The Light at the End of the Day

by Eleanor Wasserberg

  He hadn’t telephoned ahead, or sent a letter with more than vague promises to be home soon. So when the cab pulled up in front of his apartment, he could stand in the bustle of the street, just then warming and waking to the day, and watch the apartment for a moment. He loved this building: its pride of place on the street, its companionable stance next to the Wawel. The curtains were still drawn in the upper rooms, but he was surprised to see, as it was only seven o’clock, that the large dining-room window curtains had been pulled back to the light, and figures moved back and forth, in the silent shadow way of people glimpsed from afar. It must be the painting, he realised: the painting was still being created. The thought gave him a jolt of energy, and something like relief: here life had carried on just as before, his wife and daughters had been busy, and Jozef had been here to keep them company, distract them. It meant, too, he thought, searching for his key, that there would be a wait until he could relax with Anna, since a guest would be there, but perhaps that was a good thing, a sort of interval (he smiled to himself now, finding in the rhythm and sound of the unlocked latch and the swing of the heavy door that he was slipping back into his Kraków life with ease), a palate cleanser between courses, he thought, before feeling a twinge of guilt and blushing at his own coarseness. So what, he thought, it’s only in my own head.

  He was pleased that there was no Robert, no Dorothea, no Janie to accost him in the hallway or on the stairs, so he could slip into his house, absorb the sounds of home before announcing himself. He could hear the clatter and low voices of the kitchen, and somewhere a radio murmuring. One of the dogs was yapping on the top floor. But outside the dining room, where he’d seen the figures, as he listened at the door all was quiet. When he opened it, he was struck with an explosion of affection for Alicia, who was sitting cross-legged by the fire, her hair loose as she pored over some papers. He started towards her, exclaiming, ‘Ala, your Papa is home!’ and as he did so caught Karolina and Jozef in the corner of his eye, waved to them too, blew a kiss to Karolina.

  ‘Welcome home, Papa,’ Karolina said, her voice sounding lower and calmer than it had before, more like her mother’s.

  ‘Mama didn’t tell us, oh she never tells us anything—’ Alicia said, gripping the back of Adam’s jacket as he embraced her.

  ‘I’ll fetch her,’ Karolina said, and raced out of the room, before Adam had time to hug her too.

  She knows, he thought. Anna has told her; perhaps she thinks she’s old enough to know. But in the moments it took to disentangle Alicia, kiss her forehead, and obey her pull towards the painting, he had already soothed Karolina in his mind, explained, smoothed over the fact of Edie and little Marc Stefan, made a fantasy story of meeting a baby brother.

  Alicia clung to his side as he moved to where Jozef stood next to his canvas, and Adam tutted, rolled his eyes in mock irritation, but was delighted. He shook hands with Jozef, who was without a jacket, his shirtsleeves rolled up in the overheated room. An ashtray on the windowsill held the dregs of some cheap rolled cigarettes, and the floor was draped with cotton sheets to catch the drips of paint and some strong-smelling spirit. Adam returned Jozef’s warm and nervous smile.

  ‘Adam. You’ve been missed. How was France?’

  ‘Busy, busy. And here, too, I see! It’s very early for painting.’

  ‘No, Papa,’ Alicia said. ‘Morning or evening light is best.’

  Adam laughed. ‘Is it, Ala?’

  She nodded, didn’t catch his laugh.

  ‘Do you want to see it, it isn’t quite finished—’ Jozef began, but just then Karolina and Anna came into the room. Anna came straight to Adam, gave his hand a squeeze and held onto it as she turned towards the others.

  ‘You missed your deadline,’ she said to Jozef, with a laugh: her real, low laugh, not the performance Adam knew she could make. It eased his guilt a little that they had become friends, he had not left her all alone.

  ‘It’s very nearly finished, Mrs Oderfeldt.’

  ‘Well, can I see?’ Adam asked.

  Anna released his fingers, and Alicia found them.

  There was no sheet to theatrically pull away, so Alicia only steered him around to face her own image, and he caught the colour first, along with an impulse of excited recognition of a loved face.

  ‘You wore the dress I sent.’

  ‘Of course, Papa.’

  There was a silence as Adam moved closer, then further away from the painting, stood slightly to an angle, looking. He felt nervous, as though being tested for something. The anxious anticipation in the way Alicia had gripped his hand and the way they all stood, quiet, watching him, confused him and made him unsure what to say. So it was that it took him a few moments to truly look, and stop seeming to look. He noticed the lush folds of the dress first; saw Edie’s young hands unrolling the fabric for him, smoothing it over, its richness. It was all there in the paint, the bloom of fabric at Alicia’s shoulder. Her face was a rare, still expression he recognised, the very beginnings of a smile, just emerging on one side of her mouth. She’d been made prettier: her eyes larger, darker, her pale cheeks given some blood. The sunlight was hitting the edge of her hair, making it seem almost blonde. He stepped closer, to see the paint mix that made that sunlight illusion seem real.

  ‘So, Adam, tell poor Jozef it’s good, won’t you?’ Anna laughed again, but this time in her performance way, a warning he was straying into a faux pas.

  ‘Oh, Jozef, I’m sorry! It’s so good, so very, very good. You’ve outdone yourself! Bravo indeed,’ Adam said, shaking Jozef’s hand again, who had turned pink. ‘We should celebrate, shall we have something special for lunch?’

  ‘It’s not quite finished yet,’ mumbled Jozef.

  Adam looked again. ‘But surely it is? I can’t see anything—’

  ‘We need to add something in the background,’ Alicia said. ‘Just something else to deepen it, it’s too shallow.’

  ‘Oh?’ Adam beamed down at her. ‘How sophisticated an art critic you’ve become!’

  ‘What does your eye go to first?’ Alicia replied.

  ‘Alicia,’ Karolina said, ‘Papa is probably tired from his journey.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Adam said, while Anna went to call for coffee. ‘Um, I think … the dress, I suppose. I noticed the lovely colour of the dress.’

  Alicia shared a look with Jozef, who nodded at her in the way of a teacher, like Stefan would, and Adam felt a rush of warmth for him, who had come to like his Alicia so much.

  ‘Well,’ Alicia said, ‘that’s good, but do you see, Papa, how the background needs something deeper, perhaps a little flash of red too?’

  ‘How wonderful that you’ve been learning.’

  ‘I started drawing, too—’

  ‘She’s very good,’ said Jozef, simply.

  Later, Adam came to Anna as she was falling asleep.

  ‘I’m sorry, I thought you’d still be undressing, and we’d have time to talk.’

  He lay beside her, on top of the covers. She kept her eyes closed, but reached and found his hand.

  ‘Welcome home. I’m glad.’

  ‘Did you think I wouldn’t come back?’

  ‘Of course not, never. How was everything?’

  ‘They are both well.’

  ‘Marc is a good name. What will the surname be?’

  ‘Payant, like Edie.’

  Anna gave a tired smile. ‘Does she mind?’

  ‘Not that she mentioned.’

  ‘How was she when you left?’

  ‘Her mother is with her.’

  ‘That’s best. I’d have loved mine with me, those first months.’

  Adam was silent. This was a terrible habit of Anna’s, to bring up old grievances from years ago, instead of current ones. He hadn’t felt it was seemly to have the grandmother here, instead of a team of night and day nurses. His mother-in-law visited, but Anna had wanted her practically sewn inside her own skin, sharing her bed as she tried to recover, especially after
Karolina.

  ‘Well,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m sorry.’ Then, ‘Aneczka.’

  ‘Hmm?’ She opened her eyes and saw how close his face was, breathed in the smell of him. She shifted her hips and came closer.

  ‘You missed me,’ she said.

  ‘Of course.’

  He felt his body relax, sink a little further into the mattress. The threads of what he had planned to say were already disappearing. He could already hear the conversation, well-worn like grooves in a wooden floor, And so? It doesn’t sound so bad … Well, and what do you mean? A look? He looked at you? Are you a child? It’s only a pen … Move to France? Why? Is that truly the reason? If you want to move there, then go, but don’t think we’ll come too. There are limits, Adam, to my patience. This he heard in her half-awake voice, softened by sleep, perhaps also a stroke on his arm, his cheek, so that the harshness of the words would be soothed even as he heard them. He replied, too, in his head, and fell into the beginnings of sleep, a place where he was unsure if the conversation was real. He always slept well next to Anna, her surety, her lack of fear.

  ‘May I stay,’ he murmured. ‘My room feels far away.’

  ‘To sleep?’

  He opened his eyes, saw she had turned, to face the ceiling. In the twilight she could be Edie. They had the same small, sharp features, the same high cheekbones, but Edie was dark, and Anna fair. He saw that there was a new softness around her neck in the weeks he’d been gone, or perhaps he was only used to Edie’s younger, tauter skin. He fixated on it, the beginnings of their older selves (he, too, was noticing his own belly rounding a little, the hairs he asked the barber to pluck from his nose, thinking of his father and grandfather and the uncles, how as a boy he had stared, disgusted, at the wiry black sprouts) and feeling a little deepening of his love for Anna, an opening beneath a floor he had thought already as deep as it would reach. He looked over the rest of her face and body, its familiar contours and freckles in place, its gently rounding, slowly wrinkling beauty. He stifled a smile: how she would smother him with this very pillow, if she could hear his thoughts. Or perhaps it would be that she could discern the admiration in them: that he loved her fading beauty in a deeper way than Edie’s. Perhaps he should leave Edie, stop being so greedy, stop giving Anna a reason to take lovers herself, as she surely did. He stroked the satin sheet between his fingers. Had she brought anyone into this bed? Of course not. The girls, the servants: it would be impossible. The thought made him rub his feet together in boyish contentment, a feeling of security, as though they were adrift on this warm bed on a stormy sea, and he could burrow into these blankets with his wife and remain safe.

  Anna was aware of his gaze, held her face still in the way of one used to being admired, a slight raise of her eyebrows. She held her poise as he reached for her, but then exploded into a snorting laugh as he unexpectedly touched her neck, making her snap her chin down on his fingers and squeal.

  ‘Adam!’

  He laughed too, pulled her to him, and she lay on his chest, tucked her head under his chin, still shaking from the shock of laughter. They breathed each other in, slowed, became still, let quiet blanket the room. Adam drifted into a memory from the early days of their marriage: they’d been sitting in this quiet way, he reading a sales report, she writing thank-you notes for wedding gifts. The curl of paper and the scratch of pen, the hum of the street, made him aware that their silence together was no longer charged, thinking of what to say, aware of how to seem. Instead it was steady, calm, and he had thought aloud, I’m comfortable with you. She’d laughed, surprised; it was a more emotional statement from him than she was used to. ‘How romantic,’ she’d replied, in a new tone, laced with a sarcasm he was also unused to, and she pretended to swoon in her chair, making him laugh. When the silence came back, the edges of the laugh remained hanging in the air, and the charge had somehow returned. So it was in their marriage, comfort and edge, and he liked that, loved Anna simply and as an adored friend, but accepted and even enjoyed her occasional disdain for him, a kind of flirtation.

  ‘Silly boy,’ she murmured now, as though the memory of his new wife had reached out and found this older version of her.

  He reached for her, and they made love in their lazy, uncomplicated way, with the relief on both sides that he had, in fact, chosen to return to her, and not upset everything in any vulgar way, that the island bed stayed steady, that they still knew one another.

  16

  WHILE ADAM AND ANNA made love, Anna’s imagination flitted through fantasies, some from years back, some more recent, alighting on Jozef, his figure in the doorway that night in the storm, the softness of his expression as he rejected her changing, in her mind’s eye, to sharp desire. At the same moment, the real Jozef sat on an uncomfortable stool in a neighbourhood bar. He was three drinks deep into conversation with some old university friends. All of them saw themselves as artists: poets, translators, filmmakers; but only Jozef and Milo had no other income, which the others admired and envied while enjoying their warm rooms and thick coats. They liked to meet, these artists, to see themselves reflected in their old friends’ faces, to be able to say, I met with my friend, the painter, the filmmaker, I am one of the luminaries, this is my identity, not that man in the office, not that man who hasn’t read a book properly in years.

  When Jozef had arrived, late because he had stayed for dinner at the Oderfeldts’, he scanned for Milo as he kissed cheeks and clasped arms, and felt both relief and disappointment that he was missing. Their friendship, already meagre and marked by competition, now had a blank space in its centre, like a moth-eaten hole in wool picked at over time. So why did he feel disappointed, he wondered, as he settled into small talk with Ben, a teacher and writer who hadn’t written a creative word in two years, that Milo wasn’t here? It was the painting. He wanted to tell Milo about the painting. How good it was. How proud of it he was.

  ‘Jozef! We miss you,’ Ben opened the conversation. ‘You never see us now, always moving in more elevated circles!’

  ‘How is life as a pet painter?’ teased the filmmaker, a short, tense man, from across the table. ‘Do you have a warm spot by the fire and plenty of tidbits to eat?’

  Jozef waved away the teasing, lit a cigarette. ‘It’s good. They’re paying well, and the work is good.’

  ‘A portrait, is it?’ a man asked as he joined the table. Jozef glanced around, a little perplexed.

  ‘This is Maurice, perhaps you’ve met? Another painter,’ Ben said, as the two painters shook heads and hands. Maurice had a strong grip and an open, friendly face.

  ‘So, a portrait? I saw your … the Oderfeldts, right? I saw your, what was it, the mother and the eldest, years back, I heard it was good.’

  ‘You saw it or you heard about it?’

  Maurice laughed. ‘All right, I heard about it. From my friend Milo.’

  Jozef gulped down more beer, wiped at his mouth. There it was, the hopeless irritation that could blight whole evenings. He glanced around at his friends. How he wanted to relax, to not feel that bleakness come over him. What was it? So he knew Milo too? Everyone knew Milo, the consummate connection maker, the schmoozer. The silence stretched a little too long, and Maurice’s smile flickered. Jozef made what felt like a monumental effort to be friendly.

  ‘Ah, a friend in common,’ he said, and the smile came back in full force, a good smile, expensive teeth. The others relaxed into new conversations, all variations of what are you working on and lying replies. Jozef felt the effects of the beer begin to hum in his head, felt lighter. ‘We go way back. We were in competition for the commission.’

  ‘So, it’s a portrait?’

  ‘That’s right. Of Alicia.’

  ‘A beauty?’

  ‘She’s a child,’ Jozef replied, irritation rising in him again. ‘What about your work?’

  ‘Is it finished?’ Maurice pressed, ignoring the question. He covered his rudeness a little with a swig of his drink, another crinkle-eyed s
mile. His moustache was coated in beer foam.

  Jozef felt the twinge of anxiety between his ribs. This stage of a painting was like the beginning of a love affair: an obsessive desire to be close to it, keep touching it, constantly worrying that if you are away too long it will forget you, and refuse to take shape. He felt it was good, knew it was good, in some hard kernel buried deep, but it could all fall apart in these last days. That must be it, he thought. He looked away from the currents of fear he knew ran deep: an image of that thick front door closing on him a last time, no commission for some years perhaps, in which Karolina would fade from him, in which those long afternoons in the dining room, in that golden light, would be lost.

  ‘You know how it is, the last … the end of a project,’ he tried.

  ‘I don’t think my work is like yours. I’m in a slightly different field.’

  ‘Oh.’ He was being rude, he knew it. Was it that Maurice had called Anna just the mother, that Jozef knew how she would hate it? Or that Karolina was just the elder, like part of a list, like calling a star a speck, like reducing her to just one of the boring, rich patrons, not the … what was Karolina to him? He took another gulp, wished he was home.

  Ben nudged him as he went for another drink. ‘You should work together,’ he called over his shoulder.

  ‘So. It’s finished?’ Maurice tried again. He seemed amused by Jozef’s coldness.

  ‘Yes, almost,’ he conceded as he put his glass down. ‘I just have to make sure I get it right.’

  ‘Milo said—’

  ‘Please, I don’t want to hear what that prick had to say.’

  This was louder than he intended and the whole group recoiled, delighted, shocked whoops, hands to mouths, laughter. Jozef, grumpy but mild, rarely swore. The others delighted in the idea of an artists’ feud in their midst.