Homeland (10 page)

Jozef lifted the bottle to his lips again before remembering it was empty. Turning his gaunt, worn-out face towards Wladyslaw, he argued obdurately, ‘We’re going to – lose our
– citizenship if we don’t go back. And then we’ll have no choice. We’ll be cut off for ever.’

‘That’s only speculation.’

‘But they’ve already started. We’re going to be next – they’ve said so.’

‘Have they started? I’ve only heard of Anders losing his citizenship, but he’s a natural target, the commander of our army. The rest of us . . . No, they wouldn’t dare.
The bullyboys in Warsaw are simply trying to frighten us into hurrying back so that they can boss us around. But we must stand up to them. We must decide our own fate.’

‘Our fate is ugliness and horror.’

‘Jozef, Jozef . . .’

‘Our fate is to be despised, to be left to rot.’

Fishing a clean handkerchief out of his pocket, Wladyslaw pushed it into Jozef’s hand and began to intone words of reassurance as a priest might recite the creed, insistently,
authoritatively, as a matter of faith. He spoke of time bringing clarity, of no one needing to burn their bridges for a long while yet. He talked about the thriving Polish communities in America
and Australia, and gave a glowing, if imaginative, account of the education and work opportunities there; he spoke of freedom and choice, food and good company, huge landscapes and bright sunshine.
Then, to be even-handed, he made a case for going back to Poland, for making a new start in familiar surroundings, for meeting undoubted hardship and political changes, yes, but also – he
couldn’t think of an also, so he talked of the joys of returning to one’s own culture, until after half an hour he sensed that a spark of optimism had gained a tentative hold on
Jozef’s fragile imagination.

‘Rest now!’ he said at last. ‘Let’s talk again tomorrow. I’ll see if I can’t palm off another poem on Jerzy and persuade him to part with some more
vodka.’

When Wladyslaw paused at the door, Jozef gave him a slow nod, though whether this indicated belief or doubt it was impossible to tell.

Back in his room, Wladyslaw experienced a bout of misgiving. It was a brave man who dared to hold out hope to another, and a foolish one who promised more than life could reasonably deliver.
Already he felt the tug of anxiety that comes from taking on responsibility for another person, the fear that his words would come back to haunt him. It was said that Jozef had lain on the
battlefield at Ancona with half his stomach hanging out for several hours before anyone could get to him, and that when they finally reached him he was lying among the bloody, fragmented remains of
his closest friend. Wladyslaw didn’t pretend to understand the effects of his physical injuries but it seemed to him that Jozef had been suffering from a mental crisis ever since, and that
the letters from home were not so much the cause of his troubles as a convenient focus for them. Each soldier arriving in England received a mental health assessment, but this, like the monthly
chat with the visiting Polish psychiatrist, had proved absurdly easy to fake or, better still, to subvert by means which could be relied on to provide huge entertainment for the reading room.
Despite Jozef’s problems he had been as adept as any at bluffing his way through these interviews, and no one, not even those exasperated by his constant gloom, begrudged him his escape from
the head doctors. The Polish mental hospital somewhere near London was said to be full of seriously crazy people, and it was an accepted fact that, once inside, you lost all chance of getting out
again. As the saying went, you had to be mad to want to see a psychiatrist.

To maintain a hold on one’s peace of mind it seemed to Wladyslaw that it was necessary to postpone despair. During the years of deprivation and war he had seen despair sap the will and
sour the spirit, and kill as surely as any bullet. Better by far to be carried along by hope, which, given half a chance, would unreel harmlessly before you, just out of reach, effortlessly
adjusting itself to all but the most terrible circumstances.

Sitting on the bed, Wladyslaw ran his fingers over the sealed letter to Helenka. Here at least hope had not been in vain. She was alive. His gratitude was still immense, yet subdued by the
growing fear that he would never see her again.

It was barely nine thirty. He thought of going for an evening stroll. Though exercise tended to aggravate his leg, he tried to walk for at least an hour a day, either circling the grounds or
going into town for a cup of heavy brown tea and what was audaciously termed a sugar bun – the sugar, as Horatio might have it, being honoured more in the breach than the observance. Quite
apart from the need to build up his fitness, he clutched at the belief, against much of the evidence, that exercise improved his chances of a peaceful night. Today he had been too busy with the
letter to Helenka to walk even halfway round the grounds. And now it seemed he had missed the weather; when he opened the window it was to a stream of damp air and billows of rain chasing across
the spill of hazy light.

Reluctantly, he turned instead to his English lessons. He had been working intermittently and with a dispiriting lack of success on, variously,
Hamlet
,
Our Mutual Friend
and
Nostromo
. Now, in expectation of simpler stuff, he picked up the slim volume Doctor Bennett had given him. There were no photographs or illustrations to help him, only small sketches at the
beginning of each chapter, variations on a watery theme: a stream from above, with reeds and birds; a stream from below, with eels and fishes; and, angled over the water, with wild flowers at its
feet, a stumpy tree with a spiked crown like a giant medieval mace.

He began to read the first chapter at some speed to get the gist of it, but stumbled to a halt before the end of the first page. He had been warned about the size of the English vocabulary, and
everything he read seemed to confirm this. There was nothing for it but to settle down and dismantle each sentence with the aid of a dictionary. The top of the locker was too small to work on, so
he brought up a chair and, spreading his books and a pad over the bed, moved the candle closer.

In the heart of the county of Somerset lies a mysterious land of mist and water, of myth and fable, of worship and mysticism. Here, according to legend, is the land of Arthur and Guinevere,
of Camelot and Avalon, where Balin’s Sword smote upon the water and the knights embarked upon the quest for the Holy Grail . . .

A door sounded nearby. Catching the murmur of voices through the partition wall, Wladyslaw strained to listen. He thought he could make out Jozef speaking lightly, even cheerfully, and felt a
fleeting relief. For the moment at least, he could feel free of responsibility.

Here came early Christians to found a monastery upon the great tor of Glastonbury, and here, on an island in the midst of a wide inland sea, King Alfred took refuge from the invading Danes
while he plotted victory over them . . .

On the far side of the partition the door sounded again, and Wladyslaw realised the voices had ceased. He heard what might have been a locker door closing and the creak of a bed as someone got
up or sat down. He thought: They’ve left Jozef alone again. He cursed them for not making more of an effort. And yet how could he really blame them? There is nothing that drains one’s
capacity for compassion quite so rapidly as unrelieved despair.

The Levels lie at the very heart of Somerset, both geographically and symbolically, for it is from the wetlands that the county has gained its name – ‘sumer seata’ –
the land of the summer people. Until recent times, people retreated to higher ground during the winter floods, only coming down again once the land had dried out, to graze their cattle and grow
their crops.

Ten thousand years ago, before recorded time, the Levels were inundated with salt water, forming a shallow sea of some 250 square miles, rimmed on three sides by hills, corrugated by low
promontories, and dotted with islands, knolls and mumps. Then as the sea receded, the rain-spill from the surrounding hills formed a freshwater wetland, and man began his long struggle to dominate
this most stubborn of aqueous landscapes.

Wladyslaw reviewed his list of new words without enthusiasm. It was hard to believe that ‘corrugate’ and ‘inundate’ would prove useful in general conversation. As for
‘mumps’, it – or they – appeared untranslatable except as a virulent disease dangerous to pubescent boys. He rather wished the doctor had lent him a modern novel instead,
something which would provide some insights into the English psyche. ‘Manners’ over ‘mumps’.

It is a battle not yet won, for this is a land caught between two great watery forces. Firstly, there is the rain which spills off the mass of the surrounding hills onto the lowlands, where
it is carried sluggishly, if at all, by somnambulant rivers whose way to the sea is blocked for up to six hours in every twelve by the tides, causing the rivers to leak, slop, or spill their load
over the wetlands and leave the moors flooded for months on end. The second great force is the sea itself, which for thousands of years continued to encroach upon the land at high water, and can,
even now, at the coincidence of a fierce Atlantic storm with the highest of spring tides make a mockery of the sea defences and roar in across the Levels for a distance of forty miles, carrying all
before it.

Wladyslaw had a vision of the Biebrza wetlands, near the home of his favourite cousins, the Szulinskis. The floods there had always seemed benign affairs, just a rising and spilling of water
from the Biebrza River’s myriad backwaters, pools and swamps onto the wide water meadows of the flood plain. But perhaps he had never been there at the time of the spring melt. Or rain had
kept them inside the house. Or the summers had come to blanch out the other memories. The last two summers before the war had been particularly hot, vivid, sun-drenched. He saw again the scorched
quality of the light as it fell on the river, he felt the intensity of the heat, he saw again the grave beauty of Krystina as she sat playing the piano late into the evening. Krystina was the third
of his Szulinski cousins, a music student two months younger than himself, a pale slender creature with an air of artistic absorption. Most days she preferred to stay in the house practising her
music or walking her little dog in the gardens, but one morning her brothers had persuaded her to join the rest of them on a rowing trip. The day was heavy and languid, the branches of the trees
bowed almost to the surface of the water by the weight of leaves; all sound was suspended. Krystina lay against the back seat of the skiff under an ancient Japanese parasol. They passed through the
shadow of an overhanging branch, she turned her head in profile, and all at once something caught at Wladyslaw’s heart, he felt his whole world overturn and found himself irretrievably in
love.

His happiness was overwhelming, intense, pierced by an agonised uncertainty that was all too quickly justified when, a month after his return to university, Krystina sent him a note asking him
not to write so often. She wrapped up the message kindly: she said she was too busy with her studies to reply, she was looking forward to seeing him at Christmas when they would surely meet up
again, she sent her fond love as a cousin. He thought he would never experience such pain again, though in the end this, like the passion, wore itself out. By the time he saw the Szulinskis again
the following spring he was able to greet Krystina with a jovial irony, as though he could look back on the episode as a passing madness.

He wondered if she had survived the labour camps. Picturing the long white slender hands, he thought perhaps not.

Into this battle, man brought his full armoury to bear. For centuries, he ditched and drained the wetlands, he re-routed and straightened rivers, he raised and reinforced their banks, he
installed sluices and pumping stations. He built sea defences, and constructed sea gates, or clyses, across the mouths of the rivers to hold back the sea at high water. But, despite all his
efforts, he has won a fragile and uncertain victory, for the spill-waters still flood the most susceptible moors in winter, and there are no defences that can repel the sea when the forces of storm
and tide conspire to raise it a full five feet above the coast.

At ten thirty Wladyslaw closed the book with a sense of, if not accomplishment, then perseverance. The vocabulary list was difficult but not perhaps impossible. By the time he climbed into bed
he managed to persuade himself that he was agreeably tired and had a good chance of an undisturbed night. He had read somewhere that your dreams are often determined by your last thoughts, so he
fell asleep to images of the Biebrza River. But the shining water soon evaporated, and he was cast back to the heat and dust of Uzbekistan and the foul charnel house that drove his worst
nightmares.

B
ILLY SHOVELLED
another load of muck off the henhouse floor and said, ‘But why not?’

‘They’re not going to speak English, are they?’ said Stan.