Spring Will Be Ours (68 page)

Stefan had already climbed the narrow stairs quite often, flattening himself against the wall to let others come down, the buckles of his canvas shoulder bag pressing into his back. Boots tramped up and down all day. At the top, the yellow-painted rooms were a hubbub: foreign journalists came and went, two ancient Roneo machines were on the go all day, the air smelt of cigarettes and printer's ink. Stefan stuffed the canvas bag with flysheets, They were talking about producing a weekly paper,
Niezale
z
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bulletins.
ność
– Independence: in Gdańsk,
Solidarność
was sold out in minutes. There was a time when he had used his bag to smuggle copies of KOR bulletins into the factory; now, there was no need to smuggle: he could distribute information sheets openly – at work, on the estate. Their living room was full of paper – posters on the walls, bulletins on the table, a banner Krystyna had painted at the window. Just occasionally, when Stefan carried the shoulder bag down the concrete paths or echoing corridors of the apartment blocks, or turned at the top of a stairway, he looked over his shoulder. Occasionally, he wondered if everyone who took a copy was what they seemed, an ordinary worker, or housewife, or pensioner. Then he stopped himself, angrily – he shouldn't be thinking like that any more: since August, everyone was out in the open, talking in shops, at work, in cafés and clubs, in the food queues, in queues outside cinemas. Last month, while his mother babysat, he and Krystyna had stood in a queue outside the Relaks, in Marszałkowska. They were showing Woody Allen, in
Manhattan
, but that was not why everyone was queueing. There was a black and white sequence in the middle of a news film about the August strikes: for the first time, the beating and killing of the workers on the Baltic Coast in the 1970 food riots were shown to the people. To think that you could go to a cinema and see that! Something suppressed for over a decade.

And yet – and yet. In the midst of all this, the union itself, while registering hundreds of thousands of new members each day, had still not yet received the authorities'official recognition. Last week Stefan had stood among the crowds lining the pavement outside the Provincial Court, cheering with everyone else as Wałęsa and his colleagues arrived in a bus – almost a triumphal chariot, covered in flags and an enormous Solidarity banner. ‘Leszek! Leszek! Leszek!' Little Lech, our Lech – it was like a football chant, as he climbed out, grinning, waving the papers in his hand, the statutes of the union, and climbed the steps to the court, giving the victory sign before he disappeared.

They were all still waiting for the formal registration.

They were waiting for a lot. The strikers on the Baltic coast had made twenty-one demands, supposedly answered in the August Agreement. He had torn out the page from the Bulletin of 23 August in which they were published, and pinned it up on the wall of the living room. Demand for free trade unions, independent of the Party; demand for the right to strike; for freedom of speech, publication and the press – ha! Elimination of privileges of the police, the security services, the Party apparatus – ha! Many of the responding clauses in the Agreement were cautious: they spoke of discussion, of outlines of principles to be presented to the provincial authorities by the end of the year. But Clause 8 dealt with wage rises: 2000 złotys a month, as compensation for the recent price rises. ‘These increases will be introduced gradually,' the Agreement read, ‘worked out through agreements in individual factories and branches … put into effect between now and the end of September.' By the end of September, in many places, negotiations had not even begun.

And so – a one-hour warning strike. Muscle-flexing: preparing for another confrontation? For a long hard winter?

Behind him, the siren sounded once again: the hour was over. Stefan picked up the flagpole and carried it from the factory gates down the concrete path to the main entrance; from inside he could hear cheers, and he saw the workers walking back to their places at the machines. An orderly demonstration completed – as Wałęsa said later: ‘We showed we knew how to call a strike, and how to call it off.' Stefan felt a sudden rush of happiness, and quickened his pace towards the doors. If the flagpole had been a baton, he might have twirled it.

Warsaw, Autumn 1980
It grew colder, the leaves swirling from the trees on to the broad paths of the avenues, on to the parks, the lakes. The mornings were darker: it was dark when Krystyna took Olek to her mother's, and only beginning to grow light when she caught the tram to work; Stefan left long before then. The afternoons were sometimes hazy, sometimes lit by a clear, golden sun, pouring through the branches, through the windows of the library, where she took in books and reshelved them, thumbing through yellowing card indexes. The queues outside the shops where she waited afterwards were no shorter, and what you could buy when you reached the top was no more than before, but she didn't mind them quite so much. The atmosphere had changed: people were expectant, recharged, on the alert.

They had to be: they were jolting from crisis to crisis. Three weeks after Stefan had stood outside his factory gate in the one-hour warning strike, the Provincial Court had refused to register the statutes of Solidarity. The clause relating to the leading role of the Party, foremost in the Gdańsk Agreement, was not in the statutes, and the court, without notice, inserted it. Wałęsa refused to accept it, he argued that since Solidarity was an independent, apolitical union, there was no need for it. First Secretary Kania insisted that there was. The debate on the radio, the wrangling between lawyers, lasted well into November.

Winter was coming. The golden afternoon light faded to grey skies, threatening snow. Like a beacon, the news came that the exiled writer Czesław Miłosz, living in New York, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The head of Krystyna's library was a reserved man; he spent his lunch hour in his tiny office eating sandwiches and listening to the radio. When he came into the main room to tell them about Miłosz he was smiling as if he himself had been awarded the prize. Hurrying to her tram stop at the end of the day, Krystyna saw many of the people in the queues at the newspaper kiosks talking as excitedly as they'd done when they heard about the Pope two years ago. On the window of her tram, someone had stuck a placard: ‘We demand the registration of Solidarity! No modification of the statutes!'

‘Our star is on the ascendant,' she said to Stefan that night, putting a wriggling Olek into his pyjamas. ‘John Paul, Solidarity, Miłosz …'

‘… Olek,' said Stefan, looking up from the paper, and she smiled.

‘Olek, of course. To think that this baby is almost fifteen months.'

‘Time to start another,' said Stefan, turning the page.

‘You're joking.'

‘Stop saying that all the time – was I joking when I asked you to marry me?'

‘Probably.' She did up the last button at the back, and plonked Olek on his knee. ‘Hold him while I get the bottle.'

‘Tata. Say Tata,' Stefan commanded.

‘He's not a budgie.' Krystyna disappeared into the kitchen.

‘Tata,' said Olek, banging his fist in Stefan's face.

‘There! You see?' Stefan took the fist and punched it gently against the baby's own cheek; he began to giggle. ‘Just like Mama,' said Stefan. ‘Nice to think I can make my family laugh. Do you want a little brother? A sister?' He punched the fat cheek again. ‘Of course you do.'

‘Not now,' said Krystyna, returning. ‘No, not now.'

He pulled a long face. ‘Poor little lonely only …'

‘You have one then,' she said, giving him the bottle. ‘I'm too tired. And anyway, who knows what's going to happen? It's hard enough to feed and clothe this one.'

‘You just said our star was rising.' Stefan rocked the baby, who was sucking like a vacuum cleaner.

‘You know what I mean. You know perfectly well.'

‘We have seven million members now,' said Stefan. ‘Seven million and one since your father joined. That's well over half the working population.'

‘And we haven't even been registered.'

‘We're going on strike if we're not.'

‘Are we?' Krystyna went to switch on the television. Last week, Mr Kania had flown to Moscow, just for the day. The communiqué he brought back with him had been read on the news by the usual po-faced announcer:

‘Comrade Brezhnev expressed the confidence … that the communists and working people of fraternal Poland will be able to resolve the acute problems of political and economic development facing them.'

‘Oh, good,' said Stefan.

However, there was a warning.

‘The participants in the meeting resolutely denounced the attempts by certain imperialist circles to mount subversive activities in socialist Poland, and to interfere in its affairs.'

‘Hear hear,' Stefan said solemnly. ‘Absolutely right,' and as usual he'd made them laugh.

On 10 November the Supreme Court of Warsaw overruled the Provincial. Solidarity was registered, and a compromise agreed: the leading role of the Party was to be included in an Appendix. Wałęsa came out of the court shaking his arms above his head. ‘We have got everything we wanted!' he shouted to the crowd through a megaphone, from the side window of the coach, which drove him and his colleagues away and off to the Primate's Palace, where Cardinal Wyszyński was waiting to receive them, with greetings from the Pope. That night, there was a celebration, a gala performance in the Teatr Wielki, the largest theatre in Warsaw. The stage was hung with an enormous Solidarity banner. There were readings from Miłosz, from Mickiewicz; there were cabaret acts, and satirical sketches of the television news. Stefan and Krystyna didn't go to the performance, they couldn't possibly afford it, but next day everyone was singing the refrain of the song sung there by
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Jan Pietrzak, star of Warsaw's most famous political cabaret. Z
eby Polską byłe Polską
– ‘So that Poland shall be Poland.' The tune was gentle, the words sung at a pace which was almost melancholy, but no one could get it out of their heads.

‘So that Poland shall be Poland …' You heard it in queues, in coffee houses, restaurants and bars; people hummed it on the way to work; Stefan sang it in the bath so often that Krystyna had to ask him to stop.

Winter was coming; an icy wind blew through the city. But the next night, Stefan did go out – he stood among a crowd ten thousand strong before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in Victory Square, in celebration of Independence Day – 11 November 1918. The dark sky was lit by firebrands, wreaths were laid on the tomb, whose unknown soldier, everyone knew, had died defending Warsaw against the Red Army in 1920. Speeches were made – about Katyń, about the Nazi-Soviet Pact: the most recent, most terrible stains on the history of Poland since her brief independence was lost again in 1939. And then they sang the national anthem. Even as a child, Stefan sometimes found himself having to blink back tears with the national anthem – that was partly, then, because the family made such a big thing of it, telling him over and over again of the times in occupied Poland when it had been sung so bravely, so defiantly. Now, with all the emotion of the past few days behind them, the precious, longed-for feeling that with Solidarity there was real hope for change, there were tears freezing on almost everyone's cheeks as they sang it over and over again:

‘Poland is not yet lost

As long as we are alive …

What the foreign power has seized from us,

We will recapture with the sabre …'

The trams and buses afterwards were packed. Stefan didn't even bother to wait for one, he was too charged up. He walked all the way home, crossing the bridge over the Vistula where the lights of the riverboats danced in the water, his breath streaming out in front of him, and thought about his little son, and what he might one day inherit.

Within ten days, the next crisis came. Among the volunteers in and out of the crowded rooms at the top of the stairs at 5 Szpitalna Street was a young mathematician, Jan Naroz
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niak, a lanky,
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sweet-looking fellow who worked as a duplicator. Someone passed Narozniak a secret document. The someone was a clerk in the Chief Prosecutor's Office; the document was clumsily entitled ‘On the present methods of prosecution of illegal anti-socialist activity'. It consisted of a cobbled history of dissident groups since the fifties, including KOR, the Workers'Defence Committee, and although it did not mention Solidarity by name, Solidarity was clearly implicated. The ‘methods of prosecution'listed searches, confiscation of material, arrests, fines, imprisonment.

Late in the afternoon of 20 November, the boots of the militia tramped up the stairs of Szpitalna Street; they were led by a woman, the Deputy Prosecutor, and they turned
^·
the rooms over until they found the document. Next day Narozniak was arrested. So was Piotr Sapieło, the clerk who had passed it to him.

At once, Zbigniew Bujak, the Mazowsze Chairman, issued a statement. It called for the immediate release of Naroz
^·
niak and Sapieło, and threatened a strike. He added that he had not known that the document was on the premises, but if he had he would at once have ordered it to be duplicated ‘in a number of copies sufficient to distribute to every branch of our union'. The men were

On Monday, the Prosecutor's office announced that Naroz
^·
niak was being held under a ninety-day detention order, charged with disseminating state secrets. The maximum sentence was five years. By Tuesday, Stefan's
^·
canvas bag was stuffed with hastily duplicated flysheets: ‘Today Naroz niak – tomorrow Wałesa – the day after tomorrow – you.' He helped to plaster Free Naroz
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niak
posters on buses, trams and buildings all over the centre of Warsaw.