The Light at the End of the Day

by Eleanor Wasserberg

  Jozef offered another useless I’m sorry and they drew together as the sky gave up the last of its light. The glow of the odd lamp in the windows of buildings made it seem like people were camping in the heart of the city.

  ‘What will you do?’ Jozef asked.

  ‘I need money.’

  ‘Yes, we all need that.’

  ‘I’d hoped … somehow the portrait of me had come back to you. Or you’d know where to look,’ she said.

  ‘Someone might have picked it up,’ he offered, opening his hands in a gesture of hope, ‘and … it’s on a wall somewhere, or …’

  ‘Or more likely it just got smashed and buried in the mud where we left it.’

  ‘I loved the painting too, Alicia. It meant a lot to me.’ He found her hand, gave it a squeeze.

  Alicia looked at him. She could only see his profile now, looking down at his shoes, or into his hands. She gripped her sketchbook, smothered laughter at how he had misunderstood her. The painting could still save her.

  42

  HANNA STILL HAD the Oderfeldt file. Gripped between her fingers in the initial daze as she walked Alicia home that day, she’d transferred it to the inner pocket of her home-sewn jacket, carrying Jozef’s letters and Karolina’s name next to her heart. Every day for a week, while Jozef and Alicia worked, she carried it back and forth across the river, still so elated by the miracle of Alicia – a real, flesh and blood ghost come to life, and not the ghost that could shred all her happiness to pieces – that for those days she forgot the file, its portraits of desperate searching in paper and ink.

  One night, sharing stone-like bread and what Hanna termed ‘mystery soup’, Jozef and Alicia wearing the same slightly haunted, exhausted expression, lost in the world they were rebuilding across the city, Alicia blinked and asked, ‘Hanna, is there no news?’

  Hanna licked soup from the back of her hand where it had dripped from a mangled spoon. ‘Plenty! Today there was another miracle. A woman and her husband – he’d walked, walked all the way from Kazakhstan! And she had been hiding in the city. There’s so many,’ she added, abandoning the spoon and lifting the bowl to her lips to drink, ‘like fairy-tale people coming out of the forests and from under the floors!’

  Jozef rubbed the back of his neck while Alicia stared at Hanna. Hanna drained her soup. ‘Of course, you mean about Karolina—’

  ‘Or my Papa,’ Alicia said.

  ‘You have been enquiring?’ Jozef prompted.

  ‘Of course.’

  Satisfied, Alicia and Jozef sat back and fell into low conversation again about their project. It was a feeling akin to the worst of dreams: a prickling horror that spread through Hanna’s limbs and stomach. She felt the file, heavy and sharp against her breast, wondered if she was evil or mad or both. The next day she slid the file back into place, feeling like a thief. She looked around as she did so, distracted as though about to be caught out in a terrible crime, and so she did not notice the slip of paper that had been placed where the file had been, a query that had come in for Oderfeldt that morning, from a thin young woman with wild brown hair.

  Across the city, Jozef and Alicia were standing in the Oderfeldt apartment, catching the light between their fingers as it filtered through the Wawel and the magically unshattered window glass of the drawing room. Muffled footsteps from next door’s flat and the small scratch of paper as it ruffled in the draught were the only sounds. Both artists barely breathed, trying to find something.

  The apartment was a shell. The first morning they’d come, Alicia had sped from room to room like a little girl, exclaiming over the missing furniture and the spaces on the walls where paintings had been. The neighbour she’d met on her first night back in Kraków stood with Jozef on the stairs, listening to Alicia run from room to room. She offered Jozef a cigarette.

  ‘You knew each other before?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jozef replied, taking the cigarette with a grateful nod and letting her light it.

  ‘There was a couple here for a while, but they’re gone. You may as well stay here for now until you get moved on.’

  ‘Yes!’ Alicia called down the stairs, her voice echoing against the wood. ‘This is where they’ll come first if they come back.’

  That night they tried to sleep there, Hanna and Jozef curled up together by a fire in Adam’s study, and Alicia on the floor of her parents’ bedroom. They’d brought blankets and some other meagre comforts – a kettle, Jozef’s art supplies – but the hollowed-out rooms, picked clean of everything from the old life that had been lived there, made the skin on Jozef’s back prickle, as though he was trespassing on forbidden ground. He and Hanna quickly moved back to their cramped room across the river, and Alicia ate dinner with them every night before returning home, climbing through an open window into the kitchen.

  For Alicia, the furnishings didn’t matter. The rooms were hers, how the light fell through each window belonged to her, and the sound of the taps and the settling floors. Here she could pick her fingers along and name the missing books, changing the titles as she liked, depending on who she was missing most. A deep calm descended on her: she had done what she must, and come home, and now if her Papa and Karolina were alive they only needed to find their way back too. She felt her way around her old room, touching the walls, but when she came to her old hiding place, the memory of the day they had left pressing on her, stuffing Karolina’s letters and her own sketches there, she stopped. She would wait until Karolina was here, she thought, knowing it was a lie to herself, and she was simply not strong enough, yet, to bruise her heart with relics.

  Jozef and Alicia stood looking at the beginnings of the new Portrait of Girl in a Red Dress.

  ‘That line is wrong.’

  ‘No, that’s perfect, it’s this part,’ Alicia curved a finger around the edge of the shape, ‘it’s a little too wide.’

  ‘All right. Stand there again.’

  She took up position, as she had years before, her hand placed just so, the light hitting the top of her head. Jozef began to sink beneath the surface of the light to find the sketch again, just as Alicia said, ‘I’m going to paint her myself, once you’ve got the sketch in.’

  ‘Oh?’ He was surprised how stung he felt by this. ‘Then it really will be a forged Pienta.’ He gave a small laugh. ‘Why not just let me paint her?’

  Alicia waited a few seconds, trying to find the answer. ‘I want to see if I can.’

  ‘But I’ve already … found the colours again. In my head, I mean.’

  ‘So have I.’

  ‘I’d like to do it. I can’t explain,’ he said. She looked at him with a cool patience that gave him a shock of grief for Anna. ‘It’s …’ he tried. ‘I want to say goodbye, with it. Paint it for your mother and Karolina.’

  ‘She might come back yet.’

  He dropped his eyes back to the sketch.

  They did separate sketches of the face first, Jozef’s partly from Alicia’s face now, and partly from memory of the lost girl he’d painted in 1938; for Alicia, this was an exercise she’d completed whenever she could get her hands on pencils and paper. They asked Hanna to judge one night back over the river, showing her their books by lamplight.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about drawing.’

  ‘But which is better, more interesting?’ Jozef pressed. He’d found drawing the young girl again had opened wells of sadness in him, but he was satisfied with the way he’d captured her again: the tiny smile, the slightly knitted brows. Adam’s view of her face softened by a father’s love and pride.

  ‘This one.’

  ‘Ha!’ Alicia threw back her head in delight. Jozef caught her joy as she rocked back and forth with it, the first time he had seen her laugh since her return, and the three of them made a circle of brief delight, emanating from Alicia and wrapping up the lovers.

  ‘Sorry, my love,’ Hanna whispered, and Jozef shook his head, smiling. He looked at Alicia’s sketch and his happiness was quelled and deepened at o
nce: he looked at Alicia again with a fierce respect. ‘Yes, it’s better,’ he said. Alicia had failed in the exercise: it wasn’t the same face at all. The eyes were darker, older, less serene. The small smile was almost untraceable. But it was a better, a truer face. Not a self-portrait exactly, nor a replica of the girl she had been, but something of both: a lost world and new forged one shown in nothing but flakes of lead.

  By that time they’d finished the sketch, finding again the shape of the little girl Alicia had been, tracing the fall of her once thick hair around her shoulders as it now hung limp, and imagining the fall of the long-gone dress. The paint was hard to come by, especially the red. People laughed when they heard what the eccentric survivor was looking for, thinking him brain-addled by the war, ‘Paint? Are you going to eat it? Are you going to write slogans on the walls? Enough of that!’, but he found enough to mix a darker, rustier version of Alicia’s red dress.

  ‘We could use some blood,’ Alicia said, when Jozef showed her the mix.

  ‘Don’t be so dramatic,’ Hanna called from her spot under the window. She liked to sit there after work and watch Jozef paint, just as Karolina had once done. Neither Alicia or Jozef spoke of the way their hearts ached when she did that, for Jozef loved her too much and Alicia was too afraid to speak of how with every day without Karolina’s arrival, her hope of seeing her sister again was draining.

  ‘It’s too dark,’ Alicia countered.

  ‘Yes, the original was brighter. But no one will remember that. It just needs to be close enough.’

  ‘Mix it again. More vermilion.’

  Over days Jozef focused on the folds of the dress fabric, using Alicia’s sketches and their shared memories to recreate them. The darkness between the red seemed deeper than before, and the colour didn’t sing in the same way, but it was deep and rich, and in the evening light he found the shine in it with touches of white and gold. While he worked on the dress, Alicia was painting her childhood hair, finding Janie’s careful brushing there and the way she would twirl her fingers through it to make it curl. She remembered how Jozef’s original had lightened her hair to gold, making the sunlight kiss the top of her head and fall in a gleam across her shoulder. This was the way her Papa had seen her, and so she poured his love into each brushstroke. She painted, too, the skin of her old self’s arms, exclaiming over their plumpness and holding out her thin, sallow skin next to the canvas. At first they dripped paint on each other and swore as they got in each other’s way, but soon found they worked in silent ease, sometimes stopping to watch and enjoy the other’s colours. Finally Alicia worked on her own ghost’s face, while Jozef, in the sunset pink light, painted Karolina’s roses in the background.

  Day after day slipped by in the strange quiet. No news came of their lost ones, and Hanna came every evening and watched them work, bringing stories of hope and questions about dinner. They would then walk to the old neighbourhood to cook and eat. The artists both knew they were in the last days of the work, and began to feel nervous.

  ‘Hanna, do you think it will pass?’ Alicia asked, on what would be the last day of this time.

  ‘I don’t know, I never saw the first one.’

  ‘But do you think it’s good?’ Jozef asked.

  ‘My love, all your paintings are magnificent.’

  ‘It’s finished,’ Alicia said, as Jozef paused with a dripping brush. ‘Don’t add anything.’

  ‘Just a few spots of—’

  ‘No, it’s finished. You should sign it.’

  While he did so, she took his other hand and kissed it. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘So it’s done?’ Hanna came over, wrapped her arms around Jozef’s waist. He leaned into her. ‘Come and stay with us tonight, Alicia. We’ll celebrate. Find some liquor somewhere. Bring the painting there, Jozef, so it isn’t left alone overnight, in case someone else discovers this place.’

  That night Alicia watched them by lamplight, Hanna curled into the crook of Jozef’s arm. His face had lost some of its withering, softened by the flamelight and the living love in his arms, and whatever exorcism had been cast by remaking their painting. Laughing along to a joke Hanna had made that she had barely listened to, Alicia changed her mind: she wouldn’t go back for the letters, hidden in the skirting board of her room, and she wouldn’t find a discreet moment to give them to Jozef. Let them lie there safe in the dark, until Karolina came back, if she ever came back. Let Hanna and Jozef stay entwined in each other’s arms like this until then.

  ‘What will you do?’ Hanna asked, breaking into Alicia’s thoughts.

  ‘Hope the first painting stays lost,’ Alicia said.

  ‘I mean if it works. You’ll stay in Kraków? You and Jozef could start a forgery business,’ Hanna said, laughing. Jozef met Alicia’s eyes and smiled a sad smile, knowing already her reply.

  ‘I want to leave Poland, if my family is gone.’

  ‘But we can be your family. Jozef and I love you.’ Hanna was surprised by herself, realising it was true. Karolina’s sister! Perhaps it was only guilt, at her relief the older girl had never come back, but looking at this small, tense young ghost of Jozef’s old life, cross-legged on the floor, Hanna felt real warmth in her chest.

  ‘I want to leave too,’ Jozef said. ‘We can use the money for visas and travel, if it works,’ he added, taking Hanna’s hand, ‘and get married there.’

  ‘Where?’

  Jozef shrugged, smiling. ‘I don’t know. How’s your English? Canada is taking people. America too … Britain.’

  ‘Not Britain. I don’t want anywhere that was bombed,’ Hanna said.

  The three passed the rest of the evening making each other laugh with bits of broken English, trying different accents from the radio, imagining the food, the clothes, the houses and railway stations and markets. Somewhere in the currents of their conversation, it was agreed that wherever they went, it would be together.

  Kraków, 1946

  43

  MAURICE SAUNTERED AROUND new pieces for secret sale, brought in from he didn’t ask where. He was looking for his own work, to feel the queasy thrill of how it fitted in, to anxiously check it was passing. He’d made a hash of a recent piece, rushed and with the wrong type of canvas, so the whole thing was blasted from the foundations up, everything smeared and the colours bleeding into each other. He came close to getting arrested when he took it to a private collector, so now he preferred the safer, bribery-greased route of the gallery, and to walk first through the gallery rooms, listen to the whispered hush-hush conversations (for it was taboo, in this new world, to buy and sell; everything belonged to everyone, in this new Poland). He stood back from his own piece, a Milo Zysk. He knew the original had been burned along with most of Milo’s other pieces, and with Milo himself, poor bastard, in a Dresden raid. It hadn’t taken him long to start sourcing photographs and sketches from Milo’s set, and to get to work. Satisfied, he kept walking, smiling at an officer who was pontificating to his girlfriend about the artist’s promising young life cut tragically short. He wanted to impress her, and would pay well, Maurice suspected, if he could only engineer a sale.

  Maurice was on his way towards the officer when he caught sight of the painting, looked into the girl’s face. He had the same vague recognition as seeing a grown school friend, something in the face that sparks the brain, something that makes the time fall away, and he almost spoke to the girl in the painting, almost opened his mouth, right there in the gallery, almost asked, ‘Don’t I know you?’

  He looked at the girl’s almost-smile, her serene face, and memories flickered all around him: parties, artists, those rich, rich families and their beautiful rooms. Maurice leaned forward to find the muddy scrawl of the artist’s name. Jozef. Of course.

  He stepped close to the painting again, forgetting his officer and his easy money; there would be others.

  A party on Bernardyńska. Yes, that was right. He’d been invited to a party with the smart Bernardyńska set and their satellite artist
s, his friend Ben had arranged it. Just before the war. She’d been hanging in a drawing room full of modern pieces, that little circle that clustered around the university set did good work. He’d forged something for the host, made quite a lot, and gone along to see it on the walls and enjoy the thrill of fooling them all. Maurice felt, for a moment, the heat of that night, how stuffy the room had been, all of them swimming in cigar smoke, until the host – Oderfeldt, Adam Oderfeldt, of course, there was a portrait of him, somewhere, probably here, also good – until Oderfeldt threw open, theatrically, the huge doors, letting in the cooler night air, and they all cooed over the Wawel, its lights glowing against the late pink skies of summer. Had the girl from the painting been there? Must have been, there were always the sons and daughters of the house milling around, to show off their piano playing, singing, French. But he couldn’t remember her, or what her real name had been. But here was her painted self. The family were Jews, Maurice remembered with a jolt, and as he did so this wisp of the girl’s old world, and her real name, he allowed to evaporate, realising he was looking at a ghost.

  He went to his usual contact, a short, sweaty man with frightened eyes. He put Maurice in mind of a mole, all wringing hands and darting looks at the floor: he was altogether wrong for this line of work.

  ‘No nibbles yet, Maurice,’ the man said, ‘on your piece.’

  ‘Milo’s piece, Kristopher. I’m merely passing on what I found. For the good of the nation.’

  ‘Of course.’ Kristopher gave a nervous laugh.

  ‘I’m just wondering about another piece,’ Maurice murmured. ‘Pienta, made quite a splash before the war.’

  ‘Oh! Yes, we’re excited for that one. To have it back, I mean, for the people to enjoy. Came in a year ago.’