Field Study (18 page)

Ewa can’t keep the edge out of her voice.

– He doesn’t live here now. He moved away about a year ago.

– In Berlin? Still in Berlin?

– I don’t know.

– You don’t?

Ewa looks at her, the woman relents.

– Yes. In Berlin.

And then:

– How old is your boy?

– Seven. Just turned seven. How can I find him? Piotr?

– I don’t know. We’re not in touch. He only lived here a couple of months.

– Do you know any of his friends?

– No.

– Nothing?

– Nothing.

Ewa sighs. She thinks she might cry. Instead she fumbles in her bag, tears a corner from the map she bought, writes down the number of the dormitory payphone.

– I’d be very grateful. If you think of anything.

The woman takes the scrap of paper and Ewa thinks she watches her walking down the stairs, because she doesn’t hear the door close behind her.

__

She takes a wrong turning at some point after she leaves the building, expects to come to the underground station, but finds herself instead on a small square with a large black church. Evangelical, not Catholic. She hesitates. The evening service will not begin for another hour at least, the doors are open.

It is plain inside, with long pale wood pews, a table for an altar, and the cross above it is empty. Large flower arrangements stand on either side of the aisle and the
heavy smell of the lilies carries across to Ewa in the doorway.

No St Jude to pray to here, and Ewa smiles, thinks how Dorota hates it when she calls him her favourite and protector, patron saint of lost causes.

It is a long time since she has been in a church, of any kind. Couldn’t bear the thought of people looking and knowing, in the services after Piotr left, so she stopped going. For six months perhaps, and then, when she tried again, she found that she just couldn’t stand it. The suffering and piety, the demand that she put her faith in the Almighty. She did still go and see Father Gregory, though. Occasionally at first, then more regularly. Week-day afternoons for over a year, nearer two maybe. He was the one who had married them, and she would go and talk to him in the confessional. About Piotr, not about any sins she had committed: she didn’t want to believe in those any longer, and told him so, which didn’t stop him blessing her. Jacek would sleep in the pews outside and Father Gregory said she should be patient, that there would be more work again soon and then Piotr would come home, all of the others. Always the same answer and so Ewa stopped going: figured that if he believed in God then to him probably anything was conceivable.

The last time she was in a church was for Father Gregory’s funeral. She only went because Dorota cried when she said she wouldn’t. It seems cruel to her now, hardhearted:
he had listened while she spoke, and was kind when she cried, and he had been one of the few who stood up, said his piece for them, and that must have taken courage. Ewa remembers a service he gave, after the news came that Marek and some of the others had been arrested. No Piotr yet, so she must have been fourteen, not much older. The Father spoke out in support of the men, their families, and of the union. His words were quiet, but they passed like a charge through the congregation. And afterwards, people didn’t go home as usual, but stayed in the church or the street outside; no one seemed to think about leaving.

Dorota was newly married then, and Ewa remembers finding her standing out on the steps in the sun with Tadeusz. His cheeks were flushed, eyes dark and glittering. One of the few times she had known her brother-in-law to be happy.

Outside the church a tram passes and Ewa is back in Berlin. She has no watch on, does not know what time it is: knows she should find where she is on the map, walk to the underground, get a train to the mainline station. But she doesn’t want to move just yet, so she stays a few minutes longer. Sits alone in the pew and misses her family.

__

Late afternoon and Jacek is hauled back to the flat by a
neighbour. She holds him at the door by a fistful of collar, tells Dorota she found him out behind the old bottling plant, smashing windows.

Dorota says she will have to tell Ewa, tonight when she phones, and that his mother will be unhappy; he will have made her unhappy, because she wanted him to be good while he stayed with her and his Uncle. They are in the kitchen, and Dorota talks while she is cooking. Tadeusz reads the newspaper, and Jacek stands in the doorway, listening, sulking.

– She doesn’t care.

– Yes she does. She will be very angry.

– She won’t come back.

Dorota laughs, but it doesn’t sound right: not light as she thought it would.

– Yes she will. And then you’ll be for it.

– She will go and see him and then they will both stay away.

– No.

– Tell her to come home.

– I can’t do that Jacek, she is working now. She needs to earn some money, you know that.

– No!

Jacek kicks the door, punches the door frame. Tadeusz frowns.

– Stop it.

And Jacek does stop, but only to turn to Dorota, mouth stretched wide and shouting:

– I hate you!

She stops chopping and looks at him. His eyes are wet, hands in fists, held clenched: white at the knuckles and raised level with his hips.

– Listen, Jacek. That’s really not fair. I am just trying to do what’s best, for all of us.

– You make her come back then!

His small face is red and torn with fury. Tadeusz looks up.

– It is hard boy, isn’t it?

He doesn’t stand up or go to Jacek to comfort him. Tadeusz stays in his chair at the kitchen table, still holding the two-day-old newspaper, still looking at the open pages as if he were reading them.

– But you can’t bend the world to fit your plan, I’m afraid. None of us can.

Tadeusz nods at his nephew and goes back to his paper, and Jacek watches him a moment before he starts crying. Still standing in the kitchen doorway, he wraps his arms across his face. And then his shoulders, belly, knees jerk with the sobs that come and that he has no control over. He doesn’t run away. And when Dorota goes to him and crouches, puts her arms around his waist, he stands rigid, unbending at first, but after a few
minutes she feels him lean in to her.

It is so good to hold the boy like this that Dorota wants to cry too, but she doesn’t. She checks her breath and watches her husband, his eyes fixed on the newspaper, but not moving. And though she knows he has little time for Jacek and even less for Ewa, he will accept these weeks with their silences and shouting, and dinners eaten in the hallway. And then Dorota is glad of what she has, and thinks it is not so hard, really. She loves her sister, her nephew, her Tadeusz. She can sit out the spring.

Wait and see what happens.

__

When she gets off the train, Ewa calls the farm from the payphone in the station building and then stands at the window opposite, waiting for Marek.

Evening, and on the small town square a group of teenagers sit on the benches, smoking. Wide trousers, loose sweatshirts and acne, one or two with cans of beer, others drinking Pepsi. The girls smoke, long hair drawn back into tight ponytails; the boys wear theirs short, brushed forward, stiff and slick with gel.

Ewa wonders if they were all born here, if their families are farmers like the one she works for, or if their grandparents were the party functionaries who coerced and insulted. The village was divided, Marek had said, but he
didn’t say whether the families still fall into us and them, or if the lines have become blurred already in this youngest generation. Ewa knows one of her neighbours worked for the security service, has seen Jacek running with her children on the school playground occasionally, has never thought to stop him. She recognises the farmer’s daughter and waves. The girl’s nod is barely perceptible, and she doesn’t look at Ewa, fixing her gaze into the middle distance. Ewa moves away from the window, embarrassed. Sits on the bench beside the ticket office and tries not to think it is because she is Polish, tells herself it is unfair on the girl to jump to such conclusions. Jacek doesn’t like to be walked to school now, will pretend not to see her if she passes one of his football games on the square behind the fire station.

She can still see the group through the window from where she is sitting. The skinny boys make her think of her son. Six, seven years from now. Provincial town kids in western Poland, in eastern Germany: there doesn’t seem much to choose between them.

When Marek comes, the farmer’s daughter ignores his wave too, but Marek just laughs.

– She’ll grow out of it.

The warmth is going out of the day, the shadows on the village streets grow longer.

– Her boyfriend is the only one of that lot with a job.

– What does he do?

– He works nights at the service station. Sells people cigarettes and toilet paper at four in the morning.

Marek drives them there before they go back to the farm, tells Ewa he has a delivery to make, that it won’t take long. He parks on the side of the forecourt between the office and the air-pressure point, and Ewa waits in the car while he goes into the shop. She recognises the sign, a fat blue lozenge glowing against the pale evening sky. The same company who wanted to open a petrol station in her town but changed their minds. The blank, clean lines seem strangely out of place after the cobbles and crumbling gables of the town square, the comfortable shabbiness of the buildings on the farm. Here the road is new asphalt, and the petrol station is set at a junction, a short distance out of the town, as if they were aware of the clash, wanted to minimise its impact.

The street lights are coming on, the forecourt lights too. Marek comes out of the shop with a laughing German man and they start unloading the boot. Ewa gets out to help them, piles the boxes of dog food and salty biscuits behind the door to the forecourt office. The German shakes Marek’s hand, then passes him a neat roll of notes, fastened with a rubber band.

Marek fills up the tank and then waves, one arm reaching through the open window as they drive out onto the road again.

– He’s the franchise owner. I got to know him last year.

He made a deal with him to bring a few bits and pieces from Poland and the dog food has sold very well.

– Artur drove home to see his wife last night and I got him to bring some more back over. His cut should stop him moaning a while anyway.

Ewa looks across at Marek in the driving seat, thinks he is enjoying his new incarnation, acting the hustler. He smiles and winks at her, and then he shrugs.

– You know Lila, our eldest girl. Wants to be a dental assistant, so she has to take exams. I want to support her.

Marek says they still have a few years. Before Poland joins the EU and smuggling and asparagus harvests are a thing of the past.

– And he will have to look further east for cheaper labour, our farmer. Belarus. Maybe Mongolia.

Marek laughs and Ewa thinks of the Russians who used to come into town selling tortoises and caviar, children’s shoes and cigarettes that were all cardboard filter. And Dorota’s neighbours who fly to New Delhi in the summer, fill bags with grey acrylic jumpers and stainless steel buckets in the bazaars. Sell them in the winter at the junction of the road to Poznan and the border. Given the choice, Ewa thinks being a dental assistant is preferable.

__

Three days later, Ana from Warsaw has a message for Ewa when she gets out of the shower.

– There was a call for you.

– My son?

– No. Someone called Marta in Berlin. She has an address for you. Here.

Ewa reads the scribbled note, sits on her bed and looks for the road on her map. West Berlin this time, and Ewa wonders if she will be able to tell the difference. She finds the nearest underground station. Schlesisches Tor. Silesia: where she is from, and Piotr. And the last stop on the line is called Warschauer Strasse. Warsaw. Ewa points this out to Ana, then Adela, who laughs.

– He tries, but he can’t get away from us, can he?

__

It pours overnight and the guttering on the barn over-flows, rivulets seeping in under the door in the early hours, deep puddles forming under the sorting tables inside. Ewa doesn’t go out to the fields straight away, mops the barn instead with the farmer and his wife. She listens to them argue quietly as they work. About money, from what she can gather, her few German words. Ewa empties the buckets in the yard and they stand by the door together, silent now, squinting up at the damp brickwork and rusting pipes. The roof is sagging in places, the paintwork on the farmhouse hasn’t been done in years.
Ewa feels she is seeing the place with new eyes, but watching the tight, disappointed gestures of the farmer’s wife, she is sure that none of this has escaped her notice.

The farmer calls her over before she makes her way out to the fields.

– We have some clients in the city where we deliver personally, restaurants and shops. I’ll be going on Saturday, if you want, you can drive in with me.

– Thank you.

Ewa doesn’t ask how he knows she wants to go back to Berlin. Would rather not hear who has been gossiping. He holds out his hand to shake, says his name, his first name, which Ewa doesn’t quite understand, but she thinks it sounds like Gerhard, although she doesn’t like to ask him to repeat himself. His grip is surprisingly light, palm hard and dry.

– I’m Ewa.

__

Saturday, and the truck is already parked in the yard when Ewa comes out after a late breakfast. The farmer and his daughter are waiting. She climbs up into the cab beside the girl, says hello to her in Russian, but she shakes her head in response, frowning, flushing. The farmer smiles, explains that they have English in school now, and Ewa tries her best accent:

– Good morning.

– Good morning.

The girl replies, polite, but she avoids eye contact, scratches at an imaginary spot on her jeans. Her father smiles over her head at Ewa and drives on.

Ewa tries to work out how old he is.
Like Marek
. Teenage children, so most likely in his forties. Remembers she will have a teenage son soon, and then she will be in her thirties. They drive in silence, the van engine too loud for talking, Ewa watches the villages pass, the girl next to her chewing her fingernails. Her family has been farming round here since Napoleon was beaten. When Marek told her that, it seemed an eternity, but now Ewa thinks how brief the generations seem, and the times they live through. Her own grandfather, she knew, had fought with the Germans in the First World War. Piotr’s father was born before the second and told her partisan stories from his childhood, tales of heroic uprisings against the Nazis, in the nights when Jacek was a baby and kept them awake all the time. She remembers her mother’s descriptions of being moved to Silesia, too. After the war: Stalin’s orders. How the house they were put in had belonged to a German family before, like so many others in the town. Ewa recalls her mother’s descriptions, the Germans leaving on horseback and foot, in tears and anger, walking westwards, just as they had done a few weeks before. She said she had cried, too, leaving their old home in the East, crossing the wide waters of the Bug. But
her tears had stopped quickly, as soon as she fell in love with the open, unfamiliar landscape.