22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [18]
Silvana looked around the tiny flat. She finally had her own home.
Janusz jumped onto the kitchen table. ‘Can you climb up here? I want to show you the view. I’ll hold you tight, I promise.’
Through the skylight window it was possible to see the tops of the trees in the park.
‘It’s wonderful,’ she breathed, the table rocking slightly under their weight. ‘The city is wonderful.’
‘We have a fine view. The best in Warsaw, I’d say.’
He helped her down and handed her a present wrapped in gold paper.
‘Here. My wedding present to you.’
It was a necklace. A silver chain with a disc of coloured glass hanging from it, a small circle of blue no bigger than a one-grosz piece. Within the blue was a tree made of tiny circles of green and gold glass.
‘It comes from Jaraslaw, where the best glass and crystal comes from. It’s a tree. To remind us of our … of the first time we … That day in the woods …’
‘I remember,’ said Silvana. She held the little pendant up to the light, and the tree sparkled. She had a new life now with a man she loved. And she was free from her parents and her ghostly brothers at last.
Silvana loved the city from the moment she arrived. It felt alive and vibrant. The city women had short hair and wore tiny veiled hats, velvet cloches or berets perched on the back of their heads. They even walked differently. They took up more space on the pavements and led with their chins. Silvana, dressed in a straw hat and country clothes, led with her belly.
Janusz bought her a book, An Album of Film Land: A Pictorial Survey of Today’s Movie Stars. In the Café Blikle, where she ate Viennese pastries every morning at eleven, Silvana pored over the sepia images of actresses and actors, her fingers tracing high cheekbones and smooth skin, arched brows and Cupid’s-bow lips. Finally, she walked into a glass-fronted hairdresser’s shop and held out her book.
Her long chestnut hair was cut off, curls corkscrewing on the wooden floor. Silvana looked at recurring images of herself in the bevelled mirrors. She copied the other women in the salon, turning her head this way and that, nodding her approval while the hairdresser swept the piles of hair on the floor into a dustpan.
At home, undressing in the cramped bedroom of their flat, in front of an oval mirror, a pink satin slip straining over her stomach, Silvana looked at herself. She tossed her head back, her short bob shining. She was nineteen years old and thought she knew all there was to know about the world.
Janusz
The cottage was made of split logs, unpainted except for the tiny windows, whose frames were white. A rat-ruined thatch roof, like a hat pulled down at the brim, gave the building a dark, squat look. It was a simple peasant home, shabbier than some, not worse than others. What Janusz’s father would call a ‘one-acre starveling’s dwelling’.
Janusz had seen it from the brow of a hill, and walked down in the hope of finding someone who could tell him which way to get back on the road to Warsaw. He knocked but there was no response. He walked around the cottage several times and finally opened the front door, stooping to step inside.
There were two rooms with pressed clay floors, one with a blackened fireplace, a kitchen table and chair. Potatoes were stored in a wicker basket by the door. The only decorations in the room were some handmade paper icons, carefully cut and folded forms representing different saints, lined up along the windowsill. They were yellowed by age and thick with dust.
The other room had a long bench against the wall, on which a cat and kittens slept. In a corner he found a decorated wooden chest with linen and blankets inside. A dowry chest painted with bouquets of flowers and small birds. Something a young girl would be given by her family on her wedding day. There was nothing else except the mildewed smell of poverty and loneliness.
In the yard, geese honked and chickens waded through thick layers of goose shit,