The Road Home Read online

  Reproaching himself for his laziness, his thoughtlessness toward Ina, Lev walked in the direction of a riverside stall selling souvenirs and cards. The stall was shaded by the pillars of a tall bridge, and Lev felt suddenly cold as he moved out of the sunlight. He stared at the flags, toys, models, mugs, and linen towels, wondering what to buy for his mother. The stall holder watched him lazily from his corner in the shadows. Lev knew that Ina would like the towels—the linen felt thick and hard-wearing—but the price on them was £5.99, so he moved away.

  Slowly, he turned the rack of postcards, and scenes from life in London revolved obediently in front of him. Then he saw the thing he knew he would have to buy: it was a greeting card in the shape of Princess Diana’s head. On her face was her famous heartbreaking smile, and in her blond hair nestled a diamond tiara, and the blue of her eyes was startling and sad.

  Buying the Diana card exhausted Lev. As he slouched back into the sunshine, he felt spent, lame, at the end of what he could endure that day. He had to find a bed somewhere and lie down.

  He made a decision and he knew it was reckless, but he felt incapable of doing anything else: he hailed a taxi. He was almost surprised when it stopped for him. The cabbie was small and old, with stringy gray hair. He waited patiently for Lev to speak.

  “Bee-and-bee, please,” said Lev.

  “Eh?” said the cabbie.

  “Please,” said Lev. “I am very tired. May you take to bee-and-bee.”

  The cabbie scratched his head, dislodging the few ancient strands of hair that lay over his scalp. “Nothing I know of round here. Only reliable ones I know are in Earls Court. That okay for you?”

  “Sorry?” said Lev.

  “Earls Court,” said the cabbie loudly. “Off the Earls Court Road. All right?”

  “Right,” said Lev. “Take, please.”

  He got into the cab and lay back on the wide, comfortable seat. He could see the cabbie staring at him in his driver’s mirror: staring as he drove. Outside the taxi window shimmered London, a show city, with no memory of war. From time to time, Lev thought he recognized a building he’d seen in one of the slides shown to the English class in Yarbl, but he wasn’t sure. All he could feel was the onrush of the English day, time hastened by the moving traffic and the hurrying people, and the sun appearing and disappearing behind roofs and towers.

  The landlady of the Champions Bed and Breakfast Hotel introduced herself to Lev as Sulima. She was about fifty. She wore a sari and her skin was the color of olive bread, and her lips were glossy and crimson, and her voice seemed sweet to Lev, courteous and slow.

  He followed her along a clean, carpeted landing to room 7, and she showed him in.

  “My last room,” said Sulima. “You are lucky. All rooms have shower and coffee-making facilities. There is your TV. This room is a little dark, as it looks out onto the flats, but you will see that it is quiet. You will sleep very well.”

  Lev nodded. His eye rested on the narrow bed with its wooden headboard and its two clean pillows.

  Sulima smiled at him. “How many nights do you wish to stay?” she asked.

  Lev understood the question, but he didn’t know what to answer. He set down his bag.

  “One night?” said Sulima. “Two nights?”

  “How much is cost?” asked Lev.

  “Twenty pounds for the room. Twenty-two pounds with breakfast.”

  Twenty pounds. Twenty-two pounds . . .

  Lev sighed, damning Rudi for miscalculating the money question so disastrously. “One night,” he said.

  “You would like breakfast in the morning, sir?”

  Lev hesitated. He wondered what breakfast would be and whether he would have the stomach to eat it. The hot dog still flamed inside him, as though his belly were filled with greasy gas.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Sulima was switching on lights, placing the remote control of the TV on the bedside table, and Lev saw that she moved in an elegant and unobtrusive way. She smoothed the bed. “Well, you can let me know about breakfast. Just phone Reception. You want an alarm call?”

  “Sorry?” said Lev.

  “Wake-up call?”

  Lev shrugged. He had no idea what Sulima had just said, but she seemed to understand, through that smile of hers, what he was feeling, that he was beyond answering any more questions, that his human frame was about to fall. She handed Lev his key and went quietly away.

  Now that he had a bed at last, Lev sat down on it and was able to put off for a while longer the sweet moment of closing his eyes. He took off his jacket and laid out the money remaining in his pocket and tried to count it, but his mind seemed set against doing any kind of sum. He just sat and stared at the unfamiliar coins until his eye suddenly rested on a piece of torn and crumpled paper he’d brought out from his pocket with the money. He didn’t recognize it. He picked it up and unfolded it and saw a few words scrawled on it in his own language.

  Dear Lev, I have enjoyed this journey. May I wish you luck. If you should ever need a translator, here is my number where I am staying with my friends in North London. I shall help you if I can.

  Sincerely yours, Lydia.

  Lev stared at the note. He wondered when Lydia had decided to write it—decided to put it into the pocket of his leather jacket! And he smiled fondly. It was the kind of secret thing a lover might do. Yet he suspected that nothing of this sort had been in Lydia’s mind. She was simply an affectionate person, a little lonely perhaps, but moved by kindness, not by sex, and with a sensibility delicate enough to tell her that, in all probability, Lev would never telephone the number, never risk the small percentage of compromise such a phone call would entail. Yet Lev didn’t throw away the piece of paper. He put it into his wallet and, as he did so, thought with tenderness of Lydia’s knitting and of her dimpled white hands and the hard-boiled eggs she ate with such conspicuous care, so that no morsel of egg, no shard of shell, was dropped onto her skirt or down onto the carpeted floor of the bus.

  Lev moved slowly to the window of his room and looked out. The sun was obscured by the back of a high building, and only a few feet from the window was a grimy flat roof, along which a pigeon was wandering.

  “Pigeons,” Stefan had once said, “carry the soul of the countryside into the city: the souls of trees and wood sprites. The souls of the dead of the forest.”

  “Who are the ‘dead of the forest’?” Lev had asked his father.

  “Those who have suffered,” Stefan had replied. “Doesn’t the past of our country have any meaning for you?”

  Lev had got up and walked away from this conversation. He’d hated it when Stefan put him down, as he’d so often chosen to do, and the old man’s talk of “wood sprites” always infuriated and embarrassed him. He knew that Stefan hung “spirit rags” in the trees behind Auror: he’d seen them dangling there, pathetic offerings to the dead. Lev had shown them to Rudi and said, “Look at those. My father and his generation! I’m fed up with them. Their heads are in a complete fucking muddle.”

  “True,” Rudi had answered, staring at the strips of cloth. “History got them at an impressionable age.”

  Lev now stared at the pigeon, at its wine-colored legs, its little jerking head. Stefan was one of the “dead of the forest” now, buried in an overgrown plot behind Auror, where firs and ash trees were seeding themselves anew. But Lev seldom visited him. He knew Ina went there and sometimes took Maya with her, and in summer they would return home with armfuls of wild marguerites, and Maya would tell Lev, “We saw that place where Grandpappi is sleeping.” Lev had half intended to go before he left for England, to say a kind of goodbye to his father, but in the end he had stayed away. And it had been easy to stay away. It had been easy to dismiss such a visit as pointless, sentimental ritual. Yet, seeing the pigeon on the flat roof now, it was nevertheless Stefan who immediately came into Lev’s mind, and at once he could see him clear as sunlight, sitting on his hard chair at Baryn, with his half-eaten heel of s
alami, tearing bread with his stained hands, dabbing at his droopy mustache with his kerchief. And he knew that Stefan was part of the reason he was here in London, that he’d had to defy in himself that longing of his father’s to resist change, and he thought, I should feel grateful that the sawmill closed, or I’d be exactly where he was, immortal on a chair. I’d be enslaved to a lumber yard until I died, and to the same lunch each day, and to the snow falling and drifting, year on year, falling and drifting in the same remote and backward places.

  Now the bed received his bones.

  It was already afternoon. Lev lay unmoving, half covered by the sheet and blanket, in a sleep too heavy for dreams.

  He emerged once from this torpor, just to stagger to the toilet and piss away the cola in a clean bowl that smelled of boiled sweets and to note that the sky was darkening over London and that a few lights had come on in the block of flats opposite. He ran water in the washbasin and drank and caught the sound of laughter along the passage.

  The bed was as comfortable as any he’d ever slept in, and he tried not to think about the cost of it, but only about his good fortune to be lying there, with the city settling down around him for its momentous night and the woman called Sulima sitting, quiet and contained, in the hall, keeping watch.

  He put on a shaded bedside light and momentarily fell into the habitual pattern of wondering—as he had in Auror—how long the electricity would remain before some self-satisfied engineer in the Yarbl power station flicked a switch to divert it elsewhere. Maya once asked him, “Why do the lights always go out, Pappa?” but Lev couldn’t now remember what he’d replied. Something about there being too little light to go round? Something about the need to share? Who knows? But he did remember that, drunk one night, and thrown into the familiar, fumey darkness of Rudi’s house, he’d heard himself say, “Power cuts are deliberate. There’s plenty of juice. They just like to spoil our evenings.”

  Rudi’s wife, Lora, wearing her nightclothes, had come into the room where they drank. She was carrying the stub of a lit candle in a cracked saucer, and she put it down among the empty vodka bottles and went away again, without a word, and Rudi said, “Lora’s a very nice woman. One day, she’ll find a good husband.” And then they sat, laughing, either side of the flickering candle, laughing until their stomachs cramped, laughing a drunken, silent, inexplicable laugh, which felt as though it were going to have no end.

  Lev closed his eyes again. The light behind his eyelids was the color of chocolate, and he knew that sleep would be like this, velvety and dark, and that it would last until morning.

  3

  “A Man May Travel Far, but His Heart May Be Slow to Catch Up”

  Hello, Mamma, hello, Maya. Here is Princess Diana for you. I am safe. Weather is quite hot. I am going to find a job today. XXX Lev/Pappa.

  LEV SAT IN Sulima’s tidy dining room, drinking tea and writing his card. He was alone there. The tea was comforting and strong, and he remembered how Rudi, who, as a young man, had been in prison for two months, had told him that, in the Institute of Correction in Yarbl, tea was the prime currency traded by the inmates, and he thought how in their youth—his and Rudi’s—the world had still contained small corners of innocence, like air pockets in a ship that was going down. At the open window, net curtains swayed in a warm breeze. On the wall above him, near a gaudy picture of a tiger, the hands of a wall clock moved silently on. It was just after tenthirty-five.

  Lev had showered and washed his hair. His body felt clean yet heavy, as though on the surface it was young but its sinews were those of an old man. He pictured this old man walking the hot London streets, trailing his heavy bag, trying to talk to strangers, pretending he was willing and strong, ready for any work, a person of many skills . . .

  Sulima appeared through the plaster arch that led to her hallway. “You want more tea?” she asked pleasantly.

  Sulima was wearing a different sari today, the color of opals, the color of the gray-green river. Between the sari bodice and its skirt, the bulge of her midriff was smooth and golden. She stood and looked at Lev and his Diana card, and then she sat down opposite him and said, “I try to help people who come from overseas. I was helped when I arrived here. I was given a job as a chambermaid in a hotel called The Avenues. Very hard work. Cleaning and cleaning. And everything just-so: pelmet top dusted, edge of the toilet paper folded under. You know?”

  Lev had no idea what a pelmet top was, or why toilet paper might have to be folded, but he nodded just the same. Sulima moved away his breakfast plate. The sausage was half eaten, but the egg and bacon hadn’t been touched. Lev pulled out his cigarettes, took the last one from the packet, and lit it. Sulima passed him a glass ashtray.

  “You have a wife and family?” she asked.

  Lev took a pull on the cigarette, turned his head away from Sulima as he blew out the smoke. “My wife died,” he said.

  Sulima put a hand to her mouth, and Lev saw in this gesture the reaction of a much younger woman, of a child even, who’d been brought up to show repentance whenever she said something inappropriate or wrong. To help her out of her discomfort, he pointed at the picture of the tiger and said, “My daughter, Maya. Age of five years. Loves animals.”

  “Yes?” said Sulima.

  “Yes. Says to me sometimes, ‘Pappa, this pig is sad, this goose is tired.’ ”

  “Yes? Really?”

  “This tiger. She might say, ‘He is angry.’ ”

  Sulima stared at Lev. She blinked nervously and her smooth hands began to arrange and rearrange her hair. Outside in the street, Lev could hear the traffic grinding slowly by.

  “For Maya,” he said, “I must find work.”

  Sulima cleared her throat and said, “The Avenues Hotel exists no more. Alas, or I could send you there. It is a gym now. Everybody pedaling to save their hearts. But for work you should try in the Earls Court Road. Food outlets of every kind. Always in need of staff.”

  “Yes?” said Lev.

  “I think that is the first place you should try.”

  “Court Road?”

  “Earls Court Road. Out of this front door. Turn left, then right, then left. I am very sorry about your wife.”

  So here he was now, lugging the bag, in the dirty, shimmering street. The thing he most longed to buy was a pair of dark glasses.

  The words of the Yarbl teacher of English came to him as he walked: “When you ask for work, try to be polite. Our people are a proud people. We do not grovel, but neither are we rude. So say, for instance, ‘Excuse me for troubling you. But do you have anything you could give me? I am legal.’ ”

  Do you have anything you could give me? These words were difficult to remember, let alone say. And Lev was finding it hard, each time he ventured into a shop or stood at a fast-food counter, to say anything at all. In a newsagents’, a dimly lit old-fashioned place, he was filled with a sadness so sharp he could hardly breathe. So he said nothing, except to ask for Russian cigarettes, and the fat girl behind the counter picked her nose and stared at him like a lunatic.

  “Russian?”

  “Yes. Russian or Turkish.”

  “Nah. You won’t find them. Not round ’ere.”

  In a pizza parlor that felt cool, with ceiling fans turning slowly among pinpoints of bright light, Lev waited near the door until a young waiter approached him. “Smoking or non?”

  Smoking or non.

  “Do you have anything you could give me?” Lev said, managing the difficult phrase correctly this time. “I am legal.”

  “Sorry?” said the waiter.

  “No, excuse me. I am looking for work. Excuse me to trouble you.”

  “Oh right,” said the young man. “Right. Well, hang on.”

  Lev watched the waiter walk away and disappear behind a door marked Staff Only. The place was almost empty and other waiters stood aimlessly about, wearing white shirts and red bow ties, staring at Lev. The noise of the ceiling fans reminded Lev of the old ice rink at Baryn,
where he and Marina used to skate, holding on to the backs of chairs, and where the freezing air smelled of disinfectant.

  When the young waiter returned, he said, “Sorry. Uh . . . the manager’s popped out.”

  “Popped?” said Lev.

  “Yes. Out. But there’s nothing at the moment. No jobs. Sorry.”

  “Okay,” said Lev.

  The bag was beginning to bother him. Not just its heaviness, but the sight of it, containing as it did all that he’d brought with him of his former life. He imagined that somehow its contents were visible to all, and that his pitiful possessions would be derided. He had a further worry about it. Every time he set it down, the vodka bottles clanked together, and this was embarrassing, as though he were an inept gray, telling the world what he had to sell. He wished he’d asked Sulima if he could leave the bag at Champions B&B. But he was stuck with it now, as though it were part of his body.

  He came to a skip parked in the gutter and noticed that among planks of wood, stained mattresses, and piles of rubble a quantity of rusty metal had been thrown. Lev stopped and put down the bag and stared at the scrap metal and imagined what such a find would mean to Ina and how the tin would be hammered and beaten so fine it could be cut and shaped with small clippers, like fingernails. “Rust is beautiful,” Ina often said. “Rust does my work for me. Rust makes everything delicate in time.”

  Lev leaned on the edge of the skip. Anxiety about Ina was something from which he’d always suffered, even as a child, noticing that, somehow—in a way that he couldn’t describe precisely—his mother appeared ghostly, as though, in the race through life, she was an entrant nobody had seen and who crept in last, always last, with worry in her eyes. Lev often wished this wasn’t so, but it was so. And now, for years, Ina had spent her days making jewelry for other women, women for whom one didn’t have to feel any particular sorrow, women with confident smiles and fashion boots, women who smoked and laughed and defied the world. Ina had never defied the world. She sat in shadow in a wood cabin, lit by a paraffin lamp that whispered like a living and breathing thing, and her workbench was covered with metal shavings and lengths of copper wire, and her hands were burned here and there by the hot torch and the soldering irons, and as time wound on her eyesight was becoming poor. Lev knew that nobody wanted to think about the day when that eyesight failed.