22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [27]
When she woke, the pillows were plumped under her head and beside her, swaddled in a blanket, was her son.
She studied his face. He kept his eyes tight shut, his eyelids creased and purple, as if he didn’t want to see what the world had to offer him. A feeling of awe crowded her lungs and took her breath away. She felt suddenly afraid of the silent creature in her arms. It was such a tiny thing, a screwed-up, boiled red scrap of a beginning, but she knew its strength; that the love she felt already for this stranger could undo her entirely. Was she capable of looking after him? She thought of her mother and the losses she had suffered. What if her son died like her brothers had? What if he were to be ill?
‘Can you take him?’ she asked the woman.
‘Take him?’
‘I don’t know how to care for him. Please. It’s for the best. Take him. I can’t be his mother.’
‘That’s enough of this nonsense,’ said the doctor, coming between Silvana and the woman. He put a hand on Silvana’s forehead. ‘This is your son. He needs you.’
‘Will he live?’ Silvana grabbed the doctor’s sleeve. ‘If there’s something wrong with him I want to know now. I need to know he’ll live …’
‘The boy is well and so are you. All he needs is a good feed.’
But Silvana wanted answers. She tried to push the child into the doctor’s arms.
‘I need to know he’s healthy. My brothers died. It’s in my family. Boys in my family … Please tell me if there’s something wrong with him.’
And then the baby opened his eyes. He unfurled his fists, moving them as though dragging them through water, a drifting movement like pondweed in a slow river. She put her finger against his palm and he closed his own fingers around it. She stroked his face, took off his swaddling clothes and counted his tiny toes. She kissed the soft dip of his skull.
‘My darling,’ she whispered, and was embarrassed by her outburst. How could she have been so crazy? It was obvious. Her life was always going to be about this child. In that room, with the day turning into evening, Silvana lifted the child to her breast and he started to suckle, surprising her with the strength of his grip. She didn’t know how long she stayed like that, but when she looked up again, Janusz was standing beside her.
‘Can I hold him?’
She held the baby out, though in her heart she was unwilling to give him up.
‘So I have a son,’ said Janusz, his face full of surprise.
Silvana felt her body relax. Perhaps her mother’s bad luck was not going to pass itself on to her. She’d done it. She had given birth to a healthy baby boy.
‘Aurek,’ said Janusz, grinning. ‘We’ll call him Aurek, after my father.’
‘Can I have him back?’ she asked, and closed her eyes with pleasure as the weight of her child filled her arms once more.
Janusz
‘Franek, why don’t you go and catch us a chicken?’ said Bruno, smacking at the boy’s head with his army cap. ‘I’m starving.’
‘I might catch a goose or two,’ Franek said. ‘I could eat a bear, the way I feel.’
‘Don’t touch the geese,’ said Janusz. ‘Leave them alone. A chicken will be fine.’
Janusz had invited the two men to share a meal with him. He was still trying to make sense of how the weeks had passed so quickly since he had been at the cottage. He watched Franek lope outside and begin running around the yard after the chickens.
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘He’s a child,’ said Bruno. ‘A child in a man’s body. He joined up with his elder brother when he should have stayed at home. He wasn’t bright enough to go to school, but he was good on the family farm. That’s where he should have stayed. He’s not a soldier. He did all right with us until the Russians came across the border. They just kept rolling past. Hundreds of them. We knew we couldn’t fight them, but Franek went running up to one of them, yelling and shouting, telling them Poland would always be free. Nearly got himself killed. Tomasz – his brother – wanted to escape