One Crow Alone Read online

  15

  It was dark and silent in the house. On the dusty windowsill were two half-burnt candles. He lit one. It spat and guttered alight, and he cracked it off the windowsill and held it up. There were cupboards along the wall. A table and two chairs. A pan left lying on the stove.

  In a small room at the front, a heavy curtain hung at the boarded front door. Ivan lifted it. The door was bolted from the inside and locked tight. He let the curtain fall.

  They climbed a narrow stair, hands against the walls, the candle casting shadows beneath their feet.

  “What’s up here?” Magda whispered.

  “Just empty rooms.”

  Magda peered around the door of a bathroom and Ivan pulled the shutter closed, his feet crunching on the broken glass that had fallen onto the tiles.

  Under the sloping eaves at the front of the cottage was a room with a bed. Magda sat on the bare mattress with a heavy sigh. “Do you think we’re safe here?”

  “Yes. I will light a fire,” Ivan said. “See if there’s food.” He gave her the candle—dripping wax and sticking it on the small table beside the bed.

  “I won’t be far. Give me your pack.” She pulled it off her shoulder and her head sank onto the mattress. She heard his feet padding downstairs. His hand tapping the wall in the darkness. The candle fluttered. She breathed heavily in the cold, still air.

  And closed her eyes.

  But there was a picture inside her head and Ivan filled it.

  All the ways he moved. The stride of his legs as he walked into the light of the fire in the forest. His angular hands tearing at the bread outside the church in Krakow. His cheek turning as he laughed at her.

  * * *

  Downstairs, Ivan lit the other candle from the windowsill.

  He would need to find sticks to light a fire. Maybe in the shed outside.

  He turned the handle on the back door. The latch clicked open and the snowy courtyard gleamed in the moonlight. He breathed in the freshness of the cold air. It had stopped snowing.

  Far off in the woods came a screeching, barking sound.

  It wasn’t human.

  An animal? The small deer they had seen maybe.

  The shed smelled of oil. He made out a pile of sticks and branches on the floor. The glint of a small axe hanging on the wall. He lifted the axe, bundled some sticks under his arm, and made his way back to the house.

  He took the pan from the kitchen and filled it with snow from the back step. He locked the door. Tugged at the handle to be sure.

  Crouching over the hearth, he scrunched some paper in the grate, laid the twigs, and struck a match to the wigwam of twigs. Wisping smoke trails disappeared up the chimney. Gently he added the broken branches. The fire grew stronger. He split a log on the floor of the room. Stared at the flames. Fanned the embers every now and then. Felt the warmth in his hands.

  In the kitchen he found a couple of rusting tins of tomatoes at the back of a cupboard.

  Clutching a can, he came back and sat cross-legged by the fire, laid more logs on the flames, balanced the pan of snow among them, and prized open the tin with his knife.

  This was a good place to stay. If they could get more food. He stabbed his knife into a whole plum tomato and stuffed it dripping into his mouth.

  A deer maybe. Set a trap.

  He ate slowly. Enjoying the growing warmth. And he thought about old friends.

  Anna.

  He stabbed another tomato.

  He remembered the first time he had seen her. Standing in line for the sinks with the other children. Her thin face, bold under dark hair, hair cropped short against lice. Anna. The only one to help him. Holding his small hand, wiping his tears away. “Forget yesterday. You’ve only got yourself here,” she had said.

  Even then, when they were both children, she had been arrogant with knowing things and smarter than a rat. Anna showed him how to get a bit more food, a better blanket. Who to avoid, when to be counted. You had few friends in Children’s Home Number Thirty-Nine. She helped him learn. Fast.

  At breakfast they would drink the watered milk. “Don’t eat. We’re going to run away today,” she’d say. And they’d hide the bread in their pockets. Slip out of a bathroom window. It was high and their thin knees scraped on the concrete wall.

  But then they were free. And they would laugh together and stake out in a forgotten-looking place. By the railway lines perhaps. Away from where the drunks loitered.

  And Anna showed Ivan the way to tie a snare with old wire—because she had come from the countryside—that’s all she said about it. Never more. And they would place the scrap of food they had saved from breakfast, and lay it out to catch a bird.

  It was good when you never ate anything better than chicken-feet and hard bread. They would roast it over their fire, laughing, talking, falling asleep with greasy hands and bony ribs.

  But they were always caught. Always sent back.

  One time Anna said: “Let’s not go back, Ivan. Ever.”

  And they didn’t.

  They grew up quickly on the streets, learned how to avoid the police, to scavenge for food, to stamp on the drunkards’ toes and huddle together in out-of-the-way places. Ivan grew tall and strong. Anna’s hair grew long at last. Their first kiss by the train station. Ivan had felt his strength when he pulled her toward him that first time. Anna laughed and kissed him ten times on his face afterward.

  “We will go to England. It is better there. That is what they say. We just need money. Maybe America one day,” she said, smiling her thin-lipped smile inside the photo booth.

  Kaflash!

  “Two for you, two for me,” she said, tearing the sheet in half. “I’ve got bad teeth, haven’t I?” She laughed again. Anna always laughed.

  “Why do I need two pictures?” he had asked her.

  “For the passport, stupid. You need a passport to go to America.”

  “But we can’t both be in it.”

  “We’ll do it again. That one’s just so you don’t ever forget me!”

  They learned to slip and slide. To dream.

  They always needed more money. But in the winter they always spent all they had saved on food and keeping warm.

  And Anna learned to dream with a bottle of vodka. More than she liked to dream with Ivan. Her dreams slipped away under the bridge. Men came. She went with them.

  And that was that.

  Ivan found other ways to get by.

  * * *

  The snow melted in the pan. He pulled off his coat. Naked to the waist, he began to wash. Splashing the water onto his face. Rivulets ran down his chest and he wiped at them with his shirt.

  Yes, a deer would be good.

  Then he’d think how to get to Gulbekhian. That was the plan. Deliver the passports. Go back. Get the money. East. That’s what Valentin had said. The money’s all going east. Maybe he would find Anna again.

  Maybe not.

  Even Ivan had fettered dreams.

  * * *

  He reached out a lean, bare arm. Picked up a strong stick. He held it against his leg and whittled away at the end with his knife. Honing a sharp point. He would need something to kill the deer if he snared it.

  And Magda?

  The shavings fell on the hearth.

  She had pushed him away. Kicked at him when he’d tried to kiss her. He smiled to himself.

  He wasn’t used to that.

  Like Valentin had said—there were a million girls. There was something about her face though, something that made him remember. From before.

  He started.

  There was movement above. The faint glow from a candle falling on the stairs. The tread of feet.

  Magda came down and stepped blearily to the fire.

  “How long have I been sleeping?” She put her hands out to the warmth. “It’s so good.” She stood a little longer. “The fire, I mean.”

  He looked at her then. Her long hair a mess. The rounded cheekbones and the look of her,
something sharp and soft all at once. Something capable he recognized. Something that smelled familiar.

  “I found some food,” he said. “Here.”

  She crouched down beside him and picked out a tomato. Began unlacing her boots. “It hasn’t turned out so well, has it?”

  Her mouth. That was it. Like fruit that was hanging out of reach. Ivan was sure he could climb the tree.

  “Maybe you could try praying.” He smiled. “You like all that.”

  She stopped and looked at him. Put her boots beside the fire.

  “I never really thought about it,” she said. “I mean, really.”

  “Thought about what?”

  She pulled off her damp socks and laid them on the hearth, wrapped her arms about her legs. Stared into the flames. “All that.”

  Ivan pushed at the embers with the stick. “We need to find new clothes.”

  “I mean, what have we done to deserve this…?” She rested her head on her knees.

  “Deserve? Your god and his punishments live in churches,” Ivan said. “It’s just country talk. We need to get clean and look like the other people so the police don’t notice us. Think what to do.”

  “It isn’t just in churches, Ivan.”

  “Well, I haven’t heard of it anywhere else. And, anyway, if your god’s not just in churches, why are you wondering? It’s stupid.”

  “I don’t know anymore. It all seemed simple before.”

  “First we need to get clothes and food.”

  She turned her head toward him. “Maybe my mother is trying to find me.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she thinks you are still at home with your grandmother.” He looked away. Hacked with his knife. “Anyway, the world isn’t the way you think it is. We must go to Liverpool. Get the money.”

  She rested her chin on her knees again and stared into the fire, nudged her boot along the slate of the hearth with her bare toes. “Ivan—”

  He looked at her. “What?”

  “You—”

  But her words came out so small.

  She wanted them to sound different.

  Her lips clamped shut. Her heart thumped loud in her chest.

  The fire crackled some more.

  And then Ivan laughed. “So—” He put his arm over her shoulder. “You want to kiss me now?”

  She pushed him away, her face red.

  “It’s not funny!” Magda cried.

  He leaned over. “Yes it is. Come on, give me a kiss, country girl.”

  “Get off!” She pushed at him.

  He pulled away. Laughed again.

  “Everything’s funny to you, Ivan. Everything.” She was angry. So suddenly.

  “No, not everything—”

  “You’re always laughing at me—”

  “You don’t know me, Magda.”

  “So why did you bring me here? To laugh at my misfortune?”

  “You wanted to come…”

  “That’s all?”

  What could he say? He couldn’t tell her about her mouth like a fruit, and the look of her face, and the way she reminded him of someone else.

  “I needed to get to England,” he said. “You had money.”

  Magda let out a cry. Got up on her knees. A fury inside her. “You could have taken it. Just taken it!” She lashed out with her fists. “You lied! Why did you bring me here?”

  Ivan dropped the knife, shielding his head from the blows, and grabbed at her wrists. “Lie? About what? Stop!”

  She twisted in his grip, her face distorted. “You’re a liar! You’re no good!”

  “I did not lie to you.”

  “I wish you had stolen the money. It would have been better than this.”

  “Stop now!” He fought her twisting hands.

  “You’re a liar!”

  “STOP!”

  His loudness stamped a calm in the storm.

  Her breaths rose and fell in angry bursts.

  “You wanted to come, Magda. And I was helping you. Why are you being like this?”

  She turned her face away.

  “And I’m not laughing at your misfortune. I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Sorry for what?” The words caught in her throat.

  “For how it has happened,” he said. “Sorry your mother was not there.”

  “And you helped me because of the money?”

  “The money is not everything.”

  “I gave you Stopko’s money. I came with you. Now I’ve got nothing.”

  “You’ve got me—”

  She turned away from him. “I wish I had stayed at home.”

  “Sleep,” he said. “It is better. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  He put a log on the fire.

  But Magda did not sleep. She was aware of his occasional shifting as he sat beside her.

  “Everything will be all right,” he said softly. “Trust me.”

  She turned and saw his shadowed face, halved by the firelight. Eyes dark and glassy, tiny pinpricks in the flickering light.

  “I did trust you, Ivan,” she said. “But you just keep yourself closed, like a book.”

  “Why are you so interested in me?”

  “Because I don’t know anything about you. Who you are. Where you come from—”

  He stared at the fire. “My mother came to Poland with me in her belly. She was very young then. Her name was Luba Rublev. She married a man—Pokova—and had three other children with him. This man Pokova, he was always drunk. And angry. He beat me, and he beat my mother and sometimes he beat his own children too. I don’t remember much else, except that.”

  “And your mother?”

  * * *

  Ivan tried to remember his mother.

  There were her hands. That time when he’d found a bird fallen from its nest in the eaves.

  “Leave it,” she said. “You can’t help it.”

  “We could put it in a box.”

  “No. Some things are best left to take their own chances.”

  “Please, Mama.”

  He carried it inside. And she had helped him fill a little box. He remembered her hands poking about and the grass scratching at the cardboard as she rounded a hollow.

  And him, drunk in the corner, laughing. “Yaagh. It’ll be deadinthemornin’.”

  * * *

  Ivan leaned forward and poked about in the fire. “My mother came from a town in the Ukraine. Sometimes she would go home to visit her parents there. She took me across the border. Said I would see my grandmother. When we got off the bus, she left me by the side of a street. She said she’d come back. I waited. And waited.

  “It was winter. I was cold. I hid by the bus station. I cried. But no one came. After two days I went back to the street because I was hungry and cold. And the police got me and took me to the Children’s Home.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Six.”

  “And you’re running away from that?”

  “I want to be something on this earth, Magda. I don’t want to sit and become nothing.”

  Magda closed her eyes. “You won’t become something just by running away.”

  “What do you know?” he said.

  Magda looked at the side of his face. “And, anyway, how are you going to leave something on the earth if you don’t sit still?”

  Ivan rubbed at his cheek. “Those are just pretty words, Magda. In the real world it is money that talks.” He lay down on the floor beside her and pulled the blanket over his shoulders. “You think you understand me now?”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “What will I do if I can’t find my mother back home?”

  “You think you have a home still?” he said.

  She did not reply.

  “I like you, Magda. I will help you.” He put his arm over her and she lay like that with the weight of it across her stomach, rising and falling with her breaths.

  “In my village,” s
he said, “there was a man. Brunon Dudek. For him, our village was the only place in the world. He didn’t want anything more.”

  Ivan felt Magda’s heartbeat quicken.

  What more was there to know about a person than the lost things that made them whole?

  And tomorrow would wind around like always. With something new to lose and maybe something new to gain.

  That is how he had learned to think.

  Weighing it up. Balancing the scales for tomorrow. Hoping for something cast and heavy that clunked heavily to earth and stayed there. He felt her body under his arm. And it felt good right then.

  “You’re not alone, Magda.”

  She could feel his breath on her cheek.

  She could feel the warmth.

  She felt his fingers creep around her waist.

  “You have to believe that you will find the thing you are looking for,” he said.

  Her heart beat a thousand drumbeats.

  “Why can’t it be the things that were before?” she whispered.

  “Why can’t it just be here? Tonight, Magda?”

  Maybe he was right.

  “When I saw you—” he said.

  “In the forest?”

  “No. I was on the hill, laughing at you. You looked like an ant in a puddle down on the road in the snow with your pony and your dog. I saw you looking back the way you had come. You could have turned around then and gone home to your village. You had not come so far. But you didn’t turn back.

  “I thought you were a foolish country girl”—he brushed the hair from her cheek—“but you did not turn back—”

  She remembered herself then, by the river in Morochov. Sitting on the grass in the sun. In the village, the barking of a dog. Men coming back from the fields at the end of the day. The boiling of her best clothes for the Harvest Festival. Mrs. Kowalski at the kitchen table: “Remember, Magda, men are like dogs—the more you scratch at their heads the more they turn to the one that kicks them.”

  Babula laughing.

  The cool of the church high on the hill above Mokre. The wooden beams like the trees in the forest. The dancing in the evening. Dancing with the boys from Karlikov. Drunken Brunon Dudek singing his sad songs as the night turned to morning.

  No, she had not gone back.

  And now in the darkness. Ivan. Everything else gone.

  There was something she wanted to ask. But she could not think of a way to put the words.