by Sue Gee
‘Oh, keep it,’ said the man, smiling at him. ‘I’ve got another.’
‘No – it’s all right.’ He tore open the wrapping on the bread, and put two slices under the grill. No, three, he was starving. Then he shook the spaghetti out of the tin into the saucepan, and relit the match under the grill, almost burning his hand. The man was watching him.
‘Little bit stubborn, aren’t you?’
‘What?’ He fumbled for a spoon in the table drawer, moved to stir the spaghetti, already hissing at the edges.
‘I expect you know what you want, don’t you?’
Outside the window, in the field beyond the hostel garden, sheep bleated thinly. The large, airy kitchen, full of evening sunlight, seemed suddenly very quiet, except for the sound of the sheep; Jerzy wished now that the whole contingent of German students would come in, but no one came. His toast was burning; he pulled out the grill pan and turned the slices over.
‘Have you been saved?’ asked the man.
‘What?’ Jerzy felt his breathing going wrong again. He switched off the burner under the pan, and reached for the egg, adrift on the table top. It spun off and fell to the floor and smashed. ‘Oh … dammit.’ Absurdly, he felt tears prick his eyelids, and he blushed.
‘Don’t cry,’ said the man softly. ‘Jesus loves each one of us. Here, let me.’ He bent down with a cloth from the sink, and began to scoop up the slippery mess as the kitchen filled with black smoke. Jerzy leapt towards the stove and switched off grill and burner just as the door banged open at last and two of the Germans came in, a boy and a girl, smiling cheerfully at them both and waving their hands at the smoke.
‘Good evening, good evening!’
Jerzy stumbled past them, and out through the hall to the front door.
The walls of the occupational therapy rooms were covered in collages and paintings. A pottery adjoined, and through the open interconnecting doors came the hum of the wheel, the slippery sound of wet hands on clay, the smell of the unmixed clay in polythene sacks on the floor, and of the glazes. It had rained in the night, but the morning was fresh and fine: blackbirds sang, sun shone on the wet lawns, on the roses bordering the gravel paths, and in the pools of water on the terrace. It streamed through the open french windows to the room where Anna moved among her patients. They were seated in small groups at grey Formica-topped tables, where each day a selection of activities was set out: weaving at small handlooms, or in cane; patchwork; woodwork; toy-making; tapestry and embroidery; a long dressmaking table; another for collage; almost always one for watercolours. There was a whole studio for oils in another block.
Anna saved wrapping paper and string, wool, felt and milk-bottle tops, scraps of material, buttons and ribbons; she wrote off to factories for samples of fabric and wallpaper. Quite often, the work begun at each of the tables was incompleted – through frustration, uncertainty, inability to concentrate. But sometimes the materials were transformed; there were collages of landscapes, parks and gardens, faces, machines, primitive animals; there were abstracts, layers of pure colour. Each summer Anna and the other therapists organized an exhibition: this year there was a Noah’s ark in painted balsa wood, a kilim tapestry wall-hanging using a traditional Polish design, like the one which used to hang in the apartment house in Praga. There were patchwork cushions and babies’ quilts; trays and hanging baskets; endless watercolours of the terrace, with blurry geraniums and vague skies.
Broad steps led down the slope from the terrace to wide, well-kept lawns. There, as old as the hospital itself and much taller than the newer extensions, stood the cedar trees. They cast long deep shadows on the grass, shadows filled with a heavy stillness, unrelieved by light or movement in the dense branches so far above. Beyond, in the fields bordering the grounds, oak and ash trees swayed and rustled; cows moved beneath them, swishing flies. But the Victorian imagination which had planned the hospital – an asylum, then – had not, apparently, conceived of the patients needing life and movement close to them. The roses were comparatively recent; once, there must have been only the stillness of the lawns, the paths, the cedars. They were impressive, powerful; perhaps to the Victorians they had conveyed peace, reassurance, eternity. Anna, long ago troubled by eternity, and her place within the world, now thought of the darkness of the trees and their shadows as images of the patients’own retreat from their distress into darkness and silence. Naturally, many of them stayed only a short while; they recovered, they returned to the world outside the hospital, sometimes sending cards – to their psychiatrists, to Anna, who pinned them up on the wall next to the photos of Jerzy and Ewa. Some took longer to recover; some had been here for years. Among them were people who had spent the war in concentration camps, the truly dislocated. Some of those liberated from the camps had been able to make new lives: even with her own, uprooted life, and loss, Anna found it hard to imagine how they did so. Those in the hospital, arriving in England round about the same time that she and Jan had arrived, had tried to rebuild and been unable to. This place, she hoped, was their sanctuary.
‘Excuse me …’
Anna was tapped on the arm; she turned from the table of patchwork pieces and templates to see one of the patients admitted last week looking at her confusedly. Catherine was about the same age as Anna, but she looked older, although she was rather beautiful, and well dressed. Her hair was greying, and under expensive make-up her eyes were puffy with crying and marked with deep circles. She wore an emerald cotton shirt which perhaps had come from Jaeger, a soft cotton skirt and pretty shoes; if you met her outside here you would hardly think of her as a person who had tried to kill herself.
‘I can’t seem to settle …’ Her eyes began to fill with tears, the carefully brushed mascara smudging.
‘Of course,’ said Anna gently. ‘It’s still very early for you, isn’t it?’ She looked round the room for a moment, holding the woman’s hand through her arm. ‘Let’s see …’ At the moment, most of the other patients did seem to be settling into something, and Sara, the therapist sharing this shift, was talking to a group at the toy-making table. Anna turned back to Catherine.
‘Shall we walk outside for a little while?’
Catherine nodded, swallowing.
On the terrace they paced quietly up and down, and Anna listened, as she listened almost every day. After a while, Catherine stopped crying about her husband, who no longer loved her, and her children, who had left home; she went back into the room and let Anna help her find thread and fabric; she sat by the open doors, staring at an embroidery frame. Anna had no illusions about her work. She did not imagine that to sew or weave or paint was a cure for mental illness, but she knew that it helped a little, that within an atmosphere of safety and acceptance she could encourage her patients to create something outside themselves and perhaps rediscover something within themselves. It was enough.
She had come here four years ago, nervous about her first job since completing her training, a part of her still a little astonished that this was what she had chosen and been able to train for. By the end of the first week she was tired from the commuting from Clapham to Surrey, but she knew that she had found the right place, and would not leave. Of course, if it had not been for the war, if she had been able to stay in Poland, and Tata had been alive, she would have trained to be a doctor, and followed more directly in his footsteps. And yet – it was impossible, now, to imagine herself without the great scar of loss which the war had made, and it simply felt right that she, displaced, should be working with those suffering another kind of displacement. Perhaps, even if the war had never happened, she would eventually have come to this work, or something like it.
‘Tata?’
‘Yes?’ He was bent over his desk, writing his notes. ‘Sometimes I feel as if there’s something missing in me …’
What had it been? If the war had not taken everything away, what might she have found?
She moved among the tables in the sunlit room, listening to the murmuring vo
ices.
In the lunch hour, after a salad with Sara in the canteen, Anna took her coffee out into the grounds and sat in a deck chair. From the ground-floor ward next to the occupational therapy rooms, two or three nurses were helping uncertain old men and women to come out and enjoy the sunshine. Some of them wore the hospital-issue striped towelling dressing gowns: Anna observed the muted blue, orange and white against the grey brickwork of the hospital, the mauvey-grey wisteria in bloom, as the figures shuffled unsteadily on sticks or walking frames, or were pushed in wheelchairs on to the terrace. She thought she might paint them one day, the figures, the colours, the bent heads, the timelessness of old age in a last summer.
The sun was warm on her face. Anna closed her eyes. Here, in the calm, ordered grounds of the hospital, in the sweet-smelling lanes nearby, she tried to think of her family with dispassion. Sometimes it was impossible. Jerzy was off on a trip again this weekend, alone as usual, not even taking a Polish friend from Scouts. Such a clever boy, always had been, top of the class or near the top for years, expected to get eight or nine O-levels with good grades. But so withdrawn, so troubled.
‘Tata?’
‘Mmm?’ He did not look up.
‘Sometimes I feel …’
What was it that Jerzy felt so deeply? What was it that he could not tell her?
As for Ewa, she had said she was going to the university library today, which sounded very dutiful, but tonight she was working in the pub, and would probably try to leave dolled up like nothing on earth. She was beautiful, Anna could not help but know that, although she never told her so now: Ewa was becoming too self-assured, too assertive as it was. To lose her innocence, so carefully guarded all these years – to think that she might end up like some of the girls in the street, some of Anna’s patients, even, sleeping around, taking drugs … Anna shuddered. She had had so much to be afraid of in the war: what might happen to Ewa now seemed almost worse, sometimes, because it would be so pointless, such a waste. Yet somewhere she felt a twinge of jealousy, barely acknowledged, but there, that her daughter should be on the threshold of a freedom she had never known.
The sun had climbed higher; it was very hot now. Anna slept.
In the library of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Ewa sat writing at a small plain table. It was one of five or six, set out the length of the room beneath tall windows; they overlooked the plane trees in the garden, the familiar outlines of other London University buildings and rooftops. It was late afternoon, warm and summery in the gardens; behind her, the towering grey metal book-stacks of the Russian and Polish section were cool and dimly lit.
Through the open window came the sound of sparrows and starlings settling in the trees. Ewa stopped writing and stretched, suddenly restless. She sat listening to the birds, to the traffic in Russell Square and the muted, familiar library sounds: the faint squeak of the metal ladder on castors, and footsteps climbing to a high shelf; volumes slipped out and pages turned; the thump of books returned to the wooden trolley at the far end; occasionally a low voice greeting or inquiring; a yawn, a cough, papers being stacked together, a pen rolling off a desk. The narrow spaces between the bookstacks were dim, dark, even, and the whole room smelt of old paper, old bindings. The door at the far end was pushed open as someone went out, and she could hear the hum of the photocopier, and footsteps clicking away towards the lift.
She looked at her watch. Four-fifteen: she should leave before the rush hour. Sometimes, although it was vacation, she stayed late, but tonight she was working in the pub. She snapped her pages of notes into the ring binder, put it into her bag with the books, and pushed back her chair. In the hall, one of her lecturers, looked up from the card index and smiled: Ewa smiled back at him, found herself blushing, and didn’t wait for the lift, but ran down the cool stairs to the main hall, and out into the dusty, sunlit street. The traffic swept fast round Russell Square; she ran over the zebra crossing as a taxi drew up, and into the square: she often ate sandwiches or a salad here at lunchtime, on a seat under the trees, unless she was meeting anyone in Dillons’coffee shop.
American tourists were milling round the hotels near the underground; she stopped to point an elderly couple in the right direction for the British Museum. ‘Thanks, honey, we’ll go first thing tomorrow.’ More tourists spilled out of the lift at the station, clutching bags from Carnaby Street. Ewa went down to the platform, full of warm stale air, and waited for the train to rattle in from the tunnel and take her to Clapham. She wondered on the journey who would be dispatched by Mama to fetch her from the pub at the end of the shift this evening. When Tata came he sat at a corner table, watching her, while she tried to ignore him. Usually, it was Dziadek who came, and this she found touching, and embarrassing in a different way, to see him smile at her from the door and simply stand, very correct in his dark suit, waiting until she had quickly washed the last glasses and emptied the ashtrays.
‘That your grandad?’ Stan the barman had asked on her first evening there, and she nodded. ‘Military old bloke, isn’t he? Looks like a general.’
‘He is,’ she said, but did not explain when he gave her a puzzled look. What would Kevin know or care about the Army in Exile? She felt ashamed at Dziadek having to come out of his neat flat and leave Babcia alone after eleven at night, when he preferred to retire at nine, but he and Mama had insisted she must be collected. Ewa knew he disliked her working there even more than Mama did, found it incomprehensible that his clever granddaughter, who thanks to him had passed Polish A-level with a grade A, and was now at university, should be serving strangers, strange men, in a crowded smoky pub, with a deafening juke box.
The train stopped at Clapham with a jerk. Ewa got out and walked among the crush of passengers up the long flight of steps to the barrier; she showed her season ticket to the yawning West Indian woman and hurried through, crossing the main road just as the lights changed.
Then she walked up the long, treeless street, with its heavy green paintwork. Many of the windows were open in the afternoon heat; the light from televisions flickered bluely behind net curtains; dishes clattered; from an upper window a radio blared. She could see, ahead, the third-floor window with the net curtain held aside, and her grandmother waiting. She raised her hand but did not walk faster; almost every day she called in on them, but sometimes, if they hadn’t seen her coming, she went very quietly up the uncarpeted stairs, unlocked the front door of the flat where she lived with Mama and Tata and Jerzy and crept guiltily inside. ‘We didn’t hear you come back.’ Babcia or Dziadek would say later, with the lightest brush of reproach in the tone, and she would answer, even more lightly, but inwardly irritated at having always to account for herself: ‘Didn’t you? Well, here I am.’
Squatters had taken over the ground floor of a house two doors from theirs, and tacked up Indian cotton bedspreads at the window. As she drew near she slowed down a little, and glanced towards it: they had pinned back one of the curtains to let in the air, and she could see through the open window figures sitting on the floor and a candle burning on a low table. The cloying smell of incense drifted into the street, and the smell of something else, too. She stopped, stood for a moment, sure no one inside had seen her, and saw a tall man leaning against the mantelpiece draw deeply on a cigarette and turn towards a girl at the back of the room who was switching on a tape. Music began to throb; the girl turned, took the cigarette, inhaled and saw Ewa, watching.
‘Hi. Want to come in?’
She flushed, turned away and walked quickly to her own front door, closing it behind her. Had Babcia been watching her, watching them? The wire-mesh letter box was stuffed full of cards for minicab firms; there was a letter from Warsaw for Mama, she took it out and climbed the dusty stairs, hearing above her, Dziadek’s and Babcia’s door click open; as she rounded the last corner she saw Babcia looking down on her, smiling.
‘Hello, kochana, I have made you some tea.’
‘Thank you, Babcia.’ She reach
ed the top, kissed her lightly on both unpowdered cheeks. ‘Have you had a good day?’
Babcia shrugged. ‘Quiet, quiet. Come in.’
Ewa hung her denim jacket on a peg in the hall, and felt like a granddaughter again. Then she went into the sitting room, hearing Dziadek’s paper rustle; as always, he rose, kissed her hand.
‘Good evening, darling. Come and sit down.’
Babcia came along the corridor from the kitchen carrying the tray from Peter Jones which Ewa had bought for her Saint’s Day, pale green, with roses. She set it on the white cloth covering the varnished table, took three drawn-thread napkins from the drawer, three pale blue tea plates from the tray. A marbled cake in chocolate and vanilla sponge was sliced; tea poured into pale blue cups, where thin slices of lemon floated to the surface. Dziadek unfolded his napkin and spread it neatly on his knee; from his pocket he took a small bone penknife, and carefully sliced the marbled cake on his plate into smaller pieces. Babcia shook her head. The clock on the narrow varnished mantelpiece over the-gas fire gave five metallic chimes, a little wavering. It had sounded like that for years.
Ewa sipped her tea.
‘No Jerzy today,’ Babcia said sadly.
‘No. He’s on a trip this weekend.’
Babcia sighed. ‘Such a strange thing.’
From the far end of the corridor, where the kitchen overlooked the track, came the sound of an overground train increasing speed. The faintest of vibrations shook the teacups.
‘You think so?’ asked Ewa.
‘I think so.’ Babcia took another slice of cake. ‘Dziadek, also. What does a clever young boy want with trains, trains all the time? Travelling all by himself.’
‘It is a stage,’ said Dziadek. ‘It will pass. And perhaps he is learning something. I worry only for his safety.’
‘I shouldn’t,’ said Ewa. ‘I’m sure he can look after himself.’