The Light at the End of the Day

With the distraction of her daydreaming Anna had crossed the Glowny, barely registering the Cloth Hall and its crowds. She stopped now to look back at the square, pleased she had forgotten to feel anxious. So, the air tasted the same, people seemed friendly, even happy enough. She couldn’t see any posters, any signs. Milo’s face drifted across her mind, its satisfied sneer. A man stepped in her way, apologised, moved around her. A small group was gathering to hear the bugler on the hour. All was as it should be. Anna turned and tripped over a little as she did so. A man caught her arm.

‘Oh! Thank you.’

‘Watch your step, the cobbles are so uneven here.’

‘Yes, I know, I—’

‘Not from here, are you?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I saw you, looking around. Waiting to hear the bugler?’

She set her mouth a little, annoyed with herself for falling, literally, into conversation with this overfamiliar man, who up close she saw was wearing a dirty coat and no gloves. She gave a tiny nod, started to move away.

‘He’ll be playing in a minute,’ the man said, touching her arm again.

She should just keep walking, but instead she said, ‘Yes, I know that.’

‘Lived here all my life. Good time to visit.’ He tapped his nose, and his eyes began wandering over her face.

This was too much. She turned sharply and walked, ignoring her screaming feet. With a jolt she saw that he was following her.

‘Oh, don’t want to hear him? I said it’s a good time to visit.’

‘Yes, I heard you.’ She sped up.

‘Don’t you want to hear why?’ He took hold of her arm.

She felt a heat rising, began to glance around for, what? Police? The Glowny was full of people, so why did she feel so afraid?

‘I live here, and I’d appreciate if you left me alone.’ She was dismayed that her voice had a tiny shake in it. He was too close, she could smell vodka on his breath, and he still had hold of her arm. He was studying her face.

‘Kraków accent, is that?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You’re from across the river.’

What she had thought was aggressive flirtation, the vague threat of a strange man talking to her, a pretty woman, in the street, became something else. He was looking not with admiration or even with open, disgusting lust. She began to feel cold.

‘I beg your pardon? I live right here in the centre.’

‘Hmm.’ He smiled, gripped still tighter. ‘You hide it well, but I can hear it in the vowels.’ He tapped his nose with his other hand, grinned at her. ‘I know all the sounds of Kraków. I bet you speak Yiddish, don’t you?’

‘Let me go,’ she hissed, and wrenched her arm away. ‘How dare you touch me?’ Her voice rose. ‘Excuse me!’ she called out to a group of men nearby. ‘This man is—’

The man backed off as the men approached. He seemed amused. She waved the men away, feeling that her throat had closed and if she were to speak, her voice would betray her and get stuck.

Ignoring the pain in her feet, she almost stamped to the Ulica Floriańska, rehearsing how she should have spoken to the man, angry with herself for falling into such a young girl’s trap, angry that Adam’s fears had seeped through the apartment walls and followed her through the streets. In the old neighbourhood it was rare for strangers to approach you like that; everyone knew each other, but as she’d grown up and the family had got richer there had been more and more forays into the city, and she had had catcalls, looks, even a touch once or twice. It had been an annoyance, like flies in summer. Strange that in the middle of a crowd, older, in the day, she should feel so afraid. No. She was spooked by Milo and his needling, by Adam’s childishness. She wouldn’t look at it.

She stopped at the window of a favourite millinery shop, where the displays were always imaginative. The assistant was arranging ribbons, dangling silk butterflies around the jewel-coloured hats. She caught Anna’s eye for a moment, gave a courteous nod. Anna indulged in a quick thought to her younger self: You can just walk in and buy one, Aneczka, if you want. Leaning a little against the glass to relieve the pressure on her feet, she looked like her childhood self, she thought. Her little fingers splayed, she moved so her nose was pressed against the glass for a second, felt its cold bite. It was so like the way Alicia stood against the windows at home that she felt a tiny tug of warmth for her. In the glass she studied her face, looking for Alicia and Karolina there, finding, with a jolt, her mother instead.

‘Anna?’

She jumped. What did she look like, peering into the window like a street child? Worse, it was Janina Kardas, holding her hand up and squinting in an ugly way, a kind of twisted smile. Oh, go away, Anna thought, of course it would be you who would catch me off my guard.

‘Mrs Kardas, hello,’ Anna said, limping a little as she came to take her hand.

‘Janina, please.’

‘I was just … I came to see if any of the new season’s clothes … I love these displays, don’t you? Isn’t it mild today? Aren’t you hot in that thick dress?’

Janina frowned at the barb, which Anna instantly regretted. I should just go home, she thought.

‘Oh Anna, your shoes!’ Janina cried. ‘What on earth? Is that blood?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘It is, it is!’ Janina crowed. ‘It’s seeping right through your stockings! Won’t you sit down?’ Her grip on Anna’s arm was strong, guiding her into the shop where the sweet smell of leather, the tick of an ornamental clock, soothed some of Anna’s nerves. The shop girl from the window offered a chair, then tea, biscuits. Would madam like some water? As she bustled away, Janina, who had also accepted a chair, took Anna’s hand with alarming tenderness.

‘Are you all right, my dear? Are you …?’ Her face was open with glee. Anna almost laughed.

‘Oh my goodness,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I was just remembering … at the window. I used to shop here when I was younger,’ she lied. Imagine, another baby, at her age! She felt a pang of affection for Adam, prone on the bed the night before, imploring her to be a friend to him. The idea that their neighbours took for granted that they were still lovers pleased her.

Janina gave her hand a squeeze. ‘It’s only that you looked so strange.’ She kept her hand on Anna’s. Her older soft skin made Anna think of her mother, who had loved her granddaughters so much. Neither of them could remember her, though Karolina had written poems about her that Anna had secretly read, sense memories that had clutched at her: the surprising strength of her grip, the smell of slightly burnt hair, her way of cupping the girls’ faces in her hands. Anna released Janina’s hand, picked up a hat, began turning it over in her hands, feeling a familiar terrifying hollowness gaping inside her. She could never imagine holding her children’s hands, or cupping their faces in her mother’s way.

‘Anna?’ Janina said.

‘My feet do hurt, you’re right. My own fault, I rushed out this morning without thinking.’

‘Is everything all right?’

‘I wonder if I shouldn’t have come into town today.’

‘But there’s nothing to fear.’

‘A man—’ she broke off as the girl arrived with a tray of tea things. What would she say? A man touched my arm, and told me this was a good time to visit, and then heard something in my accent? The girl was very young, wore too much make-up. The tea was in good quality china, and Anna felt she would have to buy something.

‘This is a beautiful style,’ she said, gesturing behind her, as the girl clinked saucers around. ‘I’ll take three.’

The girl smiled. ‘Of course, madam.’

Janina said, ‘Yes, you must feel you should be at home, comforting the children.’

‘To them it’s just some broken windows in another country.’

Janina flushed. ‘Well.’

‘It’s Adam who is so affected.’

‘But you’ve come out? A wife should—’

‘Yes, yes, but he’s gone into work today.’

Janina was silenced by Anna’s tone. They sipped their over-sweetened tea. Anna watched the people outside, strolling, linking arms, nannies with their charges. Some glanced inside, and she felt on display, but oddly grateful for the glass and ribbons, the girl’s manners, even Janina.

‘We should visit the German refugees arriving,’ Janina said. ‘Make them welcome.’

‘Yes, I’m going to throw a party,’ Anna said, irritated by what she heard as an education in manners.

‘A party?’

‘A gathering. To welcome them, and show solidarity.’

Janina made a small sound that Anna couldn’t interpret.

‘The painter arrived, from last night, you know. Did you speak to him?’ Anna said at length.

Janina shifted in her seat. ‘The one from Berlin? He seemed—’

‘No, that’s the other one, and neither are from Berlin. You’re thinking of Milo something or other, but I mean Adam’s friend, Jozef. He’s going to paint Alicia.’

‘I didn’t listen to either of them much,’ Janina said with a sniff.

‘You seemed to, when Milo was talking about Berlin. You were interested then.’

Anna watched Janina as she angled a hat from side to side, far too ostentatious for her, deep in thought.

‘Aleks writes to me about these things too,’ Janina said. ‘He reads about them in Paris, sends newspaper clippings. He gets nervous. It’s natural for the young to overthink things, to get a little excited.’

Janina turned the hat over and over like an absorbed child. It was Anna’s turn to touch the older woman’s hand.

‘I forgot he would be there already! You must miss him.’ When Janina only nodded, Anna went on, ‘You’re right. We shouldn’t be frightened. Kraków is safe, look,’ she dropped to a whisper and nodded towards the shop girl, wrapping her hats in tissue, placing them into boxes, ‘it’s so calm and friendly.’ She called to the girl, ‘When you’ve finished, please call me a cab back to Bernardyńska.’

When the cab arrived, Anna offered her neighbour a lift.

‘No thank you,’ Janina replied. ‘I’m going across the river.’

‘To the old neighbourhood? Why?’

‘Why not? I go all the time.’

‘Is it …’ Anna had meant to say safe, but that would crumble away the thin crust they had built between them. ‘Is it nice?’

‘I like to go to my old doctor and optician, and I have a favourite cobbler there as well.’

‘I never go.’ Anna suddenly felt ridiculous in this, as though the old quarter were another world, not streets away.

‘Well,’ the older woman seemed at a loss what to say. They stood in the street, the cab waiting, Anna’s boxes piled in the back. Anna didn’t know whether she wanted to be rid of this woman or to keep her close, talk, hold her hand. She felt they were in some kind of tiring dance, the two of them, always circling, never really speaking in any real way, but each sensing how the other was shaken, and wanting to prop the other up. Perhaps she would want to cling onto any face she knew, after the strangeness of the last few weeks and the changed air in the house, her own inexplicable fear in the Glowny.

‘Come to my cobbler,’ Janina gabbled, a little flushed, evidently mortified by the long silence that Anna had allowed to open up between them. ‘You could come and have your shoes stretched. I used to go to the one two streets along,’ Janina said in a confidential tone as though this were some great secret, taking Anna’s arm and guiding her away from the cab. ‘But I can’t go there now.’

She stared into Anna’s face, waiting.

‘Oh,’ Anna said.

‘I just couldn’t possibly.’

Anna was silent.

‘The daughter, Mira, at the other shop, you know. I made a complaint about her at the school. It was years ago.’

‘She went to school with Aleks?’

‘No, no! She was his teacher.’

‘A teacher and a cobbler’s daughter?’

Janina made an impatient sound, clicking her tongue.

‘She was the daughter-in-law. Very above herself. She didn’t teach him properly. And she wore terrible clothes, a shorter skirt, in a school! I had a petition made up.’ Janina sniffed. ‘They wouldn’t serve me after that, so I go to this other place.’

‘Why don’t you just use one of the smart shops in town?’

‘They look good, but they don’t use the proper old techniques.’

Anna felt this was unlikely, wondered if the real reason was the grudge against Aleks’s hapless teacher, a hope that it would get back to the family, so many years later, that Janina Kardas was a customer of their near rival. She laughed inwardly at the pettiness of this; found she even admired it a little. She too played out her own petty grudges, tiny acts of peevishness which brought her a guilty joy: cancelling orders from certain places because of a look, a tone of voice she didn’t like, even, on one occasion, because a girl was too pretty. Perhaps that’s all it was with the painter, she realised. Perhaps Milo simply fell victim to this pettiness of hers. The thought soothed her.

‘But of course Adam gets most of your shoes from France, I suppose?’

On an ordinary day this would rile her, but she was so distracted by the oddness of the whole day that Anna let it slide.

‘Well, I should get home. You won’t let the cab take you across the river?’

‘No, I like the walk.’

The Floriańska was busy now, the cab driver beginning to clear his throat, and they said goodbye, each left with a strange discomfort of things unsaid, but not sure what they were, or why they felt a sudden impulse to confide in a woman they had never liked.

I’m sure she’s expecting, Janina thought to herself as she negotiated the crowds, with a stab of envy. Anna’s pale face, the tiny tremble when she’d taken her hand, even her throat was tense. Probably another daughter, it tends to run that way. She tried to laugh at Anna’s obvious distaste for the old neighbourhood and Janina’s habits of still shopping there, but felt instead only a vague embarrassment that she might be committing a faux pas that would be all over the Bernardyńska before long. Did you hear, Janina Kardas buys her shoes from a cheap cobbler across the river? Imagine, perhaps Kardas didn’t leave her as much as you’d think. Perhaps he was a swindler or a drinker— she broke off, too furious at this imaginary gossiping neighbour to continue.

Anna lost Janina quickly in the crowds, and sat back. What a disaster her tiny adventure had been. She felt too hot in her layers, cross and tired. The ugly hats jostled around the back seat on the cobbled streets. Perhaps she ought to have gone to the old neighbourhood with Janina, but she felt so haunted today, she could almost imagine she would meet her mother in the street.

Leaning her head against the back of the seat, she tried to untangle the strands of her mood. Adam, the rude man on the Glowny, her daughters’ coldness, their blank response to Adam’s grief, too like her own. Janina’s needling about turning her back on the streets of her childhood. None of it was the knot. Closing her eyes, she made herself look at it. It was the news from Germany. Adam had let it take root in him and perhaps she had done the same, but been unaware.

She had seen real violence once before, when she was small. Perhaps a story or a lie, it was hard to untangle sometimes in her mind. Perhaps decorated memory. Her hand was held tightly in her mother’s hand. Gloveless. So it was summer, but they were poorer then, she checked herself, so that’s no help. They were living in the old house: a dustier, darker, pokier sort of life, but loud with the chatter of Yiddish running in currents through the rooms. She remembered dinners, probably Friday nights, full of people. But this was outside of the house. In the street. There is the dim ghost of her mother by her side again, her hand. There were shouts and a rough pull on the pavements. There were ugly sounds, spat-out insults. Her mother had stumbled and pulled Anna, but in the wrong direction, and for a moment she saw through the legs of the crowd a man on the road, a beating in the street. Other men were surrounding him, kicking. He tried to get up, but fell again. The crowd had gone quiet. Anna saw the blood dripping from the man’s eye and lip, the soft, peachy parts of his face split open.

The silence had been the thing that struck her. In playground fights there was a lot of noise, gleeful chants and whooping. Here everyone lost their voices: dull thuds rang out as the crowd became still and then drifted. Perhaps there was the crack of a broken bone too, a rib or a jaw, as they left. She had started to cry, she thought now, or perhaps her mother had only said, Don’t cry, don’t cry, as they walked back to the house. These things flare up sometimes, but you are safe.

You are safe, you are safe, she sang to herself in silence, as the cab approached home. She mouthed vowels to herself, certain the man had only been trying to spook her; she sounded perfect.

When she came into the dining room where the painter was working she found her voice again and chattered into the quiet.

‘I saw Mrs Kardas,’ she said. ‘We’ll be inviting her over for dinner more. And I’m going to have a gathering for the Germans who are arriving. Girls?’

She saw too late how she had disturbed a rare peace in the room. Karolina glanced up, distracted, and gave her mother a smile, then soon curled back over her pages. The painter had stopped to give her a small formal bow and nervous nod of acknowledgement when she arrived, but was now concentrating again.

Anna was caught by a clutch of affection for Alicia, her solemn little face, her carefully placed limbs. Her hair had been left loose this morning, and she was still wearing her housedress. Soon she would be grown and curled and buttoned, pinned into place. Adam’s wish for an expensive portrait, meaning a near constant visitor and a battle of wills with Alicia, had exasperated her; now she felt she understood a little. Karolina’s childhood mildness had gently drifted into the quiet young woman now catching the edge of a sunbeam that fell across Alicia. Karolina lived in the corners of the house, curled on chairs, found suntraps like a cat. Anna felt a vague, constant care for her, level and steady as breath. But Alicia, difficult, spoiled, prone to flashes of rage, and so adored by Adam, for her she felt a waxing and waning, a tidal pull of pride and dislike.

Your children are safe, she picked up her silent song. They don’t even look Jewish.

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