Spring Will Be Ours (64 page)

You can't bear it, Elizabeth thought, if Polishness is not perfection. They drove on in silence.

Months later, on a rainy afternoon in London, in a Polish bookshop, they bought a book containing hundreds of verbatim accounts of how, all over Poland in the war, Jews had been hidden and saved from the camps and ghettos. Among them was the story of a woman in the Warsaw ghetto, who had managed to creep into one of the German workshop offices at night, and use the telephone. She had dialled the number of a Polish woman she'd known through their children before the war, and very softly spoken her own name. There was a long, stunned silence. She spoke it again, and whispered: ‘May I come to you?' Another silence. Then a single word: ‘Yes,' and the click of the receiver.

Of all the stories they read, that was the one which addressed Elizabeth. She lay awake that night thinking of the voice which came from behind the ghetto wall, after a year or more in which the woman's friend must have assumed her dead. She thought of the silence, then the single word which had saved her, and she imagined, with sudden terror, a time when a ghetto might be built in London. For Jews in Stamford Hill? For blacks in Finsbury Park or Brixton? For Asians in Southall?

She thought of herself receiving a phone call from someone behind the wall, perhaps from Hannah, begging for shelter, and knowing that if she said yes she put at risk her own life, and Jerzy's, and perhaps the lives of their children, who lay asleep in the next room. She tossed on the pillow, and lay looking into the darkness, unable to decide if the knowledge that she might hesitate, might even refuse, made her more or less human.

The days in the mountains were cool and fresh. They camped for two nights, and for one night treated themselves to a room in the hotel in Zakopane which felt like the Polish equivalent of the Hilton, though even here the shower didn't work. Zakopane was where Anna had come skiing as a tiny girl, before her mother died. Ponies and traps with jingling bells trotted down the main street, taking tourists up into the lower slopes of the forested mountains. Everywhere they drove they passed new houses being built, large, opulent, clearly costing a fortune. ‘For Party members,' said Jerzy. ‘No doubt about that.'

They climbed to Morskie Oko, the Eye of the Sea, a large, beautiful lake where the cloud-topped peaks of the mountains were reflected with the sky. They drank tea in a wooden café on the lakeside, and then climbed still higher, to a smaller, deeper lake, where few other people had come.

‘Almost our last day in Poland,' said Elizabeth, feeling the mountain air wash her skin like the purest water.

‘Are you glad we came?' asked Jerzy. ‘Even with all our – upsets?'

‘Oh yes. And you?'

‘Of course.'

‘Even though you didn't find your home?'

‘Even though.'

They went slowly down the mountain path again, and began the long drive back to Warsaw.

Wiktoria was waiting for them, late at night, a meal laid ready. She had a letter written for them to give to Anna.

‘And I do hope that you two are going to come again.'

‘So do we,' said Jerzy. ‘I wish we could take you back with us.'

She shook her head. ‘I'm much too old to travel now, though I should dearly love to see Anna again before I die.'

In the morning they kissed her goodbye, but she did not come to the station. ‘Too many goodbyes …' she said. ‘I don't want any more.' She closed the door of her apartment, and they heard her slow, stiff footsteps, walking down the corridor.

They took back the car, and spent the time before the train left in the Cepelia tourist shops, buying wooden carvings for presents. And then they went to the station, where Pani Maria was plodding along the platform, greeting her charges. She smiled at them broadly.

‘You have enjoyed yourselves? Good, good. I will talk to you later.'

They found their compartment, settled in, and sat looking out of the window as other passengers got on. There was a young couple on the platform, kissing. She was small and very blonde, with white flowers in her hair. He was lanky, with glasses. A few minutes before the train was due to leave, he climbed in with them and thrust a bulging zipped suitcase on to the luggage rack. The girl with white flowers pressed her face to the window, smiling. They kissed through the glass, very quickly, and then the train began to move, and they waved to each other until the girl was out of sight.

The lanky young man leaned back against his seat, and shook his head. Jerzy and Elizabeth eyed him sympathetically.

‘My wife,' he said. ‘We met in Croydon last year, when she came to visit her aunt. We came here last month to have a Polish wedding, and they took her passport away. I don't know when they're going to give it back. She's been a student here for three years – she says she might have to work for three years to pay back her fees before they let her leave the country.'

The train gathered speed; the suburbs of Warsaw were behind them. Pani Maria slid back the door to the corridor, beaming. ‘The gentlemen from Customs are on the train.' She shut it again, and went to the next compartment.

Elizabeth remembered their black-market currency exchange. There was something about declaring how much money you had brought into the country, and how much you were taking out? What were the Customs men going to ask about? When they arrived, they asked only about valuables being taken out of Poland without an export licence. They had no valuables, nothing to declare. The men went out again. Much later in the journey, Jerzy and Elizabeth discovered that Pani Maria had cheerfully paid a fine of thousands of złotys for smuggling crystal.

They sat on deck on the ferry from the Hook of Holland, and the crossing was calm. Jerzy was reading a book of poems by the Pope, translated into English, which he'd found in the library before they left, and hardly looked at until now. A light breeze lifted the pages. He passed the book to Elizabeth, open.

‘Read that one.'

Elizabeth took the book. The poem was called ‘Refrain', and was very short.

When I think, my Country, I look for a road running upwards, like a high voltage current cutting through slopes. This road is in each of us, steep and upward, not allowing us to stop.

The road follows the same slopes, returns to the same places, becomes a great silence, visiting the tired lungs of my land evening after evening.

They put down the book and stood leaning on the deck rail, their arms round each other, feeling the wind from the sea on their faces, as the ship cut through the water, leaving a foaming wake of white behind them.

Warsaw, July 1980
The queue outside the butcher's where Danuta had waited since seven o'clock this morning now stretched out behind her to the next block and beyond. It was half-past ten; she had already left twice, once to run to the toilet across the road and once to phone the School of Planning and Statistics, to make sure that her tutor was still there. It was vacation, but she still went in from time to time – next spring she would have completed her finals, and in the meantime she had her thesis to write, and be supervised.

‘When you sit your exams, you stop,' Mama said yesterday. ‘It's too much for you to study and waste time in a queue.'

‘I can read while I'm waiting, it's all right.'

‘But all that standing – it's not good for you.'

‘Or for you. And you go to work afterwards.'

‘Never mind. I'll live.'

The secretary of her department in the school was clipped but reassuring – her tutor would wait for her. Danuta put down the phone and ran back to the queue. On both occasions her place had been held for her by a little old lady in black; the woman behind was now complaining loudly. She was large and puffy-faced, in her fifties; her plastic holdall bulged with toilet rolls, and Danuta thought she was probably a professional, paid by two or three families.

‘I've had this place since seven o'clock this morning; why should I let you get in front and then dart in and out? If you go again, I'll move up.'

‘I shan't go again,' Danuta said wearily. ‘I also had my place booked.'

‘No you didn't.'

‘Yes I did.'

‘Don't you argue with me, young woman.'

Danuta turned away, looking over the head of the little old lady to the distant door of the shop, still firmly closed. There were jokes about butchers. That before the war you'd see a sign saying Butcher, and go inside and find meat. Now, you saw a sign saying Meat, and went inside and found a butcher. Or there was plenty of meat, so long as you didn't mind eagle. Danuta didn't find them funny any more. She and her mother spent half the week in queues: for meat, sugar, butter; for almost unobtainable soap, washing powder, toilet rolls, sanitary towels, shampoo. There were days when you queued for four hours without even knowing what might be in the shop when you got there. Or found that all the toilet rolls, which were what you really needed, had gone, but there was still flour, so you bought flour, pounds and pounds of it, even if you had plenty at home, just in case next time you needed it, there was none.

Of course, there was always the black market. But the prices were so high you couldn't possibly use it for basics, not unless you got desperate. She felt desperate quite often for shampoo: last month she'd used washing-up liquid, and her scalp had itched for days. There were people at the school who thought that the authorities deliberately kept things back from the open market, so that the factories could be sure of a higher price on the black, and she thought they were probably right – how else was it that Tata's Sport cigarettes last year had been almost impossible to find, and yet they knew people selling any number of packets you wanted, for ten or eleven times the kiosk price?

If you had the money, of course. Who had the money? They didn't. Even with Tata's job in the car factory and Mama's afternoon job in the café, they could barely get through the week. Yet everyone knew about the waste, and borrowing, bad management and bribes. Danuta didn't hear about all this on her course, not officially, anyway. On the course they studied foreign exchange and the balance of payments, trade within the Community for Mutual Economic Assistance, principles of socialist economics. They were taught that Poland was fortunate in having agreements with the Soviet Union which assured her a permanent export market. No one mentioned the transfer ruble, the worthless coin, like a token, in which Poland was often paid. No one really addressed the fact that First Secretary Gierek had plunged Poland into such debt to the West that she might never recover. No one openly compared their life in the queues with the life that Warsaw Radio and the television described, or raised the question of Party-member managers enjoying country villas and trips to the West. Danuta had never been to the West, though she hoped her job might take her there one day, but she had a number of friends who had, spending their summer holidays working in cafés and hotels in London, Oslo, Vienna. They came back with dollars to spend on the black market, and suitcases bulging with clothes. Danuta wanted to work in one of the foreign trade enterprises, checking contracts and agreements. If she did that – and why shouldn't she, with no unemployment in Poland? – she might one day be able to travel. It helped if you had a relative in the West to stay with, of course. She had Aunt Halina, who lived in London and was not really an aunt, except by marriage. Tata's brother, Henryk, was dead, and no one had ever met Aunt Halina, though they always exchanged Christmas cards.

Was the queue beginning to move? There was a side street leading to the side entrance of the butcher's: Danuta could see heads turning towards it, and she heard the delivery lorry drawing up and the rattle of the doors at the back being opened. Thank God for that. Maybe only another hour? She was hoping for chicken –
another
chicken? To wish for beef was impossible. She yawned, and looked at her watch. If she got home by twelve, she'd have an hour and a half before she need leave for the school.

The front door of the shop had opened; people stopped talking and began to move along the pavement. The first three women were going inside; she opened her purse and checked again how much Mama had given her – it should be just enough. She lifted first one foot and then another from her shoes: plastic made your feet sweat, it was terrible for standing. Of course, if one had the money, leather was obtainable, but one hadn't. She wiggled her toes, slipped each foot back, and began to feel better. Not long now.

Loud voices came suddenly from the head of the queue. She craned her neck. It didn't seem to be the usual pushing and shoving, or quarrelling about a place. What was going on? A ripple of anger ran down the line, someone was shouting: ‘They've put the prices up!'

‘What?'

‘They can't have.'

‘They have, the bastards, he's just told us – and there's almost nothing there.'

‘What is there?' Danuta called out.

‘Beef. At three hundred złotys a kilo!'

Three hundred złotys. She had stood here almost four hours, and now she could buy barely enough to feed a cat. In front of her, the little old lady in black was trembling; behind her, number 84 was pushing and swearing. Up at the front the women were shouting, banging on the windows of the shop: ‘We won't stand for it any longer!' and Danuta began shouting too.

London, 12 August 1980 ‘Wave of Strikes Challenging Authority of Polish Leaders. Poland's six-week-old wave of strikes is developing into a challenge to the authority of the Polish leadership. Poland has become a minefield, not only for the Polish Communist Party, but for the Kremlin, and therefore for the whole communist bloc … An increase in meat prices in July triggered off a series of strikes which have now reached a total of 150 stoppages …'