Nuns and Soldiers (4 page)

 

 

As a child the Count did not want to hear of these things. He was early aware of himself as a disappointment and a substitute. He shrank away from his father’s guilt and misery and humiliated pride. He did not want to join in the endless agonizing postmortem. (And Stalin said ... and Churchill said ... and Roosevelt said ... and Eden said ... and Sikorski said ... and Mikolajczyk said ... and Anders said ... and Bor-Komorovsky said ... and Bokszczanin said and Sosnkowski said ... and so on and so on.) While his father, who by this time had hardly anyone to talk to except his son, went on and on about the Curzon Line, the Count, whose ambition was to pass his exams and be an ordinary English Schoolboy, wrote carefully in his exercise book
Miles puellam amat. Puella militem amat.
He did not want to hear of those centuries of misery, of ‘partitions’ and betrayals and Teutonic Knights and what happened at Brest-Litovsk and what mistake Duke Conrad made in 1226. He would not worship Kosciuszko and Mickiewicz or even remember who they were. Worst of all, while his mother was stubbornly refusing to learn English, he was stubbornly refusing to learn Polish. (His brother Jozef had spoken excellent Polish of course.) After he went to school he uttered not another word of Polish, addressed in Polish he replied in English, then affected not to understand, then genuinely did not understand. His father gazed down at him with unspeakable pain and turned away. The tempest which raged in Bogdan’s soul rarely expressed itself physically. The Count could remember a few terrible incomprehensible Polish rows, his father shouting, his mother weeping. Later his father withdrew from his wife and child and also from his London compatriots. He never spoke again of returning to Poland. His mother and sisters had disappeared during the rising. He stayed on in England, a country whose self-interested perfidy he could not forgive. When the London Polish government (no longer the Polish government) was disbanded (some to choose exile, some to scramble back to Poland to try to gain some foothold in the new, as it soon became, Communist government), Bogdan took an office job in an English insurance firm. His idiosyncratic Marxism, unfed by any hope, had now dwindled and been succeeded by a fierce hatred of communism. He watched the events in eastern Europe with an almost spiteful pessimism. He now occupied himself with detesting Gomulka. He was momentarily cheered by the death of Stalin, but hoped nothing from the Poznan riots. He watched the Hungarian uprising and its fate with bitter envy, bitter anger. He died in 1969, having lived long enough to see Gomulka sending Polish troops to accompany the Russian tanks into Prague.

The Count passed his childhood in an ardent endeavour to be English, tormented by his father and unable to communicate with his mother. Some narrow despairing ambition took him to the London School of Economics, together with the help of a Polish Relief Fund with which his father had been connected. The Count’s name was Wojciech Szczepanski. (‘That’s a dog’s breakfast of a name,’ one of his schoolteachers had kindly remarked earlier on.) The English amongst whom he lived had to put up with his surname (which was not hard to pronounce once one knew how) but refused to tolerate the bizarre consonants of his Christian name. At school he was simply called ‘Big’, since he was even then markedly tall. He was not unpopular, but made no friends. He was laughed at and regarded as rather picturesque. He was ashamed of his father’s outlandish looks and funny accent, though a little consoled when someone said, ‘Big’s father is a brigand.’ Of course (and to his relief) his parents never invited his school fellows home. At college someone made a joke about all Polish exiles being Counts, and thus the Count became known as ‘the Count’ and addressed as ‘Count’. Later it emerged that he had another harmless first name, Piotr, and some few people took to calling him ‘Peter’ or ‘Pierre’, but it was then too late to unstick the familiar nickname. The Count was in fact not displeased by his honorary title; it was a little English jest which bound him to his surroundings and gave him a shred of identity. He did not even mind when strangers sometimes took him for a real count. In small ways he played the aristocrat or at least the gallant heel-clicking foreigner, never sure if this was a charade or not. For all his efforts to be English he had a slight foreign accent. And he increasingly felt, in every cell of his being, an alien. Yet his Polishness was no refuge. It was a private nightmare.

His mother died two years after his father. She pined away into an absolute solitude. How solitary she had always been the remorseful Count now began to measure when it was too late, and when she was almost dying he began to live in his love for her and her now incurably wistful love for him. He had acquired, in spite of his determination not to, some sense of the Polish language, and now began to learn it in earnest, sitting with his grammar book beside his mother’s bed and making her laugh with his pronunciation. Near the end she timidly asked if he would mind if she saw a priest. Hastening to find one the Count wept. His father had hated Christianity almost as much as he had hated Russia, and his mother had been used to creep off to mass alone. She had never taught her son any prayer, she would not have dared to. She had never suggested taking him to church, and the Count had never thought of going. Now when he would so gladly have gone with her she was bed-ridden, and when a black-clad Polish-speaking Lithuanian entered the house, he treated the Count, with a mixture of apology and pity, as an Englishman. After his mother died the Count used to sit in Roman Catholic churches and indulge an intense confused incoherent sorrow.

After the L.S.E., where he showed a considerable talent for symbolic logic and chess, ambition gave out. He took a job in market research and hated it, then drifted at a modest level into the Civil Service. His mother, now gone, had not failed to make clear how much she wanted him to get married. (The first word he remembered learning from his father was
powstanie
, insurrection. The word
dziewezyna
, girl, was later often upon his mother’s lips.) But somehow the Count never seriously considered the married state. He had some scrappy luckless affairs at the L.S.E. He was too much of a puritan to enjoy promiscuity. He had, fortunately, the strength required to terminate unhappy entanglements. He made out that he preferred to be alone. He felt that he was hiding, not waiting but hiding. He had friendly acquaintances, a fairly interesting job, but he was chronically unhappy. His unhappiness was not desperate, just quiet and steady and deep. His London flat became a place of solitude, a citadel of loneliness, from which he began to assume he would never emerge.

By now it had fully dawned upon the Count how irredeemably Polish he was doomed to be. At last, sick with anticipation, indecision, fear, he went to Warsaw on a visit. He told no one of his journey. No one he knew ever wanted to talk about Poland anyway. He went as a solitary tourist. There was no family to seek for. By now Warsaw had been almost entirely rebuilt, the city centre an exact replica of what the Germans had destroyed. He was fortunate enough to be present, in a breathlessly passionately silent crowd, as the gilded dome was lifted at last into place upon the reconstructed royal palace. He stayed at a big impersonal hotel near the war memorial. He was alone, a shy eccentric Englishman with an appalling accent and a Polish name. The handsome rebuilt city was ghostly to him. (He had so often heard his father say that Warsaw had been so totally destroyed that it would have been easier to abandon the flattened ruins and built a new capital elsewhere.) And in the handsome rebuilt city he wandered like a ghost, a watchful tormented excluded ghost.

Meanwhile Gomulka had been succeeded by Gierek. (The Count’s father would have hated him too.) The Polish government, which had previously regarded exiled Poles as traitors, now began sagely to woo its diaspora. The Count was amazed to receive communications with Polish stamps, periodicals in English and Polish, literary journals, questionnaires, propaganda, news. He was surprised and oddly gratified to find that they knew he existed. His father would have been alarmed, suspicious. (He felt less flattered later when he realized they could simply have searched the telephone book for Polish names.) He devoured these offerings but did not reply. There was, he felt, nothing for him at the other end, and nothing for them either. There was nothing he could do for Poland. The bureaucratic missives touched his heart, yet they were love letters sent to the wrong address. Like his father he had, in his own way, interiorized Poland, he was his own Poland, suffering alone. In spite of all his childhood resistance, his father had taught him a burning searing patriotism which flamed on, endlessly, vainly.

He spoke of this to no one, and received indeed little encouragement to do so. No one came close enough to him to suspect the intensity of this secret life. No one was really interested in his nationality or even in his nation. Was Poland invisible? He meditated often upon the
fact
that England had entered the war for the sake of Poland. (So, in a sense, had everyone.
Mourir pour Danzig?
) But in England this meant nothing now, was forgotten. It was, of course, an accident of history at what point, in those terrible years, England and France decided to draw the line. Everyone seemed to think of Poland, if thinking of it at all, in a sort of mechanical diplomatic sense as part of some more general problem: as a constituent of the Austro-Hungarian empire, as one of the ‘eastern democracies’. The eternal ‘Polish question’ was never, it appeared, really about Poland at all, but about some use to which Poland could be put or some hindrance which Poland represented in the larger designs of others. No one seemed to perceive or appreciate that unique burning flame of Polishness which though still dimmed by a ruthless neighbour continued to burn
as it had always done.

Such reflections (and they were frequent) bred in the Count a sort of frustrated fantasy heroism, as of one cheated of his inheritance and awaiting a call to arms. He had a heroic role in the world, though he knew that it was an impossible one which he would never find. In reality, he was not a crusader. (He gave money to causes but never attended their meetings.) He felt now in a new way that he was alone with his father. Admiration and love and yearning reached out mournfully towards that shade. His father had been an exile and a thinker and a gentleman, a brave man and a patriot, a man lost, destroyed, disappointed, and laid to ruins. He had died with
finis poloniae
written upon his heart. The Count, measuring by that stature his own meagre being, soberly translated his ‘heroism’ into a sort of negative sense of honour. He would never die for Poland, as his father would have done if he could, gladly and without a second’s hesitation. But he could avoid any baseness which might demean that memory, and could cultivate a narrow moral stiffness with which to resist the world. Such was his honour. He knew that his father had, all his life, seen himself as a soldier. The Count too saw himself as a soldier, but a very ordinary soldier with a soldier’s dullness and circumscribed lot and extremely small chance of glory.

 

 

When the Count was over thirty he received a tardy promotion and moved from his obscure department to the Home Office, and here he met Guy Openshaw who was the head of his section. Guy won his heart by asking him questions. The Count was a phenomenon. Guy liked phenomena. Guy never asked quite the questions which the Count wanted, and the questioning never quite succeeded in making the Count talkative. But although it may be that Guy never entirely
saw
what was before him he did ask (which oddly enough no one, not even a woman, had done before) about the Count’s childhood, his parents, his beliefs. And it was not just the precision of the questions which charmed the Count, it was the expectation of the answers, which had to be simple, direct, lucid, truthful, and uttered with a certain calm dignity. This method of questioning did elicit truth, but with an almost deliberate limitation, as if there were a definite periphery of things which Guy did
not
want to know. A less expert interrogator might, whether he liked it or not, have heard more. The Count played this game with Guy, and to some extent he played it with Gertrude, who had instinctively picked up, perhaps against her nature, some of Guy’s affectionate quizzical precision. In fact the Count did tell them, just these two, some important things about himself, and thus eased his heart and was by these ‘indiscretions’ bound to both of them.

He had been a docile student, and an excellent examinee, and he readily fell with Guy into a relation of pupil to teacher, almost (although they were of an age) of son to father. In fact to many people in his acquaintance, Guy represented some kind of patriarch. He was a very good administrator destined (it had seemed) for the highest office. His dignity, his particular cleverness, his power were for the Count guarantees of stability, proofs of meaning. He enjoyed admiring Guy and looking up to him. He stopped playing chess with Guy because he hated (invariably) beating him. Guy did not mind, but the Count did. And so it was that he became a member of the Openshaw ‘circle’ and found for himself a sort of home in the big flat in Ebury Street, and through it communicated with English society, and as it sometimes seemed to him, with the cosmos.

 

 

The Count stood at attention before Gertrude Openshaw. She did not look at him. In her grief she avoided everyone’s eyes, as if so much grief made her ashamed. A sort of terrible embarrassment united her and the Count. They did not display emotion to each other, there were no outbursts.

‘It’s snowing again, did you see?’

‘Yes.’

‘How was he?’

‘In good form.’

‘Did you have the white swan?’

‘No.’

‘Or “She sold the ring”?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know -’

‘Who - what ring - oh God. The upper side of the cube?’