22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [19]
Despite his vow to return to Warsaw, he felt compelled to stay. He would do something useful here in this dead woman’s home. He washed and bandaged his head wound with a strip of cotton sheet he found in the wooden chest, then he lit the fire in the hearth and cooked himself some potatoes.
The next day, he fed the geese and cleaned out the filthy henhouse. After that he walked around, noting the other jobs to be done. Every day he worked. He swept the yard and mended broken fences. He cleaned the two-room cottage and laid down branches of rosemary from the vegetable patch across the floors, to sweeten the air.
At night he slept in the chair by the hearth and dreamed of Silvana. By day he kept busy. He wanted to make things right. He didn’t ask himself any questions. He organized and tidied and brought in vegetables from the garden.
Out at the back of the cottage, hidden by a thicket of elder trees, he found an overgrown grassy mound marked with a birch-wood cross. The cross was worn and old, silvered by the weather to a pitted grey. There was no name, no way of knowing who was buried there. He sat down beside it, thinking of the old woman, her body still under the tree where he had left it, and felt weighed down by a loneliness that made his mouth taste bad and his eyes itch with salty tears.
There’d been an old woman in his small town, a bent creature with a downy beard of grey that had the local kids laughing till their sides split. She was crazy, spitting and swearing whenever they taunted her. His father had explained to him once, when Janusz and a group of boys had thrown stones at her windows just to see her come out screaming, that the old lady was lonely. His father had sat him down and said the word cautiously, as if it was an improper word to use in front of his son.
‘Loneliness is a disease anybody can catch. When your grandfather died in the war against the Bolsheviks, your grandmother caught the disease. She died of it when I was just a boy.’
‘But she had you,’ Janusz had replied. How could his grandmother have been lonely if she had children?
‘You can be lonely in the biggest crowd,’ said his father, and Janusz looked up at his steady face, settled in its white starched collar like an egg in an eggcup, not sure whether his father was telling him now about himself or his grandmother. Was it just that all the grown-ups in the world were lonely? That when he grew up he’d get the disease too?
‘She didn’t have her husband,’ continued his father. ‘That was what destroyed her.’ He sighed, stood up and patted Janusz on the shoulder. ‘Now, stop tormenting that old woman. One day you might be lonely and you’ll regret your behaviour here today.’
Janusz looked again at the unmarked grave. He knew what he had to do. He found some fencing wood in the log pile and, with a ball of twine, strapped a new piece of wood to the old, until he had the cross standing more or less upright. Then he set to, chopping back and clearing away the elder trees until he was so tired he could only stagger back to the house and sleep.
Janusz mended the water pump in the yard. He found a pot of whitewash and decided to repaint the window frames. Some days he just sat in the yard and watched the geese, thinking of his son and wife all those miles away and trying to work out how he had managed to become so lost and why he quite liked this numb state and this anonymous place. Over the weeks he lost track of time until finally one morning he woke up and realized he still had one more thing to do.
He started at dawn the following day, digging a hole beside the unmarked grave. By the time the afternoon threw long shadows across his back, the hole was deep enough. He drank a cupful of water from the pump in the yard, lit the fire in the hearth, took a blanket from the dowry box and went