The Light at the End of the Day

by Eleanor Wasserberg

  ‘I know, darling.’

  ‘Papa won’t know where we are.’

  ‘Yes, but he’s very patient, he’s waited this long, and you mustn’t worry,’ Anna said, guilt squeezing her insides until she felt her stomach would disappear.

  ‘I wish I had a sketchbook and some paints.’

  The angry man, the one who had shouted, raised his voice once more. ‘Paints?’ he cried. ‘You want to worry about food and water! Or lights, it will be dark soon! Didn’t you know? Paints! Or men with guns and a noose—’

  ‘It will be a long journey if you keep that up,’ Anna said. ‘Why don’t you have a good yell out of the window, get it out of your system so we don’t have to smother you in your sleep?’

  ‘Mama!’ Alicia said, delighted.

  ‘As for light, it’s a clear night,’ came the voice of the woman who had told them they were moving north, smoothly cutting through the row. ‘The moon is almost full, and will be free to shine. Look,’ and her outstretched arm blocked some of Alicia’s view of the sunset, ‘soon it will be silvering the sky.’

  Alicia stayed quiet, waiting for more.

  ‘I’m Leo,’ the woman’s voice came again, nudging Alicia a little. Anna leaned over to shake her hand. ‘Sorry for causing drama, only it’s true. At least there’s a good full moon.’

  ‘You don’t seem so worried,’ Anna said.

  ‘How do you know it’s full if you can’t see it?’ Alicia said.

  Leo shrugged to Anna’s words. ‘There’s no point panicking. It’s important,’ she dropped her voice to barely a whisper, ‘to accept the truth.’ She nodded to where Riane and the black-haired young women were still talking feverishly about some Polish garden, its rot and trampled leaves.

  ‘But what truth? Where are we going?’ Anna said.

  ‘Russia, you stupid bitch,’ replied the shouting man. ‘Didn’t you know?’

  A thousand old curses rose to Anna’s mouth, from the days before she was married. In Kraków she would have used every ounce of influence she had to remove this man, discredit him, complain to his bosses, even destroy him. All lost to her now. She ignored him, floored by her powerlessness. Alicia imagined a giant hand ripping off the roof of the car, plucking the man out and bashing him against rocks. She mouthed along the words, Dashed their heads against the floor as though they were puppies.

  ‘Be quiet, Frank,’ Leo said.

  ‘He’s with you?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Not really?’ The car creaked as Frank came over to them, picking his way through sitting figures. He towered over Leo. ‘We hid together in Lwów! We hid – unbelievable! Now you’re denying you know me?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Frank. Sit down,’ Leo said, in the tone of a parent on their last nerve. Frank sat.

  ‘We hid together, we’re friends,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you know? We hid behind an oven,’ he said, taking Anna’s arm in confidence; she slapped him away, and he continued, in the same newly friendly tone, ‘a couple from a church hid us there – so clever, they’d hollowed it out – did you know they were hanging people, taking them away and hanging them in the square? So we hid, didn’t we, Leo, for weeks—’

  ‘Frank, stop it,’ Leo snapped. The car had fallen silent, only the music of the train and the voices carrying on the evening air.

  ‘That isn’t true,’ Anna said, the car swaying around her, and Alicia’s breaths seeming very loud next to her. ‘Why did you say that? That isn’t true. No one was taken to be killed.’

  ‘Didn’t you know?’

  Alicia tried to stand up, but Anna held her tight. She could hear Janina whimpering. ‘It isn’t true – shut up, Janina! – we stayed with family and there was never any – they took people to police stations,’ she said, looking around, but in the faded light there were only the silhouettes of faces. She leaned over to Leo. ‘Make him say it isn’t true,’ she hissed.

  ‘No, I won’t,’ the man said, in childish defiance.

  ‘So we imagined our dead father then?’ one of the dark-haired young women said to Anna, her voice stretched thin and sharp to a needlepoint.

  ‘I – they told me the arrested ones would be on the same trains as us,’ Anna said.

  ‘Didn’t you know?’ Frank echoed.

  ‘Frank,’ Leo said. ‘It’s time for silence now. You’re upsetting people and I know you don’t like to.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Was that silence?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Come here and I’ll talk to you about the sky.’

  ‘But,’ Alicia said. Her mother’s face was stone as she looked towards Janina. ‘Mama,’ pleaded Alicia, feeling if she didn’t have arms around her she would fly apart, out of the tiny square windows, through the bars. Anna was completely still, so Alicia went to the old woman, who flinched as she approached. ‘Alicia, I—’ she began. ‘Oh, there, there,’ she continued, as Alicia curled up next to her, under her arm. ‘She’s all right, I’m sure Karolina’s all right.’

  ‘I hate you,’ Alicia whispered, burrowing further under her arm, wrapping herself around Janina’s thick waist. ‘It’s your fault.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Janina said, stroking her hair. ‘It’s all, all right.’

  Leo beckoned Frank closer to her. He sat with his legs crossed as she began, ‘That star there is the North Star …’

  A banging on the wall of the car stopped her, silenced them all, even Alicia’s tears. Anna jumped out of her stillness.

  ‘We’re slowing down,’ a voice called, from above.

  They stood and tried to jump up to the windows, but none could reach. Leo lifted herself up again. ‘Hello? Oh!’ She looked down at them all. ‘We’re pulling into a station.’ She leaned further out, and her words were carried away by the cool dusk air.

  ‘Let my husband up to look,’ a woman said, pulling at Leo’s dress. She jumped down so that a heavy man could balance on the rivet, heave himself up. Their two children watched with her: they were a miracle, a complete set, like a pack of Russian dolls with none missing.

  ‘Well?’ his wife called. ‘Gregor, are you going to just stare?’ She hit him on the leg.

  ‘Get off me, woman!’

  ‘Oh get down, you great lump, let me look!’

  He shook her off his leg, as hands came through the slats holding canisters. Gregor said thank you in Russian, handed them down to Leo, still standing beneath him; she opened and sniffed one. ‘Soup,’ she announced, to a chorus of Oh thank God, they aren’t starving us to death, while Frank spoke through them, ‘It’s poison, that’s how they’ll do it, didn’t you know?’

  After the shocked quiet and false calm of the clanking train, the clamour was deafening. There were roars of anger, plaintive cries, and bangs along the cars as though they were being struck from within or without. Frank caught the idea and began kicking at the car. ‘Let us out! You didn’t say you would lock us in!’

  ‘Gregor, ask them when they’re opening up the car again,’ his wife said.

  ‘Is there water too?’ Riane called up.

  ‘Ask them about the arrested people,’ Anna said. ‘A man at the station said there was a list. Ask about the list!’

  Up at the window, Gregor was asking someone, ‘We were told Poland, where are we going? You said we were going home—’ before he fell back, pushed by one of the bodiless hands, stumbled over Janina. A rising voice, speaking Polish, carried above the din outside the car. ‘Where’s your thanks? Stalin is saving your lives!’

  Anna pulled herself up onto the rivet, looked out to see a twilit station, soldiers ambling down the platform, shooing small crowds that had formed around the cattle cars. She tried to twist her neck one way then another, but couldn’t see far beyond the metal bars. A figure stood to one side, wearing a greatcoat, gazing across the tracks. ‘Sir,’ she called, ‘my daughter was arrested in Lwów, and I was told she’d be on the train with us, or sent the same way, there was
a list, please can I … sir? Hello?’ Laughter was rippling down the platform, and anger chafed her. ‘I just want to know where she is, my God – sir, I know you can hear me—’

  ‘Careful,’ Janina called up to her. ‘They’ll push you back down.’

  A woman approached, all headscarf and yellow teeth in the near dark. Her laughter was quelled by Anna’s face. She handed Anna a package.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure he’s taken care of your daughter too.’ She nodded to the figure. Anna craned her neck again, saw the glint of the dying light against the statue she had been harassing. The ringing laughter of the passing boys in uniform made sense. She nodded a thank you to the woman and jumped down.

  ‘Well, I made friends with Stalin,’ she said, showing the package to Alicia. ‘We’re sure to get anything now.’ Leo laughed long and deep, and the mood shifted. They had food. Anna felt she would fall to the floor and howl and then kick at the doors until they let her out to walk back along the tracks to Lwów, back to Karolina, but she sat on the floor with the others, cradling the woman’s package in her lap like a baby, waiting for the canister to be passed her way. I’m a failure, she thought. I have failed Karolcia every day since the moment I first held her in my arms, and I felt nothing but relief the pain was over, and now her father is in France with his lover and son, and she has only me, and here I am being pulled away from her and she’s in a cell somewhere and—

  ‘What’s inside?’ Leo asked, gently prising the package from Anna’s grip. She had torn the paper a little, and Leo tugged at it. Inside was a pack of cards and some cigarettes. Some pamphlets in Russian, which Leo threw to the side. They had no matches, so the car took turns smelling the tobacco.

  ‘We could chew it, like Americans,’ Janina said.

  ‘And spit out black bile all over the sheets and blankets?’ Anna snapped, and Janina was quiet, went back to sniffing the cigarette, rolling it around in her fingers.

  ‘We could ask for a match, at the next station,’ Frank said. ‘And set a fire!’

  ‘No, Frank,’ Leo warned.

  ‘What, it’s wood, isn’t it?’ He tapped the floor. ‘Then they’ll let us out, for air, they’ll have to!’

  ‘Or let us burn and suffocate,’ Janina said. ‘Sorry,’ she added, for this had prompted a chorus of Mamas from two young boys, and the woman in charge of them had begun singing to distract them. ‘I always say the wrong thing.’

  Janina sipped the lukewarm soup. It was like in Lwów, endless watery baby food, pap and grey vegetables. Still, she thought, eyeing the lumps in the broth, someone had chopped these, and warmed them for the strangers in the cars, even if only under orders, checked and stirred and poured for them. That gave her comfort; she sent up a silent thanks to the stars beyond the barred windows.

  By the middle of the next day they had realised no one was coming to open up the car, and their faces turned inward, categorising each other, making mental notes of names and groups. They were made up of three families and three strays: Janina (whom Anna enjoyed savagely cutting out of her own family group in her mind), Leo and Frank, whose early anger Anna quickly realised was from a terror more profound than the rest of them put together. He was a tall, timid creature, jumping at unexpected bangs from down the cars, and the only one to refuse to stand up to the windows at stations: ‘You’ll see, they’ll shoot us through those, that’s what they do with cattle, didn’t you know, that’s what the windows are for …’ This was his verbal tic: didn’t you know? Didn’t you know they’ll execute everyone, this is for the newsreels, this part, didn’t you know? Didn’t you know that Stalin and Hitler had an agreement, and we’re all being drafted into the Russian army as soon as we arrive? Yes, even the children! Didn’t you know? Every few hours he would start weeping, using up precious rags to blow his nose. The only person who could calm Frank down was Leo, who sat with him sometimes, talking in soothing tones about what constellations might be out that night, or the phases of the moon. She whispered to the car when Frank was asleep or behind the sheets in the corner of the car, ‘He’s different, I’m sure you’ve noticed, he’s like a child, a frightened child, please be patient with him, if he shouts …’

  Leo was everyone’s favourite. A German astronomer, at night she talked about the stars they could sometimes see glinting through the high windows. If there were no stars, she would talk about the importance of things that could not be seen, the forces high beyond the stars, the vast expanse of the whole of what was to be found if you kept on going up and up. She had a beautiful voice and spoke in the gentle, lazy way of one completely relaxed, which Anna liked about her. She warmed to her still more when she discovered that Leo, belying her smooth skin and thin waist and the pert breasts that showed under her thin cotton dress, was forty-five. She loved to hear about the huge open spaces beyond the wooden roof of the car, beyond the sky.

  31

  WITHIN A WEEK, stomachs cramped and skin sweated and fevers flared up and died down, passing from car to car, creeping in through the windows or in the food passed through the bars at stations. Soon the faces of the car became as familiar as a neighbourhood they had all lived in for years. While the Bernardyńska set, and even the street in Lwów became faded and hazy around the edges, so that Anna had to work hard to recall the names of people she had dined with, whose daughter married whom, or even the exact pitch of Margo’s voice, the world shrank to these fifteen: the curves of their faces, the shape of their hands, the exact shape of this one’s nose, that one’s crooked teeth. She vomited through the pipe and onto the tracks while Riane held her hair. Anna tipped water onto Frank’s lips, when he was so dehydrated he became disorientated and weak. Janina crouched in a corner, her head on her knees, like a dying animal, and Leo dabbed her face with the bottom of her dress, smoothed her hair. They fell into a comradeship of near silent nursing and wiping and gentle sounds of comforting each other.

  As the first wave of sickness died down, Alicia lay with her head in Anna’s lap. Anna stroked her daughter’s hair, her nails scratching the scalp a little too hard, Alicia’s neck bent too far around. The ache in her back was so sharp, the skin so hot, she only vaguely registered the pain in her neck. Her bladder throbbed in sickening pulses and where she had begun distracting herself by counting them, now she could only breathe and swallow, trying not to vomit. Her view of the truck was distorted into patterns of light and shade, shocks of harsh colours when the pain peaked. At first she had sat on the pipe, cold air on her thighs, and wept as the burning came. (‘Oh, I know!’ Frank called. ‘Like pissing knives, I know! Don’t tell me, stop whimpering, girl, it’s the same for all of us!’) Within hours, she was shaking in Janina’s lap, her whole abdomen aflame, until her mother had reclaimed her, pulled her to her side of the car and their awkward embrace.

  She fell into a fever dream of her painting. That dress, clean and thick, the velvet against her skin; she could still remember the way, if she ducked her head to rub her chin on her shoulder, it would feel soft and rich against her skin. In her mind’s eye she returned again and again to the way the painting glowed red and gold, how Uncle Stefan had told her it would hang in a gallery some day, her name on a bronze plaque. She remembered how she’d wanted her Papa’s attacker to see it and be afraid. Somehow, he’d become the first chink in the smooth wall of their old life, pried it open with his dirty, angry hands, let the others – the soldiers, the guards, the men in uniforms, it was always men in uniforms – pour through, erasing Papa and Karolina as they swept through their lives, wrecking and trampling everything. But the painting was still intact somewhere; her younger, richer, happier, smoother, cleaner, well-fed, spoiled face was hanging on a wall, or propped against a bookcase, or laid flat, wrapped in tissue paper, ready to be unwrapped again by careful hands; somewhere, those men in uniforms were looking at Alicia-in-paint, thinking, These are important people, these are famous people, save those ones, and save the painter too, he’s an artist … and someone would go to Jozef’s cel
l, and apologise, release him, and Stefan too, once Jozef intervened. This was the reverse-dominoes she imagined hour after hour, a reversal of the collapse, all because of the painting, finally fulfilling its role, as Uncle Stefan had promised.

  ‘She needs water,’ Anna said.

  And so the small rations of water were passed, uncomplaining, towards them. Even the little boys in the miracle family. Anna passed those back. The water was warm and metallic, dripping down the back of Alicia’s throat. It joined the pulsing in her stomach, rising and falling until she vomited it up again, coloured spots dancing across her vision.

  Anna called to the next car. ‘A doctor, we need a doctor for my daughter, pass along.’

  ‘We all need doctors, woman,’ came a gruff reply.

  ‘She has an infection and she’s really sick, please.’

  Anna could have imagined the call being taken up, passing down the cars; it could have been only the rush of air and her own panic.

  As they pulled into a new station, Leo and Janina took turns to stand up at the rivet, calling for help. Leo bellowed in Russian, ‘There’s a sick child, a sick girl in our car,’ but it got lost in the other voices, other calls of sickness and wounds and give us more water and how long will it be now? She stepped down, and Janina got up to beat at the bars with a canister, but it was a tiny tinkling chime in a whole orchestra. She looked down at Alicia, small and curled up in her mother’s lap, her face blank, her eyes open but seeing elsewhere, lost in a world of a fever that wouldn’t break. Anna caught her eye, and there was none of the rage of the days since Karolina had gone. There was appeal, and terror, and something of the days they had reached for each other in the street in Kraków, trying to speak of real things among shoes and gossip, and of the day they fled, holding each other in the sea of people. Janina turned again and screamed into the night, straight from her belly, her lungs full: ‘Help! Help! Help!’ She abandoned everything but her raised voice, shooting straight through the bars, cutting through the other voices, the rhythms of queries and complaints. A soldier came towards them. He tapped his rifle on the bars.