Field Study (16 page)

While she works, she thinks about her sister. That Dorota has probably been waiting for her to do this for months now. Ever since the divorce papers arrived from Berlin. But then winter came, Christmas and another year, and Ewa said nothing, did nothing, life went on as normal. She could see Dorota was suspicious, of course, when Adela’s idea came up, and Ewa said she would go to Germany with her. But when Dorota challenged her about it, Ewa was always careful not to give a straight answer. Sometimes she’d claim she had signed the papers, sent them back to the lawyers.

– Weeks ago already.

Other times she’d say she had lost them, torn them up, made them into papier mâché for a school project with Jacek. And when Dorota complained about being lied to, Ewa would just shrug.

– Don’t ask, then.

She thinks how Dorota can be hard work: never seems
to know when to stop, always wants her answers immediately, doesn’t understand the need for time to think things over. But Ewa has to smile when she thinks of her, and she does wonder if it’s fair, to treat her sister the way she does, after the way Dorota has helped her. Ewa’s palms itch in the hot gloves, so she takes them off, stuffs them in her pockets. The wet sand and soil work their way under her nails, leave her fingertips raw, stinging in the morning when she wakes up in the dormitory.

__

Dorota walks Jacek to school early, mostly in silence. Her head full of questions she is not sure about asking, Jacek’s mouth set, his eyes averted, so she can’t tell what he might be thinking about, if he’s thinking about anything.

Jacek never talks about him, so Dorota doesn’t know if he thinks about his father, what he remembers of him. She calculates: seven now, born in the spring before the elections, so about five years since he’s seen him. Dorota can’t be sure what Ewa has told her son, what she hasn’t. Why Piotr left, never came back, why they didn’t go with him.

Jacek says a hurried goodbye at the corner and then runs ahead so she can’t take him right to the gate. Dorota stops. She waits until he has crossed the strip of playground and she can see he has gone inside, and then she walks on. Past the school building on her way to the salon.

All day as she cuts, dries and washes, Dorota tries to assess what would be appropriate to tell a seven year old about his parents, to anticipate his questions. In the absence of answers, she confuses them with her own: whether Ewa still loves his father, whether she wants them back together, back in Poland, or all three living, illegally, in the German capital.

She has no idea.

Dorota also doesn’t know if she could simply tell Jacek facts: not without her voice slanting them this way or that. She tries it out a few times, lying in bed at night, and her husband tells her no, no.

– You still sound like you disapprove.

Tadeusz sighs and reaches out and rubs her belly before he goes to sleep. And Dorota lies awake a long time, still trying to work things out.

__

Ewa’s days pass quickly. The work is monotonous, but the place more interesting than she thought, and the people. The farm is small, and when they arrived, the farmer made a point of telling them that his place was family run: different from the larger farms that own the land all around. He pointed as he spoke, made a wide arc with his arm. He has three children. He and his wife and the eldest, a daughter, often work with them.

Lunchtime and they eat all together, hired hands and the family, the farmer’s daughter serving thick soup, long sausages and small white rolls. The girl is sixteen, maybe seventeen, with fair hair and spots. Looks like her mother, moves with the same, even gestures as her father. Ewa takes the bowl she offers, finds a place to sit between Adela and her brother. This is Marek’s fifth asparagus year, his third here. Adela said he was friendly with the farmer, and Ewa is curious.

– Was this part of a collective before, when she was born?

Ewa points to the daughter with her spoon. Marek nods, chewing. Adela answers for him.

– Her grandfather stayed out as long as he could, but they forced him in the end.

Marek swallows, joins in.

– He couldn’t get loans, machines, fertilizer. They called him an enemy of the people, the party functionaries. It divided the village. Still does, her father says.

Farmer and daughter are carrying the soup pots to the deep sink, collecting empty bowls from their workers. Marek takes a last bite of his bread, speaks with his mouth full:

– He took the land back again, after the wall fell, soon as he could. Wants it to go to her later, keep it in the family, out of the privatised collectives. He says the spirit of ’89 is
still alive here. Fighting for the subsidies from Brussels.

Marek winks at her. Outside it is drizzling and they pull their hoods up and boots on again. Ewa’s are a size too large and her heels slide up into the legs as she walks across the yard. The daughter comes out to the fields with them in the afternoon, and Ewa watches her cutting: more and faster than any of them, her father included. Eyes elsewhere, soft face closed.

__

It rains on the other side of the border too, and Jacek runs home after school. His legs carry him without thinking past the church and fire station to the two rooms he has shared with Ewa as long as he can remember, and it is only when he gets to the kiosk at the corner that he realises what he’s done. He doesn’t turn immediately but stands a moment at the edge of the pavement, where the telephone wires cross overhead. His hood is pulled tight around his face and he can hear his own breath. Dorota’s salon is ten minutes in the other direction.

She watches for him at the window. Two clients have cancelled because of the weather and now Jacek is late coming from school. When she finally sees him, he is walking slow, stiff-legged in rain-soaked trousers. Dorota goes to the small back room for towels, spreads a slice of bread and jam, which he takes from her wordlessly when he comes in. He sits down without taking his coat off and
eats, swivelling the salon chair to the window so he can watch the few cars and people passing, the water running down the wide pane.

__

They are six in the dormitory: Ewa, Adela and four other women. Two German and two from just outside Warsaw, whom Adela knows already from last year. In the evenings they cook and eat together in the communal kitchen, Adela translating. Paula, one of the German women, has children and shows Ewa photos. Ewa has no picture of Jacek so she describes him.

– He’s not the easiest. Such a boy, you know? But I love him.

They work late, are usually tired, sometimes play cards. Often they are in bed by ten. Lights out, the glow of Adela’s cigarette in the dark, Ewa whispers with her in sleepy tones. She keeps the envelope in her bedside locker. Has told Adela the story about her father-in-law, leaning out of the fourth-floor bathroom window.

– What will you say when you see him?

– I don’t know.

– Do you want to be with Piotr again?

– I don’t know.

The women in the other beds listen, tease her.

– She’s come to Germany to find a Polish man.

– Did no one tell her there are plenty in Poland already?

– Oh piss off you two. Go to sleep.

Adela stabs out her cigarette in mock annoyance, Ewa lies in the dark and smiles.

She used to make love with her husband in the bathroom, when they lived at her in-laws’ place. So she knows those four private walls, the lace curtains and what you could see through them. Piotr would sit her up on the windowsill, when Jacek was asleep, his parents out working. Afterwards she would keep her arms around him, and they would press their faces to the curtain and glass, watch the wind in the trees outside through the gaps in the net pattern. Piotr would sleep like that sometimes. Standing and leaning into her and the window. And she would watch his breath mist the pane, know the net was leaving its flowery imprint on his cheek and on her shoulder.

__

Jacek didn’t want to speak to Ewa when she called last night and so Dorota listened to her sister crying on the phone until her money ran out. She is still angry with Jacek when he comes to the salon after school. Lets him spread his own bread with jam, leaves him to get on with his homework in the small back room. Later, after she locks up, she presents Jacek with a clean rag and a bottle of vinegar to polish the mirrors. Dorota sweeps the day’s hair up, and because he is quiet, she talks to him.

– Our parents were old, so they died when we were young, you see.

– Mmm.

– I was married, but your mama was just fifteen. She knew your father then already.

Jacek sprays the mirror and Dorota doesn’t know if he is listening. She sweeps on in silence a while, not sure what she wants to say, what it is exactly she wants her nephew to understand. That Ewa was too young to know better, still is? She hears the tones of judgement in her own thoughts and flushes, jabbing at the soft grey-brown pile she has gathered with her broom. Her sister is twenty-five now, was an eighteen year old bride, and the idea still shocks her. But Tadeusz, Father Gregory, Aunt Jasia: everyone told her Ewa should marry. As quickly as possible. Piotr had just done his National Service, Ewa was still at school, but even her teachers and Piotr’s parents would call on Dorota about it. They didn’t say it, of course, but the urgency was there in their voices: before she gets pregnant. And then, when Jacek was born a little over eight months later, the same people nodded, how fortunate it was that they hadn’t waited. Dorota watches Jacek rub the vinegar smears dry on the glass and remembers crying the morning of Ewa’s wedding: relief and regret. And afterwards, that she went with her sister to the housing office to put her married name on the waiting list, for the flat they never got. Even after Jacek came along and the new government and they thought
everything would get better. Ewa moved to her in-laws’ in the meantime, and then out again nearly three years later. Not long after Piotr.

– I know my father is in Berlin.

Dorota looks up.

– Do you remember him?

Jacek blinks.

– Will you cook soon or do we have to wait for Tadeusz to come home?

__

The weather turns cold, and the wind blows in hard from home, driving the rain east to west in sheets across the fields. The asparagus stops growing.

There is other work to do, washing, sorting, bunching, packing, but the farmer’s wife says there isn’t room in the barn for all of them, so they are to work in two shifts. One in the morning, the other in the afternoon: they can divide the work amongst themselves and the first group will start in two hours. Ewa dresses while the others make themselves coffee and comfortable, get back into bed for a while. She offers Paula, the German mother, her shift, says she needs a day off, and Paula giggles, puzzled, until she understands Ewa’s sign language, then she nods gladly. Adela is in the shower and Ewa pulls on her coat as she
opens the door, leaving before Adela can stop her. She walks the path between the fields to the road, back to the wind, landscape ahead of her blurred. The long, parallel lines of the asparagus trenches lead her eye to grey nothingness, no horizon visible, just rain.

The farmer sits in his van, eating his breakfast roll, watching her standing where the track joins the road north, under the sign to the city, occasionally holding out her thumb. The few cars that pass ignore her, and the farmer judges from the way the trees are bending, and how she draws her hood close around her cheeks, that the rain and spray must be blowing full in her face.

Ewa stays there almost half an hour before she starts walking. And the farmer stays there, too, radio on, wind-screen misting. And when Ewa is out of sight, he looks out across the asparagus fields, the long, pale strips of polythene covering the sandy rows. Knows the stubborn white crowns are nestled somewhere beneath the surface. Unwilling to grow into the wind which has him gripping the steering wheel when it catches the high sides of the van.

__

Ewa waited half an hour, walked for two. One hour north and another hour back south again. Back to the women in the dormitory, who don’t say anything when she appears, blue-lipped and dripping, but wake her up later with
coffee and biscuits, and make her cups of sweet black tea in the morning when her head hurts and her bones ache and her eyes are gummed together.

When the farmer comes to say they will do the same half-day shift pattern, Adela clears it with him in her good German and low voice that Ewa should stay in bed. He says he will get his daughter to bring some aspirin.

In the afternoon, the rain slows and the wind drops. Ewa gets up and walks across to the barn where the others are sorting. She works on into the evening, after the others have gone inside to wash and cook. Only Marek stays with her, sifting the stringy root and stalk into crates ready for planting.

Ewa has known Adela since school, her family too. Started sitting next to her in class the same year martial law was declared, when they were ten, eleven. Adela was the youngest in her family, Marek her oldest brother. She came to school on a winter morning and whispered to Ewa that he had gone, but Ewa was to say nothing. She remembers thinking how sad it was, that he had to leave then, because it was just before Christmas. Marek was married, to loud Feliksa with the grey eyes, and they already had two children. Adela’s mother would send her to help Feliksa after school, and sometimes Adela invited Ewa to go with her. They would cook or play with the babies, or go out and queue if Feliksa had had no luck at the shops in the morning. It didn’t seem sad that Marek
was gone then, more exciting: a husband in the underground and later in prison. Ewa hoped, expected, that one day she’d have one of her own. Marek was a photo beside Feliksa’s pillow, a rumour that turned up in the night and was gone again: for years at a time. Ewa remembers when they heard about him being arrested, that, despite everything, it was somehow thrilling. And then later, how she’d boasted, to impress Piotr, that she knew him.

Marek was released after the amnesty. He came to their wedding a year or two later, and people said he was ill, that he had changed: unrecognisable. Adela got angry when Ewa told her, said he’d done enough, just wanted be left alone now, with his family. The democracy he had gone to prison for arrived in hard-fought stages, but he said he’d rather leave the strikes and rallies to the younger men, had three more children with Feliksa in the years after he came home. Now Konrad, the middle one, goes to school with Jacek, and Marek comes to work in Germany with his little sister and her friend from school. He stacks his completed crates on the floor, smiling at Ewa as he starts on another set.