22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [80]
‘We’ve even got a babysitter arranged,’ says Doris.
Janusz nods. ‘It’s only for a few hours.’
Silvana shakes her head. She is not leaving the boy with a stranger.
‘Who?’
‘Tony!’ says Doris. ‘I bumped into him the other day. He said to tell you he’s looking forward to seeing you. He’ll be here on the button at 6 p.m., Friday night.’
Janusz runs his finger along the inside of his collar. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘There you are,’ says Doris. ‘All fixed.’
‘Silvana?’ says Janusz. ‘Are you all right?’
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ laughs Doris. ‘White as a sheet, you are.’
Silvana sits down, her stiff skirts rising up around her. She clasps her hands together and forces herself to smile.
‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘Absolutely fine.’
Poland
Silvana
Silvana spent days wandering through the forest. It was without end. After Gregor left and the women followed him, she didn’t understand the trees. No matter how far she walked, she never found the edge of the forest and she never saw any other signs of life. She looked for men, for the partisans hiding out in the forest, but there was no one. She and the boy were alone. Perhaps, she thought, she should have been more friendly with Gregor? Wherever he had taken Elsa, maybe he could have taken her and Aurek as well.
It was the tiredness that got to her. She was too tired to be cold any more. Too tired to notice the ache in her teeth and the pain in her back from hunching against the icy wind.
She imagined lying down on a bed, one that she and the child could stretch out on. She thought she wanted sleep. After a while she knew it was death she hoped for. Silvana understood everything then. She was her mother’s daughter. Unlucky, incapable of bringing up a child.
She remembered the snow in the apple orchard when she was a child and told Aurek about it, hoping to bring some magic to the ice around them. She had made angels in the snow. She and the other children searched for untouched snow then lay down in it and stretched their arms and legs so they appeared like semaphore stars spreadeagled on the ground. Carefully, the child lying down would be pulled clear of their imprint and a magical shape like a cut-out angel would be left in the snow with no sign of how it had been made.
She hadn’t expected the winter to be so terrible. It wasn’t like the snow she remembered from her childhood at all. It was brutal. The trees glowed blue with hoar frost and the bare branches glittered. Her teeth ached with cold. Her hands stiffened; her jaw froze. Fingers swelled. Trying to do anything with them was difficult.
Aurek stopped crying. He lay in Silvana’s arms with his eyes half closed and his mouth open. His apple-red cheeks turned frost-white. She could feel him giving up.
She discovered a small clearing in the forest, a dip in the landscape where only fire-scorched tree trunks remained. A bomb must have exploded there, scooping out earth and trees like a giant hand, leaving a bowl-shaped area sheltered from the winds by high banks of snow. Silvana sat on the crater’s edge and slid down the bank on her back with Aurek between her legs. At the bottom, in a flurry of snow, she saw something that made her rub her eyes and blink.
It was then she knew she would never leave the forest again. She stared at it, taking in its beauty. It was the most colourful thing she had seen for a long time. The gold fringing beckoned her like a friend. Tightly sprung, button-backed in red velvet, a chaise longue sitting on a carpet of white like something enchanted.
Silvana had found other furniture before: tables, broken stools, cupboards. She’d never found anything as beautiful as the red chaise longue.
Black crows flew through the bare branches of the sky. They were urging her on, she was sure of it. For days she had heard them calling her name. At first she’d thought they were mocking her, but then she’d understood. She was part of the forest. The crows were telling her that. They had been leading