Spring Will Be Ours

by Sue Gee

  ‘And we haven’t even been registered.’

  ‘We’re going on strike if we’re not.’

  ‘Are we?’ Krystyna went to switch on the television. Last week, Mr Kania had flown to Moscow, just for the day. The communiqué he brought back with him had been read on the news by the usual po-faced announcer:

  ‘Comrade Brezhnev expressed the confidence … that the communists and working people of fraternal Poland will be able to resolve the acute problems of political and economic development facing them.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Stefan.

  However, there was a warning.

  ‘The participants in the meeting resolutely denounced the attempts by certain imperialist circles to mount subversive activities in socialist Poland, and to interfere in its affairs.’

  ‘Hear hear,’ Stefan said solemnly. ‘Absolutely right,’ and as usual he’d made them laugh.

  On 10 November the Supreme Court of Warsaw overruled the Provincial. Solidarity was registered, and a compromise agreed: the leading role of the Party was to be included in an Appendix. Wałęsa came out of the court shaking his arms above his head. ‘We have got everything we wanted!’ he shouted to the crowd through a megaphone, from the side window of the coach, which drove him and his colleagues away and off to the Primate’s Palace, where Cardinal Wyszyński was waiting to receive them, with greetings from the Pope. That night, there was a celebration, a gala performance in the Teatr Wielki, the largest theatre in Warsaw. The stage was hung with an enormous Solidarity banner. There were readings from Miłosz, from Mickiewicz; there were cabaret acts, and satirical sketches of the television news. Stefan and Krystyna didn’t go to the performance, they couldn’t possibly afford it, but next day everyone was singing the refrain of the song sung there by·Jan Pietrzak, star of Warsaw’s most famous political cabaret. Zeby Polską byłe Polską – ‘So that Poland shall be Poland.’ The tune was gentle, the words sung at a pace which was almost melancholy, but no one could get it out of their heads.

  ‘So that Poland shall be Poland …’ You heard it in queues, in coffee houses, restaurants and bars; people hummed it on the way to work; Stefan sang it in the bath so often that Krystyna had to ask him to stop.

  Winter was coming; an icy wind blew through the city. But the next night, Stefan did go out – he stood among a crowd ten thousand strong before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in Victory Square, in celebration of Independence Day – 11 November 1918. The dark sky was lit by firebrands, wreaths were laid on the tomb, whose unknown soldier, everyone knew, had died defending Warsaw against the Red Army in 1920. Speeches were made – about Katyń, about the Nazi-Soviet Pact: the most recent, most terrible stains on the history of Poland since her brief independence was lost again in 1939. And then they sang the national anthem. Even as a child, Stefan sometimes found himself having to blink back tears with the national anthem – that was partly, then, because the family made such a big thing of it, telling him over and over again of the times in occupied Poland when it had been sung so bravely, so defiantly. Now, with all the emotion of the past few days behind them, the precious, longed-for feeling that with Solidarity there was real hope for change, there were tears freezing on almost everyone’s cheeks as they sang it over and over again:

  ‘Poland is not yet lost

  As long as we are alive …

  What the foreign power has seized from us,

  We will recapture with the sabre …’

  The trams and buses afterwards were packed. Stefan didn’t even bother to wait for one, he was too charged up. He walked all the way home, crossing the bridge over the Vistula where the lights of the riverboats danced in the water, his breath streaming out in front of him, and thought about his little son, and what he might one day inherit.

  Within ten days, the next crisis came. Among the volunteers in and out of the crowded rooms at the top of the stairs at 5 Szpitalna Street was a young mathematician, Jan Naroz·niak, a lanky,·sweet-looking fellow who worked as a duplicator. Someone passed Narozniak a secret document. The someone was a clerk in the Chief Prosecutor’s Office; the document was clumsily entitled ‘On the present methods of prosecution of illegal anti-socialist activity’. It consisted of a cobbled history of dissident groups since the fifties, including KOR, the Workers’Defence Committee, and although it did not mention Solidarity by name, Solidarity was clearly implicated. The ‘methods of prosecution’listed searches, confiscation of material, arrests, fines, imprisonment.

  Late in the afternoon of 20 November, the boots of the militia tramped up the stairs of Szpitalna Street; they were led by a woman, the Deputy Prosecutor, and they turned·the rooms over until they found the document. Next day Narozniak was arrested. So was Piotr Sapieło, the clerk who had passed it to him.

  At once, Zbigniew Bujak, the Mazowsze Chairman, issued a statement. It called for the immediate release of Naroz·niak and Sapieło, and threatened a strike. He added that he had not known that the document was on the premises, but if he had he would at once have ordered it to be duplicated ‘in a number of copies sufficient to distribute to every branch of our union’. The men were

  On Monday, the Prosecutor’s office announced that Naroz·niak was being held under a ninety-day detention order, charged with disseminating state secrets. The maximum sentence was five years. By Tuesday, Stefan’s·canvas bag was stuffed with hastily duplicated flysheets: ‘Today Naroz niak – tomorrow Wałesa – the day after tomorrow – you.’ He helped to plaster Free Naroz·niak posters on buses, trams and buildings all over the centre of Warsaw.

  Next day, Bujak held a press conference. To the demands for the release of the two men, he added five more, including an investigation into the role of the police and the Chief Prosecutor himself in brutally harassing the workers of Ursus and Radom after the strikes of 1976 – had they, themselves, been acting beyond the limits of the law? He wanted actions against those who had produced the document, an end to harassment of Solidarity members, cuts in the police budget …

  ‘He wants the moon,’ said Krystyna that evening, reading out all this. ‘He’s going too far.’

  ‘No he’s not, he’s right, you know he’s right.’

  ‘All right, all right, he’s right. And when are you going out on strike?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’ Stefan let out a whoop.

  By Wednesday there were twenty factories on strike, including Stefan’s. In the afternoon there was a passionate meeting in the Ursus works.

  ‘Better to die on our feet than live on our knees!’ shouted one of the speakers, and with that ancient battle cry the whole audience burst into applause. The deadline for a general strike in the Mazowsze region was set for midday on Thursday; the workers of the giant Huta Warszawa steelworks began an occupation. A head-on collision with the authorities, perhaps more dramatic even than in August, seemed inevitable: for the first time, it was Warsaw leading events, with Gdańsk, Wałęsa and the national leaders following in the wake of the capital. There were urgent phone calls, desperate attempts being made for compromise by the older members of the union, including, surprisingly, Jacek Kuroń himself, founder of KOR, in and out of prison for years, arrested and released in a game of cat and mouse throughout the strikes in Gdańsk. In·the small hours of Thursday, exactly a week after their arrest, Narozniak and Sapieło were released. They were driven to the Ursus works by Stefan Bratkowski, the radical Chairman of the Polish Journalists’Association. Up all night, listening in the factory, Stefan and the workers in his section heard Warsaw Radio announce at 2 a.m. that Bratkowski had personally guaranteed to the authorities that with their release the strike would be called off. There were cheers – but also a detectable sense of anti-climax: they had been all geared up for days of this, and now the deadline had been lifted and there was nothing to do but go home.

  In the steelworks, no one was going home. They were ready for a fight, and they were determined to have it. So Naroz·niak and Sapieło had been released – but what about Bujak’s o
ther demands? Who had answered them? They weren’t ending the strike until someone did.

  ‘We showed we knew how to call a strike, and how to call it off,’ Wałęsa had said in October. Now, it looked as if neither he, nor Bujak, nor anyone else in the Solidarity leadership could call off what was happening in the Huta steelworks. It took Kania himself, in a small-hours phone call to Gdańsk, promising that Deputy Prime Minister Jagielski would come and talk to the men next morning, to quieten things down for the night. Next morning, however, Jagielski refused to go. If the men wanted to talk to him, they could wait until after the next Party plenum, due in a few days.

  The steelworkers went into a fury. Within hours, the strike was threatening to start again in the factories where overnight it had been abandoned.

  Jacek Kuroń came down to plead with them. Stefan Bratkowski collapsed. In a plane seat paid for by the government, Wałęsa flew in from Gdańsk. In the end, the government announced on television that the talks on the powers of the police which Bujak had demanded would begin. Even that was not enough. The television announcer was dragged out of his bed by workers demanding to see the actual text of the broadcast announcement. Only then did the steelmen vote, at last, at 4 a.m. on the Friday, to go back to work.

  Exhausted and unshaven, Stefan left his own factory and crawled into bed at dawn. Krystyna was asleep, but Olek, hearing his father creep past the cot, was awake at once, heaving himself up and rattling the bars. ‘Tata!’

  ‘Sssh!’ said Stefan. ‘Go back to sleep.’ He fell on to the pillow. Beside him, Krystyna murmured crossly, then asked: ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Stefan. ‘Fine.’

  ‘Compatriots! The fate of our country and our people is at stake! The continuing disturbances are bringing our fatherland to the brink of economic and moral destruction.’

  On 4 December, Kania’s appeal to the nation was published in every newspaper. Just as people were recovering from November, longing for a breathing space, the alarms which had been sounded in the Western press about a possible Soviet invasion began to appear, as strongly worded hints, in Poland. Next day, it was announced that a Warsaw Pact summit meeting had been held in Moscow: once again, confidence was expressed in the working people of fraternal Poland, but no one doubted why the meeting had been called. That weekend, a number of Soviet army divisions moved west, camping in the bitter cold along the Polish border.

  ‘Remember Czechoslovakia!’ There were few people who had not thought about Czechoslovakia ever since the first wave of strikes spread to the Baltic coast in August. But not once had those words been officially spoken in the last months, either by the Solidarity leaders or by the government: no one wanted to press the panic button. Now, the fear of invasion began to surface openly, in rumours, warnings. ‘It’s not like Czechoslovakia·, though,’ said Stefan, looking up from Kania’s appeal in Z ycie Warszawy. ‘The Czechs were all on Dubček’s side, weren’t they? Who loves Kania? Or any of them? They’d call in the tanks if they had to.’

  Krystyna shuddered, spooning mashed potato into Olek’s open mouth.

  ‘Don’t.’

  He spread his hands. ‘What do you mean, don’t? Can’t we talk about it?’

  ‘I read about it all day.’

  The reading room in the library was always stocked with foreign papers, and they had never been so busy – people queued for their turn to read them. ‘They’re hysterical,’ she said. ‘“Poland On The Brink”, “Poland Faces Collapse”. It’s almost as if they want an invasion, to wring their hands and wail over, something horrible they can watch from a safe distance.’

  ‘You don’t think,’ said Stefan, ‘that they’re doing it to show the Russians that they won’t take it quietly if they invade? That they’ll face a real fury from the West, perhaps even another cold war?’

  Krystyna put down the spoon of mashed potato and looked at him. ‘And what,’ she said, ‘did the West do for us in 1939?’

  ‘They went to war,’ said Stefan mildly. ‘They did go to war.’

  ‘You know what I mean. You know perfectly well what I mean. Where were the British planes in the siege of Warsaw? Where were the French? Haven’t your parents told you about going to sing “God Save the King” and the “Marseillaise” outside the embassies, the day after the Nazis marched into Danzig?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Stefan, ‘of course they have.’ Olek was banging on the table, trying to reach the spoon. ‘Go on, feed the poor child, or shall I?’ He took the spoon from her, and dipped it into the bowl. ‘Talk about stars on the ascendant, or the course of the planets – to think that Danzig is now Gdańsk.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Krystyna, ‘and to think that after all that, after the war, the West who care so much for us abandoned us at Yalta! Do you really think that if the Russians invade us now they will do anything to prevent it?’

  ‘You are becoming more strident than me,’ said Stefan. ‘It’s almost Christmas, please don’t let’s quarrel. There you are, Olek, all gone, nie ma – no more.’

  ‘Nie ma,’ said Krystyna, getting up. ‘That’s all we ever hear in the queues, even now. No more sugar, no more ham, no more eggs, or butter – what kind of Christmas are we going to have?’ She took Olek’s bowl and spoon to the kitchen, almost in tears.

  Stefan picked up the baby and went over to the window. Condensation trickled down the panes; he rubbed one, and looked out towards the little park. It was freezing, the first snow on the ground, and no one was out there now. The walls of the apartment block across the path from theirs were scrawled with old grafitti: Solidarity! We demand registration… Strike! Demand the release of Naroz·niak … Strike! The TV lies … We demand access to the media … Brezhnev: Stay Home! It seemed only days since he had stood here after Gierek’s last address, wondering what was going to happen to them all.

  And yet – before it ended, the year did contain another triumph.

  London, 16 December 1980 Factory sirens faded, and the screen was filled with floodlit figures, standing in the rain outside the gate of the Lenin Shipyard, beneath an enormous monument: three giant crosses whose arms, metres above the upturned faces of the crowd, were each hung with an anchor.

  ‘In Poland,’ Kenneth Baker announced, ‘hundreds of thousands of people attended this evening’s rally in Gdańsk, commemorating the riots there in 1970 in which forty-five Poles were killed. This was also the scene of this summer’s strikes, which led to the country’s first independent trade unions.’ Among the crowd, the yellow helmets of the shipyard workers gleamed. From a cord tied around the crosses, the Polish flag blew in the wind; a choir began to sing the opening bars of a Lachrymose.

  ‘Why the anchor?’ asked Elizabeth.

  ‘I’ll tell you in a minute,’ said Jerzy.

  ‘Struggle and redemption,’ said Ewa from the floor, without taking her eyes off the screen.

  ‘Polska Walcząca,’ said Anna, leaning out of her chair.

  ‘Fighting Poland,’ said Jan, from the other side of the room.

  Elizabeth turned to look at him, standing in the doorway with his arms folded, neither quite in the room nor out of it. He has changed, she thought – not completely, or he would be in here, next to his wife. But since August he is different – he is calmer, more open, more alive.

  ‘In 1970, shipyard strikers clashed with the police and army. But this evening the ceremony united the three most powerful elements in Polish society – with representatives from the independent unions, the Government, and the Catholic Church all attending.’

  The camera moved along a line of seated dignitaries: cardinals in black cloaks, scarlet cassocks, scarlet hats; men in winter coats and glasses; Wałęsa in a brown anorak, getting up, stepping forward.

  ‘Lech Wałęsa, leader of the Solidarity Trade Union, lit the flame beneath the monument to the dead.’

  In the falling rain it took him three attempts to light the oxyacetylene torch passed to him by two helmeted workers. On the third, the torch spa
rked into life; he thrust it forward and an enormous flame sprang up at his feet. He watched it, waved the torch to the crowd, and stepped aside as wreath after wreath, one for each shipyard worker shot dead by the militia, was carried up and laid upon the plinth. There were lines from Młtosz engraved at the base of the monument, from his translation of the Psalms:

  The Lord giveth His people strength

  The Lord giveth His people the blessing of peace.

  Ewa was sitting on the floor at her grandparents’feet, smoking. As Kenneth Baker and the camera moved away from Gdańsk, Babcia leaned down and gently took her hand. ‘Stop it, kochana. You smoke far too much.’

  Ewa shook her hand. ‘I can’t help it.’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘Oh, Babcia! Here we are watching one of the most moving things that’s happened in Poland since August, and all you can do is go on about smoking.’

  ‘That’s enough.’ Anna was blowing her nose. ‘To think that we should be sitting here watching all this – I never, never thought it would happen.’ She got up and went over to the table. ‘Does anyone want more?’

  ‘No thanks, Mama.’ Jerzy rose and put his arm round her. ‘All right? Are you all right?’

  ‘She is reliving her memories,’ said Jan lightly from the doorway.

  Jerzy looked at him – and that’s another thing that’s changed, thought Elizabeth. Jerzy’s not so ill at ease with him, they have something to talk about now. ‘Aren’t you reliving yours?’

  Jan shrugged. ‘Of course.’

  Dziadek was holding out his cup; it trembled slightly in the saucer. ‘Perhaps just another cup? If there is one?’

  ‘I’ll make some more,’ said Ewa, leaving her cigarette smouldering in the ashtray, getting to her feet. She took it from him, kissing him on the cheek. ‘Kochany Dziadek – what do you want for Christmas?’

  He gestured at the screen, not answering. Babcia patted him.

  ‘He’s got his present,’ said Jerzy.