The Light at the End of the Day

by Eleanor Wasserberg

  They lost the first day and night to the confusion of ringing bells, the queue for the breakfast ration, small feuds over soup bowls, soap, registration. There were fresh papers, stamped and with neat writing in capitals, that declared who was to work and where; soon the days were carved up into labour shifts.

  ‘I haven’t been given anything,’ Alicia said one early morning, watching the others wrap cloth around their hands. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘They haven’t given us any gloves for building this new Moscow,’ Leo said, smiling. ‘It won’t take long for the skin to crack.’

  Anna reddened a little as she pulled on her own gloves, brought from Lwów. ‘We can share these,’ she offered, when Leo looked at her. ‘Alicia, you’ll be going to school.’

  ‘Oh! Nice for her,’ Frank said. ‘Sit in a room all day, easy! But, it will be to teach you to be a soldier for Stalin’s army, didn’t you know? They’ll probably give you a gun to train with, you should—’

  He was cut off by Leo’s hand on his arm, as the others in the barracks had started to turn and look at him, to shift glances to the guards standing by the door. ‘Any patterns this morning?’ she asked Frank, taking his hands in hers and tying the fabric into a knot over his knuckles. He twisted to look at his leg. ‘Hmm. Maybe … maybe that one could be a bit of Orion …’

  She looked. ‘Oh! Yes, look there’s his belt … what do you have, Anna?’

  ‘See for yourself,’ Anna said, holding out her arms, covered in the same red lumps.

  ‘Hmm, if I trace this one I can see a gibbous moon.’

  Alicia began to scratch at her own bites, but her mother slapped her hand. ‘Do you want an infection?’

  ‘Will they give me a gun?’ Frank’s right, Alicia thought. I should, I should, I should. I’ll hold a gun to a man’s head and make him drive a train all the way back home.

  Anna tutted. ‘They’ll probably teach you some Russian.’ Anna inspected her own arm. ‘God, can’t we ask the guards for something acidic, some lemon, to wash the sheets in?’

  All of them, even Alicia, laughed at her, and Anna felt small, as though she’d opened a door in her old apartment, talking with Dotty or Janie, and walked through into this camp, still wearing her satin dress and holding her silver cigarette holder, continuing the conversation.

  A bell rang and the adults stood.

  ‘Where do I go?’ Alicia asked. ‘Where do we go?’ she called to a boy around her age, on the next bunk. He glared at her and Anna turned Alicia by the shoulder.

  ‘He’ll be working too,’ she whispered. ‘I told them you were younger. You can pass for it,’ she stumbled a little, struck afresh by Alicia’s drab little body, young and old all at once. ‘If they ask you’re eight.’

  ‘Eight?’

  ‘Hush!’

  ‘Tonight we’ll try putting the legs of the bed in cups of water,’ Leo said, as they filed out.

  ‘They’ll just climb on the ceiling and parachute onto the bed,’ Frank replied.

  Leo seemed animated by the idea of an experiment. ‘We’ll test it, see if it works, then we’ll compare bites tomorrow.’

  In the yard, guards strolled about in the sunshine, directing workers into groups. There had been a new train of arrivals that morning and they were queuing, huddled together and confused, to be processed. Alicia thought they seemed to be pulled from a different painting using darker, murkier paints; their clothes were dull against the bright day, the white of the processing office.

  Anna impulsively gathered Alicia back to her, clutched at her shoulders, watching the same queue. She’d felt so clever making sure Alicia was saved from whatever terrible labour was in store for them, but now – seeing the line of people fresh from the miserable train, all the security of the last days: We have arrived, so we are here, the worst is perhaps over, and so we’ll work but it could be worse and we have roofs over our heads and they give us soup – it all fell away and she felt yet again like a lumbering idiot who threw her children into harm again and again. Who was to say the school, the labour, any of it, was even real? Who was to say they wouldn’t just take them into the woods and shoot them, like Janina? She caught Frank’s eye, but he was waving and smiling at the new arrivals, seeming for once to have lost his anxieties. Alicia twisted to look up at her.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I just … I’m just not sure if …’ She was winded by an unexpected and savage certainty that Karolina and Adam were dead. She gripped Alicia’s shoulders tightly as a guard approached. ‘I think you should stay with us after all,’ she said. The guard was inspecting a clipboard, calling out names. Leo and Frank, Riane and the others from the car fell into line as the man spoke in Russian and Leo murmured translations under her breath. ‘We’re going to chop trees, build more barracks, more people are coming …’

  ‘Mama, you’re going to chop trees?’ Alicia felt she might laugh, but her mother’s face stopped her, closed and afraid.

  ‘At least the sun is shining,’ Leo said.

  Alicia’s name was being called by a tiny woman with hair cut short like a boy’s, wearing trousers and a jacket covered in badges. She looked out of place among the guards, but marched around with a whistle just the same, calling out names, each name followed by a whistle blast, a strange discordant song across the yard.

  ‘I think you should stay with us,’ Anna said again, as Alicia moved towards her.

  ‘I don’t want to chop down trees,’ Alicia said. The guard noticed her then.

  ‘Are you with us? Name?’ he barked in Polish. ‘Go, go, over there,’ he added, as the tiny woman approached. Leo took Anna’s arm as they were led away, whispered, ‘It’s all right, best she doesn’t come with us, it isn’t going to be easy.’ Anna stared hard at the short, stern woman who was corralling Alicia into a small crowd of children, holding up her hand for silence. Leo pulled her away, reading her thoughts. ‘She’s just a young girl,’ she soothed.

  The school was a warm wooden hall, with rows of low desks with a hole in the corner for inkpots; there were no inkpots or pens, so instead they sat and listened and tried to remember things.

  The tiny woman from the yard who had led the new children to join a class of twenty or so stood at the front. She spoke in Russian, but slowly, and with a gentle smile, with a hand raised towards the newcomers, as though to say, Don’t panic, you will understand soon. As she spoke she made elaborate, slow gestures, to herself (‘Ursula’), pointing down to the floor, meaning here (‘Chelyabinsk …’), and raising her hands she cocked her head for her new pupils to repeat the name of the place they found themselves cast out to, pulled away from home by an unexpected riptide. The other pupils sat low in their seats, hands under their bottoms, as though afraid they would be led away somewhere. The youngest tottered about and held onto the desks, pulled books from the sparse shelves. Ursula ignored them, and soon they were asleep on a thin rug placed at the back of the room.

  Alicia sat in silence, soaking this in, wondering how soon she could ask for painting supplies and sketchbooks. There was one painting on the wall, of Stalin. His eyes had been lightened by a good speckle of white paint, a technique Jozef could do better. It was easy to make eyes in paint sparkle like that.

  In her portrait, Jozef had changed her eyes, made the dark brown parts almost fill her whole eye, just small dots of white in the corners, and again in the centre. He’d shown her, one of those last days of the summer, before Papa came back from France, the smell of paint and sweetened ice tea in the air, and Mama’s perfume, and roses, wilting and dying in the heat. Jozef’s hands had been steady on her shoulders, steered her this way, then that. ‘See how your paint-eyes follow you?’

  ‘They don’t look like mine.’

  ‘Too much brown, you think.’ He was biting the inside of his cheek a little. He seemed pleased; the conversation was taking the direction he hoped for. This usually meant he was going to teach her a technique, and she smiled.

  ‘Yes, too muc
h brown.’

  ‘Karolina thought so too.’

  ‘They don’t look like my real – like any real eyes.’

  ‘No, but look at the whole. Here, step back.’ She did, and saw how the darkness in her paint-eyes picked up the brown of the chair and the depth of the colour in the answering corner.

  The deep pools of brown there made the light on the skin and hair sing. The eyes were two globes of light. And always there was the red of the dress, everything else in the painting polishing it to make it bright.

  ‘It isn’t a photograph,’ Jozef reminded her. ‘It’s an image that uses illusion to be more real. Do you understand?’

  She shook her head; she was always honest with Jozef when she didn’t understand. He tried again. ‘So your eyes don’t look like this in real life, fine. But …’

  ‘It makes the red and the light look better.’

  ‘Yes, yes …’ he smiled down at her, pleased she was following that far. ‘But it’s more than that too. Look at her. The extra colour in the eyes, there. That’s how I show the depth. That’s where the cleverness is.’

  Ursula spotted Alicia looking into Stalin’s eyes, wondering who painted him, wondering if that painter had the same idea, to tell the truth through a fiction. She marched to Alicia’s desk and Alicia stiffened, prepared to be castigated for half-listening, and ready to adopt the sweet, dull persona that had been useful with some governesses in the past. But Ursula was smiling, and came to stand with her hands on Alicia’s shoulders. She spoke in fluent Polish, addressing the whole class.

  ‘The eyes of this young lady have found the most important person in the room. Your hero, father and the man who has brought you here to save you and care for you, as he saves and cares for all of us.’ She moved back to the front of the class, under the portrait, which Alicia saw now was in poorly mixed colours, a dullness to the skin, a waxiness that suggested cheap paint. Ursula continued, beaming, looking like those in the grip of religious fever, keen to pass on the good news, who would call from house to house and street to street sometimes (Robert had indulged them on the doorstep in Bernardyńska, but Janie would close the door in their faces.), ‘Dear Stalin will take care of you and send you gifts. When you need something, pray to Stalin. Try praying to God: you’ll see you get nothing. Then pray to Stalin and see what happens!’ She wrung her hands together in joy. ‘You are so very, very lucky. So, let’s begin! I will switch to Russian, but don’t be frightened.’ And she went back to the slow, calm rhythm of the Russian, writing some words on the board in chalk, which they couldn’t copy, but traced on the wooden desks with their fingers.

  There were no other children from the school in her barracks and the others weren’t yet back from work duty: Alicia had a dizzying few minutes of being alone for the first time in many months. She lay on her bunk, feeling the crawling sheets beneath her and watching the weakening light move across the ceiling. Her arms were pinned to her sides by habit and she felt cold, missing a hand on her from Karolina or her mother or Janina. Papa. He felt far away and vague, the edges of him blurring.

  Ursula had given them all sweets as they left, ‘from Stalin.’ Alicia ran her tongue along her teeth to taste the sugar. Papa’s face came back, and the thousand things that made him real and living for her as she lay alone: the tickle of his beard, his way of throwing out his hands when he spoke, how she could catch him gazing in admiration at her mother when he thought no one was looking, the feel of his fingers inside mittens clasped around her own. Hope swam through her limbs and she felt strong for the first time since the train. This was fine. Sitting in a warm room every day and pretending to love Stalin: she could do that, that was easy. They’d wait out the war here at the edge of the world, and then they would gather up all their lost people and lost things and carry them home.

  Frank shook her awake. ‘They’re feasting on you!’ he mumbled. He seemed drunk, stumbling towards the bed. Alicia brushed lice from her bare legs and sat up. Frank still loomed over her, but behind him men and women were shuffling in, some bent almost double.

  ‘Where’s my mother?’

  Frank collapsed next to her on the bunk, held an arm over his face. Alicia spitefully poked a sunburned cheek and he slapped her away, grunted and turned over.

  More weight on the bunk made Alicia turn to see her mother and Leo. They’d both sat down on its edge, hanging their heads as though they had been given terrible news. Leo was breathing smoothly but Anna’s breaths were ragged and she was murmuring.

  ‘Mama,’ Alicia said, and went to kneel so she could look into her face. A vivid bruise was just beginning to find its colours along her mother’s cheek. Anna’s eyes were closed and it seemed she would sleep where she sat, she and Leo leaning into each other. The others were the same, dropping onto bunks or some simply curling up on the floor. ‘God,’ they were muttering. ‘God, God.’

  ‘Mama,’ Alicia repeated, and took her mother’s hand to shake her awake; she jumped as her mother yelped. ‘Sorry!’ she cried, seeing the raw flesh she’d touched.

  ‘Ach, oh it stings,’ Anna murmured. ‘Oh Alicia, get some water, so I can bathe them …’

  ‘No,’ Leo murmured. ‘Let’s just sleep, sleep and they’ll heal. Don’t send her out.’

  Anna’s eyes focused on Alicia’s face. ‘Were they kind to you at the school?’

  Alicia shrugged. Her mother’s face crumpled and she pitched forwards, her face in her hands. She whispered through snot and tears, ‘Oh God, what did they do? What happened?’

  Alicia spoke over her in a tumble of words, ‘Nothing, nothing, it was only strange and boring, they gave us sweets. Who hit you?’

  ‘Bed,’ Leo said, but Anna had already tipped backwards so she lay with her head cradled on Frank’s legs, as soon as she had absorbed Alicia’s words, her face still wet.

  ‘Tomorrow she must wear these all day,’ Leo muttered, peeling the gloves, wincing, from her own hands as she curled up too.

  ‘Then they’ll get stuck to the flesh and we’ll have to rip them off,’ Alicia said, feeling she had stolen Frank’s voice and should add didn’t you know? But Leo was already asleep, the whole room but Alicia lost in dreamless exhaustion within minutes.

  Anna could not believe she had been so undone, after everything, by broken skin. The sting and chafe were so relentless the first weeks that she would stop to check her palms, expecting to see the white glint of bone. She dwelled on the other pains to distract herself, as she pushed the wheelbarrow of soil or rocks: the ache in her back, the sun burning her scalp and nose, the blisters on her feet. But her hands screamed and screamed at her and she would put down whatever she carried and cradle them or hold the flesh against the cool skin on her arm until a guard came. On lucky days, she sat in circles with the others, sorting broken bricks into useable piles or ones to be broken still more to make dash for fortifying walls, and after a string of lucky days her hands began to heal, and then harden. She and Leo took silly pride in their new workman’s hands.

  ‘Look at that callus. I’m proud of that one.’

  ‘Feel mine,’ Anna said, holding her palm up to Leo’s cheek.

  ‘Like a wooden puppet!’

  ‘Like marble!’

  ‘Ask your friend Stalin where your statue is.’

  And so they found again the world that had fallen away beneath their feet rearranged itself again, and what had seemed impossible, day after day of that work, became somehow normal and they could even laugh again.

  Soon Anna turned brown in the sun, and put aside the hat that Alicia made for her from plaited-together long grass. She felt her muscles getting stronger, despite the poor quality food and the lack of sleep. The loss of Karolina and Adam gnawed somewhere beneath her ribs, and on the lucky days when they could sit sorting rubble and stones, she kept up a silent one-sided interrogation of her elder daughter: Where are you? Do they feed you? Has Margo found you, and come to visit you? Is it safe? Has your father come for you? But he must have come
for you, he’s sure to have come for you, or Margo will have found you, one of them is with you now. Other voices answered her: Janina, Adam, Margo. Karolina’s voice was silent.

  34

  THE TURN OF THE SEASONS in Kraków could be sudden. A September morning could see the Oderfeldts dressed in cotton, Anna ordering ices for after dinner, the rooms to be aired; by the afternoon a drizzle, and the fires to be lit, by evening, a cold fog might descend, and the boots brought from the winter wardrobes, the furs unwrapped from their layers of mothballed paper, Janie sent to put hot water bottles between the sheets. None of that prepared them for the savagery of the winter that came overnight in Chelyabinsk.

  Alicia was half-awake, trying to lure herself into sleep by drifting through an imaginary home, trying to fall into grief-stricken dreams. She was walking down the stairs, Mimi or Cece licking at her heels, when a deep throbbing ache in her legs made her stumble and open her eyes. The room seemed darker than usual, and a chill in the air brought a brutal homesickness. Alicia pulled the thin covers, only used so far as a useless bed bug barrier, up under her chin, but a shiver ran across her ribs anyway, and she turned into Anna’s back, moved her feet to rest on Leo’s legs behind her. She waited for sleep to come, but her fingers were cold, and holding them in her armpits made little difference; her throat, too, was sore. She sat up, causing the whole bed to stir. Clouds of breath rose as people exclaimed and pulled blankets closer, huddled together. Someone got up in the darkness to pull the door closed, and stood for a moment silhouetted in the frame, absolutely still. As she turned back Alicia saw it was Frank. Her young joints clicking, Alicia struggled out of bed, making everyone sigh and turn over and punch the thin mattresses, but she ignored them, went to him anyway. He grinned at her as she approached, the frozen floor like needle-pricks on her toes.