Nuns and Soldiers Read Online Free PDF

unstick the familiar nickname. The Count was in fact not displeased by his honorary title; it was a little English jest which bound him to his surroundings and gave him a shred of identity. He did not even mind when strangers sometimes took him for a real count. In small ways he played the aristocrat or at least the gallant heel-clicking foreigner, never sure if this was a charade or not. For all his efforts to be English he had a slight foreign accent. And he increasingly felt, in every cell of his being, an alien. Yet his Polishness was no refuge. It was a private nightmare.
    His mother died two years after his father. She pined away into an absolute solitude. How solitary she had always been the remorseful Count now began to measure when it was too late, and when she was almost dying he began to live in his love for her and her now incurably wistful love for him. He had acquired, in spite of his determination not to, some sense of the Polish language, and now began to learn it in earnest, sitting with his grammar book beside his mother’s bed and making her laugh with his pronunciation. Near the end she timidly asked if he would mind if she saw a priest. Hastening to find one the Count wept. His father had hated Christianity almost as much as he had hated Russia, and his mother had been used to creep off to mass alone. She had never taught her son any prayer, she would not have dared to. She had never suggested taking him to church, and the Count had never thought of going. Now when he would so gladly have gone with her she was bed-ridden, and when a black-clad Polish-speaking Lithuanian entered the house, he treated the Count, with a mixture of apology and pity, as an Englishman. After his mother died the Count used to sit in Roman Catholic churches and indulge an intense confused incoherent sorrow.
    After the L.S.E., where he showed a considerable talent for symbolic logic and chess, ambition gave out. He took a job in market research and hated it, then drifted at a modest level into the Civil Service. His mother, now gone, had not failed to make clear how much she wanted him to get married. (The first word he remembered learning from his father was powstanie , insurrection. The word dziewezyna , girl, was later often upon his mother’s lips.) But somehow the Count never seriously considered the married state. He had some scrappy luckless affairs at the L.S.E. He was too much of a puritan to enjoy promiscuity. He had, fortunately, the strength required to terminate unhappy entanglements. He made out that he preferred to be alone. He felt that he was hiding, not waiting but hiding. He had friendly acquaintances, a fairly interesting job, but he was chronically unhappy. His unhappiness was not desperate, just quiet and steady and deep. His London flat became a place of solitude, a citadel of loneliness, from which he began to assume he would never emerge.
    By now it had fully dawned upon the Count how irredeemably Polish he was doomed to be. At last, sick with anticipation, indecision, fear, he went to Warsaw on a visit. He told no one of his journey. No one he knew ever wanted to talk about Poland anyway. He went as a solitary tourist. There was no family to seek for. By now Warsaw had been almost entirely rebuilt, the city centre an exact replica of what the Germans had destroyed. He was fortunate enough to be present, in a breathlessly passionately silent crowd, as the gilded dome was lifted at last into place upon the reconstructed royal palace. He stayed at a big impersonal hotel near the war memorial. He was alone, a shy eccentric Englishman with an appalling accent and a Polish name. The handsome rebuilt city was ghostly to him. (He had so often heard his father say that Warsaw had been so totally destroyed that it would have been easier to abandon the flattened ruins and built a new capital elsewhere.) And in the handsome rebuilt city he wandered like a ghost, a watchful tormented excluded ghost.
    Meanwhile