by Sue Gee
‘Don’t ask me.’ He looked at her critically. ‘You look fine – it’s just the face that’s the problem.’
She threw a shirt at him.
The door from Tata’s and Teresa’s room was opened.
‘Come on, you two,’ called Tata, and Teresa hurried in. ‘All right? Are you packed? Anna, dear, do you think … should you wear a dress?’
The tram swung along the bridge across the gleaming Vistula. Ahead, the outlines of the buildings on the west bank were hazy in the heat: the medieval houses of the Old Town clustered near the Royal Palace; the nineteenth-century warehouses on the waterfront; in Napoleon Square, the sixteen-storey skyscraper, the only one in Warsaw, where the offices of the Prudential Insurance Company were housed. River-boats hooted beneath them; gulls wheeled in a cloudless sky. Over the bridge and through the Old Town, they caught another tram. It hummed past spacious parks and down broad avenues where on the orders of Mayor Starzyński trees had been planted all along the centre.
This was elegant Warsaw, the Warsaw where well-heeled families came in from the suburbs to shop for clothes, to spend the evenings in expensive restaurants and at the theatre; the Warsaw where the Polish intelligentsia browsed in the university libraries, and went to concerts, the opera, cabaret. In·Z oliborz, the district in the north of the city, there were more parks, large villas stood in well-kept gardens, and new, low apartment blocks were bordered by trees. Many of the people Marszal-kowska lived in Z·strolling down Jerozolimskie Avenue or oliborz.
There were other districts where you saw a different Warsaw. In Stare Miasto, the Old Town, pastel-painted, red-tiled medieval houses, tall and narrow, clustered along narrow streets and alleyways, overlooked cobbled squares. It was picturesque, parts of it were very fashionable, the pride of the city on the banks of the Vistula. But it was also densely populated, overpopulated, perhaps a hundred thousand people crammed into the few square miles, and many of the pretty houses, with their freezing attics and sprawling damp cellars, bred squalor and disease.
Bordering Stare Miasto was the ancient Jewish district, which stretched through the west of the city. Anna had hardly ever been into this foreign land, where cramped, overcrowded tenements housed enormous families of pale-faced Hassidic children. They ran out of the courtyards on to the long streets in ill-fitting shoes with flapping soles; their earlocks swung beneath their little caps and shaved heads. The little girls wore headscarves, and patched dresses. They called to each other in Yiddish and stared at the non-Jewish Poles who came into their district. Anna had been stared at, on the rare occasions she had gone through there with Tata or Teresa, in her nice cotton frock and neat plaits, and felt like a foreigner herself.
Tata had a few Jewish patients, but they weren’t living here, they were professional, members of the Jewish intelligentsia. Most of his patients were well-to-do Poles, but he had always been available to see others not so fortunate, for nothing, or a token fee. In the days when he and Mama were first married, they’d lived and worked on this side of the river, and he still had families from those days for whom he was ‘our doctor’. He visited patients in Stare Miasto, and occasionally in the bleak, impoverished suburbs of Wola and Ochota, on the other side of the city, where some of the houses were no more than wooden shacks, and the roads unmade. He came home to Praga with stories of children the same age as Anna and Jerzy who were ill and undernourished, living in crowded, cold, damp rooms – ‘and don’t ever forget how fortunate you are,’ he told them. Anna worried sometimes that he would catch some awful illness on these visits, and die, like Mama, but she never said so.
It was hot in the tram. She gazed out of the window, watching people greet each other in the open-air cafés, and settle down under the long sunblinds for lunch, and she turned and saw Teresa looking at the dress-shop windows and wondered if she were going to be taken on a last-minute shopping expedition, later in the afternoon.·The tram drew up at the intersection of Marszalkowska and Hoz a where Wiktoria lived, and they got off. A flower-seller stood on the pavement, buckets of carnations, tall scented stock and gypsophylla at her feet. The building behind her cast a deep cool shadow.
They stood for a moment, Teresa in her pale linen dress and jacket with her arm through Tata’s, lightly, as he looked carefully over everything.
‘Carnations?’ she suggested.
He smiled, half at the flower-seller. ‘That would be very nice.’
They walked up the long street, the pavements beneath the shops and high apartment houses black with shadow, the centre lit by the sun. Aunt Wiktoria’s apartment was on the third floor of a block entered directly from the street through wrought-iron gates. They climbed the worn stone stairs and rang the bell.
‘You’re panting, Tata,’ said Jerzy as they waited.
‘Nonsense.’ He straightened his tie and looked at them sternly.
‘Poor Tomasz,’ said Teresa. ‘You work too hard.’ She stretched up to brush something from his lapel; Anna looked away. Why was she always touching him?
Then the door was opened wide, and Aunt Wiktoria stood smiling at them all. ‘Come in! Come in! I was just caught on the telephone … are these for me? Beautiful, now let me just find a vase …’
She led them into the main room, which like their own doubled as dining and drawing room, and where the table was laid for lunch with silver, and linen napkins, the polished glasses winking in the sunlight. Anna flopped down on to the sofa; Jerzy went to look at the bookcase. There were newspapers on the table by the window; Anna watched her father cross over, pick up the one on the top and scan it quickly, holding it close.
‘You do need glasses, Tata.’
He didn’t answer; she saw him and Teresa exchange a look and then he put the paper back on the pile, but turned over.
‘Here we are.’ Wiktoria returned from the kitchen with the flowers in a vase, and put it on the table. ‘Thank you all so much. Now – I expect everyone is dying for a drink. Tomasz, perhaps you could …’
‘Of course.’ Tata went to the sideboard and opened the bottle of vodka which stood there.
‘Jerzy, are you drinking now?’ Wiktoria asked.
He turned from the bookshelves. ‘Please, Aunt.’ He wandered over to the pile of newspapers, and picked up the one on the top.
‘And Anna?’
‘A little, please.’
‘Perhaps with water,’ suggested Teresa, sitting in the armchair. ‘Jerzy, dear, come and sit down.’
Wiktoria was handing glasses.
‘Na zdrowie,’ said Tata, raising his glass to her. ‘Cheers. Happy Saint’s Day.’
‘Na zdrowie,’ they all chorused, and Jerzy put the paper down again as Wiktoria nodded, smiling. She was a tall, big-boned woman, with dark hair and horn-rimmed spectacles which hung on a chain round her neck. Their severity, when she wore them, was quite belied by the eyes behind: she seemed to Anna always to be laughing or smiling, although when they were children she had taken no nonsense from them. She had never married; Anna didn’t know why, and it didn’t seem important: she was secretary to one of the professors in the University Medical Faculty where Tata and Mama had trained, and had more friends than anyone else they knew. Anna reached into her satchel for the drawing she’d done for her, and pulled it out just as Jerzy asked abruptly:
‘Is there going to be a war?’
The question, and the silence which answered it, seemed to fill every corner of the sunlit room.
‘Is there?’ said Jerzy.
‘It is possible,’ said Tata slowly.
Anna stared at him. All through the summer there had been talk on the wireless about Germany, and the Nazi Party, and Danzig, but she hadn’t really listened, and Tata and Teresa hadn’t seemed to pay much attention. She didn’t usually see the newspapers, they went straight into the surgery; perhaps the one this morning hadn’t come, or Tata hadn’t had time to look at it. But Teresa had been listening to the wireless … was that why they had shut their bedroom door? What
did Danzig matter? She knew, without knowing why, that it was important, like Wilno, where they were going on holiday … They were going on holiday! How could there be a war?
‘It is possible,’ Tata said again, ‘but we are all praying that it won’t happen.’
‘But … but even if there is,’ Anna said, frowning, ‘you wouldn’t have to go, would you?’
‘Well …’
‘What?’ Surely he wouldn’t, he wasn’t in the army, was he? He was just an ordinary doctor.
‘I am in the Reserve Corps,’ he said, ‘like most professional men. If Poland were to be invaded, I expect we would all be called up.’
He had known all this all summer, and he hadn’t said anything? He and Teresa had had a secret like that from her and Jerzy? She could feel a great lump of misery begin to fill her throat, and turned away.
‘Anna …’ He came to sit beside her, and put his arm round her. ‘I am telling you the truth, because it’s better to do that, isn’t it?’
She could hardly speak. ‘Why … why didn’t you tell us before?’
‘Because it may not happen, after all. Why worry unless you have to? We wanted you and Jerzy to have a happy summer. And tomorrow we’re going on holiday.’
‘Still?’ She blew her nose.
‘Of course.’
‘But Tata,’ said Jerzy, still standing by the window, ‘will I have to go?’
‘Do you imagine you are old enough to join the army, you poor ignorant boy?’ said Tata, and began to sound like himself again. He got up, and looked at Wiktoria. ‘And now, perhaps …’
‘Of course. Lunch is quite ready – Teresa, my dear, would you be kind enough …’
The two women went out to the kitchen.
‘All right now?’ Tata asked Anna.
She nodded. ‘Yes, thank you.’ But unease gnawed at her. ‘I’m just going to the bathroom.’
In the corridor she heard Teresa’s and Wiktoria’s low voices from the kitchen. She stopped, her hand on the handle of the bathroom door, and listened.
The British and the French … allies … the Anglo-French agreement … pledged to come to Poland’s aid … invasion … Tomasz might not have to go …
He might not have to go. That was all she cared about. She went into the bathroom and closed the door. Inside, she looked at herself in the mirror, and splashed water over her burning, angry face. This time tomorrow they would already be on the train out of Warsaw.
‘Look, Tata, quick!’
From the kajak Jerzy pointed to the river bank: in the meadow beyond, a stork stood motionless amidst the rippling grass. Tata stopped paddling and they rested, watching. The bird raised its head, then picked its way slowly through the field; Jerzy shifted a little, and the kajak rocked.
‘Careful!’ said Anna, and the stork suddenly lifted its wings and took off, flapping awkwardly and low over the field at first, then, gaining power, steadily rising into the morning sun and away to the woods beyond.
It was ten o’clock, already growing warm, though on the river they still needed to wear jumpers. They had been travelling for just over a week; pitching their tent and exploring the countryside around for a day or two, then moving on, a journey of sunlight and water. The river meandered between deep banks planted with silver birch trees; sunflowers nodded over every corner of a field or patch of vegetables they passed. In the afternoon heat they stripped off and swam past clumps of reeds and rushes, or paddled over broad flat rocks on the river bed, where the water flickered. Grey church spires and the red-tiled roofs of distant villages marked the horizon; when they walked inland on baked mud paths and unmade roads they passed clusters of cottages under dirty thatch. Barefooted children stared from doorways; the single rooms inside were dark.
In almost every field a horse stood irritably flicking flies in the heat; men in shirtsleeves and women and children in kerchiefs moved through the corn and hay with scythes, bending and swishing, piling and tying. In late afternoon or early evening, the waggons moved slowly out of the fields and back to the villages, the children swaying on piles of hay six or seven feet high. Ragged lines of geese followed, honking; hens ran squawking to the verge.
In the larger villages Tata bought bread, potatoes and sausages, smoked bacon and yellow apples. He and Jerzy and Anna gathered sticks as they made their way back to the tent, and laid a fire, sticking the potatoes in at the bottom.
‘I wish we could live like this always,’ Jerzy said that night as they sat round the embers. He poked them with a stick; ash sighed through the charred branches to the ground.
‘One always thinks that on holiday,’ said Tata. ‘By the end of next week you will be impatient for your piano, your friends. You’ll have had quite enough of your dull old Tata.’ He stretched, and stood up; twigs snapped.
‘Light the lamp, Tata, and stop talking nonsense,’ said Anna. ‘Let’s go and read in the tent.’
The tent was awkward to handle, heavy old canvas with stiffened guy ropes, but roomy enough for the three of them. Tata had had it for years – he thought his own father might have used it in the last war – and he and Mama used to go camping in it in the twenties, when they were first married. Anna and Jerzy had seen pictures of them in the album he kept in his desk: laughing at each other into the camera, striking poses, or caught unawares: Tata – he had more hair, then – gazing into the distance with a cigarette or Mama bending down to pack more into the rucksack, showing slim calves above ankle socks and summer shoes. Tata still had the heavy black box camera; he’d used it all holiday.
It was growing dark. Anna picked up the water can and saucepan, and shivered: though they had camped well back from the river bank, she could feel the chill rising from the water. Jerzy stamped out the last of the fire.
‘Come on, you two!’ Tata called, and they turned and saw the pale yellow glow of the paraffin lamp through the canvas, and his shadow, as he sat down and reached for the book.
He looked up and smiled as they pushed apart the entrance flaps and went inside. ‘Here –’ he picked up the rug beside him and passed it to Anna. ‘I told you to bring two jumpers, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, Tata.’ She pulled the rug round her shoulders and sat down, leaning against his shoulder. Jerzy flopped on to his sleeping bag.
‘Come on, then, where’ve we got to?’
He had been reading to them for as long as they could remember. When they were small, and especially after Mama went to hospital and Wiktoria was looking after them, he came every night and sat on their beds in turn, reading the fairy tales and nursery rhymes they still had on the bookshelf in their room. When they went to school he continued, although as they got older and his practice more demanding it was sometimes only at weekends; but it had never stopped. Long after their friends had outgrown being read to, Jerzy and Anna continued to listen. Much of last year had been spent reading. Peasants, the quartet of novels which made up Reymont’s great hymn to rural Poland. For the holiday, they’d brought with them a volume of short stories by Sienkiewicz, reading one, or part of a long one, each evening.
‘Now …’ said Tata. He slipped out the cracked leather bookmark and peered at the title of the next story. ‘This one is called “The Lighthouse Keeper” – it’s based on a true story, I think.’ He shifted a little, settled back against his rolled-up sleeping bag, and began to read. ‘It so happened that the lighthouse keeper in Aspinwall, not
far from Panama, disappeared without leaving a trace. As this
occurred during a storm, it was supposed that the unfortunate
man must have gone too near the edge of the island rock on which the lighthouse stood, and been washed away by a wave.
This was the more probable, because his boat was not found
the next day in its rocky niche. The post of lighthouse keeper
therefore fell vacant …’
‘Can you see all right, Tata?’
‘Perfectly, thank you, Anna. You can move a little to the left, perh
aps, so that your shadow does not obscure the page entirely …’
She moved, lay down, closed her eyes and listened.
‘The task of finding a new lighthouse keeper devolved on
the Consul of the United States who lived in Panama, and it
was a task of no small difficulty … Life in a lighthouse tower
is an extraordinarily hard one … it is a claustral life, and
even more than claustral, for it is a hermit’s life … It is,
therefore, not surprising that Mr Isaac Folcombridge was in
great perplexity where to find a permanent successor, and his
joy may be imagined when that successor most unexpectedly
appeared that very same day. He was a man already old,
seventy years or more, but hale, erect, with the movements
and bearing of a soldier. His hair was quite white; his
complexion was as sunburnt as a creole’s, but judging from
his blue eyes he belonged to no southern race. His face had
an oppressed and sad, but honest expression. Folcombridge
took a fancy to him at first sight.
‘“Where do you come from?”
‘“What have you been doing up till now?”
‘“I’ve led a roving life.”
‘“A lighthouse keeper must be fond of staying in one place.”
‘“I need rest.”’
Tata cleared his throat. They lay listening as the interview continued. The old man, Skawiński, showed himself in his papers and testimonials as a courageous soldier who had fought in any number of campaigns throughout Europe and against the South in the American Civil War.
‘“Do you know anything about life at sea?”
‘“I served three years on a whaler.”
‘“You’ve tried different occupations?”
‘“It’s because I never could find peace anywhere.”
‘“Why?”
The old man shrugged his shoulders. “Fate.”
‘“You look to me too old for a lighthouse keeper.”