22 Britannia Road (4 page)

Jostling past a group of girls, peasants in shawls and country headscarves, he felt a hand brushing his pocket and he dodged sideways, falling into step with some soldiers, hoping that the hawkers and pickpockets would leave him alone if they saw he was going to fight for his country.

‘Bloody chaos, isn’t it?’ said a voice next to him.

‘Terrible!’ Janusz yelled back, glad to find somebody to talk to. He looked for the man, to find the eyes that belonged to the voice. ‘Are you …’

But the soldier had already gone and he was talking to the back of someone’s hat.

He arrived at the station and fought his way inside, clutching his mobilization card to his chest. For weeks, radio broadcasts had urged all available men to go to their nearest railway station, where they could sign up as soldiers ready to defend Poland. For weeks, Janusz’s heart had leapt and drilled against his ribs, waking him in the night with its rhythms. And there was no doubting that the war was going to happen. Here he was, standing in the middle of pandemonium – the station much worse than the crowded streets – his legs trembling while his heart still walloped his ribs in fury as if trying to beat the nerves out of him.

He looked up the stairs he had just descended, the thin section of the sky still visible above them. It would be impossible to fight his way past the crowds, back up to the station entrance and the over-baked day. He had to go on. He took one last look at the sky and then carried on forwards, into the crush of people.

Trains were crowded with families trying to leave Warsaw, and whole carriages were being taken over by soldiers. Pulled back and forth, fighting for room to stand, Janusz knocked into crying children, but there was no time to stop and help them. Everywhere he looked he saw bewildered infants, and it occurred to him that if anything were to happen to him, if he were to die during the war, these lost children would be his last view of Warsaw. They were surely who he was going to be fighting for, all the sons and daughters of Poland.

A harassed-looking soldier told him to hurry up and board a train.

‘Which one?’ asked Janusz.

The man waved his arm in the direction of a platform. ‘Timetable route number 401. Warsaw to Lwow. You get off at Przemysl, 491 kilometres down the line. They need men to work on the town defences there. Now get out of my sight.’

By late afternoon Janusz’s hat had vanished, his wallet containing his identity card and a few zlotys had been pickpocketed, he had been given a uniform and a kit bag and he had boarded a diesel train heading south-east.

In carriages up and down the train, soldiers were singing and
sharing jokes, but Janusz stayed silent. He prayed Silvana and Aurek would be safe. He’d said goodbye casually, as if he were just going out to buy a newspaper. He’d told himself it was braver to leave like that. He’d met up with his father a few days before and that had been the old man’s advice.

‘Don’t dwell too long on saying your goodbyes. Women always cry and make a fuss. Make it quick. Goodbyes are best kept short. Be strong and you’ll make a fine soldier.’ His father had looked down then, his hand hovering over Janusz’s shoulder. ‘Just make sure you come back in one piece.’

Now Janusz regretted the way he had left. In truth, it hadn’t been bravery that had made him turn his back so quickly on his wife and child. It had been the hot tears that had pushed at his eyes as he’d brushed Silvana’s cheek with a kiss. His father had been wrong. She’d been the brave one, standing there dry-eyed, holding their son tightly in her arms.

In the train’s corridor, Janusz leaned against the door, rocking back and forth with the motion of the tracks, watching the landscape change from tall houses and industrial buildings into flat fields and dark belts of woodland interspersed with hamlets and farms.

To pass the time he composed letters in his mind, serious ones to his father detailing the regiment he was joining. He ran through arguments about the possible outcome of the war and concluded that, given the strength of Poland’s armed forces, combined with the British and French aid promised, Germany would surely be forced to leave the Polish borders and Hitler would have to go home with his tail between his legs. Or at least that was what the newspapers were saying. Like everybody, he wanted to believe it.

As the hours passed and the flat landscape became gently hilly with rivers and forested areas, he thought of Silvana and imagined telling her about the town he was headed for. He knew it was an ancient place full of forts and flanked by mountains.

The train stopped at every town on the way, picking up more people, putting down others. As it rattled slowly towards his destination, Janusz wrote sonnets in his head to Silvana, counting the lines to make sure they were technically correct. He conjured up images
and phrases and for a while he felt almost heroic. He looked at the other soldiers around him and wrote imaginary letters to them boasting about his wife. He described her red curls, the soft plumpness of her breasts, the warm width of her hips. ‘My wife is beautiful, shapely like the mermaid of Warsaw, our city’s symbol,’ he told himself, and wished he had a pen and paper to hand.

He sat down on his kit bag, drank tea and ate pickled eggs and bread rolls, handed out from the samovar trolley that passed by. Finally, the day slid into star-pierced blackness and the train stopped overnight in a small country station. Janusz made his kit bag into a pillow and wrapped his arms around his knees. He was tired beyond belief. Surrounded by snoring soldiers, all of them shouldered together tight as cattle, sweat steaming off them, Janusz closed his eyes and slept.

The following morning, which came with a cool breeze off the hills on the far horizon, he composed more letters in his head, ones to the priests at the secondary school in his hometown and letters in French to his old history teacher of whom he had been particularly fond. He was so lost in his own thoughts, puzzling over forgotten French grammar, that it was a few moments before he realized the train was pulling to a sudden halt in the middle of some fields. He looked up at the sky. In the distance, planes were flying towards them.

‘It’s the Luftwaffe!’ yelled a soldier, and pushed Janusz roughly out of the doorway. ‘Get the hell out of the way. They’ve got machine-gunners aimed at the train.’

‘But we’re not at war yet.’

The soldier pulled the carriage door open.

‘Tell that to the Germans.’

Around him, men swore and women and children shrieked and cried. Doors were flung open and people stumbled and pushed to get out, jumping onto the bramble-lined railway track, running into the surrounding fields to hide in ditches and woodland.

Janusz dropped down from the train and ran after a group of men into an open ditch. There he crawled into a clump of tall reeds and squatted on his haunches, breathing rapidly. His uniform was heavy
and he could feel sweat running down his face, stinging his eyes. As the planes flew over, he covered his head with his arms. There was a feeling of heat across his back and a roar of engine noise, high-pitched and threatening. Then, when he felt as though the noise would deafen him completely, the planes passed overhead, rising higher in the sky and banking away towards the horizon.

‘They’re playing with us,’ said a man near him as the planes disappeared into the clouds.

‘Where have they gone?’

‘They’ll be back. You wait. They’ve been doing this for the last few weeks, air attacks like this. No bombs, just machine-guns opening fire on villages and train stations, picking off civilians. Scare tactics.’

Janusz looked over the edge of the ditch, trying to work out where the planes had gone. In a grassy meadow, far off, he saw a peasant girl. Something in the way she moved, a certain toughness, more like a young boy than a girl, reminded him of his sister Eve and his heart gave a lurch. The girl stood in the middle of a flock of geese that began to rise up around her. Four planes came out of the clouds then and looped towards the train, dipping low over the fields. Janusz saw the girl raise a hand as if to shield her eyes. He called to her, but she was too far off to hear him. There came a sound like the hammering of hailstones on a tin roof, and he realized it was machine-gun fire. The last thing he saw as he stumbled back into the ditch was the goose-girl falling.

Murder
was the word that flashed into his mind. He began to run along the muddy stream that lined the ditch, away from the train and the group of men who were crouched together, hands over their heads. Away from the image of the girl falling.

The ground around him shook as the machine-gunners opened fire again.

Janusz heard himself cry out. And then there were no words, just red behind his screwed-up eyelids and splinters of noise like firecrackers exploding in his eardrums. He stumbled and tripped, falling forwards, hitting his head as he landed, face down in the ditch. Pain surged through him. Silver stars dazzled and died in his vision. He felt a pressure on
his chest as if his lungs were being squeezed. He couldn’t catch his breath. There was blackness.

He came to, lying on his belly. Coughing and choking, he rose onto all fours, gulping the air. The planes had gone, leaving blue smoke drifting in their wake, carrying the smell of engine oil and burning. He realized he was quite some way from the train now and the ditch was deep, its sides hiding him from view. He put his hand to his head and felt blood. Had he been shot? Then he saw what had hurt him: a stone sticking out of the shallow ditch-water. His blood was on its flint edge. He must have been knocked unconscious when he fell. He tried to get up, but his legs felt incapable of supporting him. I’ll get up, he thought. I must get up.

He was aware of soldiers nearby, and once or twice he saw them above him on the grass verges. Too weak to call out to them, he stayed silent and hidden in the tall reeds. Exhaustion hit him and he fell into a trembling sleep. Within his foggy dreams he heard the sound of the train pulling away, but his limbs were too heavy to move and he let sleep overcome him again.

At the end of the day, in the dimming light, he crawled out of the ditch and lay on his back staring up at the sky. What was he going to do now? With cautious fingers he prodded and felt the swelling above his eye. The blood had dried. He sat up and then slowly got to his feet. The sound of geese honking in the distance made him think again of the girl, and he set off, walking stiffly across the fields towards the noisy birds.

The geese stood in a group around her, hissing and snaking their necks at him as he approached. He couldn’t bring himself to touch the body, so he sat down and wept beside it. What kind of a soldier was he? He had lain in a ditch while all around him people had needed help. He punished himself with these thoughts until finally he took the dead girl by the shoulders and turned her over.

A wrinkled face framed by long white hair stared blankly past him. She was a tiny old woman the size of a child. He couldn’t get his thoughts straight. Who was this? Where had the girl gone? Had he been mistaken? He touched her cheek. It was cold. His own face was burning hot. How could he have thought she was a young woman?

He picked up the body and carried it to the edge of the field, laying it down under a tree. He removed her bloodstained birch-bark sandals, tidied her clothes and closed her eyes.

He was twenty-two years old and he had lost his regiment before he’d even joined it. Thunder rumbled in the sky. The storms that had been threatening for days finally broke. The sky turned dark and the rain came pelting down, needle-sharp and carried horizontally by strong winds. Janusz turned up his collar and started walking. He hoped he was heading in the right direction for Warsaw. He didn’t know where else to go.

Ipswich

So far, what Silvana has seen of Britain is a country as worn down as her own. Signs of the war are everywhere, in the fire-damaged buildings they pass, the queues outside shops and the blank faces of the people. She thought she might have been able to leave her dark sadnesses behind in Poland, but here loss squats in every corner, persistent and obstinate, calling up the past when it is obvious to her that forgetting is what everybody needs to do. But then who is she to think like this? Her own memories threaten her constantly, and forgetting doesn’t come easily.

And yet, as she walks briskly behind Janusz up the steep cobbled hill past more of the red-brick houses that crowd these suburban streets, she feels determined, if not a tiny bit hopeful. The way Janusz had looked at the boy when he met them at the station had been loving. Accepting.

She wants to thank him, but he’s walking so fast she has to keep encouraging Aurek to run beside her to keep up. Just as she is thinking it is warm enough to take off her coat and walk with it over her arm, Janusz stops outside the last house in a terrace.

‘We’re here,’ he says, smiling. ‘Here’s the key. Welcome home.’

She turns the key over in her hand. Aurek reaches out and touches it, and she holds it out to show it to him.

‘Go on,’ says Janusz. ‘I’ve oiled the lock and fixed the hinges. The door was stiff but … well, go on. Put the key in and try it.’

She slips it into the lock and it turns easily, the door swinging open onto a narrow hallway with a door leading off to the left, a staircase to the right and another door at the end of the hall.

‘Perhaps I should carry you in,’ says Janusz. ‘Carry you over the threshold. Do things properly?’

Silvana begins to protest, but he wraps a hand around her waist, scooping her into his arms, holding her tightly. She catches her breath at the sudden sensation of being lifted off her feet.

‘Do you remember,’ he asks, his mouth brushing against her ear, ‘when we got our first flat and I wanted to carry you in, but you were –’

‘I was pregnant,’ Silvana says, finishing his sentence.

Janusz staggers slightly as he tries to manoeuvre them both through the door, and a fragment of laughter escapes her lips, surprising her with its lightness.

For a moment she remembers the girl she once was. She thinks of her usherette’s uniform, the burgundy colour of it, the gold braid on collar and cuffs. Of the apple orchard behind her parents’ house and the way Janusz waited there for her at dusk. The kind of useless thoughts that make her too aware of the lies she has brought with her from Poland. When he puts her down in the hallway she has barely a moment to straighten her coat before Aurek launches himself into her arms, burying his face in her collar.