The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel

by Neal Ascherson

  The canteen floor had been swept and washed; the tables had been scrubbed and laid with white cloths. Behind a new serving counter stood a line of women in aprons and headscarves. They were wide-eyed, expectant, a touch nervous.

  I took a bowl and went up to the steel vat containing soup. Behind it stood a thin, sad woman who seemed to be terrified by the sight of me; she flinched away and her mouth opened, showing missing teeth. She was a bit clumsy ladling out the soup: oxtail or something, but an improvement on turnip. ‘Thank you,’ I said in Polish. ‘You are very welcome here.’ She said nothing; something about me still alarmed her. Maybe she wasn’t Polish after all, but one of the Scottish ladies.

  A voice said in English: ‘Major? We meet again!’ I looked along the counter, and met the eyes of Lady Somebody as she shovelled out sausages, bacon and fried bread. Working clothes suited her; she seemed younger and more free. I noticed that she was wearing her engagement ring – a pretty blue stone mounted in gold, that went with her eyes – at the same moment she did. She twisted it off her finger. ‘Damn, I forgot! Will you hang on to this till afterwards?’ I dropped the ring into the tunic pocket of my battledress.

  When the men had all been served, she came over with a mug of tea and sat down with Tadek and me.

  ‘It seems so long ago now, the dance at Kirkton. I was going to ask you and some of the others to Sunday lunch, but you left early. Remember? You rushed off. The corporal had quite a job getting the lads into the truck without you.’

  ‘I remember. We danced.’

  ‘I hope you’ll call me Margaret. And you are... Maurycy.’ She pronounced it properly. I looked hard at Tadek, whose long horse-face had assumed an idiotic expression.

  ‘Tadek is teaching me Polish. Well, we are quite old friends, aren’t we. We met at headquarters in Leven, when we volunteers took over the kitchen in the officers’ mess. But now I’m here. With all you secret agents, in the hush-hush department!’ She laughed merrily.

  Men at other tables were looking round at us. Margaret’s voice was as sharp as an oboe, the voice of someone who had never understood why other women whispered. I wondered how much the soldiers had understood. Tadek still sat in a daze of love.

  ‘That singer at the dance,’ I asked, ‘what was her name? I don’t recall.’

  ‘Oh, that was Isabella Fowler, Tibbie – quite a character. And such a sweet voice. Yes, her mother was with us at the castle for years till the war broke out.’

  ‘With you?’

  ‘Well, yes, she did the beds and the floors at Balbrudie, kept the drawing room nice, helped Cook – you know. And we let Tibbie use the library, little bookworm. Sitting cross-legged on the carpet, reading all the old poems in Scots. She’ll go to university if this war ever ends.’

  ‘Where’s Tibbie now?’

  ‘You’ll never believe, she’s a policewoman in Edinburgh. Big Tibs, the terror of couthy Liberton. She’s been at it for over a year now. I’m surprised you didn’t know. They say you made quite a hit with her that evening.’

  ‘Ships that pass in the night.’

  ‘How sad. Well, I must ship myself off now. Do widzenia, both of you.’

  She jumped up, took her mug through to the scullery and vanished into the gardens. That night, as I undressed, I felt the ring in my pocket.

  Tadek said: ‘I’ll give it to her tomorrow.’

  ‘Why you? I’ll be seeing her, too, and she asked me to look after it.’

  ‘Sod off, will you?’ We both laughed.

  *

  Next day, the row of women waiting for us behind the counter were smiling and joking as if we had all been together for months. This time, a different woman stood at the soup vat and she was definitely Polish. Small and sturdy, she chattered away about the fresh fruit and vegetables – bananas, oranges, asparagus – they had enjoyed in Palestine. It was so strange to hear again a woman speaking my language: in a way delicious, in another way almost shocking. How could she blether on as if she were in her own farm kitchen? Hadn’t she noticed that she had landed on another planet where the skies were dark, where nobody picked the wild mushrooms in the wood and Mary Queen of Heaven didn’t stand at each crossroads?

  Tadek gave the ring to his lady, who laughed and nodded her silver head towards me. I sat with them for a few moments after the meal, but Margaret soon excused herself. ‘I have to help clear. We’re so shorthanded; half the Polish women who came yesterday are off sick. Their state of health... God, I had no idea. They should all be in hospital really.’

  *

  Walking across the gardens towards my hut, I passed the sickbay. It was sunny, and a woman in a headscarf was sitting on a bench outside the door smoking a cigarette. Her legs were bare, and I noticed dark, coin-shaped scars, ulcer marks, on her shins. It was the gaunt woman who had served me soup the day before. She was obviously one of ours. Why had I thought she might be a Scot? I sat down beside her.

  ‘Let me introduce myself. I am Maurycy Szczucki and I come from a place not far from Lwów. And can I ask madame for her name?’

  She said nothing, but raised her head and began to stare at me. She was looking straight into my eyes, but it was the stare of somebody trying to make out a distant landmark, perhaps a broken tower on the horizon. The cigarette went on burning between her fingers. Then the corner of her mouth twitched, but no smile followed.

  I tried again. ‘They say that your group is still in bad health. Were you in the sickbay to get medicine?’

  She put her hand on mine, as if to steady me. Then at last she smiled, and said: ‘I am afraid that in Scotland they don’t run to cachets Faivres. Not like that pharmacy downstairs on Czarnecki Street.’

  I sat bolt upright. As I have written, meeting dead people is not so very surprising. But this was utterly surprising. There was a moment of silence. I expect my mouth fell open. I remember taking up her hand and squeezing the bones of her fingers, as if I were counting them.

  ‘I don’t believe this. This is not possible, I don’t believe this.’

  Now the smile widened; and it was tender and, in spite of the missing teeth, familiar. She trod out her cigarette, pulled off the headscarf and shook out her short, greying hair. Wisia had been nineteen then, when we were together, and that had been seven years ago. So this worn, yellow-faced woman must be all of twenty-six years old. We clung to one another and wept, and I felt the bony knobs along her spine.

  That evening, after duty, we met again and sat on the same bench. On her knees Wisia balanced a brown-paper bag containing two real oranges.

  ‘Let’s share. They give them to me for my vitamins. In Palestine, we had fresh oranges all the time.’

  ‘But before Palestine. Tell me everything, starting in that September. And your family? You were the oldest, the big sister.’

  So she told me. Now, as I look back on what she said, I see her cropped head bowed as she talked, looking down at the orange she was slowly unpeeling in her lap. At one point in her wanderings Wisia had worked in a Persian carpet factory in Ispahan, and I remember her story as one thread in an enormous tapestry, a kilim made out of countless individual stories which I imagine in dark reds and blacks and bright green. That is the narrative of the Poles driven back and forth across the world, a journey through captivity and war and famine and plague, across forests and winter steppes, across oceans and deserts and – for brief moments of joy – into green Paradise gardens of fruit and flowers.

  Don’t talk to me about a ‘pilgrimage’. I hate that sort of pious-patriotic syrup. Don’t talk to me about an Odyssey or an Aeneid. Like us, Odysseus and Aeneas left a burning city to sail through every kind of suffering and peril, but one came home to his wife in his own house and the other reached the destined shore and founded a better Troy. For the Poles, there was no homecoming, and nothing was founded. One by one, we slipped overboard and swam ashore to a hundred different beaches, and the empty ship drifted over the horizon.

  I remembered Wisia’s family wel
l, though I had never felt close to them. She had a noisy ten-year-old brother, Władek, and a younger sister, Hania (‘Haneczka’), with dark hair, and an energetic, restless mother. Her father, a reserve officer, had been captured after 17 September and she had no news of him. I imagine we both thought about the sodden bundles packed layer on layer in those pits in Katyń Forest, and there was no need for words.

  In April 1940, her mother and the three children were crammed into cattle trucks on a train which took three weeks to reach central Asia. They survived the journey, which many did not. In Kazakhstan, mother and children dug ditches or stacked railway sleepers, and Haneczka died of dysentery a few weeks before they heard of the ‘amnesty’ in the summer of 1941.

  Hitching lifts on lorries, they set off to seek the new Polish army being formed in Russia. But after a month on the road they were intercepted, and put in a desolate transit camp with thousands of other ragged fugitives. Everyone had lice; typhus broke out.

  ‘Mama was ill; we took off our coats to cover her. I thought if I could find milk, at least, she could get well. So I walked for a night and a day, and with a gold earring I bought a tin can full of sheep’s milk in an Uzbek village. But when I got back, Mama was dead.’

  Wisia and young Władek set out again, this time on foot. They lived by scavenging, begging. Once Wisia found a crate of matches in the back of an overturned lorry, and they kept alive by selling the matches at the side of the road. Meanwhile, the Polish base had been moved even further away, to near Tashkent. By the time they got there, in the spring of 1942, both of them were skeletal and weak with scurvy. Army nurses, themselves starving, did what they could for them, but the children of the incoming Polish survivors were dying by dozens every week.

  One day Wisia woke in her tent to find Władek gone. He had told a friend that he was setting out to look for his father. In the next few weeks, she searched for him in the streets of Tashkent and in all the hospitals and cemeteries she could reach on foot. But she never saw him again.

  That summer, Stalin was at last persuaded to let the Polish army leave the Soviet Union and join the British in the Middle East; the soldiers and their ragged civilian retinue were brought down to the Caspian Sea. Wisia, who wanted to stay and wait for Władek, cried and screamed; she kicked the soldiers who thrust her back into the lorry. When they came to Krasnovodsk, rusty steamers were alongside the dock, ready to carry them across the sea to Iran.

  The crossing took two days. The sick and dying lay on the deck under a black cloud of flies. Everyone else had to stand, packed shoulder to shoulder. Wisia remembered the soft splashes as the dead were heaved over the rail into the sea.

  On the Persian shore, British doctors in uniform and Red Cross ambulances were waiting for them along the beach at Pahlevi. Wisia unbuttoned her filthy clothes and waded into the cool water, indifferent to her nakedness and to the fuel oil floating on the surface. Then she came out and lay on the sand and slept for three days and nights. On the second day, an army squad collecting corpses along the shore noticed that she was still alive. When she woke, she was wearing a clean nightdress and smelled of soap; her head had been shaved and she was lying under white sheets in a hospital ward.

  *

  Wisia stayed in Persia for many months. Soon she was well enough to help in a Polish orphanage, and later to stand and work at the looms with other women in the Ispahan carpet factory. Then she joined the army as a nurse. This meant that she could stay with the troops as they went on to Baghdad and then Palestine, while the civilian families were sent off to Egypt and then to wait the war out in India or Southern Rhodesia.

  But in Palestine Wisia fell ill again. ‘Respiratory problems, also a nervous crisis,’ she said dismissively. Instead of following her field hospital into battle in North Africa or Italy, she was put on a white cruise liner which went down the Red Sea to South Africa and then up the Atlantic to Scotland. ‘Cadet nurse Kaczmarek, Wisława: transferred to Polish First Corps for health reasons, light duties to be assigned by appropriate supply company.’

  She recited this formula with a grave expression. Once I could have told from her voice if she was being satirical. Now I could not be sure. When you are old, as now I am, it often happens that you meet somebody you haven’t seen for twenty years – but he’s plump and bald, but she’s become an old lady with puckers round her mouth! And yet, after only a day or so, you have moved back into this well-known house with its changed furniture. You soon forget that curly head on the young giant swerving towards the goal-posts, the lips which shone when they parted to kiss – all these memories fade into brown snapshots in a mislaid album. It takes more time to realise that the house itself is no longer in the same place.

  Wisia’s different face had again become Wisia to me, by the time that we met on the same bench on a third afternoon. But it was as if she was speaking with a new grammar whose rules I didn’t know. She spoke evenly, sometimes smiled. But was there agony or anger under the level surface, or mockery behind the gentle smile?

  This time, she rolled her orange up and down her knee, but for a long while didn’t peel it.

  ‘What did I do?’

  ‘When? What do you mean?’

  ‘You know. When I came back to your room, and you had gone. What did I do wrong?’

  I was silent.

  ‘I thought for a long time: it must have been because I was so easy. I didn’t try to stop what you were doing. So you thought: after all, she’s just another little whore.’

  ‘No, Wisia, no, never! Listen: that never entered my head; in fact, it was exactly the opposite...’ So I told her. Well, I told her that I was unnerved when she knelt down to pray beside the bed. That much. Not about feeling that I was being trapped. Not about escapology. I told her something about how marvellous she had looked naked, and how the contrast between hands raised to Mary and what we were about to do in the bed had been... suddenly unbearable to me.

  To my surprise, she began to laugh.

  ‘Maurycy, you are such a complete idiot. Just for that? I don’t believe you – unless all that pompous atheism of yours suddenly vanished.’

  She laughed again, putting up her hand to hide the gaps in her teeth. Through her fingers, she said: ‘The Miracle on Czarnecki Street! Pious maiden prays to Our Lady to save her virginity, and her prayer is heard.’

  I thought: she never talked like that in the old days. Better if she had.

  Wisia said, ‘Your family – you think they were so sophisticated and modern. But they brought you up as a total innocent. Only child, with no brothers or sisters. Anti-clerical household, with no prayers, no holy pictures. Didn’t you know that nice girls are always meant to cross themselves and say a prayer before they get into bed? After brushing their teeth, of course.’

  Once again, I couldn’t read her mood. I muttered: ‘What I did to you was unforgivable. When I think of what you have had to suffer...’

  ‘Quiet, quiet!’ She stuck a segment of orange into my mouth, and kissed me on the cheek. But that was something she used to do, the old Wisia, when we were walking in the park and I was in the middle of some speech about the absurdities of clerical fascism. Sometimes it was a piece of the apple she was eating, sometimes a chocolate plum. Always with the same light kiss. I felt a prickling in my eyes.

  ‘Listen, Maurycy. What you did to me and what happened afterwards to me – to our family – have nothing to do with each other. But, well, you gave me my first loss. I was lucky. I grew up with people who adored me and protected me. I was nineteen, I was in love with you, I trusted you. Nothing had prepared me for what you did. It was like the earth’s crust suddenly giving way and dropping me into a darkness which had always been waiting underneath.’

  She was silent for a moment. ‘First love and first loss. Nothing which comes afterwards is like them. Still, that feeling that we walk on a thin crust, that we can at any time fall through it... I had learned that through you, which is why I wasn’t broken, not mentally, by wh
at happened to us later. I already knew there was a pit beneath us all.’

  ‘You make me feel like a hangman, who lured you on to his trapdoor, wound the pretty rope gently round your neck and pulled the lever.’

  ‘My dear, you should have been a writer. I thought so then. Maybe you still could be. Maurycy, it’s such a blessing that we never married. Not just because you are a charming monster who ruins other people because he doesn’t know what he wants. But because of history. Here we are, breathing this Scottish air. If we had married and stayed where we were, you would be in the earth beside my father at Katyń, and I would have died in Siberia trying to keep our baby alive.’

  Wisia carefully brushed together the orange peel on her lap, and wrapped it in her handkerchief. ‘For the kitchen. For nice cakes.’ She got to her feet and faced me.

  ‘I’m away tomorrow to hospital, a place near Glasgow. My trouble is tuberculosis. Well, it’s not surprising after Russia. Some of the other girls are bad with it, too, but mine seems to need the specialists.’

  I said: ‘I can’t lose you.’

  She laughed. ‘Wisia is tough. It’s not about losing me, it’s about finding yourself. Walk delicately, my dear. Remember how thin the crust is. Even in this stony Scotland.’

  16

  Over Greenock, that was an autumn of deep war and wet streets. Men and women pulled cloth bunnets down over their noses or unfurled black umbrellas as they flowed in and out of the yards. The soft rain made the granite setts gleam under their feet. The angry ‘Second Front Now!’ slogans were beginning to wash off the walls.

  There was no end in sight to rain or war. From the Lyle Hill, there were many days when you could barely see the Argyll mountains. The misty rain came from there, out of the north-west, drawing across the estuary in long, sleepy curtains before it made the slates of Gourock shine.

  It tasted sour, this water picked up by clouds from the ocean or the inner seas. This rain had taken flavour as it trailed across distant green islands, across rocks and strands piled with debris from the Atlantic war: red buoys and yellow smoke bombs, white-painted fragments of lifeboats, grey pods of rubber latex, shapeless black bundles which had once been seamen.