The Stars Can Wait (13 page)

 

 

 

He slept a few hours that night and only then because his body begged for rest. He writhed and bridled in his bed and his mind was overrun by nightmares. He dreamed of six black dogs with red eyes chasing him and of his brother eaten whole by shadows.

When he awoke he was at the very edge of the bed, sweating and breathing shallowly. Opening his eyes he saw on the floor below him his book,
Wstęp
Do Astronomii,
open at the last page he had read, a yellow plane in the sunlight.

Constellation Gemini. A tale of two brothers, the constellation of his birth. A picture there of fifteen stars, one for each year of his life.

*   *   *

His mother was in the kitchen reading a German newspaper through the spectacles that he hardly ever saw her wear. She was frowning as she read. Józef Kukła was there also, readying to leave for the bakery. To the boy everything about the room seemed suspicious.

“Hello, Gracian,” his mother said. “You look terrible this morning. Look at how black your eyes are.”

Gracian buttoned his coat and tied his hat on. He picked up his lamp, which stood against the wall below the three empty coat hooks and the figure of Christ crucified, and opened the small hatch in the lamp base and checked the carbide, the smell as always repulsing him. Then he made for the door.

“Eat something,” his mother said.

“I'm late,” he said. “I have to go.” At the door he stopped. “Have you seen Paweł today?” he said.

There was a pause.

“What kind of a question is that?” said Józef Kukła.

Outside, the snow was lying in drifts. He made his way up the main street toward the colliery. People walked the streets just as they always did. The sun was white and smeared across the sky but still bright. He noticed that the coal dust in the air was a little heavier than usual. When he was nearly at the colliery gates, Gracian began to shiver. Soon his whole body was shaking uncontrollably and his teeth chattered and the sickness rose sour in his throat. He fell upon one knee onto the cobbles and clenched his fists and squeezed his eyes shut. The snow dust moted round him. The shivers passed. He got up and walked on.

*   *   *

At two o'clock he emerged from the mine, offloaded the equipment, and headed for home. The events of the previous night seemed now to have lost some effect, their memory flattened out like a scene on a picture postcard. If it were not for the sense of dread he felt rising in him, the boy might have persuaded himself they had never occurred. He crossed the road when he reached the shop that was once a confectioner's and was now a makeshift post office with shutters halfway down the windows so they looked like drowsy eyes. As he did so, he caught in the edges of his vision another man crossing behind him.

He glanced back and saw that the man was dressed in dark green with a dark overcoat with the collar up, and Gracian recognized him as one of the
Schupo.
He was walking slowly with his hands dug down into his coat pockets. He had a short precise gait but with a languid rolling of the shoulders. His face was impassive. Gracian quickened his progress along the street and in a short while became aware that a second
Schupo
was on the other side of the road, a little ahead of the other, keeping step. The second
Schupo,
too, did not look at him.

There were other villagers passing by, some in conversation and others not, some passing slowly and others fast, but the two
Schupo
did not pay them any heed. They kept pace with Gracian, quickening when he quickened, slowing when he slowed, always some strides behind him, down the main street.

He stopped walking in the direction of his home. Instead he turned down a narrow bystreet that led between two buildings and had not been gritted, so the snow was tamped down to a translucent crust laced black with dirt. He moved swiftly along until the street opened out a little and there were houses to the left and right of him. He knew who lived in those houses; he had known the faces of the occupants for all his life. In a village, so they said, no one is a stranger. He thought of knocking on one of the doors. He looked back at the street; the passing of people on the main street could just be seen. The two
Schupos
had not followed him.

He lingered where he was in the snow. The street was empty. He swung the carbide lamp, gripped by its thin metal hanger, lightly by his side. His eyes burned and he rubbed them with the back of his free hand. The coal dust was bad today.

Then the two
Schupos
turned into the narrow street. They were side by side, blocking the passage. They walked quickly. He turned away from them and saw two more
Schupos
coming toward him.

Behind was clear street, but he did not move. He did not believe he could outrun them.

He stood looking at their faces as they approached him. Now two stood in front of him, and the other two behind. One of those in front, the tallest, with a smooth youthful face whose cheeks had blotched rose-petal pink in the cold, was smiling and clapping his leather-gloved hands together with a noise that reverberated. Gracian looked at the snow on the
Schupo
's shoulders.

“Are you Sófka,” he said, in a way that was not a question.

Gracian looked at the four of them. Their gazes were like walls.

“Why?” he said.

The tallest one let out a staccato laugh. “That's not a question you should ask us,” he said.

His skin was so smooth and pale. Hardly older than Gracian. They were all boys together.

“We have a message for you,” the tallest one said.

Gracian did not reply.

“Did you hear me, Sófka? A message. For you. Don't you want to know it?”

Still he kept silent.

The tallest one made a gesture with his chin at one of the two behind him, and Gracian turned a little toward him.

“Tell him the message,” the tallest one said.

The one who stepped forward was wider of build and with a bullish face and neck, and his lower lip protruded with the aspect of a sulking child. He seemed serious, wrapped in concentration. He stepped forward and took off his hat and threw it down into the snow. Then he slowly removed his gloves and tossed them into the cradle of the hat. He made his hands into fists and stepped toward Gracian.

In one movement Gracian swung the carbide lamp up and round and into his face. He felt the force of it tear one end of the handle from its bracket and when he brought it down the lamp hung at a strange angle from the wire strip. The
Schupo
was leaning over to one side. There was blood coming from his face. He remained this way for a moment and then staggered and fell onto the cobbles, clutching at his cheek.

Another rounded on Gracian and he tried again to raise the lamp but he had no grip on it now, and someone kicked it from his fingers and he saw the lump of carbide fly from the lamp base and skip across the ground and then someone else hit him square in the stomach. He folded over, though he was still standing. But the blows were coming from all sides, and it was hard to block them, and then he was down in the snow.

*   *   *

As they beat him he thought of the viewing place, of the smell of the earth there and the silence of it. He made no noise other than when air was forced from his lungs.

*   *   *

Eventually they tired and stepped back from him. He squinted upward and saw the tallest one panting, his cheeks now a different red, hat askew on his head. He straightened it and wiped a hand across his neck, his chin. He straightened his coat. The
Schupo
he had struck with the lamp stood behind, blood welling at his temple.

“The message,” the tallest one said, breathless, “is this, Sófka. Tell your brother we will get him. Tell him that we know what he's up to and that we will let him wait and then we'll make him suffer in ways he could not imagine.”

He kicked Gracian in his belly twice, one for each of his parting words.

“Got … that?”

*   *   *

Lying with his eyes closed and knees drawn up, it took the boy some time to realize they had gone. One of his eyes seemed to have swelled and he could see little through it. The gaze of the other now rested upon the cobblestones. Their edges rose from the snow bed like gentle mountains, sheened in the dimming light. At the rim of sight loomed the broken lamp, with the carbide fragment a distance from it, like a treasure torn from a shipwreck. He could taste blood in his mouth.

Slowly and with great deliberation he pushed himself onto his elbows, then hands, then knees, and stood up. He could not straighten himself out fully. There was a noise like running water in his ears. He took a step and felt nauseated and waited and stepped forward again. There was pain all over the surface of him, his skin leaping at the touch of air. He made his way slowly over to the lamp and scooped the carbide up and back into the lower compartment. The handle was broken but could be fixed. The reflector was intact, as was the water valve. Light could still be had from it. He thought suddenly of walking through an empty mine shaft among endless lamplight constellations.

As he made his way home, he did not know how long he took or how he was moving his body. Once or twice he looked down and saw bright drops of blood soaking into the snow. Blooming there, like the crimson flowers by the river Hron.

 

 

 

Gracian reached the house and sat down on the thin stone step below the door. He leaned his back against the wooden door slats and stared into space. Every so often he lifted one hand up behind him and knocked faintly, with what strength he had, upon the door.

After a time he heard noises inside and felt a vibration pass through the door and then it was opened. He fell a little and brought a hand down on the stone to support himself, tipping his head back. His mother stood over him.

“Gracian! You too! This is too much! God help us, oh!” she said. She bent down and put her hands under his arms and lifted him, and then he passed out.

*   *   *

He came to a few minutes later. He was seated on a chair pushed up against the wall of the kitchen by the door. His mother was bending over him with a tin bowl of water and a rag and was wiping his face. He could see other figures indistinct behind her. As his mother dabbed at him he turned his head a little from one side to the other, feeling the cool water come down over the rise of his cheeks and across his lips. His mouth was opening and closing. “I think we've saved it,” he kept saying, “I think we've saved it. We can still see.”

After a short while Gracian stopped turning his head and speaking strange words. His eyes opened wider and he returned from wherever it was he had been. He could see his mother clearly, though the room behind still shifted and wavered, and he could see the details of her round face as she tended him. Her dark eyes had a circling of red around them and her face was drawn, the cheeks sagging and the lines from her nose deep and heavy. Her hair, pulled back, had broken in places from its binding and strands leaped up from her head to make abstract blurs against the dimming light. When she looked at him her eyes were active, searching, fragile.

“What's wrong?” he said, smarting at the cuts around his mouth.

He was aware of a movement behind them and the movement was a door opening and someone walking through into the room, head bowed, looking up toward Gracian and shouting, “Bastards!
Bękarty!
” Then two people whom he recognized as his sister and Józef Kukła holding the person back, calming him, speaking in low voices, stroking his back.

“Gracian,”
the person said, and he knew it was Paweł.

“What's wrong?” Gracian said, pushing away his mother's hand and the wet rag in it, leaning forward in his chair, wincing. “What's wrong?”

She looked at him with her restless eyes. “There has been great tragedy today, Gracian my darling,” she said in a soft voice, a voice he remembered from childhood.

“Let me see,” he said. “Let me see!”

She lowered her head and rose and moved aside for him.

Next to the kitchen table was a tableau of three figures. His brother was between Francesca and Józef Kukła, bent forward where he stood, his damaged hand prominent, covering his face, and the other clutching at his hair. His body seemed to vibrate, and Francesca and Kukła stood over him, their hands light on his shoulders, his back, soothing.

On the kitchen table a woman was laid out. She was dressed all in black and her face rose from it, so pale and alight as to be the impassive mask of a
Swięta
Maria. Her hair spread out away from her cheeks across the table, falling in one smooth long stroke beneath the table edge.

Without speaking and without anyone moving either to help or hinder him, Gracian rose and walked to the woman, no longer feeling the weight of his body. He stood over her. He lifted his hand and held it palm down a few inches from her stilled face and then moved it over her until it reached the small red hole in the centre of her chest, where the bullet had left her body. With his hand he covered the hole from his eyes and moved his palm back up to her face and brought it down again to his side. He saw now that a dark line of concern had blended with her beauty. There were two thin creases lifting vertically from the clear space between her eyebrows, and her lips, though still the pink of dusk, and full, were pressed together tightly. Her eyes were open. A film of light had covered them, dulling their colour. Anna Malewska's eyes looked like two distant planets, turning no more.

 

 

 

In the minutes and hours that followed, Gracian sat on his chair as a theatre of moving faces passed before him. With soft caressing words, in the kitchen with its darkly burdened table floating between the silver pans, his mother explained to him that the previous night Paweł and Anna had been seen by German soldiers in the forest after curfew and that, while fleeing, Anna had caught a bullet and the wound had proved fatal. Paweł had hidden with her huddled beside him until late morning, when he returned, bearing her lifeless body to the house.