Read Online The Road Home by Rose Tremain - Free Book Online

turned and were all staring at him and then whispering together. He looked down. He kept the cigarette cupped in his palm. One of the women got up and began marching toward him. He looked at her from under the peak of his cap. She was pale and pretty, with freckled arms, and she arrived very close to him, so that he could smell her sun lotion.
    “This is a private garden,” she said.
    “Yes?” said Lev.
    “Yes. This is a garden for residents only. So can you . . . go away, please?”
    Lev looked beyond the young woman to her group of friends, and he saw that they’d called the children from the swings and had their arms round them and he understood that they thought him a criminal of the kind who was bullied and ostracized at the Yarbl Institute of Correction and of whom society didn’t wish to speak.
    “You are thinking . . .” he began, then stopped. He ran short of words, but felt that, even if he’d known the words, he couldn’t have brought himself to say them about himself. The freckled young woman stood confronting him with her hands on her hips. Lev wanted to say to her that he had a daughter the age of the children in the garden, that even now Maya would be walking home from school with her small satchel and her worn shoes . . .
    “Okay?” said the young woman. “You’re leaving now. Right?”
    Lev shook his head, trying to show her that she’d read him wrong, that he was a good man, a loving father, but this shaking of his head alarmed the woman and she called to her friends, “He’s not going. Someone call the police.”
    “No,” said Lev. “No police . . .”
    “Then leave.”
    “I am new,” said Lev. “I am only looking my way through many streets.”
    The woman sighed, as one of her friends joined her. “Nutter,” she said. “Foreign nutter. Probably harmless.”
    “Okay,” said the friend, approaching Lev. “Pissez-off, right?
Comprendo?
”
    By late afternoon, and with all the leaflets delivered, hunger and thirst began to torment Lev. He thought longingly of Lydia’s hard-boiled eggs.
    He knew he was lost now. He wished he’d left a trail of leaflets to guide him back the way he’d come. He stood and looked around him, staring left and right, left and right. Then he set off again, trying to remember what route he’d followed.
    When at last he reached Ahmed’s kebab shop, it was crowded with a group of Arab men eating meat in the bread pouches and drinking coffee from paper cups. The smell of the goat meat now seemed almost perfumed and sweet to Lev, and he made his way to Ahmed’s counter and put down the empty bag.
    “Leaflets gone,” he said.
    Ahmed’s back was turned to Lev. He was carving meat from the cone, sweat gleaming on his arms.
    “What I hope, my friend,” Ahmed said after a moment, “is that you put every one through a letterbox. I have had workers who dump my leaflets in the fucking trash and then ask me for money, and although I am a very kind Muslim, that makes me hopping.”
    Around him, the Arab men began laughing.
    Were they laughing about “hopping”? Lev recalled his English teacher saying, “In a foreign language meaning sometimes arrives a little while after the words have been spoken.”
    Ahmed began filling three bread pockets with meat and salad. He set these on the counter for his Arab friends and then moved away to his coffee machine. All Lev could glean by way of meaning was that Ahmed’s mood had changed since the morning. He watched him serve the coffee and take money and put this into his sophisticated cash register, which had no ringing bell like cash registers in Lev’s country, but made only a quiet little buzzing sound of appreciation as its drawer opened to receive the notes. Lev stared at the cash register. He saw Ahmed’s wide hand poised above it, and after a moment’s hesitation, the hand snatched out a green note and closed the drawer. Ahmed crossed over to where Lev stood. He put the note down on the counter.
    “There