Spring Will Be Ours (67 page)

‘Having it off. Did you really fall in love with me just like that?'

‘You know I did. You didn't, of course.'

‘I did. The moment I saw you, sitting on that wall in the sunshine, remember? It was just like today, you're right, the end of the summer.' He reached for the sponge.

‘What shall we have for supper?' Elizabeth asked, yawning.

Jerzy sighed. ‘Salad? Chicken? Strawberries and cream? The last of the summer wine.'

‘Very English.'

‘That's what you've done to me.'

‘No chance.' Elizabeth stood up, and reached for a towel. ‘I'm hungry. I'll get breakfast, you make the bed.'

‘Yes, dear.'

They had breakfast, cleared up a bit, then walked up to the shops on South End Green. The sun was bright and warm, the pavements full of pushchairs and wicker baskets bumping into each other, and the café on the corner of Pond Street had the door wide open.

‘Let's have a coffee,' said Jerzy.

Inside, as always, old men with East European features sat in silence over chess boards, cigarette smoke drifting across to the counter, where an espresso machine hissed. Sometimes Elizabeth came and sketched them.

‘It's such a pity your father hasn't found a community like this,' she said now, stirring her coffee.

Jerzy shrugged. ‘He's not like these people. He wouldn't have anything to say to them.'

‘They're not talking.'

‘You know what I mean.' He stretched, long legs bumping against her feet. ‘Shall we go for a walk this afternoon?'

‘And pick blackberries?'

‘If there are any – it might be a bit early.'

They took a box anyway, and set out on the path to the heath which led up from behind Gospel Oak station, past the athletics track, climbing the hill where the kite flyers came. The summer wind blew through their hair; they stood on the top with their arms round each other, looking down across the rippled grass towards the ponds, where little sailing boats skimmed the water.

‘My image of childhood,' said Jerzy. ‘One of them, anyway. Ewa and I seemed to spend every weekend going to watch the toy boats on the ponds on Clapham Common.' A dog went bounding past them, after a ball, and he stood watching it go. ‘I remember one summer, much later, taking poor old Burek for a walk, not very long before he died. We heard the new motor boats buzzing across the water and hated them. It was as if our childhood had been taken away, or at least was over for ever.' He paused. ‘Which it was. Ewa's especially.'

‘Why?'

‘Oh – I think I told you, didn't I? The first time we went home. She had a sort of crisis.'

Elizabeth looked at him, brushing away the hair which blew across his forehead. ‘You'd never tell a secret, would you?'

‘No,' he said. ‘Never.' He took her hand and lifted it to his lips. Nearby, a little girl was clinging to the end of a kite string. ‘Look at it! Look!' The kite tugged and bobbed, its long tail streaming. Elizabeth turned away from Jerzy and watched her.

‘Do you want us to have children?' she asked after a while.

‘Yes, I think so. If you do. One day.'

‘You never talk about it.'

‘Nor do you. Why are you talking about it now?'

‘Just that little girl.' She pointed to her. ‘And wondering about Ewa.'

‘Well, don't. It wasn't anything so dramatic, really.'

‘But it was for her.'

‘Yes.'

They walked on down the hillside, along the broad, shady path running past the pond with the sailing boats, past the reed-fringed duck pond, and up into the woods. They found, after a while, a bramble bush full of blackberries, and they picked for a long time, without talking.

‘Falling in love seemed so simple,' Elizabeth said at last.

‘It feels simple now,' said Jerzy, straightening up. ‘Easier for me now, to love you, than it was then. Easier to tell you.'

‘I wonder why.'

‘I feel safer, I suppose. I do feel loved.' He sat on the grass, and looked up at her. ‘You do still love me? What do you mean, it
seemed
so simple? Why isn't it now? What's happened?'

She laughed. ‘Nothing. Nothing.' She sat quickly down beside him, put her arm round his shoulders. ‘You look like a worried little boy.'

‘I feel it.'

‘Don't. I only meant it was simple because nothing was known. There was just the feeling, the certainty that I loved you, without having to try, or do anything.'

‘Then you found out what I was really like.'

She leaned against him.

‘Yes. Perhaps I love you even more, now, after our dramas. I remember having this strange feeling when we met, that I'd never really know myself, until you began to know me.'

‘And has that been true?'

‘Yes, in a way. I don't think I'd be painting with such – concentration now, if you weren't there to see it.' She turned to kiss his cheek.

They walked home hand in hand, carrying the blackberry box in a string bag. The sun was beginning to sink behind the line of the hill, where a few kites still soared, and the light across the grass and through the trees was golden, casting rich deep shadows. They stood for a while watching it sink still lower.

‘The light leaving the world,' said Jerzy. ‘Our lord deserting us.'

Elizabeth took her hand away. ‘How
can
you say that? I was thinking quite the opposite: that it's like a benediction.'

‘It is,' he said, taking her hand again. ‘I was joking.'

‘No you weren't.'

‘Half joking.'

She shook her head.

Inside the house, they climbed the dusty stairs to their front door; when they unlocked it, they saw the sun still at the windows of the sitting room, making the flowers in the vase translucent. The room felt stiflingly hot; Elizabeth crossed the room and pushed the windows open.

‘I don't know why we shut them. It's not as if any burglars could get up here.'

‘Mmm.' Jerzy was by the television. ‘I just want to watch the news, to get the headlines. Do you mind?'

He had already pressed the button, and was turning up the volume. The theme tune sounded; the voice-over announced:

‘The Six o'Clock News from the BBC: Poland's striking shipyard workers sign an agreement to return to work as the Polish Government appears to give way to their demands.'

‘My God, they've done it,' he said. ‘They've done it!'

‘The agreement, signed in the Baltic ports of Szczecin and Gdańsk, is subject to government ratification in Warsaw. If approved, it gives the strikers the right to free trade unions and strike pay … Tim Sebastian reports.'

Tim Sebastian and his brown moustache seemed to have been living with them for weeks. As he appeared on the screen again they could hear a constant clapping in the background. Then the camera flashed to Wałęsa, flanked by endless men in suits, flourishing an outsize ballpoint pen in the smoke-filled hall of the Lenin Shipyard.

‘The signing of an historic agreement between workers and government … the end, it appeared, to a strike that brought economic and political chaos to Poland. The workers here say they'll be back at the shipyard on Monday … If the assurances over the trade unions are implemented, they'll be the first of their kind in the communist bloc. The men, at least, seem to feel they've won a victory.'

They were back in the studio.

‘Fantastic,' said Jerzy. ‘Amazing. I can't believe it.'

‘The people of China have heard for the first time that their Prime Minister, Chairman Hua, is to step down.'

He moved over and turned down the sound. ‘I must ring Ewa.' He went quickly to the phone, and began to dial. His fingers were trembling slightly; they slipped, and he banged down the receiver and tried again; Elizabeth watched his thin, excited face. ‘Engaged,' he said. ‘Probably talking to my mother.'

‘Or trying to phone you.'

‘Might be. I'll just try the grandparents.' He dialled again, and was answered almost at once.
‘Dobry wieczór, jak Dziadek się ma? Tak! Tak … telewizja
…'

Elizabeth got up and went out to the kitchen. There was half a bottle of wine in the fridge, left over from a couple of nights ago. She uncorked it and found two glasses in the rack above the sink. As she poured, she could hear the murmur of the television, and Jerzy talking rapidly in Polish, fluent and assured. When she went back he was laughing; as soon as he had said goodbye and put down the phone it rang again.

‘Słucham?
Ewa!'

Elizabeth put the glasses down on the table beside him. She scribbled on a piece of paper: ‘Can I talk to her?' and pushed it towards him. When he didn't turn to look at it, she scrunched it up, and threw it into the wastepaper basket by the fireplace. Then she picked up her glass again, and sat in front of the television, watching the news from the rest of the world, turned down.

Warsaw, 30 August 1980
‘They've done it! They've done it!' In the courtyards of the School of Planning and Statistics where the students had spent all morning listening to the radio, they were shouting and jumping up and down, hugging each other, waving newspapers. Danuta found herself kissed by her thesis supervisor. He was a thin, balding man in his fifties, who wore spectacles and usually looked hurried and tense. Now, he was jubilant, crazy, ten years younger overnight, grabbing her hands and whirling her up from the low wall round the courtyard.

‘They've done it!' A kiss right on the lips.

She burst out laughing, hugging him back.

Someone was talking about a party – Piotr, he was always ready for a party, and now he was inviting everyone – Basia, Hania, Jan, Staszek, Danuta, all of them chanting: ‘So-li-dar-ność! So-li-dar-ność!', spilling out of the building, on to the hot, dusty pavement, running under the trees, past the sunlit Vistula, past the flower-sellers and the newspaper kiosks where people were snatching up the papers.

‘They've done it!' On the housing estate outside the city, Stefan was racing up the stairs of his block, bursting into his own apartment, where Krystyna and her parents, and his parents, and the family from down the corridor were all crammed into the living room, chinking glasses, as the television in the corner showed, almost despite itself, Lech Wałęsa, carried through the shipyard shoulder high.

Stefan pounced on Krystyna, hugged her, took her off her feet. ‘Isn't it fantastic?' He put her down, took a glass and a bottle of vodka from the table, and suddenly remembered. ‘Where's Olek?' Everyone laughed. And Krystyna said:

‘He's asleep. Can you imagine?'

‘He can't be. Wake him up!'

‘You're joking.'

‘Can't a nation share its triumph with her sons?'

‘You're drunk already. Was everyone getting drunk at work?'

‘What do you think? Where'd you get the vodka?'

‘Tata brought it.'

‘Well, good for Tata.' Stefan raised his glass to his father-in-law, standing across the room in his shirtsleeves, broad peasant face grinning from ear to ear.

‘Na zdrowie!'

‘Na zdrowie!'

‘Za Solidarność!'

And everyone raised their glasses.
‘Za Solidarność! Za Solidarność!'

Warsaw, 3 October 1980
At midday the factory sirens had sounded: all over Warsaw, all over Poland. Under a mild, cloudy sky, Stefan stood at the gates of his factory, wearing a white and red armband, holding the Polish flag. They were on strike again, just for one hour. A warning.

On 1 September, the Baltic coast shipyards went back to work. ‘We all know what that date reminds us of,' said Wałzęsa – it was the eve of the German invasion of Poland, in 1939. Within days, Gierek had collapsed with what was announced as a ‘malfunction of the heart'and been rushed to a Warsaw hospital. There were rumours that he was wandering the grounds in his hospital gown, a pale drawn figure, telling anyone who would listen that his hands were innocent of the blood of Polish workers. He was replaced by Stanisław Kania, jowly and corpulent, an ex-police chief, once in charge of relations between church and state, approved of by Moscow. He and his Prime Minister, Józef Pińkowski, both made speeches promising major reforms.

‘Our most important task is to restore public confidence,' Kania declared in his opening address to the parliament, the
sejm.
There was also a warning: ‘Our anti-socialist adversary wants to exploit the conflicts that have arisen … We shall act decisively against cases of disruption of order.'

In the third week of September, rooms in the Hotel Morski, a rundown seamen's place, became the Gdańsk headquarters of a national union: Solidarity represented thirty-five unions, members drawn from workplaces all over the country. Now, in the squalid little rooms grudgingly allotted to them by the provincial authorities, the newly formed branches were fighting to establish themselves, without cars, telex machines, telephones or money, with battered old duplicators and typewriters and, as always, insufficient paper. They had registered three million members. Three million! Everywhere you saw the armbands, the badges: each region had its own, but the centre was always the same, the Solidarity logo which the whole world now seemed to know, the flag flying from it defiantly. Krystyna said she'd seen an old man yesterday wearing a badge with the Polish eagle re-crowned.

The Warsaw branch had quickly become one of the most active and most radical. It was called after the historic name for the central flatlands of Poland: Mazowsze. Chaired by Zbigniew Bujak, a worker in the Ursus tractor factory, the Mazowsze region had its headquarters in rooms at the top of a narrow flight of stairs in a house in Szpitalna Street. It was near where the walls of the Jewish ghetto had been, and, ironically, almost opposite the old Trade Union Council building. There was a good coffee house round the corner.