22 Britannia Road (30 page)

‘What?’

‘Marysia. Is that her lover? She sleeps with a German, doesn’t she?’

Ela smiled and Silvana saw a viciousness in the curve of her lips that she had not noticed before. The old woman’s hand went to her throat and Silvana saw a flash of colour there.

‘What’s that?’ Silvana reached out and drew Ela’s hand away roughly. The old woman was wearing her glass pendant, the green glass tree sitting in the hollow of her wrinkled neck.

Now she looked at it properly, the old woman’s face was harder than she had thought: her nose had a cruel sharpness to it, her eyes were flinty and quick.

‘It’s mine,’ said the old woman. ‘Don’t forget we saved your life. You should be careful what you say. Marysia keeps this family fed. She makes sacrifices for us. The fat on your cheeks is thanks to her. The soldiers take food from everybody in the village. We’re not even allowed to keep our grinding stones to make our own bread. Do you think this is what she wanted?’

‘So he is her lover?’

‘A year ago, he came here with other soldiers. They took our grain. He came back alone for Marysia. He took her away and we didn’t see her for days. Do you want to know how she cried when she came home? For days she shut herself in her bedroom and wouldn’t speak to us. It wasn’t just him that hurt her. There were other soldiers too. All of them shared her between themselves.’

Ela wiped her nose on her sleeve.

‘You think you’re better than us? You don’t know how we suffer. There’s an underground movement in the village. We know who the resistance members are, but we don’t say anything to the Germans. And what thanks do we get?

‘Marysia’s had death threats from the resistance, but still we don’t say anything. We could tell the soldiers all about what goes on in the village, but we don’t. So who are the bad people here? The villagers who would kill one of their own, or my daughter who has no choice
but to do as she’s told? Now get out of sight. And make sure the boy stays quiet.’

Silvana remembered the soldier in Warsaw, the one that made her lie down on the bed, taking what he wanted from her. Maybe Ela was telling the truth. Maybe Marysia had no choice. She ducked back slowly into the room and stood in the shadows watching as Ela walked out into the yard. Then she crept to the window with Aurek.

The woodsman was in the yard, and he and Ela approached the soldier as if they were greeting a neighbour, lifting their hands and calling out cheerfully. But the soldier yelled at them. He strode towards them, brandishing a gun, and they looked bewildered. He made them kneel with their hands on their heads. He shouted something and the canvas flap at the back of the truck lifted. Marysia got down from inside it. She was crying. A man climbed out of the back of the truck. A tall, handsome man Silvana recognized immediately. It was Gregor. Thinner-looking than before, and his clothes were shabby, but it was him.

Marysia was begging the soldier to forgive her.

‘You know I’m yours,’ she was saying, her hands pulling at the soldier’s arm. ‘I was going to tell you. Believe me. I was going to tell you about him, to hand him over to you. Mama, tell him.’

‘She’s right,’ cried her mother, lifting her head. ‘This man told us he was a doctor. We didn’t believe him. Marysia was going to tell you.’

The German soldier strode towards the old woman and lifted his gun. A shot rang out and she fell to the ground. Silvana gave a cry and then Aurek screamed and banged on the window. Silvana grabbed him, pushing her hand over his mouth.

Gregor looked up at the house, straight at her. The soldier looked over too, following Gregor’s gaze. They had both seen her. A cold sludge of fear numbed her, made her legs as heavy as stone. She took her hand off Aurek’s mouth.

‘Come out!’ yelled the soldier, waving his gun towards her. ‘You, in the house. Come out now.’

Silvana took Aurek’s hand and led him out onto the front porch.

‘If I tell you to run,’ she whispered to him, ‘you go as fast as you can. You just go.’

The soldier was younger than she had thought. If you took him out of his uniform and put him in peasant clothes, you might have thought him a younger brother to Marysia. And yet, with his gun in his hand, and anger flushing his cheeks, he held his ground and the rest of them stood silently watching him, obedient as sheep in a pen.

She took another step towards the small group in the yard. She was aware of movement behind the soldier and saw Antek, the old man, stumbling to his feet.

The soldier was still beckoning to Silvana. He looked her up and down, and she wondered if he was imagining her as his new mistress. Someone to take over from Marysia. All the time that he stared at Silvana, his eyes creeping over her, she knew he was unaware of the old man getting closer to him. She straightened her back and pushed her chest forwards, tried to swing her hips slightly as she walked. Maybe this was sheer madness, but the old man was so near to him, it was surely worth the attempt.

The soldier didn’t see the old man until Antek had his arms around his neck. As Antek pulled him down like a wrestler in a fairground ring, Marysia ran over to them, hitting and kicking the soldier in the back. Silvana let go of Aurek’s hand.

Gregor yelled at her. ‘Go! Get away while you can!’

He ran past the truck and down the farm track towards the forest.

Marysia yelled after him. And then, when it was obvious he wasn’t going to stop, she began to spit and scream at him. ‘Fuck you! Run, you coward. Fuck you!’

Silvana stared at his retreating figure for a second. Gregor was leaving? Running away?

Aurek was beginning to cry, his face twisted with fear. Antek and the soldier were on the ground, Marysia trying to grab the gun. Silvana looked around. She had to help them. She shook herself free from Aurek, picked up a stone jar on the ground and hurried towards the scrabbling group, smashing the jar across the soldier’s back.

The moment she did it she knew it had been a mistake. She hadn’t hit him hard enough; the jar had bounced off his shoulder. It was
like smacking a wasps’ nest with a stick. All she’d done was drive him mad with rage and loosened Antek’s grip on him.

The soldier caught hold of Silvana’s skirts and pulled her down to the ground, lashing out at her with the side of his gun, hitting her cheek square on. Silvana saw stars in blackness. She could hear Marysia screaming and Aurek crying, his voice high-pitched among the rest of them. So this was how she was going to die, she thought, as the soldier’s fist smashed against her ribs. Not in snow but in the light of a summer day, grappling in the dirt with a stranger.

She tried to escape but he grabbed her leg and pulled her back to him. She kicked out and he clutched her by the hair. It was then that she saw a flash of metal glint in the sunlight. She blinked and stopped fighting. Gregor was back, the woodsman’s axe in his hand.

Everything moved more slowly then; everything seemed clear. She knew what he was going to do. They all did, all of them understanding the moment.

The soldier let go of her and Silvana crawled away. A shot rang out, then another, the soldier firing his gun into the air, hampered by Antek’s grip on his arm. Gregor stood his ground and lifted the axe above his head.

Silvana reached for Aurek, crushed him against her chest, but she knew he heard it. The crack of metal against bone. Again and again.

She could feel something hot on her face, touched her cheek, and her hand came away bloody. Aurek slipped from her. He was open-mouthed, swaying as if he could hear music somewhere and was letting his body move with it. Blood rained on them. Aurek let out a scream and ran towards the chicken house.

There was still the frenzy of Gregor slamming the axe down again and again. It was possible to believe that he was chopping firewood and that everything was normal, except that blood and flesh were everywhere and Marysia’s face was full of fear and the old man lay cowering in the dirt beside his dead wife, his hands over his head.

Silvana backed away. She snatched up her bag and stumbled across the yard. When she reached the chicken house she found Aurek crouched at the back of it, half in, half out of a nest box. She dropped
onto her knees and grabbed his leg, pulling him towards her and still he struggled, trying to get back into the nest box.

‘Aurek,’ she cried. ‘Aurek, please. We have to go.’

She gripped the struggling child tightly in her arms, crawled out of the hen house and began to run.

She crossed the fields where the family cultivated potatoes and sugar beet and kept on running until she reached a deep stream, throwing herself into it, the cold water shocking her, setting her teeth chattering in her jaw, her legs shaking.

‘It’s all right,’ she told Aurek through gritted teeth. ‘It’s all right. Hush, my darling. Hush.’

He was shaking, shivering violently, and she washed the blood off him, rubbing at his hair, scrubbing him clean, ignoring his cries, spitting on his cheek, using her sleeve to clean him.

‘It’s all right,’ she insisted, tears running down her face. She looked at her dress and saw the bloodstains that had bloomed across it in the water. ‘It’s all right,’ she sobbed, unsure now whether she was soothing herself or the boy. ‘Hush now.’

She carried the child across the stream and climbed through a bank of brambles on the other side. Swinging him onto her hip, she staggered on across the flat landscape, the midsummer sun high in the sky above them, its heat drying their clothes. When she fell, she picked herself up, running on until she thought her heart would burst. Finally, she came to a wide, deep ditch that separated two ripe wheat fields and slid down into it, unable to go on any further.

In the muddy water, pulling Aurek to her, hand over his mouth, afraid he might scream, she lay trying to catch her breath.

She stayed there all day and all through the hot summer night, plagued by whining mosquitoes. At first light, she and Aurek climbed out of the ditch and made their way back into the forest. She could see distant flames across the fields and a spiral of grey smoke. Perhaps soldiers out for revenge had set fire to the cottage. Or maybe Marysia and Gregor and the woodsman had set fire to it and escaped.

Silvana reached the edge of the forest and the shadows of the trees,
waves of dark rolling over her. The calm of pines and spruce and birch, all the trees drawing her and the boy in, letting them become part of their stillness and secrets.

‘We’re safe,’ she told Aurek. ‘We’re safe now.’

The forest was Silvana’s home again. A green world that swallowed up boundaries in its pine-scented gloom. She knew enough, she figured, to live under the trees; how to skin rabbits, cook small birds, hedgehogs, weasels. She could roast rats so that the flesh didn’t dry out. Set fires and build shelters. She knew where the wild fruit was and what mushrooms would be good to eat. She and the boy would learn to move through the trees like ghosts.

There were times she thought of leaving the woods, but the memory of Gregor and the others still woke Aurek when he slept. He stopped speaking, making bird noises to himself instead. They were both jumpy like deer, as nervous as the rabbits they trapped.

By the time the winter came again, they had learned to eat everything they found without wrinkling their noses in disgust. They smelled like animals, and Silvana’s teeth started wobbling in her jaw. Her hair grew long and tangled. Burrs wrapped themselves up in its straggled ends; leaves caught behind her ears.

Silvana stared into the stream by the camp she had made and tried to study her reflection in the rippling water. If she held strands up to her eyes she could see the grey streaks among the red. She took her knife to it all, sawing at the lumps of matted hair at the nape of her neck. It took ages. She looked in the stream again. Waited for the waters to clear, saw a shadow that was her.
That’s better
, she thought. Then she did the same to Aurek’s hair. Forest creatures, both of them.

Janusz

Scotland smelled of wet dogs and green grass. After a week spent in a secondary school, where they had daily showers and proper meals, they boarded a train heading south. The carriages were packed with soldiers, and girls climbed aboard at every stop, sharing cigarettes and bottles of beer with the men. Bruno got up to stretch his legs and came back with Jean and Ruby. Jean, in a beige dress, sat down
next to Janusz. Ruby, a redhead with a long straight nose that made her look fox-like, sat next to Bruno. Janusz smiled politely.

Bruno tried out his few English phrases. ‘Welcome. God save the King. Thank you. I’d like a single ticket to Doncaster. Will you come to a dance with me?’

‘He’s got a way with words,’ said Ruby, laughing. ‘Jean, your one’s got lovely eyes, hasn’t he?’

‘He has. You have very nice blue eyes.’ She pointed at hers and then his. ‘Eyes.’

Janusz nodded. Ruby pulled a hip flask from her handbag. ‘Here, have some of this. It’ll warm your cockles.’

The train filled with smoke and talk and the laughter of foreign women, and Janusz sat staring out of the window, watching the undulating countryside pass, wondering how he would ever get back to France.

Ipswich

Janusz doesn’t care about the flat tyres and dented bonnet. His car is parked outside 22 Britannia Road looking official and proper, and he grins at it as if it were an old friend. The paintwork shines black as coal, and the more Janusz polishes it, the prouder he feels.

When it arrived, half the street came out to watch, and men who had never said more than good morning to Janusz before shook him by the hand and told him they thought he’d got the prime minister round for tea. They joked that he must be working triple shifts to afford a car like this, and nobody mentioned that it was towed up the hill or that the headlights are smashed and the front bumper still shows the shape of the tree the car smacked into.

Doris and Gilbert Holborn stand on the pavement beside Janusz.

‘Lovely car, a Rover,’ says Gilbert. ‘Best of British. A teacher’s car, you say? No wonder it looks so good. It’ll have been looked after, won’t it? You found your feet in this country, eh.’