Free Where the Devil Can't Go by Anya Lipska Page B

and my mates would dodge the police patrols and paint Solidarnosc graffiti all over town.”
    “Did you ever get caught?” she asked. From the mild curiosity in her tone, she might have been asking about something that happened in the nineteenth century rather than two and a half decades ago. He hesitated.
    “Just once. There were three of us – my mates had hung me by my legs over the side of a railway bridge so I could paint some slogan or other. ‘THE TV LIES’, I think it was. When the milicja arrived, the lads just about managed to drag me back up, but by the time I was on solid ground they’d legged it and I got nicked.”
    “What happened to you?”
    He looked away. “Nothing much, spent a night in the cell, got a few slaps, got sent home in the morning.”
    Bullshit. The milicja had thrown him in the back of a van and taken him to Montepulich, Krakow’s notorious jail, where the Soviets had tortured and murdered hundreds of Polish nationalists after the war. It must have been a quiet night for them to commit so much time and effort to interrogating a seventeen-year-old boy over such a stupid thing – or maybe they just enjoyed their work. He’d been left with bruises and cuts that had taken weeks to fade, but they were nothing compared to the real legacy of that night, the thing that he carried inside him, like the shadow on an X-ray. He stamped the memories back down. Forget the past.
    The girl and he gazed at the flickering video screen. The two boys were now in a car, lurching back and forward, zombie-like, to the beat. It cut to a shot of one of them, on his own, walking, before the camera pulled out to a wide aerial shot, revealing him as a tiny, lonely figure alone in a vast desolate wasteland.
    She gestured with her chin. “He is like you, when you were young.”
    “Like me ?”
    “You and your friends, back then, under the Kommunistuw – life was bad, society didn’t work for you. This music – for young people it says the same as your folk songs, it says fuck your society, we do our own thing.”
    He knew that it was common for young women to swear these days, especially the ones who’d come to England, but it still shocked him in an almost physical way to hear it. When he had been her age it would have been unthinkable to use such language in front of one’s elders.
    “Is that what you feel about Poland today?” he asked.
    She sipped her apple juice, eyes cast down. “I want to go back one day, I guess,” she said, choosing her words. “But not yet. What is there for me, in Katowice? I would earn maybe half of what I get here – I’d have to save for years just to buy a five-year-old Polski Fiat.”
    There was no anger, only a resigned pragmatism in her voice.
    “Here, once I learn English I can get a job in Marks and Spencer and earn good money, go to college part-time.”
    “What will you study?”
    Her eyes lit up, animating her whole face for the first time. “Physiotherapy, or maybe chiropractic, I haven’t decided yet.”
    Janusz knew Katowice: a powerhouse of heavy industry under the Soviets, many of its residential districts were now half-empty, depressing places, peopled by the old, the sick, and by those who lacked either the resources or the courage to leave. The thought of living there made him shudder. Maybe his generation had been lucky, after all – at least fighting the Kommies gave them a sense of common purpose.
    “Zamorski is a good guy,” he assured her. “If anyone can put the country back on its feet, he will.”
    His words hung there, shiny and shallow sounding, as she gazed at him with dark brown eyes.
    “Politicians are all the same.” Her tone was polite but decisive. “You and your friends thought that Walesa was superman, right?”
    Janusz had to admit she was right about that. He had idolised Lech Walesa once, only to watch in horrified disbelief, after the Solidarnosc leader became Poland’s first elected president, as he elbowed out some of