Revolution Baby (25 page)

It was decided that Lena and I would stay there until another option became available. I wanted to walk around the town on my own, and so Lena wrote a note on a piece of paper:
Mieszkam na
˚
oliborzu, WSM, Kolonia 5. Przepraszam, ale nie rozumiem po polsku.
Which said, “I live in ˚oliborz, WSM (for Warsaw Habitation Cooperative), Colony 5. I am sorry but I don't speak Polish.” After a few days, I didn't need the paper anymore, I knew how to say those two sentences.

 

And at the beginning of August, at Hugo and Fruzia's place, Emil showed up. He and Lena embraced somewhat awkwardly. They looked at each other for a long time, not saying anything. Where to begin, after so long? Silence seemed a good solution to me. They hugged a second time, a bit less awkwardly, a bit more tenderly. Then Emil turned to me. He smiled. Pursed his lips and closed his eyes, as if to hold back his tears. He came over to me and began to speak.

“
Przepraszam, ale nie rozumiem po polsku
,” was what I said, with my heavy French accent, but I was rather proud that I had learned a bit of Polish so quickly.

You would have thought I had just informed him that his entire family had died! I've never seen anyone's mood change so abruptly. His eyes opened wide and filled with horror. He turned to Lena, and began to yell at her, really yell!

“What? He doesn't speak Polish anymore? What were you thinking? Honestly, I prepared myself for every eventuality—that my son might be crippled. Handicapped. Disfigured. An idiot, even. But never, never could I have imagined that he would no longer understand Polish. What were you thinking? How could you have let such a thing happen?”

And wasn't that a lovely reunion for a couple who hadn't seen each other in ten years?

The next day, Lena informed me that Emil was coming to pick me up and that we'd be taking the train. He wanted me to go with him to visit the place where he worked. He hoped to get to know me that way, and create a bond between father and son. I had no objections. It was on a train that Lena had informed me that I was her son. So it seemed fitting that it was on a train that Emil was going to try to become my father.

When Emil came to the door, he reached into a big bag and took out a Polish army uniform and asked me to put it on. He was wearing his captain's uniform (from the Polish army, too, because he never was in the Red Army, as my mother had said). Apparently it would be easier for me to get around in an army uniform. So it was as a soldier that I had my first outing with my real father.

 

 

 

We climbed aboard a train packed with Polish and Russian soldiers. My father knew a few of them, and he introduced me to them with a mixture of pride and embarrassment—because of my linguistic handicap. The journey seemed endless; I got completely fed up with nodding my head whenever anyone spoke to me, and pretending to understand what they were saying. And the train moved at a snail's pace: we stopped in fields, we stopped in stations. Soldiers climbed on, others got off. Later, my father would explain that the trip from Warsaw to Poznan´, which normally took three hours, had lasted almost twenty.

My feelings toward Emil were ambivalent. I didn't know him at all, and felt no attachment to him, but there was nevertheless this little something inside me, a feeling of recognition. I was eager to know who this man was, what he thought, how he expressed himself. I noticed that he often made the other soldiers laugh, even without acting the clown. I could sense a sharp intelligence and great sensitivity. In short, I had a lot of time to spy on the man I knew was my father.

At last we arrived in Poznan´. A woman officer was waiting for us at the station. She was with her daughter, Basia, a pretty girl roughly my age, her round face adorned with dimples and almond-shaped eyes. We settled into their little two-room apartment. For how long? I had no idea. The girl and I couldn't say anything to each other, at least with words. So we found another language, a more tactile one. So far, I liked traveling with my father.

We stayed in Poznan´ for a few days. Initially I had been under the impression that Emil was here on a military mission. But as we spent most of our time at the lady's apartment, I eventually understood that his mission was more personal than professional.

One morning Emil came to get me. Our stay in Poznan´ was over. I put on my soldier's uniform, packed my bag and gave Basia one last kiss. And we left for the station, where we took the train for Wrocław. We got there in the middle of the night, after a long journey. There were several groups of soldiers at the station, as many Russians as there were Poles. My father went over to a group of Poles. After that he motioned me over, and we sat down on the cement ground. My father explained something to me, still in Polish, because he hadn't accepted the fact that I couldn't understand a thing. I gathered we'd be spending the night there. I made a pillow with my bag and after a good hour I managed to fall asleep. I don't know how long I had been asleep when another train came into the station. Some soldiers got off. Emil talked with them for a quarter of an hour or so. Then he came and sat back down next to me. I fell asleep again. Another train came in, with more soldiers. And the same scenario all over: my father got up, they all huddled together and talked . . . This time, my father came back and motioned to me to get up.

All the soldiers took their guns out of their holsters and we left the station together. It was pitch dark in the town, except for occasional flashes of light, accompanied by the sound of explosions. We could hear isolated gunshots. I got the impression that the news the war was over had not traveled this far. We made our way slowly into Wrocław. Another group of soldiers suddenly came around the corner in the dark. We stopped short. All the soldiers raised their guns. Long minutes went by. In all those years of conflict, this was the closest I had ever come to anything remotely resembling real warfare. And it was happening now that the war was over. Or at least, I had thought it was over.

After a while, one man left our group. He was holding a flashlight and he shone it on his face. From the other side, a soldier started walking toward us, also shining his flashlight on his face. They stood directly facing each other. All eyes were glued on them. They exchanged some papers. Finally they shook hands and embraced one another. There was laughter from both camps, and everyone put their guns away.

Our envoy came back to inform us that it was a detachment of Russian soldiers, not German, as we had feared. We went over to them, everyone shook hands and patted each other on the shoulders. Our group set off for the city hospital. And that's where Emil and I ended up staying.

 

My father was very busy at the hospital, even though I didn't understand the exact nature of his activities there. He visited the patients, wounded soldiers for the most part, and spoke with them, filled out papers for them, and had discussions with the hospital management.

Since the beginning of our train journey, I hadn't been feeling very well. I was aching all over, and I felt weak. And now I was in a bad way. All my joints were painful and I was finding it more and more difficult to walk. Emil didn't seem to be taking my state very seriously, and tried to cure me with shots of pepper vodka. But eventually he had to face facts: whether he believed my illness was serious or not, I had reached a point where I could hardly walk straight. He wasn't worried exactly, but he saw he could no longer force me to go along with him: he would have to do something and have a doctor look at me. He dragged me out to a car and only managed to get me inside it with great effort. There was no position where I felt comfortable, and I seemed to hurt all over, all the time.

I don't know why Emil didn't simply have a doctor from the hospital in Wrocław examine me instead of taking me by car, when I was in pain, hours away from the town of Łódê, where I was taken directly to the military hospital.

The doctor who examined me had studied in Paris and spoke fluent French—that did me a world of good! He loved it when I used slang, even though he didn't understand everything; he actually spoke astonishingly colloquial French himself for someone who rolled his r's the way he did. And while he was learning new words of Parisian slang I was quietly learning Polish again with the help of some kind nurses, who saw to it that I spent several hours a day in a heating device. But my aches did not go away.

One of the first words of Polish I learned at the hospital was
pluskwa.
I was with a dozen other patients in the same ward. My first night at the hospital, when it was time for bed, the patient in the next bed tried to explain something to me, waving his arms. I understood
noc
(night) and a few other words, but not the whole message. One word came back on a regular basis, this word
pluskwa
, but I had no idea what it was referring to.

When everybody was in bed, they switched off the lights. I tried to find a comfortable position in my bed, in spite of the pain. A few seconds later, the lights came back on, and all the patients sat up abruptly and began pounding on their beds with their bedroom slippers. They gestured to me to do likewise. I set about it somewhat halfheartedly, and then I saw little red dots spring up all over my sheets. Now I got it:
pluskwa
meant “bedbug.” Every night we had to go through the same rigmarole, as clearly it was not the final solution for getting rid of the critters.

After a few days had gone by, my doctor came to me with the diagnosis: rheumatic fever.

“Bloody fucking hell! Where did you pick that up?”

He examined the back of my throat closely.

“Your tonsils look healthy. So we'll remove them.”

“What?”

“I bet that will get rid of the pain! It's often a bacteria due to tonsillitis that attacks the joints. So we'll do it right away, although the nurse is on leave . . . ”

And that is how I found myself assisting on my own operation. The doctor explained that he absolutely needed my help, because there was a shortage of nurses in the hospital. He made me learn the names of all the instruments, explaining that I would have to hand them to him as he asked for them one after the other.

“If you get the wrong instrument, it could be serious, I might botch the operation. You have to concentrate. I'll only give you a local anesthesia, so you'll have all your wits about you. Do you think you are up to it?”

“Of course.”

“You're not going to be scared stiff?”

My pride prevented me from showing just how terrified I was. At the time I did not realize that his method aimed to make me forget fear and pain, because there was indeed a shortage of nurses, and he had nothing in the way of effective anesthesia. It hardly mattered, I took my job very seriously and had my tonsils removed, by what was virtually cold surgery, and I was neither bound nor in pain, so focused was I on my work as an assistant, since any error on my part could have disastrous consequences.

“You see your tonsils? They look like they're in perfect condition. Hang on a moment, I'm just going to cut them . . . ”

I watched attentively. The interior of my tonsils was full of pus. It was disgusting to think I'd had that in my throat for god knows how long.

“You see? I was right. You're going to start to feel better, but you've had a nasty illness, and while it might have only licked at your joints, it has bitten your heart.”

“What do you mean?”

“You'll have to go easy on your heart. You have to forget about sports, and settle for a job that doesn't require physical effort—something in an office, sitting on your butt.”

“But why?”

“Your heart has been affected, there's no doubt; that's the way it is, it will always be weak.”

The thing was, I really had no desire to spend my life sitting on my butt. I wanted to become a great journalist and travel all over the world and file reports.

As the doctor had predicted, the pain in my joints soon disappeared. And I was just as fit as before. I decided not to pay any attention to his advice; I wouldn't allow that idiotic illness that had only lasted a few weeks to dictate my future.

Back in Warsaw, it was time for major decisions. My mother had promised we would go back to Paris, but I could tell she had no intention of doing so. Lena felt at home, now that Poland was communist, and she had no desire to go back to a country that wasn't. At first I was furious, because if I had followed her all the way to Poland, it was precisely because she had promised I could go back to France for my studies. At the same time, it was normal for her to want to live with my father. Since he worked for the Polish army and didn't know a word of French, it was out of the question for him to want to go and live in France.

So I decided to go back on my own. Given the fact I had no passport, either French or Polish, there were a few administrative things I had to take care of first. I wrote to Tobcia, because she was the only person I thought I could go and live with. And while I waited for her answer, I began the formalities to get my papers.

Tobcia was taking a long time to answer. Obtaining my papers was incredibly complicated. And Lena, meanwhile, was doing a very efficient and persuasive job with her propaganda.

“What will you live on? If I send you zlotys, you won't be able to do a thing with them. And I just found a job in Łódê. We could live there for a while, you could go to school in Polish. The destruction in Łódê is not nearly as bad as in Warsaw, the atmosphere there would be quite different.”

I have translated this conversation so that it would be in the same language as the rest of my story, but Lena spoke Polish to me now, because I could understand almost everything. Yet again, she managed to persuade me. I was not sure I wanted to stay in Poland forever, but I could see that for the time being going back to France was unrealistic. Once I was an adult, if I still wanted to, then I could go back. For my university studies, for example.