The Stars Can Wait (10 page)

What a curse it was, Gracian thought, to know the answer, yet never to find it.

He took a deep inhalation, rested the ball of his skull against the wall brace, and felt the smoke fill his body with its musty breath. He closed his eyes, saw the redness of his eyelids, and passed the cigarette back over to Dylong. His arms ached, deep in the tendons.

“Well, well, well,” Dylong was muttering, shaking his head as if in disbelief or perhaps mournfulness, whispering to himself. “Next time, next time.” He took the cigarette and put it to his lips and sucked on it and exhaled through mouth and nose. He tried to spit out a few stray strands of tobacco that clung to his lip, making a noise like
thpt-thpt,
but failed and had to pick them away with indelicate fingers.

“Dylong?” Gracian said, rolling his head over in Dylong's direction.

“What is it, Galileo?”

“In your life. You've seen a lot of things?”

Dylong gave a laugh that turned into a cough. He bent forward, pressing his thick chest against his knees. He looked at Gracian and then looked back again. He scooped up a piece of rubble from the flooring before him, moved it about in his palm. Then he launched into speech.

“I have been a miner for forty years. I started when I was twelve. Saw two collapses in my career. Twenty-five men dead in the worst one, ten of them trapped for six hours, choked in the coal dust. I saw the people of this place rise up and find themselves, two long months in the spring of 1921. It took more than a vote—took blood, boy, took too much blood, going back years. Saw my own father wounded in the chest by the
Freikorps,
early 1919. He hardly spoke after that.

“Had women, many young women. Beautiful women. Had a wife the best of them all. Had a son. Not for long, but I had one, a beautiful son. I saw the Germans come in convoys over the hills, starved and pale like old women. Saw them fill their mouths up with Polish sausage, bread, butter, till they were shitting themselves in the fields. Shitting themselves and vomiting, right there in the grass, I'm telling you.”

He nodded at the empty space before them.

“You could say I've seen things, Galileo. You could say my eyes are all full up with seeing.”

Gracian considered the words. “Do you ever think of it all?” he said. “The past?” he said.

“The past should be left to the past,” Dylong said.

“I've been thinking about it,” Gracian said.

Dylong glanced at him. Old ruddy skin, ingrained with coal. A smile trace lifting a cheekbone. “Ha,” he said.

“I've lived,” the boy said. “And things have happened. People have done things. I know they've done things, and I want to know about them. It's time that I knew, Dylong.”

“What are you so worked up about?” Dylong said, turning to him. “What people?” His brow was lined.

“People like my brother. Like Paweł.”

Dylong closed his hand and reduced the rock there to dust and let the dust filter between his fingers in four coarse streams. Then he slapped his palms against each other. “Time to go,” he said. “They'll think we're starting another shift.”

He stood up, brushed down his coveralls, and began gathering: pick, shovel, drill, drill bits, anthracite.

Gracian watched him, agitated. “Do you know something?” he said, trying to keep his voice steady, aware of the close edge of Dylong's temper. “Dylong, do you know something?”

And Dylong just buckled his canvas bag with the tin and the drill bits inside and put it diagonally over him and swung the drill up over his shoulder, hoisting the shovel under the strap, and starting away toward the bend of the face where the roofless trains left for the lift shaft.

Gracian pushed himself up and ran after him, and though he was not much shorter than Dylong the boy felt half his size. He ran and overtook Dylong and stood himself firm in front of him, his arms poised, not knowing what to ready himself for. The boy could feel anger clenching his gut tight. Dylong looked at him.

“Get out of my way, Galileo,” he said evenly.

“Please,” the boy said, his voice low. “Please tell me what it is you know. About Paweł.”

Dylong looked at him with grey eyes the colour of winter.

The anger had risen unexpectedly to the boy's throat and now it began to choke him. He could not find the words; his lips moved but no sound came. He felt his face darken. He stood there in front of Dylong, his mind racing.

“How can I earn my past when no one will tell it to me?” he said, finally.

“Ah. But it is not your past we speak of, is it?” Dylong said.

“But it is. It is, don't you see? My family. My past.” He could say no more.

Dylong looked at him. He breathed loudly through his nose. He shifted the drill from one shoulder to the other. Finally he sighed.

“All right,” he said.

 

 

 

They rode not speaking to the lift shaft, and the lift shuddered and then bored upward to ground, and they stepped out into light. They stopped the water flow in the carbide lamps and extinguished the lamps and then they walked to the equipment room and signed off the spare explosives and the drill and drill bits and went to the lockers. There were a few men there, loading up, and Dylong led the boy to a quiet place where rows of coats and jackets hung like shed skins and sat him down among them.

Dylong sat down opposite, glancing around warily as if he suspected ambush. He leaned forward, and the shadows of the hanging coattails on his face looked like the wings of bats.

“Now listen,” he said. “Listen close, Galileo.”

And Gracian listened. He listened to the silence between Dylong's every breath as if that silence could yield to him a treasure unsurpassed. He became nothing but the act of listening, and such was the force of this transformation that Gracian felt that the very walls and the benches and the lockers and all about him listened too.

And then Dylong began.

 

 

 

“It must have been eleven or twelve years ago. Those were difficult times for all of us—you probably can't even remember that far back, can you, Galileo?—but they were hard times, all right. Back then all the shops were full to bursting, that's true. Far cry from these starved days we're living now. But money was so scarce it didn't really make a shred of difference. And jobs, too. Jobs most of all. If you weren't already working you were in trouble. That's why every day I still thank God for the mines, and thank Him twice for the blessing of coal. Y'understand, Galileo? Because the first thing you've got to know about all this is that a man will do strange things when he can't get work.

“Twelve years ago. You were four years old, boy, nothing but a grub. Your father was alive. Your brother was about your age now, I suppose. A little older. A man, and full of a man's ignorance. Always was a strange creature, your brother. Had his own ways and stuck to them. Stubborn, afraid of company. But strong, a fighter, always getting into brawls, always riling people up in some way or another. Despite the quickness of his temper I don't think he asked for it, really. It just came to him.

“That was the time he began courting Anna Malewska, of course. And you can imagine, can't you, the number of other men, same age and older, too, he had to contend with? Some days they would come to his door just to ask to fight him and sometimes he'd come back bloodied, though more often he'd wipe the floor with them. Got quite a reputation for it, at so young an age. A real reputation. Still carries it with him in this village.

“But young Anna never loved him for that, Galileo. You see, Anna was always chiding him and slapping him about the head and making him blush for it. Anna's always been the only one who could keep the reins on him. No, she loved him for reasons all her own. Everyone could see she wouldn't even look at another man, despite everything she could have had from them. Despite her beauty. Not another single man. In truth it was Anna and Paweł together always, as if they were the very model of love, as if their names had been written together in the book of love. Or in the stars, eh, Galileo?

“Anyway, your brother had been learning leatherwork since he was fourteen or so, but all the trouble he got himself into and those own natural habits of his put him far out of favour with the man he was apprenticed to—old Manasik, who died a few years ago from too much vodka. Manasik kept telling your brother to calm himself down or he would withdraw the apprenticeship with his shop, and what with so many men unemployed and what with him still living under your family's roof that would be a thing worth regretting for the rest of his life. Paweł was sixteen when Manasik started his threats. He put up with it for half a year, and then finally his patience crumbled just like coal under rotting brackets, and one afternoon he threw the saddle he was making half finished right at Manasik's belly, laying him to the floor. If he wasn't such a fat beast, I think he would have been crippled or even worse by the force of it.

“So Paweł left the leather trade.

“Thing is, Galileo, your mother and your father, they never knew of this. Francesca found out later, but she didn't tell them, didn't want to cause them upset. Your mother and your father only knew when it was too late. That's the next thing you have to understand about all this. Because Paweł told them he had left Manasik's employ, true enough, but then he also told them that a hidesman near Pietraszowice, your mother's birthplace, wanted his labour. This was a lie. This was the lie your brother told. And he worked hard and with great cunning to maintain that lie. You see, boy, Paweł did begin to work around Pietraszowice, but not in the way he told your family. And he came home the hours you would expect for a hardworking apprentice, often staying overnight on account of the travel distance. He made sure too that if your mother or your father had cared to make enquiries, a man who called himself Jorg Mroncz, bag-maker and saddlesmith, would vouch for him—as indeed would many others, for Paweł had made a lot of connections where he needed them and made them fast.

“Now you must understand that Paweł did not start this new venture all by himself. Even one such as Paweł could not have the knowledge to do it, or necessarily the will. To gain will, you must have others around prepared to foster it in you. So this is what happened: After Manasik kicked him out onto the street, Paweł fell in with a bad crowd. Not from this village, mind you, but from neighbouring parts. A wandering group of petty criminals and malingerers, Galileo, a no-good bunch. One or two of them had heard of Paweł's troubles and had heard too of his street brawls and his surly reputation. They approached him, invited him to drink a bottle or two of vodka and to smoke with them, and persuaded him to join their team. And though great worry would be brought upon your own family, boy, by your brother's decision that day, if the truth be told I never really blamed him for it. What could he do, without a job and a means to help the family thrive? Unemployable—in this village, anyway. Keen to keep Anna's love, and young; young and filled with the heat of it in his blood. Perhaps I would have done the same, Galileo, given the chance. For what is crime but a darkened reflection of laws made to choke a man? And it's always the young that get choked first.

“Have you guessed it yet, Galileo? I can see by that gape of yours you have not. Then I will tell you: smuggling. Your brother became a smuggler. You should have guessed it when I mentioned the land surrounding Pietraszowice. Nothing but forests, forests as dense and wild as those here in Maleńkowice. And to where do those forests stretch? A good few kilometres into German soil, with no sure way to police the border there. There's just too much forest. But the smugglers had spent years learning the secret language of the trees and the brush, the tracks and trails that led through it and crossed the border into Germany. And Paweł too learned those paths and, so the story goes, learned them better than any of his fellow smugglers.

“Smuggling, Galileo, was no small trade back then. In that time of no work and little money in Poland and Germany alike, a good many farmers were willing to buy and exchange smuggled goods. The money you could make from smuggling was often less favourable than the payment in goods. There are things in Germany you can't easily get here, and it was the same the other way around. A certain type of German orange. A certain breed of Polish horse. So these things they smuggled. In and out across the border, through the forest. Paweł learned his craft quickly. He learned how to monitor the movements of the border guards who sometimes patrolled the German fields. Learned how to pick a single route through the forest and memorize it. Flashlights were easy giveaways, you see; better by far to run in darkness. And finally he learned always to enter and exit at the same point of the forest, or else you might get lost. And if you got lost, you got caught.

“I've heard tell that your brother smuggled entire herds of horses into Germany. With the other men he would ask the farmers who were known to them as allies to forsake any spare animals they might have in return for goods or money. Then, I'm afraid, they would swell the numbers by rustling from the farmers who wouldn't sell. Picking off an animal here and there where they had been allowed to roam abroad in the fields unsupervised, tossing their manes and blowing steam through their muzzles. And in the dead heart of the night they would lash the beasts together and ferry the whole lot through, stamping and blowing and rolling their eyes, straight into trucks waiting at the other end. That's quite something, eh, Galileo? Quite something.

“So all that time your mother and father believed he was working for the leathersmith, and he would bring back gifts of bags and purses to keep them believing. Fact is, boy, no parent wants to distrust a son. No parent wants the pain of such a discovery, no matter how strongly they suspect there is something to be discovered. So they believed, with or without the gifts, and Paweł continued his runs across the border. Eventually, of course, Francesca found out. She found two sacks of fresh oranges under his bed. She always was a bright girl, and curious too, curious like all the Sófkas seem to be, but Paweł made her promise not to tell and she agreed, not wanting trouble in the house.