“Why don’t any of you smile?” Marina had once asked a surly waiter in a stained apron. And the boy—for he was a boy really and not yet a man—had looked at her, astonished.
“To smile at the customers wouldn’t cost you anything,” Marina had continued gently, but the boy had looked away.
“You’re wrong,” he said. “To smile would cost us our dignity.”
And after he’d hurried back to the kitchen, stamp-stamp-stamp in his heavy shoes, carrying the plates and the glasses and the empty carafe on a tilting tray, Marina had taken Lev’s hand and said, “Now I feel pity for the boy. Before, I felt fury and now I feel pity and I was happier with the fury!”
Marina.
It was important not to start thinking about her now. It was essential to Lev’s survival not to lose himself in dreams of her.
He descended some steps into a basement area and found, almost hidden under the pavement, a tiny garden planted with bay trees and lavender and big hydrangea bushes, struggling toward the light. A tabby cat lay curled on the low windowsill of the basement flat and barely opened an eye as Lev took out a few more leaflets and put them through the brightly painted yellow door. Next to the yellow door was a bell, with two names above: Kowalski and Shepard. Lev stood for a moment looking at these names and at the yellow door, and then at the garden, which had been made out of very few things but which was so beautiful in its small way that envy of these people, Kowalski and Shepard, stabbed at him suddenly with surprising force. He imagined them returning from their well-paid jobs, watering their plants, feeding the cat, ordering kebabs from Ahmed, buying wine or vodka, sitting close together at their table, eating and laughing and smoking, then going hand in hand into their bedroom as the night came down. And he thought, My life will never be like theirs. Never.
Lev walked on. The weight of the leaflets in the carrier bag became lighter as he completed the first three streets and came into a quiet square, where children played on a rough lawn, safe behind railings, and where the air was scented with privet. He was in a trance of delivery now: walk up the front steps, grab the leaflets, hurl them through the letterbox, walk down the front steps, go down again into the basement, examine the number of names, select the right number of leaflets, throw them in, climb back into the sunlight of the street, pass on to the next house . . . His legs ached a little, he wore his leather cap low, against the midday glare, but he wasn’t unhappy with his task. Before long, he calculated that he’d earned £1.
Lev rested for a while, leaning on the gate that opened on the square garden, watching the children on some swings and their young mothers, dressed in tight little vests and jeans, lounging on the grass in the shade of a mulberry tree. He lit a cigarette and it tasted good, and the scent of privet seemed to be drawn with the smoke into his lungs, and there was something in this combination that made Lev feel alert and fearless, and he thought that when the night came he’d return here and sleep under the mulberry and watch the life that was going on in the houses all around him and in this way acquire a new vision of London—a secret vision. And this cheered him, that he’d chosen a place to sleep, somewhere free, somewhere secret, a place where he could keep watch . . .
But now Lev saw that the young mothers had turned and were all staring at him and then whispering together. He looked down. He kept the cigarette cupped in his palm. One of the women got up and began marching toward him. He looked at her from under the peak of his cap. She was pale and pretty, with freckled arms, and she arrived very close to him, so that he could smell her sun lotion.
“This is a private garden,” she said.
“Yes?” said Lev.
“Yes. This is a garden for residents only. So can you . . . go away, please?”
Lev looked beyond the young woman to her group of friends, and he saw that they’d called the children from the swings and had their arms round them and he understood that they thought him a criminal of the kind who was bullied and ostracized at the Yarbl Institute of Correction and of whom society didn’t wish to speak.
“You are thinking . . .” he began, then stopped. He ran short of words, but felt that, even if he’d known the words, he couldn’t have brought himself to say them about himself. The freckled young woman stood confronting him with her hands on her hips. Lev wanted to say to her that he had a daughter the age of the children in the garden, that even now Maya would be walking home from school with her small satchel and her worn shoes . . .
“Okay?” said the young woman. “You’re leaving now. Right?”
Lev shook his head, trying to show her that she’d read him wrong, that he was a good man, a loving father, but this shaking of his head alarmed the woman and she called to her friends, “He’s not going. Someone call the police.”
“No,” said Lev. “No police . . .”
“Then leave.”
“I am new,” said Lev. “I am only looking my way through many streets.”
The woman sighed, as one of her friends joined her. “Nutter,” she said. “Foreign nutter. Probably harmless.”
“Okay,” said the friend, approaching Lev. “Pissez-off, right?
Comprendo?
”
By late afternoon, and with all the leaflets delivered, hunger and thirst began to torment Lev. He thought longingly of Lydia’s hard-boiled eggs.
He knew he was lost now. He wished he’d left a trail of leaflets to guide him back the way he’d come. He stood and looked around him, staring left and right, left and right. Then he set off again, trying to remember what route he’d followed.
When at last he reached Ahmed’s kebab shop, it was crowded with a group of Arab men eating meat in the bread pouches and drinking coffee from paper cups. The smell of the goat meat now seemed almost perfumed and sweet to Lev, and he made his way to Ahmed’s counter and put down the empty bag.
“Leaflets gone,” he said.
Ahmed’s back was turned to Lev. He was carving meat from the cone, sweat gleaming on his arms.
“What I hope, my friend,” Ahmed said after a moment, “is that you put every one through a letterbox. I have had workers who dump my leaflets in the fucking trash and then ask me for money, and although I am a very kind Muslim, that makes me hopping.”
Around him, the Arab men began laughing.
Were they laughing about “hopping”? Lev recalled his English teacher saying, “In a foreign language meaning sometimes arrives a little while after the words have been spoken.”
Ahmed began filling three bread pockets with meat and salad. He set these on the counter for his Arab friends and then moved away to his coffee machine. All Lev could glean by way of meaning was that Ahmed’s mood had changed since the morning. He watched him serve the coffee and take money and put this into his sophisticated cash register, which had no ringing bell like cash registers in Lev’s country, but made only a quiet little buzzing sound of appreciation as its drawer opened to receive the notes. Lev stared at the cash register. He saw Ahmed’s wide hand poised above it, and after a moment’s hesitation, the hand snatched out a green note and closed the drawer. Ahmed crossed over to where Lev stood. He put the note down on the counter.
“There you are,” he said. “Five pounds. Two hundred leaflets. I’m being generous. Okay? And I’m trusting you because I am a very kind man. You like a coffee?”
“Thank you,” said Lev. “Thank you very much.”
Homelessness, hunger, these things just had to be borne for a while, Lev told himself. Thousands—even millions—of people in the world were hungry and had no proper place to sleep. It didn’t necessarily mean they died or lost hope or went crazy.
But by this, the end of his first working day in London, Lev could see that it would be impossible to survive delivering leaflets for Ahmed. From a fruit stall, Lev had bought two bananas, and from a bread shop, a soft white roll, and from a post office, a stamp for his Princess Diana card, and from a shop selling newspapers a pouch of tobacco, some cigarette papers, and a bottle of water—and then his five pounds was gone.
He lugged his bag to the street where Kowalski and Shepard lived and, as the evening came on, went down into their basement and sat hidden in the space under the road, behind the bay trees and the hydrangea bushes. He discovered some flattened cardboard boxes tucked away in the farthest corner of his hiding place and he laid these out and sat on them, and ate the bananas and the white roll and watched everything darken around him.
He was waiting for Kowalski and Shepard to come home. He could already imagine their voices, which would be youthful, and the light from their windows, which would be comforting and soft. And he thought that if they came out to water their trees and found him, he would be able to explain to them that he’d chosen their basement because of the plants and the yellow door and persuade them to let him stay there—just for this one night.
Yet part of him felt stupid, waiting there. Above him in the street, he could hear people laughing and car doors slamming and the click of women’s high heels on the pavement. And he started to reassure himself that when Marina had been alive he, too, had had a proper kind of life—even if a poorer one than those lives going on around him in London—and he remembered how, on Marina’s thirtieth birthday, he had found at the Baryn market some scarlet shoes with three-inch heels and open toes, and Marina had put them on and dressed herself in a flouncy black skirt and a red shawl borrowed from Lora, and they had eaten roast goose and drunk beer and vodka and danced a tango on Rudi’s porch—Rudi and Lora, Marina and Lev—and felt crazy with happiness and desire. Even now, Lev could feel the beautiful weight of Marina’s supple back bending against his arm, see the sexy kick of her feet in the red shoes, and hear her laughter floating away into the hills behind Auror. Such a night. Even Rudi never forgot it and would sometimes say to Lev, “That night of Marina’s birthday. Something happened to us, Lev. We were beyond mortal.”
Beyond mortal.
Now all Lev could feel was the weight of his exhausted frame, sitting on the cardboard boxes, and the great and unimaginable weight of the city above. He tried to think about positive things: about his Diana card beginning its journey to Ina and Maya; about the kindness of women like Lydia and Sulima; about the money he was going to make, if he could only hang on and not lose heart . . .
Still, nobody came down to the basement flat. The cat had disappeared. The street lighting shaded orange the large blue hydrangea flowers. Lev tugged his bag toward him and took out a sweater knitted for him by his mother, folded it into a pillow, and laid his head on it. He lit a cigarette and smoked silently, watching the smoke curl outward from his hiding place and touch the dark leaves of the bay trees before vanishing into the air. Then, before the cigarette was gone, Lev knew that he was falling . . . falling helplessly into sleep. He had time to reach out, to extinguish the cigarette, and then he surrendered to the long fall.
Now his dreaming mind conjured a memory. He was riding home on his bicycle to Auror from the Baryn lumber yard. Strapped to his back with a hank of rope were the offcuts of wood he’d taken from the yard and with which he planned to build a low trailer to run behind the bike. This trailer (for which he’d already drawn a simple design) was going to be the most useful thing he’d ever made. It would be the object that made possible the transportation of countless other objects, the need for which would inevitably become apparent with the passing of time. “Because this is what life does,” Rudi had observed. “It makes holes in front of your eyes that you have to fill with
things.
”
The offcuts lay at an angle across Lev’s spine. The foreman at the Baryn sawmill, Vitali, had turned a blind eye to Lev’s gathering of the pieces of wood—or almost blind. All he’d said to Lev was: “You know there will have to be a small fine. Nothing severe. Some eggs would do well. Or a tin bracelet for my wife.”
The road to Auror was narrow and steep. It was late afternoon in early summer and Lev sweated as he pedaled and the rope bit into his shoulders and he prayed the tires of the bicycle wouldn’t burst under the weight of man and wood.
On the one level stretch of road, bordered by deep ditches, he saw a tractor coming toward him. The tractor was hitched to a loaded hay cart and Lev noticed the bales shifting and tilting as the tractor came on. He told himself he should dismount and pull off the road, to let the load pass, but to dismount with the wood strapped to him was going to be difficult, so he decided it was better to keep on, straight and steady, because there was room on this bit of the road for a bicycle and a cart, and the tractor driver would see him soon enough and slow down.
But the tractor didn’t slow down. On it came, with its roaring engine and its high wheels, and then it reached Lev and went by, but at the back of the cart, one bale was jutting out a few inches farther than the others and this bale struck the wood strapped to Lev’s back and he fell sideways off the bicycle and into the ditch.
For a moment, everything went dark. Then Lev saw light returning and stared up at the sky, which was crowded with the innocent pink clouds of a summer evening, and he tried to draw some strength from this sight, but the pain in his back and along his outstretched arms was fierce, and he could feel the wood pressing into his bones, and he thought that some kind of crucifixion was surely taking place. But for what was he being crucified? For not loving his father? For not clawing and tearing his way through life, like Rudi? For lying in a gray hammock when sadness got him down?
He didn’t know. All he understood was that he had to try to rise up, to get free of his wooden cross, to resume his road.
Electric Blue
WHEN LEV WOKE up, daylight pale as milk had crept into the basement area and a soft rain was falling. He lay without moving, watching the rain, refreshed by sleep, and thought that he’d never seen a rain quite like this, so gentle it seemed barely to fall, yet slowly laid its shine on the bay leaves and on the hydrangea flowers and on the gray stone of the yard.