The Stars Can Wait (6 page)

Paweł paused with his glove upon the doorknob. He inhaled deeply and stared at his hand. Here beneath the heavy unassuming cornice of the entrance the storm could not reach them, and though the cold hung round like a living thing there was the quietude of a kind of shelter.

Gracian looked carefully at his brother, at his pausing, and felt the time was right to ask a question that for two days he had not dared ask. The words before had seemed dangerous to him, full of deadly weight; it was as if their voicing might tip some invisible scale and plunge the world into terror. But now in his brother's pausing, and in the reality of the bricks and the ending of the journey, a hole had opened to claim the words, and there was no terror.

“Why, Paweł?” he said. “Why did you decide to come?”

Paweł looked up, his mouth open slightly in surprise, as if he had been woken from a doze. Gracian watched as once more his features hardened, re-formed to composure. Until there was not a hint of anything behind Paweł's eyes.

“Mother was right about one thing,” he said. “It's safer for me to work.”

He swung open the door and stepped inside.

*   *   *

They waited for a time in a dim-lit room where a secretary took their names, thumbed through a leather-bound book, found something, and snapped the book shut again. She told them to hang up their coats and wait. She looked ill, Gracian thought, as if she had not been sleeping. Then the wooden box on her desk made a sound and she pointed to the misted glass of the second door. Paweł patted Gracian lightly on the back and they went through.

A wide desk was the only furniture in the room, save the chairs on which two men sat and one empty chair on the opposite side of the desk. The plaster on the walls was fissured and peeling. Two electric fan heaters stood by two of the walls and were humming softly; the air there in the room was much too hot and smelled stale. A third man leaned loosely against the wall with his right shoe sole flat behind him, smoking a cigarette slowly, looking at the smoke as it rose. One of the men at the desk was absorbed in reading a broadsheet German newspaper with his face tense in concentration; the other, older and heavier than the others, was looking intently at Paweł and Gracian, his hands clasped before him. He was smiling in a way that seemed neither friendly nor very hostile. He had about him the air of one who could not be surprised or moved beyond his own compulsions. His hands were thick and looked dusty.

“Herr Sófka,” this man now said.
“Bitte.”
He raised one of his hands and directed it toward the empty chair. Paweł moved round and sat down, his body too large for the seat. Gracian stood behind him, keeping his arms by his sides. Paweł coughed and fingered the buttonholes of his jacket.

Gracian noticed suddenly that one of the men, the one at the wall, was familiar to him, a German who had lived in Maleńkowice when Gracian was a child. His name was Albert Schwabe. He had owned a shop; Gracian remembered trips there with his mother. Paweł, he remembered too, had once been on good terms with Schwabe and would nod to him in the street if they passed. But neither Paweł nor Schwabe showed any signs now of recognition or of acknowledgement. Both kept their eyes locked steady—Paweł's on the far wall and Schwabe's on his cigarette, its slow burning, the vertical smoke line rising.

The foreman transferred his gaze to Gracian. In German he asked if he were here to translate and Gracian answered that he was and added, “But my speaking is not perfect.”

“Don't worry, boy, we'll keep it simple,” he said, and then glanced at Paweł and lifted both hands and smoothed them down the seams of his trouser legs beneath the desk. The heaters hummed like insects.

“Well, Mr. Sófka, you want work here, is that right?” the foreman said, and Gracian translated.

“I need work. I am willing to work for you,” Paweł said, and then Gracian.

“And why are you not working already? Those who have not been working are usually troublemakers. There is no place for troublemakers. Or rather there are special places. Are you a troublemaker, Mr. Sófka?”

In his translation Gracian made himself like a glass mirror. He made himself feel no store in the words being spoken, as if they were simply packages wrapped for delivery and his job was to take the place of deliveryman, and though a part of his mind felt restive he stamped that part down and kept it safely away.

“I need work. I will work hard for you,” Paweł said.

The man gave a nod that was less a nod than a lowering of his chin toward his loosened necktie. Then, with his head down, he glanced over at the newspaper man, but the newspaper man turned a page with a rustling and kept reading. The man set his eyes straight again at Paweł.

“I see you have an injury. Tell me, how did you get it? How do you expect to work the mines with a useless hand?”

The man asked and then Gracian asked. It was so hot in the room, the air stifling. Sweat ran from his armpits and over his ribs.

“An accident in childhood; fell under a horse. It's not useless. I can hold an axe or shovel better than many men can.”

The man frowned and consulted a sheaf of paper he had all the while before him, but the consulting seemed more show than real.

“It says in this file that you were in the Polish army, although it doesn't explain why you are now here looking for a job. It also says you once spent some time in prison. The injury was not given you in either of these places?”

Gracian hesitated. He had never heard of Paweł being in prison. He did not know what this meant or would mean or even if it was true. He wiped the sweat from his brow and neck and looked at the foreman, and the foreman looked expectantly at him and he translated.

“No,” Paweł said after a moment. Gracian saw that his brother's face was flushed in the heat, but his body remained stationary and he did not look at Gracian.

The man gave a loud exhalation as if he were deflating and leaned far back in his chair. He dragged one of his slab hands over his hair and looked from Paweł to Gracian and back to Paweł again with a quizzical expression. Then suddenly he moved forward and extended a finger at Gracian.

“Translate,” he said. “Every word.”

The German looked hard at Paweł and spoke.

“Before you go, Mr. Sófka, let me ask you one question. What do you think of the way things are here? In your homeland. The situation. What are your views on these things?”

Gracian translated. Paweł shifted in his seat. For the first time he seemed unsure of himself and of what his choice of words might now be.

“I am a Pole,” Paweł said then. “I feel what my countrymen feel.”

The man raised his eyebrows theatrically, the pale wide forehead creasing. “Ah. A Pole. A Pole. Well, that is certainly an interesting proposition”—the man heard Gracian falter and glanced sharply at him—“that's
idea,
boy, you may say
idea
”—and Gracian said the word as he had been asked, and the man continued. “And I wonder why it is you call yourself a Pole, Mr. Sófka. Let me tell you about your
countrymen,
Mr. Sófka. Your countrymen are called Silesians and your countrymen do not exist. Historically they have not existed, for they inhabited a nation so weak and confused in itself as not to exist. They have always been nothing but vessels—empty glasses—for the filling and discarding of others. This is an orphan country you come from, Mr. Sófka. A tiny orphan child of a place. How do you say it—a
sierota?
After the war the smallest part of you was robbed from us. But now we have you as well.

“You were never Polish, you see. Not a Pole. You were confused, a nothing. And now you are a German. We have taken complete custody. No more problem, no more confusion. We have come to reclaim you like the father you never had. And you are lucky to have our acceptance, Mr. Sófka. You will learn in time to see the truth of this. For your own sake you will learn it.”

He eased himself back again and crossed his arms and brushed his chin with his thumb.

“What is your response, Mr. Sófka?” he said then, with his eyebrows winched up in that same way.

Gracian expected his brother to stand, but he did not. He did not even move. Instead, he smiled.

“You have given me a speech,” Paweł said, and then Gracian. “You have chosen to do this. But I have told you that I will work for you and work hard, to keep myself living. And it seems to me that what is needed is not words but work. You see, I have been told other words too, Herr Foreman. Other speeches. About the importance to you of the coal in this country of ours. About the shortage of good men and the need for more production. These things you need, but you do not speak of needs but only of countries and of philosophies. That is a shame for every man in this room.”

He stood. He rebuttoned his woollen jacket.

“But now, as you are saying, I must go.”

And then there was a sigh and the crackle of paper, and the newspaper man folded his broadsheet and placed it down before him. For the first time he looked up at Paweł. By the wall, Albert Schwabe was looking at the back of his hand, his cigarette spent. When the newspaper man spoke, it was in Polish but with a heavy German inflection.

“Mr. Sófka,” he said, “my name is Karl Gintse.
I
am the foreman of this colliery. I will give you work. You will work shift B, which starts at five-thirty tomorrow morning. Report here at five for your details. A partner will be assigned to train you. You may leave.”

Paweł paused and then nodded. He looked at Gracian, placed a calming hand on his shoulder blade, and ushered him out of the room.

 

 

 

Because the wind had subsided and because the snow brushed their ankles with pale blue shadow, the journey home passed quickly. Yet the cold had honed the air to slate and the slate slid through the brothers' clothes to their skin. There was no respite.

As they walked, Gracian's mind was full of questions. Paweł had given him no reaction to the events at the colliery, and his silence hung between them. Gracian had no idea where or by what means to broach it.

It was Paweł who spoke first. He was some strides ahead, and for an instant Gracian could not be sure the voice he heard was his brother's.

“You mustn't think about what was said in that room,” the voice said. He slowed to let Gracian draw up beside him. “You must learn things yourself and not through the mouths of others. You must think about them in your own time. Whatever you heard was my concern, and my concern only, understand, brother?”

“I understand,” he said.

They walked together, the sound of snow creaking compacted under boot soles; beneath that the rattle of breeze through bare branches.

Then Gracian saw Paweł's wide shoulders sag and his pace slow until he had stopped. He saw Paweł lift his head up and take a deep sigh inward, swelling his chest as if for the first breath. Gracian too had stopped, and now he waited.

“I'm sorry,” Paweł said.

Gracian thought of the hum of electric insects and the smell of smoke and the rustle of paper. “I told you I'd come,” he said.

“What? Oh. No, brother, I meant for speaking to you like that. Like Mother would.”

Paweł turned suddenly and looked at Gracian. His face was veined and flushed as if after physical effort.

“The trouble with families,” he said slowly, with care, “is that sometimes they try to bind themselves so tight they become blind with the effort of it, and then the blindness infects them and threatens everything they once were or might be. I do not know if a family in this blind state can ever find a cure. I think blindness is usually permanent.”

He turned his face away from Gracian's now and looked again out into the winter nothing.

“And the trouble with decisions,” he continued, “is that no matter how hard you try to keep them separate, to make space for them and then go on as before, they will always break free. And then nothing is as it was. Like water in a leaking bucket—a tiny leak you thought impossible, that you thought you'd patched—old decisions will find ways to trickle out and ruin everything. No matter how hard I've tried, it always happens.”

Gracian waited for him to speak further but he did not.

“I think I understand,” he said. He was shivering from the cold. But Paweł did not seem to feel it.

“And I'm sorry,” Paweł said. “I'm sorry for those.”

He lifted his arm and pointed to the space above their heads. Gracian looked up and saw the sky had dusked. Here and there a few white daylight clouds remained. In the upper night could be seen the dim shine of stars growing brighter.

“I know you miss them.”

Gracian wanted badly to look up but could think of nothing now but the cold. He had begun to shift from foot to foot to keep the shivers down. His teeth were chattering.

Paweł looked at his younger brother slap-hugging himself and shuffling, and then looked at the swirl of snow upon the ground, and Gracian thought he heard him laugh. Then Paweł kicked up a spray of white and began to walk again.

*   *   *

They were among the first streets of Maleńkowice and then they were further in and then they were close to the Malewskas' flat. Paweł said he would be leaving him here, and as he said it he glanced at Gracian. He halted and stopped Gracian with his hands and looked at him with urgency.

“Gracian! Your hat is undone!” Paweł said.

It was true. Along the walk the boy had been lost to his thoughts and his hat straps had slipped his mind. Instinctively he raised his hand to his right ear, and Paweł slapped it quickly away.

But not quick enough. Not quick enough to stop him from feeling that the lobe of his ear had become hard and brittle and to feel a bright razor pain through his cheekbone.

“How long has it been undone?” Paweł said.