22 Britannia Road (10 page)

He is gentle with Aurek, approaching him slowly, spreading his hands as if to show he has nothing to hide. No sudden movements. Calm and steady.

Blood pressure, weight, height, head circumference, pulse.

Aurek, in his vest, nervous as a stray dog.

‘Nothing wrong with him as such,’ says the doctor, taking off his stethoscope and laying it on his desk. He fishes in his pocket and pulls out a sweet. ‘There you are, young man. A barley sugar for your troubles. That’s it; let your mother get you dressed again.’

‘Is it normal …’ Janusz hesitates. He doesn’t know how to say this. ‘Is it normal that he doesn’t seem to know me?’

The doctor reaches for a pipe that lies on his desk and begins filling it with tobacco from a small leather pouch beside it. He glances up at Janusz.

‘You’ve been apart for a long time. You and your wife can help him of course by showing him that you are happy together. That’s important for the child’s development. But, really, there’s nothing terribly wrong with the boy.’

‘I say this,’ Silvana butts in. ‘I say this, but he won’t listen.’

Janusz coughs, shifts his weight from one foot to the other. ‘I just want to make sure the boy is all right.’

The doctor lights his pipe, sucks on it, continues speaking.

‘Your son is underweight and small for his age. He shows signs of
having rickets; his chest, that knotted look to his sternum. But it’s to be expected given his history. Unfortunately we see this a lot at the moment.’

‘He hides food around the house.’ Janusz can hold back no longer. ‘He’s not like other children. He pleases himself. Sometimes he talks quite normally. Other times he makes bird noises. What’s wrong with him?’

‘He’s been through a war,’ says the doctor wearily. ‘Give him time, a secure home, proper food and plenty of discipline and he’ll be right as rain.’

The doctor shakes Janusz by the hand and gives him a prescription for cod liver oil and malt extract.

‘I suggest liquid paraffin for the lice. He’s got quite an infestation. Leave it on his hair for thirty-six hours and take care to avoid him approaching any naked flames.’

Silvana does not shake the doctor’s hand. She holds Aurek tightly, guarding him in a way that makes Janusz think of the prisoners of war he has seen, the ones who fear their boots and coats will be stolen.

On the way home, Janusz tries to feel hopeful. There is nothing wrong with the boy. All he needs is a home and time to settle in. That sounds right. For all of them.

At break time, Aurek slips between the school railings, runs across the road, around the back of the co-operative dairy with its sign that says milk in giant glossy blue tiles, past a big house with broken glass in its windows, and stops at the main road. A policeman is walking towards him, and Aurek ducks into the garden of the empty house.

Through overgrown bushes where brown seeds stick to his clothes and weeds prickle his skin, he makes his way to the back of the derelict house. Nobody will look for him here. All he wants is to be left alone. To be allowed to wander through the easy hours of the day and sleep through the dark nights curled up against his mother.

Climbing through a window, he drops into the gloom of a large room. Cupboards full of dust and dirt stand with doors hanging from their hinges. He kicks at layers of bird droppings and old leaves
to reveal a red-tiled floor. A pigeon flaps across the room and out of the window.

This is a forgotten place. He’d like to live in this house. Just him and his mother. No separate bedrooms. They stayed in a house once, a cottage in the woods. He wanders through the dim rooms, scraping lacy cauls of pale mould from damp walls. Stopping at the kitchen, he finds a tall wall cupboard, its doors long since fallen off. He climbs inside, settling himself among the dust and pigeon mess.

He takes his wooden rattle from his schoolbag and sets it down beside him. He knows it’s a stupid baby toy and not for a boy his age, but his mother says the rattle is full of Polish magic. It was carved from magic wood. He is sure she is wrong, but still, he is careful with it. Just in case.

He stares at his hand-me-down shoes and reties one. They are a size too big and his narrow feet slip around in someone else’s footsteps. Aurek kicks at the wall, scuffing his shoe over and over. Birds fly in and out of the house and he listens to the applause of their wings, their rumbling coo. It’s a lovely sound. Peaceful. There are no other children to call him names. No adults to force him to sit up straight and write his letters.

His voice starts as a vibration in his throat, like a kitten purring. He cocks his head on one side, trying out different notes, a musician tuning up. When he has the right tune, the same lilt and fall in the song as the birds roosting above him, he opens his mouth and raises his voice. The house echoes with the sound of pigeons.

When the day begins to fade, Aurek sees a man standing in the doorway of the old house, like a black shadow. The enemy has found him.

‘Aurek?’ says the enemy quietly. ‘Come with me, son. It’s time to go home.’

Aurek climbs out of the cupboard and follows him through the leaves and broken tiles out into the street with his hands in the air, surrendering. He’s not going to admit it but he’s glad they are going home because he can feel the failing heat in the hedges and pavements and smell the night descending. Aurek is afraid of the dark. He likes to close his eyes to it and keep them closed until dawn.

He picks up a stick and holds it like a gun, shooting at windows and doors. He presses it close to his side, then swings around and shoots people in the back as they pass. Sticking his head round the door of a pub, he sprays machine-gun fire into the half-empty saloon bar. A boy about the same age, sitting at a table, stares straight at him. He has a face full of brown freckles, cheeks the colour of bacon.

The boy gives him a grin, nods his head, folds his fleshy chin into his solid neck. Aurek shoots him dead. A bullet to the heart. The boy gives a thumbs-up and falls off his chair in a swoon, clutching his hand to his chest. Aurek is transfixed. Then the barman is shouting at him to clear off and Aurek runs ahead, waving his stick in the air the way soldiers do when they want to move people quickly. By the time he gets home, Aurek has killed everybody.

He sits at the kitchen table eating bread and dripping, and Janusz breaks his stick gun into pieces.

‘No more war games,’ he says. ‘I don’t like you playing like that.’

Aurek thinks it’s a useless thing to break his twig gun. He knows there are enough sticks and twigs in the world for him to make guns out of until he’s an old, old man. Surely the enemy knows that too?

Silvana

‘Do you have to go?’ asked Silvana. She was sitting on the only chair they owned, nursing Aurek, stroking his soft baby curls, idly marvelling at his plump cheeks and long lashes. The boy was fourteen months old and never stopped smiling.

Janusz shrugged.

‘My father says it’s inevitable.’

Silvana shifted Aurek on her knee. This conversation had been going back and forth between them for a week now.

‘But what will we do?’ she asked.

‘You’ll stay with my parents.’

‘And if I don’t want to?’

‘Then go to
your
parents,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens, you can’t stay in Warsaw. It won’t be safe.’

The day he left, heading for the railway station to sign up as a soldier, Silvana stood on the kitchen table and looked out through the skylight, hoping to catch a glimpse of him walking across the park. She wanted to see him joining the other soldiers going to fight for their country, but she saw only crowds of people walking in the sunshine as though it was just another summer day in the city. She got down from the table and felt a weight in her stomach. A greasy block of fear. She was alone. She realized she should have made more of an effort to make friends. The truth was she knew no one in Warsaw. Janusz and Aurek had been her only life. And now Janusz was gone.

In the weeks that followed, the summer heat gave way to storms and the German soldiers arrived, marching in time in the pouring
rain, motoring down the shopping streets and boulevards of Warsaw, bringing a cargo of terror that hit the city, tearing up buildings, raging through the streets. Silvana was too scared to risk taking her son outside, and too scared to leave him alone in the flat. She sat huddled by the stove. She received a letter from Janusz’s mother telling her to hurry up and come home. They were worried for her safety. She had heard nothing from her own parents.

Curfews were announced. German trucks with loud-speaker systems trundled through the streets, blasting out orders, telling people to stay inside. The trams stopped running. People were not allowed to gather in groups of more than three. The sound of gunshots woke her in the night. Silvana’s days passed in a blur, sleeping, sitting by the stove, playing with Aurek, trying to summon up the courage to leave the flat and find a way out of the city back to Janusz’s parents.

When the coal ran out, she went downstairs and sat in the hallways of the first-floor flats. They had radiators that worked and it was warmer there. Many people had left and the apartment building felt empty. The Kowalskis, the couple who had taken her into their flat when she gave birth to Aurek, had stayed. They had become new Germans,
Volksdeutsche
, with red linen bands on their sleeves embroidered with a black swastika, and refused to talk to her now, acting as if she were not there when they passed her in the corridors.

Silvana was sitting on a radiator when she saw a family from one of the ground-floor flats leaving. A man and a woman with a little girl. The man carried two suitcases, the woman another. That’s how she knew they weren’t coming back.

They left the door open and she slipped inside. In the kitchen she found stale bread, a few potatoes and some onions. There was a little coal left, so she lit the stove and made soup. She wandered through the flat. It was like stepping into a magazine picture. The piano, black wood with a shine that reflected her face in it, was covered in a pale-orange silk shawl with long, delicate fringing. Silvana pressed the keys. The notes rang clearly and Aurek stirred in his baby carriage.

She stayed there a week, wandering through the empty rooms.
She dusted the ornaments and swept the richly patterned carpets. At least if someone did come, they would see she’d cared for the place. Each day she bundled up her son and went out, trying to get a bus out of the city. Each day she queued for hours and then came back to the flat again.

She was asleep in the master bedroom when the soldiers came. A hand grabbed her arm and she was jerked up onto her feet.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ said an officer, stepping through the group of soldiers. ‘These apartments are for German citizens only.’

He told the other men to leave and then, taking off his leather coat, walked around examining pictures and ornaments.

‘These are nice,’ he said, lifting a brass candlestick from the marble mantelpiece. Silvana shrugged. It wasn’t her candlestick. He could have it. He could have anything he wanted. He looked at Aurek, who was sitting on the rug playing with his rattle, and she felt suddenly afraid.

‘I am going to be living here,’ he said. ‘I’ll need a maid. You’ll have to find somebody to take the child.’

He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘You’re a pretty girl. It’s very simple. If you have the right papers you can become German. It would be better for you. You can stay in Warsaw that way. You don’t want to be sent to Germany to work on a farm. A city girl like you? No. Of course not. That’s it. Give me a smile. I can help you.’

She lay down like he told her to and hoped her obedience would save her. She would not be difficult. She would be anonymous, not interesting enough to remember and too compliant to be worth hurting. And all this decided in the time he took to unbutton her dress.

His clothes smelt of the rain. Her face was pressed against the pillows and she twisted her neck so that she could watch the curtains at the window. They were patterned with dancing children holding hands. The hem was yellowed and dirty where it touched the floor. They needed washing. Finally he rolled off her.

‘Good girl,’ he said, panting heavily.

He straightened his uniform, picked up his coat and left, telling her he’d be back later with the right papers for her.

Silvana washed herself in the bathroom, splay-legged in the bath, wiping herself dry on her dress. In the master bedroom she found a skirt and a blouse, some stockings, underwear and a fur coat: gingery fox with a brown silk lining. At the bottom of the cupboard was a pair of blue leather shoes with a bow at the ankle and tapered heels.

It was dark in her old flat. In a suitcase she packed baby clothes and put her album of film stars on top. She opened the meat safe in the kitchen and took their savings from it. Janusz had withdrawn their money from the bank in August.

‘It’s all right,’ she told Aurek, swaddling him in a blanket. ‘We’ll be all right. Your daddy will come home soon.’

But Janusz had deserted her. That’s what she really felt. He had left her and this had happened. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, told herself to stop snivelling. She washed her face and dried it, put on some lipstick and tidied her hair.

It took hours to walk through the city. Everywhere, the windows of buildings were shattered and roads were blocked. Silvana walked to the banks of the river. She could still feel the soldier, the sticky itch on her thighs, the bruised rush of him inside her, the shame of it. She stood looking at the swiftly moving water. It would be so simple to let that water carry her away.

She stumbled on in the stolen high heels and arrived at the bus terminal.

‘There are no buses heading north today,’ said the guard when she asked.

‘I have money,’ she told him. ‘I can pay. It’s only me and my son. I have to get to my parents-in-law.’

‘I can’t work miracles,’ said the man, eyeing the banknotes in her outstretched hand.

He found her standing room on an overcrowded bus. Yelling at the other passengers to move down and make room for one more, he took her money and wished her luck. The bus was going the wrong way, heading east, but Silvana didn’t care. Janusz was gone. Her home was gone. All she had was her son, another woman’s clothes and a strong desire to leave the city.