The Light at the End of the Day

by Eleanor Wasserberg

  On the train, a gaggle of young women were talking excitedly about boyfriends returning home, falling into whispered intimacies as Alicia passed. They were around Alicia’s age, but she felt a thousand years younger and older than them, in her dowdy coat, plain face, thin hair and body. She was one of a species of girl, a lucky one, that was everywhere, on trains and by the side of roads, waiting in queues, knocking on the doors of those who knew them in other lives: thin, sallow, body stuck in childhood, mind quick and instinctive as a wild animal. The young women, with different stories to Alicia, let their whispers rise into shrieks and whoops of laughter as she opened the door into the next carriage.

  She had a window, the luxury of a passing landscape. She watched the city crawl by, blocks of stone buildings, opening into grand squares, posters and placards everywhere, full of the announcement. She glimpsed buildings with their faces torn off. They were like doll houses with the wallpaper still inside, children playing in the dreamlike giant toy, a shared game played all across Europe. Alicia reopened the sketchbook and began adding a bombed-out house in the background of the station piece, but soon fell into her habit of sketching Jozef’s painting of her younger self. The face, especially around the nose and mouth. The eyes she was quite sure of now.

  A woman and a small boy came into her carriage. They sat opposite Alicia and the boy stared open-mouthed at Janina’s coat, warm and once lined with money.

  ‘Tomas,’ the woman hissed at him. ‘Stop it.’

  But the boy was already burying his head in the woman’s shoulder, gasping and afraid. Alicia fingered the buttons on the coat, tortoiseshell. They might be worth something, so she’d always kept them as a tiny last thing to trade for food and pencils.

  The mother glanced a half-hearted apology at Alicia, who was now twisting a button in her fingers, ignoring them both. She knew why the boy was crying.

  ‘It’s that stupid rumour,’ the woman said, echoing Alicia’s thoughts in Polish. Not just Polish, but a Kraków accent.

  The effect made Alicia soften, and she nodded. ‘I know, I’ve heard that too. It must have been published somewhere,’ she said.

  ‘Tomas, now stop it. It’s just a button, darling. You can’t turn people into buttons!’ The woman glanced up again. ‘You’re Polish,’ she said, and smiled.

  Alicia nodded.

  ‘Going home? Tomas, enough. Could I have some paper, and a pencil, for him to play with?’ she asked.

  Alicia looked at the precious paper. To get this last batch she’d worked for a month on a portrait of an officer’s girlfriend near Chelyabinsk. When the girl didn’t like it, saying her painted face wasn’t pretty enough, Alicia had to throw in every ounce of hoarded tobacco, carefully stashed inside a mattress for a month and filled out with bark and shredded leaves, to get the sketchbook and pencils. All her cash had gone on the train ticket.

  ‘I’m working, sorry.’

  ‘On what? You’re just sketching.’

  ‘I’m an artist.’

  The woman glared at her. ‘Sorry, my sweet, this little artist girl needs her paper,’ she said to the little boy, who now hung limp and tired on her shoulder. The woman changed course.

  ‘You could draw us? I don’t even have a photograph of him.’

  ‘I’d be happy to.’ Alicia sat up, turned a page. ‘What do you have to trade?’

  The woman dropped her voice. ‘We have some money,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy you lunch at a station stop.’

  ‘Just one lunch? I’m very good,’ Alicia said, flicking through the book to find one of her reproductions of the painting of herself, always her best work. She held it up. ‘I was taught by Pienta. You know?’

  The woman shook her head. ‘Hmm. Okay, one meal. You choose when.’

  ‘Two meals. And coffee. Unlimited. And a pack of cigarettes.’

  The woman laughed, and Alicia saw she was very young, maybe only Alicia’s age, only seemed an adult because she had the child with her. They shook on it. The woman had the calloused hands Alicia recognised.

  ‘Were you in a camp? No, no, don’t pose,’ Alicia said, as the woman prodded the boy to sit up. ‘I’ll watch you for a bit and then find a composition.’

  ‘Yes, for a while, then we left for Tashkent.’

  Alicia nodded, beginning to sketch. ‘My friend Leo did that. She wanted to go south, where it would be warm.’

  ‘It was warm.’

  ‘And … friendly?’

  The woman smiled. ‘Yes. Your friend will have been safe and happy there. You? Tomas, be still.’

  ‘No it’s fine, I don’t need him to stay still. Yes, I was in a camp.’

  ‘One of the better ones?’

  ‘I don’t know. They worked us hard and there was a lot of sickness. Typhoid one year.’

  ‘42.’

  Alicia looked up.

  ‘In Tashkent too,’ the woman said.

  They looked at each other for a moment, seeing loss written on the other’s face, before Alicia dropped her gaze back to her sketch, drawing the woman and Tomas, trying out different positions: his head on her shoulder, or lying in her lap.

  The train lumbered on. There were days of station stops and passengers shuffling on and off, passing gossip and newspapers around, clusters of dead-eyed refugees, sinking back into the hoods of their coats, ghoulish; excited groups of families, nervous single passengers. The same old stories, Alicia thought, the same people with different faces. At night they lay down on the benches like bunks, and Alicia tried to see the stars, to recapture Leo’s voice, the curve of her mother’s face in moonlight through the iron bars of that long-ago truck, but there were only clouds.

  ‘Here,’ she said, as they approached the border crossing into Poland, showing the woman the pencil portrait.

  ‘Oh! It’s …’

  ‘You like it?’

  The boy – the pencilled Tomas – was staring straight out of the paper as he had at Alicia’s buttoned coat, his face fearful. She’d made him younger and his eyes wider, to show the babyish terror. But the woman’s hands clasped at his waist, her fingers interlocking to keep him safe. He sat in her lap, dwarfed by her larger shoulders, a solidity and depth in the pencil marks. Her face was mostly hidden, hair falling over her face as she looked down to him.

  ‘But that isn’t how we—’

  ‘That’s how I see you,’ Alicia explained, the bread the woman had bought her sitting in her belly where it could not be paid back. ‘How you protect him. He’s safe with you.’

  The woman took the picture.

  ‘Look, Tomas, it’s us!’ Her smile was uneven but pretty. ‘Will you sign it?’

  ‘You like it?’

  The woman paused. ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Well, I’ll call it Train Passengers.’

  ‘Rose. Tomas and Rose. Shake the artist lady’s hand, Tomas.’

  ‘Alicia.’

  ‘Alicia,’ Rose repeated, smiling. She turned to kiss Tomas’s head, then added, ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know. I have been. My sister is … she might be in Kraków. And my father.’ She found she could not say Papa, nor speak Karolina’s name.

  ‘I pray you find them,’ Rose said, and Alicia felt terrible hope quickening deep within her.

  Someone called out down the carriage, ‘We’re crossing the border!’

  Guards were waving them through, barely looking up from the platform. Some of the passengers cheered, others hugged each other.

  ‘Tomas, this is Poland! We’re home!’ Rose said softly to him. He pointed at the banners, brightly coloured and fluttering, held up and pinned against walls as they passed.

  Alicia put her fingers against the glass. It was so long since she’d read Polish. She blushed at the strangeness of it, feeling she was betraying home, so used to the ersatz Russian she’d learned. This distracted her from what the banner said. She let her eyes absorb the individual letters. Her mind went to Ursula, writing tight letters with short stems on the bo
ard, the smell of chalk. Rose followed her gaze and took a sharp breath, looked around the carriage to see if everyone had seen what she had seen. She caught Alicia’s eye and Alicia nodded, to show she had. For every carload of coal we get a carload of Jews.

  Rose put her lips against the nape of Tomas’s neck, breathed in. Fear radiated from her. Alicia let it wash around the carriage. She knew she could easily pass, had been doing so since she left the barracks. She’d bought forged papers that pronounced her a Catholic, and she had rehearsed her part well, could recite the Lord’s Prayer, a Hail Mary, all of the Beatitudes, just in case.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Alicia said. But Rose wasn’t listening; she was staring out of the windows as the crowds thickened, holding more banners, shouting, screaming, chanting. ‘Welcome home,’ someone inside the carriage muttered, and a low rumble of bitter laughter rolled through them. Alicia jumped back as rocks hit the windows, splintering them, and Tomas began to cry.

  At the station all was chaos. Alicia knew chaos now, knew how to weave and find a wall for your back, spot an alleyway that led to a quieter place, resist the pull to cluster around those in uniform. Rose and Tomas melted away, her hat bobbing briefly above the bare heads of the crowd, who were pushing each other and chanting spite. Alicia’s chest tightened, more in rage than fear. I’m Polish, she screamed inside her head, I was born here, my father is an important man; lost out there somewhere is a portrait of me, and it is going to save me— a shove knocked her sideways, and she followed the trickle of refugees who had caught the scent of danger in the air and were backing away, out into the city.

  She came out onto the grand Ulica that led away from the station. No one had checked her papers, even now: where were the checkpoints, the lines before guards sitting at tables, the endless clipboards and forms? The Ulica was almost clear of people and traffic, only one bus rumbling over a bridge. The tramlines still criss-crossed the road but the lines had lost their hum and nothing was running. Her unease growing, Alicia crossed to the quayside. She could smell the river, even hear its slosh as it lapped the banks. She looked across to the cityscape, wondering if she could see the Wawel and home. The line of buildings along the river was unblemished. Alicia turned, looking for the demolished houses, the piles of rubble. Something was missing from the air; it took her several paces to realise it was the smoky metallic smell and taste of concrete dust that was absent. She crossed the road and walked up into a side street, trying to get a wider view. She traced her fingers along the perfect smooth brickwork of a closed and shuttered shop. It was as though the city had been emptied and encased in glass, left perfect and barren as a shell.

  She turned her back to the shop, hollowed out by loneliness and exhilaration. No one gave orders or hustled her into groups or lines or gave her papers, and no one knew or cared where she went or what she did now. Somewhere in the city might be her Papa and Karolina, searching for her. They might be breathing this clean air, walking these unblemished streets. She might turn a corner and there they would be, walking together, his arm around her, sharing stories. Alicia let her legs fold and she crouched for a moment in the deserted street, shaking.

  As she approached Bernardyńska, every step she remonstrated with herself, They won’t be. They might be, they could be. It could be that easy. Why not? You stupid child. They won’t be. She tried to ignore the perfection of the unchanged street, the window frames and thick hanging curtains, the gleaming black paint on the front doors. Passing Janina’s building she pulled her old neighbour’s coat tightly around her, sent up a tiny prayer of thanks. A wall of posters in German caught her eye. Someone had begun to tear them down, but the words still called out, half-choked orders and rules, soon to be replaced with Russian ones.

  Her steps slowed as she approached home, dwelling in the last seconds of uncertainty. The blinds were drawn. A pair of plant pots filled with red flowers had been placed on either side of the door. Someone had filled them with care, watered the flowers enough to yield that full bloom. Alicia imagined a tall, blonde woman, a German officer’s wife, patting the soil into place, enjoying her new stolen apartment. In the rush to leave the woman had left them behind. Alicia thought of tearing the flowers out and flinging them across the cobbles, before being struck with the idea that Karolina had planted them.

  The door-knocker sounded like a boom in the quiet street. Alicia put her ear to the door. The clang and crunch of an opening sound made her almost cry out with hope that they would be on the other side of the door: she could almost feel the strength of Papa’s arms around her, the tickle of Karolina’s hair against her cheek.

  ‘Hello?’ a woman’s voice said. Alicia looked around to see her standing in the next doorway. The Friels had lived there. This was a stranger. She spoke in Polish but she might be a German, left behind after the retreat. Alicia nodded to her, knocked on her own door again.

  ‘They’re out,’ the woman said. Alicia looked at her more closely. She wore the same patchwork of clothes as other refugees, as Alicia did: an old pair of shoes, a brown dress under a worn housecoat, no stockings, un-styled hair piled up in a headscarf.

  ‘They? Who lives here?’

  The woman sniffed, looked Alicia up and down in turn. The close promise of her family made Alicia feel almost drunk. ‘Well?’ she said, careless of rudeness, wanting to shake the woman.

  ‘Some Germans were in there,’ the woman said, lighting a cigarette from her housecoat. Her hair escaping from the scarf was white. Alicia turned her thoughts from wondering what the woman had seen. After a long drag the woman offered the cigarette to Alicia, who took it, grateful for the steadying smoke in her throat.

  ‘And now?’ she asked, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs, letting it warm her. She blew out, waiting for the woman to reply, impatient and afraid.

  ‘New people, just arrived.’

  ‘Polish? A man? Woman?’

  ‘If you’re looking for people, you should go to the Red Cross offices. They’re back over the river.’ The woman held out her hand for the return of the cigarette. She eyed Alicia as she sucked on it as hard as a pipe. ‘Yes, Polish, I think. And yes, a young woman, I think, pretty … an older man.’

  ‘Their names? Did you speak to them?’

  ‘No … well,’ the woman leaned against her door, ‘when they first arrived I spoke to the man a little. What are you doing?’

  Alicia settled down on the step, and was running her fingers across the brass shoehorn that still gleamed there. She remembered the feel of its smooth edge against the arch of her feet as she balanced on it, waiting for Janie to take her for a walk.

  ‘I’m waiting for them to come back.’

  ‘People come and go, get sent to different places … I wouldn’t hold your breath.’ She looked down at Alicia for a moment, and glanced at her own front door as though considering inviting her in. Alicia was relieved when instead she shrugged and went back inside.

  The cold came on quickly. She watched the light crawl down a turret of the Wawel. No streetlamps came on, and the city remained quiet, so that footsteps and voices travelled. She would hear them coming.

  The strange, still quiet of the city was especially unnerving overnight, but Janina’s coat was thick and warm. When she woke again, it was to the woman from next door, the not-Mrs-Friel, gently shaking her arm, telling her it was almost dawn. It took Alicia a long time to surface again, and realise she was home.

  40

  JOZEF HAD BEEN UP all night, trying to work while Hanna was asleep. Distracted for a while by her deep breaths and the memory of her warm skin on his in the narrow, hard bed, he’d soon sunk into the sketch. Hanna was too loud, somehow. Not in her voice, which was low and sweet, but in the space she took up in his vision: her body and hair and the awareness of where she was in the room always distracted him from a piece if she was awake. Trying and failing to sketch in the early weeks of their affair while she wrote in the corner, tiny scrawl in the notebook on her lap, her bare, thick legs str
etched across the dirty floor, was the first time he had realised he had fallen in love with her, and his surprise was so great he had stared at the canvas for several minutes, before pacing the room as she watched him, amused and curious. Awake, she drew him too far from the half-awake state he needed to work well. Asleep, he could hold her separate from him for a few hours.

  The sun was coming up now over the tenement blocks of the neighbourhood, not far from Jozef’s old apartment. A dreary bird cheep, monotone and half-hearted, irritated him. He looked behind him for the first time in hours to see Hanna’s bare feet sticking out from the covers, her large toes. He loved how solid she was, her thick waist and her heaviness, as though under her warm flesh were a skeleton made of steel.

  He looked back at the sketch, to the spot where a grey smudge showed the space where Karolina’s figure had been. He ran a finger over the space, staining his knuckles further with charcoal. Karolina’s tiny bird-like limbs and the delicacy of her fingers came to him. The familiar dread soon followed, of how impossible it was that she had not been swallowed up, so young and trusting and loving and open and soft as a ripe peach. He tried to remember the feel of her in his arms, but could only think of the texture of Hanna’s body. He let his gaze fall to the others in the sketched room. A crowd scene: figures holding glasses and throwing back their heads in laughter. In the background, a familiar window. One of the faces was sketched in more detail, a terrified grimace forming in the pencil lines. Adam, his suit’s sharp lines exaggerated at the shoulder, his fear made raw at the surface. There was Anna, just the suggestion of a dress, a line to show a hand clinking glasses with another. Amid the other, nameless figures stood Alicia, leaning against the wall, watching. Her face was clearest, layered in his memory by months of sketching that long-ago portrait. She stared out at him now in miniature, challenging him to finish. Not for the first time, he felt the heaviness of the truth that he was painting ghosts, and that everyone in the piece was dead.