The Light at the End of the Day

by Eleanor Wasserberg

  ‘Absolutely not. What do you have? Fur? Jewels?’

  ‘I, yes. And … there are pearls sewn in here.’ Anna gestured to the back of her coat. ‘But we need them for … oh maybe we should just go back to the apartment, and Adam can find us there?’

  Janina pulled her by the elbow, the girls trailing, now mute with astonishment. The horse and cart was standing a little way off the road, with a man clambering over what Anna thought must be sacks of grain, or material; when they got closer, she saw it was people.

  Alicia was pulling her roughly. ‘Mama, we can’t, Papa, and all our things. Mama, my painting is just left there in the dirt!’

  Karolina pulled her sister’s hair. ‘Be quiet,’ she hissed.

  Anna turned to Janina, whose face was tight and ugly in its concentration.

  ‘We can’t possibly,’ she said helplessly.

  ‘What, are you going to walk to Lwów?’

  ‘Adam will come with the car, I suppose,’ Anna said in desperation.

  ‘Oh! The Germans will give it back, I’m sure,’ Janina replied acidly.

  All four of them were holding each other’s arms now, like treading water in a sea current. Anna had a sudden image of Adam, twisted in the dirt, his head bleeding. She was silent. Janina helped her to undo the buttons on her coat when she found her own fingers were not able to grip them. Then Janina pulled the buttons off, one by one, leaving their threads dangling, making Anna think of plucked-out eyes. The older woman held the mother-of-pearl buttons in her palm, sorting through them like a fisherwoman looking for cockles.

  ‘You could try these,’ she said. ‘And then you have your fur as well.’ She had to shout as the murmur of the crowd became louder nearer to the cart, pushing and calling out offers. Somewhere below them, car engines purred. The sky was still clear, and the screaming noise of an invasion strangely absent. Shouldn’t there be, Anna thought, the whistle and thud of bombs, like the fields in France in the last war? She wondered if her beautiful apartment would be bombed, the front all ripped open for the world to see. Her new chinoiserie wallpaper would be ruined and covered in soot. Where was her husband?

  Janina patted the shoulders and hair of Anna’s daughters, padded like swaddled babies. Alicia scowled at her, while Karolina’s face was alert, her breathing heavy.

  ‘Well, come, no time now.’ Janina heard the briskness and coldness of her own voice.

  ‘Mama, I can’t,’ Karolina said.

  Anna glared at her. ‘You can and you will.’ She began to pull Karolina through the throng, but her daughter retaliated with strength. ‘No. Papa said we’d go to Jozef’s apartment on the way—’

  ‘Karolcia, please!’

  ‘—I want to be with him—’

  ‘The city is being invaded—’

  ‘I can’t leave without him, Mama, please, I—’

  ‘Your father has been arrested or God knows what, and you want us to go traipsing through the streets wailing for your lover?’

  As they argued Anna was pulling Karolina, aided by Alicia and Janina, towards the horse and cart. The driver stood balanced on his seat, facing back towards the city, pointing. People in the cart were saying, ‘Go, go, please can we go?’

  ‘No free journeys,’ the driver called down. ‘We go straight to Lwów but you must pay.’

  ‘Please, Karolcia,’ her mother and sister said in unison. Alicia clung to her waist and Karolina sagged where she stood, defeated. Janina was holding out the mother-of-pearl buttons and caught hold of Anna’s fur stole.

  ‘Here,’ Janina said. ‘For all of us.’

  The man appeared to click his tongue, though the sound was lost.

  ‘My daughters, at least,’ Anna said.

  Janina began scrabbling at Anna’s coat, the shock of her strong, old fingers making Anna cry out. ‘She has pearls sewn in here,’ Janina was saying, pulling and prodding Anna in the back with her free hand. Anna shook Janina off, and quickly removed the whole coat, throwing it at the driver, who caught it deftly, and pulled her onto the cart. She hauled up Karolina, ignoring her tears, and then Alicia. From up here, Anna could see the extent of the crowd. It seemed the whole population of Kraków was flooding out of the city. Janina was holding out the buttons to the driver, arguing. The calls to go were getting louder now, and Anna realised she was adding to them, a rising wail, to leave her neighbour behind in the mud, leave her possessions and car and Adam somewhere next to the road, have the horse lumber on, move, move. The cart made a sudden lurch as the crowd pressed against it, and Anna heard screams, some from her girls. The driver made a settling motion with his hands, as though they were dogs, and sat on the stool, his reins in hand. One of her coat buttons dropped into the mud from his hand as he took the reins.

  ‘Help me up, help me up,’ Janina was screaming, but Anna couldn’t release her grip on her children. As the cart began to move Janina gave such a howl of rage that one of the other women pulled her up, and she sat heavily opposite Anna, her face contorted with fury. Anna looked away, finding it unbearable.

  As the cart jolted, the crowd around seemed to press against it, and Anna felt again just as in the car how she could mow them all down if she was driving, crush them under her wheels, just to get away, before begging God to forgive her. Hands pulled at their clothes and limbs, trying to climb up. The horse stumbled and whinnied in fright as the driver braced and cajoled, his pockets full of jewels and beneath him a pile of furs, coats and money.

  Anna carefully held the fact of her husband’s loss away from her, finding she could make her thoughts flow around it. Her eldest daughter’s face was slack with grief at leaving Jozef behind, and so she watched Alicia instead: poised now, quiet, a little pale, her hat still in place. Anna was proud of her. She should have left her to care for Karolina in her love-struck hysterics, even Janina, who would help, while she went to look for Adam like a good wife. But he was gone and she was glad to be on the lurching cart making its sickening dips and wrenches through the mud, glad to be elevated from the throng, with her children safe before her.

  ‘Unbelievable, that you would leave me there on the ground, after I helped you,’ Janina said.

  A rush of unexpected tenderness for the old woman assaulted Anna. She threw her arms around her and buried her face into the space between her neck and shoulder. Janina’s dress smelled of sweat and lavender.

  ‘Thank you, thank you, Mrs Kardas,’ Anna said. ‘I don’t know why I— oh!’ They clutched at each other as the cart lurched again. ‘I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I was so afraid and I just want to get away, but Adam …’

  ‘Janina,’ the older woman replied stiffly, ‘please, for God’s sake, Anna, call me Janina.’

  ‘Janina, I’m so sorry.’

  Around an hour out of the city, the old horse was getting tired. The crowd didn’t seem to thin but swell, as though they were rushing together to some powerful rapids. All around them the trundle of other carts and the trudge of feet against road, wooden wheels against tracks, praying, the calling of names. The Oderfeldts called silently for their lost ones, like a heartbeat pulse: Adam, Adam, Adam, and Papa, Papa, Papa, then Karolina’s Jozef, added to the thousands of silent calls bursting into the air.

  Alicia had left her gloves in the car, along with their old life, and felt stripped in the cold as her hands throbbed. She watched the other women sucking their fingers and tucking them into armpits, enthralled and disgusted, before Karolina took her fingers, almost grey now, and folded them into the fabric of her coat. She curled herself into her sister’s side.

  ‘Papa,’ Alicia whispered into Karolina’s ribs. ‘My painting.’

  Later the clamour of the crowd, its rhythmic calls and cries of distress, faded as exhaustion set in. The trundle of wheels around them slowed, and crouching figures, resting on haunches or even stretched out by the side of the road, sat grey in the fading light like boulders. Karolina murmured stories about them to her sister, how they were enchanted, like the rocks outsi
de Aladdin’s cave. Janina, pinned in place by the squeeze of people on her cart bench, hadn’t moved her legs for several hours, and the blood pooled there, into her feet and ankles. Anna had put her head into Janina’s lap, not asleep but staring at her daughters.

  The other passengers were all women. Janina tried to peer into faces to see if she recognised anyone. She thought she saw a woman who had sold her some shoes, and another, not a Jew but close to the neighbourhood, who was of a higher class and who might have attended a dinner or two. In the corner, two women with identical red, curly hair, sisters, were murmuring to each other over the creak of the cart’s wheels, the clop of the horse’s hooves on the path. One of them wriggled so that a small sack appeared between her feet, and she pulled out an apple and a plum. They were passed to Alicia, with an instruction, ‘Eat these.’ Alicia turned the small, bruised fruit over in her hands. The apple was wrinkled and she picked at a brown spot near the stem. The whole cart was watching her now. Even her mother and their old neighbour were staring. She blushed and ate the plum, sucking the fruit juice out so it ran down her chin and onto her wool coat.

  ‘Thank you,’ called Karolina, elbowing Alicia as she did so, but the red-headed women were folded in on themselves, one’s head on the other’s shoulder, readying for sleep.

  The cart plodded on through the night. The skies were clear; there were no planes, nor clouds, and Janina could see the faint stars behind stars. Her husband had known so many of their names. He would have known what to do. But you are doing all right, Janina, she told herself. You are getting out of the city, you have found people, you will go to Lwów and this will all be all, all right. In the gloom the sounds and shifts of the cart, her ark, every throat clearing, every swallow and tooth click, were a comfort. She burrowed down into her coat a little, feeling the heaviness of Anna’s head in her lap.

  18

  DAWN WAS SLUGGISH AND GREY, showing up the blur of hedgerow and the sleepy sack-like shapes of the people on the cart. Alicia briefly held the eye of her neighbour, Mrs Kardas. Her lip puckered at the bottom and Alicia wondered if she was missing teeth. She started to drift into a story about her, breaking her teeth on a step, or perhaps she’d met the man who had attacked Papa on the night of Alicia’s birthday. She lost her threads of thought and memory, too tired, and saw that Mrs Kardas’s eyes had closed again. When Alicia tried to find sleep, she drifted back to the soldiers who had surrounded their car. They became giant insects, tapping at the windows with long, spidery legs, so she forced her eyes open again, tried to find some game in the cart.

  Alicia had counted everything – buttons, fingernails, boots, her own teeth, by the time the cart jolted to a stop. People opened their mouths as though to cry out, but little sound came from cold throats, only a collective croak, and a shift, a clutch at each other. With a low grunt the horse buckled to its knees, and the man was pulling back on the reins, leaning in with his weight.

  There was a sound like wind on wheat, the whisper-rasp pleas of the cart. ‘No, keep going, make it move, you mustn’t stop.’ People raised their hands, as though to push the horse on. Alicia watched her mother and Mrs Kardas begin to rise from their places on the bench, her Mama’s hair falling out of its bun, her lipstick bitten away. Alicia had always thought she might like a horse. She’d seen beautiful chestnut mares being ridden around the parks near the Wawel and along the river, girls like her in smart, tailored coats, their hair in low plaits. This horse was thin and looked patched together, like a poor child’s toy.

  The driver jumped down and tugged gently at the reins, the crowd on the cart craning and shuffling to see if the beast would move. In the minds of the grown women there was a collective flash of bloodied horse flesh, the bit cutting into the soft mouth, the red stripes and sweat on the flanks. Panic makes us cruel, Anna thought, but it’s true, it’s true, I would flay that horse alive to get away. The man moved in front of the animal, bearing it up with his weight, and he touched his cheek to the horse’s nose, whispered something.

  ‘There are children here,’ Anna called, her breath making wisps in the cool dawn air. She felt a wash of hatred for the dirty, grasping man in his warm clothes and good gloves, stolen from some fleeing husband, she thought, and her pearls, strung in a boutique in Rome, shipped in scented paper, rattling in his pockets like pretty stones plucked from a beach.

  ‘Horse needs to rest,’ the man said, unyoking the cart, and holding up his hands to the flood of protesting voices, still low and dampened by shock and cold, but forceful yet, carrying each other, I paid you to take me to Lwów, not the side of a road. Yes, yes, so did I, we said Lwów, I’ll have my coins back. The driver, himself stooped with fatigue and grim-faced, waved them off the cart. For a moment they didn’t move, and Janina even wound her arms around the wooden slats that had been digging in to her back. Then the red-haired women who had given Alicia the fruit jumped down, landing heavily in the mud. The driver held out an arm swaddled in his heavy coat, and when it was refused, he shrugged, pulled out and lit a cigarette. In the early birdsong, the red-haired sisters gathered their lumpy packs on their backs, and set off walking along the track without looking back. The cart emptied after that, some remonstrating with the driver as they went. One older woman, older than Janina, toothless, spat at the man’s feet. He spoke in a low rumble to them, held up his hands, smoked, looked at his feet, gestured to the horse, which had moved to the side of the road and was nibbling at the hedgerow. ‘In a few hours, only,’ he kept saying. ‘My horse must rest first.’ He didn’t return any of the money or jewellery. ‘It’s your choice to go. I took you this far, you get off early, fine, your choice.’

  Anna watched all this from her gaggle with her daughters, holding onto them with a slipping gloved grip on their shoulders. She was vaguely aware of the strangeness of the old woman’s place with them, instead of Adam. Her girls were staring dully ahead, and she gripped harder as though to feel the still warm flesh and blood beneath the layers. She hadn’t touched her children so often in her life; Janie and earlier nursemaids and governesses had dealt with lost teeth and spit and dribbled food, the realities of their bodies as babies and little children, their smell, the texture of their skins. Anna had kissed them lightly on cheeks, perhaps patted a head now and again. Now she felt an urge to somehow pin them to her, hide them inside her coat, feel their hearts beating against her skin.

  ‘Just us women then,’ a woman’s sharp voice said. Anna turned to look at her, gave a tight nod, a sign she didn’t want to talk. The woman looked poor, a servant or a governess, a shop worker. Anna hadn’t noticed her on the cart.

  ‘I left my husband back in Kraków,’ the woman said. She was pretty, with small features like a porcelain doll. ‘Stupid man,’ she spat. Janina had turned now too, from where she had been watching the driver fuss over his horse, cooing at it like a beloved firstborn. She shifted from foot to foot, chafing, a blister on a toe screaming at her. She mustered her most disgusted look.

  ‘You left him deliberately?’ she said. She and Anna exchanged a glance.

  ‘Was he injured?’ Anna snapped.

  The woman rolled her eyes. As she turned away Anna saw that she was pregnant. A small boy sat at her feet, wrapped in a shawl, his face dirty with what looked like berries, probably picked from the road.

  ‘Shameless,’ hissed Janina, scenting a chance to connect with Anna in their disapproval, bind them together. ‘Imagine.’

  Anna nodded. Adam tugged at her somewhere beneath her ribs, but she knew, too, there must be something else, something to do with the children. She placed a hand, gently, on Alicia’s bare head, who leaned into her at her touch, too exhausted to resist. If it had come to it she would have thrown Adam into the dirt herself, she knew, and he would have done the same.

  The woman had taken on the particular stillness of one discussed by others within earshot. She placed a hand on her belly, then began rooting in her pockets for her papers, smoothed them out and licked her finger to l
eaf through them as though counting money. Janina watched her, shifting from foot to foot.

  ‘She should be more careful with those,’ she hissed at Anna.

  ‘Do you have yours?’

  ‘Of course!’ Janina patted her coat pocket.

  Anna felt, absurdly, a memory of girlhood panic, from school: Everyone has brought the correct things, and you are to be in trouble. She disentangled Alicia from where she had threaded her hands around her mother’s waist, using her as a leaning post to sleep against, and pushed her towards her sister.

  ‘I don’t have ours,’ she confessed in a whisper.

  Janina’s mouth fell open. Anna waited for her to crow, or smother her in false, delighted concern, but she only looked at the girls and worked her mouth as though preparing and rejecting things to say.

  ‘They were in the car with everything else,’ Anna said, struggling to keep her voice low and calm. ‘Surely if we explain—’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Janina said, without any malice.

  ‘But lots of people must be in that position,’ Anna said.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Janina said, concentrating a hate-filled gaze at the back of the pregnant woman’s head, who had slowly put her papers back in her pocket, and stood with her hands clasped around her son.

  ‘I must ask for the pearls back,’ Anna said, almost whispering, mostly to herself. She had unconsciously turned to face her children as she did so, and they stared at her, seeming very young, even Karolina with her woman’s hair and figure. Her eldest daughter’s eyes were wide. Anna knew her own face must be ashen, unable to falsely brighten it in the quiet panic of the moment. Alicia was regarding her with a detachment Anna found in equal parts chilling and admirable.

  ‘Are we just going to stand here in the road?’ Janina said to the man. Around them, the other women were dispersing, setting off in one direction or another, some trudging back towards Kraków, others along the path. The pregnant woman with her papers was trundling away, looking capable and steady. Anna wanted to run after her, beg her to mother them all, get them somewhere safe. I’m not capable, she’d explain. I’ve never been capable of taking care of them at all.