The Stars Can Wait (12 page)

“What do you have there?” she was saying. “What do you have there?” and “Where did you find those?”

He pointed to where he had found them and Francesca got down on hands and knees and looked. There was another sack under the bed, which the young child reckoned was filled with oranges also, though he couldn't be sure.

Suddenly there was the noise of feet coming fast and heavy up the stairway, echoing, and the door swung wide and Paweł was there. And then Francesca standing up, so slowly, her eyes toward Paweł, not leaving his face, never leaving his face.

*   *   *

Gracian closed his eyes and saw again only the blankness and then opened his eyes. He tossed the telescope onto the bed behind him.

A frame. We need a frame to hang ourselves upon,
he thought. He went to the chest of drawers and opened the first drawer and felt inside it and found his old penknife. With a nail he folded out the longest blade. Then he walked out of the room and into the narrow hallway and over to the window that Paweł had sealed shut a few months earlier.

And with the blade of the penknife in his fist he loosened the wood tacks a little, one by one.

 

 

 

It took him three nights of loosening, working only ten or fifteen minutes at a time to avoid the others finding him at it, before he could pull the tacks out with his bare fingers. When he had done this he went downstairs and waited till the kitchen was empty and opened the cupboard beneath the basin and took out a pointed tool used for marking screw holes from his father's old tool kit. He enlarged each of the holes made by the tacks in the wood of the frame by pushing in the marking tool and twisting it around. Then he reached into his pocket, took out the handful of tacks, and dropped them easily back into place, their flattened heads obscuring the widened holes.

Magic,
Gracian whispered to himself when he had finished.
What looks real is really make-believe.

Then he waited, until the rest of the house slept and the stroke of midnight had come and gone again. He had put on his black trousers without a front button and tied about with a length of twine and also a black woollen sweater over a cocoa-brown shirt, which was the darkest he could find. His coat was blue but his hat and gloves and shoes were black. In the warmth of the house he sweated, but he did not care, for he was waiting, and when he had finished waiting he would sweat no more. The telescope had been pushed up the wide sleeve of his coat and lay uncomfortable against his arm like a splint.

When it was time he stood up, wiped the sweat away from the slope of his upper lip, and stepped out of his room.

At the end of the hall was a window. The moonlight painted pale oblongs onto the dirty wood. Downstairs slept his older sister and her husband and their baby.

He reached the window. He flipped the tacks out of their holes and caught them and pressed them into his pocket and undid the catch and eased the lower frame up as far as he needed.

The wood was old, and tiny white flakes tumbled down onto his hands.

He climbed out with an ease that was practiced, turned himself around on the ledge and knelt and gripped the wood, then lowered himself slowly until he was hanging by his fingers flat against the wall of the house. He reached out with one hand toward the crab-apple tree that grew in the yard—bare-branched now—and felt the rough cold bark of the nearest limb and held it tight. He gave a slight kick against the wall and then swung his other arm through space and clamped that hand around the branch. The snow exploded from the branches. He edged down the branch until he reached the trunk and then let himself fall onto solid ground.

He ran though the darkened yard, vaulting the wall there, across the rise of field beyond, and up toward the forest edge.

 

 

 

He guessed at the place at which he had seen Paweł enter the forest and went there and crouched in the thicket. He was some distance from the start of the route he used to take to the viewing place and could not tell what lay in the darkness beyond him. The patrol did not seem near. He let the telescope slip a little into the cup of his hand and cradled the narrower end, humming a tune to himself, a broken tune in a hum only he could hear. One of Morek's.

Góralu, czy ci nie żal …

He waited for a long time and his legs ached and his lower back too from crouching, but his head was clear still and his senses receptive. So that when a rustling and then a thin rushing of sound came from the rim of trees not more than fifty metres eastward, Gracian could move with a quickness. He scrambled forward some distance and then burst from the thicket and ran in a diagonal to the cover of a moss-shod tree and waited. A moment of silence and then a figure went before him. It was Paweł, passing swiftly.

Gracian turned and paused and then followed.

He kept Paweł always a safe distance in front of him, stopping occasionally to let it widen before moving on. To begin with he let the telescope fall into his waiting hand and swung it up to watch Paweł's movements. But to his disappointment he found that in the fluid darkness the lens was nearly useless. All it revealed was confusion, and in panic he almost lost his brother's tracks. He relied instead on his naked eyes, for although the night stretched itself into every corner, the moon brought light enough to make distinct forms of man and forest.

In this way Paweł led him, deeper and still deeper, into the tangled heart. And Gracian realized that he had entered a place unknown. He was no longer following but being drawn, for if he stopped now he might be lost to the forest.

*   *   *

They halted once at the sound of voices, both brothers closing the darkness around themselves and muting the rasps of their breaths. The patrol passed slowly through the space between them, two men with flashlights, and then was gone.

Sometime later Paweł stopped again, though there was no further sign of guards. It took the boy a moment to catch up, pushing himself behind a pine and lifting the telescope to his eye. Paweł was standing in a small clearing some way ahead, just visible against the bush. His back lifted up and down with the exertion of his breathing. Gracian settled himself, crouching among roots, one glove sucking up the damp earth. Silence spread out through the undergrowth. Still Paweł stood there, breathing.

Gracian heard a breaking of twigs by his ear and felt the presence of something close. A doe stood two feet away from him. Her body was strong and lean and her hide caught the moon along one side. She was standing with her legs planted, the front two twitching, bringing up a front hoof a little and placing it back down as if testing the ground. Her eyes were black stones with cores of light. They were looking straight at him. Steam was rising up from her. Then the doe flicked her neck and turned and was no longer there.

When Gracian looked again for Paweł he saw two of him. Instinctively he thought it must be a trick played by the forest; he lowered his gaze and rubbed his eyes and looked again. Where Paweł had been stood two figures, dressed alike in black. Was the other Anna? He thought perhaps it was, but now as he watched more figures emerged from the shadow, two of them, three, four. And then there were six there, six figures gesturing to each other, signing and then dispersing a little and running onward.

The boy stayed with them, behind them, not knowing what he should think about the sight that had gathered before him. The moonlight guided his way.

 

 

 

He was moving swiftly, muffled by the luminous snow, picking over roots and bracken. The forest passed around Gracian, back, beyond, branches reaching out but unable to sway such a progress, for it came from his feet and was drawn from energy and darkness, and his eyes streamed, and in every place was the smell of damp earth as the six figures led him on. Beneath his feet suddenly he felt a dipping of the land, a levelling, and saw the six figures move apart with precision from one another. And then emerging from between the sidelong trees, emerging as if heaving aside the forest, as if shrugging off the forest, was a cage of makeshift metal fencing and beyond that green sheet walls of aluminium, humps of outbuildings, two trucks low and heavy parked at an angle with their headlamps extinguished, sounds and forms enclosed and rising steam in the bitter cold, men moving, with rifles and without, spotlights punching through darkness like substitute suns casting raw outlined shadows on the white flat grass and catching silver on the fenced grilles.

The army base! The boy threw himself into cover and backed into a shallow leaf-clogged ditch. His body seemed then a conduit for an electricity blue and coursing. In his ears was a high-pitched resonance, like tapped crystal. Sweat slicked his brow and chilled instantly in the air, and his face was smeared with dirt.

If he lay down on his stomach in the ditch he could see the base rising beyond the undergrowth, and in that position he struggled to free the telescope from his sleeve and place it against his eye. The base perimeter glided back and forth in his vision.

Eventually he found three of the figures at the far edge by the trees where the fencing turned a corner. He could not tell if one was Paweł. The figures were crouched close to each other, looking into the base. One of them seemed to have a little notebook. He was writing in it and briefly consulting the others and then writing once more. They continued like this for some time.

On the flat of his belly, Gracian pushed himself nearer to the opening and lay still, watching. Then he moved slowly forward again until he reached the last bit of cover before the base fence. There he eased himself up and crouched and continued watching. The figures were not far away from him, seventy metres perhaps, still gathered at what seemed to be the far corner of the base. There was little activity inside the fence. There was only empty unlit ground for several hundred metres stretching between the fence and the hulk of an outbuilding. Now and again a guard would wander near the perimeter, rifle upslung, the shadows playing over him, and wander away.

There were a few soldiers here and there, talking or alone or smoking cigarettes. Many of the tents had no illumination. The entrance to the deep-grooved dirt track off which the trucks were parked lay almost directly opposite, and he could make out another unpaved road continuing into the forest. The entrance had been gated shut and bolted.

After a moment he saw the other three figures running nearly invisible among the shadows beyond the fence, past the edge of the nearest outbuilding. They stopped there and crouched down, and again one of them seemed to be taking notes in a notebook.

And now Gracian saw that one of the first three seemed to be moving ahead of the others, further beyond the fencing. Gracian moved through the bush, drawing nearer still.

The figure who had stepped forward was crouched, as if preparing for a jump. His head and shoulders were clearly visible now in the diffused light from the base, lifting out from the tree shadows like a spirit given form. The boy could make out the features of his brother.

A guard walked slowly into the open space behind the fence. He stopped, looked toward the forest. Gracian could see his brother and his brother could see the guard and he did not move even the slightest fraction. And then the guard looked away, distracted, readjusted the sling on his rifle, and made off again.

There was a pause of twenty breaths. Paweł tensed his thighs and made a jump high onto the fence, gripping it and swinging himself like an athlete over and down onto the other side as if freed then of the bonds of gravity. When he hit the ground he sprinted to the cover of the outbuilding, merging with the long sweep of shadow cast there.

Gracian watched as Paweł moved round the inner perimeter, visible between the buildings. When he reached the third, he could just make out the edge of his body looking from behind the back sheet wall, surveying the scene. Then in an instant he had recrossed the fence and was talking again among the trees to the second group of three, outlining shapes with his hands and arms, and the figure with the notebook was writing quickly.

There was something more. A guard standing in that same empty stretch of ground into which Paweł had first jumped seemed to have stalled in his rounds and was standing staring out into the forest. He was looking in Gracian's direction, his mouth hanging open and his hands resting on the body of his rifle. He was stretching his neck and pointing his chin out and pushing his shoulders back and rocking on his boot heels.

Gracian shifted position, steadying the telescope. The guard looked at him.

And then Gracian saw a light.

The light was coming from his telescope. The lens was catching the dazzle of the arc lights and was marking him out as clearly as if it were a signal pulse he was himself sending to the world. In panic he lowered the telescope and collapsed it and crouched, unmoving. The guard was still looking, and with purpose now he took a step forward.

The forest waited.

A sound came from the guard's mouth—
Hey, Sie!
—and all of time and motion was unleashed like a blast. More cries came ringing and more arc lights lit up the forest, and Gracian turned and ran, swinging his head to see the six figures fleeing too. Now the cries were growing louder and a great whirl of noise seemed to break open the night, and then came a series of sounds more distinct, with edges clear and hard: the sounds of rifle cartridges expelled from barrels.

Fire and light and pressure. And those sounds echoed and multiplied and then something opened the air by his cheek and a section of tree bark before him exploded, and only then did he hear the whine of it, short and shrill, and then he was running and running and running and running.

*   *   *

For a time he did not know where he was running. But still he went on, stumbling over the uneven earth, twigs grazing his face and clawing his body. And then finally the forest edge was approaching and the sounds behind him were fading. He crossed out into the field, breaking from the forest's pull. Looking wildly above him as he ran, the boy saw that the stars were thin white streams connecting, a beautiful alphabet in the sky.