Tissue and Bamboo, by Martin Szabo

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

In the spring of 1983 Mr Wisniewski’s kitchen was full of kites, and I was the only person in the building who knew it. He lived in the flat below ours, an upright old man of seventy-four who smelled of pipe tobacco and peppermints and wished everybody on the stairs a formal good morning, even at night. I had gone down to return a letter the postman had muddled, and through the open door I saw them: hanging from the clothes airer, propped against the dresser, lying across the table like sleeping birds, red and white and blue.

‘You may come in,’ he said, ‘if you touch nothing.’ He called me young man; everyone else called me Danny.

I touched nothing for three weeks. After that he let me cut the tissue, and after that the bamboo, and by May I was allowed to glue. He taught me without praise and without much talking. If a seam was crooked he peeled it off, laid it beside me on the oilcloth and waited until I could tell him what was wrong with it. I went home with glue on my cuffs and dreamed of crosspieces.

There was a kite festival in the park on the bank holiday at the end of May, with a prize for the best home-made kite, and I wanted to enter more than I had ever wanted anything. He said kites were for flying, not for prizes. Then, the week before, he took down the largest of them, a red-and-white diamond taller than I was, checked every spar and every knot, and said, ‘This one.’

On the day the park was full of shop kites and plastic dragons. Ours went up first time. It climbed so fast the string burned through my fingers, and then it hung over the boating lake, steady as a nail, and people pointed. I turned round, shouting for him to take the string, because it was his kite and he ought to feel it pull.

He was sitting on a bench some way back with his hands on his knees. He shook his head.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Just for a minute.’

‘No, Daniel.’ He had never called me Daniel before. He was looking at the kite, not at me. ‘The last time I flew one was in Warsaw, in August 1939, with my brother. He made them. I flew them. He was always better with his hands.’ He took off his glasses and polished them on his tie, which was what he did instead of saying things, and I knew better than to ask where his brother was now.

We did not win. A girl with a kite shaped like a fish won. I minded less than I had expected to.

When I wound the string in at last, my fingers were raw. He took my hands in his, turned them over and looked at the red lines across the palms as if he were reading them.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Next year we make two.’

What impressions does the writer create of the relationship between Danny and Mr Wisniewski? How does the writer create these impressions?

You must refer to the language and structure used in the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.