The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel Page 2

  She slid the key into the lock. It wouldn’t go. She pushed it harder until it clicked and then she turned it. The world blew up. Something slugged her body, knocking her sideways down the steps. A sound which began as a deafening crack, the sky splitting, swelled into an insufferable roar which made her clutch her head; she felt the stone house above her heave and dance. Dust filled her mouth, and even with eyes shut, she sensed things flying back and forth, skittering and smashing.

  The sound died into echoes rumbling off distant hills. Jackie spat out dust. Then she tried to stand up, but her legs wouldn’t hold her and she sat back on the step. A coping stone floated down to the pavement in front of her and silently flew in pieces. She thought vaguely: here’s what I should do, and pulled open the cardboard gas mask case, but her fingers were shaking so much that the floppy mask slid out of her hands. She forgot about it. There was a loud singing in her ears. Was this the punishment?

  After some while, she managed to get up. Union Street was twinkly with broken glass, the smooth pavements hidden by tree branches, dustbin lids, fragments of wood and stone. Bits of paper were drifting to the ground. People were coming out of their doors, running and calling words she couldn’t hear.

  She looked up at her house. The main door was wide open, swinging. The downstairs window was smashed, and little darts of glass were still falling from somewhere upstairs. A man in a blue uniform with a brown steel helmet was standing in front of her shouting. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he looked very angry with her.

  When he pointed at the house and grabbed her arm, she tried to say: ‘I never meant it, I didn’t know.’ But perhaps the words didn’t come out aloud. The angry man dragged her towards him. She broke away and started to run down Union Street, her good shoes stumbling on the debris. She ran across Ardgowan Square and past the Tontine Hotel, where a crowd of officers in all kinds of uniform had swarmed out of the bar on to the pavement. Several of them shouted at her, but she kept running. Near Nelson Street, she tripped and cut her knee, blood mixing with the dust on her leg.

  More and more bewildered people were gathering and standing in her way. An old man came out of a close and said: ‘Poor lassie, come in the hoose till I sort your knee.’ He put out a hand. She smacked his fingers away and ran on.

  *

  What Jackie was doing was what I had always done. I kept running for so many years, starting when I was a child, an only child like Jackie, in Poland. My mother constantly – my father only regularly – used to tell me that you can’t run away from difficulty or from bad deeds or half-finished decisions. They will travel with you, they said, and climb through the window to be with you wherever you go. But I believe exactly the opposite. The train begins to move, the abyss between the ship and the quay suddenly gleams, the undercarriage thumps into the wings of the climbing aircraft, and there begins a solo wheels-up party for the escaper. The baggage, unlabelled and unclaimed, remains behind. Somebody will eventually loot it, pressing their face into those beautiful but well-worn shirts. Let them.

  So I am an escapologist, and a proselytising one. This Scotland is supposed to be a Protestant country, where people are taught that they can be born anew, sinless, clutching a white stone with a new name writ thereon. And yet it’s just these Scots who assume that they aren’t on the list for rebirth. Only a few know how to escape without a struggle or a lifetime of guilt.

  The others need to be taught. Just go! Don’t wait to tie up those loose ends, don’t spend years choosing which photograph or budgie cage to take and which to leave behind. Don’t waste time buttoning yourself into your conscience; don’t brood on how what’s coming is only what you deserve. The enemy have reached the bridge; they are just the other side of the wood; in five or ten minutes they will be here. You can still make it. Go!

  With me, the skill came early. I ran away from school when I was eleven, because I considered the reverend father-teachers stupid. Home was forty miles away, but I walked through the woods by day and in the evening took a ride on a peasant’s cart. Six years later, I ran back to the old city where the school was, because I couldn’t stand the hypocrisy – as I saw it then – of my father, pumping out cloudy left-wing opinions while being fed, waited on, dressed and driven by semi-literate servants whose own families lived like animals. In the city, where I consented to live in a small flat owned by my mother, I began to study law.

  The next escape was from a pretty, merry girl. I was alarmed to discover that my parents knew Wisia’s parents and thought that she would be good for me. But in spite of that, we became engaged. One summer afternoon in my flat, I persuaded her into the bedroom. She smiled a warm, hospitable smile as if I had asked her to cook me one of her special omelettes, and she let me undress her. I got into the bed. Then I saw her kneel down naked at the bedside, cross herself and mouth a little prayer to Mary for forgiveness.

  She jumped up, laughing happily and climbed into bed. But no, I had already escaped. No to that future, that closing trap! All lust had gone. I said that I was suddenly feeling ill. She dressed again, and – full of concern – went out to look for some cachets Faivres, the chic imported painkiller in those days. When I heard the main door bang downstairs, I kicked my way into my clothes, dropped some books, my razor and my diary into a bag, ran to the station and took the express train to Kraków.

  It was a year or so later that Germany and Russia, the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, together invaded my country. My country! Where is it now? When was it? Nowhere and not now. Of course there is a Poland again today, even a smart successful post-Communist one. But it is not the land I escaped from or, to be more honest, which I fled from and lost.

  I was brought up in the east, in a borderland which used to be called Volhynia. To me, a Poland which is nothing but Catholic, Polish-speaking Poles (without Ruthenians and, above all, without Jews) is not my country. That place which I remembered began to vanish when our Jews, in their poverty and prophetic dignity, were driven away to be slaughtered. A Fourth Partition once again tore the ‘Poland’ page out of the atlas, and my own eastern borderland was seized and swallowed by the Soviet Union. The Polish families in those lands were deported in cattle trains to the east, where some were murdered by Gulag guards and very many more died as slaves. Unknown to me, the deportations began while I sat day-dreaming by my Clydeside window.

  My parents were small aristocrats – petty nobility, bonnet lairds – with liberal ideas. They became isolated from their peers because my father became noisily anti-clerical, entertained divorced couples as house guests, had ostentatiously many Jewish friends and advocated radical land reform. None of that helped my mother and father when the days of doom arrived.

  I went to see them in my army uniform a few weeks into the war, in mid-September 1939. They repeated absurdities they had heard on the radio, for instance that six hundred British aircraft had arrived to defend Warsaw. I told them to get out fast, before the Germans arrived. They said there was no petrol. I said that I could go to the nearest army unit and get them enough petrol to reach Kraków. They pretended not to understand me, and fetched up a bottle of French wine in my honour. I became angry, to a degree I find hard to explain, and shouted that they must bury all alcohol, or the soldiers would get drunk and burn the house. They laughed indulgently. Three days after I had gone, the Germans came into the district, stayed for a week and then handed it over to their Soviet allies advancing from the east.

  I know my parents left the house then, but I never saw them again. Somebody, a cousin, claimed many years later that he had seen my father standing in a file of convicts, on a Russian railway station close to the Arctic Circle. Apart from me, nobody now alive remembers them.

  Perhaps this all suggests more attachment to the past than is appropriate for an escapologist. Don’t misunderstand me. The landscape I knew as my own was pre-modern, semi-feudal; round us, a small number of mostly Polish landowners employed Ruthenian-speaking villagers who scarcely knew what to do wit
h a radio set or a bottle of shampoo. Their children were scabby, barefooted. In winter, we ran a porridge kitchen behind the stables, one meal a day, for children under ten.

  Often I was made to help, dishing the stuff out with a giant iron ladle or chasing hungry dogs out of the yard. What I dreaded was the women who sometimes snatched my hand holding the ladle and tried to kiss it. But the moment my parents left, between the Germans pulling out and the Russians taking over, the same villagers broke into our house, threw everything out of the windows and set it on fire.

  That was the world I escaped from, as a boy. Escaped? No, here again ‘fled’ is a better word. But in this case, baggage ‘unwanted on voyage’ has managed to track me down. I haven’t ceased to dream. I ride through the forests, or across the open fields of barren, sandy soil. I drive my boot deep into the snow behind the house, hearing the sound it makes which is like a raven’s croak. Sometimes I dream of waking in my own bedroom, where a fresh glass of tea is smoking on the table by the window, its saucer leaving a little disc of vapour on the shiny wood.

  I also dream of that old city where I was a student. Often I find myself looking down on it from a high hill and about to utter some prophecy, maybe some lamentation for a Jerusalem coveted by all and lost to all. But my father and mother have never returned to me in dreams, never, although I would quite like them to.

  Home? I have none. I soon became homeless, and then for a long time stateless. One lives in so many places. But sometimes a hut inhabited for a week with many others is clearer and dearer in memory than an apartment lived in for years.

  Long ago, when I first got to know Jackie’s mother in Greenock, we used to spend hours facing each other and teasing each other across the kitchen table. Once Helen asked me which word brought tears to my eyes. The game was to shut your eyes, say the word out loud and then repeat it to yourself over and over until something did or did not begin to happen. ‘Mother’ didn’t work. I tried ‘Freedom’ and then ‘Poland’ and ‘Polska’. No tears.

  I tried ‘Love’: still nothing. Helen put another sugar lump into her tea, and stirred. When I said ‘My Country’ and to myself ojczyzna, something twitched. But when I said the English word ‘Home’ a few times, my throat suddenly tightened; I saw a child lost in a forest, a fluttering bird whose nest has been taken away. I quickly opened my eyes. She was biting the corner of her lip and watching me. ‘But I don’t have a home, I don’t need one.’ I stood up and walked around the kitchen; it was cold in there.

  To tell how I came to Scotland, I must return to 1939. No, no account of ‘my war’. We did our best. I was with the artillery until we ran out of shells and became infantry. Twice we stopped retreating and counter-attacked. But then the panzers would be behind us again, closing our way out. Their aircraft came at us every day as the sun rose. We had been driven back to the outskirts of my university city when we heard that the Soviets had invaded Poland from the east. By now, the twenty men originally under my command had become six. Three chose to go back to their villages. The other three escaped with me across the Romanian frontier, where we were interned.

  Making my way from Romania to Paris, where our government and high command were regrouping, took a little time. My hope was to join the Polish army being formed in France. But headquarters selected me to go to Britain as a liaison officer, to be attached to the French naval forces based in Scotland.

  I protested: ‘Why me? I am not even in the navy! Most of our navy escaped to Scotland back in September – why can’t one of their officers do this?’ I was told: ‘Because they are too few and much too busy. Because you speak nice French and are wasting it on mam’zelles. Don’t question orders!’

  When I reached Scotland, which turned out not to be part of England, it was in the middle of the coldest winter in memory. Big snow and ice were nothing new to me. But this was a damp, bitter chill which waterlogged one’s very bones. The British, or at least the Scots, seemed not to have heard of central heating.

  In Greenock, I was billeted in a tall stone house on Union Street, with an immense view over the Clyde estuary and the anchorage called the Tail of the Bank. There was already a shortage of coal. Nothing burned in the open fireplaces, except a curious gas contraption, made out of fireclay batons, which was ignited only briefly at breakfast time.

  I went to bed wearing white seaboot stockings and slept under a British naval greatcoat. In the morning, while it was still dark, I would be woken by the rumble of iron-tyred cartwheels over the granite setts in the street and the hammer-beat of iron-shod hoofs. Then I would get up, wash in a basin of cold water and go downstairs for breakfast. One greenish gaslight burned in the hall and spread a melancholy scent.

  The others would be up already. The house belonged to Mrs Melville, a widow, who regulated the breakfast tea and kept the toast within bounds. Her son Johnston, Helen’s husband, wore a naval reservist’s uniform and spooned up his porridge quickly. Johnston was youngish, my age, with slicked-down red hair. He never spoke to me at breakfast, and left for his office with a muttered word to his mother and a nod to Helen. Jackie, wearing her school clothes, got a spoonful of sugar or sometimes a daud of treacle with her porridge. It was always Helen, never her grandmother, who went for Jackie’s sugar from the kitchen. Jackie was the next to leave, sweeping a jotter into her school bag. ‘Your gas mask, Jackie!’ It was always Mrs M, never Helen, who reminded her.

  That left the three of us. As the main door banged shut, Mrs M would turn up the wireless news, quite loud, so that nobody could talk. Helen would rise and take the plates into the kitchen. The plucky Finns were setting about the Russians. The Japs were setting about the Chinese. British destroyers were showing the Jerry navy who ruled the waves, but Poland had sunk without trace. Sometimes I thought that my uniform was its only relic, and I was the only survivor of an Atlantis which had vanished with all its people a thousand years before. Mrs Melville, seated before her final cup of tea, tried not to look at me. She behaved as if my presence, festooned with strange lanyards and badges, was a vulgar prank. There were bad days when I wondered if she was right.

  When I first moved in, I was underemployed until the French found a desk for me to occupy at Fort Matilda. So Helen and I began to talk. Her mother-in-law would leave the house after breakfast, to visit a relation or do some messages or other. Helen would make a fresh pot of tea, we would sit down again at the table and I would pull out a packet of duty-free British cigarettes.

  At first, it was ‘teach me English – correct my accent’. I even wrote words down, offered her a few shillings for an hour of language.

  I remember well why I did this. It was a conscious decision, but it sprang from a sudden impulse of caution. Teaching, keeping a table between us. Something to transact, something regular but regulated, which would end with a glance at a watch and a pleasant smile.

  We had met the day before, in the afternoon, when she came into the kitchen, swinging a bag. She had been to the fishmonger’s. I was standing awkwardly in the middle of the floor, a very foreign figure in my uniform cape and long knee-boots.

  ‘So this is our Pole.’

  ‘So it would seem,’ said Mrs M from her chair by the range. My explanation about what sort of Pole I was had failed to charm her.

  Helen took out a moist bundle wrapped in newspaper and laid it on the table. Then she looked up at me. I noticed that she had small blue eyes turned down at the outer corners, eyes you might imagine belonging to a sailor who spent time peering into the wind or laughing. Then I noticed something about myself: I was coming alert in a very familiar way. I was searching my small English vocabulary for a phrase to keep her looking at me until I could coax her into conversation. Did I have enough words to be fascinating? Or how about saying nothing, clicking my heels and kissing her hand? That would probably shock a Scottish girl into letting me make the next move as well.

  But then I thought abruptly: What are you up to? Where do you think you are? I knew already that she wa
s married, the wife of a fellow officer, a British comrade who was offering me shelter in his house and family in the name of our common struggle. ‘Time of war,’ I reproached myself, ‘is time you learned to treat married women with respect.’ So, a fit of virtue. But perhaps I also felt out of my depth, coming from a country where there is no mystery about what other people want or don’t want. Here, I had no idea what was behind these calm faces.

  I said to her: ‘Please, my English is very poor. Is possible you give me lesson, correct speaking, maybe in evenings after work?’

  She laughed loudly. ‘Ach, a Cartsdyke lassie like me widna learn ye richt!’

  ‘Excuse?’

  ‘Helen, really!’ said Mrs M. ‘Just spare us that sort of talk here.’

  ‘Okay, all right,’ Helen said. ‘I’ll learn you. I’ll teach you. When I’ve time. Mind, I never taught anyone in ma life.’

  ‘We will have conversation. I need good English accent.’

  ‘Good accent, will you just imagine that?’ said Mrs M to her knitting.

  So the next night we did begin to have lessons. Mrs M sat there after the tea was cleared, while Helen asked me questions which I was supposed to answer aloud and then in writing.

  ‘What did you get for your dinner at the French canteen today?’

  ‘I may not tell you, it is... war confidence.’

  ‘Did you get mince and tatties? For God’s sake, Mabel, the face on ye, what’s wrong now?’

  ‘Excuse, tatties?’

  Helen was war-working at Kincaid’s, marine engines, as a typist. Soon she was transferred to the back shift. No more lessons after tea; instead, it was a half-hour after breakfast. Best of all, Mrs M would go out and leave us alone. The lessons dissolved into talking, joking, smoking. My English, its seeds implanted long ago by an Irish governess, grew fast. But the table remained between us. We eyed each other across it.