22 Britannia Road (6 page)

‘Is this all right?’

He is afraid to let his weight rest against her, but she opens her thighs and draws him towards her, whispering his name, wrapping her legs around him. In the darkness he grips the edge of the mattress, and then Hélène is in his mind and he shuts his eyes to get rid of her. He has to stop this craziness. Silvana’s breathing hurries and the quick rasp of her voice in his ear sends a hot rush of pleasure through him, dispelling other thoughts. His loneliness falls away from him like unbuttoned clothes. Maybe this will be all right. Maybe they can do this. Live here, together. Forget Hélène. Make a family. He presses his cheek against her shorn hair, kisses her ear, licks it, folds the lobe against his teeth.

Something touches his hand. He moves slightly, vaguely aware of the feeling. His little finger is being pulled back sharply. ‘What the …?’ He starts. ‘Who’s there? What the hell is going on?’

He tumbles off Silvana and falls between the beds, scrambling to his feet.

‘Aurek?’ says Silvana.

Janusz turns on the main light and the child looks at him, staring him down with wide, dark eyes. There’s a possessive, adult fierceness in the boy’s gaze that leaves Janusz speechless for a moment. He buttons his pyjama top and glares back at the boy.

‘Aurek? What are you doing here? Go to bed.’

Silvana is pulling back the covers, holding out her hands to the child.

‘No, no. Let him stay.’

‘What does he want?’ asks Janusz. ‘What is it, Aurek? Were you scared of something?’

Aurek looks at his mother and makes a small mewing noise.

‘He’s thirsty,’ says Silvana. ‘Please don’t shout.’

The boy climbs into bed quicker than Janusz can protest, and Silvana wraps her arms around him. He watches as the child takes his place, small hands reaching for Silvana’s breast, dipping his head, taking the nipple in his mouth.

‘No,’ says Janusz. ‘No. Stop. You can’t do that. Aurek, get out. Go to bed.’

Silvana’s face is blank and impossible to read.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, her chin resting on the boy’s head. ‘Next time. When Aurek doesn’t need me.’

Silvana

Janusz’s father found the newly-weds a small flat in Warsaw. Two rooms on the top floor of a tall town house. They filled a suitcase and a trunk with their belongings and took a bus to the city.

‘I should carry you over the threshold,’ said Janusz as he put the key in the lock.

Silvana hesitated. He looked so handsome, his blue eyes shining at her. Nobody had ever looked at her the way he did. It was as if he saw something different in her, a truth that he had long been searching for. Of course he wanted to carry her into her new home. That’s what a husband had to do.

‘I’m not sure, Jan,’ she said. ‘Is it safe? For the baby, I mean. Look, why don’t I give you my gloves and hat. You could carry them inside for me instead.’

She saw the sadness in his face, and her optimism gave way to doubt. Perhaps he thought they had got things wrong, the baby coming along so quickly. Had he married her out of duty? By rights Janusz should be at university now, not offering to carry a pregnant peasant girl over the threshold of an attic apartment. Perhaps he was disappointed by the turn of events. Certainly his parents had been against the marriage.

But if Janusz was frustrated by his new life, he showed no sign of it.

‘Come here,’ he said laughing, and picked her up, making a big show of groaning and puffing out his cheeks, as if she were a huge burden to lift. He walked one step and then stood her down inside the door.

Silvana looked around the tiny flat. She finally had her own home.

Janusz jumped onto the kitchen table. ‘Can you climb up here? I want to show you the view. I’ll hold you tight, I promise.’

Through the skylight window it was possible to see the tops of the trees in the park.

‘It’s wonderful,’ she breathed, the table rocking slightly under their weight. ‘The city is wonderful.’

‘We have a fine view. The best in Warsaw, I’d say.’

He helped her down and handed her a present wrapped in gold paper.

‘Here. My wedding present to you.’

It was a necklace. A silver chain with a disc of coloured glass hanging from it, a small circle of blue no bigger than a one-grosz piece. Within the blue was a tree made of tiny circles of green and gold glass.

‘It comes from Jaraslaw, where the best glass and crystal comes from. It’s a tree. To remind us of our … of the first time we … That day in the woods …’

‘I remember,’ said Silvana. She held the little pendant up to the light, and the tree sparkled. She had a new life now with a man she loved. And she was free from her parents and her ghostly brothers at last.

Silvana loved the city from the moment she arrived. It felt alive and vibrant. The city women had short hair and wore tiny veiled hats, velvet cloches or berets perched on the back of their heads. They even walked differently. They took up more space on the pavements and led with their chins. Silvana, dressed in a straw hat and country clothes, led with her belly.

Janusz bought her a book,
An Album of Film Land: A Pictorial Survey of Today’s Movie Stars
. In the Café Blikle, where she ate Viennese pastries every morning at eleven, Silvana pored over the sepia images of actresses and actors, her fingers tracing high cheekbones and smooth skin, arched brows and Cupid’s-bow lips. Finally, she walked into a glass-fronted hairdresser’s shop and held out her book.

Her long chestnut hair was cut off, curls corkscrewing on the wooden floor. Silvana looked at recurring images of herself in the
bevelled mirrors. She copied the other women in the salon, turning her head this way and that, nodding her approval while the hairdresser swept the piles of hair on the floor into a dustpan.

At home, undressing in the cramped bedroom of their flat, in front of an oval mirror, a pink satin slip straining over her stomach, Silvana looked at herself. She tossed her head back, her short bob shining. She was nineteen years old and thought she knew all there was to know about the world.

Janusz

The cottage was made of split logs, unpainted except for the tiny windows, whose frames were white. A rat-ruined thatch roof, like a hat pulled down at the brim, gave the building a dark, squat look. It was a simple peasant home, shabbier than some, not worse than others. What Janusz’s father would call a ‘one-acre starveling’s dwelling’.

Janusz had seen it from the brow of a hill, and walked down in the hope of finding someone who could tell him which way to get back on the road to Warsaw. He knocked but there was no response. He walked around the cottage several times and finally opened the front door, stooping to step inside.

There were two rooms with pressed clay floors, one with a blackened fireplace, a kitchen table and chair. Potatoes were stored in a wicker basket by the door. The only decorations in the room were some handmade paper icons, carefully cut and folded forms representing different saints, lined up along the windowsill. They were yellowed by age and thick with dust.

The other room had a long bench against the wall, on which a cat and kittens slept. In a corner he found a decorated wooden chest with linen and blankets inside. A dowry chest painted with bouquets of flowers and small birds. Something a young girl would be given by her family on her wedding day. There was nothing else except the mildewed smell of poverty and loneliness.

In the yard, geese honked and chickens waded through thick layers of goose shit, scratching at the ground. The rains of the night before had turned the yard into a muddy mess and there was a stench in the
air that made Janusz cough, pressing his hand over his nose. The place was empty. It was, he guessed, the home of the dead goose-woman.

Despite his vow to return to Warsaw, he felt compelled to stay. He would do something useful here in this dead woman’s home. He washed and bandaged his head wound with a strip of cotton sheet he found in the wooden chest, then he lit the fire in the hearth and cooked himself some potatoes.

The next day, he fed the geese and cleaned out the filthy henhouse. After that he walked around, noting the other jobs to be done. Every day he worked. He swept the yard and mended broken fences. He cleaned the two-room cottage and laid down branches of rosemary from the vegetable patch across the floors, to sweeten the air.

At night he slept in the chair by the hearth and dreamed of Silvana. By day he kept busy. He wanted to make things right. He didn’t ask himself any questions. He organized and tidied and brought in vegetables from the garden.

Out at the back of the cottage, hidden by a thicket of elder trees, he found an overgrown grassy mound marked with a birch-wood cross. The cross was worn and old, silvered by the weather to a pitted grey. There was no name, no way of knowing who was buried there. He sat down beside it, thinking of the old woman, her body still under the tree where he had left it, and felt weighed down by a loneliness that made his mouth taste bad and his eyes itch with salty tears.

There’d been an old woman in his small town, a bent creature with a downy beard of grey that had the local kids laughing till their sides split. She was crazy, spitting and swearing whenever they taunted her. His father had explained to him once, when Janusz and a group of boys had thrown stones at her windows just to see her come out screaming, that the old lady was lonely. His father had sat him down and said the word cautiously, as if it was an improper word to use in front of his son.

‘Loneliness is a disease anybody can catch. When your grandfather died in the war against the Bolsheviks, your grandmother caught the disease. She died of it when I was just a boy.’

‘But she had you,’ Janusz had replied. How could his grandmother have been lonely if she had children?

‘You can be lonely in the biggest crowd,’ said his father, and Janusz looked up at his steady face, settled in its white starched collar like an egg in an eggcup, not sure whether his father was telling him now about himself or his grandmother. Was it just that all the grown-ups in the world were lonely? That when he grew up he’d get the disease too?

‘She didn’t have her husband,’ continued his father. ‘That was what destroyed her.’ He sighed, stood up and patted Janusz on the shoulder. ‘Now, stop tormenting that old woman. One day you might be lonely and you’ll regret your behaviour here today.’

Janusz looked again at the unmarked grave. He knew what he had to do. He found some fencing wood in the log pile and, with a ball of twine, strapped a new piece of wood to the old, until he had the cross standing more or less upright. Then he set to, chopping back and clearing away the elder trees until he was so tired he could only stagger back to the house and sleep.

Janusz mended the water pump in the yard. He found a pot of whitewash and decided to repaint the window frames. Some days he just sat in the yard and watched the geese, thinking of his son and wife all those miles away and trying to work out how he had managed to become so lost and why he quite liked this numb state and this anonymous place. Over the weeks he lost track of time until finally one morning he woke up and realized he still had one more thing to do.

He started at dawn the following day, digging a hole beside the unmarked grave. By the time the afternoon threw long shadows across his back, the hole was deep enough. He drank a cupful of water from the pump in the yard, lit the fire in the hearth, took a blanket from the dowry box and went back to find the body of the old woman.

He knew he was near to it by the cloud of flies that flew up to meet him. Her body was covered in them, a metallic-blue mass moving in glistening shivers. He retched at the sight of them. It was his fault for leaving her there so long. He realized now that all the tidying and mending had been a way of putting off this moment. He lifted the blanket and threw it over the body, bundling it up, flies and
all. Carrying her back to the house, he was half afraid the old woman was still alive and it was her, not the flies, pushing and pulsing under the blanket.

He dropped his burden into the ground and began shovelling the earth on top of her, working as fast as he could, until the noise of the flies became muffled and he could slow down and take his time.

When he had finished, he recited the Lord’s Prayer. He leaned on the spade, looking out across the fields. Now this final act was done, he knew he couldn’t stay much longer. There was nothing else to do here. He figured he’d stay for another week. Then he’d have to leave. He had to go back to Warsaw.

His best plan would be to find a village and get news of the war. Then he’d go home and see Silvana and Aurek. He’d see his family. Let everyone know he was safe and start again as if none of this had happened. He’d fight for his country and nobody would ever need to know about the train and how he had stayed behind when it left.

He stood up and was about to cross himself when he saw something that made him take up the spade in his two hands again. Two men coming across the fields. Two men in uniform.

He met them in the yard. Close up they looked all wrong to be soldiers. One was a lanky kid, bony-faced, with hands that were too large for his wrists. The other one was stout, heavy black eyebrows and a nose big enough to be Jewish. Short-legged and barrel-chested, he walked heavily. Their uniforms didn’t fit them properly. The boy’s jacket was too short in the arm; the other man’s too tight in the chest.

‘
Dzien dobry
,’ said the boy. ‘Good day to you.’

‘You can put that down,’ said the older man, holding his hands up in mock surrender. ‘We only want a bit of food and then we’ll be on our way.’

Janusz didn’t lower the spade. ‘Where have you come from?’

‘Lwow. We escaped from the Russians.’

‘Russians?’

‘They’re against us now,’ the boy said. ‘Didn’t you know?’

‘I don’t know anything. I lost my regiment a while ago.’ He frowned. Exactly how long had he been here now? He looked at the other man. ‘So what’s happening?’

‘The Germans took Warsaw three weeks ago. They came across the borders from Pomerania, East Prussia, Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia. We weren’t prepared at all. Now the Russians want a piece of the action too …’