Part 12 (1/2)

'A week or so ago. I saw your lady wife out shopping.'

'I was busy,' Silvana replies. 'I didn't have time to stop.'

'Next time, I insist you come and have a look at the pet shop.'

'All right,' she says. 'I will.'

Tony turns to Ja.n.u.sz. 'What a lucky chap you are, having a wife who takes such good care of you.'

Tony laughs and Silvana blushes. Ja.n.u.sz leans back on his elbow, pleased to see his wife looking happy for once. He stops himself from reaching out to her. Even though she is right there beside him, Ja.n.u.sz feels she has become distant from him. Further away from him than the blue sky above.

Poland

Silvana

When the spring came, the farmer told Silvana and Hanka he couldn't risk hiding them any longer. He looked nervous, as if afraid the women might make a fuss. Hanka shrugged and said it was time they were moving on in any case.

The farmer gave Silvana a pair of boots and Aurek a blanket. His wife handed them a parcel of food for the journey and told them never to come back or she would see to it herself that the Germans would find them.

It was May when they left, and the sun had started to dry out the muddy roads and meadows. Walking away from the farm, Silvana watched Aurek toddling ahead of her. He had grown and his baby curls were gone, revealing a thick head of hair as straight and dark as summer shadows. The sun tanned him and the boy looked happy, gambolling down the road, chasing b.u.t.terflies and dancing this way and that.

They camped near a river and washed their clothes in the water, drying them on the bank in the suns.h.i.+ne.

'My necklace,' Silvana said, putting her hand to her throat. She was sitting naked on the riverbank. Hanka had told her nudity was glorious and she was trying to show that she believed her, although all she wanted was to put her clothes back on.

'My gla.s.s pendant. It's gone.'

'That old weasel back at the farm,' replied Hanka. She stroked Silvana's neck. 'He will have stolen it for his wife. You can't trust peasants with anything. Do you want me to go back for it? I'll get it for you.'

'No,' Silvana said. 'No. It's gone.'

Hanka made a daisy chain and gave it to her.

Silvana put it on and felt grateful once again for her friend's kindness.

'Here,' she said. She held out her fur coat. She wanted to give Hanka something, a gift for her friends.h.i.+p, and she had nothing else to give. 'You should have this.'

'Really?' Hanka slipped it round her shoulders, stroking the fur.

She gave Silvana her greatcoat in exchange. That afternoon, Hanka walked up and down the riverbank in the fur coat, head held high, like a model. She didn't seem to notice the matted, dried bloodstains in the fur and the rips where the silk lining showed through.

'I thought about stealing it off you anyway,' Hanka admitted. 'Fur doesn't suit you. You're too thin to wear it.'

They sat together on the riverbank.

'We'll go back to Warsaw,' Hanka said. You can come to the Adria club where I used to sing with the Henryka Golda orchestra. I'll take you dancing. You can hear me sing and I'll show you how to dress properly. Pearls! We'll have pearls and diamonds!'

Silvana laughed. 'But what would I do?'

'Do? You could sing. Learn to dance. Use that body of yours.'

Silvana shook her head. 'I don't think I can really go to Warsaw.'

'You don't want to come with me?'

Silvana remembered the soldier in the apartment, the smell of rain on his clothes and the bruises he left on her thighs.

'Hanka, I can't.'

Hanka threw off the fur coat and lay down in the sun.

'All right,' she said. 'We won't go.' Then she turned on her side so that Silvana was left staring at her pale, naked back.

Silvana went to sleep under the stars that night. It was too early in the year for the mosquitoes to bother them, and she snuggled close to Hanka. Maybe she could go back to Warsaw? The soldier might be long gone. And she could change her name. Aurek's too. She imagined taking the boy to Warsaw's zoo to see the elephants. And the park where he could sail a boat on the lake. Then she thought of Ja.n.u.sz, and grief darkened her thoughts. Was he still alive? She shut her eyes. Everything was too complicated.

She woke when it was still dark with a warm feeling, as though she were lying between silk sheets. It was the joy of feeling Hanka's arms around her. She drifted back to sleep imagining it was Ja.n.u.sz holding her.

The next morning she sat up and realized she was alone with the boy. Beside her something glinted in the sun: her gla.s.s pendant. She picked it up, held it to the sunlight and watched the colours within it s.h.i.+ne. She looked around for Hanka, but she was nowhere to be seen.

All day Silvana waited. The sunlight thickened in the late afternoon and turned the light golden. Swarms of insects came down from the treetops and spun black clouds over the river. The sun sank onto the horizon, glowing red, its burning light turning the trees to silhouettes. Silvana knew Hanka wasn't coming back.

Silvana was still sitting by the river the next day when a man walked up the footpath towards her. He was tall with high cheekbones, a chiselled nose and a wide mouth. Silvana grabbed Aurek and stood up.

'Good morning,' he said, and his voice was pleasant, laced with a Russian accent. He held out his hand and Silvana took it.

'Gregor Lazovnik,' he said. 'Call me Gregor.'

Ja.n.u.sz

Sometimes Ja.n.u.sz believed they would never survive the winter. The weather was vicious, always chasing them, attacking, soaking and freezing them. The next safe house was outside a small town with a long street running through it and rows of wooden houses shuttered up against the winter. Dirty s...o...b..nks pressed up against windows and covered the road; walking was difficult, the three of them stumbling through undisturbed deep snow.

The house was hidden in a copse of birch trees: a three-storey clapboard property with wooden carved balconies. Milk churns and tin buckets and wicker baskets dusted with snow cluttered the front door. A tall man with a thick beard and greying hair took them in. His name was Ambrose and he helped them out of their coats and checked their cold-nipped faces and fingers for signs of frostbite.

'We're going to get you into Yugoslavia. From there, you'll get a boat to France. You'll have to be careful, of course. If anybody finds out who you are, you'll be arrested. But we'll get you through, don't worry. My G.o.d, but you men look hungry. Come on, we'll eat.'

In a kitchen filled with copper pots and baskets of herbs, Ambrose made them sit at a wooden table and gave them vodka, boiled fish heads and a hot meaty gruel that Ja.n.u.sz thought the most delicious he had ever tasted. Even when it gave him the s.h.i.+ts that night, and he ran out into the snow too many times, unbuckling his belt and dropping his trousers, he still wished he could eat more of the hot stew.

The next day they walked along the edge of a frozen lake, hunting deer with Ambrose, rifles slung over their shoulders. A thick fog was coming in across the lake, rolling towards them over the ice. Ja.n.u.sz watched Franek play with the hunting dogs that trotted obediently beside them all. They were rough-coated, long-snouted dogs that nipped at each other's heels and wagged their tails so busily they knocked shards of silver frost into the air like tiny snowstorms everywhere they went. The boy looked as happy as the dogs at his side, and Ja.n.u.sz wondered if it wouldn't be better to leave him here in this remote village where surely he would be safe until the end of the war.

'I had a dog like this one,' said Franek, stroking a big orange hound that beat its tail enthusiastically beside him. 'My brother gave him to me.'

He stopped patting the hound and looked at Bruno, his face suddenly serious. 'I want to see my dog. When are we going home?'