The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read (15 page)

But he was not unhappy. He cycled to work, leaving at seven, when it was still dark. On three evenings, he had a language lesson; a fat woman whose breath and hair and clothes reeked of onion, came to the works to teach him, in one of the empty offices under the weird, flickering neon strip-light. The language was impossible, guttural and harsh, with a complex grammar. She was not a good teacher. And so, they seemed locked together like wrestlers over the impenetrable words. Outside the windows, the snow fell and fell, mesmerising him.

On the other evenings he almost always went into the town, to sit in the hotel bars, not seeking company or conversation, but merely to look at the stir of life around him.

He discovered Antonyin’s by chance. The food of the country was unappetising, and sometimes disgusting; he had often to spit out lumps of unidentifiable,
gristly meat. The vegetables, onions, green or red cabbage, turnip and swede only, were hard and unsalted, and glutinous dumplings floated in every dish. He felt himself growing bloated, his bowels were irregular, his stomach felt gassy, and his mouth tasted permanently of grease. Then, he would simply stop eating, sometimes for days on end, though he drank a great deal of peppermint and lemon tea, and chewed liquorice root, until hunger got the better of him and he was forced back to the food again. Once, he bought a huge tin of condensed milk from a market stall and ate it late at night, spooning it up directly from the can.

His hair grew onto his collar and he went to a barber who clipped it to a raw stubble, high up his neck. His teeth ached and he dared not visit a dentist. He had boils.

Yet still he was not unhappy. He made no friends, but his conversations with some of those who spoke English were pleasant enough and one afternoon, when he had been in semi-starvation for several days, and his stomach rumbled, one of his colleagues remarked that it was clear he had not yet discovered Antonyin’s.

‘The food there won’t give you the gripes, at any rate.’

A few days later, finding that they had dug up the pavement outside one of the hotels, he had to take a back route, turned up an unfamiliar alleyway, and became lost. It was then that he found Antonyin’s. He might have walked straight past, it was so unprepossessing. Three steps led down to the door, and a blur of smoke and steam obscured the room beyond. But he could make out the sign over the window. ‘Antonyin.’

He was never to forget the first time he opened the door onto the crowded café, the first time that blast of air hit him, as if he had lifted the lid of a great bubbling cauldron, never to forget the smells – cooking oil and black tobacco, beer, spices, men’s sweat, and the ubiquitous, sweetish hair-oil.

That night, it was as if he were tasting food for the first time. There was no menu, no choice. The hotels and other eating places made a great show of offering a huge variety, but in practice most things were permanently unavailable. In any case, whatever there was tasted the same.

He was served with some crisply fried fish, a bowl
of thickly caramelised onion soup and a stew of what might have been hare, with buttered noodles and spiced red cabbage. The richness of the spices, the tenderness of the meat and perfectly cooked vegetables, lifted the everyday peasant ingredients into another class. He wiped his plate with a slice of bread, fresh, coarse-textured and moist, nothing like the sour grey stuff he had grown used to.

Around him, men were smoking and talking, drinking beer and schnapps. He felt separate from them, but not at all unwelcome, not a stranger, though he heard no word of English. He cycled back to the apartment proofed and warm against the bitter wind by the good food inside him, but more, by a feeling of having finally broken through some barrier to the close, inner heart of this bleak city, where there was warmth, conviviality and colour.

After that he went to Antonyin’s almost every night, so that his body began to grow replete, to be smooth and solid again, no longer bloated with dough and grease.

The woman came into the café on a freezing night in December, and sat down not far from him. At first, he was not particularly conscious of her, though the
fact that she
was
a woman marked her out in a place where, the wife of the proprietor who waited on them apart, no woman came. When she returned on the following night, and again alone, he noted her, and saw that she stared at him.

By now he was a regular. The proprietor greeted him as ‘Englishman’. He was happy there. One night he was invited to join a card game, and though the attempt was abandoned as the playing became too fast and argumentative for him to follow, he sat drinking his coffee and watching, trying to decipher what was being said in the thick local accents.

The food was always wonderful; sometimes there was a joint of roast meat, boar or pork, or venison. One night a miraculous pudding appeared, treacle-dark and stuffed with prunes and raisins. But even when soup and stew were the same every night for a week, the subtle changes of herbs or seasoning meant there was no monotony.

A week after her first appearance there, the woman came in and straight away sat down at his table. She was ugly, in a half-repulsive, half-fascinating way, small, with a short thick neck that seemed to sink down between her shoulders, and prominent eyes,
whose lashes were oddly pale, like those of an albino. Her skin, soft and clear as a young child’s, was pale too. He could not have guessed her age.

‘Englishman.’

He nodded slightly.

‘I have waited to speak to you.’

Behind her head, he saw through the window that it had begun to snow again. He should leave, to begin the slow cycle ride home.

‘I have wanted to tell you my life.’

She gave off the smell of desperation. As she talked, he felt the energy begin to drain out of him, so that after a while, he could have laid his head on the wooden table and slept there. But he did not sleep. He listened, and the pale, protuberant eyes stared, stared at him.

She had been brought up in a small town on the coast. Her father had been a deep-sea fisherman, a harsh illiterate man, who had severed a leg in some hauling equipment, and then been obliged to sit at home, or else limp about the quayside, boiling with rage and resentment.

When she was eleven her mother had died, of weariness and disappointment as much as from any
physical cause, and the girl, the oldest of six children, had been expected to take her place. Some genetic flaw had caused her grotesque physical appearance, the slightly misshapen body, and the protuberant eyes and peculiar paleness – she spoke of it detachedly, as if she were a doctor discussing a mildly interesting case.

At fifteen she had left home and come to Vldansk to find work in a tailoring shop. She had planned to send for her sister, but the girl had died of pneumonia that winter, after she had left.

‘The boys went to sea,’ she said, ‘then my father drowned. He fell off the quay. It might have been an accident.’

He could detect neither sadness nor longing for her lost family, for the past and her childhood. She spoke of it as if it was someone else’s history.

He was uneasy and embarrassed, yet felt obliged to humour her by staying to listen. His deep pleasure in the evenings at Antonyin’s was soured and he began to be anxious every time he came down the dingy little street to the café door. If he opened it and she was not yet there his spirits lifted, and he called out cheerfully to the other regulars. When she came in he
felt oppressed, and the evening was drained of any enjoyment. Annoyed that it should be so, and at her hold over him, he kept away from the café for over a week, stayed late at work, then went straight back to the flat, with bread and cheese and a few pickled herrings, bought from the market. He struggled with his language primer, or read, without real interest, from the odd selection of English books left over the years on an office shelf.

He returned to Antonyin’s out of defiance. He missed the food, and the close, comforting atmosphere. He would not be driven away to live like a rat in a hole. She was not there, and on a tide of relief and high spirits he drank too much, for the first time since coming to Vldansk; in any case, that was something he had almost never done. He was a controlled man.

After that, he went away for nearly three weeks, visiting mines and oil fields five hundred miles away to the east, in a part of the country where it scarcely came light all day, and the wind hurled and battered at him until he thought he might go mad. The people were pinched, sour, inward-turned, and he had difficulty in understanding their harsh regional accent.
Vldansk seemed lively and welcoming, and he returned to its now familiar streets with a sense of joy, as if returning home. But it was to Antonyin’s that he looked to complete his sense of homecoming. He would buy everyone a beer; his return would be a celebration.

He saw her at once, through the cloud of steam and smoke. She was sitting in the far corner and her eyes were on him the moment he stepped through the door. He went to the far side of the room from her. Why not? He did not know her. He was under no obligation.

She came to his table as the soup arrived, shuffling onto the wooden bench and then leaning against the wall and watching his face intently, every time he raised the spoon to drink. It was onion soup again, dark and thick, with skeins of cheese stringing across the surface. He ate it too fast, while it was hot, so that tears came to his eyes. She went on staring. There was a dish of sour green pickles on the table, and now and then she put one in her mouth. He was angry. He resented her. The evening was spoiled.

‘What do you want with me?’ He set down his
spoon in the empty bowl. He had scarcely ever spoken to her. She had been the one who had talked.

‘What do you want?’

‘Marriage.’

She might have said ‘stew’ or ‘coffee’ or even ‘money’.

‘Marriage.’

At the other end of the café, a great roar of laughter went up from a group of men, and fists drummed briefly on the table. His empty soup bowl was taken away, and a dish of the usual stew set down; hot sage and paprika smelled earthy in the steam that rose from it.

He broke his bread into lumps. He was appalled. He thought of simply abandoning the food and walking out. Then she began to stare at him again out of the protuberant eyes.

She had planned it, thought out every detail with care. She had plenty of time to think while she worked, she said, and then alone in her flat in the evenings. The idea had come to her months ago, and every day, she had gone most carefully over it. She did not want a husband to live with – she shook her head in scorn. She’d seen enough of husbands, at
home, and here, among her work companions and neighbours. Husbands were no good; they were either bad-tempered, demanding and often cruel, or else they were ‘just great lumps’. She wanted to get away. There was no good future for her here in Vldansk, only years of tailoring and loneliness, stretching towards old age. The idea of arranging a marriage for herself had come to her as her one hope of escape. She would find an Englishman, or an American, one of those who came to work in the city from time to time, as he had, and go back with him, to be married but then leave him at once, and begin a new, independent life of her own.

‘Others have done it,’ she said simply. ‘Why not me? Why should I not?’

He felt himself begin to sweat so much that the inside of his collar became wet, and his shirt stuck to his back. He wiped his sleeve across his forehead. The close heat of the café, and the hot spiciness of the food he had shovelled into himself so quickly were partly to blame. But mostly, he sweated at what she was saying to him, at the ludicrousness, the enormity of the suggestion, and the impossibility of dealing with it.

‘There would be no difficulty. We wait until June. We travel together. In England – in London or else in some other place – you would choose – we would marry. By an official, not by a priest – by a priest would not be right. And then, we part. What could be more simple?’

There was the cool appearance of rationality as well as the obstinacy of the mad about her. She knew. She would have an answer for his every possible objection, and a counter-argument. He foresaw that.

Why should he argue? He would not even discuss the matter. There was no point. He would not do it. The whole notion was repellent, and disgusted him. It was impossible. He felt almost violent about it.

She was sitting quite calmly, stirring her coffee and rum, in no hurry. She had a wart beneath her chin and another close to her left ear, pink and crinkled like the undersides of small mushrooms. He pushed his chair back roughly and got up from the table, counting out some money as he did so. He felt slippery and uncomfortable with the sweat, yet burning hot inside his clothes.

‘What you ask is impossible. Impossible. You must
find someone else – if you can. Or else stay put. Yes – stay put.’

She was made of wax. She did not flicker as he turned and walked quickly out of the café, without speaking again. In the bitter air outside, he still felt the sweat. His hands were trembling.

He did not let it affect his work. But occasionally during the day, she would come into his mind, as if she were always lurking at the back of it, like some temporarily forgotten name, and then he would see her squat stumpy body, and that face. He felt guilty about her, and was furious that he did so. He would not let her drive him away from Antonyin’s again for long. He stuck to the apartment for a couple of nights, and the hotel bar for another, but on the next, he went back.