The Light at the End of the Day

by Eleanor Wasserberg

  ‘Thank you. We are so lucky to have family here in Kraków, and the comfort of the community here.’

  This was too banal for the neighbourhood, who waited, watching.

  ‘Thank you,’ Friedrich repeated.

  His wife, glancing at her sister, added, in worse Polish but with a better understanding of the audience, ‘It feels so very different here. It is such a joy to feel safe again. Our son was – was beaten. He’s only fourteen,’ she faltered. She had a whole store of angry descriptions, in German anyway, an urgent desire to explain how he’d been dragged from Friedrich’s grasp, before the neighbours had intervened, and the look of nightmarish terror that had crossed his confident features, as though the years had fallen away and he was a little child again. Instead, she burst into tears.

  This satisfied them for now. The tears were infectious: soon the room was wiping cheeks with the backs of hands, producing silk handkerchiefs that flapped around like tiny processional flags. A huddling began, a shifting together. Jozef couldn’t keep his usual position as watching outsider from here, all of them bunched up together like this, and it made him feel anxious. Adam, his eyes red-rimmed whether from tears or the daytime drinking, shot him a hard kind of look. Behind him, Jozef felt the Hartmanns shift closer together, and to the side of him, the movement caught his eye as Anna and Janina Kardas held hands. The older woman was whispering something, and he wondered if they were supposed to be praying, felt a sudden embarrassed horror at the idea: would he ignore it, pretend he knew the words, say the Lord’s Prayer instead? He caught some of Janina’s voiceless words and found it was only the soothing whisper to a nightmare-woken child: It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s going to be all, all right.

  10

  ALICIA FOUND THE POSITION by the window now came as naturally as breathing or lying. At first she thought it was that her muscles remembered their place, but when she tried to recreate the pose in her room, without the light and the easel, she couldn’t find it so easily. Instead if she closed her eyes and imagined her painting, the flow of lines Jozef had described to her, the way the shape needed to curl like the edge of a shell, she could see the way the charcoal lines on the page would need to come together.

  Today the light was good, rich and slightly pinked by the late winter sunset. Alicia could trace in her mind’s eye how the shadow on her left side would make the glow where her hand was placed on the sill seem to bloom more richly, and how the smock she wore would absorb the golden pink light like a delicate thin petal. But he was still working with the sketches. She sighed.

  ‘Alicia? Shall we take a break?’

  She had prided herself these weeks on how disciplined she’d been, read the surprise in her family’s faces with delight.

  ‘No, keep going.’

  She watched him sink back into the place that seemed like a kind of waking dream, the strain in his face when he had to talk to them all gone. Karolina was watching him too, Alicia noticed, sitting just to one side, her head tilted.

  ‘How does it look, Karolcia?’

  Jozef stopped again, bowed his head briefly. He gave Alicia a polite smile, but she knew when she had irritated an adult, and felt annoyed at herself.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Karolina smiled.

  Alicia frowned. ‘Beautiful? It’s still just a sketch.’

  There was a tiny rattle as Jozef laid down his pencils.

  ‘But does it look good? Is it going to be good, do you think, Jozef?’

  Karolina’s eyebrows shot up just as Jozef looked at her.

  ‘Alicia! Please address Papa’s friend as Mr Pienta. Where are your manners?’

  Alicia broke the pose now, since he’d stopped working. She swallowed, feeling the secret of the man on the steps pulsing in her guts. She came to Jozef’s side.

  ‘I’m sorry to be rude.’

  ‘You are—’ Karolina said.

  ‘—Only Papa calls you Jozef, and you aren’t even working together. But we’re working together, aren’t we?’

  ‘I don’t mind, really,’ Jozef said, seeming amused. ‘Jozef it is.’

  ‘Can’t we begin the painting? The pink light today,’ she stood and leaned against the window, letting her forehead rest against the glass, ‘don’t you want to use it?’

  ‘The pink light?’

  ‘It’s making the white on my smock seem warm, and we could have roses, or something else, that same kind of shade, on the other side, to balance.’

  He looked at her. ‘You see the light that way?’

  ‘What other way is there to see it?’

  Jozef leaned over to catch Karolina’s eye. ‘Do you hear your sister talk about this light?’

  She had a book in one hand, another hand stroking the dog’s ears. ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening,’ she laughed.

  Jozef edged along the ledge towards her. ‘Tell me what you see in this light,’ he said to Karolina.

  ‘It’s lovely sunset light. Homer calls it rosy-fingered.’

  ‘That’s dawn,’ Alicia said. They ignored her.

  She turned again to the window, where the precious light was now deepening into more sunset hues, splintering into golds, reds, purples. What a waste, Alicia thought.

  ‘Shall we continue, are you tired?’ Jozef asked.

  ‘No, I mean, yes, I’m not tired. But the light is going.’

  ‘We need to go up for dinner soon,’ Karolina reminded her.

  ‘I’m sorry we lost your pink light. Tomorrow we’ll try earlier,’ Jozef said.

  They began the slow stretching out after their sessions, Karolina unfurling, Jozef rifling through the sketches, selecting which ones to keep from the day, Alicia breaking the spell of her fixed pose. Jozef fetched his battered leather satchel and laid the sketches into a larger book. Alicia followed, enjoying the images of herself slide into place. Her face was getting more detailed.

  ‘I don’t really look like that,’ she said. ‘That’s not really my face, is it?’

  Jozef laughed. ‘Everyone says that.’

  ‘Won’t it really look like me?’

  Jozef hesitated. He’d softened and sharpened Alicia’s features: straightened the nose, widened the eyes, made the cheeks fuller. It was the Alicia Adam wanted, his little Ala. Not even that, it was the Alicia he really saw, and it was Jozef’s job to reflect that back to him, to filter the world as Adam saw it.

  ‘It’s an artist’s impression of you.’

  ‘My nose is smaller.’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted.

  ‘Will my hair be down like this?’

  Jozef looked at the empty space where the portrait Alicia would be standing, saw her painted figure there in the reddening light.

  ‘Yes, I think so. We’ll need the colour. We’ll need to make your hair more golden, I think.’

  Alicia pulled some strands of hair around to look at them pinched between her fingers.

  ‘Yes, brown wouldn’t be right.’

  He laughed. ‘I’m glad you agree.’

  ‘And the rest, what colours?’

  Karolina gave him a shy smile and an awkward goodbye bob, drifted away with her books clutched to her chest. ‘Come, Ala,’ she said, but so gently that the force of it fell short of pulling Alicia away from the briefcase and talk of colours. She stayed, hovering near the sketches. Jozef had run out of things to pack away, run out of buttons on his jacket, and looked at her.

  ‘Well, white is quite traditional for the portrait of a young girl, but—’

  ‘It won’t look right.’

  He found he felt less surprise at her confident exclamations now, and noticed she no longer couched them in fake uncertainty.

  ‘Yes, white wouldn’t be right. It would make everything too flat.’

  ‘Flat?’

  ‘Like the shape, you know, there need to be things to draw the eye.’

  ‘So a deep colour.’

  ‘Yes. Something bright. See what you have among your dresses. We’ll start painting
tomorrow.’

  11

  IT WAS A WHISPER of a knock, fingers rather than a fist, as though lightly drummed on a table. Anna turned over, still half in a dream of swimming. She often had the same dream: dropped into an ocean, a cold one, but turquoise like a summer shore. She knew somehow that her children were with her, but she could never find them among the waves. She’d drop her head below the surface of the water, trying to see their legs kicking. She would realise that she had to swim home. In her dream, home was always her father’s house, never her own. Anna turned over a silk-covered pillow, heard the rain outside. The fingers rapped again. She opened her eyes, watched the door without urgency. It was the dead of night. The servants wouldn’t wake her unless for some drama, and this was a polite, hesitant sound. Adam opened the door, skulked through with the slow, deliberate movements of one awake in a sleeping room. He was always considerate. She watched him through the fringes of her eyelashes. He was looking for something on her writing desk by the window. In the dim light from the lamps outside, she saw that he was fully dressed.

  ‘You’re not going into the office at this time of night?’ she murmured, her voice gravelled by sleep.

  He turned and peered at her; bent over and thin, he looked like the gaunt figure of a spectre. ‘I’m sorry to wake you,’ he whispered. Do you have our identity papers and passports in here? They aren’t in the study.’

  She sat up. ‘What? Where are you going?’

  ‘Do you have them?’

  ‘No, why would I? They should be with Robert.’

  Adam turned and went to her dresser, his face flashing white in the mirror. He began rifling through the objects on it, and opening and closing drawers.

  ‘Adam! I said I don’t have them. Come here.’

  Anna switched on a light, wincing at the loss of the dark. She rubbed her eyes, still under the lull of sleep and its disordered thoughts. It took her a moment to look at him, obediently sitting on her bed, and reach out her hand.

  ‘What is this? I told you not to be afraid. What, are we all going to run away, like in a children’s book?’

  He wasn’t looking at her. She saw that he had taken the time to wax his beard and moustache, and smelled aftershave on him.

  ‘Come on, take your shoes off.’ She lay back, ready to have him lie in her arms, stroke his hair like a small child. It had been like this one or two nights a week since Kristallnacht. But he had always come to her straightaway, and not dressed or distracted like this, not talking about leaving. His weakness infuriated her but she would stay calm to keep peace in the house, and besides, he looked so sad and small.

  Adam stayed still, looking at the space where her offered hand had been.

  ‘Adam.’ She spoke sternly, from fear that he was becoming, as her mother would say, soft in the head. ‘You didn’t come in here to look for papers. You want me to calm you down, and I will, but then you must stop this nonsense. It isn’t manly or right. Do you understand?’

  He took a breath, and then addressed the wall. ‘I’m going to France. Edie has had a baby. She sent a telegram.’

  Anna sat up then, fully awake. She fiddled with a loose thread on the coverlet, snapped it off. She visited the tiny space she allowed Edie in her mind for a moment, where the French girl slept cramped and small.

  ‘You must go to her then. She’s very young and it’s her first. She’s probably afraid.’

  ‘Anna, you’re too good.’ He ignored the jab about Edie’s age.

  ‘Yes. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘I knew I didn’t deserve you.’ He took her hand as though to kiss it.

  ‘You impossibly stupid man,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘Didn’t you know she was expecting?’

  He looked stung. ‘I did. I think he’s early.’

  This broke through the thin layer of calm she had swiftly constructed. ‘We agreed you would tell me,’ she said, snatching her hand away as he reached for her.

  ‘I know. Only when I’m here, it all seems …’ he was getting into danger now, so he opted for a boyish shrug. ‘I know it isn’t ideal,’ he continued. ‘I would rather not leave you all here.’

  ‘And it’s a boy?’

  He gave a tiny smile, again to the wall. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, and the bitterness in her voice made his stomach shrink with fear. This could be too far. He could lose everything.

  ‘There’s no question of it changing anything for Alicia, you understand. I mean in terms of inheritance, or … I would never—’

  ‘Nor Karolina?’

  ‘Nor Karolina, though I always think she’ll take care of herself, she’s so clever. I think Stefan imagines her as president of the university one day. Well,’ he went on after a pause, ‘I’ll ask Robert about the papers.’

  He kissed her hand, and she felt a coolness in her heart, imagining the girl in bed like this, sitting up, her baby on display in her arms, her baby son, waiting to be kissed. When Adam moved to kiss her lips, she turned away.

  ‘How long will you be gone?’

  ‘A few weeks.’

  He kissed her arm where she had turned slightly from him.

  ‘Aneczka, I love you. There’s no question of me leaving you, ever, ever. You know that.’ She gave a tiny nod, her humiliation seeming like a buzzing in her head.

  He paused at the door. ‘Will you indulge me, and not take the girls into the city while I’m gone? Just visits from Jozef and Stefan.’

  She stared at him, a small smile on her face. ‘Well that will certainly indulge Karolina, who likes to imagine she’s living in a novel. Perhaps I should lock them in a dungeon?’

  ‘Be reasonable. I don’t want you all walking around Kraków. Remember what Milo—’

  ‘We all agreed he’s a bitter little nobody,’ she said. ‘Adam, for goodness sake, please find some bones in your spine. I know I didn’t marry this jellyfish of a person. Off you go to France and we’ll be fine. Robert is with us, and we live in the best neighbourhood in the city. I won’t be shut away.’

  It was late, the house asleep. Even the servants’ chatter and rush had calmed. Alicia’s dresses were wrapped in tissue paper and packed into large trunks, ready for Janie to pick out, air and press the ones for wearing that week. Inside each tissue fold was a cloth bag stuffed with lavender or cloves. When she opened the first trunk she’d thought to tear at them all, ripping the tissue and laying the dresses on her bed, like Mama in preparation for a trip. Instead she found pleasure in holding each package up to the lamplight, trying to see what colour lay inside, and carefully unfolding the envelope-like ends to reveal the fabric inside if it seemed, as Jozef had said, bright.

  Alicia felt by instinct that the fabric also mattered, though Jozef hadn’t mentioned it. The texture of these things must matter too, even the imagined texture, as a way to absorb or reflect the light, but also to make layers of weight. She sat back on her heels, on the floor next to the trunk, thinking. She closed her eyes. The heavy curtains would be behind her, the window to her left. There her hand would rest on the window ledge, cool and smooth to the touch, the white paint. But Jozef had said these things would melt away to leave only the light and her figure. So it wouldn’t be the view of the Wawel at all, but a kind of blank backdrop. She opened her eyes. It would need to be a rich, heavy fabric too, rich and deep like the colour. Otherwise the whole image would be too weightless, fly away from the canvas, be a failure.

  Around her, there were small stirrings in the house, the creak of feet on floorboards. Alicia glanced at the windows, where the darkness was still absolute, too early for the servants to wake again. Since her birthday she had imagined intruders, mobs, violence in the rooms full of their pretty furniture and glass ornaments. Blood on the carpets. The intruders wore the face of the man on the steps. Her door opened.

  ‘Oh dear, what’s this, a midnight tantrum?’

  Her Papa leaned against the doorway, his arms folded, slightly bowed in his usual way, always cramped by the
scale of rooms. He was gesturing to the floor, where despite her careful unwrapping, layers of tissue and abandoned clothes lay in piles, as though thrown there in rage. He wasn’t dressed for sleep – the dressing gown he sometimes wore on days of no visitors was not flung around his shoulders – but as though for the office: suit trousers, a jacket, a scarf.

  She steadied her breathing. ‘No, Papa.’

  ‘Now Janie will have to clear this up.’

  ‘No, Papa, I’ll do it.’

  She moved to sit on the edge of her bed as he came into the room.

  ‘And why are you up so late?’

  ‘I need to find—’

  He waved away her words. ‘I’m glad. I came to give you a kiss as you slept, but now we can say goodbye properly. I’m going away for a few weeks. What present would you like me to bring back?’ He sat next to her on the bed.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, business. France again. Do you want a dress or a new coat? Gloves?’