The Road Home (51 page)

The building was old. Had probably been a dozen different things in its time, just as the street might have had a dozen different names. Bits of it—half of the first floor—had been ripped out to accommodate the garage, but the building had retained a kind of worn-out grandeur. Steel girders now held up the high roof.

On the left-hand wall there was a bulky brick structure, and Lev walked toward this. It was, as he’d thought, a chimney breast, and he began to caress the cold brickwork with his hands. The two mechanics ignored him. But Rudi, seeing Lev lost in his love affair with an imaginary fire, approached the men. Lev heard him tell them he owned a Chevrolet Phoenix, and ask whether the garage could get parts for the car.

“No, sorry, comrade,” said one of the men. “We’re closing down next month. What’s a Chevrolet Phoenix, anyway?”

“Tchevi,” said Rudi. “Big American car. Never seen one of them?”

“Nah,” said the man. “How’d it get here? Fly?”

They decided to go back to the Brasserie Baryn for dinner.

Eva smiled her shy smile. They ordered beers, and when Eva brought them, she said again, “Would you like me to tell you about the specials?”

“Let me guess,” said Lev. “Rabbit cooked with juniper, and cold venison.”

“Well,” she said, “the rabbit is cooked with mustard seeds tonight.”

“Right. So what would you recommend?” Lev asked.

“Well . . .”

“We had rabbit yesterday evening. It was a bit . . . stringy.”

“I don’t know, really. The seaweed ravioli is nice.”

“Yes?”

“Although my mother makes it better.”

Rudi lifted his brimming tankard of beer. “Here’s to your mother!”

“Right,” said Lev, taking up his own tankard. “To your mother!”

Eva giggled, and looked sideways to see whether the maître d’ was watching her.

Then Lev said, “Do you also like cooking, Eva?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I’m lazy. I live with my mother, so I let her cook for me—or I eat here.”

“How long have you worked here?”

“About a year.”

“D’you like this job?”

“It’s okay. But I’m looking forward to the New Baryn, when there’ll be more work for everybody.”

“The New Baryn?”

“Yes. When the dam’s been built, they’re going to change the city’s name. It will be officially named ‘New Baryn.’ ”

When they’d eaten their meal of beetroot soup and seaweed ravioli, and they were the only customers left in the brasserie, they invited Eva to have a drink with them. She sat down and sipped the white wine they had ordered, and Lev found it difficult not to stare at her. He longed to ask her to undo the velvet ribbon that held back her hair.

After some moments of small talk, Rudi began telling Eva that they were from Auror.

She stared at them, suddenly dismayed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said what I said about the dam . . .”

Lev took this opportunity to reach out and lightly touch her arm. “It’s all right,” he said. “We’ve got plans. Big plans. We’re going to be part of the New Baryn.”

“Yes?”

“Yeah. Aren’t we, Rudi?”

“We’re going to
be
the New Baryn! We’re going to embody its new spirit.”

“Yes? How?”

Lev’s hand was still resting on Eva’s arm. He kept it there, and Eva didn’t pull her arm away. The maître d’, blue-lit at his post, stared at her. Rudi said, “Our plans are secret at the moment. But, hey, would you like to come for a ride with us, in my big American car, and we can whisper them in your ear?”

Now she blushed. She lifted her arm from Lev’s touch. “I can’t,” she said. “I have to get home to my mother, or she worries about me. But perhaps you’ll come here again and . . . try the cold venison?”

“Yes,” said Lev. “Tomorrow night?”

It was late when Lev and Rudi left the brasserie but, on a whim, Rudi drove them out to the Perimeter Zone, on the north bank of the river.

They parked the Tchevi and got out into the light snow that was falling. They saw that the garbage dump had been cleared away and that five apartment buildings were going up.

They stared at the building works and at the water of the river, lit by the icy moon. And both of them had the same thought: that, despite all their ardor for the restaurant plan, it was difficult to believe their lives were going to be lived here, on the decrepit edge of the city, in a place that still stank of its waste. Lev looked around him at the mounds of earth and debris, at the puddles choked with yellow silt, at the rusty cranes and the stockpiles of flimsy cinder blocks. “Hard to imagine this as home,” he said.

“Yup,” said Rudi.

They stood there in silence, letting the snow fall on them. And Lev felt his heart brim with sadness for Auror, for their old, dilapidated, careworn village.

24

Number 43 Podrorsky Street

ON THE DAY they left Auror forever, Ina, dressed in her widow’s black, walked out of her house, past Lev and Rudi, who were loading the last of the furniture into Lev’s secondhand pickup, and lay down in the dusty road. The two men stared at her, but neither of them moved.

“Is she saying some kind of prayer or what?” said Rudi.

“I don’t know,” said Lev. “I never know what she’s doing or thinking.”

They went on with the loading. They saw Ina’s hands scrabbling at the earth, gathering up dirt and letting it fall and scatter on her shoulders and on her head. Then she began to wail.

Lev stood still, leaning on the truck. He’d seen it coming, known in his heart, in spite of Lydia’s reassurances, that his mother was going to be the one to wreck the future. He pounded his fist on the truck roof, and the sound echoed in his head like an explosion. Anger welled up in him, an anger bitter enough to taste. He felt, at this moment, that he wanted to trample on Ina’s outstretched form till he heard her neck snap. When Rudi said, “Shall I go and help her up?” he replied, “No. Leave her there.”

Maya came out of the house, clutching the doll Lili. When she saw her grandmother lying in the road, she began a strange little gyrating dance of agony. Lev went to her and held her and said, “It’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right.”

But Maya was rigid, pale as ash. How could everything be “all right” when Ina had fallen into the dust?

“Hey,” said Lev to his daughter, “shall we get Lili settled in the truck? Make a nice comfortable space for her?”

But Maya just stuck her face into Lev’s side, couldn’t look at anything, couldn’t speak. He stroked her hair, which she wore, these days, scrunched back into a funny little knot, secured with some vivid lime-green elastic thing. This knot was troubling to Lev. He felt it made Maya’s face seem too wide, too vulnerable and unprotected. And what he did now was to unwind the green elastic and let Maya’s dark hair fall forward over her ears. Soon it was damp and sticky with her tears.

Exhaustion hit him. He’d been working fifteen, sixteen hours a day, trying to get the restaurant up and running, either sleeping there, at 43 Podrorsky Street, on a mattress among the builders’ rubble, or driving back to Auror in the early hours, making lists in his head, lists and more lists of all that was still to be done, of all that had not yet been sorted or acquired. And worried all the time that he was neglecting the prime thing: his cooking. When, at last, the restaurant was ready to open—if his money didn’t run out, if it wasn’t eaten away by all the
gray
sweeteners he was being forced to find—his mind might be a blank. He might be unable to remember one single recipe. The part of him that had yearned to become a chef might be dead.

He managed to keep talking gently to Maya, reminding her that tomorrow they were going skating and that Ina would be there at the rink side, watching her perform her loops and jumps. “She’ll be happy again by then,” he said, without conviction. “She’ll be smiling all over her face.”

When he next looked at Ina lying in the road, Rudi was kneeling beside her. He heard himself sigh. “Yeah,” he said, under this long, agonized release of his breath. “Help me now, comrade. Save the show for me now.”

Rudi got Ina into Lev’s truck at last, and Maya sat on her lap and clung to her, and they drove away. In the rear of the pickup, covered with a faded tarpaulin, their furniture jolted around.

Nobody looked back at Auror. Lev kept his eyes fixed on the steep road. Maya stuck her thumb into her mouth and went to sleep with her head resting on Ina’s breast. Ina’s hair was still matted with the road’s grime, but she didn’t seem to have noticed this, didn’t seem to want to notice anything, but sat petrified in the worn old seat, never moving, never blinking.

“Listen to me, Mamma,” said Lev, when they were out of the village and going fast along the Baryn road. “I’ll say this once, but I’m not going to keep on repeating it. I’m sorry for everything that’s happened. I know it’s broken your heart. But it isn’t my fault. The world’s changed. And all I’ve done is to try to adapt. Because somebody had to. Right?”

He glanced sideways at her. It was as though she hadn’t heard him. Her mouth was a mapmaker’s thin line.

Her silence endured. She acknowledged no words spoken to her by anyone except Maya. She made no comment upon anything in the new flat—not even upon the electricity that never faltered. When Lev unpacked her jewelry-making tools and laid them out on a shelf in the small white room she was to share with Maya, she silently gathered them up, one by one, and hurled them into the ancient wardrobe she’d insisted on carting with them from Auror.

Lev didn’t know what to do. Just prayed she’d speak to him at last when he showed her the work going on inside 43 Podrorsky Street. “It’s starting to look beautiful,” he ventured to Rudi. “Don’t beautiful places make people want to say things?”

“Yup,” said Rudi. “Normally. But I guess this isn’t normal.”

A month later, Rudi and Lev led Ina into the half-completed restaurant, through the heavy glass doors that had replaced the rusting louvers of the old garage. Lev watched his mother’s gaze sweep past the ocher-colored walls, the floor of pale wood, the brick hearth, and the bright spotlights, and fly up to the workmen painting the ceiling, as though it were they and not the place she was being invited to admire.

She began to move slowly, anxiously toward the men. They turned to stare down at her—so thin, so wan in her black weeds—and one of them said a polite “Good afternoon” from his high perch on an aluminum ladder. But Ina didn’t reply. She turned away from the workmen, turned back toward the light coming in from the street, and shielded her eyes.

“What do you think, Mamma?” said Lev. “D’you like the wall color? Did you notice the fireplace?”

But she just ignored him, as she always did now. She walked slowly to a chair and sat down with her arms resting on one of the new tables. Lev watched as her hands began to explore the fiberboard surface of the table. Then she examined her palm, as if for splinters, or for dust.

“Inferior quality,” she said in a whisper.

Lev looked at Rudi, who, to his mild dismay, was already wearing the new suit Lev had bought him for his coming role as the face-of-the-place.

“She made a comment,” hissed Rudi. “Didn’t she?”

Lev nodded.

Rudi bounded immediately to Ina’s side and said, “Hey, Ina, never mind the tables. What d’you think of my suit? Armani, eh? You know Giorgio Armani? First good suit I’ve ever owned. This certainly isn’t ‘inferior quality.’ Want to feel the texture?”

He offered the suit cuff to Ina, and Ina’s gnarled and veined hands slowly rose up from the tabletop to pinch the soft dark blue fabric that now enveloped Rudi’s hirsute arms.

“Eh?” said Rudi. “Lovely, isn’t it? See the silk lining? Now just let me remind you that your son bought me this suit. With money he earned in England. This place, this suit—everything—has been made possible by him. And I hope, Ina, that this fact is making some headway into your mind.”

Ina took her hand away from Rudi’s Armani sleeve. Then she turned her head very slowly toward Lev. “I’m half-starved,” she said in a quavering voice. “If this is a restaurant, bring me some food.”

Lev gaped. He was still weeks away from being able to cook anything in the kitchen. The ovens and burners he’d ordered from Glic hadn’t arrived. His contract for the gas supply had yet to be confirmed because
gray
money was still being demanded. “Mamma . . .” he began. “I’m sorry. But I’m not ready yet . . .”

“No, no, no, wait!” interrupted Rudi. “Food is no problem. I’ll get you something, Ina. Wait there. Unpack some china and lay the table, Lev.”

Rudi raced for the door and ran out. Lev didn’t go to find plates and cutlery: he just sat down opposite Ina. He knew where Rudi was heading: to
Fat Sam’s American Burger Bar,
recently opened on Market Square. Here, on Friday and Saturday evenings, queues of people trailed halfway round the block, waiting for a table or to buy takeout. Mostly, Lev tried not to think about this place, which the residents of New Baryn seemed to love so much, but he knew that Rudi and Lora were often among the customers, that Rudi’s belly was already expanding with the greasy meat and relishes and rolls he liked to gorge on there. If this went on, he’d soon be too fat for his Armani suit.

Lev looked at his mother. Her fingers had once more begun their exploration of the fiberboard tabletop. Back and forth went her hands, as though they were laying out some imaginary game of cards.

“You’re right, Mamma,” he said, as gently as he could. “The tables are quite cheap, but I’m going to put white cloths on them. They’re really going to look very nice.”

She turned away from him—as if to check whether her food was on its way. She behaved as though Lev were talking a foreign language she couldn’t possibly be expected to understand.

Rudi came back with five polystyrene boxes of burgers—one for everybody, including the decorators.

Lev wasn’t hungry. His burger stayed in its box, but he laid out a white china plate for Ina and set hers on it, and she bent her head low and looked at it. Rudi reached over and tore open her little sachet of tomato ketchup, then opened her roll and squeezed the ketchup onto the meat.