The Road Home
Copyright © 2007 by Rose Tremain
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Hachette Book Group, USA
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First eBook Edition: August 2008
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN-13 978-0-316-03282-7
Contents
Chapter 1:
Significant Cigarettes
Chapter 3:
“A Man May Travel Far, but His Heart May Be Slow to Catch Up”
Chapter 5:
Two-point-five Meters of Steel Draining Top
Chapter 6:
Elgar’s Humble Beginnings
Chapter 9:
Why Shouldn’t a Man Choose Happiness?
Chapter 10:
“Pure Anarchy in Here . . .”
Chapter 12:
A Visit to the Lifeboat Museum
Chapter 16:
Exeunt All but Hamlet
Chapter 17:
Lady Muck of the Vegetable World
Chapter 18:
It Almost Had a Scent
Chapter 19:
The Room of Colored Glass
Chapter 21:
Looking at Photographs
Chapter 24:
Number 43 Podrorsky Street
NOVELS
Sadler’s Birthday
Letter to Sister Benedicta
The Cupboard
The Swimming Pool Season
Restoration
Sacred Country
The Way I Found Her
Music and Silence
The Colour
STORIES
The Colonel’s Daughter
The Garden of the Villa Mollini
Evangelista’s Fan
The Darkness of Wallis Simpson
For Brenda and David Reid,
with fondest love
“How can we live, without our lives?”
— John Steinbeck,
The Grapes of Wrath
Significant Cigarettes
ON THE COACH, Lev chose a seat near the back and he sat huddled against the window, staring out at the land he was leaving: at the fields of sunflowers scorched by the dry wind, at the pig farms, at the quarries and rivers and at the wild garlic growing green at the edge of the road.
Lev wore a leather jacket and jeans and a leather cap pulled low over his eyes, and his handsome face was gray-toned from his smoking, and in his hands he clutched an old red cotton handkerchief and a dented pack of Russian cigarettes. He would soon be forty-three.
After some miles, as the sun came up, Lev took out a cigarette and stuck it between his lips, and the woman sitting next to him, a plump, contained person with moles like splashes of mud on her face, said quickly, “I’m sorry, but there is no smoking allowed on this bus.”
Lev knew this, had known it in advance, had tried to prepare himself mentally for the long agony of it. But even an unlit cigarette was a companion—something to hold on to, something that had promise in it—and all he could be bothered to do now was to nod, just to show the woman that he’d heard what she’d said, reassure her that he wasn’t going to cause trouble; because there they would have to sit for fifty hours or more, side by side, with their separate aches and dreams, like a married couple. They would hear each other’s snores and sighs, smell the food and drink each had brought with them, note the degree to which each was fearful or unafraid, make short forays into conversation. And then later, when they finally arrived in London, they would probably separate with barely a word or a look, walk out into a rainy morning, each alone and beginning a new life. And Lev thought how all of this was odd but necessary and already told him things about the world he was traveling to, a world in which he would break his back working—if only that work could be found. He would hold himself apart from other people, find corners and shadows in which to sit and smoke, demonstrate that he didn’t need to belong, that his heart remained in his own country.
There were two coach drivers. These men would take turns to drive and to sleep. There was an on-board lavatory, so the only stops the bus would make would be for gas. At gas stations, the passengers would be able to clamber off, walk a few paces, see wild flowers on a verge, soiled paper among bushes, sun or rain on the road. They might stretch up their arms, put on dark glasses against the onrush of nature’s light, look for a clover leaf, smoke and stare at the cars rushing by. Then they would be herded back onto the coach, resume their old attitudes, arm themselves for the next hundred miles, for the stink of another industrial zone or the sudden gleam of a lake, for rain and sunset and the approach of darkness on silent marshes. There would be times when the journey would seem to have no end.
Sleeping upright was not something Lev was practised in. The old seemed to be able to do it, but forty-two was not yet old. Lev’s father, Stefan, sometimes used to sleep upright, in summer, on a hard wooden chair in his lunch break at the Baryn sawmill, with the hot sun falling onto the slices of sausage wrapped in paper on his knee and onto his flask of tea. Both Stefan and Lev could sleep lying down on a mound of hay or on the mossy carpet of a forest. Often, Lev had slept on a rag rug beside his daughter’s bed, when she was ill or afraid. And when his wife, Marina, was dying, he’d lain for five nights on an area of linoleum flooring no wider than his outstretched arm, between Marina’s hospital bed and a curtain patterned with pink and purple daisies, and sleep had come and gone in a mystifying kind of way, painting strange pictures in Lev’s brain that had never completely vanished.
Toward evening, after two stops for gas, the mole-flecked woman unwrapped a hard-boiled egg. She peeled it silently. The smell of the egg reminded Lev of the sulfur springs at Jor, where he’d taken Marina, just in case nature could cure what man had given up for lost. Marina had immersed her body obediently in the scummy water, lain there looking at a female stork returning to its high nest, and said to Lev, “If only we were storks.”
“Why d’you say that?” Lev had asked.
“Because you never see a stork dying. It’s as though they didn’t die.”
If only we were storks.
On the woman’s knee a clean cotton napkin was spread and her white hands smoothed it, and she unwrapped rye bread and a twist of salt.
“My name is Lev,” said Lev.
“My name is Lydia,” said the woman. And they shook hands, Lev’s hand holding the scrunched-up kerchief and Lydia’s hand rough with salt and smelling of egg, and then Lev asked, “What are you planning to do in England?” and Lydia said, “I have some interviews in London for jobs as a translator.”
“That sounds promising.”
“I hope so. I was a teacher of English at School 237 in Yarbl, so my language is very colloquial.”
Lev looked at Lydia. It wasn’t difficult to imagine her standing in front of a class and writing words on a blackboard. He said, “I wonder why you’re leaving our country when you had a good job at School 237 in Yarbl?”
“Well,” said Lydia, “I became very tired of the view from my window. Every day, summer and winter, I looked out at the schoolyard and the high fence and the apartment block beyond, and I began to imagine I would die seeing these things, and I didn’t want this. I expect you understand what I mean?”
Lev took off his leather cap and ran his fingers through his thick gray hair. He saw Lydia turn to him for a moment and look very seriously into his eyes. He said, “Yes, I understand.”
Then there was a silence, while Lydia ate her hard-boiled egg. She chewed very quietly. When she’d finished the egg, Lev said, “My English isn’t too bad. I took some classes in Baryn, but my teacher told me my pronunciation wasn’t very good. May I say some words and you can tell me if I’m pronouncing them correctly?”
“Yes, of course,” said Lydia.
Lev said, “Lovely. Sorry. I am legal. How much, please? Thank you. May you help me?”
“May I help
you,
” corrected Lydia.
“May I help you,” repeated Lev.
“Go on,” said Lydia.
“Stork,” said Lev. “Stork’s nest. Rain. I am lost. I wish for an interpreter. Bee-and-bee.”
“Be-and-be?” said Lydia. “No, no. You mean ‘to be, or not to be.’ ”
“No,” said Lev. “Bee-and-bee. Family hotel, quite cheap.”
“Oh yes, I know. B&B.”
Lev could now see that darkness was falling outside the window and he thought how, in his village, darkness had always arrived in precisely the same way, from the same direction, above the same trees, whether early or late, whether in summer, winter, or spring, for the whole of his life. This darkness—particular to that place, Auror—was how, in Lev’s heart, darkness would always fall.
And so he told Lydia that he came from Auror, had worked in the Baryn sawmill until it closed two years ago, and since then he’d found no work at all, and his family—his mother, his five-year-old daughter, and he—had lived off the money his mother made selling jewelry manufactured from tin.
“Oh,” said Lydia. “I think that’s very resourceful, to make jewelry from tin.”
“Sure,” said Lev. “But it isn’t enough.”
Tucked into his boot was a small flask of vodka. He extracted the flask and took a long swig. Lydia kept eating her rye bread. Lev wiped his mouth with the red handkerchief and saw his face reflected in the coach window. He looked away. Since the death of Marina, he didn’t like to catch sight of his own reflection, because what he always saw in it was his own guilt at still being alive.
“Why did the sawmill at Baryn close?” asked Lydia.
“They ran out of trees,” said Lev.
“Very bad,” said Lydia. “What other work can you do?”
Lev drank again. Someone had told him that in England vodka was too expensive to drink. Immigrants made their own alcohol from potatoes and tap water, and when Lev thought about these industrious immigrants, he imagined them sitting by a coal fire in a tall house, talking and laughing, with rain falling outside the window and red buses going past and a television flickering in a corner of the room. He sighed and said, “I will do any work at all. My daughter, Maya, needs clothes, shoes, books, toys, everything. England is my hope.”
Toward ten o’clock, red blankets were given out to the coach passengers, some of whom were already sleeping. Lydia put away the remnants of her meal, covered her body with the blanket, and switched on a fierce little light above her under the baggage rack and began reading a faded old paperback, printed in English. Lev saw that the title of her book was
The Power and the Glory
. His longing for a cigarette had grown steadily since he’d drunk the vodka and now it was acute. He could feel the yearning in his lungs and in his blood, and his hands grew fidgety and he felt a tremor in his legs. How long before the next gas stop? It could be four or five hours. Everyone on the bus would be asleep by then, except him and one of the two drivers. Only they would keep a lonely, exhausting vigil, the driver’s body tensed to the moods and alarms of the dark, unraveling road; his own aching for the comfort of nicotine or oblivion—and getting neither.
He envied Lydia, immersed in her English book. Lev knew he had to distract himself with something. He’d brought with him a book of fables: improbable stories about women who turned into birds during the hours of darkness, and a troop of wild boar that killed and roasted their hunters. But Lev was feeling too agitated to read such fantastical things. In desperation, he took from his wallet a brand-new British twenty-pound note and reached up and switched on his own little reading light and began to examine the note. On one side, the frumpy Queen, E II R, with her diadem, her face gray on a purple ground, and on the other, a man, some personage from the past, with a dark drooping mustache and an angel blowing a trumpet above him and all the angel’s radiance falling on him in vertical lines. “The British venerate their history,” Lev had been told in his English class, “chiefly because they have never been subjected to Occupation. Only intermittently do they see that some of their past deeds were not good.”