The Light at the End of the Day

by Eleanor Wasserberg

  ‘This isn’t them. The Germans aren’t here, we’re lucky,’ Margo said, adjusting her scarf. That gentleness had crept back into her voice, at the mention of Adam. ‘Do you want to come?’

  ‘I don’t have any good clothes—’

  ‘It’s just to the market!’

  ‘But my hair—’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  Anna glanced back at her still-sleeping children and neighbour, tasted the sour, caged breath in the air. She nodded.

  The familiar sky made Anna relax a little. Early winter sun brought people out, coats unbuttoned, walking and talking in clusters. When they were travelling from Kraków, Anna had thought she would never want to be outside again, would always want walls and a roof and a fire, but now she turned her face up to the sky and breathed deeply, rolled up the sleeves of the ugly cheap coat that smelled of cigarettes, a donation from the Skliars, to feel the sun and air on her arms. When they reached the main road, the morning birdsong and low rumble of cars and buses reminded her of Kraków. As they turned down a steep road Anna recognised it as the one they had come in through, when her panic was still raging, and she’d counted cobbles to distract her, watching her own feet and feeling how her weight pressed on Janina and Karolina; shameful, but she had reached her limit, and they were so much stronger than she was. It had been dark then, and she’d been sick and hungry and feverish with pain and relief that they’d got here, away from the Germans, to where Adam would be waiting.

  Margo gripped her arm, gave it a small shake as a car roared around a corner and they rushed to the pavement. Margo took a breath, and Anna prepared for sharpness, to be spoken to like an errant child, dragging her feet. Instead Margo patted her hand and they walked on. So I’m to be treated like a fragile hysteric then, Anna thought. I’d rather be snapped at like before; I’d rather go to war with her.

  This steep road led to broader ones that were like the streets at home. There were the same high stone buildings and shops: flowers, bakeries, a bookshop. Anna recognised too the adverts painted on the sides of buildings: the same smiling women, their heads thrown back, the same families with happy children, under large red letters. Even the shape of the street signs was the same, the rectangles with white writing. Margo saw her looking at them and pointed, said, ‘They’re going to replace them with Russian names, they’re saying.’

  ‘Will you learn?’

  ‘I already speak it,’ Margo said proudly, and Anna could have rolled her eyes back into her head for how her sister-in-law had laid the soil for that little fact to be sown.

  ‘How very helpful for you.’

  ‘For all of us! I’ll teach you and the girls and Janka.’

  ‘Janina – she won’t like it if you shorten it.’

  Margo stiffened. ‘Oh! I think I may take some liberties since I give her houseroom, and she a stranger to us!’

  Anna dropped Margo’s hand. ‘Just don’t throw her out, please, please. I know she’s annoying—’

  Margo stared at her. ‘My God, what do you think of me, that I’d throw an old refugee out into the streets?’

  ‘And don’t call her a refugee, she can’t bear it. And—’ Anna broke into a laugh, ‘certainly don’t call her an old refugee, or she’ll burn the house down.’

  Anna turned and walked in the direction she thought they were headed. Margo caught up with her and they walked in silence until they turned a corner, ‘It isn’t far,’ Margo said, and the street opened into a small market square, stalls opening up for the day. It was nothing like the Glowny, its grand Cloth Hall and clock tower and the beautiful marble buildings. Anna liked it anyway, felt with every busy seller unpacking wares from boxes, or every snatch of laughter or conversation – mostly in Polish, she thought – how her breathing was getting deeper, how the state of fear she’d been in – mouse-like, a headachy heightened awareness of sound and movement – was unknotting.

  ‘See? It’s all right,’ Margo said.

  ‘I know. Look, this fabric is cheap. Could we get some to make new dresses?’ Anna held it up, thin and of dubious quality, but a pretty print of green leaves and yellow flowers.

  ‘Food first,’ Margo replied, eyeing a snaking line towards the food halls.

  ‘And I need hat pins and some rouge. Look at this fabric. Alicia would like it, and we could make a headscarf for Karolina with it, perhaps for me too, for when visitors come, since you don’t have a servant to do our hair,’ Anna chattered. She glanced at the seller, ready to barter, a little excited to try her rusty skills; she had been sent to market every week for years, until she was married and too rich to ever set foot in one. The seller was an older woman, grim-faced and with huge arms she crossed against her breasts. She was glaring at Anna, who offered the woman her most charming smile.

  ‘How much?’ she asked in Polish. The woman only stared at her. Margo fixed her with a look and said something sharp in Ukrainian, repeating the question, and the woman looked over Margo’s head.

  Margo began to steer Anna by the shoulders. ‘The war,’ she said, shrugging, ‘makes people crazy.’ She spun abruptly and spat on the ground as they walked away, narrowly missing Anna’s shoe.

  ‘Margo!’ Anna hissed, but feeling a smile erupt, seeing Margo’s fierceness on her behalf. ‘Do you ever get problems here?’

  ‘Some people are just nasty,’ Margo said in reply.

  ‘Yes, anyway there’s no way to tell, is there? I don’t think you can tell at all, we don’t dress like the conservatives do; I don’t even go to shul, do you?’ Anna knew she was gabbling, tried to stop. ‘Anyway, are you, even? Didn’t you convert to marry Schmuel? Though you know his father probably didn’t care, but their mother was such a stickler—’

  ‘There, look.’ Margo pointed.

  There they were, in their uniforms, just walking around the market. People ignored them, moved around them like apparitions. There were four of them, looking relaxed, wearing heavy coats and boots, probably too warm. One of them was laughing, the other picking up fruit.

  ‘It’s all right, don’t be frightened,’ Margo said.

  Anna watched them meander through the market like tourists. She glanced back at the woman, who was now smirking at her.

  ‘Can we go home?’

  ‘I just need flour. Forget about your hat pins and rouge. And we have plenty of dresses from donations. Besides, you can wear mine.’

  ‘Margo?’ A woman was walking towards them. Plump and graceful, she steered her way through the lines of people. Anna noted her ugly dress with a garish striped pattern, and as she got closer, the extraordinary beauty of her face: huge blue eyes, glowing skin and the gently curling, thick blonde hair of a film star. As she approached, Anna stiffened in surprise as the woman threw her arms around Margo’s neck, and was stunned when Margo hugged her tightly back.

  ‘This is Sophia Skliar,’ Margo said, laughing as Sophia planted a kiss on Margo’s cheek, leaving lipstick there.

  This grinning doll was Theo Skliar’s wife? Anna had been expecting a no-nonsense, professional woman, perhaps kind but stern, like the women she knew at home. Hadn’t Theo said his wife worked at the university?

  Anna held out her hand. ‘I met your husband, Theo—’ she began, and Sophia spoke over her, breaking her wide, welcoming smile, ‘My husband told me all about you, and I’ve been meaning to visit, since yesterday, and I have so much to say – can you understand me? Margo, does she speak Ukrainian – let’s talk in Polish.’ She switched, ‘There, hello!’ and she pulled Anna into a hug so tight that Anna felt her ribs complain. ‘Are you going back?’ She turned her smile on Margo.

  ‘Just some flour—’

  ‘Oh, we have plenty, come and take mine, come, come.’

  Sophia’s presence made Margo younger somehow, more relaxed, and the three walked back together linking arms like students, Sophia talking incessantly as though she and Anna had been friends since childhood. ‘Aren’t you proud to have a sister-in-law like this? We’re taking in
refugees too, just for days at a time. Oh! I’ve been so busy!’

  ‘There are others in our street? Are they from Kraków?’

  ‘Some, others from Warsaw I think. Some from Germany, even—’

  ‘But we might know them!’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Sophia smiled at her. ‘So many strange things! So many coincidences! Just yesterday I saw God reunite a husband and wife. He was coming from Berlin. Imagine! And she from out near Kielce! And they just so happened to both register on the same day! They saw each other in the line. Oh! I could have danced! God brought them back together.’

  ‘I wonder why he didn’t do the same for all of the separated husbands and wives? Why must your God play favourites?’ Margo asked, and Anna heard the rhythms of a long-held debate, an argument between friends that had stretched on for years. Sophia was nodding patiently, using her free hand to stroke a tiny gold cross at her neck. Anna too had a thousand angry questions, ready to batter Sophia’s smiling face with the stupidity of what she had said, but Sophia gasped and reached for Anna again.

  ‘Oh, my stupid mouth, and Theo told me your husband isn’t here. Ach,’ Sophia said, smiling her beautiful smile. ‘It will happen for you too – Margo, don’t tut at me; there’s always hope. Are you praying, Anna?’

  ‘I don’t practise,’ Anna said.

  ‘Well, come to church with us tomorrow.’

  Anna usually hated women like this, younger and beautiful, sunny and sweet. But Sophia’s shiny surface, gleaming like a polished car, and her earnest, warm face, they were irresistible to Anna now; a light switched on in the bedroom of a child waking from a nightmare. She reached and squeezed Sophia’s arm, feeling herself to be playing a role very well, as a shiny person too.

  ‘God loves everyone,’ Sophia added.

  Anna took a few seconds to parse this out, but then remained silent when Margo shot her a quelling look.

  ‘So, your church is being used as a refugee centre? Is that where we should go?’ This was what Anna needed: official papers, to find out what they should do, how they would access the money.

  ‘Yes, yes, come to the church. Everything is going to be fine.’

  Sophia lifted her face to the sunlight as they walked, closed her eyes briefly. She wasn’t so much older than Karolina, Anna suspected. She must have married very young. They stepped off the kerb and Sophia came to herself, gave Anna’s arm a squeeze. ‘The world is still so beautiful,’ she said. ‘Look at the sky and the sunlight falling between those buildings there.’

  ‘Be miserable if you like, Anna,’ Margo said, lightly. ‘Sophia, don’t preach at her. We’re at war now.’

  ‘All the more reason to appreciate the sunshine and the sky and all the things the Soviets and the Germans can’t fight over like dogs over sticks,’ Sophia said.

  The day was ripening. Anna tilted her head towards the sunlight and felt its soft early winter light on her face. She had come to think of the sky as belonging to Alicia somehow, so obsessed with light was her youngest. The full white clouds had drifted now, revealing the depth of the sky. With all the remnants of her parents’ prayers, her grandparents’ voices, what she could dredge up from memory, Anna sent up something like a prayer; harder and angrier than Sophia’s, but with the force of all the love she had.

  The Oderfeldts and Janina began to fill their time with tasks Margo set them: sewing and planting and peeling, or writing letters which would be sent into the unknown, to everyone they could think of, asking for information, help, reassurance that their world was still there. Anna wrote to the Bernardyńska apartment, hoping one of the servants might pick it up; she wrote to every neighbour and acquaintance she could think of, walking the streets in her mind, checking off half-remembered dinner party lists; she wrote to Stefan, to Janie’s parents. She copied out her letters to Adam four times, thinking of old stories and the four corners of the earth; her daughters copied out their own, so Anna could tuck them in next to her letters. She felt in doing this she was making some pantomime of family for their hosts, felt the old hollowness in her, but when she licked the seal and Alicia insisted on scrawling little sketches on the envelopes of her Papa’s face, and a tiny perfect one of the apartment and its tree-lined street, Anna’s heart caught and she didn’t feel so much of a fraud.

  Karolina stayed up late writing to Jozef, piled the papers up on the little table waiting for Sammy to bring more envelopes from the office. Later, both Anna and Alicia made sure to leaf through the letters, in the rare seconds the room was cleared of the others. Anna scanned through the detritus of her daughter’s heart, looking for evidence of plots to run away back to Kraków alone; she wanted to smile at the youthful, stormy passion she might find, too, but instead found calm, quiet sorrow: When I think I may never see your face again, I wish I could draw as you and Alicia can; I write of, to, and for you, but my words lumber and fall short. Anna placed the letter down as Janina came in, caught her eye.

  ‘Of course you must look. What if she’s in trouble?’ Janina said.

  ‘Oh, she isn’t,’ Anna said, lightly, knowing there had been blood on the journey, which even in her state of panic Anna had noted with relief. When Karolina was close to her again, coming in from planting in the garden, it was all she could do not to hold her in a fierce grip, cling to her and cry for the child who disappeared and left a young woman in her place without her mother even seeing the changeling switch.

  When Alicia looked it wasn’t even to read the words, but just to run her eyes, fascinated, over the scrawl, so rushed and intimate, none of the careful lettering and prim lining up of lines in how they had been taught to write. There were doodles in the margins: flowers and a sketch of the fields outside the barn from the journey. This gave Alicia a jolt of unexpected envy; Karolina was not to draw, or sketch, or paint, not to cross the invisible border that Alicia had drawn around Jozef and herself.

  Sophia brought them out from the little world of Margo’s front room, its tinny sounds of the cheap clock and cheaper radio, and the smell of tea and soup. The Skliars’ house had a bright blue door and was never locked, and they all took the short walk to visit at all hours. The layout of the house was the same as Margo’s but full of bright furniture and rugs, books lining every wall, and a beautiful, huge writing desk that seemed to belong to a Bernardyńska apartment. Theo was always out at the university, campaigning for his research grant, or protesting at government buildings against the restrictions on refugees. Sophia would join him with handmade banners she painted in the living room, asking Alicia to decorate them with stars and flowers. There was a carousel of refugees at their house, changing day to day, using the Skliars as a first port before they could find more permanent rooms through the church or Theo’s contacts at the university. Sometimes Sophia patrolled the bus stations and outskirts, gathering up gaggles of lost people with their hastily stuffed suitcases and bringing them to the house.

  ‘You’re so lucky you have family here,’ they said, with the same dazed faces Anna recognised from the road. ‘So lucky.’

  Anna sent her daughters away, back to Margo’s house, before she asked, ‘What news? Tell us everything,’ and the newcomers poured out stories like bile onto the beautiful rugs, poisoning the room. It was all stories they had heard before: I heard they’ve passed a law that all Jewish businesses are to be closed. I read they’ve stolen people’s homes, and where have the people gone? There are rumours they sent them into awful, cheap houses, or even out of the city. They say they are shooting people in the street. Now they became: They closed my business. They stole our home. We ran before they forced us out to God knows where. They shot my friend in the street. Right in the street. In front of his wife.

  Anna and Janina could only gape and offer their hands, and think of their lost husband and son, look to the calm street outside, rain washing the brickwork. ‘It’s all going to be all right,’ Janina whispered to the newcomers.

  One day a man from this sea of passers-through tugged at the th
reads of their old life. He sat at the beautiful desk, running his hands over the smooth walnut surface, and opened one of the lids, took out a pen, looking for all the world like he was an entranced child playing at grown-up life with a beloved new toy that he could pretend was just like his papa’s. Janina was helping Sophia prepare a lice wash for one of the women in the kitchen, and Theo was in earnest conversation with a small group of volunteers, making notes and getting ink all over his hands. Anna was free to stare at the man at the desk, fascinated by his slow, enchanted movements. There was something in his face that caught her. She went to him and introduced herself.

  ‘We’ve met,’ he said, distracted, glimpsing at her then placing his hands back on the desk. ‘Doesn’t Adam have a desk just like this?’

  Anna’s heart quickened. ‘You know my husband?’

  ‘I worked with his oldest friend, at the university. I’ve been to your house several times, Mrs Oderfeldt.’

  Anna laughed, elated and terrified at this chance. ‘Well, I hope you won’t reprimand me for my terrible manners, forgetting you,’ she said, drawing up a chair, ‘only the last few months have rather dulled my social graces.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He used to wear glasses, Anna saw, as she came close to him. He had that mole-look of one who was missing them.

  ‘Do you know anything of my husband? I haven’t heard from him since—’

  He was already shaking his head, and Anna turned to look out of the window, gave herself a few breaths to let go of her stupid fantasy, embedded in seconds: Of course, he gave me this letter for you! He’s on his way to follow it, and with all your money too!

  ‘Only Stefan and the others.’

  ‘Stefan! We’ve been writing to him, but—’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t be getting any replies.’

  Anna held the edge of the desk. She could see Stefan, as though perched on this desk, his arms folded, a small smile on his face that told he was about to make a great argument, ready to dismiss the soldiers with jokes, quotations, sheer intelligent good will. She felt, briefly, his thin arms wrapped around her as he said goodbye on that last day, heading for a lover’s house, clutching a bottle of Adam’s best cognac. He had told her not to worry, kissed her on the cheek.