22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [115]
‘No,’ says Silvana. ‘We should wait.’
‘Wait for what?’
‘For the right time,’ she replies.
Aurek takes his fingers out of his ears. He knows he won’t have a pet. His mother is not happy by the sea. The right time is never going to come.
Poland
Silvana
In the summer heat, Silvana threw off her clothes. She smeared pine sap on their bodies to keep the mosquitoes away and made circles of rowan branches around their camp to keep the soldiers out. The charm worked. There had been fewer of them since she’d been doing this.
Sometimes she lay down in a spot where the sun hit the forest floor and felt it moving across her. Ants crawled around her, big black lines of them, and she heard their legs clicking, jointed bodies rustling as they hurried. She could hear a beetle in leaf mould, its jaws crunching. Woodlice crawling under tree bark sounded like someone grinding their teeth against her cheek. The drone of a fly hurt her ears.
She was turning to wood. Her body hard as oak, skin as thin as the papery strips of silver-birch bark she and the boy ate in winter. Sometimes she imagined being an old woman, dying with only a tiny view of the sky through the branches. If someone found her, they’d knock on her arms and realize she was solid.
Maybe they’d make something out of her. A coffee table, a blanket box perhaps. She was certain that within her body were the rings of her life like a tree. The lean years, the healing growth circling her broken heart in fat bands.
She let her hand follow the sun’s path across her ribs, her sunken stomach, her hollow thighs. She knew herself, understood herself. She had no need for any wider knowledge but the moment. She felt the heartwood of her oaken body like a lump in her throat.
Aurek danced in the sunbeams around her, leaping through dappled light, catching the dust that circled them. His head was getting too big for his body. His belly was a balloon of thin-skinned air. His arms and legs were branches, thin sticks. Her tree man. Forest sprite.
‘Come here,’ she said, sitting up. ‘Come here.’
She settled him on her lap and lifted her breast to his lips. He closed his eyes and she rocked him. For hours she sat, letting him suckle. When her milk stopped flowing, he pulled on her nipple until she cried out with the sharp pain of it, but still she held him, his eyelashes fluttering against her skin. A faint tingling, deep within her, began to burn in her breasts and the milk flowed again. Aurek lay back in her arms and smiled, a slack-jawed, squinting kind of smile, as though the sun dazzled him. Silvana pressed his face to her breast again.
‘You and me,’ she whispered. ‘We’re not dead yet.’
Janusz
Janusz sat in a gloomy Nissen hut in north Wales listening to the rain on corrugated iron. Rows of barrel-shaped huts rose like burial mounds out of the earth. He and the other Poles called them beczki śmiechu, barrels of laughs. The huts had small windows punched into their frames, and the wind blew through the ill-fitting glass. Outside, in the wet mud, glistened the tyre patterns of bicycles leading out of the field onto the road beyond. Janusz sat. Waiting for Bruno.
Spring rain had soaked into muddy fields of emerald green and the hedgerows were white with blossom. If the rain didn’t stop soon, it was going to flood the camp again. As it was, a thin layer of dirty water lay on the wooden floors. A drip of water splashed on his face, and then another. The roof was leaking again. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette and dropped the butt onto the floor, where it sank with a fizzle into an inch of water.
All he was concerned about was the state of his chilblains and what bloody awful food the cook might be serving. He looked at his watch. Bruno would be back from duty that afternoon and Janusz wanted to go to the village pub with him.
‘Not a chance,’ Bruno had said when Janusz asked him if he wanted to stay on in the RAF. ‘Sign on for another five years? Not a chance.