Homeland (24 page)

‘I understand reason for this. This name is long, even for Polish. And not easy to say, even for long-time Polish speaker like me!’ He grinned at Stella, then read out the name
quickly for effect – ‘Stobniak-Smogorzewski’ – then slowly for the doctor’s benefit, then a third time with an absurd rhetorical flourish aimed at Stella, and had the
satisfaction of seeing a giggle rise to her lips.

‘You wouldn’t know where we could find this chap, would you?’ Bennett asked.

Wladyslaw suggested some likely places. ‘But please,’ he said, ‘allow me to show you—’

‘No, no,’ said the doctor. ‘No, we don’t want to keep you, Wladyslaw. You must have a great deal to do.’

‘But it will be an honour—’

‘No, I insist. No . . . you’ll want to sort out your discharge papers. If you can get them issued today, I can run you over to the farm at about six o’clock.’

Wladyslaw accepted defeat with a rueful smile.

Stella said, ‘Goodbye.’

‘But we will meet again soon?’

‘Well . . .’ Stella looked towards the doctor uncertainly.

‘I’m sure you’ll bump into each other in the village.’

‘Bump into?’

‘A figure of speech, Wladyslaw. It means to meet by chance.’

‘Ah!’ Wladyslaw pressed a hand to his chest in mock relief. ‘I am glad of this!’

He was rewarded with a broad smile. He would have offered to shake her hand – minus the kiss – but she was already moving to the doctor’s side, and he gave a small bow instead.
‘Until we meet again, Miss Stella.’

She gave a last smile before turning away. Wladyslaw stood watching the two figures until they were lost to sight behind the chapel. As the coppery head vanished, he felt for a moment
inconsolable.

B
ILLY STOOD
in the dripping dawn, his breath pluming out before him, and watched the Polack bend to the first row of withies. The rain had been falling
continuously for four days. Sometimes it fell heavily under black skies, at other times it drizzled within a globe of dismal grey; but it did not stop and was showing no signs of doing so in the
future. On the drove the cart-ruts were like twin rhynes, parallel streams going nowhere; while in the rhynes themselves the water shifted sluggishly, if at all, the level markedly higher each
morning, as if the ditches were taking in water surreptitiously during the night. The River Tone, never too accommodating at the best of times, was brim-full with shed-water from the Quantock and
Blackdown Hills and could take no more, certainly not from the pump that lifted the rhyne water up from Curry Moor, and had in the last day begun to return the water back to where it came from,
dribbling, gushing, slipping its load down onto the moor from a dozen low spots along its banks. The River Parrett, carrying the shed-water from the southern hills, hadn’t begun to spill yet,
but it could only be a matter of time. There was nothing unusual about the floods – they came virtually every year – but they were meant to come in winter, or even spring, when the
hills threw off the postponed wetness of the winter’s ice and snow in a mighty rush. They weren’t meant to come now, in early November. At this point, the ground should have had some
absorbency to it, should have had the capacity to suck the water down, layer on layer, and hold onto the stuff until the cold arrived. November was meant to be the time when withy men could get
onto the moor and cut the bulk of their harvest.

Until a week ago conditions had looked good. A single sharp frost had nipped and felled every last leaf from the withies, bang to order, creating a crisp black frost-rimmed leaf-carpet from
which the withies rose tall and thin and bare as knitting needles, save for the snarl of withy wind and vetch, which clung to them like tangled wool. But now the withy beds were a glutinous bog,
and the leaves had settled into a sodden pulp almost indistinguishable from the surrounding ooze.

Billy brushed the whetstone across his hook with the barest touch; the blade was already razor-sharp. When he judged the Polack to be a good five yards down his row he slipped the whetstone into
his pocket and bent to the adjacent row, settling quickly into the familiar rhythm, left hand grasping a cluster of withies, right hand cutting close to the stock in short tapping strokes from the
wrist; then at intervals bundling the withies up, tying them off with bonds of green withy and lugging them four at a time across the squelch to the cart, which stood on the relative solidity of
the drove. The two of them had been cutting for four days now, ever since the rain had started. Each day Billy gave the Polack more of a head start, and each day he caught up with him roughly
halfway along the row, and each day, though he made it a rule to finish well ahead, it was by a tighter margin. The contest was undeclared, the rules unspoken, but the Polack understood the game
all right, because as Billy drew closer he would look up from under the hood of his oilskins and smile and call out something in his crazy accent, and, on bringing his final bundles of withies to
the cart where Billy was ostentatiously lounging under the tarpaulin with a cigarette, would shake his head with a smile, and say, ‘One day maybe, when I am old man from this withies, then I
get to light first cigarette.’

Billy’s cigarette was largely for show. While waiting for the Polack, he went through the other man’s bundles, re-sorting and retying them. It wasn’t simply a matter of
throwing out the bent, spraggled or otherwise unusable stock, but of getting the finished bundle to the standard girth of thirty-seven inches and ensuring that the bonds of green withy were
securely tied. When Billy had started on the beds at fifteen he had found the rose knot the single greatest aggravation among the numerous provocations of that first winter, not the least of which
were conditions not unlike this, with biting cold, frequent rain, water-logged ground with the suction of a bog, leaky boots and foot rot. Time and again Uncle Stan had shown Billy the trick of the
rose knot, and time and again the blooming thing had slipped its hold and splayed the withies over the ground.

The Polack had more of a knack with knots; most of the bonds were reasonably tight. It was the bundle quality and size he couldn’t judge. He missed much of the spraggle, he missed much of
the disease, and even when he managed to collect a number of usable withies he tended to make the bundle too small, which wasn’t something Billy would care to get noticed at Honeymans’
withy works, where payment was strictly by the bundle. Also, while the Polack had learnt to cut the withies good and clean, he tended to cut them a fraction too high, leaving stubs that would
produce shorter, heeled withies next time round. But Billy didn’t point this out too often for fear of slowing him down. Yield was everything while prices were good and few other withy men
were venturing onto the moor.

Thus far, by some miracle, the Polack had avoided most of the pitfalls of a beginner, neither stabbing himself in the ankle, nor burying his blade in a stump, nor breaking the tip on a stone;
nor, it had to be said, had he complained of a bad back or griped about the weather, though both were probably only a matter of time.

When the Polack first arrived, Billy had been furious with the doctor for foisting a cripple on him without warning. To make matters worse, Billy had the strong suspicion that Bennett’s
oversight had been deliberate, a crude attempt to deter protest. This thought so incensed him that he almost rejected the Polack out of hand; but then he remembered how much time had been lost
waiting for this man to start and how much money was waiting to be made, and confined his protest to a sharp reminder that the Polack was strictly on trial.

The Polack’s attempts to overcome his handicap were almost comical. To haul the cart, he shuffled sideways like a crab, doing a strange hoppity two-step; to cut the withies, he put all his
weight on the one good leg, knee bent, and stretched the bad one out in front of him, like a Paddy poised to dance a jig; while to walk at any sort of speed he pitched along like an old tar. The
rolling gait solved one problem at least. When the doctor first tried to communicate the Polack’s name, it had sounded something like ‘Laddyslaw’, which though outlandish was not
impossible, but when the Polack himself came to speak it, something different and wholly unpronounceable emerged. For a while, Billy dodged the issue by calling him Polack. Seeing him try to walk,
however, watching the heave and dip of the shoulder and the jerky lift of the hip, a far more satisfactory alternative came to him, and he began to call him Long John. The Polack wanted to know
why. When Billy told him, he laughed and repeated the word ‘pirate’ with a grin, and took to clapping a hand over one eye.

After that, Billy just called him Johnnie.

They worked on the withy beds from first light till just before dusk, with a short stop mid-morning and midday for some bread and cheese, a swig of cold tea, and a smoke under the tarpaulin. On
these breaks they spoke – or rather the Polack asked questions and Billy proffered a series of answers – about water and floods, about the difference between withies and willows and the
uses they were put to, and about the withy man’s life.

The Polack offered no information about his own life until one morning when, cigarette jammed in his mouth, he began to pick at the callouses on his palms.

Billy said, ‘Not done farm work before?’

‘A little. At time of harvest, mostly.’

‘So what did you do the rest of the time?’

‘Before war? I was student.’

‘A
student
,’ echoed Billy, in a tone of exaggerated awe. ‘And what did you study?’

‘Literature. Polish, mostly. But some Shakespeare also.
Hamlet.
You know this play?’

‘Now let me think . . .’ said Billy, making a show of racking his brains. ‘No, I do believe that particular one passed me by.’

‘Sure. He write so many plays.’

‘Did he now?’

The Polack cast him a watchful smile, as if to assess the spirit in which this had been offered.

With the same exaggerated show of interest, Billy asked, ‘So, how many plays was it that old Shakespeare chalked up? Fifty? A hundred? Five hundred?’

‘Ah!’ the Polack conceded with a quick gesture. ‘I don’t know this. Too many for this student, that is sure.’

‘And remind me,’ said Billy, ‘is
Hamlet
the one where they all get to kill each other?’

The Polack warmed to the joke. ‘Only four or five, I think.’

‘Hardly worth bothering with, then.’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘So, what were you going to do with this literature?’

‘Aha! This is question my father asked me often. He hoped I would choose military, law, medicine – something like this.’

‘So what would he say if he could see you now?’

‘He would say it is good thing to have work.’

‘What, even work like this?’

But the Polack wasn’t going to be drawn on that one. With an amiable shrug, he drew on his cigarette and looked away into the rain which was falling in a steady curtain.

‘You come from a long line of lawyers and doctors, then?’ asked Billy, who had no intention of abandoning the subject.

‘Some . . . yes.’

‘Your father?’

‘He was soldier. In Great War, then Russian War. After this, he come home to work land.’

‘Russian War? When was that?’

‘Nineteen twenty.’

‘Blimey. You Poles are gluttons for punishment, aren’t you?’

‘We do not start this war. It is Bolsheviks. They march in and try to take our land.’

‘So who won?’

‘Poland. Big time.’

‘A touch of David and Goliath, then?’

Maybe the names weren’t the same in Polack-speak, because he looked puzzled for a moment. Then as understanding came to him he nodded rapidly. ‘Sure. We are David in this
war.’

‘Then Goliath got his revenge.’

‘Yes.’

‘Big time.’

‘Big time.’

They smoked in silence for a while. Billy watched a heron flapping lazily over the moor, its neck bent almost double, head sunk low on its shoulders, like a fastidious old man. Somewhere close
by, a very different sort of bird gave a plaintive call: a teal, unless he was very much mistaken. He remembered long cold days in a makeshift hide next to the floods, waiting for the birds to come
to the decoys, and wished he had a gun with him now.

His returned to the conversation with a sense of unfinished business.

‘You were brought up on a farm then, were you?’

The Polack hesitated a little. ‘Sure.’

‘What kind of farm?’

‘All kinds. Some animals, some wheat, some fruit.’

‘A big place, then?’

The Polack screwed down the lid of the tea jar and gazed at it for a moment. ‘Not so big. Most land not so good for farming. Most is forest and lake.’

Billy had a vision of vast acres. He said in an accent of mock refinement, ‘Very nice too. Plenty of shooting and fishing then?’

‘Sure,’ the Polack murmured vaguely.

‘So we can send you out to bag us some supper, can we?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Shoot a bit of game.’

The Polack made a wry face. ‘I am not good at shooting. And different animals here, I think.’