There Was Still Love

by Favel Parrett

  Big planes landing, big planes taking off. Planes flying to cities far, far away. Luděk liked to think about all the places they came from, and all the places they flew to. He had never been on a plane. He would probably never go on a plane, and he understood that. But going to the airport was still a big deal. It always felt like something important might happen, that someone famous might be there, or Mama might finally be coming home.

  He watched the glass doors at the airport open and close, open and close.

  People walked through dressed up in their best suits, in their best dresses and shoes, suitcases piled on trolleys. The families waiting for them were always crying, calling out, waving their arms in the air. It was like a serial on the TV, one that Babi would like, one that Babi would make him watch with her – the same scene played out over and over and over.

  Luděk wasn’t sure he could remember the last time Aunty Máňa and Uncle Bill came. He didn’t know how long they had stayed or where they’d slept, or what had happened for the whole six weeks of summer holidays. But he did remember the presents. A red Matchbox car, two t-shirts with English words on them, and his fluffy sheepskin slippers.

  He had grown out of those slippers in less than six months and that was a real blow because they were just so good. They still looked practically new – good and warm and soft, but they were useless now. His feet grew too fast. Babi said she could see them growing right in front of her eyes. Maybe Aunty Máňa and Uncle Bill had brought him something as good this time. Luděk hoped for another Matchbox car.

  When they finally came through the sliding doors, it seemed like they were walking in slow motion. They looked lost, their eyes vacant. Babi started to cry, and called out – and then Aunty Máňa put her hands on her cheeks and started crying, too. They both stood there hugging and crying right in the way of everyone. That was a bit embarrassing – two old ladies standing there crying.

  Uncle Bohdan stepped forward and took control of the trolley. Three suitcases. Maybe there really would be a lot of presents.

  Uncle Bill walked towards Luděk.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said, and he put out his hand. Luděk shook it.

  ‘And your name is?’

  Luděk grinned. ‘Luděk,’ he said. ‘It’s me, Luděk!’

  Uncle Bill smiled. ‘My God. What happened to the small boy I used to know? You are nearly as tall as me.’

  Luděk kept on grinning. He was tall for his age but he would never catch Uncle Bill. Uncle Bill was some kind of giant.

  Aunty Máňa’s arms were around him now and she lifted him up off the ground. ‘Luděk! Luděk! Luděk!’ she said, and she kept saying his name like she was trying to make sure she would never forget it.

  He looked at her face. She had the same face as Babi. Their mouths were the same, their lips downturned like an upside-down smile. And their eyes were the same, large and brown with flecks of green deep inside. They both had big faces, strong angular faces that you could grab onto with both hands. You could hang off those faces. Stone faces that could forge through anything. Faces you would never forget.

  They were not delicate, but they were useful. They could withstand a lot.

  Four adults, one child and three suitcases – Mama’s pea-green Wartburg was at maximum capacity. Luděk was squashed in between Babi and Uncle Bill and it was a tight squeeze. To makes things worse, one of the suitcases was across his lap because only two could fit in the boot. Babi had made Aunty Máňa sit in the front so she could see everything properly.

  ‘Look,’ Babi kept saying, pointing out the window, ‘The city – so dirty. See? Can you see?’

  And Aunty Máňa kept making a ‘Mmmmm’ sound, and nodding her beehived head.

  Luděk couldn’t really see out of the window, but he hoped they were getting close to home. Now that all four of them were smoking in the car, the smoke chamber was worse than ever, and Uncle Bill smoked a pipe. But Uncle Bill put the window down a few inches and winked at Luděk. And Babi did not say one word about it.

  Babi slept in the dining room on the single metal foldout bed. Luděk told her she could have his room, and he would sleep on the fold-out bed, but she would not have it. She did not seem to mind anything when her sister was here. When her sister was here she was a different person. When her sister was here she was just happy. Anyway – the dining room was a nice room, one of the biggest rooms in the flat. It was where every single Christmas Eve feast had been. They never really used the room anymore – unless people stayed.

  Luděk lay awake that night thinking about the presents.

  There had been no Matchbox car, but there was a pair of jeans. Dark denim jeans, and a t-shirt with a yellow cartoon man on it holding a sword. There was also a winter jacket. The jacket was nothing like Luděk’s old coat. It was like nothing he had ever seen. It was shiny and puffy and it had a thick metal zip and a hood to cover his head. It was like a spacesuit – grey with a navy blue stripe. Uncle Bill told him it was called a parka, and it was rainproof.

  Everything was too big for him, the jeans and the t-shirt, and Babi made him put them away in the bottom drawer until he had grown a bit. That would not be long. By the time it was cold and the summer had gone, everything would fit. And the jacket didn’t feel too big, just a bit long on the arms, and who cared about that anyway. Jackets were not meant to be tight. All the kids in the street would ask him where he got the jacket from and he would tell them that his great-uncle was a spy in THE WEST and that he brought Luděk clothes and toys and anything he needed all the way from Australia.

  Luděk had seen a small girl in the photos Aunty Máňa brought with her, and he’d stared at the pictures, stared at the face. In one, the girl was wearing the same jacket he’d been given – only she was smaller than him, younger. She probably couldn’t run around the streets by herself yet. Everybody called her Malá Liška, maybe because of her red hair.

  Above the ticking clock, Luděk could hear Babi snoring in the dining room. He got up to go to the toilet and, out in the hall, he could hear that Aunty and Uncle were snoring their heads off, too. God, everyone was snoring. The whole flat was snoring. They had stayed up late talking and drinking and smoking and now they were all honking.

  It was like sleeping in a pig barn.

  Uncle Bill hardly spoke as they walked and that was fine. There had been too much talking in the flat. Babi and Aunty Máňa talked nonstop – He did this. She did that. They got sick. Life is hard. On and on – the endless drama. Old ladies. It was a relief to get away from them.

  Uncle Bill was so tall, and he had long strides. The narrow streets seemed even narrower with him in them.

  ‘Uncle?’ Luděk asked. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Just call me Bill,’ he said.

  Luděk knew he had been called Bill for so long that he could no longer be anything else. But it would be hard to not call him Uncle. He would have to practise.

  ‘I lost my name many years ago,’ he said, and he looked ahead – the river in view. ‘I lost my name, so I had to get a new one.’

  Luděk did not know what his name had been before and he did not ask. They walked on together in silence down the long street.

  ‘When you were a baby, I used to push you around in the stroller. Or sometimes I would just carry you,’ Uncle Bill said. ‘We would stay out for hours walking around this city. For the whole of summer.’

  Luděk did not remember that, and it made him feel strange, the thought of being carried around and not knowing it. The thought of life going on before his memory existed.

  ‘You never cried,’ Uncle Bill said. ‘You liked to be outside.’

  They walked across the river, and into the Old Town. Uncle Bill led the way and he smoked his pipe and they did not talk.

  Old streets that looked the same – cracks in the thin pavement; cracks in the apartment walls. A left turn. A right turn. A long one-way street.

  A building faded yellow, stained grey. Wide windows and double
wooden doors. Number seven. They stood there for a long time. Uncle Bill reached out and put his hand against the old wood of the doors.

  ‘My place,’ he said.

  Luděk looked up at the building, at the three rows of windows. Three floors. There had been a boy and he had slept up there under the eaves of a large old flat. Only the boy had not been called Bill. He had been someone else back then.

  Now there was an old man standing here.

  He knew this place but it was not his place anymore.

  Luděk sat across from Aunty Máňa at the kitchen table. He looked at her big, still face. It hung off her cheekbones – unmovable. Babi’s face.

  Aunty Máňa picked up her roll and took a bite. She chewed, swallowed, took a sip of her coffee – coffee she had brought in from the outside world. Instant coffee in a jar. It smelt sweet.

  ‘Eat,’ she said, just a small movement of her lips, and he took a roll from the basket, a boiled egg from the plate. Aunty Máňa pushed over the butter, the jar of apricot jam. Luděk buttered his roll, spread the jam on thick.

  Uncle Bill was still in bed. He liked sleeping. He liked snoring. How did Aunty Máňa get any sleep? Luděk looked at her eyes and he suddenly wanted to ask her why she had left. Why she did not live here anymore.

  He bit into his roll. He did not ask. He knew not to ask about THE WAR, about before. He did not say a word. He cracked his egg gently on the table, one – two – three. He started to peel it and the shell came away easily.

  No one ever talked about before. Not even in whispers. Photos of before were hidden away in the back of cupboards. Stories from before were never told. Before had been forgotten, blacked out. But sometimes it was there if you looked carefully enough. There were little traces of before – like those gold and garnet earrings on Aunty Máňa’s earlobes, the same as Babi’s. Like that old suitcase in the roof space, battered and worn and locked up tight.

  Luděk took a big bite of his egg. It needed salt, but there was no salt on the table. He did not want to move to get the salt from the cupboard. He did not want to break the connection that was there in that silence with Aunty Máňa.

  She blinked. Her eyes stayed on his. They went in somewhere deep. He took a gulp of water and got the egg down. It was overcooked, the yolk chalky. Maybe he could just ask Uncle Bill about before – about what happened. He might get somewhere with Uncle Bill.

  ‘It’s good you are living here,’ Aunty Máňa said. ‘Your babi likes having you here.’

  Luděk nodded. Yes, he liked it here. Yes, it was fine.

  He took another sip of water and Aunty Máňa’s eyes blinked again.

  ‘But maybe you miss having a brother, a sister?’ she said.

  Luděk shook his head. No way. He did not want a baby – a brother or a sister. He was fine. Him and Babi. Just them.

  He shook his head again. ‘It’s fine,’ he said.

  Aunty Máňa leant back in her chair. She drank the rest of her coffee. Her eyes were still on him, but she was far away now. She was far away and thinking.

  Uncle Bill clumped into the kitchen, his face all pushed up on one side with sleep. He came over to the table and sat down. He reached out and slid Luděk’s plate towards himself – the one with the half-eaten roll with butter and jam.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  Uncle Bill’s daily joke. Luděk jumped up and grabbed his roll off the plate. He stuffed as much of it as he could in his mouth at once.

  ‘Luděk!’ Aunty Máňa said, ‘you will choke!’ But he kept chewing and his eyes laughed at Uncle Bill. Get your own breakfast, old man!

  ‘Sit down! Chew properly!’ Aunty Máňa ordered. And she whacked Uncle Bill on the shoulder. ‘Idiot,’ she said.

  She got up from the table. Her hair was down; her hair was long and it ran all the way down her back. Aunty Máňa always wore it up, careful and neat, but sometimes in the early morning it was still loose and free. And the same bright-white streak of hair that Babi had went all the way from her scalp to the base of her back.

  Aunty Máňa yawned, covered her mouth with her hand.

  ‘Make your own čaj,’ she said. Then she shuffled off in her slippers down the hall towards the bathroom.

  Luděk lifted his cup off the table. He held it up in the air and waved it around in front of Uncle Bill’s face.

  ‘Čaj! Čaj! Čaj!’ He chanted. ‘Make me some čaj!’

  Uncle Bill grabbed the cup out of Luděk’s hands. ‘You cheeky sod,’ he said. And he said it just like that, in English, with an English accent. And it was so funny – that sound. So funny – those words, cheeky sod.

  Luděk repeated the words out loud, laughing now, because they came out wrong in his mouth – ‘Chee-kee sod. Chee-kee sod. Chee-kee sod.’

  Another lazy summer day, and later he would walk with Uncle Bill along the streets and along the river and they would not talk. They would go to the park and Uncle Bill would sit and smoke his pipe while he watched Luděk climb trees and roll down hills and chuck himself off the biggest thing he could find. Luděk never grew tired of throwing himself off things. And later, Babi would look at the bruises on his knees, the cuts and grazes on his shins and palms, and she would shake her head. How was it even possible? Luděk did not know. He could not explain it, because in the rush and joy, in the moment of running and jumping and climbing trees, nothing hurt him. Nothing could touch him. Not one thing. There was nothing but energy – breath – movement. One more jump, one more flip, one more somersault in the air, then BANG – the ground, hard, cold and alive.

  Luděk felt light-headed with the smell of schnitzels frying golden in the pan. God, Aunty Máňa was a good cook. He tried to hide his delight when she cooked for them because it upset Babi. It was the one subject that caused trouble between them. Luděk left it alone. He never asked what was for dinner or who was going to cook. BUT GOD he loved it when Aunty Máňa cooked. Even her vegetables tasted good. Even the carrots. Even the cabbage.

  Babi said that Aunty Máňa was only good because she had worked as a maid in London and she had been taught.

  ‘No one ever taught me how to cook,’ she said. ‘We had nothing. There wasn’t even anything to cook.’

  Aunty Máňa never responded when Babi said these things. She just watched her sister, her face serious, her mouth held still.

  Luděk sat down at the table and Uncle Bill poured him a small glass of beer. Babi gave them both a look, but Luděk picked it up and took a sip anyway. It was like something sour and rotten washing around his mouth. He screwed up his eyes and put the glass down. Everyone laughed. Babi gave him a glass of water and he drank it.

  Aunty Máňa put a schnitzel on his plate, some fried potato, and a big scoop of cucumber and cream salad. Luděk watched the cream flood the plate. That was the best thing – the taste of the cream salad mixed with the potato, the cream melting into the crispy schnitzel crumbs. It was all of his favourite foods on one plate and he could barely contain himself. The very second Uncle Bill began to eat, he inhaled his first mouthful.

  Uncle Bill had a system. He ate everything evenly so that each different food on his plate disappeared at the same rate. This included whatever he was drinking. There was never more of one thing than another, and his last mouthful always included a bit of everything. Luděk had tried to copy this system a few times, but it was no good. What if you got full and you wasted your belly space eating cabbage? You might have to leave a dumpling behind, and someone else might eat it before you found room again. It was better to eat your favourite food first. All of it. Then your second favourite, and then the rest. Luděk ate his schnitzel first, all of it. The adults got two and he got one and there were no more left.

  Luděk had no idea how Babi had gotten so much meat. She was trying her best to get everything for her sister, and the two of them stood in lines and shopped all day, chatting on and on all the while, and Luděk could not stand it if he had to go with them because everything took forever – every sh
op the same, every line the same – and even if he got a soft drink out of it or an ice-block, it was not worth it. They had run out of toilet paper, and it had been a three-day mission trekking around the streets to try and find some. They had to use cut-up newspaper and Uncle Bill said it hurt his arse. He told Luděk it was like going back to ‘the bloody days of rationing’. Luděk had no idea what that meant. Babi was embarrassed, but there was nothing for it. There was no toilet paper in the whole Goddamn city, and no amount of money or haggling or wheeling and dealing could get you any. No matter how badly you needed it. No matter how much your arse hurt. That’s the way it was.

  Uncle Bill slipped Luděk his last bit of schnitzel, and Luděk scoffed it down.

  God, Aunty Máňa was a good cook.

  Luděk woke and it was dark. It was still night. He turned on his back and blinked his eyes until he found the ceiling, the walls, the outline of the room. He could hear voices in the lounge, soft voices.

  He got out of bed and walked silently down the hall.

  ‘You won’t be able to come again. You might never be able to come back,’ a voice said. It was Babi. Serious.

  Then nothing.

  Luděk breathed out. It was hot in the hall. His hands felt sweaty and he wiped them on his pyjama bottoms.

  ‘What will happen to you?’ A slight accent – a small hesitation. Aunty Máňa.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Babi again and the sound of a cigarette being lit, a sharp exhale. ‘She just has to get out.’ Another pause, another exhale. ‘She can’t stand it anymore.’

  Luděk felt something behind him, someone, and he turned quickly. Uncle Bill was towering over him.

  ‘What are you doing up?’ Uncle Bill said loudly, and the glass door slid open. Babi’s hard face stared at him.