The Stars Can Wait (9 page)

They were in the yard! The boy withdrew swiftly from the window, aware for the first time that he might be seen. He reasoned with himsef: They were still a distance away and without the aid of a telescope. They could not see him. He swallowed air and reapproached the window.

They were sitting with their backs against the wall and the man was leaning forward, talking to the woman. She appeared not to be looking at him but concentrating on her breathing, her chin lowered and her arms resting on her outstretched legs, bent at the elbows and palms upward like a doll's. But now she was reaching up and laying her hand on the man's face, the heel of it against his ear. And this action of hers must have been a sign, for the man stopped talking. He stopped talking and they looked at each other for a long time. Then slowly their two heads came together in a kiss.

Gracian thought their lips would part but they didn't and instead the kiss became something different; it became a joining. Their heads in the darkness became the movement of one thing. And now the man was leaning forward and inward, not sitting anymore but almost kneeling, pressing into the woman. His hand and then his arm was against her stomach, and the woman, too, pressed into the man, pressing back with her own weight, their hands moving over each other slowly, then faster. Slowly, then faster, with the man's head now buried in the crook of the woman's neck and his hands disappearing into the darkness of them both, and though the moonlight struck stark the shifting surfaces of them, still the faces were unknowable. They went down slowly together now on the lucent ground, easing down; he could see the taut folds on the man's sleeves. Then the man was lifting the woman's torso from underneath, so that her head tipped back loose and came up to meet the man's in a kiss renewed and there was a rhythm to it. There was a rhythm to it, how the man reached down, dragging his hands over her black skirt folds, which Gracian only now could see. Dragging his hands back and upward, lifting the black fabric of the skirt, the whites of her thighs showing in the night. And then he was over them, between them, and the both of them moving, moving together, their breaths bright coils of white.

And their breaths were Gracian's breaths, loud in his ears, and their fingers were his fingers keeping the lens steady.

And their movement filled him with something he had felt before without placing it, and their movement coated them both with snow, so that the ground below them was a dark bare ring, and the stars shone wide above them, and then they were slowing and slowing and slowing until they were no longer moving, frozen.

He had been balancing on the chest and now his socked feet slipped, the telescope hitting the window frame. He could feel the nerves below his skin and in his muscles and could barely lift it back to his eye.

When he did he saw both figures moving swiftly back out along the exterior wall and slipping past its perimeter and around the outer edge of the house. Gracian ran out of the room. He went down the stairs two and three at a time and now he did not care who he woke, for a hot desire had bloomed within him and he jumped the last steps onto the floor and half skidded, half padded, taking long strides into the kitchen and to the window. There was no noise in the house. He pressed his hands and face against the cold glass and stared into the void beyond the side wall, knowing he was too late. He turned his face and crushed his cheek flat against the glass. Far away down the street two shapes like flapping black rags were vanishing along the house edges.

And still he had not seen their faces. But he had seen enough. Enough of the sleepy, loping gait—so like his own—and the wide back of the one, and enough of the hair darker than night and the long arms of the other. He had seen enough. He knew Paweł Sófka and he knew Anna Malewska; he knew them well.

 

 

 

It was a new year. January 1941. The snows fell less often. Far away in Africa, the British and the Australians and the Germans were fighting a war for Tobruk.

The next night Gracian waited for them to come, but they did not come. The night after that he waited for them to come, but still they did not come.

Two nights after that the man was there at three in the morning, racing down across the field. This time when he reached the wall of the yard he paused, and Gracian got his first conclusive look. It was Paweł all right, out of breath and breathing hard. But Anna did not join him that night, and in moments he had gone.

Over the space of the next fortnight Gracian watched every night, often sleeping for some hours in the late afternoon to keep strength for the night. Five times he saw his brother emerging from the distant forest, each time taking the same route down to and around the yard. Five times too he saw his brother moving in the opposite direction, slipping out from the darkness to appear before the wall and then making his way by the same method up toward the forest. He would appear from the same place between the trees, sometimes an hour later, sometimes two, sometimes more, and come back down.

Once or twice Gracian thought he saw more figures flitting by the hem of the forest, but he couldn't be sure. Sometimes Paweł seemed as before to be waiting for someone or for a sign that Gracian could not see. But if it was Anna he was waiting for, she didn't come to him.

At first he had wondered: Did they come here every night? Had he been missing this silent congress so close below the window? Was this a habit of theirs, to meet and kiss and lie upon each other on the cold floor of the yard? But why would they do such a thing? Out of necessity? Because it pleased them?

At first he had wondered: Did Paweł want him to see these things?

But as he watched his brother come and go without Anna more and more often, he began to see it was another meeting he had been missing. Some other meeting bigger than the one that had made him wait through the hours with the telescope clutched in his fingers, wait despite his desperate weariness, because his nerves were taut in expectation and desire.

Along the yard edge, across the field, inside the forest, something else was happening.

Gracian had felt a curiosity about Paweł since he could remember anything he thought important about himself. Like all else, he had learned to get used to it. But this new discovery, of which Paweł could not be aware, had lifted a tiny lid inside him, and he felt it lift, and now he was sick of not knowing. He wanted to know, to know
something.

Because Paweł might find himself in danger. Because there were lives for the living outside of his own. Because of what he had seen in the stark moonlight, where two bodies could find themselves entangled so tightly that there seemed no hope of their parting.

 

 

 

He asked his sister first, going to her room after work. He had washed himself quickly in the shower rooms, and the black dust was still on his hands and in the creases of his neck and in slivers beneath his fingernails.

He knocked on the door and pushed it open and stood sheepish in the frame. Francesca sat on her bed with the baby at her breast, her finger delicately holding open the rough crease of her blouse. She looked up at the noise of him, her eyes preoccupied. Her face was distracted, shiny.

“Gracian. What is it?”

He had been preparing for this all day, but now the force went out of him. He simply stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, stirring the floor dust with a boot tip.

“What's the matter? Can't you see I'm busy?”

The baby had stopped his suckling and was making movements with his mouth, opening, closing. His little hands searched the air and his wide eyes roamed. Francesca pressed him back into place against her.

“Francesca … I … I've been thinking.”

“About what?”

“Nothing. It's nothing.”

The baby starting to make noises like water in a pipe.

“Then why are you still here? What's bothering you?”

“I've been thinking about Paweł.”

“Oh, yes? Well, he's certainly done a lot to think about recently.”

“He has? Like what? What has he been doing?”

“Don't be stupid. Refusing to work, first. Fighting with Józef like that. Storming out. Never calling on us. I don't care if he has a job now, he needs to apologize. There needs to be respect. You understand, Gracian, there has to be respect between families, especially now.”

“Yes. But…” Gracian ran his dirty hand across his hair, smearing his forehead. “But I was thinking about it before. About Paweł before. When I was little. I know he did some things. No one ever told me what. I—”

Francesca sighed loudly then. The baby, startled, started gurgling.

“Oh,” she said flatly, as if making an announcement. She lowered the baby onto her lap and began to rock it slowly on her knee. Up, down, up, down. The baby made a sound like
sha!
and fell silent.

Francesca was looking out with steady brown eyes under glossy lids. Looking at her little brother.

“Listen to me, Gracian,” she said. “I have enough wars to fight. My own battles. I don't have time for this one, and I have even less time for those of the past. Ask someone else. Or, on second thought, don't. Don't ask anyone. Just don't ask at all.”

She had said all she would. Quietly she set the groggy child on her lap and began rebuttoning her blouse.

Gracian nodded, took hold of the doorknob, and began to close the door. When there was only the smallest slit of light visible between the door and its frame he heard Francesca's voice again.

“Gracian,” she said, “just forget it. You'll know someday. You just picked a bad time, that's all. Bad time for all of us.”

*   *   *

Two days later he got a chance to raise the subject with Kukła. He felt somehow that this gaunt, guarded man might be willing to speak. And again he was wrong. They sat together alone in the kitchen in the fading dusk. It had been a day of exceptional brightness, the snow-covering a mirror for a high white sun. Only evening had brought relief.

Kukła was filling his pipe and reading one of his novels,
Latarnik.
It was his favourite. He had read it six or seven times while Gracian had known him. When he sat down Kukła glanced up from it, said, “Hello, boy,” and lapsed back into silence.

After a time Gracian said, “It's still cold.”

Kukła did not look up or break his reading. “Will be for a time.”

“Must be warm in the bakery.”

“Too warm. Like hell, boy.”

Gracian sniffed and leaned in his chair, making it creak. “Wonder what Paweł is doing?” He tried to say this vaguely, as if it were a question that had merely leaked from his lips and was directed to the air.

“Don't say that name near me,” Kukła said with no change in his tone.

It was very quiet. Perhaps the snow was falling again, for the falling of the snow seemed to smother sound. The beams of the house groaned somewhere.

“Just thinking,” the boy said.

Slowly Kukła placed the book open and face down on the table.

“Your brother is a kind of animal. Don't ever think otherwise. He thinks he has charm, he thinks he's full of puzzles like a circus magician with flowers up his sleeves. But there's nothing there. Nothing but his own dirty animal selfishness. Don't forget it, boy. And don't go upsetting your mother and the rest of this house by bringing him up here.”

He pushed his chair back and stood and picked up his pipe and walked out of the room.

Gracian sat still, staring at the book lying spine upward in front of him and at the reflection of the book in the polished wood. After a minute Kukła came back, retrieved the book, tucked it under his arm, and left again.

*   *   *

He didn't ask his mother. He couldn't expect anything from her.

 

 

 

Gracian thought of Gerard Dylong only later, on his shift, after they'd blown the first charges of the morning. In recent times Dylong's efforts to find the store of sulphur had seemed to intensify. Now instead of running his palms across the coal face he would lay the whole of himself against it and reach his hands up on either side in a slow circle. His big hands would skit and flutter against the rock and his eyelids too would flutter in his head and his pink tongue tip would come out from between his lips. To see this giant of a man pressing himself there was both comic and peculiar, and Gracian would often lower his eyes or turn away to tend the explosives when Dylong was prospecting like this.

Dylong's efforts were never all in vain. They were clearing record amounts of coal with each blast because of Dylong's instructions where to bore. And because each clearing revealed no sulphur, Dylong worked them both hard and strong to clear the coal to blast again, and Gracian's weariness from staying awake far into each night could not reach him, because Dylong gave him a power in his blood that sprang straight from that man's driven soul.

*   *   *

“Drill
there,
not
there,
” Dylong was saying now, pointing to his markings. “Don't get it wrong, Galileo, don't ever get it wrong.”

Watching Dylong there against the coal face, the idea came to Gracian almost with the force of a revelation. He remembered how he had once asked the veteran where he had learned his skills. At this, Dylong had laid down his hand axe and folded his arms. “The coal is a mystery to be unravelled,” he had said. “First you must teach yourself the nature of the mystery. Then you can start looking for the solution.”

*   *   *

He waited until they sat, as was their habit, side by side against the slatted wall braces, passing between them a single unfiltered cigarette burning in the carbide glow. In the quiet, Gracian wondered to himself about the solution Dylong had spoken of. He wondered at what moment Dylong had concluded that the riddle of coal had only a single possible answer: sulphur, green and pure.