Tailor of Inverness, The (13 page)

At a funeral of an old Pole during the previous week, he had told a grieving compatriot ‘We’ve got to keep going as long as we can.’

I tried to get through to Adam all day on the phone, but in the end had to write instead.

My last conversation with Dad had been two weeks before. He wanted to make new suits for Virginia and me. I told him we couldn’t afford it at the moment. We talked about them coming down in May perhaps. It was a short conversation. He always worried about spending too much money on the phone.

About 400 people attended the funeral. His Masonic friends carried him out of the church. He had been made Master of
his lodge that year, the crowning achievement of his
integration
into the life of Inverness. He had told his friends that he fully intended to enjoy his year. There was a short blizzard at his graveside, snow and sunshine. We had drinks and
sandwiches
at the Haughdale Hotel by the river where I struggled through a speech of thanks.

Angela, Casia and I sorted through all his tailoring gear, dividing it up and throwing out old bits of cloth he’d kept for patches. Angela took the bulk of the thread, catches, buttons and pieces of lining: she does the most sewing. We had a pair of scissors each and distributed parallel bars, rulers, his irons, zips, cords, piping, elastic, fasteners and his stationery. We went through his clothes. Beautiful suits which could fit me with alteration or if I fill out, jumpers and shirts, bow ties, socks, long johns and vests and two lovely coats. Mum found his maroon polo neck jumper. We were in a jolly mood. This is in good condition she said, offering it to me. I found a large tear in the arm. I don’t think so, mum. Angela laughed. Catherine and I followed suit. Mum’s face crumpled. They had to tear it, she said, he was wearing it.

I feel a responsibility, now you’re gone. There are certain parts of the living you which only exist now in me.

The months following my father’s death were filled with a sense of loss. I stayed with my mother for three weeks and then took her down to London with me for another week. I worked on my company’s next production and in the autumn, I toured the Highlands in George Gunn’s play
Songs of the Grey Coast
. The play was a family drama which took place immediately after the death of the patriarch. I played his son. Art was imitating life. I don’t know whether my loss made my role easier or more difficult. What I do know is that I drank heavily while I was performing the play and was more prone to emotional outbursts.

I didn’t return to Poland for ten years after his death. I made a couple of attempts to learn Polish by attending adult education classes in Islington, but each time, the course was curtailed by new acting jobs which clashed with class times or took me away from London. I gave up. The wars in former Yugoslavia had broken out during this period and, in August 1994, my theatre company, Plain Clothes Productions, mounted a new production in response, ‘Wolf’ by Michael Bosworth, a dream-like play which attempted to examine the causes and effects of these wars through its characters: a general and his
brutalised daughter; a prisoner from an opposing ethnic group who had been spared for his supposed storytelling powers, charged by the general with reawakening the innocent child in his daughter through his stories; the storyteller’s dead companions, doomed refugees from the war. Bleak, poetic and challenging, it was a fairytale set in a war we were witnessing through our TV screens.

A few months before the production went into rehearsal, I invited Misha round to my house to listen to a reading of the play. He was back on a brief visit, some work and some rest. His life at the time was completely dominated by Yugoslavia’s bloody demise. He had been continually travelling throughout the region, researching, reporting, utilising his extensive network of contacts, cataloguing the atrocities and the folly and beginning to prepare his mighty history of the region,
The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers 1804-1999
. He had also married a Serbian woman. His book,
The Fall of Yugoslavia
, essential reading for an understanding of the wars in Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia, was first published in 1992 and he had received a Sony Gold Award for his contribution to broadcasting in 1993.

As we read the play, Misha became restless. He seemed tired and jaded, harder, and burdened by his grim experience. He expressed happiness at seeing us, but he hardly said a thing about the play. He made his excuses and left. I think he found our enterprise an indulgence, perceiving us then as a group of comfortable middle-class Brits pontificating about a war we knew little about, wringing our hands from a safe distance and the comfort of our kitchens. I was disappointed and angry with him. I believed that Michael’s play handled the subject with perception and honesty. I knew that although Misha’s knowledge and grasp of the history and politics of what was going on were far greater than mine, I had some understanding of the subjective experience we were trying to deal with through
my own experience and that of my father. But Misha was elsewhere, preoccupied with unfolding events. I felt great sympathy for the huge responsibilities he was undertaking and for the pain he undoubtedly felt for a region he loved, but didn’t see him again for several years.

During those years, I remained distant from Poland. My daughters were born and my life was taken up with caring for them and making a living. My mother adjusted to living on her own after a long grieving process and made the journey from Inverness to London a couple of times a year. I worked regularly in Scotland and had a growing desire to live there again. I often thought of my father. Finally, some time in the late 90s, I can’t remember exactly when, I decided to transcribe the conversations I had recorded with him.

I hadn’t touched the tapes since the recordings. I think there were two reasons for this. When he died, I immediately regretted my negligence in failing to record more. I knew, even when I made the recordings, that there was much more behind what he had told me and that I wanted to try to dig deeper, but I hadn’t. I felt that it was a job half-done and that was painful and frustrating. Listening to the tapes would simply exacerbate these feelings. Also, in the year or two after his death, I was afraid that listening to his voice would have been too upsetting, that it would have hindered my recovery from grief.

As I dug out the tapes, I remembered those hours we’d spent recording them in his workroom in our house in Dalneigh. He’d set it up in my old bedroom after selling his shop in the town centre a couple of years previously. He only took on work from his long-standing customers then,
semi-retired
. By then, Dalneigh had become a quieter place. The roll at the primary school had fallen to under 200 as the children of my generation had grown up and moved out, leaving their ageing parents at home. Many of those parents
had taken advantage of Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy
legislation
and had bought their houses, adding new coats of masonry paint, porches and extensions in the process. As a consequence, the aesthetic unity of the estate had been replaced with a patchwork quality. This disunity seemed to me an expression of Thatcher’s individualistic creed. A few years later, the council spent hundreds of thousands of pounds renovating all the houses on the estate, except the ones which had become owner-occupied, so my disgruntled parents missed out on that particular benefit of public ownership.

I switched on the first tape and was immediately with him. The deep timbre of his voice filled the room in my flat in Dalston, but I was back in my old bedroom, his workroom, with its muted, pale floral patterned wallpaper and white painted woodwork and its window looking down on gardens and sheds, a telegraph pole with a fan of wires reaching out to the surrounding houses and Craig Phadrig on the skyline, forested and ancient, indifferent to the new housing estates at its feet which would eventually go the way of the Pictish vitrified fort at its summit. The tape preserved those moments, then ten years old. I saw him sitting on his workbench with his feet on a chair, in that elevated position he liked as he worked.

I didn’t write anything down for more than an hour, I just listened, thrilled and moved to hear his voice again, deep, animated, warm. The voice I loved so much and hadn’t heard for ten years. I was lost in it until the rude interruptions of my mother on the tape jolted me out of this reverie. What are you telling him your business for? Haven’t you got better things to do? When are you going to chop the wood? She clearly didn’t like what we were doing. She resented being left out or was perhaps afraid that Dad would reveal something she would prefer I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell which. My father just brushed it off. At the time, her behaviour didn’t seem out
of character, she often expressed disapproval of my schemes, so I thought little of it. I was to discover later that there were very strong motives for her agitation.

I set to work, pressing the stop and start buttons, typing in his words and mine, the questions and answers. The laborious detail of this process gave me time to think about what was being said and I chafed at the inadequacy of my probing: the lines of inquiry which I didn’t pursue or which were limited by his loss of memory or his unwillingness to go into detail. New questions kept forming in my mind as I listened and typed. One dominated all the others. There were nearly four years between these recordings and his death. Why hadn’t I listened to the tapes, thought of these new questions and conducted a second series of recordings?

There were a number of answers: living so far apart, we didn’t see each other often; the time we had together was usually filled with family obligations and routines; his illness during this period made me hesitate. Above all, I think I had an understanding that there was a limit to what he would or could tell me. My questioning on some subjects had been quite persistent, I had often pressed him for more detail and he had appeared to try to give me what he could. Repeatedly, I had found myself at a dead end, with little more than general facts, commonly-held attitudes or well-known history. The fact was that after I made these recordings, I didn’t believe he would tell me any more. He had given me as much as I was going to get.

As I typed, it was a relief to find passages which were personal, which revealed something of what happened directly
to him
. There was more of this in the first tape, which covered his childhood and the years leading up to the war. His
descriptions
of Gnilowody and life in the village were vivid: the harvest, his school, his sister’s wedding, characters in the village like Wawolka and the Kuszpisz brothers. There were the
dramatic episodes: being chased by wolves on the sleigh, his experiments with his brothers with the explosive ordnance from World War One battles they had found in nearby fields. All of these elements drew a rich picture of his lost world and, as I transcribed his words, they made me want to see the place for myself. I knew that sooner or later I would have to travel to Ukraine.

His account of the war years was more problematic for me. There were fewer personal recollections, much more in the way of general descriptions of the historical events which swept him from Poland to Russia to North Africa, Italy and finally to Britain. He struggled to remember place names, dates and people. I doubted the accuracy of his geography. It was curious that the name of the Uzbek village, Halenka, was almost the same as the name of the Russian doctor who told him about Stalin’s amnesty for the Poles, Halinka. I remembered that I had asked him to point on a map of Russia to the region where he had searched for a Polish officer. He was full of uncertainty until, after dithering for some time, he settled on a region immediately to the south-west of the Ural mountains, over 1500 kilometres from Uzbekistan. I’d let it pass at the time, knowing the vastness of Russia and the huge distances many people had travelled in transports to the gulag or
individually
as escapees, searching for reconciliation with loved ones or simply in attempts to free themselves from the Soviet authorities. There were no detailed descriptions of combat. I attributed this to the pain such memories can renew, knowing that it was rare for ex-combatants to talk about these things.

I completed my task of transcribing the tapes with his energetic post-war life in Scotland, moved by his reunion with Kazik and the loss of contact with his parents, full of
admiration
for the zest with which he embraced his new life. It was natural that he could describe the post-war period in a happier tone. These memories weren’t difficult. They weren’t about
loss and displacement; they were about renewal and hope. In spite of my frustration with the brevity of my recordings, I felt grateful for the generosity he had shown. His life had been both ordinary and extraordinary. In its own small way, it was a testament to survival, a defiance of war, but I was left with an incomplete story and knew that I would never be able to fill in all the gaps or answer all the questions which remained. I needed to know more, as much as possible, but didn’t know how to begin. I felt weighed down by the seeming enormity of this task, which engendered a demoralised inertia. Having explored some of the rooms of my father’s house I had reached one with a locked door. I combated this feeling with the demands and delights of work and parenthood. I allowed life to take its course and as it did so, a few years later, I found the key to that door.

In summer 2002, I returned to Poland with my family, taking my daughters Ruby (8) and Iona (6) for their first visit. We opted to drive. I was excited at the prospect of retracing the journeys of my childhood and opening up my Polish heritage to my daughters, but we weren’t going to Lesna. Uncle Adam and Aunt Aniela had sold their house in the early 1990s to enable Ula and her husband Janusz to finish building their new house in a suburb of Gdansk, more than 700 kilometres north-east. In return, Adam and Aniela moved in with them. This arrangement lasted only a couple of years before they moved again, to Aniela’s birthplace of Augustow, a town in Mazuria, the beautiful lake district in the north-east corner of the country on Poland’s borders with Belarus, Lithuania and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. So we took a new road.

By then, we had moved to Edinburgh. We drove to catch an overnight ferry from Harwich to Cuxhaven, near Hamburg. Arriving early in Harwich we whiled away the time with lunch in a quiet pub near the docks, watching the dull 2002 World Cup Final between Germany and Brazil, held in the reunited Berlin. We’d be there the next day. On the ferry, I joined with the children’s excitement, remembering my own from all those
years ago as they delighted in exploring the decks and
discovering
the compact features of our cabin.

Arriving in Cuxhaven at lunchtime the next day, we drove to Berlin and its World Cup hangover, where we were reunited with Tom and his friends Klaus and Johannes. Twelve years after reunification, the new Berlin was taking shape. The old centre around Potsdamer Platz and Unter den Linden, formerly bisected by the Wall, had been reclaimed. The machine-
gun-turreted
, barbed wire wasteland that was Potsdamer Platz had been transformed into a towering steel and glass symbol of the triumph of the West, the Sony Centre conspiring in a giant huddle with the Bahn Tower under a huge glass umbrella. Shoppers, office workers and cinemagoers milled through its plaza or sat at its terraced cafes, gazing at the geometry and light, and at the enormous inflatable Spiderman which pretended to climb a wall of this capitalist cathedral, there to herald the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

We drove past all this on our way out of Berlin. The other new glass umbrella, the transparent dome of the reborn Reichstag, with its spiral walkway, was off in the distance. The sight of the tourists, as they made their way up the spiral, suggested something extra-terrestrial, souls journeying up to heaven, aspiring to a higher plane, dazzled by the light of hope or delusion. Beside the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate was open, no longer a border, and Unter den Linden was complete once more. The old Mexican stand-off between buildings, the great architectural projects of East and West which symbolised the political power game that was the Cold War had faded into absurdity. I remembered how impressive and disturbing it had been to walk through the two half-cities as they
desperately
masqueraded as separate entities. Now, that was all over and the unified, single Berlin was striving to define and assert its new identity, eager to achieve a new cohesion.

Diversity was the buzzword in Berlin in 2002. Still painfully conscious of the crimes of fascism (though less so of the crimes of communism: the communist period, though full of iniquity, was like a 40-year sleepwalk as a stunned, defeated East German population tried slowly to understand what had happened to them), the city was promoting multi-cultutralism. The huge Neue Synagogue at Oranienburgerstrasse had been restored and a small new Jewish population, mainly emigrants from Russia, had settled in the city.

During this summer of 2002, the centre of Berlin was peppered with around 350 two-metre tall multi-coloured fibre glass bears, the bear being the symbol of the city. The United Buddy Bears of Berlin, you either loved them or hated them. They were psychedelic, two-tone, uniformed, chequered, striped, landscaped, stellar and everywhere. A grassy area between the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate was
designated
as the exhibition space for the International Bears. Each of the world’s countries was represented by a bear. An artist from each country, or a German artist associated with a country if no native artist was available, was commissioned to paint a bear in a way which represented his or her nation.

The International Bears stood side by side in an 80-metre wide circle, facing inwards, having a pow-wow. The British bear held a cup of tea, wore Union Jack knickers and was adorned with several gilt-framed pictures of, amongst others, the royal family, Wallace & Gromit and a London bus. The Yugoslavian bear was riddled with bulletholes. Other bears depicted Caribbean scenes (Jamaica), national costume (Belarus) and national symbols (India). But underneath all this variety, the bears were identical, all cast in the same mould. I think the concept was that we’re all the same under the skin. My children loved the bears and I liked them too. A couple of young women from London of Cameroonian descent jumped for joy when they found the bear from Cameroon.

We headed out along one of the spokes which connects the city centre to the Berliner Ring, out through the city’s north-east. This was part of the old East Berlin and it showed. With the affluence of the centre behind us, we drove through
neighbourhoods
which were more down-at-heel, not poverty-stricken, but all part of a quite featureless urban sprawl. We paused at a set of traffic lights beside a tram stop. People were waiting there: a woman in her sixties, a picture of fatigue in a worn brown skirt and cardigan and a look to match, she seemed to be held upright by the heavy shopping bags which surrounded her feet; a group of teenagers in denims, trainers and T-shirts, one with a mullet, Germany being the last bastion of that hairstyle; an harassed mother coping with a baby, two toddlers and her shopping; a man bursting out of his cheap suit, thick-necked and earphoned, carrying a fake leather wallet briefcase. It could have been Newcastle-upon-Tyne or Warsaw. From our passing car, I couldn’t tell whether these people were happy or not, just living their lives, getting on with things, working, striving, hopeful, resigned.

We joined the autobahn which would take us to the Polish border and after about 20 kilometres, I was surprised and dismayed to find that it appeared to be the only stretch of motorway which the united Germans had failed to improve. Suddenly we were back in the holidays of my youth, ker-thunk, ker-thunk, ker-thunk, as we, ker-thunk, drove over, ker-thunk, the gaps between, ker-thunk, each of the old, ker-thunk, concrete slabs which made up the original autobahn. Potholes, cracks, low speed limits, roadworks, I wondered if the appalling surface remained to deter Germans from visiting Poland and vice versa. It began to rain heavily. The catch on our
jam-packed
boot snapped and the boot swung open. I repaired it in the rain with a piece of rope and we carried on to the border at Kolbaskowo, where we queued for a mere ten minutes before showing our passports and driving on over the Oder south of Szczecin into Pomerania.

As soon as we entered Poland, it was clear that substantial changes had taken place. The first and most obvious signs were on the road: cars, lots of them. The Poles had rapidly made up for all those years without them, and the road surface was smooth! The cars filled up the smooth road, racing along, overtaking at every opportunity, vying for space. Often the road was a kind of three-lane highway with the middle lane for overtaking, in either direction, and the Polish drivers seemed to revel in its risk. In the towns we passed, there were still plenty of crumbling facades, but there were also lots of new buildings, complete or under construction, especially new houses, and signs everywhere, advertising hoardings, white boards proclaiming the existence of every conceivable private enterprise apart from prostitution and drug dealing. They seemed to multiply before our eyes in the larger towns and cities. It was difficult to spot the road signs.

Having left Berlin later than planned due to a celebratory evening with Tom and co., we realised that we weren’t going to make it to Gdansk, so we turned off the main road and made our way north to Kolobrzeg, one of several seaside resorts dotted along Poland’s Baltic coast. We spent the night there in a Soviet-era hotel block. In the morning, we briefly paddled on the sandy beach, which stretches along nearly all of the 300 kilometres of coastline between Szczecin and Gdansk. Szczecin was once Stettin, Gdansk Danzig, Kolobrzeg Kolberg.

Most of Pomerania has been outside Polish borders for longer than it has been inside them during the last thousand years, only returning to Poland after a 425-year absence in 1945. During those 1000 years, its population was a mixture of mainly Poles and Germans with some Scandinavians thrown in due to Sweden’s 100-year rule of most of the region from 1620. The Red Army rampaged across Pomerania in early 1945, taking a terrible revenge on the German population,
whom Hitler had refused to evacuate. The remaining Germans were subsequently expelled from Pomerania across the new German borders and, as in Silesia, the region was repopulated with Poles, most of whom were refugees from the eastern Polish lands annexed by Stalin’s regime. It was hard to imagine such upheaval as we travelled through Pomerania’s peaceful, sparsely-populated farmland, even though we were
accompanied
by an army of racing drivers.

We drove on through Koszalin and Slupsk to the Gulf of Gdansk, through the sister towns of Gdynia and Sopot to the city itself, finding our way to Ula’s suburb of Jasien. The building trade was booming here, with smart new blocks of flats going up. It was booming everywhere. We saw hundreds of individual houses being built on their own plots of land and many startling modernist churches, full of sharp angles, smooth pale surfaces and colourful stained glass, thrusting upwards, spearing the sky. At the turn of the century, Poland was surely the world’s church-building capital. It must also have been, and still is, one of the most religiously observant countries in Christendom.

Homogenised into an almost exclusively Roman Catholic population after the genocide of the Jews and the expulsion of most Germans and Ukrainians, and suppressed by the
anti-religious
atheism of the Communists, many Poles turned more and more to the Church during the Communist decades, for succour and as a focus for opposition. This grew to a
spectacular
climax during the 1980s with the accession of the Polish pope, Karol Woytla (John Paul II) and his support of Solidarity. Now, the devout Polish people were repaying the church’s solidarity and resistance and its endorsement of Poland through Karol Woytla’s papacy, reasserting its impressively successful association with the spirit of the nation. Through history, particularly during the 19
^th
century partitions, some Polish artists, theologians and philosophers have equated
Poland’s suffering with Christ’s, propagating the idea that Poland
is
Christ. The crucifixion has become a national symbol. Poland has been crucified, and has risen from the dead, though this new land of cars, building sites and advertising hoardings can hardly be described as heaven.

Ula’s spacious house, protected by the tinplate roofing she had acquired in Ukraine, lay in a neighbourhood of
independently
-built houses which all pre-dated the building boom we were witnessing. These were all built during the 1990s by those old enough, sharp enough, rich enough to be quick off the mark, to take advantage of the new freedom, one might even say anarchy, of that time. Ula’s drive for a better life for her family and the material gains which she saw as central to that had taken her to Australia for six months, where her brother Jurek had found her work. She also worked for another six-month stint in Chicago, a city which is second only to Warsaw for the size of its Polish population, getting work through friends who had established themselves already. She welcomed us with open arms, delighted with the girls, who immediately started playing basketball with 17-year-old Wojtek, and introduced us to Janusz, a telecoms engineer. He’d been working for his company in Belarus, erecting new mobile phone masts. We spent the evening eating and drinking in Ula’s garden, reminiscing about Lesna and our dead fathers, renewing our shared history. My mother flew in to join us the following day.

Our days in Gdansk were spent sightseeing and going to the beach at Sopot, the home of Polish pop and rock festivals. We visited the lovingly-restored Old Town and the Solidarity Monument at the entrance to the Gdansk Shipyard, the scene of the movement’s birth. Three tapering, tree-like granite crosses inlaid with anchors stand in a triangle. Beside the monument lie rows of plaques commemorating each of 28 people who were killed by Polish security police during the
dockers’ strike of 1970. Fresh flowers had been placed here. We drove to the huge medieval fortress of Malbork, founded in 1274 by the Teutonic Order. The largest fortified Gothic building in Europe, Malbork is a testament to the power of the Order. I remembered the epic film I’d seen as a child,
Krzyzacy
, and its depiction of the mighty Battle of Grunwald between the Poles and the Order, only 70 kilometres from Malbork. Like Gdansk’s Old Town, Malbork was virtually destroyed during the Second World War, but now stands restored, glorious and solid. Looking at a photograph of the fortress from 1945, its hard to reconcile the burned out ruin it was then with the seemingly impregnable structure it is today. I’m struck by the mockery modern explosives can make of so much human effort, by the irony of so much enquiry and invention resulting in so much destruction.