Clanchy Antigona and Me

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-80075-185-9
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

'An absolutely wonderful book' - Deborah Moggach In a London street at the turn of the twenty-first century, two neighbours start to chat over the heads of their children. Kate Clanchy is a writer, privileged and sheltered. Antigona is a refugee from Kosovo. On instinct, Kate offers Antigona a job as a nanny, and Antigona accepts. Over the next five years and a thousand cups of coffee Antigona's extraordinary story slowly emerges. She has escaped from a war, she has divorced a violent husband, but can she escape the harsh code she was brought up with? At the kitchen table where anything can be said, the women discover they have everything, as well as nothing, in common.

Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. She has won a Forward Prize, the BBC National Short Story Award, the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and her novel Meeting the English was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award. In 2018 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Clanchy, Kate

Leseproben

1

The Kosovan Woman

Tony Blair, April 1999

‘Where are they from, that family?’ said my husband one afternoon in early 2001. Spring: we had the front window open. ‘I keep seeing them in the street. Like Italians, but they’re not speaking Italian. That’s not Greek, is it?’

I peered out. A young woman, two girls – early teenagers with long plaits of hair – and a round-eyed little boy were filling the pavement with their clamour. I’d often seen them before. Once, mother and daughters had come screaming down the street, wailing and keening, the little boy slung like luggage over his mother’s shoulder. ‘I think,’ I said, remembering recent newscasts, ‘I think they might be from the former Yugoslavia.’

‘Haven’t they all gone home?’

‘Not if they can help it, I shouldn’t think.’

A few days later, I meet the woman and her son in the street. The little boy is carrying a yellow balloon with ‘Liberal Democrat’ on it. In seconds, he has presented it to my toddling baby, and is hugging and kissing him. The woman squats down and hugs the baby too. It is his blondness, I think, that excites these effusions, his . It reminds me of being on family holidays in Italy in the seventies, when my similarly golden-haired brother would be clasped to upholstered black bosoms until he fainted.

Not that this woman is upholstered. She is spry, elegant, quick, and the pony tail of black hair down her back is magnificently shiny and alive. She raises her head to look at me. A beautiful face: the poise and proportions and kholed dark eyes of a cheetah. She jumps up, and I see we are going to talk.

‘Are you from Yugoslavia?’

‘Kosovo.’

‘Ah.’ I make a warm, generally approving noise. ‘Three children?’

‘Yes. You one?’

‘Just one.’ She picks up my hand. She is looking for a wedding ring, I realize. I show her, expecting the sort of cloying moral congratulations, the sort of glad-handing that used to embarrass me in Kashmir or Anatolia, but instead she shows me her own hands. They are worn, brown, strong, with pronounced knuckles – and bare.

‘I am dee-vorced,’ she says, and looks closely at me, scanning my face for disapproval. ‘Dee-vorced. He beat me up.’

‘Good,’ I say. ‘Good. I’m sure that’s a good idea.’ She smiles, and I see that all her teeth are false.

Her little boy is chasing my little boy, three steps forward, three steps back. He is extraordinarily good at it, extraordinarily interested in the younger child. The baby giggles: that pure, bubbling, rippling sound. We lean against a low wall, the Kosovan woman and I, relax in the early spring sun. She tells me her name: Antigona, four long syllables, with the stress on the ‘go’. I tell her mine. I have the feeling, at least in my memory, of strongly meeting someone, of making an important connection. And I have an idea.

‘Do you want a job?’ I say.

‘Are you sure that will be all right?’ says my husband, when I announce that someone for whom we have no references and whose second name we do not know will, for the foreseeable future, be working as our cleaner and be a keyholder in our household.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Honestly. She’s great. I trust her. It’s a woman thing. And we really need help in the house. We agreed.’

And when he raises his eyebrows, indicating that not only am I being irrational but probably – typically, self-destructively, sentimentally – am about to get , (I once adopted a kitten with fleas, worms and leukaemia, and it was not me who administered the pills, nor took it on its final journey to the vet), I say:

‘Come on. She’s from . She ran away from the . We have to trust her.’

I am calling on a mutual soft spot, an area of warm agreement we share not only with everyone we know, but with many people we usually disagree with, such as the voters of Middle America, and the leader writers of the . We know, we think, what means: green hills, burnt-out villages, vast convoys of refugees on tractors. I remember that high-tech control room; NATO spokesman Jamie Shea dominating newscasts, telling us that perhaps 100,000 Albanians were in mass graves; Tony Blair receiving the adoration of camp-loads of refugees. We know what Kosovo was like: like Bosnia, wasn’t it? Dark-eyed Muslims from the Balkans, suffering, on mountains. But not as bad, because this time Blair and Clinton had started talking the kind of language we approved of, about individuals and ethics. This time we had helped, this time we had run the film back and done it differently. This time we had sent in the good soldiers – albeit all of them in aeroplanes, which concerned me at the time – before all the villages were torched, before the young men were herded like cattle to the killing field.

Even Mark, our builder – in this book I am nearly always doing up one or another early Victorian house in Hackney – is pro-Kosovar. His Polish father, dark skin, wide travels and warm intelligence do not usually prevent him from expressing the view that all refugees are Social Security scroungers out to take our jobs. But he makes an exception here, and not just because Antigona, on only her second day at work in my house, has hijacked the espresso-maker and made him a coffee with boiled milk and three sugars. ‘She’s from Kosovo, ain’t she?’ he says. ‘I don’t object to that. They had no choice, with them Serbs. They had to come here.’ And he looks over to Antigona with a most peculiar expression on his face: not lust exactly, more Madonnaworship. As if her dark hair and eyes, the spring in her step, the broom in her hand, recalled an ideal of the south and womanhood deeply imprinted on his English unconscious. It’s like a scene from .

Though Antigona seems to take a lot of men that way. Even the lugubrious proprietor of the Italian delicatessen, the man with the vast gorgonzola neck who has never done more for me than sigh heavily over my choice of anti-pasti, has spotted us walking down the street, and asks me if I know her phone number, and offers me free apricot juice. ‘Is she Italian?’ he asks. ‘Sardinian?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Kosovo. Refugee.’ And watch that expression cross his face, the moue of surprise, the tender nod. ‘Albanian asylum-seeker’ would not, I think, have had the same effect.

‘How did she get here, then?’ says Mark. Midsummer. He is back for another job, and has found Antigona a fixture in the house, thoroughly comfortable with the cupboards, mistress of the washing machine. Mark approves. How she shifts, he says, how much better the whole place looks. He has already proposed marriage and been turned down. Antigona has nonetheless made him a coffee.

‘She carried her wounded daughter out of a burning village on her back,’ I say. And watch Mark’s eyes widen and soften. ‘Then she got in a lorry,’ I add, seizing the moment as I know that Mark has strong views on the misuse of lorries. It’s the plight of the lads driving that gets him. ‘Well,’ says Mark, gulping coffee, ‘of course. In the circumstances. You would. ’

I let him have the whole story, in fact, seeing as I have it. The day after I met Antigona in the street, I put a note through her door, asking her to come by. She came, rather dressed up, with both her teenage daughters and the little boy Ylli holding her hand. I offered tea, and made it, and nobody drank it. I felt awkward, but the girls curled up like cats on my new fluffy rug and petted my baby, covering him with kisses, making him walk with his little trolley. One was darker, taller, stronger, one very thin and pale; both had glossy hair and fringed eyes like colts. I had no idea which was older.

Meanwhile, Antigona cased the joint: walking up and down the stairs, checking my cleaning cupboard, the state of all the rooms. She spoke to her daughters. The darker one said, ‘I am Mihane. My mum will take the job. Eight pounds an hour. Four hours a week. But you will find her other jobs.’ I knew that would be easy, so I agreed. Then, almost as another item of business, Mihane told me, as she had clearly often told before, the outline of their escape from Kosovo. Antigona has added many details since, and Flora, the paler and, it turns out, older daughter has been round for some help with her homework and filled in her part. Flora’s poised, elegant English is really remarkable for someone who has only been in the country a year, but she clearly gets her storytelling ability from her mother. Both tell a tale with tremendous immediacy, a terrific mixture of detail and restraint, their slim arms shaking, their dark, liquid eyes apparently fixed on the scene.

The Serbs came for Antigona in March ’99. Four policemen, heavily armed, arrived looking for Fazli, Antigona’s husband – ex-husband, I teach her to say, since she is divorced, and she does, often, with relish – who they maintained had Kosovan Liberation Army information. Antigona said she hadn’t seen him for a long while, which was perfectly true, but the Serbs didn’t believe her. One policeman held Antigona, Mihane (ten), and Ylli...