The Light at the End of the Day

by Eleanor Wasserberg

  Karolina had been haunting him more intensely since he had found Hanna like a miraculous blooming fruit on a dead tree. When he and Hanna agreed to marry, start a family and live, he had a felt a rush of terror, something between hope and guilt, and he’d returned to the apartment on Bernardyńska, begun trying to paint Karolina again for the first time in years. She was elusive, escaping into the canvas and hiding behind other figures, or remaining stubbornly two-dimensional, too betrayed and hurt to show herself.

  Hanna shifted and gave a low purring sound like a waking cat. Jozef went back to her, clung to her, living and real and half-awake.

  ‘You’ve been up all night, sleep,’ she murmured, laughing as his hands wandered over her body, across her stomach and hips. Like everyone, she’d had days and weeks of no food, months and years of malnutrition, but except for her hips sometimes bruising his own with their edge, she was healthy and strong. Jozef buried his face in her shoulder, breathed deeply, smiled into her neck, held her so tightly she gasped.

  ‘Will you sleep today?’ she asked him later, both sweat-slicked and exhausted by sex and guilt-laced happiness.

  He cupped her face in his hands and she smiled at him. ‘No, I’m going on a sort of pilgrimage.’

  Hanna had cut her hair short with a pair of rusty scissors she’d found in the kitchen when they first started squatting in the empty block. She ran her fingers through the jagged spot at the back of her beautiful strong neck. ‘Shall I come too?’

  ‘Don’t you have work today?’

  Hanna nodded, shrugged. She was a volunteer, helping with the administration of lives and bodies flung across Europe and back again. She got a free lunch of grey sandwich and weak coffee, but no money, though they’d been promised they would be taken care of as things settled, and the best workers given good jobs by the new government. ‘I don’t have to go.’

  ‘But you should.’

  ‘And where is this quest?’

  ‘Here in the city.’

  She smiled at him but with her head cocked to one side. It was rare for him not to confide in her, but she kissed him deeply, and silently began to get ready for work. Pulling her skirt over her hips she glanced at him as he watched her from the bed.

  ‘Do you want me to look for her again?’ she asked, keeping her voice as level as she could.

  He shook his head. ‘I know you tried.’

  ‘People are coming back all the time.’ Hanna fiddled with the clasp on her skirt, avoiding her lover’s eye, but when his silence drew her gaze to him, in spite of herself, he wasn’t looking at her at all, but back at the beginnings of his painting.

  The Red Cross offices were housed in the Jagiellonian, sprawling over three floors where piles of boxes and documents sat, holding lives: deportations, letters, queries, photographs, all the terrible bureaucracy and chaos of the years since the radio had propelled Janina out of her apartment and towards the Oderfeldts’ door. Hanna and the women like her – they were all women – sat behind the heavily marked desks, tracing the grooves of old graffiti with their fingers in rare slow moments. They offered quick, efficient smiles to the queues of returning lost ones, asked them to spell out names, give dates, the snippets of evidence that could lead to the truth, closure, or the dead brought back to life. Every person in the queue held a terrible hope, perhaps in the way they bit their lips or wound their sleeves around their hands. Even the hard-faced ones, the ones with ribs sticking out so far they seemed walking nightmares, had the tiniest flecks of that hope, and left the offices with either something taken from them forever, or with longing gouged open, painful as an open wound.

  Ignoring the gathering lines, longer every day, Hanna pulled open a cabinet of box files and began rifling through. There were the photographs, faces staring out: find me. Names and details and dates. She looked under both O and P. Jozef had told Hanna that Karolina might use his name, that in their early letters, when she had been washed away to Lwów before he could get to her, and he had been swept away himself into the army, they had referred to themselves as already married.

  Under O, she quickly found the file. There were the five enquiries from the aunt in Lwów: moving from polite, laywer-like language to shrill paragraph after paragraph. Hanna scanned one of the letters, finding familiar phrases. Can’t you help? I have no one left. Then the letters stopped in 1941, the poor lady caught up in the catastrophe of Lwów. Only yesterday Hanna had confided in Jozef her fear that she was losing her humanity in the sea of misery that washed up at the offices every day. She’d quoted this very phrase at him: Can’t you help? I have no one left. It’s meaningless now, Hanna said, curled in Jozef’s arms. I can’t hear the sadness of it anymore; perhaps there’s something breaking inside me. But reading the aunt’s handwriting, scrawling and quick, seeing the careful folds of the paper, imagining this woman, who searched for Jozef’s old love, tucking the letter into the envelope, she wished truly for the first time that Karolina could have been found, for this Margo’s sake. Then there were her Jozef’s own queries, one after the other, week after week at first, then monthly, before dwindling to nothing.

  Hanna double-checked. Nothing else. She filled out a new enquiry form for their sister offices, ignoring the tightness of her chest, the rising fear that she could be stitching together a future of her own heartbreak. She typed out copies of the letters and stuffed everything into envelopes, as her colleagues bustled around her carrying out the same paperwork for the people trickling in in their lines, for friends, lovers and themselves. It felt impossible, Hanna thought, that anyone ever found anyone again. Her own lost ones, her parents and brother and nieces, had died with their hands in hers, something she had not realised at the time would come to feel like a luxury.

  ‘There, Jozef,’ she said, putting the envelopes into the out tray. Silently, she added, to the spirit of a woman she’d never meet, ‘There, Margo.’ And somewhere beyond the reach of Hanna’s own awareness an inner voice spoke to Karolina: Please, please, please stay lost.

  When she returned to her desk, Hanna smiled an apology as her colleague slapped her on the arm and asked, ‘Can’t you do that in your break? Some have been waiting all night—’

  ‘Sorry. Yes, who’s next please?’ Hanna liked the sound of her voice in this place, comforting and sure. She knew Jozef loved that about her and tried to live up to it, always calm in his presence. The two women she’d addressed glanced at each other, making an invisible agreement. One stepped forward. She was slight and had a sharp, angular face, dark brown eyes. Her hair was cut short, curling around her ears.

  ‘Yes, I’m next,’ the woman said. ‘What do I need to … um … I have papers, but …’ she hesitated, drawing them from the pocket of a surprisingly good old-fashioned coat.

  ‘Are they fakes?’ Hanna asked, in a low voice so as not to frighten the woman away. The woman nodded.

  ‘We see that a lot. You can still enquire. Name?’

  ‘Mine, or the people I’m …?’

  ‘Give me the name of the person you’re searching for first, then we’ll fill out a form.’

  ‘I’m looking for several … all Oderfeldt, is the name. And … um. Just look for Oderfeldt first please.’

  Hanna almost laughed. ‘Oderfeldt? But I was just …’ Hanna gestured behind her. She used the moments of turning her head to take a deep breath, and wipe at her hopelessly stinging eyes. ‘I was just looking at that file.’

  ‘Did someone come looking for me?’

  ‘I was just, I was just this second … it’s … right back here, one moment please …’

  The woman leaned over the desk. ‘Who was it?’ she called after Hanna, who had moved mechanically, shocked, back to the boxes of files. ‘Are they here?’ the woman looked around.

  ‘But maybe there are several families with that name,’ Hanna gabbled, her hands shaking a little as she brought the file forward. ‘It might not be …’ She looked into the woman’s face, alight with that familiar look of terrified yea
rning. A sudden urge to embrace the woman came over her, at war with the building dread in her throat.

  ‘It’s … Karolina, isn’t it?’ Hanna asked. ‘I – this is your file.’ She found her throat choking the words, ‘Jozef is looking for you.’

  ‘Karolina, yes, yes, I’m looking for Karolina and Adam. Oderfeldt. Are they … is Karolina here? Sorry, I don’t understand, can you? Please, are they here? Are they looking for me?’ Alicia stared at the woman behind the desk. ‘Are you crying? What did you say about Jozef?’

  41

  HANNA TOOK ALICIA deep into her mother’s old neighbourhood, over the river and down narrow cobbled streets Alicia had never seen before. It was nothing like Moscow, where the buildings were bursting with people, children spilling out of doorways, people hanging out of windows. Their footsteps echoed on the cobbles. When a child ran across the road in front of them, Alicia jumped. Hanna glanced behind as though worried Alicia would take a wrong turn or disappear, while Alicia trailed her, feeling relief so powerful it was like a teeth-rattling blow to the face: one of the ghosts had come back and was real, flesh, and that meant she wasn’t alone; she had a place to begin.

  They came to the steps of a tenement block. A line of washing hung from a window and some wide-eyed children in dirty clothes clustered around the door. One of them held out a begging hand to Alicia, who ignored it, opening her hands to show they were empty.

  ‘Come on,’ Hanna called.

  She led Alicia through the bottom floor, mattresses and blankets scattered, sheets hung between alcoves to make little private spaces, like children’s forts, but all empty. A pair of voices drifted from behind a wall.

  The light had almost gone. The room was lit by one small lamp on the floor. Hanna tutted at it, muttered, ‘Waste!’ and gestured for Alicia to follow her in.

  Jozef was standing in a trance by his sketch, his fingers covered in charcoal hovering around Karolina’s blurred face. He didn’t hear them come in, and didn’t move until Hanna went to touch his arm. ‘My love,’ she said. ‘You’ll never imagine who came into the office today. Look.’

  Alicia stood with her arms folded around herself, unprepared for Jozef’s face as he turned. Years and grief told around his eyes and mouth, his thinner cheeks. He smiled at her.

  ‘Taking in waifs?’ he asked Hanna, and touched his lover’s hair as she wound her arms around him. ‘We can share some food with you tonight,’ he added to Alicia. ‘Then Hanna can help you with where you could go next. She always—’

  ‘Jozef,’ Hanna interrupted him.

  ‘Jozef, don’t you recognise me?’

  Alicia came to the easel. Jozef was still as Hanna moved away to make space. He watched Alicia look at the sketch and then hover her fingers, just as he had done, over the pencil-line people. ‘Isn’t this …?’ she said.

  Jozef felt laughter or tears or both build in his throat. ‘Alicia, is it you? You look so—’

  He broke off, shocked, as she gripped him around the waist in a fierce hug, put her head against his chest. He put his arms gently around her, looked at Hanna, whose tears glinted in the lamplight.

  ‘Are you all right?’ He pushed her back softly, held her by the arms. ‘But of course it’s you. Look at those dark eyes, just the same. Are you … where did you go? I know it was Lwów first. Your parents and … and Karolina?’

  ‘Jozef, don’t ask too many things at once,’ Hanna said. ‘Let’s have a drink. Apparently Greta in the next block found some vodka. I’ll – you two stay here a moment.’ Her heavy tread echoed all the way out into the street.

  Jozef kissed Alicia’s hand, his chapped lips a scratching scrap of affection.

  ‘I don’t want to ask you too many questions, but your sister—’

  ‘Mama died. I don’t know where Karolina and Papa are.’

  Alicia paused, remembering the slick of sweat on her mother’s face, how she’d brought back the old joke, Alicia, won’t you tell them I’m friends with Stalin, tell them to get me a doctor, Stalin knows me, do you remember? When she died, it was mid-sentence, talking in delirium, France, France, I still can’t believe it, Margo. With Edie and little Marc …

  Jozef was flicking through a kaleidoscope of memories: Adam, gesticulating wildly with his pipe, full of passion about some new project. Anna in an evening gown, smiling at him through red lips as she lit another cigarette. Karolina, still lost, in his arms.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, hating the hollow sound of it. ‘Your mother was—’ I can’t do it in words, he thought. I’ll have to paint Anna as I remember her.

  ‘She tried hard not to die,’ Alicia said. ‘She was angry about it.’

  ‘But Karolcia? The last letter I had from her was from Lwów. Then nothing. I tried to find out—’

  ‘You forgot about her. That woman is your new lover.’ Alicia was surprised by the shades of a forgotten voice returning: petulant and young. She could have stamped her foot like her old self, glared, thrown things. It might feel good to do those things, like acting in a play, like the way she fell into conversations in her head with Papa, and she was always careful to play the role of the girl he knew. When she looked at Jozef she felt a lurch of grief, as though his horror was flooding the room. He had covered his face with his hands, and the effect was so childlike that she put her arms around his waist again.

  ‘Never,’ he said.

  ‘She might still come back,’ Alicia said. ‘We’ll look for her.’

  Jozef wiped his face and when his hands came down again he had smoothed his features over, recomposed himself.

  ‘I went to your old apartment today.’

  Alicia laughed in surprise. ‘But I was just there.’

  ‘Did you go inside?’ Jozef asked.

  ‘No, there was a neighbour I spoke to … there are people staying there.’

  ‘Not today,’ he shrugged. ‘There’s a window you can get through in the back.’ He blushed. ‘I’ve been a few times, when I’m working on paintings from that time. It helps.’ He rubbed his face again. ‘Have some tea, it’s awful but – you just arrived, you must be starving—’

  ‘I ate a little on the journey,’ Alicia said as Jozef moved to the tiny kitchen, a line of hot plates along a wall. ‘I sold some sketches,’ she added, trying to suppress the pride in her voice.

  He stopped bustling around a stove and looked at her, a cigarette held between his teeth. His haggard face was transformed for a moment. ‘You still draw?’

  ‘Yes, I’m good.’

  He laughed. ‘Alicia, that’s wonderful. Show me, show me,’ he said, holding up a finger to wait a moment while he made the tea.

  ‘You were lucky,’ he said, lighting the stove. ‘I hope you know you were lucky that Anna got you out. Show me, come on!’

  ‘Come outside, the light is no good in here.’

  So they sat on the step under a glowing sky as they sipped the weak tea. Hanna stayed away, chatting with neighbours and letting them be. Alicia showed him the sketches of Tomas and Rose, feeling safer with strangers to start with. Jozef was silent for a while, and she began to feel hopeless, until he began nodding and moving his fingers over the points that mattered: the clasped hands and the boy’s eyes.

  ‘How was the final drawing?’

  ‘Good,’ she said.

  ‘Show me more,’ he said, glancing up at the sky. ‘We have a few minutes.’

  So she showed him the barn, the way she had tried to capture the warm sweetness of the hay in pencil lines. She showed him Margo’s house and the little room and fireplace, the chairs they had slept in, Janina’s hands around a clutch of sewing. She showed him Margo in a cramped kitchen, the ceiling brushing her bent back, and then Margo-in-layers: a piece she’d only finished a few weeks before, Margo’s faces lifting off one after the other, the beautiful sweetness of Margo’s true face left while her hands held the others. She hesitated and then showed him her mother’s face in profile, looking from a window in a thunderstorm, then again l
ying next to Leo with the light split by the barred windows, and the sketches of Anna’s broken and splitting hands. She showed him her older ghosts: Papa’s face and figure, often in motion, walking towards the frame, purposeful, his arms already open for an embrace. And finally Karolina, curled up like a sleeping seed inside flowers and vegetables, the back of her hair as she leaned over a book, her figure standing on the stairs in the Bernardyńska apartment. Alicia looked away as Jozef looked at these, his breath shallow. She kept looking away as he closed the sketchbook and wiped his face with the back of his sleeve. It was cold now that the sun had disappeared behind the pristine buildings and they sat shivering in the dusk.

  ‘They’re good.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You have lots of our painting in there.’

  ‘Yes – wait, I didn’t show you those.’

  ‘You’re a little off on the lines, but the details are almost perfect.’

  Alicia felt herself flush.

  ‘Where are all your pieces from before?’ she asked.

  Jozef shrugged. ‘All the unsold ones from my studio are just … gone. Some of them from good families like yours were seized. It was chaos.’

  ‘Where do you think my portrait is?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘We took it with us to Lwów.’

  ‘You kept it? I’m pleased.’ The thought of that portrait, that summer distilled in paint, travelling with his Karolcia, made him warm. ‘So it’s in Lwów, with your family? But that’s wonderful! You should sell it, Alicia, I don’t mean to brag but I think it will fetch—’

  ‘No, we lost it on the way. The same moment we lost Papa.’ Alicia remembered how she had cried out for her painting, how important it had seemed. As though they could hold it out like a talisman or a weapon, a symbol of who they were. Reaching further back, her memory offered up a glimpse of the monster in Glowny Square who had so frightened her on her birthday years before. She couldn’t remember or imagine how the two, the painting and that very first attack, were connected in her mind. Instead she thought of Papa sprawled helpless on the ice, with an answering squirm in her guts, still, after everything. She felt pinpricks of gladness that this and the moment in the mud outside Kraków were the worst she had seen of her Papa in the new world that had avalanched over them.