Spring Will Be Ours (66 page)

‘I am giving your demand my full attention,' said Stefan, and tweaked Olek's ear. ‘Goodnight, boss.'

Music sounded from the television; the announcer who followed Gierek looked grave, as if the weight of government were on his shoulders, too. They all looked like that, arselickers. Stefan went over and switched it off, then he began to clear the table, listening to Krystyna and Olek, protesting, in their bedroom. His cot was right next to their bed – when he grew out of the cot, he'd have to sleep in here. Or start off in their bed and be brought in here when they wanted to go to bed. They'd been on the waiting list for a flat for two years before they were married; for two years afterwards, while Stefan finished his engineering degree at the Politechnika and got started as a supervisor at the factory, they had lived with Krystyna's parents. Then Olek came along, just as they'd been allotted this place, in a suburb quite a tram ride out of the city: they had little hope of getting two bedrooms now. Anyway – who cared? The way things were going, anything could have happened by the time Olek was out of his cot.

Stefan took the plates and dishes into the kitchen and put on the kettle. It could take for ever to come to the boil, when the gas pressure was low. He reached up for their glasses on the shelf, and the tin of tea. They were almost out, and no lemon, of course, they hadn't seen lemons for months. It's as if we were in the war, he thought, remembering stories his parents had told him – living on flour and water for days after the siege of Warsaw in 1939, people eating dog meat in the Warsaw Uprising – they'd told him so much he sometimes felt he'd lived through it with them. Their album was full of photographs of relatives killed then – an uncle at Katyń, another in Pawiak prison, two aunts in the Uprising.

Even a month ago, he'd thought about trying to take the family to the West, at least for a while. No more queues, no more slogans, no more empty shelves. And now … And now? He paced up and down the tiny kitchen.

‘Stefan? Come and give him a kiss.'

‘Coming.' He went out through the living room again, into the small square bedroom, where the curtains were drawn but a chink of the summer evening light slipped through. Olek was drowsy in his cot, one hand holding Krystyna's through the bars, the other jammed into his mouth. Stefan bent down and gently removed it; Olek whimpered, and put it back.

‘You're too big to suck your thumb,' he whispered.

‘He's still a baby!'

‘Look at him – he's enormous.'

‘But still a baby.'

‘All right.' He kissed his son's hot damp head. ‘Has he got a fever?'

‘I don't think so.' Krystyna frowned. ‘I think he's fine – it's just a hot night.'

‘Yes. Tea's almost ready – come out now.'

‘I'll just stay till he falls asleep.'

‘You spoil him – he should be able to go to sleep by himself.'

‘I know.'

But she stayed, sitting on the bed, one foot swinging, her finger through the cot bars clasped by Olek's little fist. Stefan kissed her bent head: she looked as if she should be asleep already, too – it was a lot, looking after the baby and working, and queuing, but everybody did it. Someone in the factory today said they were demanding three years'paid maternity leave in Gdańsk. And free Saturdays – he and most of the workers went into the factory almost every Saturday, not for overtime, but simply ‘to meet production requirements'.

Back in the living room, he stood for a moment looking at the photograph on the bookshelf of the three of them, taken when Olek was just a few months old. Motherhood suited Krystyna, there was no doubt about it: she was twenty-four when he was born, but she looked much younger, smiling at the camera with the baby on her knee, dark shining hair in a band, her eyes shining too – broken nights hadn't quite caught up with her, then. He had his arm round her, oh yes, very much the husband and father, incredible to think that that was him, he'd never thought he'd be a family man. There was a picture of the Pope on the wall in the background, supposedly smiling down on them, the photographer must have thought his customers would like all that. Of course, it was a crappy, sentimental photo, really, but still … Olek might like to have it one day.

He lit a cigarette and wandered over to the window. There was a little park not far from the apartment block: he could see people strolling out there as they did every summer evening. It wasn't his imagination, was it? They were talking more. It was like the Pope's visit, last year, everyone out in the streets as they hadn't been for years, smiling at strangers, excited. At the factory in the last couple of weeks no one ever stopped talking. It used to be quiet, everyone doing their job mechanically, or skiving if they could. ‘Stand up or lie down, you're worth 3,000 złotys' – that was the motto. Now you went in in the morning to an excited buzz, copies of KOR bulletins passed round almost openly, everyone reading the demands: for the reinstatement of Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver, sacked from the Lenin Shipyards for distributing dissident material – that was what had started the strike four days ago; demand for the reinstatement of Lech Wałęsa, electrician, sacked for ‘agitation'in February; demand for a memorial to the martyrs of Gdańsk, the workers shot dead by the militia in the food riots of 1970. He'd still been at school, then, but he could remember his parents' shocked faces; that was how Gomułka had fallen, and Gierek come to power. And Gomułka had returned from Stalinist exile with the Poznań riots of 1956. There was a joke, in 1970, there was always a joke. ‘What's the difference between Gomułka and Gierek?' ‘None, but Gierek doesn't know it yet.'

And now? His heart was racing, as he stood at the window watching the people in the park.
There are limits that no one is allowed to cross.
But everyone was crossing them, and what was going to happen when Gierek, like Gomułka, fell?

London, 23 August 1980
Beneath an enormous scarlet banner, the grey iron gates of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk were hung with flowers. Scarlet gladioli, scarlet and white carnations, pink and yellow roses – bunches and hastily made posies were tied all along the top, brushing the heads of the people pressed up against the railings. When the camera drew back for a long shot, you could see that the crowds stretched back for hundreds of yards, uncountable heads of men in jackets and open-necked shirts, women in summer dresses, standing in the shade of the few clumps of trees or out in the sun, beneath the concrete tower blocks and medieval-style houses. Flags fluttered above the flowers; among the leaves and petals the face of the Pope smiled from postcards.

The camera was moving in again; the gates swung slowly open, and a priest walked through alone. Inside, flanking the main path, hundreds of shipyard workers, men and women in heavy blue cotton jackets and trousers, stood waiting, their hands clasped, as he walked slowly towards a makeshift altar. Photographers clambered up on to window sills, cameras flashed, journalists pushed through the crowd, thrusting microphones.

In her quiet attic room, Ewa sat watching her rented colour television. There were no shots tonight inside the main hall of the shipyard; when there were, you could see that the air was thick with cigarette smoke, the faces all along the negotiating tables tense, exhausted, excited. Ministers had been flown in from Warsaw, sent back again, returned. Party leaflets were being dropped on the yards from helicopters; today the first issue of a daily bulletin had been circulated among the strikers. It was headed
Solidarność.
Impossible to believe all this was happening:

‘Poland is not yet lost

As long as we are alive …' The voices of the crowd rose into the air as the priest approached the altar and climbed the steps behind it; they faded on a close-up of his face, and then there was a cut, and Ewa was back in the studio again. She lit a cigarette and watched the rest of the news, hardly listening. When it was over, she switched off the set and walked up and down the room, smoking. Through the open stained-glass window came the summer evening sounds of suburban gardens: a distant lawnmower, the click of a ball on a plastic cricket bat, glasses chinking, the snip of shears on privet. Someone was calling her children in to bed. Ewa went to the window and looked down. Rows of walled, tangled gardens stretched out on either side of the one below, belonging to this house, where Jane, in sleeveless cotton shirt and old, pocketed Laura Ashley skirt, was clearing away the supper from the table on the terrace. The kitchen backed on to the garden, the french windows of the sitting room, too, and through them Ewa could hear the television, still on, and Ben and Toby laughing. Jane put the last of the dishes on to the tray, and then looked up as Stuart came out, yawning. He put his hand on her shoulder, and instead of picking up the tray she leaned against him, and then they walked slowly round the garden, as they did almost every evening, stopping now and then to tug off a dead rose, or push back the honeysuckle. They walked in what seemed to Ewa to be the rarest companionship; only with Dziadek and Babcia did she ever have the same sense of a marriage of contentment, order, a silence shared.

I shall never have that, she thought, no longer questioning a feeling which seemed always to have been with her, and she turned back to her room, where the blank television screen and a pile of papers waited.

London, 30 August 1980
Her head on Jerzy's shoulder, Elizabeth lay sleepily in bed, listening to the birds. The curtains at the open casement window were heavy and old; morning sun ran in a scalloped strip all along the top, and fell between the gap where they did not quite meet, on to the wardrobe and the foot of the bed. Elizabeth yawned, turned towards Jerzy and kissed his neck. He didn't stir. It was Saturday, it didn't matter. In the week they were disciplined: he went to the Finchley Road photographer's, and she to the office, and on ‘their'days they kept to the same hours, Jerzy taking photographs or working in the darkroom, Elizabeth in her studio. Often they worked at weekends as well – impossible to be freelance and not work at weekends, but they could start when they wanted, and they shopped together, walked over the heath, went to the cinema in South End Green, had people to supper. Tonight they were having Delia, who rented out the studio; last weekend it was Ewa and Anna. Jan never came. No, not true. He had been once, soon after they moved here, dragged by Ewa: perhaps even enjoying himself; but he hadn't come again.

The sun was growing brighter; Elizabeth turned over and looked at the clock. Almost quarter to ten; she kissed Jerzy again, slid out of bed and went to run a bath, then to put the kettle on. Waiting for it to boil, she went into the sitting room, drew back the curtains and pottered about, picking up fallen petals from the vase of flowers on the table, newspapers from the floor. Jerzy had marked an article in the
Guardian
from a couple of days ago with a large ink cross: he was starting to keep cuttings on Poland, there were columns of newsprint all over the desk. Was it a coincidence that he hadn't been low or dispirited for weeks? She picked up the paper with the others, and read:

‘As the Polish journalist surveyed the committee hall at the Lenin Shipyard, crammed with strikers'delegates from over 300 factories, he kept repeating; “I never thought I would live to see such a scene in Poland.”'

There was a picture of a small, wiry man with a moustache.

‘Two weeks ago, Lech Wałęsa was an unemployed electrician harassed by the police because of his dissident activities, and struggling to maintain his wife and six children … Today he is the effective leader of hundreds of thousands of strikers along Poland's northern Baltic coast … So organized have the strikers become that they have set up their own secretarial unit, refreshment service, information office and “free printing press of the Gdańsk Shipyard”. A well-produced four-page bulletin of strike news called Solidarity appears daily
…'

The kettle was boiling. Elizabeth went to switch it off, made the tea and finished the article, leaning against the cupboard. There was a nice touch at the end, an item from
Solidarity:

‘Polish recipes: Take some ingredients in short supply, add a little salt, and mix well with something temporarily not on the market. Add what we cannot afford. The mixture can be fried or baked. We have all been eating this meal here. There is always enough for everybody. It is what the Polish miracle consists of.'

‘Elizabeth? Any chance of tea?' Jerzy sounded croaky.

‘I've just made it.' She put down the paper, stirred the pot and poured out two cups, carrying them along to the bedroom. Jerzy was lying under the duvet right across the bed, arms flung back, eyes closed. ‘Thank you. I'll do it tomorrow.'

‘So you keep saying.' She put the cups on the low table by the bed. ‘Shall I draw the curtains?'

He opened an eye and squinted at the sunlight. ‘Absolutely not. Turn off that bath and come back to bed.'

‘Please.'

‘Please.'

She went to turn off the taps, and climbed in beside him. He was naked and very warm; he drew her close, running his hands through her hair, pulling up her nightdress, sliding his fingers hard between her legs. ‘I love you. I love you.'

‘Mmm. Especially in the mornings.'

‘Especially. But always.'

‘Darling.'

On the bedside table the cups of tea grew cold. Beyond the soft, heavy curtains at the window, the birds sang, garden doors opened, people called. Jerzy and Elizabeth hardly heard them.

Afterwards, they lay in the bath, Jerzy at the taps end, his shoulder on the worn bit, where years of hard water had left a long, interesting green mark, like a map.

‘It's almost our anniversary,' said Elizabeth.

‘Anniversary of what?' Jerzy swished his feet.

‘Meeting. The blackberry walk, I mean. Falling in love.'