Love Among the Single Classes Page 17

  My blessings to you all as the New Year begins. I am, your loving husband,

  Iwo.

  In the end I have written, not about Constance or Joanna, but about Katarzyna and myself. Have I ever pleaded with her so nakedly before? Is it enough? I don’t care if she has grown older and uglier – I want the warm, familiar smell and breathing of my wife in my bed.

  Joanna rings and, by pretending to be melancholy at the end of the year, forces me to cheer her up. We agree to meet and celebrate with strangers. At any rate it must be better than hearing the Australians getting drunk, shouting and vomiting and jamming the pay phone in their efforts to make it provide them with free calls home.

  Symbolically, I scrub and sweep my room clear of the old year before setting out to meet Joanna. She is in a new coat, red, and full of good humour. My spirits lift as I see her, and we link arms like an old married couple and stroll cheerfully through the cheerful streets. I had a glass or two of vodka before setting out, and Joanna’s breath smells tart yet sweet, as though she had already hailed the New Year, but in spite of this we sit among the English in a pub and take it in turns to buy drinks for each other. Her fluent English always surprises me. I forget that she is not a stranger here, like me.

  ‘Are you ever curious about Poland? Do you ever feel you don’t quite belong here?’

  ‘Yes … no. Of course I’m curious, about my family, my parents’ home town, about the whole Polish side of me. I feel very Polish: do I look Polish?’ And she strikes a pose, showing her fine profile to its best advantage, tipping her head back just enough to expose her throat and remind me how she looks in extremis.

  ‘What does Polish look like? In Lodz no-one would take you for a foreigner, but then, here they don’t either.’

  ‘No. I have an English voice and I went to an English school and have English friends: only my culture is Polish. It’s odd, isn’t it, that I have stayed so close to my father? Do you think it’s wrong?’

  ‘For him it must be good; for you …?’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘In Poland of course it would be normal, for all sorts of reasons. You wouldn’t get a single flat, if you were in Poland. Not unless you were a nomenklatura: a high-up Party member. And your aunts would never let you go!’

  ‘They won’t let me go here, either. They are a problem, Iwo. I feel trapped, the only young one in a household of elderly people. They still see me as a child.’

  ‘So leave …’

  ‘I’ll come and live with you!’

  ‘You wouldn’t like that much either.’

  ‘I don’t know … whenever you were in a bad mood I could go and talk to all those young men downstairs …’

  ‘I’m sure one of them would take you in now: you don’t need me!’

  ‘Ah, but you need me.’

  ‘I am quite clean and tidy, aren’t I … and hardly ever lonely.’

  ‘No, Iwo, I don’t mean to domesticate you. But you are … not lonely … but alone. You are becoming obviously a man who lives alone.’

  This idea frightens me. Is it so obvious?

  ‘You are teasing me, Joanna. You are unkind, making fun of an old man…’

  ‘Did you know that when you aren’t paying attention you talk to yourself?’

  ‘Is that bad?’

  ‘Does my father do it?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘No, he doesn’t.’

  ‘So: I need you to stop me talking to myself. What about you Joanna? Do you need me?’

  She has been waiting for this question, or something like it, and I have fallen into her trap. She commands my attention by remaining quiet for a long while before answering. The noisy pub rackets around us, but Joanna creates our own silence.

  ‘It’s my turn to buy the drinks …’ I say; but she stops me.

  ‘Yes. I do need you. You know I do. Not just because I should get away from my father and stop being the baby of the household. Nor do I necessarily want children. I … I very nearly love you, Iwo.’

  ‘My dear Joanna. You do me too much honour.’

  ‘Does Constance love you?’

  ‘She has never said so.’

  ‘But she does?’

  ‘She may do, yes. She has never said so.’

  ‘She looks as though she does. She watches you all the time. She is very jealous of me.’

  ‘She knows nothing about you.’

  ‘Maybe not: but she is perceptive.’

  ‘What can she suspect?’

  ‘That I am your mistress, Iwo. And that I almost love you.’

  It is a generous declaration. I know I am being churlish in not offering her some warmth, some implied promise of hope.

  ‘Joanna. You do not know how difficult I am.’

  ‘I can see that you are difficult. I don’t like easy men.’

  ‘I am so much older than you.’

  ‘I am used to older people. Don’t think that I have not had young men after me.’

  ‘I am sure you have …’

  ‘I have … and I have still. I’m not a simple woman, either. Do you know that I have loved women, too?’

  This I had not guessed, but, as always, am immediately excited by the image of two smooth women’s bodies embracing one another, with myself invisibly watching.

  ‘Do you prefer women?’ I ask her.

  ‘No: in the end I prefer men.’

  ‘Good.’

  We smile at each other, and she leans forward and kisses me in the corner of my neck and says, ‘Let’s go? Come on!’ and we go out again into the late night London streets. We decide to go and look at the Thames, somewhere near Big Ben, so that we can hear midnight strike and feel the New Year flooding in. It is a fine, dry night, and the noise of people spilling out of the pub recedes behind us as we walk into Embankment Gardens and up the steps to Hungerford Bridge. Side by side we lean on the railings and look down into the water. Joanna has said all that she planned to say for the evening, so we stand in silence, looking across the river. It eddies beneath us, full of patterns and sounds. I gaze in a fixed focus of concentration. My thoughts and senses hang motionless, until behind me I hear the great bell strike, twelve times, and as the last reverberating chime throbs away into silence Joanna turns towards me. Her mouth parts and her eyes close.

  I can’t respond. I can kiss her, I will fuck her, but I am engaged only in actions, not with my head or my heart. I am amazed that I, a catatonic man, am apparently loved by these two women. I would, if I were normal, feel flattered, even conceited; or perhaps guilty that, having solicited the love of Constance, I am unable to respond to it. I feel nothing, except lust. What has crippled me? Was it my grandmother, frowning on my childish affection and turning it to formality and cold courtesy; or my timid, fearful mother, in awe of everyone including, finally, me; or was it my wife’s infidelities, or my own? I get only sexual relief from pleasure and feel no enthusiasm for anything. My joys are all retrospective and my appetites are momentary and impersonal. I don’t care whether it’s Joanna or Constance in my bed, and would be satisfied most of all by the spectacle of them making love to each other. I feel like a zombie in the country of the living. I am getting to fear myself – like now: I have walked with Joanna for nearly an hour, guided by her through unfamiliar streets, till we are almost back at the house where I have a room; yet I don’t remember hearing what she said, or whether I answered.

  ‘Have I been talking to myself again?’

  ‘Not a word. Nor to me.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Do you mind?’

  ‘No: I was thinking about my New Year resolutions.’

  ‘Have you made any?’

  ‘Yes. I shall decide my life this year, one way or another. I shall steer it forward, and not just drift any more.’

  ‘Good for you! Anything else?’

  ‘Yes. I shall have fun.’

  ‘Very good. Now I must think up some resolutions.’

  ‘Have mine.’

  ‘Al
l right. Why not? The second one is more difficult.’

  ‘Oh yes, Iwo, yes: fun. Let’s have fun together. What a funny word for fucking. Fun. Is fucking fun? Not really. Not often. Shall we fuck for fun?’

  I can’t bear myself. I can bear the separate parts of me: Iwo the cock; Iwo the husband; Iwo the Pole; Iwo the economist, though I don’t care for Iwo the postroom worker. But I can’t bear the composite man all those parts together make. I don’t think I ever could. How did Katarzyna endure me, or the girls? How can Constance think she wants me, and why does Joanna expose her nakedness so boldly to my cruelly distant eyes? I watch her and listen. I wonder how she feels, or what it must be like if the turmoil of her body is matched by some activity of her mind or emotions. I myself am quite silent, quite in control, and apparently quite good at what I’m doing, for she cries in crescendo, ‘Fuck me, Iwo, oh Christ fuck me, come on, fuck me …’ – easily loud enough to wake all the Australians, if they were around, which, perhaps fortunately, doesn’t seem to be the case.

  ‘Happy New Year, Joanna. Sleep well.’

  In June 1944 they finally liquidated Lodz ghetto. I remember it perfectly clearly. The streets were filled first with noises and cries and then with bodies in attitudes of abandonment and then with a great silence and a guilty atmosphere that wafted all through the city, like smoke. This tumour is bursting my brain, making fissures across the surface of my skull like those cracks that craze my ceiling. I must paint over them again. Well, sleep …

  There was a simplicity in people, when I was young. Today, everyone is as American kids say ‘full of shit’. These thoughts are prompted by a film I see a few days later, with Constance. It is an old film, black and white and stilted, but it preserved that directness and innocence I remember from my childhood. They are prompted also by a fall of snow which has covered the garden and the roofs outside my window with whiteness, and muffled all noise. That, too, is a brief return to simplicity. Lodz was such a dirty city that snow only stayed white for a couple of hours, and then gradually became speckled with black grains of dirt from the mills. This snow is whiter for longer, but its fall means that during the next few weeks my room becomes even colder. I haven’t been warm since the night of the film, when Constance stayed here. Her warmth in my bed was welcome. It comforted me. I wondered for a little while whether I couldn’t just surrender to the intensity of her need and drift, letting her draw me into her life. But by morning it was already obvious again that it isn’t possible. She left me sadly and unwillingly, saying she would be late for work. I telephoned my boss and said I was ill and would need to take a few days off work. ‘Just be sure you bring a doctor’s certificate with you once you decide to come back,’ he said peevishly. He was only guessing. Lots of people get flu and are off sick in January; and I need time to think.

  Joanna said that this year she’ll change the direction of her life, and I told her I would, too. A different kind of work would do it, and in a better job I might start to earn more money, and then I would have more choices. I have stopped believing that I will ever be an economist again. When I first arrived here I used to go to the reference section of the local library, and read the financial pages of the newspapers and The Economist every week, to try to keep up with events and become properly Western in my analysis. It was harder for me then than it would be now, since my English has got much better in the last four years. But I have become intellectually lazy. I no longer make the effort. I have stopped writing notes towards … a lecture, a symposium, an article or economic model. By working in a postroom I have become a postroom worker. Torpor makes me leaden. My brain is dull and my limbs are sluggish. I must find some way of becoming more energetic. Since I gave up swimming I take no exercise.

  The Pakistani who owns the late-opening grocery tells me he has made a resolution to keep fit. He is pot-bellied, with sunken eyes, exhausted by the long hours he keeps. He has to greet everyone pleasantly in the hope of making his customers loyal and preventing them from shopping at the big supermarkets.

  ‘What will you do?’ I ask him.

  ‘Only sport I can play is cricket!’ he says. ‘I have too big belly for young men’s games. My son’s school has squash courts, very energetic, but for me it will have to be something slower I think! My son says to me, why not try weightlifting?’

  It is a comical picture, this small, pear-shaped man like some cross-legged contemplative Buddha, heaving iron bars with weights. But I say, ‘Good idea. Where will you go? Perhaps I need something like that.’

  And so I found out from him the name of a sports centre, near here and very cheap. Perhaps I can keep my mind under control if I discipline my body, exhaust it with sweat and effort. And anyway, I might need to be in top physical condition if … Enough of that.

  I sit on my bed facing out of the window, and discover how quiet the house is during the day. They must all go somewhere. I am quite alone, and nobody on earth knows that I sit here, looking out of the window on to bare trees and ragged bushes, while snow drifts and melts on the slush and birds sit in the branches as motionless as I am. Now that I have found somewhere to exercise I ought to plan when to go. First I shall think about my life when I was a man and a husband and a teacher.

  What time did I get up in those days? Well, it was at seven if I was in a good mood and looking forward to the day. How did I get up? The trams would disturb me in my sleep, from the time they started to rattle through the streets just before six. Sometimes Katarzyna would need to start early, and I would hear her clattering in the kitchen as she slammed the kettle on to the stove and ground beans and chicory together in the coffee mill. Or it might be the sound of the lavatory cistern from the flat above, making the pipes thrum and shudder. In the summer it would be sunshine and birdsong. If I hadn’t got out of bed by half past seven, the alarm clock on the other side of my room would finally compel me on to my feet. So: it’s sometime after seven and I’m up. Out of the door and into the bathroom for a piss. I peer at myself in the mirror, inspect my hair and teeth, and wonder whether today is one of the days when I can call out to my wife about breakfast. Sometimes she will simply answer, ‘Make your own! I’m not your servant, thank God!’ but on good days she will answer, ‘All right then, what’s your fancy this morning? I bought some jam from a peasant woman, plum jam, do you want that with your bread?’ I wash and shave and go into the bedroom to dress. What shall I wear? Who am I seeing today? My underwear is shabby, but who cares, while my shirts are still good? Thank God I have never become fat. I could still wear the clothes I had thirty years ago, if I wanted to. I weigh the same now as I did then; only somehow my flesh makes fine dry folds around my body when I move or turn, and it seems paler and greyer than when I was young. I decide to wear my dark brown trousers with the tan leather jacket, and my good brown shoes. As I walk into the kitchen my wife looks up, takes in my appearance, draws her own conclusions, shifts an eyebrow up and down, and turns away. I help myself to bread and white butter and coffee, but she goes out of the room before I can make up my mind what to say to her. She cannot help leaving a warm, friendly smell behind her. She was always a clean woman, who only smelt of sweat after making love. She was both uninhibited and fastidious: an unusual combination. I loved to roll her to and fro, and watch the sweat begin to glisten between her breasts and on her upper lip, till finally we were both coated with sweat, her face and throat reddened, and her black hair lay in sticky tendrils across her forehead and between her thighs. I preferred it when we used to make love in the mornings, before the children woke. I never have the energy nowadays to make love in the mornings. But I used to, all the time.

  Did I think, then – ever – that I loved my wife? The question seldom occurred to me. I desired her, married her, lived with her, fucked her, fathered children. What had love to do with that? Now, when I look back, I see that I did what I could instead, I lived her. It came to the same thing in the end. Now I don’t even have the inclination to live Joanna, or Constance. I can�
�t be bothered to share their experiences with that absorption that women require. Except, perhaps, for Marina … I might be able to live Marina; but she is too young.

  In the evenings the telephone rings downstairs, and sometimes one of the Australians comes and thumps on my door shouting, ‘It’s some girl asking for you, Monty! You want to talk to her?’ but I always reply, ‘No, say I’m out.’ Not ill: that would bring them hurrying round full of concern and remedies. Why was I afraid of being alone? It suits me. Joanna gave me a diary and I am starting to write in it. It is so long since I wrote anything more than a short letter that my handwriting and my style are awkward, like someone for whom Polish is a foreign language.

  My room is very cold. I have no coins to put in the meter so the fire stays unlit. Today I stayed in bed mostly, just as though I were really ill. I am not ill at all. When I was a child and told lies they would often come true; so perhaps I will get ill now. I am waiting for Kasia’s letter. If she will take me back, will I go? I am afraid. It is easier to think about Poland than to go back to it. My fingers are stiff. That’s why my writing is so clumsy. Nor have I spoken to anyone yesterday or today, though now when I buy the milk and some bread, I will speak. I shall remark on the cold.

  The days are long and dark, and after a while I stop bothering to put the lights on. Into this mid-winter rigidity the arrival of Marina is shockingly violent. She comes running up the stairs and knocks on my door, and I’m quite unprepared. I don’t even know what day of the week it is.

  ‘Monty! Are you mad! Why haven’t you ever come to the phone! I’ve had to take time off to come and see you! What’s the matter? Are you ill? Oh, Iwo …’

  She comes to the bed and puts her arms round my shoulders. I would embrace her, but I am ashamed of my threadbare vest.