THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE DAY
Eleanor Wasserberg

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Eleanor Wasserberg, 2020

Jacket photograph © Shutterstock

Eleanor Wasserberg asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

‘There is a gold light in certain old paintings’ from Collected Poems by Donald Justice copyright © 2004 by Donald Justice. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

This story collection is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008164133

Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780008164164

Version: 2020-06-05

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Ignace, to Jerzy (George) and to Mark Stefan

Epigraph

There is a gold light in certain old paintings

That represents a diffusion of sunlight.

It is like happiness, when we are happy.

It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at once, this light …

The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work.

One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.

The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar.

Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good.

And all that we suffered through having existed

Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.

‘There is a gold light in certain old paintings’

DONALD JUSTICE

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Kraków, 1939

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Kraków, 1937–1938

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Kraków, 1939

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Lwów, 1939–1940

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chelyabinsk, 1940

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Kraków, 1939–1940

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Kraków, 1945

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Kraków, 1946

Chapter 43

Kraków, 1977

Chapter 44

Kraków, 2009

Chapter 45

Kraków, 1939

Chapter 46

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Kraków, 1939

1

THE ODERFELDT APARTMENT was the last building on the grand Ulica Bernardyńska, its final, corner jewel. One side looked out over the river, but it was the sight from the dining room the neighbours envied: a perfect view of Wawel Castle. The red brick walls of the Wawel jutted out into the street, as though reaching for their neighbour, and a turret sat exactly opposite the window of the main drawing room, as though they had been designed to mirror each other. Dining in that drawing room under the gaze of portrait faces in golden frames, many imagined they were at the Wawel itself, some state occasion, looking out over the terraces and turrets, the flash of green lawn. Adam Oderfeldt liked to smoke his pipe on the apartment terrace with his artist friends, and watch the sky darken over the green-tinged tower tops. On summer evenings the family threw open the windows and invited neighbours and friends for parties in the shadow of the heart of Poland.

Janina Kardas was navigating her way towards the Oderfeldt apartment, in the strangely cheerful sunshine of early afternoon. She wore her best clothes: a fur hat and a heavy winter coat, beautifully tailored with a matching ermine trim. The coat and hat were too warm for early September in the city, but she wished to display herself today as a woman of obvious good breeding. She remembered snatches of German refugee tales, how people were stopped in the street. She imagined herself seized, accosted, jostled, until the attacker, in some kind of uniform, noticed her coat, her hat, and looked then into her delicately lined face, not young or pretty enough to be in danger, she comforted herself, but somehow authoritative. He would step back, uneasy, for surely she knew people, surely her husband was someone of importance? And Janina’s imaginary self sneered a little, tugged her clothing back into place, patted her hat back onto its perch, and strode away.

Janina passed the shuttered bakery. Two weeks ago the baker had been holding forth yet again, lectures that war was coming. It had been the same for weeks, pastries and doom, and she was irritated by it. The shelves and displays had all been empty that day, and upstairs, heavy footsteps had dragged heavier furniture.

‘You’re leaving?’

‘It will happen soon,’ he’d said, chewing the thin lips on his lean face, so wrong for a baker, who really ought to be fat, adding, ‘I’m going to Lwów, I’m not sticking around.’

‘But my rolls and doughnuts,’ she had replied.

The baker had rolled his thin lips in and out then leaned in so she could smell the ginger on his breath. ‘You are crazy,’ he whispered. ‘You should get out of Kraków. You and all your … set.’ He nodded slowly as though passing on a secret code.

‘What a lot of hysteria!’ she said. She lowered her voice. ‘I’m not some poor Jew in Germany. And so what about my pastries? Am I to starve because of your paranoia?’ The baker shrugged, dismissing her, and she swept out past a group of poorer women who had caught the idea ‘war’ in the room and were worrying about it. Only a week or so later, Janina thought the word ‘war’ had become so familiar it had lost its sting, until the radio spoke it, and she could have folded in on herself like an earwig in terror.

Now she tried to ignore the crowd, who were muttering phrases that frightened her. A woman holding a boy’s hand, wearing an ugly green shawl, was saying to an old man, ‘But we have surrendered, haven’t we? The radio …’ and as she passed a couple pulling suitcases, the woman’s hair all in disarray, pins sticking out like a sewing cushion doll, Janina heard the man muttering, ‘They say the army is decimated, just utterly decimated.’ As she hurried down Bernardyńska, Janina yelped as people brushed against her, even jostled her without apology, crushing the fur on the edge of her coat. She heard snatches of conversations that made her head pound. They became a rhythm with her feet on the pavement: no, it is a matter of days, it is a matter of hours, it is now, we must leave, we must leave.

By the time she reached the Oderfeldt apartment, shameful sweat coated her lower back and her temples. Janina rang three times, holding the bell longer than was polite, before a servant finally came. It wasn’t one she remembered, but the girl did an awkward little bob, flustered, and said, ‘Oh, another one, are you come to see from the windows too? They are all upstairs—’ and then she ran off before Janina could reply.

She was left to walk up the stairs alone, and the strangeness of it made her feel shy: no servant to announce her, no invitation, but then nothing was as it should be these days. She was reassured by the gleam of the banister and the thickness of the rug she could feel through her boots. From the main drawing room came muffled sounds of voices, sounding quite relaxed; she determined to dismiss the servant’s alarm, and find comfort in her kind of sensible people.

Entering the room, Janina noticed first the elegant buttoned back of Anna Oderfeldt’s dress. She smoothed down her own coat, feeling dowdy as always in comparison to Anna. Along the windows, a row of backs: scarves obscuring hair and faces, hats on inside, people craning and on tiptoe. A drone of low, shaking voices. The Oderfeldt daughters were there, Alicia with her face pressed to the glass, her hands splayed out, smudging the pane. She always behaved like a baby, this one; she must be thirteen or so now, but indulged into endless infancy. Her older sister Karolina paced, wearing boots inside. She looked purposeful, grown up, as though she were to announce a plan soon. Perhaps they were about to leave. Janina tried to catch Karolina’s eye, but she was unseeing, moving her lips a little as though rehearsing a speech, or praying. Unsure what to do, Janina cleared her throat quietly, then loudly. Adam Oderfeldt turned and gave her a tight-lipped smile.

‘Ah! Another neighbour come for the view. Come, Mrs Kardas. Janina.’

She smiled her approval. At least Adam was behaving like a gentleman, observing the formalities.

‘Would you like a drink?’ Adam offered. He gestured to the sideboard, where vodka and nalewki sat in shining decanters. Anna turned too, pale as milk, but her gaze slid to Karolina, still walking behind Janina, before she was drawn back to the window.

‘No, thank you, Mr Oderfeldt. I just wanted to … I wondered if …’

Others turned then, just for a moment. The same pale faces, pinched with confusion. She recognised acquaintances from her son’s school, lawyers and their wives who had come to dinner, doctors like her husband, Adam’s friend Stefan from the university, the Hartmanns, David Schultz and his ugly bride of only a year, or was it two? Janina and her husband Laurie had gone to the wedding, before he died, and given them a generous gift of Meissen china. Had they ever received a thank-you note? Janina didn’t think so, and returned the wife’s weak smile with a cold blankness.

‘Yes, come and see. There’s nothing clear, but come look at her if you like,’ Adam replied.

She joined the others, craning and peering. The castle looked empty and serene – immovable. It seemed to promise that everything would be all, all right. The red brick glowed in the early autumn sunlight, cheerful against the bright blue sky. Janina remembered telling her son Aleks the story of a dragon who lived in a cave beneath the castle, fire-breathing and strong, its heart beating for the city. He’d listened and then solemnly lectured her that this was just a story, and that real dragons were called dinosaurs. That was when Laurie was still alive; she’d gone straight to tell him, that already their baby said no more stories, and she’d cried on his shoulder like a fool. It’s all right, he said to her. It’s all, all right.

For a stomach-dropping moment, Janina thought she saw a soldier on the lawns around the castle, a man running, but then he was gone; perhaps she’d imagined it. Below them, in the street, the pool of people she had waded through had become a flood.

‘Are you leaving?’ she murmured to Anna, at her side.

‘It seems so calm,’ Anna whispered.

‘You know the Friels already left? Two days ago. They’ve left everything behind. It’s all just sitting in their house,’ Janina said, unsure if she was soothed or alarmed by Anna’s show of nonchalance.

‘They’ve probably just gone to visit family,’ Anna replied, in the same low tone, but on quickening breath that told her irritation, or perhaps her fear.

Down the line of watchers, the same murmur rose, maybe we should leave too, just for a while …

‘Ben Friel wore a kippah every day, not just for special occasions,’ Anna added.

‘Yes, and they had a mezuzah on their doorframe,’ Janina readily added, before dropping her gaze to the street once more. She remembered her mother’s marble mezuzah, packed up in the attic along with all her things from the old house. She had meant to nail it outside their own apartment door, imagined the comfort in passing the old talisman as she came and went, a relic of childhood. Instead it had remained in its box all these years. It was the first time she had thought of it for so long. Would someone search the house, find it? She wanted to ask Anna, but was stalled by her neighbour’s slow movements, her cool sipping of the glass in her hands. It was childish to worry. It was vulgar to panic.

Janina caught sight of a group of Polish soldiers, heading away from the city, heads bowed, leaving their mothers behind. You should be ashamed, she thought. She wondered if her boy was safe.

‘Do you think if you did decide to leave, I could come with you?’ she murmured again to Anna, feeling a hot blush across her neck and chest.

But Anna had moved away, hadn’t heard her; she was kissing the cheeks of the Hartmanns, first the wife and then the husband. The wife, Miriam, had an old spat with Janina that went back to the girl wearing too much make-up, and walking out with Aleks when they were too young. Janina had called the girl a slut. The optician, Miriam’s father, had refused to treat Janina after that, and she had to travel across the city into the old district, back to her childhood doctor. Now, Miriam’s heavy mascara streamed down her cheeks, collected in ugly clumps in the creases of her eyes. Her eyes slipped over Janina, who wanted, suddenly, to apologise to her, to take her hand, but instead she stood mute. She turned back to the window to hide her awkwardness there.

‘There must have been another radio announcement,’ she said. ‘Look how many people there are out in the streets now.’

‘They can’t be in the Wawel already, you don’t think?’ Stefan Lis said, his voice muffled by glass as he pressed his face once more against the window.

‘No new flag there, as you see,’ Adam replied, pouring another vodka. His hand played a tune between decanter and glass. ‘It will be all right,’ he added.

It will all be all, all right. Janina caught herself in the windows, nodding as though to ritual prayer or radio music.

‘Look at them all leaving,’ Miriam said to her husband, and he raised his voice in return, breaking the hush of the room: ‘But where will they all go? Why make ourselves homeless, stateless, when we don’t even know—’

‘They’ll go to the border, Tomas, and then see from there,’ Miriam replied, her voice suddenly full of disdain. Everyone smiled and nodded goodbyes and good lucks at them even as Tomas continued to insist, ‘We’re not going to leave, at least not just yet … Adam, we’ll be here for dinner tomorrow …’ and the discussion continued out of the room and down the stairs.

‘And Mrs Kardas, where are you going?’ Adam called.

‘Oh! Home. Such a lot of nonsense and hysteria.’

2

ANNA ODERFELDT watched her widowed neighbour disappear down the stairs in her old-fashioned hat and coat. A mean relief rose in her; if Adam had overheard Janina, it would have been hopeless, but he was too distracted, enjoying, as always, the way their home was the hub of the street. She had hoped Janina would be too embarrassed to ask again to join them, had banked on her stuffy ways. If Anna were to dwell on it, past the gaping fear, she would find how guilty she felt, how wrong it was to let the old woman drift away like that. How vulnerable and small old Janina had seemed, almost tiptoeing down the stairs. Instead she stood as still as possible, tensed her muscles, deepened her breathing. Harden yourself, she thought, be wood, be ice, be steel. Are you going to let an old woman slow you down, while you get your daughters to safety, their smooth, pale skin, their soft bodies that a bullet will tear through like silk?

Soon the drawing room was quiet, emptied of its guests. Karolina had slipped away, probably to use the telephone, or send a final letter, Anna thought, and she found space among the tides of her thoughts to pity her heartbroken daughter, even as she envied her the simple distraction of such a clean, sharp emotion. Alicia had slipped behind the drawing-room curtains, still fixed on the view of the city below. Those curtains had been a wedding gift from her brother-in-law: thick pink damask lined with silk.

‘I’ll tell Janie to take down the curtains,’ Anna said.

‘They have curtains in Lwów,’ Adam replied, with a smile.

‘We could … sell them, or use them for something else. I’ve heard refugees can—’

‘Aneczka, we are not refugees! We are going to stay with family until things calm down.’

Alicia unwrapped herself from the curtain, her face flushed and hot, just as Janie, her face also blotched red, came into the drawing room without knocking.

‘Madam,’ she said, ‘please select which clothes you would like us to pack in the girls’ rooms.’

‘I want my painting, Janie,’ Alicia instructed.

‘Are you going to wear your painting?’ Anna snapped. ‘Are you going to eat it?’

‘Are we going to eat and wear the curtains?’ Alicia replied.

‘Now, now,’ Adam said, as though hushing a baby. ‘Of course we should take the things we love, just in case.’

Janie and Dorothea rolled and pressed, clicked shut trunks of fabric and books. In Karolina’s room, Alicia and Karolina pulled on layer upon layer, buttoned into fur coats so they sweated as they pulled on their boots.

‘What else do you want to take?’ Karolina asked, cupping her sister’s face in her hands.

‘My sketches. Are you taking your poems?’

‘Some of the books, but I can’t take all of them … and my letters …’

Alicia studied her sister’s face. ‘How many are there?’

‘Lots. He writes every day.’

‘Too many to take.’

‘Probably,’ Karolina said, her voice breaking.

Alicia silently took her by the hand and led her to her own room, full of piles of unpacked clothes and shoes. She crouched down at a corner under a never-used desk.

‘What are you doing?’

Alicia ignored her. She felt along the skirting board for the loose panel, pressing on it until it gave way. She held out a hand from beneath the desk.

‘What’s in there?’

‘Just sketches and things.’ She felt into the dusty space, where diaries, translations and sketch after sketch were hidden.

Karolina ran to her bookshelf and returned with a stash of letters, which she kissed before handing them to Alicia to tuck behind the walls.

As the hour ticked by, Karolina went down again and again to check for messages, to ask if the telephone had rung. Each time Janie shook her head, kissed Karolina on her hand or her cheek, and each time Karolina said, ‘Well, there’s still time,’ and Janie replied, ‘Perhaps he is on his way, in person.’

By early evening, the house had taken on the strange echo of a stripped building. In the main hallway, their Persian rugs had been rolled into thick, red sausages, lumped where diamonds were sewn into the backs. Silk dresses, fur coats, pairs of Parisian gloves with pearl edging, books, papers: they were all layered against the walls, some in leather cases, others in boxes and even baskets from the kitchen. The radio drifted between static and news of the new, almost bloodless occupation, in Polish and German words. Adam rushed back to the dining-room window, but the Wawel looked just the same. Across the city, people did the same thing, expecting the sky, the colour of buildings, even their own faces reflected in the windows, to have changed. Rushing to gather together their possessions, to keep the servants and their daughters calm, Adam and Anna passed on the stairs, stopped, held hands, pressed their foreheads together.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Anna whispered.

‘Perhaps it isn’t true.’

‘The radio.’

‘Yes, all right. We’re leaving soon.’

Janie, and even the cook, Dorothea, began to load up the beeswax-scented cars.

‘Where is Robert?’ asked Adam. ‘I want to talk to him about the route.’

‘Robert left early, sir,’ Dorothea called to him as she leaned all her weight into a pile of material that would not fit into a case. Adam recognised the drawing-room curtains.

‘Leave those, Dorota,’ he said. ‘Left where?’

‘Well, out of the city of course, sir.’

The family stood in mute shock at this.

‘Robert’s gone?’ Karolina said.

‘But he was supposed to drive us – that can’t be right,’ Anna said, strangely close to laughing. ‘Has he really gone?’

The servant women were frowning, whether at Robert’s sedition or the family’s response, it was impossible to tell.

‘He has family,’ Dorothea said, as though this explained everything. Adam stared at her. ‘He’s a Jew,’ she added, in a tone close to snapping.

‘Hysteria, just hysteria,’ Adam muttered, but he himself began to stack random objects in the hallway, and the family followed him, began to help packing. To Alicia it was like playing upstairs when she was small, carrying piles of laundry and sighing in an imitation of Janie. She used to imagine how strong and capable she looked, and how the flush of exercise might make her cheeks glow in a pretty way.

Adam carried his paintings, slid in like secrets among the layers in the cars: Adam’s own face in paint with his red hair and smiling eyes. Alicia’s wild four-year-old face with her fringe, unfinished in its beautiful frame. Alicia’s pretty brown-eyed stare, her red dress billowing confidence in its rich, lush folds.

In the hallway, the family stood in the new echoing space, with so many rugs and paintings gone. Both servants were sweating, and Janie was crying.

‘Well,’ Anna said, ‘we’ll be back before long.’

Janie pulled Karolina and then Alicia into her, kissing their heads. Alicia was stiff and shocked but Karolina clung to Janie’s neck. They shook hands and Dorothea even kissed Anna’s cheek.

‘Good luck,’ Janie said, and then she melted back into the house, wiping her face.

‘We will be leaving too, sir, very soon, so we’ll lock up the house,’ Dorothea said.

‘Papa, what about Mimi and Cece?’ Alicia asked. ‘Will they come with us or with the servants?’

Adam didn’t answer.

‘I’ll leave the dogs some water and food,’ Dorothea said, smiling down at Alicia.

Then she too was gone, her shoes sounding loud and hurried on the naked stairs down to the kitchen.

‘Go and use the toilet,’ Karolina instructed her sister. Alicia blushed and stared: only Janie spoke to her of such things.

‘Yes, go,’ Anna joined in. ‘Who knows when we will stop.’

As Alicia obeyed, her sister turned to her parents.

‘Papa. Mama. I—’

‘Darling Karolcia, I know what you’re going to say and it’s impossible,’ Adam said.

Karolina shifted her feet. ‘I can’t leave him. I won’t.’

Anna could have shaken her, made her teeth rattle. She tried to keep her voice level. ‘Karolina, the whole country is under attack. They’re saying Kraków is Germany now. Do you understand? We have to leave.’ Karolina met her with dreamy silence, her eyes brimming. ‘You’re enjoying this,’ Anna snapped, as Adam tutted at her harsh tone. ‘This isn’t some romantic drama.’

But Karolina wouldn’t pick up Anna’s bait, instead looked to her father.

Her parents shared a glance, in which a long-practised battle of wills was settled in Adam’s favour. Anna sighed out her frustration. As she left she considered holding Karolina’s face in hers, in apologetic admiration of the stubborn set of her daughter’s jaw. Instead she vented at Janie as she went down the stairs, ‘Perhaps you might move a little more slowly? I’m not sure the entire German army will have time to come and steal quite all of our things!’ Her voice faded as she stepped out into the street, lit a cigarette, her hands shaking a little.

Father and daughter faced each other. Karolina began. ‘I know you think I’m asking permission but I’m not. I’m just informing you that I’m staying. You can write to me at his address, if you stay out of Kraków for a long while.’

This wrong-footed Adam, who had been braced for a stormy passionate speech, not this calm informative one. He aimed to set Karolina off-balance in turn.

‘I see. Are you in trouble?’

Karolina’s cheeks flooded red and she stammered out a No. Adam pushed his guilt away.

‘Then there is simply no need to be reckless.’

‘I can’t leave him here.’

‘You’ve told him we’re leaving?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s written?’

‘No.’

‘Telephoned, spoken to your mother, spoken to me?’

Karolina glared at him. ‘It’s chaos,’ Robert said. ‘The message might not have got through.’

Adam took Karolina’s hands in his. His own elegant, soft fingers folded over her chewed nails and torn cuticles. He saw in them his daughter’s hours of innocent fretting over her lover, while her parents felt the very ground lurch under their feet.

‘May I suggest a compromise, my Karolcia?’

She nodded.

‘His apartment is on our way out of the city. We’ll stop there, and you can speak to him. Tell him he must come with us, because, no, listen—’ for Karolina had begun to withdraw her hands, shaking her head. ‘Because it is as impossible for us to leave you behind as it is for you to leave him. If he loves you as he says, he will come, we’ll take him. And you can marry in Lwów if you like, from your uncle’s house. If he will not, his love is not enough and so you must make your farewells and recover.’

‘He will come,’ Karolina said.

‘Well then, everyone is happy.’ He kissed her hands, one and then the other, feeling the rough edge of her torn skin under his lip.

Without Robert they had only one driver, so everything had been moved into the larger car, and the sisters perched on top of their possessions, their necks twisted against the roof. As the car pulled away, Alicia imagined the dogs scampering around the empty rooms, enjoying freedom, scratching the walls, sleeping in Papa’s bed, on the satin sheets. She imagined them greeting the soldiers as they came in with excited whines and yelps, and being shot between their watery brown eyes.

Karolina buried her elation as deep as she could. She knew it was indecent to be so happy. The war had decided things for them after waiting for so long. Within a month they could be married. She felt a surge of joy and squashed it by focusing on the familiar street, telling herself she might never see it again; she found she could not care.

Sun glinted on shop front windows. It was as though they were leaving for a late summer holiday in the mountains or to meet a train with a visitor from Berlin or Paris, Anna thought. As they continued onto the main roads out of the city, she saw lives carried in baskets and on backs, pushed in carts and prams.

Alicia saw a boy with a half-eaten apple, his mouth full, cheeks puffed out like a mouse, as though he must eat all of the food at once, before it was too late.

‘Papa,’ Alicia said, ‘we didn’t bring any food or anything to drink.’

A long silence, in which the crowd they crawled through called out to itself: Let me through, for God’s sake, let me through. Did you hear that? Their own panicked stupidity hung over the car, and Anna felt the terrible impulse to laugh again.

‘We’ll hold on until Lwów,’ Adam replied. ‘Your uncle will have a whole table of treats for us. You are going to have to learn,’ Adam said, raising his voice, ‘to be hungry and to be patient.’

His knuckles on the steering wheel were pushing against the skin, a ripple running through his hands. Alicia shifted, the hidden rug-diamonds pushing at her muscles.

An hour later they were still in the city. The roads were clogged. Waves of panic struck the crowd when rumours of planes began, though the sky was clear and silent. Some cowered next to the car, which shivered with the weight of their bodies pressed against it. A man gripped the door handle on Anna’s side, sheltering under his jacket. She shrieked, kicked out as though to shoo the man away.

‘Just drive, Adam,’ she pleaded. ‘They will move.’

But the carts and the throng and the horses made an impassable ocean. Adam nudged and blew the car horn and each time the car shuddered to a halt the mounds of beautiful things tottered. Little thuds in the earth, against the car, among the crowd, turned Karolina’s mind to her book, forgotten on her bed. The god Poseidon shaking his trident, whipping up the winds, the earth, the oceans. The thuds grew: a fight had broken out. Shouts of wordless rage. The crowd surged one way, then another. The car rocked and Karolina let out a squeal. Alicia clamped her hand over her own mouth as she saw the source of the disturbance: two German soldiers, their rifles gleaming, walked towards the car. They are here. The crowd parted around them as a shoal of fish.

Adam’s knuckles working, their grind and roll, was the only movement in the car. Breaths held, the family became a painting, locked in place. Alicia wanted to look at her mother but instead she saw only the bright white fur of her collar from the corner of her eye, the very tip of her mother’s chin, and the slow pace of the soldiers, one bending down, graceful as he touched the side of the car. He turned to his colleague and gave a low whistle of appreciation.

The first soldier rapped politely on Papa’s car window. Tap-tap-tap. Quick, businesslike. His companion shielded his eyes and peered into the car, nodding at Anna when he caught her eye, and at this courtesy Anna allowed her lungs to empty, slowly, without any kind of release, but it was something. The first soldier stood back, waiting.

‘Adam,’ Anna said.

Adam opened the door and the soldier pulled him out, without malice, without any moment of eyeball-to-eyeball triumph, and he didn’t throw him to the ground, and there were no gunshots or heavy blows to Adam’s head, he was not pushed to his knees, nor his coat dragged from him, he was not spat at. All of the horrors of Adam’s humiliation, all of the imaginary moments of terror Alicia had dreamed awake for a long time: they did not happen. There was no blood. And yet Alicia screamed all the same, because her Papa was touched by a German soldier, and he was out of the car, and they were inside it.

‘Stop, Alicia,’ her mother whispered. The white panic of her eyes killed Alicia’s scream in her throat.

Adam’s head was bowed, his fists clenched but his face turned to the floor like a servant. They were demanding something, and Adam opened his hands. He flicked his gaze to Anna, and as she met his eyes she saw urgent terror. Anna could only nod and show her husband a second of raw horror of her own, a look of love and apology and anger all at once. She threw open her passenger door, and rushed to the back of the car, pulling out first Alicia, and then Karolina, with skin-breaking force, dragging them over the piles of their possessions. They tumbled out on a layer of detritus, instantly dusted and muddied by the fall, scrambled up and away from the car, away from Adam. The crowd swallowed them, hid them, Anna clutching her children to her hips.

‘Mama, our things,’ Alicia gasped. ‘All our things. Mama, my painting.’

Kraków, 1937–1938

3

ALICIA’S FATHER led her by the hand through the damp, misty streets towards the Glowny. Her breath billowed like smoke. Warm lights were beginning to glow in the windows of the bakeries; their cinnamon sugar doughnuts sat fluffy, piping out scent and heat. She slowed, pulling Adam back, to look at a tower of pastries. She shook his wrist, meaning Papa, I want. It was usually enough. But Adam had other plans, and pulled her mittened hand back into a stroll. She trotted along, confused, but a bloom of excitement tempered her instinct to stamp and pout.

Mama had said it would be a surprise. ‘I’m not coming,’ she’d said, ‘only your Papa and you. A special birthday treat.’ Her mother had smiled and smoothed down the red satin of Alicia’s new dress; it had been too thin for the wintry air but the seamstress had lined it for warmth that week. When Alicia and Papa left, her sister Karolina hadn’t said goodbye.

Alicia pulled the fur closer around her, used the edge of it to stroke her cheek. It smelled of her mother’s heady perfume: lilies and something like cake. The Glowny rose before them, the horses clopping around the cobblestones, the Cloth Hall standing in the centre, warm and inviting. Alicia wasn’t allowed to wander in there, where cheap curios were sold: her places were the boutiques and sweet shops of the boulevards off the square, like the Ulica Floriańska, the street Mama said could be Paris. It was coming to the hour, and so the bugler would be playing his thin wail soon. Adam slowed, stamped his booted feet in the cold, and enveloped Alicia in his arms to listen. He was always respectful of the bugler.

‘Think how cold he is up there, Alicia,’ he said. ‘Lucky us in our coats and furs.’

A small crowd gathered under the church spire to listen. Alicia admired their velvet capes and fur-lined hats, some in mink like hers. The women wore pearls over their coats and the men’s boots were shiny like Papa’s. Some of the men wore their small kippah at the back of their heads, white cotton or silk and decorated with coloured threads. Adam’s was slightly different, in a dark blue, with a white threaded design. It looked like a drawing of an ocean, with his red hair around it the sand of a volcanic beach. Alicia looked around at the gathered people and wondered what their servants were like, and if they were as ugly and kind as her Janie. Adam grinned down at her and danced with her clumsily to the tune as others around them hummed softly and applauded when the glint of gold from the bugle disappeared.

‘Happy Birthday, my Ala,’ he said. Was that it? A trip to Glowny to see the bugler? For her last birthday she had received a music box and a doll, handmade in Prague and dressed in silk. She’d felt too old for the doll, but propped it against the sill with the others.

‘Come,’ her father said, ‘I am taking you to dinner like a proper little princess!’

‘Dinner? Not at home?’

She thought of the silver platters, and her new puppy on her lap, Karolina ignoring her.

Her Papa beamed at her. ‘You shall sit and dine and you shall even drink wine. You are going to the best restaurant in town, as is fitting for a lady such as yourself. You are twelve now, no longer my little one.’

He made a little bow, stiff in his thick coat, and Alicia laughed as he darted a kiss onto her nose as he came close.

‘Come.’

Adam led her across the square, past couples laughing and leaning their way to restaurants, and past the horses, the man playing a violin with a hat for change, the last shoppers with their arms full of boxes.

The Wentzl stood proudly at the edge of the Glowny, its windows aglow. Piano notes and the tinkle of cutlery and conversation floated across the square. Adam stepped back to let Alicia go in pride of place. The waiter, a penguin with a full beard like her father’s, beamed down at Alicia in her satin and fur. She stood up straighter, and gave an imperious nod copied from her mother, eyes sliding away, neck turned just so.

They were ushered upstairs with an air of hurry, but Alicia moved slowly, her hand on the polished banister, feeling truly like a lady of a huge house, feeling like Mama, and enjoying the power of making everyone wait. Adam indulged her, and a waiter hovered with Adam’s great overcoat, heavy and slipping in his hands.

The room was as grand as home. The walls were buttercup yellow, so the wintry weather dissolved into a summer light, as though they had stumbled into a fairy land in a snowy wood. The Glowny stretched below, framed by plush golden curtains that Alicia itched to roll up in. The table was set with flowers and shining silver. The waiter danced with elaborate precision to place her napkin around her throat. Adam kissed her hand as she sat. ‘Happy Birthday,’ he said.

Alicia was in heaven: her father all to herself, her sister at home, an adult treat just for her, and to be admired by Adam and the room, who she felt certain was gazing at her pretty face and curled hair. This was perhaps all she ever wanted, as well as the occasional treat and sweet and pretty dress. The deep wells in her, the unsatisfied untapped springs of her heart, stilled and were silent.

Adam ordered for her while she pulled at her white under-gloves, noticed with horror a hangnail, and slipped them back on, glancing around to check no one had noticed. She caught the eye of a lady in an old-fashioned dress who seemed to be looking at her with disgust. The woman sniffed, an ugly look distorting her face. She must have noticed the hangnail, Alicia realised, and flushed. She put her hands into her lap as the woman turned away.

Alicia was distracted from this by the arrival of cheese and bread, plates of butter, pickles, glistening beef in a sticky glaze. It was not so different from the food at home, but prettily arranged on gold-edged plates, and with sweet red wine that she sipped as elegantly as she could. Adam tested her on German and French verbs, asked what she was reading; she told him about the swallowed, stolen ruby of Agrapur, cut from the thief’s belly by the Maharajah.

‘Your sister shouldn’t give you such things to read,’ he said, but smiling and, she thought, impressed.

‘Thank you, Papa,’ she said, when she remembered to.

‘You are welcome, my little Ala,’ he replied. ‘But this is not all,’ he said, leaning back in his chair and opening his arms wide. ‘There is another gift, but, really, it’s for me so you must indulge your Papa.’

‘Not a doll, Papa, please, I have so many … I’d like …’ she cast about, caught off guard by the unexpected opportunity; she rarely ever had to ask for anything at all, ‘a fur like this one of Mama’s, or for her to give this one to me, will you ask her?’ She stroked the fur against her cheek again. That wasn’t right, it wasn’t what she wanted at all, but since she didn’t know what she wanted, the white fur would do as well.

Adam laughed. ‘I’m sure you can have it, but what else? Let’s see if we thought the same.’ He smiled, seeming delighted with this idea.

Alicia tried again. ‘Lessons.’

‘Lessons? In what? You want your governess back? Poor Miss Paula, I’m not sure she would have us again!’

She faltered. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Piano? Riding?’

‘Yes, riding,’ she said, swallowing something.

‘All right, we’ll arrange it tomorrow.’ Adam drained his glass. ‘But you haven’t guessed! Because it’s a trick! It is something wonderful but also something that you will not like.’

His mouth twitched and Alicia understood. She slumped in her chair.

‘This is something for your Mama and me. So we have something to remember how pretty you are. It is a treat for us. You will do it for us? And you will not … sabotage?’

Now she laughed. She’d been five years old, already the favourite. The young genius her Papa had paid to paint her was irritated by her fidgeting. He made her stand for long, silent, still minutes in the natural light, and she wanted to play with her sister. That night she grabbed a pair of scissors from the sewing kit in Janie’s room and chopped off her hair in a jagged, spiteful line. Her parents had almost laughed themselves sick over her stubbornness, and paid the artist double when he said he would abandon the painting. Still it was left unfinished, her wild hair in wisps around a ghost-like chalky face. It hung in Papa’s study, where he often liked to point it out to visitors and tell the story.

And now he wanted another.

‘Is it the same man?’ she asked.

Adam laughed again. ‘No, darling Ala. I want to ask my friend Jozef Pienta. You’ll like him! He is a great artist, and you know, quite poor.’

Alicia wrinkled her nose.

‘He will then have the money to make even more beautiful things, and I will have another picture with your hair all shiny and long.’

Sweets arrived, pastries glazed with sugar syrup, creamy gelatinous pudding, ginger biscuits. Alicia tried to finish her wine, but its sharpness hurt her throat.

‘Here,’ Papa said. He came around to her side and dunked a biscuit into the wine, ate it.

‘Papa!’ she shrieked, deliciously outraged. ‘Manners!’ He laughed deeply, held out his arms to encompass the golden shining room, so people turned to look. Alicia’s awareness of the woman in the corner, the hangnail, came back to her, and she wished he would sit down again.

‘Why, isn’t this my city, my table? My biscuit, my wine?’ He laughed again, deep and mellow, and Alicia poured her wine over her dessert like a syrup, ate until her stomach swelled and her head swam.

Later, she’d return again and again to this night. The sharp sweetness of the wine and cream. The waiters crowding plates among the candles so the food caught some of the golden flame, and the whole room in gold, as the sun went down, so all was warm and full and her father laughing and laughing. Sometimes she’d hear again that woman’s angry sniff, try to remember the set of the woman’s mouth, and whether it was in fact the whole room that turned away after her father’s joking speech, or if that was only her mind playing tricks.

Stepping out, rewrapped like a present, Alicia was grateful for the warm fullness of her belly and glanced back at the gleaming rooms.

‘When can we come back?’ But Adam didn’t hear, stamping and re-knotting his scarf around his throat. The wind had dropped, an icy stillness descended, and glittering ice crystals had grown on the stones of the square. As they came further away from the Wentzl, the dark and cold seemed to leach away Alicia’s pleasure. Adam held out his hand for a cab, but none stopped. Pinched faces hurried past.

‘Let’s walk home, then,’ Adam said. ‘It will be fun.’

A couple were sitting on the steps of the old town hall, leaning against one of the lazy stone lions. The woman’s legs were bare, Alicia noticed with a small thrill of shock. Her Papa hurried her along, then dropped her hand to rub his own together inside his gloves, and in the moments he stopped, Alicia took greedy sips of the strange sight on the steps, the urgency of the man’s hands, the small sounds of distress of the woman. The back of the man’s head was pressing, pressing, and the woman was shrinking back. When the man shot his hand up the woman’s skirt, exposing a shock of white flesh, Alicia gasped, and tugged Adam’s hand. Her Papa looked at her in indulgent expectation, before catching sight of the couple behind her.

He took an instinctive step forward, then stopped, his head slightly cocked, as though trying to see clearly.

‘Hello,’ he called. To Alicia his voice sounded soft, almost comforting. She had stopped watching the couple, and saw only her father’s form, striding forwards.

‘Hello, hello, stop,’ he said, much more strongly now, his familiar voice. Alicia felt her blood quicken, watching him pace, his long coat billowing behind him, towards the man with the urgent hands. Adam flicked his gaze back to her. ‘Stay here,’ he barked, and she ignored him, trotting after him just as the couple responded to the approach.

The man had stopped crushing the woman against the stone lion, and was smiling, biting his thumb and looking down. Alicia recognised the look as one of her own, when she was disciplined by someone she didn’t respect. He had long girlish eyelashes and he seemed small, much smaller than Papa. But the hands, his thumb in his teeth, were large and dirty. He wasn’t wearing gloves in the cold, which made Alicia think he must be very poor. She sneered, emboldened by this realisation, and the bulk of Papa beside her. The woman shrank even further into the stone, pulling down her skirt, her face blank. You should say thank you, Alicia thought savagely. Her mother’s voice came to her, the cadence of overheard gossip in the house, unguarded chatter in the kitchen. Having your legs out like that. Instead the woman looked at her shoes.

‘Hello,’ Adam repeated. He hesitated, glanced back at Alicia. ‘It’s cold and late. Is everything well?’

Alicia glared at the woman, who still hadn’t said thank you or taken the chance to run away. She had a sudden, unbidden image of the woman from the restaurant, her pursed lips and stony face, the angry straightness of her back.

The man continued to nod and bite his thumb, smiling, on the cusp of laughter even. Perhaps he isn’t poor at all, but mad, Alicia thought, and that’s why he doesn’t feel the cold. Perhaps he will be taken to the mountains to lie in a room painted white and with starched clean bedsheets. The man, slow and unsteady, lurching to hold onto a lion’s mane, pulled himself to stand. The woman at his feet hissed something. Adam settled into his feet, crossed his arms as the man belched smoke into the cold air between them, brought his face level to Adam. He had to get on tiptoe to do it, and swayed dangerously.

‘Go fuck yourself,’ he said.

Alicia’s shock made a laugh fall from her mouth before she could cram it back into her chest. The man narrowed his eyes at her, and Adam began to back away.

‘Come,’ he said to her, soft. When he took her hand, she felt his fingers inside his mittens were trembling. Then they were wrenched from her, there was the dull sound of something hard on flesh, and her Papa was on the ground. The stranger kicked him as he lay there, silent and only curled up with his hands around his face. Once, twice. Adam was silent. Alicia cried out, an animal sound. The man looked her up and down, taking in her rich clothes, the glint of red silk.

‘What’s that, little bitch?’

‘Don’t,’ Adam said, pulling himself up.

A small crowd had formed, almost a circle. Alicia looked around at them. ‘He kicked my Papa.’ She tried to scream it, but it came out very small. Some were shaking their heads, others were sneering. Disorientated, Alicia watched Adam slowly pull himself to his feet, a bloom of red near his temple. His hands shook as he removed his kippah, knocked askew, and put it in his pocket. He faced the man, so much taller and stronger. Kill him, Papa. Throw him to the ground, make his blood splash across the ice. Adam followed Alicia’s gaze and looked out at the gathering crowd too.

The woman on the steps called out. ‘It’s cold. I want to go home.’ The man ignored her, staring at Adam with a disgusting look of triumph on his face. Adam’s fists were clenched and he’d moved in front of Alicia.

‘I want to go home,’ the woman said again. The man gave a mock bow to Alicia, blew her a kiss, and strutted back to the steps.

‘We’re going home,’ Adam said. As he pulled her to him, the small crowd began sliding away. Alicia heard the woman on the steps hiss something again. Some in the crowd laughed.

As they retraced their steps down Bernardyńska, Adam’s grip firm and his stride quick, they didn’t speak. Alicia was lost in fantasies in which she murdered the couple on the steps. The man she scalped, making him kneel and apologise first, or had him hung from a lamppost. The woman’s face she ripped off with her nails. She kept at the edge of her thoughts her burning shame at her father’s humiliation, unable to look at its full white heat. Instead she imagined slipping out of bed later, returning to the steps with a gun. She tried scraps of different dialogue, indulged in the man gibbering at her feet, panicked spit trailing from his mouth, his hopeless, pink, squirming sobs.

As they reached the comforting block of home, Adam stopped and crouched down so that his long coat trailed on the pavement. He put his hands on Alicia’s shoulders and she began to pitch forward into the comfort of his arms, but he held her stiffly away from him, shook her a little.

‘Say nothing to Mama and Karolina. Or Janie or to anyone. Do you understand?’

She nodded, but her eyes were fixed on the bright red, striking as a midsummer flower, plastered across his temple and down his cheeks.

‘They’ll see,’ she said, in answer to his questioning gaze, and pointed at the wound.

‘Well, I slipped on the ice. Yes?’

She nodded.

‘It will be difficult for you to lie because you are a good girl, but it is because I ask you to. Yes?’

She didn’t reply that lying came to her as naturally as breathing.

Never had home seemed so solid and warm. Alicia wanted to scream at Robert to close the door, lock it, to shout that there were bad people all around, but instead she let him take her gloves as he asked, ‘And how is the birthday princess? Did you enjoy your dinner?’ Then, when he caught sight of Adam, he melted into silence. Alicia saw her father bow his head briefly; close his eyes as though in standing sleep.

Robert shut the huge double front doors, locking them in place.

‘Papa slipped on the ice,’ Alicia said. Robert nodded at her.

Some of the cold, set faces from outside, their harshness, had crept into the house with them. The pinched look of the woman in the restaurant, the woman on the steps, the crow of the man as he weaved back to her.

‘Karolina was sent to bed a few hours ago, and Mrs Oderfeldt is in the drawing room, with the radio,’ Robert said, in answer to a silent question.

Karolina slept with a book in her hand, another rising and falling with her belly’s breath, a journal filled with her scrawl. Alicia tried to make out the words, looked for her name, but the room was too gloomy. Karolina’s brown hair was bushy like Alicia’s but unlike her sister she had always resisted Janie’s attempts to tame it with oil and irons, and so it grew rather wild. Alicia studied her for a moment, wondering if she would look like Karolina in five long years, when she was seventeen too, or if she might be prettier. She jerked Karolina by the foot.

Karolina jumped and her book smacked on the floorboards. ‘If you had a nightmare get in with Janie, for God’s sake,’ she mumbled.

Alicia crawled over her sister’s body and sat cross-legged beside her.

‘Come to crow? Go on,’ Karolina said, sitting up. ‘You know Papa never took me to dinner at the Wentzl. Was it very beautiful?’

‘Yes. It was like a painting. Yellow. It glowed.’

Karolina nodded and dozed again as Alicia described the room, the food, the wine and their Papa’s rumbling laughter, the square behind the windows dipping into night. In her mind’s eye, she erased the sour-faced woman at the nearby table like a bad sketch, and then lightly said, ‘But it was icy on the way home and I slipped, and Papa slipped too trying to catch me and cut his temple and bled a little.’ As she said it she realised she would need to give this extra detail to Papa. ‘Oh, and he said he will take you to the Wentzl too, for your next birthday.’ In the weak window light Karolina snorted and rubbed her eyes.

‘Really.’

‘Yes, and also another painter is coming.’

‘Oh! Another portrait of Princess Alicia! The last one makes you look like an ugly ghost.’ Karolina followed this with a gentle push of dismissal.

Alicia settled on the stairs for a while before going back to bed. From the study, the radio rose and fell, punctuated with static. Only the odd word floated up, muffled by the thick carpets. She heard her name, and her Mama’s voice calm and steady. So, the lie was holding.

That night she dreamed of being drowned and trapped in paint like an unlucky fly. At her back, the canvas was cold and through the gloop of the sharp-smelling paint she saw her parents and Karolina, huddled in a cold place like the woman on the steps, watching her.

4

THE GIRLS ATE SEPARATELY from their parents, in the smaller room that had been their nursery, now piled with books and clothes, a desk for Karolina in the corner. Janie and Dotty came in and out with platters, the glint of sunlight on silver. Karolina was at her most animated at breakfast, telling Alicia of a new poem or story she had dreamed or sketched out that morning. The dogs, Mimi and Cece, both Alicia’s, weaved between everyone’s legs, causing Janie to shriek and curse on the stairs when she thought she was out of earshot.

Alicia, weary after her broken sleep, almost feverish still with rage, had slept late. She came in blind to the unexpected stillness, so consumed by the earthquake in her little life that it took minutes for her to identify that the squirming tension was not inside her own body, but in the room.

‘Karolcia?’

Her sister looked only confused, half shrugged with a nod to the two servant women. Janie stood at the windows, her hands clasped, head slightly bowed. As Alicia looked at her, she gave her a watery smile. Dorothea was serving up fruit, but gone was her chatter: I hope you like this, this is your favourite, I saw these at the market yesterday, look at that lovely colour in it, look at that shine! Instead the clink of china made a tuneless song.

‘Karolcia?’ Alicia said again.

Papa had told, or had failed in the lie, and they all knew, saw, as she had, how they were all laid low, something had been ripped away from them.

‘I don’t know,’ Karolina mouthed. ‘They’ve been like this all morning.’

‘Janie, is it about Papa?’ Alicia felt she should cry too, match Dorothea’s blotched cheeks, but felt only the deep stirrings of anger again.

Alicia moved to sit by her sister’s side. She started to say, ‘It was a man, with huge hands, and a boy’s face, and he was only so short, but somehow he hit Papa.’ She only got as far as ‘It was …’ and Karolina began whispering over her, ‘Someone is dead, I know it, it must be Papa or Mama, one of them has died in the night.’

Alicia chewed some fruit, let the juice drip onto the tablecloth. The other words, pressured in her throat like a blocked pipe, she swallowed too, trying to explain: it wasn’t just the blood and the strike and the shock of their tall, solid Papa on the ground, it was the way the air changed, the laughter of the crowd, the sneer on that woman’s face, her hiss, and the woman back at the restaurant, something in the set of her lips, her scowl at Alicia as though she didn’t belong. All this she swallowed, thinking on her secret, before she could allow Karolina’s words in. Karolina though was pressing on, her continued whispering, asking, ‘But which? It must be one of them, no one else is so close, it can’t be Uncle Schmuel or a cousin or something like that, who would they weep for?’ And Alicia found the question facing her easy to the point of shame. It must be Mama, she thought. It must be Mama, because if it is Papa I won’t live anymore. Karolina kept on whispering, until Dorothea banged a serving spoon on the table, ‘Enough!’ and they all jumped.

‘Go up to your Mama and Papa now. Karolina, your hysteria is ridiculous.’

Alicia’s mouth was full, and she burst some of the peach on her tongue, feeling its sticky juice as an outpouring of relief.

The dogs were in the upstairs dining room, lying in the weak sunbeams. Alicia scooped Mimi up as they approached their parents, who sat, formal, as though posing for portraits, in the high-backed chairs under the bookcase. Her Mama had her hands folded in her lap as they entered, but now held out her arms. There was an awkward moment as both girls hesitated, Alicia with Mimi squirming against her chest, Karolina looking at her mother in abject surprise.

‘Come,’ Anna said, an edge of annoyance in her voice.

Karolina went to her. Too tall for a full embrace, she felt her mother’s shoulder dig into the flesh around her own collarbone. Alicia put down the dog.

‘Girls, we are changing some plans. Karolina, you won’t be going to Zakopane with the Hartmanns. You’ll stay here for the season. Alicia, you’re also to stay inside over the winter, so there will be no riding lessons.’

‘Papa!’ Alicia cried; though she didn’t care about the riding lessons, she was unused to things promised to her being taken away again.

‘Is there an epidemic?’ Karolina asked, who loved to read about gruesome plagues sweeping through cities.

‘Yes,’ Anna answered Karolina, after a quiet had descended, and Adam had gone to move newspapers around on his desk. ‘Your father was reading about a disease in the morning papers, and we’d like you to stay inside as much as possible. We’ll take some walks together, of course,’ she said, softening at the sight of her elder daughter’s dismay.

‘There may be some difficulties, but we are surrounded by friends and our city, and all will be well.’ Their Papa spoke slowly, as though giving a ceremonial speech, or a toast at one of their long, late dinner parties.

‘I thought it must be,’ Alicia caught her Papa’s eye and he reddened further, shifted in his chair. ‘We thought it must be family who had died,’ she went on, ‘or something terrible.’

‘Well,’ their Mama said. She seemed at a loss and looked at her husband. ‘Go, go to your rooms.’

They stayed in their own sets of rooms for the rest of the day. Karolina wanted to go to the Jagiellonian, to visit their Uncle Stefan, but Adam, in a message from Janie, forbade it.

‘Besides, the university will be closed, out of respect,’ she added. ‘Your Uncle and the others will all be at home, as we are.’

‘Yes,’ Karolina said. ‘Of course,’ in such a good impression of her mother’s clipped tones that Janie gave her a tiny head tilt of deference. As she left Karolina made a face at Alicia, who buried her own in a throw rug, fearful of laughing.

‘Out of respect for who?’ Alicia almost whispered. She could feel the lie, the way it had got tangled between the servants and her parents, knotted into the wrong words.

Karolina shrugged, went to her desk and brought a small, leather-bound book to Alicia.

‘Shall I tell you the next part of the story?’

‘Have you translated the next part yet?’

‘No, silly. I only translate little bits. I have the translation here in Polish. One of Uncle Stefan’s friends did it.’

Alicia sat up, looked again at the pages. One side was full of the Greek symbols in beautiful shapes, their ink tails flicked like tiny tadpoles.

‘Why don’t you just learn the Polish off by heart, and then you can pretend to translate it, just changing a few words? Then you wouldn’t need to study so much.’

‘But I like the translation part. Besides, I think learning thousands of lines off by heart would be a little difficult, no?’ Karolina laughed.

Alicia was silent. This was a rare day of warmth between them, and she wouldn’t spoil it by saying how she didn’t understand this; in fact, she had committed the poetry Karolina had read to her so far to memory with ease.

‘I might study with Uncle Stefan too when I’m older,’ she said instead.

Karolina gave her a small smile, which Alicia translated with disappointment. ‘I think you will marry a nice rich man, Ala, and live with lots of beautiful things, like Mama.’

‘But Uncle Stefan—’

‘Remember how you tortured all your governesses, and Papa drew you out of school?’

Alicia laughed. ‘But that’s not the same! That wasn’t … I don’t need to learn all the names of the capital cities—’

‘Exactly. That’s not for you.’ Karolina pulled her hair lightly, and Alicia saw her sister believed she was kind to her, like Janie when she flicked flies out of the window instead of crushing them against the window pane. Her secret swelled, I know something, I know something true and real that changes everything, more important than your book. It isn’t a disease at all, it’s what happened to Papa last night.

‘Where were we up to?’

Alicia considered reciting the poetry. She’d become a new kind of ally to her sister then. But she felt instinctively that Karolina would be threatened, would feel something had been taken away from her, when Alicia had so much already.

‘Odysseus has just been blown back, all the way back far from home,’ she told Karolina. ‘He could see the Ithacans tending their fires and he was nearly home but then they opened the bag of winds.’

Karolina took her stubby pencil and mimed driving it into her heart, making Alicia snort. It was just like Papa at the Wentzl. They were often the same, but only when her sister was alone with her did she seem like Papa.

‘Ah!’ she cried. ‘How could I forget? It’s so heartbreaking! Close enough to see the fires!’

Alicia shrugged. ‘It was his own fault. He’s always lying to his men. Easy to warn them and explain.’

‘I thought you would like him, the liar,’ Karolina said, without malice.

Alicia went still.

‘I mean, he’s slippery and clever. You can be like that.’

‘Can I?’ Do you know I’m clever? Do you know the lie about last night?

‘Of course! You lied about that dress you stained. No one even guessed.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes,’ Karolina nodded, dragging out the word. ‘All right, back to Odysseus.’

The afternoon was an unusual one: obeying their parents, they stayed in their part of the apartment, curled up on the small, soft nursery chairs, the sound of the doorbell and hushed voices, occasional louder voices, interrupting Karolina as she read. Alicia committed the translated poetry to memory, played its tune with her fingers along her dress, saw phrases in gold, how they looped back to each other, the same refrains. She saw the azure blue of the sea and the oil glistening in the hair of the heroes, and felt the heat of the sands as though on scorched bare feet. Since her father’s fall, her whole body had been tense. Now, no adults to make her sit up or keep her fingers still or to pet her, she sank further and further into her chair, in the cool room, her sister’s voice spinning the story for her, and felt that if this was a sad day, she wanted all days to be sad days, of stillness and quiet.

5

THE DAYS TURNED still colder and bleaker, so the apartment was full of the smell of tapers and burning kindle. The haven-day of reading was long over; the sisters were summoned back to the family rooms, told to welcome and be polite to many guests. Neighbours drifted in and out, ate little, left teacups brimming. Adam began to gather up the newspapers and take them with him to his office, instead of leaving them around for Karolina to read. Anna stayed in more than usual, and Alicia could hear her pacing in the upstairs rooms, stopping at windows, turning, pacing again. The radio was always crackling through the house. One of these dull mornings Janie told them to be ready in the big dining room downstairs early: their Uncle Stefan was to visit.

Uncle Stefan wasn’t their Papa’s brother, who lived far away; he was his oldest friend, but Alicia always felt he looked like a brother to him. His face was an echo of Papa’s in the way her own was an echo of Karolina’s: the same thin, sharp bones, the crooked smile and a merriment in the brown eyes. He was tall and thin like Papa, even more so, and often had a bruise on his forehead, or his arm, from bumping into the low beams and narrow doorways of the university. He and Adam spoke in almost their own language when they were together, half-sentences which were caught up by the other, and left to drift into laughter or nostalgic silence. Unlike the rest of the house, Uncle Stefan seemed unchanged by the great plague, which made Alicia love him even more.

‘Sad times,’ Adam greeted him with a clutch on the arm.

Stefan peered into his friend’s face. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, as though acknowledging the existence of an academic argument he was about to dismantle. ‘What happened to you?’ he gestured to his own temple, mirroring the welt on Adam’s face.

‘He slipped on the ice,’ Anna said.

‘Ah, is that what we call it these days?’

‘Call what?’ Adam said sharply.

Stefan glanced at Anna, confused. ‘Adam, I was only joking. I know you don’t drink so much anymore.’

‘I was with Alicia,’ Adam muttered.

‘Come on, I have books for Karolina, and here is Anna so beautiful …’ – he kissed her hand and she laughed – ‘and come on, Adam, it was far away. It won’t happen here.’

‘Not so far.’

‘Far away? So I can go to Zakopane?’ Karolina asked her mother.

‘The Hartmanns wrote to say they’ve cancelled,’ Anna replied. ‘As a precaution. We told the girls about the epidemic,’ she said to Stefan, who raised his eyebrows in response.

‘Come on now,’ he said, in such gentle rebuke that both Anna and Adam looked away for a moment. Taking their silence as permission, he gestured for Karolina and Alicia to come closer and began, ‘There isn’t an epidemic, except of … unpleasantness.’

‘There is a measles outbreak, it said so in the newspaper,’ Anna said, flushing.

‘Some windows were smashed in Germany and some people were hurt,’ Adam picked up Stefan’s thread, left Anna’s dangling. She retreated to her sofa, furious. It had been Adam’s idea not to tell their daughters in the first place.

‘It’s far away and nothing to worry about here,’ Stefan added, aiming what he hoped was a conciliatory smile at Anna, but her face was closed, and he would need to flatter her all evening.

‘Why were people hurt?’ Karolina asked, as Alicia thought about the man on the steps and the way his back curled as he kicked her Papa. Perhaps he had come from Germany to smash windows too.

‘Well.’ Stefan gave an elaborate shrug. ‘This is the fate the gods have—’

‘Don’t!’ Adam held up a hand, but laughing. ‘Don’t start quoting at us, it’s ten o’clock in the morning and too early for epic!’

Stefan mirrored Adam’s gesture, and matched his laughter too.

‘Come, Karolina,’ he called. Alicia watched as he pulled more of the green-covered books out of a leather satchel. The two of them stood slightly apart, Karolina smoothing her hands over the pages.

‘Did you bring me anything?’ Alicia called to him, as the family drifted towards the table where tea was being served. ‘It was my birthday last month, and we haven’t seen you since then.’

‘Ah, and how was the Wentzl?’ Stefan directed his question to both Alicia and Adam, who dropped his gaze for a moment. Alicia tried to summon the night again, its nauseating mix of the rich, warm room and the images of blood on the ice.

‘It was wonderful,’ she said. ‘It was a lovely treat from Papa. Only I slipped on the ice on the way back.’

‘Oh yes, getting cold now,’ Stefan replied politely, with a small smile of amusement at her grown-up tone.

‘We haven’t been into the centre since,’ Adam said. ‘The news came through the next morning.’

‘But you can’t lock yourselves away,’ Stefan said. He’d spoken mildly, but Adam reddened.

‘You think we’re afraid?’

Stefan sat back, his thin face becoming thoughtful. ‘No, only … sad. Too sad, I think.’

‘Don’t you feel anything? Did you read the reports? They made people …’

He broke off, noticing how his daughters had become still.

‘Of course, of course. It’s terrible,’ Stefan said, without fire. ‘But remember ’35. We all worried, and what happened? Nothing. Only you have more German Jews on your payroll, and I have more in my classes, and very welcome they are too.’

‘I know,’ Adam said, picking up his tea. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added. He eyed his friend, noted he was wearing, unusually, his kippah. Adam had put his own away after Alicia’s birthday, folded it away with a twinge of regret at how it had been his father’s, given to him with a rare emotion from the old man, his eyes moist. Adam had worn it not as a believer at all but as a mark of respect, love, even, for his father, for the memory of his proud face when Adam had first put it on. He wore it for weddings, holidays, days he wished to mark with respect, such as Alicia’s birthday. Now it was gently pressed between handkerchiefs in his bedroom as though just another piece of cloth.

Stefan followed his friend’s eyes. ‘What? I’m going to my mother’s for dinner.’

Adam lowered his voice. ‘It hasn’t given you any trouble?’

‘None at all.’ Stefan heard the untold things in Adam’s question; saw how he held himself in his chair. An image of his friend being beaten made his stomach shrink, and he reached for Adam’s arm even as he dismissed the idea: Adam would have told him.

A silence descended, the rattle of the tea things, the crack of a broken book spine from where Karolina sat.

Alicia leaned over to Stefan. ‘My present,’ she whispered, but it carried, and they all laughed at her.

‘All right,’ Stefan said. ‘I confess my crime, I forgot the birthday girl.’

‘Oh, Stefan! How could you? You held her in your arms when she was born!’ Adam cried. ‘You are no longer my brother!’ and the two men collapsed in childish laughter. A look passed between Anna and Dorothea, who was pouring Stefan’s tea, and Anna’s anger ebbed away. She settled more comfortably on the sofa, her head tilted as though to hear better her husband’s newly cheerful voice.

‘All right,’ Stefan said, wiping his eyes. He turned to Alicia. ‘What would you like? Here, I’ll give you a choice. A doll, or a globe.’

‘A globe?’

‘Yes, a globe of the world. You know, when I was your age, turning, what are you, eight?’

There was more laughter at this from the parents.

‘She’s twelve! A crocodile is a better Uncle than you are, Stefan. A snake would do a better job,’ Adam said.

Stefan laughed, waved this away. ‘When I was your age, I wanted a globe more than anything. So I could see the whole world, understand my place in it’ – he started to make his teaching gestures, slicing the air – ‘so I could travel to far-away places by tracing my finger over the surface. Do you remember that one my father had, Adam? In his office.’

‘I never saw it, but you talked about it often enough.’

‘Well, it’s in my office now.’

‘Did you ever get your own, when you were younger?’ Karolina asked.

Adam started to shake his head.

‘No!’ Stefan threw up his hands dramatically, making them laugh again. ‘I asked, and asked, and I was very patient, and then my parents bought me a book of maps, which wasn’t what I wanted at all!’

‘Well, Alicia will want the doll,’ Anna said, smiling. ‘She’s not a twelve-year-old boy with an obsession.’

‘I’ll have a globe, Uncle Stefan, please.’

Adam laughed. ‘Your uncle is only teasing you. He will buy you a doll or a pretty thing.’

‘With the sea a dark blue colour,’ Alicia said. ‘And a star where we live, so I can see the whole world, understand my place in it.’

‘Of course,’ Stefan said. ‘But you know, I was only telling a story about myself. Really you can have any pretty thing you like.’

‘We’re having a new portrait of her done,’ Adam said. ‘It’s her birthday gift to ourselves.’

Her parents began talking about the painting, her Papa gesturing to the windows, where she’d probably have to stand. Karolina was busy with her books, reading some of the spines, looking up occasionally to shoot a look of puzzlement or thanks to her uncle.

Stefan turned to Alicia. ‘Another portrait, Ala? So, you’ll be famous!’

‘Will I?’

‘Oh, yes. Your parents, you know, they only hire the very best. You will be like the Mona Lisa.’

She looked blank, so he added, ‘Maybe one day you will hang in a gallery, and there will be a little card’ – he held up his hands as though making a frame – ‘that says, “Alicia Oderfeldt, famous.”’ He smiled down at her, then checked his smile at her solemn face. ‘Ala?’

She took a moment to speak. ‘Please, the globe. Won’t you get me one?’

Stefan took her hand and kissed it, his face alight with amusement at her serious expression. ‘As you wish.’

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.

‘Alicia, would you like to ask Mr Pienta about his ideas?’ the older girl asked, her face red.

Alicia placed her book aside with infuriating affectation, patting it in place like a prissy middle-aged woman. My God, Jozef thought. I will have to find a way not to throw her off that damned balcony. When she looked up at him, he tried to find some interest in the planes of her face in the firelight, some light he could use. She caught his eye, tilted her chin a little, and the effect was so akin to flirtation that he shrank back and folded his hands.

‘Your father has asked for a portrait, something … pretty,’ he said, feeling helpless at the flatness of his tone, but too irritated to rouse himself to false enthusiasm. She nodded.

‘Would you like to hold your little dog perhaps, or maybe a book you like? It is good to have something to do with your hands, or they fall like this,’ and he let his dangle like a broken puppet. The older girl laughed. Alicia caught it and gave a second-long smile that was so open and unstudied she instantly became a child again, free of poise. Then she closed her face again, straightened her back.

‘The last time I was sitting down, and I had my hands in my lap like this.’

She showed him the way ladies folded their hands together.

‘Yes, I’ve heard about the last time,’ he made a vague attempt to tease her. ‘Are you going to chop off all of your hair for me too?’

‘I was just a child then,’ she said, primly. Then she felt cross with herself; she always laughed when Papa mentioned it, and this was Papa’s friend. ‘And Papa really wants this one. He … I really want him to …’ Frustrated, she looked into the flames. She couldn’t explain her clawing need for her Papa to be confirmed in the eyes of Kraków as important, a patron, a rich man, not some dog in the street, without talking about the man who had attacked him. A now familiar flare of rage overcame her and she hid her face in Mimi’s fur for a moment, imagined her little pet biting off that man’s face, his huge hands thrown up to protect him ripped away by the dog’s sharp teeth.

Jozef dug his toes into his shoes. I’m trying, you spoiled brat, he thought.

Alicia was looking into the fire now. ‘I won’t ruin this one,’ she said. ‘I want it to be beautiful.’ I want Papa to love it, she thought. I want it to be famous, I want that man to see it and to be afraid of us.

On his way out, woozy with wine and nalewka, the oppressive heat of the study, the effort of playing his part, Jozef met Milo as they were being handed coats by two tired-looking young servants. Jozef had lost his impulse to crow at Milo and felt shy instead, and a vague panic about having to share a tram or even a long walk back to their part of the city together, labouring over conversation. He offered an awkward smile. ‘I’ll maybe get a cab,’ he said.

‘Won’t they lend a car?’ Milo replied, focused on the buttons of his coat. He spoke mildly, but when he glanced up there was a sharpness to the set of his lips. The servants retreated, probably hoping they could collapse into chairs or beds, drink their cheaper booze, gossip about them all.

‘Well, I don’t want to go back up and ask, you know,’ Jozef said, set his face in a brief grimace, hoping to find common ground. We are both outsiders here; I won, but it’s awkward for me too.

‘Of course, of course.’ Milo’s voice dropped to a loud, drunken whisper, the effort of keeping his voice hushed straining the muscles on his throat and causing flecks of spit to form at the corners of his lips. ‘You can’t trust them to share their expensive things, they sit on piles of gold, they have money sewn into the curtains, there’s gold in the fucking walls. In the walls, imagine, you could punch this through’ – Milo struck the wall with his fist – ‘and coins would spill out, but fucking wait to see if you get a penny of it over what you agreed in your contract, and they’ll probably try to screw you out of that as well.’

Jozef began to stammer, ‘Well, I don’t …’ and Milo waved his words away, lurched at the door. He fumbled with the large, heavy doorknob. ‘Where’re their servants? They can’t even run a house properly, it’s all smoke and mirrors you know, pretending to be upper class, they all come from shoe sellers and market stalls. Good luck with the portrait, but don’t expect anything from these fucking dogs, you know.’

Jozef had unconsciously been nodding, a tic of his nerves, trying to scramble what to say, how to defend his friend, how to deal with the aggression spilling around him. Please, please, just leave, just go, he thought.

Milo took his silence and the nods to mean agreement and shook Jozef’s hand before wrenching the door and stumbling down the steps. Jozef sank for a moment against the coats still hanging from the beautiful oak stand.

His mother had never had much time for Jews, but even she would have been ashamed of him just then, he knew. To allow such a breach of manners, to insult the host who has just fed you, to use such language in their very home: this would have appalled her, although she would have also – later, when he told her about it, in a letter or a visit – reminded him to check his contract and keep a tab on expenses.

Jozef counted seconds, feeling his cheeks warm with the embarrassment of this childish fear of Milo walking slowly, their paths crossing. He buttoned and unbuttoned his coat. He should have said goodnight to his hosts, but his reserves of social energy were used up, and he felt a desperate desire for his small, draughty room, his bed, the silence and the blank walls. He hesitated over a bell he suspected would summon a servant and allow him to pass on a message, or at least be subtly shown how to behave, but weariness from it all made him open the door himself and step into the night.

At the top of the stairs, in the spot his younger daughter took to overhear conversations between him and his wife, Adam Oderfeldt stared at a knot of wood. He’d thought it would amuse him to overhear the two painters and their impression of his daughter, the house, his friends, himself. Pienta in particular he had hoped to impress, liked to have the younger, poorer man around to be generous to, to ostentatiously not comment upon his stained cuffs. He felt a series of small collapses in the solid wood beneath him, as though it was not solidity beneath him at all but a thin crust which covered seething lava. The painter from Warsaw with his news from Berlin and his drunken bitterness, and the man who had struck him on Alicia’s birthday joined many others, smaller, less clear, easy to dismiss, but considered together something began to take shape. Averted eyes. Contracts more carefully checked. Requests for other opinions. A certain gleam in the eyes when sharing news from across Europe, perhaps searching his face for fear. The trickle of news from Germany, someone’s cousin, someone’s schoolfriend, someone’s brother-in-law, and now open attacks, in the streets there, and signs going up around Kraków.

Adam placed a palm on the step, tried to feel the massive weight of the house, how its foundations sent deep roots into the street. Tried to feel the comforting solidity of the Wawel, but found instead only a flimsy seal that could be punctured and peeled away like tissue paper. Adam sat for a while listening to his sleeping house, the only sound the far-away clinks of Dorothea and Janie working downstairs.

He sought out Anna. He wanted the steadiness of his wife’s slim body next to him, her deep breaths. He found her in her room, already with her hair around her shoulders, always thinner than it seemed in its elaborate twists.

‘Goodnight, dear,’ she said. ‘Did your guests leave? I’m afraid I might have abandoned them rather rudely.’

Adam sat on the edge of the bed, felt a dull ache in his back. He looked down at himself: the pristine shirt beginning to crumple, the soft belly beneath, the long, spidery limbs. He had broken his leg skating years before, and the splintering ease of it came to him then, how he had snapped like kindling. He wrapped his arms around his knees like a child.

‘So we’ll ask Jozef to paint Alicia for you. I didn’t like his dirty cuffs tonight or how much wine he drank, but I liked the earlier one he did of us well enough, I suppose.’ She was chattering insistently, the business of the house, their decisions, and he gratefully took the hint. He wanted only to lie down next to her.

‘Don’t invite Milo again,’ Anna added.

Adam started, hung his head. So she had heard it. ‘Of course not,’ he said.

Anna pulled at the skin of her cheeks in the mirror, eyed the reflection of her husband on the bed. She wondered if she could try to describe the revulsion she’d felt earlier: how Milo seemed like rotten meat with perfume spilled across it; how somehow he had insulted her, something in the way he took her hand, some cast to his voice. Instead she only said, ‘I didn’t like his manners at the table, holding court like that.’

Adam watched her, rubbing some lotion into her hands and smoothing it across her forehead. She caught his eye in the mirror.

‘Do you go to France this summer?’

This caught him off guard.

‘I might. Let me know if there’s something I can bring you.’

She made a small sound of assent, turned with a questioning look.

‘May I stay?’ he always asked, a formality he couldn’t shake.

‘To sleep.’

‘I’ve upset you, but it was you who talked about France.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Anna, dearest Aneczka. I’m … please be a friend tonight.’ He spread his hands in a hopeless gesture. For a terrible moment he felt he might cry in front of her, which had happened only once in their marriage, when her mother had died. Anna had cradled him like a baby and said nothing, her face only a little paler than usual.

‘What is it?’ she said now.

He laid back, the canopy of her pretty bedroom, birds and blue swirls in silk, swimming above him. He was drunk. I’m afraid, he thought. A man attacked me, with Alicia there, her little hand wrenched from mine, and I lay sprawled on the ground like a child, and now she lies for me, and another man insulted me in my own house, and even Jozef who I thought loved me, said nothing, nothing, and across the border they are killing people right there in the streets, I can’t wear my kippah now, I’ve hidden it away, and now even you are angry with me over this old problem of France, and I am all alone.

‘What do you think of this rumour, about businesses?’ he asked, into the silks.

‘What, are you worried?’

‘No.’

‘Then what?’

‘Perhaps a little.’

He heard her feet on the carpet, felt her weight, cat-like, on the end of the bed. She put a hand on his shoulder. Adam began to lean into her, but then she shook him gently. ‘Well, stop. It will upset the whole house. We’ve already kept the girls inside these weeks, and for what? So they can grow pale and bicker. Go into work. Work harder so you don’t fixate on things like a boy.’

7

IN THE DAYLIGHT HOURS the apartment took on a different mood. Adam was presumably at his factory, lines of fabric and textiles, the crunch of sewing machines; or in some well-lit office with plants and the smell of leather. Anna welcomed Jozef when he arrived, ordered tea and pastries, but had since disappeared. Jozef had painted in Adam’s study last time, his patron at the desk. Now, sitting in the small room Anna had led him to, the plate of pastries demolished, he felt nervous, unsure which rooms he was allowed in, unsure where the girl was, where her mother had gone, or who he was to ask. The pastry, some almond flaky thing, expensive, made a sticky paste at the back of his throat and the tea had run out. Outside the door all was quiet. Should he ring a bell? In the corridor he caught sight of a servant, but she bustled away before he could ask. Fighting the irritation that descended on him, Jozef pressed on, knocking on doors, finding beautifully furnished empty rooms, until he found his way back to the large room which overlooked the Wawel, the huge dining table from the previous night cleared and laid with a pressed new tablecloth. With relief he saw the older girl was curled in a window seat, reading.

‘Good morning.’

‘Oh! Excuse me, Mr Pienta.’ She started to uncurl and closed her book.

‘Please, Jozef, please. Don’t, no, please don’t let me disturb you, only—’

‘I’m sorry, I was supposed to come and fetch you, Mama has gone out but then I lost track of time.’

She was wearing the same kind of simple clothes as the previous evening, her feet bare in a pool of winter sunlight. Her hair was pulled into a messy plait which left curls around her face. She arched her back, stretching out from her reading pose, and glanced at the Wawel with a smile. Jozef could see the composition. The play of light on the grey and brown, warming it like sun on autumn foliage. The strands of hair, the edge of the cheek.

‘I should paint a portrait of you, Karolina.’ He was pleased he remembered her name this time.

She turned from fetching her book. He’d expected a pleased blush, perhaps a smile. Instead, to his surprise, there was an unmistakeable frown for a moment, before her face went blank.

‘I’m sorry if I offended you,’ he stammered, feeling his face grow hot.

‘I’m not offended.’

‘What are you reading?’

‘Some poems. I’ll take you to wait for Alicia, she’s choosing a dress.’

He walked with her, watching her bare feet sink into the carpets. Perhaps, he realised, with a rush of horror, she thought he had been flirting with her. She would tell her parents and there would be uproar. He stopped and she turned to look at him.

‘I only meant, you were accidentally, in that pose reading by the Wawel, it was a good composition. I thought you might like a portrait like your sister’s. That’s all, I wasn’t trying to flatter you,’ he said, feeling like a little boy explaining some blunder, irritated still more by the rules and games of this world that Adam kept pulling him into.

Karolina bit the inside of her cheek. She must be about sixteen, seventeen, Jozef thought. I should be more careful.

‘It’s only that,’ she faltered, her own face flushing. ‘Thank you for the thought, but Papa and Mama would never think of it. It’s only Alicia they’d want.’

‘But,’ he said, moving towards her and trying not to smile, ‘I painted a portrait of you and your mother, years ago. Don’t you remember?’ As he asked her, he felt vertigo from trying to reach back to those days, trying to align the little child he had painted, all chubby arms and squirming, with this still, barefoot creature fixing him with a level gaze.

‘That was before Alicia was born.’ She spoke simply, without bitterness.

Jozef had been the favourite himself. He was the only boy, and his sisters had been lumped together and dismissed, while his voice was always heard, his work celebrated, his whims indulged. He considered comforting Karolina with denial, a claim that Adam had also asked for a portrait of her this time, and explaining to him afterwards. But he could see the sharpness in Karolina’s eyes, and saw that she would resent the platitude.

‘Parents love all of their children, but there is always a favourite. It’s no one’s fault,’ he tried. She nodded. He went on, ‘It’s not always good to be the golden child, either. The pressure.’

‘I don’t think Alicia feels any pressure.’

He hadn’t meant to get pulled into petty family politics.

‘We should find your sister. I’d like to work in the morning light.’

His encounter with Karolina had made him even less interested in Alicia. They found her in her room with a pile of dresses, an obscene frothy pile of silk and frill and lace.

‘I don’t know which one,’ she said as they came into the room. ‘I should have asked Papa before he left for work.’

‘Good morning,’ Jozef said, unable to resist the rebuke to her manners. He wouldn’t indulge her any more than he had to.

‘Good morning,’ she replied listlessly. She seemed genuinely worried about the dresses, and Jozef felt a flash of exasperation.

‘It really doesn’t matter about the dress,’ he said, trying to keep his voice soft. ‘It’s just sketches today.’

‘Alicia? Did you hear? Don’t worry,’ Karolina said, kneeling down to where her sister was rummaging, almost feverishly. She was sitting on a pile of fabric.

‘You look like the Princess and the Pea, Ala,’ Karolina teased her.

‘It has to be perfect,’ Alicia almost whispered.

‘What you are wearing today is fine for now,’ Jozef said.

They went back to the window where Karolina had been reading. The older girl found another window seat, with a dog curled in her lap, to watch them and sometimes make notes in a leather book. Jozef wondered if she was also sketching, but thought better of asking her. He asked Alicia to stand naturally by the window so the light found one side of her face.

It was like navigating in a snowstorm. There was nothing to catch the eye, to create a composition from. A blank of plain face and dull hair and the white smock he assumed was day wear in the house, a kind of rich girl uniform. To relax her, he asked Karolina to hand Alicia the dog, which lolled in her arms.

He’d expected laziness, distraction; he had a stock of wheedling phrases and false jollity stored up, expected long breaks and trifling chatter. Instead she was so focused as to be unnerving, stood almost too still, breathed in shallow sips as though afraid. Karolina was also puzzled, he could see, glancing up from her notebook and watching her sister with a small smile that told her surprise.

Jozef tried to relax her. He asked questions about her education, what she was reading, what her favourite game was. Who was her best friend? Alicia, her head and face turned slightly from him as directed, answered from a tiny opening at the side of her mouth in the shortest possible answers, until she crossed into rudeness.

‘Alicia,’ Karolina said. ‘Mr Pienta asked you about Mimi, did you hear him?’

Alicia broke the pose and glared at him. She put down the dog, which trotted away primly, tinkling bells. ‘She is three, I heard the question. Why don’t you want to sketch?’

‘Alicia!’ her sister rebuked her.

Jozef smiled at her, repressing his dislike. ‘I am sketching. Only you are a little … stiff. Try to relax a little. Try—’

‘I’m standing how you told me to stand.’

Her face was reddening in a warning of tears. Jozef retreated to the sketch, pretended to be engrossed in the dull lines. His own petulance threatened to overspill and wash away his mask of deference; he allowed himself, half ashamed and half satisfied, to think vicious insults against Alicia as he sketched the same line again and again. By the time he got to spoiled little bitch he had exorcised some of his irritation. He glanced up again, to where Alicia was still standing in the odd puppet-like way, the muscles on her neck so taut they looked painful. Her arms in the white smock were bare and goose-bumped; he saw they were still carrying some puppy fat.

‘Come, come,’ he said, softening his voice and soothing his conscience a little. ‘Let me show you what I’m doing, maybe that will help.’

He had only meant this for Alicia, but they both came, Karolina breaking the spine of her book as she laid it face down. They stood behind him and he tried to explain.

‘For now I’m just trying to get an idea of the shape and the pose. See?’ He ran his finger over the edge of the composition. ‘At the moment it’s too much of a block, like a square. Best is if there is some graceful line, here—’ he broke off to curve the edge of the line where Alicia’s arm and side could make an oval with his finger, smudging the pencil line. ‘And on the other side, something different. See now you are like a stiff old photograph, like—’ and he turned to them, made a rictus face, his arms pinned to his side, leaned onto his toes so his calves strained. It worked; the girls laughed. ‘There is no interesting line in the shape to—’

‘Yes, I see,’ Alicia said. Karolina was also nodding, but her eye was wandering back to her book. Jozef smiled at Alicia but it was clear to him she had no idea what he was talking about. At least she might relax a little.

She went back to her position, curved her right arm into her side, placed her left arm on the edge of the windowsill, tilted her right shoulder slightly forward. Jozef laughed in surprise. Professional models in the big studios needed more coaching.

‘That’s it, just exactly as I said, absolutely perfect. You’re quick.’

The girl flushed with pleasure. That’s how to handle her, Jozef thought. No one tells her she’s clever.

‘See,’ Jozef went on, ‘now the light is catching you in interesting ways. Let me just …’ He rummaged, found his chalk. ‘Karolina, you see?’ but she was reading now, looked up briefly, smiled and nodded, returned to her other world. Alicia made a movement when he said ‘see’ but he held up a hand, showing her his palm, and she stayed still with a smile.

He began to dart chalk over the sketch: here, the crook of that elbow, here, the left cheek, pushing the right further into shadow. A small crown of light here towards the forehead: Adam would like that, but it also drew the eye up to the face. He felt specks of excitement, worked quickly to anchor the ideas. His own work, that wispy ghost back in his studio, evaporated. He fell into a rare state of focus, vaguely aware of the two girls and the turning of Karolina’s pages, her occasional yawn and stretch, noting the movement of light, its creep across the carpet and angular growth along the curtains. A portrait like this would usually be punctuated with rests for the child, but after her brief lesson Alicia was perfectly still, moved just so when directed, her eyes fixed on some far-away point. The sunlight warmed the room, the low hum of the city outside was soothing in its monotony, the contrast between the hush inside and the bustle below; the three of them stayed as though under a spell. There was no awkwardness in the silence between them now, but a quickly strengthening thread of purpose.

8

ANNA HAD WORN the wrong shoes. They pinched around her toes, and a low throb of pain had begun in a ridge where the leather dug in. The sun had coaxed her into walking the short way from the apartment into the shopping district around the Ulica Floriańska.

She had been in the apartment too long, absorbing Adam’s nerves, the crying of the servants, the quiet confusion of her daughters over their parents’ lies and pronouncements. Restlessness tickled at her as she sat for hour after hour in the stiff-backed chair in her husband’s study, listening to him read out sections of news reports, watching him fiddle with the radio, echoing the reports as though continuing a long debate, though she had said nothing, a half-read magazine in her lap.

When she’d said she was going shopping, Robert had gone to ready the car, and Janie began collecting her outdoor things: boots, coat, gloves. But then the doorbell had rung and the painter arrived, and there was tea to order and small talk to be made, and she would have been trapped with the man all day if she hadn’t slipped out as he ate his pastries, giving instructions to Karolina to take care of him.

It was poor manners, she knew, but he was only a portrait painter. Besides, she thought, as she walked as slowly as she dared, hoping for a stately rather than hobbling effect, Karolina would soon need to learn how to host. She was seventeen now, and couldn’t curl up like a little beetle with her books much longer. Perhaps they would send her to university, all her beloved books and their musty smell; she would meet a husband there, or perhaps she might marry one of Adam’s business associates. A society wedding, with a reception at the Wentzl or at a villa out near Zakopane, perhaps. The newlyweds would settle in Kraków, one of the nice apartments near the river. The ghosts of Anna’s parents would say to each other, Look at the way our little Aneczka’s daughter lives. Look how our blood has trickled upwards.

With the distraction of her daydreaming Anna had crossed the Glowny, barely registering the Cloth Hall and its crowds. She stopped now to look back at the square, pleased she had forgotten to feel anxious. So, the air tasted the same, people seemed friendly, even happy enough. She couldn’t see any posters, any signs. Milo’s face drifted across her mind, its satisfied sneer. A man stepped in her way, apologised, moved around her. A small group was gathering to hear the bugler on the hour. All was as it should be. Anna turned and tripped over a little as she did so. A man caught her arm.

‘Oh! Thank you.’

‘Watch your step, the cobbles are so uneven here.’

‘Yes, I know, I—’

‘Not from here, are you?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I saw you, looking around. Waiting to hear the bugler?’

She set her mouth a little, annoyed with herself for falling, literally, into conversation with this overfamiliar man, who up close she saw was wearing a dirty coat and no gloves. She gave a tiny nod, started to move away.

‘He’ll be playing in a minute,’ the man said, touching her arm again.

She should just keep walking, but instead she said, ‘Yes, I know that.’

‘Lived here all my life. Good time to visit.’ He tapped his nose, and his eyes began wandering over her face.

This was too much. She turned sharply and walked, ignoring her screaming feet. With a jolt she saw that he was following her.

‘Oh, don’t want to hear him? I said it’s a good time to visit.’

‘Yes, I heard you.’ She sped up.

‘Don’t you want to hear why?’ He took hold of her arm.

She felt a heat rising, began to glance around for, what? Police? The Glowny was full of people, so why did she feel so afraid?

‘I live here, and I’d appreciate if you left me alone.’ She was dismayed that her voice had a tiny shake in it. He was too close, she could smell vodka on his breath, and he still had hold of her arm. He was studying her face.

‘Kraków accent, is that?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You’re from across the river.’

What she had thought was aggressive flirtation, the vague threat of a strange man talking to her, a pretty woman, in the street, became something else. He was looking not with admiration or even with open, disgusting lust. She began to feel cold.

‘I beg your pardon? I live right here in the centre.’

‘Hmm.’ He smiled, gripped still tighter. ‘You hide it well, but I can hear it in the vowels.’ He tapped his nose with his other hand, grinned at her. ‘I know all the sounds of Kraków. I bet you speak Yiddish, don’t you?’

‘Let me go,’ she hissed, and wrenched her arm away. ‘How dare you touch me?’ Her voice rose. ‘Excuse me!’ she called out to a group of men nearby. ‘This man is—’

The man backed off as the men approached. He seemed amused. She waved the men away, feeling that her throat had closed and if she were to speak, her voice would betray her and get stuck.

Ignoring the pain in her feet, she almost stamped to the Ulica Floriańska, rehearsing how she should have spoken to the man, angry with herself for falling into such a young girl’s trap, angry that Adam’s fears had seeped through the apartment walls and followed her through the streets. In the old neighbourhood it was rare for strangers to approach you like that; everyone knew each other, but as she’d grown up and the family had got richer there had been more and more forays into the city, and she had had catcalls, looks, even a touch once or twice. It had been an annoyance, like flies in summer. Strange that in the middle of a crowd, older, in the day, she should feel so afraid. No. She was spooked by Milo and his needling, by Adam’s childishness. She wouldn’t look at it.

She stopped at the window of a favourite millinery shop, where the displays were always imaginative. The assistant was arranging ribbons, dangling silk butterflies around the jewel-coloured hats. She caught Anna’s eye for a moment, gave a courteous nod. Anna indulged in a quick thought to her younger self: You can just walk in and buy one, Aneczka, if you want. Leaning a little against the glass to relieve the pressure on her feet, she looked like her childhood self, she thought. Her little fingers splayed, she moved so her nose was pressed against the glass for a second, felt its cold bite. It was so like the way Alicia stood against the windows at home that she felt a tiny tug of warmth for her. In the glass she studied her face, looking for Alicia and Karolina there, finding, with a jolt, her mother instead.

‘Anna?’

She jumped. What did she look like, peering into the window like a street child? Worse, it was Janina Kardas, holding her hand up and squinting in an ugly way, a kind of twisted smile. Oh, go away, Anna thought, of course it would be you who would catch me off my guard.

‘Mrs Kardas, hello,’ Anna said, limping a little as she came to take her hand.

‘Janina, please.’

‘I was just … I came to see if any of the new season’s clothes … I love these displays, don’t you? Isn’t it mild today? Aren’t you hot in that thick dress?’

Janina frowned at the barb, which Anna instantly regretted. I should just go home, she thought.

‘Oh Anna, your shoes!’ Janina cried. ‘What on earth? Is that blood?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘It is, it is!’ Janina crowed. ‘It’s seeping right through your stockings! Won’t you sit down?’ Her grip on Anna’s arm was strong, guiding her into the shop where the sweet smell of leather, the tick of an ornamental clock, soothed some of Anna’s nerves. The shop girl from the window offered a chair, then tea, biscuits. Would madam like some water? As she bustled away, Janina, who had also accepted a chair, took Anna’s hand with alarming tenderness.

‘Are you all right, my dear? Are you …?’ Her face was open with glee. Anna almost laughed.

‘Oh my goodness,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I was just remembering … at the window. I used to shop here when I was younger,’ she lied. Imagine, another baby, at her age! She felt a pang of affection for Adam, prone on the bed the night before, imploring her to be a friend to him. The idea that their neighbours took for granted that they were still lovers pleased her.

Janina gave her hand a squeeze. ‘It’s only that you looked so strange.’ She kept her hand on Anna’s. Her older soft skin made Anna think of her mother, who had loved her granddaughters so much. Neither of them could remember her, though Karolina had written poems about her that Anna had secretly read, sense memories that had clutched at her: the surprising strength of her grip, the smell of slightly burnt hair, her way of cupping the girls’ faces in her hands. Anna released Janina’s hand, picked up a hat, began turning it over in her hands, feeling a familiar terrifying hollowness gaping inside her. She could never imagine holding her children’s hands, or cupping their faces in her mother’s way.

‘Anna?’ Janina said.

‘My feet do hurt, you’re right. My own fault, I rushed out this morning without thinking.’

‘Is everything all right?’

‘I wonder if I shouldn’t have come into town today.’

‘But there’s nothing to fear.’

‘A man—’ she broke off as the girl arrived with a tray of tea things. What would she say? A man touched my arm, and told me this was a good time to visit, and then heard something in my accent? The girl was very young, wore too much make-up. The tea was in good quality china, and Anna felt she would have to buy something.

‘This is a beautiful style,’ she said, gesturing behind her, as the girl clinked saucers around. ‘I’ll take three.’

The girl smiled. ‘Of course, madam.’

Janina said, ‘Yes, you must feel you should be at home, comforting the children.’

‘To them it’s just some broken windows in another country.’

Janina flushed. ‘Well.’

‘It’s Adam who is so affected.’

‘But you’ve come out? A wife should—’

‘Yes, yes, but he’s gone into work today.’

Janina was silenced by Anna’s tone. They sipped their over-sweetened tea. Anna watched the people outside, strolling, linking arms, nannies with their charges. Some glanced inside, and she felt on display, but oddly grateful for the glass and ribbons, the girl’s manners, even Janina.

‘We should visit the German refugees arriving,’ Janina said. ‘Make them welcome.’

‘Yes, I’m going to throw a party,’ Anna said, irritated by what she heard as an education in manners.

‘A party?’

‘A gathering. To welcome them, and show solidarity.’

Janina made a small sound that Anna couldn’t interpret.

‘The painter arrived, from last night, you know. Did you speak to him?’ Anna said at length.

Janina shifted in her seat. ‘The one from Berlin? He seemed—’

‘No, that’s the other one, and neither are from Berlin. You’re thinking of Milo something or other, but I mean Adam’s friend, Jozef. He’s going to paint Alicia.’

‘I didn’t listen to either of them much,’ Janina said with a sniff.

‘You seemed to, when Milo was talking about Berlin. You were interested then.’

Anna watched Janina as she angled a hat from side to side, far too ostentatious for her, deep in thought.

‘Aleks writes to me about these things too,’ Janina said. ‘He reads about them in Paris, sends newspaper clippings. He gets nervous. It’s natural for the young to overthink things, to get a little excited.’

Janina turned the hat over and over like an absorbed child. It was Anna’s turn to touch the older woman’s hand.

‘I forgot he would be there already! You must miss him.’ When Janina only nodded, Anna went on, ‘You’re right. We shouldn’t be frightened. Kraków is safe, look,’ she dropped to a whisper and nodded towards the shop girl, wrapping her hats in tissue, placing them into boxes, ‘it’s so calm and friendly.’ She called to the girl, ‘When you’ve finished, please call me a cab back to Bernardyńska.’

When the cab arrived, Anna offered her neighbour a lift.

‘No thank you,’ Janina replied. ‘I’m going across the river.’

‘To the old neighbourhood? Why?’

‘Why not? I go all the time.’

‘Is it …’ Anna had meant to say safe, but that would crumble away the thin crust they had built between them. ‘Is it nice?’

‘I like to go to my old doctor and optician, and I have a favourite cobbler there as well.’

‘I never go.’ Anna suddenly felt ridiculous in this, as though the old quarter were another world, not streets away.

‘Well,’ the older woman seemed at a loss what to say. They stood in the street, the cab waiting, Anna’s boxes piled in the back. Anna didn’t know whether she wanted to be rid of this woman or to keep her close, talk, hold her hand. She felt they were in some kind of tiring dance, the two of them, always circling, never really speaking in any real way, but each sensing how the other was shaken, and wanting to prop the other up. Perhaps she would want to cling onto any face she knew, after the strangeness of the last few weeks and the changed air in the house, her own inexplicable fear in the Glowny.

‘Come to my cobbler,’ Janina gabbled, a little flushed, evidently mortified by the long silence that Anna had allowed to open up between them. ‘You could come and have your shoes stretched. I used to go to the one two streets along,’ Janina said in a confidential tone as though this were some great secret, taking Anna’s arm and guiding her away from the cab. ‘But I can’t go there now.’

She stared into Anna’s face, waiting.

‘Oh,’ Anna said.

‘I just couldn’t possibly.’

Anna was silent.

‘The daughter, Mira, at the other shop, you know. I made a complaint about her at the school. It was years ago.’

‘She went to school with Aleks?’

‘No, no! She was his teacher.’

‘A teacher and a cobbler’s daughter?’

Janina made an impatient sound, clicking her tongue.

‘She was the daughter-in-law. Very above herself. She didn’t teach him properly. And she wore terrible clothes, a shorter skirt, in a school! I had a petition made up.’ Janina sniffed. ‘They wouldn’t serve me after that, so I go to this other place.’

‘Why don’t you just use one of the smart shops in town?’

‘They look good, but they don’t use the proper old techniques.’

Anna felt this was unlikely, wondered if the real reason was the grudge against Aleks’s hapless teacher, a hope that it would get back to the family, so many years later, that Janina Kardas was a customer of their near rival. She laughed inwardly at the pettiness of this; found she even admired it a little. She too played out her own petty grudges, tiny acts of peevishness which brought her a guilty joy: cancelling orders from certain places because of a look, a tone of voice she didn’t like, even, on one occasion, because a girl was too pretty. Perhaps that’s all it was with the painter, she realised. Perhaps Milo simply fell victim to this pettiness of hers. The thought soothed her.

‘But of course Adam gets most of your shoes from France, I suppose?’

On an ordinary day this would rile her, but she was so distracted by the oddness of the whole day that Anna let it slide.

‘Well, I should get home. You won’t let the cab take you across the river?’

‘No, I like the walk.’

The Floriańska was busy now, the cab driver beginning to clear his throat, and they said goodbye, each left with a strange discomfort of things unsaid, but not sure what they were, or why they felt a sudden impulse to confide in a woman they had never liked.

I’m sure she’s expecting, Janina thought to herself as she negotiated the crowds, with a stab of envy. Anna’s pale face, the tiny tremble when she’d taken her hand, even her throat was tense. Probably another daughter, it tends to run that way. She tried to laugh at Anna’s obvious distaste for the old neighbourhood and Janina’s habits of still shopping there, but felt instead only a vague embarrassment that she might be committing a faux pas that would be all over the Bernardyńska before long. Did you hear, Janina Kardas buys her shoes from a cheap cobbler across the river? Imagine, perhaps Kardas didn’t leave her as much as you’d think. Perhaps he was a swindler or a drinker— she broke off, too furious at this imaginary gossiping neighbour to continue.

Anna lost Janina quickly in the crowds, and sat back. What a disaster her tiny adventure had been. She felt too hot in her layers, cross and tired. The ugly hats jostled around the back seat on the cobbled streets. Perhaps she ought to have gone to the old neighbourhood with Janina, but she felt so haunted today, she could almost imagine she would meet her mother in the street.

Leaning her head against the back of the seat, she tried to untangle the strands of her mood. Adam, the rude man on the Glowny, her daughters’ coldness, their blank response to Adam’s grief, too like her own. Janina’s needling about turning her back on the streets of her childhood. None of it was the knot. Closing her eyes, she made herself look at it. It was the news from Germany. Adam had let it take root in him and perhaps she had done the same, but been unaware.

She had seen real violence once before, when she was small. Perhaps a story or a lie, it was hard to untangle sometimes in her mind. Perhaps decorated memory. Her hand was held tightly in her mother’s hand. Gloveless. So it was summer, but they were poorer then, she checked herself, so that’s no help. They were living in the old house: a dustier, darker, pokier sort of life, but loud with the chatter of Yiddish running in currents through the rooms. She remembered dinners, probably Friday nights, full of people. But this was outside of the house. In the street. There is the dim ghost of her mother by her side again, her hand. There were shouts and a rough pull on the pavements. There were ugly sounds, spat-out insults. Her mother had stumbled and pulled Anna, but in the wrong direction, and for a moment she saw through the legs of the crowd a man on the road, a beating in the street. Other men were surrounding him, kicking. He tried to get up, but fell again. The crowd had gone quiet. Anna saw the blood dripping from the man’s eye and lip, the soft, peachy parts of his face split open.

The silence had been the thing that struck her. In playground fights there was a lot of noise, gleeful chants and whooping. Here everyone lost their voices: dull thuds rang out as the crowd became still and then drifted. Perhaps there was the crack of a broken bone too, a rib or a jaw, as they left. She had started to cry, she thought now, or perhaps her mother had only said, Don’t cry, don’t cry, as they walked back to the house. These things flare up sometimes, but you are safe.

You are safe, you are safe, she sang to herself in silence, as the cab approached home. She mouthed vowels to herself, certain the man had only been trying to spook her; she sounded perfect.

When she came into the dining room where the painter was working she found her voice again and chattered into the quiet.

‘I saw Mrs Kardas,’ she said. ‘We’ll be inviting her over for dinner more. And I’m going to have a gathering for the Germans who are arriving. Girls?’

She saw too late how she had disturbed a rare peace in the room. Karolina glanced up, distracted, and gave her mother a smile, then soon curled back over her pages. The painter had stopped to give her a small formal bow and nervous nod of acknowledgement when she arrived, but was now concentrating again.

Anna was caught by a clutch of affection for Alicia, her solemn little face, her carefully placed limbs. Her hair had been left loose this morning, and she was still wearing her housedress. Soon she would be grown and curled and buttoned, pinned into place. Adam’s wish for an expensive portrait, meaning a near constant visitor and a battle of wills with Alicia, had exasperated her; now she felt she understood a little. Karolina’s childhood mildness had gently drifted into the quiet young woman now catching the edge of a sunbeam that fell across Alicia. Karolina lived in the corners of the house, curled on chairs, found suntraps like a cat. Anna felt a vague, constant care for her, level and steady as breath. But Alicia, difficult, spoiled, prone to flashes of rage, and so adored by Adam, for her she felt a waxing and waning, a tidal pull of pride and dislike.

Your children are safe, she picked up her silent song. They don’t even look Jewish.

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