22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [62]
She hears Janusz stirring in the bed beside her.
‘What have you been doing?’
Silvana starts at the sound of his sleepy voice.
‘I was having a cup of cocoa. I didn’t mean to wake you.’
She pulls her blankets around her and shuts her mind to the letters. They hurt her too much to think about.
‘Janusz? They sent me home. I lost my job.’
Silvana turns on the bedside lamp.
Blinking in the light, Janusz looks hungover, his eyes bleary, his hair standing up in tufts. He asks her to turn off the light.
‘You never liked the job anyway,’ he says. ‘We’ll talk about it later. I have to sleep now.’
Silvana listens to Janusz’s breathing settle. She thinks of Tony. The way he looked at her when he gave her the dictionary, the touch of his fingers against her cheek. Her hand rests on her chest and, slipping it inside her nightdress, she cups her breast, fingers tracing circles over the nipple. She’s come this far. Her goals for the rest of her life are clear to her: marriage, motherhood, this house. A third of the rest of her life for each of these. With these thoughts turning in her mind, she buttons her nightdress, sinks back onto the pillow and lets sleep pull her into the darkness of her dreams.
Poland
Silvana
Gregor was a handsome man who knew it. Long-limbed and lean, he wore a tailored tweed suit under a long trench coat and a mustard-coloured scarf tied tightly round his long neck. He said he was a doctor. He’d worked in Russia, living in backwood villages in the Urals, miles from any towns. He was a znakhar, a practitioner of folk medicine. He had a small group of people with him now: three women and a man. The first day Silvana joined them, Gregor instructed her to look out for anthills. The old man with him suffered from arthritis.
‘I need to find the ants that build their hills up out of the ground. If you find them we have to gather the nests whole. The secretion the ants use in nest-building is excellent as a cure for crippling diseases.’
‘He knows what he’s talking about,’ said one of the women to Silvana. ‘He saved my baby.’ She stroked her stomach. ‘It’s early days. I’m just eight weeks, but I’m as sick as a dog already. I come from a village fifty or so miles north of here. I met Gregor a few weeks ago. I was bleeding and he gave me medicine that stopped it. Now look at me. I’m fine. He’s an amazing man.’
Her name was Elsa. She had a round, freckled face framed by a thick bob of dark, shiny hair. Her eyes were large and long-lashed and her lips plump and given to pouting. She followed Gregor everywhere. When she was too tired to move from the camp she sat and watched for him.
There was an old couple. He was fond of complaining of the cold, rubbing his bald head and making jokes about needing a haircut. She was wide-hipped, loose-skinned, her hair plaited and piled on top of her head like grey sausages. She took charge of cooking whatever Gregor brought them. The rest of the time she fussed over her ailing husband.
The last was a dark-haired woman called Lottie. Silvana called her the pianist. She wore her hair in a tight bun and had elegant hands which she stared at for long periods at a time.
Gregor showed Silvana how to use a knife to skin animals and how to set traps, and she was surprised how quickly she learned to survive in the trees.
‘Here,’ he said, handing her a dead rabbit the first time they went hunting. ‘Don’t be afraid. Take one of my knives and I’ll show you what to do.’
They were deep in the forest, among bracken and thorny brambles.
Silvana nodded. She had already skinned rabbits with Hanka when they overwintered at the farm. She would show this man she knew just what to do. She took the knife he offered her, a short-handled, stubby hunting knife. Aurek crouched beside her.
Gregor smiled at her, as if she was his favourite student.
‘Start at the hind legs. We want to