The Light at the End of the Day

by Eleanor Wasserberg

  ‘Alicia, see?’

  ‘Oh!’

  Thick snowflakes were falling. Here was a familiar muffling of the world, a piece of home, where there would be skating once the river froze, and hot chocolate ready on their return. Alicia looked into Frank’s face, his childish smile; she could see he was imagining snowball fights, perhaps a day or two of suspended work.

  ‘I’m still sunburned from yesterday,’ he said. ‘But it’s winter now, didn’t you know?’

  His arms were still bare and peppered with gooseflesh. Alicia’s mind went to her coat, handed in on their arrival. Had they given her mother a receipt, a ticket, to get it back? It was a good coat, thick and lined; Alicia could sleep under it.

  Alicia didn’t say, But Frank, think. She didn’t say, But Frank, now it is a frozen world, don’t you see how much harder everything will be? She studied his face. He was so old, as old as Papa and Uncle Stefan, but he was younger than she was in his mind. He seemed to think the snow would melt like sugar. Alicia felt the ground shift beneath her yet again; the brief summer, the stolen season was over.

  Alicia said, ‘It will kill the bed bugs.’

  Frank let out a guffaw that bent him at the waist. ‘Come, come!’ he said, beckoning her out into the snow.

  ‘Frank, no! It’s freezing! Come back in.’

  He was running in his socks and thin trousers, only the filthy jacket from the cattle car over his shoulders. He bounded in circles and pointed his footprints out to her.

  ‘Yes, I know, come inside!’ she called. Behind her, other voices rose, Close the door, are you crazy? Alicia, is that you? Is that Frank? Get him inside!

  A floodlight illuminated the snow. For a moment Alicia was stunned into a child’s wonder: the flakes were fat and thick, falling in that gleeful way, riding on the wind. In the floodlight they looked like the sparks of a vast bonfire drifting down from the sky. She pointed upwards so Frank would notice: she knew he’d like to see it, but he was holding out his arm, the dark sleeve there, to catch the flakes, exclaiming over the intricate patterns. Neither of them saw the guards coming.

  In the classroom, Ursula wore thick, padded gloves that she removed with her teeth when she needed to write something down. Alicia sat with her hands in her armpits, working her toes inside her boots, trying to make clouds into shapes; on the walk over, some of the guards were making smoke rings with their breath and laughing.

  While Ursula turned to the board, writing the Russian for snow and ice, Alicia told the children of Frank’s beating under her breath. She expected a reflection of the sickened lurches her stomach had taken as the sounds of fist on flesh, breaking and splitting and shattering bones, crashed across the yard. She wanted to pass on that feeling so that she didn’t have to sit with it there in the cold schoolroom.

  Instead the other children looked at her with blank expressions, and one of them, a boy with missing teeth, said, ‘Did they stamp on his head?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what they did to my grandfather,’ he said.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘No, at home.’

  He had taken his daily boiled sweet from Stalin out of his mouth so he could speak through his toothless gums, and now he put it back and turned back to the front, where Ursula was glaring.

  She came to Alicia’s desk.

  ‘Alicia, pay attention,’ Ursula said.

  ‘Yes, Miss Ursula.’

  ‘What’s the matter? You’ll have to get used to the cold.’ Ursula spoke in Polish, although she knew there was to be Russian in school only, or how would they learn, how would they know the language of their new country, and all its music; despite this, Ursula could not shake out of herself a core of kindness that responded to a sad, a bewildered, a lost face of a youngster in her care with the sound if its mother tongue.

  ‘Yes,’ was Alicia’s simple reply, in Russian. She preferred to keep quiet with this one. It seemed nothing good would come, here, of seeming anything other than docile and pliable. She looked up into Ursula’s elfin face, the tip of her sharp nose red, raw and flaking. She affected a sad little girl voice, despite not feeling like a little girl, perhaps, since the day she lay in her bed in Bernardyńska and thought of ways for that man to die.

  She mimed drawing in the air, tried to think of the Russian word for it, only managed, ‘Please …’ and the mime. She gave up and asked in Polish, ‘Please can we have art supplies?’

  ‘Oh! Yes, ask Stalin and he’ll provide for you.’ Ursula beamed at her, and walked on.

  When she arrived back at the barracks, Frank was alone on one of the bunks. Alicia was annoyed: her five minutes before the adults came back was the joy of her day, a slice of stolen time when the guards who escorted them back from school went to their own buildings and the workers had not yet arrived. One of the kinder guards had brought them boiled water and poured it into canisters which they placed around the room like little heaters; Alicia took one and hugged it.

  ‘Leo?’

  She ignored Frank’s mumbling as she went to sit on her frozen hands on another bunk.

  ‘Leo, Leo, did you see they sent me back early?’

  ‘Leo’s not here,’ Alicia said.

  ‘Who’s that? Sarah?’

  ‘Who’s Sarah?’

  ‘My sister, didn’t you know? We hid behind the oven, so clever …’

  Alicia snuggled under the thin blanket with the makeshift hot water bottle, rubbing her feet together. The sheets smelled sour.

  ‘They sent me back early.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘I couldn’t keep my balance.’

  ‘It’s icy.’

  ‘No, it’s … I can’t see properly, somehow … I can’t … there’s something wrong with my eye or my … I kept falling.’

  Alicia sat up, the blanket still wrapped around her. She folded her swaddled legs under her to look at Frank. His face didn’t look so badly beaten as all that. Not as though a guard had stamped on his head. His lip was split, and there was a small bruise at the top of his nose. They’d mostly hit his back and sides as he curled up in the snow, cracking ribs, Alicia and Leo trying to pull him away, screaming at them to stop.

  ‘You just need to sleep. It was nice of them to let you come back early.’

  ‘Yes, yes, little Ruski, they’re teaching you well, ha? Stalin loves me, Stalin will take care of me!’ he sang tunelessly, waving his arms as though conducting an invisible orchestra.

  ‘You know back in Poland they are stamping on people’s heads?’

  Frank stopped waving. ‘What, didn’t you know?’ he echoed.

  Leo and the others came in, bickering about the temperature in a herd of companionable irritation.

  ‘Must be fifty below, I’m telling you … look at my fingers!’ Leo said.

  Anna snapped, ‘We’d all be dead, you stupid woman.’

  ‘Oh God, shut up you two … why don’t you just look at the thermometer by the well?’ someone called over.

  ‘They’ve taken it away! They want you think it can’t possibly be fifty below, but I’m telling you … Frank, how are you, sweetheart?’ Leo leaned over him and he tried to sit up. ‘No, no, you rest.’

  Anna pulled Alicia into an embrace for warmth, took her daughter’s hands between hers and began to rub them. Together they watched Leo press the back of her hand to Frank’s forehead.

  ‘Shall we try to tape up his ribs somehow? We could cut a sheet into strips,’ Anna said.

  ‘I think he just needs to rest,’ Leo said.

  As they sank into their fitful frozen sleep, Frank resurfaced, reached for Leo. ‘So dizzy,’ he said.

  ‘Shall I tell you about the sky to help you sleep?’ she whispered.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  They all listened as Leo talked of the Pleiades, and the trail of stars falling to the horizon, and the moon, which was almost full now, about to wane again into a sliver.

  ‘Thank you, Leo,’ Frank breathed, as they all sank
again, snow drifting in through the slats.

  Anna said a very quick prayer, half-remembered from a long-ago home, and tried to close Frank’s eyes. They stayed open. How had she forgotten that? Her mother’s eyes had done the same. She stroked Leo’s hair until she woke.

  ‘What? Come on, it can’t be, it’s still pitch black,’ her friend mumbled.

  ‘Frank is dead.’

  Even Anna, who barely tolerated Frank, had felt the heaviness of it when she woke to see him staring glassy-eyed at her, unbreathing. To have run and hidden and made it all this way, then to die at the edge of the world, for no one who loved him to ever know. She’d touched her fingers to his face and tried to remember the right prayer. So she was prepared for Leo’s grief to swamp them all, perhaps even to have to manage Leo’s untrammelled rage at the guard who had beaten her friend. Instead Leo seemed to shrink and diminish; she hugged herself, said only, ‘Oh, but I promised his sister, oh I promised her,’ bowed her head for several seconds, as Anna took her hand.

  ‘Do you think he was suffering very much, but didn’t say?’ Leo whispered.

  ‘No, I think he just slipped away. They must have hit his head, and …’ Anna shrugged. She added, ‘Should we wake a guard?’

  But Leo shook her head and Anna was glad. Instead they sat with Frank as the others slept until dawn, holding hands over his still chest, letting their thoughts drift to other lives and losses. When Alicia woke, she surprised both of them by crying over Frank and kissing his icy forehead. It was she who went to alert a guard. It was the same one who had beaten Frank. It gave her a little satisfaction when he furrowed his brow and bit his lips. It was unclear if it was guilt, irritation, or both. I hope you get into lots of trouble, Alicia thought. I hope Stalin shoots you in the head himself.

  ‘Well, he’ll have to be buried,’ he said, as another guard came in, the kind one who brought them hot water.

  ‘Who?’ the kind guard asked. He was short and slight, always seeming too small for his uniform.

  ‘That soft in the head one. He’ll have to be buried,’ he repeated, looking around. ‘Who speaks Russian? Come on. Out by the woods,’ he added.

  There was a pause.

  ‘You want us to do it?’ the small guard asked, and laughed, loud but short. The small crowd that had gathered around Frank’s bunk, where Leo and Anna still sat either side of him holding hands, took a collective breath. Some of them glanced at the canisters of hot water and the extra blankets the kind guard had brought.

  ‘Won’t … won’t you help?’ Leo asked.

  ‘I’m busy, we’re busy! Come on, it’s not so bad. Go and ask at the mess for shovels.’

  ‘But it’s completely frozen!’ Anna said. She felt a shock of laughter threaten and swallowed it down.

  ‘Better get started then.’

  Anna and Leo went. On the way, Anna took Leo’s arm and said, ‘I don’t understand, he has been so helpful.’

  ‘I see it,’ Leo said, shaking. ‘He sees us like pets, perhaps, Anna. Don’t be cruel while they’re alive, fling them in the ground when they die.’

  35

  SOON AFTER her mother and Leo buried Frank in the woods, coming back hours later with fresh blisters and bruises from driving shovels into the icy ground, Alicia came to her desk to find pencils, paintbrushes, little pots of paint, paper. She looked up to see Ursula wiping tears away, overcome by her own generosity, the kindness of her dear Stalin, her country, towards this little waif. Alicia blew on her fingers, warming them slightly, so she could feel the slick wood of the paintbrush, undo the lid of the paint, take in the smell of those days with Jozef, her lessons. She went to Ursula and hugged her around the waist, burrowed her face into Ursula’s small, soft belly for a moment. Ursula touched her hair, and told her to thank Stalin, and Alicia did, curtseying to the portrait for added effect.

  While the others copied out a Russian poem with the new pencils, Alicia held on to the moment of seeing her mother carry out Frank’s dead body, the shock of its white flesh and open eyes. She saw Frank’s feet go last, thinking of how, soon, they would be covered with the frozen earth. So she began a sketch of poor Frank, who couldn’t know what a clean death luck granted him, taken by a quick beating and an unlucky fall onto ice.

  As winter deepened and hardened, everything was hunched and clawed; backs and knees and fingers curled up. Soon the snow was too thick to work properly and people huddled under blankets all day; if they were clever, they kept moving in a slow, steady walk from barracks to barracks, around in a loop, not too much, or they would need too many calories, but enough to make the cold chase them a little.

  School became a place to stay warm. Ursula got ill, listless and pale, coughing and feverish, so for weeks she curled up at her large desk at the front, told them to read or play quietly, remember to thank Stalin for all their gifts. Alicia planned to sketch and then paint Papa and Karolina, bring their faces to her, hang them up in the barracks like Stalin’s face in the classroom, so they could pray to them like family gods. Instead, as she sat at her little desk, she found that when her own pencil touched the page, it was details of her own painting that kept finding their way onto the paper. Sometimes it was her fingers wrapped around the back of a chair. Sometimes the dress, the folds of it, or the eyes. She knew she was getting it all wrong, knew it was misshapen and the perspective was out and the light points were the wrong shade. Without Jozef she couldn’t find the painting again, and had to think hard to remember how her face in paint had looked; when she thought hard, she could only find the feeling of richness, fullness, pleasure in helping to make something beautiful, something that would make her Papa happy, and show that man what an error he had made in attacking them. She flipped page after page and brought Papa and Karolina into the frame, Janie and Leo, Margo, Frank, Janina, her mother; they stood like ghosts behind the girl’s figure. She put Stefan’s face in the walls behind her, added Isaac’s in the folds of a curtain. When she tried to add colour the whole thing looked childish, and she ripped it up.

  Somewhere the real painting was waiting to be found again and reclaimed. Alicia hoped whoever had it took care of Jozef’s canvas, didn’t put the girl in direct sun, or let her go damp and cold, let mould creep across her painted skin. Alicia was going to need her, when they all went home. They would start there, build a world again around her: a wall, floors, furniture, and everyone back in their place. The weeks and months since the day they left Kraków would be rolled back like a long carpet, and everything as it should be again.

  Kraków, 1939–1940

  36

  HIS FRIEND’S FACE was so changed that Adam looked behind him for a moment, thinking they had called out the wrong prisoner. His eyes were unsmiling as he shuffled to sit at the small table in the police station.

  ‘They tricked us, gathered us all for a meeting,’ Stefan said, looking at the table, pressing it with his fingers until the tips turned white. ‘They booked one of the largest conference rooms. We’d all agreed our points. We even invited press, but do they care? They’ll do anything in front of anyone!’

  ‘I came as soon as I heard,’ Adam said. ‘I’ve been trying and trying to—’

  ‘Then they just arrested us, for nothing, nothing!’ Stefan said. ‘They were laughing at us—’

  He seemed to only then notice who was sitting in front of him. ‘Adam, you child. What are you still doing in the city? You said you were going that morning!’

  ‘Anna and the girls have gone, but I—’

  ‘Well, go after them, go, go.’

  ‘I will, I will, only—’

  ‘There’s no only. Where are you staying? Don’t tell me you’re so stupid to stay in the apartment?’ He glanced at Adam’s arm. ‘Have they made you register? You haven’t registered yet, have you?’

  ‘No,’ Adam said, following Stefan’s glance and rubbing at his arm, as though there really was a star there that could be smoothed away. ‘I’ll be gone soon.’

  ‘They
’ll make you if you stop to talk to any of them. Don’t stop for anyone, just walk straight out of the city if you have to.’

  ‘Walk? To Lwów? I still have two cars at home, I – Stefan, I’m here to help you, not—’

  ‘Well, you can’t go back there. Where are you staying?’

  Adam shone a smile, a sliver of their old life. ‘I’m camping out at your dirty room behind the university.’ He longed to tell of his escape from the Bernardyńska apartment, down the back stairs and crawling through a window like their boyhood games come true; already it was an adventure in his memory, while on the night he had been so fixed by fear that he had vomited into the trees in the courtyard until he thought his stomach would disappear. Looking at Stefan now, he swallowed his story. His eyes had seemed empty before, but were now hollowed out.

  ‘See?’ Adam tried. ‘You’re wishing you’d thought of that.’ He wagged a finger at Stefan, eager to make him smile. The room was a long-running joke between them, Stefan’s dirty hideaway for girlfriends, boyfriends, lost weekends with various students.

  ‘I did,’ Stefan said, his voice so small Adam had to lean in. ‘I was letting lots of students stay there. Jews. Must be over a dozen. They’re … they’re all gone?’ He held out his hands and looked into his palms. Adam took them into his own.

  ‘I – maybe they decided to leave, like me and Anna.’

  ‘The rooms are so near the Jagiellonian. They were swarming all over there. You’re crazy, you can’t stay there. They’ll move you over the river. Adam, you have to go.’

  ‘And leave you here?’

  His friend’s face changed again. ‘Oh! This. It’s nothing. They treat us well enough. At least here they bring us books sometimes. You can go, you can go, please, please.’

  37

  THE CARETAKER WAS exhausted, his stinging eyes struggling to stay open, his head heavy. He sat in his usual leather chair in the factory reception, where three well-spoken, serious young women used to answer telephones and march to take messages upstairs. On day shift, he liked to try to flirt with the two pretty ones, dark-haired and with pert bottoms in tight pencil skirts; at night, he was alone, a torch and a paper bag with something sweet from the bakery, picked up by his mother that morning. Now, it was just past what his mother called witching hour, and the night was bitter. Ice streaked the pavements outside, where he was supposed to patrol. The new bosses had told him he must patrol carefully.