Tailor of Inverness, The (14 page)

A few days after our arrival, we set off for Augustow and old Aunt Aniela. Our 370km journey took us across the watery flatlands of the Vistula delta and into Warmia and Mazuria. Most of the ground we covered lay in the German territory of East Prussia in 1939. We skirted the small cities of Elblag (once Elbing) and Olsztyn (Allenstein). We stopped for lunch by one of the many hundreds of lakes in this region. Not far to our north, near the town of Ketrzyn, was the site of the Wolf’s Lair, the name given to the heavily bomb-proofed concrete complex which was Hitler’s home and headquarters for the best part of three years as his armies swarmed and swaggered into Russia, ground to a halt and defeat at Stalingrad, then retreated to their ultimate destruction.

During the afternoon, we passed swathes of forest where a storm had swept through a few days earlier with gusts of hurricane-force wind. The power and paths of these gusts was clearly marked by the jagged stumps of tall trees and their slaughtered bodies. Some lay next to the roadside, only recently cleared from the road itself. For 20 or 30 kilometres, we drove behind a large black Mercedes with smoked glass windows and Belarussian number plates. It was heavily loaded with
goods or people or both, we couldn’t tell. Its chassis sank towards the road as it beetled along bumpy tree-lined roads. It seemed sinister and mysterious, like the country it was returning to, still in thrall to a militaristic, Soviet-style dictator, a strange surviving remnant of the old regime.

Augustow is a pretty little market town surrounded by lakes and forest, a tourist resort full of smiling holidaymakers in summer. We found Aniela’s smart, modern three-storeyed house quite easily. It was an emotional reunion. We hadn’t seen each other for 12 years and during that time, both Adam and my father had died. Aniela lived on the top floor of the house where she had her own bathroom and kitchen. Below was her older sister Helena and her husband Julian. They greeted us warmly, Helena excited and voluble, though I understood only a little of her Polish, while Julian beamed.

Aniela had to make some final preparations for the dinner she was cooking and I needed to stretch my legs after the long drive, so Julian offered to take me for a walk along the nearby canal. The girls came with us. Julian was sprightly and neat, no doubt much slower and more careful now he was approaching eighty, but still light on his feet. We weren’t in a hurry. It had been a hot day, which was only just beginning to cool as dusk arrived. I was in the slightly dazed state of a man who has been driving for five hours. I was also beguiled by this new place, which was so close to places I’d often gazed at on maps: Belarus, Russia, Lithuania and Ukraine. As we sauntered along the canal bank, I noticed a figure slowly cross into our path. She walked about 50 metres ahead, matching our pace, a tall, statuesque woman with black hair and a long black skirt which hugged her hips. They swayed slowly as she walked. The sight of this woman attracted and disturbed me. She reminded me of the black Mercedes, sleek, forbidding, tantalising. She stayed ahead of us, maintaining the same distance for perhaps ten minutes until Julian announced it was
time to turn back for dinner. She kept on walking, my romantic embodiment of the East.

Her image swayed around in my head as we returned to the house for
pierogi, bigos
, vodka and an animated dialogue of reunion and family in Polish and sign language. Aniela urged me to eat and eat, piling seconds and thirds on to my plate until I had to almost physically restrain her from giving me any more. Virginia and the girls entered into the boisterous spirit of the occasion as we took our coffee and cake down to the garden and showed old and new family photographs to each other: party nights in Lesna during the ’70s and ’80s led by Adam the mischevious rogue, always with a twinkle in his eye, my father fully engaged, laughing and smiling, my mother in various attitudes of amusement, bemusement and quiet intoxication, her fun always tempered by her lack of Polish, and Aniela, who was always sober, watchful and reliable; our mountain walks in the Highlands and the girls with their grandparents in Islington and Inverness. Julian produced his harmonica and played old tunes which we hummed along to. We sang a few Scottish and Irish songs in return. Ruby and Iona picked ripe cherries from a tree in the garden as the low sun dazzled us then sank out of sight.

We stayed in Augustow for five days, swimming, sunbathing, boating and eating Aniela’s enormous meals. Helena would pant and wheeze her way up to Aniela’s floor carrying bowls full of yet more food, eager to contribute to the overwhelming hospitality. I was expected to eat the most, being the man, which was a relief for Virginia as she groaned at the thought of yet another
golabki
. Downstairs, Helena and Julian lived to the soundtrack of Radio Maria, the ultra-conservative Catholic radio station which poured out its daily diet of church services, hymn-singing, homilies, diatribes and phone-ins, at once serene and savage, where the sweet voices of newly-confirmed children would mix with those of ranting
homophobes, anti-semites and anti-abortionists.

We paid a visit to Augustow’s cemetery and Uncle Adam’s grave, a great slab of polished black marble. Aniela had already paid for her space beside him. We laid our flowers down, and a little metal lamp with orange glass, lit by a tealight, which we’d bought at the shop by the cemetery entrance. It was strange to me that Adam should be here, when I associated him with nowhere but Lesna. It seems that memory can have a permanence which the business of everyday life can never have.

On the only Saturday during our stay, we visited the weekly market in a square in the town centre. Here, there were stalls with fruit and vegetables, clothing, household goods and tools. There were rows of old men and women in scarves sitting on stools and wooden boxes with their produce laid on the ground or on little tables in front of them: jars of honey and
blueberries
; eggs, cheese and cakes; knitted socks and mittens; tomatoes, courgettes and cabbages; straw dollies and carved wooden boxes and horses. Some of these traders had come bearing the fruits of their farms and gardens from the nearby borderlands, from Belarus, Lithuania and the Russian enclave.

In one section of the market, there were a few traders sitting behind large tables which were covered in a chaotic multitude of bric-a-brac and antique items, large and small: watches, jewellery, carved animals, mirrors, candlesticks, coal scuttles, dolls. There was some post-war communist memorabilia: a toy Soyuz rocket, a framed picture of Stalin, Lenin lapel badges. My eyes widened as I noticed that on each table there were numerous items of militaria from the last war. They were from all sides, from the armies of Poland, the Soviet Union and Germany, but mainly Germany. Perhaps the Nazi stuff sold best. Little busts of Hitler, Nazi ashtrays, Iron Crosses, SS breastplates, flags, medals, caps, helmets, uniform jackets, bayonets, badges, mess tins, even the odd Luger. One of the
helmets had a hole shot through it. Paperwork from the Nazi occupation: identity cards, anti-partisan posters,
arbeitsbuchen
(workbooks).

There were faded armbands of the racially-defined forced labourers and prisoners, the
ostarbeiter
, the
untermenschen
: the red and white of the Poles, the blue and yellow of the Ukrainians, the blue and white of the Russians, the yellow armbands and stars of the Jews. Among all this ghoulish commerce, the most shocking items of all were
mezuzah
cases, the long decorative boxes containing the prayer
Shema Yisrael
, which are nailed to the doorposts of observant Jewish houses;
menorahs
, the seven- and nine-branched ceremonial candleabra for
Hannukah
and the Temple; and
tallitot
, the fringed, black and white Jewish prayer shawls.

The looted possessions of the murdered. What journeys had this plunder taken, how many hands had it passed through to arrive here? How many lives and stories were represented on these tables? Whose hands had torn these medals from the corpses of the soldiers who had owned them and had they bought the bread which meant life for the looter? Where was the house in whose window that
menorah
had been lit on a dark December evening as the family prepared the meal to celebrate the
Hannukah
holiday? Was it still standing? Who lived there now?

The tables themselves were an echo of the aftermath, a silenced battlefield of plunder from each constituency of its victims. Seeing it all laid out for us to buy seemed offensive to me, but was clearly quite normal to its sellers. This wasn’t a museum, these items weren’t mediated by the interpretation of historians and curators and glass cases. They were there to be bought and sold by profiteers, by those who wanted to rescue memory or by those who wanted to perpetuate myths, neo-fascists, anti-fascists, or just the mildly curious.

One day, I explained to Aniela, Helena and Julian that I
wanted to visit Podhajce and Gnilowody. Julian fetched a map of the region. We spread it out on the kitchen table and he drew the old Polish border to the east with his finger, the one which existed when he and my father were boys. ‘
To jest
Polska
’ he declared. ‘That is Poland.’ He pointed to a village near Lviv. ‘That is my home. Poland should have it all back.’ This playful, impish old man was suddenly fierce, angry. I recalled our visit to Lesna in 1990, eight months after the collapse of the DDR when, just 40 kilometres away at the Gorlitz/Zgorzelec border crossing, a group of Germans had staged a demonstration, demanding the return of Silesia.

Aniela had gone to her bedroom. She returned with an old envelope and a small black and white photograph. She handed me the photograph. ‘There is your father.’ I was surprised. I stared at the photograph, at first uncomprehending, trying to take in what it was telling me. Here was a picture of my father from 1940 or ’41, younger than I’d ever seen him, in an army uniform. There were seven soldiers in the picture, arranged in two small rows for the photographer. The photo appeared to have been taken in a rather run down, functional building, a barrack room or classroom perhaps, possibly a tent. The floor was sandy and a curtain covered the wall behind the group, probably put up as a temporary background for a morning of soldiers’ photos.

The group in the photograph is solemn. Seven young men, three seated on wooden chairs at the front with crossed legs all at the same angles. These three seem more assured than the four behind them. The one in the centre of the front row has stars on his lapels. He must be the senior one in this group. His right cheek is swollen. He must have had a tooth problem at the time. All seven of the young men are fair skinned, but tanned. They look like they’ve spent a lot of time outdoors. My father is at the back, on the right, taller than the others. Handsome and erect, he is staring at the camera. His look is
serious, possibly defiant, perhaps betraying a hint of fear. Like the others, save for the one seated at the centre, his uniform bears no insignia. As I studied the photograph, I could just make out a star on each of their caps.

A communist star. A communist star.

Soviet Army 1940, Mateusz is standing, far right

I didn’t understand. I turned to Aniela. ‘
Armia Sovietski?
’ ‘Soviet Army?’ She shrugged and nodded her head. I frowned and silently cursed my poor Polish once more, which prevented me from probing. I tried to make sense of this. How could he have come to wear a Soviet uniform? There seemed to be only two possible explanations: perhaps the Soviets had issued the Poles with these uniforms as a stopgap, as they re-formed in Kazakhstan after Stalin’s amnesty for Polish prisoners-of-war
was declared; or he had been in the Soviet Army. It had to be the former. He’d never been in the Soviet Army, he’d been a prisoner of the Soviets. It was all there, on the tapes.

Disturbed and confused, I took my eyes away from the photograph to look at the envelope Aniela had given me. It had come from the former Soviet Union, from newly-
independent
Ukraine. She pointed to the details of the sender. ‘
Twoj tato kuzyn
.’ ‘Your father’s cousin.’ I couldn’t read it as it was written in what I thought was Russian, in Cyrillic script. She wrote it out for me in Roman.
Bogdan Baldys, from Podhajce
.

‘Is he still alive?’

‘Yes. He’s still in Podhajce with his wife. That’s his address.’

On the day before we left, we hired two kayaks, put one daughter in the front of each and paddled along the meandering Czarna Hancza River for 25 kilometres. We had been driven to our departure point by the hire company and arranged a rendezvous time of 6pm that evening. It was a warm, muggy day. Hundreds of electric blue dragonflies hovered over the water and around our boats, the occasional one pausing to rest on Ruby’s hat or Iona’s knee as the girls sketched their surroundings, the fallen trees, fields and reedbeds we passed. On a little jetty among the reeds, an old lady appeared, calling to us to buy as we approached and extending a plateful of cakes over the water. We veered towards her, but overshot, the current carrying us away, our kayaking not expert enough to time our liaison with the tempting cakes. We craned our necks backwards to make our apology and she laughed and waved.