Tailor of Inverness The Read online

  Praise for this book

  ‘Matthew Zajac’s breathtaking investigation of his father’s mysterious past has taken him into the darkest corners of Central Europe’s 20th century history. Out of a merely curious son develops a forensic investigator who peels back the lies hiding truths not just about Nazism and Stalinism but also the puzzling but energetic mendacity of his own father. Zajac’s winning personality, however, turns what might have been a sustained exploration of pessimism into a revelatory and uplifting examination of self, family and national identity. Matthew’s final discovery is heart-stopping and sincerely moving. This book ploughs a parallel furrow to The Hare with Amber Eyes.’

  Misha Glenny, author of The Balkans, McMafia, and Dark Market, writing of this book

  Praise for the play The Tailor of Inverness by Matthew Zajac ‘… a beautifully realised tale of the reality of survival in war-torn Eastern Europe … Matthew Zajac’s moving performance is a triumph of evocative staging and storytelling.’

  Katie Toms, Observer

  ‘…brilliantly encapsulates the effects of war on individuals, families and societies… As the truth becomes less and less certain, so the fracturing impact of the war grows more tangible, lending this touching personal story the grand metaphorical weight of 20th-century history. All this and live fiddle too.’

  Mark Fisher, The List

  ‘This is a towering piece of work with a glorious performance by the author.’

  Emer O’Kelly, Sunday Independent Ireland

  THE TAILOR OF INVERNESS

  Matthew Zajac

  For Virginia, Ruby & Iona

  For my mother

  For Anna Kotek

  For Irena

  The dress you gave me

  Was a butterfly

  Blown by the wind

  I pinned it to my heart

  The dress you gave me

  Squeezed through the rubble

  And the air between the censor’s hands

  Its creases match mine

  The dress you gave me

  Is my bitter sister

  I pinch and tear at her absence

  Though she was never born

  Your stitching is strong

  Closed up, impenetrable

  Your fear folds in the shadows of the skirt

  I wear it and watch

  As you run

  Into

  The Distance

  Matthew Zajac

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of Illustrations

  Map

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE: Inverness to Lesna

  1: The Poles of Inverness

  2: The Journey

  3: Arrival

  4: Our Polish Summers

  5: The Persecution of the Flies

  PART TWO: Mateusz

  6: Childhood

  7: War

  8: The Tailor of Inverness

  PART THREE: Matthew

  9: Semi-Detached

  10: 1989

  11: Return

  12: The Promised Land

  13: The Tapes

  PART FOUR: Aniela

  14: A New Road

  15: Augustaw

  16: Letter from Ukraine

  PART FIVE: Gnilowody

  17: The Journey Home

  18: At the Ternopil Theatre

  19: Mykola

  20: Pidhaitsi

  21: You’ve Come Back

  22: Olga

  23: The Meaning of Ancestry

  24: Communing with my Ghosts

  25: Departure

  PART SIX: Irena

  26: Search

  27: Approach

  28: Contact

  29: Irena

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  GLOSSARY

  Copyright

  List of Illustrations

  Me and my father Mateusz, the electric flats, Dalneigh 1961

  Adam, Aniela, Mateusz, Ula, my sister Angela and Jurek, Lesna 1959

  My father’s brother Kazik 1939

  Mateusz, Easter Ross c.1988

  Adam, Mateusz and me, Lesna 1990

  Soviet Army1940, Mateusz is standing, far right

  Mykola and Xenia Baldys, Ternopil 2003

  Jewish Cemetery, Pidhaitsi 2003

  Polish Catholic Church, Pidhaitsi 2003

  Aunt Emilia and Uncle Pavlo c. 1930

  Teodosiy c. 1941

  Olga Kindzierska 2003

  My grandmother Zofia Zajac, nee Baldys c.1925

  Mateusz, Kazik and Adam c. 1963

  Bogdan and his family, Pidhaitsi 2003 Bogdan far left, Hala 2nd right

  Irena and Anna 1948 Irena wears the dress my father gave her

  Jan and Anna Kotek, nee Laska 2005

  Tailoring school group, Podhajce 1938. My father is on the front row, far left

  Me and Irena, Loch Ness 2006

  Poland and its borders

  PROLOGUE

  I’ve got this thing inside me which I need to get out. It has been there since I was born and it has grown as I’ve grown. When I was a child, a teenager, a young man, I wasn’t aware that I would feel a compulsion to purge it, but that changed around the age of 30. I’m 49 now, and I’ve reached the point where I start to write this book, where the purge begins. Purge. A word with negative connotations in modern times, when associated with politics. Not for me though, as I begin my personal purge, my clearing out.

  Although a purge can suggest atonement, a spiritual cleansing, mine won’t have that effect. It won’t have a moral dimension. Perhaps purge is the wrong word. Perhaps the full meaning of this exercise, its payback, will remain elusive.

  This purge is about self-expression and although I’m confident of the therapeutic power of the process of self-expression, for me anyway, which this book represents, I don’t wish to express everything. Indeed, I can’t. Some of the history is incomplete, unknown in spite of my best efforts. I present this story to you in the knowledge that questions will remain.

  The thing I need to get out is my father’s story. His name was Mateusz Zajac. He was a Pole. I inherited his name, with the English form Matthew, which he also adopted when he settled in Scotland. He was a tailor. He started his own business in Inverness, the main town of the Scottish Highlands, in 1956.

  So that’s what this book is: a striving for an understanding of where I’ve come from, of the past which has produced me, of places, of myself, of my father. Of a farm in Ukraine, formerly the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), formerly Poland, formerly the Galician region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, formerly Poland. It’s a journey, both physical and – what? – psychological, spiritual, rational? All of these, I suppose, although I wouldn’t describe myself as religious at all.

  I want to make contact with my origins, with my father’s origins, to open a route which was closed to him in September 1939 with the German and then Soviet invasions and partition of Poland. A route to his home in the village of Gnilowody, near the town of Podhajce in the Tarnopol region or, as one should say today now that these places are Ukrainian, not Polish, a route to Hnilowody, near the town of Pidhaitsi in the Ternopil region. A route to his parents. He told me that after September 1939, he never saw them again. That information is contained in Part Three of this book, edited transcripts of conversations I recorded with him in 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall came down.

  My generation had grown into adulthood as Soviet Communism ossified and then stumbled towards relinquishing its power over its satellites. In adulthood, I had begun to be more conscious of the pain caused by the wrenching apart of my father’s
family and the impossibility of him ever seeing his birthplace. So much was unknown, censored, oppressed. I began to feel a need to unlock it all. That’s why I made the recordings with him. They were my starting point, but it took me a long time to go any further. I was hampered by the preoccupations of my work, by my lack of Polish, by my own urge, inherited or learned, to live in the moment and look forward.

  My father’s energetic, single-minded drive to create his new life in Scotland, to ‘never look back’ had been a success in many ways. He had brought up well-educated Scottish children. He was highly respected and well known in Inverness and the Highlands for his work, producing beautiful suits, coats, Inverness capes, skirts, kilts, plus fours and hunting jackets and making alterations to everything from evening dresses to jeans. He had a long-running contract with the RAF base at Kinloss. As an important mark of his integration into Highland life, he had been accepted into the Freemasons. His life, and ours, was orientated towards succeeding in the world we were in. There was no going back. Except for the holidays.

  When I made the recordings, I had an idea that I might want to write about him one day. I envisaged a book, what you now have before you. But when I first started to think seriously about writing it, it was a daunting prospect as I had never written a book and didn’t consider myself to be a writer. I had dabbled in writing from time to time, experimenting with a couple of screenplays and short stories and the occasional poem and song, but I had never felt the compulsion which I think is common to true writers. I guess that has changed now.

  During the years of my discoveries about my father, I remained unable to find my way into writing this story. Then one day, I think in 2006, I saw what was staring me in the face. I had spent a large part of my professional life working with new plays, acting in them, commissioning and producing them, and I had my own theatre company, Dogstar, started in Inverness in 1999 by my friend and colleague Hamish MacDonald. I joined him to run the company in 2003. I knew a lot more about plays than I did about prose writing, so why not try writing a play about my father first? And that’s what I did, though it’s not a conventional drama. I sometimes wonder if you can even describe it as a play.

  The Tailor of Inverness opened at the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe Festival at the Assembly Rooms and to my great joy and surprise, it was an instant hit. Eighteen of its twenty four performances sold out. Hundreds of people failed to get a ticket. The production won a clutch of awards. Since then, it has toured three times in Scotland and to Poland, Ukraine, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Australia and the USA. The response of audiences in each of these countries has been quite overwhelming.

  The success of the play gave me the confidence and the motivation to get on with writing the book.

  Here it is at last.

  PART ONE

  Inverness to Lesna

  1: The Poles of Inverness

  In 1956, three years before I was born, my parents moved to the electric flats in Dalneigh, a neat new council estate on the west side of Inverness. We stayed in the flats until 1967, moving just around the corner to a semi-detached house. Dalneigh was populated then with many young families making a new start. Most of these families, like mine, were incomers to Inverness, from Scotland’s Central Belt or rural parts of the Highlands, attracted to the growing town by jobs, new houses, clean air and the stunning surrounding landscape. The estate had an assertively modern new primary school which housed 600 children, baby-boomers smartly turned out by proud parents in their red and black uniforms, a peaceful, democratic re-appropriation of that dangerous colour combination. Dalneigh encapsulated the relief and optimism of post-war, post-rationing Britain, where ordinary people could aspire to, and began to achieve higher standards of living, where, for the first time, ordinary people could actually afford TVs, cars, washing machines and refrigerators. It was a new community in a new world, a perfect place for strangers to re-invent themselves.

  There weren’t many Poles in Inverness then. Maybe twenty, each one a survivor of the Second World War from a country which had lost one quarter of its total population. Twenty wasn’t enough for a community, for a club and a Saturday Polish school like they had in Glasgow and Edinburgh. There was a bigger group in Easter Ross around Invergordon, where Polish soldiers had been stationed during the war. We went to a couple of Polish cultural events there in the ’60s which featured Polish food and a traditional dancing group, some local daughters dressed in colourful costumes: black velvet sequinned waistcoats, skirts, boots and ribboned headdresses.

  Me and my father Mateusz, the electric flats, Dalneigh 1961

  Dad didn’t go to the Catholic church in Inverness, which must have curtailed his contact with some of the local Poles. We all went to my mother’s church, the Scottish Episcopalian St. Andrew’s Cathedral. I don’t think my dad was ever very religious, but he was observant. He went with the flow and followed the form. When I learned of his parents’ separate creeds and their attendance at his father’s Catholic and his mother’s Orthodox church services, I understood his pragmatic attitude, even more so when I took into account the fact that my Scottish grandparents followed different creeds too. Granny was the Episcopalian, Grampa was Church of Scotland. There was also an anti-Catholic streak on that side of the family, as was the case in thousands of Scottish Protestant families at the time (and, sadly, even to this day), so life could have been more difficult for my parents if my dad had declared himself a ‘papist’. His pragmatism when it came to religion was just one aspect of his adaptability.

  In his old age, my father regretted the fact that he hadn’t taught us Polish. He worked very long hours when I was young, so it would have been difficult for him. He also explained that someone had persuaded him that it would confuse us. I think that ‘someone’ was probably my mother. In her defence, I think this was a common view at the time. I’ve met many second-generation Poles like me who were never taught the language by their fathers.

  Polish was spoken at home, though, when dad was visited by his Polish friends. I always loved hearing it. There was a sense of joy about it, as the men were released from the restrictions of their second language, and the Polish flowed out of them, animated, relieved, fully engaged with each other. I often wished I could join in, but satisfied myself with mimicking the sounds and the song of it, happy to recognise the few words and phrases I understood, happy because they were happy.

  These visits usually took place at the weekend and they got progressively happier as the drink flowed with the talk. My father’s closest Polish friends in Inverness were John Bloczynski and Rura, and they were regular visitors to the house, especially Rura. Rura’s first name was Wladyslaw, but everyone knew him as Rura. It was simpler for the Highlanders to get their tongues round his surname. Rura worked for the Forestry Commission and lived alone in a single room which reeked of tobacco in the Commission’s hostel in Cannich, a small village deep in the Highlands about 50 kilometres west of Inverness.

  He was an energetic and immensely strong wee man with a quiff of reddish-brown hair and tanned, leathery skin. He had been a member of the Commandos during the war and now he spent his life in the forestry plantations of Glen Affric, Glenurquhart and Mullardoch. His English was poor, so my parents would help him with form-filling and officialdom. In return, he would help my father in the garden. He was a prodigious worker and would happily dig the potato patch at an incredible rate and chop logs which he’d bring from Cannich in his mini-van. He also had a carpentry workshop at the hostel where he spent much of his spare time. He made us many wooden objects: a couple of coffee tables, lampshades, ashtrays, a meat safe before we had a fridge, which still stands in my mother’s garden, forty-five years after he made it; a sledge and even a pair of cross-country skis for my sister, which she never used because they were far too heavy. He built our large garden shed, also still standing and watertight. He just couldn’t stop making things. They were always solid, built to last.

  Rura would turn up on a Saturday, so
metimes bearing his latest creation and always bearing whisky, rum or vodka, sometimes all three. Mum and Dad would go with him to the British Legion Club or entertain him and a few neighbours at home. Rura loved the socialising. His life in Cannich was lonely, so he was always ready to have fun when he got to Inverness. He laughed and joked a lot and made up for his poor English with his sheer energy and personality. He also communicated with his mouth organ and, later on, his accordion. He wasn’t a great player, but he loved playing and had enough talent to drive through his tunes with gusto. He never read music, he just learned tunes he liked by ear, popular Scottish tunes of the time and the odd Polish tune: ‘Lovely Stornoway,’ ‘Sto Lat,’ ‘Donald Where’s Your Troosers,’ ‘March, March, Dabrowski,’ ‘The Dashing White Sergeant’.

  After I began piano lessons at the age of eight, my mother would usher me into the living room in my pyjamas to give the adults a tune. I always found this a strangely lonely experience, with my back to everyone, facing my music and the piano keys and feeling the weight of expectation bearing down on me. It always seemed to go quite well, though. The adults were indulgent and delighted, but I was still relieved to finish, smiling in response to the clapping and words of encouragement and scurrying out of the room with my glass of lemonade, away from the chatter and the smell of cigarettes and alcohol. Rura’s applause was always the loudest. He simply embodied joie de vivre.

  After I passed my driving test, when I was seventeen, I would sometimes drive Rura back to Cannich. By then, I had decided to become an actor and he would always delight in acting out a High Noon scenario with me when we met, drawing his imaginary six-shooters and exploding into laughter. On one of the last occasions when we met, at the hostel in Cannich, he gave me the skull and antlers of a dead stag he had found. The beast had been wounded by hunters and had managed to escape into the forest, to die there. Rura died up there himself, struck down by a massive heart attack in 1985, when he was out working on his beloved hills. I guess the combination of his intense work rate and heavy smoking finished him. Perhaps the stressful effects of his desperate wrench away from Poland in 1939 and his lonely life in Scotland played their part too. He hadn’t reached sixty, which means he couldn’t have been more than fourteen when the war broke out.