He felt at the same time this tired, trapped fear alongside this great and in some way desperate gratitude for this accidental family around him. “They are good people; we’re all in the same boat here,” he thought. “All reliant on the agency still, as if they hold us in some grip.” Because of the break when they’d laid them off for three weeks, he hadn’t quite clocked up the twelve months’ unbroken work that would make him eligible for benefits, so he couldn’t move out of the house yet, not on the money he had. There was talk that the agency had organized this break deliberately so they didn’t have a choice but to accept the work and the stoppages in their paychecks — the deductions for rent, for the transport to work that was laid on, for house cleaning, though none of them had ever seen a cleaner. “But it’s just talk,” thought Grzegorz. “We’re responsible for ourselves.”
He was handed a glass and took a big, long drink. “We have to keep moving forward,” thought Grzegorz. “We think we have no choice. But this is the land of choice. We can’t just blame the situation all the time. We have to take the next step.” He looked for his wife. She had gone from the room. The baby was still with the old woman.
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 He held his new son and drank, his older boy withdrawn and strangely displaced, confused by the placatory attention people were showing him, pointing at the new baby.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 He was always withdrawn, self-contained.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.