn't,' Julianna whispered.

‘She didn't send you parcels?' Had Wiktor kept them and the contents for himself? Helena wondered.

‘At Christmas, and for Mama's and my birthdays, but not every month. Magda sent good warm clothes for Mama and me, and tins of food. Ham and salmon and chocolates. Wiktor's boys loved the chocolate.'

‘But the letters …'

‘There was always a letter in the parcels. A short note, wishing us good health, luck and happiness. They always finished with her love and a sentence or two about how well she was doing. But there were never more than three a year. Except early on, just after she went to the West, when she sent a special letter with a money order to pay for Adam Janek's memorial cross.'

‘But I watched her write the letters and pack the parcels – one, sometimes two a month – with clothes, food and photographs of me. Magda used to give them to a friend who passed them to Polish sailors on Cardiff docks so they could be posted here in Poland to avoid being opened by customs.'

‘I told you, we only ever had three parcels a year.' Julianna's voice sounded harsh in the darkness.

‘But you wrote back –'

‘Wiktor would never let Mama or me reply to Magda's letters. He said if Magda had still been decent and cared anything for us, she would have returned at the end of the war to help us run the farm. But he says … says …'

‘What, Julianna?' Helena saw she was trembling, and her heart went out to her. She longed to embrace her, but she was afraid to try.

‘That Magda, like Weronika, had been … used by the German soldiers. Mama says he is wrong, but he always argues that if Magda had been pure she would have come back after the war. Then, when you came to the village with Magda's ashes, he said it was proof that Magda was no better than Weronika and he'd been right all along. That Magda … my sister … was a …'

‘But Wiktor knew that I couldn't be Magda's child. Weronika said that after Magda gave birth to Helena she couldn't have any more children. And Helena, like Adam Janek, was murdered by the Germans. You all saw it happen.'

‘Wiktor says you are some whore's German bastard.'

Helena didn't attempt to deny it. She couldn't disprove it any more than Wiktor could prove it. ‘I think it's likely that Magda picked me up in the children's home where she worked as a nurse.'

‘We heard that Magda had worked in a children's home, but Wiktor said the Germans used the Polish girls they took for only one thing, and he wanted none of the Germans' dirty leavings in his house. He can't help being the way he is. It was horrible here during the war. Things happened … dreadful things. He changed.' Julianna sat down suddenly on the Janek gravestone as if her legs would no longer support her. ‘Wiktor was very different before the Germans came.'

Now that Julianna had begun to talk – really talk – she couldn't stop. Once again Helena heard the stories of Magda's childhood, told in a different voice but with the same accent, stories that confirmed everything Magda had told her about her pre-war life. And, as Julianna painted the same idyllic childhood, village and rural life that Magda had, Helena sat next to her and listened.

Time and distance had probably gilded the memories of both women, but their essence was undoubtedly true. The past remained treasured and untarnished by the horrors of the war that was yet to come, the untimely and premature deaths of so many friends and relations, and even Wiktor' s cruelty, as he had been transformed by bitter experience into a vicious bully.

These were recollections that had not only warmed Magda's life but also her family's. For the first time Helena realised that Julianna and Maria Niklas had needed them even more than Magda because their drab, regimented communist lives were so much bleaker than Magda's had been in Pontypridd. She recalled what Peter Raschenko had said in Ronconi's cafe the evening before they had left for Poland: ‘I guarantee that after Poland, you'll look at this place in a new light. It may not be paradise, but compared to Russia and Poland, it's almost Utopia.'

Ned was still looking at the photographs in Josef's folders when he heard a crash and an agonizing scream. He ran on to the landing in time to see Josef rush from the bar. Stefan was in the yard wailing and rubbing his eyes. Josef grabbed him and spoke rapidly in Polish before charging into the house. Ned raced headlong down the stairs and followed.

He found himself in a large kitchen. Footsteps echoed in a stone passage and he hurried after Josef, who was sprinting up a magnificent wooden staircase. At the top was a galleried landing studded with half a dozen doors. One was open. Josef disappeared through it. Ned rushed after him.

Anna was lying on her side on the wooden floor. She was groaning, her eyes were rolling and her legs and arms were covered with blood. A splintered chair lay beside her.

But all Ned could look at were the photographs on her nightstand.

Framed snapshots of Helena at various stages of her childhood had been neatly arranged around a large studio portrait of her in graduation cap and gown. Below it was a silver rose vase that held a single red rose.

‘Anna needs help,' Josef shouted.

Ned tore his attention away from the photographs and looked down at Josef, who was cradling Anna's head.

‘Leave her,' he commanded, the trained doctor taking control. ‘She needs to be in the recovery position.' He moved two empty vodka bottles that were lying on the floor, and rolled Anna on to her left side. After checking her airways were clear, he picked up a glass from the nightstand. He sniffed it. ‘Neat vodka?'

‘She drinks it that way,' Josef informed him bleakly.

‘She drank all this today?'

‘There were no bottles here when I helped Anna change the beds and take down the laundry this morning.'

‘Not even in the wastepaper basket?'

‘No.'

Ned set the glass back on the nightstand before kneeling next to Anna. Her skin was pale and clammy, with an unmistakable bluish tinge. He pinched the skin on the back on her hand but she didn't react. He forced open her mouth. She retched, and a stream of clear liquid flowed from her lips. Her tongue lolled.

‘I'll fetch the first aid box.' Josef went to the door.

‘There's a small black bag in the bottom of my suitcase. Can you get that instead? And a bucket, lukewarm drinking water – if it's been boiled so much the better, salt, a large beaker, cup, spoon, and a funnel if you have one. And towels. Lots of towels and wash­ able blankets. You have all that?'

Josef nodded and ran out. Stefan, who was still wailing and grinding his knuckles into his eye sockets, entered a few seconds later. Anna groaned when Ned checked her airways again, and Stefan's wails heightened to a scream.

‘Anna will be all right.' Ned hoped the tone of his voice would reassure Stefan, but he regretted that he hadn't learned rudimentary Polish as he'd intended. Stefan's cries became louder and more irritating, and Ned suppressed the uncharitable wish that Josef would return and shut the man up.