The Light at the End of the Day

by Eleanor Wasserberg

  ‘We should visit the German refugees arriving,’ Janina said. ‘Make them welcome.’

  ‘Yes, I’m going to throw a party,’ Anna said, irritated by what she heard as an education in manners.

  ‘A party?’

  ‘A gathering. To welcome them, and show solidarity.’

  Janina made a small sound that Anna couldn’t interpret.

  ‘The painter arrived, from last night, you know. Did you speak to him?’ Anna said at length.

  Janina shifted in her seat. ‘The one from Berlin? He seemed—’

  ‘No, that’s the other one, and neither are from Berlin. You’re thinking of Milo something or other, but I mean Adam’s friend, Jozef. He’s going to paint Alicia.’

  ‘I didn’t listen to either of them much,’ Janina said with a sniff.

  ‘You seemed to, when Milo was talking about Berlin. You were interested then.’

  Anna watched Janina as she angled a hat from side to side, far too ostentatious for her, deep in thought.

  ‘Aleks writes to me about these things too,’ Janina said. ‘He reads about them in Paris, sends newspaper clippings. He gets nervous. It’s natural for the young to overthink things, to get a little excited.’

  Janina turned the hat over and over like an absorbed child. It was Anna’s turn to touch the older woman’s hand.

  ‘I forgot he would be there already! You must miss him.’ When Janina only nodded, Anna went on, ‘You’re right. We shouldn’t be frightened. Kraków is safe, look,’ she dropped to a whisper and nodded towards the shop girl, wrapping her hats in tissue, placing them into boxes, ‘it’s so calm and friendly.’ She called to the girl, ‘When you’ve finished, please call me a cab back to Bernardyńska.’

  When the cab arrived, Anna offered her neighbour a lift.

  ‘No thank you,’ Janina replied. ‘I’m going across the river.’

  ‘To the old neighbourhood? Why?’

  ‘Why not? I go all the time.’

  ‘Is it …’ Anna had meant to say safe, but that would crumble away the thin crust they had built between them. ‘Is it nice?’

  ‘I like to go to my old doctor and optician, and I have a favourite cobbler there as well.’

  ‘I never go.’ Anna suddenly felt ridiculous in this, as though the old quarter were another world, not streets away.

  ‘Well,’ the older woman seemed at a loss what to say. They stood in the street, the cab waiting, Anna’s boxes piled in the back. Anna didn’t know whether she wanted to be rid of this woman or to keep her close, talk, hold her hand. She felt they were in some kind of tiring dance, the two of them, always circling, never really speaking in any real way, but each sensing how the other was shaken, and wanting to prop the other up. Perhaps she would want to cling onto any face she knew, after the strangeness of the last few weeks and the changed air in the house, her own inexplicable fear in the Glowny.

  ‘Come to my cobbler,’ Janina gabbled, a little flushed, evidently mortified by the long silence that Anna had allowed to open up between them. ‘You could come and have your shoes stretched. I used to go to the one two streets along,’ Janina said in a confidential tone as though this were some great secret, taking Anna’s arm and guiding her away from the cab. ‘But I can’t go there now.’

  She stared into Anna’s face, waiting.

  ‘Oh,’ Anna said.

  ‘I just couldn’t possibly.’

  Anna was silent.

  ‘The daughter, Mira, at the other shop, you know. I made a complaint about her at the school. It was years ago.’

  ‘She went to school with Aleks?’

  ‘No, no! She was his teacher.’

  ‘A teacher and a cobbler’s daughter?’

  Janina made an impatient sound, clicking her tongue.

  ‘She was the daughter-in-law. Very above herself. She didn’t teach him properly. And she wore terrible clothes, a shorter skirt, in a school! I had a petition made up.’ Janina sniffed. ‘They wouldn’t serve me after that, so I go to this other place.’

  ‘Why don’t you just use one of the smart shops in town?’

  ‘They look good, but they don’t use the proper old techniques.’

  Anna felt this was unlikely, wondered if the real reason was the grudge against Aleks’s hapless teacher, a hope that it would get back to the family, so many years later, that Janina Kardas was a customer of their near rival. She laughed inwardly at the pettiness of this; found she even admired it a little. She too played out her own petty grudges, tiny acts of peevishness which brought her a guilty joy: cancelling orders from certain places because of a look, a tone of voice she didn’t like, even, on one occasion, because a girl was too pretty. Perhaps that’s all it was with the painter, she realised. Perhaps Milo simply fell victim to this pettiness of hers. The thought soothed her.

  ‘But of course Adam gets most of your shoes from France, I suppose?’

  On an ordinary day this would rile her, but she was so distracted by the oddness of the whole day that Anna let it slide.

  ‘Well, I should get home. You won’t let the cab take you across the river?’

  ‘No, I like the walk.’

  The Floriańska was busy now, the cab driver beginning to clear his throat, and they said goodbye, each left with a strange discomfort of things unsaid, but not sure what they were, or why they felt a sudden impulse to confide in a woman they had never liked.

  I’m sure she’s expecting, Janina thought to herself as she negotiated the crowds, with a stab of envy. Anna’s pale face, the tiny tremble when she’d taken her hand, even her throat was tense. Probably another daughter, it tends to run that way. She tried to laugh at Anna’s obvious distaste for the old neighbourhood and Janina’s habits of still shopping there, but felt instead only a vague embarrassment that she might be committing a faux pas that would be all over the Bernardyńska before long. Did you hear, Janina Kardas buys her shoes from a cheap cobbler across the river? Imagine, perhaps Kardas didn’t leave her as much as you’d think. Perhaps he was a swindler or a drinker— she broke off, too furious at this imaginary gossiping neighbour to continue.

  Anna lost Janina quickly in the crowds, and sat back. What a disaster her tiny adventure had been. She felt too hot in her layers, cross and tired. The ugly hats jostled around the back seat on the cobbled streets. Perhaps she ought to have gone to the old neighbourhood with Janina, but she felt so haunted today, she could almost imagine she would meet her mother in the street.

  Leaning her head against the back of the seat, she tried to untangle the strands of her mood. Adam, the rude man on the Glowny, her daughters’ coldness, their blank response to Adam’s grief, too like her own. Janina’s needling about turning her back on the streets of her childhood. None of it was the knot. Closing her eyes, she made herself look at it. It was the news from Germany. Adam had let it take root in him and perhaps she had done the same, but been unaware.

  She had seen real violence once before, when she was small. Perhaps a story or a lie, it was hard to untangle sometimes in her mind. Perhaps decorated memory. Her hand was held tightly in her mother’s hand. Gloveless. So it was summer, but they were poorer then, she checked herself, so that’s no help. They were living in the old house: a dustier, darker, pokier sort of life, but loud with the chatter of Yiddish running in currents through the rooms. She remembered dinners, probably Friday nights, full of people. But this was outside of the house. In the street. There is the dim ghost of her mother by her side again, her hand. There were shouts and a rough pull on the pavements. There were ugly sounds, spat-out insults. Her mother had stumbled and pulled Anna, but in the wrong direction, and for a moment she saw through the legs of the crowd a man on the road, a beating in the street. Other men were surrounding him, kicking. He tried to get up, but fell again. The crowd had gone quiet. Anna saw the blood dripping from the man’s eye and lip, the soft, peachy parts of his face split open.

  The silence had been the thing that struck her. In playground f
ights there was a lot of noise, gleeful chants and whooping. Here everyone lost their voices: dull thuds rang out as the crowd became still and then drifted. Perhaps there was the crack of a broken bone too, a rib or a jaw, as they left. She had started to cry, she thought now, or perhaps her mother had only said, Don’t cry, don’t cry, as they walked back to the house. These things flare up sometimes, but you are safe.

  You are safe, you are safe, she sang to herself in silence, as the cab approached home. She mouthed vowels to herself, certain the man had only been trying to spook her; she sounded perfect.

  When she came into the dining room where the painter was working she found her voice again and chattered into the quiet.

  ‘I saw Mrs Kardas,’ she said. ‘We’ll be inviting her over for dinner more. And I’m going to have a gathering for the Germans who are arriving. Girls?’

  She saw too late how she had disturbed a rare peace in the room. Karolina glanced up, distracted, and gave her mother a smile, then soon curled back over her pages. The painter had stopped to give her a small formal bow and nervous nod of acknowledgement when she arrived, but was now concentrating again.

  Anna was caught by a clutch of affection for Alicia, her solemn little face, her carefully placed limbs. Her hair had been left loose this morning, and she was still wearing her housedress. Soon she would be grown and curled and buttoned, pinned into place. Adam’s wish for an expensive portrait, meaning a near constant visitor and a battle of wills with Alicia, had exasperated her; now she felt she understood a little. Karolina’s childhood mildness had gently drifted into the quiet young woman now catching the edge of a sunbeam that fell across Alicia. Karolina lived in the corners of the house, curled on chairs, found suntraps like a cat. Anna felt a vague, constant care for her, level and steady as breath. But Alicia, difficult, spoiled, prone to flashes of rage, and so adored by Adam, for her she felt a waxing and waning, a tidal pull of pride and dislike.

  Your children are safe, she picked up her silent song. They don’t even look Jewish.

  9

  THE DRAWING ROOM smelled of musky perfume and sweat; despite the cool day, people’s heavy, dark coats, the layers of wool, were making pools under their arms and on their lower backs. Jozef imagined the bloom of dark patches creeping along silk and the drips among the tiny hairs at the backs of necks. It pleased him to think of the elegant guests this way, their fleshy under-selves, the sharp tang of their bodies: under breasts, underarms, the lines under the buttocks. It wasn’t that he found it titillating, or even subversive, to strip them like this. He did it as a kind of guard against his nerves, certainly, but also as a kind of painter’s exercise, tracing the body, enjoying peeling away layers of careful pinning and arranging, the theatrical absurdity, really, of money and its pretence at being better, because of a thicker, denser, softer fabric, a shinier pin.

  He stood in his accustomed place at the edge of the room, near the windows, sipping the best quality Russian vodka. He’d come to know the view from this point in the room very well over the last few weeks, where his easel was set up, and the sketches of Alicia layered over one another, so he could flip through them like a child’s game and watch her shape emerging, the lines becoming cleaner. As the afternoon progressed several of the guests had come over to peer at it, made practised noises of appreciation, turned away with barely concealed sniggers. They could only see charcoal and pencil, not the painting to come.

  The vodka was too strong. Jozef would have liked it watered down, but when the servant, Robert, had offered the glass, he felt somehow it wouldn’t be the thing to ask. He held the glass in both hands, trying to warm the ice. The cold against his skin was welcome: he too was wearing a too-thick suit, black, borrowed from his landlord. Watching more guests arrive, he realised he stood out. Some of the men wore the caps on the back of their heads, and it was only he and the servants who were in full black. The women wore smart dresses and scarves, high heels, as though attending a society wedding.

  Anna was circulating and Jozef watched her with interest, how she made a complicated dance of the room, touching arms and guiding guests together, catching an eye here, a wave there, a whisper to someone that led to a smile and a squeeze. Jozef tried to imagine her body beneath the silk dress with its long, flowing jacket that trailed behind her, as with the others, but found he couldn’t do so easily; instead she seemed made of fabric and pins, like a clothespin doll. He followed her as she navigated the invisible currents of the room with supreme confidence until she came to Jozef’s side.

  ‘And Jozef,’ she said, as though continuing a conversation from earlier, ‘you must be lonely, standing here by your easel. Come, I’ll introduce you to some of Adam’s friends.’

  ‘I prefer to be here, Mrs Oderfeldt.’

  ‘Anna, please. But you look rather odd standing here alone.’

  He shrugged, a little stung. ‘I am a little odd, I suppose.’

  She gave him a vague smile, but stayed still.

  ‘I like to watch people,’ he added.

  ‘Artists do that, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, I imagine most of us do.’

  ‘I don’t really.’

  ‘You don’t find people interesting?’

  ‘I hope you aren’t going to paint us all, drinking in the middle of the day.’ She looked over his shoulder, where the easel stood. ‘Alicia and Karolina are enjoying your company, I think.’

  She was still looking over his shoulder as they spoke. The effect was unnerving and somehow belittling. He felt like a small child being reprimanded.

  ‘Karolina must find it a little boring, sitting with us all the time,’ he said.

  Anna shrugged, took a glass from a circulating waiter, sipped. Jozef realised she was a little drunk. ‘I’m not sure I know what Karolina thinks about anything,’ she said, and let out a laugh, the controlled merriment of rich ladies who must flirt and be charming.

  Jozef wondered where Karolina was, spotted her in conversation with Stefan on the other side of the room. Even in that second-long glimpse he noted the supple bend of her spine as she perched on the arm of a chair, leaning in to whatever Stefan was saying, nodding. It struck him that she was perfectly relaxed; he had never seen her that way before, so languid and happy. It made her mother’s tension, the set of her neck and back, the tightness in her shoulders, still more noticeable.

  Anna continued, ‘But I think as long as she has one of Stefan’s books—’ she broke off as Alicia approached. Jozef noticed how the younger daughter ghosted Anna’s movements, the confidence of her stride, the slightly arrogant cast of the neck, even though she was shorter than everyone in the room. She threw indulgent smiles at the guests as a film star might: Jozef half expected her to give a regal wave. Anna made a tiny pulse-like movement towards her daughter, but seemed to catch herself, placed a hand on her hip.

  ‘I don’t like your hair this way, Alicia,’ she said. ‘It’s rather too grown up.’

  The girl’s hair was pinned up, very much like Anna’s and the other older women’s, in a French chignon.

  ‘Papa likes it,’ Alicia said, in a neutral way that could be defiant, but was hard to read. ‘He said I look like Pola Negri.’

  Anna laughed. ‘Stay here with Mr Pienta while I talk to the other guests.’

  ‘Yes, Mama.’

  Anna gave him a nod and swept away, was soon embedded in a circle of women, joining their choruses of Did you hears and Well I nevers.

  Jozef sank down onto the sill and Alicia joined him, her back to the Wawel.

  ‘Are you sad?’ she asked.

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘About Germany.’

  ‘Oh! Well, I know your Papa was upset. But I, I think …’ he dropped his voice, and she smiled slightly, moved her head closer, ‘I think, well, that—’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she interrupted him. ‘I don’t know why we should all be here being upset about dead men we don’t know. If it was Papa or you I would be sad or Uncle Stefan a bit b
ut I don’t really care about anyone else.’

  He was surprised by the strength of the warmth he felt on her casual dropping in his name next to Adam’s, and suppressed a grin.

  ‘What about poor Karolina and your Mama?’

  She looked shocked. ‘I meant men of course!’ but she covered her mouth in delight at her faux pas. ‘If Karolina died I would cry for days.’

  Should he ask again about Anna? He decided not to. Alicia seemed to fall into thought, and they sat for a moment in comfortable silence. This felt the most natural state for them after these weeks, the only sound the scratch of his work and the occasional murmur if he wished her to move, but she was so instinctive in her understanding of the shape that he only needed to raise a hand, nudge the air, and she would find it perfectly. It was like conducting the world’s most talented orchestra.

  ‘Is the painting going to be good?’ she asked, after a while. She asked this often; in the beginning he had read in it the whine of a child, and dismissed it with a shrug; now he weighed the question.

  ‘Yes, Alicia. I think it is going to be good.’

  ‘The shape is right,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And soon we’ll be painting?’

  He laughed. ‘Soon I’ll be painting.’

  A hush fell over the buzzing room. Karolina’s laugh was the last voice to die, a clear ringing laugh that was beautiful, Jozef thought, in its difference to Anna’s earlier studied one. He wondered what her Uncle Stefan had said to make her laugh like that. She was usually so solemn, even sad, with him, but then he was practically a stranger to her. Adam’s silver spoon against crystal glass silenced them all.

  ‘A moment for our friends in Germany,’ he said.

  A collective hanging of heads then. Some people looked into their glasses, others shifted their stance. A general air of uncertainty hovered: was a party the right thing? Were they playing this all wrong? Glances shifted to the Weiss family and their German visitors. A couple, thin and tired-looking. They were both blond, with the kind of pale freckled skin that made a person look always on the brink of illness. They could have easily passed, Jozef thought, and wondered briefly why they didn’t simply pretend; then he remembered they must have had to register. That’s when they should have come, he thought, not waited around for things to get worse. The couple blinked around, seeming to shrink back as the room looked at them, raised glasses, nodded with comforting smiles. Through the minds of the neighbourhood ran currents of thought not unlike Jozef’s. People imagined their own family, and their own streets, their own offices and surgeries, lecture halls; they imagined the thugs coming, the glass glinting in the streets like jewels, but then came the thought, Except we would have left sooner, imagine staying, when things were already so bad; wearing stars on their sleeves like in some kind of children’s game, imagine being so reckless, careless with your safety, your children’s safety, so foolish. And even though the smiles stayed fixed in place, the gentle nods, the kind eyes, the German couple felt a change in the air, dropped a hand each from their own glasses, found each other’s. The quiet stayed a little too long, and the husband, Friedrich, found his voice, spoke in Polish.