The Ice Saints Page 14

  ‘But Derek, people often do that.’

  ‘Jotting things down. On a little pad.’

  Rose half-closed her eyes and giggled. ‘Just trying to improve her English.’

  ‘Wanda doesn’t know any English,’ he wailed. ‘She’s always said so.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Rose was still laughing.

  ‘Nothing.’

  That this was untrue was obvious to both of them. He would have had to do something. But he disliked being teased and at present it muddled him. He stared down at the dirt- engrained table between the beer glasses and his mind flicked over a succession of sore but not entirely disagreeable points, which were the recollection of what in fact had taken place, and he felt again the shock of Wanda standing there by the desk, reading a letter from his mother.

  He had retreated quickly, slammed the front door so that the chain rattled, and returned to the room to find her lying, unsmiling but self-consciously posed across the folk-weave cover of his bed. Syntax deserted him, and he could only remember the single word ‘money’. ‘Pieniądze’ he blurted out, rummaged for his wallet and fled. In the race to the kiosk and back up the dingy staircase he had thought of nothing at all. But when he saw her again Wanda had become a thing. He could not bring himself to speak to her. She did not drink in the daytime, she had already heard all his gramophone records, and soon she finished her cigarette and still lay there... This memory he carried around with him like a somewhat grubby handkerchief. Her treachery might have made him incapable but at that point it had excited him extremely.

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ he lied. ‘I want them to learn to trust me.’

  ‘But you don’t trust them.’

  ‘I suppose I don’t.’ His attention wandered. It was impossible to tell what he was after, beyond convincing himself of his own importance.

  ‘Does Mirek know about this?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mirek Sypniewski. Your friend. Haven’t I got his name right?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Mirek.’ Loasby fiddled with the ash-tray and said: ‘No, I don’t trust Mirek at all.’

  ‘Really, I think you must have persecution mania or something. He was frightfully outspoken against anything like that. And, after his experience, he must know all about it.’

  ‘That’s the trouble, isn’t it? They’ve got something on him. In any case he is always coming into contact with foreigners. No, I don’t trust old Mirek any farther than I can throw him.’

  She felt obscurely wounded by this. Mirek Sypniewski had been the first person here really to catch her sympathy. She remembered him standing in the dark, heavy with sadness. To distrust him would be cruel, and yet it might be more cruel to expect too much. He was not after all a noble survivor from the past, like Adam Karpinski, but a product of this generation.

  Rose stood up.

  ‘Let’s go. This beer’s horrid and I think it’s stopped raining.’

  A few slow sun-refracting drops were falling but there was a lifted clearness in the air. At four o’clock the streets were crowded with workers going home to dinner. The shop windows were filled with the usual unrealities, plaster models of legs of pork and salami and photographs of Gomulka for May Day, surrounded with whirls of scarlet and crêpe paper, and in reaction to this, though most people were wrapped up in sick-smelling plastic against the weather, they had armed themselves with something real to carry home: a loaf of bread, shiny with freshness, or a spray of pussy-willow or apple blossom or a bunch of marsh marigolds.

  In this crowd Derek and Rose were soon embarrassed by each other. Each of them wanting to get back to their own Poles and if they spent too much time together they felt diminished and anxious.

  Because of this they walked in silence, both listening to the relentless squeals of Derek’s new Polish shoes, until Rose said:

  ‘What I was trying to tell you was, that two men came to the flat and asked about you.’

  ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘It was while I was away. The Rudowskis were worried because Tadeusz is trying to get a passport.’

  Her Poles, however, did not bother him. ‘What did the men say?’

  ‘They asked about you. Janet didn’t know too much.’

  ‘Probably they were the same ones. They really are interested in me. They know there are certain things I approve of a lot.’

  ‘Like being spied on.’

  ‘No. Not that.’

  Yet he went around administering approval, and was snubbed for it, though less often than he should have been. Only yesterday he had complimented somebody on the cleanness of the streets; ‘Yes, we Poles have so little we can afford to throw away.’ Today he noticed for the first time the new municipal wastepaper baskets, which took the impractical form of penguins with gaping beaks. ‘Just look at those.’

  ‘They’re hideous, aren’t they?’

  He was hurt: if an effort was being made, Rose ought not to be beastly about it.

  ‘At least they’re doing something,’ he said.

  At the tram stop, he told her that his new friends had asked to see him again.

  ‘Will you go?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think it would be rather stupid. What good can it do you? Or them, for that matter. Besides, I think you ought to tell somebody. Other English students’ll be coming here, won’t they?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who’ll I tell?’

  ‘Our Embassy.’

  He sniffed. ‘A lot of snobs. What do they know about real conditions here? They live apart, cut off.’

  ‘You could tell them, then.’

  ‘I could write a report, I suppose. For the Ambassador.’

  ‘You don’t need to do that,’ Rose said, feeling tired by now. ‘One of them is coming down next week. I’ll put him on to you.’

  ‘Oh, all right.’ Derek looked gloomy. His glory was being dissipated all too rapidly.

  Rose was sorry for him: ‘Look, why don’t you come out to supper tonight?’

  After listening to him for over an hour, it was really almost too much for her patience to watch him weigh up this invitation against his other opportunities for this evening.

  ‘All right,’ he said. Then the tram she was waiting for came swinging round the loop in front of them.

  Rather later Derek turned up at the Rudowskis’ flat, where he drank too much of Witold’s jarzembiak and gave a curiously confused account of the possibilities of English life.

  ‘Unless you’re in with the Establishment,’ he kept repeating, ‘You haven’t really got a chance.’

  After he had gone, Tadeusz asked Rose: ‘Is it true what he said?’

  ‘Of course it’s not true,’ Janet told him. ‘He’s one of those people who like to blame others for their own failure.’

  ‘I found his point of view most interesting,’ Witold said.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The following day Rose received the telephone call she was expecting.

  ‘My darling Miss Rose, may we meet very soon?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Now?’

  A pause. Adam sensed people standing round her and even pictured the stupid Rudowski breathing on her neck.

  ‘All right, yes.’

  Adam replaced the telephone and went back to his table.

  He had spent the morning at the University, in conversation with a few of the old professors who still retained the glamour which attached to learning in this country. Most of these were survivors from Lwow and Wilno, the lost universities in the East. A good deal of their glory had departed, nowadays they were bald, their features were adorned with every type of wrinkle and protuberance, they were dressed often in garments of what looked like old furnishing material; they remained however both happy and civil. They still had the relish of their obscure knowledge (one of them, Professor Doctor Boczok, spoke all the Melanesian languages but had never left Europe). Regularly they published the results of their resea
rch. They had discovered that even in the worst times only one paragraph of a learned article need to be devoted to the ritual Ave Caesar; if the article were to be published in the United States, this paragraph could be excised.

  But these graceful and antiquated professors could seldom be got at by themselves. A henchman was always present, an assistant of either sex, bloodless and bespectacled, whose sense of reality was so feeble that it could be satisfied by the latest efforts to make Marxism fit the facts. These poor specimens considered themselves Adam Karpinski’s enemies: they were supporters of Witold Rudowski.

  Adam did not let them worry him. It was pleasanter to think about Rose, who now came into the café. She was wearing a simple charcoal-coloured dress and had her hair done up in a sort of bun. He kissed her hand, then her face.

  She settled beside him. In both of them the insistent machinery of strain was suddenly switched off; everything was calm now and there was nothing to worry about any more. While Adam ordered coffee, her eyes began to absorb him again. Dirt ringed his shirt collar. He smelt quite different from in the mountains. He looked so smashed, she ached with love for him.

  From the five days they had already spent together, she had learned the course of the syndrome. First there had been the wild elation, the race in the growling Mercedes towards the snowfields. Adam sat half-turned in the seat beside Bogdan Malczarek, who was driving, and talked continuously. At such times Adam dominated everything; merely by being there he ridiculed the querulous plainsong of Mrs Malczarek, who once they were out of Krakow became calm and cheerful. Beyond the car windows the sloping landscapes were an unending celebration. The river glittered between new- budded trees, wooden houses were being built, fields were being ploughed. Then the mountains closed in, and in the villages the foreign car was stared at by strange men who wore white felt trousers, elaborately embroidered, and girl-guide hats ringed with cowrie shells.

  At Adam’s instigation, the writer threw the long black car like a racing toboggan down the thawed roads. Towards evening they came to the rest house where they were to stay. It was sparsely furnished and decorated only with such battered hunting trophies from the past as a stuffed lynx and a frieze of roebuck antlers, or perhaps chamois horns, like little coat-hooks all the way up the stairs. ‘Vous voyez,’ Adam said at the sight of these, ‘On a été diablement cocu ici. What’s that in English?’

  ‘Cuckolded, I suppose...’

  And now, back in Biala Gora, Rose laughed.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’

  ‘I was remembering the little horns.’

  He sighed, swinging her hand in his. ‘If one could always live in the mountains, one’s life might be bearable.’

  ‘Please don’t.’

  He shook his head. ‘You will go away and why should I wish to survive? I don’t really want to survive as far as tomorrow, when Mr Mark and Mrs Alexandra will arrive. She is a bitch and a cow, Alexandra, and a terrible liar. I adore her. Tell me what on earth can the Tathams think about us?’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Poles.’

  ‘Oh.’

  From the depressive phase of the syndrome, women and outsiders were excluded.

  In the mountains, this phase had followed on the third or fourth day. Rose had sat with him all one afternoon by a stream, burning-cold from the glaciers, while he talked about the trains beyond the Urals, the camp and the Kolkhoz, and his wanderings after the amnesty. Tears scorched her eyes, though it was all long ago and those never released must be dead by now. Bones in the permafrost.

  The phase returned now. ‘We are infected with unhappiness. Our position is an impossible one. It would be much better if we had been all exterminated. It was a good idea last time but it did not quite succeed. The next time, which will be quite soon now, they will be successful and we Poles will not trouble the rest of the world any more.’

  She tried to ride this one out but could not. ‘Oh, please. Stop. Stop.’

  ‘What difference does it make to you, Rose? Already you say to me you are leaving—’

  ‘Stop, please,’ she sobbed.

  He stopped, but only to plunge into a malodorous silence like a sick animal.

  After about five minutes of this, she asked plaintively: ‘Can’t we go and have lunch somewhere? I’m so hungry.’

  They went to the restaurant of the Hotel Hoffman, a huge room with galleries and a round glass roof, built in a kind of Baltic baroque style which was now coated all over with sour-cream paint. ‘There is nowhere else to eat in this dreadful town,’ Adam said. They sat at a square table with a dirty white cloth and two bottles of mineral water.

  On reading the menu, however, he became livelier.

  ‘Wonderful! They have pstrag.’

  ‘What on earth’s that?’

  ‘In English, I forget. A fish.’

  ‘It’s usually carp.’

  ‘No, no. Forelle.’

  He began to sing in a cheerful baritone and when he had stopped they ordered the cold trout and some fillet of beef en croûte. This last too was only to be found by occasional good fortune, since in a people’s democracy all parts of the animal appear to carry much the same value. Their order was discussed at some length with the waiter and when he had gone Rose asked: ‘Do you always call waiters “darling”?’

  ‘Warsaw people do.’ He looked around him appraisingly. ‘Perhaps it is not so bad here: I am glad because I shall be coming here quite often.’

  It was bleakly tactless of him to speak of a time when she would have gone. ‘Why?’

  ‘When I have my job at the University.’

  ‘But I thought Witek—’

  Adam hunched forward. He was intent, not with personal affection, but with the effort of proving his arguments. His grey eyes looked deep into her eyes and walked about on the bottom of her soul.

  ‘Now, darling,’ he said, ‘he is quite impossible, isn’t he?’

  ‘No! No! Please don’t say that. I have to believe in my own people.’

  ‘Poor Rose.’ He curled his hands with pity.

  ‘What has happened? He seemed to think it was so certain.’

  Adam’s breath brushed over her face. ‘You know that I have had some political difficulties in the past. But this morning I learn that our Party is in a liberal mood just now. So I think I shall be accepted after all.’

  ‘You don’t even live here!’

  ‘I shall come down once a fortnight to give my lectures.’

  ‘You couldn’t do that in England.’

  ‘No, you couldn’t do that in England. Tell me, does your dear brother-in-law actually know anything? I have never been able to find out.’

  ‘Poor Witek. He’ll lose everything.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Yes.’ She stared away in whirling misery for some minutes.

  Then she swallowed some vodka. ‘Well, let’s try and be happy and not worry about my family.’

  ‘Darling, you should be like me and have no family. It is very fashionable here since the war. Even my wife has stopped writing to me.’

  The waiter served them with trout in aspic from a long metal dish. Adam picked up two forks and stared at his plate for a few minutes. Then he looked up, as though he had just thought of something.

  ‘Rose, why do you stay here? Why don’t you come to Warsaw? You have three weeks left.’

  ‘Have I?’ she asked with surprise.

  ‘Yes.’ He removed a bone from his mouth and put it on the side of his plate. ‘I saw your weezer.’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Your weezer. On your passport.’

  ‘My visa!’

  It was the first proper mistake in English she had heard him make, and she giggled a touch hysterically, even though she saw it annoyed him. ‘When?’

  ‘What do you mean when?’

  ‘When did you look at my visa?’

  ‘When you gave them your passport at the rest house, of course.’ He tapped the table impatiently. ‘W
ill you come to Warsaw?’

  ‘It’s all so difficult.’

  ‘What do you mean, it’s so difficult? You can do what you want.’

  ‘Darling, how can I possibly know what I want? I simply can’t let them down.’

  ‘Of course you can, you simply do not care. You are cold and trivial like all the English.’

  ‘You know that is not true.’

  ‘Then after this I shall never see you again?’

  She looked away. Perhaps she could not imagine this yet and thus could stand it.

  ‘You’ll come to luncheon tomorrow with Alexandra and Mark? Please. It will be insupportable without you.’

  ‘It’s getting difficult to explain at home.’

  ‘Stop talking about those ridiculous people!’ he shouted at her.

  They finished their trout in a reverberating silence. While the plates were being changed, she picked up her vodka glass and said nervously: ‘Na zdrowie!’

  ‘And, darling, do stop trying to cheer me up! Polish women let their men be gloomy.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Never mind.’

  He smiled wanly. At that moment he looked so smashed that it was difficult to believe that, in Warsaw, he was a successful man who held down three jobs.

  When they left the restaurant he said: ‘Now we take a tram.’

  The tram wound through the grey streets and went clear of the town. It was the same one that Rose had taken with Tadeusz but today she had forgotten this, being involved in a haze of sunlight and vodka and unhappy love.

  ‘This,’ Adam said, ‘is the true contemporary problem. Nowhere to make love, except the middle of the forest.’

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  ‘I’m going to be out again, tonight.’

  Janet was correcting a translation. She looked much older when she wore her spectacles. ‘I thought you would be.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Rose, it’s difficult to keep secrets here. Mrs Wahorska wrote from Krakow at once to Krystyna Kazimierska.’

  ‘Those old bitches. They’ve always got their knife into somebody.’