Spring Will Be Ours (6 page)

Anna giggled. ‘Yes, Tata.'

‘Good. And then we shall paddle our dear old
kajak
all the way through these lovely lakes, here … down to the river Zejmiana … here … and all the way on to the river Willa. It is particularly lovely countryside – we shall travel by river all the way to Wilno, and there we shall catch the train back to Warsaw.' His finger skimmed down winding tributaries, and brought them safely home. ‘By which time you will be fit! We shall paddle and swim and walk – you have both been disgracefully idle all summer.'

‘Yes, Tata.' Jerzy and Anna winked at each other, and then there was a rattle of cups from the corridor, and they looked up to see Teresa in the doorway with a tray of coffee.

‘Ah – thank you, my dear,' said Tata, and folded the map, nodding to them to pull back a chair for her and rise.

Last month, while Jerzy was camping with his Scout troop, and Anna with Guides, Tata and Teresa had had a little holiday by themselves. Anna didn't know why Teresa was not coming with them now, and she didn't like to ask, partly because she wasn't used to questioning any decision Tata made, and partly because she wouldn't want him to think she wanted her with them. She did not exactly dislike Teresa: she was simply, even after three years, an intrusion, and she tried too hard.

Tata still kept the photograph of their real mother on his desk in the surgery; there was another in their room, on the chest of drawers: Mama with Anna on her lap, Jerzy standing beside her, already, even at two, very dark and serious and still. Anna sometimes thought now that at fifteen he looked like the pictures of Slavic scholars she'd seen in an old book of Tata's – thin, with cropped hair, high cheekbones, wide-set eyes: when he was reading, or playing the piano, he was lost. Quite different from Andrzej, his best friend. Andrzej was big-boned, fair-haired, athletic, a bit of a daredevil. Anna liked him, but she was also shy of him: when he came to the apartment she smiled, and went off with her drawing book.

The photographs of her and Jerzy, as small children, with Mama and Tata, were everywhere, for so long so much a part of her life that they were in its background, like the stories Tata told them, of the days when Mama was alive. In the foreground were school, and Guides; her friends Natalia and Jadwiga; her drawing. Every now and then there moved in and out of her thoughts, like a wraith, her secret sense of … displacement, as if she were not quite whole, and therefore did not quite belong anywhere, even with her friends, even in the family. Most important in her life was Tata, to whom she had tried a few weeks ago to talk about this strange feeling. He had been writing notes in his surgery after his last patient had gone; she somehow found it easier to mention it when he was half-preoccupied.

‘Tata?' She sat on the leather couch, her legs swinging.

‘Mm-hm?'

‘I have this funny feeling sometimes …'

‘Mmm?' His pen moved across the page, his balding head bent low. He needed glasses.

‘Don't you need glasses, Tata?'

‘Possibly. I am trying to refer Pani Treszka to a consultant. What feeling?'

‘Oh, just … sometimes I feel as if there's a bit of me missing, that's all.'

‘Your head, perhaps?' He finished writing and turned the page over on to the blotting pad, smoothing it, looking across at her quizzically.

‘Oh, never mind.' She slid off the couch and went to stand beside him, her arm across his shoulders. ‘Is Pani Treszka very ill?'

‘No, but you know that I should not tell you if she were. One does not discuss one's patients with ignorant children.'

‘No, Tata.' She smiled and leaned against him, feeling utterly safe. ‘Perhaps I'll be a doctor one day – not quite so ignorant.' That was all she really wanted: to be as clever, and useful, as Tata – or Mama: she'd been a doctor, too.

‘What are you trying to tell me, darling?'

But the feeling of strangeness had melted; she patted Tata's balding head. ‘I can't remember.'

The front door banged: Jerzy was home from the
gimnazium
, secondary school; it was the start of the summer holidays. What did anything else matter?

He was calling from the corridor. ‘Tata?'

‘In here.' The surgery door opened, and he came in. They were together again.

And now the summer was almost over, and they would be together for two whole weeks. She looked at Jerzy rummaging through the clothes on his bed, stuffing shirts into his rucksack – hardly a Slavic scholar now.

‘Hopeless …' she said. ‘Let me.'

‘Thank you. I did ask.' He perched on the other end of the bed, watching her folding and stacking. ‘I suppose we'll need sweaters.'

‘Of course. Have you got a clean one?'

‘I think Teresa …' He swung off the bed, pulled out a drawer in the chest and a deep blue sweater from within it. ‘Yes, she did. Good for her.' He examined a sleeve. ‘Darned, too.'

Anna felt a twinge of guilt in her relief that Teresa was not coming. Then the door from the surgery into the apartment was opened, and Tata called out: ‘Is everyone ready?'

The wireless in the kitchen was turned off. ‘Almost,' called Teresa. ‘I'm just going to change.' They heard her coming out and saying something to Tata in a low voice; he did not answer, but they went into their bedroom and closed the door.

Jerzy looked at Anna and raised an eyebrow. ‘What's all that about?'

She shrugged. ‘I don't know.' She looked down at her cotton skirt and sandals. ‘Do you think I look respectable enough for Aunt Wiktoria?'

‘Don't ask me.' He looked at her critically. ‘You look fine – it's just the face that's the problem.'

She threw a shirt at him.

The door from Tata's and Teresa's room was opened.

‘Come on, you two,' called Tata, and Teresa hurried in. ‘All right? Are you packed? Anna, dear, do you think … should you wear a dress?'

The tram swung along the bridge across the gleaming Vistula. Ahead, the outlines of the buildings on the west bank were hazy in the heat: the medieval houses of the Old Town clustered near the Royal Palace; the nineteenth-century warehouses on the waterfront; in Napoleon Square, the sixteen-storey skyscraper, the only one in Warsaw, where the offices of the Prudential Insurance Company were housed. River-boats hooted beneath them; gulls wheeled in a cloudless sky. Over the bridge and through the Old Town, they caught another tram. It hummed past spacious parks and down broad avenues where on the orders of Mayor Starzyński trees had been planted all along the centre.

This was elegant Warsaw, the Warsaw where well-heeled families came in from the suburbs to shop for clothes, to spend the evenings in expensive restaurants and at the theatre; the Warsaw where the Polish intelligentsia browsed in the university libraries, and went to concerts, the opera, cabaret. In
^·
Z oliborz, the district in the north of the city, there were more parks, large villas stood in well-kept gardens, and new, low apartment blocks were bordered by trees. Many of the people Marszal-kowska lived in Z
^·
strolling down Jerozolimskie Avenue or oliborz.

There were other districts where you saw a different Warsaw. In Stare Miasto, the Old Town, pastel-painted, red-tiled medieval houses, tall and narrow, clustered along narrow streets and alleyways, overlooked cobbled squares. It was picturesque, parts of it were very fashionable, the pride of the city on the banks of the Vistula. But it was also densely populated, overpopulated, perhaps a hundred thousand people crammed into the few square miles, and many of the pretty houses, with their freezing attics and sprawling damp cellars, bred squalor and disease.

Bordering Stare Miasto was the ancient Jewish district, which stretched through the west of the city. Anna had hardly ever been into this foreign land, where cramped, overcrowded tenements housed enormous families of pale-faced Hassidic children. They ran out of the courtyards on to the long streets in ill-fitting shoes with flapping soles; their earlocks swung beneath their little caps and shaved heads. The little girls wore headscarves, and patched dresses. They called to each other in Yiddish and stared at the non-Jewish Poles who came into their district. Anna had been stared at, on the rare occasions she had gone through there with Tata or Teresa, in her nice cotton frock and neat plaits, and felt like a foreigner herself.

Tata had a few Jewish patients, but they weren't living here, they were professional, members of the Jewish intelligentsia. Most of his patients were well-to-do Poles, but he had always been available to see others not so fortunate, for nothing, or a token fee. In the days when he and Mama were first married, they'd lived and worked on this side of the river, and he still had families from those days for whom he was ‘our doctor'. He visited patients in Stare Miasto, and occasionally in the bleak, impoverished suburbs of Wola and Ochota, on the other side of the city, where some of the houses were no more than wooden shacks, and the roads unmade. He came home to Praga with stories of children the same age as Anna and Jerzy who were ill and undernourished, living in crowded, cold, damp rooms – ‘and don't ever forget how fortunate you are,' he told them. Anna worried sometimes that he would catch some awful illness on these visits, and die, like Mama, but she never said so.

It was hot in the tram. She gazed out of the window, watching people greet each other in the open-air cafés, and settle down under the long sunblinds for lunch, and she turned and saw Teresa looking at the dress-shop windows and wondered if she were going to be taken on a last-minute shopping expedition, later in the afternoon.
^·
The tram drew up at the intersection of Marszalkowska and Hoz a where Wiktoria lived, and they got off. A flower-seller stood on the pavement, buckets of carnations, tall scented stock and gypsophylla at her feet. The building behind her cast a deep cool shadow.

They stood for a moment, Teresa in her pale linen dress and jacket with her arm through Tata's, lightly, as he looked carefully over everything.

‘Carnations?' she suggested.

He smiled, half at the flower-seller. ‘That would be very nice.'

They walked up the long street, the pavements beneath the shops and high apartment houses black with shadow, the centre lit by the sun. Aunt Wiktoria's apartment was on the third floor of a block entered directly from the street through wrought-iron gates. They climbed the worn stone stairs and rang the bell.

‘You're panting, Tata,' said Jerzy as they waited.

‘Nonsense.' He straightened his tie and looked at them sternly.

‘Poor Tomasz,' said Teresa. ‘You work too hard.' She stretched up to brush something from his lapel; Anna looked away. Why was she always touching him?

Then the door was opened wide, and Aunt Wiktoria stood smiling at them all. ‘Come in! Come in! I was just caught on the telephone … are these for me? Beautiful, now let me just find a vase …'

She led them into the main room, which like their own doubled as dining and drawing room, and where the table was laid for lunch with silver, and linen napkins, the polished glasses winking in the sunlight. Anna flopped down on to the sofa; Jerzy went to look at the bookcase. There were newspapers on the table by the window; Anna watched her father cross over, pick up the one on the top and scan it quickly, holding it close.

‘You
do
need glasses, Tata.'

He didn't answer; she saw him and Teresa exchange a look and then he put the paper back on the pile, but turned over.

‘Here we are.' Wiktoria returned from the kitchen with the flowers in a vase, and put it on the table. ‘Thank you all so much. Now – I expect everyone is dying for a drink. Tomasz, perhaps you could …'

‘Of course.' Tata went to the sideboard and opened the bottle of vodka which stood there.

‘Jerzy, are you drinking now?' Wiktoria asked.

He turned from the bookshelves. ‘Please, Aunt.' He wandered over to the pile of newspapers, and picked up the one on the top.

‘And Anna?'

‘A little, please.'

‘Perhaps with water,' suggested Teresa, sitting in the armchair. ‘Jerzy, dear, come and sit down.'

Wiktoria was handing glasses.

‘
Na zdrowie
,' said Tata, raising his glass to her. ‘Cheers. Happy Saint's Day.'

‘
Na zdrowie
,' they all chorused, and Jerzy put the paper down again as Wiktoria nodded, smiling. She was a tall, big-boned woman, with dark hair and horn-rimmed spectacles which hung on a chain round her neck. Their severity, when she wore them, was quite belied by the eyes behind: she seemed to Anna always to be laughing or smiling, although when they were children she had taken no nonsense from them. She had never married; Anna didn't know why, and it didn't seem important: she was secretary to one of the professors in the University Medical Faculty where Tata and Mama had trained, and had more friends than anyone else they knew. Anna reached into her satchel for the drawing she'd done for her, and pulled it out just as Jerzy asked abruptly:

‘Is there going to be a war?'

The question, and the silence which answered it, seemed to fill every corner of the sunlit room.

‘Is there?' said Jerzy.

‘It is possible,' said Tata slowly.

Anna stared at him. All through the summer there had been talk on the wireless about Germany, and the Nazi Party, and Danzig, but she hadn't really listened, and Tata and Teresa hadn't seemed to pay much attention. She didn't usually see the newspapers, they went straight into the surgery; perhaps the one this morning hadn't come, or Tata hadn't had time to look at it. But Teresa had been listening to the wireless … was that why they had shut their bedroom door? What did Danzig matter? She knew, without knowing why, that it was important, like Wilno, where they were going on holiday … They were going on holiday! How could there be a war?