by Sue Gee
The domestic supervisor was English, a woman in her thirties called Lisa. Lisa had an over-tanned face and frizzy blonde hair. You were not allowed to leave your floor until she had checked each room.
After breakfast, Danuta and the other chambermaids went upstairs. In each of ‘her’rooms on the fourth floor Danuta stripped and remade the double bed with fresh linen: four pillow cases, one bottom sheet, one enormous duvet to manhandle into a new cover. She vacuumed the carpets with a huge, heavy Hoover, cleaned the bath and basin and lavatory, put out fresh towels, mopped the bathroom floor, dusted the bedside cabinets and dressing table, cleaned the ashtrays, wiped clean the window sills, washed the aluminium trays of aluminium tea things, and the cups and saucers.
At the end of her first morning, when she had finished the fifteenth room, she was soaked in sweat, her arms and legs trembling. She leaned against the wall of the landing, carpeted in red, and waited with her eyes closed for Lisa to come and inspect. New arrivals came out of the lift at the far end; through the smell of floor cleaner, toilet cleaner and scouring powder which clung to her, Danuta realized she could smell scent, and she heard American voices laughing and talking. Many of the guests were American, there were also Arabs, and a few French and Germans. At least, she thought, exhausted, the tips should be good. Everyone said the Arabs were fantastic. There had been nothing on the dressing tables this morning, when Lisa had shown her which were her rooms, but that must be unusual.
‘You asleep or something?’
She opened her eyes, almost jumping away from the wall. Lisa was frowning.
‘Excuse me – I am sorry …’
‘Well come on, let’s have a look.’
Danuta followed her from room to room, nervously watching her straighten duvets, look under each bed, run a finger along the window sills, check the toilets.
‘There’s dust behind here!’
‘Where?’ Danuta hurried to look. There was a thin film of dust on the wastepipe leading from the toilet in Room 206. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t see …’
‘Well you’d better look. Go on, don’t just stand there – where’s your cloth?’
Danuta bent to wipe the wastepipe clean. The soft net curtain at the window blew a little in the breeze from the open bathroom window; outside it was hot and sunny and she could see the trees of Hyde Park. Perhaps she could sunbathe there at the weekend. She went out of the bathroom just in time to see Lisa slip something from the dressing table into her pocket. A tip? It must be – how had she missed that? She followed her out, and along to the next room. At the end, Lisa said only: ‘Right, you can take the linen along to the lift. The laundry’s down in the basement.’
There were six Filipino women in the laundry, chattering in high-pitched voices. They smiled at Danuta and she put down the basket of bedclothes and smiled back.
‘Lisa …’ she said cautiously.
‘Lisa is a cow,’ one of them said cheerfully. ‘On Fridays you check your money.’
‘I will.’
Next morning, Danuta was so stiff she could hardly get out of bed. By the end of the week, some of the stiffness had gone, but still, when she straightened up from each bath her back ached so much she had to lie on the floor before she went on to the next room. She had managed to get to most of her tips before Lisa and that was the money she was saving to send home: her wages were going to pay for her fees at a language school in Oxford Street. Basia, the pharmacist from Kraków, had told her about it. After lunch that Friday she went to Lisa’s office on the ground floor, to collect her wages.
‘Right, then.’ From a pile of small brown envelopes on her desk, Lisa took the one with her name and gave it to her.
‘Thank you.’ She took it along the passage and opened it quickly. There should be thirty-five pounds. There were two ten-pound notes, and three ones. She hurried back to the office.
‘Excuse me – I think there is a mistake?’
Lisa looked up from her desk. ‘What do you mean?’
Danuta held out the envelope. ‘There are twenty-three pounds. It should be thirty-five?’
‘But there’s your deductions, isn’t there? See your paper inside.’
She looked inside the envelope, pulled out a folded piece of lined paper written in smudgy ballpoint capitals. National Insurance. Tax. ‘But …’
‘But what?’
But if she was working illegally, how could they be deducting these things? Who was the money going to? She opened her mouth to speak, but felt an enormous lump in her throat. Anyway, to argue that in English was beyond her.
‘If you don’t like it,’ said Lisa, ‘you can always leave.’
Danuta couldn’t look at her. She walked out of the office with her envelope and ran down the stairs to her room. Twenty-three pounds! How was she supposed to live on that? What about her school fees?
She sat on the edge of the bed with her head in her hands.
If she didn’t like it, she could always leave. But she couldn’t, could she? Not after just one week, when it had taken her a week to find this job. She couldn’t go back to Halina and her lectures and the couch which smelt of Henryk, and where she was in the way. In any case, it might be the same in any hotel, and she couldn’t look for a restaurant job without somewhere to live. Danuta got up and went out of her room, along the corridor to Basia’s. She knocked on the door, asking in Polish: ‘May I come in?’
After a few moments the door was opened; Basia looked pale and sleepy.
‘You were resting,’ said Danuta. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Basia yawned. ‘It’s all right. I have to go to school in a little while anyway. Are you coming with me?’
‘Yes – but the money!’ Danuta held out the pay packet.
Basia nodded. ‘I know. What can we do?’ Danuta followed her into her room. There were pictures of her family on her bedside cabinet, just as there were on hers, and a young man, a snapshot taken in the mountains.
‘Is that your boyfriend?’
‘Yes. I miss him, but he has another year to study. What about you? Have you got someone at home?’
Danuta shook her head. ‘No. Perhaps I should try to find a rich Englishman.’
They both smiled wryly.
‘How much did you say the fees were?’
‘Fifty pounds a month,’ said Basia. ‘That’s to do the Cambridge Proficiency – it’s really difficult, but they say it’s the one with status.’
‘Oh. Well, I suppose that’s all right. Just.’ Danuta looked down at her heavy skirt and nylon blouse. ‘I was dying to buy some clothes, you know.’
‘I work in the evenings as well,’ said Basia.
‘Do you? I wondered why I never saw you. Where?’
‘In a restaurant in Knightsbridge.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘It’s right across the other side of the park. It’s very expensive, rather glamorous. You might find your rich Englishman there.’ She yawned again. ‘Come on, we’d better go. You can enrol today, but I suppose you won’t start classes till Monday.’
‘Do you think it’s all right if I just put down a deposit?’
‘Oh, I expect so.’
They left the hotel together, walking along to the Bayswater Road. ‘Should we get a bus?’ asked Danuta.
Basia shrugged. ‘Actually I always walk, to save money.’
‘And in the evenings?’
‘I get a cab back from Knightsbridge, I have to, it would be madness to walk back alone, don’t you think? I don’t leave till after midnight. But I walk there.’
‘And you’re up again at six? My God, no wonder you’re tired.’
Buses thundered down from Marble Arch, past the park railings, hung with violently coloured paintings. It was very hot suddenly, and there seemed to be tourists everywhere, licking ice creams and wandering slowly under the trees. In Oxford Street, Danuta looked in window after window of summer dresses, cotton trousers and jackets, cool cotton tops, pretty coloured sandals
. She could feel sweat trickling down the back of her neck, and her feet in last year’s plastic shoes were killing her. Music pounded out of the boutiques, girls five years younger than she were swinging carrier bags full of new clothes.
‘Does it make you upset?’ she asked Basia, as they stopped at a doorway. She gestured at the shops, the sunny street, the throngs of people buying things.
Basia nodded. ‘My first week was such a shock. I don’t think I’m going back to Poland.’
‘What about your boyfriend?’
‘He’ll come over next year. He’s a pharmacist also – perhaps by the time he comes I’ll have a proper job, I hope so.’
‘Were you in Solidarity?’
‘I was still studying, I couldn’t – I wore a badge, of course, but –’ She smiled. ‘I’m not really political.’
‘How can you be Polish and not be political?’ Danuta asked, half serious.
Basia laughed. ‘I don’t know, but that’s me.’ She nodded at the doorway. ‘This is the school, come on, I’ll show you where the office is.’
That was three weeks ago. Now, Danuta’s days had a routine of work, school, study, fall asleep and work, school, study. Tiredness had become a part of her; she couldn’t remember not feeling tired, and she knew that once her English was better she would try for an evening restaurant job, like Basia. What was the point of coming over here if she was almost as poor and twice as tired as she’d been in Warsaw? What was the point of missing her parents, and them missing her, if she couldn’t even send them anything to make it all worthwhile? So far she had sent one parcel, a cardboard box packed with tins of ham, tins of fruit, soap, soap powder, shampoo, Marks & Spencer tights for Mama and Marks & Spencer socks for her father. Still, every time she bought anything at all, she thought, automatically, that she should be buying more – dozens of bottles of shampoo, or packets of sanitary towels – luxury! – just in case, next time she came, there was nothing. On her days off, she sometimes went sightseeing. She had been to the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. On her days off, she could sleep in, but she discovered they were all expected to work up to nine days without a break. She wrote long letters home. Once she had telephoned, using five pounds of ten-pence coins to talk to Mama.
‘I miss you so much, kochana, are you all right?’
‘I’m fine, Mama. I’m making lots of money, and I have a nice friend in the hotel, another Polish girl.’
‘Are you sure? Are you really all right?’
‘I’m sure!’
What was the point of saying anything else? Mama would only worry more. The queues in Warsaw were even longer, but otherwise, apparently, things were calm. For the moment, Mama said, Solidarity was out of the limelight: it was shake-ups in the Party which had taken the headlines.
On a humid afternoon, Danuta and Basia set out for school, testing each other on verbs as they walked up the Bayswater Road.
‘The past tense of Think?’ Basia asked.
‘Thought, I thought, You thought, He, She or It thought …’ The grammar wasn’t so bad, easier than Polish in fact, but the pronunciation was a nightmare. How were you supposed to tell between thought, cough, bough, through, rough? ‘We thought, You thought, They thought.’
‘Very good. To speak?’
‘Spoke. I spoke, You spoke …’ They crossed the Edgware Road, where taxis swept past, and Danuta suddenly grabbed Basia’s arm. ‘What does that say?’ She pointed to a newspaper placard.
‘What?’ Basia followed her arm, frowning. ‘Oh, my God.’
‘Something about the Pope, isn’t it? What’s happened?’
‘He’s been assassinated! Quick!’
They ran towards the Evening Standard seller. ‘Thank you … oh, he’s not dead, he’s not, but someone’s tried to kill him in Rome, look.’
Danuta and Basia stood reading the paper until they were knocked into twice, and moved out of the crush, standing against a shop window.
‘A Turk? Why should a Turk want to kill John Paul?’
Danuta bit her lip. ‘He was paid to do it, he must have been.’
‘By whom?’
‘Who do you think?’
Basia looked at her.
‘He’s our most powerful ally in the West, isn’t he?’ said Danuta, and realized she was shaking all over.
They walked on arm in arm to the school, where few people seemed to have noticed, and not particularly to care, that the Pope was in a Roman hospital, fighting for his life. Within a week or so, when it was clear he was recovering, Danuta had almost forgotten the shocking, dizzying impact of that afternoon. It was only months later that she remembered how she had felt, and realized that perhaps it really had been the beginning of the end.
The translation agency where Ewa worked was in a second-floor office in a small street behind Oxford Circus. It was an old building, with a creaking lift; once you were above the carpeted ground floor, the corridors were covered in linoleum and rambled through the building past endless brown doors with nameplates. There were solicitors, travel agents, insurance brokers and accountants, a theatrical agent. Some of the doors opened on to offices where walls had been knocked down and low partitions put up: there were carpets, potted palms and yucca plants, word processors, coffee machines and canvas chairs, gleaming photocopiers, posters and prints from Athena. In others, little had been touched; ancient, even wartime filing cabinets were heaped with battered cardboard ring-binders, and dusty files; there were kettles and trays of cups in corners. Ewa’s agency belonged more to the second category, and she liked it: The only thing she didn’t like was the journey from Blackheath, but it was manageable, and she had been working here for years and wanted to change neither her job nor her home. Was the Blackheath flat home? It was where she lived, she didn’t want to live anywhere else, and she had made it hers. On Sundays, often, she went to have lunch with her family. That was home. So, in a way, was her desk in the agency.
Ewa sat in a corner by the window, a privilege she had earned through being here for so long. When she first came, she was by the door. There were four desks, and many translators had sat at them over the years. The unchanging element was the woman who ran it, a tall, spare, unmarried Englishwoman in her sixties. She was called Patricia, and Ewa had never met anyone quite like her. Patricia had worked in the War Office, then the Foreign Office. She had travelled. She had come home – no question where that was. She was very, very English, but she was also fluent in three languages and understood more. She had inherited the agency in the late fifties when the Hungarian founder died, and she had left it much as he had liked it. There were word processors; there were also box files dating back to the fifties, theatre posters curling at the edges, a library of dictionaries and old reference books, constantly updated. The agency’s clients ranged from publishers to export companies; there were plenty of opportunities for freelance work, and Ewa often had a book or a series of articles in her briefcase.
It was June, a warm summery morning with a breeze. In spring and summer Ewa often walked to work from Charing Cross, across the Strand, and up St Martin’s Lane and Charing Cross Road. She did it partly for the exercise, partly so that she could look in the bookshops. Sometimes she scanned the windows, sometimes, if she had time, she went in and browsed. This morning, she had woken early, was out of the house by eight and had time to spare. She wandered into one of the shops, just opened, a smell of dust as if the floorboards had just been swept, and a smell of coffee from the back. She browsed for a while among the new novels, then in the East European section. She wandered across to the magazines on the rack in front of the counter. A red and white title caught her eye: she pulled out something called PSC News. The Polish Solidarity Campaign newsletter: at the bottom, the scarlet Solidarity logo was printed on either side of a slogan: Solidarity with Polish Workers. The front page was headlined ‘The Bydgoszcz Crisis and After.’ Ewa looked at it, frowning. The issue was No. 2 – how had she missed No. 1? She had been fol
lowing events in Poland ever since last August – no, devouring them. Was she really so out of touch with her own community here that she didn’t know about a whole campaign?
The newsletter cost twenty pence. She bought it, tucked it into her bag to read properly in the lunch hour, and hurried off to work.
‘Morning, Ewa.’ From her desk beneath the bookshelves, Patricia looked at her over her glasses.
‘Good morning.’ Ewa smiled at her, and hung up her jacket. Her Solidarność badge was pinned on the lapel – Wiktoria had sent that at Christmas, one each for all of them. ‘Would you like a coffee?’
‘I have one, thank you. Help yourself.’
There was no one else in yet; Ewa helped herself and carried the mug over to her desk. The window was open at the top and she could hear the buses and taxis from Oxford Circus; on the sill, a window box of lobelia and petunias stirred in the breeze. Patricia had already watered them. Ewa sat down, and pulled her papers towards her.
In the lunch hour she went, as she often did, to Regent’s Park. Sometimes she had lunch with one of the other people in the agency – she was fond of Marika, the Dutch girl who had come a couple of years ago, and was married to an English doctor. Occasionally she had lunch with Patricia, occasionally with François, who made her blush. Today, everyone had their own arrangements, and she went to the park by herself, buying fruit from a stall on the way. The park smelt of cut grass, drying. Everywhere, office workers in deck chairs had lifted their faces to the sun and fallen asleep. On the boating lake children were laughing and shouting, and the summer wind rippled the water, beneath a cloudless sky.
Ewa found a deck chair and sat down. She hung her jacket on the back, pulled an apple from the paper bag and the PSC News from her jacket pocket, and began to read, munching. The paper had been launched, it appeared, by English people. A brief statement of aims announced that PSC News was ‘issued in order to acquaint trade unionists and other sympathizers of the Solidarity movement in Poland … We hope the newsletters will also serve to coordinate activity and information about contacts and support for Solidarity within the British Labour movement.’ The story of the militia’s brutality in Bydgoszcz, and its aftermath, took up three pages. There was a long list of other, violent acts against Solidarity members: assaults, the windows of offices broken, the barn belonging to the son of the old peasant beaten up in Bydgoszcz burned to the ground while he visited his father in hospital. Inside, there was an eye-witness account of the four-hour strike in the Ursus factory in Warsaw, and an exchange of open letters between Wałęsa and Gwiazda, his deputy, clearly revealing the growing rift between them over the decision to call off the general strike. And there was the text of a moving appeal made on Polish television by Jan Kulaj, a leader of the newly registered Rural Solidarity.