The Light at the End of the Day

by Eleanor Wasserberg

  ‘But where did you get it? From … one of my colleagues?’

  ‘It was found in an attic, right here in the city! Hidden, you know, like so many of them … but this one was found and returned.’ Kristopher dropped his voice, began walking towards the painting. ‘It’s to be a very carefully managed sale, very delicate.’

  ‘Who brought her in?’ Maurice asked. He was becoming excited, but quelled the movement of his arms, willed his skin to stay pale. Kristopher, though always on edge, had nothing of the guardedness, the nerves, of someone who knew he was sitting on a potential fortune.

  ‘The couple who found her. It was all managed quietly. I paid a significant amount. It’s the original, I’m certain.’

  ‘I’ll give you five hundred for her. I knew the artist, one of my old friends,’ he added, with just enough sorrow to be convincing, a small shake as he rubbed at his eyes. ‘He was arrested very early, disappeared. He was engaged to be married, you know … terrible. I’d so like to have it.’

  ‘So you can flood the market with copies,’ Kristopher whispered, and snorted.

  ‘And devalue the work of a mourned friend?’

  Kristopher opened his mouth to retort, fell silent as a group of twittering visitors passed, rubbed at his bald patch.

  ‘It’s complicated. The family have made a claim.’

  It was Maurice’s turn to snort. ‘You mean a servant, or a third cousin.’

  ‘Obviously we don’t want a scene, or authorities …’

  ‘Of course not,’ Maurice said, wondering if he could get his work out of there in time, if the gallery with its secret deals was to be investigated.

  ‘So we’ll take a cut, enough to cover the original sale, and sell it on for her if she agrees.’

  ‘Sell it to me,’ Maurice said. ‘What is she asking for it?’

  Kristopher gave a wet little sniff. ‘We’ll need to set up a meeting.’

  The painting was taken down, covered again, and carried out by Maurice and Kristopher, after hours, into a new room full of more lost things.

  The seller was waiting. She was vastly pregnant, holding her hands over her belly and shifting her weight from foot to foot. Her hair had been wrestled into a bun and wisps escaped around her face. As he set the painting down and approached, Maurice assessed her face. It had the hardened look some carried these days, weary and sad but with an underlayer of steel. The woman’s husband patrolled around the room, shooting worried looks at the door.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Kristopher said. ‘It’s just us.’

  The man whispered something to his pregnant wife and she waved him away.

  ‘Maurice,’ he said, holding out his hand and studying her face. He could see a slight resemblance, but she could still be a crook. He was good at spotting his own kind.

  ‘Karolina,’ she said, her grip firm. ‘I understand you want to buy my painting.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m hoping to take it with me to England.’

  ‘But it’s been sold to the nation,’ Maurice said, with his full, perfect smile.

  ‘Whoever found it had no right to sell it. It belongs to my family. If there’s a problem,’ she glanced at her husband, who nodded, ‘we’ll have to report it to the authorities, and—’

  ‘Mrs Garside, please, we’ve already agreed …’ Kristopher wheedled.

  ‘I didn’t mean to offend you,’ Maurice soothed. ‘Only the painting means so much to me. Jozef was a dear friend, you see.’

  The woman stiffened, and he saw he had mis-stepped. She turned away, then back with a surprising sharpness to her movement, given the heaviness of her body. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. Her voice had changed, softened to a tremulous, thin sound. Maurice was torn between guilt and elation: he had unwittingly peeled away a layer of armour without even trying, laid her bare, ready for the sale. ‘You want it to … return to him?’ When he didn’t respond, she continued, answering herself, ‘No, to remember him by, to remember him by, isn’t it? It is, it is …’ Her husband rushed to her side as her voice rose, took her hand.

  ‘Ina,’ he said, and Maurice clocked how he stroked her wrist in slow, countable touches, how he pulled her back, almost invisibly, from the brink of a spiral of questions she would answer herself, tears and worse; he’d seen it, everyone, all the survivors, all across Europe and beyond, had seen it, played out a thousand times.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Maurice said.

  She was breathing heavily. ‘Which is it?’

  ‘Oh, I – well he was arrested early on, and—’

  She nodded, her face becoming blank and hard again.

  ‘I want,’ he pressed gently, ‘to have her shown in a proper public gallery …’

  A peeved voice came, ‘This is a—’

  Maurice shushed Kristopher with a look. ‘A place,’ he drew nearer, considered taking her hand, thought better of it, ‘a respectable gallery where she can be really seen. I have many contacts, friends, supporters of Jozef’s work, his legacy.’

  ‘Ina,’ her husband said. ‘Won’t you consider it? It’s an awful lot to arrange to take it with us.’ He had to call after her as she walked away from all of them, towards the painting. She gazed at her face, and a lost world unfurled around her, lost voices whispered in her head. The girl’s hand on the chair was the same hand she knew, resting in her own as they whispered each other to sleep through abandoned rooms. She held the face of the girl’s ghost in her mind’s hands. Looking into it now she felt somehow a grown Alicia’s face looked back at her, a depth to the eyes that hadn’t been there before. Her eyes drifted to the roses, and the day she had first kissed Jozef pressed into her body. The years between falling away, all the years in Lwów with its horrors, the beatings and murders in the streets, Isaac and Sammy and Margo disappearing one by one. A squirm from her baby pulled her back into the room. She placed her hands back on her belly, its swimming promise.

  Kristopher peeled off his own notes, licked his fingers and counted them with practised speed, before stuffing the rest into Karolina’s hand. Maurice’s handshake was tight. He rewrapped the painting so quickly the girl’s face had disappeared under the sheet in the moments Karolina had turned back to her husband for a steadying forehead kiss. When he carried the painting away, the dealer scurrying behind him like a little rodent, Karolina followed even to his car door, which was closed in her face.

  Maurice’s apartment brimmed with half-finished forgeries, contraband, piles of cash (some fake, some real), medals stolen from dying men, jewellery stolen from the lost. It all sat in boxes or in piles on the rickety wooden table in the tiny kitchen, where Maurice cooked up pills of flour and sometimes rat poison, to sell to men who sold them to other, more desperate men and women, the ones who wished to forget. He hauled the painting in and set her against that table, which tottered and threatened to spill its piles onto the floor. He steadied it, and unwrapped her.

  He lit a cigar to sit and study her, steadied his breathing as he sucked, feeling the burn in his throat. She’ll fly, he thought. He had a good sense for what some buyers were looking for: a nostalgia hit laced with poignancy, a long-dead child from a world turned to dust, a painting that was written about and talked about in the magazines just before that velvet, that soft hair, that wallpaper, roses and softness and rich, well-fed, milky skin, found itself swallowed up in gun metal and smoke. Sell them a tiny slice of that old world and they’d pay anything for it. Some of them were still rich. The pregnant woman, some old lover of poor Jozef’s (he didn’t believe for a second she was truly an Oderfeldt, but it was more trouble than it was worth to contest the claim) could have asked for five times what she did and he’d still make a profit.

  He traced a finger along Jozef’s signature, remembered a long ago night in a bar, before the war. A serious, sensitive soul he’d been. Talented for sure, and nervous about this piece. It had turned out well. Maurice turned away to tap cigar ash into the sink, a rare sadness settling around his chest. He c
ouldn’t think of any of that set who were likely to still be alive.

  ‘Do stop smoking around the food, Maurice.’ His boyfriend Pietror swept in, his dressing gown trailing behind him, his hair in a silk scarf that Maurice had traded good quality tobacco for, after some row or other.

  ‘Food?’ Maurice echoed, still looking at the girl.

  Pietror flung out an arm towards a pile of vegetables next to the sink. ‘Do you know what I had to go through to get these? You have to eat properly.’

  ‘I’ll take you out! I’m about to make a big sale. Look at her!’ He pulled Pietror to his side, gave him a kiss. He smelled of cheap perfume and the heavy, sticky cream he insisted on using on his skin.

  ‘Oh!’ Pietror breathed. ‘What a horrible old-fashioned painting! My mother would love it.’

  ‘It seems old-fashioned because the world has changed,’ Maurice said, feeling defensive, wanting to cover the canvas again. ‘She’s like … the days just before the world went mad, there she is, just standing looking out from a dead girl’s eyes.’

  ‘Ugh, how morbid you are,’ Pietror said, moving to the sink. He heard the sullenness in his lover’s silent draw on his cigar, and added, ‘We can look at photographs, newsreels for all that, not that I see why you’d ever want to, dreadful business, all of it.’ He began rifling through the cupboards.

  ‘What are you looking for? There’s a lot of money to be made in looking back,’ Maurice said, with a shrug.

  ‘A chopping board. You live like an animal. People want to look to the future, Maurice.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be such an old woman.’

  He gave Pietror a long, deep kiss, but when Maurice pulled back to hold Pietror’s face in his hands, his lover dipped his eyes, fiddled with the sash on his dressing gown. Maurice felt a fracture widen between them. He covered the painting up again. ‘Forget I mentioned it,’ he said. ‘Forget all about it.’

  A few days later Maurice was back at the gallery, collecting his money for the fake Milo painting.

  ‘That … lodger of yours,’ Kristopher said, counting out notes from a wad of banknotes.

  ‘Pietror?’

  ‘He’s been talking. Saying the wrong …’ Kristopher licked his finger as a note stuck, ‘… vague phrases. To the wrong people.’

  ‘What people?’

  ‘We won’t be working together again, Maurice.’ Kristopher gave him a watery, apologetic smile.

  When he got back to the apartment, sweating, Pietror was gone. A swift check of the kitchen showed him the piles of cash untouched, but there was a stale tinge to the air, despite the half-drunk cups of ersatz coffee in the sink, the rumpled, cooled bedsheets, that told him Pietror would not be returning.

  In the war, a Romany family had hidden behind a wardrobe in the back room. There was a sliding panel: the landlady had shown him when he moved in. Imagine, she said, how it must have stunk in there, and she’d laughed. Now Maurice slid that panel over the painting, so it was back in the darkness. With it were golden chains, watches, the knives, the piles of money. Maurice was just looping back to the kitchen to pile up more cash into his arms, along with the bags of fake pills, when banging on the door shook the little flat. The voices of the police outside sent a shake through his body that scattered the cash and pills across the floor.

  Kraków, 1977

  44

  KAROLINA BITTERLY REGRETTED letting the painting go to those crooks, who had buried or lost it, or let it go to some fat red-cheeked private collector who would leave it in a drawing room to be forgotten. She read stories of uncovered lost paintings and objects, stolen from families like hers, and made sure to talk about the painting and its subject every day to the baby, then the boy, then the young man.

  She named him George, eager to cement his Englishness. He was pale, tall and thin, with Adam’s frame and long, elegant hands, and Anna’s sharp tongue and eagerness to be alone. He inherited, too, Alicia’s love of colours and shapes of things, her quietness and watchfulness, her capacity for lies and secret-keeping. His mother told George, a thousand times, in a thousand different ways, in her lisping Polish accent, patting his head or kissing his cheek or doing up the buttons on his coat, That painting is yours, you know, make sure you get it some day. They all but forced me to sell it, I had to, you know, we were trying to get to England. A man who loved me painted it of our little Ala, who died somewhere out in Russia in the snow. But you know things stolen from us are being returned. Make sure you get the painting, you get her some day, she belongs with you. He’d want you to have it, the painter. They’d both want you to have it. George nodded along and half-listened, just as he did to the other, rare flakes of her old life that floated through her accented chatter like dust in sunlight, always of before the war: Anna’s soft skin, when you kissed her cheek goodnight, her perfume, the silk dresses, a gold pen her father had owned, Alicia’s curls, their little dogs, the fresh flowers every morning in summer, sugar mice in the kitchen … he absorbed it all as he played with toy soldiers on their front lawn, then on walks along the beach, on the way to school, in the car. He grew up with a Sussex accent and a vague sense that his blood ran back to somewhere over the sea.

  In the wilderness year after his mother’s death, George travelled to Poland for the first time. He was thirty but looked eighteen, awkward and too tall and wearing a florescent backpack full of ugly knitwear, terrified of the legendary Eastern European cold. When he arrived, he realised he had imagined the world his mother had conjured for him in a kind of theatrical display, as though there would be a waving grandmother in an immaculate dress, an official handing the painting over to him at the airport. On the first day he dutifully followed a city map, biting off his thick gloves every time he needed to get it out of his pack, then swearing as his fingers froze, to Bernardyńska. His mother never gave him a number, but he stood outside the most likely address, just opposite the castle building, as she’d said. There was illegible graffiti on the door, behind an iron grate. A woman smiled at him and asked something in Polish as she approached.

  ‘Oh, sorry, English.’

  ‘Tourist?’

  ‘Yes, well. This was my mother’s house. My mother lived here.’

  ‘Halby?’

  ‘Um, no, Garside … no, sorry, Oderfeldt.’

  The woman gave an elaborate shrug and a smile, and opened the door, a delicious warmth curling from the hallway inside.

  ‘What flat?’

  ‘Um, I don’t know.’

  She shrugged again, and he felt stupid, stepped back into the street as she closed the door.

  The National Museum where the painting lived now was outside the city: he had to get a bus, and wandered around, lost, before he came across the pretty building with large stone steps. The woman at the front desk didn’t speak English but handed him a leaflet with sections in different colours. He headed for Polish paintings, on the top floor, where he passed frame after frame of faces and family groups and landscapes, fruit and flowers, buildings, dogs. He didn’t know anything about art and began to look forward to his hotel room back in the city, a film and room service. There was no girl with blonde hair in a red dress to be found. He went to sit in a window seat, a view down into a courtyard full of trees. Not a bad place to end up, he thought, if he could only find her. A man in a suit was walking through the gallery, a lanyard hanging over his tie, his hands behind his back like a soldier. George approached him.

  ‘I can help?’ the man asked.

  George blushed. He must look so out of place, he realised.

  ‘My mother always told me about a painting here.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Um, it’s called Girl in a Red Dress, no, sorry, Portrait of Girl in a Red Dress.’

  ‘Ah, yes, Pienta?’

  ‘Oh, um, sorry, I don’t know. It was of my aunt, my mother’s younger sister, actually,’ George said, blushing again as the man raised his eyebrows, seemingly impressed.

  ‘Ah, please. This way.’ He l
ed George to a side room, sofas and plants, a new receptionist. There were paintings stacked against a wall, face down, the whites of their backs exposed and pencil marks scrawled on the bare canvas, serial numbers and arrows George could not decipher.

  The man chatted in Polish to the woman behind the desk, then turned back. ‘Sorry, please,’ he said, and smiled, gesturing to the pile of paintings.

  George rocked on his heels, hooked his long fingers under his backpack straps. In moments like these, when he felt like a little boy, he missed his mother with breath-taking fierceness. Besides, she could have spoken to them in Polish. He felt stunned by his own incompetence as a son in not bringing her here before.

  ‘Please,’ the man said again. He came over and pointed again at the paintings, smiled, as though inviting a child to play. ‘You can look for her.’

  ‘Oh.’ So he put down his bag, began gingerly moving the canvases. ‘I can just …’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  Here were more figures, fields. One striking one of a group on a bus, or a tram: ghostly faces seeming to stare out of the frame.

  ‘No, not this one, you said, Girl in Red, no? Hmm,’ the man said, picking up another frame and setting it aside with ease. ‘No, no, no … ah! This is her, yes?’

  He flipped the painting around, set it down on the floor. It was frameless, taped to a piece of thick white card. George stood over it and looked into Alicia’s face. ‘This is her?’ he echoed, looking into her face. She wasn’t what he was expecting, although she was also exactly as his mother had described: the dress was blood red, billowing at the shoulders, the girl’s, his aunt’s, young little face was serious and playful all at once, a tiny smile playing at her lips, her dark eyes seeming to hold laughter in them.

  ‘I should have brought her sooner,’ George said, to himself.

  ‘You can’t take her,’ the man said, simply.

  ‘Oh, no, I know, of course,’ George laughed. ‘She’s … it’s a beautiful … why isn’t she on display?’