The Light at the End of the Day

by Eleanor Wasserberg

  Adam’s letter was the usual tone of just before a return from Edie: respectful, unsure, that of an old friend who was no longer certain they had any claim to your time. He mentioned Edie and his new son in the lightest way, as though acquaintances of Anna’s she might be vaguely interested in. She’s doing quite well, he is healthy and has red hair. We spoke of them moving closer, to Poland, but she doesn’t want to leave her mother. Towards the end of the letter his anxieties seeped through. I hope you haven’t been taking the girls into Kraków. The newspapers in France are reporting this law has been passed in Germany after all. I trust you are being sensible, dearest Aneczka. Anna sighed, realising she would soon have to manage Adam’s fear all over again, and worse, the fear of a new parent, a thousand new ways for the world to hurt you.

  She glanced at her eldest daughter again, felt the echo of her young infatuation, the buzz along the skin, the butterflies, the racing pulse. A confusion of envy and protective love enveloped her. Karolina would have to have her heart broken, and cry, and no doubt write some poems about it. It was a shame that once the painting was finished they would have to gently remove Jozef from their lives. Anna liked his quiet, thoughtful face. She liked his honesty. Should she be angry with him? She was quite certain he hadn’t taken advantage of Karolina. Besides, he also exuded a kind of youthful awkwardness that made her hope he, too, would not suffer too much when they were separated.

  Anna brought the letter to her face, stroked its edge along her cheek, smelled it, imagining she could catch a trace of Adam’s scent in it, moustache wax and coffee. Imagined it was a love letter, and she an unmarried, restless daughter; imagined trailing excitement and lust around the house, leaking so strong they could smell it down in the street. She felt instead the steady pulse of her heart, the calm affection for Adam that was a mixture of loving friendship, fond exasperation and a kind of reflected pride in her position. She still, after all these years, enjoyed being Adam Oderfeldt’s wife. Besides, he could be sweet and funny and when they were lovers it wasn’t unpleasant. Still, she’d missed something, she felt, watching Karolina. She’d cut passion out of her life like a brown piece of apple. The thought made her feel irredeemably old.

  ‘I’m going upstairs,’ she called over. ‘This room is too warm. Karolcia, open a window.’

  The girls were pulled out of their strange spell. Jozef’s paintbrush clattered on the sill, probably staining it, as he went to help Karolina with the window, stiff in its frame. Alicia was looking at her mother with unconcealed annoyance.

  ‘Why should we let in all the cold air, and the noise from the street? Now we won’t be able to concentrate.’

  ‘Alicia, please,’ Anna said, suddenly exhausted.

  ‘Papa always likes the air,’ Karolina reminded her, now kneeling on the sill, one arm uselessly supporting the window as Jozef struggled to lift it.

  ‘He goes out on the terrace,’ Alicia replied, breaking her pose and stretching. There was a crack as she rotated her neck.

  ‘Fine, do what you want with the kurwa window,’ Anna snapped, and snatched up her letter, slipping on her shoes. Her daughters exchanged a shocked look, and Jozef’s back was still turned. Anna saw he had flushed with embarrassment as she left the room, feeling her own face blush.

  ‘Well,’ Jozef said. ‘The kurwa window is open now.’ Karolina laughed. They were still close, her kneeling on the sill, his sleeves rolled up, and she let the laugh carry her to lean into him for a moment, her arm against his. If he lifted his arm, she would be nestled against the whole side of his body. But he only pressed, slightly, his arm to hers, and she could be imagining it all.

  Alicia had been looking down into the street below, but now she came over to look at the canvas, and Jozef moved away. Her little shoulders fell a little when she saw it, and Karolina felt a rush of love for her and her persistent openness, her lack of mask, even after all her lessons.

  ‘I know, I know, it still doesn’t look like much,’ Jozef said to Alicia’s silent disappointment. There was a smile in his voice. Karolina found his kindness to Alicia almost unbearably attractive. Alicia only kept looking, her head moving slightly to catch the light on it in different ways.

  ‘See,’ Jozef went on. ‘I’m layering up the background. It looks like brown sludge now, but look here,’ he pointed at something on the canvas, ‘here is your little paint-ghost. See her shape?’

  ‘Yes,’ Alicia smiled.

  ‘Now imagine her in red, with the gold of the hair. See this splash of white here?’

  Alicia nodded.

  ‘That’s where the sunlight hits the top of your head.’

  Karolina would have expected a bigger smile here, more chatter, but instead Alicia gave a deep breath and a nod again, just like Jozef did when he was pleased with the mix of colours or with the curve of a sketched shape.

  ‘Yes.’ Alicia gave him a small smile then. ‘Well, let’s keep going. It sounds like Papa will be home soon and I need it to be finished by then.’

  Now it was Jozef and Karolina who exchanged a look: a practised exchange of apology, swiftly accepted with indulgence, then deepened for a moment into something else, before breaking off. Alicia fell back into her concentrated space; Jozef, despite himself, affected by her impatience, began to mix the reds. Karolina stayed on the sill, enjoying the contrast of warm air at her feet and cool air against the back of her neck, enjoying how she could gaze at Jozef in plain sight under the guise of watching an artist at work.

  In her room, Anna lay on the bed, all the windows wide open, freezing air washing over her stripped body. She thought of Adam and Edie. She thought of Jozef and Karolina. She thought of Jozef.

  Across Europe, her husband was carefully holding his mind still. He found this stillness in a memory of himself and Stefan as children, camping in the forests outside the city. City boys, they’d marvelled at the layers of stars, and challenged each other to find the dark spaces, the emptiness between them, that they were used to in their city night skies. That was what Adam did now, in front of the guard. He pushed all the pinpricks of light away, tried to think of blankness, to make his face blank too. The man had been holding Adam’s papers for a long time. He had smoothed the documents over with his palm, like an archaeologist discovering some precious artefact, and his large, girlish eyes, long eyelashes like the baby Adam had just left, flicked between the old picture and Adam’s face.

  When the train had chugged across the border and into Germany, Adam felt his usual boyish disappointment at the lack of otherness, foreignness: the fields were just the same, the glimpse of cars and farms and bridges, all the same as France, or home. The passengers continued their murmur of pleasantries and complaints about the weather and the rattle of the windows and the quality of the pastries from the first-class coffee cart, how perhaps it was the same as the standard class after all, and perhaps they had wasted their money. Adam read a newspaper in French, trying to stretch his vocabulary, exercise his linguistic muscle, but he found his heart quickening at the headlines alone, and placed it to one side as the train pulled into Offenburg. Again the same wooden platforms, pots of flowers, women in winter coats and hats, only the German signs to make any difference. One man got onto their carriage, nodded politely as he moved down to a booth.

  But then the air in the carriage changed, a collective fumble, a break in the easy conversations. Three guards stood in the doorway, looking every inch the soldiers in their dark grey suits and military-style caps. One of them called out ‘Border control’ in German, then another translated into French. Despite the destination of the train, there was no translation into Polish. The second guard’s voice though was surprisingly gentle, and Adam sipped his coffee, knowing his papers were in his inside pocket. He looked out of the window, unable to account for how the carriage seemed to be charged with anxiety, unable to tell if it was coming from his own traitor heart, which betrayed his new-found fear at every turn. On his night train to France during the earlier journey, Ge
rmany had passed in a blur of darkness and glimpses of low-lit stations, the lulling rock of the sleeper carriage, where Adam drifted in and out of sleep, dreaming of his children. The silent, sleepy train guard had collected their papers at one stop, and returned them stamped.

  One guard moved to the end of the carriage, a slow walk with his arms behind his back, like an officer. Perhaps it is the army, Adam thought, a show of strength, more posturing, as the newspapers say. The whole country is like the new boy at school swaggering about. He came to a stop at the door, and the second guard began to move, this time gesturing for papers, leaving the third guarding the other door. The arrangement caused an irrational surge of panic in Adam, and he took out his passport and papers, arranged them carefully on the table. A woman was arguing with the guard in French, with a northern accent too strong for Adam to easily follow, but he caught the gist, which was that part of her identity papers were missing, and she would be fined. The woman’s voice fell into a deeper and deeper hiss, until the guard, worn down or bored or in search of something else, abruptly walked away, shocking the woman into silence. His footsteps grew louder as he approached Adam.

  ‘Papers,’ the man said in German, although they were right there, on the table, and Adam gestured to them. The guard held his eye, and Adam gathered them up, handed them to him, feeling like a boy who has misunderstood the school rules, with the whole class watching.

  Then began the long period of blankness, Adam searching again for darkness between stars. The carriage noticed the length of time, became quiet, some craning to look, others carefully looking out of the window, listening. The rustle of the papers as the guard sifted through them again and again, held them up, as though against the light, to match picture to picture, stared openly at Adam.

  ‘Remove your hat,’ the guard said, in perfect Polish.

  Adam did so, held it in on his lap like a cat.

  ‘Part of your papers are missing.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Part of your papers.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Everything is here.’

  The guard gave a small patient sigh, as though Adam was a very slow child or employee. He pointed to a blank space in Adam’s border card.

  ‘Religion.’

  Now the carriage moved again: a rustling, as even the politest turned to look.

  ‘There is no requirement for such a thing in Poland.’

  ‘But we are in Germany.’

  ‘But I am Polish, and passing through on my way to Kraków.’

  ‘In Germany you must obey German laws.’

  ‘But I am not subject to this law,’ Adam said, keeping his voice slow and steady, as though at a dinner party, arguing for fun, counting points on his fingers, relaxed, watching Stefan’s face as he marshalled his counter arguments. ‘It surely does not apply to other nationals.’

  ‘Fill it in,’ the man said, thrusting the papers back to Adam. He folded his arms, as Adam smoothed the paper back down on the table. Adam took a pen from his inside pocket, a beautiful gold-plated thing that he used to sign the biggest contracts. He held it for a moment, hoping the guard would feel discomfited by the sight, by the fact that he, Adam, was clearly an important man, but the guard only stayed rooted to the spot, oblivious.

  Adam’s mind raced. All the newspapers he’d read. All the radio broadcasts, late-night conversations. He thought about writing Catholic. There was a low hum of impatience from the guard at the furthest door, a check of a watch. The guard standing over him though was calm, impassive, as though there were all the time in the world. Adam wrote, wafted his hand to dry the ink, handed the paper back. When the guard read it he seemed pleased, nodded. He exchanged a nod with the guard at the door. ‘But this is a crime, to conceal your Jewish identity. There is a big fine. Luckily for you, you are rich,’ he gestured at Adam’s pen.

  ‘But I wasn’t concealing anything. I told you, this is a German law—’

  ‘And you are in Germany,’ the man said.

  ‘It’s two thousand Reichsmark, payable immediately,’ the man from the door called.

  ‘That is ridiculous.’

  ‘If you can’t pay, we take you off the train, and to a police station.’

  Adam’s breath quickened. He took out his wallet, pressing down the rage to somewhere beneath his ribs.

  ‘I can write a cheque.’

  ‘Cash.’

  Adam was ashamed to feel his blood rising. ‘Who carries so much?’

  ‘The pen will do,’ the guard said. ‘Gold?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The guard gave a low whistle, exchanged a look with the guard by the door.

  ‘You know there are people without enough to eat?’ the guard said. He spoke in everyday Polish, but his accent was pronounced. Perhaps he’d spent time there, or studied over the border. In Kraków, he could even be one of Adam’s employees, a nod of respect as he walked through the door.

  It had been an extravagance, it was true. He’d bought it in the early days, before buying the apartment and after the first big order had come through, and he’d asked Anna to marry him, all in the same week. He liked the coolness of it against his fingers, the weight. At first he’d displayed it on his desk, as it reminded him of his father’s things. Somewhere in the apartment were his father’s pens, some also in gold and silver. Over time he’d stopped displaying it, carried it around like any pen, dropped into briefcases, shoved into suit pockets. Once he’d let Alicia use it to draw with.

  ‘You know this?’ the guard pressed.

  Adam nodded. The guard took the pen, turned it over in his hands. He spun it like a baton and handed it to the other guard. Adam looked out of the window, feeling it was desperately important to seem as though this encounter had ended exactly as he had wished. He had escaped a fine, and it was only a pen. In the time he moved his eyes to look at the now empty platform, the guards had slipped off the train. There was a piercing whistle, and the train began to move. Adam wanted to ask someone if it would stop in Germany again, or continue straight over the border, but the low murmur in the carriage had not returned. For a few minutes, it seemed that no one even moved, and then people began to slowly unfold papers, open bags, painstakingly, wincing if they made too much noise, as though trying not to wake a sleeping beloved. Adam felt eyes on him, even heard the inrush of breath more than once, as though people were preparing to speak, but kept his face turned, angry at the carriage and its pity. Or perhaps they were silent because they hadn’t known he was a Jew – how could they? And now they were angry. Both incensed him, and he turned the anger inwards, nursed it, carefully avoided reimagining how he would laugh in the guard’s face, and the carriage would laugh too, throw the guards off, make a complaint to the driver or the police or the government, someone, and the guards would stand humiliated on the platform, unable to meet his eye as he watched through the window. He searched and found again his memory of Stefan, the cold of deep night as they camped under the stars, their young eyes hunting darkness.

  15

  ADAM BROUGHT HIS SECRETS trailing after him into Kraków: the way his new son’s fingers had curled around his thumb and squeezed with a surprising strength that made him laugh aloud; the way in the days after he arrived he had slept at Edie’s side, like a husband, her in the crook of his arm, listening to her moaning softly when the creaks of the floorboards meant the nurse he had hired was up with the baby, the thin cries sinking through the ceiling. How he had promised Edie he would stay, that the girls were old enough now, Anna was his beloved friend, everyone would understand. Whispering this into Edie’s dark hair, her slim neck, his hands wandering over her still soft belly and thighs, until she made a sound to make him stop, still bleeding and sore as she was. How when Edie developed a fever, sweat soaking through the sheets and her eyes wild with fear, he’d spent a fortune on bringing a private doctor from Nice, and stayed up all night praying, promising God as carelessly as a new lover, and then whispered still more fervent promises to E
die as she slipped in and out of awareness, barely able to recognise him, asking for her mother. How the doctor had spoken sharply to him, Where is the girl’s mother? You must bring her here, she is asking for her. Don’t you know how ill she is? Women die from this. How when Edie’s mother had arrived, sent for by train, she had been cold to him and accused him of ruining her daughter’s life, in such rustic French he could barely understand her, but he promised her, too, that he would be moving here just as soon as everything was settled in his marriage, that he loved Edie, that he would die too if she did not recover. How when the doctor came downstairs with a relieved look, said it was not as bad as he had feared, as it could be, that her body would fight it off. And yet he took Adam aside, Best if she doesn’t get pregnant again, you understand. How when Adam, leaving the baby in his grandmother’s arms, went to see his lover, asleep but breathing steadily, the smell of sickness leaving her, he was already wondering if there was a train to Kraków that afternoon.

  All this Adam filed away in his mind, making Edie, and even the perfect baby son, so heart-bursting in the flesh, faint impressions on the back of his mind. When he was out of France they were like shadow puppets. His life with Anna and his daughters came back into focus, switched places from where they, too, had been dancing shadows on the walls. This he found easy, a long-practised sleight of focus, the twist of a kaleidoscope. More difficult was the in-between world of the train, his returning sense of dread, which at the house in France had been held apart, cocooned in the villa as they were, few newspapers, no radio. This he also tried to file away as the train pulled into Kraków, his fellow passengers avoiding his eyes, finding instead that he fell into thinking of Alicia’s birthday all those months ago, and that his fear was again taking root.