Homeland (38 page)

‘Oh.’ Then, as it sank in, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, that’s wonderful, Wladek!’

‘It is not ideal, because London is long way from here. But they have quota for Poles and, who knows, maybe they take old fellows like me.’

‘
Old
,’ she rebuked him. ‘But what will you study?’

‘This is where I require your advice, dear Stella. This is one thing I ask of you tonight, if I may.’

‘I’ll be glad to help all I can, of course I will. Though I’m not sure I’ll be too much use if it comes to choosing between history and philosophy.’

‘I thought also of law.’

‘Oh . . .’ She tried to hide her bewilderment, and failed. ‘Why law?’

He wished he’d never mentioned it now, because it had detracted from his main purpose, it had spoilt the mood.

‘More practical, I think.’

‘But if your heart’s not in it . . .’

‘Ah, my heart, Stella . . .’ Suddenly the mood was restored, and he determined not to let the enchantment slip away again. Moving a little closer to her, he removed his glove and
touched the back of his hand softly to her cheek. ‘Yes, my heart must be my guide. This is why I must say to you, there are two reasons I go to study. One, to build a good life. Second, so
that I can hope to be near to you, Stella. Because without you, this life will be nothing for me.’

She stared at him. ‘Oh.’ She sighed again. ‘Oh.’ Her eyes filled suddenly, she looked down and clamped her lips together.

Not sure what to make of this, but feeling it wasn’t entirely negative, he pressed on. ‘You give me hope for future, Stella. You give me purpose in this life. I feel that if I can be
near to you then my future will be rich and full of happiness.’

She looked up again, her gaze tearful and bright. Her mouth, strongly shaped and well delineated, was parted slightly as if in hesitation. With infinite slowness he bent to kiss her. Her lips
were cold, but they were soft and they exerted an unmistakable answering pressure against his own, a pressure that grew and shifted, until her lips were moving under his.

When they drew apart, her eyes flickered open, she breathed, ‘What you said . . . that was the most lovely thing anyone has ever said to me.’

‘I speak from my heart, Stella.’

Her eyes brimmed again, she gave a light laugh. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Say only that I may live in hope.’

She gazed at him while the snowflakes danced and dithered and spiralled between them. ‘Yes,’ she said shyly. Then, with a small smile: ‘Yes, you may.’ Then a last time,
with growing confidence: ‘Yes.’

‘Then I am happy man.’

The snow was easing off, the sky seemed to have lifted a little as they rumbled back along the river road. Coming to the tip of the long tongue of land that dissects the
wetlands, they turned onto the ridge road, its surface smooth and icy from the scouring wind. The road rose steadily for a mile or so before dipping towards a bridge over a railway cutting. At
first the bridge was partially obscured by a bend, but Wladyslaw caught a glimpse of two lorries parked there, both of them military. As they drew closer he saw a third military lorry parked
opposite by the start of a drove-road. Stella took the tractor slowly onto the bridge and stopped. The lorries were empty. Stella stood up in her seat to peer over the side of the bridge.
‘There,’ she said. Going to the edge of the trailer, Wladyslaw looked down into the steep-sided cutting and saw a gang of men strung out along the railway tracks, shovelling at the
voluminous snowdrifts. Their uniform greatcoats and caps identified them as German POWs. There must have been guards too, but he couldn’t see them.

Wladyslaw said, ‘Good job for them, I think.’ But Stella wasn’t listening. She was looking up the road towards a car coming from the direction of the village. She flung
Wladyslaw a questioning look over her shoulder. At first he thought she was concerned about the speed of the car, which was fast for a vehicle travelling on snow, but then he realised it was the
car itself she had recognised.

Approaching the bridge the car braked abruptly and began to skid, its back end slowly swinging out to one side, until the driver wrestled the steering the other way, when, with a brief
counter-lurch, it straightened up again and at a more sedate pace turned across the road to park behind one of the lorries. Arthur Hanley climbed out and glared at them, his face set in a mask of
fury. Going to the boot he pulled out a shotgun and, wedging it over one forearm, came marching towards them. He shouted something to Stella, which Wladyslaw couldn’t catch over the rattle of
the tractor, and followed it with an impatient flicking motion of one hand.

Stella climbed out of the driving seat and dropped down onto the road. She tried to say something, but her uncle was already shouldering past her to mount the tractor. In the time it took Hanley
to get into the seat and wedge the shotgun against the mudguard Wladyslaw vaulted out of the trailer. He had barely landed before it moved off with a jolt.

He remembered that Stella’s aunt had been ill with pneumonia, and said immediately, ‘Is it your aunt, Stella? Is she not well?’

‘No, no! It’s the Germans’ – she indicated the cutting – ‘he says they’ve been stealing from him.’

The tractor swung wide around one of the lorries and disappeared down the drove-road.

Wladyslaw began to follow at a brisk hop of a walk. He called back to Stella, ‘You stay here, OK?’

He set off down the drove-road as fast as the snow and his leg would allow. Ahead, the tractor was steaming rapidly down the hill, the trailer rocking frantically in its wake. Suddenly
Wladyslaw’s foot hit ice and he almost fell. By the time he had regained his balance and re-established some sort of stride, the tractor had reached the bottom of the hill and was turning
across the snowfield. Wary of more hidden ice he kept his eyes firmly on the path in front of him, registering the tractor’s progress only as a movement on the periphery of his vision.

When he finally reached the level ground, he saw the tractor standing by the railway embankment and Hanley clambering up the slope onto the track, the shotgun in his hand. Following the path of
compacted snow left by the tractor, Wladyslaw began to run.

As Hanley neared the entrance to the cutting the first group of prisoners stopped shovelling and stared at him. There seemed to be some conversation, or possibly some shouting, because the next
group of prisoners also lowered their shovels and looked round. Still talking, or at least gesticulating, Hanley marched away from the first group and began to harangue the second bunch of men. The
hectoring voice was muted by the snow, a faint disjointed sound. The rest of the prisoners had been concealed inside the cutting but as Wladyslaw scrambled up the embankment he could see them
spread out beyond Hanley, twenty, maybe thirty of them, their uniforms dark against the wall of whiteness. They had stopped working and were looking towards the scene of the shouting. For some
reason there were no guards in sight.

Limping hurriedly along the track, Wladyslaw heard Hanley’s voice lift in a roar. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about!’

The first group of prisoners gave Wladyslaw a cursory look as he went past. One of them was lighting a cigarette, another smiling slyly as if at a joke.

The second group, some seven or eight strong, had fragmented, drawing back into a ragged semicircle, leaving an impassive man of about forty to take the brunt of Hanley’s onslaught, which
consisted of the same speech repeated with a bully’s emphasis, the enunciation exaggerated, the consonants delivered with a shower of spittle and vaporised breath, the message underlined by a
furious jabbing finger. ‘Don’t go pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about! You were seen taking them away! You were seen in broad daylight! And I’m not
leaving till you get them back to where they came from. You hear me? I’m not budging from this spot!’

The impassive German gave a slow shrug, a lifting of both shoulders and an outward turn of a gloved hand.

‘Don’t give me that, you piece of vermin!’ Hanley’s voice hammered out. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You’re guilty
as hell, the lot of you!’

The German turned down his mouth in an expression of disdain or incomprehension or both.

His face contorted with rage, his mouth twitching uncontrollably, Hanley grasped the shotgun in both hands and swung it up to point at the German’s chest. ‘You think this is some
kind of joke, do you? You think this is funny? Well, I’ll teach you otherwise.’

There was a collective pause, a freezing of all sound and movement, which no one seemed inclined to break until Wladyslaw stepped forward and said quietly, ‘Maybe he does not
understand.’

Ignoring him, Hanley lifted the shotgun higher. ‘Answer me, you devil!’

Smoothly, showing no flicker of expression, the German uncurled the fingers of one hand from the shovel and, leaving a thumb looped around the hilt, spread his fingers in a fan of surrender,
while raising the other hand lazily to shoulder height. As a gesture of submission it was almost farcically relaxed; as a gesture of indifference it was defiantly accomplished.

Quivering with rage, Hanley jabbed the gun forward. ‘Answer me, do you hear?’

At that instant it seemed to Wladyslaw that Hanley’s finger curled and tightened on the trigger. With a sense of having left it too late, his nerves steeled against the impending blast,
Wladyslaw stepped forward with what felt like impossible slowness and, grasping the twin barrels in one hand, quickly pushed the gun up until it was pointing at the sky.

Hanley gave a grunt of surprise and fury before trying to wrench the gun free. Wladyslaw clapped his other hand to the barrel and held on as Hanley yanked it backwards and sideways with violent
jerks and twists. After some particularly fierce tussling, Wladyslaw thought the older man’s grip was loosening, that he would relent, but then Hanley’s shoulder came barging into his,
a raised elbow cracked hard into Wladyslaw’s nose, and he realised that the lull had marked nothing more than a change of tactics. If Hanley was stronger than he looked, he was heavier too,
and, thrown back onto his bad leg, Wladyslaw almost lost his balance. Getting his good leg down again, he twisted round and managed to thrust the gun barrel up once more, pushing it higher and
higher until Hanley, holding on tenaciously, was forced to lurch backwards. At once, instinctively, Wladyslaw saw his opportunity to hook a foot round Hanley’s ankle and pull him off-balance.
To get his foot that far, however, it was necessary to swing it back and get some momentum behind it. By chance and ill fortune he was perfectly balanced as he took aim, his good leg solid beneath
him, his bad leg swinging forward with plenty of weight behind it. By the time he realised that Hanley was shifting the leg he was aiming for it was too late to pull back, and his boot crashed into
Hanley’s shin with a solid crunch.

With a sharp bellow Hanley staggered back and let go of the gun. Wladyslaw barely managed to get a safe grip on the barrel before his own leg became a shaft of fire. The pain made him want to
retch, a mist seemed to cover his eyes, and it was some moments before he was able to call to Hanley, ‘You OK?’

Hanley was bent over his leg, nursing it. His cap had fallen off his head onto the snow and Wladyslaw limped across to pick it up.

‘The kick was accident,’ he gasped, holding out the cap to him. ‘Sorry.’

Hanley glared at Wladyslaw in disbelief, his eyes bulging, his skin damp, his lips pulled back in a wide grimace. His bared teeth were yellow in the bleached light, his skin an unhealthy grey,
and the falling snow was forming a white down on his dark hair.

Wladyslaw was still holding out the cap. ‘Now . . . if you wish . . .’ he panted. ‘I will make enquiries.’

When Hanley didn’t respond Wladyslaw dropped the cap onto the snow just beside him and turned to the impassive German. ‘
Sprechen Sie Englisch?
’

The German had relaxed again. He was leaning on his shovel. ‘
Nein.
’

Wladyslaw threw the question out to the rest of the group and got a general shaking of heads.

Wladyslaw’s German was poor, barely a few words; he asked if anyone spoke Polish. People glanced at each other, then a voice from the semicircle shouted across to the first group of
prisoners. The man who lifted his head and turned round in response was the one who’d been lighting a cigarette when Wladyslaw passed by, a square-jawed character with a badly broken
nose.

‘Would you translate?’ Wladyslaw called to him.

‘So long as it doesn’t get me shot,’ he said in excellent, virtually unaccented Polish. Drawing on his cigarette, he strolled forward until he was within easy earshot.

Wladyslaw turned back to Hanley. ‘So,’ he said in a tone of conciliation, ‘what is problem exactly?’

But Hanley was still glaring at Wladyslaw as if he hated him.

‘I can try for answer,’ Wladyslaw said with something like gentleness, ‘if you inform me of problem.’

Finally, with a terrible effort, Hanley hissed, ‘Give me my gun.’

Wladyslaw glanced rapidly around in the hope of seeing some guards, but saw only Stella standing a short distance behind him, wearing an expression of misery and disbelief. Turning his back on
Hanley, he hobbled over to her.

‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t have done anything.’

Not knowing how to answer this, feeling a sudden weight of responsibility, Wladyslaw said, ‘Look after these, please.’ Breaking the gun open, he removed the cartridges from the twin
barrels and placed them in her hand. She shook her head gently as she grasped them.

Wladyslaw walked back and gave Hanley the empty gun.

‘You’ll pay for this,’ Hanley said with cold antagonism. ‘First thieving – now assault. I’ll get you locked away. And your friends – the whole lot of
you.’

‘These are not my friends, Mr Hanley.’

Hanley’s mouth quivered and twitched.

‘These are not my friends,’ Wladyslaw repeated. ‘These are German prisoners.’ Realising that further explanations were useless, he said, ‘But I will ask for the
information you wish. If you tell me, please, what they have stolen.’