The Light at the End of the Day

6

THE PAINTER STOMPED towards the huge apartment block, his precious canvas beginning to curl. Irritation bubbled in him, and he found that his breathing had become erratic and shallow. Back in his small studio, his project was pulling at him. He could feel its colours draining away, his vision becoming wispy and faint, so that when he was free to stand before it again, he would find only the ghost of a brilliant idea. Instead of capturing it he had been compelled to catch the tram across the city, his sketching tools in a leather case, his fresh canvas sheets in a roll over his shoulder. He had felt only annoyance at Adam Oderfeldt’s letter. There was no satisfaction for Jozef in a portrait piece of a spoiled child, who had a reputation as a spiteful girl who had ruined another painter’s work with a tantrum and a pair of scissors. Besides, being in the hushed exquisite apartment made him anxious and awkward. Something blocked his ears so that he had to ask the family and servants to repeat what they said, and his own voice sounded strange and muffled in his head. He felt watched and judged by everyone in the house, and an exhausting mix of irritation and guilt at Adam’s aggressive friendliness, his patting him on the back, offering the him nalewka, expensive cigars, a coat.

‘I was waiting in the rain,’ he said, when the plain-faced servant finally opened the door, holding a sewing kit. She flushed.

‘I’m so sorry, sir.’ She had a slight stutter, which got worse as she gestured with the kit. ‘I would normally come down right away, but I was sewing, upstairs I mean, so I didn’t hear.’

‘Oh, it’s, please, it’s all right, it doesn’t matter.’

‘Won’t you come in right away?’

She avoided his eye as he came inside, and this made him so miserable with guilt and being always all wrong in this place, some invisible spell of wrong cast even as he stepped onto Bernardyńska, that he almost turned back to the door. Instead he stammered a little himself as he followed the girl up the stairs.

‘It’s only that my paints, and my canvas must be dry, you see.’

She nodded, without turning around, and so he cast around for ways to please her, and said, ‘This house is always so clean and well kept. You must work hard on it.’

This was met with a glare. ‘I do not clean, sir.’

He almost threw up his arms in defeat, and was silent.

In the drawing room, the youngest girl was playing with a small dog by the fire, teasing it as it rolled and wriggled on a thick rug that looked like sheepskin. Jozef was assailed by the familiar envy as he thought of the same scene in his own home, the threadbare, cold, hard nature of it. The grate empty except for some newspapers. The soot on the cheap mat before it, full of fleas that jumped like sparks in a fire and feasted on his ankles. The girl glanced up.

‘Hello, Alicia,’ he said, the muffled feeling thicker than ever in his ears and spreading to his throat. He liked children, but the necessity that he please this one made it difficult. The girl was dressed in a ridiculous way, in layers of bright silk and white stockings that were becoming peppered with dog hair. Her hair was curled like a doll’s, and when she turned her face was blank like porcelain. She was plain, with nothing of the mixture of sharpness and softness that beauty required, that her mother had. Her nose had a small kink, the lips were thin, the skin rather sallow.

‘You’re the painter, I suppose,’ she said, in a bored tone matching his thoughts, sounding eerily like her mother, who Jozef had always found cold.

‘Where is your father?’

‘Smoking on the terrace.’

‘And your mother?’

‘Upstairs with Karolina.’

Jozef felt the canvas slip a little in his newly warmed hands. He felt a vague panic about how to paint such a vacuum, before reminding himself that it was not to be one of his true pieces, only a family portrait. The girl watched as he laid the canvas down and placed the leather satchel next to it.

‘Why have you brought those?’ she asked. ‘Papa has ordered everything in for us.’

On an upstairs terrace, Adam greeted the painter with his usual warmth.

‘Ah, you are here! You have seen little Alicia? But she was so young the last time you saw her properly! Isn’t she a little beauty? But why are you wearing this suit jacket? It’s all sodden from the rain! Why didn’t you bring a coat, or even better, you should telephone and we’ll send a car! Honestly, why must you insist on living in this peasant way?’ He laughed, flicking ash over the balcony edge, his beard and moustache quivering. In the course of this speech he had lit a cigar for Jozef, and manoeuvred him into a beautiful wrought-iron chair. Jozef fought his bad temper and quelled the image of his abandoned piece back at home, smiled in what he hoped was a genuine way.

‘So, you’d like a portrait of your youngest?’

‘We’ll talk of it later! You’ll stay for dinner?’

‘No! No, I must get back.’

‘So, what do you think of Alicia? Isn’t she bright and funny?’

‘Yes, of course. A lovely child.’

Adam watched him, nodding.

Jozef shifted in his chair, breathed out on smoke, ‘How are you, after Germany then? I read—’

‘What a shock! It’s all the neighbourhood’s talked of for weeks. I cried, you know, I’m not ashamed to tell you. Such a terrible night, such a frightening thought. But …’ Adam leaned forwards, ‘it doesn’t seem so bad as all that. I was worried, we all were, and there were rumours, you know, always these rumours. But nothing has changed. You know, we aren’t poor. A poor Jew is in trouble. Perhaps, maybe, if we were poor … but we are not like that. It’s just not the same for us, in this part of the city, you know, not the same at all.’ He shrugged, looked out at the Wawel, gestured to it with his cigar, as though it confirmed his tumble of frightened words. He went on, ‘I hope it is not disrespectful to ask that we go ahead with the painting? You don’t mind?’

Jozef shrugged. He’d read the reports of the German pogrom with a distant disgust; saw the pictures of people beaten in the streets, glass glinting on the pavements, with a muted horror that he forgot when he turned the page. He noticed the name for it was Kristallnacht, which he liked for its crisp sound, wondered how the artists were responding to it, something about refracting, through mirrors and glass, perhaps, or the Juden in red paint, repeated like a chant. There would be lots of red. If he were German he’d do a piece himself, perhaps make a name for himself with it.

He watched his patron pace and smoke and gesticulate, now talking about what he wanted from the painting. Jozef barely needed to listen, it was always the same: regal, refined, pretty. Probably the wretched, pampered dog at her feet.

Adam blew out a plume of smoke, continued as though Jozef had replied to his earlier question. ‘Yes, yes, it’s certainly not a matter of disrespect. You’ll come for our party? The view is perfect from here. We are having the whole neighbourhood over. To talk, drink, just be together, you know. Some people are bringing German families who are coming to stay until things are calmer. Can’t blame them, I’d do the same, if there were the same dangers here.’

‘Oh, well I—’

‘But you’ll be visiting so much for the portrait, you might as well. It’s next week. Alicia’s a princess, you know,’ Adam went on, with no trace of irony that Jozef could discern. ‘You should look at the Infanta portraits, for example, to give you an idea.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Jozef choked down laughter. ‘We’ll start right away.’

‘Oh, we’ll pretend there are some others to consider for the commission, just for appearances’ sake.’

‘Oh?’ Oh God, Jozef thought, I hate this. The games of high society, and I don’t know the rules. He’d lost commissions before, after Adam had promised them to him. Turned down other work, and failed rent.

‘I promise, it’s yours. You can start discussing after dinner,’ Adam said, settling into the chair opposite him, and laughing as Jozef started to protest. ‘After! Anna and my other daughter will be back home, and we’ve invited some friends. Then you can decide on some ideas, you know, look for the best place in the apartment, think about lighting, and so forth.’

‘I really must get back.’

‘To a sad little bowl of unsalted soup? You know, they say you cannot make art on an empty stomach!’

‘Who says that?’

‘They! Everyone! Come on. I think it’s beef tonight.’

‘I should go home and change.’

‘Not at all, not at all. Please, Jozef. I want you to feel at home. Things have been so … what a dreadful time! You must stay and relax, have fun. We all should.’

As dinner guests began to arrive Jozef recognised a fellow painter, a rival from Warsaw. They shook hands wearily.

‘Milo,’ Jozef nodded. ‘Enjoyed your piece for the Hartmanns.’

‘And your last,’ Milo murmured, seeming close to laughter. He’d made an effort, a good quality suit. Jozef smelled starch; Milo must be doing well. He felt the shabbiness of his own suit, the turpentine stains on his cuffs. He moved away to the windows, sipped his wine, watched. It was always the same people at these things: doctors, lawyers, businessmen and their wives. Tonight many of them carried the same edginess as their host: talking slightly too fast, in a determined way, gripping arms along with strong handshakes, as though to reassure themselves that they were all still real. Jozef felt the rare quickening, deep in his gut, of an idea: a scene, like this, in a beautiful room, with well-dressed men and women, posed in the elegant, relaxed way of pre-dinner drinks, but their faces distorted in raw terror.

Hopeless to try to sketch it out now: Adam caught his eye, gestured for him to join a circle. As hands were shaken, Jozef leaned in, pointedly turned his arm so the unpatched holes in his left sleeve were visible, said, ‘I’m Jozef, the bohemian spectre at the feast.’ This earned him many ‘Of course, of course,’ smiles, some vague compliments on his earlier work for the Oderfeldts, and hearty laughter from his patron.

‘You remember Stefan, my dearest friend,’ Adam said, leading Jozef to a new circle.

‘Yes, of course,’ Jozef lied, shaking another hand, but holding it a moment longer when he recognised him after all.

‘Professor!’

‘Ah, Jozef! How wonderful to see you here. Are you the one to paint Alicia? How wonderful for you!’

Jozef laughed. ‘Well, I hope.’

‘Do you? I imagine these commissions must bore you to death.’

Jozef only smiled. ‘I wasn’t aware you knew the family.’

‘Knew? Adam and I are brothers in name. We grew up together! Well, are you doing well? What are you reading at the moment?’

‘I don’t read much now. I only draw and paint.’

Stefan tutted good-naturedly. ‘A shame, when you had such a good scholarship, but art is a lofty aspiration.’

‘I do miss the university,’ Jozef said. ‘Those beautiful painted ceilings and doors.’

‘How like you to notice the colour of the paint, not the knowledge within.’

‘I should have known,’ Jozef laughed and shrugged. He felt so much better. A genuine friend, someone he liked and trusted. He didn’t have to impress Stefan, or study his face or speech to know which step to take next. The commission was certainly his, if Stefan and Adam were such friends.

As they took their places for dinner, the wine and candlelight relaxed Jozef further. He’d hoped to be sitting next to Stefan but instead was at the end of the table, next to an older woman, plump in grey satin, her thin hair artfully arranged over what Jozef suspected was a balding patch. He held out his hand for her.

‘Mrs Kardas, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘We met last summer.’

She looked a little shocked; when she took his hand, nodding along to the introduction, her hand had all the paper limpness of a dead moth.

‘I know your son quite well,’ Jozef pressed on, a little dismayed. ‘We had some classes together at the Jagiellonian.’

Mollified, she simpered as though he had given her the most extravagant compliment.

‘Aleks is such a clever boy,’ she said. ‘He simply sailed through his classes. Professor Lis over there says he’s still held as a shining example at the university. Shining, that was his exact word. You know he graduated over six months early? He’s left for France now, to continue his studies. But of course you must have heard.’

Jozef drained his glass. He imagined his long dead father, aped his voice in his mind, his advice, which would be to view these excursions into high society as a holiday: Enjoy the rich food. He had no advice for a dull dining companion. A smaller voice, his mother’s, whispered, They’re only Jews, after all.

Talk around the table was the confident debate of old friends, looping from personal anecdotes and memories, laughter at old well-worn jokes, gentle competition over the looks and intelligence of their children. No one mentioned Germany, the stack of newspapers on Adam’s desk, until Milo, the painter from Warsaw, cut through the currents of conversation.

‘How do you all feel about this latest attack on the Jews? Didn’t you say,’ he said, waving his fork at a doctor to his right, ‘your family has fled? Why didn’t they come tonight? You’re German, aren’t you?’

‘They would have been welcome,’ Anna said, sounding more fevered than she meant to.

The doctor, Karl Weiss, took a while to reply, nodded at Milo, as though absorbing a complicated patient history.

‘I’m Polish. So is my wife,’ he said.

‘It’s Laura’s family, isn’t it, come from Berlin?’ Janina pressed. ‘What did they say?’

‘Yes, her sister’s family,’ Karl replied. ‘They were grateful for the invitation,’ he said to Anna, breaking into a warm smile at her, which she returned, ‘but they want to rest.’

Into the waiting quiet, Janina asked, ‘Are they hurt?’

‘No.’

‘What did they see?’

Karl sat back in his chair, pressed his lips together. ‘Nothing you haven’t already read.’

This was enough to open the space for the conversations they truly wanted: details from the radio and the newspapers, the newsreels, were shared and picked over, offered up to Karl for him to only nod at, or say, ‘No, they didn’t see that, but they were lucky, perhaps …’ Occasionally someone would hear something new, a detail they hadn’t seen before: the old men kneeling in the glass, the cutting of hair, the people pulled from their beds, a fire in a family shop, a beautiful painting slashed to ribbons; they each found a detail to focus on, one story, a person or a family, and let the others – the whole houses emptied, the disappearances – lie untouched somewhere in the spaces of the unsaid things.

Adam said again and again, ‘I cried, I’m not ashamed to tell you.’

‘It may well turn out to be a good thing,’ Stefan said, raising his hands to quell the Oh Stefans this prompted. ‘It’s one thing for them to go along with the things they say, the pictures, the … it’s another to see their neighbours beaten up, see the windows smashed in a street they know.’

‘Laura’s husband thinks the same,’ Karl returned. ‘It was their German neighbours who drove them to the border, in their own car. Some of the boys stood about, he said, refusing to hurt anyone.’

‘They didn’t stop anything either,’ Adam said.

‘But it’s not been so bad as the rumours promised. Some of the neighbourhood was practically hysterical,’ Janina said. She leaned in to Jozef to add, ‘I was quite alarmed, I thought maybe Aleks should leave earlier, or maybe not leave at all, but my husband would have wanted him to go.’

A wave of similar sentiments were rolling around the table: It’s not so bad, things will be calm, Kraków has always been a safe and pleasant kind of city, especially this neighbourhood.

‘I’ve seen a few signs,’ Milo called out, which quelled these voices. Jozef felt a small thrill at Milo’s reddening face as everyone turned to look at him. He’d been seated towards the top of the table, near their hosts. Perhaps Anna liked him better, with his more elegant clothes and his swagger. ‘The same as in Berlin,’ he said, as he picked up a shoot of asparagus, dipped it, put it in his mouth, as the table watched and waited.

‘What signs? I haven’t seen any signs,’ Jozef said after this pause. Milo shot him a look, swallowed.

‘Yes, you have.’ He directed his gaze to the rest of the table. ‘They were pasted all over the old Jewish quarter. Someone put one on the doors of the temple.’

‘You mean the Remuh? No, we would have heard,’ Stefan said.

‘What did they say exactly?’ Tomas Hartmann said. He was a lawyer, and used the tone of a lawful investigation, as though he might pull out a notepad and begin a case.

For a moment, Milo’s face glinted a kind of triumph. ‘Cartoons, Jews and dogs, you know, that kind of thing …’

A quiet bloomed, except for one man, another doctor – Jozef thought he’d said, something to do with the throat was his specialism – who clicked his cutlery against his wine glass, as though about to give a speech. But when everyone looked at him expectantly, he stopped and shrugged.

Adam spoke. ‘I have noticed there is a little more … perhaps nastiness on the streets, but only late at night, among the rougher elements of the city, and they are drunkards and scoundrels, just looking for a fight. They are just … angry at everything because they’re poor. What talk is there at the university?’ he asked Stefan.

‘Just as I’ve said,’ Stefan replied in gentle tones. He shrugged. ‘What can we do but stay calm and wait it out? There’ve been beatings in Germany for years now.’

‘People are dead,’ Karl said.

Several conversations broke out at once. ‘Yes, that’s what I heard,’ ‘Yes, we shouldn’t be surprised,’ came from some, though their tone was a return to the brittle forcefulness that had so struck Jozef earlier in the evening. Others were more shocked, saying, ‘What, just killed in the streets, just in front of everyone like that?’ and ‘The law is still the law, they should complain, what are the police and lawyers doing?’ There seemed a kind of grim satisfaction, Jozef thought, in the first group, showing off their worldly cynicism in their bland acceptance of the news, pitying their cosseted and blind peers.

Milo seemed to be enjoying his moment in the spotlight, called out again so that his words carried over these smaller groups, so heads turned back to him and there was even the scrape of chairs as people moved to hear him more clearly. ‘There are rumours that soon Jews will be stripped of their businesses, professional licences, that sort of thing.’ When the guests only nodded, tutted into their laps, he added, ‘I mean, here in Poland too.’

He looked around expectantly, and Jozef felt there was a certain ugly hunger in his face, which turned bewildered as most around the table chuckled and seemed to relax.

‘Well, that isn’t possible,’ Tomas Hartmann said, and sat back in his chair, as though at the end of a long meeting. ‘These lower elements, youths without any direction, you know, and the odd fight, that’s one thing, but a law like that could never be passed here. Even with Piłsudski gone, things can’t get so bad.’ Again the table fed these lines back to itself, a murmuring echo, That isn’t possible. Jozef was sitting too far from Milo to do what he wished, which was to lean in and whisper, Well, that didn’t have your intended effect.

‘The books and beatings, they aren’t always groups of angry young men,’ Milo said. ‘It’s the government too.’ But his spell was dissipating; shoulders had dropped a little, and the table turned to remembering their last scare, when Piłsudski had died, and they had stood at the funeral procession wondering what would happen now that the refrain ran hollow: Piłsudski would never, Piłsudski is a friend to Jews. ‘Do you remember? All that nervous chatter! But it turned out to be nothing …’ Soon determined conversation moved back to this new painting of Alicia, how much the family’s other paintings were admired, how they would like to see them, Oh, could we? They hang in one of the drawing rooms, I think? Shall we take nalewka in there?

As they glided over the thick rugs, the house lit up for the party, the Wawel splendid from the windows, Adam touched Jozef’s arm.

‘Go find the girls, they are in my study, I think.’

‘They aren’t in bed?’

‘We let them stay up; Alicia will never sleep when we have guests. And you should talk about your painting.’

Jozef was surprised by the rush of relief he felt on hearing he had the commission. He must have been more worried about money than he thought. The canvas at home, even the thrill of his strange new idea, had faded. He looked for Milo, hoped to savour his moment of triumph, but he was ahead with the others, and a servant was waiting to show him to the study.

The two sisters were sitting together by the fire, the youngest in the same silly frothy dress. Jozef lingered near a bookshelf, pretending to study the gold-leaf titles and thick leather bindings. The girls hadn’t seen him. Alicia was reading, probably a studied pose, Jozef thought, she’s been told to read and is gazing at the pages to please her sister. But on watching her for a few seconds he saw that she was truly engrossed, biting her lip a little, turning the pages greedily. The older one was dressed more like a servant than a lady of the house, in a dull brown dress, her hair un-styled. This one would be more at home, Jozef thought, in the tenements of his own neighbourhood, the smell of grease in the air, holding a baby or two. He approached them and smiled at Alicia.

‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’

He winced. He sounded like an angry schoolteacher.

Alicia ignored him. The older one smiled at him. Jozef felt a mild panic, smothered by wine: he had forgotten this one’s name.

‘Mama told us to wait up, so you could talk about your portrait,’ the older girl said. She gestured awkwardly for him to sit in the leather chair by the fire, and he gave her a grateful smile.

They sat for a while, watching the embers burn. Despite himself, and his acute awareness of the awkward silence, Jozef began watching the colours with a painter’s eye, imagined the spark of that sunset orange on a canvas, wondered if that particular red could be captured. He felt a kind of hopeless shame at the silence that thickened around them, except for the fire and the stubborn turn of Alicia’s pages. It should have been he who made the effort, but his old sullenness in this house had descended, his heavy dinner weighing him down into the chair.