‘Ah, now we come to the point,’ the man said, smiling. He came to stand at George’s side, looking down at Girl. ‘It seems she’s only a copy.’
George looked at him. ‘Oh?’
‘A forgery. So many from the period, you know. It was a chaotic time!’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘But you’re too young to know,’ the man dismissed him with a wave of his hand. ‘Anyway, this is a good one, a very good one. We’re looking for the records of the original sale.’
‘I see.’
‘We’re doing some tests. This one was found at the back of a wardrobe in the sixties. But it’s just a copy! It’s an interesting story,’ the man said, as he guided George to the door. ‘There were rumours that a whole Romany family hid behind the same wardrobe in the war. A space made, you know,’ he made a box shape in the air with his hands, ‘and then later one of these … thieves, bad persons … hid all kinds of things in there.’
‘All right. Well, thank you, anyway. I’ll, um, if I leave a number, would someone call me, if, I don’t know, the real one is ever found?’
‘Yes, of course, but if she is, she belongs to the museum.’
George nodded and smiled, feeling his failure settle on his shoulders. He felt a desert opening behind him, the realisation that he had no family at all, that he was the last of a line, all of his mother’s and father’s blood stopped up in one body. He made fervent resolutions as he was walked back through the side door, through the gallery rooms, down the steps: he’d hire an investigator, for his dear Mum’s sake. He’d ask the press in England to look into it; that kind of thing sometimes ran at weekends. This would give him something to do. But by the time he stepped down from the bus back into the city, his resolve was already weakening.
Back in Kraków, George strolled through Glowny Square, taking pictures of the Cloth Hall, the beautiful church spire. He joined a small crowd to watch the bugler who called in the hour. He drank beer in patio bars, and took a bus to a stadium to watch the football match he really came to see. He hoped his mother’s ghost might be satisfied, noticing only a tiny seed of disappointment not to have the money she’d promised he was owed. If he wondered how the painting was forged or by whom, it was fleeting, a vague plucking at the back of his mind.
Kraków, 2009
45
GEORGE AND MARC STEFAN met first in Glowny Square, where they ordered hot cider and grinned at one another, almost overcome by shyness. They both laid out prepared packages of photographs on the tablecloth as a waiter placed the cider in smoking carafes at the edge of the table and brought them blankets for their knees.
‘You’ve been to Kraków before?’ Marc asked in French-accented English.
‘Yes, just once, years back. My mother always wanted me to come, and find the painting, but it turned out it was a fake! Must have been … let’s see, my Mum died in ’76 …’ George smiled at him. ‘Do you think we look like each other?’
Marc smiled too. ‘I don’t know! I think maybe you look a little like my granddaughter, you have the same ears.’
They smiled shyly at one another.
‘What time is the …’
‘Two o’clock.’
Marc took out a pen. He sketched out the family tree on the back of a napkin while George filled in gaps as he knew them.
‘So Karolina, she’s this branch … that’s my mother. And her sister, Alicia, that’s the girl in the painting, and she’s your … hang on … so my aunt and your half-sister.’
‘Okay, so, I add my mother here … Edie.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘And here I add me, my daughter Natalia, my granddaughter Sophie … so she’s the youngest of the line!’
‘A little heiress!’
‘Bof,’ Marc said, making George laugh with the French sound.
George hesitated, then asked, ‘Do you know what happened to your father, my grandfather?’
That made them smile at one another, both unused to family connections they hadn’t built themselves, but Marc’s faded.
‘Yes.’
‘You do? My Mum never …’
‘It’s easy to find. I asked at a library, I remember, doing a project in high school. My mother always knew or suspected I think but …’ Marc shrugged.
George took a sip of cider. ‘Could you …’
‘He was arrested in 1940, early. Taken to the ghetto. Then to the camp. Auschwitz. The second one, Birkenau.’
George felt an impulse to reach out, as though his mother had stirred somewhere in him, and wanted to embrace the little brother she never met.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said lamely.
‘I’m sorry too, very sad, but I never met him,’ Marc said. ‘That I remember, anyway.’
‘Do you … want to go to Auschwitz, while we’re here? You can do a day tour …’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
They sat looking out across the Glowny, pigeons chasing each other across the cobbles. George’s mind drifted and imagined, how right until the end, his grandfather couldn’t believe it: he still thought there would be a letter, a phone call, a car to pick him up, that Edie or Anna or both would be waiting for him beyond the barbed wire.
‘And this side … Anna, my grandmother?’
Marc smiled. ‘My mother never met her. I think, you know …’ he brought his hands together and then separated them.
George laughed again. ‘Yes, I wonder if they knew about each other.’
‘Oh yes, well my mother knew, anyway. She used to find pictures of Anna in his pockets, you know? And pictures of the daughters, said it drove her crazy.’
‘And here, Alicia,’ George said, underlining her name with his finger. ‘My Mum talked about her all the time.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘I think she must have died in Russia, perhaps. My mother looked for her when she came back to Kraków, but there was never any word of her. She said there were files, for if people had made enquiries, you know? At the Red Cross. And there was nothing for her, our, family at all. She went to her old apartment too but it was empty. She moved to England soon afterwards. Started again.’
The family tree sketched in, warmth brimming between the men, they paid the bill and made their way to the museum. There they wandered through rooms of landscapes and faces until they came to the little girl in the red dress, her hair falling across her shoulder. Next to her was Jozef and Alicia’s second painting, retrieved from the back rooms, the twin Jozef had sold to Kristopher and his crooked art gallery. The curators had written a small piece about the excellent quality of the forgery, mounted next to the brass plaque, but it was in Polish, which neither Marc nor George could read.
Adam’s son and his grandson stood with their arms folded, glancing at each other, Marc fiddling with his watch.
‘Well, there she is,’ George said. There you are, Mum, I found her, he added silently.
‘It’s a pretty enough painting.’
They laughed.
‘I’m afraid I don’t know anything about art,’ George said.
‘I prefer modern pieces, you know?’
They lapsed into silence.
‘Must have been a thrill to find it, though, in the walls like that!’ Marc Stefan tried.
‘Skirting board, they said. A panel.’
‘Skirt?’
George laughed, pointed to the ones in the room.
‘Ah! And … it’s nice, that it was at home all this time.’
George took a step closer to the portrait. The man on the phone had been almost breathless, telling him how a decorator had dropped a tin of paint that rolled across the room and cracked open a secret panel. Out they’d pulled the portrait, rolled up and covered in dust, along with old, flaking letters and books. George drew still closer to Alicia’s face. ‘My mother said she was terribly spoiled, her little sister.’
‘Yes, look at that dress!’ Marc gave a small laugh. ‘Though she must have
been well behaved enough. Can’t imagine Sophie ever standing still long enough to be painted like that!’
‘Do you have a photograph of her? Do they,’ George gestured to the painting, ‘look alike?’
‘Oh! Not really …’ Marc fumbled in his bag, pulled out a phone. ‘Look. You should meet her! Come to France sometime, you must come in the summer …’
They drifted away to a bench and sat looking at photographs of the young Sophie, smiling in a sundress and shades with pink plastic frames.
Absorbed in this way, they almost missed her. She stood back from the portrait for a long time, legs crossed like a ballerina, her arms knotted behind her back. Her stillness was almost audible; people turned to her as though she spoke, and studied her poise, the elegant lines of her face. She seemed unaware of the room, fixed on the painting. Soon she moved closer. Marc and George, now delighting in the broken ice between them, were laughing over a story of Sophie’s naughtiness just as the woman passed them, and George glanced up. He watched the woman, admiring her elegant, slow movements and feeling a quietly reflected pride in how absorbed she was by his family’s portrait. She studied the plaque Marc and he had been unable to decipher. Marc followed his attention, and when the woman gave a little sound, of surprise or perhaps recognition, Marc stood and ventured, ‘Oh, do you speak French? Or English? Could you translate for us?’
‘We can’t read the Polish,’ George added, joining Marc as he approached the woman.
‘Of course,’ the woman said. ‘It’s about finding the forgery, this one,’ she gestured. ‘And then the real one so recently. It theorises,’ her face broke into a wide smile, ‘that Pienta himself made the forgery, so accurate and good it is.’
‘Thank you,’ George said, and she nodded. He glanced at Marc and shared a look of embarrassed pride as he began to add, ‘That’s actually our—’
‘They’re half right,’ the woman interrupted him. She had an accent, American or Canadian, that George couldn’t place. There was something powerfully familiar about her. ‘It was Jozef and my mother herself who made it together.’
Marc, translating in his head, took a second longer than George. By the time he had broken into a delighted, astonished laugh, George was already holding out his hand, embarrassed by how his fingers trembled with shock and joy. ‘I think we’re cousins,’ he said.
Kraków, 1939
46
ADAM WAS ALREADY rifling through his pockets for his papers, ready for the arrest procedures, calculating how much cash was in the lining of his coat, enough to bribe these ones or perhaps the next, or at least to get a phone call, to get to Sammy or to Friel, when the soldiers slammed the door of his car, honking the horn like excited teenagers behind their first wheel. They waved him away, starting the engine and beginning to push through the crowd just as he had done. One of them was waving his gun through the windows, laughing at the cowering people who scattered as they saw it, saw them.
Adam stared after the car, becoming aware of the cold as the sun drained away, realising he was gloveless. He put his hands in his pockets, and struggled back towards where Anna had pulled the girls from the car, the piles of carpets and suitcases, paintings, books, jewellery, their life in Kraków scattered through the mud and grass. He stood on tiptoes, called Anna’s name, knowing it was trying to catch water in his hands.
The piles of things he tried to gather together into tighter space, waiting for Anna to find her way back to it with the girls. He sat for a while on one of the rolled-up carpets, yelling at people as they kicked over the piles as they walked, and one or two who simply picked up small boxes, even cases, wrapped furs around them and walked on.
‘Thieves!’ Adam cried, rage coursing through him, but unable to give chase, to take on the wretched criminals; only one he tackled, wrenching Jozef’s painting of Alicia from a woman’s hands, and pushing her violently back into the stream. He could have struck her face, but instead took the painted Alicia back with him, to sit on his knees and wait for her living figure to come back. Wrapping his hands in one of Anna’s scarves, snarling at the thieves, he waited for two hours. By then only the carpet he sat on, two suitcases, and the paintings were left.
He looked into Alicia’s painted face. When Jozef had first revealed it to him, back in the apartment, her portrait seemed on the point of laughing, the little smile just curbed; he imagined her biting her tongue behind her lips, so as to appear serious and not get into trouble. How he loved that rare look on her face, how he loved her laugh for its rarity, just as he did her mother’s. But now that he looked in the bleak grey light, the people streaming around him, picking at his things like crows at carrion, the painted eyes looked sad, the eyebrows just beginning to knot, as though tears were coming. Stupid, childish: Anna would roll her eyes at him, laugh at him, call him a boy. Still he held the portrait to him as though comforting it, or it him, wrapping his arms around the heavy frame.
‘Where have you and your mother and sister gone? Back home?’ he asked her. Alicia’s painted face stared up at him. He wrapped her up in one of the rugs, patting her in place as though tucking a child into bed. The evening was closing in.
Adam turned to go home. He looked back to see two German soldiers picking through his things. They didn’t notice him staring, or feel his fury at them and himself for leaving everything behind. One of them was holding the painting. It was pointless to torture himself and watch them carry it away, but he stood anyway, risking arrest and a beating and the what-else to twist the knife in his own stomach. Instead he watched the soldier lie the painting down against a rolled-up rug, and walk away, disappearing across the field. On impulse, Adam hurried back and flipped the painting over, unhooking the frame, and rolled his painted daughter up in his inner pocket.
When he was twisted by the shoulder to face the wrong way, carried with the current of refugees away from home, he dodged and stepped until he was back on the right path. As he approached Kraków he listened for the wail of sirens and the engine-shudder of planes, watched for drifting smoke, even fire. But there was only the trudge of people and the smell of churned-up ground, sweating bodies, fear. The radio had been so certain, but apart from the boys who had taken his car, there were no soldiers: was it all a trick? Were the boys who took his car even German? Adam felt himself grow hot with humiliation, a welcome distraction from the thought of Anna and his daughters standing in the mud, and what Anna must think of him, how angry she must be at his failure.
It was dusk as he limped back into the centre, his feet screaming in the smart shoes, made for pacing on carpet, in an office. The streets were still clogged with people, late-deciders, scurrying and looking around them like field mice under hunting owls. All eyes looked to the sky in impulsive, cringing expectation, but it remained clear. From streets away, Adam heard shouts, unmistakeably military in their strange sing-song aggression, but couldn’t make out words, whether German or Polish. As he turned onto Bernardyńska, like a runaway child slouching home, his insides, which had seemed to crawl upwards, cramming into his chest and throat, began to settle. Anna would be there, and they would make a new plan. He wondered, looking up at the row of shuttered windows, which other neighbours would still be here. Wawel Castle stood benign and calm, and he scanned for a new flag, reflexively, just as he had the last few days and that very morning, neighbours arriving with every new broadcast. He stopped with a withering feeling of horror as he saw, finally, the red and black fluttering on the highest turret. Perhaps until then he had not truly believed it. ‘Look, look,’ he urged one of the trickling people, who carried a suitcase in each hand. Adam grabbed the man by the arm. ‘Look, look, the Wawel. See, they’ve put up the flag, they’re really here.’
The man nodded. ‘I know, son,’ he said, and gave Adam a weak smile. Adam almost laughed at ‘son’, for they seemed to be of an age, but perhaps in his wonder Adam seemed younger.
‘Yes,’ Adam said, feeling a fool even as his fear grew. ‘So they’re really here
.’
‘They’re really here,’ the man echoed kindly. He added, ‘Good luck to you,’ as he walked on, swinging his cases.
Adam was only yards from the apartment, but felt a thousand eyes, watching from every turret and wall of the castle, as he approached home. Reaching the door, he was already planning to stay sequestered in the back of the flat, away from the huge windows he was so proud of, as he waited for the family to arrive; or perhaps they were already here and waiting for him. He stood for stupid seconds touching the door, waiting in his panic for Robert to open it. Mechanically he felt his empty pockets, praying for the cool weight of brass. He tried the door, the bell, knocked on the window, knowing it was hopeless. When he laughed, an explosion of nervous tension, a woman rushing past, a young child swinging on her arm, spat on the floor. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she said, before storming on.
Adam cupped his hands to his face and looked through the tiny crack in the downstairs shutters. All was dark. His key was in his car. ‘Anna?’ he called through.
A narrow alleyway led to the back entrances of the apartment blocks, for deliveries and servant business. Adam trailed his hands along the damp wall, grateful for the glum light that shone from a lamp in the back courtyard. A pocket of quiet sat over the trees and benches of the shared garden, ice glittering on bark and wood. He felt the windows of the Bernardyńska buildings as eyes on him as he took the back steps leading to the kitchen. He knocked and called to silence. Even the dogs had gone. He looked up to see only darkness behind his neighbours’ shutters, listened hard for a few seconds, the rustle of his own blood in his ears, before looking for a rock to smash one of the window panes.
He crept through his own house like a burglar, shying at the floorboard that creaked too loudly, the coat hanging in the hallway that looked like a figure standing and waiting to arrest him. He battled with his body as he went, stern with his heart and his lungs, his shamefully shaking fingers as he clasped doorknobs. Dotty and Janie had left everything immaculate, from the swept kitchen floor to the folded newspapers neat in piles and screaming danger, serene next to a vase of chrysanthemums in the dining room. There was no sign of Anna and his daughters. The strange quiet persisted, his steps echoing: the rugs had gone, of course, he realised, and there was no hum of trams and traffic, only the odd stray cry from the street, wordless shouts. Across Kraków, people were vanishing under floorboards, disappearing into attics and cellars, climbing into the sewers, curling up like mice, trying to become dormant until this all passed.
The Light at the End of the Day Page 33