The tribune was covered in greenery. The safely preserved banner of the municipality was brought, escorted on both sides by women orderlies girdled with red and white brocade.
The infantry were wearing helmets, with the Polish bicolour on a Russian three-sided bayonet. Then a platoon of anti-tank gunners, a platoon with submachine guns, with girls in the front rank. Then machine-gun carriages. Then the cavalry, with bicoloured ribbons braided in their horses’ manes. Public societies came to the tribune with their banners. Flags fluttered, red, and red and white.
‘Niech żyje Armia czerwona!’ Long live the Red Army.
‘Niech żyje!’ we heard from the tribune.
Children and adults climbed up telegraph poles and trees, and stood on the church wall.
‘Niech żyje bohaterski Poznań!’ Long live heroic Poznań.
Hats were thrown in the air, bouquets of greenhouse flowers were thrown to the soldiers. The last to clatter past the tribune were six tanks, and no sooner had their clamour died down than an astonished, joyful exclamation was heard and taken up by the crowd: ‘Look! The cranes are flying back!’
Taking off their caps, their heads thrown back, the crowd gazed upwards to where, in a sky that had meanwhile cleared, cranes returning from the south soared over the city. A sign of spring!
Today in a newsreel I caught a glimpse of the snowbound Russian winter and samovars and felt unhelpfully homesick.
Here, spring is on its way, even though in places last year’s leaves have not yet fallen from the trees. A long autumn passes into spring, almost omitting winter.
Imagine such a dull, monotonous life, not wakening to new excitement from autumn to spring.
In Russia every season is clearly marked, and with each new season you start your life afresh.
Perhaps because there was a war on, I was still eager for challenges, but somehow no longer in the thick of the action. I was looking around to see if I could find something new and exciting.
Poznań stagnated, ever further from the front line of the advancing army, which had already forced a crossing of the River Oder. Troops of the 1st Byelorussian Front, under the command of Marshal Zhukov, had fought their way forward 400 km in two weeks.
The city was changing in front of our eyes, primarily by becoming springlike. Although that was entirely natural, many people may remember the sense of solidarity of that spring of 1945 in the West, with gentle breezes wafting the aroma of fields ploughed, for the first time in freedom, by Polish peasants, with their green, tender shoots and hopes of peace and work.
The city was coming back to a life that was still austere but enlivened by the coming of spring. The plasterers and painters were suspended on the walls of buildings in their cradles. The chimney sweeps in black top hats and with all their appurtenances rode everywhere on bicycles. The schoolchildren of Poznań hurried to get to school in time for the bell, and any one of them, with their satchel bumping up and down on their back, was sure to say good day if they met me: ‘Dzień dobry, panno lieutenant!’
Wiktoria Buzińska sewed me a green dress from the lining of a coat, and ornamented it with a yoke from a piece of polka-dotted satin. How amazing that was, what luxury suddenly to be wearing, if only for a moment, a light, feminine dress with short sleeves, after three-and-a-half years of constantly wearing a tunic. What a delight to lock my door and secretly put it on. The SS man’s room had no mirror, and I tried as best I could to make myself out in the glass of the windows when evening darkened them. There is no describing how enchanted I was by my own appearance.
Later, in May, I wore this dress when I was photographed in Berlin at the monument to Bismarck, at a hoarding with portraits of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill, and in various other temporary or permanent historic settings.
At New Year 1945, when our army was redeployed from the Baltic states to Poland and had its headquarters in Kaluszyn, something between a town and a shtetl, Major Bystrov had told me when no one was listening that he would try from now on to carve out a ‘creative day’ for me, because the war was coming to an end and I would find myself trying to get back into the Literary Institute with absolutely no new qualifications. Pulling my desk over to one corner and spreading out some unimportant German papers to make it look as if I were translating, I made a conspiratorial start under Bystrov’s watchful eye. In a slim, blue Polish school notebook I wrote down the title of a story, ‘The “Son-in-Law”’. I had had it in mind for a long time: there was something secretive about it that moved and excited me. I had been imagining everything that would go on in the story. All I needed was an opportunity to sit down and write it.
And now I had it. ‘The “Son-in-Law”’. I wrote it once more, this time as part of the text. ‘…that was the name they gave to young Russian deserters in encirclement who shacked up with grass widows in nearby villages whose husbands were absent in the war.’ Now what?
I decided the first sentence was not quite right. It sounded like a dictionary definition. I crossed it out. Something more ‘literary’ was needed. In the end I wrote down, ‘A cow was pulling an oxcart,’ then improved it to ‘a spotted cow was pulling an oxcart.’ And that was the fruit of a day’s work.
Bystrov’s sound pragmatism saw no signs of promise in this, and he said frankly that with such a woeful level of productivity he could not justify further diversion of the war effort. He stripped me of my creative day, and was right to do so. The notebook survives as testimony to my incompetence. I was able to write ‘The “Son-in-Law”’ as I had imagined it, about the tensions of life behind German lines, only after I got home when the war was over.
How easily and willingly I would jot down this and that as it happened (when, that is, I was allowed to), and how difficult it proved to sit down and just write.
Captured Germans were sent, over time, in echelons to the east. Fearing the hatred of the Poles, they always asked to be escorted by Russian soldiers.
Studying German staff headquarters documents from the captured citadel was becoming less operationally valuable, and had not yet become of historical interest. It was also thoroughly depressing. Our army was standing 80 km from Berlin, and here we still were putting on weight in Poznań where nothing serious was happening. Little did I know how merciful fate was being, holing me up in Poznań for the whole time the Red Army was advancing through Germany, right up until the assault on Berlin. But that is an aside.
Already in Poznań the war was covertly preparing to withdraw and allow the return of what is, perhaps, the truly dominant feature of human existence: love – personal, intimate feelings. There was danger in those, there was risk, but also all the radiant wonder of being alive. Since we were in Riga I had been collecting slim volumes of Ivan Bunin’s poetry, and magazines with Marina Tsvetayeva’s poems, whenever I came across them. I carried some with me wherever I went. They were pulsating with a life that had unfamiliar facets, a different sadness, different passions.
What a blow was coming my way! A famous writer flew in from Moscow and called on us when I was not there. He asked the colonel hospitably welcoming him whether, by chance, we had any emigré literature, because he would really like some to read. That was our visiting celebrity’s only request to us.
I can imagine our Colonel Latyshev regretfully shrugging his shoulders as he explained he had nothing to offer. Being a generous man, he no doubt imagined others were equally generous. He called Zhenya Gavrilov in from the kitchen. Zhenya was always pottering around there, drying dishes with his bedsheet, because we never had any shortage of people looking for a meal, or of dishes to wash when they left. Zhenya, keen to make a good impression on Ewa, helped her out when he had time to spare, which was more or less all the time except, of course, when he was spending late evenings with Ewa’s neighbour, young Zosia.