He stretched and snuggled further down into his chair, looking again at the three empty chairs behind the reception desk. Martha, that was the name of the prettiest. She never smiled at him, rolled her eyes when he tried to talk to her, which made him wild for her. All three of the girls had been gone for two weeks now. Martha had left her little woollen shrug behind, still draped over the back of her chair. The workers, too, were depleted. The Jews were all gone. Some had left weeks before, presumably of their own accord, and the others bitched about them, dropping their team in the shit, with the boss gone too, and what was to happen? Others showed up for work one morning but had disappeared by first break, their work permits in a neat pile on the reception desk. The receptionists among them. It made sense perhaps, keep everything in its own place, a different factory where all the Jews could work together, over the river. But he had liked Martha, the way she punched numbers on the telephone with a sharply polished nail, tap tap tap.
He closed his eyes again. It wasn’t just the chill, the late hour. The panic that had risen in him like bile was receding. For weeks, the tension humming across the river and through the streets, in the crackle of radio static, the flick and crack of newspapers on the tram, had made everyone alert, unable to sleep; voices came out off-key, conversations were smothered around children. Then the Polish troops streamed out of Kraków, heads bowed, leaving behind mothers, lovers, school friends. The new flags went up, parades, new names for the squares were announced and ignored. His friends stopped meeting in their usual bar and went home early, straight after their shifts. The sound of marching troops, shouting German voices, the thud of boots on the pavement, was monstrous, terrifying, unbearable, until it became as normal as traffic. Then new faces, new names of new bosses to learn, new procedures, new papers, a new receptionist, a crone with bitten fingernails and a barking voice. The anxiety that had gripped them all was beginning to lessen, leaving exhaustion behind.
The caretaker jumped as his torch rattled to the floor, dropped from his almost-sleeping fingers. He yelled out, a childish cry of a boy seeing a monster-shadow on the wall: a figure stood at the door.
The figure raised a hand and came closer. A face became visible through the glass panels. ‘Lucaz? My keys don’t work,’ a voice called.
The caretaker felt a moment’s embarrassed relief. ‘Sir,’ he said, rising, for in the fug of his doze he had forgotten everything, falling into the old pattern. As he stood, the new reality gripped him and he stopped. ‘Sir? Mr Oderfeldt?’
‘Open the door.’
‘They … they changed the locks, sir.’
The figure was unmoving. Lucaz fumbled with his keys, his torch glinting on the edge of filing cabinets and the telephone’s gleam. As he opened the door, he began a speech without knowing what he was to say, only prompted by a nervous anger that his old boss had forgotten the new rules, was naïve, senseless, stupid.
‘Sir, you shouldn’t be here, I – we thought you’d already gone—’
‘I’ve just come to collect some things. From my office.’
Lucaz found the words of his speech fading away, as Adam strode past him.
‘Put the lights on,’ he said.
‘They said I wasn’t to … just to patrol.’
Adam stopped at the door that led onto the factory floor.
‘Just for a moment.’
Lucaz shook his head. He had an idea that his new bosses were testing him, watching from a nearby building. ‘You shouldn’t have come,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it’s … safe, you should leave. Most of the others, the Jews have left.’
Adam came back towards him. In the gloom Lucaz saw his face was thinner, his eyes bloodshot. He towered over Lucaz without threat, putting his hands in and out of the pockets of his good coat. He seemed to begin and dismiss several words before answering.
‘I am leaving. I am not causing any trouble, Lucaz. I only wish to go to my office. Just for a moment, you see. Then I will leave.’ When he marched to the door again, Lucaz trotted behind him.
Adam dug the sharp nails of his thumbs into the soft palms, an old childhood trick to stop him from the horror of crying in front of Lucaz. Opening the door of his office, he had been prepared for chaos, a stripped and broken room, all his pride lying in tatters on the floor. Instead it was the cruelty of the perfect room, just as he left it, already feeling like a relic, and he was clutched with a strange grief over this little piece of the world that had been his, that he had carved out for himself. It felt absurd, in that moment, that he would not settle into his chair, do some paperwork, tell Lucaz to fetch him a coffee, share a late-night doughnut and even a little gossip, before calling Robert to pick him up in the car, and crawling into bed next to Anna.
The young man was near sobbing, ‘Sir, please, they said I had to call, if – sir, Mr Oderfeldt, you don’t understand, this office will be cleared, you have to leave.’
He had been so proud of this room. When his father ran the business he had a different building outside the city, a tiny office at the back of the factory floor, down some stairs. Adam could still remember the uneven walls under his fingers as he tried to hold on, unbalanced by the depth of each step. He had insisted on a larger, lighter office when he grew the business and moved closer to the city, where he could stand and watch the workers, hear the hum of the machines running off sheet after sheet. Their textiles were in every bedroom in Kraków, he was sure. These new bosses probably slept in sheets and on pillowcases made on those machines they had stolen from him.
He went to his desk. The lock and key on the drawer was still his own. He shot a questioning look at Lucaz.
‘It’s all to be cleared, they said. Soon, I think,’ he shrugged. ‘I – you can’t take those,’ the caretaker added, jangling his keys in his hands, his torch wobbling over the papers and cash that Adam had taken from the drawer, feeling the steady, calming weight of them in his hands.
‘What? They’re mine.’
‘Don’t you read the newspapers? It’s all to be seized.’
‘Did you think I asked you to open up so I could have a farewell tour?’
Lucaz looked between Adam and the door, as though his new bosses were already standing there.
‘Are you going to keep working here?’ Adam continued. ‘For them?’
‘This is no time to be giving up work, sir. They say we have to keep everything routine. Except the factory space will be used to make other things and the change of … of management.’
Adam took a long look, to the window down onto the factory floor, the wooden desk, a thin layer of dust dulling its shine; the pictures of Alicia, framed and arranged so she grew up across the walls. In the low light he couldn’t see her face clearly.
‘I see,’ Adam said, putting the papers and the wad of notes, thick, heavy and comforting, wrapped in a band, into a briefcase. On impulse, he also snatched up some loose, unframed photographs in the drawer, ones he had brought from home and had meant to frame one day. The caretaker made a small sound carried on a sigh. He was a large man, the bulk of him blocking the door. Adam turned and clicked the briefcase shut, clenched his hands into brief fists, but when he turned, as straight-backed and authoritative as he could muster, Lucaz gave way, only mumbling, ‘They’ll ask me, they’ll ask me where everything is, they’ll think I stole it … Sir?’
Adam almost galloped down the stairs, back across the silent factory floor, and into reception. ‘Thank you, Lucaz, good luck,’ he called over his shoulder, as the young man called, ‘Wait, sir, I’m supposed to … I’ll have to tell them you came …’
Adam turned. ‘Could you arrange a telegram for me?’ He pinched out a wad of notes, held them out.
Lucaz eyed the notes. It was more than six months’ wages. Just sitting in the office all this time. Just spare cash. ‘I’ll have to tell them you came,’ he repeated, taking on the tone he used for the boys who tried to jump the fences in the summer, bored and looking for trouble. He rubbed his chin in an
imitation of deep thought.
Adam’s breathing quickened. He offered more notes. ‘Lucaz, it’s just a telegram.’
‘Have you registered?’
‘What?’
‘You’re supposed to register,’ Lucaz said, feeling his stomach seethe at the strange thrill of reprimanding the boss. ‘So they can move you to the … the new place for all the Jews.’
‘Well I’m not going there. I’m going out of the country.’ Adam’s hand was still proffering the notes and he let his arm fall. Lucaz crossed his arms again as Adam took another wedge, folded it in half.
‘Lucaz, I just need you to—’
‘I’ll need all of it.’ Lucaz swallowed down his shame. The man had made it so easy, holding out money like that, coming alone in the middle of the night. He could do so much worse and no one would say anything. He’d even get pats on the back.
Adam stared at him. A series of tiny pulses seemed to go through his body, like little electric shocks. Lucaz counted on his fingers. ‘Opening up for you. Against orders. Covering up you were here. Unregistered, that’s, that’s extra. Sending a telegram extra again.’
‘I’ll give you half. That’s generous,’ Adam said, as Lucaz sucked air between his teeth like a market seller. Adam’s heart was racing. He’d spent all of the cash in his coat lining already. This was all he had to get out of Kraków and to Anna. ‘I need some,’ he offered honestly. ‘I have nothing but this.’
Immediately he realised his mistake. All residual deference ebbed out of his old employee. He simply took the notes from Adam’s hands.
‘Wait, please,’ Adam tried, but Lucaz only shrugged.
Adam’s scrambled mind struggled to make a decision. Forget the telegram, Stefan’s voice whispered. Get out. But if he could reach Sammy, find out they were safe, he could change course, after explaining to Anna, and get to France, sell the house, Edie would understand, recoup their losses, use the money for visas … he could still get out of this if he could get to France.
‘The telegram?’
‘I said so, didn’t I? I’m not a cheat,’ Lucaz mumbled, looking at the floor as he folded the cash into his pocket.
‘And I’ll need to come back here once more, to use the telephone.’
38
ADAM FELT THE familiar sting of betrayal and guilt, even as he told himself, yet again, that this was the best way to help, a clever plan, and Anna would soon understand once he could explain everything. He took the photographs, the ones from his office drawer, from his inside pocket. On the top, Anna’s smile was wide, a rare full-toothed childish grin, and he brought the image closer to see the wrinkles at the side of her eyes, his favourite detail of her face.
Years before, in bed, he’d been telling her a story of him and Stefan as boys, a stupid prank on Stefan’s older brothers, and he glanced at her as she lay on her side, the sheet pulled up over her nose in the cool room. He so desperately wanted to make her laugh, made his voices ever sillier and higher, his gestures more elaborate, almost knocking over the jug of flowers next to the bed, but his new wife’s breathing was steady, her face still. He stopped, embarrassed, and lay next to her again. Her eyes narrowed to almonds, and spidery lines creased at the edges, ran right to the edges of her face.
‘Ah, you are laughing!’ He was elated, not just by the relief that he was not such a dull disappointment after all, but by the expressiveness of her eyes, how he could read her whole face by them.
‘I’m smiling, silly boy.’
‘That was a laugh.’
‘Come on, what did Oskar say?’
‘You don’t care,’ he teased, turning to light a cigarette.
Anna really did laugh then. ‘All right, I don’t I suppose. Tell me a different one.’
And then he’d lit the cigarette, or had she taken it from him and thrown it, pulled him to her? Was it even so early, perhaps after Karolina was born …? He glanced up from the photograph, young Anna’s smiling eyes, to think, then let the memory go. In the picture her eyes were closed, so she hated it, ‘It makes me look ridiculous, like one of those fussy old grandmothers in a long black dress, like I don’t know how a camera works!’ but he had kept it in his desk at work, because of her smiling eyes. In the image she held Karolina in her arms and stood on the front step of the apartment. Just behind them was a ghostly figure – Janie perhaps, or Anna’s mother, ducking out of frame. Adam searched Anna’s arms then, saw only the bundle, a tiny blurred suggestion of baby fingers poking out. He kissed the photograph, looked out of the window at the city, dull under grey soggy skies. The telephone sat shining on Stefan’s desk, waiting for its moment. He’d been too spooked to go back to the factory, too afraid of Lucaz’s greed and slowly dawning awareness of his power, which he’d soon start playing with like a glorious and frightening new toy. He’d taken a chance instead and hoped that Lucaz had sent the telegram as planned, and taken yet another one in trying Stefan’s office, a little ransacked but with the phone line still working, on a Sunday. Waiting for the time he’d asked for, he ran a finger along the huge globe that still sat next to Stefan’s desk, a terrible sickness settling on him at the thought of his friend still sitting in the prison, left behind if Adam’s plan came together.
He dialled for the operator, held for long minutes, was patched through across the broken and smoking land between him and where Anna sat in his brother’s office. When her voice came through the static his heart lurched for her. Where are you? Are you coming?
He talked through her, realising she would only hear his voice as he heard hers, as though carried on the high winds of a storm. Listen, I’m going to get to France to sell the house there. Edie can move back in with her mother. She’ll understand. Then we’ll have money for visas out of Europe, if it comes to that … I don’t have any other money.
The line went dead as he was trying to explain. Even through the stormy line he could hear her spiralling anger at the old incendiary words: France, Edie. And something with poor Karolina, heartbroken over Jozef. She hadn’t mentioned Alicia at all. He sat back in Stefan’s chair, feeling a fool for risking so much for a conversation that had achieved nothing but to know his wife and daughters were safely in Lwów, which perhaps was enough, though he felt sure he had known it anyway, that if any of them had come to harm he would have felt it in his cells, in the marrow of his skeleton.
Adam cast around his friend’s office. He should bring him something, before he left, before he found a way to France. He started to open drawers, but they had already been cleared out. He turned to look on the shelves, see if there was a beloved book he could bring, and became so lost in the titles, their gold lettering, that he didn’t hear the men coming down the corridor, Lucaz’s tip-off fresh in their ears.
Kraków, 1945
39
IN MOSCOW, Alicia walked up and down the platform of a huge station with elaborate mosaics on the walls, gleaming with rich jewel colours that made her think of Stalin’s boiled sweets. Her legs ached and the old weakness in her bladder stung.
It took a long time for the trains to be organised, but Alicia was well-trained in waiting. She had a sketchbook full of figures, a pencil, even a small mix of paints and brushes that she had carefully arranged in a towel, wrapped like an artist’s set. She looked away from the tiled walls and out across the street, into the city. It could be Kraków, or Kraków as it was in her memories, which might be now more cobbled together memories of other people. She was nineteen now, and already that distant childhood was slipping into an imagined landscape, a half-remembered conversation, an unfinished sketch. She started to draw the lines of the platform and the shapes beyond it, trying to feel her way into the focus point. Colours started to rise: a glint of those mosaics against the grey, but they had to hold off until the shapes were there.
Somewhere across the cities and fields was the barrack room they’d lived in, the hot summers and freezing winters, turning through extremes like a tossed coin. But this felt like a differe
nt place. Alicia scribbled in figures and details: porters, a few lost-looking soldiers, but mostly clusters of travellers like her, thin and wearing expressions of shock and relief. Both the perfect, infinite sky of the Russia she’d first met, and its snowscape twin, were gone. Instead the sky was grey, and a misty drizzle washed the streets.
It had been a week since the announcement. People smiled uncertainly at each other, and laughter punctured the air, muffled by the roar of traffic. The station was busy, queues stretching into the street and voices raised at the ticket counter. Many times, sitting on Margo’s suitcase, wearing Janina’s coat, Alicia fancied she recognised someone; her eye would catch on a face, the particular gait of a hurrying figure, the angle of a head as someone spoke: You know them, something would whisper to her, some spark of recognition, from the journey, from one of the journeys, from Kraków, all that time ago, from Lwów, from Russia, you know them. She imagined them all as objects bobbing on an ocean. Now the tide had changed again and they were all to be swept back with the receding waves. None of her recognised people ever materialised; they were phantoms and doppelgangers, a Leo there, a Margo, a Jozef, Adam striding towards her, arms open, his coat flying out behind him. The day before, so certain had she been that Karolina was leaning against a wall, laughing with a group of soldiers, her hair grown down to her waist but the set of her jaw, the low cadence of her laugh unmistakeable, that Alicia had started towards her, calling out, ‘Karolcia,’ her whole body throbbing with joyful relief, before the woman turned again, showing a stranger’s face.
The Light at the End of the Day Page 28