Transit(38)

‘I thought maybe you could speak,’ he said sadly.

The translator was a woman of about my own age who lived in Warsaw. She had emailed me several times to ask questions about the text: I had watched her create her own version of what I had written. In the emails she had started to tell me about her life – she lived alone with her young son – and sometimes, talking about certain passages in the book, I would feel her creation begin to supersede mine, not in the sense that she violated what I had written but that it was now living through her, not me. In the process of translation the ownership of it – for good or ill – had passed from me to her. Like a house, I said.

Pavel was listening to what I said with his head cocked to one side and his eyes alert. In Poland I build my own house, he said presently. I make everything. I make the floors and the doors and the roof. My children, he said, sleep in the beds I make. He had learned his trade from his father, he went on, who was a builder. But the houses his father built were different from Pavel’s. Cheap, he said, wrinkling his small nose. The house was in a forest, beside a river. It was a beautiful place.

But my father don’t like, he said.

I asked him why not and he made a curious little humming sound, a small smile at his lips. My way and his way, he said, not the same. The house had enormous windows, he went on, that went from the ceiling to the floor. In every room – even the bathroom – the forest was so visible that you almost felt you were living in the open air. He had spent a long time thinking about the house and designing it. He had taken out books on modern architecture from the local library and studied them. I would like to be architect, he added, but – he shrugged resignedly. There was one house that had particularly caught his eye, a house in America. It was made almost entirely of glass. He had taken his inspiration from that house, although after that first time he had made sure not to look at the photographs again. He had developed his own idea and built it with his own hands. But then he had had to leave it and come to England to find work. He rented a bedsit near Wembley Stadium, in a building full of other bedsits occupied by people he didn’t know. In the first week, someone had broken in and stolen all his tools. He had had to buy new ones, as well as a better lock for the door, which he had installed himself. His wife and children were still in Poland, in the house in the forest. His wife was a teacher.

He resumed his folding of the dust sheets, shaking each one out with a snap and folding it into a tight, neat square. I said he must miss his family and he inclined his head melancholically. He went back as often as he could, he said, but these visits were so expensive and so upsetting he had started to wonder whether he was better off not going at all. The last time, when he was leaving, the children had clung to him and cried. He paused and laid his hands on his stomach and grimaced slightly.

‘In this country I make money,’ he said. ‘But maybe is not worth.’

He had always worked for his father, in the family firm, but after his father’s reaction to the house Pavel had decided not to do that any more.

‘All my life,’ he said, ‘he criticise. He criticise my work, my idea, he say he don’t like the way I talk – even he criticise my wife and my children. But when he criticise my house –’ Pavel pursed his lips in a smile – ‘then I think, okay, is enough.’

I asked what exactly his father hadn’t liked about the house.

Pavel made his humming sound again, clasping his hands in front of him and rocking back and forth slightly on his toes.

He hadn’t consulted his father at any point during the project, he said, but when it was nearly finished he had invited him to come out and look at it. They had stood outside and looked at it together, the transparent box. Pavel had designed it so that in certain places you could see all the way through it, out into the forest on the other side. His wife and children were in the kitchen: they could see them, his wife cooking dinner, the children sitting at the table playing a game. He and his father had stood there and looked and then his father had turned to him, striking his own forehead to signify Pavel’s stupidity.

‘He say, Pavel, you idiot, you forgot to build the walls – everyone can see you in there!’

He had heard afterwards that his father was freely talking about the house in town, telling people that if they went out to the forest, they could stand there and watch Pavel shitting.

After that Pavel had tried to find other work and failed. He had come to England and worked for a few months building the new terminal at Heathrow, being routinely sacked on a Friday night and rehired on a Monday, because the building company never knew in advance how many labourers they’d need. Then he’d met Tony and got the job he had now. At the end of his time at Heathrow, the terminal had opened: he was working near the arrivals gate and all day long he would watch people streaming out through the doors. No matter how often he told himself to stop, he kept glancing up, thinking that his family were about to come through that opening, thinking he recognised faces he knew in the crowds, sometimes hearing Polish voices and fragments of Polish conversation. For hour after hour he watched the scenes of reunion as other people received their loved ones. It was addictive: when he got home his room was correspondingly colder, bleaker, more lonely. It was better to be here, in this house of books: he’d been meaning to ask whether I’d mind if occasionally he borrowed one, so that he could try to improve his English. It was difficult to talk to anyone, his language level being what it was: this conversation was the longest he had spoken to anyone in weeks. The problem was that his thoughts far outpaced his verbal ability. Yet he knew that when he spoke, he improved rapidly: he had once been stuck on a bus in a traffic jam, sitting next to a girl who had started to talk to him, and by the end of that conversation, which had lasted an hour, they had been able to exchange confidences and intimacies in a way he hadn’t done with anyone since his conversations with his wife on his last visit home. She had told him he was all bottled up.