The Ice Saints Read online

  Downstairs Rose, who was now quite white, refused their offer of a lift.

  ‘No, I’ll take the tram. I would rather, really.’

  Mark was pompously affectionate in his farewell. ‘Rose, you simply must come and stay when you return Warsaw- wards. Alexandra and I insist.’

  Adam was giving instructions to the driver of the hired car.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  At the stop outside the School of Engineering, Janet Rudowski pulled herself wearily on to the tram. While she stood among the crowd of people returning from work and waited to pay her fare, she noticed that Rose was sitting up in front. Rose’s shoulders were hunched as though she huddled away from cold; she looked unprotected. Janet watched her with apprehension.

  Apprehension – so often the feelings Janet had for her own family amounted only to this. Apprehension during the war, whenever she returned home on her leaves from the hospital. Apprehension growing as you approached Barnham up the asphalt drive and the school-building gave off a dull tone like a bell that someone has jarred against, a thrumming noise which was a mixture of banged radiators, shouting in corridors, wireless sets shrilling the Forces programme, and all the semi-articulate hums and moanings that are emitted by a mass of schoolboys. All that life beyond the green baize doors which had made her desperately shy as a child. Homecomings were always anguish. The greatest anguish had been when Nico was killed and there was nobody to protect her any more, but it was always there: every time she approached the green door of School House, her heart burst with being sorry for Daddy and hating Mummy.

  Now when she saw Rose in front of her in the tram, she experienced that identical jab of hate. Their mother, aesthete and convert and flower-arranger, had always let it be known that she had the finer perceptions; she had looked on Janet, by then a staff nurse, as a plain member of an unprivileged race, trying her best to be useful. And Rose was the same, since her return from Krakow. Rose was special: whatever happened to people, it happened to her differently. Rose went off to meet her grand friends, and never said where she was going.

  Janet paid her fare and went and sat next to Rose. Rose clutched her arm and gave her a half-blind look. ‘I don’t want to talk.’

  Once inside the flat, however, Rose talked and talked.

  At the end she said: ‘You won’t tell Witek, will you? Please.’

  ‘No.’

  The spoilt child was stopped in her tracks: their mother, through Rose, had got her deserts at last. You could have worked this all out from the beginning, at Barnham. But because they were in Biala Gora, at the extreme edge of the known world, everything was different. Family apprehensions could not exist in the presence of true fear.

  Janet had known this fear since her arrival. She had spoken the language badly and everyone took her for a German. Only Witek could protect her then. The disasters that followed, the confiscation of their savings, the police terror, lack of food and the loss of their second child, were a progression that was pointing in only one direction, towards their final destruction. The apprehensions of the English middle class were a mockery compared to this, and yet they had done their work. The Poles grew stockier, squarer and uglier in those years, as though they were holding up the low sky with the brute strength of spines and shoulders. Janet endured with her husband and with friends like Krysia, but sometimes she felt that they had an idea of what happiness was, and she had not.

  Even now, Rose was still demanding action.

  ‘I’ll keep him in England. I don’t care what I promised Witek. I want to keep Tadeusz there for ever, away from this appalling place. I’ll do anything you ask. He simply must not grow up here.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about it now, I want my tea.’

  ‘I’ll get it.’ This was the first time Rose had offered to help with anything so simple.

  Janet lay back on the divan, her eyes closed. Because with Rose you paid the full emotional cost of family life, she was more tired than ever.

  Rose went into the kitchen. Tadeusz was standing by the table. There was no other door; he must have been there the whole time.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said.

  Was he trembling at what he had overheard, or from the gaucheness, the minor stresses of adolescence? From now on she would never be able to tell what he was feeling. There were secrets everywhere and anybody could deceive Rose. Once you had heard of the existence of a world of lies, you felt their presence everywhere. Perhaps, under the influence of some drug or other, one might see a chair or a table as totally evil; it was a quality of perception like this.

  Tadeusz slithered past her. He went into the sitting-room and began talking to his mother.

  Beyond the door their voices rose and fell in the monotonous uncoloured English of exiles.

  ‘Mrs Kazimierska has telephoned. She wants to see Rose before she is leaving. She has a package for her to bring to England.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘And about May Day Parade. I will be marching with my class but I can show Rose where to see best.’

  His voice was raised, strained. Perhaps he was talking so that Rose would be able to overhear in the kitchen.

  ‘Of course, darling,’ Janet said. ‘Why did you come back so early today?’

  ‘It is because we must go back this evening for the meeting that is discussing our excursion.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘I must go now, to fetch my colleagues.’

  ‘Give me a kiss.’

  When Tadeusz had left, Rose came in with two glasses of tea.

  ‘Do you think he heard what we were saying?’

  ‘What you were saying, Rose. I wasn’t saying anything.’

  Rose put down the tea. ‘One tries to help, one does everything and—’ she began to howl. ‘Oh God, it’s too awful here, awful. I want to go home.’

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  On the morning of the First of May Tadeusz led her into the middle of the town until they reached a spot on the pavement opposite the Party Headquarters. Exactly there, he left her. He had to join the contingent from his school, the Tenth Gymnasium, who were waiting in a side street nearly a mile away on the other side of the town.

  Tadeusz ran through the streets against the crowd. Everything was closed for the holiday, but not many people were about, for the spring feast of the workers was a dying rite. No procession was taking place in the capital this year, and hardly anything even in Red Square, Moscow. Biala Gora kept the privilege because there had recently been disturbances in the factories and a pro-religious riot in a local industrial settlement. The procession here was a show of force.

  When he arrived among his school-fellows, he took up his place without speaking to any of them. The sense of responsibility, which affected him very much at this time, made him feel dumb and rude. Even when he forgot Rose, he had the usual resentment at taking part in politically organized activity. He didn’t want it to be either a success or a failure, yet he was annoyed when other people in his class made a joke of it. There was no point in being like them; you ended up half-sickened with boredom and frustration. He desperately wanted to do things properly, as his mother and Rose had told him they were done in England, but there seemed to be no chance.

  After some preliminary shuffling and marking time, the contingent of the Tenth Gymnasium moved off. Now Tadeusz began to be irritated by Basia Wengorzewska, the girl marching in front of him. Couldn’t she march straight, without wobbling and swaying around like that? A mass of hair, light brown but blonde-streaked as though it had been tumbled in fresh pollen, kept on escaping from underneath her cap. From time to time she glanced around her, and he tried to catch her eye to frown at her. But she was not watching, only seeing whether she was being watched. His agony grew. He longed to stop her and pull her together: she was so soft, so inadequate compared with the stolid girls marching on either side. He stared and stared at her until he felt dazed.

  Meanwhile Rose felt she had been waiting for hours in front o
f the Party Headquarters. The local leaders were beginning to appear on the first floor balcony and above them the huge images of Marx, Gomulka and Lenin, bellying and shrinking in the fresh breeze, seemed alternately to smirk or to pull long faces at the crowd lining the street below. Rain earlier had wettened the party flags so that they had lost their brightness and were now the colour of an old nose-bleed. The wind had also twisted up the long streamers across the street. As a result they seldom showed more than one word at a time: Long Live... Peace... War... Capitalism... Reconstruction. Twigs were being blown off the trees and Rose felt one of them falling past her face. She picked it up. The plane tree blossoms were just unfolding on it, yellow-green, with the flower stalks still as fragile as stamens. She held it up and yawned, and let the unborn flowers flick against her cheek.

  Now, from the inner recesses of the plane trees, loudspeakers crackled into full voice. The march past began, stopped for a speech, for applause and for ritual shouting, and began again. How small the factory-workers were, particularly the older ones! They wore berets or cloth caps, raincoats or blue-grey jerseys with zip-fronts. Their faces were grey and expressionless. Because of the recent disturbances participation was compulsory and their sections took an age to go past. With the exception of a few medalled veterans on Armistice Days, Rose had never seen civilians march like this and it felt wrong. This should have been a march of protest. They should be protesting now, because they were so poor, so ill-dressed, so ugly with their swinging work-distorted heads. Yet as they passed the balcony and the huge floating faces (Lenin, blown to one side now, was showing his back to the other two) each man stiffened, straightened his arms and turned eyes right.

  After half an hour, the sheer weight of numbers began to make its effect. Every public demonstration, if it is massive enough, creates this willing doubt. It becomes the reality itself. Individual protest is eccentricity; private reservations are merely reflex twitches like those a dog makes when it is dreaming. The tramp of boots on the cobbles, the applauding spectators, the desperately cheerful music blot out everything. Long live the First of May!

  Long live the First of May! The slogan is meaningless, but what does anybody’s protest mean? If you are Adam, nothing at all. For him all arguments end in nihilism. He is still in the Labour Camps, less free than any of these workers. He is out of date but not far enough. To protest now you need to remember far back to a time, infinitely long ago to Rose, when she was a small child. Then you can remember what it was to be free. And who can remember, except for the old has-beens, people like Krystyna Kazimierska? At least you would never find her taking part in this drilled stampede past Party Headquarters.

  By now Rose was completely involved, her throat sore and her eyes smarting with tears. She couldn’t decide what she thought about the onset of the school children, who seemed to bring a lightening of the atmosphere, a flicker of smiles along the stolid length of spectators on the opposite side of the street. Brought up at a school, she was used to smiling at the seriousness children bring to a rigmarole of no real importance; it was hard to do that here with old Karl Marx flapping away like a luffing mainsail against the building over there. All she could do was feel a pang of sympathy for the plain faces of the little girls above the nineteenth-century uniforms with sailor collars, and feel pleased, too, that nobody had wasted time on teaching them to march properly. And a moment later all this was forgotten in the tenseness of knowing that Tadeusz was approaching, of feeling his presence like a wave washing along between these two banks of onlookers.

  His class was the best turned out, except for Basia Wengorzewska, pink-faced with exertion now, pouting with boredom and always out of step: an infant Bardot whose sulks made everyone’s seriousness seem doltish. But Rose did not notice her at all. Her eyes were on Tadeusz.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  He, however, had completely forgotten about her. Once, at an intersection of streets near the Main Post Office, he failed to see that the line in front was marking time; he stumbled straight into Basia, collided on to the soft shock of her warmth and retreated, slightly overwhelmed. Trying to think of something different, he looked at the clock on the Post Office. It was after eleven, past the time when he usually had his ‘second breakfast’ but he didn’t feel hungry. The line stopped there for about ten minutes and then they moved off again. Basia kept tripping over the cobbles where they had risen up under the winter’s frosts.

  At about ten yards from the balcony, he glanced up. Rose wasn’t waving or anything else, just staring at him, and for the first time for several days they looked each other in the face.

  Then he blushed, until his face grew quite shiny. He laughed; the laugh fluttered and trembled all over his face. The moment was a long one and in its confusion he forgot to turn to the balcony, to the row of dark suits, and the steel-rimmed spectacles which were just beginning to glint in the first sunshine of that day.

  Then he was gone.

  Rose was ridiculously gratified. At first she could not tell why, except that Tadeusz had not looked at the row of Party bigwigs but at her instead. Then she knew it was because she had got through to him at last.

  The sun was really shining now and all around people were smiling and nudging each other into attention.

  From a window one floor above the balcony and invisible to its load of occupants, a small man had set out to grapple with the recalcitrant image of Lenin. There was a rope around his waist and the heavy brown façade of the nineteenth-century German building afforded him plenty of holds. Above him the great banner, free of its guy ropes, swooped backwards and forwards on the wind. His hand flew out, like a white star on the dark brickwork, seized one of the flying ropes and hauled it in. Mouths were open in the crowd and nobody spoke. The march past of children continued but now only the most devoted parents were watching it. With the finicky attentiveness of an ant selecting and trundling a fragment of twig, the man tied the rope tightly down on to the front of the building. At length he looked down, expecting some silent evidence of praise from the face upturned beneath him. Above, the banner hung motionless. From where he was, he could not see that it was the wrong way out: beside Marx and Gomulka hung a blank sheet, where Vladimir Ilyich had finally turned his face to the wall.

  The crowd enjoyed this very quietly. But, as the last contingents of children gave way to the first deputations from the University, militiamen began signalling to the little man on the window-sill. The officials on the balcony, disquieted by all the attention they had seemed to be receiving, began squinnying upwards into the sunlight. Even the professors and students broke step to watch what was going on. One of their number, however, was determined to pretend that nothing odd was happening. At exactly the correct moment Witek’s head turned rigidly towards the building and then forward again. Witek did not see Rose at all.

  A minute later, in the contingent from the Faculty of History, Rose saw the tall striding figure of Krysia Kazimierska, and this seemed the final evidence of fear, of the naked power still generated by the drab group on the balcony.

  As soon as the parade was finished, the onlookers flooded out over the streets and began hurrying home. Tadeusz made his way back against the crowd to fetch Rose but, when he reached the place where she had stood all morning, he found her gone.

  Rose walked to the tram stop and then took fright at the rush of shoving, short-tempered people. She remembered that Tadeusz had promised to come back for her but now it was too late to look for him. Frustrated, she decided to wait until the trams were emptier, and to sit down for a while and think.

  But as people do who intend to go away and think, she soon gave herself up to exorbitant fantasy. From this morning she had already made up her mind that, while other people including Adam were venal time-servers, Witek actually enjoyed the world he inhabited. That it was ultimately terrifying she knew from seeing Mrs Kazimierska marching by. And above all she believed that Tadeusz’s blushes meant that now he was properly humiliated by it
, and must be rescued, which was what she was going to do. These thoughts took perhaps the minute or two in which she was looking for a seat on one of the park benches. Once she sat down she was off dreaming about having Tadeusz in London with her. Having Tadeusz was a compensation for the loss of Adam.

  An hour later she arrived home. She let herself quietly into the hallway, because there was nearly always work in progress somewhere in the flat. Now, though, there was the sound of violent quarrelling, breathing silence, then sobbing. She stood for a moment wondering what to do.

  Then she decided to go in. It would give Witek and Janet a rest: they usually desisted in her presence. She opened the door.

  Janet had her back turned. Witek was sitting on one of the divans: it was he who was weeping.

  He saw Rose first, and rushed at her. ‘There she is!’

  Chapter Thirty-four

  At first everything was confusion and shouting.

  Rose sat down. ‘Please, please tell me what has happened.’ Witek was in full cry and could not easily be brought back to the beginning. ‘She says, Tell me what’s happened!’ He stood over her. ‘You tell me nothing at all. Why did you come here? I think you came here to Poland because of love. I forget that you English do not love your families at all. Yes, I can tell that the minute I meet your family at Barnham. It is all cold and unhappy. You do not love each other at all.’

  For a time the sisters were too scorched by this to speak.

  ‘You English go away to find – to found colonies because you do not love each other at all.’

  Rose was frightened now. As soon as there was no possibility of thinking him ridiculous, all her English resources would be gone. ‘Please, please, what has happened?’