As the day wore on, Ritwik realized that Dusan’s English was not as minimal as he had first taken it to be. Perhaps it was nervousness that had inhibited him, perhaps the company of strangers, but he told Ritwik that he had read English in his school for three years, a school in a small, small village next to a town called Bogovino near the foothills of the Sar mountains, on the border of Macedonia with Kosovo. Dusan spelt out, like a child learning his first alphabet and getting the vowels jumbled with each other, the names of the town and the mountain, and then inscribed them on the earth with a hardy point of a piece of straw. When Ritwik asked him what had brought him to London, with a shrug his English disappeared once again. Different variations on the question, from several angles, only brought shrugs, silence, apparent incomprehension and a subsequent immersion in work.
The other thing Ritwik noticed about Dusan was that he never smiled. Not that there was much to smile about when your body was contorted impossibly, like a whimsically bent metal clothes hanger, and the sun got more and more ruthless, but normal people smiled when they introduced themselves to each other, or said ‘thank you’, or did any of those unthinking little acts of civil courtesy or politeness. No trace of those in Dusan; he wasn’t rude or anything, but it felt to Ritwik that there were vast dark clouds moving inside him all the time, darkening his eyes. For all he knew, he had never learnt to smile at all.
In the numerous silences that marked their fruit-picking, Ritwik battled with discomfort bordering on pain, hunger, headache, curiosity, anxiety and, the biggest of them all, boredom. Who would have thought that ten to twelve hours in a field of strawberries would become so viscous after the first two that they refused to budge? He filled up the vast spaces between his intermittent conversation with Dusan thinking about the ways in which Miss Gilby was getting knottier by the day, opaque and locked in her world, a world that often refused him entry. Every time he thought or wrote of Miss Gilby now, the face of Anne occupied his mind, ludicrously so because his Miss Gilby was stuck at what, forty-five? Fifty? Fifty-five even?
At other times, he populated the emptiness with musings on the politics of the country house poem; the georgic versus the pastoral; the famous English countryside, written and talked about so much, extolled, loved, and there he was in the middle of it, unable to construct a broader canvas of ‘Countryside’, stuck in a strawberry field which could only be a tiny detail in the huge picture of the literary construct. Where were the gently rolling green fields, the fields of barley and rye, the hills clothed with forests? And why was it all so close to major roads, so that the sound of traffic, a steady sea-roar, was always its music, not birds or crickets as the books and poems and essays had deceitfully promised? And what was Dusan thinking about? Where was he?
The next three days gave some sort of an answer to where Dusan went inside his head while his red, sore fingers plucked strawberries, his head bent, his body splayed and hunched at the same time. But only a type of answer and one, Ritwik felt, he himself had much to do with piecing together into a coherent fabric from the disparate shreds and rags Dusan threw at him.
On the second day, as Ritwik stretched his whole body out on the ground, racked with currents of pain and brittleness and warnings from his lower back and neck, Dusan asked Ritwik who he lived with, whether he had family in England, if he had lived in this country all his life. Ritwik answered with accurate facts, not a word more than he deemed necessary, but they were all true, if not the whole truth. There was silence for a long while as Ritwik tried to gather enough courage to ask him reciprocal questions but he hesitated too long and the moment went.
That day Ritwik had come prepared with a two-litre bottle of water, two sandwiches — white bread and cheese and tomatoes bought with the previous night’s twenty pounds — and two apples, one for himself, one for Dusan. When he offered his food and water to Dusan, the boy looked at him with a dumb surprise, then took them from Ritwik without a word of thanks but with a touching lowering of the head, as if he were being offered grace by an angel. He also volunteered information about himself, which Ritwik had not dared ask for. He lived in a house with his mother, two sisters, two brothers, three uncles, two aunts and five nephews and nieces. Full house, absolutely crammed, thought Ritwik, reminded of the hell of Grange Road. When Ritwik mentioned that he too had lived in a joint family, although not in one as large as Dusan’s, the boy painstakingly explained to him that they all lived in one room, not one house, one room in a place called Barnet. The men, all of them, went to work, if they could find some. His uncles worked exclusively in construction and building: there was more work in that field than in farming and, anyway, this was seasonal, not really a regular job. They did not have proper papers in this country so it was difficult but between the six of them — Dusan, one of his brothers, the three uncles and one nephew — they managed to survive. Dusan’s mother and her sons and daughters were waiting to go to the United States because she had an uncle in a town there and he was going to arrange for papers and a house, maybe, who knows, even schools for his sisters and himself, because he would like to be a doctor.
They had waited in England for fourteen months now and, before that, two months in Albania, from which they had had to flee because the police came to their village once, with guns, went knocking on every door and asked everyone to get out and never come back again. And there was no work to be had in Albania, you could die of hunger and thirst and even a dog wouldn’t come and piss in your mouth to wet your throat. So they had taken a ship to Bari and then a bus from Bari to Rome and then things got fuzzy and out-of-focus for Ritwik because Dusan wasn’t very clear about how he and his family had come from Italy to England. There were vague mutterings about relatives in the UK, an Albanian community, promise of work but the narrative ran into the sand. At this point, Dusan stared hard at the ground and went red-faced and silent. Maybe it was just the sun and the racking pain from fruit-picking. Or maybe Ritwik didn’t pay enough attention, for the sound of his own blood rushing around in his ears blocked out this boy’s story, a story that exposed his own as thin and tinny. His lot, which he had escaped, appeared as luxury compared with Dusan’s. He felt small and ashamed and couldn’t make eye contact with the Albanian boy for the duration of their farm experience. Which was all of three days, because he wasn’t picked up by Tim’s van on the fourth day as he stood on Chichele Lane with loose newspapers and the debris of last night’s kebab wrappers and take-away cartons littering the morning road.
And there had been no Dusan either. When Ritwik had asked Saeed, he had answered that he had no idea where the boy was, what his name was, where he came from. Like everyone out here, he was part of a floating population, here today, gone tomorrow, looking for better work, more pay. It was possible that he had found some place else, somewhere less temporary and less short-term than fugitive tasks like fruit-picking. Or, Ritwik thought, his uncles had found him something more stable in a construction job, leaving Ritwik with all those questions he had never asked about Dusan’s father and why he had had to leave Macedonia — was there violence? Was his village burnt down as the dalits’ were in India? Did he watch members of his family killed? — never had time to ask him about his country and if many people escaped or only a few. In the end, it came down to Ritwik’s own ignorance of the world, of his willed innocence about what was happening in it: he couldn’t look beyond the boundaries of his own shadow.