The Stars Can Wait (4 page)

The soldier smiled a tight smile, his eyes flickering. “Stay still,” he said. “Come on, lady.”

She began to brush his hands away, slapping, resisting. “I don't believe it!” Her voice was loud, almost screaming. “Abuse! Abuse! You wish to abuse an old widow who needs her son to guide her. A scandal!”

Gracian could not move. The soldier had begun to blink rapidly. His face was becoming the color of a rash. “Stay
still!
” he said.

“Scandal! Pervert!” she continued. “Rape! This is rape! The rape of an old woman! This man here is a pervert!”

They were causing an obstruction. People were bustling behind them, past them, muttering, looking, passing and passing. The next train was thundering in at the platform edge, the steam plume gusting. Further down the platform, two other guards had been alerted by the noise, and the nearer flicked a cigarette stub onto the tracks and began to wander slowly toward them. The young guard looked over at him, uneasy. Gracian's mother kept shouting.

“Abuse! Help me!”

“Fine!” the guard said suddenly. “Go! Get away from me! Go, you mad old bitch! Go!”

They went.

*   *   *

But it was the second time, the chance that never should have been granted them, that lingered in Gracian's mind. It came back often, puzzling, disquieting him.

It occurred at Pawonków station. A busy afternoon, busier than usual. A small tight crowd waiting for the train, pushing against one another at the identification checkpoint. Gracian was surprised by the people, the hustle of forms, and did not see the guard waiting some distance from the checkpoint, the guard who had watched them arrive. The boy led his mother straight toward him. The guard was older, thickset, untidy. As soon as he saw the boy and the woman he hoisted up his rifle and stopped Gracian's mother short, the muzzle pressing in against her heart.

A tiny noise, an exhalation, escaped her throat. Seeing her like that, Gracian felt a knife blade at his throat. This time, he thought. This time for sure.

The guard looked them both up and down. He kept the rifle where it was with one hand and with his other pulled a cigarette from his top pocket and then a lighter. He lit the cigarette, and a cloud of smoke billowed from his lips.

“Gained some weight, haven't we?” he said in German through the smoke. “Must be that country air. Is that what it is?”

Gracian's mother opened her mouth and then closed it. Gracian realized he was shaking.

“Or maybe the bun's in the oven. Just like that.
Bang!
And the sprog's shown up.” He laughed once, a staccato wheeze.

There was a silence.

“The boy's not with me,” Gracian's mother said softly. And then, “What will you do?”

The guard looked at them both. His gaze was hard, scouring. “Don't miss your train,” he said then, almost casually, lowering the gun.

Gracian's mother stared at the guard. Then she moved slowly to her left, her eyes upon his. She caught hold of Gracian's cuff and pulled him with her and began to jog and then run to the platform. Of the two, only Gracian looked back.

The look in his eyes. A thin electric cord between them, vanished now in the curl of smoke.

“Why didn't he arrest us, Mother?” he said breathlessly.

She shot him a glance. There was sweat on her forehead. “
Because,
boy. Don't ask such questions,” she said, hurrying along.

The next week they made the same journey. The guard was nowhere to be seen.

*   *   *

And so it was. The snow had erased all traces of summer. The yellow air of the hot months, the blooming forest, the rich green pastures, all had become as unfamiliar as the phrases of a dead language.

Each and every night, Gracian stood by his window and looked upon what was lost to him.

The days went on: the turning earth, the withering of flowers.

*   *   *

One night that month Gracian had a dream. He dreamt he was back amid the mud and grass in the viewing place, but he had forgotten the magnifying glass. He scrabbled in his pockets for it awhile and then finally gave up and sat back, his arms outstretched behind him. His eyes rested then, as they often did, upon the brightest of the stars, the pole star. It seemed brighter than ever. It pulsed and shimmered and its light was of a whiteness and a purity that Gracian would never have guessed could be possible and its brightness sighed like the giant breaths of some Creature of Light.

Frustrated that he could not examine the star through the convex glass, Gracian squinted, channelling his concentration to the front of his head and feeling the dull pressure behind the holes in his skull. And as he watched, the star grew. He kept staring hard and the star kept growing. It grew larger and still larger until Gracian could see its blue aura like a gas flame playing about the pure white globe. It was not simply growing but coming closer.

And now the star was pressing against the forest roof, the bright noiseless curve of a new horizon. And still it came, until it was bending flat the distant rim of trees, snapping them like kindling, and its belly was only a foot now from Gracian's upturned face. Gracian paused and then reached out his hand to touch it. Its thin blue atmosphere brought with it a gentle breeze, lapping his skin. The texture of the surface was firm but yielding, like rubber. The breeze ruffled his hair and the light was gentle, ebbing. Gracian was not afraid.

Then he noticed that a series of white rungs protruded from the star face. As his eyes grew accustomed to the magnesium glare he saw more of them, rungs one after another stretching up the curvature of the star to the vanishing crest. He reached for one and curled his hand around it and felt a lifting, a sucking, and his legs flew from beneath him and his feet were on another rung and he was hanging upside down above the earth.

With little effort he started to climb. He felt at rest and at peace and he was happy. He climbed the curve a short distance and then he felt the great star shudder and there was a rustling and creaking of wood as the star began to rise.

It rose higher and higher above the forest and, looking down now, he could see the whole of Maleńkowice below: the fields; the forking stretch of streets and houses, including his own; the grey hulk of the mines. Gracian climbed and the star rose until he was at the very top, his ankles brushed by pale blue shadow, and the village was nothing but an ideogram scrawled across the land.

Gracian looked around him. There were many other stars suspended in the thick black night, a galaxy-ful. Seeing them, Gracian felt a surge of warmth that spread from his heart in waves. He walked about on the star surface, craning his neck at the panorama, and then he noticed that a cluster of stars to his right seemed to be moving. As he watched, the stars slid out of their positions and jostled and slid again, passing each other and aligning and realigning. Gracian realized that they were gathering into shapes of light against the black. Letters. Words. They were sky-spelling.

LOOK CLOSER

they read.

And Gracian felt a shift, a change, and turned around and saw Paweł standing some feet away from him with Anna Malewska. He regarded them for a time, and then Anna stepped forward beyond Paweł. Her eyes were dark and depthless and her hair kissed her face, and her lips were parted in a smile like no other. She lifted a hand and gestured to him, once.

Gracian turned back to where the letters had been, but the stars had moved. Now they formed an endless chain of stepping stars, stretching into the far-off emptiness; the closest star was near enough for Gracian to step onto.

He turned back, and now with Paweł and Anna Malewska stood his father and Gerard Dylong, and each of them looked at him in turn. Their eyes were knowing. Uncertain which way to move—toward the knowledge of the faces or the mystery of the stars—Gracian closed his eyes and held his breath and then, in a burst of spontaneous motion, he spun away from Paweł and Anna Malewska and his father and Gerard Dylong and jumped forward into the night. The stars had gone and the night had become a sheer vortex of solid coal and as he fell his hands scraped against it, a crumbling rain of black sooting his face, and his feet scrabbled to gain purchase, but there was nowhere to go but headlong into the convulsion of his chest and the snapping open of his eyes to the morning.

 

 

 

Paweł was home. When Gracian came back from the colliery he was sunk down in a chair in the kitchen under the bare yellow bulb with his boots up on a chair. He was tapping the good fingers of his crippled hand against the tabletop and then rubbing the wood in little strokes and then tapping again. He was listening to his mother, his face shadowed, lowered. She was standing at the opposite end of the table, leaning on it with both hands, talking with her back bent and her face jutting out toward Paweł. Gracian regarded them from the doorway and then shivered in the warmth of the room and took off his coat and hat, the snow flecks falling away and dying tiny liquid deaths on the floorboards.

No one acknowledged him.

“It can't go on, Paweł,” his mother was saying. “There isn't enough of anything. This morning they took the animals. Pig, the hens. Gone. Something has to—”

“Mother, I've told you,” Paweł said.

She lifted her arm abruptly in a stiff movement, her finger pointing to silence him. An oil-slick shadow swept across the table, remained.

The door opened. Francesca's husband, Józef Kukła, came into the room. He was a tall and silent man, with a thin sculptured face. He was an irritable man too, with a tendency to work himself into a fury. Many times Gracian had heard his arguments with Francesca rising up through the house.

He was tapping out his pipe and pressing in the tobacco and toying with it in his hand. He did not like Paweł. In the young man's absence, Kukła had often cursed his name. He walked to the sink and poured some water and stood and regarded the pair, the pipe bulb cupped in his palm. He smiled in a way that made clear he would not be leaving.

“Go away, Józef. Please,” Gracian's mother said.

Kukła lifted the pipe and put it tenderly between his lips and lit up, puffing. He looked at Paweł and Paweł ignored him.

“Mother.” Paweł spoke evenly, quietly. “No one will employ me. Not because of my hand or my health. Because I was in the Polish army, yes. And because I am an outsider here and always have been. Now is no time to trust outsiders, they think. Now is no time for trust at all.”

“But it's too
much.
” Her voice rose a tone. “Have you
tried?
Can you at least tell me that? All this time have you really been looking?”

The question extended across the table and faded. The time for Paweł to answer came and passed. He looked at his boot tops and lifted a hand and dragged it across his chin. At the door Gracian felt a pulling inside him, a sinking.

“Why must it always be your way, Mother? Your way or nothing,” Paweł said finally.

“He's a lout. A lazy good-for-nothing,” said Józef Kukła now, his voice a sudden intrusion into the balance of the room.

“Quiet, Józef,” she said softly, looking now at her hands, the splayed fingers. “Leave here. This is between my son and me.”

Paweł lifted his head and the shadows on his face fell away.

“Mother, you can't understand my life now. The way I live. The choices I have made. There have been choices made, Mother, and not just by me—”

“Yes,” said Józef Kukła. “You have chosen to laze around like a dog. You have chosen to put a strain on your mother, your sister, to put your whole family at risk. No, I will not leave. It's time for you to behave decently, like a man should.”

Kukła's eyes were molten brown. The pipe was shaking in his hand; the thin smoke stream shattered, whirling.

Paweł sat up slowly, as if moving each muscle one by one. He pulled his boots off the chair and placed them upon the floorboards.

At the door Gracian could not move; he felt he was at the edge of a great abyss. He could not move, he could not move.

A noise escaped his mother like a sob. “Paweł!” she said. “Why can't you see? We are all afraid! Why do you want to die?”

“But you smuggle food!” Paweł shouted, standing up now, his hands in fists.

“
You
speak to me of smuggling?” she scoffed, her head cocked. “I do it out of necessity! Necessity! To feed my children!”

“Don't preach to me about necessity!”

She threw her hands up to her face. “I lost your father. Why have you always been intent on making me lose a son?”

“My father?” Paweł said. “
Disease
killed my father. This village killed my father. The coal in the air killed my father, ate him up from inside. I
know
what killed him, Mother. In the end it will kill us all.”

“That's enough!” Józef Kukła stepped forward, reaching out toward Paweł, the pipe under his whitened knuckles now suddenly toylike, ridiculous.

And then Paweł turning, finally meeting his eyes and not as tall as Kukła but a stronger animal and pulling back his arm and driving it into Kukła's stomach. Kukła wheezing, one leg skipping back to retain balance, and Paweł rounding on him, bringing down another punch, but Kukła fast and, flinging his arms up around Paweł's waist, gripping hard, his red cheek pushed in against Paweł's stomach, forcing him back four or five paces, slammed hard up against the wall, and the bare bulb swinging wild veering shadows. Paweł was blinking rapidly, winded now but bringing up his knee with force, and Kukła's grip slackening and Paweł heaving one sharp punch into the face and blood now visible on Kukła's lips. Then both men were down on the floor, wrestling, no words but only noises in the rising dust.

Kukła had dropped his pipe. Gracian watched it. The tobacco burned. The smoke cast a shadow. He could smell it.