22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [6]
‘I expect we’ve both changed … but it doesn’t matter,’ he says, trying to sound relaxed. ‘We’re still the same people inside. Time doesn’t change that.’
Even as he says it, he knows he is lying. She does too. He can see it in her eyes. The war has changed all of them. And Silvana’s hair is not just short. It has turned grey.
Poland, 1937
Silvana
The very first time Silvana saw Janusz he was swimming. It was late spring in 1937 and all about was a feeling of listlessness, as if the sudden appearance of the sun had turned the town into a child that wanted only to play in the streets all day. Silvana had finished her afternoon shift at the Kine cinema where she worked as an usherette. The daylight was always surprising to her after the dark interior of the cinema, and she stood on the pavement feeling the breeze playing with her skirt hem, the sunlight stroking her cheek. She was eighteen years old and all she knew was that she didn’t want to go home just yet. That to walk in the sun, though she had nowhere to go, was preferable to the damp silences that would creep over her the moment she entered her parents’ small cottage.
She wandered down the tree-lined main street, past the square with its water fountain and tall, crumbling houses, and took a dusty path into the shadows of the red-brick church and the presbytery. Once past those solid buildings she left the shade behind, the sunlight leading her down the road out of town. A few hundred yards ahead was her parents’ one-storey wooden house, painted the same blue as the other peasant cottages that surrounded the town. Silvana stopped and stepped off the road into an apple orchard. It had once belonged to her family but her father had sold it. He worked on other people’s farms now, gathering wood, harvesting, whatever the season asked of him. The trees were loaded with white petals, big clouds of blossom, the grass under the trees soft and wildly green. A scene of ripenings and hopes. She stood in the dappled light and breathed in deeply, knowing that whatever happened to her in life, wherever she went – and she hoped it would be far away from this small town – she would always love this place.
Silvana took a footpath towards the river, glancing back at the cottage. Her mother Olga would be in the kitchen, drinking the vodka she distilled in the cow barn, the clear fiery liquid made from sugar beet or horseradish or, in a poor year, onions and elder. Yes, she thought. Her mother would be drunk, surrounded by all the hapless creatures she collected: kittens climbing her skirts; puppies tumbling at her feet and chewing on the table legs; the nests of blind rabbit kittens, wingless chicks and solitary leverets that she fed every hour and nursed as she had once nursed her own dying sons.
She was known among her neighbours as a good woman who had not had things easy, having a difficult daughter to bring up. Silvana knew there was some truth in that: she had been a hard child, was still tough and inflexible, but no harder, she always believed, than her own mother had been to her. And then there were her brothers. The three boys born before her who had failed to grow up. Her mother’s little princes caught in their infancy, who had blinked and whimpered through her childhood. Silvana knew their stories off by heart.
Her father Josef had started whittling a wooden rattle when his wife first fell pregnant. He’d used a piece of cherry wood from the orchard, and somehow that wood had brought bad luck down on them. He was not a talented carver in any case. By the time the child was born, the rattle was only half finished. When the child died at three months, around the same time the potato crop failed, Josef carried on carving the rattle. He didn’t notice the knife sinking into his thumb, making a gaping wound that bled and bled. When Silvana was young she liked to hold his thumb, run her finger along the jagged seam of his scar and hear the story of how he got it.