Field Study

by Rachel Seiffert

The look of disbelief on Ash’s face.

  – Disgust, too. Like he hated us.

  They were transferred, separately. North Africa, again, but not on leave this time: hard labour. Butler was court-martialled, Fran discharged, a few weeks after war’s end. Dishonourable.

  Deserter. Not shot like they were in the Great War. Fran remembers the other men’s faces, when they turned up again. Is sure many of them thought they should have faced the firing squad.

  – The road was mined, you see.

  Five more men dead, and he and Butler had missed it by going cross country.

  Fran pauses there, blinking slowly. I think he might have finished, but I don’t want to be the first to break the silence, so I wait. I can’t see behind his glasses if he is crying. I wonder if I want him to be. And then why, exactly.

  – Three from the first truck, two from the second. The one I was in.

  Fran looks at me. Holds his eyes steady on mine while he tells me he is sorry they died. That he has thought of them often: when he was in prison and in all the decades since. But stronger than the regret, even now, is the relief that he wasn’t among them.

  Second Best

  Silesia, Poland: 1996

  Ewa is early. Adela said she was to wait for them on the main road out of town and they would pick her up at ten o’clock, where the concrete was laid for the service station the summer before last. Ewa has six weeks’ clothing zipped into a bag and twenty minutes to wait. Here the houses peter out into the surrounding country: heavy fields and a thin row of trees at the near horizon. The spring has been wet and the weeds grow thick, green-dark in the cracks of the unused forecourt. Few cars pass, a few people gather at the junction, watching for the morning coach that comes and then goes. The people say their goodbyes and hellos, linger in small groups, disperse. Ewa stands alone, on the other side of the road, waiting.

  East of the German border now, she will be south of Berlin soon, where the ground is more sand than soil. Asparagus land. Even in the city, Ewa knows, you can feel it under your feet: the grit that blows across the back-courts and pavements, the city streets. She has not been there, but she has heard tell, has been picturing it for weeks, ever since Adela suggested the job. Spring harvest: asparagus for the German capital. Six weeks of bending and cutting. Seven days, long hours, no matter. The more work, the more money, the better. And a two-month visa.

  Adela is late, Ewa sits down on her bag. At the far end of the street she sees her sister coming, and that she has Jacek with her. Ewa groans as she sees the bicycle round the corner: Dorota pedalling, Jacek on the handlebars, sullen. Today nothing has gone according to plan.

  – Adela called.

  Dorota shouts as soon as she is in earshot.

  – They have to change one of the wheels on the car. They’ll get here as soon as they can.

  Ewa stands as her sister pulls up in front of her. She tries to catch her son’s eye, but he slips off the handlebars, keeps his face turned away. Ewa has said goodbye to him once already this morning, thinks Dorota has brought him deliberately, to make the whole thing harder.

  – We wanted to keep you company.

  Ewa nods and Jacek takes the bike and cycles a wide arc around his mother and aunt. Across the broken concrete of the forecourt, out into the road and back, circling. Legs too short for the saddle, he stands on the pedals, arms reaching forward and up to the handlebars. Ewa speaks to him as he turns.

  – Just this month and next month, remember, then the rent is paid and I’ll come home. And you know, maybe we can even get a bicycle. A bicycle in time for summer, Jeyku.

  He pedals on and on. Ewa turns to her sister and Dorota kisses her, but her grip on her arm is tight.

  – I know what you are doing.

  Ewa blinks. She kisses her sister back. No hiding anything from her.

  – You went to see Piotr’s mother.

  Ewa wonders, briefly, if it is worth denying, worth lying, and then Jacek passes.

  – You went to see the old sow.

  – Don’t talk about your grandmother like that, Jacek.

  Ewa looks from her son to Dorota, who shrugs.

  – I saw you there. This morning.

  Ewa sighs.

  – And so you told Jacek, of course.

  – I’m not going to lie to him.

  – Whose son is he?

  – She’ll be my mama while my mama is in Germany.

  Jacek is still cycling. Dorota blushes. Ewa laughs.

  – And you told him that, too, I suppose?

  The two young women look at each other. They both have red hair, dyed red-brown and grown long around their pale faces.

  – I want to go, Dorota. I want to earn some money for us, for me and Jacek. And I want to go to Berlin, too. See Piotr. See what he says.

  The boy cycles up and down the empty forecourt behind them. Picking up speed, slamming on the brakes, trying to make the back wheel skid out on the concrete. Every so often he succeeds and then he shouts to his mother and she waves. The rest of the time she talks or stands in silence with her sister. They share a cigarette and when they speak, they mirror each other’s movements. Shoulders shrugging in emphasis, thumbnail rubbing a lower lip.

  – She wouldn’t give me his address in Berlin, the old sow. She didn’t even ask after Jacek. Just nothing, you know.

  Ewa takes an envelope out of her bag, shakes it so her sister can hear the coins inside, and then describes how her father-in-law threw it down to her as she was leaving. She was on the path up to the road when she heard him whistling, saw him lean out of the toilet window in his vest.

  – I didn’t even know the old man was at home. Must have been in the bathroom the whole time. The only room in that flat with a lock, you know. And now it’s just him and the old girl, I think he shuts himself away in there.

  Jacek shouts, Dorota waves, Ewa smiles, opens the envelope, shows her sister: thirty-three Deutschmarks and Piotr’s address.

  – I don’t think it’s a good idea, Ewa.

  – I know you don’t.

  __

  Adela arrives, an hour later than planned. Small car loaded with suitcases and boxes, other asparagus cutters: Adela’s brother Marek and two cousins. They make room for Ewa on the back seat while she pushes her bag into the boot.

  Her son stops cycling and watches her.

  – I’m going now, Jeyku. Time to say goodbye again.

  He stands astride Dorota’s bicycle on the other side of the forecourt, at the far edge where concrete gives way to mud, then field. Ewa waves to him but he doesn’t come over. Stock still, blue T-shirt and long pale hair. He stares and Ewa calls, laughing at first, but then saying come on, and please.

  – Jacek. Please?

  There is a short silence in which they both stand and blink, mother and son. And then Jacek turns, drops the bicycle and runs. Fast, without looking back, disappearing as the road curves south into the town. Leaving Ewa with the abandoned bicycle, and the clicking, spinning motion of its upturned wheel.

  __

  In the car, the others are kind. Pressed together, they pretend not to notice that Ewa is crying. She stares out at the fields passing, Poland going, Germany coming, feels the tears dry on her cheeks, tight and itchy. Only another hour or two, and they will be on the farm already, and tomorrow they will start working. She will earn some money and then she’ll go looking. In her pocket, Ewa has a Berlin address. No phone number. And it’s good that way. She doesn’t want to call him. No warning.

  __

  Dorota is tempted, but she doesn’t tell Jacek what his mother will do when she gets her wages. Over there, on the other side of the border. Even though it takes her two hours to find him after Ewa has gone and he shows no sign of being sorry. Even though she has to keep the salon closed all morning because of him and the customers are angry. Even when he kicks the table legs and refuses his dinner, and the already small kitchen becomes much smaller, and her husband Tadeusz picks up his plat
e and goes to eat standing outside in the stairwell. Even then Dorota respects her sister’s wishes and bites her tongue.

  When Piotr left, he never told her, never said that he wanted to go. Dorota has never known whether to believe this entirely, but it’s what Ewa always insisted. She turned up at their place with Jacek and two bags one morning, told them Piotr had been gone for three days already.

  Ewa didn’t cry, though Jacek did all the time. For weeks it was just about impossible to get a word out of her. All she said was that he’d written a letter: the postmark was still Poland, but one of the towns at the border. Inside he told them he was gone, but not where to or how long he would stay there.

  – He never said why? He never gave you the least indication?

  Ewa put her hands over her face when Dorota started shouting, spoke from beneath her palms in a quiet monotone. She checked through his things, she said, while she was packing. In the wardrobe, the drawers, the laundry basket, under the mattress. She couldn’t find anything, and only one change of clothes was missing.

  He’d lost his job, of course, the winter before, but then so had well over a hundred others in the town when the bottling plant closed. They hadn’t gone, at least not so soon, and at least when they did, they sent money to their families, promised to come home. It was not an easy time, not for anyone, but they’d seen worse, surely. The elections had been, they had a new government, a whole new system, and it was bound to be painful for a while, but it made no sense to her to leave. Not now that everything was changing.

  Dorota tried to understand them. Not only Piotr, but also her sister: why she was so quiet, why she never asked any questions. Tadeusz found Ewa the first of a series of jobs: evenings with his brother at the bakery. And then a couple of rooms in a building nearby that weren’t too expensive. In that first time, money was often short, and they would do their best to help her. Dorota sat for Jacek a couple of times a week, and would try to talk to her sister when she came home from work. But Ewa just used to say:

  – Another time, yes? I’m tired, okay?

  And then she would climb into the bed beside her boy, ask Dorota to turn the light off when she was ready to go.

  It was spring then, and cool and wet, just like now. Jacek was two, they had been married nearly three years and Ewa was barely twenty.

  Dorota thinks Ewa wants to know now. And she doesn’t blame her.

  __

  It rains the first week on the farm, almost without stopping. But it is warm and the asparagus tips push their way up through the fine soil, pale combs sprouting along the dark tops of the trenches.

  It is hot work, Ewa bending, crouching, digging with her left hand, forcing the knife down into the earth with her right. Twenty of them, making their way along the rows, the farmer teaching those who are new, then working alongside them. He speaks only a few words of Polish, the necessary ones, explains methodically, by demonstration, drawing the fat yellow-white asparagus spears up out of the sandy soil. Ewa gets faster, the stems she pulls longer: she learns to anticipate the snap and release as she works the blade through. Sweat gathers in drops on her back, underneath her breasts, mixes with the cooler rain which runs from her cheeks, down her throat, off the nape of her neck. Water inside and out. By the end of the first hour each day, her coat is wet, her jumper dry, the T-shirt beneath soaked through.

  While she works, she thinks about her sister. That Dorota has probably been waiting for her to do this for months now. Ever since the divorce papers arrived from Berlin. But then winter came, Christmas and another year, and Ewa said nothing, did nothing, life went on as normal. She could see Dorota was suspicious, of course, when Adela’s idea came up, and Ewa said she would go to Germany with her. But when Dorota challenged her about it, Ewa was always careful not to give a straight answer. Sometimes she’d claim she had signed the papers, sent them back to the lawyers.

  – Weeks ago already.

  Other times she’d say she had lost them, torn them up, made them into papier mâché for a school project with Jacek. And when Dorota complained about being lied to, Ewa would just shrug.

  – Don’t ask, then.

  She thinks how Dorota can be hard work: never seems to know when to stop, always wants her answers immediately, doesn’t understand the need for time to think things over. But Ewa has to smile when she thinks of her, and she does wonder if it’s fair, to treat her sister the way she does, after the way Dorota has helped her. Ewa’s palms itch in the hot gloves, so she takes them off, stuffs them in her pockets. The wet sand and soil work their way under her nails, leave her fingertips raw, stinging in the morning when she wakes up in the dormitory.

  __

  Dorota walks Jacek to school early, mostly in silence. Her head full of questions she is not sure about asking, Jacek’s mouth set, his eyes averted, so she can’t tell what he might be thinking about, if he’s thinking about anything.

  Jacek never talks about him, so Dorota doesn’t know if he thinks about his father, what he remembers of him. She calculates: seven now, born in the spring before the elections, so about five years since he’s seen him. Dorota can’t be sure what Ewa has told her son, what she hasn’t. Why Piotr left, never came back, why they didn’t go with him.

  Jacek says a hurried goodbye at the corner and then runs ahead so she can’t take him right to the gate. Dorota stops. She waits until he has crossed the strip of playground and she can see he has gone inside, and then she walks on. Past the school building on her way to the salon.

  All day as she cuts, dries and washes, Dorota tries to assess what would be appropriate to tell a seven year old about his parents, to anticipate his questions. In the absence of answers, she confuses them with her own: whether Ewa still loves his father, whether she wants them back together, back in Poland, or all three living, illegally, in the German capital.

  She has no idea.

  Dorota also doesn’t know if she could simply tell Jacek facts: not without her voice slanting them this way or that. She tries it out a few times, lying in bed at night, and her husband tells her no, no.

  – You still sound like you disapprove.

  Tadeusz sighs and reaches out and rubs her belly before he goes to sleep. And Dorota lies awake a long time, still trying to work things out.

  __

  Ewa’s days pass quickly. The work is monotonous, but the place more interesting than she thought, and the people. The farm is small, and when they arrived, the farmer made a point of telling them that his place was family run: different from the larger farms that own the land all around. He pointed as he spoke, made a wide arc with his arm. He has three children. He and his wife and the eldest, a daughter, often work with them.

  Lunchtime and they eat all together, hired hands and the family, the farmer’s daughter serving thick soup, long sausages and small white rolls. The girl is sixteen, maybe seventeen, with fair hair and spots. Looks like her mother, moves with the same, even gestures as her father. Ewa takes the bowl she offers, finds a place to sit between Adela and her brother. This is Marek’s fifth asparagus year, his third here. Adela said he was friendly with the farmer, and Ewa is curious.

  – Was this part of a collective before, when she was born?

  Ewa points to the daughter with her spoon. Marek nods, chewing. Adela answers for him.

  – Her grandfather stayed out as long as he could, but they forced him in the end.

  Marek swallows, joins in.

  – He couldn’t get loans, machines, fertilizer. They called him an enemy of the people, the party functionaries. It divided the village. Still does, her father says.

  Farmer and daughter are carrying the soup pots to the deep sink, collecting empty bowls from their workers. Marek takes a last bite of his bread, speaks with his mouth full:

  – He took the land back again, after the wall fell, soon as he could. Wants it to go to her later, keep it in the family, out of the privatised collectives. He says the spirit of ’89 is still alive here. Fighting
for the subsidies from Brussels.

  Marek winks at her. Outside it is drizzling and they pull their hoods up and boots on again. Ewa’s are a size too large and her heels slide up into the legs as she walks across the yard. The daughter comes out to the fields with them in the afternoon, and Ewa watches her cutting: more and faster than any of them, her father included. Eyes elsewhere, soft face closed.

  __

  It rains on the other side of the border too, and Jacek runs home after school. His legs carry him without thinking past the church and fire station to the two rooms he has shared with Ewa as long as he can remember, and it is only when he gets to the kiosk at the corner that he realises what he’s done. He doesn’t turn immediately but stands a moment at the edge of the pavement, where the telephone wires cross overhead. His hood is pulled tight around his face and he can hear his own breath. Dorota’s salon is ten minutes in the other direction.

  She watches for him at the window. Two clients have cancelled because of the weather and now Jacek is late coming from school. When she finally sees him, he is walking slow, stiff-legged in rain-soaked trousers. Dorota goes to the small back room for towels, spreads a slice of bread and jam, which he takes from her wordlessly when he comes in. He sits down without taking his coat off and eats, swivelling the salon chair to the window so he can watch the few cars and people passing, the water running down the wide pane.

  __

  They are six in the dormitory: Ewa, Adela and four other women. Two German and two from just outside Warsaw, whom Adela knows already from last year. In the evenings they cook and eat together in the communal kitchen, Adela translating. Paula, one of the German women, has children and shows Ewa photos. Ewa has no picture of Jacek so she describes him.

  – He’s not the easiest. Such a boy, you know? But I love him.

  They work late, are usually tired, sometimes play cards. Often they are in bed by ten. Lights out, the glow of Adela’s cigarette in the dark, Ewa whispers with her in sleepy tones. She keeps the envelope in her bedside locker. Has told Adela the story about her father-in-law, leaning out of the fourth-floor bathroom window.