The Light at the End of the Day

by Eleanor Wasserberg

  ‘Stand, go, wait, it’s your choice,’ the man said.

  He drifted over to his horse, the smoke from his cigarette and the steam from the horse’s breath mingling together. Anna listened for the low rumble of other carts, other horses, other people, the crowd from Kraków that had streamed out of the city. There was only the birdsong and the snorting of the horse.

  ‘We’ll find a house,’ Anna said, imagining Adam’s low, soothing voice, saying the same words, how simple he would make it. ‘We’ll find a house and they’ll see we have children and they’ll help. I would, if it were my house … wouldn’t you, Mrs Kardas, Janina? I’d take people in, people are good, they will let us rest, we can eat and rest, and then when the horse is rested, we can go, or we’ll find another route.’

  An urgent hunger came upon her, and she swallowed heavily, ashamed of the flood of saliva that had filled her mouth as she imagined a family taking them in and sharing fresh morning bread, the yeasty dough burning the roof of her mouth. The sky had lightened even more now, the streaks of colour and mist becoming washed out by a cool grey.

  ‘Mama, shall we go?’ Karolina was gently insistent. ‘It’s cold.’

  ‘Sir?’ Anna called. The driver touched the horse’s nose, whispered something in the beast’s ear. Its sides swelled and fell like billows.

  ‘I’ll let her rest, then leave again for Lwów at sunset,’ he called. ‘Better to travel at night.’

  The road had made it seem they were stranded in the middle of nowhere, but when they pushed through the hedgerow, farms dotted the fields. The field was freshly harvested, hay packed in clumps. Alicia stamped and broke the stalks, enjoying the popping sensation through her thin shoes, satisfied at their clean collapse. Their colour was a muddy yellow that would work well for canvas skin, mixed with a pearly white. For a moment Jozef’s fingers blending paint came to her. He rubbed his forefinger and thumb together, held them against the sunlight stream that poured through the front rooms of the apartment. Then he frowned at the palette again, turned to study her bare arm like a mathematical problem. He’d been pleased with how the skin had turned out, though it was more golden and rosier than her real paleness.

  ‘Mama,’ she started to say, though she had no plan of what to say. She was desperate to urinate. Her mother was waddling inelegantly ahead, lifting her coat and raising her feet high like a stork, trying to avoid the swampy puddles beneath. Anna turned with difficulty, Janina clinging to her arm, the two older women locked in an awkward dance. Karolina was also unsteady, gripping Alicia’s shoulders.

  ‘I’m ill,’ Alicia tried.

  ‘We’re all cold and tired,’ snapped her Mama.

  ‘I shall faint!’

  ‘Then we’ll leave you here in the corn!’ Anna said, before lurching around again.

  ‘Come on,’ Karolina said, as they set off across the field again. ‘There is a bed and food waiting for us nearby.’

  A gunshot cracked across the sky and burst a startled flock of pigeons into their path. The fog they were in was scattered, and all four darted forwards, reaching for each other, struggling towards the nearest farmhouse in a bumbling quartet of trips and heavy breaths. None of them spoke, but Janina heard again the Kraków tempo: They are here, they are here, we must go, we must go. Germans on the road, Germans shooting horses, Germans shooting people.

  The farm was awake: smoke ghosted from the chimney. Small, surrounded by simple wire fencing, Anna thought, these are the places children escape to in fairy tales, inhabited by kindly woodcutters and wives with dirty aprons who cook soup. They vaulted the fence with all the ease of the terrified, even Janina, who launched at the door and pounded it like a betrayed wife.

  On the other side: not the fairy tale of Anna’s imaginings, but a group of young men. Farmhands, streaked with dirt and finger-thick grime on their aprons. They sat and leaned, arranged around the meagre furniture, murmuring to each other in rusty early morning voices, cigarettes dangling from their mouths. The room was dark and thick with smoke, an earthy, sweaty smell. One of the men, dark bearded and with an angular face, was at the stove, where some kind of salted meat fried in a pan. The men did not immediately react to the women and girls on the other side of the door, but looked in open curiosity.

  Janina took charge. ‘We need to speak to your master or mistress please, the farmer. It is rather urgent.’

  ‘You’ve come from one of the cities,’ the bearded man said. One of his friends held out his burning cigarette to Anna.

  ‘Water please,’ she said to him, and he went to a jug by the sink.

  ‘Come on, come in,’ the bearded man said.

  ‘Jews, are you?’ the man with the water jug said, passing a cup to Anna, who sank into a chair. The question hung in the air, heavy with pity. The fumes from the meat and the cigarette were heady and made her hunger spark back into life. Her daughters and Janina had shuffled in and stood against the stained walls. Their silence answered the man’s question, though Anna wanted to add, It’s so unfair, we don’t even practise, my grandfather would be so unhappy with me, and here we are anyway.

  Janina said, ‘What does it matter, we’ve come from Kraków, where the Germans have—’

  ‘Yes, yes, all right, fine,’ one of the other men said.

  ‘No master farmer here, we’re all working on bringing the last of the harvest in,’ another chimed in.

  ‘Why aren’t you fighting? Don’t you know Kraków has just been invaded?’ Janina said. Where are your mothers? she thought. Don’t you know my boy is fighting?

  ‘Even if the world is going to hell, we still need to bring the harvest in,’ one of the men said, after a long pause.

  ‘What was the gunshot?’ Karolina asked. Her voice was raspy from misuse and the cold. The men gave a collective shrug.

  The bearded man said his name was Peter. He took them to a barn building at the back of the farmhouse, full of rolled bales of fresh hay, sweet smelling. A low window showed a view of more fields and a smaller box-like building. ‘You can go to the toilet out there,’ he said. ‘We need to work but we’ll bring food over.’

  Anna kissed his hand and he blushed, nodded and left.

  They went to urinate in turn, keeping watch for each other at the barn window, but it was soon clear that the men were no threat, even seemed to be avoiding the area around the barn to give them some privacy. Then they slept for most of the morning, woke to eat bread dipped in dripping and some puckered plums that were left for them at the door. Karolina caught her mother’s eye as Anna licked fat from her fingers, and was astonished when her Mama smiled, carried on. The barn became sticky as the day heated, and the smell rose from of their dresses and skin, doused in fear.

  ‘Sunset, the driver said,’ Janina murmured, her voice almost lost to the rafters as she lay on her back in the hay.

  ‘Yes,’ Anna replied.

  ‘But is it safer here? Maybe we should wait, we don’t know what’s out in the fields.’

  ‘Nothing, just the farmers,’ Anna said. ‘Adam knows we were heading for Lwów, so we must get there, to meet him.’

  ‘What if Papa is stuck back in Kraków? Maybe we should go home,’ Karolina said. ‘And Jozef—’

  ‘No one asked for your opinion, child,’ Janina said, and felt an instant shudder. She mustn’t make Anna angry, mustn’t be cast out. ‘I’m sorry, dear,’ she said, sitting up and studying Karolina, who looked unruffled. ‘It’s only that—’

  ‘Yes, of course, we can’t go back,’ said Karolina. ‘I know.’

  ‘What about all our things and my painting?’

  It was Anna’s turn to flare up. ‘Your Papa is missing and Robert and Janie and Jozef, Stefan, everyone we know is back there but it’s Jozef’s painting you miss?’

  Alicia bit her cheek. She had never been able to explain what it meant to her, the image Jozef had made, that they had made together.

  ‘Mama, if we get it, I mean if we hadn’t lost it, they’d know we are impo
rtant people, we are rich. They’d see. Now we just look like peasants and they can kill us.’

  ‘Kill us? Are we soldiers? They don’t kill girls and women.’ Anna’s shock at her daughter’s calm heavy words made her voice rise.

  ‘Then why don’t we go back and look for it? And for Papa, and Jozef, I mean, of course,’ Alicia said, half to her sister, whose face was closing in a way that meant she was becoming angry.

  ‘My God, you were sent to try my patience!’ Anna found her mother’s sayings came too easily at times. ‘Because as I have just explained, your father is to meet us in Lwów.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Stop it, Alicia,’ Karolina said.

  ‘But he is with those Germans. He won’t be able to—’

  Anna got up and began to walk in circles, kicking up hay-dust. ‘He will explain – have you forgotten that your Papa is a businessman? They wanted the car, he’ll give it to them, probably make a deal of some kind. Then he’ll make his way to Lwów—’

  ‘Do you think he got the painting from the ground? Maybe he used it to make a deal,’ Janina said, trying to soothe Alicia and her own nerves at having offended them all.

  ‘Yes,’ Alicia almost whispered. ‘Perhaps he’ll bring it to Lwów.’

  This seemed to bring an end to the discussion. Anna went to the small window, looked out. For a few minutes, the only sound was the soughing of the men bringing in the harvest, and the thuds as they dropped it outside the barn.

  ‘How can they keep working when we are under attack?’ murmured Janina to herself, for something to say. In truth it made her inexpressibly glad, calmer, not only that these men surrounded them, but that they were working as though nothing had happened.

  When the thumping stopped, an hour or so later, one of the men came back with a jug of milk. He placed it on the ground and scuttled out again. ‘Like we are wild animals,’ Janina sniffed, but she gulped the milk straight from the jug along with the others, cream coating her mouth.

  The afternoon settled into an unreal calm.

  ‘I wish we had a radio,’ Anna and Janina kept echoing to each other. ‘If only we had a radio, the radio will be telling people what to do and where to go, and what is happening at home. Do they have one at the farmhouse, do you think? I think we should go and ask them. Why don’t you go and see if they have a radio?’ These phrases they cycled around and around in between gulps of milk and watching the sky, looking for the signs of sunset, neither making any move towards the house in search of a radio. Finally, Alicia, from a spot she’d taken up by the window, said, ‘The light is changing.’

  ‘You and light, my God,’ Anna muttered. ‘Is the sun setting?’

  ‘It’s beginning to.’ This was painting time. Every line edged with the softest light.

  They all looked at one another. None of them wanted to leave the warm, dry barn with its veneer of safety, its quiet. Anna and Janina both toyed with similar words in their mouths. Perhaps we should, maybe it’s safer to? But when neither of them spoke, Karolina and Alicia finishing the last of the milk, they began to layer up again in their double coats and re-lace their shoes, and left the barn.

  The sky was full of nothing but birds swarming like bees, flying from tree to tree, practising for their long flight. The day had cooled. Anna inwardly cursed again for not thinking to wear her beautiful watch, still sitting on her dresser. It was worth something, but it was also disorienting not to know how many hours it had been since they left the house that morning, which already felt an impossible age ago, saying goodbye to the servants and packing up the cars, arguing over the curtains. Except it wasn’t that morning, but the day before, that they had left. All those hours Adam had been alone. Her apartment empty. The Germans swarming in the streets she knew like flies, smashing windows, beating people in the street, killing them, if the newspapers were to be believed.

  They were halfway across the field, its expansive flatness feeling too big and open, before they realised they hadn’t thanked the farmers.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Anna said when Alicia complained. ‘We can’t miss the horse and cart, and I’m sure they know we’re grateful.’

  ‘How can you be so rude, Mama? They even gave us milk, that was probably for their coffee, and they didn’t have to help us, we could have been sleeping in the field all this time.’

  ‘For God’s sake! Do you think thanking people is important today?’

  ‘You always said that manners—’

  ‘Alicia, stop,’ Karolina warned.

  Alicia didn’t care about thanking the farmers, but she knew that pushing her mother, bickering about something as at home, a point of etiquette, soothed for a moment her racing mind. ‘I think we should go back and—’

  Her mother stopped, and shook her hard by the shoulders. ‘No,’ Anna said. ‘You don’t. You’re just afraid. We keep going.’ They eyed each other. Alicia was still short and slight, not much grown since the days Jozef had painted her, but her face was sharper, growing more like Anna’s. She nodded.

  It was a fruitless argument in the end. The man with the horse and cart was long gone, back along the road to Kraków to pick up more fleeing people with their coins and jewellery, their heirlooms of medals from the last war. They waited until the sun was past set, and no trace of light marked the sky, watching the odd gaggle left from the flood of people out of Kraków, all on foot, scanning for any faces they knew, before stumbling back through the fields in the dark towards the farm.

  19

  ALICIA QUICKLY CAME to love the sweet hay smell of the barn. For years afterwards she’d enjoy buildings like this: sun-filled, warm wood, beams, piles of hay stacked around the walls. It was a time of strange peace, before Lwów, and while she was still healthy enough to not notice her body any more than usual.

  Janina made them all beds from the old hay, even covered patties of it with some of the layers she and Karolina had worn, to make pillows. Alicia liked to take handfuls of it and hold it next to her nose as she rested (they were always tired, in the barn, though none of them could explain why, when they did nothing, walked nowhere, except outside to urinate). It masked the rising smell of her stale clothes. After a while, it distracted her from the nagging discomfort in her abdomen. The farmhands mostly left them alone, except to bring food and sometimes news. It turned out they didn’t have a radio, but the farm across the fields did; when they went to collect their orders of eggs and milk they would also get a bulletin.

  ‘It’s true about Kraków,’ was the first of these, from Peter. (‘God’s sake, did he think we were running away for fun?’ Janina said, after he’d left.)

  ‘What does it say to do? Where does it tell the refugees to go?’ Anna asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Not many left of these,’ he said, handing out apples. ‘Don’t worry,’ he added, prompted by the look of panic that had fleeted across Janina’s and Anna’s faces. ‘No advice on the radio. It just reports lots of people heading east, out of Poland altogether.’

  ‘So we shouldn’t go back to the city, for certain?’ Anna said.

  ‘Did they bomb the whole city?’ Janina asked, thinking of her house, how little she had packed, just a photograph of Aleks, in his new soldier’s uniform, and her identity papers, snatched from the dresser when she finally succumbed to her fear; she had left everything else.

  ‘The radio says it was bloodless.’ He shrugged. ‘They just surrendered.’ He shook his head, tutted a little. ‘You should go east, with the others. The radio and newspapers say that Lwów will be occupied by the Soviets soon. It will be better for you.’

  But the prospect of the road, walking all the way to Lwów, was impossible. Better to wait it out here, where it felt quiet and safe. Adam would be in Lwów by now, Anna told them all, and they just needed to wait for things to calm down a little, and then join him.

  They stayed and stayed, even as the farm went more and more quiet, until only Peter visited them. After a week, he came with hard-boiled eggs wra
pped in a towel.

  ‘It’s getting colder,’ he said. ‘Do you need more blankets?’

  ‘Why can’t we just sleep at the farmhouse?’ Anna said. ‘All of your friends are gone, aren’t they? There must be lots of spare beds.’

  ‘You can’t stay there.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘They’re here, in the village. They’re visiting all of the farms.’

  They all fell silent. Karolina began peeling the eggs. Peter crouched down, picked up some of the hay from a bale, rubbed it between his fingers. ‘I have to take this out to sell,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ Anna said, after a while. ‘Can we stay here, still, in the barn?’

  ‘I think you should go east, I said before. Lots of people are going to Lwów. Safer there.’

  ‘We should walk over to the next farm, what do you think? They might have a cart,’ Janina said.

  ‘So, have all your friends gone? It’s gone so quiet,’ Alicia added, pulling her legs beneath her.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Well, what will you do?’ she said.

  ‘The next farm, that’s a good idea, isn’t it? What do you think?’ Janina pressed.

  ‘I’m sorry, they wouldn’t help you.’

  ‘But why not?’ Alicia said, as the others sighed and sat back.

  ‘They just wouldn’t,’ Peter said, flushing a little. ‘They don’t like Jews.’

  ‘We’re not Jewish,’ Anna said, too quickly, with too much a pitch of fear, and he only looked at her in response, without any sneer or satisfaction.

  ‘I think you are.’

  ‘On what grounds?’ Janina said, reaching for the language of the law, or Laurie’s way of speaking, to steady herself.

  Peter only looked at them. The barn seemed to shrink to Anna then. She liked Peter, his steady way of speaking, his country accent. He was between them and the door.