MORNING SERIAL

TEUTONS disdained effete French, dog-Russian, pigYiddish, whorish Polish, which he now rushed to embrace. This was what she had to barter: not her body but her tongue. Language would save his skin and Wolfi’s and Effi’s.

‘I’ll tell you what you can do for me,’ he said.

‘Yes please, anything.’ ‘Oblige me by talking in Polish. I used to be quite a linguist.’

‘Oh,’ said the girl, shocked. ‘Polish is not allowed. We are told to forget Polish, which is what the scum talk.’

‘It’s your mother tongue, though. You can’t forget your mother tongue.’

‘Mister, I will forget anything I am told to forget.’

‘All that’s over now,’ said Quantz. ‘You can forget all that forgetting business. Plenty of Americans are Polish Americans.

Start by telling me your name — your Polish name.’

There were so many layers of forgetting required. She was all at sea.

Syllables began to slide off her tongue; her native language expressed itself in baby talk and nursery rhymes. Maria was her name but that word floated in memory; it did not attach. On the farm they called her Helga.

She had learned to answer to Helga and it would smart when she peeled off that label, like a sticking plaster. Helga-Maria sat in her sack-dress, light through wavering treetops washing over the brown arms clasping her knees. Her eyes, suspicious of yet another sadistic trick in a world of unfathomable perversities, were blue but void of brightness, like drowned lights.

Michael listened to the outpouring of words with a pleasure insubstantial as the sipping of long untasted wine. Her cadences seemed to melt in his ear, to soften and liquefy the heavy burden of her story. Maria had worked on a farm, and been treated as family, and drunk milk straight from the cow. Now the woman she called Mother had turned her away, saying, Walk home to Poland.

Which way was Poland, please? she wanted to know.

> The Element of Water by Stevie Davies is published by Parthian in the Library of Wales series www.parthianbooks.com

CONTINUES TOMORROW