The Light at the End of the Day

by Eleanor Wasserberg

  ‘Hey. Quiet now, old woman,’ a voice came in Russian, and Janina heard only the sense of his words, a dismissal. She reached out of the bars, grasped and found cloth. A shocked cry came out as she tugged and screamed again, ‘Help us! Help! Help!’ A crack as he dropped the rifle and his head connected with the bars. Her hand was wrested away, a painful grip on her wrist.

  ‘Stupid old bitch!’ More men came. Janina’s courage drained. She stepped down, backed away. The men’s eyes were wide through the bars, looking down at the people below. One of the little boys started crying, the other watching him in wide-eyed toddler disdain as he chewed on his mother’s hand.

  Janina began gibbering, ‘I was trying to help. I was trying to help.’

  Voices called down. ‘Hey. Hey! Who was that just attacked me? Where is she?’ A collective gasp came up from the car as a shock of flashlight beamed in, whipped around them.

  ‘Please,’ Anna whispered. Then tried again, found her voice, though she spoke to the floor. ‘My daughter is sick.’

  ‘Quiet, quiet!’ Frank said. ‘They’ll kill us all, didn’t you know?’ Leo shushed him, reached for Janina’s hand. Anna did too, gently lying Alicia’s hot one in her lap, so they held Janina between them. She felt the bucking pulse of Janina’s wrist, and her own heart quickened still more. The flashlight disappeared, and in the gloom Anna took Janina’s hand, kissed it. Janina kissed Anna’s cheek. ‘It’s all right,’ they whispered to each other.

  The screech of metal and wood was a shockwave through the car: they cried out, and huddled together, as the doors were wrenched open. There was the world: a station platform, a rush of cool air, floodlights beyond the station showing the tips of woodland. Leo took a long gulping look at the sky, but the lights were too bright to trace the stars. A boy in soldier’s uniform stood with his arms crossed in petulant fury, while three others shone torches into the car. A small crowd of soldiers and civilians milled up and down the platform, large Alsatian dogs on chains barking into the night. The air was full of smoke and petrol.

  ‘Is that child dead? That one, dead?’ one of the men called, shining his beam on Alicia’s limp form.

  ‘Oh my God, is she?’ shrieked one of Riane’s girls, and there was a scramble away from the car, a collective recoil, but the soldiers held up their hands, and everyone stopped.

  ‘What … what did he say?’ Anna said.

  ‘No, she’s sick,’ Leo called, in answering Russian. ‘We’ve been asking for a doctor.’

  ‘Where’s that old woman that attacked me?’ the boy called. He pointed theatrically to his head, a small stream of blood. He drew a finger across his temple, held it up in indictment, the red inky stain. ‘Come on out, you old bitch!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Anna whispered. Her breath, on Janina’s face, was somehow still sweet. ‘I – Janina, I’m so, so sorry, oh my God, I’m sorry—’

  ‘Thank you for trying to help me, for bringing me with you,’ Janina whispered, as she unknotted Anna’s fingers from her own, one by one, as she had used to do when Aleks gripped the railings outside school, frightened of bullies.

  ‘I’m so sorry about Karolina,’ she added. She once more held the smooth cool skin before laying Anna’s hand back on Alicia’s form. As she stood, Anna called, ‘Wait,’ and others stood, blocking her way, trying to explain, but the torchlight was on her face, and the boy she had hurt stood grim-faced, triumphant. ‘It was an accident, it was an accident,’ Anna cried, with all the authority of her old self. ‘She was trying to get help for my daughter!’ The men broke their stare, spoke to each other, and it seemed for a moment that the nightmare months had fallen away, that Anna could save her by sheer will, by the force of her outrage, as though they were simply young, offensive boys in Kraków; their mothers would be furious, That’s a dear friend of the Oderfeldts you were rude to, do you want your father to lose his business deal? But then the boy beckoned Janina again, and all the fantasy protection fell away. Anna faded from her as she picked her way through the figures in the car.

  So, it’s to be a Russian prison, Janina thought, as the boy led her away from the platform, Anna’s cries still carrying across the air. I can write to Aleks from there, she thought, the boy’s rifle in the small of her back, small shouts from the other cars, as they noticed her, calls of what are you doing? As they stepped further away from the floodlights of the station, the expanse of air and sky above her, she thought, It might be better, I’ll be alone, but I won’t be in that damned car full of vomit and stench … As she was pushed to her knees, she thought, Perhaps they’ll send me back to Kraków after all. As they told her to look ahead, cold steel against the back of her neck, Janina’s last thought was of her own apartment, the little chair by the window, Aleks’s photographs, her china set with hot bubbling coffee, Laurie working at his desk, turning to smile at Aleks playing with his toy soldiers on the floor, and she almost sobbed with relief and contentment, as though waking from the worst of dreams.

  Chelyabinsk, 1940

  32

  THE GUNSHOT didn’t sound right, dull and quick as a dropped brick. Anna replayed it anyway, over the next days and weeks of the journey, as the car doors were relocked and the train trundled on, leaving Janina behind. To the gunshot memory-sound Anna added the thundery echoing she had always imagined, and soon expanded into deeper daydreams, in which she and Janina had a longer goodbye, more time to explain, then still wilder ones, in which the car door opened and they all rushed out, crushing the guards and running away into the woods. Had she really sat motionless on the floor, while Janina was taken away?

  At the next station, she traded her shoes for some apples. ‘If you want fruit, I just showed you how to get some yourselves,’ she snapped, when hands stretched out towards her in the car. The air was warming, and the apples were cold and sharp. She chewed off chunks to give to Alicia, who sucked on them like sweets.

  Over the days and weeks Alicia’s eyes refocused, her swollen abdomen and poker-hot skin receded back into pale, thinner flesh. When Alicia’s eyes scanned the car for Janina in the dim light, her mother only shook her head, and Alicia said, ‘I thought I dreamed it.’

  ‘No.’

  Alicia took another sip of water, let savage thoughts run through her: Karolcia was her fault, so it’s right. But Janina’s familiar old face, her puckered, frightened eyes, the way she had looked up at them from the mud outside Kraków, her quiet sewing, her silent language of looks with her mother, even her cold apartment at home, the hot chocolate and pastries … she had been one of them and now she was lying dead somewhere.

  ‘Mother.’

  ‘Do you need more water?’

  ‘Are they going to shoot us?’

  Frank inevitably fell into a track of didn’t you knows, shouted down by the others, while Anna stared at her daughter. The commotion died down again as they strained to listen to a message being passed from truck to truck. A new station was approaching.

  Leo spoke Anna’s lines, ‘Janina was trying to help you, but she accidentally hurt one of the soldiers, and they had to take her away, probably only to prison for a little while, or to send her home or back to Lwów, you know? But we are all co-operative and there’s no reason for them to hurt any of us, why go to all this expense of the trains and so on, why feed us and give us water? Think, child.’ She shushed Frank as he muttered, ‘It’s for the newsreels, didn’t you see the photographers and the cameras?’

  Alicia only looked at her mother. Anna could make out her sharp face made still sharper by her weight loss, her deflated cheeks that Adam had so doted on and loved to pinch and kiss. Her recent illness had turned the whites of her eyes more sallow, almost yellow, and her hair was scraped back from her face, from the worst of the fever, held in a strip of fabric torn from Janina’s dress. Under her clothes, Anna knew, under her thin and flaking skin, the wasting muscles, Alicia’s bones were sore and her organs as old and sluggish as an old woman’s. She felt seized with the layers of l
oss she tried so often not to look at, this one buried so deep under the obvious absences, spaces where the others should be. Who Alicia would have been was gone, and here was this creature in her place, hard and angry and confused. ‘I don’t know,’ she finally replied, and Alicia met her honesty with a tiny nod, before curling up again to rest.

  They arrived in midsummer. The shock of the opened car doors, air rushing in and bathing them all in what felt like cool water, kept them all static for a moment, before the blinking and squirming against the fierce light began, the turning away of faces, the pressing shut of eyes. All around was the sound of the doors opening, and the rising smells of bodies long packed in boxes and sent on rails across countries through a hot season. New guards beckoned them down, held out arms for them to jump. They were in different uniforms again, with gentle hands. There were few voices. People clustered together, holding hands, eyeing the strangers from the other trucks, whom they knew only by voice.

  The beauty of the landscape was a shock. Alicia readjusted her mental image, the Russia she’d seen in her mind’s eye, populated by the conversations on the journey, was from fairy tales: snowy, with palaces and bare forests, bears and frozen streams. Instead, here was a wheat field, whispering under the sun, a forest beyond, green and lush. Tall grasses rippled like a lake. They’d all assumed they would know when arrival was near by the cold. Instead the sky, still and high, was the richest blue, and so clear that a crescent moon sat in the exact shape Leo had described only the night before. Alicia let her eyes bathe in the blue of the huge dome of sky, noticed the deepening of it towards the horizon, the way the white speckles of cloud, almost invisible, seemed to dissolve into the sapphire and lighten it, as though really paint. All this she didn’t think in words but saw as a composition: the flecks and smudges of paint. Karolina would have found the right words.

  ‘Is this Russia?’ Alicia found the courage to ask her mother, once she had torn her eyes from the sky.

  ‘It must be,’ Anna said. ‘It doesn’t seem so bad.’

  ‘It’s a trick,’ Frank said. ‘Didn’t you know?’

  ‘Like Circe’s island,’ Leo said to Alicia, smiling, but she ignored this; they needed to stay alert. She rifled through her mind for any helpful lies. Who should they ask about Karolina and Papa, and what story might send a thread back into Europe to find them?

  ‘Is there water?’ Anna asked a passing guard. She shifted her weight from bare foot to bare foot.

  The guard looked surprised, smiled vaguely. Leo repeated the question in Russian, and added, ‘It’s hot, and we’re thirsty,’ as she stroked her throat, arching her neck a little. Her blonde curls, stunning even unwashed and unbrushed, fell down her back. The guard gawped at her, and Anna caught Leo’s eye, suppressing a smile. Once she’d have done the same, but the journey had made her feel detached from her body, which, besides, was a thin, old, broken and sour-smelling thing now. One of her powers, maybe her only power, was gone. The guard started to answer Leo in a stutter, but then they were all caught in a current of voices and movement, guards herding the refugees through the long grass, calling to them in Russian, This way, this way. The grasses waved over their heads, soughed in the breeze, and it was blessedly cool in their shade. The refugees still held on to each other, making chains that flattened paths through the grass. Alicia let her eyes drink in the shifting shades of green. She’d been starved of colour for so many weeks. Through the grass came disembodied calls, always from the guards. Alicia understood the word Moscow.

  She touched Leo’s arm. ‘What are they saying?’

  She imagined stumbling out of the grass into one of the huge Moscow squares, ten times bigger than Glowny, or turrets of Russian fairy-tale palaces glinting in the sun over the crest of a hill.

  Leo turned back to her, breaking her hand away from Frank’s in front of her, and using it to wipe at her underarms. Alicia noticed that they were soaked in sweat. She cocked her head to catch the calls, floating across the grass like strange birdsong.

  ‘This is where you are going to live now,’ Leo translated. ‘We’re building a new, second Moscow.’

  They came out of the long grass first, emerging like woodland sprites, holding hands. A set of simple barracks. Wildflower meadows stretching behind, towards more forests. There was a low hum, a bees’ nest somewhere nearby. The sun seemed swollen and close, throbbed against the white walls of the barracks and their own hatless heads. The others from the cattle cars stayed in their clusters, at the edge of the long grass, beginning to talk to each other, relaxing a little since it was quiet, and the guards weren’t shouting, and they didn’t have guns. They began fanning themselves, stripping off layers. People began asking for water and shade.

  There were still more guards, different uniforms again, more men, more papers, more arms held stiffly behind backs, shoulders pushed back, saluting each other, nodding to each other, talking to each other in a secret language, relaxing and taking out a cigarette when they heard some magic password. How ridiculous they all are, wherever you go, Anna thought, here are more boys dressing up in costumes, playing at a game, thousands, millions of them everywhere, all playing a long stupid game, and here we are again trying to find out the rules and the magic words. Some secret dance was happening between the ones who took them from the trucks and the new guards, a reporting, a deference from one set to another. The refugees watched, trying to decipher it. Eventually another secret signal happened, like chemicals passed between bees in a hive, and the new guards all snapped to attention, began marching around in their stupid way. The first set scurried to stand with the refugees, and they gestured for them to line up outside the large, central barracks building. This was a dance they all knew by now, almost comforting in its familiarity; everyone had survived at least one of these dances, and those with papers dug them out, those with stories to rehearse began running through the details of the narrative in their heads.

  Frank was in full flow. ‘They’re going to line us all up and shoot us, didn’t you know? I know, I know,’ he said, lurching towards one of the guards, and striking his own temple with a forefinger. ‘I know, I always knew! We should never have left Lwów, I knew you were all liars! Hmm? Hmm?’ His thin body was curled down towards the face of the guard, who was laughing at him. Leo’s hands pulling him back made no difference.

  ‘That man,’ Anna muttered, but her traitor heart had quickened all the same; the blood rushing to her head made her dizzy. Leo looked around to her in appeal, and both Anna and Alicia helped drag Frank back. Leo began walking him up and down the line like an agitated horse. The laughing guard stepped towards Anna, another man following him.

  ‘He’s crazy,’ he said, in patched-together, heavily accented Polish. ‘Why’d they bring you all this way to shoot you?’

  ‘There are lots of Poles here, and Jews,’ his friend added, in smoother Polish. ‘You’ll feel at home.’

  ‘This is best time to arrive,’ the first man said, and his colleague added, ‘Yes, yes, the summer. We came in the winter—’

  ‘The winter!’ his colleague rejoined.

  ‘Oh my God!’ and they laughed. It was a well-oiled conversation, and they let it run, while Alicia and Anna stood stupefied:

  ‘Oh, just you wait!’

  ‘You won’t believe it—’

  ‘You think Poland is cold—’

  ‘But we survived it—’

  ‘It won’t kill you.’

  ‘It isn’t so bad.’

  ‘Don’t look so frightened.’

  Leo and Frank returned. Frank had subsided into a mumbling, agreeing conversation with himself.

  The laughing man placed a hand on Frank’s shoulder, making them all jump.

  ‘Really, friend. They won’t hurt you. Look, they don’t care about the papers here, or anything. When I was deported I had just the clothes on my back. They don’t care here, they just want you to work.’

  Lots of the refugees had made the same mistake, and realise
d around the same time. Some bilinguists on both sides helped, but most understood from watching how the new guards moved along the lines, and how the men who had brought them from the train tracks lowered their eyes, sometimes, or nodded in recognition: whether defiant or deferential, both told the story of a long relationship of prisoner and guard.

  ‘You came through Belarus? That’s where I’m from,’ the laughing man said, falling into easy conversation, though none of them were replying. ‘It’s beautiful, no? Did you see the landscape, all the wildflowers?’ He directed the last question to Alicia, who shook her head, her stomach still too tight to speak.

  ‘Well, was it Belarus, or not?’

  Alicia was saved by the line moving forward again, just as Anna snapped, ‘We don’t know, we were locked in a cattle truck.’ She added, after Leo shot her a warning glare, ‘Thank you for speaking in Polish. I can understand some Russian, but—’ but the men were drifting away, to talk to other, more interesting newcomers, to ask to trade, sweets or cigarettes or the playing cards they had been given at this station or other, and to ask, urgent in their homesickness, the bewildered new arrivals about the wildflowers of Belarus, the exact shade of the poppies.

  33

  ALICIA HAD TRIED TO keep up her nightly ritual, reaching for Karolina’s mind across countries, passing over fields and towns and marching men, to find her and scoop her up and take her to the apartment on Bernardyńska, but once in Russia she lost the habit. Even in the cattle car, before the infection seized her, it had felt possible to create an invisible barrier between herself and the other bodies, root into the wooden floor, close her eyes and begin travelling through her mind. Here, adults and children slept together in one long bunk. She was sandwiched between Leo and her mother. Every time someone moved, which was often – scratching, slapping at insects, rolling over, kicking each other – everyone would wake, a collective moan rising, until uneasy, restless quiet returned, all of them staring into the gloom and the long hours of thinking, wishing for morning to come.