Spring Will Be Ours (58 page)

They looked at them all in silence, then left, thanking the attendant; she nodded, barely looking up from her knitting. Out in the street, they passed more plaques, more shrines with candles burning.
On this spot 42 Poles were executed by the Nazis … On this spot 12 … Here were 19
…

Some had small bunches of flowers laid in the niche in the wall, or white and red ribbons, and some had postcards of the Pope, smiling, his hand raised.

‘We must ask Wiktoria about the Pope,' said Elizabeth. ‘Do you want to go to mass while we're here?'

‘Perhaps.'

‘Only perhaps? I thought that would be one of the first things you'd want to do here.'

‘Why? We never go in London.'

‘I know, but –'

‘But what?' Jerzy said irritably.

‘But nothing,' she said. ‘I'm sorry I mentioned it.'

They came to a small park, and sat on a bench, beneath the trees. There were trees and parks everywhere in the city; the impression, still, was of space, and cleanliness – not a shred of litter anywhere. In the main roads and streets away from the nest of the Old Town, traffic squealed. Pedestrians had right of way: if you put a foot off the pavement, cars were meant to let you cross. It felt absurdly dangerous.

Elizabeth turned to look at Jerzy, who was scuffing at the earth beneath the bench with his heel. He looked withdrawn and troubled. Well – you could call it troubled if you were feeling sympathetic and understanding. Otherwise you might say sulky.

‘Jerzy?'

‘What?'

‘What's the matter?'

‘Nothing. I'm just thinking.'

‘Are you all right?'

‘Yes.'

Not: yes, thank you for asking, and sorry I've suddenly cut off without warning or explanation. Just: yes.

Elizabeth gave up. A squirrel danced across the path; Jerzy scuffed again, and it scampered away and up a tree on the far side. She sat watching it, feeling Jerzy's silence descending like a cloud between them. I hope this isn't going to happen all through the holiday, she thought, remembering days in London when he left home in the morning perfectly equable and came home dark-faced, not speaking. It didn't happen often, but it happened, and at first she'd been reduced to tears of frustration. The last couple of times she'd fled to the studio. I really didn't think it would be like that here, she thought, and realized she had been hoping, all the time they planned this trip, that Jerzy would come to Poland and feel somehow cleansed, purified, made whole. What a very Christian image. People didn't have road-to-Damascus changes in themselves like that – unless they were on the road to Damascus.

‘Jerzy?' she asked again, and put out a hand towards him. He went on scuffing. ‘Shall we go and find somewhere for lunch?'

‘I'm not hungry.'

‘I am – come on, let's go and look.'

‘You can go if you want.'

She moved away and stood up. ‘I thought we were on holiday together.'

‘So? Can't you be independent for five minutes?'

‘Jerzy! What is the matter with you?'

‘I just feel low, that's all.'

‘I know you do. You don't have to take it out on me.'

He didn't answer. Elizabeth began to walk rapidly away, down the path towards the iron railings. No studio to escape to now: where was she supposed to go? Across the road, further up, there was a large café, with tables and chairs set out on the pavement; she stepped off the kerb, and a Fiat braked sharply, horn blaring. She jumped and stepped back again, waiting until at last a driver slowed and waved her across. Then she ran down the road to the cafe; she suddenly heard Jerzy call her, but she didn't stop. She pulled out a metal chair and sat down at a metal table, and waited.

‘Elizabeth – I'm sorry.' He was standing beside her, panting; he pulled out a chair and sat down, shaking his head. ‘Sorry,' he said again.

‘Are you going to tell me what's wrong?'

He waved at the air. ‘Forget it, forget it, I'm just being neurotic. For God's sake let's have something to eat – where's the waitress?'

The waitress, in cotton dress and flowered apron, looked tired and took their order indifferently. There was, in any case, almost nothing to order, certainly nothing you could call lunch, and they waited twenty-five minutes for two glasses of tea and two slices of cake with a topping which tasted of nail-polish remover.

‘Listen,' said Jerzy, when they'd paid. ‘Do you mind going to Pawiak this afternoon? We don't have to. I suppose one of the things I'm worried about is that I'm going to burden you with my family, and all its history here, and you'll just get bored, or find it oppressive, and then I'll feel guilty, but frustrated, because I really need to see it all.'

‘I know you do,' Elizabeth said. ‘What do you think I am? I know you do. If I didn't want to see, and be with you when you saw, I wouldn't have come, would I? Frankly, just at the moment I hardly care what we see as long as you talk to me.'

‘Sometimes talking is the last thing I want to do.'

‘Well – at least acknowledge that it's difficult when you cut off. Can't you do that?'

‘Yes,' he said, ‘I can.' He reached across the table, and brushed a strand of hair away from her cheek. ‘You look so earnest when you lecture me.'

‘I look earnest? You should see yourself sometimes.'

‘I'm glad I can't. Come on, let's go.'

They got up and he took her hand. Elizabeth gave it to him feeling more or less reconciled, still a little wary; then he bent to kiss her and for a moment they clung to each other, eyes closed. A passerby coughed in disapproval, and they drew quickly apart.

‘Not the done thing here,' said Jerzy.

‘Quite right too.' Elizabeth felt the tension between them slip away as they walked on, following the folded map from the guidebook, through the Krasinski Gardens, which were very beautiful, and were near to the place where the ghetto had stood, high walls sealing off four hundred thousand Jews. Now, it was as if it had never been.

‘There's a Monument to the Jewish Heroes a few streets away,' said Jerzy, looking at the map again.

‘Is there?' Elizabeth found herself remembering something: not long after they'd met, she'd told a Jewish friend, a woman she'd known since art school, that she'd fallen in love with a Pole. Hannah had not been pleased. ‘They're anti-Semitic,' she said. ‘Hitler didn't choose Poland for the camps for nothing, you know.'

This seemed such a terrible thing to say that Elizabeth had never told Jerzy. And she wasn't going to tell him now, either.

They walked on, down Dzielna Street, until they saw a deep paved and cobbled space across the road, with a leafy tree set into it, the trunk covered with metal plaques. Beyond the tree was a long low wall, with a dark, semicircular entrance at the foot of a flight of steps; a pillar of original brickwork, concrete and plaster stood before the steps, and from it projected an iron girder, surmounted with rolls of barbed wire, all that remained of the original entrance. On the wall above the gaping black semicircle, in relief, was a single word: PAWIAK. Trees and tower blocks rose beyond it. Jerzy and Elizabeth crossed the road, and went slowly down the steps.

Off to the left ran a long corridor, with reconstructed cells, and straight ahead of them was what looked like another cell, but which they quickly saw was where the attendant made her tea, and sold postcards. She was tiny, old, wearing an apron; they saw a mug and kettle on a shelf behind her. She nodded at them, unsmiling, and they heard her follow them, as they made their way down a further flight of steps into a windowless area, half underground. On the left an open space held glass cases, all along the wall; they looked at papers documenting labour camps, street round-ups, executions. Photographs of members of the AK resistance hung on the walls; they could not tell if they had been taken by Poles or the Gestapo. There were other photographs: endless rows of hangings – bodies swinging or hanging limply from gallows, from balconies. Elizabeth saw Jerzy wander into another room, and glimpsed what looked like iron and metal objects – instruments of torture? She did not follow him, but went over to another low case, resting her hands lightly on the glass as she looked at the list of names on a yellowing sheet of paper. Behind her there was a hiss: she turned to see the tiny old woman shaking her head at her, gesturing to her to take her hands off the glass. She jerked them away and stood, uncertainly.

Jerzy was still in the far room; she couldn't face going in there, but neither did she want to stay here, being watched with disapproval, even animosity. What was the matter with this old woman? She went out, into another long dark corridor. There seemed to be no other visitors; she walked slowly along, past cell after cell, each with a small spyhole set into the door. Anna's brother must have been in a cell like one of these. She stood on tiptoe, and lifted the spyhole flap aside, peering in. It was very dim, and shadowy inside; for a horrible moment she imagined herself hearing the screams of other prisoners as the door was slammed shut on her and bolted.

Footsteps came towards her, very quietly, from the other end of the passage. She thought: I don't belong here, I don't even belong with Jerzy, I want to go home. The footsteps came closer, and she suddenly heard herself giggle, like a nervous child who doesn't dare to cry but is about to. At once, there was a spitting, cackling torrent of Polish, and she swung round to see the old woman advancing on her, furiously waving her hands, shouting. Elizabeth turned and ran.

‘Jerzy! Jerzy!'

She bumped against him at the corner. ‘What's she saying? What have I done? I giggled – it was only, because I was so frightened –'

Behind them, the tiny, wrinkled woman was still shouting. Jerzy held Elizabeth, and listened.

‘She thinks we're German,' he said. ‘She thinks we're German, that we've come to mock …' He let her go, and walked over to the old woman.
‘Proszę, Pani
…' Elizabeth, still shaking, saw him towering over her, explaining in a low voice. The old woman shook her head, and did not apologize.

‘Let's go,' said Elizabeth. ‘Please, let's go …'

They made their way back to the entrance, past the cubbyhole where the old woman spent her days, up the steps to the sunlit cobblestones. Elizabeth drew a deep breath.

‘Are you all right?' Jerzy asked.

‘Yes, I think so. My God … she must be half-mad, working down there all the time.'

‘But that's how people here must feel, still.'

They walked across to the tree, and stood looking at the white metal plaques, shaped like shields or scrolls. Each bore a name, in capitals, dates and an inscription, and the outline of a cross, lying on a strip of weeping willow.

‘What does S.P. mean?'

‘
Swiętej Pamięce
– In Holy Memory.'

There were dozens of plaques: to Stanisław Kajak, Bartłomiej Urban, Jerzy Bielski, Piotr Kwiatkowski, Wladysław Bloch – all round and up the trunk, beneath the leaves.

‘And your uncle escaped,' said Elizabeth, still shaking, as they walked away.

‘Hard to believe, isn't it?' said Jerzy. ‘It must have been like a fortress – but he escaped from the ruins of the ghetto, on a working party, not from here.' He told her the story, as they walked on down Dzielna Street. ‘I will understand if you don't want to go to the cemetery now,' he said. ‘We can go another day.'

‘No – let's go today. After that, a cemetery might even be quite soothing. And we can do something quite different tomorrow. But can we take the tram?'

The tram cost 1 złoty, for any distance. They stood near the front, on the slatted wooden floor, as it swung humming down the street past buildings which, Elizabeth distantly noticed now, reminded her a little of Oxford Street. It was late afternoon, the tram filling with people leaving work. They looked tired and grey, but so did people on London Transport. It was their clothes which made them look different: everything was in Western styles of five, ten years ago – there were flares and bell-bottoms, platform shoes. And shiny, synthetic fabrics: many of the men wore cheap grey suits and open-necked shirts; dresses and skirts looked like Crimplene or polyester, cardigans acrylic.

‘We're here,' said Jerzy, and the tram swayed to a halt, and the doors hissed open. They got off, and walked the hundred yards or so to the cemetery. It was very large, bordered with trees, crisscrossed with gravel paths. There were row upon row upon row of identical large grey headstones, each carved with long columns of names: dozens, hundreds, thousands of names, soldiers and civilians killed in the Uprising, an endless roll call of the dead. At the foot of almost every stone were bunches of flowers – marigolds, michaelmas daisies – and all through the cemetery scores of candles in low dishes burned. The sky was grey, now, the air cool; they bought a candle in a dish from a woman selling them at the gate, and carried it along the paths. There were other visitors, mostly Poles, mostly older, talking quietly in twos and threes, or walking alone, bending to lay flowers, or light candles, one from another.

It took them almost an hour to find the headstone, and the name: the stone was almost at the end, and the name on it in the third column, amidst dozens of others: Jerzy Tomasz Kurowski. They stood looking at it, and Elizabeth remembered the photograph of the laughing boy in shorts, on the sunlit river. Jerzy bent down and lit their small red candle from one of the others, and put it beside them; then he stood up and slowly crossed himself. For a moment Elizabeth felt taken completely by surprise, as if she had expected to see Jerzy beside her, and found a stranger there instead. Almost at once, she realized that the gesture in fact suited him perfectly, as if he did it all the time.

He reached towards the stone and lightly touched the name below his uncle's: Andrzej Maciejowski.