22 Britannia Road (3 page)

Silvana took a footpath towards the river, glancing back at the cottage. Her mother Olga would be in the kitchen, drinking the vodka she distilled in the cow barn, the clear fiery liquid made from sugar beet or horseradish or, in a poor year, onions and elder. Yes, she thought. Her mother would be drunk, surrounded by all the hapless creatures she collected: kittens climbing her skirts; puppies tumbling at her feet and chewing on the table legs; the nests of blind rabbit kittens, wingless chicks and solitary leverets that she fed every hour and nursed as she had once nursed her own dying sons.

She was known among her neighbours as a good woman who had not had things easy, having a difficult daughter to bring up. Silvana knew there was some truth in that: she had been a hard child, was still tough and inflexible, but no harder, she always believed, than her own mother had been to her. And then there were her brothers. The three boys born before her who had failed to grow up. Her mother’s little princes caught in their infancy, who had blinked and whimpered through her childhood. Silvana knew their stories off by heart.

Her father Josef had started whittling a wooden rattle when his wife first fell pregnant. He’d used a piece of cherry wood from the orchard, and somehow that wood had brought bad luck down on them. He was not a talented carver in any case. By the time the child was born, the rattle was only half finished. When the child died at three months, around the same time the potato crop failed, Josef carried on carving the rattle. He didn’t notice the knife sinking into his thumb, making a gaping wound that bled and bled. When Silvana was young she liked to hold his thumb, run her finger along the jagged seam of his scar and hear the story of how he got it.

It was after the death of their second son that Olga began drinking the vodka she made to sell to other peasants. Josef still hadn’t finished the rattle. He had sold the fields by then and only worked in his orchards.

‘It can’t happen three times,’ he said to Olga. ‘We’ll try again.’

After the third child died, Olga knew the rattle must be cursed. She buried it in the garden, wrapped in a lock of her hair to ward off
evil. Josef dug it up one moonless night and hid it in the unused cot. He went to his wife and told her they would try again for a child.

Cold as an unlit oven, Olga barely looked at the daughter she gave birth to a year later. Silvana Olga Valeria Dabrowski. Josef believed the curse had been broken. He finished the rattle, polished it, tied a ribbon to its handle and gave it to his healthy, strong-minded daughter.

But Olga couldn’t forget her baby boys. She kept their clothes in a locked cupboard, wrapped in tissue. Blue nightdresses with sheep embroidered upon them, white knitted booties, small blue bobble hats, three shawls crocheted gossamer thin. When Silvana was old enough, she was allowed to touch the hems and rub the tiny collars between her fingers.

‘Be careful,’ Olga warned. ‘These are more precious to me than gold.’

When she was ten years old, Silvana stole the baby clothes. She couldn’t help herself. She took them out into the garden to play with, but it began to rain so she ran in. Olga found the clothes the next day, covered in mud, tangled and torn in the raspberry canes.

‘I was wrong about you,’ she said, locking Silvana’s bedroom door. ‘You are a deceitful little girl. Say sorry for what you have done.’

Silvana banged on her door, screaming to be let out. She would not apologize.

Olga put her mouth to the keyhole. ‘A boy would never behave like this.’

‘Your boys are dead!’ screamed Silvana, full of her own furies. ‘I’m your child. You hear me? I’m your child!’

‘You’re the devil’s child!’ her mother screamed back. ‘You lived when my boys didn’t.’

Over the years, Silvana hardened herself against all of them: her crazy mother, her useless father and the pressing ghosts of her dead brothers; all of them trapped within the four walls of the cottage.

In the afternoon sunlight, she flicked a wasp away from her face and stared at her home. For a place so full of complications, it appeared serene, and she wondered if all houses were capable of presenting such a good façade, looking four-square and right while
their insides were full of banging doors and raised voices. She watched smoke rising from the chimney of the cottage for a moment longer, then turned her back on it and walked briskly towards the river and the big sawmill.

Weeping willows and green sallows overhung the sparkling waters of the river, the hum of insects as loud as the continual buzz of machinery in the mill. A path had been scythed along the bank and she kicked off her shoes and followed it, the grass springy under her stockinged feet. Ahead, she saw a group of young men, all of them laughing and jumping off the bank into the river. Feeling shy, with her shoes dangling in her hand and her stockings flecked with grass, she thought about turning back. Then one of the men caught her eye. He was blond, broad and muscular. Not tall, but strong-looking.

She stopped to watch him dive into the water. He closed his eyes and straightened his body. He held his hands above his head, dipped at the knees slightly so that his calf muscles bulged, and sprang off his toes, his body cutting through the water’s surface, leaving only ripples behind. As he came up out of the water, he looked at her, shook the water from his hair and smiled. The sun caught the water droplets beading on his fair skin and turned them into tiny diamonds. He clambered onto the bank, his body shining like something brand-new. Silvana smiled back, dazzled by him.

Janusz was the only son in a family of five daughters, and to Silvana he was as golden as the rest were mouse-coloured. Five sisters, all anonymously plain, and Janusz, the eldest, with Prussian blue eyes and white-blond hair. A vodka bottle in a bar full of dark beer. As the only brother, he was the last to carry on the family name. His father drummed that into him, hoping his son would study law at university and become someone of importance in Polish society. His mother wanted him to study to be a priest.

Silvana saw what a good son Janusz was, how hard he tried to please his family. But she also knew he had no interest in studying law. Janusz loved machinery, anything that had bits of metal and cogs and screws that he could take apart and put back together again. Really, he was the cleverest man she had ever met.

He lived in a three-storey house overlooking the municipal park.
His father worked in local government, and the family prided themselves on their fine manners. So fine were their manners, they almost managed not to show their disappointment when, just months after Silvana and Janusz’s first meeting, Janusz took her home and explained that he was going to do his duty and marry his sweetheart.

Janusz believed in God in those days. He never missed church, and he lectured Silvana at every opportunity on God’s purpose for them all. Silvana liked to listen, though she didn’t take it in much. She was too busy dreaming about American movie stars. At mass on Sundays she sat with his dull-eyed sisters, who complained of the aching necks they got from peering up at windows set high in stone walls, their brown felt hats tilted longingly towards the outside. His sister Eve said Janusz only loved God because he didn’t have to talk to him face to face.

‘You must never think Janusz is shy,’ she told Silvana. ‘He has plenty to say. It’s just that growing up with sisters, and Mother being the way she is, poor Jan has been henpecked. His only defence is silence.’

Eve was the middle sister, stuck between two older sisters intent only on marriage and two younger sisters who carried on like twins and went everywhere arm in arm. As a result, she said, nobody noticed her and she was free to do whatever she wanted. And what Eve wanted was music. Her violin was her passion, and she practised for hours at a time, emerging from her bedroom with her brown hair fallen around her shoulders; her face, freckled like Janusz’s, creased with concentration. She was always closer to her brother than the others, and Silvana liked her the best of all of them.

That first summer, when talk of a possible war with Germany was something neither of them took any interest in, Silvana and Janusz had spent their spare time by the river or taking bike rides out of town into the country.

‘I don’t want to say goodbye,’ Janusz told her as they lay on the grass under the shade of a cedar tree.

She laughed and took his hand in hers. His face looked so serious.

‘Janusz, we’ve only just got here. We can spend all day together.’

‘Yes, but then you’ll leave me.’

‘I won’t leave you. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Why do you have to go to work tonight? I see all those men there who look at you when you take their tickets. They only go to look at you.’

‘Don’t be stupid. I love films. I like my job.’ She felt annoyed with him and wanted to be mean, so she said, ‘Anyway, I like it when men look at me. If I’m beautiful, I can’t help it, can I? Maybe you should be careful. I might get bored and go off with someone else.’

He snatched his hand from hers and slapped her across the face, quickly, the way you might knock a crawling fly from somebody’s cheek. Silvana turned away from him as if he had hurt her badly, but she knew it was the other way round. She had done the hurting. When she looked back at him he was red in the face and his eyes watered as though he was about to burst into tears. She was pleased. Pleased to have got a reaction. He loves me, she thought.

She pretended to be angry. She got up and walked away, and he jumped up and ran after her. When she stopped fighting in his arms he kissed her passionately, slipping a hand inside her dress. His fingers pressed against her, following the curve of her breast, the run of her ribs, as if he were looking for a way to reach inside; as if he wanted to find her heart and take it for himself.

‘You’ve already got it,’ she whispered to him.

He stopped kissing her and looked into her eyes. Then he grabbed her hand and led her into the woods.

Silvana knew they had crossed an invisible line together, that they couldn’t go back to how they had been before the slap. They made their way deeper into the woods and it got darker the further they pushed through the bracken, the trees growing closer together.

‘We could keep going,’ Janusz said, holding back a bramble. ‘We could make a camp and live out here. I could have you all to myself.’

Silvana laughed. ‘So that’s what you want, huh?’ She was a little afraid but she tipped her chin at him and tried to look confident. ‘My stockings are getting ruined,’ she said. Then she felt mischievous and lifted the skirt of her dress. ‘Look at this ladder.’ She showed him the rip in her black cotton stocking. ‘You’ll have to buy me new ones.’

‘Let me see.’

‘No. No, it’s nothing.’ Silvana pushed his hand away. She pouted at him. ‘I suppose you’re going to hit me again?’

He shook his head slowly. ‘Never. I will never hurt you. I will always worship you.’

Nobody had spoken to her like that before. He knelt in front of her and moved his hand up her skirt, the coldness of his fingers against her warm thigh making her gasp. He was breathing heavily by then, as if he’d been running. When he tried to put his hand inside her underwear, she pushed him away.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Wait a minute.’

‘What’s the matter?’ He was standing now, his mouth against her ear. ‘Have you done this before?’

She shook her head. ‘Never. What about you?’

‘No. But I want to. Do you?’

She took a deep breath and nodded. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I do.’

He kissed her again and they fell to their knees in the bracken.

It was as though she was the world, the whole wide world, and she let him explore her. And that was how she got her baby: the day Janusz led her into the woods. She would always remember feeling enormous that day, a giant woman, her hardness melted to softness, driven away by the sudden generosity of her body, the beginnings of their son already trawling in her juices.

‘I love you,’ Janusz said afterwards. ‘I love you.’

They lay side by side, holding hands. Silvana closed her eyes and listened to her heart steadying. She was shrinking now, a breeze chilling her bare legs, doubts gathering in her mind over what they had done.

‘Do you really?’ she asked. ‘Why?’

‘What do you mean, why? I just love you.’

‘I want to know why.’

She wanted him to say he loved her because she was beautiful and because she was the one he had been looking for all his life. (She watched a great many films in those days and was very susceptible to American musicals.)

‘Because that’s what happens,’ he said, after a moment’s pause. ‘People fall in love.’

‘Oh.’

‘And do you love me?’

Silvana looked at his sweet, serious face, the longing in his eyes, his unbuttoned collar and his braces hanging loose. She stroked his cheek and he groaned, catching hold of her hand and kissing it.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Show me,’ he breathed. ‘Show me again.’

So she did.

Janusz

Janusz struggled off the crowded trolley bus, stepping down into a surging mass of people on Prosta Street. Holding his hat to his chest, he slipped into the crowds of men and women so packed together they moved like a flexing muscle, pushing him towards Warsaw Central station.

His chest felt tight, and he wondered if it was the storm-laden weather or the fear of what the future held that made him struggle for breath. A smell of sewers rose up from the grated drain holes in the cobbled streets. The heat of the day had settled like a net over the city, snagging the fumes of traffic and horse shit along with the odours of fish markets and rotting vegetables. For weeks now there had been talk of food shortages, and peasants had started bringing their produce into the city, selling it at inflated prices to families who were stockpiling supplies in their cellars. Janusz looked up at the tall buildings around him and beyond to the sullen August sun. It was glazed with skeins of grey clouds and what little breeze there was blew hot. How he longed for rain to clear the air.