‘Charges? You can’t be serious. You can’t really believe that I had anything to do with Eric Kent’s death. Or with Kellerman’s fantasy about amateur Fascists?’
He was standing and looking down on me. I jumped to my feet and faced him.
‘You have applied to go back to Poland. I don’t quite know why, but that’s for your own conscience. Obviously, we can stop you leaving, and we will. But on the other hand... Major, would you just calm yourself and stand away from me? Thank you.’
He went on: ‘But that doesn’t quite have to be the end of the story. You never know: some reason for us to stall the French could turn up. So you could find yourself on that boat after all. And to be honest, that might suit us much better. It really does depend on you.’
I heard a chain rattle and a flush. The other man came back into the room. The two nodded at one another. Slowly, we all sat down again.
When he had pulled out a pipe and lit it – that maddening British silence between tamping down tobacco and finally waving a dying match in the air – the small man leaned back.
‘We could talk about a sort of gentlemen’s agreement. D’you have any idea of what I’m driving at?’
I did.
*
‘But he can’t divorce me,’ Helen said. ‘Not if he’s dead.’ Heads down in the rain, we were walking along the Esplanade. Hugh lay in the pram which Mabel had once used to wheel the infant Johnston.
‘Helen Melville doesn’t need a divorce. Why can’t you remember she’s dead too?... And we can say Helen Douglas’s birth certificate got burned in the blitz. Then we could marry in the registry.’
‘Third time lucky, huh? How could I pass for a wee Polish countess? I’d be better off with Craig’s godly folk in Ontario, even though I scunner them. And you’d be better off staying here than howking big stanes out the rubble in Warsaw.’
‘Helen, I’ve explained all that. I’m not staying to rot in a cell for some spy-novel shite left behind by Eric. Or because I helped Johnston to walk free. It’s him should be getting chased, not me.’
‘Okay, okay. If I said yes, I’d become stateless same as you, right?’
‘No, Helen, listen! Once we register over there, you become Polish citizen married to another Polish citizen. Yes, you lose British passport as wife of a foreigner: it’s British law. But you’d never be stateless.’
‘Are there any houses left in Poland? Was it all not flattened in the war?’
‘We’ll be in a different part. They call it the Recovered Territories, where the Germans were. We’ll be getting a fine, warm German house for free, with maybe a garden. More modern than other regions: better roads, more electricity, and there’s state aid for the settlers coming in. Schools for Hughie when he’s older...’
‘It’s all daft. Why am I even thinking on it? How would it be with you out all day and me no speaking a word of the language?’
‘Neighbours are so friendly in Poland. They’ll help you to manage. You’ll soon learn how to ask for things.’
‘Aye, that’ll be right – just perfect! I wonder. And that’s you who said he never needed a home.’
‘I never meant it that way.’
‘Ya did so.’
‘I did not!’
‘Ya did sot!’ We both started to laugh. She pushed wet hair off her cheek.
‘There’s us talking like we was five-year-old weans. See now, Mike, I’ll think about it. If it wasn’t you, I’d be dumping this whole scheme of yours away in a second. Me and Hughie in Poland, for God’s sake! Just tell me this: if I didna like it, I could come back here, right?’
‘And walk out on me? Of course. But please don’t.’
*
That night, I went wandering. The Tontine didn’t fit my mood; I walked on until I found myself outside the Auchmar Vaults.
In a dark corner, I stared into my pint of heavy until a man came to sit beside me.
‘They was asking after ye. The men from London, that wanted the coffin lifted.’
I recognised Dougie, the undertakers’ man at Johnston’s ‘funeral’ all those years ago.
‘I telt them: “Ye’ll no find him in there, just bits of other poor bastards.” I said: “See, we filled up the box, gave it weight, for the family’s sake.” Mister, are you going with Helen the widow now? I heard ye were.’
I said that I was. I hoped to take her back to Poland with me.
‘I kent her as a lassie, Helen Houston. They came frae Cartsdyke and stayed in the next close to us up in Hope Street. Most days I saw her, and she was aye laughing, that’s before her mother died. Boy, a big coarse laugh she had. The wife would be telling me: “Get that Helen to hold her row or I’ll go crazy.”’
I wished he would leave me alone. But he said: ‘Youse Poles is all away hame now. High time ye went. But you’s taking wur daughters with ye. The flowers o’ Scotland, wur bonny women, away tae Poland to be your Polish wives. In a fuckan Communist country. Mister, I had a few drinks, right, so nae hard feelings. Excuse me. But I’m telling you: Helen Houston will be greetan bitter tears, day and night, in thon dreich land of yours. And I hate that. I truly hate it.’
*
When he put on his cap and swayed towards the street door, I stayed in my corner. I wanted to get Dougie out of my head. But instead, as I stood up to buy myself a whisky, his words were replaced by all the warning words that le Gallois and Wisia and Helen had used about me. Passive, wary of human contact, aimless.
So was this not, in fact, the first positive decision I had ever taken in my life? To marry Helen, if that obstinate creature would consent, and remove with her and the baby to a new life in a new Poland?
Easy to say: no choice. That faced with destruction in either a French or British prison, Poland was my only chance. So was this just another flight, another escape? The only decisions I had made before were negative ones: fleeing from school, fleeing from home, fleeing from Wisia’s love. But this was different, I told myself. Surely this was positive. Surely I was seizing command of my life at last.
But why, then, had I lied to Helen? Those welcoming neighbours, those nice clean houses waiting for us? Well, not quite lies. I wanted to believe that a new, democratic Poland might soon be like that. It was a picture framed by some of the new government’s publicity. But by now I had also been told about the trains, trucks and carts crammed with families expelled from their eastern homes, already pouring into the Recovered Territories. What would be left for us?
And I wanted to dispel the conversation with the two gentlemen in the bungalow. Easy! I would simply play along with their ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ in order to get clear of Britain and France, and then I would ignore it. And they hadn’t precisely asked me to be a spy. Merely to let a certain somebody know when I had a permanent address. Then nothing. Just wait until you are contacted again. No more. But I still felt dirty. And uneasy about questions which I could neither avoid nor answer.
What had happened to Tadek? Were there still boys fighting ‘in the forest’, and were the British still secretly helping them? I forced myself to hope that, as returning soldiers, we would be welcomed by the new coalition government, but I wasn’t so sure about how the Communists would react to us.
Le Gallois had told me that one’s decisions had to be authentic, like a painting. I admitted that my act of will still had some suspect brush strokes. These were my feelings about the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’, about my own politics, about marrying Helen, about the meaning of ‘home’.
I saw that I was diving down into a darkness. But I would make that dive. There had to be a place of light beyond.
27
‘Hughie, speak English when you talk to Mama!’
He was a sturdy child. So he should be: a Scots-Canadian by blood. And yet when he stood before me in the kitchen, legs planted apart, I thought that he already looked like a native. With his blond hair and greenish-grey eyes, he could be Polish, apart from the Fair Isle jersey Mrs M had knitted
for him before we left.
‘Why doesn’t she learn to talk like me?’
‘What’s he saying, Mike?’
I translated. Helen finished loading coal briquettes into the stove, and sat down at the table.
‘He’s aye asking that. And he understands English fine. Well, but for how long? He’ll lose it altogether if you go on learning him Polish.’
‘The boy just wants to be like the other children. And he’s going to be clever, the way he’s picking the language up.’
‘What else is he picking up, for God’s sake? I’ve no way of knowing. And when will the Embassy in Warsaw answer your letter? It’s two months now.’
Mrs Papadakis came into the kitchen, followed by her thin, wordless daughter. Refugees from the Greek civil war, the family shared the house with us and a Polish widow with two small boys. Each family had one room for sleeping and living. We shared the kitchen and the vandalised bathroom.
Like many German houses, this one had a washroom cellar underneath, with a separate entrance in the overgrown garden. Who might be hiding there overnight – migrating families on the road from the east, Czech smugglers with black-market chewing gum, even terrified Germans who had missed the deportation trains? We could never be sure.
The house first assigned to me in this small town had turned out to be occupied. Refugees from what was now Soviet Lithuania crowded out on to the steps as we arrived and shouted abuse. For several bad moments, they thought Helen was a German trying to reclaim her home, and a man still wearing tattered uniform brought out a revolver. In the end a room was found for us elsewhere, in what had once been a handsome villa before its owners were chased out and its contents looted.
The bath tub had been wrenched out and lay on its side in the garden; the locks and handles on all the doors had been cut away and replaced by loops of twine threaded through the holes. There were no beds. But I surprised myself – never ‘good with my hands’ – by buying a collapsed cart from a neighbour and sawing it up into planks which I nailed together into a bed frame. Why didn’t I buy the horse too? The neighbour was puzzled; the little mare had pulled him and his wife and furniture all the way from Ukraine.
Helen had been merry on board the old liner which took returning ex-soldiers back to Poland. We had secured a new birth certificate for Helen without too many lies, and we were married on a wet spring morning in Glasgow. Knowing what they knew about Helen’s marriages, we did not embarrass Jackie or Mrs M by inviting them, and a hotel porter served as witness.
On the ship, there was a crowd of young Scottish women, several of them mill girls from Pitnechtan, all war brides steaming towards an unreadable future. At thirty-four, Helen was the oldest, but by the time we docked at Gdynia she had merged into their happy, raucous gang. Before we filed ashore, the girls all swore that they would keep in touch, that they would never forget one another.
When we reached the small once-German town where we were to live, it was late summer. Helen was not laughing now. She had seen what remained of Danzig, now Gdan´sk, after British bombs and Soviet arson had done their work, and with Hughie on her knee she was silent on the long lorry journey to the west. Our town was ‘recovering’. Many buildings round the market square were still fire-blackened shells, but trains were running and the German street names had been torn down and replaced. At the corner by our scarred suburban villa, Nazi ‘Schlageterstrasse’ had become Communist ‘Dzierzyn´skiego’, named for the Bolsheviks’ first head of police terror.
‘Both shameless murderers,’ said the Polish widow from upstairs, when I met her one day on the corner. I looked around to see who might have overheard. I think it was the first time I did that, and it made me angry with myself.
I found a job in the town’s finance office. As almost nobody was registered yet, and none of the incomers had any intention of paying tax, there was not much to do but look out of the window at the faded red-white banner over the market square. It read ‘Long Live the July Manifesto’ – the first proclamation of the pro-Soviet government.
Helen worked fiercely to clean the villa, carry water in pails when the pipes choked, and clear a space in the garden’s underbrush for a back green where clothes and sheets could be dried. I went with her to the market where, as well as looted German cutlery and old uniforms, it was often possible to buy ham or smoked sausage in those first years before the shortages set in. But most of the cooking was done by exuberant Mrs Papadakis. She knew other Greeks who had a way of getting rice.
Mrs Papadakis adored Hughie. He took her fondling placidly, but he preferred the company of the two Polish lads, who were older and soon appropriated the Dinky Toy cars he had brought with him. In our first month, I arranged for him to join a playgroup organised by nuns. A community resettled from some Ukrainian convent, they had set themselves up in a red-brick Protestant church previously used as a Soviet officers’ club. The Sisters smiled at Helen when she brought Hughie round, and one old nun tried speaking French to her. ‘Double Dutch to me,’ said Helen afterwards. ‘And how do they all drink tea out of glasses, with no milk?’
I soon knew it was not going to work. Helen took longer. I realised for the first time how naturally gregarious she was, thriving among the kids in the Hope Street close, the typing pool at Kincaid’s, the boys on the base in Manitoba, the young wives on the ship. Helen did not really understand the brutality of the political upheaval around us; she still assumed it was vaguely the same as what the British called ‘socialism’. But she couldn’t learn the language and she hated the food – even the rare luxuries I sometimes brought back (‘that cream’s gone sour-like!’).
The one domestic thing she did know about was poverty and the vigour needed to drive back encroaching dirt, cold and vermin. She found it baffling that Polish women envied her, treating her as if she were a millionaire visitor from a planet of luxury.
Helen was valiant in those first months. I watched her struggling to wash a blanket in the kitchen sink, and then I imagined this same woman guiding a four-engined bomber down through darkness and battering winds to a half-seen runway. When would she admit how lonely and how bored she was becoming? What had I done?
I had never been married, nor even lived with a woman for more than a few days in some small Paris hotel. But my solitude lacked integrity. I liked to feel alone but within easy reach of others, in company but not part of that company. I knew perfectly well that when Helen decided to face her own unhappiness and reached out to me for reassurance, I would fail her.
The break came one day in autumn. I came home to find Helen sitting with Hughie on her knee, while Mrs Papadakis rubbed some sort of herbal paste into eczema blisters which had spread over his chest and arms.
‘It’s no getting any better. And he’s coughing. Mike, he needs properly seen to. And what’s this the nuns sent him home with?’
It was a rosary, wrapped up in a letter which pointed out the fate awaiting an unbaptised infant if it died. The Sisters were concerned about Hughie’s unsanctified presence among Christian children, but the community’s priest was ready to perform the necessary sacrament as soon as possible.
‘Religion? Purgatory, before he’s even three years old?’ Helen’s eyes were full of angry tears. ‘Mike, I need to get home with him. Just a wee break, maybe for Christmas with his Grannie Melville and Jackie, and a proper doctor to him. And that goes for me too, Mike. I cannae take this place any more, I’m telling you. I’m sorry for it, but Mike, I want out.’
She was crying now. Hughie, alarmed, joined in. Mrs Papadakis lifted him on to her own lap and tried to mop Helen’s face with the herbal-paste cloth.
I applied for an exit visa on Helen’s new Polish passport. Weeks passed: no response. I wrote to the British Embassy in Warsaw, begging them to offer Helen an entry visa and assist her on compassionate grounds, although she was no longer a British subject. But months went by, snow fell, a Polish winter began, and there was no sign that my letter had even reached Warsaw.
In November, the nuns congratulated Hughie on St Hugh’s Day but suggested that he should find a different playgroup for Lutherans and Jews somewhere else in the town. On the BBC, we heard that the leader of the Opposition had been forced to escape from Poland in the boot of a diplomat’s car. In November, a parade in the ruined market square carried posters celebrating the Bolshevik Revolution and Comrade Stalin.
Hughie celebrated his third birthday; neighbouring children came with cakes and admired his remaining Dinky Toys. Their mothers asked once again if Helen was German, and whether she knew where the Germans had buried their gold before they left. We stopped making love, not only because Hughie slept in the same room.
*
It was the week before Christmas. There had been a power cut all day, and an oil lamp was glowing in the kitchen as Helen read Orlando the Marmalade Cat to Hughie. Mrs M had sent him the picture book, in a parcel with two packets of tea.
‘See the funny wee puss in trousers!’ I heard a car outside in our street, still something unusual, and went to the window. An old pre-war Fiat with the plates of a Warsaw taxi had stopped at the kerb. A small woman in an enormous brown fur hat emerged and stood uncertainly in the snow.
She looked up and our eyes met. Running out, I took her hand and guided her up the broken steps and into the warm kitchen. I could hear cars revving their engines not far away, but there was nobody in the street to see her. I said: ‘Margaret, this is Helen, my wife. And Hughie. And what – how – this is unbelievable!’
The two women studied one another. ‘Remember I told you about Margaret? The castle where I broke my ankle?’
‘In my castle, tea’s all I have to offer,’ said Helen.
Margaret accepted and sat down. She glanced round the kitchen without commenting, then turned back to me.
‘Mike, I can’t stay, it’s all a bit mad but I’m with the Embassy in Warsaw. Have been for months. Brits who speak Polish are pretty thin on the ground.’
The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel Page 26