Underground

by Tobias Hill

  Between the Strug Blocks the little kids and old men are playing. The old men play Pan at a pink plastic table, holding the cards down with their shirtsleeves. The little kids are choosing who will jump off the Block D entrance steps. They sing the choosing song.

  ‘Ana Dua Likka Fakka Torba Borba Ussmussmaka …’

  When I was little I sang it often, but it’s a long time since I heard it. When you are little the years go slower because they are a bigger part of your life. Time goes quicker for me now. I’m bigger; the years are smaller.

  Piotr says I’m wrong. He says it’s our galaxy going towards a black hole and the closer it gets, the faster we go. I think he’s right too. Ideas aren’t like real things. Sometimes they can be two things at once. That’s what I think.

  ‘It’s you, Maria! You!’

  She is bony and very small. She climbs up on to the steps’ concrete edge and jumps. Her skirt flies up into her face and all the kids laugh. She comes down on her feet, slap in the dust; it doesn’t look too bad. Then she falls over and balls up and begins to cry.

  ‘Eee hee. Uuu huu. Uuu.’

  I look away from them all, across the town. The sun catches in the waterways, over towards the docks. I’m facing London Piccadilly England. My mother chooses to forget and my father holds me so hard it hurts, but I can go west. When I’m big I’ll do that. In the West no one will know me. In the West I can be whatever I want.

  I say winiak is the colour of my mother’s Baltic amber. Piotr says it’s the colour of piss in summer. I say we’re both right. We sit looking at the bottle with our backs against the wall of the Laboratory of Oncology. It’s sleepy here with the thaw sun on us; no one comes and there are no windows for them to see us by. I pass the bottle to Piotr and he holds it up. The sun comes shining through it.

  Piotr unscrews the cap and takes a swig. His eyes go all bulgy. He looks like a shot rabbit at harvest. The rabbits come out of the high rye and roll when they’re hit, and the pheasants run up the air like stairs and the skylarks twirl upwards like paper ash from a fire.

  ‘Hoooah! I need some water.’

  He doesn’t get up, just leans back again and closes his eyes. He doesn’t pass the bottle to me either. I take it myself. He didn’t drink much, but then Piotr is small. Me, I am not so small.

  The screw-top scrapes against the glass. It’s an old vodka bottle, there are Russian words stamped into the neck. I raise the bottle and toast Piotr and Poland and my mother. When Dad drinks he toasts Stalin. He dedicates the winiak, the coffee cups, saucepans, the blue-green curtains and the four boxes of shaving foam aerosols stacked in the hall: To the name of Jozef Stalin! Na zdrowie, Na zdrowie! Throwing his arms about. It’s one of his jokes. He doesn’t care if no one laughs. He laughs himself.

  When Mother drinks she toasts no one. Drinking is another of her secrets. I take a good long swig.

  ‘Hoooah! Christ. It’s fine, isn’t it?’

  The sun is also fine. It feels like my guts are on fire with the season. Seagulls go over towards the canal, calling and laughing. ‘Here. You want some more?’

  ‘Her body tanned and wet down by the reservoir.’

  We walk along by the canal in the hot sun, looking for pike. It’s me and big Wladislaw and Piotr and Karol. Wladislaw sings.

  ‘River was dry. Down to the river. Ay. Ayayay. That’s the best song. He’s the king. Isn’t he, Piotr?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You don’t even know who he is. Do you have a music centre, Piotr?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Borja! Farm boy. You’re such a liar.’

  ‘I do, though. My grandfather Roman does. Because Roman loves to listen to Iron Maiden.’

  Our laughter goes bouncing away along the towpath wall, towards the docks and factories. Scrawled on the brickwork are gibbet pictures in red chalk and white paint. In each noose is the letter of an enemy: L for Legia Warsaw, J for the Jews. Piotr kicks up against the wall. For two steps he’s running sideways. It’s February. You can still feel the cold on your face.

  We took the winiak from Piotr’s dad, who gets it free from Mr Krajewski, who lives on the fourteenth floor of Block A and married a German before the war and now he sells rotgut to half the town.

  Everybody wants to be friends with Sir Farmer Wittlin. Even now when there is nothing in the shops except glass shelves, he has food. This last Easter, Piotr had pig’s knuckles and duck’s liver. There is still one pig left. It’s Lech, who is the fastest and has warts. Piotr tried to save some for me but his mum wouldn’t let him. We had mushrooms in soured cream, and the cream was too sour.

  I have many secrets now. Hanna Tuwim is one. When I learned how to come I thought of her. At night I stood at the window looking out across town, thinking of her until I came into my hand. No one taught me how to do it, I just knew. I was glad when she went away. It’s too late now.

  My mother is another. The way she sings in her foreign language sometimes when she works. Quietly, not to be heard, only to make sound. I know she sings in the language of Jews.

  ‘See anything?’

  ‘No. Just a bottle. I thought I did.’ Karol slaps his knees clean and stands up and we go on.

  Lots of things get frozen into the canal ice. Just here there’s green bottle-glass, wooden apple crates, pages of a torn-up book, a pram with no wheels. We are looking for pike. Last thaw Karol came walking back to the Strug Blocks with a piece of ice bigger than himself. A pike was frozen into it. It was striped green and gold and the belly was white. That year there were pictures of dinosaurs in 7C’s biology books. The pike was the colour of the dinosaurs. When the ice melted Piotr cut it open and inside were eggs, like green caviare, and seven fish, each one smaller than the one before. So here we are.

  ‘Have you got more than ten records, Casimir?’

  ‘I don’t have any records.’

  ‘Who’s your favourite band? Is it Iron Maiden, like Piotr’s grandad?’

  ‘I don’t like music.’

  ‘Everybody likes music.’

  ‘Not everyone.’

  ‘Why not, then?’

  We stop to look at the ice. Already it’s melting at the edges and around the bridges. All winter the dock boats break it and then it freezes again behind them. Now it’s heaped up like broken windows. Some of it’s milky and some clear.

  ‘Why don’t you like music, Casimir? Is it because of those foreign songs your mum sings? Karol heard them.’

  Across the canal is wasteground, then a red building with a big sign for the Association of Cattle Head De-Boners. There are girls across the next bridge, walking together in last year’s long grasses. I recognize Monika from the way she walks, her arms folded across her belly. She’s wearing a skirt. I wonder how she got tanned so quickly.

  ‘Is your mother foreign, Casimir?’

  I look round at Wladislaw. I wait for him to say anything more but he doesn’t. He sees I’m waiting and so he gets a stone and throws it whickering across the ice. I look back at the girls.

  ‘What do you see?’ says Piotr. Light reflects off the whitewashed bridge. His face is all freckles and wrinkles, screwed up against it.

  ‘Them.’

  When I was small we played with Monika all the time. Now I don’t know her. The girls are separate from us. It’s like the dinosaur pictures from last year’s book, each different-shaped creature standing in its own group. It’s not really like the dinosaurs. I made that up.

  Piotr looks across at them with his screwed-up face. ‘Which one would you have? If you could.’

  ‘Monika.’

  Karol comes up beside us. ‘The Tomassi sisters have got a notebook with all Led Zeppelin in it. English and Polish.’

  The girls are closer to us now. One of them sees us, her face lit bright and heart-shaped, turning away.

  ‘Wait –’ Piotr squats down at the canal bank, arching his head first left, then right. ‘There’s something under the bridge.’

  We all look
round where Piotr points. There is something, for sure. It curves like a tyre where the ice has melted, twisted out of the slush.

  ‘One of us could walk to it. Piotr, I dare you.’

  ‘The ice is too thin.’

  ‘Karol? I dare you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Casimir, can you see it?’

  ‘Casimir, you see the best.’

  Piotr is taking off his glasses, wiping hair out of his face. I look away from him, out into the shadow of the bridge. The object is smoother than a car tyre and not as wide. Green and muscular.

  ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘Casimir, don’t. The ice is too thin.’

  Wladislaw pushes Piotr back against the towpath wall. ‘It’s thicker than your fucking glasses. Look at the barrel, will you?’

  Near the bridge are all the things people have dropped down on the ice to break it, stones and half-bricks. Close to the bridge is a metal beer tun. It’s small for a barrel, but even so. The ice is grey and flat under it.

  ‘Look at that, will you? What’s wrong with you all? I dare you.’

  ‘You do it, Wladislaw, if you think you can.’

  ‘Who asked you? Casimir?’

  I reach down the canal bank, into the cold water. There is a gap between the side and the ice. I put my hand under the ice, feeling its thickness.

  ‘Casimir? It could have broken and frozen again. If they dropped the barrel and it floated, the broken ice would freeze underneath it –’

  ‘I said I’ll do it.’

  I stretch one foot out on to the wet ice, then lean on to it. The ice creaks like polystyrene packing. Then the other foot. Now I’m standing on the ice, it only took a few seconds. My shoes are thin and the cold makes my feet hurt.

  ‘Bloody hell, Casimir,’ says Karol. Quietly, as if shouting could break the ice under me.

  He and Wladislaw are still standing next to me, close as if I was on the ground. Wladislaw smiles and stares. It scares him, which I like to see; I scare him. I can’t see Piotr now. I turn around and start to move. The ice creaks at the third step, and the seventh.

  ‘Casimir?’

  I look up. Monika is on the bridge. When I wave she starts to laugh.

  ‘Casimir, what are you doing?’

  I laugh back. I start to say I don’t know when the ice goes through.

  At night I count red lights from the rear window, but if it’s daytime like now I ride with my face against the side-window. The light catches in its dust and it changes as you drive, rolling against the glass.

  We’re on Constitution Street, going slow. I see the luxury shops with floured pastries in glass cases. Old women selling plastic bags by the Old Square crossing. One man with his suitcase propped open on a dustbin. There are bottles inside – Head and Shoulders, I know the shape of them. One man in a trench coat and hat with a cigarette. You can tell he’s a speculator too, even though you can’t see what he sells.

  ‘Small-timers.’ My dad kisses his teeth with his tongue, a long drawn-out tut. The steering wheel straightens inside the ring of his hand.

  ‘How soon?’ says my mother.

  ‘Tomorrow, late. I could do with help this time.’

  ‘No. You don’t know if Jan is on duty.’

  ‘Not yet. I can telephone.’

  ‘Why so quick?’

  My dad is going away again. Astrakhan is where he has friends in furs. It’s four days’ drive but the friends are what counts. They’re made from dead lambs stitched together, but the wool is soft and the inside is also soft, like skin. This is the furs I’m talking about. The friends give Dad presents. A Russian Army watch that glows in the dark. The pistol of a cosmonaut. Only the best for the best. That’s what they said. Dad told me. We were playing Pan. I almost won that time.

  ‘Michal? Why does it have to be –’

  ‘I don’t know. Because it does.’

  Outside are more old women with plastic bags. Women with grey cauliflowers and dusty bilberries and branches of yellow broom laid out on newspapers. Two Gypsy men with jars of live fish around their feet, all of them turning the light slow and orange. The old women look at nothing. The Gypsy men look at everything.

  ‘I could use him. He’s big enough now.’

  ‘I said no.’

  ‘Big enough. We’ll see.’

  ‘Look, Mum. Mum. Mum?’

  She looks. ‘Goldfish.’

  ‘They’re great, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, they are. Beautiful.’

  My mum’s hand and mine hold each other; I don’t look round but I can feel them. A big ball of knuckles on the plastic seat between us. When it moves the plastic burns my fingers, but only a little. I keep my face to the glass, watching the light change.

  The cold rushes up around my knees, cock, chest and head. My hands go into the water last and when they are through I pull them down, wrestling upwards. My eyes have closed themselves and I open them and look.

  The ice is full of light. The water is clear green from inside. My mouth starts to open itself and I taste the ice, which is sour, like iron. I close my mouth and kick upwards. The water won’t let me up. Instead it turns me round to face the bridge.

  The pike is there after all. It leans away from me, a long trunk the colour of the water. Its mouth is open, a white crack in the greenness. The teeth are shining white inside the hooked jaw, the hook of it curving up through the lit ice.

  The water is getting darker. I kick again and come up under ice. My face presses against it. Now I can bring my hands up and I hit through the ice, into the air. I think, ‘Still waters run deep’. Cicha weda brzegi rwie. There are voices screaming my name and one voice breathing. The one voice is mine. I make it go on breathing. I hold on to the ice and wait until something else happens.

  My mother keeps notes in her pockets. If you’re in a quiet place with her you can hear the rustle of them. I’ve only seen her read them once. She does it in secret. We don’t talk about it.

  One day in June I came home from school. I called out but no one answered. I walked in through the empty rooms, which were full of light and me sighing in the warm air, stretching the work out of my arms.

  The bathroom door was open and my mother was there. She was standing by the basin with her skirt hitched up. There was blood on her hands and on her legs. She was staring at her palms. I tried to look away but she looked up at me and I couldn’t.

  She was as scared as me. I know it was her period now but then I didn’t. After that she saw Dr Berman. He said she had Alzheimer’s Disease and that she should go away. That was his diagnosis. But I know he was wrong. What my mother has is not a disease. It is that she wants to forget so much.

  It’s getting dark when Dad goes. I push open the window to call goodbye to him but then I wait. He walks to the car, looking both ways across the railway sidings with their blue signal lights and the allotments with their tinfoil scarecrows glittering white.

  Our car is navy, not blue. Against the edge of the birch woods navy is the same colour as darkness. If pine trees grew there and not birch you wouldn’t see the car at all. It’s the right colour for a speculator.

  He stops by it, not getting in. It’s just spring; the nights are still cold. His face is clear in the dark, like the birches. It turns quickly and I look down the road and there are people coming. Two men in uniform, army or Militia.

  The woods are near him, so he could run. I would. But he just stands with his face turned, watching them come up the back road towards him.

  At the car they stop. I count time passing by the alarm clock’s tick. They couldn’t stand for so long without talking. One of the men lights a cigarette, dropping his face towards the match, and I know him. It’s Tomek the Militia man, Wladislaw’s father. He holds out the match to my dad and lights his cigarette too and then waves it out.

  They go on talking, and then Tomek and the other Militia man take off their gloves to shake hands. My dad throws away his cigarette and shakes their
hands but he doesn’t take off his gloves. Then he gets into the car and the tail lights come on. I lean out of the window, holding on to the Singer’s heavy iron frame.

  ‘Dad!’ It’s too late.

  ‘Dad!’

  One of the Militia turns his face up to me as they walk away. My father’s car goes east, towards the highway.

  I get into bed and think of my father. It’s an insult to shake hands with gloves on. My dad insulted the Militia and they did nothing. Outside the lampposts come on. Their light stutters across the ceiling from ten storeys down. Through the wall I hear my mother’s bed creak as she lies back.

  ‘You could have died.’

  ‘I was all right.’

  We sit on the stairs, Monika and Piotr and me. You can hear the echoes coming up from each floor. Voices and doors and dogs. The clatter of pigeons around the entrance.

  ‘I got out by myself. I was all right.’

  ‘I could see you through the ice.’

  My arms are still cold, so that I shiver a bit. Monika is warm beside me. It’s good, having her here.

  ‘You were looking up.’

  ‘I told you it was thin. You knew. Why did you do it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Was there anything there? Was that why you did it? Was it because of Wladislaw?’

  ‘Maybe.’ I stand up. I don’t tell them about the pike. It’s my secret. I know it must be still there, dark in the dark water. It feels good, the seeing and knowing. ‘Do you want to come inside? My mum made zúr soup. There’s plenty.’

  I remember how it felt. The taste of ice was sour, like metal or snow. There was the terror of coming up under it. Then there was the feeling of breaking through the ice. That was great, though. I just reached up with my hands and broke through to the air. With it came the feeling of sight. It was worth doing just for that.