The Road Home

by Rose Tremain

  They filled the buckets with lake water and set them in a line near the breaking waves. Then they turned on the headlights of the car. They took off their shoes and rolled up their trousers and stood knee deep in the freezing water, with their heads bent low, waiting for the carp to swim into the blazing beams of light.

  “It’s good the moon’s gone down,” whispered Rudi, “or they might get confused. Fish aren’t that intelligent.”

  Nothing happened for a while. Then they began to see peculiar flashes and shimmerings of blue light under the water. These came and went and came again, and Lev and Rudi stared at them. “What the fuck are they?” said Rudi. “Is this lake full of aliens? Is that why no one comes here?”

  But Lev soon saw what they were: they were the fish. Where the light touched them, their bodies gave off a neon-blue shine.

  “Shit!” said Rudi. “Why blue?”

  “Perhaps they’re Russian fish,” said Lev. “Russian gay carp.”

  “Blue” was the word Russians used to denote gay men, and Rudi sniggered, but now they both felt there was something troubling about the sight of this blueness. And the fish were small—they didn’t look like carp: they looked like exotic creatures that belonged in an aquarium, and though a few of them were now swimming very close to Lev’s and Rudi’s legs, neither wanted to try to pick them up.

  After some useless minutes of staring, Rudi waded ashore and turned off the Tchevi’s headlights to see what would happen, and what happened was that, in the darkness, the blue fish remained illuminated, like slow-flickering gas flames, irradiating the water all around them, and Lev thought he’d never seen anything as strange and surprising as this sight. He reached down and tried to seize one of the fish in his hand, but the fish jumped clean out of the water in a dazzling arc, like a blue shooting star, and now ten or twenty fish began to jump, making a neon fountain all around them, which after a while subsided, and the blue began to fade and fade, until all that was visible to Lev and Rudi was the black surface of the lake.

  They sat by the remains of their fire, drying their feet. Both of them wondered whether they’d had some kind of vision or waking dream, but after a while Rudi said, “It was real, that color. There’s got to be something wrong here. Radiation from somewhere. I reckon those fish are contaminated.”

  “Well,” said Lev, “they’re too small to sell, anyway. Aren’t they?”

  “Nothing’s too small to sell,” Rudi said, and Lev agreed. In Yarbl market you could sell hairpins, you could sell pine cones. So they sat there, looking at the buckets lined up, and thought of all the things they could call those small fish, like “freshwater sardines” or “Essel blue grayling,” but then they remembered the dumplings they’d eaten, cooked in the contaminated lake water, and wondered whether they were already marked out for illness or death, and so they emptied the buckets in silence, piled them back into the car, and drove home.

  Since then, it had sometimes worried Lev that he might be slowly dying, without noticing anything much, from eating dumplings cooked beside Lake Essel, or even from accidentally touching the body of a leaping fish. Now, in Kowalski’s yard, seeing a similar blue on the hydrangea petals, this worry returned to him: the peculiar worry and the beautiful memory, tangled together, pushing against each other, like wrestlers, neither giving way.

  The night felt cold—far colder than the night before—and Lev had to take all his clothes out of his bag and spread them over his body, but even then he found it difficult to sleep.

  “When you can’t sleep, son, make a plan” was something his father used to say. “Then you won’t have wasted those hours.” So Lev made a decision. The decision surprised him, and yet he knew it was a sensible one: tomorrow he would call Lydia. She’d offered to help him, and now he needed help, so he would accept. It was as simple as that. He’d make his way to wherever she was, in her friends’ house. Together, he and she would read all the job advertisements in the newspaper and Lydia would decipher everything for him. She would know what a hod carrier was. She would call the telephone numbers printed on the ESJOBS pages to arrange interviews, and by nightfall he would have found work.

  Although, in Lev’s English class, students traveling to England had been advised to buy a mobile phone “as soon as you can afford one,” they’d also been taught how to use a public telephone, and he had memorized these instructions, like a poem:

  Detach receiver.

  Insert coin.

  Dial your number.

  Speak.

  It was still early in the morning. Lev heard a man’s voice answer and felt sweat break out on his brow. “Excuse me,” he said. “May I talk to Lydia?”

  “Who is it?” snapped the English voice.

  “My name is Lev.”

  “Olev?”

  “Yes. Lev. May I talk with Lydia?”

  He heard the man’s voice calling her name, and then Lydia came on the line.

  “Lev?” she asked. “Is that you from the bus?”

  The sound of his own language made Lev want to laugh with joy. He apologized to Lydia for bothering her, and she told him this was no bother, it was a pleasure, and he explained about the newspaper and the job descriptions he couldn’t begin to understand.

  “Ah,” said Lydia at once, “you need a translator. Why don’t you come to Muswell Hill this evening and we can remember our journey together?”

  Lev asked where Muswell Hill was, and Lydia told him that it was a nice area, where the houses and flats had gardens growing round them and where you heard foxes barking in the night and these foxes lived off domestic garbage and reared families in lairs dug cleverly under garden walls.

  “Oh,” said Lev. “I’m like a fox, then. I’ve been sleeping in a lair under the road.”

  This upset Lydia. She told Lev she would go and find a tube map and instruct him how to get to Highgate, which was the nearest Underground stop to Muswell Hill. She said that when he arrived at the station and came out into the daylight, she would be waiting for him, and they would go back to the flat of her friends, who were called Larissa and Tom, and Lev could share a meal with them.

  Lev dozed in his foxhole for most of the day, and the sun came and went, and he rolled cigarettes and listened to the sounds of the street. A postman came down the basement steps and put some mail through Kowalski’s letterbox, but hurried away without catching sight of Lev. When he felt hungry, he ate the remaining crust of the bread and the last two slices of the salami.

  On the crowded tube, Lev sat very still, clutching his bag. He let his eyes swivel round to take in the other passengers, and he thought how, in his own country, people mostly looked the same and were the same kind of size, but here in Britain there seemed to be a gathering of nations, and in this gathering, human flesh of every color was being too well fed, so that even young African girls who, a generation ago, would have been thin and stately, were overweight, with pregnant-seeming stomachs bulging out of tight clothes and big round faces and hands pudgy and ugly, with silver jewelry digging into their fat fingers. And there was a lot of food being eaten right there, on the tube train. One of the African girls was sucking a lollipop. Children filled their mouths with crisps, cramming the food in, like babies, with their fat little palms. Two huge white men, sitting with their knees wide apart, as if to show off the insolent bulge of their private parts, were consuming hamburgers and onions out of cardboard boxes, and the smell of the onions was like that of something festering, and Lev put his hand over his face. When the men got off the train, they left the half-empty cartons, stinking up the carriage, on a narrow shelf behind the seats. Lev felt sick. Everybody knew America was a fat country, but somehow news of England’s decline into obesity hadn’t traveled as far as Auror. There, in people’s imaginations, English people were still pale and thin. They wore their belts tight.

  At Embankment station, as Lev changed for the Northern Line, he passed a saxophonist playing for coins in one of the long, airless corridors, and he notic
ed that this person was very thin, like him, and wondered whether he’d come from miles away and whether he slept there, in the tube station, on a ragged-looking coat, and spent time watching the tourist boats on the river. He wondered, too, how much money he made. Because here everybody was hurrying, and though some people began, without noticing it, to walk in time to the jazz music, they didn’t stop to throw down any change. But the guy just kept playing, anyway. It was better than begging, Lev supposed. It was a way to pass the time.

  The journey from Embankment to Highgate took so long it was as though Muswell Hill might be in a different city. Lev’s bag grew heavy on his knee. He longed to see daylight again. He longed for a cigarette. The exhaustion in the eyes of his fellow passengers now began to convey itself to him. And he remembered how, in Yarbl or Glic, he’d felt this same tiredness, which was the tiredness that came from crowds, from the breath of others, from the town’s harsh light, from being visible to so many eyes. And he realized that, since the close of the Baryn sawmill, he’d seen almost no one, only Maya and Ina, and Rudi and Lora occasionally, and that this invisible life had left him unprepared for the city and unaccustomed to its scrutiny.

  Lydia was waiting for him, as promised, outside the tube station.

  She was wearing a summer dress, and the material of the dress was printed with scarlet flowers and her arms were bare and pale and she wore blue-tinted sunglasses against the vivid light. When she saw Lev she smiled, and as he approached her, she held out her pale arms, as though Lev were a friend she’d known all her life.

  She said that Tom and Larissa’s flat wasn’t far, and as they walked along steep streets where the paving slabs were crooked and lumpy, where small gardens overflowed with abundant green, and where the scent of privet and roses perfumed the air, she told Lev that Larissa came from their own country and was a teacher of yoga, and Tom was an English psychotherapist who made good money and was generous with everything he owned. “As you see,” she added, “Muswell Hill is a Paradise.”

  The flat was on the ground floor of a tall house, and it had a basement part, which was Tom’s counseling room, that had its own entrance and waiting room and a toilet where the patients could prepare or recover. It looked out onto a neglected garden, where apple trees had clustered together and formed a deep shade and where a few cracked terra-cotta pots had been planted with geraniums. Its main room was long and light, with a wood floor and Afghan rugs and worn leather sofas and an upright piano and a round table set for the evening meal. Lev looked at this room and thought that the colors in it and the proportions of it made it the most beautiful room he’d ever seen. He put his bag down and stood in the doorway, staring at it, and Lydia said, “I know what you’re thinking, Lev.”

  Larissa came out of the kitchen and shook Lev’s hand. She was a dark, graceful woman, with wild hair scrunched up on the top of her head and big eyes, like the eyes of a Greek movie star whose name Lev couldn’t remember. Lev kissed her hand in an old-fashioned gesture he hadn’t intended, then felt stupid and awkward as she took her hand away, yet he saw that she wasn’t irritated, only amused. “Welcome,” she said. “Lydia has told me all about your journey and how it seemed quite short because of all your conversations.”

  “Yes?” said Lev.

  “Yes. Tom and I feel we know all about you. So now, come and sit down. Has Lydia told you about her job?”

  “No,” said Lev.

  “Oh, tell him, Lydia!” said Larissa.

  And Lev saw Lydia blush and start smoothing down the scarlet flowers on her dress, as though preparing for some entrance into a grand soirée.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ve just been so lucky, Lev, because Larissa and Tom know Pyotor Greszler, the well-known conductor from our country, who has just arrived here in London to rehearse with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and everything about this job was lined up for me when I arrived.

  “You see, Pyotor is quite old and his English is very bad, and so I am his translator, between him and the orchestra. I tell the musicians everything Pyotor says and everything they say back to him. I am there all day, translating instructions and listening to their music. And I just could never have imagined any job so wonderful.”

  Lydia put a kiss on Larissa’s cheek, and Larissa smiled and said, “We’re so happy for you, Lydia. We couldn’t be more happy.” And then she turned to Lev and said, “Pyotor telephoned me after the day Lydia began work and he was delighted with her. He said she was a very, very sensitive translator of musical mood, and he really enjoyed having her there in the rehearsal room. Isn’t that fantastic?”

  “The only thing is,” said Lydia, “I haven’t had time, because of the hours I spend with Maestro Greszler, to look for somewhere else to stay, and Tom and Larissa have been so kind, to let me stay here as long as I like. I think Fortune has smiled on me, and I really don’t know what I’ve done to deserve all this.”

  Lev looked at Lydia’s face, bathed in a wide, ecstatic smile, and he thought how, sometimes, life uncovers hidden marvels, like consignments of poinsettia flowers.

  Lev was about to congratulate Lydia when Tom appeared in the room. He looked confused for a moment, as though he hadn’t expected to see a stranger standing there, but Larissa said quickly, “Tom darling, this is Lev, Lydia’s friend. You remember?”

  Tom looked at Lev, and Lev saw that he was, in some ways, the embodiment of how he’d imagined all Englishmen to be: tall and lean-framed, with blue eyes and hair of no color, edging toward gray, and clothes that were unremarkable. Tom shook Lev’s hand and said, “Welcome to London,” and this seemed odd to Lev, as though his first arrival had been a mistake and this was the real beginning to his new life, here in the “Paradise” of Muswell Hill.

  “Sir,” said Lev, “thank you.”

  “Well,” said Larissa brightly, “let’s have a drink, Tom.”

  “Sure,” said Tom. “Wine? Vodka? What would everybody like?”

  “Lev likes vodka,” said Lydia quickly.

  “Larissa?”

  “Yes, vodka. But open some white wine, too. I’m cooking sea bass.”

  “Okay,” said Tom, “wine and vodka coming up.”

  When Tom left the room to go to the kitchen, Lev asked Larissa if he could visit the lavatory. His bowels had begun, suddenly, to cramp. It was as if his lower intestine had been asleep for four days and now it had inconveniently woken up.

  Larissa showed him to a bright little bathroom, where sea shells had been arranged in a line along the windowsill and where soft white towels hung on a wooden rail and the pull cord to the light switch was made of plaited silk. Outside the bathroom window, Lev could smell the freshness of the garden.

  He looked at his face in a shiny mirror cabinet and saw that there were smudges of soot or dirt on his cheeks and that his hair looked dusty and his shirt stained. He sat down on the toilet and relieved himself as quietly as he could. The idea that he was taking a shit in the flat of an English psychotherapist made him feel very mildly afraid. When he was done, he ran warm water in the washbasin and soaped his hands and face and took off his filthy shirt, which stank of sweat and of Ahmed’s kebabs, and washed his armpits and dried himself on one of the soft white towels. He looked longingly at the bathtub. He found a clean shirt—his last one—in his bag, and put it on. It was a brown-and-white checked shirt he’d obtained in the Yarbl market, in exchange for a wood plane and some three-inch nails.

  He felt restored.

  When he emerged from the bathroom, he could smell the fish simmering. As he sat down on one of the leather sofas, a large glass of vodka was put into his hands. He asked whether he could smoke and Tom said, “Yes, of course, of course,” and brought him an ashtray. He began the procedure of rolling a cigarette and looked up to see Lydia smiling at him protectively as he arranged and rearranged his little line of tobacco on the Rizla paper.

  The dinner astonished Lev: a tomato and pepper soup served with hot bread, then the sea bass cooked on a bed
of fennel, with waxy new potatoes and a cucumber salad. Each mouthful surprised him afresh with its exquisite savor. He found himself staring at Larissa, at her face and then at her hands, wondering what knowledge she possessed to make food taste like this. Lev ate as slowly as he could, taking smaller and smaller mouthfuls. When his serving was gone, he wanted to start again with the scarlet soup. He thought that he’d be happy to eat this same meal every day for the rest of his life.

  As the evening went on, darkness began to fall in the room and Larissa lit candles on the table. Lev looked out of the tall windows and saw the sky behind the apple trees fade to a luminous green.

  The Paradise of Muswell Hill.

  It felt yet more marvelous to Lev because of the beautiful food and because, at last, he was comfortable in his own language again, but it wouldn’t be his Paradise for long. Later, when he’d gone through all the jobs in the paper with Lydia, he’d be out again in the street on his own. He knew he was miles and miles from Kowalski’s yard, so where would he sleep? Would he ask to be found another B&B? Spend another twenty pounds for a clean bed and a shower?

  He told himself he’d think about this later. If need be, he could sleep under the apple trees. Foxes might come in the night and sniff his dreaming form. He drank the white wine and felt it go to his head as Lydia kept talking excitedly about her job, about the genius of Pyotor Greszler, and about her love of music, and Tom and Larissa proposed toasts to the future, and the wineglasses were filled again and Tom got up to open another bottle. Then Lydia said, “Enough about me. I am so selfish. Now we must help Lev to find a good job. This is our mission.”