I walked deliberately slowly up to the white Georgian town house that is the Polish Club. The building was donated to the Polish resistance during the Second World War, later becoming a cultural meeting place, a kind of home to those who could not return to a Poland ruled by Stalin. While researching the Black Vodka concept, I had discovered that, like myself, Stalin was physically misshapen. His face was pitted from the smallpox, one of his arms was longer than the other, he was called ‘tiger’ because his eyes were yellow and he was short enough to have to wear platform shoes. I have never worn shoes with heels to make me feel bolder, but I have always thought of myself as lost property, someone waiting to be claimed. To be offered an elegant home for a few hours at the hospitable Polish Club always does good things for my dignity.
I hung my coat on a wooden hanger, placed it on the clothes rail in the foyer and made my way into the bar, where a polite and serene waitress from Lublin confirmed my booking in the dining room. She discreetly invited me to ‘enjoy a drink until my companion arrives’. Keen to obey her, I ordered a double shot of pepper vodka. Thirty minutes later, I had researched the raspberry, honey, caraway, plum and apple vodkas, and my companion had still not arrived. The sky was darkening outside the window. An elderly woman in a green felt hat sat on the velvet chair next to me, scribbling some sort of mathematical equation on a scrap of paper. She was so lost in thought, I began to worry that somewhere else in the world, another mathematician would pick up on those thoughts and at this very moment, 8.25pm, find a strategy to solve the equation before she did. It was possible that while she sat in her chair struggling with the endless zeros that seemed to perplex her deeply, someone else would be standing on a stage in São Paulo or Ljubljana, collecting a fat cheque for their contribution to human knowledge. Would I, too, be waiting in endless humiliation for Lisa, who was probably at this moment lying in Richard’s arms while he kissed the zero of her mouth?
No I would not. She arrived, late and breathless, and I could see she was genuinely sorry to have kept me waiting. I ordered her the cherry vodka while she told me the reason she was late was that she had been planning a dig that was soon to take place in Cornwall, but the computer had crashed and she’d lost most of her data.
There is nothing that feels as good as breathing near someone you desire. The past of my youth was not a good place to be. Is it strange then, that I am attracted to a woman who is obsessed with digging up the past? Lisa and I are sitting in the dining room of the Polish Club on our first date. We arrange the starched linen napkins over our laps, admire the chandelier above our heads and discuss the oily black eggs, the caviar that comes from the beluga, osietra and sevruga varieties of sturgeon. The waitress from Lublin takes our order and Lisa, naturally, wants to know less about fish and more about me.
‘So where do you live?’ She asks me this as if I am an exotic find that she is required to label in black Indian ink.
I tell her I own a three-bedroom flat with a west-facing balcony in a Victorian double-fronted villa in Notting Hill Gate. I want to bore her.
I tell her I never dream or cry or swear or shake or snack on cereal instead of apples. Better slowly to prove more interesting than I first appear.
Lisa looks bored.
I tell her that my mother wanted me to be a priest because she thought I’d look best in loose-fitting clothes.
She laughs and plays with the ends of her hair. She shuts her eyes and then opens them. She fiddles with her mobile, which she has placed on the table. Lisa shuffles her shoes, which are red and suede. She eats a hearty portion of duck with apple sauce and discovers I like delicate dumplings stuffed with mushroom because I am a vegetarian. When she stabs her fork into the meat it oozes pale red blood which she mops up with a piece of white bread; little, delicate dabs of the wrist as she brings the blood and bread up to her mouth. She eats with appetite and enjoyment. That she is a carnivore pleases me.
After a while she orders a slice of cheesecake and asks me if I was born a hunchback.
‘Yes.’
‘Sometimes it’s difficult to tell.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, some people have bad posture.’
‘Oh.’
Lisa licks her fingers. Apparently it’s an excellent cheesecake. I am pleased she is pleased. The waitress offers us a glass of liqueur from a bottle that has ‘a whole Italian pear’ lurking inside it. The pear is peeled. It is a naked pear. We accept and I say to Lisa, ‘We should get that pear out of the bottle and make a sorbet with it’ — as if that is something I do all the time. In fact I have never made sorbet. She likes that. It is as if the invitation to wedge the pear out of the bottle is like freeing a genie. She becomes more animated and talks about her job. Apparently when she finds human remains on a dig, bones for example, they have to be stored in a methodical way. Heavy bones, the long bones, are packed at the bottom of a box; lighter bones such as vertebrae are packed at the top.
‘Archaeology is an approach to uncovering the past,’ she tells me, sipping her liqueur — which, strangely, does not taste of pear.
‘So when you go on a dig, you record and interpret the physical remains of the past, is that right?’
‘Sort of. I like to know how people used to live and what their habits were.’
‘You dig up their beliefs and culture.’
‘Well you can’t dig up a belief,’ she says. ‘But the material culture, the objects and artefacts that people leave behind, will give me clues to their beliefs.’
‘I see. You know why I like you, Lisa?’
‘Why do you like me?’
‘Because I think you see me as an archaeological site.’
‘I am a bit of an explorer,’ she says. ‘I’d like to see the bone that protrudes in your thoracic spine.’
At that moment I drop the silver fork in my right hand. It falls noiselessly to the carpet and bounces before it falls again. I bend down to pick it up and because I am nervous and have downed too much vodka, I start to go on an archaeological dig of my own. In my mind I lift up the faded rose-pink carpet of the Polish Club in South Kensington and find underneath it a forest full of wild mushrooms and swooping bats that live upside down. This is a Polish forest covered in new snow in the murderous twentieth century. At the same time, in the first decade of the twenty-first, I can see the feet of customers eating herrings with sour cream two metres away from my own table. Their shoes are made from suede and leather. A grey wolf prowls this dark forest, its ears alert to the sound of spoons stirring chocolate-dusted cappuccinos in West London. When it starts to dig up an unnamed grave that has just been filled with soil, I do not wish to continue with this mental excavation, so I pick up the fork and nod at Lisa, who has been gazing at the lump on my back as if staring through the lens of a microscope.
The rain tonight is horizontal. It makes me feel reckless. I want to give in to its force. As we step onto Exhibition Road I slip my arm around Lisa’s shoulders and she does not grimace. Her hair is soaking wet and so are her red suede shoes.
‘I am going home,’ she tells me. She beckons to a vacant taxi on the other side of the road and all the time the warm rain falls upon us like the tears in my dream. Her voice is gentle. Rain does that to voices. It makes them intimate and suggestive. While the taxi does a U-turn she stands behind me and presses her hands into my hump as if she is listening to it breathe. And then she takes her forefinger and traces around it, getting an exact sense of its shape. It’s the kind of thing cops do to a corpse with a piece of chalk. Now Lisa bends down and opens the door of the taxi. As she slides her long legs into the back seat, she shouts her destination to the driver.