‘Oh, yes, quite right. Out with the old, eh? Mind you, Doris won’t part with ours just yet. We had plenty of sing-songs in it, me and her and Geena. Our Anderson shelter is a firm favourite. Crazy, innit?’
‘Yes,’ replies Janusz, mimicking Gilbert’s country vowels. ‘Crazy, innit?’
‘And what about your son?’ says Gilbert. ‘What’s he going to do now he’s not got a den to play in?’
‘I’m going to make him a tree house.’
‘That’s a beautiful tree,’ says Gilbert, looking towards the oak. ‘Must be hundreds of years old, I reckon. Not many houses around here have got trees like that in their gardens, I can tell you. And you’re right. It’s perfect for a tree house.’ He pulls out a packet of cigarettes and offers one to Janusz. ‘A tree house and a flower garden. That’ll keep you busy. I’ve got some dahlia tubers you can have, if you’re interested. We’ve got a club going, shows and whatnot. You could join us if you wanted. Where were you based before, Jan? In the war, I mean. I was in the Home Guard myself.’
He passes a box of matches over the fence and Janusz takes them, lighting his cigarette in cupped hands.
‘I moved around. Scotland, Kent, Devon. Engineer corps.’
‘Bit of fun that was, I imagine. Next time you need a hand, let me know.’
‘Thank you, I will.’ Janusz tries to think of something else to say, something to keep this conversation with his neighbour going. ‘I know a friend of yours,’ he says. ‘Tony Benetoni?’
‘Tony the Wop? Ah, now he is a real gentleman. I haven’t seen him for quite a while. And he spoke about me?’
‘He said to tell you that if there is anything you need, to get in contact with him.’
‘Did he? He said to tell me that? Oh, yes, he’s well known round here. Local businessman, he is.’
‘His son is Aurek’s friend.’
‘Is he?’ Gilbert grips the top of the wooden fence with his hands. He lowers his voice and Janusz steps closer.
‘Tony’s a useful bloke to know. Doesn’t understand the meaning of rationing, if you see what I’m saying. Anything you want, Tony can get it. He’s not a spiv. I wouldn’t want you to think that. No, Tony’s an absolute gentleman, like I said. But he can get you anything you want off ration. Look, I’ve got half a bottle of scotch in the garden shed. Come over when the women are out shopping. I’ll show you my seed catalogues and we can have a great old chat about the war and all that.’
Janusz does not want to remember the war.
‘That would be nice,’ he says, handing Gilbert back his matches. ‘Thank you very much.’
It is a hot and humid summer’s day, but English houses don’t have shutters on their windows so Silvana cannot shut the heat out. Instead, she does what the English do and opens the windows and doors, hoping for a breeze. The kitchen is filled with the sweet smell of cooking and a plate of biscuits steam gently on the table, a dishcloth covering them to keep off the flies. She checks the time on the clock. Aurek and Janusz will be back soon. They left an hour ago to watch a game of cricket being played in Christchurch Park. She hopes Aurek won’t be difficult. The last time Janusz took him to the park, Aurek ran away and came home on his own.
She is washing up when she hears the metal-on-stone sound of horses’ hooves, followed by a harsh, whining cry, ‘Ragggannnddbone, ragggannnddbone.’
In the street, a black and white horse stands in front of a wooden cart piled high with clothes, broken bits of furniture and pots and pans.
The rag-and-bone man climbs down from his cart and gives Silvana a black-toothed grin as she rushes out of her front door, wiping her hands on her apron.
‘Can I have a look?’ she asks.
‘Course you can, Miss.’
She sees a pair of men’s leather shoes poking out of a porcelain chamber pot. Black lace-ups. They look practically new. All they need is a clean. The leather is hardly worn. She holds them out to the man.
‘How much?’
‘If you let me have a quick drink of water you can have ’em for a florin.’
‘Yes. Wait one moment please. I’ll be right back.’
Janusz keeps money in the kitchen drawer; money he uses to buy himself a drink at the British Legion bar with Gilbert after work on a Friday. She finds the right change and takes the man a glass of water and some biscuits on a tray. The more she looks at the shoes, the more she is sure Janusz will like them.
‘Thank you very much, Miss,’ says the rag-and-bone man, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. ‘You’re a real lady.’
In the kitchen she lays the shoes on newspaper on the table, opens the pantry cupboard and takes out Janusz’s shoe-polish box. It is a large wooden box with a brass catch on the front. She wants Janusz to be able to see his reflection in the shoes. She wants him to have something brand new.
She dips her hand happily into the box, reaching for a brush, and catches sight of a pale-blue airmail envelope, just the corner of it. She pulls it out. The writing on it reminds her of the perfect copperplate they used to have to learn at school. She reaches back inside the box and pulls out more letters, lots more.
Sitting down at the kitchen table, she begins to take them out of their envelopes, one by one, unfolding their sharp creases. There are a few French words she knows. Je t’aime is an expression she understands. The letters are full of that phrase. It jumps out at her. Silvana struggles to think straight. She tries to steady her breathing. She must not panic.
So that is what he did during the war.
He fell in love.
She doesn’t understand. Why did he bring her here if he loves another woman? It can’t be true. This can’t be true. Just when she thought she and the boy were safe. She folds up the letters, making sure her tears don’t fall upon them. Her fingers tremble as she puts them back under the dusters and soft brushes, as carefully as she’d put eggs back under a broody hen. Her stomach churns, and she thinks she might even be sick, so terrible is this feeling of hurt.
She stumbles through the hall and out into the street, slamming the front door behind her, hurrying down the hill into the heat-hazed town, sweat sticking her hair to her forehead and tears stinging her eyes.
In the narrow streets of the town centre, she walks aimlessly, past the grocer’s and the ironmonger’s where new saucepans, jam boilers and pressure cookers, preserving jars and canning machines glint at her. All shining, silvery and bright and brilliantly necessary. And why not a wedding ring in silver? That preserving pan with its practical heavy bottom – a sliver of that would make a ring. Why hadn’t she insisted upon a wedding ring when she had the chance? She’s not a proper wife without a ring. Maybe the other woman has a ring? And then another thought comes to her. A terrible thought, worse than all the others. What if he leaves them, and Aurek loses his father? She can feel tears pricking her eyes again when somebody calls her name.
‘Silvana! Doing a bit of shopping?’
Tony stands beside her. He is wearing brown overalls and his sleeves are rolled back to the elbows, revealing forearms covered in thick black hair. He waves an arm to show her a sign painted above a shop doorway: Benetoni’s Animal Emporium.
‘Why don’t you come in and have a look around? Mine is the best pet shop in Suffolk.’
She casts around for something to say.
‘I’m thinking of buying pots. For the kitchen.’
‘Tell me what you want and I’ll get it … Hey? Are you all right?’ He steps towards her, his arms reaching out to her. ‘You’re crying.’
For a moment she is tempted to tell him why. But she can’t. Of course she can’t.
‘I’m sorry, I have to go.’
‘But wait …’
She begins to run, not caring that nobody runs in the streets here. She is a foreigner. She will always look out of place. Why not pick up her skirts and run if she wants to? She hears him call her again as she rounds the corner, but she doesn’t look back.
She has no idea of where
she is going, and finds herself at the docks. Ahead of her are semi-demolished warehouses, piles of brick rubble and official-looking signs warning the public to stay away, that many of the buildings are bomb-damaged and structurally unsafe. Some of the warehouses are still in use, and men are unloading sacks of grain into them. Coils of thick rope lie everywhere on the ground, and dust and debris drift on the breeze.
Picking her way over ropes and stacks of hessian sacks, she walks along the quay, past the sailors and warehousemen, ignoring the looks they give her, to where the water drifts away into the horizon and seagulls swagger and wheel in the sky.
Heavy wooden barges with red sails move slowly on the greeny waters. The salty smell of river mud is thick in the air, and seabirds wade across the gleaming black mudflats in the dry docks. Some way out, there is a ship covered in orange rust and peeling paint. A metal warship, held in place by huge chains, as if whoever moored it there was afraid the ship might try and escape to sea.
She remembers the terrible seasickness she suffered on the journey to England. How, when she finally staggered down the gangplanks onto English land, she knew she would never return to Poland.
She is as out of place as that ship on the river. Lost. Wanting a country that doesn’t exist any more. Poland is under communist rule. She can never go back. That’s the truth of it.
She heads towards home, her mind clearing. She has been so sure of her own role as villain in this marriage, she never imagined Janusz could be capable of hiding things from her.
But she must harden herself. To ask him about the letters would be to risk their family, and Aurek must have a family. It’s what she promised him. It’s likely that the affair is over. A wartime foolishness. And if Janusz is still involved with this other woman, she must not interfere. She must be hard and serious and stay silent. She has no choice. She must go back and be a good wife. Let Janusz have his secrets. At least now she is not the only one in the marriage with something to hide.
When she walks through the hallway and into the kitchen, Janusz and Aurek are waiting for her.
‘They’re a perfect fit!’ says Janusz.
She looks at his face blankly.
‘The shoes!’ It was you that left them on the table?’
‘Oh. Yes. Yes, I got them from the rag-and-bone man.’
‘I’ve cleaned them. Aurek helped me. A bit of shoe polish brought them up like new. English leather. You remember the doctor we took Aurek to? He had the same shoes, I’m sure.’
‘I’m glad you like them.’
‘I’ll keep them for best, of course.’
‘That’s right,’ she says, sinking into a chair and beckoning to Aurek to come and sit on her lap. ‘Keep them for best.’
Poland
Silvana
As the months went by, Aurek delighted Silvana and entertained Hanka. Full of energy, he played in the rabbit cages and ran with the farm dogs, his back bent, shoulders rounded, touching the ground with his hands for balance, pushing himself off from outstretched fingers. He was fast like that.
Hanka called him a little bear. She told Silvana a story about a boy brought up by bears in a Lithuanian forest. The three of them were wrapped in blankets in their straw bed, Aurek curled tightly against Silvana’s breast.
‘Nobody knew where he had come from,’ said Hanka, tickling Aurek’s fingers. ‘The bears took him as their own. He went about on all fours and grew hair down his back. He lived on a diet of crab apples and honey. A hunter caught him and gave him to the king of Poland, who tried to teach him to speak, but he never learned to do anything other than grunt.
Aurek laughed at the story. Hanka grunted and growled like a bear until Silvana was worried Aurek would hurt himself laughing so hard. They giggled and growled and roared and, finally, when they fell back on the straw exhausted by their laughter, Silvana pressed her face against the top of her son’s head and felt tears run down her cheeks.
‘My little bear,’ she whispered to him. ‘My lost little bear.’
‘Here,’ Hanka said one night when the stars looked sharp enough to slice the black velvet sky into icy ribbons. She held out a dried plum, dark and wrinkled. Silvana’s mouth watered at the sight of it.
‘Would he like this?’
Silvana looked at Aurek, curled up in her arms, head tucked in. She wasn’t sure. Hanka tutted.
‘All children like them.’
She held the piece of fruit out to Aurek and he pushed it greedily into his mouth.
‘See? I knew he would.’
‘What will we do when the summer comes?’ Silvana asked. ‘Will we stay here?’
‘Warsaw.’ Hanka leaned across her and wiped a dribble from Aurek’s mouth. ‘I’m going to Warsaw. You can come if you want.’
‘You’re going to the city?’
Silvana was surprised. She had thought Hanka would go home. Hanka had told her about her family home: a white stucco house with an avenue of lime trees leading to it and Virginia creeper trailing across its façade. A pavillon de chasse, she called it. She had described the shooting trophies in the hall, heads of boar and roe, glass domes containing blackcock and capercaillie and the floors made of marble. Outside were kitchen gardens, a lake full of carp, a dairy and a laundry. It sounded like a wonderful place.
‘Why don’t you go home?’ she asked.
Hanka shook her head.
‘I was a child during the Great War. The Germans took over our house. They had their motor-repair shops in the barns alongside the vegetable gardens. My family hid almost all our possessions, the paintings, sculptures, the silver and so on; all walled up in the cellar. At the end of the war, all the valuables were safe but my mother died. She caught typhus from one of the soldiers. And now another war, and our house is taken over again. My father didn’t bother hiding the family heirlooms this time. The only thing he asked was that his children would be safe. He’s forbidden any of us to go near the house until the war is over. I can’t go home and I can’t carry on living like this. I need to be in the city.’
It was true that Hanka looked as if she belonged in the city. Her limbs were too fine for farmwork, her hands too soft.
‘I’m going back to see my lover,’ continued Hanka. Silvana watched her face grow still, the tiredness settling in the shadows under her eyes.
‘He’s a musician. He plays American jazz, and the last time I saw him he told me to get out of the city. He said he didn’t want me having to sing for a German audience. So I left. But I miss him. I have to go back: I have to see him again. And I don’t care who I sing to. I just want my life back.’
Silvana rocked Aurek on her lap and Hanka smiled at her.
‘So, little Silvana, will you come with me?’
Silvana felt her heart ache. ‘Yes,’ she said. Though the thought of returning to Warsaw filled her with dread.
Janusz
On a moonless night, a guide took Janusz, Bruno and Franek to the Hungarian border. They were used to each other now, and Janusz had even begun to feel fond of Franek and his mad ways. The boy’s heart was in the right place and he was as brave as they came. They’d been given papers, but it was still best to cross at night, in secret. They reached a rocky promontory and watched as border guards with dogs patrolled the path below them.
‘The guide said we’ve got about fifteen minutes before they come back,’ said Bruno as the guards rounded the corner out of sight.
‘I need a machine gun,’ said Franek.
He was shivering and shaking, and Janusz wanted to tell him to stop bloody moving.
‘I’d take them all out,’ Franek said. ‘Bang, bang, bang. Shoot them all down. If I had my old gun from home, I could do it.’
‘When do we go?’ asked Janusz. He felt sick, and realized he too was shaking.
‘We go now,’ said Bruno. ‘The guards won’t be expecting anything tonight. Nobody would want to be out on a night like tonight. Even the wolves would find it too cold. One at a time. Every three minut
es. That gives us plenty of time to make it across. You go first, Jan. Then Franek and I will follow you. Don’t worry, we’ll be right behind you.’
Janusz couldn’t feel his legs any more. He doubted his ability to run. His breath was coming in quick gasps. He was trembling with tiredness and his heart was hammering.
Bruno nodded. He gave Janusz a push. ‘OK, it’s time,’ he whispered. ‘Good luck. Go!’
Janusz got up and started running, scrambling down the rocks.
He didn’t look back. If he was going to die, so be it. He stumbled. His legs were not listening to his brain; they buckled under him, but he forced himself to keep going. There was no one on the road. He crossed it and threw himself into the deep snow, where he rolled downhill. He slithered and slid and slammed into a fir tree. Getting to his feet, he ran. Finally he reached the shelter of trees and, on hands and knees, crawled into a forest of dark pine trees and lay there. He could taste blood on his lip, and a pulse thumped in his neck. He could feel it: the blood pushing through him, the feeling of being alive. He lay still and his heart pumped, fear twitching his eyelids, pulling at a nerve in his cheek. He worked his way further into the trees and dug himself into the snow. Shivering, he heard noises around him. Cracking branches and scuffling sounds. He hoped Bruno was right. That the night really was too cold for wolves.
Franek came into view, running and jumping through the snow, smashing full pelt into Janusz, knocking him in the face with his elbow.
‘Sorry,’ panted Franek. ‘I didn’t see you.’
‘Jesus, Franek,’ whispered Janusz. ‘I think you’ve broken my bloody nose.’
‘Christ, no, I’m sorry …’
‘Forget it, you big oaf. You made it. We both did.’
‘We made it,’ said Franek. ‘I’m a good soldier.’
He sounded so proud, Janusz only just managed to stop himself from hugging the boy.
Ipswich
The pile of wooden planks underneath the oak tree gets bigger all the time, and Aurek climbs it, jumping up and down, feeling the wood wobble underneath him. If the pile keeps on growing, it will be even easier to climb his tree than before. He will jump on the wood stack and be able to leap into the tree’s lower branches. Hop onto them, just like a sparrow hunting insects.
22 Britannia Road Page 12