She leaned again over the wooden
parapet, pretending to be sightseeing. Not that these people were in any state
to notice her. They were scarcely human; they spoiled the idyllic scene. It
must be they who had flattened the reeds on either side of the river. One was
on his knees, leaning into the rushes, peeing. Someone knocked him over in
mid-flow. A rumpus of crumpled arms and legs began. It filled the dark shining
air with drunken Polish voices.
After a very short time it subsided. They
were too far gone for a good scrimmage.
One voice, that of the peeing man,
began with the sad song Yurek had been singing near the castle, the secret song
about thousands of Poles lying dead at the bottom of the Baikal Lake, Siberia’s
enormous southern stretch of water. His voice was deep too, like Yurek’s. It
was probably a song sung by many drunken Polish men. After all, the Russian border
loomed very near. Other thinner, less melodious voices joined in. She heard the
song differently now,after having been in those cellars. Who was she to
criticise these men?She understood at last why the Poles tolerated their drunks.
The singer pulled aside the rushes and
stood up. It was Yurek. In his good jacket and trousers – which looked to be in
even worse shape now.
He certainly hadn’t taken long to put
himself in a state of total collapse.
She scarcely knew she had moved before
she was down beside him, holding him. He clutched her back, his bodyout of
control, almost pulling her to the ground. She drew up, away from him. His eyes
gleamed with drunken emotion, stared unseeingly at her.
‘My poor country,’ he whispered,
laughed in despair,‘poor Poland.’
So! Yurek was not as matter of fact
about The King’s cellars as he had seemed to be. He had taken it all very
personally. Of course he had. It was one of the first things he had come upon on
his return journeys to his homeland after 1990; the horror of those cellars.
Before that, in the communist years, such knowledge had been dampened down,
hidden.
He was still in a kind of post-glasnost
shock.
Now he came out in a rush with the
unexpected. Said it as if he were confessing something terrible.
‘I met my father’s sister. Aunty. She
hugged me. She lofs me. Lofs me.’ So that’s where his half-brother had taken
him, to his father’s sister’s home. It was love, even more than the cellars,
which had shaken him.
‘That’s great Yurek, isn’t it?’
He looked at her blearily.
‘It was wonderful. Wonderrrful. She
said she held me in her arms when I was little baby. She loves me. All warm. Lovely. I
couldn’t take it. Too rrrich for me.’He shivered as if his aunt had tried to assault him, not love him. ‘I ran away. Down
here.’
Liz understood. Living with a mother
like his; damaged, her life twisted withNazi and Stalin haunted fears, he couldn’t
take even a little of such warmth. And getting it from the newly found sister
of his birth father, the father he had longed for all his life and never known?
It was too much! He’d had to anaesthetise himself.
Now though, thanks to selfish, ruthless
Uncle, she, Liz, was going to have to pull him out of the anaesthetic.
Uncle’s minder stood behind her with
the thermos.
‘Yurek,’ she whispered, ‘we’re in a bad
situation darling. I know you don’t want me anymore but I need your help, I’m
in danger. Danger, Yurek. Do you understand?’
He propped one eye open,trying to
concentrate. ‘Danger,’ he managed to say, but it hadn’t got through to his
brain. She held out the cup of coffee the minder had handed her. ‘Drink this
Yurek, for the love of God.’ He shook his head violently, looked hard at her.
‘What,
Yurek?’ She was frantic. ‘What?’
He almost yelled then. ‘Not for the
love of any damned God!’
Liz glanced nervously around at his
companions, hoping desperately none of them understood English. They might not
besober but they were Poles. Their God, their Catholicism gave them the will to
survive.An atheist in their midst? Never! Such knowledge would kill them.
‘Yurek, drink this, it’s me, Lizzie, I’m
scared, Uncle’s going to do something awful to me if you don’t sober up and
help me.’
She didn’t believe that about Uncle,
not really, in spite of all his suspicious Warsaw dealings. She was just afraid
the bleary-eyed Yurek didn’t care enough about her to pull himself together.
He looked at her, long and hard. Then,
finally, kept his head steady and allowed her to feed him the coffee. Perhaps
the idiocy of the drinking was over. Perhaps she had Yurek back. But for how
long? She ignored the whispering inside her that the knight gallant in him, what
was left of it, belonged to someone else now.