22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [7]
It was after the death of their second son that Olga began drinking the vodka she made to sell to other peasants. Josef still hadn’t finished the rattle. He had sold the fields by then and only worked in his orchards.
‘It can’t happen three times,’ he said to Olga. ‘We’ll try again.’
After the third child died, Olga knew the rattle must be cursed. She buried it in the garden, wrapped in a lock of her hair to ward off evil. Josef dug it up one moonless night and hid it in the unused cot. He went to his wife and told her they would try again for a child.
Cold as an unlit oven, Olga barely looked at the daughter she gave birth to a year later. Silvana Olga Valeria Dabrowski. Josef believed the curse had been broken. He finished the rattle, polished it, tied a ribbon to its handle and gave it to his healthy, strong-minded daughter.
But Olga couldn’t forget her baby boys. She kept their clothes in a locked cupboard, wrapped in tissue. Blue nightdresses with sheep embroidered upon them, white knitted booties, small blue bobble hats, three shawls crocheted gossamer thin. When Silvana was old enough, she was allowed to touch the hems and rub the tiny collars between her fingers.
‘Be careful,’ Olga warned. ‘These are more precious to me than gold.’
When she was ten years old, Silvana stole the baby clothes. She couldn’t help herself. She took them out into the garden to play with, but it began to rain so she ran in. Olga found the clothes the next day, covered in mud, tangled and torn in the raspberry canes.
‘I was wrong about you,’ she said, locking Silvana’s bedroom door. ‘You are a deceitful little girl. Say sorry for what you have done.’
Silvana banged on her door, screaming to be let out. She would not apologize.
Olga put her mouth to the keyhole. ‘A boy would never behave like this.’
‘Your boys are dead!’ screamed Silvana, full of her own furies. ‘I’m your child. You hear me? I’m your child!’
‘You’re the devil’s child!’ her mother screamed back. ‘You lived when my boys didn’t.’
Over the years, Silvana hardened herself against all of them: her crazy mother, her useless father and the pressing ghosts of her dead brothers; all of them trapped within the four walls of the cottage.
In the afternoon sunlight, she flicked a wasp away from her face and stared at her home. For a place so full of complications, it appeared serene, and she wondered if all houses were capable of presenting such a good façade, looking four-square and right while their insides were full of banging doors and raised voices. She watched smoke rising from the chimney of the cottage for a moment longer, then turned her back on it and walked briskly towards the river and the big sawmill.
Weeping willows and green sallows overhung the sparkling waters of the river, the hum of insects as loud as the continual buzz of machinery in the mill. A path had been scythed along the bank and she kicked off her shoes and followed it, the grass springy under her stockinged feet. Ahead, she saw a group of young men, all of them laughing and jumping off the bank into the river. Feeling shy, with her shoes dangling in her hand and her stockings flecked with grass, she thought about turning back. Then one of the men caught her eye. He was blond, broad and muscular. Not tall, but strong-looking.
She stopped to watch him dive into the water. He closed his eyes and straightened his body. He held his hands above his head, dipped at the knees slightly so that his calf muscles bulged, and sprang off his toes, his body cutting through the water’s surface, leaving only ripples behind. As he came up out of the water, he looked at her, shook the water from his hair and smiled. The sun caught the water droplets beading on his fair skin and turned them into tiny diamonds. He clambered onto the bank, his body shining like something brand-new. Silvana smiled back, dazzled by him.
Janusz was the only son in a family of five daughters, and to Silvana he was as golden as the rest were mouse-coloured. Five sisters, all anonymously plain, and Janusz, the eldest, with Prussian blue