The Stars Can Wait (5 page)

And now his mother was yelling, no words but only noises—
“Haaaa! Haaaa!”
—dancing around the two men, shaking her hands and brushing her fingers against them and slipping off them, repelled, as if the two men had become one liquid mass; and the door slammed open once more and Francesca rushed in, her eyes wide and unbelieving and the baby crying in her arms, wailing, its tiny face raw and crumpled, and Francesca setting the baby on the tabletop and moving over to help her mother. And finally Paweł was dragged up, breathless, panting, his neck veins throbbing, and Kukła rolling on the floor covering his eyes with his palms, and Paweł's hair smeared against his forehead, no blood on his face but dark reddened blotches. And his mother shouting.

“Out! Out! Out! Out! Out! Get out of here!
Haaa! You are not welcome in this house!
”

Paweł sniffed and pushed his damp hair back and snatched his coat and hat. Without speaking, he walked past the table across the room and to the door. He did not look at Gracian. He opened the door onto a rectangle of frozen white. Outside, the snow was still falling, and he stepped into it.

Gracian watched him go. He felt despair. He felt it as a candle flame, starting at his feet and rising up to ignite his body until his heart burned and his eyes stung and a choking pressure in his throat caused him to gasp out, a gasp that crippled him, bending him at the waist.
“Paweł!”

From where he was now, in the street, in the snow, Paweł stopped and turned and saw Gracian. He stood for a few moments and raised one hand. Then he turned back again into the blank white afternoon and was soon gone, and Gracian felt suddenly certain that he would never see his brother again.

 

 

 

Later, as Francesca tried to nurse Józef Kukła, who would not stop cursing, Gracian's mother stood and came over to Gracian and looked her son in the eyes and embraced him and refused to let go.

“Secrets, nothing but secrets,” she said in a low voice, close to his ear, almost whispering. Then she looked steadily at the boy's face. “You don't have secrets, do you, Gracian? Not like your reckless brother. You wouldn't keep secrets from me? At least not big ones?”

Gracian not struggling, but thinking it best to yield to his mother's arms, and shaking his head no, rested his cheek on the cleft of her shoulder which was shaking gently now, and remembered.

*   *   *

Eleven years old. The black shape of a man filling the yellow doorway.
Perhaps now you'll have a hobby,
the book spinning from his hand down onto the mattress.

The constellation of his birth was Gemini.
Wstęp
Do Astronomii
had shown him; fifteen stars formed its main body, and the two largest in the diagram signified the heads of twin brothers. Their names were Castor and Pollux. They were born from an egg, for their mother was a swan; each had a different father. It was said that Pollux was the son of a god and immortal but that Castor was human and could perish. In their lifetimes Castor became famous as a rider of horses, and Pollux fought and won many battles. The brothers had power together over winds and sea. When Castor was killed by his cousin, Pollux begged the gods to let him die with his brother, for in his heart he had only abiding love for him. The gods listened to his pleas, and finally the twins were etched together in the heavens, their hands bearing spears aloft.

Fifteen stars. It had seemed amazing to Gracian how something so simple could make for such a story. That was the marvel of it—from points of light, whole destinies might unfurl.

 

 

 

A week passed without a sign of Paweł. No one in the house spoke of the argument. Only the bruises on the face of Józef Kukła acknowledged its occurrence, and those too were fading.

In the village, Old Man Morek kept his vigil, his hats and coats a livery of snowflakes. He had begun to sing a new song, a song Gracian had never before heard him sing. It boomed and lilted endlessly on the bitter wind. It was about the mountain people.

Góralu, czy ci nie
żal
,

odchodić
od stron ojczystych,

świerkowych
lasów i hal,

i tych potoków srebrzystych?

Góralu! Czy ci nie
żal
,

Góralu! wracaj do hal.

Highlander, aren't you regretful

for leaving your homeland,

the forests of pine and the meadows,

the silver mountain streams?

Highlander! Aren't you regretful?

Highlander! Turn back to your green meadows.

Gracian mined each day from 6
A.M.
to 2
P.M.
, seven and a half straight hours with one half-hour break. He lost himself in the work. With Gerard Dylong he could load eight or nine wagons over the twenty-wagon quota. There were no days off.

“Well, well, Galileo,” Dylong would say, watching the boy work as if there were not an end to his endurance. “Finally becoming a man?”

Always Dylong told him aimless, rambling stories of the old Silesia. Always they found no sulphur. Always they smoked a cigarette together after their shift. For Gracian, there was nothing but this daily ritual.

At the end of the week, Gracian passed out into the day after finishing and crossed the courtyard, where men walked quickly or lingered for a time, talking in the cold. His body ached with the work. He looked at his feet as he went, his mind empty. In his right hand he held the carbide lamp, which he kept always at home with him. Despite having showered, he felt the coal dust still on his skin, clinging like sweat. He felt the hardness of his arms and shoulders, the tautness of sinew. Approaching the wire-mesh perimeter fence, he glanced up.

Beneath the battered metal sign that read
RICHTER
stood Paweł. He was leaning against the gate edge with his hands dug into his coat pockets and his hat pulled down, breathing white. Gracian stopped and closed his eyes and counted to five and then opened them and found Paweł still standing there in the winter glare.

“Hello, Gracian,” Paweł said.

Gracian gave a flick of his hand by way of greeting. He looked at his brother. There was some swelling on his cheek.

“How is Mother?” Paweł said.

Again he simply gestured. No words would come to him.

Paweł cleared his throat and squinted into the sky above Gracian's head and then looked at the ground.

“Blasted cold,” he said, as if to himself. Then he looked at Gracian. “There is work down at colliery Osok. In two days' time I will see the foreman. I need someone who can speak German. To translate,” he said.

Like many other villagers born in the early years of independence, Paweł had never learned German. Gracian had learned mostly from his mother, but Paweł was never one to listen hard to the teachings of others.

Gracian continued looking at Paweł. He examined his face and saw a strange expression in his eyes. Eventually he spoke.

“I'll come,” he said.

It was December 1940. The snows showed no sign of abating.

*   *   *

Two days later, after his shift, Gracian walked through the snow to the Malewskas' flat. The flat was owned by the mining company. It was small and saw little light. The walls were the green of damp earth.

When he arrived, there was only Anna. Her voice told him to come in and he pushed open the door and saw her standing with her back to him, framed in the doorway of the tiny kitchen. She was engaged in some task: drying crockery, perhaps. Her black silken hair was pulled back and tied with a thin length of red cloth.

“Sit down, Gracian,” she said, without turning.

Gracian took his hat off and sat on one of the wooden chairs. In Anna's unobserving presence he felt aware of the details of his own body: the largeness of his hands, the gestures of his arms, the heavy, mechanical movements of his legs. Already he felt the heat growing in his cheeks and temples. He sat still and stared at the matted fur of his hat.

Anna came in now with a mug of coffee, saying, “You must be tired.” He reached up and took it, keeping his eyes lowered and feeling the coolness of her fingers in the exchange. He took a sip. Between the hem of her long skirt and the rim of her leather slippers he could see her bare ankles. He watched them move across the room and saw her sit opposite him and watched the ankles cross over each other lightly, feet heels-up on the worn tan carpet.

“Paweł is just coming. He's getting dressed,” she said.

Gracian looked up then and met her eyes and saw she was smiling in a way he thought suggested puzzlement. Her face had a radiance that Gracian thought could make even time stop to look in its direction.

“And how is young Gracian?” she said.

He drank again from the mug. The coffee fumes bathed his face. “Fine,” he said. And then, “I'm fifteen,” his eyes averted.

Anna smiled. They sat together there for a time in silence.

There was a noise then, a loud shuffling, and Paweł came in through a door Gracian had not noticed. He was wearing old suit trousers, a pale shirt and a brown sweater and over that a woollen jacket. He was newly shaven, red about the ears and throat. He seemed agitated, alert. He was tugging at the points of his shirt collar, folding them down and smoothing them over the neckline of his sweater.

He placed his good hand on Anna's shoulder and she tilted her head slightly and reached up to brush his knuckles and then with her fingers reached back to feel the smooth black knot of hair, her movements quick and tender, probing.

“Gracian! Good!” Paweł said passionately, his face animated. “Are you ready? It'll be a long walk and a cold one. We need something to warm us, I think. Anna, will you fetch us something to warm our hearts?”

Gracian had never heard Paweł speak like this, with such abandon. In his mind he tried to fit the words to Paweł or Paweł to the words but could accomplish neither. He was not enjoying his stay here. He was filled with the wariness of the trespasser and wanted only to leave.

Anna shook her head and laughed and then stood. Paweł sat down heavily in her place and rubbed his hands together and grinned at Gracian. Anna returned with a half-full bottle of rye vodka and two clean shot glasses. She filled them, handed them over, and stood with her hands upon her hips.

“Drink!” Paweł said.

Gracian looked at the crystal liquid in his hand and then raised the glass to his mouth. They drained their glasses together. Gracian gagged once, then felt the seeping flame in his throat.

Paweł clapped his hands together and stood. They put on their coats and fastened them and tied their hats close under their chins, then gloves and woollen scarves. Gracian led the way to the door. He heard Paweł say, “I'll be back soon,” and turned and saw Paweł and Anna embrace. She slid her arms around the bulk of his coat, and he placed his hand on her cheek. They kissed on the mouth, and when they parted both seemed struck with a sadness.

Looking at them like this, Gracian felt as if he were invisible; he had become nothing but a frame containing this image of his brother and Anna Malewska collected between the dull walls. And as an image yields up only its surface, so Gracian understood then that an impenetrable wall encased and sealed them both and held them safe from all enquiry.

*   *   *

It was over four kilometres to colliery Osok. The wind had picked up, and in it the snow did not fall but sucked and circulated in shifting rhythms. It clung lightly but persistently to everything, until the walking figures seemed built of snow: concentrations of white moving in the haze. They were heading northeastward, faces into the wind, and if they had tried to talk—which they did not—their voices would have been swept up and lost completely.

Soon they left the narrow outskirts and were on a country lane where the white was thicker and unbroken and great banks of it sat upon the lane edges. As they passed, it would occasionally slide and collapse and reform itself, locked in the private geologies of snow. On the path they were utterly alone. They met no one. They walked with their backs bent and their hands pressing their collars against their cheeks. The path was straight and unrelenting.

They stopped once for Gracian to wrap his scarf tighter in a wadded loop about his chin. Paweł grappled with his own hat straps, hands clumsy in their gloves, and retied them firm. Gracian squinted into grey and saw there was no distinction now between earth and sky. They seemed in neither day nor night but rather in a lost and in-between time, a single moment extended out forever. Gracian longed for the mist to part before him and reveal the special clarity of a darkened sky. And as he longed, it seemed to him that the stars he could not see were also certainty; they were all the certainty of the universe gathered and condensed and sharpened until the black night was punctured a billion times and the light of eternity shone through, bright and clear and unwavering.

“We're over halfway!” Paweł shouted hoarsely into the whirling snow, gesturing at his brother to continue.

Gracian had never felt such cold. He thought their journey would not end.

*   *   *

Then through it came the first houses of Osok. Two German guards sat hunched and shivering in a small wooden signal shack, their rifles drawn up against them and held by the barrels, but the brothers passed without question. Between the snow-washed shadows of houses the wind retracted its needle claws.

The village of Osok existed only as a bare and tiny annex to its colliery. Its mines were ancillary, smaller than those of colliery Richter, and it was for this reason perhaps that its nameplate had not been Germanized. The colliery building was brown-brick solid and without embellishment and towered up as if it had sprung directly from the rock from which it had for so long drawn its means of business. Reaching it, the brothers crossed the forecourt and found the offices and the door marked
FOREMAN
, gold on glass.