by Sue Gee
Elizabeth gave up. A squirrel danced across the path; Jerzy scuffed again, and it scampered away and up a tree on the far side. She sat watching it, feeling Jerzy’s silence descending like a cloud between them. I hope this isn’t going to happen all through the holiday, she thought, remembering days in London when he left home in the morning perfectly equable and came home dark-faced, not speaking. It didn’t happen often, but it happened, and at first she’d been reduced to tears of frustration. The last couple of times she’d fled to the studio. I really didn’t think it would be like that here, she thought, and realized she had been hoping, all the time they planned this trip, that Jerzy would come to Poland and feel somehow cleansed, purified, made whole. What a very Christian image. People didn’t have road-to-Damascus changes in themselves like that – unless they were on the road to Damascus.
‘Jerzy?’ she asked again, and put out a hand towards him. He went on scuffing. ‘Shall we go and find somewhere for lunch?’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘I am – come on, let’s go and look.’
‘You can go if you want.’
She moved away and stood up. ‘I thought we were on holiday together.’
‘So? Can’t you be independent for five minutes?’
‘Jerzy! What is the matter with you?’
‘I just feel low, that’s all.’
‘I know you do. You don’t have to take it out on me.’
He didn’t answer. Elizabeth began to walk rapidly away, down the path towards the iron railings. No studio to escape to now: where was she supposed to go? Across the road, further up, there was a large café, with tables and chairs set out on the pavement; she stepped off the kerb, and a Fiat braked sharply, horn blaring. She jumped and stepped back again, waiting until at last a driver slowed and waved her across. Then she ran down the road to the cafe; she suddenly heard Jerzy call her, but she didn’t stop. She pulled out a metal chair and sat down at a metal table, and waited.
‘Elizabeth – I’m sorry.’ He was standing beside her, panting; he pulled out a chair and sat down, shaking his head. ‘Sorry,’ he said again.
‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?’
He waved at the air. ‘Forget it, forget it, I’m just being neurotic. For God’s sake let’s have something to eat – where’s the waitress?’
The waitress, in cotton dress and flowered apron, looked tired and took their order indifferently. There was, in any case, almost nothing to order, certainly nothing you could call lunch, and they waited twenty-five minutes for two glasses of tea and two slices of cake with a topping which tasted of nail-polish remover.
‘Listen,’ said Jerzy, when they’d paid. ‘Do you mind going to Pawiak this afternoon? We don’t have to. I suppose one of the things I’m worried about is that I’m going to burden you with my family, and all its history here, and you’ll just get bored, or find it oppressive, and then I’ll feel guilty, but frustrated, because I really need to see it all.’
‘I know you do,’ Elizabeth said. ‘What do you think I am? I know you do. If I didn’t want to see, and be with you when you saw, I wouldn’t have come, would I? Frankly, just at the moment I hardly care what we see as long as you talk to me.’
‘Sometimes talking is the last thing I want to do.’
‘Well – at least acknowledge that it’s difficult when you cut off. Can’t you do that?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I can.’ He reached across the table, and brushed a strand of hair away from her cheek. ‘You look so earnest when you lecture me.’
‘I look earnest? You should see yourself sometimes.’
‘I’m glad I can’t. Come on, let’s go.’
They got up and he took her hand. Elizabeth gave it to him feeling more or less reconciled, still a little wary; then he bent to kiss her and for a moment they clung to each other, eyes closed. A passerby coughed in disapproval, and they drew quickly apart.
‘Not the done thing here,’ said Jerzy.
‘Quite right too.’ Elizabeth felt the tension between them slip away as they walked on, following the folded map from the guidebook, through the Krasinski Gardens, which were very beautiful, and were near to the place where the ghetto had stood, high walls sealing off four hundred thousand Jews. Now, it was as if it had never been.
‘There’s a Monument to the Jewish Heroes a few streets away,’ said Jerzy, looking at the map again.
‘Is there?’ Elizabeth found herself remembering something: not long after they’d met, she’d told a Jewish friend, a woman she’d known since art school, that she’d fallen in love with a Pole. Hannah had not been pleased. ‘They’re anti-Semitic,’ she said. ‘Hitler didn’t choose Poland for the camps for nothing, you know.’
This seemed such a terrible thing to say that Elizabeth had never told Jerzy. And she wasn’t going to tell him now, either.
They walked on, down Dzielna Street, until they saw a deep paved and cobbled space across the road, with a leafy tree set into it, the trunk covered with metal plaques. Beyond the tree was a long low wall, with a dark, semicircular entrance at the foot of a flight of steps; a pillar of original brickwork, concrete and plaster stood before the steps, and from it projected an iron girder, surmounted with rolls of barbed wire, all that remained of the original entrance. On the wall above the gaping black semicircle, in relief, was a single word: PAWIAK. Trees and tower blocks rose beyond it. Jerzy and Elizabeth crossed the road, and went slowly down the steps.
Off to the left ran a long corridor, with reconstructed cells, and straight ahead of them was what looked like another cell, but which they quickly saw was where the attendant made her tea, and sold postcards. She was tiny, old, wearing an apron; they saw a mug and kettle on a shelf behind her. She nodded at them, unsmiling, and they heard her follow them, as they made their way down a further flight of steps into a windowless area, half underground. On the left an open space held glass cases, all along the wall; they looked at papers documenting labour camps, street round-ups, executions. Photographs of members of the AK resistance hung on the walls; they could not tell if they had been taken by Poles or the Gestapo. There were other photographs: endless rows of hangings – bodies swinging or hanging limply from gallows, from balconies. Elizabeth saw Jerzy wander into another room, and glimpsed what looked like iron and metal objects – instruments of torture? She did not follow him, but went over to another low case, resting her hands lightly on the glass as she looked at the list of names on a yellowing sheet of paper. Behind her there was a hiss: she turned to see the tiny old woman shaking her head at her, gesturing to her to take her hands off the glass. She jerked them away and stood, uncertainly.
Jerzy was still in the far room; she couldn’t face going in there, but neither did she want to stay here, being watched with disapproval, even animosity. What was the matter with this old woman? She went out, into another long dark corridor. There seemed to be no other visitors; she walked slowly along, past cell after cell, each with a small spyhole set into the door. Anna’s brother must have been in a cell like one of these. She stood on tiptoe, and lifted the spyhole flap aside, peering in. It was very dim, and shadowy inside; for a horrible moment she imagined herself hearing the screams of other prisoners as the door was slammed shut on her and bolted.
Footsteps came towards her, very quietly, from the other end of the passage. She thought: I don’t belong here, I don’t even belong with Jerzy, I want to go home. The footsteps came closer, and she suddenly heard herself giggle, like a nervous child who doesn’t dare to cry but is about to. At once, there was a spitting, cackling torrent of Polish, and she swung round to see the old woman advancing on her, furiously waving her hands, shouting. Elizabeth turned and ran.
‘Jerzy! Jerzy!’
She bumped against him at the corner. ‘What’s she saying? What have I done? I giggled – it was only, because I was so frightened –’
Behind them, the tiny, wrinkled woman was still shouting. Jerzy held Elizabeth, and li
stened.
‘She thinks we’re German,’ he said. ‘She thinks we’re German, that we’ve come to mock …’ He let her go, and walked over to the old woman. ‘Proszę, Pani …’ Elizabeth, still shaking, saw him towering over her, explaining in a low voice. The old woman shook her head, and did not apologize.
‘Let’s go,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Please, let’s go …’
They made their way back to the entrance, past the cubbyhole where the old woman spent her days, up the steps to the sunlit cobblestones. Elizabeth drew a deep breath.
‘Are you all right?’ Jerzy asked.
‘Yes, I think so. My God … she must be half-mad, working down there all the time.’
‘But that’s how people here must feel, still.’
They walked across to the tree, and stood looking at the white metal plaques, shaped like shields or scrolls. Each bore a name, in capitals, dates and an inscription, and the outline of a cross, lying on a strip of weeping willow.
‘What does S.P. mean?’
‘Swiętej Pamięce – In Holy Memory.’
There were dozens of plaques: to Stanisław Kajak, Bartłomiej Urban, Jerzy Bielski, Piotr Kwiatkowski, Wladysław Bloch – all round and up the trunk, beneath the leaves.
‘And your uncle escaped,’ said Elizabeth, still shaking, as they walked away.
‘Hard to believe, isn’t it?’ said Jerzy. ‘It must have been like a fortress – but he escaped from the ruins of the ghetto, on a working party, not from here.’ He told her the story, as they walked on down Dzielna Street. ‘I will understand if you don’t want to go to the cemetery now,’ he said. ‘We can go another day.’
‘No – let’s go today. After that, a cemetery might even be quite soothing. And we can do something quite different tomorrow. But can we take the tram?’
The tram cost 1 złoty, for any distance. They stood near the front, on the slatted wooden floor, as it swung humming down the street past buildings which, Elizabeth distantly noticed now, reminded her a little of Oxford Street. It was late afternoon, the tram filling with people leaving work. They looked tired and grey, but so did people on London Transport. It was their clothes which made them look different: everything was in Western styles of five, ten years ago – there were flares and bell-bottoms, platform shoes. And shiny, synthetic fabrics: many of the men wore cheap grey suits and open-necked shirts; dresses and skirts looked like Crimplene or polyester, cardigans acrylic.
‘We’re here,’ said Jerzy, and the tram swayed to a halt, and the doors hissed open. They got off, and walked the hundred yards or so to the cemetery. It was very large, bordered with trees, crisscrossed with gravel paths. There were row upon row upon row of identical large grey headstones, each carved with long columns of names: dozens, hundreds, thousands of names, soldiers and civilians killed in the Uprising, an endless roll call of the dead. At the foot of almost every stone were bunches of flowers – marigolds, michaelmas daisies – and all through the cemetery scores of candles in low dishes burned. The sky was grey, now, the air cool; they bought a candle in a dish from a woman selling them at the gate, and carried it along the paths. There were other visitors, mostly Poles, mostly older, talking quietly in twos and threes, or walking alone, bending to lay flowers, or light candles, one from another.
It took them almost an hour to find the headstone, and the name: the stone was almost at the end, and the name on it in the third column, amidst dozens of others: Jerzy Tomasz Kurowski. They stood looking at it, and Elizabeth remembered the photograph of the laughing boy in shorts, on the sunlit river. Jerzy bent down and lit their small red candle from one of the others, and put it beside them; then he stood up and slowly crossed himself. For a moment Elizabeth felt taken completely by surprise, as if she had expected to see Jerzy beside her, and found a stranger there instead. Almost at once, she realized that the gesture in fact suited him perfectly, as if he did it all the time.
He reached towards the stone and lightly touched the name below his uncle’s: Andrzej Maciejowski.
‘His friend.’
‘The one he tried to save?’
‘Yes.’ He stood looking out across the cemetery, the sea of stones, and said something quietly, under his breath.
‘What did you say?’
‘Myriads of broken reeds,’ Jerzy repeated. ‘Myriads of broken reeds, all still and stiff…’
She frowned, trying to remember. ‘Edward Thomas,’ she said at last. ‘You read it to me once.’ She put her arm through his, leaned her head on his shoulder. After a while, he disengaged himself, and took a photograph of the headstone, for Anna. Then they turned away, and walked along the paths until they were at the gate, and out in the street again. Afterwards, Elizabeth could remember only colours: grey stones, mauve and gold flowers, the pale flickering flames and the sharp autumnal coolness of the air, as if it were like that always.
Night. A dark wet street with alleyways leading off it, the only light from the moon, moving behind ragged clouds. Someone was following him. He had to make his way to the other side of the city, in secret, but there were footsteps behind him. He stopped. They stopped. He turned, his heart pounding, but there was no one there. He went on, ashamed of feeling so afraid. There was a patrol on the corner, three or four Germans in uniform, rifles raised; they were talking very quietly – he could make out a few words, hear them shifting from foot to foot on the wet pavement. He ducked into an alleyway, and leaned against the wall, hearing the sound of his own breathing. How was he to get past?
He shifted, and his foot struck something which rang, something metallic. A manhole cover. Very slowly he bent down and tried-to lift it, scraping his fingertips until they were raw, managing at last to heave it off, and aside, and he knelt at the rim and looked down. The rungs of a ladder clung to the side of the shaft; below was nothing but yawning darkness, and the sound of water. He couldn’t go down there. He could not. But if he didn’t reach them, on the other side of the city, if he didn’t warn them … Then he would be safe. Shame and fear flooded him. He could not bring himself to go down, but he must go on through the streets, he crept to the entrance of the alleyway again, and looked out.
The patrol had gone. Quickly, he ran, and at once the sound of the footsteps behind him came again, and someone panting. He did not dare to stop; he ran on, stumbled, found his legs suddenly heavy and slow, and ahead of him heard the click of a gun. He stopped, and the footsteps stopped. He turned, and saw a thin dark figure, a boy in a jacket, and his own face, very white, staring at him.
‘Jerzy?’
The boy did not answer, but went on staring.
He moved towards him, held out his hand; the boy turned, and now it was he who was following, with sudden loud German voices behind them, pounding feet. The boy ducked into the alleyway, and disappeared. He ran after him, tripped on the manhole cover laid aside, reached out to darkness, and slipped, with a lurch of terror, over the rim of the shaft, and fell, and fell and fell.
Someone was sobbing. He was sobbing, uncontrollably, his whole body shaking, hearing Elizabeth from a long way off, saying his name, feeling her hold him. He stopped, at last, and sat hunched in the bedclothes, shaking his head. Dawn light filtered through the curtains. He drew deep breaths, wiping his eyes on the sheet, and turned to see her anxious face, silky fair hair tangled, cotton nightdress slipping off her shoulders. He put his arm round her, and drew her close; she was very warm.
‘Tell me,’ she whispered. ‘What was it?’
‘In the morning. I don’t want to think about it now. Come here.’ Her mouth like a flower, opening to his.
‘The Pope’s visit?’ said Wiktoria. ‘It was remarkable, of course. Even before he came it was remarkable.’ She sat at the top of the table, passing plates. ‘You two still look very tired this morning. Did you sleep well?’
‘Not very,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Jerzy had a nightmare.’
‘A nightmare?’
‘But I’m fine now,’ said Jerzy. He kicked her u
nder the table, gently, and Wiktoria looked away.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘The Pope. Help yourselves, please. When we heard the announcement from the Vatican on the news it was as if … as if a miracle had happened. Like a sign, that God had not forgotten us. I expect that sounds absurd to you young people, but that is how we felt. Were Anna and your family in London pleased?’
Jerzy nodded, spreading stale bread with jam. ‘Particularly my grandparents.’
‘Naturally. Anyway, people in the streets were stopping complete strangers to talk about it – that in itself is a little unusual now – and of course a lot of us were crying –’ She looked at Elizabeth. ‘We are rather emotional, you know, the Poles. I expect you are finding that.’
‘Yes.’
‘Exuberant and hospitable,’ said Wiktoria. ‘Also depressive. I imagine Jerzy is not easy to live with?’
He laughed. ‘We’re managing,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Just about.’ She felt completely at ease with Wiktoria now. No wonder Anna and her brother had leaned on her during the war.
‘Good. So – everyone was in a flurry, and when we knew he was coming here, in June, the city was suddenly full of people, going to visit the places he would be visiting, walking and talking. It was summer, of course, so the evenings were long … I went with a friend, and we felt as if we were in Warsaw before the war, you know, free to come and go as we pleased; just seeing so many people was extraordinary. Many of them had travelled long distances to come here, from all parts of Poland, and there had been stories of how the city would be overrun with peasants, or crowds of people out of control. It wasn’t like that at all. It was just … a kind of calm excitement. There was an enormous cross in Victory Square, draped with a red banner; it was opposite the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and it towered over us …’
‘That was where he celebrated mass?’ Jerzy asked. ‘We saw it on television.’
‘Did you? Yes, it was there. You could hardly move; people were holding up crosses, pressing forward to get a closer look, children on their parents’shoulders. And when he began to speak … “Dear fellow countrymen! Dear brothers and sisters! Fellow sharers in the Eucharistic Sacrifice that is being offered today in Warsaw’s Victory Square!” I shall never forget it.’ She shook her head. ‘We felt as if we were worth something again – more than that. We were the people we knew ourselves to be, not what we were told we were, or should be. Simply – ourselves.’