Swimming in the Dark - Tomasz Jedrowski Page 0,27

words I didn’t know, acronyms that meant nothing to me. It was like another language. At one point he mentioned ‘Israel’, those jagged syllables that had become so potent in only a day. I tried to guess the meaning of it all, but only saw blanks. When the programme was over, Mother moved the indicator back to another station and turned up the volume. This, I discovered, is what she would do every night, so no one would ever know they had listened to the forbidden station. And while the music played, they began to explain. They explained about the Jews, that there had been many in Poland before. For a thousand years. That most had been killed in the camps that the Germans had set up during the war. Granny recalled seeing her neighbours forced on to trains, never to be seen again. Of course we weren’t really taught this at school. We were taught that the Germans had suppressed the Poles and how our Russian brothers had saved us. Jews weren’t Polish, of course. Some Poles still blamed them for the war. That year, Mother said, there had been unrest, student strikes all across the country. So the Party had turned on the Jews. They had called them traitors, dismissed them from their jobs. This was why Beniek’s family had left. Once they were gone, no one ever spoke about them again. One day your country is yours, and the next it isn’t.

Beniek’s departure spelled the end of my childhood, and of the childhood of my mind: it was as if everything I’d assumed before had turned out to be false, as if behind every innocuous thing in the world lay something much darker and uglier. Every evening now Granny and Mother would let me into the little room. We’d huddle together by the speaker, silent and serious, leaning forward, listening to the voices from across the Wall, and after the programme was over, Granny and Mother would explain something new about our history. How for over a century the country had been divided by Russia and Germany, how it had ceased to exist on the maps. How our culture had survived in the underground, parents teaching children their forbidden language and history, and how the country had finally gained independence after the First Great War. They taught me about the second one too, the side we were never told. How, after years of occupation, the people of Warszawa rose up against the Nazis, how the Soviets arrived and how, instead of helping the Uprising, they stayed on the other side of the Wis?a and waited. They knew they’d win the war, knew the Germans would retreat eventually, so they let them take revenge on the Poles. The Soviets watched on as the city was decimated and its population slaughtered or deported. When the Germans finally left, there were fewer than a thousand survivors in the capital.

I guess you believed what they told us in school, that the Soviets were our liberators. That they were the good ones. Our allies. Sometimes I wish I could have been as light as you. Because I didn’t enjoy these nights in my mother’s room, these terrible truth-spills. They were a ritual, their pull too strong to resist. Even if I didn’t understand it all, I understood enough for anger to collect at the bottom of my stomach. The fact that I couldn’t tell anyone made it all worse. I’d been handed a poisoned gift, powerful truths I could never admit to knowing. Mother had made me swear never to mention anything to anyone, lest they sack her – or worse.

I suppose the scariest thing was the lack of certainty. The fifties were over and people no longer disappeared for speaking out. But in the sixties – and even later – things were more arbitrary. Almost anything was possible, depending on who happened to denounce you and what they thought they could get from you. Even with my childish intuition I sensed that a single mother was more vulnerable than most.

So, just like before, I’d take part in the morning salutes at school, and bow in front of the portrait that hung above the teacher’s desk, of Party Chairman Gomu?ka’s ancient, crumpled face scowling down at us. I took part in the marches, in the parades, in the 1 May celebrations, the anniversaries of the October Revolution. Holding banners with obsequious slogans praising our Soviet brothers, singing the songs they had taught