The Stars Can Wait (14 page)

The others listened with closed faces as Gracian was told this news, and his eyes moved from one to the other: Francesca with her long hair down, Józef Kukła's high cheekbones, Paweł. Gracian saw then that the lives of the people in this room would be connected always by an indissoluble bond, and the shape of that bond lay silent and in black upon the table. The five of them had become points frozen into a new constellation. And the constellation was upon the earth, and the story it told was one of death.

When Gracian had asked the question burning to leave his lips, What had they been doing there, so late, in the forest? his mother had smiled and come to him with more water for his face and hands and told him not to worry himself; he should rest for the bruises to heal.

At this, Paweł had looked up from where he had been kneeling at the table end, his hands around the feet of Anna Malewska and his forehead pressed against the soles. He looked up and said, “Enough, Mother,” in a voice that seemed dredged from some lived dream. “There's nothing to keep from him.” His eyes were indistinct and yet directed at Gracian. “An army of people is rising,” he said, “all over this country. A net is spreading, at the word of President Raczkiewicz and General Sikorski in London, cast by ourselves in villages and towns and cities, to trap the German army. Last night in the forest we were collecting intelligence for the spreading of that net; it's called reconnaissance, do you see, brother?” And then his face seemed to crumple, disintegrate, and he looked at his hands, turning them over as if he'd never seen them before, and his voice sounded broken. “But last night I was sure of myself,” he said, “and now I do not know what to do. I am lost.” He turned to their mother, with his three-fingered hand stretching out in a soundless plea.

Gracian had watched as his mother drew herself up, became large, larger, growing in the centre of the room. Her shadow lengthened, and the power she had was the power of her temperament, for always she had been organizer, orderer of events, corrector; and as she spoke now her sons, her daughter, and her daughter's husband nodded and obeyed, for her voice was commanding.

“We shall stay with her tonight,” she said. “From what you have told me, Paweł, the Germans have no reason to suspect that any one of you was shot?”

“True.”

“And do the other ones know about Anna?”

“No.”

“And her mother and father, the Malewskas, do they know of your involvement?”

“Yes.”

“Can they be trusted?”

“Yes. They have often assisted us in their way.”

“Then I will tell them tonight and you will tell those others that you can, and tomorrow we shall take her out into the fields and bury her. She will not be denied that. But there must only be a few of us. Gracian and I shall go to the mine early tomorrow. We'll say he had a bad fall and ask for a few days' rest. They should give us that,
Boska Wola,
God willing. And Paweł, my son, you realize that you must go to work in the morning. We cannot give them any reason to suspect. Go to work and afterward meet us at the place of the burial.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“We will spread the news that Anna Malewska has disappeared. Vanished. Taken, perhaps, into Germany. There is no other choice. It is our best hope.”

Then she pointed her finger at those who listened, drawing it round in an arc as if to link them together. Her voice was solemn.

“What has happened here must forever remain secret. Not a word must be spoken to anyone else. For the good of us all, no one else will know about Anna. Is that understood?”

And each of them in turn said yes, for they understood well enough.

 

 

 

The funeral was held in the early afternoon in a deserted field some way from Maleńkowice. It lasted only a little time. Apart from the family there were William and Urszula Malewska, their faces red and stricken, and four others, whom Gracian supposed were the figures he had seen in the forest. They stood around the opened ground in a broken ring. When Paweł arrived from Osok, one of the men gave a service and Anna Malewska was lowered into the waiting earth. The wind was strong and the snow eddied, the clothes of the watchers whipped and billowed.

Gracian could barely stand. His lips were swollen and his cheek too, and his skin bore patches of yellow and violet. It was painful for him to watch, and the pain was not only without but also within, a chattering of voices. When the earth had been shovelled back on her and the tamped mound marked by a tiny cross, those present dispersed slowly into the field. Paweł turned and his face was pale, without blood, and Gracian, who had stood some way from the others, lifted his eyes to the wide grey horizon. A flock of birds twisted through the distant sky.

Paweł saw his mother then. After a moment she opened her arms and he sank down between them, his cheek to her breast. “I just wanted to keep us all together. That's all I asked for,” Gracian heard his mother say, her voice dipping on the wind.

He turned to look, but Paweł had become only a pair of arms around his mother's back, his hands gripping her coat there, knuckles showing white.

 

 

 

When guilt is serious it grows in stages, like the winter. First is the creeping ground frost, spreading out across the mind yet leaving the space still for old roots of doubt and debate to breathe, and with them the seeds of absolution. Perhaps it was not he who had alerted the guards? Perhaps they would always have been caught, if not then at least eventually? And could he control the wanderings of light? Or the path of a bullet? Hadn't Paweł given him the telescope in the first place? And how did he ever get hold of it? But such questions soon become exhausting, and then the air hardens and the ice congeals and there is no turning away. Guilt has taken over and remains.

So it was for Gracian Sófka, lying each night beside his brother, his outer wounds fading slowly and sleep rarely claiming him. Occasionally in the day he would be struck again by an attack of shivering, his very toes and fingertips shaking and then finally calming. He felt there was something growing inside him, bursting to escape, trembling, making him tremble with it. He lay awake and watched his brother—restless, sometimes weeping in his sleep—and felt it wanting to flow out in one long stream through his lips and relieve him of its pressure. But he could not bring himself to let it. He feared it, and the release of it, and what that might bring.

Thus the brothers were once again united. Gracian's mother had taken him to the foreman of colliery Richter, Herr Schultz, who sat with his long unhumorous face behind a small desk in the little office with green stone walls cold to the touch. He wore glasses, over which he regarded the boy and mother before him, the boy with heavy bruises and his hands raw, the mother making his plea. Ridiculous, it was clear Schultz had thought. The boy should state his own case. He's old enough. The foreman's lips were narrow and pale and not the kind that parted easily with words, and when finally they opened it was to give out seven of them: “Four days, I can do no more.”

Paweł continued to work, forcing himself awake long before the break of day for the walk to Osok. When he came home it was as if he were his own empty reflection. No emotion passed across his features, and the blankness of his eyes was the blankness of grief. His mother treated him tenderly, taking food up to him where he would sit in the brothers' room or sometimes lie on the bed, his hands crossed upon his chest. Even Kukła seemed shocked by Paweł's state and would now and then mutter a consolation, his eyes downcast. In such a condition it was harder than ever for Gracian to speak with his brother.

*   *   *

But a night came on the final day of Gracian's convalescence. The brothers had been lying beside each other in silence for some time, and in the play of darkness the space between their beds seemed depthless. Neither slept. Gracian lay and listened to each rough nuance of sound, the pressure ebbing and thickening in his throat. He felt the presence of something weighted in the air. Then there was a shifting of springs and falling fabric from his brother's bed and a lamp sparked, slicing yellow light through the room.

Paweł was turned toward him in his bed. He seemed suddenly anxious, eager. “How's the telescope, Gracian?” he said.

Gracian did not move. He lay facing upward, able in the gold light to see the smooth high ceiling.

“The telescope,” Paweł said again. “Have you been using it?”

“A little.”

“A little? Why not a lot?” Paweł was sitting up now, his legs half swung across the mattress edge. “Can I see it?”

“Why?”

“I want to see it.”

Gracian moved with difficulty, until he could reach below his own bed. He found the place in which he had concealed the telescope and pulled it out. Paweł held out his hand but the boy did not give it to him. He felt shivers rising and quelled them, his eyes shut.

“Give it,” Paweł said.

And reluctantly he gave it over.

Paweł turned the telescope in his hands. The lamplight caught on its curvature, and a thin arc of brightness fell over Paweł's face. He was smiling.

“Beautiful, isn't it? I just wanted to look at it. It was my present to you. I wanted you to get some use from it,” he said, leaning back a little, scratching at his chin. He was unshaven.

He ran his fingers over the telescope, retracted and extended it once more. Then he lifted it to his eye and looked through the wide end into the obscurity of the room.

Gracian was up now, watching. As Paweł turned his head, the telescope tapered away from his head like a watch mender's loupe but grown gigantic, ugly.

“I've never looked through that end,” Gracian said.

When Paweł brought the telescope down, his smile had gone. “No?” he said. “Perhaps you should, one day. Makes everything simpler, you see. Just a small clear picture.”

The words wrapped themselves around Gracian's heart. He made a gesture with his hand as if to illustrate something he had not said. He sat forward, looked into Paweł's eyes.

“How,” Gracian said then, “can we be certain of things?”

Paweł looked at the boy. There was longing in his expression. After several moments he handed the telescope back to him and pushed himself forward until his feet were firm upon the floor and sat straight opposite him, less than three hands' breadth separating their faces.

“This is a time of choices, brother,” Paweł said. “Anna made hers, and I made mine. We made our choices together. That is all we have in this world. We live by choices, and we die by them.”

Then he let a sound out through his nose and stared down at his feet. Slowly, and after some time, he tilted his head, as if to ask
What?

Gracian could hear him breathing.

“She was all that I was, Gracian,” he said, and there were tears on his face, “and she was more than that too. How can I do without her?”

Paweł leaned over suddenly, reached across and put out the lamp. He lay back in the dark upon his bed. No sound came from him, not even breath. After a time Gracian felt he could speak. He was fearful.

“The men,” he said. “The
Schupos.
They told me they were going to get you. Hurt you. They said to give you that message. That they knew.”

He heard Paweł move over the covers.

“It's all right, Gracian,” his brother said in the quiet. “Someone will get me sooner or later. I'm not afraid of it. From the beginning, that has been my destiny.”

And as the shivers came back to Gracian, swimming quickly up through his body, flowing down into his arms and fingers, the image entered his mind and lingered: a dress draped over a chair back in an empty room, two small shoes below it, both pointing a little sideward, as if soon to begin a journey of their own.

 

 

 

The conversation remained in Gracian's thoughts. He went back to work at the colliery, even though still his skin had not healed and the cuts on his limbs made it difficult to dig.

“Those
beasts,
” Dylong said, his voice a low sharp hiss, huge arms straining beneath the sleeves. “If I could I'd pick them off one by one. How dare they do this to Galileo—my trusted partner?”

Once he asked about Anna Malewska, drawing Gracian aside and speaking low under his breath.

“Any news of her? The village is talking, yabbering; the story is she's gone, simply vanished. Paweł must be sick with the worry.” He moved in closer, his breath heated. “We all fear the worst.”

To this Gracian did not reply.

*   *   *

Two weeks after Anna's death, Gracian awoke in the early hours drenched in sweat. Paweł slept next to him, muttering in his slumbers. Gracian lay very still and then eased himself out of bed. The brick heater had been baking all night and the room was very warm. He wore only a loose shirt and long underwear. Taking care not to disturb his brother, he walked, up on his toes, across the room. He reached the window and pulled it down slowly, the glass rattling with a light keen noise that belonged to another—sunlit—world.

Gracian's thoughts had turned again, inexorably, to the stars. He had been too weak and the shivers had come too often recently for him to pay them heed. But as the days passed, he had felt their attraction return. He saw them when he closed his eyes, strewn across that private darkness, speeding his heart.

Now they were laid out before him in the cloudless sky. Gracian gazed at them all, hundreds of them, more finding his eyes the more he gazed. The desperation was upon him. He felt it contorting his face, pulling down the edges of his mouth, and congesting his chest. Breath clogged his throat.

He stretched out his hands then, out of the open window, reached them out toward the stars. Among them, he knew, there was never loneliness, for they had known nothing but solitude. No time, for they had known nothing but the slow burn of millennia. No happiness and no sadness and no responsibility, for they had known nothing but the silence. Since he was a child he had come to them for release from all around him. Now he asked them for what they had always given him. He asked them not with words but with the shivers of his body, his hands outstretched. He asked them to relinquish, to advise, instruct, listen. He fought to rise up to them.