Homeland (25 page)

‘Oh yes? What animals you got there then?’

‘In area of Poland where we live – deer, many kinds. And bears, though not so often you see them. And wild – do you say
pig
?’

Billy shrugged. ‘Pig’ll do.’

‘And wild cat, with big ears.’ With a hand he fashioned a long tapering ear high above his head.

‘Blimey, a real live larder right there on your doorstep. And you didn’t shoot ’em?’

‘Oh, my father, he liked to shoot. And my next brother also. But I liked quiet time. To ride in forest. I have this horse named Ishtar. Big. Black. Brave. Clever also.’ He tapped a
finger to his temple. ‘She is best horse in my life. She has no fear, not even of wolfs.’

‘
Wolfs
,’ Billy mimicked. ‘Blimey, what sort of a crazy forest you got there, Johnnie? With bloody wolves.’

‘But they don’t come near. They don’t want trouble.’

‘Very obliging of them, I’m sure. What, they see you coming, do they, and they just bugger off?’

‘Sure.’

‘But what if they decide they’re feeling a bit peckish that day? What if they decide on a bit of sport, wolf-style?’

The Polack laughed this off as though it was too ridiculous to merit an answer.

‘Well?’ Billy demanded impatiently. ‘What happens then?’

‘Listen,’ the Polack said equably, ‘I tell you this story. One time when I was fifteen, I ride into forest. I go for long time. Two hours maybe. Then I turn to come home again.
My mind at this age, you understand it is full of dreams and stories and poetry. I look at trees and sky, but I am not looking at path ahead. So, there is this tree that has fallen across path,
like so.’ He placed his forearm at an angle. ‘There is space to go under this tree if I lie flat on Ishtar’s neck’ – he ducked his head low – ‘but I dream
my dreams as always, and I lift up my head again too quick.’ He acted this out as well: a throwing up of the head, followed by a grimace of alarm and surprise. ‘And too late, I see
there is more tree. So
pow
!’ He hit the heel of his hand against his forehead and threw his head back in a mime of collision. ‘I fall from Ishtar. I know nothing for long time. I
am – how do you say – ?’

‘Out cold?’

‘OK. I am
out cold
. For many hours. When I wake there is no Ishtar. No nothing. Just forest. And my head hurt like hell. Not so good!’ he exclaimed with an almost boyish
delight. ‘Then I hear this silence around me. Animals, you know. And then I see on path in front, maybe just five metres away, six, seven wolfs. But you know something? I have no fear. I know
I am safe. They look at me. I look at them. We say hello. And then they are gone. Is OK. No problem.’

When he lapsed into silence, Billy prompted, ‘So you
flew
home, did you?’

The Polack dragged himself free of his memories with an effort. ‘Excuse me? Ah no. Ishtar, she goes home. She finds Jerzy, who is – I don’t know how you call this person
– this man who attends horses?’

Billy flicked the last of his cigarette high into the air and watched it arc down onto the withy bed. ‘A groom?’ he murmured.

‘
Groom.
OK. No one is home but Jerzy. Not my father. Not my brother. So Jerzy, he take my father’s horse, he take dog with good nose, he take Ishtar also, but it is not dog
that find me, it is Ishtar, just like this.’ He made an arrow of his hand and sighted along it. ‘Not many horses can do this thing. She is best horse ever in my life.’

‘Lucky,’ said Billy, thinking of the horses and the servants and the acres of forest. ‘Surprised you don’t want to go back,’ he said.

‘There is nothing for us now. The Russians take everything.’

‘A bit of a change for you, this place, after a big estate, servants.’

There was a pause while the Polack got the measure of this remark. ‘We don’t have big estate, Billy. Just small place.’

‘What, that takes two hours to cross?’

‘But forest is not our land. Forest is for – for’ – with urgent circlings of his hand the Polack searched for some expression that escaped him – ‘for everyone
who wish to hunt, to ride, to walk.’

‘A sort of park.’

The Polack gave a doubtful nod. ‘And servants – I think servant does not have same meaning for us.’

‘Oh, I think it has the same meaning everywhere.’

The Polack gave him a narrow stare and looked away.

‘Doesn’t it?’ Billy argued innocently.

‘These people, they work for us only sometimes,’ the Polack said. ‘Other times they work their own land. They choose when.’

‘Got it. So, you all muck in together.’

‘We help each other, yes.’

‘Everyone takes it in turns to act as groom?’

Suddenly the Polack was alive with suppressed anger. ‘You wish to say something, Billy? Just say it. OK?’

‘I’m not saying anything,’ Billy protested. ‘No skin off my nose either way, is it?’

‘You think we have lazy life or something? You think we do not work?’

Billy shrugged. ‘Listen, nice if you can get it.’

Straightening up abruptly, the Polack dragged his hat low over his ears, raised his hood, and prepared to go out into the rain. ‘You hear propaganda, I think. You believe bad things in
English newspapers.’

‘Never read them myself.’

With a gesture of disbelief, a lifting of a splayed hand, the Polack snatched up his hook and, limping over to the withy bed, worked doggedly through the afternoon without looking Billy’s
way.

For the Polack’s living quarters Billy had fixed up the old apple store, which was the only outhouse to have any sort of windows, two small openings set high in the walls, covered in mesh.
Billy had replaced the mesh with thick glass cut roughly to size by the smithy and fixed with home-made putty of whiting and linseed oil. He removed the storage racks and accumulated jumble and
muck, and limewashed the walls and scraped the peeling paint off the door, and laid a rough covering of flagstones over the earth floor. The doctor loaned a truckle bed, card table and chair, and
for heating Billy resuscitated an old paraffin stove from the back of the woodshed.

The Polack made no comment when Billy showed him the room; he merely looked about him and nodded. Next morning, however, he asked if he could put up some shelves, and Billy pointed him towards
the tools and the discarded storage racks and said he was welcome to knock up whatever he liked. Later that night as Billy returned from the village he saw a light in the window of the apple store
and heard hammering, and, when he went to summon the Polack to work next day, glimpsed through the half-open door two shelves on the wall, not as robust as they might have been, but supporting four
or five books and a framed photograph. Billy was turning away when his eye caught a crucifix pinned above the bed. It was small and ornamented and appeared to be hanging slightly off true, but for
an instant it might have been the crucifix over Billy’s bed at the St Paul’s hostel in Bristol where he’d fetched up two days short of his fifteenth birthday. The batty old
Christian Brothers who ran the place had taken him in, fed him and found him part-time work. They hadn’t asked questions and, apart from the occasional halfhearted admonition to follow a
steady path, they hadn’t preached either, virtually the only people in that long and troubled year to have encouraged him towards independence. Ordinarily he loathed religious symbols, but
the sight of the ornate Catholic crucifix prompted him to feel something like affection.

Before dawn each morning the Polack came into the kitchen to make himself breakfast, and again in the evening to share whatever Stan had cooked up during the day. One afternoon, just before
dark, the Polack disappeared into the orchard and returned with a quantity of wild mushrooms which he turned out onto the table with the air of wishing to help out. But Stan wasn’t having
dubious manure-feeding fungi mucking up his stew and turned them down flat. Mystified, the Polack cooked them up for himself in a separate pot and, defying Stan’s predictions, appeared in
perfect health the next morning.

Notwithstanding the Polack’s foreign habits, the old man made the most of his new audience. In no time he was banging on about the old days on the moor, and the steam-driven pumping
engines built in the mid-1800s which, though capable of lifting a devil of a lot of water, still left much of the Levels to flood regularly, until in this last war – the one just gone, he
pointed out, so there’d be no confusion – diesel pumps arrived, and a new river, the Huntspill, was carved right across the northern Levels to feed water to the munitions factory at
Puriton. As a result, to the delight of the progressive types, a lot more land could be kept dry all the year round. It was only the moors around the Parrett and the Tone that still flooded every
winter, he declared with pride. And some years at other times too, because the Tone went nowhere except into the Parrett, and the Parrett had no fall in it and almost no flow, you could drop a leaf
into it and watch the damn thing shift all of three or four inches in the time it took to smoke a cigarette; and when the Parrett got past Bridgwater it got too wide to be closed off by a clyse or
any other contraption known to man; in fact in its last ten miles it turned into a blooming great estuary – he’d seen it for himself some twenty years back – so that when the wind
and tide were high, as often as not you got the flood water right
back
again. Sometimes the water would take weeks –
weeks
, he cried – to travel to within yards of the
sea, only to be pushed all the bloody way back again in no time flat. Bloody useless river, he guffawed. Nothing like it.

Every time Billy thought the Polack must have run out of questions, he went off on a whole new tack. One day, as they hunched under the tarpaulin on their mid-morning break, the Polack started
asking about the local customs.

‘Customs are what foreigners have,’ said Billy, raising his voice against the splattering of the rain. ‘We don’t have customs here. We have backward thinking.’

‘I mean to ask, how people pass evenings . . . Sundays . . . Where they meet. How they spend time.’

‘Well, the men go to the pub. The girls . . . their big excitement is going to Taunton, I suppose, though don’t ask me what they do there. The rest of them . . . they don’t go
anywhere much.’

The Polack absorbed this slowly. ‘And pastimes? What is it people like to do? To walk? To talk? To go to dances?’

‘Dances . . . If you don’t mind three old granddads churning out slow waltzes and girls who think they’re doing you a big favour by letting you dance closer than six inches
apart – then yes, there’re dances all right.’

‘And this is where young people meet?’

Billy smirked. ‘So that’s it, is it, Johnnie? You’re hoping to find yourself a nice little English girl, are you? Hoping to have yourself a bit of
ro
-mance.’

The Polack shrugged this off with a quick smile, which Billy took as a yes. ‘I mean instead,’ the Polack said in the tone of someone trying to get the conversation back on track,
‘where do young people meet to talk? To discuss?’

‘You’re getting too technical, Johnnie. Finding a girl in England is no different from finding a girl anywhere else. Probably a lot easier. You take her out a couple of times –
to a dance, a film, a caff – you make her feel a bit special, and before you know it, you’ll be in there, no trouble. Like fruit dropping off a tree.’

The Polack’s features hardly altered, yet Billy had the impression that he had understood his meaning perfectly and had the nerve to disapprove. This whiff of virtuousness had surfaced
once before, on the Polack’s first day, when Billy had likened a recalcitrant mole wrench to a woman who refused to open her legs, and the Polack’s expression had taken on the same
distant look.

‘Look,’ Billy said irritably, ‘you might get the weather and the price of potatoes from the men if you’re lucky. But the girlies – all they’re interested in
is frocks and nylons and which blokes are likely to give ’em a good time.’

The Polack turned his cigarette round and examined the lighted end with concentration. ‘But for – excuse me, perhaps I have wrong word –
discussion
?’ He spoke the
word in a Frenchified way. ‘Is this in pub, with men only?’

‘Blimey, what’re you after, Johnnie – a bloody debating society? Well, you won’t find anything like that round here, I can tell you now. They already know all the
answers, see. And they don’t like anyone trying to tell ’em different. But what were you hoping to discuss, for God’s sake? Unemployment? Food shortages? The national
debt?’

‘I wish to learn what people think of politics . . . of social problems . . . of their wishes for future.’

Billy gave a coarse laugh. ‘Well, I can tell you – you’re in the wrong place for that kind of stuff. This here is the bogs, in case you hadn’t noticed. Thirty years
behind the times and in no hurry to catch up. No, if you’re looking for
debates
and the like you’ll have to make for civilisation, or as close as you can get to it. Why
don’t you ask that schoolmistress, what’s-her-name? She might be able—’ Seeing the Polack’s gaze drop suddenly, Billy peered at him in disbelief before giving a low
chuckle. ‘So that’s where you’ve set your sights, is it?’ The Polack’s hasty frown confirmed it, and Billy continued with relish, ‘Well, well . . . you
don’t waste any time, do you? Quick off the mark, I’ll say that for you. These books she’s been bringing down for you – come with love and kisses, do they? A bit of passion
with the grammar.’

‘These are books that I ask for,’ the Polack said.

‘I’ll bet they are! No doubt you’ll be wanting a whole encyclopaedia at this rate.’

The Polack shook his head vehemently. ‘Please. It is not like this.’

Billy laughed. ‘You should angle for a few night classes.’

The Polack threw his cigarette into the rain with a sharp flick of the wrist.

‘A bit of kissing and cuddling will do wonders for your English.’

Pulling his hat on, the Polack ducked under the edge of the tarpaulin.

‘Just a joke, Johnnie,’ Billy called after him. But the Polack didn’t hear or wasn’t listening because he hobbled away without looking back.