by Maeve Binchy
She left the pink-and-white enamel pin, the one that she had bought to hold his attention, in a little box for her mother. Just before dawn she brought her mother breakfast in bed. Warm bread and honey and milky coffee.
Mamusia sat up in bed, delighted.
“It's not my birthday, Ania. Why did you do this?”
“I have to catch the early bus, Mamusia. Take your time getting up. Everything's done downstairs.”
“You are the best daughter in the world.”
“Go back to sleep, Mamusia.”
“See you this evening, little Ania.”
“Good-bye, Mamusia,” she said.
She had tidied and emptied her bedroom, and left the envelope of her savings on the kitchen table for Mamusia to find. She looked around the house for the last time and pulled the door closed after her.
From the next town she took a train to the city and a plane to Dublin; she had hardly any money left when she arrived. She owed it all to Mamusia, who would now have to face life without her. She, Ania, would start saving all over again.
This was a rich, rich country with jobs everywhere. Lidia had been pleased when Ania telephoned that morning and had given her an address to go to. Her apartment was upstairs over a Polish restaurant and Ania would arrive late in the evening. If Lidia wasn't there, Ania could wait downstairs and have a coffee. Lidia would tell them she was coming.
Sitting in the bus leaving the Dublin airport, she looked open-mouthed at all the huge motorways, all the new buildings, the tall craggy cranes reaching up into the sky. As they drew nearer the city center, she saw big houses, apartment blocks and buildings all lit up in the night sky. There were hundreds of young people moving around the wide streets and elegant squares. Had she arrived on a festival day or during a carnival?
She showed the handwritten address to people, and they waved her in the right direction. Soon she was in the Polish restaurant having a bowl of soup and talking to the friendly people who worked there.
Lidia would be back soon, they said. She worked in several bars and restaurants; they did not know which one it was tonight. And then Lidia came in and there were hugs and tears and the people who owned the restaurant offered them some plum brandy.
“Where are you going to work, Ania?” one of the waiters asked her.
“I don't know yet—I still feel I am in Poland.” She smiled.
“Maybe you could wash and iron our clothes here!”
“Oh, I would be very happy—”
“She would be very happy to see you well dressed and smart,” Lidia finished for Ania before she could agree to do their laundry for them.
“But why won't you come to work for us? Both of you?” the man said with a huge smile.
“Because if we had wanted to work for Polish no-hopers who drink a bucket of beer each a night, then we wouldn't have come all this way. Plenty of those back home,” said Lidia cheerfully and she propelled Ania upstairs.
The apartment was small and poky. They had a tiny bedroom each.
“You didn't get a flatmate?” Ania asked in admiration.
“No …”
“You knew I'd come eventually?”
“When you were ready,” Lidia said.
It wasn't hard to get work in Dublin if you were prepared to clean floors, wash dishes, look after old people or stack shelves. But Ania's English was not good.
“Don't go where there are a lot of other Polish. You'll never learn English if you do that,” Lidia warned.
“Maybe I could go to an agency?”
“No, then you meet other immigrants all day, and the agency takes most of the money in any case. All we will do is ask around. They won't take you in a pub—not until you can work out what's a half one, a half and half, a black and tan—you could write a whole dictionary on the names of drinks,” Lidia said.
“And thank you for not asking questions, Lidia.”
“I'll hear eventually,” Lidia said.
Every week Ania wrote to her mother. She asked for news about Mamusia's health and about the baby nephew. She asked how Mrs. Zak was and if the uniforms for Lev's ice cream factory were going well. She never mentioned the Bridge Café and its occupants. She told stories about Dublin—the wealth all around, the beautiful clothes, the handbags in stores costing a fortune, the young people who had cars that they parked at school and university. It was like the movies, it was just like Hollywood, she said over and over.
She got letters back that made her homesick even though her mother never mentioned Marek, and the occasional postcard from her sisters. She often longed to be in a small place where she would know everybody who passed by.
She got a short letter from her sister-in-law, Zofia.
Well done, Ania. You are a young woman of great courage. I am glad you made this decision and I hope it works out well for you. I am sure that it will.
And now I will tell you a secret. Before I met your brother I was involved with a man like Marek. He took and took and gave nothing. Only when I have found a good man do I see how bad the first one was. It will be the same with you. Good fortune in a strange land…
Zofia
And for the first few weeks it was indeed a strange land.
Ania cleaned offices early in the morning: it meant getting up at four a.m. She also worked at a hairdresser's, washing the towels and sweeping up the floor. But these were just filling-in jobs when someone was on holiday or off sick. She had yet to get a job of her very own. She longed to approach a dressmaker or even a dry cleaner's and offer to do mending and alterations, but her English was still very poor. Who would want to pay someone who could only say, “Please? Sorry? What did you say?”
She studied hard with a phrase book and went to English classes in a church center. There she met Father Flynn and made curtains for his club. She never missed Sunday Mass.
Naturally she agreed to do the ironing for the people who ran the restaurant downstairs.
Lidia shook her head. “They will just use you. They have no money themselves; they won't pay you …”
But they paid her in meals, so she was never hungry and she kept the euros she earned in a box under her bed.
Now she had this really wonderful job in the heart clinic. Once there, she had come on amazingly. She was a person of authority now, a member of the team. She had new friends who all helped her to speak English. She begged them to correct her if she got a word wrong, for how else would she learn? And Clara had taken her out to a restaurant for lunch the very first day and many times since then. She had become a friend of the nurses, Fiona and Barbara, and went to the cinema with them from time to time. Dr. Declans mother had got Ania some hours working in her launderette. Poor Hilary, who had lost her mother so tragically, was also a friend. Ania had helped her carry bag after bag of her late mother's clothes to charity shops. Hilary had a warm, friendly son called Nick, who was a great support to her; week by week she seemed to grow a little stronger.
She told Ania that she was a peaceable person to have around the house.
“Peaceable!” Ania repeated the word a few times.
“Don't mind me—I will only teach you mad English.”
“I like this word peaceable,” Ania said. “It's what I would like to be.”
And soon the letters Ania wrote to her mother were more about people than about the great wealth and glitter of a capital city. She was no more on the outside looking in; she was part of it all now. She wrote how she had helped Judy Murphy to wash her funny Jack Russell dogs, how she had met a great Polish priest called Father Tomasz, who had invited them all to have a picnic at a shrine to St. Ann in Rossmore. She wrote about Dr. Declan and his terrible accident and how he was now back at work again.
She mentioned a very nice man called Carl, who was the son of one of the patients at the clinic. He was giving her English lessons and teaching her about Ireland at the same time. Carl was a real teacher in a real school and he had taken her to see a Nativity play up there. Wasn't
it amazing that all over the world children told the story of Baby Jesus in the same way?
“You might be even a little proud of me, Mamusia, if you saw me,” she wrote. “I have learned to hold my head up high and greet people and I am never without work. I am saving and in about a year I will come back to Poland and give you all I have saved.”
Mamusia wrote back saying that she was always proud of Ania and it had nothing to do with saving money. Ania should spend money on herself. Go to a theater, maybe, buy a nice outfit and a piece of jewelry—that's what Mamusia would really like for her daughter.
And as Ireland became more and more real to Ania, Poland began to fade away. Apart from Mamusia's letters, the chat in the restaurant downstairs and the girls she met at the church center, she did not think or talk in Polish anymore. In fact she told Lidia proudly that she even dreamed in English now. Which made it such a huge shock the night she came back home late and discovered Marek in the restaurant.
Waiting for her.
She was tired. It had been a long evening and there hadn't been as many customers where she was working, which resulted in even fewer tips. She had been thinking of taking a sandwich and a big milky coffee up to bed.
This was absolutely not what she wanted, her first confrontation with Marek after all this time.
“What a surprise!” she said in English.
He replied in Polish. “How good it is to see you again. Oh, Ania, I've longed for this moment.”
“Yes,” she said, still in English, “yes, I'm sure you must have longed for it.”
He gave in and spoke in English too. “And tell me—do you feel the same?”
“I feel tired, Marek. That's all.”
“Are you not pleased to see me?” He couldn't bring himself to believe the coolness of her response.
“Oh, everyone is always pleased to see you, Marek. Oliwia, yes, and Julita?”
“Julita is not around anymore.”
“I am sure she has been replaced,” Ania said bitterly.
“You know there was never anyone but you.”
Ania smiled a tired smile. “Oh, I know that,” she agreed. “Where did Julita go?”
“I was sure that busybody Lidia told you all about the whole business, what happened at the café.”
“No. Lidia and I never talk about the café,” she said simply.
“As if I believed that…” he said.
“Go home to your wife, Marek.”
“No, Oliwia is not around either. There was a lot of trouble. Her father got to hear about things. He was very angry.”
“That is sad, but it has nothing to do with me,” Ania said.
“It has. I want to start again. All over, from the beginning.” He had a yearning look in his face.
“Are you mad?” she asked.
“Well, you did come back to my bed after I married Oliwia,” he said, aggrieved at her reaction.
“Yes, I did, and I have no idea why. It's a mystery to me. It's I who was mad at that time.”
“You were there because you loved me,” he explained, as if to a small child.
“Is this a holiday you're taking in Ireland?” she asked, changing the subject suddenly.
“No, I hear there's plenty of work here, and with two friends I am going to open a club.”
“You are leaving the Bridge Café?”
“It's no longer mine to leave.”
“And your little daughter, Katarina?”
“She will not want to be bothered with me. She has her mother and her rich grandfather.”
“And why do you come to me?”
“When we have this club, I want you to come and work with me. It will be like before.”
“They don't have cafés like that in Ireland,” she said.
“It's going to be a lap-dancing club. They have those everywhere. And you, Ania, you dance so well…”
“But I don't dance naked around a pole or at people's tables in front of their faces.” She was appalled.
“You would be so good. You still look lovely, you haven't got fat and puffy like Oliwia has.”
“Good night, Marek.” She made a move to go upstairs, but he put his hand on her arm.
“Let me come with you.”
“Go home, Marek. Go back, clear up the mess you made.” This time he held her arm more firmly, stopping her from leaving. Behind him, she could see the waiters come closer. Protectively.
“It's all right, he's going,” she said to them.
“You owe me—we owe it to each other to finish the dream.”
“That's what it was—a dream. On my part. On your part—I don't know. You never loved me. Never. Do you know what a relief it is for me to know that? For such a long time I thought you had loved me and I had somehow done something to lose your love. This way it's much better. I have no fear of you anymore. No fear of displeasing you …” She was aware that Lidia had come in and was standing silently, supportively at her side.
Marek reached toward Ania, but she pushed him away. She could hear the restaurant owner asking, “What do we do now?”
Lidia was wordless. It was Ania's call.
It took her ten seconds. Then she said, “He will go away.” She stood tall, as she had told her mother she did. She met people's eyes. She had nothing to apologize for.
It was a moment when they all recognized this, particularly Marek.
“It's all right, I'm going,” he said angrily. Then he turned back to Ania and said roughly, “I did love you for a bit. Truly …”
“Good-bye, Marek,” she said, as she had said all those months ago, the night before she left Poland. But this time she really meant it.
She felt that she had been given a fresh chance, a new start. It was as if she had been cleansed, the way she had felt when she went to confession a while back. Her English was nearly good enough to go to confession now in this country. Perhaps she could see that nice Father Flynn. She would do it this week.
Chapter Five
Brian Flynn hadn't known what to expect when the new Polish priest arrived in Rossmore. He certainly didn't expect that he would have a new best friend.
Tomasz was a cheerful, optimistic young man eager to do anything to help in the parish. He was the kind of priest that Brian thought he himself used to be twenty years back. Someone who believed that anything could be done if there was enough goodwill. Brian didn't really believe that anymore. People didn't seem to need the Church these days, so what was he doing trying to be a bridge between God and the faithful?
Apart from a few elderly folk there was hardly anybody at his daily ten a.m. Mass. Once it had been the start of the day for women who went about their shopping afterward and shop workers who used to slip into his church for a quarter of an hour during their break. Schoolgirls praying for a good career or a handsome boyfriend came in to light a candle. The parents of sick children came in to seek help, the anxious and disturbed came looking for peace.
Where are they now? Either up at that holy well talking to St. Ann or just getting on with life according to their own resources. Father Brian Flynn knew that if this was true and if people were managing on their own, then he should be pleased for them, and God would be pleased too. Why keep an empty ritual going if nobody needed it?
But then, this way heresy lay. The next step would be to think that the Church had no role to play in salvation. And this was a road that Father Flynn did not want to travel. So he watched enviously as young Father Tomasz labored on, organizing processions that hardly anyone supported, and festivals that were largely ignored.
The days passed. Every morning he visited his mother, who stayed in Neddy Nolan's house, a happy home where Neddy and Clare with their baby girl managed to combine looking after not only his mother but also the aged canon and two confused brothers who used to work in a garden center before the bypass came and changed the town. They had now totally transformed Neddy and Clare's garden and made it the envy of all Rossmore. Meanwhile, Clare was s
till teaching at the local convent school.
These were the kind of people who had replaced the Church, Brian Flynn would sometimes say to Tomasz when they played a game of chess at night. Tomasz said people like the Nolans hadn't replaced the Church, they had just added to it and wasn't it something to be celebrated rather than sighed over?
Tomasz learned three new words every evening. He particularly liked the word eejit.
“What does it signify exactly, Brian?” he asked.
As so often these days, Brian Flynn felt at a loss. “That fellow's an old eejit. It means he hasn't a great brain.”
“Is he mentally ill? Does eejit mean mentally ill?”
“No, no, it doesn't. It means that he behaves kind of foolishly.”
“Like he is going through a breakdown?”
“No, it's in his nature to do something sort of eejity. No, that's not much help. He's a bit of a gobdaw.”
“Gobdaw!” Tomasz cried, delighted. “What a wonderful word! What is a gobdaw?”
It was a relief to turn to talk about the conference in Dublin, the day of lectures and seminars about the Church and the New Irish, the reaching out to immigrants, policies that were now becoming relevant to parishes all over the country.
Brian and Tomasz took the train to Dublin for the meeting. During the day the bishop approached Brian and explained that there was a great need for hardworking, energetic priests in Dublin's inner city.
“Oh, Your Grace, please don't take Tomasz from me now. He's such a live wire, such a force in Rossmore,” Brian begged.
“Who said anything about Father Tomasz? I was talking about you,” the bishop explained. And it was as simple as that. The process had begun. In a matter of three months Father Brian Flynn was transferred to a Dublin parish.
Nobody seemed to mind where he lived. The days were gone when the priest's house was a matter of concern and importance, but it was expected that he find somewhere to live fairly speedily. He had asked around and Johnny, a big, bluff guy with the looks of an all-in wrestler, said there was a flat available in the house where he lived. Not elegant, mind, but convenient—good pub round the corner, late-night shop up the street. The landlord didn't live on the premises, which was always an advantage, but of course come to think of it Brian wouldn't be throwing many wild parties. Anyway, the negotiation was done swiftly and Father Tomasz hired a van to bring Brian Flynn's few possessions up to Dublin.