by Joan Dempsey
Ashley sidled over toward Sophie, the scuffing of her boots resounding in the cavernous space. She smiled shyly, and laid her hand for a long moment on Sophie’s shoulder, an unusually intimate and uncommon gesture for two strangers this early in the semester. This didn’t raise Ludka’s suspicions at the time, overshadowed as it was by Sophie’s distasteful tone when she spat out “homosexuals,” but later she would remember how easily and instinctively they’d joined forces and cite it as the moment in which she began to have concerns about them both.
What Ludka admired most about Prelude, 1939 was that it captured the insularity of the people, the way they had so clearly huddled into themselves, individually or with one or two loved ones. There was no eye contact among any of them, not one glance, with one notable exception—the poor busker searched the faces of the passersby, pleading for even the briefest of connections. He got nowhere, and to Ludka’s mind his raised bow, jaunty with hope and forever suspended above his tilted, empty case, was the epicenter of the whole tragic painting.
Will asked if he could escort Ludka back to her office, and when they arrived, the art department’s administrative assistant flagged Ludka down as she unlocked her door.
“Message.”
Ludka pushed open the door, circled her desk, where she dropped her keys and soft leather satchel, and began to unfasten her black wool cape. Will tossed his backpack on some papers piled on a chair and turned his attention to her bookshelves.
“Stanley Brozek,” said the assistant. “Doing research on Polish artists from the World War II era. Looking for information on someone named Apolonia?”
Ludka froze. Attention, Ludka, uwaga! She fought the sudden gravity that threatened her bowels, that demanded she collapse into her chair. Unbidden, a dormant instinct honed to an art form nearly seventy years ago arose and assumed command, demanding she carefully compose her expression and glance as if nonchalantly out the window. No one in the quad seemed out of place.
“Take this, young man.” She cleared her throat. “Hang it there.”
Will took her cape and hung it behind the door. Ludka sat abruptly, betrayed by her old knees. She thought furiously, scanning her memory for a Stanley Brozek, hands anchored on her desk, fingers splayed and immobile, an old trick to steady herself, to curb instinctual rash action, to disguise anxiety. Sixty-three years since she’d been addressed as Apolonia, even by Izaac, who, like her, had shrouded certain pieces of their history in silence. The assistant handed her the note. Ludka didn’t trust her hands not to shake, so she flapped them impatiently at her in-box and cemented them again on her desk, a sudden damp sweat apparent in her palms. Will eagerly scanned the spines of her books. The assistant laid down the message and inched out the door, clearly anxious to be on her way.
“Specifically, he inquired for me by name?”
Ludka could hear the alarm in her voice, and when the assistant nodded, she rushed to cover it up, saying she would phone him on Monday. The assistant walked off, wishing them both a good weekend.
Will pulled a book off the shelf and leafed through it. “Can I borrow this?” He showed her the book, an introduction to abstract art in America, and suddenly she wondered who, exactly, he was. She searched his eyes, dark blue behind the narrow rectangles of his wire-framed glasses, and gave him a fierce look. He shifted his attention to the window behind her, then back to the book in his hands.
“There is library. From here, books disappear.”
He didn’t shy away, just smiled and slid the book back into its place. Unlike a lot of young men his age he stood to his full height, just over six feet, shoulders back, head high, an open and confident young man.
“Who’s Apolonia?”
“Please, I must work!”
He seemed puzzled, and tugged the rings on his ear. She softened. He was a boy who liked art, nothing more. This was 2009, she must remember. A lifetime had passed. He knew nothing.
“I’m looking forward to seeing your collection,” he said. “When is that, next week? You have a lot of abstract art, right?”
“From today, five weeks. The thirteenth of March.”
He smiled and shouldered his backpack. “Want me to close the door?”
Ludka nodded. As soon as he was gone, she hurried to lock the door, then took hold of the cord on the venetian window blinds. After another scan of the quad she tugged to release the brake. She didn’t hold tightly enough, and the slats came clattering down onto the sill, and this was when she began to shake. She twisted the clear plastic rod, and the slats pivoted in lockstep, obscuring the last of the day’s sun. Ludka lowered herself carefully into her chair and took hold of the message. A California number, which of course meant nothing. He could be a continent away or outside in a car with his cell phone. Either way, he was too close.
2
Apolonia
In front of a wide fireplace, built by hand more than two centuries ago with stones extracted and hauled by horses from the nearby Adams River, Izaac was turning a page of the New York Times when he heard a car coming swiftly down the driveway.
More than forty-eight years ago, late one winter night when they’d been living in this house only a week, and their first son, Lolek, was an infant, Izaac had woken in a panic. Ludka had heard a truck coming down the driveway and was shaking him, calling him Krzysztof Wincenty, the Polish name she had assigned him in 1940 when she’d spirited him out of the Warsaw ghetto to keep him hidden in her family’s apartment from the Nazis. They were to use this name at all times, memorized with the fictitious life story of a Catholic cousin from Krakow. Izaac’s real name had been forbidden, but Izaac chanted it, silently and incessantly, knowing even at ten years old that a person could willfully disappear. He’d never stopped incanting his name, even after reclaiming it in blotchy ink on the immigration papers on New York harbor’s tarry dock, even after influential journals had given him countless bylines that had catapulted his civil rights career, even after he’d been elected attorney general. At eighty years of age, Izaac murmured it still—the way a more religious man might murmur his prayers: My name is Izaac Szymon Rosenberg, Izaac Szymon Rosenberg. But that first week in this house, hearing “Krzysztof Wincenty” in the dark bedroom, Izaac had sprung to attention and, like Ludka, had heard the rumble of a Nazi truck before he remembered where they were: America, postwar. It had snowed. The neighbor with his plow had kindly come to open up their driveway.
Now, all these years later, he still started when cars approached the house at unusual hours. He deftly closed the paper and folded it into quarters, leaned well forward and pushed off the arms of his chair to get himself up. His stature had collapsed with age and he slumped a bit, not burdened with a full-blown dowager’s hump, but pitched enough to sling back his elbows for balance as he shuffled in his slippers to the back entrance hall. He eased aside the curtain covering the narrow window that flanked the door, just enough to peek out: Ludka, home unexpectedly early. He pulled open the door and waited behind the storm door, frigid air emanating from the glass. He held the paper in both hands behind his back. Ludka parked the car so it was facing back up the long driveway. Izaac frowned; it was customary to pull into the garage.
Ludka got out of the car, her spiked black galoshes clomping one at a time onto the dirty ice, her subsequent steps slow and cautious, left arm clutching her satchel’s shoulder strap, the other cocked and held out to the side, as if reaching for a handrail. When she got to the door, he pushed it open. The cold air felt fine after the heat of the fireplace, and in it he detected the smell of oncoming snow.
“What’s wrong?” He scrutinized her face. “What is it?”
“Let me in, Izaac.”
His shoulders tensed. He stepped aside. Ludka unfastened her cape and hung it on one of the brass hooks they used in lieu of the coat closet, which they’d converted to storage for their paintings. Her eyes darted past him. She rapped her fist on his chest and gave him a little shove.
“Right, right
.” He gave her some space. She sat down in a straight-backed chair next to the door and bent over to unzip her galoshes.
“You’re driving me to drink, here, kochanie. What is it?”
“No drinking! I need your wits. Someone has come looking for Apolonia.”
He would have expected an icy dread to descend at this exact moment. He had, in fact, in the early years, conjured that very feeling countless times by imagining such a scene as this, preparing for its inevitability. Now that it had arrived, he realized that the dreadful weight of anticipation that had burdened him all these years had been a misplaced concern, a habitual, unexamined holdover from another lifetime that should have been laid down the minute he stepped onto American soil in 1950. In this country, nothing could touch his Ludka, not back then, not now.
“Stanley Brozek. I’m wracking brain, Izaac. Who is he? This name is ringing a bell, but I cannot place it.”
Izaac tapped the paper lightly against his thigh. “I don’t know. Come.”
He tossed the newspaper on top of her galoshes to offer Ludka his arthritic hands, which were still good enough for leverage.
“Take a breath, kochanie, and come with me into the kitchen. I’m going to have a little drink and I suggest you do, too. One drink won’t shatter our wits. Come now.”
In the kitchen, while Ludka related the story of Brozek’s phone call, Izaac took a bottle of Belvedere out of the freezer and poured two small measures into crystal shot glasses. Ludka stooped to see out the pass-through from kitchen to dining area, scanning the view out the three-paneled French doors into the yard and field and wetland beyond, all of which were only palely illuminated by the mild light reflected from the snow. She had a vague sense that she was being overly alarmist, but she’d wound herself up tightly enough that she couldn’t begin to tease loose her more sensible mind. When she straightened up, the kitchen cabinets above the pass-through obscured her view and she hit the closest cabinet once with the side of her fist, rattling the dishes inside.
“Already we should have torn these down. I’ve told you years and years and still you haven’t done this. How can I see? I break my neck, craning.”
Izaac gently took her hand, and put a shot glass into it.
“Look at me. Tell me what’s troubling you about this Stanley Brozek. Do you think he is some grudge-bearing Polish partisan or communist anti-Semite come all the way to Hampshire, Massachusetts, to persecute an old Jew-lover like you? This is not postwar Poland. The Ministry of Public Security has not found you out and come to shoot you. Who cares anymore about an old woman who rescued some Jews? This is decades beyond, this is America. Be reasonable. Even with the Nazis they just extradited—I read it in today’s Times—the Germans want to move on. ‘Whispers of enough,’ the paper says, and they’re talking about Demjanjuk! If no one wants to prosecute Demjanjuk for what he did at Treblinka and Sobibor, no one’s going to care about you defying the Nazis. Brozek’s probably a scholar, studying Polish art. He must have come across your sketches. He’s not skulking around in our garden, ready to break down our door. It’s a ridiculous notion.”
“Is that it? Is lecture over?”
Immediately she regretted her acerbic tone. Those sketches were the last she’d ever done, and she didn’t want to think about that. She did sound ridiculous, she knew, but Izaac did not know everything. She took a drink of the vodka, and the spreading warmth brought the promise of calm. Izaac leaned against the counter and closed his eyes, and Ludka felt her muscles begin to drain of the adrenaline that had propelled her for the last hour.
“No one will ever know I did sketches.”
“I’m not so sure about that. They found the archives shortly after the war.”
“I know this, Izaac, but it makes no difference. I did not sign them, only I tagged them with an A. Who would even know to trace them to Apolonia, much less to me?”
“Maybe Brozek is finally the excellent scholar who’s putting two and two together.”
She hadn’t considered this. If Brozek were to ask her outright if she was the artist, what would she say? She drank her vodka too fast; it hurt going down. Her greater concern, though, was that Brozek might suspect what else she had done. But even if he did suspect—and she hadn’t yet thought of a way this would be possible—he was far more likely to visit her at the office than he was to invade her home.
“I am ridiculous old woman, Izaac, you know this. This Brozek will want to stir the pot.”
“Maybe it’s time the pot got stirred. Maybe it’s time. And if it isn’t, if you really don’t want Brozek to know you’re Apolonia, don’t let him. It’s simple: tell him you know nothing and he’ll go away.”
He tossed up his hands as if dispatching a carrier pigeon. It amused her that she hadn’t thought of this simple solution, and then with a sudden and immediate clarity she knew why—she was wildly eager to learn what Brozek knew. She smiled at Izaac and thumped him on the forearm, not yet aware of the next thought that was pushing its way forward, that wouldn’t manifest until later tonight when they were in bed, lights off, Izaac lightly asleep: Stanley Brozek could be Oskar.
3
At St. Hedwig’s
If Oskar had even survived the war, he would be eighty-six by now, and he certainly wouldn’t be at St. Hedwig’s for Sunday morning service. Nonetheless, as Ludka slowly walked the length of the nave, she checked each pew, studying all the unfamiliar old men, trying to reverse the years to see who might emerge as her former comrade. All day yesterday she had berated herself for leaving the phone number sitting in her in-box, and told herself that one more day after all these years wouldn’t matter. And while it was certainly possible that Stanley Brozek was Oskar’s given name, the name Ludka had never known, it was far more likely Stanley Brozek was a perfect stranger.
She took her usual seat three-quarters of the way into the third pew on the left, as always leaving room at the end for her older son, Lolek. He was the most powerful state senator in Massachusetts and came home from Boston to the district each weekend to attend church with his mother and Marta, his wife. In earlier years, their two children had come, too. Lolek and Marta always came in through the east entrance, and Lolek led them straight through the transept up to the crossing, so it would appear as if they were trying to slip in unnoticed, which of course never happened. Ludka herself didn’t use the more convenient east entrance because she liked to walk all the way down the center aisle; Professor Zeilonka wasn’t too high and mighty to attend mass, even if she never volunteered in the kitchen. At St. Hedwig’s, as in every other Polish church, this was akin to sacrilege, and the other women gossiped about her, making things up in the absence of information, something about which Ludka was aware but stubbornly shoved from her mind. They complained to each other that she could do more to preserve their heritage than decorate her traditional pisanki Easter eggs each year, a serious accusation given Poland’s history of being repeatedly butchered by invading armies, the pieces divvied up among the occupiers like so many cuts of lamb. It was critical Poles stick together, and for these women the best way to persevere was through simmering pots of bigos or boiling pierogis or baking a pan of klopsiki. They had only a vague idea that Ludka had already accomplished far more in the eyes of historians for the preservation of Polish culture than centuries of church bazaars. Ludka was also, of course, married to a Jew, and not just any Jew, but the first Jewish attorney general in Massachusetts, something most people, including Izaac himself, could hardly believe had come to pass. But Izaac’s predecessor had not been an honest man, which opened an unexpected midterm vacancy. Izaac’s prominence, then, coupled with their influential son, put Ludka in a league of her own.
There was a stir from the people nearby, and Ludka knew that Lolek and Marta had arrived. She felt a little start of excitement to see that Tommy, her grandson, was with them. He was thirty-six, an English teacher at Adams River High School, but Ludka still saw him as an overgrown boy, with soft skin and his fathe
r’s large ears and misbehaving hair. When he saw Ludka, he lifted his chin in acknowledgement and moved past his parents. Lolek was shaking hands, with Marta tight-lipped beside him, looking as if she’d rather be anywhere else. Tommy genuflected and slid into the pew next to Ludka, put an arm around her, and kissed her cheek.
“Babcia!” he said.
Ludka regarded him quizzically. Tommy only ever came to church at Christmas and Easter. He withdrew his arm from her shoulders.
“I could stand to pray.” He avoided eye contact. “Miss me? How’s Dziadzio?”
“Dziadzio is Dziadzio, happy at home with his New York Times.”
Tommy smiled like this was the best news he’d heard in a long time.
“I’d love to wear a cape like this,” he said, fingering Ludka’s sleeve. “Wouldn’t that be so dashing? I’d have to move to London or Paris. Or maybe New York. They’d drum me out of Hampshire in a heartbeat.”
He sounded sullen, and his right leg bounced up and down. Ludka laid her hand on it and he stopped, sighed, and lowered his head as if in prayer.
“What’s trouble?”
Tommy pushed his fingers under his round, wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“After mass you will come back to house. Tell me and Dziadzio.” Tommy nodded.
The congregation had filled in behind and around them, and the church resonated with rustles and murmurs, the cadences of English and Polish all blending together. St. Hedwig’s was a glorious church, classified as a minor basilica, in deference to St. Peter’s in Rome. Ludka had chosen it not only for its Polish congregation and its beauty, but because it reminded her so much of the church in which she’d grown up: Bazylika Archikatedralna święty Jana—St. John’s. Gray marble columns flanked St. Hedwig’s nave and held aloft the intricately carved arches—sky blue and gilt-edged—that crowned the clerestory and framed its stained glass. In the sanctuary, just above the priest’s chair, rose a large painting of the famous Black Madonna of Częstochowa, and when the sun hit it just right, at this time of year usually toward the end of the Eucharist, the Virgin Mary and her holy son shone as if a brilliant sun had risen before them. The church had weathered a lot since its erection in 1889, including a near schism during the Second World War that almost closed its doors, and a fire in 1991 that destroyed enough to make the renovation more like a rebuilding. The fire wasn’t caused by ancient wiring as everyone suspected, but by an arsonist who hit more than one church in the area and was disappointed when he saw mostly thick black smoke billowing from St. Hedwig’s, not the flames he had imagined licking at the feet of Christ on the Cross. In fact, once the damage was assessed, Ludka and Izaac’s younger son, Frank, who had been a volunteer firefighter at the time and was now the fire chief in the nearby city of Huntsfield, wondered if perhaps it was a miracle that Jesus was untouched despite the char and ash all around him. Then his mother told him the legend of the painting of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, how back in the twelfth century, in its first home in Jerusalem, its holy presence was said to have saved the church from fire. Frank had momentarily considered returning to his mother’s church, the church of his childhood, but quickly caught himself—the shadow of his brother had already been too heavily cast at St. Hedwig’s. Ludka had long since given up on bringing Frank back, although she still missed his weekly presence in what she thought of as the family pew.