by Sue Gee
‘Was I right?’ he asked at last. ‘Did someone hurt you once?’
‘Yes,’ said Ewa, ‘but I shouldn’t have let him. I shouldn’t have let it affect me so much. Almost my whole life. It wasn’t – it wasn’t as if I loved him.’
‘You didn’t love him?’
‘No. To tell you the truth, I hardly knew him.’ She shivered suddenly and took her hand away. ‘I hardly know you, either.’
‘Yes, you do, in the way it matters. You know you do.’
She shook her head, and pushed back her chair. ‘I think we should go. I think I should go home. I think you should go back to your hostel and write to your wife.’
‘And you think I will hurt you, also, but I won’t. I would never hurt you.’
‘But you will,’ said Ewa, and clicked open her bag, looking blindly for her purse. ‘Or I will hurt you. Or your wife will suffer. If we – if we go on seeing each other, how can it be otherwise?’
He drew a long, deep breath, and did not answer. Ewa beckoned to the waiter, paid the bill, and picked up her briefcase. Then they both got up, and walked to the doors of the restaurant.
Out in the street the air had the acrid smell of a city on a summer night. It was warm, and the sky was almost dark. Couples were strolling, hand in hand. Ahead, buses revved up along Tottenham Court Road, brightly lit. Ewa turned to Stefan, and held out her hand without speaking. He took it, and raised it to his mouth, and this time did not simply brush it with his lips, but kissed it, once, and gave it back to her, gravely.
‘Do you have for to go?’
‘To Blackheath – it’s the other side of London. I have to catch a train.’
‘Would you let me take you to the station?’
‘It’s Charing Cross, it’s quite a way, I mean, it’s not far, but –’
‘Let me walk with you,’ he said. ‘Please.’
‘Where is your hostel? Don’t they close those sort of places early?’
‘It doesn’t matter where it is, and it doesn’t matter if they close the doors, I can climb in through the window. I should like to see you safely on to your train.’ He put his arm round her, and she leaned against him; they stood for a moment, very close, and then she put her own arm round his waist, and they walked slowly past the neon-lit hi-fi shops and across Oxford Street, where lonely drunks were swaying by the tube, and on down Charing Cross Road, past the bookshops.
‘That’s where I bought the magazine,’ said Ewa, and nodded towards it. ‘Just this morning. It feels like last year.’
They walked past Leicester Square, hearing disco music throb, and seeing the lights of cinema hoardings and crowds of people coming out.
‘Do you go to the cinema often?’ asked Stefan.
‘A bit. Do you?’
‘A bit.’ He smiled down at her, and did not suggest that they went together one day. When they reached Charing Cross Station, and walked across the concourse, he let go of her for a minute, and she saw him stop, and look at a dark shape, huddled at the top of the steps leading down to Villiers Street. ‘Is he sleeping?’
‘I expect so.’ Ewa opened her bag and took out her season ticket. ‘You should see them down on the Embankment. There are hundreds.’
‘Even in the winter?’
‘Oh yes.’
He shook his head, and she said: ‘It’s not all so easy in the West.’
‘No. No, it isn’t.’
The station stank of cigarettes and chips. A whistle blew, and Ewa looked up at the board above the platforms. ‘My train goes in a couple of minutes,’ she said. ‘Thank you for coming with me.’
‘Which is your platform?’
‘Number three. Here …’ She walked quickly towards it, and flashed her ticket at the black ticket collector.
‘Okay, darling, hurry now.’ He made to wave her through, and she turned to Stefan.
‘Well – goodbye.’
‘Goodbye, Ewa. You won’t give me your phone number? Just so we could meet once or twice? We are friends, after all, aren’t we?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we are friends. But I don’t think I should give you my number.’ Another whistle blew, and she said: ‘Quick! That’s my train, I must go.’ And rushed past the ticket collector without looking back. On the platform she ran, searching, as always, for a carriage with several people in it: it was much too unsafe to get in one which was empty. She found one, wrenched open the door and got in, hearing the whistle blow once more, and slamming the door behind her. As the train began to move, she allowed herself one look out of the open window, and saw Stefan, running frantically along the platform towards the moving train, and shouting: ‘My overalls!’
‘Your overalls – oh, my God.’ She grabbed her briefcase from the seat, but the train was swaying too much for her to get them out in time. She leaned out of the window, and he yelled: ‘Now will you give me your number?’
Ewa began to laugh again. ‘Prawicka!’ she shouted. ‘It’s in the book.’
‘I’ll call you!’
The train gathered speed, and she sank back on to the seat, seeing the other passengers look at her with curiosity, then look away. She leaned back, still laughing, as they crossed the river, full of reflected lights, the carriages creaking over Hungerford Bridge towards the South Bank concert halls, Waterloo, and the unsung stations of south London.
Danuta was working in the evenings in a large, busy eating house off Leicester Square. Now her routine was extended: work in the hotel from eight until two, go to the language school from half-past two to half-past four, and then it wasn’t worth walking all the way back to the hotel, because she’d only have to set out again in half an hour, so she went to a café she’d found on the edge of the maze of streets which became Chinatown. Here she had her only peace of the day. She sat at a table in the corner, and made one coffee and a roll last for forty-five minutes, while she read, wrote letters, sometimes almost fell asleep. At half-past five, just as it was closing, she got up, paid, and walked to the eating house, where she worked from six until eleven. Then, unlike Basia, who spent money on a taxi home, she walked back up to Tottenham Court Road tube station, where she could get a bus all the way down to Lancaster Gate. It was only a few minutes’walk from the stop to the hotel, which was, after all, on a brightly lit street, and in any case, Basia left work much later. Basia often looked as if she were sleepwalking: she sat in the class at school with her head nodding over her translations, and Danuta, too, spent most of the time yawning. She made herself go, though: she had paid the fees and her English was improving.
The Home Office had extended her visa for three months, that took her up to almost the end of August, still officially a tourist. It was now the middle of July. At the end of August, what could she do? There were other Polish girls in the hotel now, and one of them, from Wrocław, had been to England before, and said you could sometimes find a sponsor, an English person who would write to the Home Office explaining that you were living with them, and that they were financially responsible for you. Danuta thought her chances of finding someone like that were extremely unlikely. Another girl had said that of course, you could always try to find someone to marry. Then you were set up fine. Danuta didn’t want to do that. She sat in her corner in the café near Chinatown, and wrote her letters home.
‘Dear Mama and Tata,
‘The weather here is fine, and my English is improving fast. Work at the hotel isn’t too bad, and now I have an evening job! The money is good. I hope you’re getting the food parcels all right, I sent one last week, with some chocolate in it for Babcia, and also a shirt from Marks & Spencer for Tata – I hope the chocolate doesn’t melt. Some of the girls in the hotel say their parcels aren’t getting through, that perhaps they’re stolen at the border. Is it true there have been hunger marches?’
The papers here had reported that. While Solidarity was holding a three-day conference in Gdańsk, hundreds of people have marched through the city of Kutno, carrying banners and empty sau
cepans. ‘We are tired of being hungry.’ ‘We are tired of queueing.’ ‘We demand life on the level of a civilized country.’ Adam Michnik, co-founder of KOR, and one of the most respected intellectuals in Solidarity, had announced: ‘Poland faces hunger uprisings.’ Was it as bad as that in Warsaw?
Mama wrote that it wasn’t quite as bad as that, but the shortages were still dreadful, even with the ration cards.
‘The black market has become impossible now, the exchange rate has rocketed. Every day there seems to be a new story in the queues. Lorryloads of cigarettes have been found on a rubbish dump – you can imagine how Tata reacted to that! He has had to queue for two hours, sometimes, at the kiosks. Everyone talks about Gierek’s luxury private villa, and everyone, still, is convinced that the government is deliberately holding back food supplies. I remember you used to say you thought that was a bit far-fetched, but really I am not so sure. Thank you for the parcels, darling, and please, please look after yourself, and don’t spend all your money on us. Use it to go out and enjoy yourself, buy some nice clothes …’
Danuta kept the letters in a folder from the language school. She had bought some new clothes, spending hours on her days off in Benneton and C & A, and the cheap end of Covent Garden, trying on everything, looking in the mirrors over and over again with different trousers, sandals, shirts, cotton dresses. She had lost six kilos since she came here, everything fitted, but she knew she also looked wan, even grey. Out of the hours spent trying on, she had bought a pair of trousers, two cheap Indian cotton shirts, one thin, expensive sweater from Benneton and a pair of sandals. She took pleasure in consigning last year’s plastic shoes to the dustbin. She also bought a bottle of Body Shop shampoo. Occasionally, when she had slept in on a day off, washed her hair in the basement bathroom shared with a dozen other hotel workers, and dressed, slinging the sweater round her shoulders, she thought, ironically, that she looked as she should have looked if she’d got a good job in Warsaw: slender, well dressed, hair gleaming – ready to meet any foreign trade representative. Instead, she was cleaning baths and toilets, half asleep, and changing bedclothes; at night she was serving egg and fries, burger and fries, chicken and fries, scurrying from table to table, the only waitress there, the manager had told her, who they could be absolutely sure would not muddle up the order tickets, or give the wrong bill at the end. The manager told her she could train to work on the till if she stayed another three months: that wasn’t nearly so tiring, but you had to be sharp, and he thought she was sharp. Danuta hedged about the training, and hedged when he asked her out. She didn’t want to be there in another three months, but she didn’t want to lose the chance of getting off her feet.
She worked six nights out of seven, trying to make evenings off coincide with the following day off, but that wasn’t always possible. On an evening towards the end of July she was free, but had to work in the hotel next morning. She wanted an early night; after supper in the kitchen she waited for forty-five minutes until the bathroom at the end of the basement corridor was empty, and went in to have a bath and wash her hair.
The bathroom had cracked white tiles and a cork bath mat with a corner broken off. A small window was set high in the wall; there was a large tin of scouring powder and a cloth, and notices. On the door: Please Leave This Bathroom As You Would Wish To Find It. Above the basin: Now Wash Your Hands. A long piece of string was tied above the bath, so that if you were desperate you could hang your tights and underwear to dry, but it was risky. Danuta supposed people dried them on the radiators in the bedrooms in winters; at the moment, they drooped outside the windows, below the basement railings. They all spent fortunes in the launderette.
She turned on the taps, which were large and stiff, and sat on the edge, waiting for the bath to fill. Upstairs, every bath had a shower unit. Down here, there was one, but it didn’t work properly, you were either scalded or chilled, so Danuta and Basia, like several of the girls, had bought a rubber hose, which just fitted the taps. The bathroom began to fill with steam. Danuta stood on the edge of the lavatory and tried to reach up to the little window in the wall, to open it further, but it was just too far. She climbed down again, and ran the cold tap. It was half-past eight; she wanted to be in bed and asleep by half-past nine. She took off her pyjamas and climbed in, lay back and shut her eyes. Three days before her next day off, ten before her next evening and day together … she seemed to spend hours in calculations like this, it was like being at school, and waiting for the end of term. But then there was something to look forward to. She sat up, and reached for the shampoo. From the passage outside the door she could hear footsteps, voices, doors opening and closing, the radio, sounds that went on all the time, but there was a man’s voice she didn’t recognize, as well. Most of the men in the hotel didn’t sleep here; those who did were Colombian, or Spanish, and this voice was English. And someone was banging on a door. She sat listening for a moment, hearing the English voice again; then it all went quiet.
She tipped the bottle of shampoo into her hand, and the bathroom began to smell pleasantly of jojoba oil, whatever that was; she turned on the shower and began to rinse; shampooed again, rinsed again, and ran her hair between her fingers until it squeaked. She turned off the taps, reached for her towel and wound it round her head. She had forgotten about the English voice; she washed, got out, dried herself, put on her pyjamas, cleaned the bath. Then she opened the door and went out, carrying her spongebag. There were doors open all along the corridor, and no radios on now. She knew at once that something was wrong, but couldn’t work it out – was her door open, too? Then two men appeared suddenly from the room where the girl from Wroclaw slept, and Danuta jumped as they came towards her. They were both in suits, one had a gingery moustache: he flicked open a little plastic wallet and waved it towards her.
‘Home Office. May I see your passport, please?’
Danuta’s stomach lurched, and turned over.
‘You speak English?’ the man asked brusquely. ‘You understand?’
‘I – yes.’
At the far end of the corridor, behind the two men, a door was opened quietly, and Danuta saw Enrico, the little washer-up who swore, creep out. He looked up towards them, and immediately backed into his room.
‘Your passport, please,’ the man with the ginger moustache repeated. ‘Which is your room?’
‘I – this one.’ Danuta moved on bare feet towards it, so frightened she thought her knees were going to give way. She tugged open the zip on her spongebag, feeling for her key, then fumbled trying to get it into the lock. The men stood watching, impassive. She got the key in, turned it and pushed the door open. It was a heavy door, and swung to unless you held it open. The ginger moustache followed her inside; his colleague, who was younger, and very thin inside his suit, waited, one foot against it, watching.
Danuta bent down and opened the bedside cabinet. What were they going to do to her? Would she be deported? Sent to prison? There was a silence, as they watched her, naked under thin summer pyjamas, feeling for her passport. She stood up, and handed it over without looking at them. The man with the moustache flicked through it, quickly, turned and nodded towards his colleague to come and look too. As the younger man moved a little towards him, Danuta heard a click, at the far end of the corridor, and knew, straight away, that Enrico was making for the stairs. He could have got out of his window, but the wall and the railings were probably too high, and anyway, Enrico wasn’t very bright. The stairs began halfway along, he might just have time.
The moustached man held open her passport.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Excuse me?’ Danuta looked at him, not knowing how to answer.
‘I said what are you doing here? In this hotel.’
‘I – I am staying here.’ Trickles of water from her wet hair were escaping beneath the towel on to her neck.
The man shook his head. ‘Don’t try and be clever.’
‘Hey!’ His colleague darted sud
denly out of the room, and ran down the corridor. ‘Just a minute, you!’
Danuta put her hand to her mouth. Moustache moved swiftly towards the door. ‘Stay here, please.’ The door swung to, and she heard scuffles, Enrico swearing and shouting in Spanish. He had been here illegally for over a year, he was supposed to be supporting two families: his sister’s, at home in Colombia, and his own here. What was going to happen to him now? She crept to the door and pulled it open a crack. She could see the two men hustling him up the stairs; they must have a car outside. Moustache still had her passport. She ran to Basia’s room and knocked on the door. No answer – of course, she was in the restaurant, she’d escaped. Would they come back to check her room later? Were they going to bring back her passport? They must, surely they must.
She turned away, hearing a voice behind her on the stairs say suddenly: ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ and she jumped and screamed. Moustache ran down the stairs, and came up behind her. ‘I asked you to stay in your room. Go in, please.’
He pushed open the door, and she went in, shaking.
‘There’s no need to scream like that,’ he said coldly. ‘You understand what is going on?’
She nodded, feeling the little room horribly airless and crowded with them both in there. He was a big man, and she thought suddenly: My God, he could rape me and I wouldn’t stand a chance.
The man leafed through her passport again, and looked her up and down, at the outline of her breasts beneath the cotton pyjamas.
‘Your visa has not expired,’ he said.
‘No.’
‘But you are specifically forbidden to work. Aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘So I will ask you again: what are you doing here?’
What could she say? She said nothing, looking down at the worn carpet beneath her feet, thinking only: Let me be safe, and I don’t care about anything else. Let me be safe. Please.
He tapped the passport. ‘What were you doing in Poland?’
‘I – I finish my studies in March. I have a degree in economics and statistics.’