Love Among the Single Classes (28 page)

When my daughters were little girls at school, who was there who could tell them the truth about their country and its past? Even the teachers didn't know the truth; it wasn't their fault. So children grew up under the great lie. I shall change that, and they will at least have the choice: take it or leave it. Believe me, or the powers that be. If I begin with this truth about myself, they may believe that all the other things I tell them are also true. What more can I do for them?

I have no idea how Henryka and Stanislaw will respond to this, but one thing is certain: it will alert the authorities, who do of course read my letters, and they can work out for themselves at which point I shall cross the border. From East Berlin there's only one place: Frankfurt an der Oder … unless I go south, to Dresden, and from there to Wroclaw … I pore over a map, murmuring the Polish names. I shall have hardly any luggage. Most of what I need is waiting for me at home. It will be good to wear my old clothes again.

Back here in England I wake up happy one morning and realize that it is the first of May. I am happy because of a dream I had last night. I was in the garden of a house that my parents had lived in long ago, before the war, so I must have been a very small boy. In my dream it is recognizably the same garden, but filled with flowers of such brilliant colours that they shimmer in the air. There are several animals as well, an oddly assorted bunch – a hippo, and a couple of ordinary farmyard pigs, and lots of chickens, and a fox – but they are all serene and harmonious. The garden is filled with a celestial humming sound, rhythmical and pulsating,
which flows from the mouth of a nun. She is at the top of the garden swaying and smiling in her black and white habit. Above her head a goldfish is flickering through the air, more like a humming-bird than a fish, making figures of eight in time to the music. Its scales gleam as they catch the light. This gentle scene throbs with sweetness. It fills me with such contentment that I wake up and find myself smiling. I used to have dreams like that in my childhood. I take this dream to be a good omen.

Tadeusz invites me for an evening at the Polish Centre, and I listen while everyone talks of fresh arrests and imprisonments. The authorities are playing cat and mouse with the supporters of
Solidarnosc
, academics and dissident writers. They put them in prison and then, apparently at random, let them out again, using some phoney amnesty as a pretext. It's the usual tactic – good policeman, bad policeman – keep them guessing and you produce such insecurity that even good actions make the victim suffer. So, for the benefit of the West, some people are arbitrarily released while days later others, just as arbitrarily, are arrested.

Tadeusz and his cronies are greatly exercised about this, and my indifference seems callous. But I can hardly tell them about my dream, let alone that I am about to return to Poland. Tadeusz still has hopes of me for Joanna. To please him, I agree to partner her at Marina's wedding. It will give us the appearance of a couple, but she needs that status and it doesn't make any difference to me. A few days after that I shall be on my way back to my wife.

I haven't told anyone at the postroom that I am leaving, either, in case the foreman uses it as an excuse to dismiss me, but I no longer bother to make myself pleasant to them. Only the fat fellow still tries to talk to me. He says I should look after myself better, or go and see a doctor, or, best of all, find a woman to take care of me, but anyway I should stop counting under my breath as it's driving the others mad. I ignore his platitudes and in due course he too gives up and leaves me in peace. Sometimes in my lunch hour I walk up to the square and look for the black-haired girl who cried
once, in the rain, but I never see her. She'll be back with either her father or her boyfriend. Fd like to satisfy my curiosity and know which.

I prefer to write in my diary rather than talk to people. I shall take it home with me, to show Kasia she had no reason to be jealous. It has become, recently, an extended love-letter to her, and a recollection of our love. Much of it is erotic. The thought of her waiting excites me very much.

You have black curly hair on your head and under your arms and around your nipples, and it makes a line down your belly and flowers between your legs, and I will kiss all of it and watch it darken and become damp with sweat as we make love. You give off a strong, feral smell when you lose control and become female under my hands. I shall lick you into shape. I shall be starved for sex, like a man who has been in prison for four years. We will shut ourselves up inside our flat and fuck until we are too sore to fuck any more.

What could the authorities charge me with? Conspiring to overthrow the state by force? That would be a joke. I haven't even been to look at the Castle – though I shall go before I leave, so that I can tell my compatriots how our esteemed government in exile is housed. They can't think those dreamy old men have anything to do with modern Poland? Most of them probably, in their hearts, dislike
Solidarnosc
as much as Moscow itself! Maybe the authorities will decide I have been in England to raise funds for the workers' struggle? That's a laugh too. What do the English know about Poland's struggle? The liberal sympathies of the West have turned out to be a sour joke that has curdled in my mind. They'll have difficulty claiming that I must have been in touch with the Underground. After those two deaths in prison – both suicides, both students close to me – the Underground has little love for me. They mistrust coincidences. So what can the authorities get me for? Ah, how ironic! I see that four years in England have left their mark.
I am beginning to think like an Englishman. They don't need facts. They will invent, search my flat, plant papers, question my wife, my daughters, my former colleagues … and, of course, me.

In the war, when I was a youth, I saw people being killed, or being taken away to their deaths. I saw many corpses – habitually – they became ordinary to me. What must that do to a learning mind, such casual familiarity with death? It can make you into a necrophiliac. The only difference between me and most people is that I admit it. Death is not a taboo. It becomes a need. You miss it, and need to re-create it – if necessary, in yourself.

My diary again:

I have doubled the amount of time I spend at the gym. I now go there early in the mornings before work as well as in the evenings after work. My heart and lungs pound to bursting with the workload I impose on them. I can now run 1,500 metres in just under six minutes, and 5,000 metres in less than half an hour. I can do two sets of twenty press-ups and twenty chin-ups. This physical fitness makes me mentally calm and perfectly in control. I sleep better than ever. I have memorized my exercise routine, and could improvise much of it without equipment, if necessary, in a bare cell. It is concentration, counting, and repetition which matter. I now count my steps to the tube station from the gym, and at the other end, from the tube to work, and count stairs as I run, not walk, up and down them. The repetition of numbers is comforting and imposes a discipline. It also helps me to detach myself from what is going on around me. Kasia, you are all I have left now (one). My daughters are married and lost to me (two). My grandson, my posterity, is dead (zero). England has failed me; other women have failed me (three). But I still have my numbers and my wife. My wife, the one love in the world. Wife is life, life is love, love is lust, lust is lost, so – I must, I must come full circle.

I shall sit

immobile

my eyes fixed

upon the heart of things

Not me, Kasia: that's Zbigniew Herbert. He couldn't stay in the West, either.

I am becoming addicted to humiliation. I can no longer persuade myself, even on good days, that Iwo will ever love me, let alone marry me. I don't know by what definition I love him. We are more like strangers now than the first weekend we met. Since Christmas I have seen him precisely five times, and two of those times he didn't even want to make love to me.
And yet
… I think about him more than ever and compulsively invent conversations with him in my head – they never take place, of course.

One day, instead of going to the library, I take a very early tube – leaving Kate to see herself off to school – and wait outside his house to check if he still goes in to work. I hang around in the road, walk up and down, and eventually buttonhole the postman. If there are any letters for Mr Zaluski,' I say, Tm just on my way to see him … I could take them!'

The postman looks at me as though I were dotty and says, That's all right, Missis, I'll just put them through the letterbox, if it's all the same to you.'

In fact there is no letter for Iwo. By ten o'clock when he still hasn't appeared, I bang on the front door, which is opened by a tousled young Australian. Iwo's room is immaculate and empty.

I shut the door firmly behind me, lock it, and stand in the middle of the floor with pounding heart. Now what do I do? For all I know, he's just down the corridor in the bathroom. I have no desire to look through his private things, but I want to feel like him. I want to do what he does. I take my shoes off and stretch out on his taut white bed. Here his body rests at night. His head dents this pillow. His eyes see
those trees. I am terrified that he will return, but I can't hurry away. I turn my head and look across the room. At the far end, the white gauzy curtain is drawn across the cupboard where he keeps his things, and the chest of drawers in which he found the photographs of his family that he showed me the first time I came here. How confiding he was then, quick to explain, to draw me into his past and tell me its names. The curtain shimmers slightly, then flutters in a draught, and at the same time I hear steps on the stairs. I can feel myself going white. After the footsteps have passed I stand up, straighten the bed to its former perfection and leave the house.

This episode gives me a new fantasy to work upon. I've always been better at expressing myself on paper than in speech, so I draft wonderful letters which I might have left behind for him. Sometimes they are flamboyant and metaphorical: why does this room look like midwinter when outside it's warm and bursting with spring?; while other versions are confident and decisive: Iwo, your bedsitter days are over! I have decided to buy a new house, smaller but more central, and I want you to help me choose it and then ‘Come live with me, and be my love' (English quotation!). I polish a number of variations on this letter to such a fine, artless elegance that it's all I can do not to send one; but of course I don't, and I always knew I wouldn't. Yet the illusion of action gives me temporary relief from the pressure of frustrated energy stored and growing within me.

My obsession with Iwo moves like a cloud across everyday life, blotting out more and more of it. In the library I have ceased to look interested and available for conversation or enquiries. I spend as much time as possible either doing my Polish exercises for Magda, and trying to memorize long columns of Polish words; or else reading Polish history, poetry, trade union affairs and the political broadsheets which I order from libraries all over London.

‘You doing an Open University course on Poland or what?' asks Steve one morning during our coffee break.

‘Yeah,' puts in Linda, yawning; ‘thought I might try one,
too. Maybe something on the ancient Greeks? Stav bangs on about them all the time.'

‘Constance?' repeats Steve.

‘No. Not exactly.'

‘That's
right
, course you have, I'd forgotten … you've got this Polish fella, haven't you?' says Linda, perking up at the sniff of gossip. ‘How's it going?'

‘Not very far, at a guess …' I say, trying to look wry and offhand.

‘Bloody foreigners! Don't know why we bother with them! Yes I do.' She turns to Steve, who is wearing his concerned male feminist expression indicating discreet but non-aggressive sympathy.

‘… It's because you lot are such wallies nowadays! You “my-turn-to-do-the-nappies” brigade: you're hopeless! A right turn-off!'

‘Linda, it's not fair to drag Steve into it. Just because you think men with big muscles and tiny minds are macho …'

The conversation is steered safely away from Iwo. Linda and Steve will argue the merits of old sexism versus new, improved equality, till the cows come home.

One great consolation is that nowadays Cordy is around more often than usual. She's cramming for her finals and it's easier for her to work from the comparative peace and quiet of her bedroom here than in the communal chaos of the house near college that she shares with four or five other students. Sometimes she'll walk through the breakfast room to put the kettle on for yet another cup of sweet Nescafé and find me hunched up on the sofa.

‘How's it going? On schedule?' I say.

‘Yeah, doing OK. Coffee?
You're
not, by the look of you. Not bloody
Iwo
again …?'

All three of them are now openly splenetic about Iwo: heaven knows what they must say among themselves.

‘Cordy, a, it's no business of yours; b, I'm sorry but I love him; and c, I can't help it. Don't call him that …'

‘Sometimes I think
I'm
forty-four and you're the one that's twenty-one,' she says.

While we wait for the kettle to boil she tells me about her Ben. She sounds secure, happy in their mutual, uncomplicated love. They meet mostly at weekends, Take in' a film or two, perhaps a party, spend a couple of nights together and go their separate ways on Monday to work during the week for their coming examinations. I look at her as she stands looking at me, her face reflecting concern for her suddenly mad mother, though her mind is still on her revision notes. She is barefoot; her strong, slightly grubby feet planted firmly on the black and white floor. She always loved going barefoot and, as a child, the first thing she did on coming home from school was to tear off her shoes and socks and leave them in a wrinkled heap by the doormat. In consequence her feet are wide and her toes splayed, but they are good, healthy feet. She is a good, healthy young woman, more sane and balanced than I have ever been, except briefly, during the child-bearing years of my marriage, when I thought I was doing what women are meant to do.