One Crow Alone Read online

  “Yes. Don’t let me down.” He handed in a bucket with a lid. “Enjoy!”

  That grinning gold-toothed face was the last thing Magda saw as the doors closed. The remains of daylight disappeared when the heavy bolts clamped shut.

  Beneath her the bundles of fur were soft. She could hear Ivan breathing beside her. “Will it be dark the whole way?” she whispered.

  “Yes. But at least you’ll be warm.”

  She heard the smile in his voice.

  The truck started up. Chassis juddering under the bales of fur.

  “It will be better if we lie down,” he said. “The best we can do is sleep. It will be a long journey.”

  “I am afraid.”

  He settled down next to her. “Try not to think too much. It will be all right.”

  Magda closed her eyes. The darkness was too dark. If she closed her eyes, she could pretend it was not. She could pretend that she had made a choice. And that it was the right one.

  * * *

  At first she was nauseous with the disembodied lurching. But soon that passed and the rumbling of the engine became a comfort. It was when the jolting and rumbling stopped that she grew afraid again.

  They hid then. Scrambling to the back on all fours and burying themselves in between the soft bundles of fur. But no one opened the doors.

  * * *

  Later, Magda dreamed. The dreams were not good. They were troubled dreams. She could not remember them when she woke, but she knew they were not good.

  * * *

  “Magda. Let’s drink. Here.” Ivan handed her the bottle of vodka. “It’ll warm you up.”

  She put it to her lips. Tipped it back a little. The taste was harsh and bitter and burned at her throat.

  “You’ll get used to it. Go on.”

  She drank some more.

  They lay on their backs, side by side.

  “You remind me of a girl I knew once—” Ivan said. He thought about his friend. Anna. Warm beside him with a bottle of vodka. Just like this. A long time ago.

  He closed his eyes.

  “Tell me,” said Magda. “Tell me about her.”

  Ivan turned on his side in the dark. “Sometime maybe I will. But what about you? Your mother—I suppose you know where she lives.”

  “I have an address.”

  “Why did she leave your village?”

  “Like everyone. To work. She always says she’s going to come back home one day, come back and buy an apartment in town. She’s going to buy a good apartment for us all to live in, and sell Babula’s cow. She did make Babula sell the cow. They had a big fight, but she did make her sell the cow in the end.” Magda swigged from the bottle again, felt a lightness in her thoughts. “But I don’t even remember the color of her eyes. Maybe they are green. Or brown.”

  “So you haven’t seen her for a long time?” Ivan said.

  “She comes home every summer. On a bus. She’s always so tired and Babula treats her like a child and she doesn’t like it, I know. But she cries when she has to go back.” The alcohol flooded into her blood. Thoughts jumbled in her head.

  “Well, let’s hope we find her.” Ivan took the bottle away.

  “Ivan—” Magda coughed a little, tasted the cheap vodka at the back of her mouth. “Ivan, do you know the story of the forest spirit, Lesh-ee?”

  “What?”

  “Lesh-ee—”

  Ivan laughed. “The spirits in the forest. Have mercy! Have mercy!”

  Magda rested her hands on her stomach. Smiling in the dark. “All right. So who are you then?”

  He rolled onto his back. “You always ask the same foolish questions.”

  “No, I want to know. Who are you? Tell me about your friend. Tell me about your home.”

  Ivan reached out for her, fumbling under the heavy pile of furs. “I am Lesh-ee. Grrrr! The spirit in the forest!”

  But it wasn’t funny anymore. Just like that.

  She brushed him away with her hand.

  Alone with her troubled thoughts.

  12

  On a cold dark night we are carried across the sea. To a place where men like rats from sinking ships have scurried the ropes to land.

  Where gray salt waters pound the bulwarks of concrete jetties and hard gloved men hunch backs into a sea-sprayed wind. They curse with blueing and indelicate lips as their slow-moving fingers sling the freezing strops to rusting hooks.

  And a battered container, lurching and swinging, is hoisted from the icy decks of a great ship. And now a new lorry that has taken possession of the load turns from the road and pulls into a snow-filled yard.

  This is the place. A Mountain of Glass.

  Home of fifteen million spirits.

  Of fifteen million mouths to be fed. And fifteen million hearts to be warmed. And fifteen million minds to be led.

  Multiplying under a dark, beady lens, this great sprawling organism grows, spreading like bacillus on a dish: London.

  Here Crow preaches, ragged and hungry among the crumbling darkened stucco. Spying through keyholes and hopping across the white-topped roofs where chimneys belch smoke once more into the heavy gray sky. Digesting all the while, a deficit of hope that clanks slowly from A to B and B to A, back and forth like the pendulum of some awful clock passing time.

  It is here that Crow waits.

  And watches.

  And keeps its privy counsel.

  * * *

  Magda felt that she was back in her bed in Morochov. Babula was pressing her hand with cool, old fingers. Babula, mopping her brow. The old woman leaned close, Magda could feel the breath on her cheek. There were voices out on the porch. It was the priest. And the Dudek brothers.

  Magda could hear them talking.

  It was as if she were waking from a dream.

  Babula seemed to be leaning on her in the cool dark of the bedroom. It was difficult to breathe.

  Babula. Babula, you are so heavy.

  She could hear the priest in the room. She tried to open her eyes.

  She has been a very bad girl, Father.

  Yes, she has.

  I told her not to listen to the spirits in the forest, said Brunon Dudek, standing at the foot of the bed. We’ll help lay her out, Agnieszka.

  A bag of potatoes is all you’re getting, Brunon Dudek.

  Magda could feel hands pinching under the bedclothes: the cold hands of the spirits from the forest.

  Have you dug her grave, Agnieszka?

  Under the apple trees, Father. Nail the coffin shut with your shoe.

  Magda tried to raise her head as she was lifted from the bed. Was she dying? She did not want to die. She did not want to be buried under the apple trees. She grabbed for the blankets.

  No! Don’t let them take me, Ivan.

  But they were carrying her into the garden. The light was bright. She tried to open her eyes.

  I don’t want to be buried under the apple trees!

  The priest laughed. The Dudek brothers laughed.

  Ivan. Help me!

  The light grew stronger. It was so bright.

  Don’t bury me!

  * * *

  “Wake up! It’s just a dream. Have some water.” Ivan opened the bottle of water and found Magda’s hand.

  He knew they had crossed the sea while Magda had slept. The engine had stopped but the lurching had gotten worse.

  Magda let a little of the cold water trickle onto her tongue and down her throat, and lay back on the bundles of fur.

  “Just rest, Magda. We will be in London soon.”

  And what will there be when they open the doors? she thought. The opening of the doors meant that tomorrow would come at last. The world would come back with the light. You do not know where you are going. What will happen. What you will find.

  She felt like the dog, Azor, waiting in the snow, watching the world disappear. Everything hurt. Her knees throbbed. A dull thumping ache behind her eyes. Ivan was close beside her. It comforted her a little.
r />   The container lurched with a loud bang and was still.

  * * *

  “Hey! You! Truck of finished pelt need unloading. And your friend.”

  The short Russian who issued this command rubbed his hands together in the cold. He was wearing a long fur coat that made him look even shorter.

  A man stood up from bending over the salty rawhides he had been heaving onto a conveyor belt.

  “Oy mate!” he shouted at his friend, whose head and arms were hidden inside a rinsing drum.

  “Mate!” he shouted again above the din of the machines.

  The man pulled his head out. Mouthed a What?

  The first man pointed out through the hanging plastic sheeting at the open door of the warehouse. “We’ve got to unload a truck.”

  The other man slammed the red plastic power button with the palm of his hand and the conveyor ground to a halt. “I’m effing freezing. What time is it?”

  “Three-ish.”

  The two stood side by side at a metal sink, washing their bloody hands. Hung their aprons on hooks on the wall.

  “Is it a big load?”

  His friend peered through the plastic sheeting into the yard.

  “Looks like it.”

  They pulled on their hats and jackets and stepped outside. The lorry had parked in the unloading bay.

  The Russian saw them and put up his hand. “Wait!” he barked.

  “What the bleeding hell—?” The man stamped his feet. “I’m freezing my nuts off out here! What’s he doing?”

  “Dunno.”

  Two coat-bundled figures stumbled along the wall of the yard toward the open road.

  “Look!”

  The Russian came striding back across the snow. “What you look at? Get on with it!” And he scuttled back inside the warehouse.

  The man nudged his friend and pointed. “That was illegals in the truck.”

  “Not our problem, mate,” said his friend, and they adjusted their hats, and with heads low they stomped out into the yard.

  13

  The doors of the container opened. Magda turned her head to the light, blinked, shielded her eyes with her hand.

  There was a man wearing a fur coat.

  He seemed to be shouting at them. “You go now. You cannot stay.”

  “We have to get out, Magda,” Ivan said. “Give me your mother’s address.”

  “Get her out. You have to go,” the man shouted.

  Magda pulled her mother’s address from the pocket of her coat.

  “We need to find this place—”

  The Russian grabbed the scrap of paper and looked at it. “Down road. Station. You go train to Hampstead Heath.”

  They scrambled down from the bales of fur and jumped onto the concrete floor of an open shed. Magda stood unsteadily on her legs. Blinked in the light. Ivan talked to the Russian in the fur coat.

  He looked paler than she remembered. He turned and smiled at her. It wasn’t the same face that had laughed at her over the fire in the forest. Or the face in the shadows of the nighttime in Krakow. Or the face she had imagined in the darkness. But still smiling. He took an envelope from the Russian.

  She leaned against the doors of the container. The back of her neck still throbbed.

  “I need to sit down.”

  “We have to leave this place. I’ll find somewhere to rest. I promise. Here, lean on me.”

  Magda let her weight fall on Ivan’s shoulder. He helped her along the side of the container. Saw two men staring at them from the warehouse.

  “Hurry, Magda. We must get away from here.”

  Out on the road the snow was plowed into dirty heaps along the pavement. With approaching dusk, the sky was growing dingy between the rooftops. A small electric car whirred slowly along the icy white. It disappeared around a corner between the shabby warehouses.

  They found a dark, narrow alleyway that led to nowhere, and sat in the snow behind some large plastic bins. She managed a smile. “This is London, Ivan. It doesn’t seem much better than Krakow, does it?”

  “We have to get to the train station. The Russian told me it is not far. It’s nearly dark. That will give us some cover.”

  Magda leaned back against the wall with her coat pulled close around her, hands tucked under her arms.

  They were here. In London. England.

  Against all the odds.

  And when she found Mama the world would fall back into place.

  Her hand crept inside her pocket to the carefully folded paper there. Mama’s address.

  Mama. At last.

  * * *

  “Yalla! Yalla!”

  Ivan jumped up and peered around the corner of the alleyway.

  “What is it?” She crept up beside him.

  Farther up the road, a dingy electric light glanced across the sidewalk from the door of a liquor store. In front of the grilled windows a group of boys hung around in the snow, drinking from unmarked bottles—accompanied by a ragtag group of stocky, square-snouted dogs, bristling like loaded weapons.

  Another group of youths straggled out of a side street. “I ain’t blettin’ doin’ it, blud. Give me your phone—”

  A dog snarled. The drinking boys stepped out from their street-side barracks.

  “Yalla, yalla! Listen to dis, chungdys! CDB are takin’ ova Camden bluds!”

  They got their response, with gestures crude: “No man! TMS are pinchin’ ova Camden ’n soon takin’ ova London. We got dogz blud, you feel me? They gonna rip you up like shankin!”

  Shouting from along the street. The sound of breaking glass. A bottle smashed against a wall.

  Snarling and barking.

  Bellowing.

  Padding footfalls.

  “—don’t joke no more. Faisal killed Gek but don’t think you gonna get away wid dat medevil shit.”

  Dull, thick sounds of boots on ice. More barking.

  “If you lot mediboys come try another thing like dat. Chungdy. This me, ova here.”

  Running feet. Slathering, teeth snapping.

  “—don’t come frontline Camden sans invite, coz we is CamdenDogBoyz and we’ll terrorize you marginuls—”

  Running. Shouting. “They got him! They blettin’ got Shaddy, bludz!”

  Footsteps stumped toward the alleyway.

  A flailing blur of legs, and dogs with flattened ears jumping and snapping. And then they were past. Braying in the dark.

  “Quick,” said Ivan.

  Magda followed him out onto the street, skirting along in the shadows of the buildings, broken bottles crunching underfoot. They ducked down a side road. They pulled up for a second against the wall, Magda’s breath hammering in her throat.

  “Magda. You all right?”

  “What happened?”

  “This is not a good part of the city,” Ivan said, and leaned breathless against the wall beside her. “That’s all. I think we’re safe now.”

  “But why were they fighting?”

  “People always fight over scraps.” He pushed himself up. “Come on, we need to keep going.”

  Magda stumbled after him in her heavy coat, the bag slapping on her back as they picked up the pace once more.

  Soon they came to a wide road. Cars drove slowly on the ice. Ivan stopped. “There. It’s down there. Where the man said.” Ivan pointed across the road to an open, steaming hole on the darkening street. “The train station.”

  Magda followed him as he crossed the road at a fast clip, head down, looking over his shoulder from time to time, heading for the damp stairway sucking streams of people from the cold streets into the dimness.

  Below ground, all was noise and gloom. The air stale from a thousand breaths. Muffled in large coats, people trudged by in lines. Some haggled over pathetic collections of old boots and tawdry goods that had been laid out on blankets on the ground. And in dark corners the homeless and desperate crouched, begging cigarettes from nervous characters who preyed in the shadows of stairwells and broken lift
s.

  By a battered table, a woman with flaking nail varnish stood beside a steaming coffee urn. She saw two tired-looking kids edging nervously through the crowds.

  “Quid fer a cup-a-coffee,” she shouted. “Quid fer a cup-a-coffee. You want a nice cup-a-coffee?” She beckoned to them. “Only a quid.”

  Magda looked at Ivan, but he shook his head.

  The woman studied their faces. “You look like you need a bit of luck, don’t you, my loves. Still, it ain’t my stall so I can’t give you a coffee. But cheer up”—she leaned close—“the guard’s gone for a fag, so you can jump the gates if you’re quick.” She winked.

  Magda translated for Ivan, and they pushed across the crowded ticket hall and vaulted over the gates. They made their way along the dingy tunnels. Down the silent escalators, wide-eyed, past women selling hot rice in newspaper cones. Along the cold, tiled passageways, and through the arches to the platform.

  Two policemen strode through the crowd, guns in their belts.

  Ivan hung back against the wall.

  A train clanked in from the dark of the tunnel. Squealed to a halt. Doors opened. People spilled out onto the platform.

  They jumped into the carriage. Found themselves stuck against the dirty glass as the bodies crammed in. Packed like chickens in a crate.

  The policemen drew nearer.

  “Mind the gap. Stand clear of the doors,” said an automated voice. The doors slid shut and the train lurched forward into the dark tunnel.

  No one talked or moved—just rocked en masse as the train bumped along the tracks with a grating and a clunking and the flashing of lights.

  “Do you know where we are going?” Magda whispered.

  “Yes. Hampstead Heath. That is what the Russian said.”

  * * *

  Like a gannet, the train disgorged its gutful.

  A man—it does not matter what his name is—trudged from the bowels of the station up to the cold street above, shoved along shoulder to shoulder with the miserable dull-coated backs of the others.

  The lucky ones.

  He was thinking of his supper perhaps, and trying to remember that things hadn’t always been like this.

  It’s just a blip. We’ll get over it. That’s what they said to begin with—and now a million people were jumping out of the woodwork telling you it was solar cycles or a new Ice Age or goddamn Armageddon.