by Frank Tuohy
In the Library Rose and Mark were confronted by a small scarlet-faced man. He was dressed in violently checked tweeds of a type usually only worn by peers or bookies, and then only in the immediate proximity of a horse.
‘Hullo, hullo, Mark old boy, how very nice to see you! How is Alexandra? And the children? Alexandra’s ragtime band! Ha! ha! I won’t forget that in a hurry.’
Mark did not flinch.
‘Rose, this is George Pilkington. Rose Nicholson.’
Mr Pilkington eyed Rose, found her pretty and hurriedly looked away. ‘Over here on a visit? Weather’s turned out well for you, hasn’t it? Looks like we’ll be getting a game of tennis again, Mark, before we know where we are.’
After the quietness, the grey subdued confidences on the verge of despair to which Rose had been subjected in the last few days, this man’s voice, like Alexandra’s, was strangely discomfiting.
She moved away as soon as she conveniently could, while the two men went on talking. With nothing better to do she took a book from the shelves at random: it was a large expensive-looking volume on soil erosion. The date of cataloguing was June 1946, the year of publication, a year in which soil conservation still provided another of the fairly easy answers. Here in the British Institute this book had survived Mikolajczyk, Bierut, Stalin and Rokossowski. Rose turned back to the fly-leaf: it was virgin. Nobody had ever taken the book out of the library.
‘See if we can’t get our revenge on H.E. in this year’s doubles, what?’
A timid secretary approached. ‘Dr Rudowski is here, Mr Pilkington.’
As soon as the girl was out of earshot, Pilkington rolled his eyes and bit his lips with histrionic rage. ‘These people, they’re incredible! I ask you, this one seems to think I’ve got nothing better to do than sit around all day listening to his views on teaching English. I tell him again and again that’s quite outside my scope, but does it make a ha’porth of difference? Oh dear me no. As far as I’m concerned, he’s the biggest clot on this or any other side of the Iron Curtain.’
Rose pushed the book on soil erosion back into the shelf. ‘Excuse me, I think he’s looking for me.’
‘Who is?’
‘Dr Rudowski.’
Pilkington stared at her with popping eyes. ‘You don’t know him, do you?’
‘Yes. He’s my brother-in-law.’
Beside them, Mark Tatham was shuddering convulsively. He was like an asthmatic, or someone stopped during the parturition of an overwhelming sneeze. His face darkened and tears of laughter broke from his eyes and trickled down his cheeks.
Chapter Twenty
‘I am sorry we could not have some conversation with Mr Pilkington. He is a very interesting man.’
‘Oh, Witek, no, he’s terrible.’
He accepted it now as a good joke, her condemnation of everyone he recommended and he smiled warmly to show that he appreciated it. They were sitting in a café near the air terminal, where they had left Rose’s suitcase. They had glasses of weak coffee in front of them.
‘Perhaps you should not take so much coffee. It may make you nervous.’
Kind, weary and ponderous, a supporter of the Established Order, there was after all nothing in Witek which could appeal to the English. Rose held on to her right to defend him to the utmost; she tried to avoid thinking that, whatever happened to Aunt Louise’s money, it was he who finally must be deceived and defeated.
‘It’s all right.’ She was already trembling a little. ‘Reisefieber, you know, before the aeroplane. Tell me, have you had a good day?’
‘I have excellent news for you, excellent.’
‘About Tadeusz’s passport? Is it going to be all right?’
He stopped, checked in his course. ‘No, not that. That is – we must wait.’
‘Oh, I see. Well, go on.’
‘It is about our department of English Philology. We are to have examinations this summer and twelve students are to be admitted.’
‘Witek, that’s wonderful. And you’ll be in charge.’
‘Unfortunately, not yet. At the moment we are obliged to have Professor Mikulski, the professor of Russian, to supervise. But he is a good man and very conscientious. And I will set the entrance examinations.’
‘I see.’ She wondered if this professor was a good man in the way Elizabeth had said Mark Tatham was, and what it meant.
‘I’m very happy for you, Witek.’
‘And now I must work on my thesis for becoming Docent. Without this I cannot be Head of our department. I am afraid, even before that, they may choose another man.’
‘But can they do that now?’
‘Unfortunately yes. There is one of the lecturers of Warsaw University. Some persons think he is a good scholar but I do not think his methods are modern ones. His thesis was “The Versification of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”.’
Rose fidgeted with her coffee glass. ‘I realize now I’ve met him.’
‘Yes?’
‘On my first day here. He was at lunch.’
Witek could not resist the temptation to hear Rose, in her brusque way, condemn somebody else.
‘Did you think well of him?’
‘Yes. He’s very nice and intelligent.’ She saw his disappointment and added: ‘Of course he’s a fearful reactionary.’
Her hand jerked nervously and coffee spilt in the saucer. She was furious with herself, not so much for betraying Adam Karpinski, whom she scarcely knew, but for reducing everything to the level of Alexandra and Nanny: for not taking seriously lives which were fought out in an atmosphere of risk and apprehension.
Since her conversation with Mark Tatham in Lazienki Park, this atmosphere was a sick feeling in the air; everything, sky, street and buildings had grown a little darker. Once you began to think about it, suspicion was everywhere. Did Witek know of Janet’s visit to the British Embassy last autumn? Did he think Rose’s appearance here this spring was something to do with that, and not entirely to the pleasures his country offered? Everyone here had secrets, the truths you could utter at any moment and must keep simmering in your head behind your tongue. In this atmosphere a betrayal must be like a move towards liberation, the relief from a whispering insistent pressure.
Only Witek was out of this, worrying about his own career. ‘And that man is Docent, from Warsaw University. He had many friends among the older professors.’
‘But you have friends, too, surely.’
‘Not so many. Mrs Goldberg at our ministry. Dr Zwiersz in our University Council, Professor Mikulski, one or two more. They understand that it is important, what we want to do.’
‘I see.’
‘The old methods are no longer suiting the students of the new generation. We cannot have professors who are interested only in one or two students who can become scholars or assistants. Everyone has to work, everybody must be useful.’
‘Of course. It’s obvious, isn’t it?’ She looked at her watch; there were another ten minutes until the bus left.
‘To them, not.’
‘But, Witek, it’s you who are starting the department. You’ll be able to show them what to do.’
‘You are very kind to me, Rose.’ He shifted his chair a little nearer; once again there was the problem of his breath. ‘Rose, I know I am not the best, I know my English is not perfect but I learn only late in life, in England. When I married I spoke only a little – you can still remember?’ Rose nodded. He was enjoying humiliating himself rather too much.
‘I was frightened of your mother. She was the sort of lady who never realized that some others could not speak English.’
‘Oh, Witek, you shouldn’t have worried. She never listened to what other people said. It made no difference.’
He smiled. ‘Yes, I think sometimes after I married she wondered who I was. She had been told but she was not listening.’
‘She was glad you were a Catholic, though.’
Witek went into a sort of mumbling silence.
; ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean—’
‘No, the Catholic church has done much good for our country in the past.’
‘Probably. I couldn’t take the Convent though – that was my trouble.’ She looked at her watch again. ‘We must go, mustn’t we?’
They stood together in front of the airport bus.
‘Witek, I am pleased, really. I mean, everybody in authority thinks you are absolutely all right. So there’s no need for you to worry about Tadeusz going to England any more, is there?’
‘No – yes.’ He smiled. ‘Please, though, remember that I want him back.’
As she kissed him, she said in a childish voice: ‘Of course. How many more times do I have to promise?’
Witek watched her get on to the bus with a pang of loss. He would miss her. It was true that she did not know what all this meant to him, but she was the only one who knew at what cost, against what an emptiness and absence of private affections, he had attained this point in his career. Standing outside the bus in the warm spring evening, he offered his success to Rose, with love.
Chapter Twenty-one
From the window of Adam Karpinski’s flat, in a new block near the intersection of two avenues, Marszalkowska and Jerosolimskie, you look down on to the Polonia Hotel. This is practically the only substantial building to survive the destruction of the city, and now its ugly elaborate façade is like a face which appears in a dream in a wrong country and a wrong era. Adam could remember staying there in 1938, while visiting the capital with his parents. The city he had seen with the sharp eyes of a fourteen year old possessed a sort of Platonic reality for him: it subsisted somewhere else and even today, in certain dream states induced by vodka or love or tiredness, the grey Stalin-period buildings would dissolve like so many screens and that Ur-city reassemble its fragments, the Ghetto and the Royal Palace arise from nothing again and even the main railway station, where the family arrived and departed for the country, would manage to disinter itself from under the colossal weight of the Palace of Culture.
This afternoon, however, the sun shone and everything was real. Shelves of books, in various languages, still gathered the dust which the new building exhaled from its brittle plaster. There was no room for pictures and the few he possessed Adam had let his divorced wife take with her. They had waited years on a list for this new flat; he was glad to leave the old one which had witnessed terrible events, but he had left his wife behind on the way. Because he was a writer he was permitted two rooms, one to work in. He had no need of taste – there was nothing much to have taste about – and the apartment was a machine for his various activities and from the window he could watch the new Warsaw rise, which was something with which he was painfully involved.
He packed a suitcase, switched off the refrigerator, and locked the door. He left behind a chess-board, set out with a game in progress by telephone with one of his University colleagues (the friend was already defeated; Adam would win in three moves) and a bunch of red roses, ribbon and asparagus fern, presented by his seminar students on his birthday.
Adam walked down Marszalkowska towards the air terminal, past flowerstalls and wooden palings which were pasted with fresh witty posters for ancient Westerns. At one of the kiosks he bought an armful of literary weeklies, their yellow pages closely printed and stuffed out with the reviews and commentaries and bloc-notes of an always articulate intelligentsia. At least two contained articles by himself. He was the first to take a seat in the airport bus.
He watched Rose approach across the pavement with Witold Rudowski and swore gently. One of those mildly ridiculous swear-words: it meant ‘dog’s blood’. He had not at first recognized her; the context was so completely different from luncheon at the Tathams’. Then he remembered that the girl was in fact related to Rudowski. All the same, he protested that a peasant like that should be with a girl who, apart from being pretty and well-dressed, was also a friend of the Tathams.
One might accept Rudowski as a scientist or a politician; indeed, one accepted him or, rather, different versions of him, every day. But beside the late Professor Dybowski or beside the late Professor Stankiewicz, and all those high-domed philologists of the past generation – who had trained at German universities and, in several cases, afterwards died in German camps – Rudowski was a figure of farce, a mere puppet dangling on the strings of a few bargain-basement ideas. On closer inspection, even this English girl Rose, this English Rose, appeared to be addressing him with a patronizing air.
Rose climbed in and sat near the front of the bus. She waved through the door at Rudowski, and his decent peasant face beamed back at her. The bus began to move away.
Adam put his face near the window, so that he caught the full afterglow of Rudowski’s farewell to Rose. The eyes of the two men stabbed at each other through the glass. Rudowski flinched. His smile disintegrated into abject worry. Adam grinned fiendishly.
The bus gathered speed, carrying Adam and Rose off together. He settled back in his seat and went on watching Rose. There was a new warmth in having her there, about five yards distant, while worried Rudowski stumped off round Warsaw on his clumsy intrigues.
Rose had a bright clearness which was not really connected with any colour in her head or clothing. He was appreciating this, and the line of hair, cheek and arm, so that it came as a shock to perceive that, like Rudowski, she was undergoing a temporary illness of worry. Her shoulders shifted under its burden and her hand kept going to her face. Believing herself unobserved, she could allow herself to look desperate. As he watched, he became so much absorbed in this that he was quite unconscious of the rows of seats which lay between them. He was with her, hearing the inaudible noises of her distress, amused and at the same time liking her because she was not indifferent, as one had so often heard the English to be.
To the others in the bus she was a foreigner and therefore happy. But Adam was not so stupid as to believe material comforts made life less ‘real’ or their possessors insensible to emotion. Still, she was young and smart, and anguish came more surprisingly from her.
He kept her in sight at the airport, following her across the tarmac to the little Ilyushin aeroplane. When the passengers stood in a group listening for their names to be called, he lost her, but there she was again in the aeroplane, only a few seats ahead of him, huddled against the window. When the stewardess stopped beside her with a tray of boiled sweets, Rose took one with a sort of blind, pawing movement.
The aeroplane taxied slowly across the field, swung round and stopped. Seagulls fleered up and resettled, farther away. A few spots of water struck the thick glass of the windows.
‘Miss Rose Nicholson. May I sit here, please?’
*
The surprise took her far more violently than he expected. She coloured fiercely, had a moment’s difficulty with the sweet in her mouth, stammered something. Then the twin engines roared up. Outside, the seagulls, fields and low sheds began racing backwards.
It was quieter in the air and he heard her say: ‘You shouldn’t move while the plane is taking off.’
Used to jet planes, however, Rose herself had forgotten that this provincial veteran would be circling sharply. When it lurched sidewards she fell towards him. He felt her bones against him, she smelt as exotic as the Western world, while beyond her small face the wing-tip dropped like a stone, and below them stood the Palace of Culture, an axle with the whole grey city gyrating around it.
‘I didn’t hear your name called out,’ she said.
‘You remember my name?’
‘Of course.’
The engines roared up. ‘Someone else’s ticket.’
‘What?’
‘Perhaps I’m using someone else’s ticket.’
‘In England you can’t do that.’
He grinned. ‘No, in England you can’t do that.’
‘What happens if we all get killed? Nobody will know who you are.’
He grinned. ‘Nobody. It will be most confusing.’<
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She looked out of the window. Webs of cloud were floating past, and the flat country lay far below. On her other side, Adam Karpinski filled up the whole of the view.
‘Do you mind if I smoke my pipe?’
‘No, please do.’
When he produced it, however, Rose eyed it doubtfully, as though it was an assertion of Englishness she could not quite approve of.
‘Have you seen anything of the Tathams?’
‘I had lunch there today.’
He got the pipe going and said: ‘I’m very fond of them both – Alexandra is a terrific girl.’
Rose noticed that certain expressions brought, like this one, a cawing note into his voice, as though he were mimicking the traditional conception of an English ‘toff’.
‘I don’t know her well,’ Rose said. ‘She scares me a bit.’
‘There used to be girls like that here, before the war. Now they are too expensive for our Socialist economy.’
‘Well, Alexandra’s got money of her own.’
‘Are the Bermondseys rich?’
‘I suppose they are.’
She resisted what might be a foreigner’s clamorous interest in the English upper classes, and was silent.
He watched her for a little, then said: ‘Why are you going to Krakow, if I may ask?’
‘To see it.’
She hated having to explain herself, and in any case the whole operation seemed more and more of a mistake to her. She was not here to look at places, but to look after people. It was not her fault that the people, with the exception of Tadeusz, had proved so unsatisfactory.
‘I was told I had to see Krakow.’
‘Of course. We Poles are always informing foreigners that we have lost everything. But we must also show them what we have lost.’ He pulled at his pipe. ‘That is, if they are at all interested.’