The Road Home

by Rose Tremain

  “There you are,” he said. “Five pounds. Two hundred leaflets. I’m being generous. Okay? And I’m trusting you because I am a very kind man. You like a coffee?”

  “Thank you,” said Lev. “Thank you very much.”

  Homelessness, hunger, these things just had to be borne for a while, Lev told himself. Thousands—even millions—of people in the world were hungry and had no proper place to sleep. It didn’t necessarily mean they died or lost hope or went crazy.

  But by this, the end of his first working day in London, Lev could see that it would be impossible to survive delivering leaflets for Ahmed. From a fruit stall, Lev had bought two bananas, and from a bread shop, a soft white roll, and from a post office, a stamp for his Princess Diana card, and from a shop selling newspapers a pouch of tobacco, some cigarette papers, and a bottle of water—and then his five pounds was gone.

  He lugged his bag to the street where Kowalski and Shepard lived and, as the evening came on, went down into their basement and sat hidden in the space under the road, behind the bay trees and the hydrangea bushes. He discovered some flattened cardboard boxes tucked away in the farthest corner of his hiding place and he laid these out and sat on them, and ate the bananas and the white roll and watched everything darken around him.

  He was waiting for Kowalski and Shepard to come home. He could already imagine their voices, which would be youthful, and the light from their windows, which would be comforting and soft. And he thought that if they came out to water their trees and found him, he would be able to explain to them that he’d chosen their basement because of the plants and the yellow door and persuade them to let him stay there—just for this one night.

  Yet part of him felt stupid, waiting there. Above him in the street, he could hear people laughing and car doors slamming and the click of women’s high heels on the pavement. And he started to reassure himself that when Marina had been alive he, too, had had a proper kind of life—even if a poorer one than those lives going on around him in London—and he remembered how, on Marina’s thirtieth birthday, he had found at the Baryn market some scarlet shoes with three-inch heels and open toes, and Marina had put them on and dressed herself in a flouncy black skirt and a red shawl borrowed from Lora, and they had eaten roast goose and drunk beer and vodka and danced a tango on Rudi’s porch—Rudi and Lora, Marina and Lev—and felt crazy with happiness and desire. Even now, Lev could feel the beautiful weight of Marina’s supple back bending against his arm, see the sexy kick of her feet in the red shoes, and hear her laughter floating away into the hills behind Auror. Such a night. Even Rudi never forgot it and would sometimes say to Lev, “That night of Marina’s birthday. Something happened to us, Lev. We were beyond mortal.”

  Beyond mortal.

  Now all Lev could feel was the weight of his exhausted frame, sitting on the cardboard boxes, and the great and unimaginable weight of the city above. He tried to think about positive things: about his Diana card beginning its journey to Ina and Maya; about the kindness of women like Lydia and Sulima; about the money he was going to make, if he could only hang on and not lose heart . . .

  Still, nobody came down to the basement flat. The cat had disappeared. The street lighting shaded orange the large blue hydrangea flowers. Lev tugged his bag toward him and took out a sweater knitted for him by his mother, folded it into a pillow, and laid his head on it. He lit a cigarette and smoked silently, watching the smoke curl outward from his hiding place and touch the dark leaves of the bay trees before vanishing into the air. Then, before the cigarette was gone, Lev knew that he was falling . . . falling helplessly into sleep. He had time to reach out, to extinguish the cigarette, and then he surrendered to the long fall.

  Now his dreaming mind conjured a memory. He was riding home on his bicycle to Auror from the Baryn lumber yard. Strapped to his back with a hank of rope were the offcuts of wood he’d taken from the yard and with which he planned to build a low trailer to run behind the bike. This trailer (for which he’d already drawn a simple design) was going to be the most useful thing he’d ever made. It would be the object that made possible the transportation of countless other objects, the need for which would inevitably become apparent with the passing of time. “Because this is what life does,” Rudi had observed. “It makes holes in front of your eyes that you have to fill with things.”

  The offcuts lay at an angle across Lev’s spine. The foreman at the Baryn sawmill, Vitali, had turned a blind eye to Lev’s gathering of the pieces of wood—or almost blind. All he’d said to Lev was: “You know there will have to be a small fine. Nothing severe. Some eggs would do well. Or a tin bracelet for my wife.”

  The road to Auror was narrow and steep. It was late afternoon in early summer and Lev sweated as he pedaled and the rope bit into his shoulders and he prayed the tires of the bicycle wouldn’t burst under the weight of man and wood.

  On the one level stretch of road, bordered by deep ditches, he saw a tractor coming toward him. The tractor was hitched to a loaded hay cart and Lev noticed the bales shifting and tilting as the tractor came on. He told himself he should dismount and pull off the road, to let the load pass, but to dismount with the wood strapped to him was going to be difficult, so he decided it was better to keep on, straight and steady, because there was room on this bit of the road for a bicycle and a cart, and the tractor driver would see him soon enough and slow down.

  But the tractor didn’t slow down. On it came, with its roaring engine and its high wheels, and then it reached Lev and went by, but at the back of the cart, one bale was jutting out a few inches farther than the others and this bale struck the wood strapped to Lev’s back and he fell sideways off the bicycle and into the ditch.

  For a moment, everything went dark. Then Lev saw light returning and stared up at the sky, which was crowded with the innocent pink clouds of a summer evening, and he tried to draw some strength from this sight, but the pain in his back and along his outstretched arms was fierce, and he could feel the wood pressing into his bones, and he thought that some kind of crucifixion was surely taking place. But for what was he being crucified? For not loving his father? For not clawing and tearing his way through life, like Rudi? For lying in a gray hammock when sadness got him down?

  He didn’t know. All he understood was that he had to try to rise up, to get free of his wooden cross, to resume his road.

  4

  Electric Blue

  WHEN LEV WOKE up, daylight pale as milk had crept into the basement area and a soft rain was falling. He lay without moving, watching the rain, refreshed by sleep, and thought that he’d never seen a rain quite like this, so gentle it seemed barely to fall, yet slowly laid its shine on the bay leaves and on the hydrangea flowers and on the gray stone of the yard.

  Plumbed into the wall of Kowalski and Shepard’s flat was a standpipe with a drain underneath it and a coil of garden hose looped over the head of the tap. Lev crawled out from his hiding place, crept over to the tap, and listened. A few cars went by in the street, but he knew that it was still early; no sound from inside the flat and no sign of the tabby cat. As modestly as he could, Lev pissed into the drain, then turned on the tap and rinsed his hands, splashed water on his face. Then he returned to his sleeping place and lay down again with his head on Ina’s sweater, which, he remembered, was known as a “jumper” by the English, and he couldn’t imagine how this word had come into being. He lit a cigarette.

  He lay and smoked and listened for the opening of the yellow door. He wasn’t afraid of the moment when he’d be discovered, only curious to see Kowalski and Shepard. He half-wondered whether he’d ask them to let him stay there, in return for looking after their plants, but heard Rudi laugh derisively and say, “Oh sure, Lev. They’ll be delighted to have a complete fucking stranger using their wall as a toilet and messing up their coal hole with his human form—all for a couple of minutes hosing down their pot plants. In fact, I think they’ll believe this is really their lucky day!”

  Afte
r a while, the silent rain ceased and the sun began shining on the wet leaves. The street was noisier than before and Lev felt the pulse of the city beat faster as people gathered themselves for the working day. He was certain now that, whoever they were, Kowalski and Shepard weren’t there; they’d left everything tidy, with the hose neatly coiled and the brass door knocker shined up, but they were somewhere else.

  Ahmed was raising the grille over the front of his kebab shop when Lev came walking along with his bag.

  “Good,” said Ahmed, with one of his toothy smiles. “My leaflet man. Ready for a new day?”

  Lev asked Ahmed if he had a washroom he could use, and Ahmed showed him through the fly curtain into a dark passage, piled up with cartons of cola and paper plates, and off the passage was a tiled lavatory with a washbasin and a plastic mirror. The room had no window, and the floor, recently washed with disinfectant, had been spread with pages of newsprint to encourage it to dry. On one of the pages, near the basin, there was a photograph of a topless woman.

  Lev shaved his face and washed his body. The presence of the near-naked woman troubled him. Since the death of Marina, he couldn’t stand to think about sex. He had told Rudi one night, “I could be a monk now. I wouldn’t care.” And Rudi had said, “Sure. I understand, comrade. But that will pass, because everything fucking passes. One day, you’ll come alive again.”

  That day still seemed far off. Lev stared down at the photograph. How could such a picture be in a national newspaper? The model had ridiculous breasts the size of pumpkins, and lips fat and wet, and all she was wearing was a spangled G-string. He wished the girl was dead. He wished the person who’d photographed her was dead. He wished copulation had died out, as a thing to do, like collecting old postage stamps, like sticking up pictures of Communist leaders on your wall . . .

  Twenty-first-century man is a dog, he thought, a vile, raunchy dog, with its teeth bared and its cock purple and hard and strands of stinking drool falling from its greedy mouth . . .

  He ground his heel on the picture, to tear it. Took his towel from his bag and dried his body. He stared at his face in the plastic mirror and tried to see in it some glance or trait that he could admire, but in the ugly light of this toilet his face looked yellow and ghostly, barely human. There was no light in his eyes.

  And he could feel it overwhelm him then—as it seemed to have to do from time to time—his sorrow for the death of Marina. Just thirty-six years she’d lived. Thirty-six years. She was a beautiful woman with a voice that was full of laughter. She went to work every morning at the Procurator’s Office of Public Works in Baryn, wearing a clean white blouse. In the evenings, she put on a striped pinafore and sang as she cooked supper. She rocked her child to sleep in her tiny bed, patient as a madonna. She danced the tango on a summer’s night, wearing red shoes. She fashioned a rug from rags, over months and months of time. She made love like a crazy Gypsy, with her dark hair falling around Lev’s face. She was perfect, and she was gone . . .

  Lev knew this wasn’t a good place in which to start crying.

  He tried to act as Rudi would have acted, to start swearing or stamping his feet to stop any tears welling up, but they were choking him, they had to fall. Lev pressed his damp towel to his face and prayed the heartache would pass, like a brief storm, like a nightmare from which it’s possible to wake. But it wouldn’t pass, and so he stood there weeping, and after a while—he didn’t know how long—he heard Ahmed bang on the door.

  “Lev,” Ahmed called softly. “What’s up with my leaflet man?”

  “Nothing,” stammered Lev.

  There was a moment’s silence, and then Ahmed said, “When men cry, it is never for nothing—and that’s not one of my proverbs. That’s the truth.”

  In the midst of his sorrow, Lev also felt foolish. “I am sorry,” he said. “I am sorry.”

  “Okay,” said Ahmed. “I’m going to make you coffee. You take your time. Then you come out and drink the coffee. All right?”

  Lev heard Ahmed go away. The offer of coffee moved him, and he thought, Twenty-first-century man is a dog, but sometimes, like a faithful dog, he remembers the trick of showing affection.

  One more day.

  He told Ahmed he’d work one more day delivering leaflets, but after that he’d have to find a job that was better paid.

  Ahmed said, “I understand. My pay is shit, I know. I am a very small outfit with a very big fucking rent. But what job are you going to get?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lev.

  “You go to the Job Center, I’m telling you, my friend, they won’t help you.”

  “They won’t help me?”

  “No. Catch-twenty-two. You know what this means?”

  “No.”

  “Lose-lose, it means. American slang for lose-fucking-lose.”

  “Yes?”

  “To get any job, you must be on Benefit for one year. To get Benefit, you must have worked for one year in this country. Funny, eh? You see? Catch-twenty-two.”

  Lev fumbled to roll a cigarette with the new tobacco he’d bought. His hands were still shaking from his outbreak of grief. He remembered the word “benefit” from his English classes, but knew that it had about it a complexity of meaning he’d never been able to unravel. He struggled to recall what his teacher had said as he watched Ahmed hack the torn remains of his meat cone from the spit, throw them into the trash bucket, and start cleaning the grease from the spit mechanism. Lev completed rolling the thin cigarette and lit it, and the taste of the Virginia tobacco was unfamiliar, like the sugar-tainted breath of a stranger.

  After a while, Ahmed wiped his hands on a stained dishcloth and turned back to Lev. “Coffee good?” he said.

  “Yes. Thank you, Ahmed. You are kind.”

  “I’m a good Muslim, that’s all. In Heaven, at least a few virgins will be mine.” Ahmed laughed.

  Lev wondered whether, in his mind, these “virgins” had breasts like pumpkins and oily lips. Then Ahmed searched around on a crowded shelf underneath the counter, pulled out a crumpled newspaper, and put it down in front of Lev.

  “Evening Standard,” said Ahmed, tracing the two black words with his thumb, “London newspaper. You look in here, Lev. Look very carefully. Find the pages “ESJOBS.” Also hundreds of rooms to let. Today you do my leaflets. Tomorrow you find a job right here in this paper. Job and a room. Okay? Then you’ll be right as rain.”

  When his day reached its end and Ahmed had paid him another £5, Lev couldn’t think of anywhere else to go except back to his hiding place in Kowalski and Shepard’s yard. This time, his supper was a loaf of brown bread and a packet of salami. Of the £5 he’d earned, only £2.24 remained. He hardly dared to think about the cost of everything. To quench his thirst, he drank water from the tap on the wall.

  Night came and the flat remained dark. Lev sat in his hole under the pavement and smoked and brought out a flashlight from his bag and began to study the columns of jobs in the newspaper:

  Hod carriers req Croydon; commissioning mangrs build serv mech or elec exp; dryliners and ceiling fixers Sydenham; LUL traffic marshal perm pos; plumber own tools Corgi reg . . .

  His brain yearned for rest. He lay down. He kept the torch alight and shone its narrow beam onto the hydrangea flowers, and this electric blue reminded him of a time when he’d gone night fishing with Rudi and they had made one of the strangest discoveries of their lives.

  They’d driven in the Tchevi to Lake Essel, which was a cold, still lake miles from Auror, surrounded by firs and pines, where, Rudi had been told, you could stun fish with electric light and pick them out of the water with your hands. “It’s because,” Rudi had explained to Lev, “that lake is so remote. Those fucking fish have never seen man-made light before, so they come to take a look and then—too late, brother!—they’re killed by curiosity.”

  Lake Essel was hard to find. The Tchevi squeaked and growled as Rudi drove it down this track and that, and the overhanging branches of trees thr
ashed at the car roof and the wheels spun in the ruts of sandy mud and fallen pine needles. Sometimes Lev and Rudi could see the lake in the distance, with the moon glancing down on it, but then the track would run out and there would be nowhere to turn, so the Tchevi had to roar backward with its engine screaming and Lev told Rudi he could smell burning.

  “Burning?” snorted Rudi. “That’s not fucking burning. That’s protest! That’s a beautiful engine telling you it doesn’t appreciate being treated like a pickup truck. It’s like a racehorse getting frisky when you ask it to pull a cart. You just have to master it.”

  When they found the lake at last, Rudi parked the Tchevi right down on the shoreline, on a curve of sand, so that they could shine the headlights onto the water. “The fish will never have seen lights that huge,” said Rudi. “Every fucker in that water is going to swim over.” The back seat and the trunk of the car were loaded with plastic buckets, and the plan was to fill these with live fish, then drive to Yarbl and sell them at the early-morning Saturday market. Live fish always sold better than dead ones, and there were rumors that these were carp—considered a delicacy in this region. Rudi said, “Even if they’re not carp, we’ll call them carp. Unless they’re fucking eels. Then I guess we’ll have to call them eels.”

  Lev and Rudi got out and looked at the moon on the water and listened to the sounds of the night and the small wavelets breaking on the strip of beach. Then they built a fire and sat by it, drinking vodka and smoking and cooking dumplings, made by Ina, in a little black stewpot hooked up to a curving branch. It was a summer night and moths came drifting to the fire and the moon fell out of sight behind the firs as Lev and Rudi ate the dumplings, which were floury and delicious. With their bellies full and the vodka and the cigarettes easing their minds, it was tempting to go on sitting there, talking about the world, and not bother to start catching carp. Only the thought of the money they could make at Yarbl made them turn their attention to their night mission.