22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [56]
Silvana laughed. ‘But what would I do?’
‘Do? You could sing. Learn to dance. Use that body of yours.’
Silvana shook her head. ‘I don’t think I can really go to Warsaw.’
‘You don’t want to come with me?’
Silvana remembered the soldier in the apartment, the smell of rain on his clothes and the bruises he left on her thighs.
‘Hanka, I can’t.’
Hanka threw off the fur coat and lay down in the sun.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘We won’t go.’ Then she turned on her side so that Silvana was left staring at her pale, naked back.
Silvana went to sleep under the stars that night. It was too early in the year for the mosquitoes to bother them, and she snuggled close to Hanka. Maybe she could go back to Warsaw? The soldier might be long gone. And she could change her name. Aurek’s too. She imagined taking the boy to Warsaw’s zoo to see the elephants. And the park where he could sail a boat on the lake. Then she thought of Janusz, and grief darkened her thoughts. Was he still alive? She shut her eyes. Everything was too complicated.
She woke when it was still dark with a warm feeling, as though she were lying between silk sheets. It was the joy of feeling Hanka’s arms around her. She drifted back to sleep imagining it was Janusz holding her.
The next morning she sat up and realized she was alone with the boy. Beside her something glinted in the sun: her glass pendant. She picked it up, held it to the sunlight and watched the colours within it shine. She looked around for Hanka, but she was nowhere to be seen.
All day Silvana waited. The sunlight thickened in the late afternoon and turned the light golden. Swarms of insects came down from the treetops and spun black clouds over the river. The sun sank onto the horizon, glowing red, its burning light turning the trees to silhouettes. Silvana knew Hanka wasn’t coming back.
Silvana was still sitting by the river the next day when a man walked up the footpath towards her. He was tall with high cheekbones, a chiselled nose and a wide mouth. Silvana grabbed Aurek and stood up.
‘Good morning,’ he said, and his voice was pleasant, laced with a Russian accent. He held out his hand and Silvana took it.
‘Gregor Lazovnik,’ he said. ‘Call me Gregor.’
Janusz
Sometimes Janusz believed they would never survive the winter. The weather was vicious, always chasing them, attacking, soaking and freezing them. The next safe house was outside a small town with a long street running through it and rows of wooden houses shuttered up against the winter. Dirty snowbanks pressed up against windows and covered the road; walking was difficult, the three of them stumbling through undisturbed deep snow.
The house was hidden in a copse of birch trees: a three-storey clapboard property with wooden carved balconies. Milk churns and tin buckets and wicker baskets dusted with snow cluttered the front door. A tall man with a thick beard and greying hair took them in. His name was Ambrose and he helped them out of their coats and checked their cold-nipped faces and fingers for signs of frostbite.
‘We’re going to get you into Yugoslavia. From there, you’ll get a boat to France. You’ll have to be careful, of course. If anybody finds out who you are, you’ll be arrested. But we’ll get you through, don’t worry. My God, but you men look hungry. Come on, we’ll eat.’
In a kitchen filled with copper pots and baskets of herbs, Ambrose made them sit at a wooden table and gave them vodka, boiled fish heads and a hot meaty gruel that Janusz thought the most delicious he had ever tasted. Even when it gave him the shits that night, and he ran out into the snow too many times, unbuckling his belt and dropping his trousers, he still wished he could eat more of the hot stew.
The next day they walked along the edge of a frozen lake, hunting deer with Ambrose, rifles slung over their shoulders. A thick fog was coming in across the lake, rolling towards them over the ice. Janusz watched Franek play with the