22 Britannia Road Page 2

  Every evening Janusz comes back from work and starts on the house, finishing only when he is too exhausted to carry on. When he lies down to sleep he has the impression his arms are outstretched in front of him, still painting and wallpapering.

  Alone on his bed at night, he dreams. He enters his parents’ home, running up the porch steps. The heavy front door swings open and he calls for his mother but he knows he has arrived too late and everybody has gone. In one of the empty, high-ceilinged rooms is a dark-haired woman in a yellow dress. She stands up, takes off her dress and beckons to him, then maddeningly, quick as a fish in midstream, the dream changes direction and she is gone. He wakes with a start, eyes open, heart thumping. He moves his hand towards the ache in his groin and twists his face into the pillow. This loneliness will kill him, he’s sure of it.

  Victoria station is huge, and even at seven in the morning the place is noisy and full of lost people who grab Janusz by the elbow and ask him questions he can’t answer. He wipes the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief and checks his watch. He has been practising what to say to her when he sees her. ‘It’s been a long time’ is what he thinks he will say. It sounds casual and yet full of meaning.

  He finds himself searching his mind for Polish phrases, but he’s been immersed in the English language for so long now he has lost the habit. It’s like trying to recall the names of half-forgotten school friends, requiring too much effort and an unwilling excavation of the past. Truth is, there’s too much nostalgia in his mother tongue. If Silvana can speak English it will be easier. They will be making a new life here and she will have to learn the language. ‘Welcome to Britain’ is another phrase he thinks he might use.

  The platforms overflow with crowds. Suitcases are piled high on trolleys, and rag-and-bone bales of clothes and belongings are everywhere. People blur past in greys and browns and dark blues. He scans the crowd, trying not to think of Hélène, how he had once imagined it would be her he would meet like this after the war. Then he sees a woman looking his way. He stares at her and feels a jolt of recognition. Everything comes back to him. It is Silvana. His wife. His hand goes up to take off his hat, an awful, narrow-brimmed trilby. It came with his demob suit and he swears it’s made of cardboard. He smooths his hair, spreads finger and thumb across his moustache, coughs, clasps the hat in his hands and walks towards her. She is a wearing a red headscarf and, now he has seen her, she stands out in the colourless crowds like a single poppy in a swaying cornfield.

  Janusz focuses on the headscarf until he is near enough to see the embroidered birds with flowing wings sweeping over her forehead and tucking themselves under her chin. She looks thinner, older, her cheekbones more prominent than he remembers. As she recognizes him she gives a small cry.

  A skinny, dark-haired child leaps into her arms. Is that Aurek? Is that him? The last time Janusz saw him he was just a baby, a plump toddler with baby curls. Not even old enough for his first haircut. He tries to see the boy’s face, to find some familiarity in his features, but the child clambers up Silvana like a monkey, pulling her headscarf off, his arms locking around her neck, burying his head in her chest.

  Janusz stops still in front of them and for a moment his courage fails him. What if he has made a foolish mistake and these two are somebody else’s family? If all he has really recognized is the forlorn look the woman carries in her eyes and his own lonely desires?

  ‘Silvana?’

  She is fighting the child, trying to pull her headscarf back on. ‘Janusz? I saw you in the crowd. I saw you looking for us …’

  ‘Your hair?’ he says, all thought of rehearsed lines gone from his mind.

  Silvana touches her head and the scarf falls around her shoulders. She looks away from him.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He doesn’t know whether it is the sight of her that fills him with apologies or the idea that he has already made her uncomfortable in his presence. ‘Really. I didn’t mean … How are you?’

  Silvana pulls her scarf back onto her head and knots it under her chin. ‘The soldiers cut it.’

  It’s hard to hear her clearly with the racket and grind of trains arriving and departing and guards calling across the platforms. He takes a tentative step closer.

  ‘We were living in the woods,’ she says. ‘Did they tell you? The soldiers found us and told us the war was over. They cut our hair off when they found us. They do it to stop the lice. It’s growing back slowly.’

  ‘Oh. It doesn’t matter. I … I understand,’ says Janusz, although he doesn’t. The child clutches something wooden in his hand. It looks vaguely familiar. Janusz frowns.

  ‘Is that the rattle your father made?’

  Silvana opens her mouth to speak and then closes it again. He notices her cheeks colour slightly in a blush that disappears as quickly as it comes. But of course it is the rattle. She doesn’t need to say a word. The dark wood, the handmade look to it: it has to be. He smiles with relief, suddenly reassured. Of course this is his family.

  ‘You kept it all this time? Can I see it?’

  He reaches out, but the boy pulls it to his chest and makes a grumbling sound.

  ‘He’s tired,’ says Silvana. ‘The journey has tired him.’

  It’s a shock to see a child so thin. His son’s face has a transparency to it, and the way his skin is tight, revealing the cradling structure of bones beneath – it makes Janusz’s heart ache like a soft bruise.

  ‘Aurek? Small, isn’t he? Hello, little fellow. Don’t be frightened. I am your … I am your father.’

  ‘Your moustache,’ says Silvana, pulling the boy onto her other hip. ‘It’s different. It makes you look different.’

  ‘My moustache? I’ve had it for years. I’d forgotten.’

  ‘Six years,’ she says.

  He nods his head. ‘And my family? Do you have news of them? Eve? Do you know where she is?’

  Silvana’s eyes darken. Her pupils widen and shine, and he’s sure she is going to tell him Eve is dead. That they have all died. He holds his breath.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know where any of them are.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘I never saw them again after you left us.’

  He’s been waiting for news of his family for years. He’d thought Silvana might arrive with letters from them, stories about them. Some information on their whereabouts. They stand in silence until Janusz speaks again.

  ‘Well, you’re here now.’

  Silvana answers in a whisper and he has to lean in towards her to hear what she is saying.

  ‘I can hardly believe it. I can hardly believe we’re here.’

  Janusz laughs to stop himself from crying. He presses her hand into his, curling his fingers over hers. He feels tired suddenly. It is as much as he can do to look her in the eye.

  ‘I expect we’ve both changed … but it doesn’t matter,’ he says, trying to sound relaxed. ‘We’re still the same people inside. Time doesn’t change that.’

  Even as he says it, he knows he is lying. She does too. He can see it in her eyes. The war has changed all of them. And Silvana’s hair is not just short. It has turned grey.

  Poland, 1937

  Silvana

  The very first time Silvana saw Janusz he was swimming. It was late spring in 1937 and all about was a feeling of listlessness, as if the sudden appearance of the sun had turned the town into a child that wanted only to play in the streets all day. Silvana had finished her afternoon shift at the Kine cinema where she worked as an usherette. The daylight was always surprising to her after the dark interior of the cinema, and she stood on the pavement feeling the breeze playing with her skirt hem, the sunlight stroking her cheek. She was eighteen years old and all she knew was that she didn’t want to go home just yet. That to walk in the sun, though she had nowhere to go, was preferable to the damp silences that would creep over her the moment she entered her parents’ small cottage.

  She wandered down
the tree-lined main street, past the square with its water fountain and tall, crumbling houses, and took a dusty path into the shadows of the red-brick church and the presbytery. Once past those solid buildings she left the shade behind, the sunlight leading her down the road out of town. A few hundred yards ahead was her parents’ one-storey wooden house, painted the same blue as the other peasant cottages that surrounded the town. Silvana stopped and stepped off the road into an apple orchard. It had once belonged to her family but her father had sold it. He worked on other people’s farms now, gathering wood, harvesting, whatever the season asked of him. The trees were loaded with white petals, big clouds of blossom, the grass under the trees soft and wildly green. A scene of ripenings and hopes. She stood in the dappled light and breathed in deeply, knowing that whatever happened to her in life, wherever she went – and she hoped it would be far away from this small town – she would always love this place.

  Silvana took a footpath towards the river, glancing back at the cottage. Her mother Olga would be in the kitchen, drinking the vodka she distilled in the cow barn, the clear fiery liquid made from sugar beet or horseradish or, in a poor year, onions and elder. Yes, she thought. Her mother would be drunk, surrounded by all the hapless creatures she collected: kittens climbing her skirts; puppies tumbling at her feet and chewing on the table legs; the nests of blind rabbit kittens, wingless chicks and solitary leverets that she fed every hour and nursed as she had once nursed her own dying sons.

  She was known among her neighbours as a good woman who had not had things easy, having a difficult daughter to bring up. Silvana knew there was some truth in that: she had been a hard child, was still tough and inflexible, but no harder, she always believed, than her own mother had been to her. And then there were her brothers. The three boys born before her who had failed to grow up. Her mother’s little princes caught in their infancy, who had blinked and whimpered through her childhood. Silvana knew their stories off by heart.

  Her father Josef had started whittling a wooden rattle when his wife first fell pregnant. He’d used a piece of cherry wood from the orchard, and somehow that wood had brought bad luck down on them. He was not a talented carver in any case. By the time the child was born, the rattle was only half finished. When the child died at three months, around the same time the potato crop failed, Josef carried on carving the rattle. He didn’t notice the knife sinking into his thumb, making a gaping wound that bled and bled. When Silvana was young she liked to hold his thumb, run her finger along the jagged seam of his scar and hear the story of how he got it.

  It was after the death of their second son that Olga began drinking the vodka she made to sell to other peasants. Josef still hadn’t finished the rattle. He had sold the fields by then and only worked in his orchards.

  ‘It can’t happen three times,’ he said to Olga. ‘We’ll try again.’

  After the third child died, Olga knew the rattle must be cursed. She buried it in the garden, wrapped in a lock of her hair to ward off evil. Josef dug it up one moonless night and hid it in the unused cot. He went to his wife and told her they would try again for a child.

  Cold as an unlit oven, Olga barely looked at the daughter she gave birth to a year later. Silvana Olga Valeria Dabrowski. Josef believed the curse had been broken. He finished the rattle, polished it, tied a ribbon to its handle and gave it to his healthy, strong-minded daughter.

  But Olga couldn’t forget her baby boys. She kept their clothes in a locked cupboard, wrapped in tissue. Blue nightdresses with sheep embroidered upon them, white knitted booties, small blue bobble hats, three shawls crocheted gossamer thin. When Silvana was old enough, she was allowed to touch the hems and rub the tiny collars between her fingers.

  ‘Be careful,’ Olga warned. ‘These are more precious to me than gold.’

  When she was ten years old, Silvana stole the baby clothes. She couldn’t help herself. She took them out into the garden to play with, but it began to rain so she ran in. Olga found the clothes the next day, covered in mud, tangled and torn in the raspberry canes.

  ‘I was wrong about you,’ she said, locking Silvana’s bedroom door. ‘You are a deceitful little girl. Say sorry for what you have done.’

  Silvana banged on her door, screaming to be let out. She would not apologize.

  Olga put her mouth to the keyhole. ‘A boy would never behave like this.’

  ‘Your boys are dead!’ screamed Silvana, full of her own furies. ‘I’m your child. You hear me? I’m your child!’

  ‘You’re the devil’s child!’ her mother screamed back. ‘You lived when my boys didn’t.’

  Over the years, Silvana hardened herself against all of them: her crazy mother, her useless father and the pressing ghosts of her dead brothers; all of them trapped within the four walls of the cottage.

  In the afternoon sunlight, she flicked a wasp away from her face and stared at her home. For a place so full of complications, it appeared serene, and she wondered if all houses were capable of presenting such a good façade, looking four-square and right while their insides were full of banging doors and raised voices. She watched smoke rising from the chimney of the cottage for a moment longer, then turned her back on it and walked briskly towards the river and the big sawmill.

  Weeping willows and green sallows overhung the sparkling waters of the river, the hum of insects as loud as the continual buzz of machinery in the mill. A path had been scythed along the bank and she kicked off her shoes and followed it, the grass springy under her stockinged feet. Ahead, she saw a group of young men, all of them laughing and jumping off the bank into the river. Feeling shy, with her shoes dangling in her hand and her stockings flecked with grass, she thought about turning back. Then one of the men caught her eye. He was blond, broad and muscular. Not tall, but strong-looking.

  She stopped to watch him dive into the water. He closed his eyes and straightened his body. He held his hands above his head, dipped at the knees slightly so that his calf muscles bulged, and sprang off his toes, his body cutting through the water’s surface, leaving only ripples behind. As he came up out of the water, he looked at her, shook the water from his hair and smiled. The sun caught the water droplets beading on his fair skin and turned them into tiny diamonds. He clambered onto the bank, his body shining like something brand-new. Silvana smiled back, dazzled by him.

  Janusz was the only son in a family of five daughters, and to Silvana he was as golden as the rest were mouse-coloured. Five sisters, all anonymously plain, and Janusz, the eldest, with Prussian blue eyes and white-blond hair. A vodka bottle in a bar full of dark beer. As the only brother, he was the last to carry on the family name. His father drummed that into him, hoping his son would study law at university and become someone of importance in Polish society. His mother wanted him to study to be a priest.

  Silvana saw what a good son Janusz was, how hard he tried to please his family. But she also knew he had no interest in studying law. Janusz loved machinery, anything that had bits of metal and cogs and screws that he could take apart and put back together again. Really, he was the cleverest man she had ever met.

  He lived in a three-storey house overlooking the municipal park. His father worked in local government, and the family prided themselves on their fine manners. So fine were their manners, they almost managed not to show their disappointment when, just months after Silvana and Janusz’s first meeting, Janusz took her home and explained that he was going to do his duty and marry his sweetheart.

  Janusz believed in God in those days. He never missed church, and he lectured Silvana at every opportunity on God’s purpose for them all. Silvana liked to listen, though she didn’t take it in much. She was too busy dreaming about American movie stars. At mass on Sundays she sat with his dull-eyed sisters, who complained of the aching necks they got from peering up at windows set high in stone walls, their brown felt hats tilted longingly towards the outside. His sister Eve said Janusz only loved God because he didn’t have to talk to him face to
face.

  ‘You must never think Janusz is shy,’ she told Silvana. ‘He has plenty to say. It’s just that growing up with sisters, and Mother being the way she is, poor Jan has been henpecked. His only defence is silence.’

  Eve was the middle sister, stuck between two older sisters intent only on marriage and two younger sisters who carried on like twins and went everywhere arm in arm. As a result, she said, nobody noticed her and she was free to do whatever she wanted. And what Eve wanted was music. Her violin was her passion, and she practised for hours at a time, emerging from her bedroom with her brown hair fallen around her shoulders; her face, freckled like Janusz’s, creased with concentration. She was always closer to her brother than the others, and Silvana liked her the best of all of them.

  That first summer, when talk of a possible war with Germany was something neither of them took any interest in, Silvana and Janusz had spent their spare time by the river or taking bike rides out of town into the country.

  ‘I don’t want to say goodbye,’ Janusz told her as they lay on the grass under the shade of a cedar tree.

  She laughed and took his hand in hers. His face looked so serious.

  ‘Janusz, we’ve only just got here. We can spend all day together.’

  ‘Yes, but then you’ll leave me.’

  ‘I won’t leave you. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Why do you have to go to work tonight? I see all those men there who look at you when you take their tickets. They only go to look at you.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. I love films. I like my job.’ She felt annoyed with him and wanted to be mean, so she said, ‘Anyway, I like it when men look at me. If I’m beautiful, I can’t help it, can I? Maybe you should be careful. I might get bored and go off with someone else.’