The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss
he said.
‘True.’ To Laura, Squire said, ‘I saw a likely-looking Malay restaurant just two blocks from the hotel where we could have lunch. Then a siesta?’
‘I don’t believe that I could eat any lunch.’
The bald man said, ‘Maybe you can know from my voice that I am from Sydney. You from America, you two?’
‘Wrong guess, chum. England.’
The bald man was astonished. ‘England, eh? You don’t sound English, does he, Tinka?’
This last remark was addressed to the semi-blonde woman. She turned her head slightly, waved a slow hand by swivelling it on her wrist, but did not deign to answer.
‘What you do in a place like this?’ the bald man asked Squire. ‘You live here? Your girl – you English too, darling?’
‘Where are we having the party tonight, Tom?’
‘Grahame’s got an open-air place in mind which someone recommended to him. Jenny’s booked a table.’
‘Grahame’s an old sweetie pie.’
The bald man moved over and said, ‘Mind if I join you? Can I buy you some drinks? I always am glad to speak with English people. My sister has married an English man in the Air Force.’
Seeing that the man was not going to be put off, Squire and Laura turned their attention to him.
‘Were you born in Australia?’ Laura asked.
He groped in the pocket of his shirt, brought out a cigar case, took a card from it with clumsy fingers and offered it to them.
‘Is me,’ he said proudly, as they read ‘Andrej Joachimiak: Computers, Micro-Processors’. ‘Andrej Joachimiak. I and my firm make the only Australian computer in the world. No one else.’ Over his heavy mid-European accent a few flimsy Australian vowels had been laid.
‘You manufacture computers?’
Joachimiak screwed one of his temples with what looked like an awkward but nevertheless determined attempt to touch his brain with his finger.
‘Know-how. Is all in here. I can make a great success. I am a real know-all.’
‘And were you born in Australia?’ Laura asked again. ‘Is Joachimiak an Australian name?’
‘Ah-hark, the lady is a little curious about me, yes. I know, I know it, all lady are detracted by success. Well, I tell you, lady, I was not born in Sydney but in Ostrow Lomelsky. You know Ostrow Lomelsky? Maybe you been to Ostrow Lomelsky?’
Suddenly, he appeared to have lost interest in the conversation.
He turned and lumbered back to his wife, who had produced a paperback entitled Growing Old Today and was glaring at one of its pages.
She was smoking continuously. Her cigarettes and lighter lay on the table beside her empty glass. Joachimiak grasped the lighter and blunderingly relit his cigar.
‘Can I buy you another lager?’ Squire asked the man.
‘A brandy. I want brandy. That is kind of you. I’d like to shake your hand, mister. First bit of kindness I’ve had all day. People don’t care any more, do they?’
He shook hands with Squire as the barman delivered three fresh drinks. Sinatra was singing ‘What Now My Love’.
Joachimiak edged round Squire so as to be able to address Nye face to face, and returned to his previous question. ‘You maybe been to Ostrow Lomelsky?’
‘Not that I remember,’ Nye said. ‘Where is it, exactly?’
He became very cunning, winking and putting one finger along his nose whilst almost laying his head on the bar.
‘Ah-hark, so you never heard of Ostrow Lomelsky? Well, you’d like that place. Very quiet. Wide spaces. Only a little village. Very cold winters, all the time it freeze very hard and the horses die.’ The mere recollection made his accent heavier. ‘Very pain to work, I don’t know. The River Bug, it freeze so hard – you know the River Bug?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Is not good, in winter is not good, River Bug. So anyhow, I tell you how you get to Ostrow Lomelsky, then you go and see what I say. You know Lublin? Is big city south from Warszawa. From Lublin in a car, if you got a car, drive north-east, only nowdays you don’t drive too far or you come to the frontier with the Soviet Union.’
He broke off to laugh, cough, and drink half of the brandy Squire had provided. His wife continued to read, drawing cigarette smoke into her lungs before issuing it into the atmosphere.
‘Sounds a nice part of the world,’ Squire said.
‘Terrible, terrible, I can tell you, Mr Englishman; Sydney is a whole lot better than Ostrow Lomelsky. Not so quiet, no, not so quiet, but a whole lot better.’ He shook his head, laughing and wheezing. ‘You think Ostrow Lomelsky sounds good? I have to sleep with my parents on top of the stove, you know? Turnips frozen in the ground.’
Wheezing, he turned back towards his wife. ‘Tinka, this Limey likes the sound of Ostrow Lomelsky. With the sewer running through the street?’ She paid him no attention, thumbing the pages of her book.
‘You were telling us how to get to your birthplace.’
‘What for you want to know?’ He swigged down the rest of his brandy, gasped, coughed, and said, ‘So you drive in a car if you got a car north-east from Lublin at forty kilometres an hour, across the River Wieprz where was once a massacre in older days, all the Jews killed off, and in two and a quarter hours you will be in Ostrow Lomelsky, right smack by Krzysztof Gajda’s gasthof.’
‘I see,’ said Squire. ‘So Ostrow Lomelsky is ninety kilometres outside Lublin in a north-easterly direction?’
Joachimiak took the cigar from his mouth and laid it along his nose, at the same time cocking his head so that it almost rested on the bar.
‘Ah-hark, you are pretty fast at calculations, mister. Congratulations, for I see you are a smart guy for an Englishman. But your calculations are wrong, anyhow, or maybe you drive too fast, because the correct distance is only sixty-two kilometres.’
He started to laugh, dropped the cigar on the bar, bent double to laugh, turned back to his wife to try and get her to share his amusement.
‘Eh, Tinka, Tinka, this limey guy, he think Lublin is ninety kilometres outside Ostrow Lomelsky! Ninety kilometres! Jesus, Sweet Saviour! This guy’d be in the River Bug before that. How you like that?’
She looked at him stonily. ‘You’re pissed,’ she said.
He redoubled his laughter. ‘Yes, but, Tinka, you hear what this guy say to me?’
‘I heard,’ she said. She regarded him without expression.
‘We’d better be going, Sun’s waiting for us,’ Squire said, slipping off his stool and pulling some crumpled dollars out of his pocket.
‘Don’t go,’ Joachimiak said, grabbing his arm. ‘Listen, let me get you a drink. Barman, barman, two brandies!’
They made a difficult exit. Sinatra was still singing ‘My Kind of Town’. The woman at the table watched them from over the top of her paperback without changing her expression.
Sun asked them, as he held out a hand to assist Laura Nye unnecessarily into the power boat, ‘You have a happy time on the island?’
‘It was lovely. Thank you very much.’
She started giggling. ‘What was the name of that dreadful village near the River Bug?’
‘Oswelsky Tommel?’
‘Stromsky Something. Stromsky Lomsky.’
They could not remember, and