22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [87]
She goes into Aurek’s bedroom and climbs into his bed. She waits for sleep to take her. No dreams of Poland, she thinks. Please, no dreams of planes and snow and the sound of children crying tonight. Aurek stirs in his sleep, throwing an arm around her, his skin hot against her neck.
Her intentions have always been clear to her. To give Aurek a father. If the boy is safe, she is safe.
‘I’ve got you, my darling,’ she whispers to Aurek, and she knows it is he who holds her. In the rough seas she feels she is floating in right now, it is the boy who is the life raft. Try as she might, she cannot lose this image. This floating in dark waters. But it is not her watery thoughts that bother her; it is the knowing that as surely as the boy holds her up, he is also pulling her under.
Poland
Silvana
Silvana woke to find an old man grinding snow into her chest. It was such a ridiculous sight she closed her eyes again, but still he went on, pushing and pummelling her until she couldn’t ignore him. She had snow in her mouth, and as she woke again she thought of the boy and tried to speak, to ask the man where her son was, but words wouldn’t come.
The next time she opened her eyes, Aurek was bundled onto her chest. She wasn’t lying on the red chaise longue but on a pile of logs on a sledge, a goatskin wrapped around her and the boy, being dragged through the forest.
They arrived at a cottage, where a dog barked and two women stood watching them. Silvana tried to focus, to see who they were, but she kept drifting into a light sleep. She saw one of the women bend towards her and Aurek being taken from her. Then she was picked up herself and carried into the cottage, where she was laid on the table, her clothes stripped from her.
‘Mama,’ said one of the women. ‘Maybe we should get them by the fire? She’s like a wet stone.’
‘No, too much heat’s bad for them. Antek, keep rubbing the boy with that towel, especially the skin that’s gone yellow. We’ve got to get them warm from the inside.’
Silvana heard them talking as she drifted in and out of consciousness. Had she been lucky? she wondered. Should they both have died? Or was it the boy’s luck that had saved them? She shut her eyes. Her head burned and her body felt like dough, but her heart filled with love for the child.
They were poor peasants, these people who had saved Silvana and Aurek’s lives, their clothes no better than rags. Several times when Silvana woke from the deep sleep she kept falling into for the first few days, she thought she was at her parents’ home again, her mother standing over her.
The woodsman was delighted by his rescue. He looked in on them each day as they began to recover. He was called Antek, and his wife, a smaller, sober version of Silvana’s own mother, was named Ela.
Ela stood crookedly, shaped by her meagre life like a tree shaped by the wind. When she walked she carried her head low, her back bent like a shelf for the snow to settle upon. She complained of stomach pains and drank bottles of medicine the colour of charcoal.
They had just one daughter, a stocky young woman called Marysia.
‘There are soldiers in the village, an hour’s walk along the river,’ Ela said as she sat massaging Silvana’s legs with goose fat. ‘You should stay close to the house.’
‘Germans?’ Silvana asked. She had been at the cottage for a couple of weeks and was just beginning to feel strong enough to take notice of where she was.
‘A few hundred of them. We have no problems with them.’
‘The villagers call us kulaks because they think we’re on the side of the Germans,’ Marysia said. ‘But they’re jealous because we don’t have to work for the soldiers like they do.’
‘The Germans are not so bad,’ Marysia told Silvana when her mother had left the room. ‘Some of them are better than the