There are not and never have been many Russian restaurants in England; but in a corner of a street in the town nearest the aerodrome the Malinovskys have a little eating-place with marble-top tables and huge silver handstand cruets and yellow cane chairs and a smell of fried fish that is the shadow of Russia. Mrs. Malinovsky is from the south, near Kharkov. She is thin and olive-skinned, with black-brown hair and large numb black eyes, and when she speaks she lets fly with excited kindly hands. “What you like? We got soup and hamburger and fried potatoes. Or you like fish? We got nice salmon wid cucumber salad. Is very nice.” And then: “But oh, please God when war is over I haff so nice food here, so nice, so nice, so nice, please God!”
When I first saw Mrs. Malinovsky I could not guess her nationality. She might have been Italian. The subject, however, was a delicate one and I did not know how to approach it.
“You haven’t lived long in England?” I said at last.
“Oh, no! Oh, no! Where you think I from?”
“You might be from anywhere,” I said.
“Anywhere?”
“Well, you know,” I said, “almost anywhere. From some little country somewhere. From some little country like Lithuania.”
“Lithuania?” she said. “Lithuania?” She looked at me with wide still black eyes. “How you know?”
“I don’t know.”
“How you know I from Lithuania?” she said. “How you know that? I was born in Lithuania! My mother is born in Lithuania! All my family is born there! How you know? How you know?”
I did not know at all how to account for that extraordinary piece of insight on my part.
“I just know,” I said.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” Mrs. Malinovsky said, laughing and crying. “Is wonderful! Oh dear, oh dear!”
From that moment Mrs. Malinovsky took me to her heart. “You come in Sunday and we have nice food. We have chicken and nice fish and beet soup —”
“Bortsch,” I said.
“Bortsch, yes! How you know?”
“Everybody knows bortsch,” I said. “Bortsch is Russia. Roast beef is England.”
“Oi! Oi!” she said, half crying, half laughing again. “Oi! Oi!” she called back in a loud excited voice into the kitchen behind the restaurant. “Here is a gentleman who like bortsch! You hear?”
“Oi! Oi!” Mr. Malinovsky called. “I hear!”
After that I became, to the Malinovskys, the man who liked bortsch. Whenever I went there Mrs. Malinovsky came into the restaurant wiping her hands on her apron and then throwing them excitedly up into the air and clasping them together. “Oi!” she would call. “Here is the young man from the Air Force! The young man who likes bortsch! You hear?”
“Oi,” Mr. Malinovsky would call, “I hear.”
But somehow, although I was always the young man who liked bortsch and although Mrs. Malinovsky always said there would be bortsch on Sunday, there never was any bortsch. Either there were no beets or the bortsch had all been eaten or Mrs. Malinovsky had decided to make something else after all. Similarly there was never any chicken; the salmon was always gone; and it was the wrong time of the year for cucumber. And so after a time, faced with nothing but the actual sausage and fried potatoes, I began to feel, as we say, that I had had it with Malinovskys.
Then one day Mrs. Malinovsky asked me a question.
“Do you know Mr. Markus?” she said.
“I didn’t know him. I know all about him,” I said.
“All about him?” she said. “All about him? Then where is he? Where is he now? He used to come in here. Now he doesn’t come.”
“No,” I said.
“Well, why doesn’t he come? Isn’t he on the station any more? Where is he?”
“We don’t know,” I said. “He flew his Spitfire into the Scharnhorst.”
Mrs. Malinovsky was very quiet, holding her hands.
“He was Lithuanian,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, “the only Lithuanian.”
“He was so nice man. I don’t believe nice man like that are killed. I don’t believe that nice Mr. Markus was killed!” she said. “I don’t believe it.”
I did not say anything. It is the thing they all say, the thing they all believe. In the eyes of those who love them, pilots are never dead. So when Mrs. Malinovsky said: “I believe that nice Mr. Markus is all right,” I thought it kinder not to speak.
After that, whenever I went into the Malinovskys’, we talked about Mr. Markus. There were things about him that Mrs. Malinovsky did not know, and I told her them. There were things about him I did not know, and Mrs. Malinovsky told them to me. I told her how he was the only Lithuanian in the Air Force, a man from a country not at war. I told her how he had played international football and what a distinguished important diplomatic sort of flier he had been, before the war, in his own country, how he had flown important personages all over Europe and how he had been decorated in every capital, until his tunic looked like a coat of many colours. She told me in turn how he used to come into the restaurant with a young lady and eat the Malinovskys’ simple food, and talk, as exiles always talk, of their own country. I told her how he had flown aeroplanes since he was a schoolboy and how, when the war which was not his began, he had gone to France to fly for France, and then how, after France fell, he had come to England to fly for us. I told her what an engaging, temperamental, distinguished person he was, and she told me over and over again how she could not believe he had been killed.
We talked of him so often, she asking me again and again for news and I telling her and really knowing that there was no more news to tell, that I began to see the Malinovskys’ handy little restaurant, with its actual sausages and fried potatoes and its bortsch that I never tasted, as a corner of Lithuania in England. I was sure that Markus was dead; Mrs. Malinovsky was sure that he was living. Whichever way it was, I used to get great satisfaction from the very fact that Markus had been with us at all: that as a free man, making a free choice, entering a war that he had no need to enter, he had made the choice he had.
But if I had great satisfaction in Markus, Mrs. Malinovsky had greater faith. And finally one day I was able to go down to the Malinovskys’ and see that faith justified.
“I have come to tell you something,” I said. “Mr. Markus is all right!”
“Is — is what? Is all right?” she said. “Is all right?”
“He is a prisoner,” I said. “It has just come through.”
Now it was Mrs. Malinovsky who could not speak. She stood crying quietly, slowly clasping and unclasping her hands. Whether she was crying for Markus or Lithuania or Russia or simply out of joy I could not tell. It was her great moment and she was very proud. I felt a great satisfaction too. I remembered the last anyone had ever seen of Markus: how he had taken the Spitfire down to nought feet over the Scharnhorst and had put her practically down the funnel and was never seen again. It was a great satisfaction to all of us to know that he had performed a miracle and was alive.
“Oh, please God,” Mrs. Malinovsky said, “when war is over we will have bigga celebration! So big, so nice! So nice food! So nice, so nice, so nice, please God!”
And, please God, we will.