With her mouth close to my ear, she said, ‘You and Dominik could come, you know. Ryszard could arrange it.’ She pulled away to look at me.
I gave her a smile.
She nodded. I had already told her that I would never leave Poland for good.
There were promises to write, and more kisses, until Ryszard took Małgorzata by the shoulder and gently pulled her away. ‘You don’t want us to miss the train.’
She shook her head quickly. They walked out of the apartment and I closed the door.
The apartment normally had a chaotic appearance, littered with books and photos and ashtrays, but Małgorzata had cleaned it for us. The order was disturbed only by a crate-like structure in one corner of the living room, offcuts of wood piled by its side.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Oh that,’ said Dominik. ‘It’s the cot.’
I remembered that he and Ryszard had started making it on the day that Małgorzata had announced her pregnancy. While the rest of us sat in the kitchen and talked, they had retreated to the living room and banged away with much swearing and carrying on. Looking at the cot, I thought that I could have done a better job. The planks of wood were sawed unevenly, their edges unfinished. I felt inside and something jabbed my palm. I withdrew my hand. It had been pricked by the sharp-end of a nail.
‘You really thought a baby could sleep in this?’ I asked Dominik.
‘No.’ He settled onto the sofa and put his feet on the coffee table. ‘As it turns out, I was right.’
17
Małgorzata’s apartment, which used to be an eruption of activity, was now a mausoleum. More and more often, Dominik worked at the underground paper until late. I filled my time by drawing and painting. I hadn’t worked on another sculpture since Flight. After the exhibition, I’d transported my sculpture to the Academy. When Professor Jankowski returned from Paris he told me he was pleased with the piece. He said I should take my time with the next one. Keep exploring new materials, new trains of thought. If he had heard that a picture of my sculpture had appeared with Dominik’s article about State corruption, he didn’t say anything about it.
Professor Jankowski had told me that the exhibition in Paris was a success. The nettle dress, in particular, had been a hit. ‘Your replacement isn’t half the sculptor you are and she got herself a fellowship in Barcelona,’ the professor said. She would be leaving at the end of term. I pictured her sitting in the sun eating oranges, surrounded by all the Gaudís. I would have loved to have seen them.
I spread a large sheet of paper on the floor and weighed down the corners. Next I wedged open a tin of blue paint and dipped in a brush, thinking of the fantastic creations Gaudí brought to life. Working quickly, I painted two interfacing cliffs with tangles of flowers and weeds sprouting from their tops. Then, using black, I painted a glass house perched between the cliffs. I imagined standing on its glass floor, peering down at the cavernous space beneath.
When Dominik came home my painting was pinned to the living room wall and I was in the kitchen, making bigos. ‘I was hoping we’d have cabbage tonight and here it is!’ Dominik joked.
‘Ha.’ For the last couple of weeks, we’d eaten cabbage nearly every night – there was still no meat in the shops. ‘I wasn’t expecting you home for another couple of hours.’
‘My editor gave me an early mark.’ With a fork, Dominik scooped a bit of bigos from the saucepan and tasted it. ‘She had some first-years coming in to do the night shift. She wants me to get my sleep, apparently. I’ve been getting special treatment since that corruption piece.’ He forked some more food into his mouth. ‘Actually, this bigos is delicious.’
Since that article, Dominik had become a talking point at university. By association, so had I. People now called me, ‘the girlfriend of the handsome young journalist’. An irritating title that wasn’t even correct. I was his fiancée.
‘How long until dinner?’ Dominik’s hand moved down my back, making me lightheaded.
‘This can wait.’ I turned off the stove.
He led me into the living room. ‘Nice painting,’ he said, glancing at the wall. Then he kissed my neck. ‘I was thinking about you all day. I couldn’t wait to get home.’ He slid his hands under my dress. ‘You see, this is what it will be like when we’re married.’
I unbuttoned his shirt. ‘We could honeymoon in Paris. Or even somewhere more exotic, like Spain.’
‘Spain.’ He knelt on the floor and lifted my dress, kissing my stomach. ‘I like that.’ The rest of his words were muffled by my skin.
A heart thumped steadily against my cheek. We had fallen asleep on the living room floor, among my sketches and painting materials, the side of my face pressed to Dominik’s chest. The sound of his heart reminded me of holding a seashell to my ear to listen to its inner roar. When I was young, Father took me to the beach at Sopot. We ate boiled eggs and pickle sandwiches and he told me that Mother loved to swim but that he didn’t know how. We walked hand in hand to the edge of the sea. Salt water lapped at my ankles. I wanted to go further out, but Father said no, ‘Stay here with me.’ I sat on the wet sand, splashing icy water onto my legs. Father wrote my name in the sand, Ania, with a heart around the letters. I turned my face to the sun, daring myself to look straight at it. At the last moment I scrunched my eyes. How could I help Father with the stone carving if I was blind?
The thumping was louder now. It travelled from my eardrums, into my throat. ‘Dominik,’ I mumbled.
The thumping kept coming and then there was shouting too: ‘Open the door! You’re under strict orders to open the door immediately.’
Fear iced through my veins. I fumbled on the floor for my dress and pushed my arms into it, hastily doing up a button, then another. ‘Dominik.’ I shook him. ‘Someone’s at the door.’
He rolled over. ‘Tell them to go away.’ A loud sigh escaped from his mouth and then he sat up. ‘Someone’s here?’
I turned on the light in the living room while Dominik made his way to the door. He opened it a crack. ‘Can I help –’
Two militiamen stormed inside, truncheons in their fists. One of them aimed his weapon at Dominik and said, ‘Put your shirt on.’ His double chin wobbled as he turned to face the mural pinned to the wall.
‘What’s this about?’ I asked. My dress was too short and I tugged at the hem.
The man smirked at my efforts at modesty. Then he said to Dominik, ‘Pan Duwak, get dressed. You’re going on a holiday.’
‘I didn’t ask for one.’ Dominik ran a hand through his hair.
This seemed to throw the man. He regained himself by kicking a tin of paint. ‘Well you’re getting one anyway.’
The lid from the tin cracked open and I crouched down to secure it back on.
‘Come on, get dressed.’ The man was shouting now. ‘Don’t keep us waiting. You’re coming too, Pani Skowrońska.’
I concentrated on practicalities. I had trousers and a shirt in the bathroom and I went there to change in privacy. ‘Where are you going?’ shouted the other man. He was younger-looking, and his military garb contrasted oddly with his pretty face, his pink lips and delicate nose.
‘I’m getting dressed.’
The double chinned one said, ‘Follow her. I’ll stay here.’
In the bathroom, I shut the door behind me. There was a tightness in my bladder, as though my insides had been wrung like a wet cloth. I located my change of clothes as the door flung open and the nose of a gun pointed in. It was the militiaman with the pretty face. He prodded the bathroom window, as though it posed an escape route.
‘We’re on the seventh floor,’ I reminded him. Hoping I sounded more confident than I felt. I replayed images of Krzysio, lying in the hospital bed. I didn’t let myself think of Dariusz.
‘You’ve got one minute.’
Through the closed door, I heard Dominik talking to the other one. ‘I can understand you’ve got a job to do but we’re entitled to hear the charges against
us.’
‘We’ll get to that later,’ the man said.
The toilet seat was cold against my thighs. I let my bladder go, feeling the warmth trickle from my body into the porcelain bowl. The bathtub was flecked with mould and I had a sudden desire to clean it. I wiped myself with toilet paper and then wound some around my fingers and stuffed it in the pocket of my trousers. A knock on the door. ‘Pani, let’s go.’
I quickly gathered a few things: my satchel and notebook, a jumper, a coat and boiled eggs. I gave a couple of eggs to Dominik and he slipped them in the pocket of his jacket.
The lift was broken and the men marched us downstairs. Outside, the sky was so black it dragged at the edges of the moon. One of the men shoved Dominik, and then me, into a van, banging my head against the ceiling.
‘Watch it!’ Dominik said.
There was a woman in the back of the van. Dressed in a beige dressing gown, she leaned her head against the wall. When she saw us she buried her chin in the folds of her gown and looked the other way.
18
All this time I had been living in a dream. Even after what had happened to our friends, I never thought I’d end up in prison. In hindsight my naiveté was astounding. I had, willingly or blindly, placed myself in the way of danger.
And yet, so had all the women in my cell.
There were eight of us here, living and sleeping in a small brick room with a single barred window by the ceiling. I was the new girl. I’d been here for five days, though it felt like months.
On the night they dragged Dominik and me away, the militiamen refused to tell us what we’d done wrong. They kept repeating the same thing: ‘We have information that you’ve been engaging in anti-state activities.’ Anti-state activities. Did they mean the exhibitions we held? Dominik’s article and my photo? Or was it something else? I remembered the night they came to Małgorzata’s apartment after martial law had been declared. Your names are going on a list. Had they been watching us all along?
Elżbieta, the dentist who slept in the bunk below mine, said that the oldest woman to get interned was eighty-one.
‘What did she do?’ I asked, trying to picture this revolutionary grandmother.
Elżbieta admonished me. ‘You’ll soon learn that’s a useless question – why. It assumes there’s some logic to this system. But since you asked, the old woman was talking to her grandson on the telephone, fretting about her sick canary. The canary stopped singing, she said. The telephone operator was listening and decided the old woman was speaking code. They pulled her in. Wanted to know who the ‘singing canary’ was. When she insisted the canary was a bird, they threw her in prison.’
‘Is she still here?’ The springs of my bunk bed creaked as I shifted.
‘They only held her for two days,’ said another cellmate. ‘Then one of those foreign, what do they call themselves, “international human rights organisations”, got word of it and threatened to start a campaign on her behalf. It doesn’t look good, locking up an old babcia.’
‘The important question is, how was the canary when she got home?’ another woman asked. Everyone laughed.
Elżbieta said that this was the way of it now: they could lock us up without pressing charges. Half the time they threw people in prison to stop them from possibly doing something wrong in the future. None of us knew what we’d done or how long we would be kept here. ‘We get treated better than the criminals at least,’ Elżbieta said. ‘Take my advice, stick to a routine and wait it out. You’ll be okay.’
Although I had nodded, I couldn’t let go of the conviction that this was a mistake and that someone, someone, had to be able to fix it. Maybe Dominik, who they’d carted off to the men’s prison. Maybe a guardian angel or God.
Every time a guard strode past the cell, I waited for him to rush in and say, ‘We got it all wrong. We’re sorry. You’re free to go home.’
The dining room, with its liverish walls and cold concrete floor, was packed for dinner. I sat on a bench at a steel-legged table with three of my cellmates. Across from me, an alpine scene hung on the wall. Next to it was a small wooden crucifix. The women were talking about the next edition of the prison newspaper, Our Bars. They wanted to write an article about how terrible the meals were here. If it wasn’t for food parcels from relatives and the Red Cross, they said, we wouldn’t survive.
I took a spoonful of the dirty liquid that posed as soup, swallowing quickly. It tasted like toilet water but at least it was hot. Sleeping in a cold cell was starting to make me sick. Though it was summer, our cells were impermeable to the warmth. As much as I hated sharing a bed with a stranger (a cleaner from Legnica whose knees and elbows dug into my back at night) at least her bulk helped keep me warm.
As I swallowed more soup, a middle-aged woman in a green housedress strode up to the table, carrying an aluminium cup. ‘Pani Skowrońska?’
‘That’s me.’
She wedged herself onto the end of the bench. ‘I was told to look out for a plait,’ she said, gesturing to my hair. She placed a piece of paper by my bowl of soup. ‘From Dominik. He also arranged for you to get this.’ She reached into her pocket and then handed over an orange and purple package. It was milk chocolate flavoured with fruit. I thanked her and made an exit. Was the note really from him?
In my cell, I climbed onto my bunk and unfolded the paper. It was undeniably Dominik’s handwriting; I recognised the narrow letters, the way they leaned forwards, each one in a hurry to see what came next.
Aniusieńka.
My darling, I trust you are keeping strong. I’m in Barczewo and who do you suppose is in the cell next to mine? None other than Adam Michnik! I have seen him in passing and am planning on asking him to have a look at an article of mine. Why not pick the brain of one of the finest writers in the country if you have the chance?
There is plenty to keep me busy here. While I allow myself short breaks for meals and twenty minutes of exercise each day, I spend the rest of my time writing. It turns out that I’m very productive when I don’t have parties or women – that is, one woman in particular – to distract me. (I’m joking of course, my sparrow.)
People say the women’s cells aren’t too bad and I hope this is true. Every night and every day I miss you more. This missing is a physical thing that makes my bones and my throat ache. When I see you again I’m going to wrap you in my arms and marry you on the spot. You are my life, little one.
All my love, D.
I had been holding my breath as I was reading and now that I’d reached the end, I exhaled.
The way to survive this was to follow Dominik’s example and keep myself occupied. I took out my notebook and started a sketch that my cellmate had requested for the prison newspaper. I drew our crowded cell with its bunks and small barred window and its squat toilet next to the sink. And then a girl with a long plait who was sitting on a bed, drawing. My cellmate had said that the prison newspaper was smuggled outside once a fortnight. Perhaps it would get to Barczewo.
19
The Colonel’s office was stale with the brown smell of cigar smoke. A guard slouched near a bookshelf, blinking hard, as though trying to keep himself awake.
I sat at a desk, readying myself for the interview. My skin gave off an unpleasant odour – I hadn’t bathed since Małgorzata’s apartment. Adrenaline surged through me. I gripped my hands in my lap.
The guard yawned and then stood to attention as a tall man in military uniform entered the room. I understood, without it being said, that this was the Colonel.
The Colonel didn’t lift his feet when he walked, he just slid across the carpet. ‘Thank you for waiting.’ He towered before me and when I stood up to meet his gaze, he motioned for me to sit. ‘What a day.’ He settled into his chair. ‘All this paperwork …’ He picked up a manila folder from his desk and then tossed it back down. ‘Well, it gets in the way of the real job, don’t you think?’
I nodded and then stopped myself mid-way: I couldn’t get into the
habit of agreeing with this man.
He opened the manila folder and peered in it, ‘Pani Skowrońska,’ he said under his breath. ‘Student, artist …’ Then he tutted and said, ‘Dissident.’ He sighed and looked directly at me. The edges of his eyes were pink and wet, like one of Father’s rabbits when it had an infection. I shifted my gaze away but he had already caught me staring. He opened his drawer and retrieved a small glass vial and untwisted the lid. Then he tipped his head back and dropped liquid into his eyes. ‘I have a daughter at university.’ He sat straight again, blinking. Liquid dribbled down his cheek and he wiped it away. ‘Same age as you or thereabouts. I worry about her, as no doubt your father worries about you.’
At the mention of Father, my lips went dry.
He breathed in loudly and then said, ‘Of course, I taught her all I could. From a young age, she understood the aims of the People’s Republic, understood what we’re working towards. Not everyone is privileged to have that type of upbringing. The schools teach what they can but it’s not the same as having a strong moral example in the home, wouldn’t you agree?’
Don’t nod.
There was a shuffling sound at the back of the room. I glanced behind at the guard, who sighed. How many of these interviews had he witnessed? And were they all as one-sided as this?
‘A lot of people thought I would be disappointed when my first-born was a daughter,’ the Colonel said, ‘but I was overjoyed. Such beauty! And women can make a unique contribution to our country, don’t you think? Without our wives, our sisters, our daughters, where would we be?’ He smiled with pleasure at this little speech. ‘Would you like a coffee? I know I would.’ He beckoned to the guard. ‘Two coffees. Oh, and a couple of biscuits.’
The rich smell was enough to weaken my knees. The last time I’d had coffee was at home with Father.
The guard placed a blue ceramic pot on the table and then sloshed coffee into our glasses. He stood by as the Colonel lifted his steaming glass and took a sip.
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