22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson

shabbier than some, not worse than others. What Janusz’s father would call a ‘one-acre starveling’s dwelling’.
    Janusz had seen it from the brow of a hill, and walked down in the hope of finding someone who could tell him which way to get back on the road to Warsaw. He knocked but there was no response. He walked around the cottage several times and finally opened the front door, stooping to step inside.
    There were two rooms with pressed clay floors, one with a blackened fireplace, a kitchen table and chair. Potatoes were stored in a wicker basket by the door. The only decorations in the room were some handmade paper icons, carefully cut and folded forms representing different saints, lined up along the windowsill. They were yellowed by age and thick with dust.
    The other room had a long bench against the wall, on which a cat and kittens slept. In a corner he found a decorated wooden chest with linen and blankets inside. A dowry chest painted with bouquets of flowers and small birds. Something a young girl would be given by her family on her wedding day. There was nothing else except the mildewed smell of poverty and loneliness.
    In the yard, geese honked and chickens waded through thick layers of goose shit, scratching at the ground. The rains of the night before had turned the yard into a muddy mess and there was a stench in theair that made Janusz cough, pressing his hand over his nose. The place was empty. It was, he guessed, the home of the dead goose-woman.
    Despite his vow to return to Warsaw, he felt compelled to stay. He would do something useful here in this dead woman’s home. He washed and bandaged his head wound with a strip of cotton sheet he found in the wooden chest, then he lit the fire in the hearth and cooked himself some potatoes.
    The next day, he fed the geese and cleaned out the filthy henhouse. After that he walked around, noting the other jobs to be done. Every day he worked. He swept the yard and mended broken fences. He cleaned the two-room cottage and laid down branches of rosemary from the vegetable patch across the floors, to sweeten the air.
    At night he slept in the chair by the hearth and dreamed of Silvana. By day he kept busy. He wanted to make things right. He didn’t ask himself any questions. He organized and tidied and brought in vegetables from the garden.
    Out at the back of the cottage, hidden by a thicket of elder trees, he found an overgrown grassy mound marked with a birch-wood cross. The cross was worn and old, silvered by the weather to a pitted grey. There was no name, no way of knowing who was buried there. He sat down beside it, thinking of the old woman, her body still under the tree where he had left it, and felt weighed down by a loneliness that made his mouth taste bad and his eyes itch with salty tears.
    There’d been an old woman in his small town, a bent creature with a downy beard of grey that had the local kids laughing till their sides split. She was crazy, spitting and swearing whenever they taunted her. His father had explained to him once, when Janusz and a group of boys had thrown stones at her windows just to see her come out screaming, that the old lady was lonely. His father had sat him down and said the word cautiously, as if it was an improper word to use in front of his son.
    ‘Loneliness is a disease anybody can catch. When your grandfather died in the war against the Bolsheviks, your grandmother caught the disease. She died of it when I was just a boy.’
    ‘But she had you,’ Janusz had replied. How could his grandmother have been lonely if she had children?
    ‘You can be lonely in the biggest crowd,’ said his father, and Janusz looked up at his steady face, settled in its white starched collar like an egg in an eggcup, not sure whether his father was telling him now about himself or his grandmother. Was it just that all the grown-ups in the world were lonely? That when he grew up he’d get the disease too?
    ‘She didn’t have her