The Road Home Read online

  Andy picked up his beer. He seemed about to walk away, but then he stopped and looked at Lev’s hand, tensed around the tenpound note. “You buying for Sophie?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Lev.

  “We all love Sophie,” he said. Lev waited for the thing that would follow—some instruction or warning—but it didn’t come. Andy just held his gaze for a moment longer, then walked away. Lev looked back at where Sophie was standing, talking to Sam again, and he thought that Sam’s miniature hats were ridiculous objects and that they would never make a woman look beautiful, no woman in the world.

  Lev paid for the vodkas and put the change into his jacket pocket, but he didn’t move from the bar. He tipped the ice out of his drink, and drank the vodka neat, leaning hunched over on the bar counter. He knew that, thanks mainly to Christy Slane, his loneliness had diminished in recent weeks, but now he felt it return as something else, as a feeling of inadequacy and rage. He longed for a cigarette. At his back, rough tides of laughter pushed at him and threatened to knock him down. He could feel the hard floor of the pub through a hole in his shoe. He had a desire to spit and see a gob of his own saliva arrive on the polished surface of the bar. Imagining this gob, this mark of himself, he suddenly heard his name spoken. Without turning, he saw Sophie arrive at his side. She took up her glass of vodka and poured tonic into it, took a sip, and put the glass down.

  He didn’t want to look at her. He wanted to stay folded inside his own fury. Then he felt her soft hand on his neck, and the hand pulled his head toward her face, and he saw her mouth open and waiting and let himself be steered toward it. The kiss Sophie gave him was a violently sexual thing, and Lev felt her teeth clamping against his, trying to lock him to her, bone on bone.

  In his rage and loneliness, he could have held her to him, could have let his arm go round her waist, let himself feel her breasts against his chest. But he didn’t do this. He resisted. He broke away from Sophie and walked out of the pub.

  Now he was alone in his room in Belisha Road. Below, in the scuffed garden, the dog was whining.

  Lev sat on his bed, smoking, staring at the plastic shop and its welcoming sign, HI! MY STORE IS OPEN. Then he got down on his knees and opened the shop door. Inside, a plastic storekeeper, a figure with a black mustache, was wearing a long Hessian overall, tied round his waist. On his face was a cheery smile, and he held out his hands, palm upward, in a gesture of innocence.

  Lev examined the miniature wares on the counter: cans of soup, sacks of flour and sugar, boxes of matches, tins of boot black, and he saw that this was a shop out of some past time, like the shops that existed in Baryn long ago, before the war, when Stefan and Ina were children and wore wooden shoes. Lev held the storekeeper tenderly in his hand for a moment or two, then replaced him behind his counter, where he immediately fell over. He left him lying there and closed the shop door.

  Lev lay down on his narrow bunk. He longed to sleep. He wished his mother were there to bring him one of her homemade sleeping drafts and smile her crooked smile. He thought about the poinsettia flowers and Ina’s rare expression of joy when she’d caught sight of them on the morning of her sixty-fifth birthday. Then he thought about being a boy in Auror and holding Ina’s hand as he walked to school, going all the way there with his head tipped back, marveling at the speed of clouds as they unraveled across the blue sky. “Lev!” Ina would scold. “For pity’s sake, look where you’re going.”

  He got up and began a letter to her. The dog outside in the garden kept whimpering as the night grew colder.

  Dear Mamma,

  I am sending with this letter another £20 for you. I miss you and Maya very much. Tonight I would like to be home with you in Auror, where life is simple. Here, it is so difficult to keep my balance. I am never sure what anybody is thinking about me or what I am really thinking about them.

  I hope the goats are safe and none have been stolen. With this £20 please make sure you have all you need for the winter. Please send me a picture of Maya wearing the coat I sent. Ask Rudi to take it with his Kodak.

  I am still working in the restaurant kitchen. Now I ask the chefs how they put together certain dishes and I watch G. K. Ashe when I can. I am going to try to make some of these Ashe recipes and become a fine cook! I think this could be useful in my life somehow.

  One of the good things I can tell you about the GK Ashe kitchen is that there is no waste. All the chicken carcasses and meat bones and the stalks and ends of vegetables and onions are boiled for stock (which the chefs call “bouillon”) and I admire this. Also, the taste of the bouillon is very good. But there is waste left on the plates by the clientele. One of my jobs is to scrape all the uneaten food into the bins, and every night at least one bin is almost full to the top, and then I take out the plastic sacks and put them onto the street and sometimes I’m troubled by this. Sometimes it is difficult for me to leave the sacks there.

  9

  Why Shouldn’t a Man Choose Happiness?

  THE ENGLISH WINTER began to bite. The rowan trees of Belisha Road, lopped in their flowering by the council chain saw, appeared black and dead. Frost quietened the mornings. Christmas lights flickered and swung in the rising winds of the dark afternoons. Waiting for his night bus, Lev sat hunched inside his anorak, with his hands deep in his pockets and the hood pulled over his forehead, and saw that, in this attitude, he was regarded by other people with terror.

  At work, Sophie seldom spoke to him now. Her station was just behind Lev’s sinks, and now and again he would turn and watch her, but her head always stayed lowered. Bright light fell onto the lowered head, onto the soft cap and the red curls escaping from it.

  And Lev knew that he wasn’t indifferent to this sight. He watched Sophie’s hands, paring, peeling, coring, scraping, dicing. He saw how dexterous these hands were and how, in her, there seemed to be nothing that was programmed for illness or death. Often, he found himself thinking about the kiss. He wanted to break the silence between them, but he didn’t know how.

  He asked Christy Slane’s advice. Christy was trying out a new cream for his eczema, and his nose and cheeks were slathered green.

  “I’m the wrong person to consult,” he said. “I see now that I’ve never understood women at all. Never ever. I understand mad March hares better than I understood my own wife. If you ask me, the lot of them belong on the fucking moon.”

  Christy was drinking more as Christmas neared. He told Lev that on Christmas Day he was going to take three sleeping tablets and not wake till it was over. He said, “The thought of Frankie opening her stocking with Myerson-Hill kills me dead.”

  Lev stared at the green cream on Christy’s face. Then he said, “I have good idea. You listening to me, Christy? We make Christmas meal here for Frankie. Pierre will tell me a nice sauce for turkey. And stuffing. I can do this.”

  Christy looked at Lev tenderly. His bloodshot eyes glistened, momentarily, with the threat of tears. “You’re a good man, Lev,” he said.

  “Why not do this?” said Lev. “Make everything nice here for Frankie?”

  “Well, for starters, because her mother wouldn’t let her come. Not in a million years. But it was a fine thought. I’m glad I’ve got you as my lodger. I was lucky there. If we had any money, we could get on a plane and spend Christmas in your village, eh?”

  “We can’t do that . . .”

  “I know we can’t, but I still think it’d be grand. Rudi could meet us at the airport. I’d get to ride in the Tchevi. And we could pack up the plastic shop and take it to Maya.”

  Christmas. Lev saw how it advertised itself on every street and seemed to preoccupy every mind. He saw its daze and worry everywhere in people’s eyes. He understood how Christy, in particular, felt it as a coming ordeal—an armada of sufferings he felt unable to endure. As day followed day, he seemed to subsist on a diet of fret and anxiety, unleavened by the smallest gulp of happiness.

  In his free time, Lev walked the streets of the West End, amon
g the litter and the chivvying crowds and the slow-moving buses, staring at the brightness of everything, looking for a present to send to Maya. In his country toys were quiet things—objects that looked forgotten before they’d been bought. Here, they screeched and flashed from shop windows in vengeful colors, parading huge price tags. Even the boxes in which they were housed appeared expensive.

  “Ah, forget bloody Oxford Street and Regent Street,” Christy advised. “Go to one of the charity shops in Camden. They have homemade kinds of things there. Much better for a little girl than some battery-charged velociraptor.”

  But in the charity shop, Lev felt stifled. He crept around, coughing, among old women pushing limp garments along dented rails. The place smelled of worn shoes and chewed-up books. The ugly fluorescent lighting reminded him of run-down stores in Baryn. The few soft toys he found there were hand-stitched in felt and had no life in their faces. He wanted his daughter to be amazed by his Christmas gift.

  He came out into Camden Market, bought wrapping paper decorated with silver penguins from a stallholder chewing gum to keep his face from freezing in the bitter morning air. When Lev got home to Belisha Road, he unrolled the paper and let the penguins stretch across his floor. He lit a cigarette and looked at them and began to remember Christmases in Auror. He remembered how, during the Communist years, when Christian ceremony was banned, Ina would nevertheless defy authority by getting out a worn gold icon and setting it up on the wooden beam above the fireplace and putting candles round it.

  On Christmas morning she would kneel there and say her prayers aloud, and she would show Lev how to put his hands together and stay very still beside her while she asked Jesus and His mother, Mary, to bring the family better times. Stefan let his wife do this, without comment or protest. In later years, when Lev worked alongside his father at the Baryn mill, Stefan had once observed to his son, “I’ve always let your mother pray. I don’t believe in all that Jesus superstition, but who knows? Suppose it’s true, after all? Then Ina’s prayers could be like an insurance for me, eh? They could get me through the narrow gate.”

  And when Marina died, Ina tried to comfort everybody with the idea that Lev’s young wife was in Paradise. Marina’s photograph stood on the beam, next to the icon, and Ina’s candles cast a golden light on her. “She’s there,” Ina would whisper. “She’s with God, Lev. I know it. Every fiber of my being tells me that Marina is in Heaven.”

  These days, religious practice was permitted again. At Christmas-time, Ina laid branches of fir in a corner of the room and wrapped small gifts in crepe paper: wooden toys for Maya, gloves or scarves for Stefan and Lev. The Baryn yard let its workers have the day of the Christian festival off. (The chief supervisor of the mill was a grand adulterer and he liked to cram his atonement for the year’s sins into the twenty-four hours of a family Christmas—the better to carry on with his affairs when the new year dawned.)

  Ina would kill a goose and cook it with rosemary and chestnuts, and Stefan would open a bottle—or two—of his best vodka, and the day would slide peacefully toward darkness and sleep. It was a kind of dying, Lev remembered. A surrender. As though, once the senses had been stilled to this deep rest by rich food and heavy drinking, no morning would intrude on them ever again. And when that morning did come, glaring white at the small windows, the three grown-up occupants of the house—the three left alive—staggered out of their beds in astonishment. They felt like Lazarus.

  Lev found Maya’s present at last. It cost more than the money he sent home each week. It was a doll that resembled a living baby. This baby gurgled, and opened and closed its eyes, and could be made to wet its diaper. It was dressed in a romper suit and lived in a soft basket under a pink woolen blanket, with its head on a white embroidered pillow. Already Lev could imagine Maya cradling it. She would lay it down to sleep beside her and comfort it with gentle orders and instructions.

  For his mother, Lev found a pair of American steel wire cutters for her jewelry-making and a box of scented soap. And when these presents were wrapped up in the silver penguins and posted, he felt a sudden lightness of heart. He was proud that he’d been able to afford such well-made things.

  At the beginning of Christmas week, Lydia telephoned. She sounded very unhappy. She told Lev that Pyotor Greszler’s concert program in England had come to an end and that he’d gone home. She’d looked for other translation jobs, she said, but hadn’t found anything. But she’d become embarrassed about staying on so long with Tom and Larissa in Muswell Hill, so she was working au pair now for a rich family in Highgate. She said, “This job is not at all the same as the other. Maestro Greszler respected me. Here, in this household, I am nothing.”

  She said she had a Christmas present for Lev. She asked him to meet her on Sunday morning in Waterlow Park, not far from where she worked. She said, “I will show you this place, where I often walk. I like it very much. It is quite green and quiet and sometimes they hang sculptures in the trees. Then we could go for a cup of coffee in Café Rouge.”

  Lev said, “I have no present for you, Lydia. I spent my last money on a doll for Maya.”

  “Oh,” said Lydia, “I didn’t expect you would have anything. But we’re still friends, aren’t we? We’re the kind of friends who could go for a walk in the park. Or am I wrong?”

  Lev could hear the agitation in Lydia’s voice. He thought of her face with its mud-splash of moles, smiling and flushed in the bar of the Festival Hall, then grave with vexation as he stumbled out, along the row of furious concertgoers. He felt that he was destined always to disappoint her.

  “Of course we’re friends . . .” he said.

  “Well then,” said Lydia. “Waterlow Park is quite small. Come at eleven o’clock and I’ll find you there.”

  He did as she instructed. This was the other odd thing about Lydia, he reflected, as he trudged up Swains Lane, with his dented London A–Z in the pocket of his anorak: he always obeyed her—until something happened which made it necessary for him to flee. He thought that he obeyed her because the journey on the coach had bound him to her. It was a peculiar bond, a bond fabricated from hard-boiled eggs and English words rehearsed aloud and the fields of Europe fleeing past the window. It was a bond that should have been broken by now, but wasn’t.

  She stood on a swath of muddy grass, a lone figure in a red coat against a lightless December sky. When she saw him coming toward her, she waved wildly, as though summoning rescue. This made Lev smile: the girlishness of it, the unconscious desperation. He kissed her cheeks, pink with cold. She touched his face. “Your hair is quite long now,” she said.

  She put her arm inside his and they set off across the grass toward a gnarled tree. Hanging from its branches were large colored shapes, made of papier-mâché and painted brown and red and yellow. They were light enough to be moved by the wind. They moved silently, sometimes turning on their strings.

  “See?” said Lydia. “Do you like this? I think it is quite original.”

  “What are they meant to be?” asked Lev.

  “Oh,” said Lydia, “you can’t ask that question anymore, Lev. Those kinds of questions belong to the old era. Art is just itself these days. These shapes are themselves, as you are you and I am me.”

  Lev looked at the tree. It irritated him. It reminded him of the trees behind Auror where Stefan used to hang up his spirit rags. He noticed that the objects had been painted the color of autumn leaves. He thought the wintry tree would look far more beautiful without the hanging man-made things, but he said nothing. They stood and watched the moving shapes, and a brown mongrel ran up to them and sniffed them. Lydia knelt down and patted it. She said, “I would like a dog. Some little creature to love me.”

  She then steered Lev toward a shrubbery where the holly trees, bright with berries, had been draped with bolts of scarlet cloth. She said, “I am happy in this park. I don’t know why. I think it is because there is a mind at work here. A mind that is full of surprises. Don’t you like what th
ey have done with this holly?”

  Lev looked at the cloth. He was indifferent to it. He felt indifferent to all that was untrue. Behind him, somewhere, he could hear a tennis game start up and he envied the players. He thought how, in his life in England, he never ran anywhere anymore, but only stood at his sinks or crept into bus shelters or wandered the streets with slow steps, like the steps of an old man. And this realization wounded him the more because he knew suddenly—as he stood and stared at the shining holly so ridiculously festooned—where he wanted to run to. He stood very still, gazing at the ground. Then he pulled free of Lydia’s arm and fumbled for a cigarette. He’d shocked himself with his thoughts. He felt his hands shaking.

  “Lev,” said Lydia, “are you all right?”

  He lit the cigarette. He inhaled the smoke deeply and waited for it to calm him.

  “Lev . . .” Lydia said again.

  “I’m okay,” he said, “but it’s cold here. It feels like snow. Shall we go to the café?”

  “Oh,” said Lydia, “I had been planning a nice walk before the light goes. See, there is a little sun now. That will warm you. Let’s make a tour of the park.”

  He let himself be led, smoking all the while. The sunlight came and went and the clouds above London darkened. The sounds of the tennis game grew faint. They skirted a pond, where a few ducks swam in pairs. Lev threw his cigarette into the water and began to walk faster, so that Lydia had to skip to keep up with him. He wondered whether his heartbeat was audible to her as he pounded along. But he didn’t care whether it was or whether it wasn’t. It was his heart. Its blood beat in his ears. He was a man and he knew that he had decided, on this Sunday in December, to come alive again. He wanted to run now—this moment, without hesitating—to where she lived. He’d known her address by heart for weeks, memorized it off Damian’s staff contact list, knowing that one day he’d need it. He needed it now. He was a man and she’d kissed him and now it was time . . .