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Anthony Steyning
snail P.O. 398
29670 San Pedro de Alcantara
Malaga - Spain
email: steyning at gmail dot com

Danushka spotted Joey at the Queen's Larder that first night Gordon and Kathleen took the Russian refugee girl out on the town. They wanted to give her a taste of the freedom oozing from a London pub so shortly after the second Great War. Like saying See, this is what life’s all about and Why we won and Why one day we’ll free Russia, too. It was 1947, people were poor and life somewhat limited but free and rather good. Gordon felt warmly towards public watering holes, not because he drinks more than the others, but because he enjoys people so much. With all that light-hearted banter, those wickedly funny mock insults, the free-wheeling political talk, the shouting, the ranting and the raving of it all… absurd English closing hours the only thing people ever heard him grumble about.

Sorely missing this open life, he and Kathleen had only recently returned to England. They had spent the last years in or around the desert at Suez and Cairo, where besides the posh colonial hotels coffee houses were the only drinking spots, and none offering grand theatre of the sort. Still, this isn’t an ode to public houses but how a Russian girl stole her first, slow, hesitant glances at Joey that night. With him still an anonymous, insolently grinning American serviceman, drinking a bitter brand of beer he doesn’t care for and those first glances soon leading to a wide-eyed fascination even though she doesn’t realise why she’s so struck by the pock-marked military man--- perhaps the certain resemblance to a brother she left behind. And neither could she fathom that her subsequent encounter with this man was only one of millions between the uprooted inheritors of those blighted post-war years, many with lasting consequences… and on several continents.

Gordon and Kathleen had been the first to cross paths with Danushka, now it was Danushka crossing paths with Joey. He had come to visit her at home today, carried along by the human tide, the new times. He had just arrived on the sparsely lit landing, in front of Gordon and Kathleen's exotic rosewood door, Danushka their new adoptive daughter, come to them from Sweden, where she had ended up fleeing the Soviet Union, the Frozen Union, following a gruesome, solitary, arctic escape. Lucky Strike and the climbing of three stairways had caused Joey to be slightly out of breath, he had gone up quickly, soundlessly he thought, cat-like even, two steps at a time. But Danushka had heard him make his way up all the same, possessing an extraordinary sense of hearing, developed while growing up outside Grinyovo, a village in northern Russia, a place still wild and primitive, where the frozen earth hardly holds any odours, but where she also learnt to detect the scent of a snow-hare, hiding three dozen feet away. She opened the door before Joey had a chance to knock. She did this as silently as the brash, grinning, gum-chewing American exciting her so unbelievably, thought he had walked up.

" Hi! How are yah!" he drawled. It sounded more like a statement than a common question, but Danushka couldn’t tell the difference. She was too overwhelmed by his impromptu afternoon visit, and also her English was still very poor.  By a stroke of exquisite luck she had caught his face a second time, at the Strand Ballroom, the night before. It’s the dance hall below the Lyceum Theatre, where Gordon and Kathleen had taken her this time round. It was Kathleen who had suggested they go there for the benefit of the lonely, stateless girl. So she could meet people her own age, and despite Gordon’s complaints, who feared he would feel out of place, precisely the way it turned out. For these halls are even more vulgar than he had expected, they were nothing like the graceful dances he and Kathleen had been invited to in Cairo and later on, in Alexandria. Here, shop-assistants, cheeks and eyes plastered with cheap make-up, laughed noisily and drank like men, servicemen and young workers having managed somehow to stay out of the armed forces and constantly on the prowl. Kathleen soon noticing how many of the quick, new couples disappeared after only one dance, returning with blushing cheeks and shiny eyes from somewhere behind a curtain, probably an emergency exit and a convenient stairwell. She didn’t entirely approve of this, even though she had done her own things not so many years ago, but one look at the wonder on Danushka's face making it all worthwhile for both of them. The Russian girl enthralled and beguiled by the music, the loud clothes and all the carefree smiles. It was unlike anything she had ever experienced, soon hesitantly tapping her small foot to the beat of this exciting music, so new to her. Until the moment her heart had stopped dead cold, cutting off her breath, her spine straightening, forcing Kathleen to take note and follow the girl's sudden fixed glance. And Danushka instinctively grabbing Gordon's arm after recognizing Joey in the crowd, the same soldier she had first seen at that pub, a couple of months before.

Kathleen had raised her glass, for only another woman knows what it feels like to see an anonymous man, a man she could fall in love with, for what couldn’t have been more than a breathtaking second time. As for Gordon, he had looked at the masses round him and seeing nothing or no one out of the ordinary, asking innocently what the sudden fuss was all about. But Kathleen couldn’t tell him, not then, not until later, at this point only kicking him under the table, in an effort to shut him up.

Joey had stood on the Strand Ballroom's mezzanine balcony, quite inadvertently looking down at them. A spinning mirror-ball on which spotlights were trained hanging from the ceiling, reflecting dozens of illuminated moving dots on the faces of people below. To him it appeared as if the looks they cast, and particularly Danushka's somewhat anxious stare, switched off and on, and on and off… And then he noticed the older woman waving, signalling that he should come down. This surprised him, because he wasn’t certain he knew these people. His first reaction to ignore them, but then curiosity got the better of him and he slowly made his way through the crowd, down the broad and winding staircase, wondering what the hell this was all about.

 Danushka had been praying to catch another glimpse of the man who subconsciously reminded her of Vladimir, the brother she couldn’t be without. Once she had asked both Gordon and Kathleen to pass by the Queen's Larder with her again, the pub of her new English night, without quite being able to put into the words why she wanted so badly to go back there. The place where she had seen Joey once and only very briefly, but was unable to forget his defiant smile, rough cheeks, and that black hair of his, cut like a brush and intriguing her so much. She even remembered her fright when it looked as if that very same soldier was getting into a fight with another man that night, a man with long, blond hair and a flat nose. But it turned out to be a minor scuffle that nobody else had paid attention to, the blond bloke running out, the soldier, her soldier, fortunately hanging round for a while, though she never spoke with him, only asking Gordon what kind of uniform he wore. It turning out he’s a Yank, a word she wasn’t familiar with, a word they hadn’t taught her yet in language class.

As a rule Danushka doesn’t like uniforms, nobody where she comes from could be expected to, but this was different. Soldiers here looked kind and knew how to smile. And so it was that this first indelible impression, the soldier's first fleeting imprint on her mind grew into something of an obsession. Getting to the point that when Gordon and Kathleen took her to the Palladium where the couple tried to get her to laugh at the comics Flanagan & Allen, she would secretly look round to see if she could find Joey, whose name she didn’t know at the time, or even during a Chelsea football match, where Gordon loved to relax, having been away from sporting events like these for more than a decade, afterwards again dropping by the Queen's Larder at Danushka's request, and with him in no way objecting, always to see if she could catch her American.

Later finding out about these pub stops, Kathleen had merely assumed the Russian girl just loved the atmosphere here, she hadn’t always joined the two of them and no idea the request was of a romantic nature. The girl obviously didn’t know a soul in London and Kathleen, normally an astute observer in matters of the heart, this time had spotted no signals at all, until suddenly, last night, at that ballroom, where it all come together, for all of them. Danushka having spent most of the day buying vegetable preserves and clothes with Kathleen's leftover ration coupons, even then thinking about the soldier carrying her purchases well-packaged to the Red Cross, for shipment to her mother and her brother Vladimir, in Russia. Enclosing a simple but warm and pleading letter, in which she naively begged to be reunited with them, in it also speaking at length of Kathleen and of Gordon, of preparing to go see Marx's grave, or his chair at the British Museum’s round Reading Room, a stone's throw away from her flat. Short lines about King and Queen, about newspapers, the radio and all the other new things in her life in a care-package that would unlikely reach its destination, but nobody could convince her of that. Not even Kathleen, whose good counsel on any other subject matter she would blindly accept.

During the last several months Danushka had been studying English, four hours each day, at the Polytechnic. An institute she could walk to alone, on new shoes with high square heels and ankle straps that made her look taller than she was and on which she still was only learning to walk. She had begun to speak simple phrases which more often than not wouldn't have an article or sometimes even miss a verb, as in Russian apparently.

"Danushka! Man you know?" Gordon had teased her at the ballroom, imitating her, at last figuring out the source of her fascination. Kathleen, smiling radiantly, grabbing the girl's small hand, a young American musician, Benny Carter, leading the band. The reason Joey had come here, to listen to the music and to steal a dance.

In the end Kathleen had rather enjoyed the entire soirée. She had met her husband in the same building, upstairs at the theatre, before the war, during different times, a nurse still, her close friend Evelyn who would also go to Palestine but end up in New York to work at a large hospital, with her at the time. But through the terrible intervening war years they had lost touch with each other, Kathleen's letters to her always coming back unopened. She often wondered if Evelyn was still alive, if she still trotted the occasional fox, boogied the woogie, or jittered the odd bug, always giggling at would-be seducers coming to fetch her, dragging her off to dance on the polished parquet floor. Unless they were ugly, or rude and arrogant, I only do Gregorian mambos, Evelyn would say to them, turning the unfortunates away as fast as she decently could. Kathleen doubted Gordon was aware of any of it at this particular point, she decided not to bring their memories up. After all, this was Danushka's night.

" Come on, Gordon! Let's take Danushka to a dance!"

" I like pubs, Darling! Not dance halls! Now surely you know that..!"

But our boy had nonetheless started to get ready, for he was a kind old sod.

" Oh dear, not that dreadful hat again?" Kathleen went on. " Darling, hats make you look so… so humourless..! Like all those men on the Kremlin balcony we see in the Times, reviewing those frightening parades. Or those silly American gangsters, in the movies! Am I right, Danushka? Say yes!"

But Danushka did not, could not understand Kathleen's comparisons and complaint, so failed to respond.

" I need to wear a hat, darling! It's quite miserable out there!"      

" But aren't we taking a cab?"

 " Cab or no cab, it's this dampness! I can't adjust to it... It feels as if the Thames flows straight through my veins!"

" Very well, then! You win, dear! Wear a hat! I only want everyone to see that lovely old face of yours!"

" Good God! I think the desert's got to her! Danushka, did you hear that?"

                                           * * * * * * * * *

Kathleen and Gordon were an emancipated couple who had worked for His Majesty from Gaza to Aden and from Amman to Aleppo, ending up with the Suez Canal Company where Gordon had been placed to keep an eye on the books and on the French. The Sumners had worked very hard and were most conscientious which didn’t stop them from partying in India or sometimes carousing from Tangier to Piraeus on a slow boat, off the coast of Tunisia or France. On leave then, and too much in love to worry about anything else, but that was before the war and it had lasted only until they were forced to view the world with different eyes. It was the moment they had concluded that their mission lay in London now, where all their civilization was being blown to pieces it seemed. Where Kathleen could care for the wounded under the sort of chaotic conditions to which she had become accustomed, during her years between Nile and Euphrates. Gordon to make himself useful because of the peerless, compassionate and collected leader that he is, at any rate, that is what they felt when it became clear what that rot Hitler was up to. But they couldn’t make it back to England in time, the new war preventing anyone from crossing its Mediterranean fronts, and soon extending itself into North Africa, less than a hundred miles away from where they used to live.

But when that great human folly was over, and after they had made it home at last, annoyed, disappointed and frustrated, they wanted to make amends even though this wasn’t required of them. It was why they were so immensely pleased when his Majesty called on them again, through the Home Office and because they were fluent not only in French but spoke a mouthful of Arabic and Russian as well. This time asked to take charge of a wispy Russian refugee, barely a woman, apparently lost. Gracefully accepting that responsibility and after Danushka, shy and insecure arrived at their home, starting her informal but certain Western education right off. By taking her to the National and to the tattered Tate, but also by taking her for obvious reasons to see Boris, the Russian expatriate grandmaster, co-owner of the Mandrake chess club in a basement on Mead, a street the free French took great delight in mispronouncing, and a good friend of Gordon, our chess-obsessed, hard-drinking old boy.

At the very beginning Boris often interpreted between the Sumners and Danushka whenever communication had ground to a halt. Boris had lived in London for many years and from him and during their walks, Danushka heard about the heroics of Wanda Landowska, the Polish harpsichord player, performing at Underground stations throughout the Blitz' fieriest nights in an effort to soothe people's nerves. It was a story of courage, of conquered fear, greatly touching the young refugee’s heart. Boris also teasing Danushka in Russian about the great treatise on which he was supposed to be working, entitled Capitalism, Communism and Sodomy, phenomenally parallel concepts he said, but she was too young to laugh, preferring to look at the new faces, the new streets where Churchill's booming voice still rang from old wireless sets and innocent windows, open. She watched the thousands upon thousands of people, when in that other life of hers she had been with only three other people, then two, then one, then none... and now not getting enough of it.

Despite Kathleen's efforts to dress her more decently, Danushka unwittingly contributed to the new émigré look with her ill-fitting, ill-matching, even grotesque clothes ---the bungled haircut and the pre-historic walking shoes she had brought with her all the way from Russia. She quizzed Boris innocently about the pervasive pomp, the continuous ceremony she saw going on all round her ---the changing of the Guards, the flying Union Jacks, all those drawings of a dog called Bull, the wigs on sombre, black-robed men. Serious soon, he would explain to her that all these symbols are born of deep respect for the people by the people, and the basis of England's legendary resilience.

"Turning their country into a prison doesn’t make sense to them... But Danushka, you still haven't told me anything about yourself, " Boris said during one of their Soho strolls. But how could she begin to tell him what had happened to her, what she had been through, why she was here? Her love for Vladimir, Volodya, and the mission, his mission that she was on, about the weeks of lifting her knees up high and over deep and heavy snow in order to progress, across that interminable, frozen night. About their last minutes together, the morning her brother had taken her to the edge of that silent shrouded forest with which she was so well acquainted. The spot where Vladimir had stopped their three steaming, harnessed horses beside those grey, frigid thickets she knew so well because it was the exact same place her father had also taken her, years earlier, when she was still small. To walk and to play the last summer that he was still alive, surprising her at the time because he had never taken her anywhere, so naturally she had loved him for it, only much later to understand that he must have sensed a darkness in his future, and those small outings his final embrace. 

"If they stop you, say as little as possible. You got lost travelling around the region, trading handicraft for food. That's all. You know it's illegal, everything always is. But now that we've beaten the Nazis, they're not going to be as tough as they used to!'

Danushka's brother, Vladimir, had spoken softly but urgently, vapour dancing from his mouth. And perhaps more to reassure himself, adding:` Naw, they won't punish you. They'll scold you, they'll try scaring you, but in the end they'll send you home! Anyway, you're just a girl!'

He should have realized the utter stupidity of that last, short phrase, the contradiction it contained. Like weak mortar making the entire edifice of his weeks of pleading and reasoning with Danushka come crashing down. For this terrible, this solitary Homeric journey, this flight on foot to the West she was about to embark upon that morning, shouldn’t it have been his?

But at the time Danushka did not pick him up on it. Too stunned, she had listened to him but not heard him, barely nodding while he fidgeted with the small knitted bag that he strapped round her fragile frame. It was filled with well-wrapped tempera-coloured Kargopol Polkan watchdogs and Sirin-bird clay figurines. Her alibi, should she get caught, Vladimir impressing upon her.

She was too dazed by the cold, but probably even more by her deep sense of disbelief, the surreal business of leaving her brother and reluctant lover and the only life she had known. There, just outside Grinyovo, in the Karelia region, a long way southwest of Arkhangelsk, a city, according to Vladimir, named after an arch-angel who must have got lost one day and crashed. For no sane angel, Volodya had muttered, would otherwise have come to stay in modern Russia, the Russia that was sometimes besieged from the outside, but just as surely from within. But then, he said, more and more angels were trying to descend. Some like hungry, lonely vultures, only perching, tired of flying, and of lying, jealous of the living, despite all their troubles, for could it be that eternity is even colder than anything down here? And was it the gaze of those very imaginary angels, which had made Vladimir send her looking for warmth in the west?

" Danushka, what are you thinking?" Boris asked. " You haven't  said anything in nearly half an hour!"

" Don't you want to know how I got here, Boris?"

" How you got here, my little Danushka, is your secret. It's the one thing we exiles never ask each other. It brings bad luck! But do talk about yourself, if it makes you feel better!"

" My nostrils, my eyebrows were frozen.. They were for weeks." Danushka spoke, following Boris' advice. She sounded like she was reciting a story she had read, and re-read. " It was at least forty below the day I left. My brother limped nervously round the troika on the loud, crunching snow. You see, his right foot had been nearly severed, bloodied, infected, cut to the bone, after one day accidentally stepping into a bear-trap. But that was another year, and summer, and he a boy without shoes. I was too small to help him then. It was a terrible accident, but at least it kept him home, with me, with my mother, when other men, all men, were sent to fight at Stalingrad. He fixed my snow-shoes and said  `Here's a map. I drew it while you were asleep. It's the best I can come up with since the bastards took away our books'!"

Danushka had spoken softly, monotonously, the words now flowing forth. She was unable to stop, the months of pent up anguish had taken their toll. Her Russian phrases were heavy, having been composed during weeks of unspeakable solitude. Heavy and ponderous like every damned step through that hateful snow. Boris just let her speak, and speak, and then, putting his arm round her, softly asked:

" Do you still love your brother?"

" Why not? What are you asking me? If I hate him now? Because he sent me here? Away from him?"

" He could have come with you..!"

" Volodya, that's his nick name, can't walk! Didn't I just explain that to you?" Danushka's voice had contained affection but now contained no small amount of quiet rage.

" You could have refused. You could have stayed!"

" And you? Why didn't you stay, Boris? What are you doing here, in London? Things aren't that simple, are they? I left, because of Volodya, because he begged me to, on his knees. My mother never leaving her bed since my father disappeared. She had nothing to do with it. She cares more for herself than for us. Her grief is selfish and mean. It wasn’t for her that I would stay, or leave!"

" But if he loved you, how could he..?"

" Volodya loves me, but he loves Russia even more. That's why he sent me. To see where it all went wrong, how we all went wrong. Yes, I didn't care, I only wanted to be with him. But I couldn't disappoint him, it was too important. Even though, out there, on that tundra, sometimes zig-zagging like the track of some train gone mad, all those weeks, and until the day I fainted and woke up in that Swedish country church, I was very, very angry with him..!"

" How long did it take you? Did you know the terrain? Did the Sumi Lapps help?"

" I don't remember. And didn't you just tell me not to speak about that part. I think I want to go back to Kathleen!"

She missed Volodya, his stubbly beard against her face, his pounding chest, his sweet embrace. Oh, it was she who had first pressed her breasts into the hollow of his stomach, she who had taken his warm, rough hand and thrust it between her thighs when she was barely fourteen. He had laughed and admonished her, drawing away at first. But she couldn’t help it. She was like the animals she had lived with all her life. She knew them well. She had often been told to lie beside them when they were ill, in the small barn at the far end of their kholkoze. And sometimes she needed Volodya to touch her, as if she too were unwell.

Then, once, it had happened. During one long polar night he finally let her have her way, for the first time allowing her to sit on top of him. Moving silently, gently, until electric bolts ripped through her loins and she had sobbed with happiness. But this she told to nobody, not even her new friend Kathleen. Not because she had done anything wrong, but because speaking about Volodya in this way was like sharing him with someone, and that she could never, ever contemplate.

Their love had lasted until last year, when she turned seventeen. When Vladimir had first begun to talk about the future, about freedom when all she wanted was him, his nearness, to prepare him his bath, his food, Mother always sick in bed.

"We'll have to get you out of this rotten icebox, Danushka! Away from Stalin, the night. None of this is very healthy for you. We're living like animals, look what's happening to us,' and then, horribly, Vladimir had begun to shy away from her. As if he couldn’t bear to be with her any longer. And this hurt her more than anyone could possibly understand.

" She must have crossed a part of Finland, or a piece of northern Norway, to get to Sweden....!" Boris thought. He was enormously impressed with this unassuming, giant of a small girl. He turned a corner, wondering about the quickest way back to Gordon's flat. He respected his tiny compatriot's wish to be alone. But then Danushka spoke again, as if she felt a need to sum it all up.

"Volodya wants me to describe to him where Marx worked, un-harassed, here in London, and maybe go to Switzerland one day to a city called Zurich, where railway cars go straight up mountains and into the sky, to see why Vladimir Ilyich could work, read and write there, yet nobody is allowed to read at home."

Whereupon Boris quietly put his huge arm round Danushka's shoulder and told her one more thing.

"Well, I don't know about your brother sending you here, but he's right about one thing, Danushka!" he said. " The big dream is and was a good one for Russia. An inevitable dream, because before things were always very, very bad. Yes, there had to be a revolution. But where it all went wrong was when we allowed Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, butchers all of them, to fail us! You see, my sweet, dreams only work, provided next morning you wake up! If not, all you do is end up in a coma. And that's not living, is it? C'mon, I'll walk you home!"

                                           * * * * * * * * *

"Piss off!" tall, blond, wavy-haired, flat-nosed, but not unhandsome Tommy had mumbled under his breath, jumping to his feet, off the barstool on which he had been sitting, drinking a half-pint of Bitter. He had just witnessed what he thought was an American serviceman move  in on a pretty blond bird who in a distant way reminded him of his mother. She was obviously a lot younger and also a lot shorter. Her parents were sitting next to her, but didn’t resemble her. Tommy was furious. He was pretty sure it was the Yank, the same bloke with whom he had a bit of a run-in at the Queen's Larder one night, a few months back. And perhaps this was even the pretty girl who that evening had also been there.

Tommy, like a good number of young Englishmen, had a thing against all those foreigners reigning in London right after the war and who seemed to be grabbing and snatching away all the girls. He had just left the stale air of the moist walls and old clothes in his flat; his grandmother sitting near the window, gazing down dreamily into the narrow street below. She had waved at him and smiled as he walked away towards the tube, to come to this dance and have some fun, too.

Earlier that day, Tommy had come home after his workout at Nigel's Gym. He had dumped an old army bag full of sweaty clothes on the floor, the room was small, stifling, less than a few hundred feet square. The table against the wall was crowded with dirty plates and teacups, in the corner stood his unmade bed, too short for him. Tommy had been shocked at the old woman's appearance. She had looked more neglected than ever. She had looked haggard, and he had tried cheering her up.

" Watcha cock! How's yourself?"

She nodded. She was glad he was back, but she had not been feeling well of late. And it hadn’t helped catching her grandson going into her purse and stealing a handful of change. It wasn’t as much for the money as the matter of her last and only hope betraying her. Just like her husband and only daughter had always done. And then that grinding, that dreary poverty, always the scraping by, every hour of every day... Her bones ached as well. She had cried a lot, and did poorly trying not to show it.

Tommy felt badly about having disappointed her. It was true he had been a bit short for half a pack of Navy Cuts cigarettes and gone into her wallet. But he had done so dozens of times and always put the money back. Later, after earning a bit of cash doing deliveries for the green-grocer down the road and without ever bothering to tell her. He’s no thief, or if he is, she never his victim. He loves her, respects her, they have a bond. The one his mother reinforced by not showing up at home anymore, preferring to run round with one bloody foreign soldier or sailor after another. Probably dreaming of a new life in New Zealand or Rhodesia, but getting dumped once a month. Either way, dropped, engaged or married, doing the two of them, him, Tommy, and his grandmother, absolutely no good

 " Are you still angry wif'me then?" he grinned, while washing up over a small wooden tub in the corner that represented the kitchen, and before going out to the West End, to the Strand Ballroom, maybe, later that evening.

" There's a man come by! 'is name is Wea'erby or something!"

" Wha's 'e want then?"

" 'e said 'e saw you fight the o'er night. Says you could be somebo'y. May even 'ave a job for you...!"

Some time earlier Tommy had concluded that if he were ever to get out of this rut, this depressing life, someone would have to do something very easy for him, something he apparently was incapable of doing for himself. And that was to force him right up against a huge wall. Without the possibility of retreat, cornered like a rat, forced to fight back and get killed or to take one desperate leap over that wall, to freedom and more. He dried his face and put on clean clothes. He combed his unfashionably long, blond hair, powerfully stroking it back with a nearly toothless comb, it making little difference.

" Well, aren't you 'appy!" he said. " Come, I'll take you down to the Jack for a pig, I made a few bob today, you can tell me all about the bloke!"

He would bring her back home in half an hour, and then go out, he had decided. Up to now Tommy figured boxing was his only way out, his only ticket to another life. But he also had terrific self-doubts which paralysed him. He didn’t have a great deal of self-respect, a stigma that came with the neighbourhood, their private lives, stuck in the East End, turf of the Dockers, while not being one of them. Sure he had tried to work in the port. But it was a father and son thing to get in and he didn’t have one of those, of course. That is why it bothered him the old girl seemed to be giving up, she, the only person who had always encouraged him, pushing him to finish school, feeding him, dressing him, even getting him those small jobs at the chemist and the green-grocer while he was growing up, then sending him off to Nigel's...Where she wanted him to become tough, a fighter, no longer the pale, poor, insignificant lad who would be everyone's doormat. So that one day he could drive a lorry or even join the Navy...

Tommy didn’t know for sure what it was that bothered her. It couldn’t just be the incident with the spare change. Perhaps it was the recent war, the bombings, the memories, or simply her arthritis. But here she was, very down indeed. And he wondered what he could do for her. Steal, fight, claw? Yes, but not on his own. Better fight in the service of someone much stronger than him, someone as yet unknown. Who would corner him but ultimately offer a new horizon for the two of them, 'im and 'er. Presently he eased his grandmother down the stairs, the apples, across the slow road which took forever because of her stiff legs, poor shoes and the cobbles uneven and wet. As always, it had been raining miserably.

"C'mon, then. It’ll cheer you op!" he insisted with a smile, in pure Cockney, thinking of a loop and a quick Tommy for ‘er.

A man his grandmother's own age, well-dressed for the area, looked up as they walked in. He was carefully eating fish that had just been served. Tommy had never seen the man there before, he wore a plaid jacket with leather patches at the elbows, a shirt and tie to match, and he also sported a moustache which curled at the tips. He would better fit at some country inn, but perhaps he had some insane craving for the Pearly Queen and her ensemble, performing there later that night.

Tommy had just sat down with his grandmother and let his eyes run round the house to see if anyone he knew was there, when upon their return to her face he saw something that gave him a pleasant jolt. For what struck him was how suddenly and unexpectedly happy his grandmother looked, from one moment to the other her entire demeanour changed, colour back to her cheeks, back a little straighter, she had quickly tidied her grey hair in the back of her neck ---smiling at the elderly gentleman who smiled back at her.

And suddenly it was the happiest night either one of them had in a long time. It was miraculous. Tommy tried to have a conversation with her but she hardly paid attention. He had tried to help her eat as he so often did, by holding her deformed arthritic hand or by helping her glass to her lips, but tonight she wouldn’t have it. She gently pushed him away, others who knew them and looked their way and saw what was going on, smiling. But Tommy didn’t care. He hadn’t seen her like this for ages and enjoyed the moment as much as she did. Until his mind drifted back to the mysterious afternoon caller, Weatherby, who would return in the morning, he had left word. Where he came from, what he had to offer, what he looked like, if he was sincere…

                                           * * * * * * * * *

“ 'Ello, there! Like to dance?" Tommy, said, pulling Danushka out of her seat and onto the dance floor in one move. It all occured so suddenly, she didn’t know what was happening. Her mind was on Joey, an unknown soldier, who had just joined their table. Joey, a man appearing to be so affable but who deep in his heart carried a lurching, slow-burning sense of refusal. Often affability is only manoeuvring, the taking of initiative, the controlling of conversation, of keeping intruders at bay. Joey was good at talking fast and talking hard, it’s what the streets had taught him. But here Danushka found herself standing on a half-empty floor, the music just started, and another man, come from nowhere, putting his arm round her waist.

Gordon and Kathleen waved to encourage her, shrugging their shoulders, signalling to her to make the best of it. Joey raised his eyebrows just a tad. He didn’t know who the guy who looked like a boxer was, though there was something vaguely familiar about him. Nor did he know what to make of the ‘dude’ coming on so fast.

" Come on! Come on! What's the matter! Dance! Dance!" Now it was Tommy's turn to feel awkward, because the small, pretty girl on the high heels had suddenly sunk her face into her hands. For the first time since she was fourteen sobbing out loud, though this time not for happiness and in the middle of that dance floor, in front of a seated, noisy crowd.

" It's all right, it's all right!" Kathleen came to the rescue, apologizing to the calm but annoyed young Englishman. "It's not her fault! She's a Russian refugee! I suspect she's never danced before. Please let me take her back to our table, and do join us for a drink!"

" Cunt Yank" Tommy muttered angrily under his breath. " It's all 'is bloody fault, i'n't it!". He declined Kathleen's invitation and left. After having a closer, a second look at the people round that table, Tommy was now convinced that Joey was the same soldier with whom he had a run-in at the Queen's Larder one night. Joey had rubbed him wrong even then, cap cocked nonchalantly on a thick, dark, military crewcut, over a pockmarked face, and an irritating grin. It was the second time Joey had spoiled Tommy's evening, and this one had started off so well. That first time he had hared out of the Queen's Larder, to make his way to the Russell Square tube station, in anger throwing a half-open fist at the red, solid cast-iron and fast dozing letter box that stood in his path. A punch that was the first expression of a new dawn for him--- he wasn't going to take it anymore. It was also the first manifestation of the will he would require to one day get behind the steering wheel of a racing car. That is if he could persuade Weatherby to let him drive one, not repair one, something he would eventually be allowed to do. But this time leaving quietly, into the night.

For all his brawn Tommy became aware some time ago that it was quite pointless to end up at the wrong end of an upper-cut. For knock-outs are radical, immediate, public and humiliating. Deep down Tommy was afraid of their devastating consequence: in the ring one can't come in second or third, the pressure to win debilitating him. Still, he remembered gloating over the stiff elbow he had sunk into the Yank's ribs that time. Tommy was becoming like England itself ---tattered but scrappy once purpose had defined itself. Despite everything, he was getting more at ease with himself.

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It was Christmas in London. The months had whisked by. A Salvation Army Brass Band played psalms outside Harrod's, while two woman officers, beating belled tambourines in good time, collected for the poor. Gordon threw a half-crown into the kettle and shivered in his winter coat. Kathleen was inside, shopping, but he had come out, not able to stand the hustle, the bustle, the pushing any longer.

It was a dark, late afternoon and the wind blew cold. His nose was red and his eyes watery, his fingers stiff inside his fur-lined gloves. His gout was on the move. He didn’t complain, just wasn’t used to these decidedly un-Egyptian temperatures. Port Saïd had been his last posting, administrating the Canal there, and its scorching weather for most of the year bearable only because it was so dry at the same time, dryer than the desert from where it would emanate so relentlessly. But there was also dust there, and blindness and cholera. And closer to the Nile, malaria, hunger and fanaticism, all inter-twined. And a European could only take so much of that, so that the urge to come home was many faceted, one of them the local, grovelling functionaries so inert and corrupt as to drive any sane, honest man mad. On top of the heap, Farouk, like a fat, gluttonous, perspiring, conspiring sphinx, his operetta army another thorn in most expatriates’ side. In the end Gordon hearing the rumblings in the desert, the other side of Alexandria and Rommel, the desert rat, getting ready with his Italian footmen for Montgomery at Al Alamein. The Germans everywhere from the Levant to Libya and though here not occupiers per sé, an impediment to his and Kathleen's freedom to travel, making those last years in Egypt too painful to describe.

It’s during times like these that memories begin to haunt, that childhood re-imposes, that sadness sets in, particularly when sitting dreaming on the terrace of Shepheard's Hotel, after business had brought him to Cairo, and having crossed the ochre sands between here and the Suez Canal yet another time. There Gordon suddenly remembering his younger sister getting her first menstruation at the age of twelve, parading up and down with her package of sanitary cotton, for everyone to note that she had become a woman and expecting to be treated as such, with suitable respect that is. She luckier than Eve, born many years later, getting none from her parents, but Gordon couldn’t know this of course. In fact he would never meet the youthful widow, an out-of-protest stripper, at one point sharing Tommy's life.

Here Gordon would reminisce about his years at Public school, the summer camping trips to France. The jumping into roped-off river, everybody naked, all the boys keeping away from the headmaster's fast hands, even digging trenches round their tents to keep that man at bay… the boys' running joke, anyway. Or the smoking of his first, swiped fag during the same outing, the prolonged nausea it caused, cramps setting in worse than if he had eaten a few pounds of green plums. He smiled, wondering what ever became of the little rogues and would-be bugger, where they were all swimming now.

He had solemnly promised Kathleen they would return home as soon as all the fury ended, praying England would still be there, unchanged. In the Middle East, those last years, he had become more sensitive to the suffering round him, becoming particularly irritated with the appalling arrogance of his own younger colonial colleagues. He found their airs of hegemony stupid and immoral, the invisible exploitation they carried on round the clock out of date. There, as in India, did they not realize the world as they knew it or imagined they knew it had already come to an end? That fellahin and untouchable deserved a better lot?

" Silly bastards!" he called those Empire types, each day getting more heavily into drink.

To some Gordon appeared laconic, but he was very much a man of quiet commitment, diffident but on the inside angrier than all hell. He was the perfect keeper of the Suez books ---honest, lawless, yet never an anarchist. Only not respecting rules that he recognised had to exist, for the others, of course, never for him. A gentleman of the first order, non-confrontational, smooth and graceful as a tropical fish, new internationalist, in a small symbolic way father to his King...

" Rashwa, Sumner Effendi? Foulous? A small greasing of the palm, Sir?"

" Two loads of coal, Sumner? One for our pocket, one for the ship?"

" No thanks! Thank you all very much! And I do mean the lot of you!"

Except giving baksheesh to the forgotten, the handing out of alms, this he never refused and why they followed him to the souks, the infirm, the children, his clan, all of them, whenever he passed through.

" Sumner Effendi, Sumner Effendi....!"

" Yes, yes, all right...Here you are....God bless...!"

He took the handkerchief Kathleen had ironed for him that morning and loudly blew his painfully throbbing nose. The colourful piece of cloth had been given to him by a distant Irish cousin. The English always manage to have their Irish cousins somehow be distant, Gordon mused, thinly smiling, although he didn’t quite know how they accomplished it. Then he chuckled in the wind, for without them knowing it, he is the Irish cousin, which probably explains his creative behaviour in all those foreign lands and Kathleen probably not even remembering it, though she had been warned by him time after a bottle of gin or two, one intimate evening. Gordon originally hailed from County Mayo, but he could barely remember its green, rolling grass. His parents had left for Durban when he was only four. And then moved, and moved, in search of a better life, before the turn of the century, but always within the old empire. He had been used to open decks, to open skies, to open shirts and even a few dispersed open minds. Now here in London, the new do's and don'ts, where to cross the road, where to enter a building, to pay for the telephone, the wireless, and how to address Mr. So and Mrs. So, in which mandatory corner to place one's initials, where to affix a stamp, stamps, stamps everywhere, on every corner, corners and the lining up behind each lingering queue ---it was all a bit taxing, but it didn’t matter, did it? For he was home, home at last, and home was where Kathleen got him. He the best friend she ever had, while taking his quirks, his morning testiness, the double gins, the smoking, mainly because he’s the most decent man she has known and is ever likely to meet.

And still, it wasn’t so terribly long ago that she got rid of all her previous and incidental lovers, dashing nibblers of her nipples who bought her dresses and who brought her momentary passion, stroking her softly in her shadowy corners. But these men always ended up treating her with the cruelty of a child, which they were, these younger lions. Not worth it, she decided, not really, even though Gordon, much her senior, at night would soon and mostly snore.

This Kathleen presently walked out of Harrod's, half a dozen stately black taxi-cabs standing patiently waiting in line for her. Red double-deckers tearing dangerously close round their parked fenders, one taxi-driver, spotting Gordon standing somewhat forlornly on the pavement as if he was unsure where to go, reckoning here was a man of distinction, probably good for a handsome tip, calling him `Guv'ner', offering to drive him where ever he wished.

" Look, Gordon! Look what I bought for Danuska! The poor dear! She has absolutely nothing to wear!"

" Yes, yes, I agree, it's a lovely jumper. But when do we go back to the flat? Do you think that American has left by now? Wasn't he returning to Berlin tonight? We don't know much about him, do we! Are you quite sure Danushka’s safe with him?!"

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 Only a few years after Vladimir Chernov was born in Minsk, but well before Danushka saw her first light near Grinyovo…. on a different parallel, on another continent, with a different climate, with a different pace and mood, a newborn male infant was abandoned on a subway train. For the first time and already taken in his very new life for what would be one of many subsequent, dubious, even odious rides.

Wild, free and scrambling, free ferocious grazing for wealth, fast and rocketing events nearly every hour of the day, racing Fords and racing minds, these propelled the American herd forward but also made it inadvertently trample on some of its stumbling, weaker components, unnoticed, and in dust that was never seen to settle. One of these an infant, soon to be baptised Joey by a British nurse named Evelyn, who worked at the Mt. Sinai Hospital having just completed a long stint in Palestine.

" Oh, my Gawd, I thought it was a snake. But, oh, Amazin' Grace, when that there brown bag moved, and after all them white folk be gone runnin’ way screaming, I saw, praise the Lawd, I saw the tiniest of li`l bitty fingers done come stick right outta that there brown shoppin' bag, I swear!"

An eighty-four year old black woman with doleful eyes explained what happened to the Bronx precinct policeman who had ‘done come rushin’ up the ill-lit stairs leading to the over-ground portion of the evening sub-way line, summoned to retrieve a bag with a snake.

Chorus: Watcha say, ole woman?

Old Man: Watcha say, ole Missie?

Youth: Whatcha say, ole puss?

Old Lady: It’s Mrs Bailey, I'll have ya’all know!

" They done run faster than a crazed herda buffalo, them white folk!" she added, her face turning sombre with contempt." And they'ze white fingers, you know! I don't believe how they’d be doin' a bad thing like that, to one their own!"

Evelyn, the delightful, heavy-set nurse who had just been hired at the hospital's obstetrics ward, named the foundling Lawrence after a countryman of hers, whose exploits in the thirst-lands of Arabia had captured her imagination and had long been the subject of her lonely passion. But this darkish child, instead of on the Bronx line, might have been found on sandy knoll, deep in that mythical desert where Evelyn used to work before sailing to America of the canyons, some ancient indeed, but in her opinion mainly urban, ghastly new, and more like towering forests of stone. Then on second thought she not only named him Lawrence but also Joseph, after a carpenter, once upon a biblical time.

Needless to say the hospital's very name held tremendous appeal for nurse Evelyn, the reason she fought so hard for a job there and succeeding just in time to be entrusted with the welfare of young Lawrence Joseph, tiny traveller, discoverer, bed-wetter, lover of offered wet breasts and a short time later the odd spoon of lukewarm pabulum. Only the latter provided lovingly by Evelyn, every four hours, on or off shift, not the former, as regrettably she was long dry. Authorities soon throwing inane darts at invisible charts to determine small Joey's future, callously ignoring the nurse's fervent pleas to adopt him followed by their refusal and having something to do with her temporary legal status in the United States of Infinite Wisdom, being unmarried, and lacking `stability', though not apparently a heart...

Darts then making Joey's rather prolonged stay at Mt. Sinai come to an abrupt end one day--- his natural mother declared incurably absent and so dispatched on his endless journey of foster upon foster home. Where it would soon become apparent to all who touched upon his young life that Joey was smart, healthy and the proud possessor of a will of his own, one that would ultimately prevent him from fitting in with those very parents, their other child, their parakeet or their garish wallpaper. And just as well, for these families received money for his care and he would find out they took him only till the Christmas shopping bills were paid, not a day longer.

Joey concluding it was much less painful not to become attached to anyone, not even a dog, than to follow his natural urge for affection. He was a youngster subjected to short-term leasing, with no drop-off charges, a fully lubricated child, handy to have round, here to air-condition a summer, there to warm a long winter's night, rented out by and large at a pace of twice a year, understandably cultivating in him a sizeable aversion and a deep mistrust towards anyone married and adult.

And it was a certain Mrs. Agnes Monroe who was the last and easily the most determined of these merchants, one who decided to use her cunning lust to rid him of his acne. She seduced him only two days after the young, strong castaway had reached the age of thirteen. A boy who’d never been taught to stop and look at a chestnut tree, or admire the spotted tufts of a night-owl weary at dawn, after its long hunt in a wet, dark park. A boy who knew what a home-run was, without having set foot in Yankee Stadium, despite having grown up in and around the Bronx. Agnes Monroe herself becoming convinced at an early age that by being good she wouldn’t get too far, all the signs there, whatever turn she took. As a small girl nobody ever noticing her, no matter how diligent, courteous and prompt she was. Boys teasing her, girlfriends using her, parents decent but only sitting there, and sitting there, smiling. Somewhat like the parents of another, younger woman called Eve, who was growing up in North Yorkshire and who would have a crush on Joey, an American of native Indian extraction, accidentally meeting him in the lobby of her Paris hotel.

As it turned out though Mrs. Monroe had, miraculously, and given her bloodline, a more than accomplished mind. But even that would do her little good and adding insult to injury, she wasn’t particularly lovely either. At home there had been no money to force the course: she could never buy the graces and the love other, richer girls, who also ugly, could. So that when to her own astonishment a man turned up a second and then a third time at her doorstep, she decided to marry him as fast as she decently could.

He owned a fruit-stand, rose early, shaved poorly, but if not much else, always paid the rent. Of this she could be sure. The times were hard, America's bag had burst, even banks went bust and New York was a battle field, so that her choice had been justified. He became her twice a week husband. Only God could divine what he was doing on this earth, because it soon seemed to her that he came from another planet. Out of touch, out of reach, mainly sticking it in her wrong moist end, and getting her pregnant the few times he turned her over.

" Albania in New York!" she often hissed in an attempt at bitter humour, referring to his swarthiness. But where then did he get the name Monroe?

Untrained, stumpy and overweight, her natural intellect by far surpassed her husband's and continued to grow through prodigious reading throughout her life, which with a small break here, a loving push there, might well have taken a fuller direction. But what she saw, what she experienced was endless crap, adorned, to boot, by children who were indifferent to her. What she needed was a lift, a laugh, some tension to off-set the unbearable boredom of her existence. Getting it when that incredible orphan walked in through her door, acquired on impulse, in a last attempt to break down the wall between her family and herself, bringing in some extra cash to boot, but where Agnes Monroe went wrong was not perhaps by seducing the orphan, but by deciding to steal him, lock, stock and barrel, by wanting to keep him all for herself.

" Joey, why don't you stay home from school this afternoon? You've worked so hard lately, and the weather is so foul. Come, I'll write your teacher a note! What d'yah say, hey, boy?!"

They could spend some time together... He had been placed in September, it was now November, and she had grown to like him a lot... He was so big for his age, almost like a man... And a good man had to rest... Had to be spoiled... Until five o'clock in the afternoon at least, till then no one else home... So she would bake him his favourite pie, of apple, buying a whole case of soda just for him… With a bit of money she had secretly put away for him...

And thus it was that Agnes Monroe, blushing with an excitement she had never felt in her life, took revenge on her world. On her silly, smiling, peasant parents who were still alive, on her husband and in a way on all of New York. And this by soon opening her housecoat and her genital orifice wide all at once, keeping Joey home from school whenever she desired. And to this end would write long reports to his principal and the Child-Welfare agency concerning his supposed frail health, while spending evenings glaring at her husband and children, all the while furiously fondling Joey's new, young thighs under the kitchen table with stockinged feet.

Joey's skin cleared up nicely that fall, but failing every one of his exams. In addition, after the first excitement of his strange initiation, Mrs. Monroe's appetite becoming progressively more obsessive while in direct proportion Joey's suddenly declined. As a consequence she became rather jealous of his every move, creating an atmosphere in the three bedroom tenement that could soon be cut with the hard, dried edge of his repeatedly stained handkerchief, Alice no longer speaking to anyone but Joey, her children hating him and observant neighbours winking meaningfully, at the outdoor market, behind her husband’s back.

And so it came that she nabbed not only Joey's precocious manhood but a good slice of his youth as well. And when she missed two periods and explained to Joey what this meant he knew the time had come to move on. But he was trapped, could talk to no one, couldn’t ask for help, didn’t want another foster family and was damned if he would go back to some foul-smelling ward. He turned fourteen and to the streets all at once. But not before smashing up the Monroe house first, with a crowbar he had found in a lane, one morning, poorly clad but not yet underfed, and smiling rather eerily.

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With Kathleen, Danushka would go on excursions of a different sort. With her she discovered London by roaming Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury and with her she was slowly beginning to appreciate how much Vladimir loved her by sending her here. She stood in the Fitzroy and brushed against tall, paint-stained Augustus John without either one of them knowing the other, quite obviously. Not far from a stringy writer named Blair who called himself Orwell and a man who, like Vladimir, understood the depths of the totalitarian menace so well. Just like Koestler, who was also there, as was an alcoholic cherub whose given-name was Dylan and who would soon leave for and rush back from short-lived illusion in freshly slaughtered Prague, in a great hurry to smoke and drink himself into an early, melancholy grave.

Danushka also finally encountered Marx at Highgate Cemetery in North London where she stood pensively before his imposing granite and bronze tombstone, covered by new wreaths and surrounded by wooded walkways, wild flowers and the breath of island air she was beginning to get accustomed to. It is where she prayed for Volodya whose warm body she missed, asking him for help and strength:

" Volodya, Voloydya, I'm here. I've done everything you've asked, but what do I do next?!"

But then and fortunately she got distracted by some of the other headstones, each with its own story to tell, surely not all necessarily sad. For this, in a certain way, could also quite easily be a happy place. And we do live or die by distractions or the lack of them. Like stones, stone angels everywhere, ivy snuggling up and round. Or terraces rising and falling according to where one stood and which way one looked. Plus those beds of flowers, pasture green lawns once immaculate, now neglected, leading away towards more and more neighbourhoods of the immensely peaceful dead.

" Look, the Egyptian Avenue behind that special gate! It even has obelisks. Miles of sand now, and we're all set!" Kathleen exclaimed. She laughed at the gaudy banality of it all and would have had a real soul-mate in Manolo, the Spanish stowaway, now on his way to Hoboken and Greenwich Village, where he would befriend an awkward ex-serviceman, just back from Berlin, at Zanetti's Café and also the man whose feet Danushka would some day cure from a case of severe and chronic eczema, by teaching him how to bathe them gently, in his own urine…

It was still the moment that Danushka first stood silently next to Marx's chair. Under the Imperial Dome of that reading room, just past the Egyptian room, at the British Museum, always thinking about her brother Vladimir but only to be distracted again and again, as through some strange power, a pair of invisible eyes looking down on her from the book-stacked walls, taunting eyes, haunting eyes, of deep and tempting American blood, eyes set below a soldier's cap and above cheeks rougher than Volodya's, eyes that at that very moment were at work somewhere at Berlin's Tempelhof Airfield, under an aircraft, contemplating an engine, but also busy planning another visit to London. To get a chick or to catch a flick starring a bunch of nose-thumbing brothers, also called Marx.

Danushka was an earth child. A child of a far northern parallel linked to nature with dimensions and properties long lost to the millions in the cities. She, like Joey, inexplicably as well, could feel what others could not. It was this sense which had guided her across the frozen North where she had been cold, lonely and exhausted, but never afraid.