Spring Will Be Ours (59 page)

‘His friend.'

‘The one he tried to save?'

‘Yes.' He stood looking out across the cemetery, the sea of stones, and said something quietly, under his breath.

‘What did you say?'

‘Myriads of broken reeds,'
Jerzy repeated.
‘Myriads of broken reeds, all still and stiff
…'

She frowned, trying to remember. ‘Edward Thomas,' she said at last. ‘You read it to me once.' She put her arm through his, leaned her head on his shoulder. After a while, he disengaged himself, and took a photograph of the headstone, for Anna. Then they turned away, and walked along the paths until they were at the gate, and out in the street again. Afterwards, Elizabeth could remember only colours: grey stones, mauve and gold flowers, the pale flickering flames and the sharp autumnal coolness of the air, as if it were like that always.

Night. A dark wet street with alleyways leading off it, the only light from the moon, moving behind ragged clouds. Someone was following him. He had to make his way to the other side of the city, in secret, but there were footsteps behind him. He stopped. They stopped. He turned, his heart pounding, but there was no one there. He went on, ashamed of feeling so afraid. There was a patrol on the corner, three or four Germans in uniform, rifles raised; they were talking very quietly – he could make out a few words, hear them shifting from foot to foot on the wet pavement. He ducked into an alleyway, and leaned against the wall, hearing the sound of his own breathing. How was he to get past?

He shifted, and his foot struck something which rang, something metallic. A manhole cover. Very slowly he bent down and tried-to lift it, scraping his fingertips until they were raw, managing at last to heave it off, and aside, and he knelt at the rim and looked down. The rungs of a ladder clung to the side of the shaft; below was nothing but yawning darkness, and the sound of water. He couldn't go down there. He could not. But if he didn't reach them, on the other side of the city, if he didn't warn them … Then he would be safe. Shame and fear flooded him. He could not bring himself to go down, but he must go on through the streets, he crept to the entrance of the alleyway again, and looked out.

The patrol had gone. Quickly, he ran, and at once the sound of the footsteps behind him came again, and someone panting. He did not dare to stop; he ran on, stumbled, found his legs suddenly heavy and slow, and ahead of him heard the click of a gun. He stopped, and the footsteps stopped. He turned, and saw a thin dark figure, a boy in a jacket, and his own face, very white, staring at him.

‘Jerzy?'

The boy did not answer, but went on staring.

He moved towards him, held out his hand; the boy turned, and now it was he who was following, with sudden loud German voices behind them, pounding feet. The boy ducked into the alleyway, and disappeared. He ran after him, tripped on the manhole cover laid aside, reached out to darkness, and slipped, with a lurch of terror, over the rim of the shaft, and fell, and fell and fell.

Someone was sobbing. He was sobbing, uncontrollably, his whole body shaking, hearing Elizabeth from a long way off, saying his name, feeling her hold him. He stopped, at last, and sat hunched in the bedclothes, shaking his head. Dawn light filtered through the curtains. He drew deep breaths, wiping his eyes on the sheet, and turned to see her anxious face, silky fair hair tangled, cotton nightdress slipping off her shoulders. He put his arm round her, and drew her close; she was very warm.

‘Tell me,' she whispered. ‘What was it?'

‘In the morning. I don't want to think about it now. Come here.' Her mouth like a flower, opening to his.

‘The Pope's visit?' said Wiktoria. ‘It was remarkable, of course. Even before he came it was remarkable.' She sat at the top of the table, passing plates. ‘You two still look very tired this morning. Did you sleep well?'

‘Not very,' said Elizabeth. ‘Jerzy had a nightmare.'

‘A nightmare?'

‘But I'm fine now,' said Jerzy. He kicked her under the table, gently, and Wiktoria looked away.

‘Well,' she said. ‘The Pope. Help yourselves, please. When we heard the announcement from the Vatican on the news it was as if … as if a miracle had happened. Like a sign, that God had not forgotten us. I expect that sounds absurd to you young people, but that is how we felt. Were Anna and your family in London pleased?'

Jerzy nodded, spreading stale bread with jam. ‘Particularly my grandparents.'

‘Naturally. Anyway, people in the streets were stopping complete strangers to talk about it – that in itself is a little unusual now – and of course a lot of us were crying –' She looked at Elizabeth. ‘We are rather emotional, you know, the Poles. I expect you are finding that.'

‘Yes.'

‘Exuberant and hospitable,' said Wiktoria. ‘Also depressive. I imagine Jerzy is not easy to live with?'

He laughed. ‘We're managing,' said Elizabeth. ‘Just about.' She felt completely at ease with Wiktoria now. No wonder Anna and her brother had leaned on her during the war.

‘Good. So – everyone was in a flurry, and when we knew he was coming here, in June, the city was suddenly full of people, going to visit the places he would be visiting, walking and talking. It was summer, of course, so the evenings were long … I went with a friend, and we felt as if we were in Warsaw before the war, you know, free to come and go as we pleased; just seeing so many people was extraordinary. Many of them had travelled long distances to come here, from all parts of Poland, and there had been stories of how the city would be overrun with peasants, or crowds of people out of control. It wasn't like that at all. It was just … a kind of calm excitement. There was an enormous cross in Victory Square, draped with a red banner; it was opposite the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and it towered over us …'

‘That was where he celebrated mass?' Jerzy asked. ‘We saw it on television.'

‘Did you? Yes, it was there. You could hardly move; people were holding up crosses, pressing forward to get a closer look, children on their parents'shoulders. And when he began to speak … “Dear fellow countrymen! Dear brothers and sisters! Fellow sharers in the Eucharistic Sacrifice that is being offered today in Warsaw's Victory Square!” I shall never forget it.' She shook her head. ‘We felt as if we were worth something again – more than that. We were the people we knew ourselves to be, not what we were told we were, or should be. Simply – ourselves.'

Jerzy and Elizabeth had stopped eating. They sat, listening.

‘Everyone says that old age romanticizes,' Wiktoria said slowly. ‘That you see the past in a warm nostalgia that has nothing to do with how it really was. And of course the Poles are experts at that. Naturally the time we had between the wars, our brief independence, was not perfect, but now – the whole economy is collapsing. We are in debt everywhere, and already you can see the shortages, not just food, but flats – you have to wait for ever. Furniture, cars, clothes – everything. And perhaps none of these things would matter so much – after all, I'm sure the West is not paved with gold the way the young people here think it is – if only we were not all the time told that the past was worse, that everything wrong now is the fault of the past, that if only we will work and work and work, and never raise our heads, it will all be better. How do you work when you have no spirit left, when you are fed lies all the time about what is really happening?'

She tapped the table impatiently. ‘You saw the Victory Square mass on television? Do you know what we saw, when we got home, and switched on the television? The Pope against the sky, as if he had dropped out of the clouds, and was almost alone. I think the cameramen were told to shoot only from below, that's what everyone was saying, because if they did that, then you couldn't see the crowds! Can you imagine? And when there were shots of the crowd, wherever he went in Poland, it was almost always of old peasant women, or nuns, or priests – we hardly ever saw a young face, or a family, but we knew they had been there because we were standing amongst them! Well … That's enough, now. Forgive me. What are you going to do today?'

‘I thought we might try to visit Chopin's house,' said Jerzy. ‘But you don't have to change the subject, Aunt. We want to hear.' ‘No – it
^·
makes me too angry if I talk like that too much. Chopin's house – in Zelazowa Wola. Yes, that would be a very pleasant day for you.'

‘Would you like to come with us?' Elizabeth asked. ‘We thought we might hire a car today.'

‘So the streets of the West
are
paved with gold, after all,' said Wiktoria. ‘It's all right, I am teasing. Yes – yes, I should like to come in that case. Perhaps you could pick me up?'

The road out of the city was flat and lined with willow trees. There were no proper borders, and Elizabeth, driving an unfamiliar Fiat, her nerves scratched by driving through Warsaw on the right-hand side and stalling twice at traffic lights, drove slowly. They were overtaken by cars roaring down the centre of the road, twice sending them nearly into the ditch. When this was not happening they found themselves stopping to let horse-drawn waggons move slowly on to the road from a side lane, and then they travelled behind them, looking up at an enormous, swaying mountain of hay. Sometimes children were perched on the top, eating apples; the waggons turned after a couple of kilometres into another lane, followed by honking lines of white geese. There were sunflowers everywhere, and the fields full of hayricks.

They passed women scything in the fields; a little girl in a kerchief sucked her thumb and watched them drive by; behind her a bare-chested man in a beret guided a horse-drawn cutter through the stubble. They came to a wooden church, and stopped again.

The church was locked. They walked round to the side, to a graveyard full of trees. Early afternoon sunlight dappled the paths; ahead, in the middle of the main one, rose a plain wooden cross, perhaps twenty feet high. Birds sang; tiny red and black beetles scuttled; a rich tangle of weeds and bushes grew between the crowded graves. Here they had no one to look for, they simply walked hand in hand along the warm sandy paths, where insects buzzed in the flickering light beneath the trees. Many of the graves were large and raised, with stone borders, railings and stone crosses set high above them, and many of the headstones bore small ceramic ovals with sepia photographs of those buried there. Elizabeth stopped before one of a young girl, perhaps sixteen, with dark hair, dark eyes – she looked a little like Anne Frank. There were older men and women, sombre in spectacles, or smiling broadly; on every single grave there seemed to be fresh flowers. They stopped before a stone with a verse inscribed beneath the name of a man who had died at Auschwitz.

Łatwo jest mówić o Polsce
Trudno dla niej pracować
Jescze trudniej umierać
A najtrudniej cierpieć.

‘What does it mean?'

‘That is a verse you will see everywhere in Poland,' said Wiktoria, who had been walking stiffly behind them. She leaned on her stick, and brushed away a fly.

‘And on Polish graves in England too,' said Jerzy, and slowly translated:

It is easy to speak of Poland
Hard to work
Harder to die
Harder still to suffer.

They stood for a moment in silence, then went on, stopping by a low wooden railing, beyond which lay untilled ground, no graves, and the graveyard wall. Before the railing was a small stone cross, with a white
^·
shield bordered in red nailed to the centre, an inscription:
Z ołnierz W.P.
– Soldier of the Polish Forces – and a name, Kazimierz Słoma. At the foot of the cross there was no plinth, and the grave was without a border, but a helmet lay there, pockmarked with six bullet holes. Lilies grew round it.

Jerzy photographed that, too, and then they went slowly back to the car, and on to
^·
Zelazowa Wola – ‘Or it will be closed before we get there,' said Wiktoria.

As they drove, Elizabeth remembered Jerzy asking yesterday morning about ‘inflicting too much death'. It was impossible to go anywhere without touching on it, even in a tiny shrine in a city street. Memories and melancholy were everywhere; she could feel it all becoming a part of her, too.

What had Jerzy dreamt about last night?

‘That's it,' said Wiktoria, and Elizabeth turned left and down a gravel drive between tall trees, and stopped before a small whitewashed cottage, covered in creeper, with a red-tiled roof. Chopin's house. They climbed out of the car, and saw a handful of other tourists walking into the gardens. Inside the cottage, they smelt fresh paint, and the polished tables shone. There were flowers in vases; net curtains at the windows moved gently in the breeze; the whitewashed walls were hung with prints and portraits. They moved from room to quiet room, stopping by the small piano. Elizabeth felt like an American at Stratford, but with a real sense of awe, too, as she looked quickly round, then stroked the yellowed keys.

‘Tch, tch, tch,' said Wiktoria, raising an eyebrow.

Elizabeth smiled at her, went across to Jerzy and took the guidebook out of his jacket pocket. She turned the pages.
Zełazowa Wola
… Chopin had lived here only in his youth, had spent most of his life in exile in Paris. She looked out of the window, saw a small boy playing in the gardens, a hundred and fifty years ago, humming.

‘They give concerts here,' Wiktoria was saying. ‘On the Steinway grand in the sitting room. I came to one, once, before the war.'

Jerzy had moved towards the front door. They followed him out into the gardens, helping Wiktoria down stone steps to a sunken lawn and a lake covered with algae and waterlily pads. Frogs and small toads hopped in the long grass at the water's edge. It was very warm, now; their shadows fell across the still green lake, and then, from speakers in the trees, came the music, exuberant waltzes and mazurkas, and the slow, aching nocturnes, drifting out across the water.