Cold Sea Stories

The Bicycle Express

THE ATTIC ROOM where Lucjan had been dying for a few months now did not smell of must or medicine, just antiquity. I knew that as soon as he heard my footsteps in the corridor he would immediately turn his armchair to face the door, so as I came in I would see his face, graced with a smile cultivated through long suffering. As I heated some food for him or washed the dishes he would ask me questions: ‘Do you remember what the Romans called a side road?’ Or ‘How would you translate this: Etiam periere ruinae?’ He was as pleased as Punch when I gave the right answers. ‘Diverticulum, as opposed to via,’ I said slowly. ‘It didn’t lead to the capital but to a country estate. Like the one Horace was given by Maecenas. Etiam periere ruinae? I think that’s from Lucan,’ I said, as I served him warmed-up pierogi, ‘and it means “not even ruins will remain”.’ Over the cake my mother baked for him each week, Lucjan talked about his final work. It was a commentary on The Aeneid, a sort of dictionary, in which he was making an alphabetical list of concepts that in his opinion were unclear, and had only ever been badly translated or completely overlooked by the Polish publishers. As we were finishing our tea, Lucjan moved his chair to the desk, where he showed me a page written in Braille, cranked out on a special machine. I didn’t know that alphabet and so, lightly tracing his right index finger over the bumps, he read me his output for the past few days. Afterwards I would help him to get up from his chair, and we would stand at the window where, outside, against the rooftops of Wrzeszcz and some slender poplar trees, the clouds were drifting by. And then Lucjan would take off his dark glasses, turn his face to the light and say: ‘Can you describe them for me?’

‘Today there are some nice, plump cumulus clouds,’ I replied, ‘but they haven’t any autumn heaviness yet. It’ll be a few weeks before they go grey.’

Sometimes, as I was on my way out, on the stairs or in the doorway I ran into Mrs Truda, who gave him his injections. I only attended this operation once, and I remember being quite unable to tear my eyes off her forearm, where a purple number from Stuthoff was visible. In the place where Lucjan had spent fifteen years they didn’t tattoo the prisoners, but his skin bore a record of the past too. On his hands and cheeks – to his great shame in the days when he could still see his face reflected in the mirror – the marks of frostbite showed.

That day, when I was due to meet Fredek by the shipyard at four, Lucjan did not ask me any questions. He was absorbed in his own thoughts, and not even my news about the strike could restore his energy. Only once we were standing in our usual place by the window, where outside in the bright blue sky not a single cloud was passing, did he softly recite a line of Virgil with perfect emphasis: ‘Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbras,’ and then asked quickly: ‘Hasn’t anything come from Israel?’ I had to sadden him with a negative reply, and I knew how greatly disappointed he was. When he went blind, Lucjan had donated his entire library to the university, since when we had been acquiring books in Braille for him with extreme difficulty, because Greek and Latin, like Sanskrit and Hebrew, were an absolute rarity among editions for the blind. Homer was sent to him from London, and he received the Gospels in Greek from Los Angeles. Virgil and Seneca arrived in Wrzeszcz from Bologna, and he was sent a selection of Aristotle’s works – by way of a Papal foundation – from Rome. Now he was waiting for a Hebrew Bible, which, like all the other major religious books, he already knew in the original language and could translate any randomly chosen extract on demand.

‘I’ll write to Tel Aviv again,’ I said in parting. ‘I’m sure they haven’t forgotten our request.’

The trams and buses weren’t running the King, so there was a terrible crush on the local train. There was no other way to reach the centre of Gdansk, and of course that was where everyone wanted to go, to the main station, from where it only took seven minutes to get to the shipyard gates. And either in a whisper or in a lowered tone everyone really was talking about the same thing: so far they’re not shooting yet! But they’re sure to start, there can be no doubt - the only question is when?

I too could remember that December, exactly ten years ago: my father and I had gone up to the loft to listen for noises from the city centre through the open mansard window. The frosty air carried the boom of single shots, ambulance sirens and the rumble of tanks. The glow of fire shone red over the city. Now and then a helicopter appeared in the gloomy expanse behind it, firing flares, and then, in the brief flash of light, we could clearly hear two or three bursts of heavy machine-gun fire. There were moments when all these noises stopped, and we thought we could hear the shouts of the crowd repeatedly rising and falling.

‘Just remember,’ my father had said as we made our way down two floors to our flat, ‘this is the beginning of their end.’ Naturally when he said ‘their’ he wasn’t thinking of the workers. A few days later I saw the burned-down Party headquarters from the tram window, once the curfew had been lifted. At the Hucisko crossroads, right by the tram stop, I found a shipyard helmet flattened like a matchbox. The stench of burning and tear gas was everywhere. The food price hikes had been withdrawn and people were hurriedly doing their Christmas shopping. Just as hurriedly the portraits of the leaders who had been ejected from their posts were being removed from all the classrooms at my school. Our art teacher turned a blind eye as we burned them on a big pyre next to the school dump. Cyrankiewicz took far longer to burn than Gomułka, maybe because his pictures were on worse paper. At home in the evenings it was the only thing people talked about: how the workers had sung the Internationale before the Gdansk committee, how they had been shot at in Gdynia, how those arrested had been tortured, how those killed had been buried on the quiet with the help of secret agents, how the Soviet warships were anchored off our city, and how on television the new Party Secretary was promising the whole nation peace, prosperity and justice.

It was all running through my memory like a long forgotten black-and-white film from childhood. Now, as the crowd of sweaty people poured from the train onto the platform and headed in the hot August sun towards the shipyard gates, it was hard to imagine anyone wanting to shoot at this colourful motley of locals, tourists and holidaymakers, and certainly not in daylight in full view of the foreign journalists’ cameras. Apart from the obvious advantage of summer over winter there was another, much more profound difference. This time, rather than come out onto the streets, the workers had shut themselves in the shipyard; it was the street that was now coming to them, bringing food, money and information all the time. At the shipyard gates, alongside bouquets of flowers and a Polish flag, someone had hung a portrait of the Pope. The communiqués read over a loudspeaker sounded like a litany: factories all over Poland were joining the strike, literally by the hour. The plaster Lenin in the shipyard conference hall was having to watch patiently as the demand was formulated: yes, we want a pay rise, but more than that we want to have our own, completely independent trade unions.

‘So far it’s like a picnic,’ I heard Fredek’s voice behind me, ‘but I wonder how it’ll end?’

I turned to face him and saw he had come on his bike. ‘If they’re going to crush them,’ I said, ‘they’ll only do it at night, when there’s no one there.’

‘Maybe so,’ said Fredek, who didn’t look worried, ‘but first they’ll have to force the gates with a tank. Then fetch them out from every corner of the shipyard. With a bit of passive resistance that’ll take hours. But what if the lads set off a few acetylene cylinders? Or get on board a ship and cut the hawsers?’ At last we had reached the fence right next to the gates and Fredek had parked his bike, leaning it against the wire netting. ‘Besides, there’s one more thing too,’ he said, pointing at the portrait of the Pope. ‘We’ve got him, and that’s better than the troops!’

‘I’d rather rely on a few dozen striking factories. And the others that are ready to join in.’

‘Well, it’s actually happening,’ said Fredek. He took out a packet of Sport cigarettes and we lit up. ‘It’s a real revolution, can’t you see?’

Like this we passed the quarter hours, smoking and chatting, that was all. More and more delegations were being let through the gates, greeted with applause. Communiqués, committee resolutions, poems and prayers came pouring from the loudspeaker non-stop. And the mood of the endless rally intensified when a worker wearing an armband appeared from inside the gates: hands black with printer’s ink, he threw leaflets into the rippling crowd. Not a single scrap of paper was left on the ground. Everyone wanted his own copy of the bulletin that the censor hadn’t vandalised in advance, if only as a souvenir.

‘Not a bad duplicator,’ reckoned Fredek, ‘but they’re using too much ink, they haven’t got the experience yet.’

‘If only they’d read it out on the radio too,’ I joked, ‘to the whole country, don’t you think?’

‘We haven’t got the radio yet.’ Fredek suddenly became serious. ‘But have you got a bike?’

‘No,’ I replied, ‘but you must have heard what they said,’ – I pointed at the loudspeaker. ‘At the committee’s request the railway workers aren’t going to stop the trains. So the city won’t be paralysed.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Fredek dismissively. ‘What do I care about the railway? I’m thinking of the bicycle express!’

And that was how, from Fredek’s simple idea, my own August revolution began. Next day I called at the shop on Holy Ghost Street.

‘They’re selling like hot cakes,’ said the salesman, smiling. ‘Or rather, we’ve sold out already – there’s just that one left.’ He pointed to a dark corner of the shop. ‘Rather a clunky import from Big Brother, and I haven’t got any spare inner tubes for it.’

Minutes later I was riding from Holy Ghost Street into Tkacka Street on a heavy but sturdy Ukraina bike, resistant to frost, cobblestones, rain, sun, sand and puddles. It had a very solid basket, a set of keys in a small box under the saddle, a dynamo and lights. Only the bell didn’t work, as if something inside its simple mechanism was welded together, but it didn’t matter. I rode slowly past the Arsenal building, the theatre, the market hall and the Academy of Sciences library, aware that the seat was a bit hard and would give me trouble unless I covered it with an old beret or a towel in the traditional way.

‘Good heavens!’ groaned Fredek when we met that evening on the corner of Łagiewniki Street. ‘It’s an armoured train instead of the cavalry! A propos, did you listen to Radio Free Europe yesterday? The Russkies are making noises about manoeuvres, saying they’re hurrying them up and things like that. Do you think they’ll enter the country?’

‘They’ve been here for the past thirty-five years,’ I said, barely managing to keep up with his nimble racing bike. ‘Legnica, Szczecinek, Borne Sulinowo, tanks, infantry, aeroplanes – they don’t have to enter the country at all, they only have to come out of their barracks!’

‘I meant crossing the border, an invasion, you know, all our brothers in the Warsaw Pact.’ He changed gear and rode even faster. ‘Like we invaded the Czechs with them in 1968.’

I had no time to answer, because Fredek was already braking outside the shipyard gates, where in the falling twilight the last of the gapers and passers-by were hovering; shortly after, we had collected some bundles of bulletins from Mikołaj at the pass desk, wrapped in the Voice of the Coast and tied with ordinary string. Then we slowly rode abreast, through the park along Victory Avenue, continuing our conversation about the possible, or impossible invasion, especially with the East German People’s Army participating, which here, in Gdansk, was sure to be given an enthusiastic reception, considering the traditional Polish-German friendship; Romania would definitely not take part, but Czechoslovakia was sure to be forced into it, whereas Hungary’s involvement – as we both agreed – was not a foregone conclusion, because as the Russian generals knew from previous experience, the Hungarians always sided with the Poles, just as we had fought in the Hungarian uprisings, so to sum up – we were just passing the Opera house – their leader János Kádár could sleep in peace, though we couldn’t say the same for the East German Erich Honecker, the Czechoslovak Gustáv Husák and Leonid Brezhnev, that exotic trio, who might be joined by the Bulgarians, as the world’s greatest Russophiles, if you don't count the French, of course. The tram depot, the construction firm base, the ball-bearing factory, then the paint and lacquer plant in Oliwa – that was our first route. It all went smoothly and very quietly: at each gate someone wearing an armband collected a wad of bulletins from us, and sometimes we shared a cigarette, chatting about the same thing all the time – whether they would finally send an authorised delegation from Warsaw to start talks, not about a pay rise, but about free trade unions, which no one had, from the Elbe to Vladivostok.

Our night rides had no hint of conspiracy or special mission about them: the workforce in each place received bulletins from the shipyard via their own delegates and couriers during the day, and we only delivered whatever was issued in the afternoon or evening, so next day at dawn everyone had the latest information – the late edition, said Fredek, handing a bundle of news sheets in at the gate, the evening bicycle express!

Sometimes, when we didn’t feel like chatting and we rode a long stretch in silence, I thought about Lucjan. He had just about witnessed my birth: in 1957, when my father brought me and my mother home from the hospital to Chrzanowski Street in the Opel he borrowed for the occasion from Mr Hoffmayer, Lucjan was waiting outside our door. Thin and haggard, in an old raincoat and a railwayman’s cap, he looked like an arrival from the spirit world. His name had always been remembered on All Soul’s Day, but no one believed he was still alive anymore. In September 1939, when the Soviets occupied Lwów, he had been arrested and deported to an unknown place. He had not turned up in any of the Polish armies later on, not Anders’, nor Berling’s, nor in post-war London, nor on any Red Cross list. ‘He was killed at Katyń,’ my father thought, ‘or in one of the Gulags, like millions of anonymous people.’ Meanwhile, here was Lucjan standing in the stairwell; seeing my mother’s surprise, he took from her the quilt I was wrapped in and asked, ‘A son or a daughter?’ Afterwards, when he and my father were sitting in the kitchen, and my mother was washing me in a baby bath before the burning stove, Lucjan took a good look at me and said: ‘Well I never, what a wee scrap of a fellow – where I’ve come from he wouldn’t last as long as five hours.’ I was to hear this remark from my parents many times, and forever after in my mind his figure was shrouded in a gloomy aura that never lifted as the years went by. It wasn’t to do with the facts themselves, which he did relate, though rather reluctantly. That one remark of his contained a grim reminder, like a dull thud from an abyss that emanated total and utter emptiness. Even in later years, when he was living in Warsaw and used to visit us every summer by the sea, as I became more and more aware of his amazing linguistic genius, I still kept running into that indelible mark in his personality. Perhaps that was why he rejected the permanent job offers that came with time. In Warsaw he was the bookkeeper at a coal yard. In Gdansk, where a few years before retiring he eventually moved to our neighbourhood, into a small attic room with a kitchen, he settled for a job as a night watchman. In this final period he gave up the radio, didn’t read any newspapers and even stopped going to church; he only came to our flat for Sunday dinner once a month. Once blindness, and soon afterwards a progressive illness, had chained him to his bed and an armchair, he refused to move in with us, and gave any help a cool reception. Nevertheless I could tell he enjoyed my visits, perhaps for the exact reason that - after coming back from hell - he had seen me on the very threshold of life. Now I was seeing him on its other threshold, the final one, and it felt as if we had both ended up in the same circle, but at different points along it.

A few bicycling nights later I visited him again. He asked me to tell him our exact routes. Rather than details of the strike, he was more interested in the look of the port from Siennicki Bridge where my chain came off; the driver of a police radio car who went past us had slowed down noticeably at the sight of two young men fixing a bike halfway across the bridge in the middle of the night. Were the tugboats at anchor illuminated? What about the wharves? Can you see the rust on the tramlines at night, or only in daylight? Those were Lucjan’s questions, but when I read to him, one after another, the strike committee’s resolutions, and then selected information from the bulletins saying that the whole country was on strike, or ready and waiting, that human solidarity had never been so genuine or so profound in our country, and that we would win, because after all one day we had to win, since we had always kept losing, at least for the last two hundred years, he just nodded politely and said: ‘All right, that’s all politics. But what are you going to do afterwards?’

‘But you know that,’ I said, a little irritated, ‘I’m going to write my dissertation on Iwaszkiewicz and how his Ukrainian stories echoed Romanticism.’

‘And then what?’

I didn’t really know what he meant. What could happen then, except life? Marriage? Work? Travel? I had never lived in terms of the future, I didn’t like projects, plans or specific ventures, because anyway, as Lucjan knew perfectly well, in our everyday reality nothing ever came entirely true, and at the drop of a hat it could all change, suddenly collapse, be destroyed, wiped out or smashed to bits. So how could he ask questions like ‘then what’? If Lucjan weren’t blind I’d have answered by asking: ‘Do you think I’m clairvoyant?’ But it wasn’t appropriate for me to say that, so after a short silence I simply replied: ‘I don’t know.’

He looked worried by my answer. For a moment his furrowed face wrinkled into a mask of concern.

‘I mean your dreams. Oculos habent et non videbunt, you understand? “Eyes have they, but they see not.” Psalm 115. Towards the end it clearly says: “The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence.”’

I shrugged my shoulders. Did he mean my religious beliefs? We had never touched on that sort of topic, not even when he had occasionally explained an extract from the Bible to me because I needed it for an Old Polish literature class. In any case, I was already late. At the shipyard conference hall the talks with the government delegation were just starting, and I wanted to be there on the spot and not miss anything; the negotiations broadcast by cable radio could only be heard at the shipyard gates. As usual I left him the cake my mother had baked, and we said goodbye until next week.

The next few bicycling nights were warm and starry. After delivering the bulletins Fredek and I would ride to the beach at Brzeżno or Jelitkowo, and there, waiting for the sunrise, we would chatter away like souls possessed about what was going to happen – next day, month or year. Things that had been quite unthinkable for years on end now seemed within reach. Sometimes we reminisced about our school days, including the student chaplaincy on Czarna Street, where what attracted us was not so much religious need as the charms of the girls. Whenever Alicja sang ‘Ma-ra-na-tha’ from the altar in her beautiful contralto voice, to the sound of a guitar, a flute and a violin, there can’t have been a single boy who didn’t want to take communion in her company. Joanna had a lovely black plait, and as she read Saint Paul’s words about love, our desires, though not originating from the soul or the Scriptures at all, filled the chapel with sexual tension.

We had other memories too, of the City Parks Service and Scout Brigade IIIb on work camp in 1974, tidying up the old German graveyard. When the excavator scoop rose yet again, a white stream of skulls and bones had come pouring out of an enormous heap of sand – they were the SS-men shot by the Soviets, probably in 1945, lying in an unmarked mass grave. Iron crosses, helmets, and especially death’s head insignia from the officers’ caps enriched more than one collection of militaria in our city that summer. We managed to stuff our pockets and plastic bags with them before the prosecutor arrived. That same year, before the holidays began, Fredek and I had scrawled a message on the wall at our school: ‘We’ll get revenge for Katyń!’ How surprised we were next day when instead of a maths test we had a special assembly for the first lesson. Accompanied by two secret policemen, the headmaster threatened to expose and punish the guilty parties. Afterwards, as a historian, he gave us a half-hour lecture that proved without question that the tens of thousands of Polish officers and civil servants who died there were killed on the orders of Hitler, not Stalin.

At dawn, as the sphere of the sun rose over the bay, I was riding my Ukraina home. The quiet, empty suburbs were still dozing as I thought about that mythical journey of my father’s, which Lucjan was so fond of asking about. My father had paddled an ordinary canoe more than six hundred kilometres along the River Dunajec, then the Vistula, to Gdansk. In literally the heart of the city, on the Motława, he had put down his oar, picked up his rucksack and set off through the burned-out, silent streets, where brick dust and the smell of people burning were falling like a mist on the remains of the thousand-year Reich. He never liked to talk about it; all I knew, which was obvious, was that he had gone in search of a new life, because the old, pre-war one had ceased to exist in any way, shape or form, but why did he choose that particular route and direction? Only now, 35 years after his early morning march through the gutted streets, as I rode through almost the very same places on my bike, did I think he might have been like Abraham, who had received a summons from God: ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy father’s house’. And if, I continued to fantasise, he might have been Abraham, I would have been Isaac, and then the remark Lucjan had made just after I was born – ‘Where I’ve come from he wouldn’t last as long as five hours’ took on a completely different meaning and significance; it would be like a prophecy, not a commentary on an ordinary situation defined by history. But what on earth did that change in my life?

The bicycle express soon came to an end, on the day when Lech Wałęsa the electrician was carried on the workers’ shoulders and declared the end of the strike. Not long after I got my first job as a journalist at the Solidarity union information office. Fredek was in charge of the printing. The revolution was having ever wider-reaching effects, and for lack of other goods, had become the number one export item, as a while later the Czechs, Germans, Hungarians and Slovaks came to believe, and finally the Russians themselves. Whatever my thoughts about it later on, often critical, nothing could change the miraculous fact that it brought freedom, without so much as a single hair falling from the heads of our opponents – even those who had more than once fired, or given orders to fire at people merely because they were demanding bread and liberty. In fact they only quailed with fear once, when the television showed the execution of Nicolae Ceauşescu.

The clunky Ukraina went on providing excellent service. I rode it to work and to the university, where instead of writing my dissertation I was helping my colleagues to set up the Independent Students’ Union. One October day as I was organising a rally, Lucjan died. The funeral did not draw a crowd. A few old men – former Gulag prisoners, the priest, my parents and I said the prayers. The day before the burial, when Lucjan’s body was lying in the mortuary, my father and I went to his attic to start sorting out his flat. In the letterbox I found a delivery note, and that afternoon I collected the parcel. It was the Hebrew Bible, published by the Landau Foundation if I remember rightly.

‘What shall we do with it now?’ my mother fretted. ‘They don’t keep Braille in normal libraries, and I’m sure no one knows Hebrew at the ones for the blind!’

‘We’d best send it back,’ my father reckoned.

But I had another idea. In the chapel at Srebrzysko, before the coffin was closed, I placed the Book in Lucjan’s hands, with his right index finger just under the cover, touching the first letter of Bereshit, or the Book of Genesis. As the gravediggers were flattening the small mound of earth with their spades, I remembered a line from The Aeneid that I had heard my cousin Lucjan quote in the first days of the August strike: Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbras. Distracted by the funeral, for lack of a dictionary I couldn’t translate it properly, and afterwards I plain forgot about it. Years later, as I was leafing through a beautiful translation of Virgil in a bookshop, I found that extract, which goes: ‘On they went, those dim travellers under the lonely night, through gloom…’