‘Is a cook-up,’ he said.
Pavel was upstairs, sanding down the woodwork. Whenever Tony paused the drill the hissing scrape of sandpaper filled the house instead.
‘Pavel in bad mood,’ Tony said, lifting his mask. ‘Is best upstairs.’
Pavel suffered from stomach aches, he added. It was difficult to know whether the stomach aches caused his bad mood or the other way around. Tony tried to make him stay at home but he wouldn’t. His theory was that Pavel was constipated.
‘He all blocked up,’ he said, winking, ‘with Polish homesick food.’
Pavel came down the stairs and walked silently past us to his toolbox. His small boots were thickly coated with dust. He removed a fresh roll of sandpaper from the toolbox and returned wordlessly upstairs with it.
Tony resumed his drilling. He was trying to dismantle the timbers inside the wall but they were stubborn and he had to yank them violently to get them out. One of them came away unexpectedly easily and fell across the joists with a crash. There was a volley of ferocious thumps from downstairs and then shortly afterwards the sound of someone furiously approaching up the steps outside. A series of thunderous knocks rained on the front door.
Tony stood, drill in hand, and we looked at one another for a few moments.
Outside, I could hear Paula’s voice. She was shouting. She said she knew I was in there. She said I should come out: she would spit in my face for me. She had told everyone in the street about me: people knew what I was like, and my children too. She pounded at the door with her fist again. Come out here, she said. Come on, I dare you. Then there was the sound of her returning down the steps and a few seconds later the basement door slammed with such a crash that the whole building shook.
‘I go speak with them,’ Tony said, removing his mask.
He put down his drill and went out of the front door, leaving it open behind him. I heard him knock on the basement door below. After a while I heard the sound of voices. The tone and cadences of Paula’s voice seemed almost to be coming from inside me. Tony did not return immediately and the house started to become cold. I wasn’t sure whether or not I ought to close the door. I went upstairs to my room but found Pavel there, sanding the windowsill. When he saw me retreating he stopped.
‘Please,’ he said, with a minute and courteous inclination of his head. ‘Is finished, come in.’
We stood and looked down together from the window to where Paula had stood on the front steps below. I realised Pavel must have witnessed the whole thing. I asked him if he was feeling any better and he made a wavering gesture with his hand.
‘A little,’ he said.
He started to fold up the dust sheets he had draped across the floor and over the bookcase adjacent to the window. Something in the bookcase caught his eye and his hand immediately darted out to take it. He turned to me with it, his face suddenly lit up, and said something rapidly in a foreign language. It was a book: when I didn’t reply, he held it out to show me.
‘You speak Polish,’ he said, pointing at the cover with his dusty finger.
The book was in Polish, I said, but I couldn’t understand it.
He looked immediately crestfallen. It was a translation of a book I had written: I said he could keep it if he wanted to. He raised his eyebrows and examined it back and front, turning it over in his hands. Then he nodded his head and tucked the book into the pocket of his overalls.
‘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.’