Читать книгу The Silence on the Shore - Hugh Garner - Страница 14

CHAPTER SEVEN

After eating her lunch in the non-medical staff’s dining room, Sophia Karpluk walked into the small garden between the administrative and laundry buildings and sat down on the grass. She pulled a paper-covered book from a pocket of her light blue smock. Its title was English — The Easy Way; she studied the lessons during noon hour, and read it in conjunction with her Polish-English dictionary in the evenings.

Against the open-windowed wall of the laundry building a young Italian, Giuseppe Mantia, was fooling around with a couple of the girl laundry employees. He was pawing them, despite their pretended protests and giggles. Sophia turned her back on them, glad that she could separate herself from her fellow employees during the lunch hour, even though she was one of them in the eyes of the others employed by the West End Hospital. Her blue smock marked her as a “laundry immigrant,” as she had once heard herself called by a girl from the office.

She glanced at the book and repeated to herself, “I shall. I shall not. I shan’t. I will. I will not. I won’t.” What was the difference between the words? She tried both of them in sentences. “I shan’t go with you. I won’t go with you.” Why have both words if one of them sufficed? There were times when she grew sick of trying to learn English at her age. It was too difficult, and what would be the good of it anyway?

She lifted her eyes from the book and watched some of the young office employees who were strolling along the paved paths across the garden. They were raised above the laundry workers and the maintenance staff by their lack of blue clothing. And raised above these, at least in their own estimation, were the starched-white figures of the nurses, who were snotty to everyone but the doctors and patients in the private patients’ wing. The hospital staff was as stratified as the inmates of a concentration camp, she thought.

The June day was so balmy and beautiful that she laid her book aside and leaned backwards on her arms, letting the warm sun reach her throat. Lately she had noticed the merest hint of wrinkles on her neck, and some tiny vertical ones appearing on her upper lip. The sight of them had sent her into a panic. Was she, who had spent her youth and young womanhood working in a German munitions factory, then in a labour camp, and finally in a camp for displaced persons, going to become old before she had begun to live?

But why think of that? She soaked up the warm sun and remembered the man who whistled in the room next to hers. She was sure he was young, but apart from that she had not let her imagination carry her. One evening, when she had heard him leave his room, she had spied on him from the front window as he hurried down the street. The brief view of his back had told her nothing but that he was fairly tall and slim.

The man who lived in the back room did not interest her much. What had Mrs. Hill said, that he was an editor? It was a cultured position. She knew his name from hearing Grace shout it up the stairs when he received a telephone call. Walter Fow — ler. Walter Fowl. Walter Chicken. Walter Chickener. Did they have such silly names in English?

The young Italian grabbed one of the giggling girls and passed his hand across her breasts. The other one watched him jealously, snickering to hide the fact. Sophia turned from the sight of them impatiently, glancing at her watch. It was five minutes to one. She pushed herself to her feet, brushed some dry grass from her smock, and walked across to the rear door of the laundry.

It was hot and humid inside the one-storey building despite the open windows and doors. Wisps of steam rose from the wall pipes and machinery. Some of the men stood talking near the large shipping door, while small knots of women and girls stood against the washers and near the door to the toilet. It was true that they were all immigrants: Italians, Yugoslavs, three Hungarians, several Poles, and a Lithuanian girl. The foreman was also an immigrant, a petty tyrant, foul-mouthed, ignorant, and conscious of his preferred status as an Englishman. Sophia, with her knowledge of the British occupation forces in Germany, had long ago placed him properly as a member of the English lower classes, probably able through ambition or sycophancy to become an army quartermaster-sergeant but no higher. She loathed him almost as much as she detested the greasy young Italian they called Joe, but whose name was Giuseppe.

When the ancient machinery began to hum and shiver on its beds, she took her place in front of the huge twelve-roll automatic ironer. On either side of her two other women stood before similar machines. They began their work, with movements as automatic as those of the machines themselves, passing the wet sheets into the padded rollers.

The noise of the washers from across the room cut off all extraneous sound, and Sophia let herself sink into a train of thought that would carry her through the afternoon. It was a trick she had earned in the wartime munitions plant, and one that is learned early by all who work at monotonous and repetitious jobs. Soon she was miles away from the laundry building, attending a dance recital. Here she met a Polish widower who invited her to go with him to a concert the following week. She was immersed in her daydreams when Giuseppe approached with a load of laundry in his wagon.

He leaned close to her and shouted above the noise, “You wanna screw, baby, eh?”

It was something he had learned got a laugh when it was overheard by the other workers. Because Sophia was aloof and did not mix with him and his kind inside the shop or out, he tormented her with it at every opportunity. She had discovered that ignoring him was her only defence, for on an earlier occasion when she had reported it to the foreman he had asked, “What’s the matter, isn’t it a good question then?” He had not even bothered mentioning it to Giuseppe, believing as he did that all foreign women were sexual pushovers, if you liked that kind.

As he placed a pile of wet laundry beside the machine, Giuseppe grinned in her direction and said something suggestive to her in Italian. She knew it was vulgar and sexually offensive by the way he said it. She turned her head away and concentrated on feeding the sheets into the machine.

From the corner of her eye she saw him push the wagon into the wide aisle behind her and disappear from her immediate view. Suddenly without any warning at all she felt his stubby finger pushed hard between her buttocks. She bowed herself against the feed-board of the ironer, stiffing the urge to scream. This was a new trick of his, now he had discovered that the women left their girdles in the dressing room because of the summer heat.

“You like goose, baby, eh?” he shouted, parroting something he had newly learned.

Sophia felt tears of shame and frustration filling her eyes, but she held back from wiping them with her hand. She stared blearily into the rollers, letting her outrage and anger vent itself in her trembling flesh. Each sheet she pushed into the machine became the screaming bursting form of Giuseppe Mantia, and she watched his agonized crushing and ignored his piteous pleas with a joy she had never known before.

The angry self-pitying tears overflowed her eyes and ran down each cheek to the corners of her mouth, as she tried to check them without lifting her hands to her face and giving herself away. Why was she forced to work among such animals? Even the gypsy whores in the concentration camp had been better than her fellow workers here. And even the German guards and block-leaders had shown some subtlety in their off-handed sensuality with the women prisoners.

She was careful for the remainder of the afternoon, keeping her eye on Giuseppe as he moved around the floor with his wagon loaded with wash or laundry materials. The next time he came near her machine she raised her foot to him. He looked down at the cruelly pointed toe of her shoe, and though he grinned at her he stayed outside of kicking distance. She allowed her anger to end in fantasies of revenge. The hour between four and five passed like five minutes as she thought of the best way to permanently hurt and humiliate him.