The Ice Saints Read online

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Serious?’

  ‘We don’t know yet. He’s had a fall. He’s got concussion and they’ve taken him to hospital. Witek’s putting a call through to the hospital now.’

  Rose made lines with a fork on the tablecloth. Would they accuse her of communicating a disease of clumsiness which causes people to fall off mountains?

  When Witek at length came back to the supper table, his normal manner, of heavy politeness, had quite gone. He looked solid and blunt and might never have had an ambition in his life. Still, out of civility to Rose, he spoke in English.

  ‘I have a colleague who has a motor-cycle. I think he will drive me there tonight.’

  ‘Is it very bad?’ Rose asked.

  The Rudowskis turned to her as though this curiosity from a bystander occasioned them some surprise. Rose felt her- self slipping out of their lives at last.

  ‘It’s concussion and his leg is perhaps broken. Nothing else.’

  ‘Thank God.’ But they made Rose feel it was not her business to say this.

  While Witek telephoned his colleague, Rose began putting the supper things together. Obviously they were not going to be eating any more. She was herself afflicted by nervous pangs of hunger and, once through the kitchen door, she quickly devoured some slices of sausage and licked her fingers. Tadeusz’s bed, flat and empty with the blankets folded up, accused her of callousness but she was unconvinced. Did she feel so detached because she was seldom quite sure what was going on? Or because Tadeusz falling off a mountain came too late in a long progression of shocks and portents and disequilibria?

  Outside in the twilight they found Witek’s colleague: another small and solid man.

  After handshakes and farewells, the motor-cycle roared and spluttered off towards the main road. There was a hint of wartime in this bleak departure, and in the image of the two men on the little machine pitting themselves against all that distance. It was also a very Polish image: only human beings, loved or hated, could give meaning to the bare landscape and the looming approach of night.

  Janet took Rose’s arm. ‘I do hope he’ll be all right.’

  ‘I’m sure the hospital is looking after him.’

  ‘No, I mean Witek.’

  ‘What could go wrong with him?’

  ‘Oh, it’s dark, and a long way, and at night it’s dangerous, there are drunk peasants lurching all over the roads.’ They walked slowly back to the door of the building. ‘If only we had a car! God, why is life so hard? Why?’

  Rose, who for the first time wanted to cry, squeezed her arm. ‘Let’s do some work. I’m sure it’s the only thing.’

  Janet dictated translations of two articles on plant disease and her sister took them down in shorthand. They spent a good deal of time leafing through a technical dictionary whose accuracy they did not trust, and checking it with the Shorter Oxford. When Rose had typed out the articles there were so many further corrections to be made that she had to do them again. They were working to fill in time and yet, despite a nagging anxiety, felt comfortable and easy together in a way they had not experienced till now. It was nearly midnight when they finished. Both were exhausted. The telephone rang while Rose was in the kitchen making tea. When Janet had replaced the receiver she came through to the kitchen.

  ‘Tadeusz is all right. He’s quite conscious and talking. Poor old Witek sounds in a terrible state though. He’s starting back now as he has early classes tomorrow. I suppose he’ll get here some time in the small hours.’

  *

  Rose, who was sitting up in bed with her face still swelled with sleep, was trying to discover what was going on. It was half past five in the morning. Witek was shouting. It was a noise that had been going on for some time, but she had woken into the middle of it.

  Perhaps this time he had become insane.

  For Rose’s sake, he tried to curse in English, but contact with Janet had provided him with no word much stronger than ‘beastly’. He went back to Polish. There too words failed him; he knew no distinction between sincerity and violence. When you really meant anything, you broke things. He now destroyed two folk art vases and tore up a square of peasant weave. They did not much matter, but Rose was shocked and frightened; she had the wincing, English respect for property.

  In retreat, she put her head under the pillow and stayed there, glad that Witek had no sense of the ridiculous and hoping that, when she returned to the light, everything would somehow have changed.

  Janet had disappeared, Witek sat at the table, weeping. He was still in his plastic raincoat, and the dust of the country roads shadowed his eye-sockets and ran down in dark trickles with his tears. He stared out on to a prospect of misery, a man endlessly betrayed by his women.

  Rose emerged from under her pillow, dishevelled, with hair all over a hot face, and asked: ‘What am I supposed to have done now?’

  ‘You tried to steal my son from me, that is all. He heard you tell Janet about it. All the time you plan to deceive me, from the very beginning. You make him fond of you so that he is frightened to tell me. He tried to kill himself in the mountains because he could not think of any way to get away from you. He walked and walked and hoped he would die. But they were finding him in time.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This is true and all the other things too.’

  It was no use telling him that the plans had been Janet’s; after all, she had not told Janet of Witek’s blundering passes at her. Peace must come now, with the causes of war undecided, with everything important unsaid. Meanwhile she listened to Witek’s wild cry, the cry of a man always excluded from the possibilities of life.

  ‘Why did you work against me, Rose? Why am I always so disgusting and dismissed and dishonourable? I am doing the best for my son. Rose, this is a terrible world we are in here, and you come – you come from Kensington and you try to ruin everything.’ He stopped. In a silence he said: ‘You ruin my poor life.’

  And so she had it at last, if she wanted it: the stiletto thrust of her victory – his admission that he hated his life. It was what she had shamelessly worked for, and it was now quite useless to her. The end was here, now. She did not speak.

  Janet came out of the kitchen. Rose watched her with a sudden imploring sympathy.

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ Janet said briskly. ‘I shall be all right. Just leave here as soon as possible. That’s all I want now.’

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  To and fro the train rattled on ill-found sleepers. Alternately Rose felt the upholstered right haunch of the woman on her left, the upholstered left haunch of the man on her right. First they had gazed at her luggage with suspicion, then settled down into fat silence, members of a potato-eating race well adapted to the unending discomfort of train journeys.

  The train was slowly proceeding through a marshy landscape near the remains of a prehistoric lake village. From time to time its whistle gave out a ringing, lacustrine cry, the sort of cry that wild fauna might have emitted across these Tennysonian meres on every rainy afternoon since the Ice Age. Rain spat again and again on the windows. Today was one of the chill weeping days in the early part of May, the days of the Ice Saints, St Pancras, St Servace and St Boniface, whose arrival affords a reminder that all is by no means well with the year. If you had confidence in the spring, your trust was misplaced: it will let you down. And if you are a pessimist you can give the satisfied snort of those whose worst fears are justified, and continue toting the burden of existence a little farther on.

  For Rose, who looked forward to nothing at all, the day remained abysmally sad. She was returning to London. God must come and blast the inhabitants of Beauchamp Place, and frizzle up those on the pavements outside Harrods. Only then, surely, could He bring about a balance of the world’s pain.

  The carriage was darkened by someone standing in the doorway.

  ‘Please, you remember me?’

  At the first words of a foreign language the faces of the other
passengers stiffened: they were no longer present. To Rose the question sounded oddly humble. Here was someone who knew her yet did not know how far down the bill she had actually gone. He was a tall young man wearing a beret, and a black sweater which was hidden under another of those smelly plastic raincoats.

  ‘Of course I remember you!’ But the puzzle in her voice told him clearly that she had forgotten his name.

  ‘Miroslaw Sypniewski.’

  ‘Mirek, of course.’

  She surprised him by getting to her feet at once. Half-stumbling across her neighbour’s plump legs, she arrived beside Mirek in the corridor, like a swimmer grabbing the boat’s edge.

  ‘You remember the evening at the Students’ Club?’

  ‘Of course I remember. You were very sad.’

  He laughed. ‘Where are you travelling now?’

  ‘To Warsaw.’

  ‘You are staying with friends?’

  ‘No, I’m going home.’

  And so he looked sad again. ‘I think you are pleased,’ he said though her voice had given him no cause to think this.

  ‘No, I’m not. Everything has gone wrong, you see, and I had hoped for so much.’

  ‘In this country we must be very careful with hope.’

  ‘I know.’

  A station drew up outside the window. Loud-speakers were playing elderly cheerful music but inside the train it was quiet.

  ‘What happened to Derek?’ Rose asked suddenly.

  ‘He has left. But his girl has not yet got the English visa. She is waiting in Biala Gora. I think there is some difficulty.’

  ‘There might easily be. What’s she like really?’

  He shrugged. ‘She is the first Polish girl Derek is getting to know. For him perhaps it is different. But it is a pity, I think.’

  She liked him for his sympathy. He was a really kind man. Of course Loasby had distrusted him, but even now, after everything else that had happened to her, she was certain that Loasby was wrong. She watched Mirek’s tall body swaying to and fro in front of her and felt a curious sensation of peace. He had been appointed to lead her out of this wilderness and into the sane world.

  ‘I can understand about Derek. One feels, if one had started with different people, everything would have turned out differently. One might have discovered something.’

  Mirek looked at her ruminatively. ‘I’m afraid you don’t have a very good impression.’

  ‘I do, really.’

  ‘Not really, I’m afraid.’ He laughed. ‘When is your aero- plane?’

  ‘This afternoon. At four o’clock. The LOT plane.’

  ‘I may take you to the airport?’

  ‘Oh, please do.’

  The train started again. As they approached the Warsaw area, the sandy earth along the track began breaking out with the spiked vegetation of the seashore. Though Poland is in the heart of Europe, much of it looks as though it were near the edge of the sea. Rose and Mirek stood talking in the corridor; in his presence there was never any sense of strain. He bought her a scorching glass of tea. When the ticket collector came round, he was obliged to pay extra.

  ‘Why do they make you do that? I thought you were a student and paid half fare anyway.’

  ‘It is nothing. It is not important.’ He seemed embarrassed.

  Later she saw that he had been given a new ticket. She realized then that he had intended getting off at the last station. Now, for her sake, he was coming on to Warsaw, even though, after today, he would not be seeing her again. Because he had been in prison, he could never leave Poland. His kindness was like a small bunch of roses at the end of an arduous journey.

  *

  Two hours later they were in the airport shed.

  Around them stood the strangely clad members of an excursion of American Poles, escorted by their own priest. All of them had the shiny coarseness given by a generation or two in the Middle West, but under this they kept a look of their forebears, of people like Witek, for instance, or of the passengers in the train. None of them looked at all like Mirek. He and Rose stood apart, without talking. A whole cloud of possible emotions made them distrust speech.

  The tourists spoke a mixture of Polish and American. Now and then while they talked, they slapped at their chests and sides as though stabbed by pain. There the hand felt the limp oblong and was reassured. Then a doubt; might it after all be only a forgotten wallet or a neglected letter? And so they fished out the olive-green passport and stared at it for a moment, as intently as in a mirror; it was their reality. Their faces lost anxiety and they looked as though they had just been kissed.

  The sight of these people, the strident result of so much that is both desired and detested, had finally driven Rose and Mirek speechless; there was so little to say and so much to explain. At last a stewardess shepherded the excursion through into the customs. Rose kissed Mirek quickly, and followed.

  By the gate on to the airfield there was almost a stampede: elbows thrusting, feet stamping, silence and laboured breath, as the visitors fought once more to escape from the soil of their ancestors.

  Again Rose stayed till last.

  Looking back, she saw Mirek standing in his pale raincoat behind a wire fence, and beyond him a whole landscape waiting for explanation.

  We hope you enjoyed this book!

  More classics from Apollo:

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  For more information, click the following links

  Author’s Note

  About Frank Tuohy

  About the Introducer

  Endpapers

  About the cover and endpapers

  More from Apollo

  About Apollo

  Author’s Note

  For obvious reasons it is important to state that all the people and incidents in this novel are imaginary.

  About Frank Tuohy

  JOHN FRANCIS TUOHY (1925–1999) was a novelist and short story writer. After studying Moral Sciences and English Literature at King’s College, Cambridge, he worked for the British Council in a number of academic posts abroad including Finland, Brazil, Argentina and Portugal. It was his posting in Kraków, Poland, that provided the inspiration for The Ice Saints, his third novel, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Winning plaudits from C.P. Snow and Muriel Spark, Tuohy’s work was favourably compared with Chekhov and acclaimed for its exploration of Englishness.

  About the Introducer

  NEAL ASCHERSON is a Scottish journalist and writer. He read history at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was taught by Eric Hobsbawn who later described Ascherson as ‘perhaps the most brilliant student I ever had. I didn’t really teach him much, I just let him get on with it’. For his National Service he was posted to Malaya with the Royal Marines. He graduated with a triple-starred first but declined offers to pursue an academic career. Instead he chose a career in journalism, reporting from Asia, Africa and Central Europe for the Guardian, the Scotsman, the Observer and the Independent on Sunday. He has written and lectured widely on Polish and Eastern Europe affairs and contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He is Visiting Professor at the Institute of Archaeology at UCL and is editor of the journal Public Archaeology. His books include Black Sea, Games with Shadows and The Polish August. His first novel, The Death of the Fronsac, will be published later this year.

  Endpapers

  About the cover and endpapers

  WALDEMAR ŚWIERZY (1931–2013), Poster advertising the film ‘Villa Borghese’, c. 1950. Colour lithograph. In Communist-era Poland, US publicity material was banned, which led to a wonderfully diverse range of Polish-designed movie posters. Waldemar Świerzy was a Polish graphic artist, known for his book jacket, poster, record sleeve and postage stamp designs. He used a variety of techniques across his career, frequently mirroring Polish social history through a myriad of sty
les: folk art from the 50s, pop art from the 60s, portraits from the 70s, and TV images from the 80s. One of the founders of the Polish school of posters in the 1960s and 1970s, Świerzy created over 2,500 posters through his career.

  © Waldemar Świerzy / DaTo Images / Bridgeman Images

  More from Apollo

  Find out more

  APOLLO LIBRARY

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Visit Apollo now

  About Apollo

  The Apollo list reflects in various ways the extremity of our time, and the ways in which novelists responded to the vertiginous changes that the world went through as the great empires declined, relations between men and women were transformed and formerly subject peoples found their voice.