The Stars Can Wait (3 page)

She unclasped her long grey hair and then reclasped it. Her face was grim.

“They don't even bother to lie anymore. Before they used to tell us favouring the Germans was about protection. Now they say it's about
right.
Everything's changed,” she said into her plate.

*   *   *

Later, Gracian went to his room and looked out the small window at the stars, blinking in the haze of late evening. He reached beneath his bed, found his book on astronomy, and inspected its cover, faded red letters on cream, in the lamplight.

His brother had given him the book when he was barely eleven years old. It was a time when Paweł was on leave from the army. He had walked into their room at night, still in uniform, his figure looming inside the doorway, and tossed it onto the bed. “A present,” he had said. “Perhaps you'll have a hobby now.” Gracian had read it all that night, understanding what he could. Though he was a better reader than many of the other children in the village, many of the words were difficult and strange. But to his surprise he had found in the densely typed facts and diagrams a kind of opening. A chance for escape.

Now he opened the pages as he had done so many times before and saw—the River, the Furnace, the Hunting Dogs;
Eridanus, Fornax, Canes Venatici.
The Lion, the Wolf, the Southern Cross;
Leo, Lupus, Crux
—but without the naked sky above him, the words seemed nothing but mute and meaningless shapes dying into white. Only the stars themselves could give them life.

*   *   *

He was standing in the darkness by the small window when Paweł came into the room just before curfew. Gracian did not move. He felt Paweł regard him for a time in silence and then take off his coat and boots and lie on his bed. The brothers did not speak. For a long while there was no sound or movement between them. Then Paweł said, “You can always watch from there.”

Gracian stood where he was, his face cooled by the glass. “It's not the same,” he said.

He listened to the sound of Paweł breathing and the wind whipping through the crab-apple tree, sending slow languid ripples across the black lour of forest beyond.

“Please understand, Gracian,” Paweł said. “It's different now. There is danger out there, and you're too young for it. Please—have some sense.”

Silence, and then words.

“But it's fine for
you?
” said the boy.

“Gracian.” Paweł's face was soft, pleading.

There was no answer.

When Paweł next spoke his voice was firm. “It would do you good to be scared, brother,” he said. “There is much to be scared of, down here in Poland. I will be staying with the Malewskas for some nights, but don't think that lets you off. I'll be watching you, boy.”

Gracian heard Paweł's body shifting the springs. He did not doubt his brother's words. His eyes lifted up into the beyond and he stood there with his hands in his pockets while behind him Paweł stared unsleeping at nothing and the wind didn't stop.

 

 

 

A month passed and the snows came.

It was November of 1940. For four weeks he had been unable to risk his skin to look at the sky. The snow clung to every surface it could and was drawn into a fine top mist by the wind, and the time had come for Old Man Morek to sit outside his house and play his sad songs to the winter mornings. No one knew how old Old Man Morek was, though the children gossiped and whispered to each other that he had lived beyond one hundred, two hundred; he could not die. His long face was etched with a labyrinth of lines, as if his skin were a lake that retained the surface impressions of an age of rainstorms. He too had once been a miner.

Each morning when the snows came, Old Man Morek would sit upon the crumbling step of his house, his frail body secreted within a mound of coats and wrappings of wool, fur, and cracked leather. Warmed this way, he would sing unaccompanied to whoever would listen, or to no one perhaps, in a voice unexpectedly clear and deep and sonorous. Old Polish folk tunes, laments of the Turning Earth and the Passing of Time and the Endlessness of Labour and the Withering of Flowers.

Nobody disturbed Old Man Morek's performances. Even the special police seemed to accept him as a part of the landscape.

Each morning on his way to colliery Richter, Gracian would nod his greeting to the old man. The old man would incline his head in acknowledgement, and the echoes of his song would reach the boy as he passed and merge with the substance of some well of feeling within him. It was not anger or frustration that had overcome Gracian, but melancholy. The world had become dull and formless. Every day became the same slow parade of undifferentiated shapes and actions. Like a ship, he sailed by the stars. Without them he was lost.

In the mines, deep down beneath the earth's surface, was the worst time. He worked with Gerard Dylong and half listened to his partner's latest theories of where the sulphur might lie and to his stories of how the village was before, when he was a child and Poland did not exist, when the language of his forefathers had to be learned from their mouths for it was not to be found in schoolbooks, when there was nothing to see but fields and farms. Dylong was the greatest spinner of tales, Gracian thought, in all the world.

Sometimes the coal glistened like a frozen black ocean. Other times they came across prehistoric fossils, imprinted like transparencies in the rock: strange animals; giant leaves, with veins like aerial maps of all Poland, displayed one on top of another.

*   *   *

Gracian worked with his mind inert and his muscles moving as if by some independent impulse. The work was always hard and unrelenting and left him dirtied by an indelible film of coal. Sensing the boy's quiet and his depression, Gerard Dylong became gruff and would often try to goad him into speech. When this failed he would slap him and force him to work harder, shouting, “Silesia is nothing but one giant lump of coal, boy! Somewhere inside there's treasure! Dig harder! Dig!” And Gracian would fall deeper into his waking slumber until shift end and the rising of the lifts into day.

*   *   *

In the village of Maleńkowice, too, there were stories, stories hushed and murmured and spread only in the most private of conversations. Stories, tales, whispers: of more villagers taken from the street or from their homes or from their beds and loaded onto trains and army trucks to Germany; of men beaten for refusing or being unable to speak German to officials; of informants and special favours and old friends become bitter and unspeaking; and of the Jews. There had only ever been five or six Jewish families in Maleńkowice, but one month before the invasion they had simply disappeared. No one knew of their fate. Some claimed they had settled in Romania or Hungary, others that they had died or been captured mid-journey. Many Jews from surrounding parts had been taken to live packed up together like farm animals in a town to the east called Sosnowiec. Gracian had heard from Dylong that they were building a work camp up in Oświęcim, sixty kilometres southeast of Katowice.

*   *   *

It seemed to Gracian that the stories were like a disease. He had seen them infect the whole village. He had seen them infect his family and transform his mother's face into something grey and withdrawn. Now when he was not suspecting she would wave her spoon at him and tell him to keep quiet and take care, and Gracian would tell her he understood—though in fact he understood little. There were days when the boy felt the stories humming in the frozen air, spoken not through voices but through secret glances exchanged in the street, looks of fear and suspicion and distrust shot between those who had lived together for many years as neighbours. Days when, Gracian thought, the very air sang and trembled with the tension of the unsaid, and the only rest from it all seemed to come when, at some undisclosed time of day—on his way to or from work, perhaps, or with his mother buying food—a German carrier truck, its dark load unseen, rumbled through the cobbled main street, disturbing the grit. Then those around would stop and watch it pass before them, the snow swirling wildly in its wake, heading, ever unstopping, toward a destination unknown.

*   *   *

His days were busy, his mother and Francesca were always occupied with their labours, and Gracian felt himself craving the company of his brother. He was aching to speak to Paweł, to impart something to him he could not himself define, and to find a steadiness and a mooring in his brother's words. But Paweł was absent more than ever before. He would appear only occasionally in the house, and then he would argue with their mother and afterward become still and wordless. Sometimes he would bring Anna Malewska with him, and at these times, looking upon her, watching her move, Gracian would feel his cheeks grow hot and red and he would become awkward in his actions and have to leave, hurrying for the coolness of his room.

 

 

 

The rations were not enough to feed them. A week's worth of bread, milk, sausage meat, and eggs could be finished within three days. “How are we supposed to live like this?” Gracian's mother said. “With a mother, a baby, a husband, and two strong boys to feed!” Despite his habitual absence and the tension ever increasing between them, she still considered Paweł a household member. “It's impossible, I tell you. Impossible!”

Gracian's mother had grown up in the country, in a collection of houses that passed as a village named Pietraszowice. She still had many friends there. In the country, where life was lived off the land, food was a little more plentiful but the farmers were desperate for other supplies: fabric, kitchenware, sewing needles. Thus, without fuss or debate, as if some binding resolution had been quietly made, Gracian's mother began to visit the place of her birth.

On early-shift days, Gracian accompanied her after work. Together, braced against the cold and with his mother dressed in the old way, the way of the country, in long skirt and heavy tunic, they would walk through the village to the station. There they showed their identification to the armed guards and stood on the stretch of platform where the snow was doused with salt to await the local train. Eventually it would come, loud and steaming, and idle before them. It was sixty-five kilometres to their destination. The journey took one hour and thirty-five minutes. Gracian sat with his hands in his lap and watched the dull scrub by the tracks give way swiftly to flat open country, the snow thick, dense, virginal, halted only by the horizon line, as if severed by the grey weight of the lowering sky. At Pawonków station they disembarked.

From there it was another mile to Pietraszowice. They walked, feet crumpling the snow, among clogged paths made not of cobblestones but of flattened dirt, and the boy held his mother's elbow when the going was hard. As they walked, Gracian looked around at the pure white inclines surrounding him and remembered how, when he was a child, he would take the wooden sled his father made and spend the day skidding down the gentle hills. A time that had passed. He was fifteen years of age. No age for sledding, or the joy of snow.

*   *   *

When they reached the farming settlement they headed for the heat of the first house, that of Jan Piowcyk and his wife and their five children, and then progressed to the others. They were greeted warmly but their hosts always seemed tired, and there was about the proceedings the guardedness of business. After Gracian's mother had exchanged pleasantries, she removed the bundle of cloth from her tunic and opened it out upon the table. When she did this, Gracian noticed, her movements were delicate, considered, like a doctor's. Then the host brought out food—smoked ham, meats of many kinds, eggs, milk—and placed it opposite his mother's offering.

After a deal was struck they never lingered.

“I am very lucky,” his mother would say. “Lucky to have old friends like you. God has been kind to me.”

“We, too, are lucky. You know we trust you. Everything is difficult, now the fields are dead under the snow,” they would reply.

*   *   *

Gracian's mother was a thin woman, even bony, her chest flat and her hips narrow. But returning from Pietraszowice she would be fat, buxom, swollen with health. In the lining of her skirt and tunic she had fashioned pouches, and in the pouches she tucked the food pressed tight against her underclothes. She became a walking pantry. Her breasts were two proud joints of ham, her potbelly filled out with a stoppered jug of milk and other fresh dairy products, her arms plumped invitingly with sausage coils, her cheeks flushed under the weight of it all. Transformed thus, she would keep her son close to her on their return as she waddled through the slush, Gracian's hands ready to rectify any slippage of her ballast until they reached Pawonków. His job upon arrival both at Pawonków station and Maleńkowice station was always to direct them both away from guards who might have noticed them upon their outward trip and to tend his mother as she moved, as if she were pregnant or decrepit. When they reached the village they did not take the main street to the house but hurried through back lanes on a circuitous route that took them home in twice the time it should have taken. But still they had their food.

*   *   *

Two times, they were caught, the first at Maleńkowice, the second at Pawonków.

In Maleńkowice there had been a young tall set-faced guard with thick brown stubble around his underjaw. This was to be a random search.

“Stop, old lady,” he said in German as they passed him. “Wait there.”

Gracian's stomach dipped and rose. He felt his hair bristle. Before either could react, the guard had upended his rifle and slung it behind his back and was reaching out to frisk his mother. She slapped his hand away, affronted. She could speak German, as could Gracian.

“How dare you!” she hollered. “How dare you touch me! An old woman with a bad back and swollen legs!”