Heart and Soul (19 page)

“I can't remember—it was all long ago.” He was very uneasy now. It was so strange to see him like this. Always it had been Ania who had been apprehensive—but not tonight.

She worked late. No dancing but nonstop serving and waiting on tables. Then she put on her jacket and began to walk home. Marek ran after her.

“Is something wrong, Ania? You have been very strange tonight,” he asked.

“No.” She continued walking.

“I mean, you know the situation. We are into Oliwia's father for so much money, you and I can't make any move at this stage. And of course little Katarina is getting older and sees things, so she can't be around the café so much, which means I have to be up at the house more. But you know all that.”

“Yes.” Ania didn't break her stride.

“And you do realize that I love you and only you?”

“Sure.”

“So what's all the attitude about?”

“Go back, Marek. Back to the café. Julita will wonder what has happened to you.”

“Julita?” He stopped as if shot. “You mean Oliwia.”

“No. I mean Julita; she will be in a good mood because she has a lovely vase of flowers, but she will wonder why you are not coming upstairs to see her.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” he blustered.

“Good-bye, Marek.”

“What does this mean?” He was starting to look defeated.

“What it says. Good-bye.”

“You are leaving the café.”

“I have left.”

“But you can't do that. What about your wages …and …everything …”

“I have taken my wages from the till. I left a note.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don't know.”

“You'll get over this—it's a silly fit. It's nothing.”

“No, I won't.”

“You got over my marrying Oliwia. You came back to my bed after that.”

“I know. Wasn't it extraordinary?” Ania said.

They were nearly at her house now and he realized he wasn't going to get any further tonight. “Tomorrow, when all is calm, we will talk. There is a phrase, ‘Morning is wiser than night.’ Perhaps it's right.”

“Yes, perhaps.”

“See you tomorrow, Ania.”

“Good-bye, Marek.”

She did not close her eyes that night, which was just as well, since there was a lot to be done. She finished a great mound of her mother's sewing work and left the garments neatly ironed, folded with labels on each one. Then she sat down and wrote a long letter to her mother. Once she got the first few lines, it was easy to write.

Then it was simple. In fact, Ania wondered why she had never told her before. She packed a suitcase to take with her and placed the rest of her clothes in a cardboard box in case they would be of any use to her sisters. She left the green jacket on top, the one her mother had trimmed with velvet. The outfit she had worn when she met Marek.

She left the pink-and-white enamel pin, the one that she had bought to hold his attention, in a little box for her mother. Just before dawn she brought her mother breakfast in bed. Warm bread and honey and milky coffee.

Mamusia sat up in bed, delighted.

“It's not my birthday, Ania. Why did you do this?”

“I have to catch the early bus, Mamusia. Take your time getting up. Everything's done downstairs.”

“You are the best daughter in the world.”

“Go back to sleep, Mamusia.”

“See you this evening, little Ania.”

“Good-bye, Mamusia,” she said.

She had tidied and emptied her bedroom, and left the envelope of her savings on the kitchen table for Mamusia to find. She looked around the house for the last time and pulled the door closed after her.

From the next town she took a train to the city and a plane to Dublin; she had hardly any money left when she arrived. She owed it all to Mamusia, who would now have to face life without her. She, Ania, would start saving all over again.

This was a rich, rich country with jobs everywhere. Lidia had been pleased when Ania telephoned that morning and had given her an address to go to. Her apartment was upstairs over a Polish restaurant and Ania would arrive late in the evening. If Lidia wasn't there, Ania could wait downstairs and have a coffee. Lidia would tell them she was coming.

Sitting in the bus leaving the Dublin airport, she looked open-mouthed at all the huge motorways, all the new buildings, the tall craggy cranes reaching up into the sky. As they drew nearer the city center, she saw big houses, apartment blocks and buildings all lit up in the night sky. There were hundreds of young people moving
around the wide streets and elegant squares. Had she arrived on a festival day or during a carnival?

She showed the handwritten address to people, and they waved her in the right direction. Soon she was in the Polish restaurant having a bowl of soup and talking to the friendly people who worked there.

Lidia would be back soon, they said. She worked in several bars and restaurants; they did not know which one it was tonight. And then Lidia came in and there were hugs and tears and the people who owned the restaurant offered them some plum brandy.

“Where are you going to work, Ania?” one of the waiters asked her.

“I don't know yet—I still feel I am in Poland.” She smiled.

“Maybe you could wash and iron our clothes here!”

“Oh, I would be very happy—”

“She would be very happy to see you well dressed and smart,” Lidia finished for Ania before she could agree to do their laundry for them.

“But why won't you come to work for us? Both of you?” the man said with a huge smile.

“Because if we had wanted to work for Polish no-hopers who drink a bucket of beer each a night, then we wouldn't have come all this way. Plenty of those back home,” said Lidia cheerfully and she propelled Ania upstairs.

The apartment was small and poky. They had a tiny bedroom each.

“You didn't get a flatmate?” Ania asked in admiration.

“No …”

“You knew I'd come eventually?”

“When you were ready,” Lidia said.

It wasn't hard to get work in Dublin if you were prepared to clean floors, wash dishes, look after old people or stack shelves. But Ania's English was not good.

“Don't go where there are a lot of other Polish. You'll never learn English if you do that,” Lidia warned.

“Maybe I could go to an agency?”

“No, then you meet other immigrants all day, and the agency takes most of the money in any case. All we will do is ask around. They won't take you in a pub—not until you can work out what's a half one, a half and half, a black and tan—you could write a whole dictionary on the names of drinks,” Lidia said.

“And thank you for not asking questions, Lidia.”

“I'll hear eventually,” Lidia said.

Every week Ania wrote to her mother. She asked for news about Mamusia's health and about the baby nephew. She asked how Mrs. Zak was and if the uniforms for Lev's ice cream factory were going well. She never mentioned the Bridge Café and its occupants. She told stories about Dublin—the wealth all around, the beautiful clothes, the handbags in stores costing a fortune, the young people who had cars that they parked at school and university. It was like the movies, it was just like Hollywood, she said over and over.

She got letters back that made her homesick even though her mother never mentioned Marek, and the occasional postcard from her sisters. She often longed to be in a small place where she would know everybody who passed by.

She got a short letter from her sister-in-law, Zofia.

And for the first few weeks it was indeed a strange land.

Ania cleaned offices early in the morning: it meant getting up at four a.m. She also worked at a hairdresser's, washing the towels and sweeping up the floor. But these were just filling-in jobs when someone was on holiday or off sick. She had yet to get a job of her very own. She longed to approach a dressmaker or even a dry cleaner's and offer to do mending and alterations, but her English was still very poor. Who would want to pay someone who could only say, “Please? Sorry? What did you say?”

She studied hard with a phrase book and went to English classes in a church center. There she met Father Flynn and made curtains for his club. She never missed Sunday Mass.

Naturally she agreed to do the ironing for the people who ran the restaurant downstairs.

Lidia shook her head. “They will just use you. They have no money themselves; they won't pay you …”

But they paid her in meals, so she was never hungry and she kept the euros she earned in a box under her bed.

Now she had this really wonderful job in the heart clinic. Once there, she had come on amazingly. She was a person of authority now, a member of the team. She had new friends who all helped her to speak English. She begged them to correct her if she got a word wrong, for how else would she learn? And Clara had taken her out to a restaurant for lunch the very first day and many times since then. She had become a friend of the nurses, Fiona and Barbara, and went to the cinema with them from time to time. Dr. Declans mother had got Ania some hours working in her launderette. Poor Hilary, who had lost her mother so tragically, was also a friend. Ania had helped her carry bag after bag of her late mother's clothes to charity shops. Hilary had a warm, friendly son called Nick, who was a great support to her; week by week she seemed to grow a little stronger.

She told Ania that she was a peaceable person to have around the house.

“Peaceable!” Ania repeated the word a few times.

“Don't mind me—I will only teach you mad English.”

“I like this
word peaceable,”
Ania said. “It's what I would like to be.”

And soon the letters Ania wrote to her mother were more about people than about the great wealth and glitter of a capital city. She was no more on the outside looking in; she was part of it all now. She wrote how she had helped Judy Murphy to wash her funny Jack Russell dogs, how she had met a great Polish priest called Father Tomasz, who had invited them all to have a picnic at a shrine to St. Ann in Rossmore. She wrote about Dr. Declan and his terrible accident and how he was now back at work again.

She mentioned a very nice man called Carl, who was the son of one of the patients at the clinic. He was giving her English lessons and teaching her about Ireland at the same time. Carl was a real teacher in a real school and he had taken her to see a Nativity play up there. Wasn't it amazing that all over the world children told the story of Baby Jesus in the same way?

“You might be even a little proud of me, Mamusia, if you saw me,” she wrote. “I have learned to hold my head up high and greet people and I am never without work. I am saving and in about a year I will come back to Poland and give you all I have saved.”

Mamusia wrote back saying that she was always proud of Ania and it had nothing to do with saving money. Ania should spend money on herself. Go to a theater, maybe, buy a nice outfit and a piece of jewelry—that's what Mamusia would really like for her daughter.

And as Ireland became more and more real to Ania, Poland began to fade away. Apart from Mamusia's letters, the chat in the restaurant downstairs and the girls she met at the church center, she did not think or talk in Polish anymore. In fact she told Lidia proudly that she even dreamed in English now. Which made it such a huge shock the night she came back home late and discovered Marek in the restaurant.

Waiting for her.

She was tired. It had been a long evening and there hadn't been as many customers where she was working, which resulted in even fewer tips. She had been thinking of taking a sandwich and a big milky coffee up to bed.

This was absolutely not what she wanted, her first confrontation with Marek after all this time.

“What a surprise!” she said in English.

He replied in Polish. “How good it is to see you again. Oh, Ania, I've longed for this moment.”

“Yes,” she said, still in English, “yes, I'm sure you must have longed for it.”

He gave in and spoke in English too. “And tell me—do you feel the same?”

“I feel tired, Marek. That's all.”

“Are you not pleased to see me?” He couldn't bring himself to believe the coolness of her response.

“Oh, everyone is always pleased to see you, Marek. Oliwia, yes, and Julita?”

“Julita is not around anymore.”

“I am sure she has been replaced,” Ania said bitterly.

“You know there was never anyone but you.”

Ania smiled a tired smile. “Oh, I know that,” she agreed. “Where did Julita go?”

“I was sure that busybody Lidia told you all about the whole business, what happened at the café.”

“No. Lidia and I never talk about the café,” she said simply.

“As if I believed that…” he said.

“Go home to your wife, Marek.”

“No, Oliwia is not around either. There was a lot of trouble. Her father got to hear about things. He was very angry.”

“That is sad, but it has nothing to do with me,” Ania said.

“It has. I want to start again. All over, from the beginning.” He had a yearning look in his face.

“Are you mad?” she asked.

“Well, you did come back to my bed after I married Oliwia,” he said, aggrieved at her reaction.

“Yes, I did, and I have no idea why. It's a mystery to me. It's I who was mad at that time.”