It used to be like that with Janusz when they were young. They could look at each other and know what the other was thinking. Even their dreams overlapped sometimes. These days, there is a cool politeness between them both.
‘I miss certain foods,’ she says in response to Tony’s question about her homeland. He often asks questions about Poland, and she is happy to answer as long as he doesn’t touch on the war. When he tries to ask her about the years she spent in the forest, she changes the subject, or diverts his attention, pointing out a squirrel scampering along the path, or finds her coat sleeves need straightening, a button needs buttoning, her handbag clasp checking.
‘Pierogi,’ she says. ‘I miss them. Dough filled with cabbage and cheese, or mushrooms and onions. Anything you like. We always ate them with sour cream. You can have sweet ones too. Honey and apple and nuts. When I think of pierogi, I feel …’
‘Nostalgic?’
‘Tesknota. Yes. Nostalgic. That’s why I don’t think of these things very often.’
Tony holds his hands in front of him, a politician about to give a speech, playing to the crowds. Silvana likes this self-important way he has about him. As if he is out to impress her. And it has been years since a man has tried to do that.
‘Do you ever think of going back?’
‘Janusz thinks we’ll be able to go home one day, but how can we? There’s nothing to go back to. Our homeland is communist now. We couldn’t go back even if we wanted to.’
‘But Aurek has the right to know where he came from. Everybody should know who they belong to and where they come from.’
Silvana looks at him. ‘Aurek belongs to me,’ she says firmly.
On the edge of the park, they turn to watch the boys playing behind them.
‘Well, I had better go,’ Silvana says.
‘Must you? Why not let the boys play a little longer?’
Tony holds her hands for a moment, gently, as if they might break if he grips them too firmly. She looks at them when he lets go, to see if they are as fragile as he thinks. But no. She has tough hands. Small and muscular and always searching for something to fill them.
‘I’d love to walk you home,’ he says. ‘But people might talk if Janusz isn’t back from work and they see us arrive together. I wouldn’t want to set tongues wagging. The British are narrow-minded and sharp-tongued, and the inhabitants of this town are the worst of a bad bunch.’
‘Well,’ she says as they wait for Aurek to come down from the tree he is climbing. ‘I’ll see you again soon.’
‘Perhaps you and Janusz would like to take the boys for a walk this weekend. Or we could go to the boating lake with them?’
‘Yes, that would be nice.’
She is used to Tony making suggestions like this. Sometimes he shows up, but more often than not he doesn’t. Then he turns up out of the blue, days later, with gifts for them: oranges and glassy green grapes; a freckled banana each; pork sausages that they have to cook right there and then because they are, as he says, slightly on the turn. Things so unexpected and delicious, Silvana forgets all about the missed outings.
‘Tell me,’ he says. ‘Before you go. The dictionary? I know I shouldn’t ask, but I am curious. Was it useful to you? You’ve never said.’
Silvana considers the question, fidgeting with her hair. She makes a comment about Peter, how he is growing tall for his age.
‘Yes, he is,’ says Tony. ‘But the dictionary? What was it for?’
Silvana casts a look around. There is nothing to distract him from his line of questioning. The park is empty, the squirrels have already been pointed out and if she fiddles with her clothes and hair any more he will think she has lice.
‘Silvana?’
She takes a deep breath and tries the truth. ‘I had some letters I needed to translate.’
‘Letters? Just some letters?’
Tony’s brown eyes are steady on her, inviting. Talk to me, they say to her. And she wants to. She is tired of carrying Janusz’s secrets. She has enough of her own. She coughs nervously and tips her chin towards him, trying to look as if she is amused by this conversation.
‘The letters belong to Janusz. They’re from another woman.’
‘Another woman?’
‘Isn’t it silly?’ she says, trying to sound as English as she can. ‘Just so silly.’
‘Oh, Silvana. I’m sorry.’ Tony takes her hands in his again but this time he is forceful, crushing her fingers. A sudden, horrific thought comes to her: what if he confronts Janusz?
‘It’s complicated,’ she says, wishing she could speak Polish to him now. She itches to unroll her own language, to taste it on her lips, all its nuances and figures of speech, all the subtle dips and turns her own tongue could produce. She could explain everything to him in Polish. ‘It’s nothing. I only told you because it’s so tiring keeping secrets all the time. Janusz is a good husband, really he is. And he’s a good father to Aurek.’
Tony pulls her to him, pressing her hands against his chest, and this time there is no mistaking the way he holds her.
‘Silvana, darling. I had no idea …’
She looks into his eyes, and for a moment she thinks he is going to kiss her. And yet she doesn’t pull away from him.
‘What if I tell Janusz I know and then he leaves me? What if he goes back to her? What will Aurek and I do then?’
Tony leans towards her, his voice hot against her face. ‘But you must know …’
‘I don’t know anything.’
‘You must know I will always help you. You must realize how I …’
Behind them, Aurek tumbles down from the tree and wraps his arms around Silvana’s legs. She pulls her hands free of Tony’s grip and steps away from him.
‘Really, I must go.’
‘Don’t. Come to the flat. Now. We can talk. Please don’t go like this.’
He looks so sad that she is sure one of them or perhaps both will start to cry, and crying is pointless. Crying would be a sign that it is all too much. Crying would show Tony that she is a woman with no control over her life. She has already been a fool telling him. It would be better to explain that she is just a mean-faced survivor who came to England to give Aurek a father.
She whispers. ‘Janusz and I … We don’t know who we are any more. So much happened during the war. The past won’t leave me alone. During the war, I thought Janusz was dead. All those years apart. I never imagined he would find me. Too much happened …’
She looks into his eyes again. She has no idea what she is doing, telling Tony about her life. She might as well be out on a window ledge, about to fall to her death. She is risking everything, and for what? The chance to tell him the untellable? Or to feel the heat of this man’s eyes upon her?
‘Please forget I said anything. Aurek needs his father. I … Please, just pretend I never said anything. I have to go.’
With a residue of strength still within herself, Silvana turns on her heels, hoping Tony will see only the back of a strong woman walking away from him. He calls after her, urging her to wait, but she does not turn around.
Aurek hurries to keep up. Silvana knows he doesn’t like it when she walks too fast, but it is all she can do not to break into a run. Aurek is whining, but she cannot slow down. She grabs his hand and pulls him along. At the edge of the park she stops.
‘Aurek. Look behind you. Can you see them?’
Aurek shakes his head.
‘Good. Come here. I’ll carry you. We have to hurry home.’
Aurek struggles in her arms and she knows he is too old for this kind of embrace, but she begs him to be still and, finally, he wraps his legs around her back and snakes his arms around her neck.
By the time Silvana puts the key in the front door, she has convinced herself that Janusz will be there, that he will know everything she has said. But when she steps into the hallway, the house is empty and the only sound is the clock ticking on the mantelpiece in the front parlour.
She opens the back door for Aurek, who runs outside and climbs the rope ladder into his tree house. In the pantry, the wooden box sits on a shelf. Just the sight of it brings on anxiety. She will burn the letters. She’ll take them out and burn them, and then the three of them will be able to live like they did before.
She picks up the box and sets it on the kitchen table. Carefully, she pushes her hand through the cloths and brushes and tins of polish, but the letters are not there. She yanks everything out of the box, shaking it, turning it upside down. What now? Slowly she refills the box, picking up the things she threw around, tidying the contents. She puts it back in the pantry and closes the door, leaning against it as though afraid it might spring open of its own accord. Then she steps out into the garden, gulping lungfuls of damp air.
The vegetable plot below the tree has yielded onions and carrots; she and Janusz harvested them together. There are more onions to be lifted. Janusz planted ones that keep growing. Everlasting, they are called. Silvana sighs. What kind of a fool is she turning into where even the name of an onion can make her feel weak?
She runs a hand over the heads of rust-coloured chrysanthemums. The holly bushes Janusz planted are still tiny, but they sparkle with blood-red berries. In Poland they’d say those berries were the sign of a hard winter to come. Blue Michaelmas daisies and white anemones tumble over each other, and the last of Janusz’s giant pink and purple dahlias, staked and supported, proudly rise up towards the sky, glowing in the late-afternoon light.
Silvana picks a few flowers until she has a small bunch in her hand. If Janusz knew she had found the letters, surely he would have said something? He must have moved them thinking she knew nothing about them. She feels a sense of relief that the letters have gone. As if some tight knot within her has been straightened out.
Maybe she feels better because she has told Tony about them? She persuades herself Janusz has thrown the letters away. This means the affair must be over. It was a wartime thing, that’s all. And what about herself and Tony?
She is a master at lying to herself, pretending certain things happened in one way and not another, and she manages to settle the story in her mind. She might have had a small infatuation for Tony, but it is over now. He is just a friend of the family. Nothing more than that. A man with a boy the same age as their son. She looks down at the bunch of flowers in her hands and realizes she has plucked all the petals off and is holding only a few stalks and leaves. She lets them fall onto the lawn.
As the sun sets, the garden becomes sombre. The sky turns turquoise and the first star appears.
‘Come down,’ she calls to Aurek in his tree house. ‘Come inside and we’ll make tea for your father.’
Father is such a good word. It fits with family, mother and son. Safe words. Standing there, on the lawn Janusz has lovingly mown and rolled, looking up at the back of their house, she knows she must never see Tony again. Their friendship is over.
Poland
Silvana
A cold wind installed itself, sweeping through the forests, blowing the leaves off the trees. Silvana watched the leaves tumbling down, circling and dancing around her. It had been over a year since she had left Warsaw. Over a year since she had last seen Janusz. She heard a noise of cracking twigs and sat up as Gregor lumbered into view, carrying a sack, which he dropped in the middle of their camp.
He made a great show of emptying it, handing out black bread and apples to everybody.
‘And I have … salt!’ he said.
He dipped his finger in a paper parcel and licked it. ‘We will need it for the winter. We should make a store if we can. There’s a woodsman who has a cottage a mile or so from here. He’s friendly and willing to give us food. I treated his wife for stomach pains. I used chaga, a fungus that grows on birch trees. She’s promised me she will kill a couple of chickens for us. Then we can have a feast.’
In dribs and drabs after that, Gregor brought other things, some milk in a can, more bread, some potatoes. The now heavily pregnant Elsa ate first. She wasn’t far off giving birth, that was obvious. Gregor sat beside her until she had had enough. Silvana pushed Aurek forward.
‘After her, he must eat. He’s a child. He needs the food.’
She sat him on her lap and guarded him while he ate. The others talked about her but she didn’t care. The boy had to eat.
They reorganized the camp for winter, weaving wild clematis and the bark of the birch trees into panels to make walls for their huts. Branches were bound together to make shelters, which Silvana padded with moss and dried bracken. Gregor walked among them, undoing mistakes and handing out sheaves of willow canes he had gathered. Without him, Silvana doubted any of them would survive.
He came to her again one night, pushing his rough hands into her clothes, disturbing the small amount of warmth she had, sending cold air against her skin. His breath smelt sour.
‘Who are you keeping yourself for?’ he asked. ‘Your husband is never coming back. He’s dead on a battlefield somewhere. Stop this ridiculous show of independence. It’s not worth it.’
His words broke something in her, and she gave a sob as she opened her arms to him, pressing her lips against his.
It was over fast. He was on her and Silvana was bucking under his fingers, already finished with him as he pushed himself inside her. Afterwards she lay in his arms, aware of Aurek next to her, fidgeting in his sleep.
‘You’d better go,’ she whispered.
‘I like you, forest girl,’ he said.
‘Please, just leave. I made a mistake. I’m sorry.’
Silvana heard him pissing against a tree. Gregor was a dog, a wolf with his pack. She felt like a fool.
Janusz
Janusz and Bruno left Yugoslavia in a fishing boat and arrived in Marseilles, sitting among piles of netting and baskets of fish. France was more beautiful than Janusz had imagined. Dusty yellow mimosa spread a buttery light across the hillsides. Stumpy palm trees and leathery blue agaves shimmered in the heat of an early spring.
They and the other men with them were told they should catch a train to Lyons, where they’d be given uniforms and an army rank. Bruno didn’t want to. He had plans to get to England. When the boat docked and they felt solid ground under them, Bruno pulled Janusz away and they slipped into the shadowy, labyrinthine streets of the old city.
The first thing they did was swim. They stripped off their filthy clothes and ran into the sea. While Bruno splashed and yelled, Janusz dived into the waves and swam out as far as he could. He drifted in the swell of the waves, looking back at the coastline. The water was crystal clear. He was in a country he had only ever seen in books.
It was Janusz who strung enough French together to get them some rooms, and they ended up in a ramshackle, skinny building in Marseilles’ backstreets. Each day they walked to a small curve of beach near the port and sat in the sun.
‘You look like a lobster from the fish market,’ grinned Bruno through the smoke of a cigarette hanging from his mouth. ‘I’ve never seen a man so sunburnt.’
Janusz ignored him. ‘We can’t do this, just sit around all day. We need to join a French unit.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. I’m in no hurry right now. We can afford to stay for a week or so. If they want us, they can come looking. We can have a couple of weeks before we risk our lives again.’
Each day they hiked to different beaches. Each evening they walked back and ate in bars, plates of grilled octopus and orange sea urchins. Janusz pushed them around with his fork.
‘I don’t know how you can eat this,’ he said. ‘Why can’t we just have a steak?’
‘It’s cheap and it’s good,’ said Bruno. ‘Look over there.’ He nodded towards the waitress. ‘She’s pretty.’ Bruno pushed back his chair and got up from the table. ‘I don’t know what you are going to do tomorrow, but I think I’ll be busy.’
‘With her?’
‘Why not?’
Janusz turned his head away. ‘Do wha
t you want.’ He didn’t think the girl would be interested in any case. Bruno barely spoke a word of French.
The next day, Bruno was still with the waitress and Janusz set off on his own. He found a beach and walked for miles until the sand gave way to rocks and boulders. Seagulls squealed as Janusz found their nests and took their eggs, large blue-white ovals. The birds wheeled and dived at him until he was forced to run, his hands above his head in surrender.
He walked in the tide, trouser legs rolled up, shirt tied around his waist. A heat haze rising off the waves made him dizzy and his head began to throb. Sitting down by some rocks, he made a pillow out of his shirt and closed his eyes.
When he woke the sun had shifted around and he was in the full heat of its rays. Dizzy and thirsty, he wandered back to his rooms, where he drank a jugful of water and poured another over his head and neck. He lay down, soaking wet, cocooned himself in a sheet and thought of Silvana. He staggered up and hunted around until he found a pen and a scrap of paper by the side of Bruno’s bed. But he couldn’t think what to write. What could he say? I am in France in the sun and I hope you are safe with my parents? He dared not even think of her in Poland. He felt dumb and thick-headed. He put the pen and paper down and collapsed on his bunk.
That night he dreamed in his airless room that his tightening, burnt body had split open like a chrysalis. That another man, another Janusz, emerged from his skin and stepped slowly out into the airless night, eased from his shell by the sweat that poured off him. That this other man stood in the moonlight and loped through the streets until he came to the sea.
The Mediterranean, so clear and fresh by day, had turned silky black, and he paused for a moment at the water’s edge before wading out into it, letting the waves lick his raw new body. He was somebody else. He had been reborn from the air into water. A birth in reverse.
He woke with a terrible thirst. He tried to move, but the pain across his back stopped him.
He heard Bruno’s whispering voice, ‘Jan? Are you getting up today? Listen, there’s a camp in the hills above the city. I met some men last night. The Germans are making their way south. They should be here in a matter of months, maybe weeks. The men I met say we can join a military unit and get a boat to England. We need to move on. What do you think? Jesus, look at you.’
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