The Light at the End of the Day

‘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.