The Road Home (3 page)

“I wonder what you’re thinking about?” asked a voice. And it was Lydia, pausing suddenly in her new task, which was knitting.

Lev stared at her. He thought it was a long time since anybody had asked him this. Or perhaps nobody had ever asked him, because Marina had always seemed to know what was in his mind and tried to accommodate what she found there.

“Well,” said Lev, “I was thinking about my friend Rudi and the time when I went with him to Glic to buy an American car.”

“Oh,” said Lydia. “He’s rich, then, your friend Rudi?”

“No,” said Lev. “Or never for long. But he likes to trade.”

“Trading is so bad,” said Lydia, with a sniff. “We shall never make progress as long as there is
gray
trade. But tell me about the car. Did he get it?”

“Yes,” said Lev. “He did. What are you knitting?”

“A sweater,” said Lydia. “For the English winter. The English call this garment a ‘jumper.’ ”

“A jumper?”

“Yes. There’s another word for you. Tell me about Rudi and the car.”

Lev took out his vodka flask and drank. Then he told Lydia how, after Rudi had bought the Tchevi, he drove a couple of times round the empty streets of the apartment estate to practise being at the wheel, with the professor of mathematics watching from his doorway, wearing an astrakhan hat and an amused expression on his face.

Then Lev and Rudi set off home, with the sun gleaming down on the quiet, icy world, and Rudi put on the car heater to maximum and said this was the nearest he would get to Paradise. The car engine made a low, grumbling sound, like the engine of a boat, and Rudi said this was the sound of America, musical and strong. In the glove box, Lev found three bars of Swiss chocolate, gone pale with time, and they shared these between cigarettes, which they lit with the radiant car lighter, and Rudi said, “Now I have my new vocation in Auror: taxi driver.”

Toward afternoon, still miles from their village, they stopped at a petrol station, which consisted of one rusty pump in a silent valley and a freckled dog keeping watch. Rudi honked the horn and an elderly man limped out of a wooden hut, where sacks of coal were on sale, and he looked upon the Tchevi with fear, as though it might have been an army tank or a UFO, and the freckled dog stood up and began barking. Rudi got out, wearing only his trousers and boots and checked shirt, and when he slammed the driver’s door behind him, the remaining hinge broke and the door fell off into the snow.

Rudi swore. He and the pump attendant gazed at this mishap, for which there didn’t seem to be any immediate remedy, and even the dog fell into a nonplussed silence. Then Rudi lifted up the door and attempted to put it back on, but though it went on all right, it wouldn’t stay on and had to be tied to the seat fixings with a frayed bit of rope, and Rudi said, “That fucking professor! He knew this would happen. He’s turned me over, good and sweet.”

Rudi stamped about in the snow, while the tank was filled with gas, because it was beginning to freeze again and Rudi had no coat or hat and the falling of the door had pricked his bubble of happiness. Lev got out and examined the broken hinges and said, “It’s just the hinges, Rudi. We can fix them back home.”

“I know,” said Rudi, “but is the fucking door going to stay on the car for the next hundred miles? That’s my question.”

They drove on, brimming with the petrol Lev had paid for, going west toward the sunset, and the sky was first deep orange, then smoky red, then purple, and lilac shadows flecked the snow-blanketed fields, and Lev said, “Sometimes this country can look quite beautiful,” and Rudi sighed and said, “It looked beautiful this morning, but soon we’ll be back in the dark.”

When the dark came on, ice formed on the windshield, but all the worn wiper blades would do was crunch over this ice, back and forth very slowly, making a moaning noise as they moved, and soon it became impossible to see the way ahead. Rudi drew the car to the side of the road, and he and Lev stared at the patterns the ice had made and at the faint yellow glow the headlights cast on the filigree branches of the trees, and Lev saw that Rudi’s hands were trembling.

“Now fucking what?” Rudi said.

Lev took off the woolen scarf he was wearing and put it round Rudi’s neck. Then he got out and opened the trunk and took out one of the three remaining bottles of vodka from the straw and told Rudi to turn off the engine, and as the engine died, the wiper blades made one last useless arc, then lay down, like two exhausted old people fallen end to end beside a skating rink. Lev wrenched open the vodka, took a long sip, then began pouring the alcohol very slowly onto the windshield and watched it make clear runnels through the ice. As the frosting slowly vanished, Lev could just make out Rudi’s wide face, very close to the windshield, like a child’s face gazing up in awe. And after that they drove on through the night, stopping to pour on more vodka from time to time and watching the illuminated needle of the petrol gauge falling and falling.

Lydia paused in her knitting. She held the “jumper” up to her chest, to see how much farther she had to go before casting off for the shoulder seam. She said, “Now I’m interested in that journey. Did you reach your home?”

“Yes,” said Lev. “By dawn we were there. We were pretty tired. Well, we were
very
tired. And the gas tank was almost empty. That car’s so greedy it’s going to bankrupt Rudi.”

Lydia smiled and shook her head. “And the door?” she asked. “Did you mend it?”

“Oh sure,” said Lev. “We soldered on new hinges from a baby’s pram. It’s fine. Except the driver’s door opens violently now.”

“Violently? But Rudi still drives the Tchevi as a taxi, with this violent door?”

“Yes. In summer, he has all the windows open and you can ride along with the wind in your hair.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t like that,” said Lydia. “I spend a lot of time trying to protect my hair from the wind.”

Night was coming down again when the coach arrived at the Hook of Holland and waited in a long line to drive onto the ferry. No berths had been booked for the passengers of the bus; they were advised to find benches or deck chairs in which to sleep and to avoid buying drinks from the ship’s bar, which charged unfair prices. “When the ferry arrives in England,” said one of the coach drivers, “we’re only about two hours away from London and your destination, so try to sleep if you can.”

Once aboard the boat, Lev made his way to the top deck and looked down at the port, with its cranes and containers, its bulky sheds and offices and parking lots, and its quayside, shimmery with oil. An almost invisible rain was falling. Gulls cried, as though to some long-lost island home, and Lev thought how hard it would be to live near the sea and hear this melancholy sound every day of your life.

The sea was calm and the ferry set off very silently, its big engines seemingly muffled by the dark. Lev leaned on the rail, smoking and staring at the Dutch port as it slipped away, and when the land was gone and the sky and the sea merged in blackness, he remembered the dreams he’d had when Marina was dying, of being adrift on an ocean that had no limits and never broke on any human shore.

The briny smell of the sea made his cigarette taste bitter, so he ground it underfoot on the high deck, then lay down on a bench to sleep. He pulled his cap over his eyes and, to soothe himself, imagined the night falling on Auror, falling as it always fell over the fir-covered hills and the cluster of chimneys and the wooden steeple of the schoolhouse. And there in this soft night lay Maya, under her goose-down quilt, with one arm thrown out sideways, as if showing some invisible visitor the small room she shared with her grandmother: its two beds, its rag rug, its chest of drawers painted green and yellow, its paraffin stove, and its square window, open to the cool air and the night dews and the cry of owls . . .

It was a nice picture, but Lev couldn’t get it to stabilize in his mind. The knowledge that when the Baryn sawmill closed Auror and half a dozen other villages like it were doomed kept obliterating the room and the sleeping girl and even the image of Ina, shuffling about in the dark before kneeling to say her prayers.

“Prayers are no fucking good,” Rudi had said when the last tree was sawn up and shipped away and all the machinery went quiet. “Now comes the reckoning, Lev. Only the resourceful will survive.”

2

The Diana Card

THE COACH PULLED INTO Victoria at nine in the morning, and the tired passengers stepped off the bus into the unexpected brightness of a sunny day. They looked all around them at the shine on the buildings, at the gleaming rack of baggage carts, at the dark shadows their bodies cast on the London pavement, and tried to become accustomed to the glare. “I dreamed of rain,” said Lev to Lydia.

It felt very warm. Lydia’s half-finished jumper was stowed in her suitcase. Her winter coat was heavy on her arm.

“Good-bye, Lev,” she said, holding out her hand.

Lev leaned forward and put a kiss on each of Lydia’s mole-splashed cheeks and said, “May you help me. May I help you.” And they laughed and started to walk away—as Lev had known they would do—each to a separate future in the unknown city.

But Lev turned to watch Lydia as she hurried toward a line of black taxis. When she opened the door of her cab, she looked back and waved, and Lev saw that there was a sadness in this wave of hers—or even a sudden, unexpected reproach. In answer to this, he touched the peak of his leather cap, in a gesture he knew was either too military or too old-fashioned, or both, and then Lydia’s taxi drove away and he saw her looking determinedly straight ahead, like a gymnast trying to balance on a beam.

Now Lev picked up his bag and went in search of a washroom. He knew that he stank. He could detect an odd kind of seaweed stench under his checked shirt and he thought, Well, this is appropriate, I’m beached here now, under this unexpected sun, on this island . . . He could hear planes roaring overhead and he thought, Half the continent is headed this way, but nobody imagined it like it is, with the heat rising and the sky so empty and blue.

He followed signs to the station toilets, then found himself barred from entering them by a turnstile. He put down his bag and watched what other people did. They put money into a slot and the turnstile moved, but the only money Lev had was a wad of twenty-pound notes—each one calculated by Rudi to last him a week, until he found work.

“Please may you help me?” said Lev to a smart, elderly man approaching the stile. But the man put in his coin, pushed at the turnstile with his groin, and held his head high as he passed through, as though Lev hadn’t even come within his sight line. Lev stared after him. Had he said the words incorrectly? The man didn’t pause in his confident stride.

Lev waited. Rudi, he knew, would have vaulted over the barrier without a second’s pause, untroubled by what the consequences might be, but Lev felt that vaulting was beyond him right now. His legs lacked Rudi’s inexhaustible spring. Rudi made his own laws, and they were different from his, and this would probably always be the case.

Standing there, Lev’s longing to be clean increased steadily as the moments passed. He could feel stinging pains here and there on his skin, like sores. Sweat broke on his skull and ran down the back of his neck. He felt slightly sick. He took out a cigarette from an almost empty pack and lit it, and the men coming and going from the washroom stared at him, and those stares drew his attention at last to a
NO SMOKING
sign stuck onto the tiles a few feet from where he stood. He drew in a last sweet breath from the cigarette and ground it out under his feet, and he saw then that his black shoes were stained with mud and thought, This is the mud of my country, the mud of all Europe, and I must find some rags and wipe it away . . .

After some time, a young man, wearing overalls, unshaven, and carrying a canvas bag of tools, approached the washroom turnstile, and Lev decided that this man—because he was young and because the overalls and the work bag marked him as a member of the once-honorable proletariat—might not pretend that he hadn’t seen him, so he said as carefully as he could, “May you help me, please?”

The man had long, untidy hair and the skin of his face was white with plaster dust. “Sure,” he said. “What’s up?”

Lev indicated the turnstile, holding up a twenty-pound note. The man smiled. Then he rummaged in the pocket of his overalls, found a coin, handed it to Lev, and snatched the note away. Lev stared in dismay. “No,” he said. “No, please . . .”

But the young man turned, went through the barrier, and began to walk into the washroom. Lev gaped. Not a single word of English would come to him now, and he cursed loudly in his own language. Then he saw the man coming back toward him with a smile that made dark creases in the white dust of his face. He held the twenty-pound note out to Lev. “Only joking,” he said. “Just joking, mate.”

Lev stood in a toilet stall and removed his clothes. He took an old striped towel from his bag and wrapped it round his waist. He felt his sickness pass.

He went to one of the washbasins and ran hot water. From a seat by the entrance, the elderly Sikh washroom attendant stared at him with grave, unblinking eyes under his carefully wound turban.

Lev washed his face and hands, tugged out his razor, and shaved the four-day stubble from his chin. Then, careful to keep the threadbare towel in place, he soaped his armpits and his groin, his stomach and the backs of his knees. The Sikh didn’t move, only kept staring at Lev, as at some old motion picture he knew by heart, which still fascinated but no longer moved him. The feel of the warm water and the soap on Lev’s body was so soothing he felt almost like crying. Reflected in the washroom mirrors, he could see men glancing at him, but nobody spoke, and Lev soaped and scrubbed at his body until it was pink and tingling and the sea stench was gone. He put on clean underpants, then washed his feet and stamped on the towel to dry them. He took socks and a clean shirt from his bag. He ran a comb through his thick gray hair. His eyes looked tired, his clean-shaven face, gaunt in the cold light of the washroom, but he felt human again: he felt ready.