The Stars Can Wait (7 page)

“What's wrong with it?” Gracian said breathlessly.

“How
long?
”

“From the beginning, maybe.” He could feel it now, the burning of it. “What is it?”

“Frostbite! Frostbite, you idiot boy! Cover it, we have to get to the house.”

“I can go myself.”

“Quiet, Gracian, walk faster.”

They approached the house from the back, passing the old crab-apple tree. In panic Gracian ran to the door, but Paweł had the scruff of his collar and dragged him back.

“Stay. We have to warm it slowly.”

He bent down and took his glove off and tucked it into his pocket and then with his three-fingered hand scooped up snow and held it between his thumb and fingers as one would hold something precious. He told Gracian to lift the flap of his hat, and he examined the ear and then rubbed the snow gently into it.

He told Gracian to wait, and for a time they waited. Then Paweł opened the door and walked in, pulled a chair close to the door, and told Gracian to sit on it.

“Sit here. In fifteen minutes close the door.”

“What will happen?”

“It will heal. I think we've saved it.”

Paweł turned to leave and Gracian watched him.

“Paweł,” he heard himself say. His voice was so quiet he thought Paweł would not hear it. But Paweł stopped and paused where he stood.

“I know what you said about forgetting. But that man said you were in prison.”

Gracian saw a bright silver gun nestled in cloth the colour of midnight.

Paweł tapped his hand against his thigh and sniffed in the cold.

“A long time ago, Gracian,” he said. “That leak has been fixed,” he said.

Then he left.

*   *   *

When Gracian's mother discovered him alone on the chair with frostbite in his ear she shouted at him until her throat was sore. When he told her that Paweł had a job at colliery Osok, she stopped and stared at him, and her lips were open a little.

“Well, that's something,” she said eventually, covering the hole of her mouth with one hand.

*   *   *

During the evening Gracian's ear swelled. It swelled and it would not stop swelling. By nightfall his earlobe had become the size of a heavy fruit, like a springtime orange. The growth was pink and translucent and gave a shock of pain when touched. It brought an itching deep down in the base of his skull. When Gracian ran his fingers gingerly across its surface he felt the strangeness of his own body expanded beyond its natural horizons. He looked at it in the small square of mirror among the shadows of his room and examined the intricate patina on its thin-stretched globe, felt its stupid bobbing weight as he moved his head. He turned this way and that and glimpsed the presence of its curvatures in the corners of his eyes.

This is what it's like,
he thought to himself.
This is what it's like to be changed beyond all expectation.

In the morning Gracian's mother heated a darning needle over a pan of boiling water and handed it to him. As she turned away he saw that the skin about her eyes was swollen.

*   *   *

He pricked it himself. When it burst it released a measure of clear liquid, a miniature river flowing from his head.

Later, at the mine, the men elbowed him and teased him about his bandaged ear.

“That's what happens when you listen to Gerard Dylong for too long,” they said.

 

 

 

Some days later Gracian found Paweł waiting for him once more by the gates. Around one eye there was a fading bruise, yet he seemed relaxed.

“You've had a fight,” Gracian said.

“Perhaps. How is your ear?”

A thick pale crust had formed upon the earlobe and it itched ceaselessly.

“Fine.”

“And how are Mother and Sister?”

“Mother's been crying.”

Paweł was silent.

“Will you come with me? For a short time?” he said then.

They walked to the Malewskas' flat. Neither Anna nor her family were to be seen. Paweł told him to wait where he was and left the room. One of Anna's dresses was draped over a chair back, and below that lay a pair of her shoes. In the empty room, Gracian wanted to go over and touch them.

Paweł returned some time later with a large battered cardboard box in his arms.

“Here,” Paweł said, giving Gracian the box.

“Why?” said Gracian.

“No questions. There is one thing, before you look. You must never show this or mention it to any person. Only you and I must know of it. Understand?”

“I understand.”

“Do you swear, brother?”

“I swear.”

Gracian opened the box. Inside was bedding made of crumpled strips of paper and on top of the paper was the most wonderful thing Gracian had ever seen. He looked at it for a long time and then, as careful as if he had a baby in his hands, he lifted it out.

There it was.

A telescope.

Two

 

 

 

The telescope consisted of three cylinders of brass-hued metal, each with a thin gun-silver rim encircling the ends. Four rims in all. The thinnest cylinder, as thick as a small tree branch or a hand-axe handle, could slide into the second cylinder, which again could slide into the last. Then the whole thing was no longer and no more wide than a wine bottle. The sliding took some effort; the action was halting and stubborn, as if the telescope found no dignity in its own reduction. There were dents in the metal of the cylinders, signs of wear and usage. But the lenses were clear and true and without blemish. Weighed on upturned palms the telescope was surprisingly light, as if it might splinter like parchment if dropped, its secret lost forever.

*   *   *

Gracian knew from experience that certain objects seem to possess a soul, or at least hold within them a store of memories and experiences that can be read upon their surfaces like type. He felt this of the telescope from the moment he saw it on its paper bed. He felt the life of it and heard its calls to him, a music of glass and metal. Images came to him all at once.

He imagined the telescope in the hands of a sailor on some storm-stung sea. He saw its skin reflecting the lightning, prying a space between black-heaped clouds, rain spattering the metal with the sound of frying oil.

He saw it in the hands of an assassin. There in some distant country crouched among the baking rocks above an encampment, moving slowly from one far-off figure to the next, registering faces, gestures, habits, uncovering and remembering, pointing down like an arrow from its owner's eye; as if the telescope brought the first death, the real death, before the bullet.

Last, he placed it in the hands of a blind man, brought up and pressed against the fragile bulb of his eye. The blind man stood on a balcony that hung over an ancient town draped in blue light. He stood there casting a long shadow on the balcony floor with the telescope raised to his veiled eye.

For the blind man, Gracian saw, this was a great and unfading pleasure, an imaginary magnification of a world he had known only in his imagination, a sweet reassurance that the vistas he saw in his mind were as real in detail as any other. For when the blind man looked through the telescope, the lens projected only what the viewer already kept within him.

But Gracian did not lift it to his own eye until later that night, when he had reached home and stood in his room with the doors closed and no lamp lit. Earlier he had gone downstairs to the brick-tower heater that stood in the corner of Francesca's room. He had dragged over the hessian sack of coal, which belched out black puffs and stained his hands, and he had opened the iron grille at the base of the tower and shovelled in coal, stoked it, and closed the grille. Then he had gone into the kitchen to eat with his family, the telescope concealed in the deep inner pocket of his coat, which hung on his chair. The suspense of it was nearly impossible to bear.

In a few hours the sky was completely dark and the brick tower had radiated its heat to the upper reaches of the house. Gracian got up from the table, hiding his eagerness to climb the stairs, and the curious eyes of his mother and his sister watched him disappear from them, his coat bundled in his arms and the telescope inside like the heart of a sleeping animal.

Only the top pane of the small window in his room could be opened, and Gracian hauled it down. Then to give himself height he dragged over the old dusty clothes trunk. It had belonged in turn to his grandfather, whom Gracian had never known, and his father. His father had used it when he was in the army during the Great War. On one side it said
SÓFKA
in peeling gold letters. He stood up on it before the window and felt the chill air on his face and the clinging warmth of the room on his back and neck, as if he were rising up half submerged from a gentle sea. His ear was nearly healed and no longer throbbed in the cold.

Then slowly, ceremoniously, he looked through the eyepiece of the telescope.

The difference was this: Lying back in the viewing place with his father's magnifying glass before him, the stars had revealed themselves to him in two layers, one within the other. The first was the flat wide ground of the sky; flat, yet of that depth of darkness in which the eye loses itself. The second was in the round frame of the glass, the stars there gorged and indistinct, the sky slightly grainy as if drained of substance. In this way, he had transformed the star-strung sky into a page for his perusal, examining the stars together in their scattering and then subjecting a portion to closer scrutiny. And each layer was distinct; Gracian could move his eye from one to the other at will.

But the telescope sucked Gracian up through it into a singular universe, a looming, shivering place whose vibrations were numerous and often wild, responsive to the beat of his heart and the hot blood-swell through his hands. Here the stars were no longer a multitude and instead became a few fat round shimmers, light blurs of great brightness and beauty and seemingly so near that the boy reached out a hand out to feel them and was surprised to find his fingers groping through nothing.

There were no longer layers but a concave concentration, a oneness. Everything about looking through the telescope, it seemed to Gracian, was singular. One eye squeezed shut, hiking up the corner of his mouth, the other wide open against the single hole. The entirety of vision was channelled through that hole, that open eye, pulling him whole into the giant stars so far away. An upward flow. Circles within circles.

For the first time, Gracian was able to see things the book with faded red letters on cream had spoken of. He could make out the faint forms of stars that had evaded him. He could see the hazy colourations that meant he was looking perhaps at another planet or perhaps another moon. And though he could no longer see the constellations complete, he could trace out their patterns, as if in doing so he were giving them life.

Through the metal eye, Gracian's world was restored to him. Each day he waited patiently to greet it again. For a time everything inside him felt well and at peace, and he thought what he felt was a kind of love. He had a new secret now, and to look through the telescope was to surrender to its power.

 

 

 

Christmas came and went. Gracian's mother could secure only a single carp from the salesman who came each year from the breeding rivers in the south. She had to bribe him twenty deutsche marks. No one made an effort to invite Paweł; in any case, there was too little food for his inviting. But his absence had hung in the room like a void, a ripple of the air. Gracian ate with his mother and Francesca and Józef Kukła and the baby. There was little talk.

“This is
good,
Mother,” Francesca had said, speaking through a forkload of carp. “There really is plenty.”

“Yes!” said Kukła; then, turning to Gracian, “Your mother could make a broth with hot water and a rusty nail!” It was an old joke. His father used to make it. Kukła laughed too loudly, slapping his knee.

*   *   *

Gracian looked at the stars. The viewing place, like the imprint of a breath against a windowpane, was fast fading from his memory. He began to talk and joke again with Gerard Dylong and the other men at the mine and felt an easiness return to his steps as he walked through the village, though the easiness had a limit and the limit affected all the villagers. The attacks by the local special police, whom the villagers called by the German term
Schupo,
had worsened. There were four or five of them, youths from the surrounding region, in age not far off from Gracian, who would patrol the village threatening those who passed. Gracian had heard of at least three beatings and had himself met their stares on his way back from the colliery. Józef Kukła had begun to come home later from work in the bakery, to avoid their patrol. Even Old Man Morek cut his songs short. And Gerard Dylong said he had been spat at.

“They spat in my face yesterday in the street,” he said. “They were so young their uniforms hardly fit them. Those green hats falling off their heads. I could have killed them all. I thought that, to myself, y'understand? I could have snapped their necks like twigs and left them broken.” He shrugged his heavy shoulders. “But what then, Galileo? Then this world might well have lost the best coal miner it's got. It would be like robbing the world.” He leaned over and patted the coal face. “And I would never have found my treasure.” His smile was like its own lamp in the dimness.

Through the telescope Gracian learned to see again. Though at first it was the stars alone that occupied his sight, over time a change occurred. After he had had his fill of the constellations, Gracian's muscles would lengthen after the work of the day and he would often fall into a weariness. At these times he would transfer his gaze to matters closer: to the fixtures of his room, to the empty cracked concrete of the yard with its vegetable patches strangled bare by the winter. He came to enjoy this shift of perspective and spent some time indulging in it, for he found the pleasure of looking at the sky made keener by the pleasure of looking at the world around him.