Bridge of Clay

by Markus Zusak

  When she asked the English teacher about them, by sketching a house and pointing to the paper, he burst forth loudly with laughter. “I know, I know!” But soon he gave her an answer. “No, not paper. Fibro.”

  “Fi-bro.”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  —

  Another note about the camp and its many small apartments was that it was much like the city; it sprawled, even in such a tight space.

  There were people of every color.

  Every speech.

  There were high-headed proud types, and then the worst offenders of foot-dragging disease you could ever hope to meet. Then there were people who smiled the whole time, to keep the doubt within. What they did all have in common was that they all seemed to gravitate, in varying degrees, to people of their own nationality. Country ran thicker than most things, and that was how people connected.

  In that regard, Penelope did find others from her own part of the world, and even her own city. Often they were very hospitable, but they were families—and blood ran thicker than country.

  Every now and then, she was invited to a birthday or a name day celebration—or even just a cobbled-together get-together of wódka and pierogi, barszcz and bigos—but it was strange how quickly she’d leave. The smell of that food in the stifling air; it belonged here as much as she did.

  But that wasn’t what really bothered her.

  No, the one thing she truly dreaded was the sight and sound of men and women standing up, and loosening their throats, for another rendition of “Sto Lat.” They sang for home like a perfect idea—like there weren’t any reasons to leave. They called on friends and family, as if the words could bring them near.

  * * *

  —

  But then, like I said, there was the gratitude, for other times, like New Year’s Eve, when she walked through the camp at midnight.

  Somewhere close by there were fireworks; she could see them between the buildings. There were great plumes of red and green, and distant cheers, and soon she stopped and watched them.

  She smiled.

  She saw the workings of light in the sky, and sat on the stony road. Penelope held her arms, either side, and rocked herself, just lightly. Piękne, she thought, it’s beautiful, and this was where she would live. The thought of it made her eyes close, hotly, and talk to the simmering ground.

  “Wstań,” she said. And again. “Wstań, wstań.”

  Stand up.

  But Penelope didn’t move.

  Not yet.

  But soon.

  “Wake up, for Christ’s sake.”

  While Penny comes in, Clay begins the process of wading, gradually, out.

  On the first day, after my front porch ultimatum, he made his way to the bread bags and remaining coffee. Later, he dried his face in the bathroom, and heard me on my way out to work. I was standing over Rory:

  Me in my dirty old work gear.

  Rory still half asleep, half dead from the night before.

  “Oi, Rory.” I shook him. “Rory!”

  He tried to move, but couldn’t. “Oh, shit, Matthew, what?”

  “You know what. There’s another Goddamn letterbox out there.”

  “Is that all? How do you know it was me?”

  “I’m not answering that. What I am saying is that you’re taking it back and reinstalling the bloody thing.”

  “I don’t even know where I got it from.”

  “It’s got a number on it, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know what street.”

  Now the moment Clay was waiting for:

  “Je-sus Christ!” He felt me seething, right through the wall, but then the practicality. “Okay, I don’t care what you do with it, but when I get back home later, I expect it gone, you got that?”

  Later, when Clay went in, he discovered the whole conversation was had with Hector wrapped like a wrestler around Rory’s neck. The cat lay molting and purring, simultaneously. The purrs were hitting pigeon-pitch.

  When he noticed a new presence in the doorway, Rory spoke, a muffled tone. “Clay? Is that you? Can you do me a favor and get this bloody cat off me?” after which he waited for the last two stubborn claws, and then, “Ahhhhhh!” He breathed a great, relieving breath. Cat hair floated up; it showered down. Rory’s phone alarm now bleating—he’d been lying on it, trapped by Hector.

  “I guess you heard Matthew, the cranky bastard.” Despite his appalling headache, he gave the tired suggestion of a smile. “You wouldn’t mind throwing that letterbox over to The Surrounds for me, would you?”

  Clay nodded.

  “Thanks, kid, here, help us up, I better get to work.” First things first, though, he walked over and slapped Tommy, hard across the head. “And you—I told you to keep that cat of yours”—he found the extra strength—“OFF MY FUCKING BED!”

  * * *

  —

  It was Thursday, and Clay went to school.

  On Friday he left it for good.

  That second morning he went to a teacher’s room, where there were posters fixed to the wall, and writing all over the board. The posters were both quite comical. Jane Austen in frilly dress, holding a barbell with weights overhead. The caption said BOOKS ARE FRIGHTFULLY TOUGH. The other one was more like a placard, saying MINERVA MCGONAGALL IS GOD.

  She was twenty-three years old now, that teacher.

  Her name was Claudia Kirkby.

  Clay liked her because these days, when he went to see her, she broke ranks with proper politeness. The bell would ring and she’d look at him. “Go on, kid, get out of here…get your arse to class.” Claudia Kirkby was good with poetry.

  She had dark brown hair and light brown eyes and a sunspot center-cheek. She had a smile for putting up with things, and calves, nice calves, and heels, and was quite tall and always well-dressed. For some reason, she’d liked us from the start; even Rory, who’d been nightmarish.

  When Clay went in before school that Friday, she was standing over the desk.

  “Hey there, Mr. Clay.”

  She was going through some essays.

  “I’m leaving.”

  She stopped, abruptly, and looked up.

  No get-your-arse-to-class on that day.

  She sat down, looked worried, and said, “Hmm.”

  * * *

  —

  By three o’clock I was sitting at the school, in Mrs. Holland’s office, the principal, and I’d been there a few times before—the lead-up to Rory’s expulsion (in waters still to come). She was one of those stylishly short-haired women, with streaks of grey and white, and crayoned-under eyes.

  “How’s Rory going?” she asked.

  “He’s got a good job, but he hasn’t really changed.”

  “Well, um, say hi from us.”

  “I will. He’ll like that.”

  Of course he would, the bastard.

  Claudia Kirkby was there as well, in her dignified heels and black skirt, cream shirt. She smiled at me, like always, and I knew I should have said it—it’s good to see you—but I couldn’t. After all, this was a tragedy. Clay was leaving school.

  Mrs. Holland: “So, um, as I said, um, on the phone.” She was one of the worst ummers I’d ever known. I knew bricklayers who ummed less than her. “We’ve, um, got young Clay here wanting, to, ahh, leave us.” Damn it, she’d hit us with an ahh now, too; this wasn’t looking good.

  I glanced at Clay sitting next to me.

  He looked up but didn’t speak.

  “He’s a good student,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Like you were.”

  I didn’t react.

  She went on. “He’s sixteen, though. By, um, law we can’t really stop him.”

  “He wants to go
and live with our dad,” I said. I’d wanted to add for a while, but somehow it didn’t come out.

  “I see, well, um, we could find the closest school to where your father lives….”

  Suddenly it came:

  I was hit by a terrible numbing sadness in that office, in its sort-of-dark, sort-of-fluorescent-light. There’d be no other school, no other anything. This was it, and we all knew it.

  I turned away, past Claudia Kirkby, and she looked sad, too, and so dutifully, damningly sweet.

  Afterwards, when Clay and I walked to the car, she called out and chased us down, and there were her soundless, fast-running feet. She’d abandoned her heels near the office.

  “Here,” she said, with a small stack of books. “You can leave, but you’ve gotta read these.”

  Clay nodded, he spoke to her gratefully. “Thanks, Ms. Kirkby.”

  We shook hands and said goodbye.

  “Good luck, Clay.”

  And they were nice hands, too; pale but warm, and a gleam in her sad-smiling eyes.

  In the car, Clay faced his window and spoke, casual but also flatly. “You know,” he said, “she likes you.”

  He said it as we drove away.

  Strange to think, but I’d marry that woman one day.

  * * *

  —

  Later, he went to the library.

  He was there by four-thirty, and by five he sat between two great pylons of books. Everything he could find on bridges. Thousands of pages, hundreds of techniques. Every type, each measure. All jargons. He read through them and didn’t understand a thing. He liked looking at the bridges, though: the arches, suspensions, and cantilevers.

  “Son?”

  He looked up.

  “Would you like to borrow any of those? It’s nine o’clock. It’s time to close.”

  At home, he struggled through the door, he didn’t turn on the light. His blue sports bag flowed over with books. He’d told the librarian he’d be gone a long time, and was given a lengthy extension.

  As luck would have it, when he came in, I was the first one he saw, prowling the hallway like the Minotaur.

  We stopped; we both looked down.

  A bag that heavy announced itself.

  In the half darkness, my body was blunt, but my eyes were lit. I was tired that night, much older than twenty; I was ancient, stricken and grizzled. “Come on through.”

  On his way past, he’d seen I was holding a wrench; I was fixing the tap in the bathroom. I was no Minotaur, I was the Goddamn maintenance man. And still we both watched that book bag, and the hallway felt tighter around us.

  * * *

  —

  Then, Saturday, and waiting for Carey.

  In the morning Clay drove around with Henry, for his books and records at garage sales; he watched him talk them down. In one converted driveway there was a collection of short stories called The Steeplechaser, a nice paperback, with a hurdler embossed on the cover. He paid a dollar and handed it to Henry, who held it, opened it, and smiled.

  “Kid,” he said, “you’re a gentleman.”

  * * *

  —

  From there, the hours fell.

  But they also needed conquering.

  In the afternoon he went to Bernborough, for several laps of the track. He read his books up in the grandstand, and started to comprehend. Terms like compression, truss, and abutment were slowly making sense.

  At one point, he sprinted the channel of stairs, between the splintery benches. He remembered Starkey’s girl there, and smiled because of her lips. A breeze shuffled through the infield, as he left and quickened on the straight.

  It was down to not much longer.

  He would soon be at The Surrounds.

  Penelope made it through summer.

  Its test was the choice of enjoying it.

  Her first effort at the beach was a typical double hit; a mix-up of sunburn and southerly. She’d never seen so many people move so fast, or be swept with so much sand. On the bright side, it could have been worse; at first, when she saw the bluebottles floating serenely in the water, they looked so pure and otherworldly. Only when children came running up the beach, in varied states of distress, did she realize they’d all been stung. Biedne dzieci, she thought, poor children, as they sprinted toward their parents. While most of them shivered under the showers, and cried and sobbed unedited, one mother, especially, kept her daughter from rubbing sand in. She’d reached down for panicked handfuls of it and raked it over her skin.

  Penelope watched helplessly on.

  The mother took care of everything.

  She calmed her and kept her close, and when she had her and knew she had her, she looked up, at the immigrant close at hand. No more talk, just a crouch, and stroking the girl’s tangled hair. She saw Penelope and nodded, and carried the child away. It would be years before Penelope learned that bad bluebottle days were rare.

  The other fact that amazed her was that most of the children went back in the water, but this time not for long, on account of the howling wind; it came up seemingly from nowhere, carrying darkening lumps of sky.

  To top it all off, she lay awake that night, throbbing hotly amongst her sunburn, and the pitter-patter of insect feet.

  But things were looking up.

  * * *

  —

  The first momentous event was that she found herself a job.

  She became a certified unskilled laborer.

  The camp was linked to what was then known as the CES—the government-run job center—and when she visited their office, she was fortunate. Or at least, fortunate in her usual way. After a long interview and a sea of governmental forms, she was granted permission for the uglywork.

  In short, it was public amenities.

  You know the ones.

  How could so many men piss with such inaccuracy? Why did people paint and smear and decide to shit anywhere but in the toilet? Were these the spoils of freedom?

  In the stalls, she read the graffiti.

  Mop in hand, she’d recall a recent English class, and chant it into the floor. It was a great way to pay her respects to this new place—to get amongst its heat, to scrub and clean its filthy bits. Also, there was a personal pride in knowing that she was willing. Where once she’d sat in a frozen, frugal storeroom, sharpening up the pencils, now she lived on hands and knees; she breathed the breeze of bleach.

  * * *

  —

  After six months, she could almost touch it.

  Her plan was coming together.

  Sure, the tears still welled up each night, and sometimes during the day, but she was definitely making progress. Out of sheer necessity, her English was forming nicely, although it was often that calamitous, jumbled-up syntax of false starts and broken endings.

  Decades later, even when she was teaching English at a high school across the city, she sometimes summoned a stronger accent at home, and always we couldn’t help ourselves, we loved it, and cheered, then called for it. She never did manage to teach us her original language—it was hard enough practicing piano—but we loved that ambulance could be umboolunce, and that she told us to shurrup rather than shut up. And juice was often chooce. Or “Quiet! I can’t even hear myself fink!” Somewhere in the top five, also, was unfortunately. We liked it better as unforchantly.

  * * *

  —

  Yes, in the early days, it all came down to those two religious things:

  The words, the work.

  She wrote letters to Waldek now, and called him when she could afford it, realizing, at last, he was safe. He confessed all he’d done to get her out, and how standing on the platform that morning was the highlight of his life, no matter what it cost him. Once, she even read to him, from Homer, in broken English, and was certain she felt him c
rack; he smiled.

  What she couldn’t know was that the years would pass by, almost too quickly, in that way. She would scrub a few thousand toilets, and clean chipped tiling by the acre. She’d withstand those bathrooms’ felonies, and work newer jobs as well, cleaning handfuls of houses and apartments.

  But then—what she also couldn’t know:

  That her future would soon be determined, by three connected things.

  One was a hard-of-hearing music salesman.

  Then a trio of useless piano men.

  But first, it was a death.

  The death of the statue of Stalin.

  He’d never forget the day he first saw her on Archer Street, or actually, the day she’d looked up, and seen him.

  It was early December.

  She’d driven seven hours from the country with her mum and dad, and they arrived late afternoon. A removalist truck was behind them, and soon they carted boxes, furniture, and appliances, to the porch and into the house. There were saddles there, too, a few bridles and stirrups; the horse-works important to her father. He’d been a jockey once as well, in a family of jockeys, and her older brothers, too; they rode in towns with awkward names.

  It must have been a good fifteen minutes after they got there when the girl stopped and stood, midlawn. Under one arm she held a box, under the other, the toaster, which had somehow come loose on the trip. The cord hung down to her shoes.

  “Look,” she’d said, and she’d pointed—casually across the road. “There’s a boy up there on that roof.”

  * * *

  —

  Now, a year and a few months later, on Saturday night, she came to The Surrounds with a rustle of feet.

  “Hey, Clay.”

  He felt her mouth and blood and heat and heart. All in a single breath.

  “Hi, Carey.”

  It was nine-thirty or so, and he’d waited on the mattress.