I clear the pillows away and follow her instructions until she is upright again.
‘Where did you get her?’ I ask.
‘From the priests. She cleans their house. But don’t say anything to her about the vodka because she’ll tell them and they’ll interfere.’
The mention of the girl makes her think of the occasion.
‘I thought you said you were bringing someone.’
‘I did.’
‘Well where is he?’
‘He’s waiting outside.’
‘Call him, please,’ she says. ‘That’s rude.’
I lean out the door and call to Jacob and watch him advance along the hall on the tips of his toes. He dips his head, enters, and stands in the centre of the room. I see he has a box of chocolates and feel foolish for having brought nothing. Renata has drawn the sheet up to her chin, two skeletal hands folded in front of her, her little head among the pillows like a raspberry set down in a basket.
Jacob leaves the chocolates on the table beside the bed and goes out for a chair. Renata puckers her lips, then wets a finger and draws it over each of her eyebrows. ‘He’s a fine-looking man,’ she says gravely, leaning over a little towards me. She’s trying to get a look at herself in the mirror. ‘Wonderful set of shoulders.’
We’re all together then in the room, Jacob and I in our chairs, the girl from the country coming and going with tea and cakes. Renata has Jacob up near her head, drawn in close to the bed. I watch her primp and trill and cajole, laying her hand on his for emphasis, all the gestures except certain more intimate ones a little outsized, as she asks him all about his studies, his family and how he likes our country, especially its girls. I watch her throw her head back, clasp her hands to her chest and let out a long tinkling laugh like a run of notes on a xylophone over something that Jacob has said. She’s lost none of her skill, I think, even if she never uses it.
She pushes herself back up the pillows and adjusts her bed jacket. She looks over to me as if to include me once more in the gathering, then back to Jacob.
‘Do you know what the difference is between a man and a woman?’ she says.
We do not venture an answer.
‘I will tell you. In the mind of every man there are six monkeys sitting on chairs. And in the mind of every woman there are six monkeys sitting on chairs, with another one watching.’
Jacob is looking at the floor, taking this in, nodding. I thought I’d heard most of her thoughts on these matters more than once, but this one is new.
She looks at us and laughs.
‘Now it’s time for a story,’ she says, ‘before you go. Which of you will tell it?’
It is a long while since I have heard anyone ask for a story. Whenever it happened to me it was a request that came from a woman, a woman I was pursuing and who was allowing herself to be pursued, and it always filled me with fear and a wish to escape. I never felt that I had anything ready. I thought I would disappoint them, and there would be a cooling. I turn to Jacob and find that he is looking at me. I know it is I who must do it. So I tell her about M. I tell her of how I met him in the Stary Rynek and of the story he told me that night, of how he risked everything for that beautiful woman he knew so little of and of how then he lost her. I tell her how he looked as he told this story. ‘He’s driving around looking for her,’ I say. ‘Here. This is her.’ I show Renata a photograph. ‘What do you see in her face, Renata? In the middle of their rapture, in the highest point he had ever reached, she left him. No explanation, no trace. He loved her with all that he was. This cannot be doubted. Then she did that to him. Can you think why?’
Renata raises one brow as if to ask if I have reached the end. There is something caustic in this, I think, and it makes me nervous.
‘Is that how you see it?’ she asks. ‘That this was done to him?’
She looks from one of us to the other, stopping at me. ‘Is that the opinion of both of you? Has it not occurred to you that there could be things in her life which have nothing at all to do with him?’
Her mouth snaps shut, like a purse closed with drawstrings. Her eyes do not move from mine. It is a look that seems made from ice.
That was not the first time Renata had left me feeling chastened, but afterwards I began to think of Hanna in a new way. She gave me the first of the clues.
‘How many times do you think a person can fell in love?’
I am walking along the river with Jerzy. We have been talking about the poor quality of the sausages being produced by a new factory in Wroclaw, and my question startles him. He stops and pushes his hands down into the pockets of his jacket. He looks over at the trees on the other side of the river. It could be that he would like to ask why we have changed course in this way, but he does not. He is thinking instead of an answer.
‘If you are Chopin,’ he says, ‘maybe not very often. But if you are Charlie Chaplin, maybe every day.’
He looks at me.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘It’s that young man I met in Krakow.’
‘The one who has you reading about the physicists?’
‘Yes.’
‘What of him?’
‘It’s his anguish. And the thought that it could have no end.’
‘Maybe it will be the making of him,’ he says.
‘That’s the sort of thing said by people far away from the feeling itself.’
He ignores this. He turns me by the arm towards the bridge we always aim for, and we begin again to walk.
‘He should look down at himself as though from a distant star,’ he says. ‘Sometimes you have to make of your pain a small thing.’
‘And that is an operation for heroes.’
‘Well then at least he must let it find the way to its own death. He must not grow attached to it. He must be patient. He must believe that one day he will be well again.’
This appears to bring the matter to an end for Jerzy. He now begins to speak about the greatly superior sausages his sister has sent him from Ostroleka. ‘Hunters’ sausages,’ he says. ‘From her own butcher.’
‘But Jerzy! Think of it. To have so much and then to lose it. To be able to think of nothing except finding it again. All the clues impossible to follow. Maybe never again to be able to feel anything.’
I sense him looking at me out of the corner of his eye. He knows well of my long wintry bachelorhood. And the reasons for it.
‘Do you know where he’s gone?’ he says.
‘Finland, I think. That’s what he said.’
‘Is there a phone number, or an address? Maybe you’d be more peaceful if you could communicate with him.’
‘I haven’t even got his name! We talked the whole night and he told me all those things about himself. We drank enough to lay waste to a regiment. And then he was gone. I kept three photographs by accident which must be precious to him. I get the idea sometimes that I should bring them to him. What do you think? I know the city he was heading for, the story he was following. You could come with me.’
‘Wait a minute. Why Finland?’
‘He has the hope that he will find her there. Or at least someone who will be able to tell him where she is. Her mother, as it happens.’
We have still to walk eight hundred metres to the bridge and then back again so I tell him the story of the ballet that came to Rouen, of Paris and the naval attaché, the island in England, the student of engineering from Finland on the beach and then the aspiring theatre director who moved in with her mother and who once fell off a roof.
I feel some sense of agitation in Jerzy. He stops, and lays a hand on my arm.
‘But what are you saying?’ he says.
‘What do you mean?’
‘This is the plot of a novel.’
‘Well I know it’s melodramatic, but—’
‘No, no! It actually exists. It’s called Her Bright Shining Eyes or The Shining Star or something like that. By Malgorzata something, I think. One of my daughters read
it when she was a teenager. I picked it up one day and even though I didn’t want to read it I was driven along by curiosity. It starts, let me see, in Zamosc, or maybe Chelm, then it goes to Warsaw, and it finishes on the sea at Gdynia. Very popular with Polish girls, my daughter told me at the time. There was the older military man, the student who gambled, the ballet school … I don’t remember anything about a theatre director …’
And all the rest of the way to the bridge and back along the footpath I listen again to this story of the little girl and the dream of the dance that never left her.
That was the second of the clues.
I am given the third clue right here in this room where I began to think of all these things and to make sense of them after coming back from Krakow and where now this work is soon to come to an end. It is New Year’s Eve. I have balloons on the wall and a bottle of champagne in a bucket with ice and three glasses because Miss Zelenska who lives on the floor below and who prepared a carp for me for Christmas is coming up to join Jacob and me for this drink. Then we will all go down to the town hall to hear the orchestra and maybe dance a little and welcome in this new time into which none of us can see. But I don’t care about that now, for the labour has been long and the end of it is soon to come and I feel a lightness and a thirst and a feeling of expectancy as I wait for their arrival and for this night to begin. It is Jacob who arrives first, his shoes newly polished. He is wearing a red tie with white stripes, for Poland, he says. He is carrying a book with the mark of our library on it, a book with pictures, for he has something to show me, he says, something about that photograph of Hanna, something that made him think. Finally it came to him, he says, for it made him remember a photograph of his father standing in front of a statue when he was a young man. So he wrote to him in Africa asking him about it and waited for the reply without saying anything to me for he wanted to know for sure, and now he has the letter, and he can tell me. I take Hanna’s picture as he asks me to from the drawer, the one of her in the turquoise coat smiling in the snow, and he opens the book to a page he’s marked with a little strip of paper where there’s a creased black and white photograph of Jacob’s father in a dark suit standing in front of the same statue in nearly the same place as the girl and, printed in the book, a close-up picture of the statue itself. Look, he says to me, here it is, the same statue in all three pictures, a statue not from Finland or any of the other places in her story. It is of someone you above all should know well. And as I hear Miss Zelenska come up the stairs and pause at the door to arrange her hair maybe before knocking, I get this clue from Jacob which, had M. known it, would have made his journey shorter and very different, but no more heartening perhaps, for I can see as I look from the picture in the book, a serious picture without people in it and with exaggerated colours such as might be found on a postcard, to the picture of Jacob’s father stiff-shouldered and nervously smiling and finally to the picture of M.’s beautiful girl that the position of the trees and the arrangement of streets and windows and bricks of the clock tower are the same, and that the pale blue-green statue of the powerfully built man dressed in robes and with long hair curling above his shoulders, the index finger of one hand pointing to the heavens and the other holding an astrolabe, commemorates someone whom I have studied, whom all of us have celebrated and that each year at Christmas Grand-Uncle Zenon praised with such zeal and pride for his discovery that the sun not the earth is the centre of our system and that the planets move in circular orbits around it. But above all he praised him for his nationality, for this was a statue of our own Nicolaus Copernicus.
19
Starlight
WE SET OUT in the morning on the nine o’clock train, Jerzy, Jacob and I. We’ve cakes and a flask of tea for the journey. We even have blankets for our knees in case the heating fails. It’s cold and radiant, the shadows from the trees long over the glittering snow, children racing in the lanes. We are four days into this new year which I had awaited like a man hiding from gunfire behind a wall. It started well, as it happens, for at the New Year’s Eve dance Miss Zelenska went up on her toes and kissed me on the cheek. She is fair-haired and laughs in a way that sends her back on her heels. When we met on the stairs one day before Christmas and I told her about the last time I tried to cook the carp she laughed and laid her hand on my arm and said that she would be pleased to cook it for me. Tonight, when we return from our excursion, I am to prepare her dinner.
We are making for Torun, birthplace of Copernicus. Jerzy, I would guess, is coming to humour me. Jacob is coming to see the statue before which his father once stood. I am here in order to say goodbye, I think.
I say to them on the way that I am going to tell them about Copernicus.
‘We already know about Copernicus,’ says Jerzy. ‘We know about him like we know about our own grandmothers.’ His arms are folded across his chest. He looks like a citizen complaining about dogs at a town hall meeting. Yet in his aspect there is the suspending of his authority for the day and a passing of it to me. ‘Well, I suppose Jacob doesn’t,’ he says.
‘That’s correct,’ I say. ‘And maybe there are some things about Copernicus that you haven’t heard. Or if you heard them once you may have forgotten them.’
‘That’s possible,’ says Jerzy.
‘For a Pole, Copernicus was a lucky man,’ I tell them. ‘I looked in the books of the library for signs of struggle in his life, but I couldn’t find any. Maybe some nervousness about the Church’s reaction to his ideas about the solar system, but nothing more. The best education, the finest comforts, security, servants. Aren’t these our national aspirations now? Well, most of us would be willing to forgo servants, I suppose. But the rest, yes, that is what is called for. How did it happen that Copernicus came by these things? He was ten when his father died. His great fortune, and the fortune of science, was that he and his brother then came under the protection of their rich Uncle Lucas, Bishop of Ermeland. What would have become of him were this not the case, we of course cannot know. But Torun was then still a small medieval city. What could he have expected of life? Maybe writing by day in a ledger and at night dreaming and gazing out of his window at the stars? As it was, Uncle Lucas sent the boys to the university in Krakow, where Nicolaus developed a passion for astronomy. This did not seem to be a suitable occupation to Uncle Lucas, and the boys were therefore sent to Italy, where they studied law and medicine. Italy then was experiencing the Renaissance. Nicolaus was exposed to ideas and to people he could not previously have imagined. His brother stayed on in Italy to serve the Church, but Nicolaus returned to Poland. He was excited by what he had seen and sought his mother’s counsel about what he should do with his life. “It is your Uncle Lucas who has provided for you,” she said. “You should do what he says.”’
Jerzy unfolds his arms and moves to the edge of his seat. He looks at me intently. ‘And then?’ he says.
‘Lucas got a position for him as the canon of Frombork. This is where he had the servants. He also had plenty of time. He practised medicine, law, architecture. He was a civil servant. He even had a spell in the military when he organised the defences at Olsztyn. But of most importance to him, and of course to us, was the interest in astronomy which he had first discovered in Krakow. He gathered together a large library and commissioned the building of an observatory in the grounds of Frombork cathedral. And from here he made the calculations and did the thinking that led him to the conclusion that the sun rather than the earth was at the centre of the planetary system.’
Jerzy raises a finger in the air.
‘Excuse me,’ he says.
‘Yes?’
‘What was the work he did as a civil servant? Do you know?’
‘Yes I do know,’ I say. ‘He worked with currency.’
‘I thought you were going to say that,’ he says. He shakes his head in wonderment, an unusual gesture for him. ‘That’s remarkable.’
‘I think so too,’ I say.
‘You don�
�t suppose it could be a coincidence, do you?’ he says.
‘I would doubt it,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I also.’
‘You don’t think that what could be a coincidence?’ says Jacob.
Jerzy turns around to face him.
‘It’s that girl who made such a mess of the young man our friend here met in Krakow,’ says Jerzy. ‘It seems that everything she told him about her home life was an invention. Her mother came out of a novel for teenage girls and now we learn that her stepfather, or whoever he is – a Finn named Ritso who had an obsession with theatre – has been based on the life of our Nicolaus Copernicus. You just switch plays for astronomy and disregard various details and there he more or less is.’ He leans back in his seat. ‘She’s more intriguing than I thought,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I would say that too.’
‘Why do you suppose she did that?’ he says.
‘I’m not so sure,’ I say. ‘Why do you suppose she did it?’
I can see that this sort of pedagogy could irritate him were it to go on, but for the moment he appears to accept it.
‘Perhaps she had something to hide,’ he says. ‘Some betrayal, or crime.’
‘Well, yes, perhaps,’ I say. ‘But she needn’t have something to hide simply because she does not wish to reveal herself.’
He looks at me sharply. I can see in the way his lip curls a little and his face greys that a thought is beginning to form within him about Moscow and the conversation we had by the river when I came back from Chicago. He is unsure of his bearings. I could press him and wait to see what would happen. Perhaps I might even obtain his forgiveness if it all played out in the right way. But this is not the moment for that. There is no moment for that at all unless he wishes it, this fine man.
‘Maybe she just did it to entertain herself,’ I say. ‘She liked stories. That torments him now because he realises he hasn’t much of an idea of who she is. But it was also something that drew him to her. That mysterious air she had when she told them. He went into some of them himself. They made them together. And this thing of Copernicus and the romantic novel, that’s one of the ways that stories are made, isn’t it? A piece of something from one place, then another piece from somewhere else?’
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