The Road Home

by Rose Tremain

  There was a long pause, then Lev heard his daughter’s voice.

  It sounded very quiet and far away.

  “Pappa?”

  “Yes, it’s Pappa. How are you, my flower? Do you like your new doll?”

  “Yes,” said Maya.

  “Did you think up a name for her?”

  “Lili.”

  “Yes? She’s called Lili?”

  “She can go to sleep.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “She does pee-pee in her diaper.”

  “Right. So you’ll have to wash the diaper and put a clean one on?”

  “Yes. When are you coming here, Pappa?”

  “Soon. You’ll have to dry the diaper in front of the fire. But be sure not to let it burn. Grandma will help you . . .”

  “She’s gone,” said Ina’s voice. “All she asks about is when are you coming back.”

  “You know the answer to that,” said Lev. “Tell her I’ll come back when I have some money—or you can come here . . .”

  “Lev,” said Ina, “it’s Christmas Day.”

  “I know it’s Christmas Day. I was just about to wish you —”

  “So don’t spoil it by asking me to come to England. I’m much too old to leave my country. If you want Maya with you, then send money and I’ll put her on a bus. I’ll just get used to being here all alone . . .”

  “Mamma . . .”

  Lev looked up. Sophie was standing in the doorway, wearing a tartan dressing gown. Her hair was wild from sleep.

  Ina went on: “I’ve lived in Auror for nearly seventy years. I prefer to die here.”

  “Don’t worry, Mamma,” said Lev, picking up his packet of cigarettes and holding them out to Sophie. “No one will take you away from Auror. Now, did you get my presents?”

  “Yes. Cutters. But they’re too heavy.”

  “They’re too heavy for your hand?”

  “Much too heavy. I’d need a man’s strength to use those.”

  “Oh,” said Lev.

  Sophie came and sat beside him and lit her cigarette.

  “Lev?” said Ina. “Did you hear what I said? The wire cutters are too heavy. It’s a waste of precious money.”

  “Never mind,” said Lev.

  “Never mind? Why ‘never mind’? You mean you’ve got money to burn now?”

  “No . . .”

  “From working in a kitchen?”

  “No.”

  “What did you mean, then?”

  “I’ll try to find some different cutters—lighter and smaller.”

  “It’s not worth it. I can manage with the tools I’ve got.”

  “But you got the soap, too. Did you like that?”

  “It looks expensive.”

  “Not too expensive. But you liked the smell of it?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, Mamma. Well . . . Merry Christmas. Is Maya wearing her anorak?”

  “Yes. But you know, in the nights she cries. She says to me, ‘Has Pappa gone to that place where Mamma is sleeping?’ ”

  “No!” shouted Lev. “I hate that! Don’t let her believe that.”

  “Children believe what they want to believe. What can I do?”

  “Explain it to her! Tell her I’ll come back . . . for sure . . .”

  “When? How can I tell her that if I don’t know when?”

  “As soon as I have enough money. For heaven’s sake, I’m only doing this for her and for you—for us all. You have to help me a bit.”

  There was silence. Then Lev could hear his mother crying. He swore under his breath. He almost wished he’d never made the call. He covered the mobile and said to Sophie, “She’s crying.”

  Then Ina said, through tears, “It was a bad idea. England. I read an article in the Baryn Informer about the crime there. It’s becoming a terrible place. Violence. Drunkenness. Drugs. Everybody too fat. You were better off here.”

  “I wasn’t better off,” Lev said, as gently as he could. “I had no job. Have you forgotten? Please stop crying, Mamma. Please . . .”

  Sophie got up and began to wander about the room. Lev watched her, loving the sexy grace with which she moved. Meanwhile, he scoured his brain for something to say that would comfort Ina, but he felt instead only the dark distance that separated him from her, the great continent of Europe that lay between them.

  “Listen,” he said, with a sigh, “I have to go now because calls from this mobile are very expensive. But please try to see things differently. I’m sending money . . .”

  “You should have done like Rudi: found a livelihood in Auror.”

  “What livelihood?”

  “Taxi driver. Car mechanic. I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know because there was nothing. No work. So just stop saying all this. Now I’m going to say good-bye, Mamma. Right? I’m going to go now.”

  “Yes. You go.”

  “I’ll send another twenty pounds next week. Did you hear me? I’ll send twenty pounds next week.”

  “Yes, I heard. Good-bye, Lev. Today I asked the Holy Mother to pray to God to bring you home.”

  Ina hung up.

  Lev sat motionless with the phone in his lap. He felt as if a stone had lodged itself inside his rib cage. He put his head into his hands.

  “Tell me . . .” said Sophie.

  “My mother. She doesn’t understand that I’m trying so hard for her and Maya. All she says to me, ‘Lev, come home, come home.’ But home, why? Nothing there, Sophie. No work. No life. Only family.”

  Sophie handed her half-smoked cigarette to Lev, and he took a long pull on it. “Today,” he said, “at Ferndale, with you and Ruby and everybody, I was happy. You know? So happy. When I serve up their nice meal, very happy. When you sing, so happy. This was my best Christmas. And now . . .”

  “I know,” said Sophie. “Families kill you. It’s why I hardly ever see mine. But, hey, listen, the day’s not over yet. Let’s go to the pub. Get a nice steak pie. Have some drinks. Shall we? It’s not as though we haven’t earned them.”

  Lev reached out for Sophie. He pulled her to him and sat very still, with his arms round her, resting his head against her scarlet curls. He loved the smell of her. Knew the scent alone could drive him wild. Wondered how crazy, in time, he would allow himself to get.

  11

  Flooding Backward

  ON THE MORNING before the restaurant reopened, Sophie said, “Lev, you have to go home today. I’ve got stuff to do.”

  Stuff? What stuff? But he didn’t argue, even though the day yawned in front of him, long and lonely without her. He told himself he had things to occupy him: his room to clean, money to send to Ina. And he remembered Christy, alone in the flat. Perhaps he and Christy would walk to Hampstead Heath and watch the kite fliers and the hardy swimmers breaking the ice on the frozen ponds.

  Before he left, Sophie offered to cut his hair. She shampooed it and rubbed it roughly with a towel. Then she positioned Lev at her wooden dressing table, and he could see himself, brightly lit, in an old, three-sided mirror, with the towel draped over his shoulders, and he stared at his two profiles and at Sophie’s soft hands caressing his damp head.

  Clustered round the mirror were a collection of cosmetic products and a jewelry stand, in the shape of a tree, hung with necklaces and beads. In whichever direction Lev looked, he saw his own image framed by these objects. He sat obediently still, staring at the lotions and creams. And he remembered how, when Marina had been alive, he’d loved this scented, intimate paraphernalia, the modest vanities of her life as a woman: the smell of lipstick and foundation, the one precious bottle of perfume, eked out over time, the stubby pencil with which she drew out the elegant line of her eyebrows . . .

  He felt tempted to talk about Marina now, to remind Sophie that he’d been loved before—as if this fact would make him more beautiful to her, more visible and strong. But she was absorbed in the hair cutting. She arranged his head this way and that. She kept telling him not t
o move. She was tender toward him, but part of her, he felt, had left him already. The flat had gone still and silent.

  Marina became Lev’s companion in this silence. It seemed a long time since she’d been there with him, but now she was . . .

  She and Lev were traveling in a bus going from Auror to Baryn in the heart of winter, and on the way, their baby began to arrive. Little Maya. She beat with her fists and with her feet inside Marina, to throw out the fluid in which she’d been floating, and suddenly the floor of the bus was drenched, and when the driver saw this, he began swearing and swerving all over the icy road.

  The bus skidded to a stop. A fellow passenger covered Marina with her woolen shawl. Other women clustered round. The men stared from a horrified distance. Lev asked the driver to go straight to the hospital in Baryn. So the driver let the bus hurtle on, ignoring its scheduled stops, leaving people waiting in the sleet, waving their arms in vain. Marina’s contractions were coming every three or four minutes. Lev knelt by her and held her hand. When the pain came back, she didn’t cry out, but tightened her grip on Lev’s hand, and her nails dug into his palm.

  The road seemed long and gray and unforgiving. One of the women, a babushka with a lined and suffering face, whispered to Lev, “Comrade, you may have to be a hero and deliver your own child. Do you have vodka for sterilization?”

  Vodka for sterilization.

  The phrase later passed into hilarious usage between Lev and Rudi. When the small frustrations of life got them down, Rudi would say, “Shit, Lev. We need vodka for sterilization.”

  Lev smiled at the memory of this, and Sophie said, “What are you smiling at?”

  “Nothing,” said Lev. “Only thinking about Rudi.”

  She went on snipping and shaping. Lev looked at the gray drifts of hair on the floor beside his chair. He returned to the bus and the shadowless landscape going by the window and the babushka rolling up his sleeves for him and pouring vodka over his hands and forearms. And he remembered that, instead of feeling alarmed or afraid, he’d begun to feel excited at the idea of bringing his child into the world on the road to Baryn. He began, even, to hope that the bus wouldn’t reach the hospital in time. He recast himself as a hero, steadied himself for what might prove to be his finest hour . . .

  “Okay?” said Sophie. “I think that’s finished. Now you don’t look so 1970s, man.”

  Lev stared at his face, shorn of his long hair, and he thought that it had never appeared to him quite like it appeared now. He reached up a hand and touched his neck: it was unexpectedly smooth and cold. He tugged the towel off his shoulders and held it in an awkward bundle in his lap.

  “Okay?” said Sophie again.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s good. Thank you.”

  Sophie took the towel from his hands. “It’s a bit short, but in a week it’ll look brilliant.”

  She lightly kissed his mouth. He got up, brushed the hair from his knees, and went into the bedroom, where he began to pack his things. He looked out of the bedroom window into Rossvale Road, and it, like the landscape on the route to Baryn, seemed to be without shadows. He watched a young woman walking along, pushing a baby in a buggy. A small dog followed at her heels. Lev sighed as he folded his checked shirt.

  For all the dramatic preparations, he’d never had to become the hero in the story of Maya’s birth. The bus drew into the Baryn hospital compound in time, and the passengers cheered, the babushka smacked a kiss on Marina’s cheek, and the driver wiped his forehead, which was oily with sweat. Orderlies came running out of the hospital doors with a trolley and Marina was wheeled away. All Lev could do then was follow, aware of the vodka fumes that still emanated from his body.

  The hospital corridor was painted green. Lev jogged behind the trolley, trying to keep one hand on it. But then a set of swing-doors loomed up at him, blocking his way. The doors swallowed the trolley with Marina on it, and a white-coated doctor, who appeared from nowhere, instructed Lev to wait on a wooden chair of the kind that furnished the Office of Public Works.

  Lev sat down. He could hear his labored breathing. He was alone in the waiting area, and he stayed sitting on the wooden chair for a long time. A tin ashtray piled up with his cigarette butts. The vodka evaporated on his skin.

  Then, at last, a nurse came through the doors and held up a tightly wrapped bundle. “Daughter,” she said curtly. “Yours now.”

  Lev sat with Christy, drinking tea. They smoked and coughed in a kind of unison. He looked up at Christy and noticed now that his eczema had retreated, that there was some color in his thin face.

  “Must be the sleep,” Christy commented. “Slept for thirty-nine hours—just to be on the safe side, so as not to experience a chink of Christmas Day. You know? Heard the phone ringing coupla times. Got up to piss. Drank a glass of milk. Those pills gave me excellent dreams, too. Chipper as a spaniel, I was.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. You know your hair’s feckin’ short, fella. Was that deliberate?”

  “Sophie said I looked like 1970s person.”

  “I think it suited you long, but never mind. To go on with me dream: I was at Silverstrand, in Suffolk, where Angela and I once or twice took Frankie. Lovely sea there. Beach nice and clean. I floated along the shore, light as the wind, with all me worries gone. The breakers came tumbling in, and the sun put a glint on the foam, and I saw all the beauty in that, every speck.”

  “That’s a nice dream, Christy . . .”

  “Well, it is. It was. And when I wake up finally, when the pills have worn off, I feel all optimistic suddenly, and think to meself, maybe, with Sophie as, like, the female chaperone, we could make a day out with Frankie—without Angela peering down me neck. What d’you say, fella? One Sunday. We could all go to the zoo.”

  Lev stubbed out his cigarette. “Or go to that place in your dream,” he said. “Silverstrand. Why not there?”

  Christy stared at Lev. His eyes began their familiar, nervous blinking.

  “I don’t know . . .” he said. “In the dream it was lovely, but it’s a while since I visited . . .”

  “Walk by the waves,” said Lev, “or run.”

  “Run?”

  “Yes. Along the sand.”

  “Easy on, fella. Not sure I’m up to running! Might end up facedown in a rock pool. Then the gulls would start circling the territory.”

  As Christy began to laugh and the laughter turned to a cough, Lev’s phone rang, and he walked with it into his bedroom because he thought it might be Sophie, summoning him back to her, but it was G. K. Ashe.

  “Nurse,” said G.K., “how was Christmas?”

  “Good,” said Lev. “Thank you, Chef.”

  “Okay. I’m glad. Well, now listen up. We’ve got a crisis. Tony’s left.”

  “Yes?”

  “Fuck him. Gave me no decent warning, and he’s dumped us in the merde, because we’re full New Year’s Eve, absolutely sodding chocka. So here’s what I’m doing. I’m going to put Sophie in as the second sous-chef. She’s overdue a chance, because she’s dedicated, and she watches and learns, so I think she can hack it. Right?”

  “Good, Chef.”

  “And I want you to take on the veg prep. It’s not difficult. It’s not rocket science, it just needs care. Are you up for it?”

  Lev sat down on his bunk bed and looked at the shop and the old-fashioned storekeeper still lying prone behind his counter.

  “I will do it, Chef,” he said.

  “Good. Good man. If it goes a bit pear-shaped tomorrow evening, it’s not so catastrophic, because we’re clientele lite, but for the New Year we’ve got to be up to par. Go and buy some proper knives. Get down to those catering suppliers in Swiss Cottage. I’ll reimburse you. And then pick up some stuff—salad, endive, potatoes, carrots, whatever you can find—and start practising, okay? Try to get your chopping speed up. Remember, it’s the body of the knife you move, not the tip. And endeavor not to sever your fingers or your hand. I don’t want to see bloo
d in the gratin.”

  “Yes, Chef.”

  “And don’t worry about the KP work. I’ll find a new nurse. Nurses aren’t hard to get. I’ll give you and Sophie a week’s trial. If the week goes all right, I’ll put your money up. Seven pounds an hour. If it’s crap, you’re back at the sinks. You understand me, Lev?”

  “Yes, Chef.”

  “Good. So it’s up to you. Everything now is up to you.”

  The call ended and Lev sat still for a moment, staring at his mobile. Then he walked through to Christy, who was clearing away the tea things. “Christy,” he said, “I’m going shopping now. Cook a nice vegetable stew for supper.”

  “Yes?” said Christy. “Well, don’t let me stop you, fella. Make a lovely change from milk and pies.”

  Little Gem lettuce: pare away stalk, separate and rinse leaves, spin dry, leave ready for the chefs in colander, covered with clean wet towel.

  Baby carrots: slice tops, leaving half-inch of clean green, scrape and rinse, leave ready.

  Spinach: rinse, wilt over low heat, if requested, leave for chefs to drain and season.

  Rocket: rinse and spin, leave in colander.

  Haricots: pinch out tops, discard oversize beans (stockpot), wash, leave for chefs.

  Zucchini: top, wash and drain, slice or baton-up as requested.

  Tomatoes: Blanch and skin. Deseed before chopping . . .

  Sophie had written out and pinned up for Lev what she called her “Veg Blueprint,” and now he was hunched over his new station, cutting, rinsing, scraping, separating, slicing. “Keep your ears pricked,” G.K. had told him. “If I need spinach, I’m going to shout out, so will Pierre and Sophie. If we need carrots batoned up or fennel sliced, again, we’re just going to shout it. And then we’ll need them fast. You got it?”

  “Got it, Chef.”

  “Keep your chopping boards clean. I don’t want to experience a zucchini seed on my endive. And if you cut your finger, rinse it, dry it, dress it quickly, and carry on. Elastoplast and stuff is up there, above your head. Always put on a fingerstall to prevent blood leaking through.”