Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Rose Tremain
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
1. Significant Cigarettes
2. The Diana Card
3. ‘A Man May Travel Far, but His Heart May Be Slow to Catch Up’
4. Electric Blue
5. Two-point-five Metres of Steel Draining Top
6. Elgar’s Humble Beginnings
7. The Lizard Tattoo
8. The Need to Shock
9. Why Shouldn’t a Man Choose Happiness?
10. ‘Pure Anarchy in Here …’
11. Flooding Backwards
12. A Visit to the Lifeboat Museum
13. The Pitch of It
14. Jig, Jig …
15. Nine, Night-time
16. Exeunt All but Hamlet
17. Lady Muck of the Vegetable World
18. It Almost Had a Scent
19. The Room of Coloured Glass
20. Loans for Dreams
21. Looking at Photographs
22. The Last Bivouac
23. Communist Food
24. Number 43 Podrorsky Street
Acknowledgements
Credits
Copyright
About the Book
‘On the coach, Lev chose a seat near the back and he sat huddled against the window, staring out at the land he was leaving …’
Lev is on his way to Britain to seek work, so that he can send money back to Eastern Europe to support his mother and little daughter.
Readers will become totally involved with his story, as he struggles with the mysterious rituals of ‘Englishness’, and the fashions and fads of the London scene. We see the road Lev travels through Lev’s eyes, and we share his dilemmas: the intimacy of his friendships, old and new; his joys and sufferings; his aspirations and his hopes of finding his way home, wherever home may be.
About the Author
Rose Tremain is a writer of novels, short stories and screenplays. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer Richard Holmes. Her books have been translated into numerous languages, and have won many prizes including the Whitbread Novel of the Year, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Prix Femina Etranger, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Angel Literary Award and the Sunday Express Book of the Year.
Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a movie; The Colour was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and selected by the Daily Mail Reading Club. Rose Tremain’s most recent collection, The Darkness of Wallis Simpson, was shortlisted for both the First National Short Story Award and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Three of her novels are currently in development as films.
Also by Rose Tremain
Novels
Sadler’s Birthday
Letter to Sister Benedicta
The Cupboard
The Swimming Pool Season
Restoration
Sacred Country
The Way I Found Her
Music and Silence
The Colour
Short Story Collections
The Colonel’s Daughter
The Garden of the Villa Mollini
Evangelista’s Fan
The Darkness of Wallis Simpson
For Children
Journey to the Volcano
For Brenda and David Reid, with fondest love
The Road Home
‘How can we live, without our lives?’
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
1
Significant Cigarettes
ON THE COACH, Lev chose a seat near the back and he sat huddled against the window, staring out at the land he was leaving: at the fields of sunflowers scorched by the dry wind, at the pig farms, at the quarries and rivers and at the wild garlic growing green at the edge of the road.
Lev wore a leather jacket and jeans and a leather cap pulled low over his eyes and his handsome face was grey-toned from his smoking and in his hands he clutched an old red cotton handkerchief and a dented pack of Russian cigarettes. He would soon be forty-three.
After some miles, as the sun came up, Lev took out a cigarette and stuck it between his lips, and the woman sitting next to him, a plump, contained person with moles like splashes of mud on her face, said quickly: ‘I’m sorry, but there is no smoking allowed on this bus.’
Lev knew this, had known it in advance, had tried to prepare himself mentally for the long agony of it. But even an unlit cigarette was a companion – something to hold on to, something that had promise in it – and all he could be bothered to do now was to nod, just to show the woman that he’d heard what she’d said, reassure her that he wasn’t going to cause trouble; because there they would have to sit for fifty hours or more, side by side with their separate aches and dreams, like a married couple. They would hear each other’s snores and sighs, smell the food and drink each had brought with them, note the degree to which each was fearful or unafraid, make short forays into conversation. And then later, when they finally arrived in London, they would probably separate with barely a word or a look, walk out into a rainy morning, each alone and beginning a new life. And Lev thought how all of this was odd but necessary and already told him things about the world he was travelling to, a world in which he would break his back working – if only that work could be found. He would hold himself apart from other people, find corners and shadows in which to sit and smoke, demonstrate that he didn’t need to belong, that his heart remained in his own country.
There were two coach-drivers. These men would take turns to drive and to sleep. There was an on-board lavatory, so the only stops the bus would make would be for gas. At gas stations, the passengers would be able to clamber off, walk a few paces, see wild flowers on a verge, soiled paper among bushes, sun or rain on the road. They might stretch up their arms, put on dark glasses against the onrush of nature’s light, look for a clover leaf, smoke and stare at the cars rushing by. Then they would be herded back onto the coach, resume their old attitudes, arm themselves for the next hundred miles, for the stink of another industrial zone, or the sudden gleam of a lake, for rain and sunset and the approach of darkness on silent marshes. There would be times when the journey would seem to have no end.
Sleeping upright was not something Lev was practised in. The old seemed to be able to do it, but forty-two was not yet old. Lev’s father, Stefan, sometimes used to sleep upright, in summer, on a hard wooden chair in his lunch break at the Baryn sawmill, with the hot sun falling onto the slices of sausage wrapped in paper on his knee and onto his flask of tea. Both Stefan and Lev could sleep lying down on a mound of hay or on the mossy carpet of a forest. Often, Lev had slept on a rag rug beside his daughter’s bed, when she was ill or afraid. And when his wife, Marina, was dying, he’d lain for five nights on an area of linoleum flooring no wider than his outstretched arm, between Marina’s hospital bed and a curtain patterned with pink and purple daisies, and sleep had come and gone in a mystifying kind of way, painting strange pictures in Lev’s brain that had never completely vanished.
Towards evening, after two stops for gas, the mole-flecked woman unwrapped a hard-boiled egg. She peeled it silently. The smell of the egg reminded Lev of the sulphur springs at Jor, where he’d taken Marina, just in case nature could cure what man had given up for lost. Marina had immersed her body obediently in the scummy water, lain there looking at a female stork returning to its high nest, and said to Lev: ‘If only we were storks.’
‘Why d’you say that?’ Lev had asked.
‘Because you never see a stork dying. It’s as though they didn’t die.’
If only we were storks.
On the woman’s knee a clean cotton napkin was spread and her white hands smoothed it and she unwrapped rye bread and a twist of salt.
‘My name is Lev,’ said Lev.
‘My name is Lydia,’ said the woman. And they shook hands, Lev’s hand holding the scrunched-up kerchief, and Lydia’s hand rough with salt and smelling of egg, and then Lev asked: ‘What are you planning to do in England?’ and Lydia said: ‘I have some interviews in London for jobs as a translator.’
‘That sounds promising.’
‘I hope so. I was a teacher of English at School 237 in Yarbl, so my language is very colloquial.’
Lev looked at Lydia. It wasn’t difficult to imagine her standing in front of a class and writing words on a blackboard. He said: ‘I wonder why you’re leaving our country when you had a good job at School 237 in Yarbl?’
‘Well,’ said Lydia. ‘I became very tired of the view from my window. Every day, summer and winter, I looked out at the school yard and the high fence and the apartment block beyond, and I began to imagine I would die seeing these things, and I didn’t want this. I expect you understand what I mean?’
Lev took off his leather cap and ran his fingers through his thick grey hair. He saw Lydia turn to him for a moment and look very seriously into his eyes. He said: ‘Yes, I understand.’
Then there was a silence, while Lydia ate her hard-boiled egg. She chewed very quietly. When she’d finished the egg, Lev said: ‘My English isn’t too bad. I took some classes in Baryn, but my teacher told me my pronunciation wasn’t very good. May I say some words and you can tell me if I’m pronouncing them correctly?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Lydia.
Lev said: ‘Lovely. Sorry. I am legal. How much please. Thank you. May you help me.’
‘May I help you,’ corrected Lydia.
‘May I help you,’ repeated Lev.
‘Go on,’ said Lydia.
‘Stork,’ said Lev. ‘Stork’s nest. Rain. I am lost. I wish for an interpreter. Bee-and-bee.’
‘Be-and-be?’ said Lydia. ‘No, no. You mean “to be, or not to be”.’
‘No,’ said Lev. ‘Bee-and-bee. Family hotel, quite cheap.’
‘Oh, yes, I know. B & B.’
Lev could now see that darkness was falling outside the window and he thought how, in his village, darkness had always arrived in precisely the same way, from the same direction, above the same trees, whether early or late, whether in summer, winter or spring, for the whole of his life. This darkness – particular to that place, Auror – was how, in Lev’s heart, darkness would always fall.
And so he told Lydia that he came from Auror, had worked in the Baryn sawmill until it closed two years ago, and since then he’d found no work at all and his family – his mother, his five-year-old daughter and he – had lived off the money his mother made selling jewellery manufactured from tin.
‘Oh,’ said Lydia. ‘I think that’s very resourceful, to make jewellery from tin.’
‘Sure,’ said Lev. ‘But it isn’t enough.’
Tucked into his boot was a small flask of vodka. He extracted the flask and took a long swig. Lydia kept eating her rye bread. Lev wiped his mouth with the red handkerchief and saw his face reflected in the coach window. He looked away. Since the death of Marina, he didn’t like to catch sight of his own reflection, because what he always saw in it was his own guilt at still being alive.
‘Why did the sawmill at Baryn close?’ asked Lydia.
‘They ran out of trees,’ said Lev.
‘Very bad,’ said Lydia. ‘What other work can you do?’
Lev drank again. Someone had told him that in England vodka was too expensive to drink. Immigrants made their own alcohol from potatoes and tap water, and when Lev thought about these industrious immigrants, he imagined them sitting by a coal fire in a tall house, talking and laughing, with rain falling outside the window and red buses going past and a television flickering in a corner of the room. He sighed and said: ‘I will do any work at all. My daughter Maya needs clothes, shoes, books, toys, everything. England is my hope.’
Towards ten o’clock, red blankets were given out to the coach passengers, some of whom were already sleeping. Lydia put away the remnants of her meal, covered her body with the blanket and switched on a fierce little light above her under the baggage rack and began reading a faded old paperback, printed in English. Lev saw that the title of her book was The Power and the Glory. His longing for a cigarette had grown steadily since he’d drunk the vodka and now it was acute. He could feel the yearning in his lungs and in his blood, and his hands grew fidgety and he felt a tremor in his legs. How long before the next gas stop? It could be four or five hours. Everyone on the bus would be asleep by then, except him and one of the two drivers. Only they would keep a lonely, exhausting vigil, the driver’s body tensed to the moods and alarms of the dark, unravelling road; his own aching for the comfort of nicotine or oblivion – and getting neither.
He envied Lydia, immersed in her English book. Lev knew he had to distract himself with something. He’d brought with him a book of fables: improbable stories he’d once loved about women who turned into birds during the hours of darkness, and a troupe of wild boar that killed and roasted their hunters. But Lev was feeling too agitated to read such fantastical things. In desperation, he took from his wallet a brand new British twenty-pound note and reached up and switched on his own little reading light and began to examine the note. On one side, the frumpy Queen, E II R, with her diadem, her face grey on a purple ground, and on the other, a man, some personage from the past, with a dark drooping moustache and an angel blowing a trumpet above him and all the angel’s radiance falling on him in vertical lines. ‘The British venerate their history,’ Lev had been told in his English class, ‘chiefly because they have never been subjected to Occupation. Only intermittently do they see that some of their past deeds were not good.’
The indicated lifespan of the man on the note was 1857–1934. He looked like a banker, but what had he done to be on a twenty-pound note in the twenty-first century? Lev stared at his determined jaw, squinted at his name written out in a scrawl beneath the wing collar, but couldn’t read it. He thought that this was a person who would never have known any other system of being alive but Capitalism. He would have heard the names Hitler and Stalin, but not been afraid – would have had no need to be afraid of anything except a little loss of capital in what Americans called the Crash, when men in New York had jumped out of windows and off roofs. He would have died safely in his bed before London was bombed to ruins, before Europe was torn apart. Right to the end of his days, the angel’s radiance had probably shone on this man’s brow and on his fusty clothes, because it was known across the world: the English were lucky. Well, thought Lev, I’m going to their country now and I’m going to make them share it with me: their infernal luck. I’ve left Auror and that leaving of my home was hard and bitter, but my time is coming.
Lev was roused from his thoughts by the noise of Lydia’s book falling to the floor of the bus, and he looked at her and saw that she’d gone to sleep, and he studied her face with its martyrdom of moles. He put her age at about thirty-nine. She appeared to sleep without travail. He imagined her sitting in some booth with earphones clamped to her mousy hair, buoyant and alert on a relentless tide of simultaneous translation. May you help me please. No. May I help you.
Lev decided, as the night progressed, to try to remember certain significant cigarettes of the past. He possessed a vibrant imagination. At the Baryn sawmill he’d been known, derogatorily, as a ‘dreamer’. ‘Life is not for dreaming, Lev,’ his boss had warned. ‘Dreaming leads to subversion.’ But Lev knew that his nature was fragile, easily distracted, easily made joyful or melancholy by the strangest of small things, and that this condition had afflicted his boyhood and his adolescence and had, perhaps, prevented him from getting on as a man. Especially after Marina had gone. Because now her death was with him always, like a shadow on the X-ray of his spirit. Other men might have been able to chase this shadow away – with drink, or with young women or with the novelty of making money – but Lev hadn’t even tried. He knew that forgetting Marina was something he was not yet capable of doing.
All around him on the coach, passengers were dozing. Some lay slumped towards the aisle, their arms hanging loosely down in an attitude of surrender. The air was filled with repetitive sighing. Lev pulled the peak of his cap further over his face and decided to remember what was always known by him and his mother, Ina, as ‘the poinsettia miracle’, because this was a story that led towards a good ending, towards a smoke as immaculate as love.
Ina was a woman who never allowed herself to care about anything, because, she often said, ‘What’s the point of it, when life takes everything away?’ But there were a few things that gave her joy and one of these was the poinsettia. Scarlet-leafed and shaped like a fir, resembling a brilliant man-made artefact more than a living plant, poinsettias excited in Ina a sober admiration, for their unique strangeness, for their seeming permanence in a world of perpetually fading and dying things.
One Sunday morning some years ago, near to Ina’s sixty-fifth birthday, Lev had got up very early and cycled twenty-four miles to Yarbl where flowers and plants were sold in an open-air market behind the railway station. It was an almost autumnal day, and on the silent figures setting out their stalls a tender light was falling. Lev smoked and watched from the railway buffet, where he drank coffee and vodka. Then he went out and began to look for poinsettias.
Most of the stuff sold in the Yarbl market was fledgling food: cabbage plants, sunflower seeds, sprouting potatoes, currant bushes, bilberry canes. But more and more people were indulging their half-forgotten taste for decorative, useless things and the sale of flowers was increasing as each year passed.
Poinsettias were always visible from a long way off. Lev walked slowly along, alert for red. The sun shone on his scuffed black shoes. His heart felt strangely light. His mother was going to be sixty-five years old and he would surprise and astonish her by planting a trough of poinsettias on her porch, and in the evenings she would sit and do her knitting and admire them, and neighbours would arrive and congratulate her – on the flowers and on the care her son had taken.
But there were no poinsettias in the market. Up and down, Lev trudged, staring bleakly at carrot fern, at onion sets, at plastic bags filled with pig manure and ash.
No poinsettias.
The great catastrophe of this now announced itself to Lev. So he began again, retracing his steps along the lines of stalls, stopping now and then to badger the stall-holders, recognising that this badgering was accusatory, suggestive of the notion that these people were greys, keeping the red plants out of sight under the trestles, waiting for buyers who offered American dollars or motor parts or drugs.
‘I need poinsettias,’ he heard himself say, like a man parched with thirst or a petulant only child.
‘Sorry, comrade,’ said the market traders. ‘Only at Christmas.’
All he could do was pedal home to Auror. Behind his bicycle he dragged a home-made wooden trailer (built with offcuts poached from the Baryn lumber yard) and the wheels of this trailer squeaked mockingly as the miles passed. The emptiness of Ina’s sixty-fifth birthday yawned before Lev like an abandoned mine.
Lev shifted quietly in his seat, trying not to disturb Lydia’s sleep. He laid his head on the cool window glass. Then he remembered the sight that had greeted him, like a vision, in some lost village along the road: an old woman dressed in black, sitting silently on a chair in front of her house, with a baby sleeping in a plastic pram by her side. And at her feet a motley of possessions for sale: a gramophone, some scales and weights, an embroidered shawl, a pair of leather bellows. And a barrow of poinsettia plants, their leaves newly tinctured with red.
Lev had wobbled on the bike, wondering if he was dreaming. He put a foot down on the dusty road. ‘Poinsettias, Grandma, are they?’
‘Is that their name? I call them red flags.’
He bought them all. The trailer was crammed and heavy. His money was gone.
He hid them under sacks until it was dark, planted them out in Ina’s trough under the stars and stood by them, watching the dawn come up, and when the sun reached them the red of their leaves intensified in a startling way, as when desert crocuses bloom after rain. And that was when Lev lit a cigarette. He sat down on the steps of Ina’s porch and smoked and stared at the poinsettias, and the cigarette was like radiant amber in him and he smoked it right down to its last centimetre and then put it out, but still kept it pressed into his muddy hand.
Lev slept after all.
He woke when the coach stopped for gas, somewhere in Austria, he assumed, for the petrol station was large and bright and in an open bay to one side of it was parked a silent congregation of trucks, with German names written on them, lit by orange sodium light. Freuhof. Bosch. Grunewald. Königstransporte …
Lydia was awake and together she and Lev got off the bus and breathed the cool night air. Lydia pulled a cardigan round her shoulders. Lev looked for dawn in the sky, but could see no sign of it. He lit a cigarette. His hands trembled as he took it in and out of his mouth.
‘It’s going to be cold in England,’ said Lydia. ‘Are you prepared for that?’
Lev thought about his imaginary tall house, with the rain coming down and the television flickering and the red buses going past.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘When the winter comes,’ said Lydia, ‘we’re going to be shocked.’
‘Our own winters are cold,’ said Lev.
‘Yes, but not for so long. In England, I’ve been told, some winters never quite depart.’
‘You mean there’s no summer?’
‘There is summer. But you don’t feel it in your blood.’
Other passengers from the coach were now wandering around the gas station. Some were making visits to the washrooms. Others just stood about, as Lev and Lydia were doing, shivering a little, onlookers unsure what they were looking at, arrivals who had not yet arrived, everybody in transit and uncertain what time their watches should be telling. Behind the area where the trucks were parked lay a deep, impenetrable darkness of trees.
Lev had a sudden desire to send a postcard from this place to his daughter Maya, to describe this night-limbo to her: the sodium sky, the trees unmoving, the glare of the pay-station, the people like people in an art gallery, helpless before the unexplained exhibits. But Maya was too young to understand any of this. She was only five. When morning came, she would take Ina’s hand and walk to school. For her lunch, she would eat cold sausage and poppyseed bread. When she came home, Ina would give her goat’s milk with cinnamon in a yellow glass and raisin cakes and rose-petal jam. She would do her homework at the kitchen table, then go out into the main street of Auror and look for her friends and they would play with the goats and chickens in the dust.
‘I miss my daughter already,’ Lev said to Lydia.
By the time the coach crossed the border between Germany and Holland, Lev had surrendered himself to it: to his own small space by the window; to the eternal hum of the air-conditioning; to the quiet presence of Lydia, who offered him eggs and dried fruit and pieces of chocolate; to the smell and voices of the other passengers; to the chemical odour of the on-board lavatory; to the feeling of moving slowly across wide distances, but moving always forwards and on.
Watching the flat fields and the shimmering poplars, the canals and windmills and villages and grazing animals of the Netherlands going past, Lev felt so peaceful and quiet that it was as if the bus had become his life and he would never be asked to stir from the inertia of this bus-life ever again. He began to wish Europe were larger, so that he could linger over its scenery for days and days to come, until something in him altered, until he got bored with hard-boiled eggs and the sight of cattle in green pastures and he rediscovered the will to arrive at his destination.
He knew his growing apathy was dangerous. He began to wish that his best friend, Rudi, was with him. Rudi never surrendered to anything, and he wouldn’t have surrendered to the opium of the passing miles. Rudi fought a pitched battle with life through every waking hour. ‘Life is just a system,’ Rudi often reminded Lev. ‘All that matters is cracking the system.’ In his sleep, Rudi’s body lay crouched, with his fists bunched in front of his chest, like a boxer’s. When he woke, he sprang and kicked away the bedclothes. His wild dark hair gleamed with its own invincible shine. He loved vodka and cinema and football. He dreamed of owning what he called a ‘serious car’. In the bus, Rudi would have sung songs and danced folk dances in the aisle and traded goods with other passengers. He would have resisted.
Like Lev, Rudi was a chain-smoker. Once, after the sawmill closed, they’d made a smoke-filled journey together to the distant city of Glic, in the deep, purple cold of winter, when the sun hung low among the bones of trees, and ice gleamed like a diamond coating on the railway lines and Rudi’s pockets were stashed with grey money and in his suitcase lay eleven bottles of vodka, cradled in straw.
Rumours of an American car, a Chevrolet Phoenix, for sale in Glic had reached Rudi in Auror. Rudi lovingly described this car as a ‘Tchevi’. He said it was blue with white and chrome trim and had only done two hundred and forty thousand miles and he was going to travel to Glic and see it, and if he could beat the owner down on the price, he was going to damn well buy it and drive it home. The fact that Rudi had never driven a car before didn’t worry him at all. ‘Why should it?’ he said to Lev. ‘I drove a heavy-lifting vehicle at the sawmill every day of my fucking life. Driving is driving. And with American cars you don’t even have to worry about gears. You just slam the stick into the “D-for-drive” position and take off.’
The train was hot, with a fat heating pipe running directly under the seats. Lev and Rudi had a carriage to themselves. They piled their sheepskin coats and fur hats into the luggage rack and opened the vodka suitcase and played music on a tiny, shrieking radio, small as a rat. The hot vodka fug of the carriage was beautiful and wild. They soon felt as reckless as mercenaries. When the ticket collector came round, they embraced him on both cheeks.
At Glic, they stepped out into a snow blizzard, but their blood was still hot and so the snow seemed delectable to them, like the caress of a young girl’s hand on their faces, and they stumbled through the streets laughing. But by then the night was coming down and Rudi announced: ‘I’m not looking at the Tchevi in the fucking dark. I want to see it gleaming.’ So they stopped at the first frugal guest-house they found and sated their hunger with bowls of goulash and dumplings and went to sleep in a narrow room that smelled of mothballs and linoleum polish, and never stirred till morning.
The sun was up in a clear blue sky when Lev and Rudi found their way to the Tchevi owner’s building. The snow all around them was thick and clean. And there it was, parked alone on the dingy street, under a solitary linden tree, the full extraordinary length and bulk of it, an ancient sky-blue Chevrolet Phoenix with white fins and shining chrome trim; and Rudi fell to his knees. ‘That’s my girl,’ he said. ‘That’s my baby!’
It had its imperfections. On the driver’s door, one hinge had rusted away. The rubber windscreen-wiper blades had perished to almost nothing in successive cold winters. All four tyres were worn. The radio didn’t work.
Lev watched Rudi hesitate. He walked round and round the car, trailing his hand over the bodywork, scooping snow from the roof, examining the wiper blades, kicking the tyres, opening and closing the defective door. Then he looked up and said: ‘I’ll take her.’ After that, he began to haggle, but the owner understood how great was Rudi’s longing for the car and refused to lower his price by more than a fraction. The Tchevi cost Rudi everything he had with him, including his sheepskin coat and his fur hat and five of the eight bottles of vodka remaining in the suitcase. The owner was a professor of mathematics.
‘I wonder what you’re thinking about?’ asked a voice. And it was Lydia, pausing suddenly in her new task, which was knitting.
Lev stared at her. He thought it was a long time since anybody had asked him this. Or perhaps nobody had ever asked him, because Marina had always seemed to know what was in his mind and tried to accommodate what she found there.
‘Well,’ said Lev, ‘I was thinking about my friend Rudi and the time when I went with him to Glic to buy an American car.’
‘Oh,’ said Lydia. ‘He’s rich, then, your friend Rudi?’
‘No,’ said Lev. ‘Or never for long. But he likes to trade.’
‘Trading is so bad,’ said Lydia, with a sniff. ‘We shall never make progress as long as there is grey trade. But tell me about the car. Did he get it?’
‘Yes,’ said Lev. ‘He did. What are you knitting?’
‘A sweater,’ said Lydia. ‘For the English winter. The English call this garment a “jumper”.’
‘A jumper?’
‘Yes. There’s another word for you. Tell me about Rudi and the car.’
Lev took out his vodka flask and drank. Then he told Lydia how, after Rudi had bought the Tchevi, he drove a couple of times round the empty streets of the apartment estate to practise being at the wheel, with the professor of mathematics watching from his doorway, wearing an astrakhan hat and an amused expression on his face.
Then Lev and Rudi set off home, with the sun gleaming down on the quiet, icy world and Rudi put on the car heater to maximum and said this was the nearest he would get to Paradise. The car engine made a low, grumbling sound, like the engine of a boat, and Rudi said this was the sound of America, musical and strong. In the glove-box, Lev found three bars of Swiss chocolate, gone pale with time, and they shared these between cigarettes, which they lit with the radiant car lighter, and Rudi said: ‘Now I have my new vocation in Auror: taxi driver.’
Towards afternoon, still miles from their village, they stopped at a petrol station, which consisted of one rusty pump in a silent valley, and a freckled dog keeping watch. Rudi honked the horn and an elderly man limped out of a wooden hut, where sacks of coal were on sale, and he looked upon the Tchevi with fear, as though it might have been an army tank or a UFO, and the freckled dog stood up and began barking. Rudi got out, wearing only his trousers and boots and checked shirt, and when he slammed the driver’s door behind him, the remaining hinge broke and the door fell off into the snow.
Rudi swore. He and the pump attendant gazed at this mishap, for which there didn’t seem to be any immediate remedy, and even the dog fell into a nonplussed silence. Then Rudi lifted up the door and attempted to put it back on, but though it went on all right, it wouldn’t stay on and had to be tied to the seat fixings with a frayed bit of rope, and Rudi said: ‘That fucking professor! He knew this would happen. He’s turned me over, good and sweet.’
Rudi stamped about in the snow, while the tank was filled with gas, because it was beginning to freeze again and Rudi had no coat or hat and the falling of the door had pricked his bubble of happiness. Lev got out and examined the broken hinges and said: ‘It’s just the hinges, Rudi. We can fix them, back home.’
‘I know,’ said Rudi, ‘but is the fucking door going to stay on the car for the next hundred miles? That’s my question.’
They drove on, brimming with petrol Lev had paid for, going west towards the sunset, and the sky was first deep orange, then smoky red, then purple, and lilac shadows flecked the snow-blanketed fields and Lev said: ‘Sometimes this country can look quite beautiful,’ and Rudi sighed and said: ‘It looked beautiful this morning, but soon we’ll be back in the dark.’
When the dark came on, ice formed on the windshield, but all the worn wiper blades would do was crunch over this ice, back and forth very slowly, making a moaning noise as they moved, and soon it became impossible to see the way ahead. Rudi drew the car to the side of the road and he and Lev stared at the patterns the ice had made and at the faint yellow glow the headlights cast on the filigree branches of the trees, and Lev saw that Rudi’s hands were trembling.
‘Now fucking what?’ Rudi said.
Lev took off the woollen scarf he was wearing and put it round Rudi’s neck. Then he got out and opened the trunk and took out one of the three remaining bottles of vodka from the straw and told Rudi to turn off the engine, and as the engine died the wiper blades made one last useless arc, then lay down, like two exhausted old people fallen end to end beside a skating rink. Lev wrenched open the vodka, took a long sip, then began pouring the alcohol very slowly onto the windscreen and watched it make clear runnels through the ice. As the frosting slowly vanished, Lev could just make out Rudi’s wide face, very close to the windshield, like a child’s face, gazing up in awe. And after that they drove on through the night, stopping to pour on more vodka from time to time and watching the illuminated needle of the petrol gauge falling and falling.
Lydia paused in her knitting. She held the ‘jumper’ up to her chest, to see how much further she had to go before casting off for the shoulder seam. She said: ‘Now I’m interested in that journey. Did you reach your home?’
‘Yes,’ said Lev. ‘By dawn we were there. We were pretty tired. Well, we were very tired. And the gas tank was almost empty. That car’s so greedy it’s going to bankrupt Rudi.’
Lydia smiled and shook her head. ‘And the door?’ she asked. ‘Did you mend it?’
‘Oh, sure.’ said Lev. ‘We soldered on new hinges from a baby’s pram. It’s fine. Except the driver’s door opens violently now.’
‘Violently? But Rudi still drives the Tchevi as a taxi, with this violent door?’
‘Yes. In summer, he has all the windows open and you can ride along with the wind in your hair.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t like that,’ said Lydia, ‘I spend a lot of time trying to protect my hair from the wind.’
Night was coming down again when the coach arrived at the Hook of Holland and waited in a long line to drive onto the ferry. No berths had been booked for the passengers of the bus; they were advised to find benches or deck-chairs in which to sleep and to avoid buying drinks from the ship’s bar, which charged unfair prices. ‘When the ferry arrives in England,’ said one of the coach-drivers, ‘we’re only about two hours away from London and your destination, so try to sleep if you can.’
Once aboard the boat, Lev made his way to the top deck and looked down at the port, with its cranes and containers, its bulky sheds and offices and parking lots and its quayside, shimmery with oil. An almost invisible rain was falling. Gulls cried, as though to some long-lost island home, and Lev thought how hard it would be to live near the sea and hear this melancholy sound every day of your life.
The sea was calm and the ferry set off very silently, its big engines seemingly muffled by the dark. Lev leaned on the rail, smoking and staring at the Dutch port as it slipped away, and when the land was gone and the sky and the sea merged in blackness he remembered the dreams he’d had when Marina was dying, of being adrift on an ocean that had no limits and never broke on any human shore.
The briny smell of the sea made his cigarette taste bitter, so he ground it underfoot on the high deck, then lay down on a bench to sleep. He pulled his cap over his eyes and, to soothe himself, imagined the night falling on Auror, falling as it always fell over the fir-covered hills and the cluster of chimneys and the wooden steeple of the school-house. And there in this soft night lay Maya, under her goose-down quilt, with one arm thrown out sideways, as if showing some invisible visitor the small room she shared with her grandmother: its two beds, its rag rug, its chest of drawers painted green and yellow, its paraffin stove, and its square window, open to the cool air and the night dews and the cry of owls …
It was a nice picture, but Lev couldn’t get it to stabilise in his mind. The knowledge that when the Baryn sawmill closed Auror and half a dozen other villages like it were doomed kept obliterating the room and the sleeping girl and even the image of Ina, shuffling about in the dark before kneeling to say her prayers.
‘Prayers are no fucking good,’ Rudi had said, when the last tree was sawn up and shipped away and all the machinery went quiet. ‘Now comes the reckoning, Lev. Only the resourceful will survive.’
2
The Diana Card
THE COACH PULLED in to Victoria at nine in the morning and the tired passengers stepped off the bus into the unexpected brightness of a sunny day. They looked all around them at the shine on the buildings, at the gleaming rack of baggage carts, at the dark shadows their bodies cast on the London pavement, and tried to become accustomed to the glare. ‘I dreamed of rain,’ said Lev to Lydia.
It felt very warm. Lydia’s half-finished jumper was stowed in her suitcase. Her winter coat was heavy on her arm.
‘Goodbye, Lev,’ she said, holding out her hand.
Lev leaned forward and put a kiss on each of Lydia’s mole-splashed cheeks and said: ‘May you help me. May I help you.’ And they laughed and started to walk away – as Lev had known they would do – each to a separate future in the unknown city.
But Lev turned to watch Lydia, as she hurried towards a line of black taxis. When she opened the door of her cab, she looked back and waved, and Lev saw that there was a sadness in this wave of hers – or even a sudden, unexpected reproach. In answer to this, he touched the peak of his leather cap, in a gesture he knew was either too military or too old-fashioned, or both, and then Lydia’s taxi drove away and he saw her looking determinedly straight ahead, like a gymnast trying to balance on a beam.
Now Lev picked up his bag and went in search of a washroom. He knew that he stank. He could detect an odd kind of seaweed stench under his checked shirt and he thought, Well, this is appropriate, I’m beached here now, under this unexpected sun, on this island … He could hear planes roaring overhead and he thought, Half the continent is headed this way, but nobody imagined it like it is, with the heat rising and the sky so empty and blue.
He followed signs to the station toilets, then found himself barred from entering them by a turnstile. He put down his bag and watched what other people did. They put money into a slot and the turnstile moved, but the only money Lev had was a wad of twenty-pound notes – each one calculated by Rudi to last him a week, until he found work.
‘Please may you help me?’ said Lev to a smart, elderly man approaching the stile. But the man put in his coin, pushed at the turnstile with his groin and held his head high as he passed through, as though Lev hadn’t even come within his sightline. Lev stared after him. Had he said the words incorrectly? The man didn’t pause in his confident stride.
Lev waited. Rudi, he knew, would have vaulted over the barrier, without a second’s pause, untroubled by what the consequences might be, but Lev felt that vaulting was beyond him right now. His legs lacked Rudi’s inexhaustible spring. Rudi made his own laws and they were different from his and this would probably always be the case.
Standing there, Lev’s longing to be clean increased steadily as the moments passed. He could feel stinging pains here and there on his skin, like sores. Sweat broke on his skull and ran down the back of his neck. He felt slightly sick. He took out a cigarette from an almost empty pack and lit it, and the men coming and going from the washroom stared at him, and those stares drew his attention at last to a No Smoking sign stuck onto the tiles a few feet from where he stood. He drew in a last sweet breath from the cigarette and ground it out under his feet and he saw then that his black shoes were stained with mud and thought, This is the mud of my country, the mud of all Europe, and I must find some rags and wipe it away …
After some time, a young man, wearing overalls, unshaven and carrying a canvas bag of tools, approached the washroom turnstile and Lev decided that this man – because he was young and because the overalls and the work-bag marked him as a member of the once-honourable proletariat – might not pretend that he hadn’t seen him, so he said as carefully as he could: ‘May you help me, please?’
The man had long, untidy hair and the skin of his face was white with plaster-dust. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’
Lev indicated the turnstile, holding up a twenty-pound note. The man smiled. Then he rummaged in the pocket of his overalls, found a coin, handed it to Lev and snatched the note away. Lev stared in dismay. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, please …’
But the young man turned, went through the barrier and began to walk into the washroom. Lev gaped. Not a single word of English would come to him now and he cursed loudly in his own language. Then he saw the man coming back towards him with a smile that made dark creases in the white dust of his face. He held the twenty-pound note out to Lev. ‘Only joking,’ he said. ‘Just joking, mate.’
Lev stood in a toilet stall and removed his clothes. He took an old striped towel from his bag and wrapped it round his waist. He felt his sickness pass.
He went to one of the washbasins and ran hot water. From a seat by the entrance, the elderly Sikh washroom attendant stared at him with grave, unblinking eyes under his carefully wound turban.
Lev washed his face and hands, tugged out his razor and shaved the four-day stubble from his chin. Then, careful to keep the threadbare towel in place, he soaped his armpits and his groin, his stomach and the backs of his knees. The Sikh didn’t move, only kept staring at Lev, as at some old motion picture he knew by heart, which still fascinated but no longer moved him. The feel of the warm water and the soap on Lev’s body was so soothing he felt almost like crying. Reflected in the washroom mirrors, he could see men glancing at him, but nobody spoke and Lev soaped and scrubbed at his body until it was pink and tingling and the sea-stench was gone. He put on clean underpants, then washed his feet and stamped on the towel to dry them. He took socks and a clean shirt from his bag. He ran a comb through his thick grey hair. His eyes looked tired, his clean-shaven face, gaunt in the cold light of the washroom, but he felt human again: he felt ready.
Lev repacked his things and went towards the door. The Sikh was still motionless on his hard plastic chair, but then Lev saw that near him was a saucer and that it contained a few coins – just a few, because people here were apparently in too much of a hurry to bother with a tip for an old man with bruised eyes – and Lev felt troubled that he had no coin to put in the saucer. After all the soap he’d used and the amount of water he’d splashed onto the floor, he owed the attendant some small consideration. He stopped and searched in his pockets and found a cheap plastic cigarette lighter he’d bought at the bus depot in Yarbl. He was about to put this in the saucer when he thought, No, this Sikh man has a job and a chair to sit on and I have nothing, which makes every single thing I own too precious to give away to him. Lev’s thinking in relation to the tip he was refusing to give grew more sophisticated when he told himself that the Sikh appeared so unmoved by everything that went on around him that he would therefore certainly be unmoved by a paltry cigarette lighter. And so Lev walked away and out through the turnstile, heading for the sunshine and the street, and he imagined that the Sikh wouldn’t even bother to turn his head to give him a reproachful stare.
Where the buses pulled in and drove out, Lev paused. Long ago – or it seemed long ago to him – when he’d booked his seat on the Trans-Euro bus, the young girl in the travel office had said to him: ‘On your arrival in London, you may be approached by people with offers of work. If these people come to you, do not sign any contract. Ask them what work they are offering and how much they will pay and what place they will find for you to sleep in. Then you may accept, if the conditions appear right.’
In Lev’s mind, these ‘people’ resembled the policemen of cities like Yarbl and Glic, heavy types with muscled forearms and healthy complexions and hand-guns slung about their anatomy in clever places. And now Lev began hoping they would appear, to take from him all responsibility for the next few days and hours of his life. He didn’t really care what the ‘work’ was, as long as he had a wage and a routine and a bed to lie in. He was so tired that he felt almost like lying down where he was, in the warm sunshine, and just waiting until someone showed up, but then he thought that he didn’t know how long a day was, a summer day in England, and how soon afternoon and evening would arrive, and he didn’t want to find himself still on the street when it got dark.
People arrived and departed in buses, taxis and cars, but no one came near Lev. He began to walk, following the sun, very hungry suddenly, but devoid of a plan, even a plan for getting some food. He passed a coffee shop, and the smell of the good coffee was tempting, but though he hesitated on the pavement outside the place, he didn’t dare go in, worrying that he wouldn’t have the right denomination of money for the food and coffee he desired. Again, he thought how Rudi would have mocked this pathetic timidity and gone bounding in and found the right words and the right money to get what he wanted.
The street Lev was in was wide and noisy, with red buses swaying along close to the kerb and the stench of traffic spoiling the air. There was no breeze. On a high building he saw flags hanging limp against their poles and a woman with long hair and a gauzy dress standing at the pavement’s edge, silent and still, as if a figure in a painting. Planes kept passing overhead, embroidering the sky with garlands of vapour.
Lev turned left off the crowded boulevard and into a street where trees had been planted and he stood in the shade of one of these trees and put down his bag, which felt heavy now, and lit a cigarette. He remembered that when he had started to smoke, all those years ago, he had discovered that smoking could mask hunger. And he’d remarked on this to his father, Stefan, and Stefan had replied: ‘Of course it does. Didn’t you know this till now? And it’s much better to die from the smoke than to die of hunger.’
Lev leaned against the tree. It was a young plane tree. Its patterning of shade on the ground was delicate and precise, as though nature were designing wallpaper. Stefan had ‘died from the smoke’, or from the years and years of sawdust at the Baryn mill, died at fifty-nine, before Maya was born, long before Marina fell ill or the rumours of closure began to circulate in Baryn. And all he’d said at the end, in his frail voice, like the breaking voice of an adolescent boy, was: ‘This is a rotten death, Lev. Don’t go this way, if you can help it.’
A sudden spasm of choking assailed Lev. He threw away his cigarette and drank the last dregs of vodka from his flask. Then he sat down on the iron grating that circled the plane tree and closed his eyes. The feel of the tree on his spine was comforting, like a familiar chair, and his head fell sideways and he slept. One hand rested on his bag. The vodka flask lay on his thigh. Above him, a nesting sparrow came and went from the tree.
Lev woke when someone touched his shoulder. He stared blankly at a fleshy face inside a motorcycle helmet and at a bulging belly. He’d been dreaming about a potato field, about being lost in the enormity of the field, among its never-ending troughs and ridges.
‘Wake up, sir. Police.’
The policeman’s breath smelled stale, as though he too had been travelling without rest for days on end. Lev attempted to reach into his jacket pocket to produce his passport, but a wide hand seized his wrist and now gripped it with fearsome force.
‘Steady on! No tricks, thank you kindly. Up you get!’
He pulled Lev roughly to his feet, then pinioned him against the tree, giving his ankle a nudge with his boot to force his legs apart.
The vodka flask clattered to the ground. On the policeman’s hip, his radio made sudden, violent sounds, like the coughing of a dying man.
Lev felt the policeman’s free hand move over his body: arms, torso, hips, groin, legs, ankles. He held himself as still as he could and made no protest. Some far-away part of his brain wondered if he were about to be arrested and sent back home and then he thought of all those unending miles to be covered and the shame of his arrival in Auror with nothing to show for the pain and disruption he’d caused.
The radio coughed again and Lev felt the iron grip on his arm relax. The policeman faced him square-on, standing so close to him that his fat belly nudged the buckle of Lev’s belt.
‘Asylum-seeker, are you?’