Everything I Found on the Beach (2 page)

In the first mild blur of alcohol the hard edges of his worry smoothed off. “Did I make all the wrong choices?” he thought. “We couldn't have stayed though. We could never have stayed.” He held his new son and drank, his older boy withdrawn and strangely displaced, confused by the placatory attention people were showing him, pointing at the new baby. They were talking to him. “You have to say ‘brother' here. You can't call him your brat like in Poland. It means something else here.” They laughed. “Learn to call him your brother. You're not in Poland now!” He didn't understand; besides, the activity in the kitchen startled the boy. He was always withdrawn, self-contained. Grzegorz watched him and thought back to the boy's first birthday.

They'd put him down on the carpeted floor and round him set out the traditional things. A book, a banknote, his wife's sister's rosary, and a vodka glass, the
kieliszek,
all spread out equally from the child. Then they waited, tongue in cheek but with that strange whisper of conviction superstitions can have, to see what he reached for first. Whether he would be, in his future, an intellectual, a businessman, a priest, or a drunk. Of course, it's possible to be all of them at once, his friend had said. That had made them laugh. You just need four hands! His son had reached for the book. “That's not a good sign,” thought Grzegorz. He felt inadequate. Grzegorz felt it immediately as something he would not be able to help with.

The women were rolling out the dough for the pierogi, the small stuffed dumplings, cutting out circles with a glass and dropping in the fillings then folding them and pinching them closed. Some of the other children were helping and there was a long row of parcels starting to line up.

The women took the ducks and drained the blood off into cups and the air stank as they burned the last fine feathers off the duck on the gas ring and the kitchen filled with an acrid tang. Still the boy stared. Grzegorz watched the skins tauten in the flame and the buds of down char and desiccate and the women's fat, soft hands brush them off. He looked down at his new little son, at the delicate red ribbon, then at his older boy who stood watching while the other children ran round catching the plucked feathers that inevitably escaped and floated round in the crowded light of the kitchen.

The boy stared. Grzegorz thought his son must have some faint memory of the big farm table, the low ceiling. Of the warm, milky smell of the soft old woman that was being blurred in his mind amongst the matrons of this house, that was turning into nothing more than a suspicion he once knew someone special. Poland would be a strange thing to him, a distant awareness that would perhaps fade and become nothing more than a historical fact as he grew. With all the Polish around him, nothing had really changed. But there was no place of focus for the boy now, and, looking at him, Grzegorz felt the boy
would always carry this sense of having been removed from something and that he would never understand it.

He nodded as one of the women lifted the boy and stood him on a chair where he held on to the unit alongside her, staring at the process of the ducks, surrounded by the noise and festivity. The boy watched the women pour the white vinegar into the blood to stop it clotting, twitched his nose with the sharp smell of it, and poked his finger curiously into the blood. Then he watched as one of the men took the big abattoir knife from his bag and cut up the ducks, now these strange, naked, riddled creatures, and quartered them onto the board.

Grzegorz took up his new son and went out. The house was always crowded and small but it seemed to close in on him. He seemed to be carrying too many confusing emotions, and just didn't know how to feel. It was like he couldn't settle on one feeling. This was all new. He thought of the wide eyes of the boy watching the ducks being quartered. There was no resting place of family, of places he knew. There had been for the first boy, and he had taken him from them. Now, he had to get it right for them both.

Grzegorz was still partly stunned. He had thought the hospitals here would be so much better than at home, but he was horrified. The machines here were newer, the buildings better kept. But he'd suffered this unshakeable feeling that they were being herded like cattle, going through this numerical process. There didn't
seem to be any doctors about, any nurses. Not like when his first son was born. At least there had been people to help, always. And he knew the score. They'd saved what złotys they could and when they went into the hospital paid off the right people, so the care and concern they got was good and consistent. You got what you paid for. But here there had been an impersonal thing he couldn't get used to. He was horrified by the farm-like ward, had tried to pay a nurse to get his wife a room, anywhere, just some place they could be away from people for a while, for the first few hours of his new baby's life, before going back into the house. The nurse had just looked at him bewildered, and he didn't have the English to explain.

He lay down in the women's room with his wife. She was tired, brittle looking. From the women's room, they smelled the stock making in the kitchen below, heard the simmering of the building celebration. People stayed away to give them time. They were thankful for that. There were people in the hospital, there were people here. They just wanted space together to take in this massive new thing.

Grzegorz looked down at the exquisite new thing of his son and felt this strange and terrible pride. The boy threw out his arms and cried. From somewhere, Grzegorz had the illusion of Christmas as the cloves and the allspice lifted through the room and the smell of the stock grew. He saw the ducks clearly in his grandfather's hand, the long, low marsh. Remembered exactly the precious
tin his grandmother kept the spices in. The boy cried feebly and his wife put him to her breast. “The things we need are very simple,” thought Grzegorz. “I want to have the things we need for them.”

Hold worked inshore the strings of prawn pots, bringing up the creels with the pot haul and letting the boat idle, anchored some by the weight of the string in the water. He was a few hundred meters off the shore and the sun had come round enough to light up the beach and it looked beautiful, and he thought there was something more determined in the way the coast looked in the colder months.

Much of the prawn fishing was done in these colder months and he emptied the prawns into the drum and they flicked and clicked and there was no rhyme or reason to why some of the pots had prawns and some none. He knew this very well, that there were no averages, no laws with fishing. He could imagine the prawns nibbling, testing, weighing the pot. Something had to make them want to go in, they had to be encouraged; but once they were in, that was that. They were stuck with the decision.

Hold rebaited the pots that needed it with the scad and herring they had salted down and then he set the boat and played the string back out into the water and there was the comfortable rhythm of the engine and the splash of the creels rhythmically hitting the water.

He went cursorily through the drum and picked out the smallest prawns and threw them over the side, and wondered how they felt for that moment in the totally foreign element of the air; then he lifted some buckets of seawater and filled the drum and banged on the lid. He didn't believe in the unnecessary suffering of things and saw no purpose to letting the prawns suffocate blithely in the air. That was a very strong thing in Hold: his belief that a thing should not die nor be hurt without purpose. For this reason he didn't take the lobsters that were only just of size, knowing how slowly they grew, nor did he shoot things that were scarce, the hares and doves, which he seemed to remember seeing all the time as a child but rarely saw now. Though he fished and shot, this was for a purpose, and that he was engineer of the hurt inevitable he felt with great responsibility, and that was a great driving force in him. It gave him a respect for life and for the right of things to exist. He felt we had come too far from this.

He played the strings out and then went on to the lobster pots that he had put out for the first time this season. In the first pot there was a big lobster and there was no reason for it on the fresh bait, and in the other pots, their spines stuck with weed and debris, were spider crabs, strangely early and again, for this, without reason to be there. He unloaded the lobster from the pot and put it in a tub, and then took out the spider crabs, their conkery shells crusted with acorn barnacles. He wondered whether the spider crabs being early was from
some disturbance, perhaps flushed by the scallop dredgers out at sea, or some sign of unusual warming water. “Ah,” thought Hold. “There just aren't any rules. Just the rule that the sea will keep surprising you.”

In the kitchen, the boy helped the women throw the spices into the pot and then watched them take the deformed pieces of duck out from the water and shred off the meat, putting the offal to one side on a plate. The boy stared at it with a kind of enamored disgust. “For your mama,” they said. “It will help keep her strong after the baby.”

The boy helped throw the dried fruit into the soup, then they poured in the cups of rich black blood and then gradually the flour, and the boy watched as the soup slowly thickened.

Still there was an illusion of Christmas with the smells that had reached the sleeping room. Grzegorz looked down at the little red ribbon on the child's wrist. It was unnerving him. He thought it made the baby look as if it wore a price tag, as if somehow he was for sale. Part of him wanted to rip it away, to tear away the idea that there could be anything like an evil eye out there to be protected from. But he didn't feel he could defy superstition for one moment. It had been built into him too long ago. “It's not being watched. It's being kept down,” he thought. “I'll have to try and make a little
more now. We can save more. We can get out of here to a place of our own.”

When the couple came back to the kitchen and saw the boy on the chair helping the women with the soup, Grzegorz almost choked with this cloth of thanks that seemed to cough up out of him from somewhere. He was filled with this great sense that they would make it, that they would get through all of this and be happy soon. That this was just a stop on the way. He reached for his wife's hand and held it, and for a moment just in this small gesture there was all this renewed hope.

One of the older women handed a plate to his wife and there was something almost religious about the act, as if of some great donation. She looked down at the duck offal.

“It'll keep you strong,” said the woman. Grzegorz saw the great pride in the woman's face.

The wave of hope broke and smashed over the stones of the facts. “I'm still in Poland,” thought Grzegorz. Again, the boat of his emotions tipped in the waves. “We can't move on while there is all of this, we can't become anything new.” He looked at all the Polish products around the place, sitting in the cooking smells, the familiarity of the sounds. He looked desperately out of the window at the wall opposite with the big graffiti, “Polish out,” but he didn't register it any more. He wanted to feel better at this incredible time.

“This is where we are now,” he thought. “And we have to move on. Here. Poland has nothing for us.” He wanted so much to change things and to bring all these new things to his life. He was very desperate for that. “I just need a chance,” he thought. He watched his wife eat up the small offal with her fingers, holding their tiny new son. Someone needs to give me a chance.