He finds himself in a maze of narrow streets; cars parked all over the place; pedestrians wandering around without looking. What a nightmare! This left-side driving business is no joke. How can he get back on the beltway? He takes a right turn and squeezes the trailer through a narrow archway, which might have had a no-entry sign on it, but too late now, when suddenly Marta shouts,
“Stop! Stop!”
He slams the brakes on. The trailer bucks and jolts. Remember not to do that again, Palenko. Gentle pumping action next time. From the trailer, there is a crash and a shout, and a few moments later Tomasz stumbles out in his socks and underpants, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
“What’s happening? Why have we stopped?”
“I don’t know,” says Andriy. “Why have we stopped?”
“Look!” says Marta, pointing.
He clambers out and stands on the pavement with the others. They are all gazing upward. In front of them, a towering creamy mass of carved and weathered stone, arches upon arches of strange intricately patterned tracery, the stone as delicate as paper, soars higher and higher into the sky, and the solemn figures of long-dead saints gaze back down at them from their pedestals.
He has seen the golden-domed cathedrals of Kiev, the skyline miracle of the Lavra, but this is different—yes, this is quite something. No paint or gilt. The beauty is all in the stone. What would it have been like to work up here in the sky, chipping and carving away at this luminous stone with a hammer and chisel, instead of hammering at the coal face in the dark underground? Would he have become a different kind of man—closer to the angels?
He bows his head and crosses himself in the Orthodox way, just in case. No one speaks. Marta closes her eyes and crosses herself too. Yola pulls down the hem of her skirt below her knees and crosses herself with both hands. Tomasz goes back into the trailer and puts his trousers on. The Chinese girls just stare.
Emanuel whispers to Andriy, “What are these beastings and goblins? Why have they put symbols of witchcraft upon a Christian church?”
“Don’t worry,” he whispers back. “It’s okay.”
Dear Sister
Today I was blessed with a visitation of Canterbury Cathedral which is an outstanding Ediface built completely of stone and miraculously carved with fearsome fiends and hobgoblins sitting outside gaping open-mouthed. But the inside is filled up with mysterious Peace for in this Cathedral are many wondrous window glasses such as I have never seen even in St George’s on Likomo Island that deepen sunlight into red and blue and stories of Our Lord and His Saints are told in colourful artistry.
And a priest came upon us and asked if we would pray and I was afraid to partake of the protestant faith but the Catholic Martyr whispered that all such Cathedrals belonged formally to our Good Religion and were stolen from us by mindless protestants. So we went into a small prayersome chapel beauteous in stillness and light and we asked the Lord to deliver our sister Irina who was seized by the Spawn of Satan and nobody knows her wherebeing. After the prayers everyone said Amen even the dog I wish you could see this dog it is outstanding in piety. And I also prayed for that godless fellow who has slipped through the fishing net of Love. For in this silent glimmery chapel I felt the Presence of the Lord standing close beside us listening for our prayers and I felt His breathing in the cool stony air.
Then I heard Organ music and a choir was singing Sheep May Safely Graze which stirred me up for this Cathedral is named after Saint Augustine. Then good Father Augustine of Zomba knocked on my memory door and his kindly ways which watered my eyes with rememberances of home.
Andriy feels better, more at peace, after their prayers in the cathedral. It isn’t until they are back at the trailer that he notices Emanuel is missing. He goes back to the chapel to look for him, but he has disappeared. Somewhere in the cathedral, an organ is playing and a choir is singing. Drawn by the music, he follows the sound along a stone aisle where the ancient glass throws pools of colored light on the floor. A service is in progress, and there in the front row of the congregation is Emanuel.
His eyes are shut, so he can’t see the odd looks the others are giving him, but his mouth is open, startlingly pink in his youthful brown face, and he is singing aloud in a sweet high voice, along with the choir. And as he sings, tears are pouring down his cheeks. There is something so vulnerable and yet so powerful about the closed eyes, the open mouth, the tears and the music, that it makes Andriy catch his breath. Who is this young man? Andriy feels an urge to put his arm around him, but he holds back, as you would hesitate to wake a sleepwalker, for fear that the sudden shock of reality would break his heart.
A flash of memory comes to him—a circle of enraptured faces at a secret Orthodox service down in a woody ravine, where his grandmother took him as a child. The priest sang the litany and sprinkled them with holy water, promising forgiveness for their sins and solace for the grinding daily hardship of their lives. “Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy.”
His father said that religion was the opium of the masses and it was a shame that his mother, who was a good woman in every way and a good communist, should believe such nonsense.
In the silence at the end of the music, he goes up to Emanuel and touches his arm. Emanuel opens his eyes, looks around him, and smiles.
“Ndili Bwino, my friend.”
Her prayers have made her feel pleasantly righteous, and after righteousness it is natural to feel hungry and thirsty. So as far as Yola is concerned, their first priority when they get to Dover is to have some lunch.
Unlike in Canterbury, where all the shops were open, in Dover everything is very closed. At last down a back street they find a small, gloomy shop with two narrow aisles, smelling of spices and something musty and not very nice. The shopkeeper is a plump Indian woman about Yola’s age, dressed in a green sari, with a red spot on her forehead. Yola studies her curiously. She is not unattractive in an Asiatic sort of way. The red spot seems to be in the wrong place. Surely it should be on her cheeks.
Yola as the supervisor is naturally in charge of the shopping, but in the interests of harmony she lets everyone have a say. They agree on five loaves of white sliced bread (better than coarse Polish bread and quite inexpensive), margarine (more modern than butter, and also cheaper), apricot jam (Tomasz’s favorite), teabags and sugar (they have been drying out and reusing their teabags, but there is a limit), bananas (Andriy’s choice, typical Ukrainian), salted peanuts (a special request from Emanuel), a large bar of rum-and-raisin chocolate (Yola’s own little luxury), two large bottles of Coca-Cola for the Chinese girls, and a tin of dog food. Tomasz lingers in the off-license section, studying the labels, but his request for a bottle of wine is firmly rejected by Yola. Unnecessary. Too expensive. Andriy is also hanging around in the off-license, looking at the beer.
“Did you see the markup Vitaly has been making on the beer he has been selling us?” he says grumpily. Typical Ukrainian.
Marta has stayed in the Land Rover with the dog, and Yola cannot remember her special request.
The Indian shopkeeper tut-tuts as she puts all this through the till.
“You are not eating a balance diet.”
“Not balance?” It is Yola’s responsibility to see they eat properly.
“Protein. You must have a protein. If you eat all this you will be feeling sick.”
Yola looks at their pile of shopping and realizes that she is right. Just looking at all this stuff is making her feel a bit unwell.
“What can you recommend?”
The shopkeeper hms and ruminates.
“Pilchards.” She points down the aisle. “Fishies. Good for you. Cheap. In tin over there.”
Yola thinks the fishes in the picture on the tin look plump and appealing and she is pleasantly surprised by the price. They take two tins.
Between the waist of the shopkeeper’s sari and the bottom of her blouse is a soft bulge of brown flesh. In civilized countries this area of a woman’s body is normally concealed,
but Yola notices that the Ukrainian is staring at it fixedly.
“Madam,” he says, very politely, “I wish to ask, from where you learn such wisdom?”
What a flatterer that beetroot-brain is, almost like a Pole. (Of course Polish men are renowned throughout the world for being flirtatious, on account of their habit of hand kissing, but sadly this does not make them good husband material, as Yola has discovered to her sorrow.) The shopkeeper laughs modestly and points at a picture above the counter of a smiling wrinkled old woman dressed in bright blue, with a triple string of pearls and a stylish blue hat.
“This lady is my inspiration.”
Everyone gathers around to look. The old woman in the picture looks back with a cheerful smile and a wave of her gloved hand. Yola thinks that to have both a veil and little blue feathers in a hat is unnecessary: One or the other would have made a sufficient statement.
“She is a lady of extreme age and wisdom. In her long years, which unfortunately are now over, she gave many cheery indications of the important things in life. To have friends come from afar is a pleasure—this is one of her great sayings.” The shopkeeper folds her arms on the counter with a friendly smile. “You not from around here. I think you all come from afar, innit?”
“You are right, Madam.” Tomasz smiles ingratiatingly. “We have come from all the corners of the world—Poland, Ukraine, Africa, China.”
He too is staring at the brown bulge. Really, what can you do with men?
“And Malaysia,” adds Chinese Girl Two.
“Well, have a lovely time, my dears, and bon appetit.” The shopkeeper beams at them over the counter. “That is another of her sayings.”
“This is a great saying,” says Emanuel. “I will commit it to memory.”
But Chinese Girl One whispers to Chinese Girl Two, “I think that saying attributed to the old lady in blue is in fact a saying of Confucius.”
And Chinese Girl Two points at the red spot in the middle of the shopkeeper’s forehead and whispers, “I think it is a bullet hole.”
They giggle.
I AM DOG I AM GOOD DOG I SIT WITH MY MAN I EAT DOG FOOD MEAT MAN EATS MAN FOOD BREAD FISH WE ALL EAT WE ALL SIT ON SMALL SMOOTH STONES NEAR BIG WATER SUN SHINES HOT THIS WATER IS NOT GOOD TO DRINK BAD TASTE BIG WATER RUNS AFTER DOG DOG RUNS AFTER BIG WATER BIG WATER HISSES AT DOG SSSS DOG BARKS AT BIG WATER WOOF DOG SNIFFS BIG WATER SNIFF SNIFF NO DOG SMELL NO MAN SMELL ONLY BIG WATER SMELL EVERYWHERE STONES WOOD WEEDS WASTE DOG FINDS MAN-SHOE BESIDE WATER WET SHOE GOOD MAN-SMELL SHOE DOG BRINGS WET SHOE TO SOUR-PISS-STRONG-FEET-SMELL MAN HE IS HAPPY GOOD DOG HE SAYS I AM GOOD DOG I AM DOG
Andriy feels quite queasy by the time he’s finished his lunch. Those pilchards in tomato sauce—they were good, but perhaps he shouldn’t have eaten so many. While the others set out on foot to the ferry terminal, he spreads his towel on the pebble beach and stretches out in the sun with Dog beside him. The slow pull and surge of waves down at the water’s edge is soothing. Dog falls asleep almost instantly, hissing and snoring as rhythmically as the sea. Andriy is incredibly tired, but each time he is on the point of sleep the fluttery panicky feeling starts up and wakes him. I did not do it. The left-side driving, the excitable passengers, this self-willed trailer, the argument with Ciocia Yola, and a niggling unspecific anxiety which swirls around in his head like a mist without taking any fixed form, all have tired him out yet left him unable to relax.
He must have started to drift away at last, when he is brought back abruptly by a thunderous crash just a few feet from where he is lying. His blood freezes; his heart begins to pound. Half asleep, as if waking from a nightmare, he listens to the dreadful sound—a long crescendo, a terrible reverberation, a slow fading rumble. It is the long-drawn-out growl of the earth crying in pain. It is the roar of the coal face collapsing in the darkness below ground.
He sits up, rubs his eyes. There is nothing. Nothing but the waves pounding on the pebbles a few inches away from his feet. The tide has come in. And yet, in that moment of waking, he relived the terror of looking into the fuming blackness of noise and dust and knowing his father would never emerge alive.
That sound—no, he will never be able to work underground again. He cannot go back down there. In fact he had never wanted to be a miner in the first place. He would have stayed on at school and studied to be a teacher or an engineer. But when he was sixteen, his father had shoved a pick into his hands—they were long past the time of power tools—and said,
“Learn, son. Learn to be a man.”
He had replied in that clever sixteen-year-old way that makes him wince now to remember, “Is a man someone who grubs about like a beast under the ground?”
And his father had said, “A man is someone who puts bread on the table, and puts his comrades’ safety before his own, and doesn’t complain.”
In Donbas, there is only one way to put bread on the table. When they said the pit was uneconomic, international solidarity couldn’t help, the mine workers’ union couldn’t help. So they had gone back underground and helped themselves. Well, you have to live, don’t you? When the roof fell, Andriy had lived, and two others. Six had been killed. The story didn’t even make the headlines beyond Donbas.
But why him? Why did he live, when the others died? Because a voice in his head insisted, if you want to live, run—keep running. Don’t look back.
He watches a bank of gray clouds massing up on the horizon.
And why Sheffield? Because Sheffield is the place where the puddings are pink and the girls put their tongues in your mouth when they kiss. And there was something about the blind man, the gentleness of his voice when he spoke of the welcome that awaits strangers in his city, the way he clasped your hand and seemed to look right into your heart, even though of course he wasn’t looking at all. Yes, now you remember, Vloonki was his name.
And once you get to Sheffield? He hasn’t thought that far ahead. Tomorrow he will look for Irina, and when he has found her, he will be on his way.
However long Vulk waited for me, I would wait longer.
From my leafy hiding place, I watched as the sun carved its slow arc from the wooded hills in the east, up over the rolling patchwork of green and gold fields, and down to the other horizon. It was strange, because although I could see the sun moving, I felt inside as though time were standing still. I was waiting—waiting and trying not to think about why I was waiting, because those thoughts were so horrible that if I let them creep into my mind, I might never be able to chase them out again. “You like flovver…?”
When I get back to Kiev, I thought, I will write a story about this. It will be a thriller, following the adventures of a plucky heroine as she flees across England, pursued by a sinister but ridiculous gangster. Thinking of my story made me feel better. When you write a story, you can decide how it ends.
As the sun moved across the sky, a spume of streaky clouds that unfolded in its wake started to thicken and turn heavy. Strange how I had never noticed before how expressive clouds can be, like people, changing, ageing, drifting apart.
At some point I must have fallen asleep, because suddenly I opened my eyes to find the sun had disappeared and what I had thought was a line of hills, blue in the distance, was in fact a long bank of clouds that had swallowed up the sky. It was going to rain. I was incredibly hungry. I thought if I didn’t eat something soon, I would faint. I squeezed myself out of my hollow and peered down the track. Where I had caught the gleam of sunlight on metal before, there was nothing now but leaves. Had he gone, or was it just that the sun had moved around? Was he hiding, waiting for me? Maybe everywhere I go from now on, he’ll be hiding, waiting. Stop. Don’t think those thoughts. If you think like that, you will be his prisoner all your life.
I knew I had to find food. I looked around me. There were trees, bushes, grass, leaves. Were any of them good to eat? I pulled a handful of grass—well, if cows eat it, it must be okay. I chewed on it, but I couldn’t bring myself to swallow. There were some red
berries on a shrub with a vivid toxic luster. Mama, Papa, you know about this sort of thing. Don’t be foolish, Irina. You know you shouldn’t eat berries or mushrooms unless you are absolutely sure. How many times do I have to tell you that?
Even as I was turning these thoughts over in my head, I had already started to walk back down the track. In the daytime, it seemed no distance. I crawled through and walked down the other side of the hedge to keep out of view. At the bottom, the track widened and there was an old wooden table with benches on each side, though some of the planks had been pulled off. There was no vehicle in sight, but the ground was gashed with tire marks. Either he’d been back, more than once, or there’d been other vehicles. I looked more closely. There, in one of the wheel-ruts, I spotted the stub of a cigar. My heart started up—boom boom. I remembered he had a cigar last night, but was it the same cigar? Or had he been back? Had he been sitting in his mafia-machine, smoking a cigar and waiting for me? “Little flovver…” I stamped on the stub and ground it into the grass. And there was another strange object, something gray and rubbery. It looked like part of a shoe. What a stink! But Vulk’s shoes were shiny black.
Then I noticed, beneath the broken table, a screwed up bundle of paper. I knew at once what it was. Another stroke of good luck! I picked it up. That smell! I couldn’t help myself. I was salivating like a dog. I unwrapped the bundle and counted them. One, two, three…There were lots! I stuffed them into my mouth. My stomach growled with pleasure. They were cold and stiff, like dead men’s fingers. They were absolutely delicious. And something else was buried there beneath the chips, something golden and crispy. I broke off a piece and put it on my tongue. It was like manna. It was…It was all gone.
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