Spring Will Be Ours

by Sue Gee

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Ewa took the cup out to the kitchen. ‘Excuse me, Tata.’ She lit the gas under the kettle and washed the cup, cut another slice of lemon. Then, waiting for the kettle to boil, she wandered out, and down the corridor to the empty room she once had shared with Jerzy. It was dark; she switched on the light and stood looking at the narrow bed, with its neat candlewick quilt, at the shiny wardrobe, where there were, even now, marks of Sellotape from where the pictures of trains had once been stuck. Someone else should be living here, using this room, she thought. What do Mama and Tata do with themselves, rattling about in all this extra space?

  She switched off the light again, and went across to the window, where the curtains were not drawn. Fluorescent lights ran all along the track, and it was raining here, too, a thin sheet of silver, shining as it fell. She pressed her face against the glass, hearing laughter from the other room.

  Warsaw, January 1981 The courtyard of the school was inches deep in snow. Sitting at the window of the library, two floors up, Danuta watched the caretaker digging and clearing it, his spade scraping on the ground, the piles he heaped in the corners glistening as the morning sun rose behind the rooftops.

  It was cold in the library, colder than at home, where the old tiled stove heated the apartment like a friend. But she couldn’t spend every day huddled up at home, it was lonely once her parents had left for work, and anyway in her last term she didn’t want to miss what was going on here. The caretaker stopped for a rest, leaning on his spade, his breath rising in a cloud. As he shifted, feeling in his blue overalls for his cigarettes, the sun caught the shining red and white of a little badge pinned on his top pocket: Solidarność. Danuta leaned forward and tapped the window, wanting to give him the thumbs up, but he couldn’t hear her. Her badge was on the lapel of her winter coat, hanging behind her on the chair – in the first weeks after the August strikes, something like two thousand students had queued downstairs to join.

  Since then, her course had been turned upside down. There were students having to rewrite whole theses in the light of the mismanagement revealed in the last few months. In the Ursus factory Solidarity had compiled a fifty-page dossier on the huge piles of equipment rusting away in the snow, the new spare parts dumped on scrap heaps. There were stories like that, apparently, in Solidarity bulletins all over the country – about the five-year plans which could last not a month less, the towns where factories were so overmanned it was impossible to get a job even though officially there was no unemployment. The trainloads of Polish goods speeding towards Moscow. There was the story about the fish which couldn’t be canned because suddenly there was a shortage of linings for the cans. Sweden offered to purchase the surplus – but ‘our people need fish’, and so the whole uncanned, unmarketable lot went to waste. There were stories of Swiss bank accounts, of silver grouting in the bathrooms of private villas, of sheepskin coats for the winter which went not to workers but directors; of the economists’report commissioned by Gierek which was stuffed at the back of a drawer. Danuta found watching television was quite a bit more interesting now; journalists gave ministers a grilling and exposed almost laughable depths of ignorance about the departments they were supposed to be running. Almost the only person to come out of it all unblemished was Tadeusz Fiszbach, the Party Secretary in Gdańsk who had helped to negotiate the August Agreements, and openly respected the shipyard workers. He had no villas or secret bank accounts, he was straight, a true communist if you like.

  For the rest, it was as if a dark, heavy stone had been turned over, revealing a crawling mass of nasties: negligence, incompetence, indifference, lies and deceptions. But revealing it all had not in itself changed anything – there were still the shortages, there was talk of rationing. People began queuing at five in the morning. Naturally, the authorities were blaming Solidarity – it was the strikes which caused economic chaos, as if it hadn’t been chaos for decades. In reply, Solidarity was demanding access to information on a national scale. It was one thing to know that in a textile factory in Łódź no one could do any work because there weren’t any bobbins. If the authorities wanted Solidarity to cooperate in lifting Poland out of the quagmire by denying themselves some of the 21 Demands, then the authorities would have to come clean: to announce exactly how much coal was produced, where it was exported; how exactly food was distributed, who decided it. There was hardly a person in any queue Danuta had stood in since last autumn who did not believe that there were food mountains rotting in warehouses, deliberately held back from the open market so that Solidarity could be blamed for the shortages.

  In the meantime, there were the farmers, over three million of them, the last privately run cog in the machine, neglected for years, demanding registration of their own union, Solidarność Wiejska – Rural Solidarity. They were backed by Wałęsa and the Solidarity leadership, but in October the Warsaw Provincial Court had ruled that self-employed workers could not form a trade union. Two weeks before Christmas, in heavy boots and sheepskin coats, the farmers had marched into Warsaw from all over the country, again demanding registration; since the second day of the New Year, they had occupied the headquarters of an old trade-union council in Rzeszów, a provincial town right down in the south-east, where many of the roads must be almost blocked by snow.

  The caretaker had cleared half the courtyard. Watching his square, blue-overalled shape bending and lifting spadesful of snow Danuta thought that he or his father had probably come from the country. The image of the peasant farmer, tilling the earth with medieval tools, exploited both by the old estate owners and by the communists, was as old as Poland itself – she had tried, once, to write in an essay about how the rapid, forced industrial expansion under Gierek missed the whole point: that Poland was above all an agricultural country; she could grow rich just through investing in the land. When the essay was returned, her comments were ignored. Now the peasant farmers, who had always refused collectivization, were marching together under their own banner – which, it was noticeable, drew a much quicker and more sympathetic response from the Church than industrial Solidarity had done. The simple son of the soil – a gentle, Christian image. But the simple sons of the soil might refuse to send their produce to the towns this winter. Piotr, the boy who’d held the party on the night of the August Agreements, had been down to Rzeszów, where the double doors of the occupied building were padlocked and guarded by enormous men in heavy coats and felt boots, wearing red and white armbands.

  Amongst the graffiti on the walls inside was a nice little piece:

  We don’t care about life

  The pig also lives

  We want a life of dignity. I want a life of dignity, too, Danuta thought. She looked at the empty sheets of paper in front of her, and realized that she’d been sitting here chewing the top of her pen until it was almost off, and had written nothing. ‘Principles of Trade within the Community for Mutual Economic Assistance …’ She had two more months of this. Everything might have been turned upside down, but she still had to finish her revision, sit the exams. After that – providing she passed – she would be qualified. And then what?

  To work in Warsaw you had to have a Warsaw Identity Card – naturally, she had that, but actually to get a job in a foreign trade enterprise now – well, it was not going to be as easy as she used to think. She used to think all she had to do was qualify – Solidarity had revealed that was only the first step. There was unemployment in Poland just as there was everywhere else. To get the kind of job she wanted she would have to pull strings, and she knew no one with strings.

  If there’s nothing for me here, she thought, watching the sun rise still higher, and the piles of snow begin, just for a few hours, to melt a little, I’ll go to the West anyway, I’ll do any old job there for a while. After all, I know a little English, I have Aunt Halina to go to. Suppose she won’t have me? I won’t tell her I’m coming, then, I’ll just surprise her. I’ll get out of this country before something happens so that I never can
.

  Warsaw, 12 February 1981

  ‘I am a soldier, so every job, every duty entrusted to me I regard

  as a service, a service to the nation and to socialist Poland.’

  A dark winter evening. Stefan walked away from the queue at the newspaper kiosk, reading as he went. So there was a new voice in the sejm, the voice of a man whose eyes were hidden behind dark glasses. The photograph in·Zycie Warszawy showed him in full military uniform, medals on his chest. General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Defence Minister, had been a quiet background figure in the last six months. Now, he had been made Prime Minister, replacing Pińkowski, who had once been accused of favouring Solidarity. Jaruzelski declared that there had been ‘many positive changes’since the signing of the Agreements; there were also ‘serious anxieties’. Here we go, thought Stefan. He bumped into someone, looked up and apologized. ‘Proszę, proszę.’ The man he had bumped into was also reading the paper; they grinned and walked past each other.

  Stefan was making for Krystyna’s library; he was going to surprise her and pick her up after work, something he couldn’t often do because of working overtime, and especially since the dispute about free Saturdays last month, which after warning strikes had only just been settled. They still had to work one a month, and in return for the others off they had to work extra time anyway to make a forty-two-hour week. But today he had skived – to hell with it, for once, Krysia needed a surprise, or something, anyway, to cheer her up: this winter had been a pig.

  The library was in a quiet network of streets off Jerozolimskie Avenue. Heaps of cleared snow lined the pavements; under the lamps, people were leaving offices and hurrying towards the avenue to catch trams and buses home. They were huddled up in cheap coats against the cold, their faces pinched; a lot of them had probably been up queueing since dawn. He and Krysia took it in turns now. Sugar had been rationed – to think that even last summer he had thought it was like living in a war. It was a hell of a lot worse now. He reached the library, climbed the steps and pushed open the heavy front door. Inside, it wasn’t much warmer than out; he sat on a bench in the hall and waited for Krysia to come downstairs. On the noticeboard someone had pinned up one of the Rural Solidarity flysheets he’d been distributing. Hang on – the someone was probably Krysia, wasn’t it? He’d given her a handful. It felt suddenly rather strange to think of her doing something like that by herself, so that a stranger could come in here and perhaps wonder who’d pinned it up. It was his wife, for God’s sake! For a brief, uncharacteristic moment, Stefan had a small, chilling vision, like a snapshot, of Krysia, without him, in trouble. He felt in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes, remembered he couldn’t smoke in here, swore, and went back to the paper, to the report of the speech Jaruzelski had made yesterday.

  ‘The expected stabilization has not materialized … Evil, hostile political forces are pursuing activities aimed against socialism, our alliances, our economic stability … striving to turn back the wheel of history and achieve a counter-revolution … To resist this process is not just the business of the authorities, it is also the patriotic duty of all forces of prudence and responsibility, including the millions of members and activists of Solidarność, who support the constitution and believe in the precepts of the socialist system.’

  Well, of course, thought Stefan, there is always patriotism. No one can ever resist that – especially from a soldier. Shades of Piłsudski, Sikorski. Hands up those of you in Solidarity who are not patriots. Well, then – you will resist the evil, hostile political forces! Even if those forces are in fact yourselves. If there wasn’t a joke about that yet, there soon would be. Coming next, perhaps, as in 1968: It’s All the Fault of the Jews.

  Jaruzelski concluded by calling for a strike moratorium. ‘I appeal for three months of hard work, for ninety peaceful days.’

  Three months of hard work – that sounded like more of the same. But ninety peaceful days … that sounded all right. Like a holiday. There were a lot of people who’d buy that.

  Footsteps came running down the stairs. ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’

  He shot the newspaper up in front of his face, croaking like a robot. ‘I-am-invisible.’

  ‘No you’re not.’ Krystyna pulled it away, and quickly kissed him on both cheeks. ‘I’d know those feet anywhere.’

  ‘And I’d know those tits.’

  ‘Stefan! Sssh!’

  He got up, grinning, and folded the paper. ‘You’ve seen all this, presumably.’

  ‘About Jaruzelski? Yes.’

  They went to the door and he held it open, bowing low.

  ‘What has got into you?’

  ‘I don’t know, really. It must be love.’

  ‘What nonsense.’

  They hurried down the steps and along the pavement, arm in arm.

  ‘So what do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘About Jaruzelski? Well … he’s clean, isn’t he? No one can pin anything on him, anyway.’

  ‘I thought you’d be frightened. That he’s just paving the way for the tanks.’

  ‘Don’t! When I first heard about it, I was. Now – I’m not so sure. He seems … sincere.’

  ‘They all seem that, my darling.’ He stopped under a street lamp, and kissed her. Her face was freezing. ‘Poor baby. Shall we go for a drink?’

  ‘What about Olek?’

  ‘I’ve phoned your mother – she’s going to take him home and put him to bed.’

  ‘Wonderful. What about money?’

  ‘I’ve borrowed some. Come on, let’s go!’

  Their arms round each other’s waists, they walked on to the coffee house near the avenue where they used to meet a long time ago, before they were married. It was small and crowded and warm. Jazz came through the speakers, candles burned in saucers, cigarette smoke wafted to the ceiling. There were Solidarity posters pinned up everywhere. They pushed their way through to the back.

  ‘It’s taken,’ said Krystyna, looking at their old table.

  ‘Never mind, we’ll wait. Two coffees coming up.’

  When he came back, they stood drinking and listening to the music, a slow, melodic sax that seemed to go on for ever. After a while, the people at their old table got up to go, and they moved quickly across before anyone else could take it.

  ‘I feel better,’ said Krystyna. She slipped off her coat, and they sat with their hands clasped across the table. The candle was quite low; with his free hand Stefan picked up a match from the saucer and began to catch the drips of wax, feeding them back into the centre. The flame spluttered and fizzed.

  ‘If you do that too much, it’ll go out,’ said Krystyna, watching. She reached out to try to take the match away. ‘Stop it.’

  Stefan shook his head. ‘Sorry. I’m thinking.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I have an idea. I’m not sure if you’ll like it.’ He dropped the blackened match into the saucer and looked at her. ‘How do you feel about travelling?’

  ‘Travelling,’ said Krystyna. ‘Travelling where? You mean in the summer? Anything could have happened by then.’

  ‘Exactly. I mean going to the West for a bit. Perhaps to England. All of us.’

  She looked at him in astonishment. ‘Now? You want to leave Poland now? When there’s everything left to fight for? I can’t believe it.’

  Stefan took his hand away and lit a cigarette from the candle. He puffed at it quickly. ‘I knew it – you are more radical than I am. I thought you’d jump at the chance – for God’s sake, everyone does it! Go over for a few months, have a break, earn some real money –’

  ‘Doing what?’

  He shrugged. ‘Waitressing?’

  ‘And who’d look after Olek?’

  ‘We could do shifts. I could work on a – I don’t know, a building site or something. Or be a waiter. Decent food, decent clothes, no more queuing. We could do a lot for the parents, with that kind of money.’

  ‘We’d do a lot for the parents if there was – God
forbid – an invasion, and we were swanning about in London.’

  ‘You said you thought Jaruzelski was all right.’

  ‘No I didn’t. I said he seemed all right, but –’ She reached over and stroked his arm. ‘I thought you were so excited about everything. Still. What’s happened?’

  He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I’m just tired. I thought you were, too. I felt sorry for you. And I don’t know – every now and then I think: Have we really got a chance?’

  ‘Well you mustn’t think that. Come on, Stefan!’

  ‘And to think I was bringing you here to cheer you up.’

  ‘You have, you have. It’s lovely being back.’

  He took her hand. ‘All those years ago, my Krysia. How long have we known each other?’

  She held his hand against her cheek. ‘Always. It feels like always, anyway.’

  Warsaw, 20 March 1981 ‘They’ve beaten up men in Rural Solidarity!’ Stefan banged open the door of the apartment, and kicked it shut behind him. Olek, staggering across the floor towards him, sat down with a bump and began to scream.

  ‘Hey!’ said Krystyna sharply. ‘Mind what you’re doing, Stefan. It’s all right, Olek – come on, come on, that’s enough.’ She bent to pick him up. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘There’s three men in hospital,’ said Stefan. ‘In Bydgoszcz. Olek, Tata didn’t mean to frighten you. Bad Tata, go on, beat him up, go on.’ He took Olek’s hand and punched it on his arm. Olek went on screaming.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake just leave him alone,’ Krystyna snapped. ‘It’s your free Saturday, isn’t it? We’ve been waiting and waiting for you to come back so we can go to the park. You’ve been hours.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry, but everyone in Szpitalna Street was talking about it, I couldn’t leave. Let’s go now, come on, let’s just take him out, he’ll be fine as soon as we’re in the fresh air.’

  They bundled Olek into his clothes and clattered down the concrete stairs to the ground floor, his yells echoing on the landings, then diminishing. Outside, Stefan lifted him from Krystyna’s arms and they crossed the road to the little park, where he put him down. ‘There you are, old chap, off you go now.’