by Sue Gee
‘Well …’ said Jerzy, after a while. ‘Perhaps we should go and see my parents now … Dziadek and Babcia are joining us for lunch.’
‘Fine.’ Elizabeth finished her glass and set it down on the low table before the sofa. They all got up; Jerzy moved towards his grandmother, bent down and kissed her on both cheeks.
‘Dziękuję, Babcia.’
‘Jerzy …’
She gave her hand to Elizabeth, who found herself kissing both cheeks also. They smiled at each other again, more confidently, but still as if from a great distance.
Dziadek took her hand, and kissed it.
‘I am so glad to have met you,’ she said.
‘Please. Come again.’
‘We will,’ said Jerzy. He led her out of the room, along the narrow corridor. ‘See you in a few minutes, then.’ He opened the front door, went across to the one opposite, and knocked.
‘Mama? It’s me.’
They stood on the square of landing and waited, Behind them, the grandparents’door discreetly closed. Elizabeth reached for Jerzy’s hand and he smiled down at her.
‘All right so far?’ The palm of his hand was damp; he released it, quickly wiping it on his jeans, and took a deep breath.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I knew it would be all right.’
Then the door was swung open, and a slim, dark-haired woman said: ‘Well … hello, darling. Come in.’
‘This is Elizabeth, Mama,’ said Jerzy, and then quickly, as if despite himself: ‘Is Tata here yet?’
His mother smiled, shaking her head, and led them into the living room, larger and lighter than the grandparents’, with daffodils on the table. ‘My husband will be here in a little while,’ she said to Elizabeth. ‘In the meantime I am delighted to meet you.’ Her hair was coiled in a knot at her neck in a style which did not belong to 1978 but which suited her perfectly. Her gaze was warm, but not quite uncritical, and shaking hands Elizabeth felt herself assessed. And found wanting?
‘And this is my daughter …’ said Anna, and Elizabeth turned to see an unquestionably beautiful girl in the doorway, holding a tray. She had dark hair cut to the jawbone, and wore a black mohair sweater threaded through with a dazzle of colour; she came into the room and observed them all coolly, setting down the tray of cutlery on the table.
‘Hello, brother.’ She crossed over, stood almost on tiptoe and kissed him quickly, on both cheeks.
‘Hello, Ewa. You look very nice. This is Elizabeth.’
‘How do you do?’ Ewa shook her hand with formality, and gave a formal smile. ‘Jerzy has been telling me about you.’
‘Oh?’ For a moment Elizabeth was about to play the game: ‘Nothing too dreadful, I hope?’ She realized at once that it would be quite out of place. Ewa didn’t look as if she played games of any kind, and Elizabeth was aware of being at once made to think not: Do I like you? but: Please will you like me? She saw herself in her Fair Isle cardigan and wished she had worn something very dark, and bold.
‘Well …’ Anna said again. ‘Do let’s sit down. Did the grandparents give you anything to drink?’
‘Sweet sherry, I expect,’ said Ewa, and went back to the tray. ‘I’ll lay the table while you all … socialize.’
Elizabeth saw Jerzy frown, flickeringly, as Ewa carefully counted out knives and forks. Then they were sitting by the fire, which popped quietly into the silence.
‘Jerzy says you are a painter,’ said Anna. Behind her, on a bookcase and the wall, were photographs: Elizabeth saw one, cracked and faded, of a boy and girl in a boat, on a sunlit river. Another, sepiatinted, of a boy – the same boy? – with dark cropped hair and cheekbones like Anna’s, eyes burning into the camera.
‘Yes,’ she said, looking back at Anna. ‘I’m a painter – I do portraits, mostly, and interiors, still-lifes. Rather ordinary.’
‘That is not what Jerzy says.’
She thought of the picture of the family she had done for him. ‘Perhaps I’m beginning to move in a different direction, I’m not sure. Jerzy says you paint, too.’
‘It sounds like a new game,’ said Ewa, from the table. ‘Jerzy says. He’ll say something now, you know, if you press the right button.’
‘Shut up, Ewa,’ said Jerzy, in a tone that wasn’t quite joking.
‘There, you see?’
Far below, the street door banged. ‘There’s Tata,’ said everyone at once. Elizabeth felt suddenly very nervous, though she was also fleetingly aware that the situation had its comic side: The Ogre Climbs the Stairs. Then, seeing Jerzy get to his feet, brushing back his hair in a quick tense gesture she had never seen before, she felt ashamed of even considering mockery, and stood up beside him, taking his hand.
A key turned in the lock, and the front door was opened.
‘We’re in here, Jan,’ Anna called, with a lightness Elizabeth sensed was unaccustomed, artificial.
The front door closed, and a man who looked quite unlike Jerzy came into the room, nodding to them all rather as Ewa had.
‘Dzień dobry – good afternoon. I am sorry to be late.’
Jerzy was tall, and slender to the point of thinness; his lips and nose were finely drawn, his colouring fair – grey-green eyes, light brown hair. His father was a good head shorter, but much more muscular, thick-set, and despite the grey in his hair and deep lines in his forehead he looked far stronger than Jerzy, whose hand in Elizabeth’s was soaking wet. He ushered her forward.
‘Tata – this is Elizabeth. My father …’
‘How do you do?’ said Elizabeth.
‘How do you do?’ The hand which took hers was cool and hard. He seemed to look at her only briefly, with the same polite, empty smile Ewa had given her, and then he released her hand and felt in his jacket pocket.
‘Excuse me if I smoke.’ It was not a request.
‘We are just about to eat,’ said Anna, gesturing at the table. ‘Ewa – perhaps you could call the grandparents?’
Jan lit a cigarette, and coughed. ‘I’ll put it out when they come.’ He moved aside as Ewa went past him to tap on the grandparents’ door, and he nodded to Jerzy, who smiled at him, awkwardly.
‘How are you, Tata?’
‘I am well. And you? Still taking photographs?’
‘Well … yes.’ Jerzy ran his hand through his hair again.
‘May I ask what you do?’ Elizabeth said to Jan, deliberately.
He took another puff of his cigarette, and shrugged. ‘I’m a technical draughtsman. Very dull, I’m afraid.’ He turned as the door opened. ‘My parents – or perhaps you have met them already?’
Elizabeth nodded, and smiled as they came in, following Ewa, and stood like guests who came infrequently: very correct, waiting to be shown to the table. Anna, who had been in and out, carrying dishes, was indicating places.
‘Babcia … Dziadek … Elizabeth – perhaps you could sit between Dziadek and Jerzy. Jan, please …’
He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray on the table by the fire, and came to sit down.
‘So,’ said Ewa, pulling out the chair beside him. ‘Here we all are.’ She sat down and smiled at Elizabeth with more warmth, obviously making an effort. ‘That’s a pretty cardigan.’
‘Thank you.’
Anna was passing plates, indicating dishes.
‘This is bigos,’ she said to Elizabeth, lifting a lid. ‘A kind of sauerkraut, with sausage.’ Steam rose from the dish; it smelt of vinegar and spices. ‘And there is kasha – buckwheat – in here, and cucumber with dill … I thought you might like to try Polish food. Please help yourself.’
‘Thank you – it looks delicious.’
Babcia and Dziadek were carefully unfolding napkins. Babcia asked Anna something in Polish, and Anna said in English: ‘No, I made it this morning.’
‘Please,’ Elizabeth said again. ‘Please speak Polish. I don’t mind at all.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Anna. ‘The grandparents understand enough.’
; But as the meal began, and remarks were exchanged in English, Elizabeth felt ill at ease: they might understand but they did not speak. If she and Jerzy stayed together, perhaps there would always be someone excluded in family gatherings: the grandparents, too polite to insist on Polish being spoken, or herself, the newcomer, the outsider.
Dziadek said something in Polish. Ewa answered in Polish. It started to rain. Drops splashed the window panes and bounced off Anna’s window boxes; they bounced off the slate roofs of the houses opposite whose windows were hung with net curtains, like Dziadek’s and Babcia’s. A door banged down in the street. In the middle of Clapham Elizabeth felt as if she were in a foreign country: up here, enclosed by the falling rain, listening to a language she did not understand, with a family whose history was locked within the room in books she could not read, in photographs of the dead.
There was another silence, disturbed only by the pattering rain. She heard herself saying to Ewa: ‘Do you ever think of yourself as English?’
‘No,’ said Ewa flatly. ‘I don’t.’
Jerzy looked at her. ‘You used to. Part of you used to.’
‘But not any more.’ She turned to Elizabeth. ‘Has Jerzy taught you any Polish yet?’
‘A few words, that’s all. I was thinking that I might go to classes one day. Or perhaps …’ Would this be tactful? ‘You’re a translator, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Ewa, ‘but not a teacher.’
Beside her, Elizabeth felt Jerzy stiffen.
I shall be conciliatory now, she thought, because I have no choice, in our first meeting, on your territory. Perhaps not another time.
‘No,’ she said calmly. ‘Of course not.’
‘Classes would be a good idea,’ said Anna, and gestured at the table. ‘Please – do have some more.’
‘Or perhaps you are going to anglicize him,’ said Ewa. ‘Do you think that’s what will happen? I believe that in many Anglo-Polish marriages, Poland almost disappears.’
‘Ewa …’ said Jerzy, ‘what is the matter with you?’
‘Nothing, I don’t think.’
‘No one,’ said Elizabeth, ‘is talking of marriage. And even if we were, I don’t think that would happen.’ She turned to Jerzy. ‘I haven’t tried to …’
‘On the contrary.’
‘Good,’ said Ewa coldly, and set down her knife and fork. ‘Because the British betrayed us, you know, in 1945.’
‘Ewa!’ Anna put down the lid of a dish with a clatter. Ewa ignored her. ‘Did you know that?’ she asked Elizabeth.
‘I … No, I don’t think I did.’
‘Then perhaps Jerzy should tell you. I’m talking about Yalta, where Churchill and Roosevelt handed us to Stalin on a plate.’
‘Ewa,’ said Jerzy, ‘I really don’t think this is necessary.’
Ewa ignored him too. ‘The Allies did almost nothing to help us,’ she went on, ‘when we – when my parents’generation – fought in the Warsaw Uprising, and then, after signing Poland away, the British tried to repatriate us. The government said to all the people like my parents, and grandparents, who had endured the occupation, and fought in the resistance, and been forced to leave their country, to all the Poles who had fought – in this country, in Africa, the Middle East, in Italy – under British command. “Of course, you are heroes. Of course, you can come and live here if you really want to – but actually, if you really want to go on serving your country, we advise you to return there.” Knowing that we would have to live under Stalinist rule!’
Ewa’s hands on the table were trembling, her face pale. Elizabeth saw the grandparents exchanging horrified glances. ‘And look at Poland now,’ Ewa said, her words falling over each other. ‘It’s a downtrodden, crippled, corrupted country, that’s all. Do you know that I can just remember hearing about the workers shot dead in Poznań in 1956, when I was a little girl? And I can remember it happening again, in Gdansk, in 1970, but I don’t suppose you noticed it in the papers. Where’s Poland, after all? Shot dead by the militia, for protesting about prices!’ She drew a long breath, as everyone began to talk at once. ‘Yalta,’ she said loudly, ‘is one of the reasons why I do not feel English, or British, or whatever this country is supposed to be now.’
‘Ewa!’ Anna was looking at her in horror. ‘You have been quite unforgivably rude.’
‘Have I? It used to be the other way round, didn’t it? Didn’t it, Tata? I used to be too English. Now I am too Polish?’
Jan was reaching into his pocket; he lit a cigarette, and Jerzy coughed. ‘You have surprised me, Ewa,’ said Jan. The only one, thought Elizabeth, shaking, who does not look shocked, appalled.
‘May I have one?’ Ewa asked him, and he lit one for her, and said something quietly, in Polish.
Ewa inhaled deeply, and turned back to Elizabeth.
‘My father says that he admires my patriotism, but that I owe our guest an apology. Forgive me. I wasn’t aware myself that I felt so strongly.’ She tried to smile.
Elizabeth did not know how to answer.
There was a silence, eyes avoided. Under the table, Jerzy took her hand.
Elizabeth found herself thinking of another table, her parents at breakfast, reading the Telegraph and Express, trees rustling soothingly beyond the window, the gate at the end of the path going click, as the gardener arrived. At the edge of this world, where you canvassed for the Conservatives, who needed no canvassing here, where you went to fêtes for the church, lurked the fairy-tale evils of post-war Britain: socialism, communism, blacks. I’ve spent years of my life trying to get out of that garden gate, she thought. Ever since I left home and came to London, nationalism has been something to laugh at, to apologize for; something, at worst, to equate with the National Front. But if you are Polish … if you are Polish, apparently, the world is a bitter place. The West has abandoned you, the East has overrun you. You stand alone. It is that kind of thinking which has made the Poles so proud, so passionately interested in themselves. This room is full of nationalists – patriots, they would say. There should be a difference.
Smoke drifted across the table, and Jerzy coughed again.
‘For goodness’sake, Ewa, take that cigarette somewhere else, or put it out,’ said Anna, and got up to clear the table.
There was a general movement of chairs pushed back, hands reaching for the neutral zone of cutlery and plates. Ewa took herself to the ashtray on the table by the fire, and sat down.
‘Sorry, sorry, everyone.’ She took another deep puff. ‘Sorry, Jerzy. I was going to be quite different.’
The rain stopped, and sun shone in the puddles down in the street. Dziadek and Babcia had cups of tea with floating slices of lemon, and returned to their own flat, seen across the landing by the whole family.
Dziadek bowed over Elizabeth’s hand. ‘My granddaughter …’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Please don’t worry.’ What else could she say?
He shook his head.
When they had gone, Jerzy said: ‘Come and see my old room.’
She followed him down the corridor. ‘That was Ewa’s,’ he said, as they passed a very small one, next to the bathroom. ‘When we got older. Dziadek comes in and uses it as his study now.’ At the far end of the corridor were two doors. ‘That’s my parents’room.’ He indicated one to the side. ‘And this is where Ewa and I used to be.’
He pushed open the door and she saw a small square room with a narrow bed, table and chair, a shiny utility furniture wardrobe. Jerzy closed the door behind him, and they went to stand at the window. Beyond were factory buildings, or warehouses, and trees; below was the railway line. They stood at the window with their arms round each other, looking out. A Sunday underground train rattled past, almost empty.
‘It used to be steam,’ said Jerzy, ‘when I was very small. It was wonderful – I can’t tell you how … magical, otherworldly. Especially at night.’
Elizabeth put her head on his shoulder.
‘An
d what did Ewa think of it?’
He looked down at her. ‘Has she upset you very much?’
‘Hasn’t she upset you?’
He hesitated. ‘Actually she really shocked me. I never realized she felt so …’
‘So bitter.’
‘Well … I suppose it did sound bitter. I was going to say – so passionate.’
‘About Poland.’
Jerzy frowned. ‘Of course about Poland. What do you mean?’
‘You don’t think she’s jealous.’
‘Jealous. Of me?’
‘Of me.’
‘Because you’re English?’
‘No!’ She drew away. ‘Why should she be jealous of that? The English are to be despised, aren’t we? Aren’t we? After all, we only went to war for Poland, didn’t we? And swam through it all unscathed while Poland was martyred. And betrayed her.’
Jerzy was scarlet. ‘She has upset you.’
‘Of course she has! Does it surprise you?’
‘No … no.’ He looked stricken, pacing up and down. ‘I’m so sorry … I knew it wouldn’t work, bringing you here. I told you.’
‘It would work, except that she doesn’t want it to.’
‘Because she’s jealous … because I have you, now, and she has no one?’
‘I don’t know about that. I mean because I have you.’
‘What? Oh, don’t be absurd.’
Elizabeth said nothing.
‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘At least, I thought you did, with your painting, but …’ He shook his head. ‘I mean – I suppose you understand that the shadow was there, but … not what it felt like. For us. Especially for me, I think. Not Ewa. If anything, I should be afraid of losing her.’ He was pacing again. ‘Never mind. I’m just very sorry.’