Underground

by Tobias Hill

‘It’s Pentecost. You can’t use flax. It has to be irises.’

  ‘Why bother? Only old people have the irises now. Broom is much prettier. I know where there’s wild broom –’

  ‘Shh!’ Two old women are at Susicka’s stall. He wraps their flowers slowly because of his stumpy hand, with the bouquets on his knee. He did the hand in the Memory of Jozef Stalin steel factory and now he sells flowers. He can drive too, even going fast.

  Now the old women are going off down Zwyciestwa Street with their arms full of irises. There are only the three of us in the square. It’s quiet except for the churches.

  ‘Now!’

  I push Piotr out. He goes because he’s my friend. I’d do the same for him. The colonnades are flat arches of sun between shadow. I run through them as Piotr walks across the open.

  ‘Hello, Mister Susicka.’

  ‘Hello. It’s cold weather, isn’t it?’

  Susicka always says that. It’s not cold. His big soft face is always smiling except when he drinks; then he never smiles. I come round into the southern colonnade. The stall is up against the far end. There are collared doves in the square, they sing coal, coal. I run in the shadows so they won’t fly away.

  ‘Yes, sir. Can I have some irises? Just three of them.’

  ‘Just three? You know, it’s only sixty for a bouquet. Don’t you have sixty? Three’s no use.’

  I come in close and low. Susicka is wrapping the three irises, holding them lengthways on his knee. I’m so close I can smell him, like two-days-old milk. I crawl between the green tables. Susicka’s shoes are home-made and rimmed black where water has stained them. His socks are worn thin between their ribs. I can see the skin of his fat ankles. It is blue-grey, like the insides of raw fish.

  ‘All done! I put in one extra for you. Three’s no use.’

  ‘Thanks. Could I have them unwrapped?’

  ‘Unwrapped?’ He laughs from his belly. ‘Unwrapped flowers are for lovers. Have you got a lover already?’

  ‘No. I do. Yes, sir.’

  He goes on laughing and unwrapping. A soft, slow man. I come up behind him, diving upwards from the push of my arms, lifting the irises out of two white pots. They squeak together, wet in my arms and smelling of onions.

  ‘All done!’

  All done. I jump back between the tables, light and strong, down through the sun and shadow. The excitement fizzes in me like bottled Fanta, bubbling up sweet. I try to laugh but the flowers keep hitting me in the face. The air is full of sweetness and church bells. I run until I have to stop and then I stop.

  Piotr comes belting up. He’s laughing too now, his red face happy under the grey-brown hair. He still has the four unwrapped irises. We go on towards the Strug flats, up to my place. The stairwell lights have gone and we hold the irises up ahead, the yellows of them like candles. It seems like they make the dark lighter. Piotr says they can’t but it seems they do.

  For Pentecost you cover the floor with irises. We do it in the kitchen and Mother’s room. There are plenty of flowers and two left for Mother’s bed and Dad’s. It takes ages; our hands go yellow with iris dust. When we’re done, the sunlight is still coming in the windows. It falls on the flowers and takes their colour, like light off water. The stove and refrigerator and white kitchen cupboards take their colour. The rooms have all gone blue and golden.

  We go and wait in my room. We play with my AH-18 Combat Helicopter. Piotr is the secret police and I’m the speculator with Russian vodka and American cigarettes.

  ‘Casimir?’ It’s Mum. We jump up, remembering. What do we do now? She goes into the kitchen and cries out, so we run into the kitchen.

  ‘We got them! Do you like them? It was me and Piotr together.’ Mother is smiling with both hands to her mouth. It makes her look young. Then the smile begins to go.

  ‘Where did you get them? Casimir?’

  I shrug. ‘We got them. For Pentecost.’ I’m still smiling. I can’t make it go. It starts to hurt. ‘For you. We both got them.’ Her eyes are hurt. It’s the same look as when Dad has hurt her. The shame begins. It’s a shaking in my belly and legs, then my chest. ‘For you. For Pentecost.’

  I turn and run. I go into the trees and don’t come out until Piotr stops calling and goes home.

  I open the door and the house smells of flowers, but the irises have gone. The rooms are back to their ordinary colours. Even the golden dust is dusted away. We have chopped-ham salad and beetroot soup and cabbage pasties for supper. We don’t talk because the radio is on.

  She said other things, my mother. Not to the telephone man but to herself. She has no friends, my mother, no one to talk to. It was night and she was drinking, alone in the kitchen. I heard her rattling the glass and cursing, I heard her say blood. She was arguing about blood money. She wouldn’t have it in her home. It sounded like she was arguing and that scared me, because it was just her there, and me listening. It was my father she was talking about. His mother, who was killed by the Russians. And blood money.

  I got them without any money. And I liked the rooms being blue and gold; I never saw rooms like that before. It made me feel empty and good inside. But blue is the colour of shame.

  ‘Ariel? Have you done your Human Philosophy?’

  ‘Don’t call me that.’

  ‘I knew you didn’t. How do you like my hair?’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘It’s only hair anyway. What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘It’s OK. I said it was. It’s fine.’

  ‘I don’t care. It’s not important. Yours is much more manageable. I can help you with your homework, you know.’

  We walk home. I like it better when she doesn’t talk. Once she taught me to write and I wrote my middle name and now she uses it all the time. She knows what my name means and she won’t tell me. She could be lying though. She makes me nervous.

  ‘My parents have new jobs in Warsaw. Party jobs.’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘We’ll move soon. In Warsaw no one knows anyone. What do you want to do when you grow up?’

  It’s a stupid question. I wish I hadn’t told her my middle name. I try and look at her without her seeing. So I can remember her. From the side she looks proud. From the front she just looks skinny.

  ‘Grow a beard.’

  She stops. Crows cough and clatter by the foot of B Block. She throws a stone. ‘Don’t be stupid. I know you’re not.’

  ‘What about you? What do you want?’

  A car horn. It is her father, waiting for her. The sun is ahead of us. A little boy on a tricycle comes out of the light. His shoulders rock and the wheels creak, creak.

  Hanna stops. Red hair and blue eyes. No one has hair like hers. It is the colour of squirrel fur. Beautiful. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘I want to be like snow.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The more you press it, the harder it becomes. In the end it’s ice.’

  I give her her geography books. She takes them without saying thanks. She looks at me again with her thin eyes.

  ‘I want to go somewhere where no one knows I am Jewish. Then I can just be me. Don’t get like ice, Ariel.’

  She turns away without saying goodbye. In three days I will never see her again. I shout goodbye after her but the car’s already going.

  ‘I told you. Look at it. It goes mad.’

  In my mouth the spit tastes sweet and rich as blood. I hawk into the silo dust. I hurt from running hard.

  He is right; Piotr is usually right. He takes off his gloves, which are dark where the squirrel bit him, and he sits down between Monika and me. It is spring and cold in the silo. The blood hardens fast.

  The squirrel goes round and round without falling; there is no up and down in its head. Its red fingers flutter in the chicken wire and Maria tries to stroke them, but she is only four and slow with it.

  ‘Leave it alone.’

  ‘I want to stroke it.’

  ‘No –’ Monika pulls her sister away.
‘Stupid Ohyn.’

  Maria starts to cry. Not making any noise, just crying down her cheeks. The squirrel chatters and the cage shakes; it is just sheet chicken-wire pulled up into a ball, messy at the top where I bunched it together. Maria stops crying to watch. Now the squirrel jumps hard to one side. The cage tips over and begins to roll. It goes towards Monika and she screams and kicks at it.

  ‘No, oh no! Get it away from me!’

  No one wants to touch the cage because we know the squirrel will bite. It has gone mad, as Piotr said it would. We would bite, if it was us.

  Her hands are quite red from work, and the ambers red in them or gold or black, like lumps of tar on the new town roads.

  I watch her face. She holds an amber up to the light. The blacks of her eyes go small; they are smaller than a millimetre. She smiles and frowns at the same time.

  ‘Where’s that one from?’ It’s the red amber, from Persia. It’s too big for millimetres, it is in centimetres. The light moves slowly inside it.

  ‘You know where.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I whine at her. We’re at home, no one can hear.

  She picks it up, turns it in her hands.

  ‘This is from Persia. Your grandfather bought it from the Gypsies. They came to Kielce every spring and harvest. Their king was richer than almost anyone then, but we were not so poor either. Do you know what your grandfather did, Ariel?’

  ‘He bought amber from Persia.’

  She laughs. ‘Do you know what his work was?’

  ‘A miller.’

  ‘I never saw him with flour on his skin, not once outside the mill. He was a clean man. He liked everything in its place. You have that from him. And the size of you, and your name. I know it’s not much.’

  She puts the Persian amber down and I take it. It is smoother than my skin. Smoother than my mother’s skin.

  ‘Was he rich?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so. We weren’t allowed to own the mill, so he rented it. It belonged to a German called Wagner. He was the only German in town and quite friendly. We weren’t rich. Comfortable. My father rented the mill for forty years –’

  I look up. She is frowning down at the ambers. ‘There were more before the war. He had to sell them.’

  ‘What for?’ I keep my voice quiet, like hers. Like church.

  ‘For me. I was so hungry then. For potatoes.’

  I look down at the amber and think of potatoes. All the beautiful colours of honey and green water, changed into grey. ‘Lots of potatoes.’ It is half question and half not. She shakes her head. Her eyes don’t move to me.

  ‘No, no. One for each amber. One potato, one egg. The taste of one egg!’ Her eyes close. ‘Pushing his hands through the wire, my father. Everybody’s hands and all their jewellery, the gold worth less than potatoes. And the people outside, who were our old neighbours. Wagner and the rest, taking all they could. I still remember everything. If I am not careful, I remember it all. It is so much better, to just forget –’

  She shakes her head. It means she won’t talk any more. Already it is more than ever. I don’t understand, but I remember for later.

  ‘Why wasn’t it his mill, if he was the miller?’

  She takes the amber out of my hands. ‘It doesn’t matter why. It’s time for your homework. What do you have?’

  ‘Human Philosophy.’

  We go to do the Human Philosophy. It’s boring for me and boring for her. Then Dad is home, smiling, with two big handfuls of broken biscuits and poppy-seed cake, and we kiss and laugh with him. First things first.

  It was Piotr’s idea but I caught it. The Wittlin farm is three fields, three pigs, the duck Archangel and the chickens for eggs and carp in the pond for Christmas, fat as pigs. The barns and the silo, white paint and red rust.

  We were in the woods by the top field, where the pines are old and fat at the roots like spring onions. The red squirrel sat quite still. Not looking at us but away to one side, as if it was listening to music.

  ‘Catch it!’ hissed Maria.

  I leaned forward into my run and pushed hard with my thighs and feet, arms and shoulders, curling my feet into the pine earth. Then I was on to it and it came alive, biting at the sleeves of my winter coat. Piotr said take it to the silo and we did.

  In the cage the squirrel stops upside-down, holding the bars. It is a beautiful thing, but it scares us too. A rich little man in a red fur. A speculator, loan shark, Party member. It has hands, face, heart and eyes, just like me.

  ‘What do we do now?’ says Monika, and I say, ‘We can do anything we want. We are alone.’

  ‘Hey, is that your dad’s car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s brilliant, that is. A Polonez. When did he get it?’

  ‘Casimir! Is that your car?’

  ‘Yes, it is. He got it yesterday from Katowice.’

  ‘Hey, mister! Can we touch it?’

  ‘Mister Kazimierski, sir? How much was it?’

  ‘No. Four hundred. Oy! Hands off, you.’

  The price comes out with Dad’s smoke. He has an American cigarette, a Marlboro. The smoke is like a speech balloon in a cartoon, silvery-white.

  ‘Four hundred thousand zloty? Bloody hell. Did you hear, Boleslaw? Four hundred.’

  ‘Thousand? Bloody hell. What colour is it, sir?’

  ‘You ponce, are you blind? It’s blue.’

  ‘Hey – watch your language. And it’s not blue. It’s navy.’

  They all crowd round outside the school gates, kids and teachers too at the back, Mr Kruczkowski, the Human Philosophy master, and Mr Grudzinski, who does Arithmetic and PE. Dad doesn’t smile, but I know he wants to. It’s good that he doesn’t. Being too happy is like being the smartest in class. It’s better to keep quiet about it.

  Ours is the biggest car on the street. It’s got a boot and four doors. This morning it took eleven tries to start; it would have been quicker to walk to school but we drove anyway. I’m the second one in school to have a Polonez but it is the first to be navy.

  We go on a car trip to see my Uncle Jan. He is a guard at the Russian border. Mother says he met me when I was baptized.

  ‘Be polite to him, love. He can get very angry, your uncle. It is just his temper. Are you ready?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s go then!’

  She is as excited as me. The car starts first time. It’s a March Saturday, and the sunshine comes down between the houses and at street corners, through trees and leant long down hillsides.

  We have Marlboro for my uncle. Dad brings an emergency oil can so if we run out of benzene, we can stop at garages and fill the can for free. He does it even when we already have a full tank. Mum says it’s dishonest. Dad says it’s the law and he didn’t make it. Their voices get louder, softer. Wind comes hushing in the window. Mum sings, not out loud, just humming.

  For a time I sleep in the back seat, where the plastic is warm in the sun. Then I wake up and look out of the window. The coalfields have gone and instead of them I see fields of flax, twisted walnut trees, apple orchards in long bony rows with their whitewashed trunks.

  ‘When do we get there?’

  ‘Soon. Go to sleep, love.’

  I’m not tired now. I sit up. ‘What is it called, the place he lives?’

  Mum turns round in her seat. I wait for her to tell me. She turns back again. She talks without looking at me. ‘Where are your gloves?’

  ‘Here.’ I hold them up drooping from my coat. They are on elastic through the arms. She isn’t looking anyway.

  ‘Just sit still. We’ll be there soon.’

  It sounds like what she said makes no sense, but it does. It means she forgot where we were going too. It happens more and more often, her forgetting. Dad makes a joke of it. He says one day she’ll go shopping and forget where she lives. It’s not much of a joke.

  One time, I was waiting for her in Pieronek’s shoe shop and she left without me. I was in the back with the mirrors with pi
ctures of French women, measuring my feet on the foot-measuring stool. When Mr Pieronek saw I was still there he called my flat but no one was home. Then he locked up the shop and took me back on the tram. My mum went back to the shop later and there was a note, so it worked out fine.

  When Mum forgets, it’s different from the way I do. It’s something to be scared of, you can feel it. I don’t ask Mum about it because if I do, she’ll tell me and then it will be true. My mother’s eyes are blue and the brows are thick and the nose is small and hooked. I think she is probably beautiful but I don’t know. She is just my mother.

  Mother and Father. I look at their heads in the front seats. Their hair is the same colour, black and bright. They grew up together in Kielce. Kielce is at the heart of Poland. Where did I learn this? In school I learn that Silesian anthracite is the richest coal source in the world. My parents’ hair is the colour of anthracite. My hair is a different kind of black, more like roadtar. From behind, my parents look like the same person.

  Uncle Jan is different. The veins in his face are the road-map across Poland, from Gliwice in the west to Terespol in the east. His hair is white like a grandfather, although he is not even a father, not even married. He is my father’s brother and in the Militia Border Guards. His uniform is green and itchy and he has to carry a satchel with a book of the names of all travellers.

  He won’t show me his gun and he shakes my hand without smiling. He smells hot and sour, like zúr soup. Not like my dad, who smells of his imported aftershaves, sometimes like firs and sometimes salt.

  ‘Casimir? You’re getting big. God knows you don’t get it from my family. When are you going to start helping Michal with his work, eh? It’s a long haul he does now, to Astrakhan. Hard work. Do you know where that is, eh? Astrakhan?’

  ‘No, sir. In Russia.’ I stay polite with him, for now.

  ‘In Russia. Go off and play.’

  The smell of him is ugly and dangerous. Now he brings out winiak brandy in a brown bottle and I go away while the two of them drink. Mother is standing at the window but she doesn’t see me go past. Outside it is not cold at all; I could do without the gloves.

  Terespol is two towns with the border through it. In Russia it’s called Brest and it looks bigger. It’s not dark yet but there are no kids around, only border guards. I play by myself, as far as I can go. There are oak trees here with rook nests in them, big balls of twigs like mistletoe.