by his clutch of new recruits, but at the café’s threshold he turned.
‘Remember what we used to say when we were skinny-arsed conscripts shivering in the barracks?’ he shouted to Janusz. ‘Life is like toilet paper …’
Janusz finished the saying for him: ‘… very long and full of crap.’
The rectangle of oak slid open and Janusz bent his head to the aperture.
‘I present myself before the Holy Confession, for I have offended God.’
He shifted in his creaking seat and coughed, a bassy smoker’s rumble. Through the wire mesh, he could make out Father Piotr Pietruski’s reassuring profile, topped by his unruly shock of white hair.
‘It has been, uh, three months since my last confession,’ he said.
‘Six, faktycznie,’ corrected the priest. ‘I did hope that we would see you at Midnight Mass, at least.’
‘I’m sorry, father. I’ve had a lot of … business to attend to.’
Unconsciously, he clenched his right hand, stretching the grazed knuckles white.
The priest tugged at his earlobe – it was a familiar gesture, but whether it signalled resignation, or exasperation, Janusz never could tell. He felt a surge of affection for the old guy: Father Pietruski had always looked out for him, from that first morning more than two decades ago when he’d showed up here after a 48-hour bender, rain-soaked, wild-eyed and stinking of wodka.
Back then, before every inner-city high street had its own Polski Sklep, homesick Poles had beat a path to St Stanislaus, hidden away down an Islington back street. English Catholic churches, all modern steel and concrete, were unappealing, but St Stan’s was solid, nineteenth century, its stone structure curvaceous as a mother’s cheek, and since the mass was conducted in Polish it had felt almost like being at home. And the shop in its crypt where you could buy real kielbasa, cheesecake and plums in chocolate, didn’t hurt either.
These days he wasn’t even sure he still believed in all the mumbo jumbo, so why did he still come? Partly, he supposed, because the church felt like the last remaining pillar of the old Poland, a place where respect and honour were valued above all else. Or maybe because he’d never forget how Father Pietruski had found the drunken boy a bed, fed him lemon tea, and later on, put him in touch with a foreman looking for site labourers.
Even if it meant the old bastard never got off his case.
‘Have there been any recent incidents of violence?’ asked the priest.
‘One scumbag who was beating his wife. She came to me for help.’
‘And?’
‘I like to help women. I helped her. He decided to get another hobby,’ Janusz shrugged, pressing a smile from his lips. Better not to mention the woman in question was his girlfriend.
The older man sighed. It was never straightforward with this one: his methods might be unsanctionable, but his instincts were often sound.
‘Anything else to trouble your immortal soul?’ Janusz detected a trace of sarcasm.
‘Sins of the flesh, father.’ A sudden image: a rumpled bed, the rosy S of a woman’s naked back, Kasia’s, framed by an oblong of light. ‘The normal things.’
‘These “things” are not normalne. You are a married man: that sacrament is indissoluble!’ The priest actually rapped out each syllable with his knuckles on the mesh.
The old fellow had – unusually for him – raised his voice, stirring up a little rush of whispers from outside the box, where, Janusz knew, a bevy of old dears would be waiting to confess their imagined sins. Maybe the priest was right, but what was he supposed to do? He and Marta had read the last rites over their marriage long ago, and he wasn’t cut out to be a monk.
‘Yes, father,’ Janusz bowed his head a fraction. The exchange didn’t alter much with the years. It was a pain, yes, to be lectured, but like the church’s smell – incense, spent candlewicks and ancient dust – it was strangely comforting, too.
‘I know you and Marta have been estranged for many years,’ Father Pietruski continued, his voice lower, but still firm. ‘Nonetheless, you must try again – for the sake of the boy, at least. Build some bridges with her, hmm?’
Janusz moved his head in a gesture that he hoped might pass for assent. The priest waited for something less ambiguous – in vain.
‘Say three Hail Mary’s and the act of contrition,’ he said, blessing Janusz with his right hand, ‘And I’ll meet you at The Eagle in half an hour.’
Janusz stood and stooped to leave the box, the step loosing off a gunshot crack. The ladies outside rustled with excitement, like birds disturbed at their roost.
‘Dzien dobry, paniom,’ he bowed, recognising many of the faces. They chirped greetings back, but one, sitting in the middle of the pew, grasped his arm as he tried to pass.
There was no escape. Pani Rulewska’s upright posture and the deference of the other women marked her out as their leader, even though she was in her late fifties, a good couple of decades their junior. He paused, bowing his head a fraction.
She wore a dark red skirt suit of some rich, soft material, which even he could see was beautifully tailored. He recalled that she owned a designer clothes factory in the East End, and never let anyone forget that a gown created by her Polish seamstresses had once graced the shoulders of Princess Diana.
‘Now, panie Kiszka, I hope that we can count on your support in the forthcoming patriotic event?’ she demanded in her rather grating voice.
Patriotic event? He felt a flutter of panic, as though he was eight years old again, and unable to remember the next line of his catechism.
‘The election?’ she prompted. ‘The older people, of course, can be relied on, but the youngsters, the ones here, they are another matter. They are away from home and family, they are led astray by straszne English habits. Drinking, sex, drugs …’ Pani Rulewska shook her head. ‘This is no longer the England we once loved.’
The other women bobbed their heads, murmuring assent. He nodded, too, and not entirely out of politeness: the England he’d found a quarter of a century ago might have been duller and greyer, but hadn’t it also been gentler, and more civilised? Or am I just getting old and cantankerous? he wondered.
‘You are known, and respected – mostly …’ she qualified. ‘You can reach the young ones, tell them how the new president will rebuild the country and give them all jobs back home where they belong.’
Despite Janusz’s instinctive distrust of politicians, the Renaissance Party candidate did seem to offer Poland a way out of the predicament it found itself in after twenty years of democracy. Sure, the economy had bounced back after decades of Communist mismanagement, but there still weren’t enough well-paid jobs to prevent the exodus of a million or more young people overseas, most of them to the UK. The country’s graceful Hapsburgian squares were fast disappearing beneath a deluge of fast- food chains and gangs of stag-partying Brits, and unless Poland’s exiled generation could be lured back home soon, he feared for his country’s identity.
Janusz liked the Partia Renasans’ big idea, a massive regeneration programme to create jobs and attract the exiles home – and the way it reunited the alliance of the church, unions and intelligentsia, which in the eighties had defeated the Communist regime under the Solidarity banner. The Party had already won the Sejm and the Senate, and now its leader, Edward Zamorski – a respected veteran of Solidarnosc, a man who’d endured repeated incarceration and beatings during the fight for democracy – looked set to become president.
Which was all well and good, but knocking on people’s doors wearing a party T-shirt wasn’t really up Janusz’s street. So after murmuring