by Rose Tremain
“I’m sorry,” said the sister, “but you must go now. You must let Mrs. Constad rest.”
Lev nodded. He felt choked, unable to speak. He got up slowly, took Ruby’s hand and kissed it, felt his own tears fall and moisten the fragile hand. “Thank you,” he stammered.
“Lev dear,” she said, and he saw the shadow of a smile touch her face. “Always so galant. I hope the restaurant is a grand success.”
He arrived early at Panno’s for his evening stint and found the patron cleaning out his charcoal fire to re-lay it.
“Hey!” said Panno when he saw Lev. “Just the man. Got an offer for you. Nice offer, my friend. Vacancy in the kitchen from next week. You want?”
Lev stared stupidly at Panno. Even yesterday, he would have leaped at this offer, but now he hesitated, wondering, Can I do it? Thirteen or fourteen hours a day, six days a week, at the stoves. Will I survive this?
“What’s the matter?” said Panno, seeing him falter. “You’re a chef, aren’t you? With a nice reference from G. K. Ashe! You’ve been wasted on front-of-house. Come and learn Greek food in my kitchen.”
Lev nodded, stammered out his thanks to Panno, and said he’d do it.
“Good,” said Panno. “Seventeen pounds an hour. Okay? That way, you make ninety or hundred pound a night. And I keep paying you cash, so no National Insurance bullshit and no tax, right? It’s a chance for you to get on your feet.”
“Thank you, Panno.”
“No, it’s good for me, too. Shake on it, eh?”
The two men shook hands, Lev’s hand cool from his walk, Panno’s warm and dusty from his charcoal ash. Then Lev went to the sink, drew himself a glass of water, and drank. His mind was already doing wild sums. Now he’d be making about £1,400 a week. Already, by juggling his jobs at Ferndale Heights and Panno’s, he’d saved almost £2,000. And today, he’d banked a check from Ruby Constad for £3,000. He was halfway to his target.
He put on his blue-and-white apron and began laying tables.
He thought that he should have been walking on air, but his legs felt sluggish, his brain feverish with anxiety. And he knew this wasn’t just tiredness or even sadness at Ruby’s dying. It was because his dream, his heart’s desire, his Great Idea was sailing closer, ever closer to him now, but there was one terrifying, insurmountable problem: far off in Baryn, where it would have its existence, no one waited for it. In his own country, where he longed to return, it wasn’t even the empty piano shop of his sentimental reveries; it was nothing. It was nothing because no one trusted him anymore.
23
Communist Food
LEV FLEW HOME in the middle of winter, mild and damp in London, but ice-cold in Auror.
He’d told nobody he was coming, preferred to arrive like this, a stranger in a world newly strange to him, make his own way, slowly, by bus, from the airport at Glic to Baryn, and then on to his village.
On the first of the familiar, worn-out buses, belching heat from some blackened part of its engineering, Lev chose a window seat and kept wiping the condensation from the steamed-up glass so that he could stare out at his country—at the abandoned farms and silent factories, at the deserted coal depots and lumber yards, at the new high-rise flats and the bright, flickering heartbeats of American franchises, at a world slipping and sliding on a precipice between the dark rock face of Communism and the seductive, light-filled void of the liberal market.
Lev was glad of the snow shroud that softened the ugliness of the town suburbs, made the low village houses look picturesque, gave beauty to a straggle of mules being led through the purple afternoon, carrying bundles of reeds on their scrawny backs. He even found himself half hoping that, beyond Baryn, the road would be pronounced impassable so that he could postpone his arrival in Auror.
It was dark by the time the bus drew into the depot at Baryn, and the darkness gave Lev the excuse he needed to go no farther that night. After all, no one was expecting him. No meal was being prepared, no lamp or fire lit. It would be better, he told himself, to arrive in Auror in the morning, with hoped-for sunlight making the snow look clean, when Maya was at school, when Ina was working in her shed, when Rudi was out on his taxi round. Better to arrive under a blue sky.
He found a room in the two-star Hotel Kreis, with a double bed and an old TV on a plastic console that was buckling under the television’s weight. In the hotel dining room, Lev was served a meal of tinned soup and unidentifiable stew. He noticed that the tablecloth was stained and the tines of the forks tarnished. He drank a carafe of inky red wine and fell asleep with the trams grinding and clanking outside his bedroom window and the surge of the hotel plumbing above and beneath him, as though some unmapped inland sea were slowly filling the cavities of the walls. He slept a dreamless, exhausted sleep.
The morning brought sunlight and the beginnings of a thaw.
Lev got off the bus outside Auror and looked toward his village, then up at the hills behind it. He stood silently on the empty road. He listened to the quietness of everything. Thought how, all the years he’d lived here, he’d never seen clearly how lonely, how far from all thriving worldly habitation Auror actually was. Nothing moved in the snowscape, only the glimmering droplets of the thaw among the hedgerows, silently falling.
Then Lev heard a low rumbling noise start up, like the sound of a generator. He couldn’t see the river from here, but he looked over to where it was, saw the top of a steel crane rising above the trees. Now, added to the rumbling, came the muffled wump-wump-wump-wump of a pile driver. So then Lev understood that it had begun: work on the Project of Outstanding Public Utility (POPU), known as Dam No. 917, adjacent to the village of Auror.
Lev picked up his bag. He could feel his heart beating loudly, as if in time to the wump-wump of the machinery pounding shafts into the riverbed. When the first houses came into view, he faltered and stopped. Why was it so excruciating, this moment of return? For such a long time he’d imagined it differently, with all the familiar faces smiling at him from behind the barrier in the airport arrivals hall, Maya rushing forward to fling her arms round him . . . But now here he was, moving silently into his village like a ghost, as though he or the village—or both—were guilty of some terrible dereliction.
Who’s there?
Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself!
Lev remembered suddenly that it was Saturday. This made everything worse. Because now he had no idea where everybody was going to be; and he didn’t know how best to imagine anyone. Would Ina be working in her shed? Would Maya be playing with her friends in the snow? Or would he have to walk into his own front room and find them both there beside the woodstove, see them turn to him with a terrified look?
He found himself wishing, irrationally, that he had Christy Slane with him, a comrade, a true stranger to whom everybody would have to be polite and welcoming, a shield behind which feelings could be hidden. Because alone like this, in the vacant white landscape, he felt a kind of sordid nakedness, as though his family had never before seen him, seen him as he truly was, and now they would, and when they saw what he was, they’d turn away in disgust.
He walked on. He was at the brow of a familiar incline. Any moment now his own house would come into view. The wump-wump-wump of the pile driver was louder, closer . . . Then he heard the sound of a vehicle and saw, as he reached the top of the incline, the unmistakable blue-and-white shape of the Tchevi moving slowly toward him. Lev stared at the approaching car. On it lumbered, its low center of gravity as impressive as always, its chrome still gleaming in the morning light, and at the wheel . . . well, it could be one person and one only. No passenger beside him. Rudi alone, probably setting out on an early taxi run to Baryn.
Lev put down his bag. The Tchevi didn’t slow, but came gently on up the hill, its old American engine still throbbing and gurgling, like a big outboard motor on a boat. Now Lev could see that Rudi was wearing dark glasses against the snow’s glare. Lev was about to raise an arm in greeting, but his
arm felt heavy at his side, so he just stayed where he was and waited for the moment when Rudi would recognize him.
Now the car slowed a little, but it was only a tiny diminution of its speed, a mark of courtesy to a stranger passed on the road. It didn’t stop, but drove on by. Lev could hear the car radio playing.
Wump-wump-wump . . . Wump-wump-wump . . . Wump-wump- wump . . . The pile driver, the beat of the car’s music, the pounding of Lev’s heart: all combined to isolate him inside a cold cavern of sorrow. His friend had seen him and driven on, driven away!
Lev turned in the direction of the Tchevi, raised both his arms in a gesture of despair, saw the car’s brake lights come on, saw it slide to a halt on the downward slope of the hill.
He waited. All around him, the snow was melting and shimmering.
Abandoning his bag, he began to walk toward the Tchevi, saw the driver’s door open with its habitual, violent swing and the hunched figure of Rudi climb out into the road. He was wearing the worn Canadian lumber coat he’d exchanged for two spare tires at the Baryn market. His hair was gray and wild.
“Hey!” he called. “Lev! What the fuck . . . ?”
He stood by the open car door, holding on to it as though for support.
And Lev found himself wondering, What’s the matter with him? Is he ill, is he lame, or what? Why doesn’t he move?
But then, as Lev approached him, Rudi began to walk toward him, and the walk turned into a run or, rather, a familiar lopsided jog, the only expression of speed Rudi’s body had been capable of since the long-ago days of his youth.
“Hey!” he called again. “Hey, comrade!”
Then the two men reached each other and clung together, in a slumped, exhausted embrace, like heavyweight boxers nearing the end of a bout. Lev wanted to say Rudi’s name, tried to say it, but found that he was unable to speak.
Now Lev was sitting in Rudi’s kitchen. Lora sat beside him, holding on to his arm, and Rudi was opposite them, staring at his friend with a kind of awe.
“It’s like,” he said, “I’m some heartbroken old apostle, come to visit your tomb, and then you walk out of it with holes in your fucking feet.”
They were drinking coffee, eating cinnamon cakes. The small house smelled of cigarette smoke and wood fumes. Lev noticed that the ceiling above the stove was black with grime. The feel of Lora’s hand on his arm was warm and comforting.
“So, what now?” said Rudi, after a while. “What happens next?”
Lev reached for another cake, took a sip of his coffee. Felt the weight of the moment.
What happens next?
“Okay,” he began. “This is what happens next. I’ve been saving money. Quite a lot of money. More than you or I ever earned in our years at the mill. And this is what we’re going to do with it . . .”
Strangely, he felt calm as he talked. He laid out his vision of the restaurant in Baryn like a man describing some perfectly recollected memory that hadn’t dimmed with time but only gathered color and clarity as the months had passed. He talked about the piano shop and the open fire and the wood floor and the white tablecloths and the bar. He said he was going to begin the search for premises in Baryn as soon as possible. He told Rudi and Lora how much he now knew about cooking and how it had become his belief that, in any human existence, good food might make a crucial difference to a person’s day-to-day ability to go on and not give in to despair. He described the changes he’d made at Ferndale Heights and the way the residents had been cheered by them, even in their last months on earth. He boasted that he was going to try to ameliorate the lives of every citizen in Baryn.
After a while, as, in the hall, the broken cuckoo clock blurted out some hour or other and the telephone rang a couple of times and was ignored, Rudi began to ask questions.
“What’s the ‘we’ in all this, my friend? How do we fit in?”
“Right,” said Lev. “This is how I see it. The thing I want is that everybody gets to do what they’re best at.”
“What am I best at?” said Rudi. “Getting plastered. Driving a twenty-five-year-old car. Pissing into engine coolers. What use am I going to be?”
“Maître d’,” announced Lev, snapping his fingers for emphasis. “Restaurant manager. Front-of-house. You run the dining room.”
“You’re joking.”
“No. Why? You take drinks orders. Make everyone feel welcome. You’ll be fantastic at this. Keep the waiters in line. Crack jokes. You’re the face-of-the-place.”
Lora burst out laughing. “Beautiful!” she said. “The face-of-the-place! I never thought of anything so perfect for Rudi.”
“Why’s it perfect for me?” said Rudi. “My fucking face ain’t so handsome anymore. And my jokes are pathetic these days. There’s nothing worth joking about.”
“Now there will be,” said Lora. “Think of this, Rudi: your own bar area, a cellar full of wine.”
“These I like. But I’ll be no good, my friend. I’ll drink too much. I’ll say some fucking rude thing to a customer by mistake. I’ll be too clumsy.”
“Maybe,” said Lev. “I was clumsy when I started at GK Ashe. But you’ll learn.”
Rudi now rubbed his eyes, and it was as though he was shining them up, because when he turned, Lev could see them sparkling.
“Jesus,” Rudi said. “God damn you, Lev! Why’ve you kept this secret so long?”
“Because I couldn’t tell you till I had the money. And I wanted to be here, to present it to you, face to face.”
“Well, now you’ve got it, buddy, face to face with the face-of-the-fucking-place!”
Their laughter chimed out, ravishing the morning quiet.
“What’s Lora going to do?” asked Rudi, when the laughter subsided. “How’s she going to get involved? I’m not bossing my wife around as a waitress.”
“I know,” said Lev.
“It’s okay,” said Lora. “I can just keep on with my horoscopes.”
“Those fucking horoscopes!” said Rudi. “If I hear the word ‘Jupiter’ one more fucking time, I’m going to start shooting at the night sky.”
“Well, this is what I wondered,” said Lev. “I wondered whether Lora would like to work with me in the kitchen.”
“I’m not a chef, Lev.”
“Hey, but wait a minute, you make nice meals, babe,” said Rudi. “That’s a start. Isn’t it? And sometimes she has to make them out of heels of sausage and stale bread and God knows what kind of bitter leaves. Eh?”
“Exactly,” said Lev. “Now I can get you good ingredients, Lora, and teach you everything G. K. Ashe and Panno the Greek taught me.”
Lora leaned against Lev and put a tender kiss on his cheek. “We missed you so,” she said. “Didn’t we, Rudi?”
“Yes, we fucking did. Especially when we thought you were never coming back. Oh shit, I know it’s eleven in the morning, or whatever, but let’s have some drinks to celebrate. Vodka for sterilization!”
Rudi got up to fetch the glasses and the vodichka.
Lev looked round at the familiar room and thought that he could sit there forever with his friends: let time drift and pass and never want to move from their side.
He reached for the vodka.
The next morning, Lev woke on Rudi’s sofa. The world was encased in ice. Droplets of the thaw had petrified into a million glinting pieces of glass. As the sun rose, the dazzle of this glass world was breathtaking to see.
Lev sat with Rudi and Lora at the kitchen table, nursing his hangover, drinking Fanta, munching stale rice cakes. Beyond the window, the ice trees tinkled in the northerly breeze, like a forest of chandeliers.
It was tempting to stay there, by the woodstove, not move for another whole day, to doze in the afternoon, to talk on and on with Rudi and Lora until a second night fell. But Lev was now longing to see his daughter.
This was the day when he would finally arrive home.
“Listen,” said Rudi, “let me go ahead, prepare Ina. Otherwise when she sees y
ou, she’s going to fall over into the fucking woodpile. You follow along.”
“No,” said Lev. “I know where Mamma will be on a Sunday morning: church. I’ll wait for her outside. She’ll be full of sanctity so, with any luck, she won’t yell at me.”
“Yeah, but her heart may stop.”
Lev sighed. “Then it’s a good end. She dies in front of her church, knowing her Prodigal Son has come back, after all.”
Lev took a shower, then repacked his bag and set out. He walked slowly through the village. From behind closed windows, from behind lace curtains, he saw one or two people stare at him, a figure they almost recognized, wandering alone through the empty morning.
Now he stood in front of his house and looked at it. Nothing moved here: no sound at all. Even the machinery at the river had fallen silent. The boards of the wooden veranda were bleached gray-white with the passing of the seasons. A small purple bicycle was propped up against the wall beside the front door.
Lev found himself shivering. He wasn’t used to the cold of Auror. Found himself wondering how he’d ever survived all those winters at the lumber yard. This work now had in his mind something inhuman about it, as though it had been a form of unspoken punishment all along—punishment for the simple crime of being alive in a complicated age.
He went up the steps to his front door. At his back, he could imagine it, the floodwater rising, already swallowing whatever had been left lying on the ground—broken tools, sacks of rotted potatoes, plastic buckets, chicken bones left by the dogs—then beginning to wash round the walls of the houses, beginning to seem deep, beginning to look green and dark . . . And he thought, as he stood shivering outside his door, that it didn’t matter, that Auror was a place so lonely, so abandoned by time, it was right to drown it, right to force its inhabitants to leave behind their dirt roads, their spirit rags, and join the twenty-first-century world.
Instead of walking down to the church, Lev went into the house and crouched by the woodstove, trying to get warm. The room smelled of damp wool. On a wooden clotheshorse, some of Maya’s little clothes were drying. The doll she’d named Lili sat in a chair with her eyes rolled shut. Lev went to his bag and took out the presents he had brought for his mother and daughter and laid them out on the table, beside some plastic flowers Ina had stuck into a glass vase. He lit a cigarette and waited.
