Spring Will Be Ours (69 page)

Next day, Bujak held a press conference. To the demands for the release of the two men, he added five more, including an investigation into the role of the police and the Chief Prosecutor himself in brutally harassing the workers of Ursus and Radom after the strikes of 1976 – had they, themselves, been acting beyond the limits of the law? He wanted actions against those who had produced the document, an end to harassment of Solidarity members, cuts in the police budget …

‘He wants the moon,' said Krystyna that evening, reading out all this. ‘He's going too far.'

‘No he's not, he's right, you know he's right.'

‘All right, all right, he's right. And when are you going out on strike?'

‘Tomorrow.' Stefan let out a whoop.

By Wednesday there were twenty factories on strike, including Stefan's. In the afternoon there was a passionate meeting in the Ursus works.

‘Better to die on our feet than live on our knees!' shouted one of the speakers, and with that ancient battle cry the whole audience burst into applause. The deadline for a general strike in the Mazowsze region was set for midday on Thursday; the workers of the giant Huta Warszawa steelworks began an occupation. A head-on collision with the authorities, perhaps more dramatic even than in August, seemed inevitable: for the first time, it was Warsaw leading events, with Gdańsk, Wałęsa and the national leaders following in the wake of the capital. There were urgent phone calls, desperate attempts being made for compromise by the older members of the union, including, surprisingly, Jacek Kuroń himself, founder of KOR, in and out of prison for years, arrested and released in a game of cat and mouse throughout the strikes in Gdańsk. In
^·
the small hours of Thursday, exactly a week after their arrest, Narozniak and Sapieło were released. They were driven to the Ursus works by Stefan Bratkowski, the radical Chairman of the Polish Journalists'Association. Up all night, listening in the factory, Stefan and the workers in his section heard Warsaw Radio announce at 2 a.m. that Bratkowski had personally guaranteed to the authorities that with their release the strike would be called off. There were cheers – but also a detectable sense of anti-climax: they had been all geared up for days of this, and now the deadline had been lifted and there was nothing to do but go home.

In the steelworks, no one was going home. They were ready for a fight, and they were determined to have it. So Naroz
^·
niak and Sapieło had been released – but what about Bujak's other demands? Who had answered them? They weren't ending the strike until someone did.

‘We showed we knew how to call a strike, and how to call it off,' Wałęsa had said in October. Now, it looked as if neither he, nor Bujak, nor anyone else in the Solidarity leadership could call off what was happening in the Huta steelworks. It took Kania himself, in a small-hours phone call to Gdańsk, promising that Deputy Prime Minister Jagielski would come and talk to the men next morning, to quieten things down for the night. Next morning, however, Jagielski refused to go. If the men wanted to talk to him, they could wait until after the next Party plenum, due in a few days.

The steelworkers went into a fury. Within hours, the strike was threatening to start again in the factories where overnight it had been abandoned.

Jacek Kuroń came down to plead with them. Stefan Bratkowski collapsed. In a plane seat paid for by the government, Wałęsa flew in from Gdańsk. In the end, the government announced on television that the talks on the powers of the police which Bujak had demanded would begin. Even that was not enough. The television announcer was dragged out of his bed by workers demanding to see the actual text of the broadcast announcement. Only then did the steelmen vote, at last, at 4 a.m. on the Friday, to go back to work.

Exhausted and unshaven, Stefan left his own factory and crawled into bed at dawn. Krystyna was asleep, but Olek, hearing his father creep past the cot, was awake at once, heaving himself up and rattling the bars. ‘Tata!'

‘Sssh!' said Stefan. ‘Go back to sleep.' He fell on to the pillow. Beside him, Krystyna murmured crossly, then asked: ‘Are you all right?'

‘Fine,' said Stefan. ‘Fine.'

‘Compatriots! The fate of our country and our people is at stake! The continuing disturbances are bringing our fatherland to the brink of economic and moral destruction.'

On 4 December, Kania's appeal to the nation was published in every newspaper. Just as people were recovering from November, longing for a breathing space, the alarms which had been sounded in the Western press about a possible Soviet invasion began to appear, as strongly worded hints, in Poland. Next day, it was announced that a Warsaw Pact summit meeting had been held in Moscow: once again, confidence was expressed in the working people of fraternal Poland, but no one doubted why the meeting had been called. That weekend, a number of Soviet army divisions moved west, camping in the bitter cold along the Polish border.

‘Remember Czechoslovakia!' There were few people who had not thought about Czechoslovakia ever since the first wave of strikes spread to the Baltic coast in August. But not once had those words been officially spoken in the last months, either by the Solidarity leaders or by the government: no one wanted to press the panic button. Now, the fear of invasion began to surface openly, in rumours, warnings. ‘It's not like Czechoslovakia
^·
, though,' said Stefan, looking up from Kania's appeal in Z
ycie Warszawy.
‘The Czechs were all on Dubček's side, weren't they? Who loves Kania? Or any of them? They'd call in the tanks if they had to.'

Krystyna shuddered, spooning mashed potato into Olek's open mouth.

‘Don't.'

He spread his hands. ‘What do you mean, don't? Can't we talk about it?'

‘I read about it all day.'

The reading room in the library was always stocked with foreign papers, and they had never been so busy – people queued for their turn to read them. ‘They're hysterical,' she said. ‘“Poland On The Brink”, “Poland Faces Collapse”. It's almost as if they
want
an invasion, to wring their hands and wail over, something horrible they can watch from a safe distance.'

‘You don't think,' said Stefan, ‘that they're doing it to show the Russians that they won't take it quietly if they invade? That they'll face a real fury from the West, perhaps even another cold war?'

Krystyna put down the spoon of mashed potato and looked at him. ‘And what,' she said, ‘did the West do for us in 1939?'

‘They went to war,' said Stefan mildly. ‘They did go to war.'

‘You know what I mean. You know perfectly well what I mean. Where were the British planes in the siege of Warsaw? Where were the French? Haven't your parents told you about going to sing “God Save the King” and the “Marseillaise” outside the embassies, the day after the Nazis marched into Danzig?'

‘Yes,' said Stefan, ‘of course they have.' Olek was banging on the table, trying to reach the spoon. ‘Go on, feed the poor child, or shall I?' He took the spoon from her, and dipped it into the bowl. ‘Talk about stars on the ascendant, or the course of the planets – to think that Danzig is now Gdańsk.'

‘Yes,' said Krystyna, ‘and to think that after all that, after the war, the West who care so much for us abandoned us at Yalta! Do you really think that if the Russians invade us now they will do anything to prevent it?'

‘You are becoming more strident than me,' said Stefan. ‘It's almost Christmas, please don't let's quarrel. There you are, Olek, all gone,
nie ma
– no more.'

‘Nie ma,'
said Krystyna, getting up. ‘That's all we ever hear in the queues, even now. No more sugar, no more ham, no more eggs, or butter – what kind of Christmas are we going to have?' She took Olek's bowl and spoon to the kitchen, almost in tears.

Stefan picked up the baby and went over to the window. Condensation trickled down the panes; he rubbed one, and looked out towards the little park. It was freezing, the first snow on the ground, and no one was out there now. The walls of the apartment block across the path from theirs were scrawled with old grafitti: Solidarity! We demand registration… Strike! Demand the release of Naroz
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niak
…
Strike! The TV lies … We demand access to the media … Brezhnev: Stay Home!
It seemed only days since he had stood here after Gierek's last address, wondering what was going to happen to them all.

And yet – before it ended, the year did contain another triumph.

London, 16 December 1980
Factory sirens faded, and the screen was filled with floodlit figures, standing in the rain outside the gate of the Lenin Shipyard, beneath an enormous monument: three giant crosses whose arms, metres above the upturned faces of the crowd, were each hung with an anchor.

‘In Poland,' Kenneth Baker announced, ‘hundreds of thousands of people attended this evening's rally in Gdańsk, commemorating the riots there in 1970 in which forty-five Poles were killed. This was also the scene of this summer's strikes, which led to the country's first independent trade unions.' Among the crowd, the yellow helmets of the shipyard workers gleamed. From a cord tied around the crosses, the Polish flag blew in the wind; a choir began to sing the opening bars of a
Lachrymose.

‘Why the anchor?' asked Elizabeth.

‘I'll tell you in a minute,' said Jerzy.

‘Struggle and redemption,' said Ewa from the floor, without taking her eyes off the screen.

‘Polska Walcząca,'
said Anna, leaning out of her chair.

‘Fighting Poland,' said Jan, from the other side of the room.

Elizabeth turned to look at him, standing in the doorway with his arms folded, neither quite in the room nor out of it. He has changed, she thought – not completely, or he would be in here, next to his wife. But since August he is different – he is calmer, more open, more alive.

‘In 1970, shipyard strikers clashed with the police and army. But this evening the ceremony united the three most powerful elements in Polish society – with representatives from the independent unions, the Government, and the Catholic Church all attending.'

The camera moved along a line of seated dignitaries: cardinals in black cloaks, scarlet cassocks, scarlet hats; men in winter coats and glasses; Wałęsa in a brown anorak, getting up, stepping forward.

‘Lech Wałęsa, leader of the Solidarity Trade Union, lit the flame beneath the monument to the dead.'

In the falling rain it took him three attempts to light the oxyacetylene torch passed to him by two helmeted workers. On the third, the torch sparked into life; he thrust it forward and an enormous flame sprang up at his feet. He watched it, waved the torch to the crowd, and stepped aside as wreath after wreath, one for each shipyard worker shot dead by the militia, was carried up and laid upon the plinth. There were lines from Młtosz engraved at the base of the monument, from his translation of the Psalms:

The Lord giveth His people strength

The Lord giveth His people the blessing of peace.

Ewa was sitting on the floor at her grandparents'feet, smoking. As Kenneth Baker and the camera moved away from Gdańsk, Babcia leaned down and gently took her hand. ‘Stop it,
kochana.
You smoke far too much.'

Ewa shook her hand. ‘I can't help it.'

‘Of course you can.'

‘Oh, Babcia! Here we are watching one of the most moving things that's happened in Poland since August, and all you can do is go on about smoking.'

‘That's enough.' Anna was blowing her nose. ‘To think that we should be sitting here watching all this – I never, never thought it would happen.' She got up and went over to the table. ‘Does anyone want more?'

‘No thanks, Mama.' Jerzy rose and put his arm round her. ‘All right? Are you all right?'

‘She is reliving her memories,' said Jan lightly from the doorway.

Jerzy looked at him – and that's another thing that's changed, thought Elizabeth. Jerzy's not so ill at ease with him, they have something to talk about now. ‘Aren't you reliving yours?'

Jan shrugged. ‘Of course.'

Dziadek was holding out his cup; it trembled slightly in the saucer. ‘Perhaps just another cup? If there is one?'

‘I'll make some more,' said Ewa, leaving her cigarette smouldering in the ashtray, getting to her feet. She took it from him, kissing him on the cheek.
‘Kochany
Dziadek – what do you want for Christmas?'

He gestured at the screen, not answering. Babcia patted him.

‘He's got his present,' said Jerzy.

‘Yes, I know.' Ewa took the cup out to the kitchen. ‘Excuse me, Tata.' She lit the gas under the kettle and washed the cup, cut another slice of lemon. Then, waiting for the kettle to boil, she wandered out, and down the corridor to the empty room she once had shared with Jerzy. It was dark; she switched on the light and stood looking at the narrow bed, with its neat candlewick quilt, at the shiny wardrobe, where there were, even now, marks of Sellotape from where the pictures of trains had once been stuck. Someone else should be living here, using this room, she thought. What do Mama and Tata do with themselves, rattling about in all this extra space?

She switched off the light again, and went across to the window, where the curtains were not drawn. Fluorescent lights ran all along the track, and it was raining here, too, a thin sheet of silver, shining as it fell. She pressed her face against the glass, hearing laughter from the other room.

Warsaw, January 1981
The courtyard of the school was inches deep in snow. Sitting at the window of the library, two floors up, Danuta watched the caretaker digging and clearing it, his spade scraping on the ground, the piles he heaped in the corners glistening as the morning sun rose behind the rooftops.