Kingdom of Twilight

by Steven Uhly

  She heard someone descending the stone steps that led into the cellar, and at once recognized the almost hesitant tread of Frau Kramer, the typical caution of an elderly lady abandoned by the confidence of youth—perhaps she had never even known it in the first place. The Kramers had impressed upon her that she must never lift the floorboards herself. If we want to survive we have to be on our guard at all times, Herr Kramer had said. Without attentiveness there is no life, her grandmother would often mumble as she stared absently out of the window, lost in the memories of her distant youth.

  Margarita waited for the first chink of light, which blinded her even though it came from a gloomy paraffin lamp that Frau Kramer had placed on the floor beside her as she lifted the floorboards and moved them aside. Frau Kramer was a short, squat woman, a perfect fit for this low-ceilinged farmhouse. In the dim light she looked like one of those austere figures from a Dutch genre painting. The smile on her narrow lips revealed a set of large, white, slightly irregular teeth. She had certainly never been a beauty, but she radiated an unobtrusive warmth that put people at their ease in her presence. Margarita returned the smile and allowed herself to be helped out of the hole. She was completely stiff from having lain there for ages; her joints ached and it took a while for her circulation to return to normal. Her delight at being freed from the hole was short-lived, however. The cellar was a grim place. There was no plaster on the walls and the somber atmosphere created by the dark-red bricks made her even more aware of her circumstances. Junk was dotted randomly around the room—old furniture and equipment left behind by the previous Polish owners and now useless to anyone else. On one side were two skylights nailed up with wooden boards. On the opposite side were rough and ready wooden shelves that held large preserving jars, which in the light of the paraffin lamp gleamed in an array of colors: dark-red, dark-yellow, orange, green. In front of the shelves three or four salamis hung from the ceiling. The cellar was so low that Margarita could not stand up straight. She was tall, beside her Frau Kramer looked like a square block of stone next to an obelisk. Hand in hand, the two women went slowly in circles around the cellar, without saying a word. Margarita’s head was bowed like a penitent in a procession, while Frau Kramer walked upright and with confidence, as if the cellar were actually a better place. After a while Margarita stopped.

  “I think it’s fine now.”

  “Come, child, let’s sit; you’ll only sprain your neck if you keep standing,” Frau Kramer said in her melodious voice, which seemed permanently on the cusp between talking and singing. Margarita thought that in truth she was a tiny bird, a little, fat sparrow trying to be human, but betrayed by her voice. And her friendly manner. They sat on two low stools that must have belonged to the Poles. It was only now Margarita noticed that Frau Kramer was looking at her solemnly.

  “I spoke with my husband about you yesterday,” she said in her sing-song tone. “It’s all sorted out now.”

  Margarita gave her a quizzical look. All she knew was that Frau Kramer insisted on making a ritual out of telling her something important. It must be good news.

  “You’re a beautiful young woman who’s expecting a child. Someone in your situation can’t remain in a hole in the ground for goodness knows how long.” She rubbed Margarita on the arm and gave her a smile of encouragement. Two small dimples appeared in her chubby cheeks.

  “We’ve decide that from now on you should live in the whole cellar.”

  Margarita was horrified.

  “But what if they find me? That would be the end for all of us.”

  “Calm down, child. Nobody’s going to find you, God willing. The barbarians can do what they like, but they won’t find you.”

  “If only I could be as confident as you are, Frau Kramer.”

  “You must be confident, child, you really must. Otherwise you won’t make it.”

  They fell silent. Frau Kramer was still patting her arm and looking cheerful. Margarita was staring into space. Until now she had been lying in a hole in the earth, which had been dug into a larger hole—this dark cellar. Now she was going to be buried only once rather than twice over. The Kramers had summoned all their courage to risk this offer. But they were right; in her pregnant state she could not remain on cold, damp earth indefinitely. She would not survive.

  “Will I have any light?”

  “Only in the daytime, you’ve got to understand that.”

  She did understand. At night the light could seep through the cracks in the boards over the skylights, betraying her presence. Having light would almost be like being reborn. For the first time in ages she felt hope budding inside her. A strange hope. As if this change were part of the journey she needed to make to achieve her final liberation. As if it were impossible for everything to be over in one go, but that it had to be a gradual process, as if a long darkness and a long imprisonment were one and the same thing—you could not be free suddenly, just as you could not suddenly tolerate daylight. Having worked out its mechanism with such clarity, she thought that her hope, thus exposed, must immediately crumble to nothing, terrified like a shy animal. But it held firm. She smiled.

  “Fine. That’s fine, we’ll do that. Thank you very much, Frau Kramer. You and your husband.”

  Frau Kramer now gave her a loving embrace and placed a hand on her belly, caressing it awkwardly for a few moments. Then she started to cry.

  “It cannot be God’s will,” she said after a while, her voice choked, “that there should be no new life. That cannot be so.”

  Margarita was unprepared for such an emotional outpouring. She listened silently to the other woman, as if Frau Kramer were playing a tune that had not been heard for a long time. One of the tears that Frau Kramer shed as she clutched Margarita rolled from her right eye, down her cheek and fell on the young woman’s neck, producing at that very spot a sensation equaled in intensity only by her back pains. She closed her eyes and focused on it. As the seconds passed the spot seemed to grow larger. She did not notice that her own eyes had welled up with tears. It was as if her entire consciousness were filled with nothing but this spot. All of a sudden she was struck by the desire to taste Frau Kramer’s tears. Taking her head in both hands, she felt the woman’s soft skin on her palms and kissed her on the eyes. Ran her tongue across her lips. Tasted the salt. Frau Kramer’s salt. Kissed her eyes again.

  “Mama, mother,” she whispered. “Don’t cry. Everything will be fine.”

  5

  “My dear child. In reality the earth is hollow. Everything that surrounds us, and which you’ll soon be able to see, is the deep core of our planet.” She pointed at the paraffin lamp on the small, rough-hewn table in front of her.

  “This is the central star of the earth’s core. It lights up the entire world. Outside? Oh, there’s nothing interesting outside, my child. Outside people cling to the earth as if trying to tear large chunks out of it. Outside people are much smaller, much, much smaller. And that’s why there are so many of them. They scurry around like ants, forever in search of something, forever running around in circles, always far too quickly. But in here, my child, in here it’s just the two of us and this table with the sun on it, and the shelves on the wall over there with the preserving jars that twinkle like distant stars, and the old wooden bed by the wall behind us, and the book in my hand.”

  It was not a thick book. On the cover in reddish-brown Gothic letters was printed The German Mother and her First Child. Written by Dr. Johanna Haarer, it had been published by Lehmann in Munich. In 1940. Herr Kramer had taken it from a large pile of books in the street outside a house he happened to be passing in town. He had stood there, holding the book and gazing at the house, a handsome, spacious, turn-of-the-century building, and recalled having once seen something similar, a few streets further on, near the river. On that occasion he had arrived on the scene earlier and, together with a small crowd of people, watched a young woman in a dressing gown dash out of the house with a little girl, about six years old, followe
d swiftly by a young, elegantly dressed man, his hands shielding his head while two men in black S.S. uniform ran after him, beating him with truncheons. Herr Kramer did not turn away when the man fell to the ground and the woman rushed back to help him to his feet again. He witnessed the man, his head bloodied, pull himself together to start running again. Herr Kramer watched the bystanders, people from neighboring farms, townspeople. They stood there in silence, some smiling, some stony-faced, others with a look of indifference. The two S.S. men still harangued the couple they had driven from the building, screaming so loudly their voices went hoarse. The sobbing child clung to her mother. S.S. men stood at the windows and now began to toss objects into the street—small items of furniture and books. The books opened as they fell, flapping as if they were losing all their words and were nothing but blank pages as they hit the ground. It was windy, clothes flew everywhere, Herr Kramer saw men’s suits and a blue dress that held its position in the air for a moment, like a ghost, before swirling into a tree and becoming entangled in its branches. The crowd of bystanders pounced on the discarded items, squabbles broke out, but the S.S. paid no attention.

  That had all been a few years ago, but Herr Kramer remembered the episode in perfect detail. He knew what must have happened in the house where the pile of books stood. Concluding that The German Mother and her First Child was a most useful book, he took it home. Now it was in Margarita’s hands. She regularly dipped into it, for she liked its scientific tone and the detailed anatomical diagrams, of which there were seventy-five. Margarita thought it was important to acquaint herself with the subject, to avoid doing anything wrong. Often she read out loud, as loud as her clandestine existence would permit, to prevent the child from developing in total silence. And when her eyes became tired from the gloomy light of the paraffin lamp she would say whatever came into her head, such as the story of the hollow earth. Now she opened the book and read out loud:

  “The reasons why a child may cry are so numerous and diverse that some mothers, after careful examination, will have to conclude that it is none of those listed. The child is simply crying, and incessantly so—but the cause is unfathomable. Frequently there is nothing to do but assume that the child is crying owing to some predisposition, out of habit, or simply to pass the time.”

  She paused and looked at her belly.

  “Don’t even think about it, do you hear me?”

  Frau Dr. Haarer was very certain about how to solve the problem:

  “Where possible the child should be removed to a quiet place and be left there alone. It should not be picked up again until the next feeding time. Frequently it requires only a few trials of strength between mother and child—these are the first!—before the problem is solved.”

  She raised her head. A quiet place, she pondered, looking around the cellar. Alone, she thought. All of a sudden she thought of the S.S. officer they had shot, Piotr and she. The S.S. officer with his innocent blue eyes. And finally she realized what had touched her so peculiarly before she had fired the old revolver. The infinite loneliness staring at her from those Aryan eyes, a loneliness as open as Frau Dr. Haarer’s book. She imagined Frau Dr. Haarer as the German’s mother and wondered what she looked like. She must be tall and lean, with a long, bony nose and hollow cheeks. A wizened woman, to whom indulgence was alien, who lived in permanent fear of exploitation and who had passed all this on to her offspring with her elaborate method of raising children. All this, plus loneliness too.

  Margarita continued reading, but no longer out loud, for she did not wish her unborn child to hear any more of Frau Dr. Haarer’s opinions. “If a dummy has no effect, dear Mother, then you must be firm! Do not take the child from its bed, carry it around, rock it in your arms, push it around or sit it on your lap. And on no account feed it. Otherwise the child will grasp with extraordinary rapidity that it need only cry to attract the attention of a sympathetic soul and become the object of that person’s concern. After a short while it will demand such attention as a right, with no let-up until it is carried, rocked or pushed around again—thus the tiny, but implacable tyrant is complete.”

  Margarita put the book on the table and stood up. With her head stooped she saw the bulge in her belly that was already quite large. She put her hands around it, caressing it. Then she said, as if taking an oath, “My dear child, I promise to do the opposite of what this book says. Where it says, ‘Do not feed!’ I will feed you. Where it says, ‘Be firm!’ I will be soft. Where it says, ‘Leave alone!’ I will take you in my arms. You’ll surely be a little tyrant, but perhaps not a big one later on.”

  She sat down again, the speech was over. Her child would move from a small, dark hole to a large, dark hole. It would neither breathe fresh air nor see daylight. That was bad enough. But it would not spend its nights alone from birth, as demanded by Frau Dr. Haarer. It would never be alone, so long as they were forced to live in this underworld. And she herself would no longer be alone either. Two pieces of good news in one day.

  She heard knocking on the cellar door. Twice in quick succession, twice more slowly: the signal they had agreed. Herr Kramer had come up with the idea, and to begin with Margarita thought it silly. But in truth she liked knowing who was there. For although the two of them knocked in the same rhythm, Frau Kramer did it gently, like a conspirator requesting entry. Herr Kramer, on the other hand, knocked loudly, like someone announcing his arrival. This time the knocking was soft.

  Since Margarita had settled in the cellar with the Poles’ furniture, Frau Kramer had come down as often as she could, her excitement growing as Margarita’s belly became ever rounder. She had begun to knit clothes for the baby, even though wool was in short supply, which meant she had to unravel her own things. Sometimes the two women sat together like mother and daughter, discussing what would have to happen once the child was born.

  Even Herr Kramer’s visits were more frequent. He was a taciturn individual, who always gave the impression of not belonging wherever he happened to be. Whenever Margarita heard his heavy tread on the cellar steps she braced herself for a conversation with few words and lengthy pauses. All the same she enjoyed his company, for he radiated a strong aura of dependability.

  This dependability was very soon put to a stringent test. When Margarita was in her seventh month of pregnancy, food became scarcer. Not only had it been a poor harvest, but the Wehrmacht had also taken away two forced laborers who had been helping out in the fields to work in an armaments factory back in the German heartland. The Kramers had spent the entire autumn saving the harvest on their strip of land, only for the Wehrmacht to come along and confiscate half of it. They also heard that the Russians were gradually getting closer.

  Margarita was permanently hungry, but there was never enough food. The shelves along the cellar wall, where preserving jars had once shone in different colors, were empty. And they sensed the winter was going to be a cold one. One morning Herr Kramer told his wife that things could not go on as they were. It was not right that the two of them had to starve while a stranger in the cellar sat doing nothing but waiting for the birth of another mouth to feed.

  “But she’s not a stranger anymore,” Frau Kramer replied. Herr Kramer did not know what to say. He knew that his wife had gone much further than he had. She had accepted Margarita and her child into the family. He had not, and perhaps never would. It was evening. They were sitting in the kitchen at a long wooden table, which suggested that the Polish family who had once lived here must have been large. The kitchen was the most spacious room in the entire house, apart from the hayloft on the first floor. Even the stable was smaller. Frau Kramer got up and sat beside the tiled stove. She knew what was going through her husband’s mind. Where were they going to get extra food from without attracting attention? Her gaze wandered to the two small windows above the sink and cooker. Outside she could see the driveway that wound its way to the Łódź road. It was lined with elms, whose expansive crowns were already in darkness. In a few weeks they
would be losing their leaves.

  “Maybe the pastor can give us something,” Herr Kramer said after a while.

  “How’s the pastor going to get hold of more food than he needs to live on?”

  “He could ask other families.”

  “What’s he going to tell them? That there’s a Jew living with the Kramers who’s having a baby and is in desperate need of more to eat? The pastor can’t help us and I’m sure the other families don’t have any more than we do.”

  They fell silent once more. Outside the dog barked. Must have seen a cat. The dignified ticking of the grandfather clock beside the stairs cut into the silence. It was an heirloom from Frau Kramer’s family, one of the few pieces of furniture they had brought with them.

  “We could sell the grandfather clock and buy ourselves a third cow with the proceeds,” Frau Kramer suggested. Herr Kramer watched his wife get up from the table and fetch a blanket to put around her shoulders. He was surprised that she was willing to part with this valuable heirloom. She was never quite as predictable as he assumed. But who was going to buy a grandfather clock at a time like this?