The Light at the End of the Day

by Eleanor Wasserberg

  ‘Are we going to eat and wear the curtains?’ Alicia replied.

  ‘Now, now,’ Adam said, as though hushing a baby. ‘Of course we should take the things we love, just in case.’

  Janie and Dorothea rolled and pressed, clicked shut trunks of fabric and books. In Karolina’s room, Alicia and Karolina pulled on layer upon layer, buttoned into fur coats so they sweated as they pulled on their boots.

  ‘What else do you want to take?’ Karolina asked, cupping her sister’s face in her hands.

  ‘My sketches. Are you taking your poems?’

  ‘Some of the books, but I can’t take all of them … and my letters …’

  Alicia studied her sister’s face. ‘How many are there?’

  ‘Lots. He writes every day.’

  ‘Too many to take.’

  ‘Probably,’ Karolina said, her voice breaking.

  Alicia silently took her by the hand and led her to her own room, full of piles of unpacked clothes and shoes. She crouched down at a corner under a never-used desk.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Alicia ignored her. She felt along the skirting board for the loose panel, pressing on it until it gave way. She held out a hand from beneath the desk.

  ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Just sketches and things.’ She felt into the dusty space, where diaries, translations and sketch after sketch were hidden.

  Karolina ran to her bookshelf and returned with a stash of letters, which she kissed before handing them to Alicia to tuck behind the walls.

  As the hour ticked by, Karolina went down again and again to check for messages, to ask if the telephone had rung. Each time Janie shook her head, kissed Karolina on her hand or her cheek, and each time Karolina said, ‘Well, there’s still time,’ and Janie replied, ‘Perhaps he is on his way, in person.’

  By early evening, the house had taken on the strange echo of a stripped building. In the main hallway, their Persian rugs had been rolled into thick, red sausages, lumped where diamonds were sewn into the backs. Silk dresses, fur coats, pairs of Parisian gloves with pearl edging, books, papers: they were all layered against the walls, some in leather cases, others in boxes and even baskets from the kitchen. The radio drifted between static and news of the new, almost bloodless occupation, in Polish and German words. Adam rushed back to the dining-room window, but the Wawel looked just the same. Across the city, people did the same thing, expecting the sky, the colour of buildings, even their own faces reflected in the windows, to have changed. Rushing to gather together their possessions, to keep the servants and their daughters calm, Adam and Anna passed on the stairs, stopped, held hands, pressed their foreheads together.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Anna whispered.

  ‘Perhaps it isn’t true.’

  ‘The radio.’

  ‘Yes, all right. We’re leaving soon.’

  Janie, and even the cook, Dorothea, began to load up the beeswax-scented cars.

  ‘Where is Robert?’ asked Adam. ‘I want to talk to him about the route.’

  ‘Robert left early, sir,’ Dorothea called to him as she leaned all her weight into a pile of material that would not fit into a case. Adam recognised the drawing-room curtains.

  ‘Leave those, Dorota,’ he said. ‘Left where?’

  ‘Well, out of the city of course, sir.’

  The family stood in mute shock at this.

  ‘Robert’s gone?’ Karolina said.

  ‘But he was supposed to drive us – that can’t be right,’ Anna said, strangely close to laughing. ‘Has he really gone?’

  The servant women were frowning, whether at Robert’s sedition or the family’s response, it was impossible to tell.

  ‘He has family,’ Dorothea said, as though this explained everything. Adam stared at her. ‘He’s a Jew,’ she added, in a tone close to snapping.

  ‘Hysteria, just hysteria,’ Adam muttered, but he himself began to stack random objects in the hallway, and the family followed him, began to help packing. To Alicia it was like playing upstairs when she was small, carrying piles of laundry and sighing in an imitation of Janie. She used to imagine how strong and capable she looked, and how the flush of exercise might make her cheeks glow in a pretty way.

  Adam carried his paintings, slid in like secrets among the layers in the cars: Adam’s own face in paint with his red hair and smiling eyes. Alicia’s wild four-year-old face with her fringe, unfinished in its beautiful frame. Alicia’s pretty brown-eyed stare, her red dress billowing confidence in its rich, lush folds.

  In the hallway, the family stood in the new echoing space, with so many rugs and paintings gone. Both servants were sweating, and Janie was crying.

  ‘Well,’ Anna said, ‘we’ll be back before long.’

  Janie pulled Karolina and then Alicia into her, kissing their heads. Alicia was stiff and shocked but Karolina clung to Janie’s neck. They shook hands and Dorothea even kissed Anna’s cheek.

  ‘Good luck,’ Janie said, and then she melted back into the house, wiping her face.

  ‘We will be leaving too, sir, very soon, so we’ll lock up the house,’ Dorothea said.

  ‘Papa, what about Mimi and Cece?’ Alicia asked. ‘Will they come with us or with the servants?’

  Adam didn’t answer.

  ‘I’ll leave the dogs some water and food,’ Dorothea said, smiling down at Alicia.

  Then she too was gone, her shoes sounding loud and hurried on the naked stairs down to the kitchen.

  ‘Go and use the toilet,’ Karolina instructed her sister. Alicia blushed and stared: only Janie spoke to her of such things.

  ‘Yes, go,’ Anna joined in. ‘Who knows when we will stop.’

  As Alicia obeyed, her sister turned to her parents.

  ‘Papa. Mama. I—’

  ‘Darling Karolcia, I know what you’re going to say and it’s impossible,’ Adam said.

  Karolina shifted her feet. ‘I can’t leave him. I won’t.’

  Anna could have shaken her, made her teeth rattle. She tried to keep her voice level. ‘Karolina, the whole country is under attack. They’re saying Kraków is Germany now. Do you understand? We have to leave.’ Karolina met her with dreamy silence, her eyes brimming. ‘You’re enjoying this,’ Anna snapped, as Adam tutted at her harsh tone. ‘This isn’t some romantic drama.’

  But Karolina wouldn’t pick up Anna’s bait, instead looked to her father.

  Her parents shared a glance, in which a long-practised battle of wills was settled in Adam’s favour. Anna sighed out her frustration. As she left she considered holding Karolina’s face in hers, in apologetic admiration of the stubborn set of her daughter’s jaw. Instead she vented at Janie as she went down the stairs, ‘Perhaps you might move a little more slowly? I’m not sure the entire German army will have time to come and steal quite all of our things!’ Her voice faded as she stepped out into the street, lit a cigarette, her hands shaking a little.

  Father and daughter faced each other. Karolina began. ‘I know you think I’m asking permission but I’m not. I’m just informing you that I’m staying. You can write to me at his address, if you stay out of Kraków for a long while.’

  This wrong-footed Adam, who had been braced for a stormy passionate speech, not this calm informative one. He aimed to set Karolina off-balance in turn.

  ‘I see. Are you in trouble?’

  Karolina’s cheeks flooded red and she stammered out a No. Adam pushed his guilt away.

  ‘Then there is simply no need to be reckless.’

  ‘I can’t leave him here.’

  ‘You’ve told him we’re leaving?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s written?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Telephoned, spoken to your mother, spoken to me?’

  Karolina glared at him. ‘It’s chaos,’ Robert said. ‘The message might not have got through.’

  Adam took Karolina’s hands in his. His own elegant, soft fingers folded over her chewed nails
and torn cuticles. He saw in them his daughter’s hours of innocent fretting over her lover, while her parents felt the very ground lurch under their feet.

  ‘May I suggest a compromise, my Karolcia?’

  She nodded.

  ‘His apartment is on our way out of the city. We’ll stop there, and you can speak to him. Tell him he must come with us, because, no, listen—’ for Karolina had begun to withdraw her hands, shaking her head. ‘Because it is as impossible for us to leave you behind as it is for you to leave him. If he loves you as he says, he will come, we’ll take him. And you can marry in Lwów if you like, from your uncle’s house. If he will not, his love is not enough and so you must make your farewells and recover.’

  ‘He will come,’ Karolina said.

  ‘Well then, everyone is happy.’ He kissed her hands, one and then the other, feeling the rough edge of her torn skin under his lip.

  Without Robert they had only one driver, so everything had been moved into the larger car, and the sisters perched on top of their possessions, their necks twisted against the roof. As the car pulled away, Alicia imagined the dogs scampering around the empty rooms, enjoying freedom, scratching the walls, sleeping in Papa’s bed, on the satin sheets. She imagined them greeting the soldiers as they came in with excited whines and yelps, and being shot between their watery brown eyes.

  Karolina buried her elation as deep as she could. She knew it was indecent to be so happy. The war had decided things for them after waiting for so long. Within a month they could be married. She felt a surge of joy and squashed it by focusing on the familiar street, telling herself she might never see it again; she found she could not care.

  Sun glinted on shop front windows. It was as though they were leaving for a late summer holiday in the mountains or to meet a train with a visitor from Berlin or Paris, Anna thought. As they continued onto the main roads out of the city, she saw lives carried in baskets and on backs, pushed in carts and prams.

  Alicia saw a boy with a half-eaten apple, his mouth full, cheeks puffed out like a mouse, as though he must eat all of the food at once, before it was too late.

  ‘Papa,’ Alicia said, ‘we didn’t bring any food or anything to drink.’

  A long silence, in which the crowd they crawled through called out to itself: Let me through, for God’s sake, let me through. Did you hear that? Their own panicked stupidity hung over the car, and Anna felt the terrible impulse to laugh again.

  ‘We’ll hold on until Lwów,’ Adam replied. ‘Your uncle will have a whole table of treats for us. You are going to have to learn,’ Adam said, raising his voice, ‘to be hungry and to be patient.’

  His knuckles on the steering wheel were pushing against the skin, a ripple running through his hands. Alicia shifted, the hidden rug-diamonds pushing at her muscles.

  An hour later they were still in the city. The roads were clogged. Waves of panic struck the crowd when rumours of planes began, though the sky was clear and silent. Some cowered next to the car, which shivered with the weight of their bodies pressed against it. A man gripped the door handle on Anna’s side, sheltering under his jacket. She shrieked, kicked out as though to shoo the man away.

  ‘Just drive, Adam,’ she pleaded. ‘They will move.’

  But the carts and the throng and the horses made an impassable ocean. Adam nudged and blew the car horn and each time the car shuddered to a halt the mounds of beautiful things tottered. Little thuds in the earth, against the car, among the crowd, turned Karolina’s mind to her book, forgotten on her bed. The god Poseidon shaking his trident, whipping up the winds, the earth, the oceans. The thuds grew: a fight had broken out. Shouts of wordless rage. The crowd surged one way, then another. The car rocked and Karolina let out a squeal. Alicia clamped her hand over her own mouth as she saw the source of the disturbance: two German soldiers, their rifles gleaming, walked towards the car. They are here. The crowd parted around them as a shoal of fish.

  Adam’s knuckles working, their grind and roll, was the only movement in the car. Breaths held, the family became a painting, locked in place. Alicia wanted to look at her mother but instead she saw only the bright white fur of her collar from the corner of her eye, the very tip of her mother’s chin, and the slow pace of the soldiers, one bending down, graceful as he touched the side of the car. He turned to his colleague and gave a low whistle of appreciation.

  The first soldier rapped politely on Papa’s car window. Tap-tap-tap. Quick, businesslike. His companion shielded his eyes and peered into the car, nodding at Anna when he caught her eye, and at this courtesy Anna allowed her lungs to empty, slowly, without any kind of release, but it was something. The first soldier stood back, waiting.

  ‘Adam,’ Anna said.

  Adam opened the door and the soldier pulled him out, without malice, without any moment of eyeball-to-eyeball triumph, and he didn’t throw him to the ground, and there were no gunshots or heavy blows to Adam’s head, he was not pushed to his knees, nor his coat dragged from him, he was not spat at. All of the horrors of Adam’s humiliation, all of the imaginary moments of terror Alicia had dreamed awake for a long time: they did not happen. There was no blood. And yet Alicia screamed all the same, because her Papa was touched by a German soldier, and he was out of the car, and they were inside it.

  ‘Stop, Alicia,’ her mother whispered. The white panic of her eyes killed Alicia’s scream in her throat.

  Adam’s head was bowed, his fists clenched but his face turned to the floor like a servant. They were demanding something, and Adam opened his hands. He flicked his gaze to Anna, and as she met his eyes she saw urgent terror. Anna could only nod and show her husband a second of raw horror of her own, a look of love and apology and anger all at once. She threw open her passenger door, and rushed to the back of the car, pulling out first Alicia, and then Karolina, with skin-breaking force, dragging them over the piles of their possessions. They tumbled out on a layer of detritus, instantly dusted and muddied by the fall, scrambled up and away from the car, away from Adam. The crowd swallowed them, hid them, Anna clutching her children to her hips.

  ‘Mama, our things,’ Alicia gasped. ‘All our things. Mama, my painting.’

  Kraków, 1937–1938

  3

  ALICIA’S FATHER led her by the hand through the damp, misty streets towards the Glowny. Her breath billowed like smoke. Warm lights were beginning to glow in the windows of the bakeries; their cinnamon sugar doughnuts sat fluffy, piping out scent and heat. She slowed, pulling Adam back, to look at a tower of pastries. She shook his wrist, meaning Papa, I want. It was usually enough. But Adam had other plans, and pulled her mittened hand back into a stroll. She trotted along, confused, but a bloom of excitement tempered her instinct to stamp and pout.

  Mama had said it would be a surprise. ‘I’m not coming,’ she’d said, ‘only your Papa and you. A special birthday treat.’ Her mother had smiled and smoothed down the red satin of Alicia’s new dress; it had been too thin for the wintry air but the seamstress had lined it for warmth that week. When Alicia and Papa left, her sister Karolina hadn’t said goodbye.

  Alicia pulled the fur closer around her, used the edge of it to stroke her cheek. It smelled of her mother’s heady perfume: lilies and something like cake. The Glowny rose before them, the horses clopping around the cobblestones, the Cloth Hall standing in the centre, warm and inviting. Alicia wasn’t allowed to wander in there, where cheap curios were sold: her places were the boutiques and sweet shops of the boulevards off the square, like the Ulica Floriańska, the street Mama said could be Paris. It was coming to the hour, and so the bugler would be playing his thin wail soon. Adam slowed, stamped his booted feet in the cold, and enveloped Alicia in his arms to listen. He was always respectful of the bugler.

  ‘Think how cold he is up there, Alicia,’ he said. ‘Lucky us in our coats and furs.’

  A small crowd gathered under the church spire to listen. Alicia admired their velvet capes and fur-lined hats, some in mink like hers. T
he women wore pearls over their coats and the men’s boots were shiny like Papa’s. Some of the men wore their small kippah at the back of their heads, white cotton or silk and decorated with coloured threads. Adam’s was slightly different, in a dark blue, with a white threaded design. It looked like a drawing of an ocean, with his red hair around it the sand of a volcanic beach. Alicia looked around at the gathered people and wondered what their servants were like, and if they were as ugly and kind as her Janie. Adam grinned down at her and danced with her clumsily to the tune as others around them hummed softly and applauded when the glint of gold from the bugle disappeared.

  ‘Happy Birthday, my Ala,’ he said. Was that it? A trip to Glowny to see the bugler? For her last birthday she had received a music box and a doll, handmade in Prague and dressed in silk. She’d felt too old for the doll, but propped it against the sill with the others.

  ‘Come,’ her father said, ‘I am taking you to dinner like a proper little princess!’

  ‘Dinner? Not at home?’

  She thought of the silver platters, and her new puppy on her lap, Karolina ignoring her.

  Her Papa beamed at her. ‘You shall sit and dine and you shall even drink wine. You are going to the best restaurant in town, as is fitting for a lady such as yourself. You are twelve now, no longer my little one.’

  He made a little bow, stiff in his thick coat, and Alicia laughed as he darted a kiss onto her nose as he came close.

  ‘Come.’

  Adam led her across the square, past couples laughing and leaning their way to restaurants, and past the horses, the man playing a violin with a hat for change, the last shoppers with their arms full of boxes.

  The Wentzl stood proudly at the edge of the Glowny, its windows aglow. Piano notes and the tinkle of cutlery and conversation floated across the square. Adam stepped back to let Alicia go in pride of place. The waiter, a penguin with a full beard like her father’s, beamed down at Alicia in her satin and fur. She stood up straighter, and gave an imperious nod copied from her mother, eyes sliding away, neck turned just so.