Underground

by Tobias Hill

  ‘He hid her. In the war, Dad hid her. Didn’t he?’

  I sound proud of him. My uncle laughs and chokes. Wipes the vodka off his mouth.

  ‘Where? Some people did, but not our mother. No, Anna went to the camps. Buchenwald. Her whole family died there. She was still beautiful when she came back. She didn’t talk any more or move much, but there she was all the same. And Michal took her away. He didn’t leave a note. In the west they were giving land away, driving out the Germans, but we didn’t know he’d gone there for years. He was twenty-two.’

  The chair grates back as I stand up. Jan looks up at me, then away. I’m so glad he has to look up at me.

  ‘Is that it? That’s nothing. You’re so old, Jan, old and –’

  ‘No, that isn’t it. Sit down, big man. I haven’t finished with you yet.’

  I go on standing. Jan chuckles, down in his throat. His voice goes on and on. I want to tell him to stop. It’s too late now.

  ‘You are born out of hate, boy. That’s what I’m telling you. You’re a child of hate. I was going to tell you about the other Jews. Because in the end, given the choice of Jews or wallpaper, people chose wallpaper. Stories started going round – the Jews were killing children, the Jews were making matzo bread with Polish blood. Crazy stories. A boy went missing – he turned up in the next village months later, but it was too late by then. It was July, the holidays, and the heat was getting up. Most of the Yids were living in one house on Planty Avenue. I came cycling down there one day and there was fighting going on. I could hear chanting, Beat the Jews, Kill the Bloodsuckers.

  ‘Michal was there. He was hurting them, like the rest. There was blood on him, but not his own. He was like a dog. I couldn’t get him away. Foreigners! he kept saying, Bloody foreigners! There was one man killed holding on to a tree, and I remember a woman too, with blood around her. She was pregnant. I don’t know if she was dead. Forty-two of them died, though. She probably was dead, don’t you think? The Jews almost all left Poland after that, the ones who were left. All except Anna.

  ‘You see how it is now? Your father hated the Jews, and married a Jew. I think he got it from our mother. Myself, I always thought he hated Anna too. Hated loving her. And now there’s you. I wonder if he hates you too.’

  Everything goes quiet. We watch each other across the room. Jan has the bottle clutched against his chest. My legs are shaking badly, rattling against the table. I make myself keep on standing.

  ‘You’re lying. We would have learned it in school. If that had happened I would know.’

  ‘No. Why would they teach it? No one wants to remember Kielce. If they can, they forget. As if it never happened. What else is forgetting for?’

  ‘You’re lying about my dad.’ My eyes are hot. I can’t tell if I’m crying until Jan starts to smile again.

  ‘You know I’m not.’ He leans towards me. ‘Because you know him well enough. Don’t you? By the time you get back from Astrakhan, you’ll know all about him, believe me. Just wait.’

  ‘My mother loves him.’

  Jan backs away. He looks bored with me now. ‘So try not to fall in love, eh? Your mother was smart, before the war. Not now, though. I can’t stand looking at her. She’s like a shadow. And now I’m going to get an hour’s sleep. You want to sit here and drink, you do that. Good night, nephew.’

  I sit alone at the kitchen table. The bottle is there but I don’t drink. Sometimes I hear the TV and sometimes not. Once I look round, through the angle of open doors, into the guest room.

  My father sits in there with his back to me. Wide shoulders and big head, very still. Beyond him is the TV, its white square and the white noise coming out of it like a sigh: Haaaah. I look at my father sleeping for as long as I can. Then it’s four o’clock and time to go and I look away.

  ‘Is there any more food?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Water?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Cholera. I can’t stand buying from these cheating Russians. Their faces when they make money off us, I can’t stand that. Not that it’s real money.’

  He laughs without turning. I don’t understand why he laughs. I watch the back of his head as he drives. The point of the skull under the thick black hair. Russia goes by around us, its birch stands and waterlands. Silver and black, vertical and horizontal.

  ‘Having dollars here, Casimir, it’s like being in a fairy tale. In Poland we’re ordinary people, but here – Hey, you could buy a woman. You want to? God knows, you’re big enough. In Astrakhan, you can buy a beautiful woman for nothing. The price of that Silesian sausage. Don’t let me stop you either. Don’t worry about your dad, eh? Casimir?’

  There’s a pipeline by the roadside, sometimes close and sometimes further away. Its stilts and bridges run down village main streets and around town halls. I don’t know what it’s for, gas or oil. Yesterday I would have asked my father, but not today. There are so many questions I want to ask him and will not ask. I don’t want to hear his answers.

  ‘Casimir? You all right back there? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’ve been quiet as the dead since we crossed the border. What is it, are you scared of Russia?’

  A flock of birds is ahead and above us, falling slowly behind. I crane back and see they’re white geese, a big V of them over the villages and factories. The village houses are cheap wood, white birch and wet black boards. Nothing strong in them except the heavy, sloped roofs. Every town has a statue of Lenin painted silver, and all the statues point north. Like a warning: Go back. The pipeline goes on and on beside us, south-east towards Astrakhan.

  ‘Jesus, you’re not feeling sick, are you? That’s all I need. Eh?’

  ‘Nothing is wrong.’

  I look past my father’s head. The sun is out. It’s the colour of chalk. There are flax fields all around us now, sloping away to flat horizons. I turn in my seat, looking out. There are no houses, no hills, no trees, only the flax flowers. A whole landscape blue as irises. My father’s head black at the centre of it all.

  We come towards Astrakhan at night. It’s warm in the dark, the way Gliwice is only in summer and the first long days of autumn. For a day there’s nothing outside us except rolling dunes of earth, like a seabed. No trees except along the steep banks of rivers. I watch the rivers coming, miles away.

  The back of the car is full of maps, old books of them with worn-out covers. I learn all the republics and states from the Caspian Sea to China: Turkmenistan, Afghanistan. For ten hours I try and work out if the USSR is bigger than the surface of the moon. Sometimes when I look out there are animals in the dark. I recognize flocks of sheep and small, muscled horses. There are also tiny deer, no bigger than horned yellow dogs. Once I wake from sleeping and there are three camels sitting in the dunes. When I look back to see them again they are already out of sight. I don’t know if they were real now.

  On the outskirts we stop to piss by the roadside. I pick up handfuls of sandy dirt. Back in the car, I see my fingers are stained pink with its colour.

  My father’s employer is Iranian. We drive to his office on Kalinina Street but the shop front is locked and empty, grey boxes piled against grey windows. There’s no sign to say where the Iranian has gone. My father stands in the street and curses the Iranian, the Russians and their rotting country. Then we get back in the car and drive on to the Hotel Lotos over the city’s rivers and tributaries and canals. There’s a tourist shop in the hotel lobby and my father buys forty bottles of Löwenbräu. In our room he begins to drink, steadily and in silence, his face full of anger.

  Astrakhan is a city of water. The horns of riverboats carry a long way at night. The sound drifts into the hotel room with the mosquitoes. I lie awake listening, ten feet from my father.

  It isn’t easy to find the Iranian. My father’s Russian is good, but no one talks to us. For two and a half days we search, not speaking. When my father looks at me now his pupils are tight with guilt and fear. The
re is no hate, though. Jan was wrong about that. I walk a few steps behind him, so that I don’t have to see his face.

  Old women bend down in the streets, splashing dirty water over their boots, washing away the dirt. Everything leans or bends here. There are avenues of ash trees, knotted together above the oil trucks and private cars. Houses which sag down into the mud, the wood of them carved and patterned like icing on wedding cakes. Some are grand like Piotr’s house at home, with iron balconies hanging crooked from corners and under French windows. Their metalwork is the green of river water under ice. It must be cold here in winter. You can see it in the buildings.

  On the third morning we go to the Volga fish markets. Across the water are golden stands of horsetail, and beyond them, the mosques. There are men singing in the mosques, and the sound of them shakes over the water, like heat. We walk between the stalls and decks, looking for the Iranian. It’s five days now since I’ve spoken to my father.

  ‘Hey! Look at this, look at this. You see this? Fresh sevruga! Try. You’ll love it. You want it? Try. You want half a kilo? How much you want?’

  ‘We’re looking for someone.’

  ‘A friend? Or business? Where you from?’

  ‘Poland. We’re looking for the Iranian.’

  ‘Then why are you wasting my time? You want fish you come to me, you want Iranians, go to Iran. Bojemoi! Crazy Poles.’

  ‘I can pay.’

  ‘Listen, I have good Russian sevruga, you see? Fresh Russian sevruga from the bellies of the most beautiful Russian lady sturgeon. What about the young man, now? Maybe he wants to try. He’ll like it, I can tell from his face.’

  ‘I can pay in dollars.’

  ‘Is that so. How much?’

  ‘Just tell me where he is.’

  When my father speaks Russian he sounds like the Gliwice Militia men, who never smile. I stand behind him, trying to understand them both. The stall-holder spits when he talks and there are cold-sores on his bottom lip. The Russian is not clear like in school. Here it is wet, blistered, thick on the man’s tongue.

  He leans forward for the money. Under him shine big jars of caviare, tarry black or clouded grey or green, which are the cheap eggs of river carp. I listen hard, catching what I can.

  ‘Thank you. Well then. Go down.’

  ‘Down? I pay you for directions, I want to know which deck and –’

  ‘Just go down, Pole. As far as you can go.’ When the stallholder grins, the moustache pulls back over his lips. His mouth is cracked and red, like the crust of cooked meat. ‘The steps are steep down there. Watch your heads.’

  At the bottom of the last stairs we come to a long room. There is no door, just a thin man at a table, writing in a fat book. He doesn’t look up. His skin is dark. Until Astrakhan, I’d never seen people with dark skin. Only Gypsies. There is no light except on his table.

  I wipe my hands on the backs of my trousers. Here there’s always dirt on me, I can feel it in my sweat. All day the mosquitoes feed off sturgeon and at night I hear their whine in our cheap hotel room and I sit up in the warm dark, reach out and kill the mosquitoes between my hands. Their blood smells of caviare. Now I wipe my hands and stand waiting.

  My father coughs, steps forward. From somewhere in the long room comes the crackle of a cigarette and its glow, away from the table’s light. ‘Salaam aleicum.’

  ‘Wa aleicum es. You’re late. I expected you two days ago.’ The man at the table speaks Polish. He has the accent of a newsreader.

  ‘I couldn’t find you. Your office –’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Our business isn’t until tomorrow. Is this your son?’

  The man looks straight at me. His eyes are grey, the colour of sevruga. The cheeks are sunk inwards, as if he has no teeth. When he smiles the teeth are bright and clean and I’m surprised.

  ‘Kazimierz Ariel Kazimierski. You’re a man already. Come here. Come, come!’

  He waves me over. I feel Dad move beside me, shifting around, uncomfortable or uneasy. How does the man know my middle name? It scares me. I want to look at my dad, to see in his eyes what I should do.

  Instead I make myself walk forward, up to the lit table. The man is turning pages. There are rows of numbers and tiny foreign writing. I recognize the writing from home, on the tins of fish in Grandad’s old room.

  ‘Do you know what language this is?’

  ‘Arabic.’

  ‘Good! You’re a clever young man, aren’t you? Cleverer than your father, I think. And quieter. These are my accounts, Kazimierz. Imports, exports. Do you know what we sell here, boy?’

  I shake my head. He doesn’t look up because he knows I do not know. He goes on turning the thin pages, talking in his easy voice.

  ‘Tomato paste. I bring tomato paste into Russia and your father helps me. Do you know most Russians have never tasted a tomato? Imagine having never cooked with that flavour and colour! My own belief is that the tomato is the basis of all Western cuisines, and many Eastern too. But it’s all things Western these Soviets want. Pizza, ketchup, full English breakfasts, chilli in a bowl, hamburger relish and spaghetti bolognese. So, I bring them tomato paste. One day I will have a tomato paste empire, you see? So far I have offices in Brest and Vladivostok, Moscow and here. I like it here best, because I can take the boat home once a month and see my children and sleep with my wife. And from here I will also see the eclipse tomorrow. Do you know what an eclipse is, Kazimierz Ariel?’

  ‘When the moon disappears. I saw one before. It was OK.’

  Now he looks up at me. His grey eyes are like his voice. Mild and lazy, as if he is always about to smile. ‘Was it? Well, tomorrow is another kind of eclipse. The sun will disappear. I’ve never seen this myself, but I think you may find it a little more interesting.’ The man looks away and down, voice rising. ‘Mister Kazimierski, are you ready to work tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There will be a shipment fifteen kilometres due south off the coast at three o’clock p.m. You and the boy will go and meet it alone. Your boat is moored at the usual place, and the payment will be there for you when you return. Leave the shipment there. I’ll pick it up myself in a day or two. I don’t foresee any problems, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’ The man stands up. Stooping, too tall for the ceiling. He shakes my dad’s hand but not mine. ‘Goodbye, old friend. I’ll call you when I need you again.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you, sir. Goodbye.’

  We walk back to the stairs. There are no portholes down here on the bottom deck. The walls of the market ship seep river water. My throat is dry and I gulp, trying to make it all right. But it isn’t all right, not here. I gulp again and again. My father goes up the stairs first. I follow him close as I can. Each deck we go up, I breathe easier. Up we go, into the market noise and warmth and stench. Up and out into the simple light.

  All day it rains and my father waits for tomorrow. He drinks beers from the rattling refrigerator in our hotel room, while the rain comes down over the wooden houses, the canals choked with lotus flowers, the churches and mosques with their golden turrets.

  I leave him alone. Even in Astrakhan, it’s better to be away from him. I walk for a long time, putting distance between us. It’s a hundred kilometres to the sea but I go towards it anyway, past dry docks and factories. There is nothing else to walk towards. The smells of Astrakhan are in my mouth when I swallow. It’s like being ill, when you can taste the sickness in your spit. I go as far as I can, down mud streets and over bridges. Then I turn back. The rain is warm on my scalp.

  When I look up again I’m at the central market. People are trading or just sheltering under the corrugated-iron roofing. I push in with the crowd. There are stacks of shrivelled rosehips and fresh dates. Bunches of dill and ferny mimosa flowers and lotus, which are pink as the steppes earth. Purple heaps of shredded beetroot and rows of pike-perch, like little green dragons. Bread with caraway, coffee with cardamom, black suspender belts with brass
buckles.

  I come out between two butchers’ stalls. Across the road is the Hotel Lotos. I count up to our room, five six seven floors. The light is still on. My father is there, waiting for me. Beyond and above the hotel there is the sky. Clouds the colour of sevruga. Only at their western foot is a puff of red, where the sun is going down. I remember the Iranian; tomorrow there will be no sun. I try and imagine it and but it’s impossible. The flame of a candle after the candle has gone out.

  The rain is getting colder. I walk across the road to the hotel. The lifts are working today and I take one up. On our first night they broke down and a Moscow businessman was trapped inside for two hours, hammering on the doors, enraged. The machinery shudders as the lift opens.

  My father is at the window of our room, looking out. On the TV is a Russian film. In the film it’s a sunny day in black and white. A postman stops his bicycle and falls asleep under the shade of beech trees.

  ‘Did you have a good walk, eh?’

  My father stands up and then sits down again. He is trying to smile but the lines of his face work against it. There’s a towel on my bed and I dry my face and head with it while he talks.

  ‘I saw you. Across the road in the market. You looked up. He’s something else, the Iranian, isn’t he? All that tomato crap. He liked you, though. There’s a lifetime’s work for you here. You could do worse than take up where I leave off. Hey, you want to know the truth of it?’

  He comes and sits beside me. ‘The truth is complicated. We take things out of the country, not in. There’s a chain of people around us. First there are Soviets who sell goods to the Iranian, then we take the goods out of the USSR for him. Then he sells the goods all over the world. If the Soviets could do it themselves they would, but it’s against the laws. They can’t sell these things to foreigners, the Yanks might notice. So they hire the Iranian, and the Iranian hires us.