‘Adam will be devastated,’ she whispered.
The man turned to face her. ‘I don’t know that he’s dead,’ he said. ‘They arrested all of the professors at the Jagiellonian.’
‘What? All?’
‘Tricked them. Said they were to meet in a conference room at the university, not long after the invasion. They were all there, ready to discuss. And they just arrested them all.’
‘Not you?’
‘I was just an assistant.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘And! What happened to them all? Where did they take them?’
The man gave an exhausted shrug. ‘We protested the next day, wrote letters …’ he shrugged again. ‘How long will they let me stay here? Is it safe here?’
Anna planned to tell Karolina the news lightly, simply, without preamble or decoration. Her daughter was in the tiny, frozen garden at the back of Margo’s house, digging holes in the hard soil, her hair spilling around her. When she looked up, the cold had given her cheeks and nose a rosy glow and her dark eyes were full of tears from the wind.
‘Mama?’
‘Has Jozef replied to any of your letters?’
Karolina sat back on her heels. She bit her lip. ‘No, but—’
‘Karolcia—’
‘Please don’t make a speech about him forgetting me, or I him. I don’t complain about it or lie around crying or even write about it anymore. Just let my heart be,’ Karolina said.
Anna hugged herself, the cold lashing at her ribcage. ‘Was he still going in to work, do you know?’
‘What?’
‘Did he still have a class running, when we left?’
Karolina wiped her face, blinked at her mother. Anna gave herself up as a coward.
‘Go to Sophia’s, there’s a man there you need to speak to.’
‘We should take in more people,’ Isaac urged his parents later that night. He fiddled with the radio dial in Margo’s front room, trying to find music, but there were only voices drifting through the static.
‘Nonsense,’ Margo said, pulling a stitch taut by the fire.
‘There are sixteen at the Skliars now.’
‘Sophia doesn’t have any children.’
‘And? There’s only one of me, I don’t take up so much room,’ Isaac replied with a smile, stretching to touch the ceiling.
‘Sixteen? Too many,’ Margo said. ‘She’s got no sense, that girl. What?’ she said, to Anna’s raised eyebrows.
‘I thought you loved Sophia.’
‘I do! Stupid child that she is! Sixteen in one house!’
Sammy cleared his throat. ‘Maybe we should ask Theo if there’s anyone who needs—’
‘Where would we put them?’
‘We can sleep on the floor and they’ll sleep in our beds upstairs,’ Isaac ventured.
Margo sniffed. ‘How many did you take in Kraków? Anna? Janina?’
‘We left just as everything was starting,’ Anna said.
‘But the refugees from Germany?’ Margo pressed.
There was a short silence. ‘You threw a party after Kristallnacht, Anna. I remember the Germans there. We made them very welcome,’ Janina said, looking around, returning a smile from Isaac.
‘I don’t want any more people,’ Alicia said simply.
Everyone looked at Anna. She sighed and said, ‘That’s not very kind, Alicia—’
‘Alicia’s right. We can barely afford to keep you all here,’ Margo said.
Janina and Anna exchanged a frightened look which Sammy caught, and he gave them a reassuring glance, a slight shake of the head, to say, No, no, she doesn’t mean it, don’t worry.
Margo tore off a thread in her teeth. ‘More people. Are you crazy? We shouldn’t draw attention to ourselves.’
‘There’s no law against it,’ Sammy said, but he crossed to the window, pinched the edges of the closed curtains together.
Upstairs, Karolina lay on Margo’s bed, springs digging into her back, listening to the ebb and flow of the argument. New letters to Jozef were spilled across the bedspread, never to be posted; she didn’t know where to send them, and anyway they were only full of empty phrases and imagining a different turn, that day of the invasion, where she had kissed her family goodbye and walked through the tense city that was still their own, straight to Jozef’s house.
24
THE LIGHT STARTED to weaken and the last of the winter sun drained away. Sophia had found French tutoring work for Anna. Anna was a terrible teacher and spent most of her time sighing or laughing at the terrible slow progress of the children of Sophia’s friends and church congregation, but was given food to take back to Margo’s house with her in payment. Every week she went to Margo’s bank in the city and tried to explain about her account in Kraków, took letters signed by Theo and Sammy attesting to her identity, and every week she left penniless, imagining their money mouldering away in infested Kraków.
Janina and Margo took in laundry and filled the house with the smell of soap and starch. Janina’s hands began to crack and swell, but she liked to stay in the house behind Margo’s walls, and to listen to Margo gossip about the neighbours, providing laughter or a shocked face as required, and earning Margo’s friendship with her receptive audience. Even Alicia helped, steaming sheets in the kitchen, folding their canvas-like whiteness, laying them next to each other to notice the different shades, how they glowed in different ways when held up to this or that corner of the room.
Sophia worked hardest to find something for the heartbroken Karolina. She took her to her church, where Karolina, uncomplaining, washed pots and arranged donations; she found her pupils to tutor, and Karolina would teach them in a dull monotone, tears sometimes filling her eyes until she would put her head on the desk in Sophia’s house and close them.
Anna had limited patience with it. ‘For God’s sake, I wish there were more books here to distract her; it’s the only thing she really loves,’ she said one day to Sophia.
‘But that’s perfect! I’ll find her something at the library! I’m in charge of the archive – oh! We should have her look after the Polish books! There are so many and she can categorise them – we’ll work together!’
So Karolina and Sophia left every morning for the library, Sophia chattering happily, as though there were no war at all, Karolina in a carapace of worry. Sophia brought her home every evening with paper and pens for Alicia’s sketches, and gossip about people the others had never met: Veronica is going to get married, Ria has disappeared, they say the whole family has gone. Alicia listened in envy, wishing she could work outside the house too, but kept on sewing and darning and mending what Margo gave to her every day, and at night, sketched the house and the swollen family: Janina’s wrinkled hands, the edge of the window frame, the view from the top of the street.
Isaac went back to school to finish his final year, came home with stories of new German and Polish boys, new drills between Latin and French.
Sammy looked more and more harassed; his gelatinous cheeks hung in sadness more often than they stretched to show his usual beam. He sat in silence while the family and Janina made small talk over simple meals, was slow to rise to Margo’s prodding to chime in with someone’s name (‘Who is it, Sammy, that awful woman with the eyebrows and she wears those ugly rings? She has lots of children Anna could tutor …’), and if Isaac – it was always Isaac – asked about his day, and the others would hush, in case there was news of Adam, he would only shake his head.
At night, Sammy lay next to his wife, whispering to her in her sleep.
‘Things are getting worse,’ he would whisper, watching her face to see if she was hearing him in a dream. ‘The cases are piling up, but I can’t help anyone.’
He moved onto his back, staring at the ceiling. Imagined the sky beyond it, the ceiling dissolving to leave them all exposed to the cold air. He felt the weight of them all: his wife and son, his sister-in-law and nieces, the old woman, draggin
g on him somewhere in his stomach, and released a violent sigh of anger at Adam for disappearing, for being arrested, for running, for dying in the street, whatever he had done, for leaving him with this, for weeks and who knew how much longer, when it was only meant to be for a few days. Then he apologised to Adam’s spirit, if it had come to that, and the spirits of their parents, and got up to pace around the upper floor of the house and bite the inside of his cheeks until they bled, waking up the women downstairs, who took turns watching the shadows moving through the floorboards and hear the weight pressing down from above, Margo’s gentle snoring in the background.
Even through his fug of anxiety Sammy left for work every morning and returned every evening. Every day he answered the same question from Anna, ‘Any news?’ with the same response, ‘No change.’ Over the weeks it became such a habit that the words lost their meaning and became like the other inane politenesses of good mornings and how are yous and will you have some tea. Routine soothed and lulled them all, even Sammy, even Karolina.
25
IT TOOK A LONG TIME for Margo’s doubts to blossom into anxiety, and then fear. It was normal for Sammy to be late, in these strange days, to be swamped at the office with case after case and to come home stuffed with stories he wouldn’t tell until they were curled up together alone in their bed, her head on his huge barrel chest, feeling the false safety of his arms around her. She’d close her eyes and deepen her breathing, taking in the scent of him, which to her was the smell of home. Thinking she was asleep, he’d whisper of whole families disappeared, and only their servants left to report them missing, and tale after tale of arrests for the wrong papers, the wrong tone of voice, the wrong set of the jaw or wrongly pitched look in the eye. ‘What can I do?’ he’d whisper into the dark. ‘I go, I follow all the procedures, I file the paperwork. I don’t even know if it’s the police or the army who has them. I can’t help any of them. And … they arrest so many Jews. They say at the office it’s, of course, the refugees are mostly Jews, so it stands to reason …’
That night Margo lay in bed alone, counting the hours. It wasn’t unheard of for Sammy to sleep at the office when things were so busy. Perhaps he had made a bed on the little sofa in his office where years ago she had caught him with a secretary. So when she woke to an empty bed, Margo let her worries be.
By the following night, Sammy had still not come home. Margo went to his office, the lights of one corner still on. When the clerk, working late, told her Sammy hadn’t been in at all that day, she thanked him. She buttoned her coat, then put her gloves on carefully, tugging the seams straight over each finger. She walked out of the office and down the stone steps, deaf to the horns and belching smoke of the traffic below, a muffling in her ears. Tucking her coat under her, she settled on the lowest step, and wept.
A hand on her shoulder, like Sammy’s heavy but gentle weight, made her leap up, certain it would be her husband as though summoned by sheer will, but it was the clerk again. He looked rather disgusted as he handed her a handkerchief; this incensed her, when she could have torn out her hair, screamed at the passing carts, and still even tears for her missing husband was too much! She took pleasure in filling his handkerchief with a satisfying stream of snot. The clerk cleared his throat.
‘Mrs Oderfeldt, there’s a telegram for Schmuel.’
‘What? So? Nothing from Sammy himself?’
‘It’s from his brother.’
The line was terrible, full of static, making his voice drift in and out of focus as though he was talking to her from different rooms, whispering from far away, then suddenly speaking with his breath in her ear. Anna pressed the receiver to her head, its heat and its dusty, tinny hardness; with her other hand she gripped the edge of Sammy’s desk.
‘What are you talking about, what house?’ she said.
‘The money … I can sell it—’
‘You want us to go to France? Are you crazy?’
‘… I tried to … France. Edie will send …’
She blinked around the office. It was like the edge of the table Sammy was permitted in Margo’s house, writ into a whole room: papers everywhere, spilling out of files, stacked in tottering piles, like little falling cities, and propped up with pieces of engineering: rulers, larger files, boxes. Static roared in her ears.
‘Anna?’
‘You aren’t in prison?’
‘I’m staying … say where in case … Stefan’s case.’
Anna felt her whole insides shrivel with rage, her lungs almost convulse as she drew breath to shout, but it came out as a strangled whisper.
‘I’ve been here all this time, the girls, and you stayed in Kraków and not dead or arrested or even hurt or anything else and you could have left at any time?’
There was a long crackle down the line. ‘… don’t understand … safe.’
‘And now you’re leaving but to go to France?’
His voice had gone and the line sang a dead tone. Anna stared at the phone, unsure for a horrible moment if she had pressed the button, unconsciously, before saying what she needed to say to him, before evoking their daughters for him, before exploding in righteous fury, abandoned for that young girl and her son, after everything, after all her years of patient friendship under this one understanding, that when the world was falling apart he would be at her side. She was his wife.
‘Kurwa!’ She smashed the phone against the desk. A man ran in, face slack with outrage, and wrenched it from her hands, listened to the dial tone and gave her a raised eyebrow look that told her she was lucky it was still working. She sat in a hot fug of shame and anger that she bathed in for a moment like summer sun, before smoothing her ugly borrowed brown dress in her lap, adjusting her hat (her own, expensive) and gathering up the bag Margo had lent to her with nothing in it.
She opened the door of Sammy’s office as Margo’s voice battered at one of her husband’s colleagues.
‘Don’t give me that. There must be a way to—’
‘Mrs Oderfeldt, please.’ (Perhaps I’ll start using my old name, Anna thought, I always liked it, Kotowski, and that little whore can take his name if she wants, why not?) ‘There’s no need to panic,’ the same man who had taken the phone from Anna’s hands said, dismissing the first man with a nod.
‘Who’s panicking? I’m just asking where my husband is. Do I sound like I’m in a panic? Am I running around screaming? It’s been over a week.’
‘Well, that isn’t unusual, for a difficult case, he will be staying at the police station with the client—’
‘Oh! Thank you, thank you, thank God I have you to explain to me, a lawyer’s wife and with a degree in law myself,’ – Anna looked up, this was extraordinary news to her – ‘how these things work,’ Margo spat. ‘Except he isn’t at the police station, because I have called there, and it is unusual not to telephone to the office, isn’t it?’ She opened her hands. Et voilà, and what do you have to say for yourself now? The man stood in his thin suit, badly made tie, and shrugged, blushing. Anna took a wildly childish pleasure in his humiliation and smirked at him. Margo noticed Anna then.
‘What news from Kraków?’ she asked in a gentle tone. ‘Is it bad? Is he coming?’
‘No, he isn’t coming.’
‘Does he have a lawyer? In Kraków they’re arresting everyone, without even charging them—’
‘I know that,’ Anna snapped.
‘No, there are procedures,’ the young lawyer interrupted her, before stopping at Margo’s glare.
‘But if he has access to a telephone it can’t be so bad,’ Margo said.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Anna smiled at her.
‘Well then,’ Margo gave her a weak smile, then folded her lips, and Anna felt the force of what lay beneath her face: So now your husband is safe, but mine is not.
They left the office and stepped into the quiet street; it was Sunday, so few people were about, and the cold kept the majority inside, along with the new bite of disappearances in th
e air. The young lawyer came with them, locking up the office he had opened only at Margo’s insistence, after the telegram from Adam gave a time he could get back to a telephone.
Now, Anna and Margo picked their way through the freezing slush, Anna in a daze of confusion and regret, imagining all the things she should have said, and wondering how to frame this story to her daughters. As she watched her shoes, faithful and strong since Kraków, muddied and bitten by the journey, carry her over patches of pavement, she toyed with the idea of saying it wasn’t Adam at all that called, but a friend: Stefan, Jozef? Telling them he was dead. She indulged in the grim daydream for a moment before discarding it. Margo walked beside her with her usual heavy step, a slight limp.
‘Do you really have a law degree?’
‘Of course. It’s where I met Sammy.’
‘Why don’t you go back to work, since we need the money?’
But Margo wasn’t listening. She looked back at the office, then down the street, as though lost. ‘We didn’t have classes together, but then a professor we shared threw a dinner at the end of the first year.’ She spoke over Anna’s head, watching the memory play out on the grey street, as though a film of it was projected onto the side of that office building.
Anna took her hand. ‘Margo, it’s all right, he’ll be all right.’ Anna was struck by a familiar fear, that she was empty, that she had got lost somehow, and didn’t love or feel like other people did, that she was always only pretending. Perhaps that was why Adam had left her, finally, for Edie, not because of the girl’s younger body, but because she had a working heart. In the private abyss of her mind she found now how little she had ever cared about Sammy. Now she felt how they were more tethered together than ever, that Sammy’s plight was hers, and her children’s too. She studied Margo’s pinched little face, the pointed nose, the dark eyes. She saw the cleverness in them and the kindnesses she’d shown her, the times she’d ignored Alicia’s insolence and smiled at Karolina’s sweetness and given them all clothes and her food without complaint. And there was no blood between them, not real blood that bound by memory and ancestors whispering the same thoughts into dreams; there were only the long-ago promises they had made to brothers. Margo’s blood was Isaac, and she shared his roof and his food, his protection, with Anna and her children. Shame submerged her from her toes in a rush through her body and poured out of her mouth. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and would have embraced her, had a car with a beeping horn not made them jump out of the road where they’d been walking for the clearer path.
The Light at the End of the Day Page 20