The Stars Can Wait (15 page)

But they would not have him. High above they shone, mute and cold and resolute. And at that moment, Gracian could make out nothing within them that might be deemed human.

He recoiled from the window and sat down below it, his back to the wall, the open glass above him. He covered his face with his palms and let out dry sobs, devoid of tears.

*   *   *

It was then, sitting below the window with his back to the stars, that Gracian made a decision. At first it was like a gas, but then it took on shape until it filled him up hard and solid. Tomorrow he would go to his brother and he would tell him. He would present to him the truth. About Anna, about everything else. Each word of it. And he would not stop until the telling was done.

 

 

 

Since Paweł had caught him in the viewing place, less than half a year had elapsed. Old Man Morek sang no more; his season had ended. The war had entered its second year.

Perhaps, in their journey, the stars throw invisible shadows upon the earth.

The decision stayed with Gracian and grew in strength until it possessed him like a fever. He planned to tell Paweł the next day, after he returned from the mine. He reached home and moved swiftly through each room of the lower house and then each room of the upper. Paweł was nowhere to be seen.

He found his mother and asked her, “Where is Paweł?”

She regarded him. “Didn't he tell you? Paweł has gone to stay with William and Urszula. He wanted to see them, to be in the apartment. There are memories there for him.”

“What?” Gracian said, shocked. “When will he be back?”

“In a few days. Two days, I think.”

“But surely it's not safe for him there—”

“Safe there as here, Gracian. I think now we should let him be.” She nodded hard, confirming her own words. “He'll be back.”

Gracian left the house and walked quickly in the direction of the Malewskas' flat. But once again he was unable to complete the trip. Standing in the street, he imagined himself knocking on the door of the apartment and bringing to it a new dimension of sadness. It should not be that way, he thought. Paweł would return in two days. He stopped where he was and turned back home again.

But the next morning there was a collapse at colliery Osok. Pressure that had built up slowly and unchecked in the rocks took the moment to expend itself. One hundred and seventeen square metres of coal and rock gave way, splintering the roof slats. Paweł had been shovelling out rock when it happened, leaning on his side in the crevice of a metre-high face, the walls close around him and the ceiling low over his head. His partner worked below, his boots braced against the wall. They were alerted first by a rain of soot, so fine as to be the touch of a gentle breeze. Then a sound like tearing, the lamps flickering.

Paweł was not far from the site of the collapse. When it came he looked upward and opened his mouth, as if to call the earth down upon him. Blackness lined his throat, filled his lungs. He reached out with his hands, and the rock swallowed him.

The dust cloud roiled and thundered through the mine, churning outward with its own black life. It reached as far as the lift shaft, half choking the men there. On the surface was felt a gentle vibration, and for the briefest moment a shimmering band of movement swept over the streets of Osok.

*   *   *

It took some hours for the colliery officials and surviving miners to ascertain the extent of the damage. The lifts would not work properly and had to be fixed. Sparse clouds of coal dust spiralled languidly around the shaft opening. The few inhabitants of Osok gathered around the colliery building, and a great hum of voices rose up from them. By and by it was found that fourteen men had lost their lives.

In the late afternoon a man from the colliery made the walk to Maleńkowice to inform the family. Gracian had returned from colliery Richter and stood at the top of the stairs when he heard the door open. The man wore a blue suit that didn't fit him and had removed his tie and stuffed it into one pocket so the top folded out like a dark tongue. There was dirt on his face and hands.

The man told them where he had come from, and Gracian's mother did not have to hear him speak further. She looked at his face, his old suit, and began to wail. She moved unsteadily around the kitchen, shouting and weeping, until she caught hold of Francesca, and both women went down onto the floor together, the younger supporting her mother. Gracian remained where he was, at the top of the stairs. Józef Kukła was still working.

When their mother was a little calmer, the man from the colliery told them what had happened. When he had finished he said, “I'll leave you alone,” and closed the front door softly, as if not to wake a child.

 

 

 

In the evening Gerard Dylong came to visit them. He stood in the doorway, his head nearly touching the frame top. His hat was in his hands, and his hands hung unsure over his chest. Gracian watched his entrance from his vantage at the top of the stairs. He saw Dylong talking to his mother, putting his hand on her shoulder, and then his mother shaking her head and thanking him and leaving the room. He saw Dylong talk next with Francesca, for a longer time, Francesca standing with one hand on her hip and the other arm cradling the sleeping baby, every so often brushing hair away from her face. One of Dylong's fingers was the length of the baby's head. Some of their talk came up to Gracian. He heard Dylong say “sudden” and “proud” and “It really is a riddle.” And once he heard his sister say, “In a way I suppose it's a mercy. I was afraid he'd die … by other means. Worse ones.”

Then Dylong said something and Francesca pointed to the ceiling, and Dylong made his way toward the stairs.

Dylong found the boy in his room. He was sitting on the floor below the window, which had been opened wide. The room was full of cold air.

“Hello, Galileo,” he said, stooping a little, his hat still clutched like a scrap.

When the boy did not answer, Dylong took a few steps forward, hesitant, and sat himself upon the corner of the far bed.

“I just came here to check up on my partner.”

The boy's eyes were on the wall.

“I have a friend who works at Osok. He said the collapse happened quick and heavy, in the blink of an eye. Anyone trapped wouldn't have felt a thing,” Dylong said. “Coal's like that, rough and gentle by measures.”

The boy had closed his eyes. Dylong ran the back of his hand over his mouth, played with the fraying stitches of his hat.

“I'm sorry, boy,” he said. Then he stood up. “I'm going now.” He made toward the door, then spoke again.

“Remember, we've got sulphur to look for. I need you for that. We'll find it yet. I'm telling you, we'll find it.” Again, he broke off. When he reached the door he turned and put his hat on.

“I know people say I'm deranged,” Dylong said then, quietly. “And it's true that even if I did find the sulphur, it probably wouldn't be me who'd profit from it.” He tapped his finger once against his forehead. “But if you spend your life digging through coal, you better have a good reason.” He smiled a sad smile and made again to leave. “See you soon, Galileo.”

“Dylong.”

“Yes?”

“Why do you always call me by that name?”

Dylong looked at Gracian and Gracian looked back at Dylong.

“Because you're a star-gazer, boy,” Dylong said. “You always will be—even if tomorrow the stars fell out of the sky.”

 

 

 

Later Gracian opened his eyes and realized he had slipped into sleep. Outside, night had fallen. He stood up slowly and began to pace up and down. On his seventh circuit of the room he vomited liquid in the corner by the door. He knelt down, wiping at his mouth until the nausea stopped. Then he looked up and saw the two empty beds, and in a rage he set upon them. He pulled off the linen and trod on it with his boots. He tipped the mattresses from their iron harnesses and tried to tear them. He broke most of the metal springs. Afterward he went to the wardrobe and threw the clothes out onto the floor, and the hangers also. He splintered the wood with his fists, his feet. Then for a long time he sat in the wreckage of the wardrobe and looked at nothing. For a moment something had seethed, but now it had gone. He felt helpless.

Gradually, however, sitting among the twisted hangers and shards of wood, a clarity entered him. He felt a convergence, a resolution. An immense weight had dissolved; the world felt lighter. He put on his coat and gloves and hat and gathered that which he needed, tucking it all down into the coat folds. Then he went downstairs.

*   *   *

They sat around the kitchen table in silence. Gracian did not know when they had arrived there or if they had heard the noise coming from his room. When he appeared at the door, his mother glanced up.

“Gracian, it's you. I think I must have been sleeping. How are you?” She looked him up and down. “Where are you going?” she said.

“I won't be long.”

“But curfew's nearly fallen.”

“I have to go. I won't be long,” Gracian said.

“Gracian, no—”

He went over to his mother and embraced her, smelled her fragrance, stroked her hair.

“Oh,” she said, pressing her face into his neck, beginning to weep. “It's too much,” she said.

“I know,” Gracian said.

“I am partly responsible, I know I am,” his mother said through the weeping, her face ruined. “I asked him to get that job.”

Gracian looked down at her, at the top of her head. “He didn't do that for you, Mother,” he said.

Looking up then, she saw great kindness in her young son's face.

And when he walked through the door, nobody tried to stop him.

 

 

 

And so Gracian made his final journey into the forest. After a time he reached the viewing place. It was just as he had remembered it. As if this little piece of the world had been waiting for his return all along. He had forgotten the beauty of it: the trees piling up toward the sky, the concentration of silence, the silver wash of moonlight. Snow covered the ground, the tips of the grass and the hide of moss showing through.

He walked slowly around the small clearing and then tipped his head back. Tonight the forest gave out a kind of glow, a soft cradle for the stars. Gracian walked into the centre of the viewing place and reached into his coat and removed the book, faded red letters on cream, and the telescope. He held one in each palm and looked at them.

His breaths were ragged bursts. Colour had blossomed in his cheeks and his eyelids fluttered, the wings of butterflies. He lowered himself to his knees and placed the book and the telescope on the earth before him. Then he stood and took off his gloves and pushed them into his pocket. He lifted his head once more and saw the constellations set in their places.

The stars can wait,
Paweł had said.
That's all they ever do.
And he knew this to be true. The stars would wait, wait and watch, but no longer would he watch them. For his life was not theirs, and his flesh was not that of gas and fire. His flesh was real and the last and truest boundary, and now he felt against it tiny far-spaced pricklings, growing quicker. He looked down beneath him and saw round dark dents sink into the snow, and these shallows became deeper and more scattered, and then it was raining, long heavy drops tumbling, splashing onto his skin.

There was a swelling in his veins. The rain was falling, washing off the snow, and he knew that winter had finally passed. Gracian went down again onto his knees in the centre of the viewing place, water running down his face, water washing the earth. The book and the telescope lay before him. He felt the future upon him. The vision of it was a choice to be made.

In its falling the rain seemed to rise up from the ground, and Gracian too had become as the rain, a slender line descending and yet rising, lifting upward yet drawn down to the earth, and finally then, as the rain soaked his hair, the tears came, the final release that his eyes could give, and the tears fell out of him like rain. He thought:
To be faithful to the chosen vision. To accept its failings. To unmoor the stars.
And with his hands he began to dig in the earth softened by the water falling, cleared by the water falling, scooping handfuls of sod, feeling the warm ghost of spring in his fists. Eventually he had cleared a hole in the earth. He took up the book and the telescope and placed them tenderly into it. Then he filled the hole, pushing in the soil, pressing it flat with the heel of his boot. Until they were buried. His eyes shone with tears in the moonlight, and he wiped at his cheeks, mud hanging loose from his fingertips.

*   *   *

And if one could have risen upward then, up away from the kneeling boy, his hands black with earth, it would be only to see the dark rise of the spruce trunks in the rain, and above that the quivering crests of a green and shadowed sea, and above that still, high above, the great open sky in which the distant sentinels write their traces: wheeling, passing by, beckoning infinity.

THE STARS CAN WAIT.
Copyright © 2002 by Jay Basu. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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