The Stars Can Wait (8 page)

There were times, too, after work, when the afternoon balanced on the edge of evening, that Gracian found himself alone in the house. He had begun to stand in Francesca and Kukła's room, where the window gave a clear view of the curve of the main street. The texture of the cobblestones, the dim traces of figures behind darkened windows, the expressions on the faces of those who passed, all were laid out before him. He stood entranced, his coat close at hand so he might conceal the telescope if anyone came back to the house unexpectedly.

It was on one of these occasions, viewing the street outside, that out of the corner of his eye Gracian noticed a spider. It was crawling down the white flaking window frame, its feet barely alighting on the wood. Distracted, the boy glanced at it and saw it slip on the bevel of a frame divider and tumble suddenly into empty space above the pane. And just as he thought the insect had lost its fight with gravity, it stopped falling and hung there suspended, legs dangling limp like the hand of a dying man.

Without thinking he turned the telescope upon it, finding that he had to step back some paces to let the creature come into focus in the lens. Now the spider was a mass of bristling hairs protruding from the round nub of body and the junctured skeletal legs. In a moment, though, the spider recovered itself and began to climb up its invisible thread, and Gracian could see its workings like those of a machine with its casing off: the synchronized flexures of the limbs, a set of tiny pistons; the pincers clutching, strong, enduring.

It seemed to Gracian at that moment that there existed in the world two visions, each at an extreme. One saw the world from a great height or distance and the other from hardly any distance at all. Both visions were full of intricate sights, a whole universe of them, but normally these lay beyond the reach of man. The vision held and lived by men was a pale, weak thing compared to the other two visions, which, Gracian thought, might be called the true visions. The vision of man existed at neither one extreme nor the other but in an unrevealing haze between the two: an unlit, compromised vision, offering nothing beautiful to the eye.

It was possible for man to gain passing access to the true visions, as he himself had done. Through the surrogate eye of a telescope this could be achieved, or through other means equally unsatisfying—a book of history, perhaps, that spoke of the great roll of ages, or the reflection in a morning dewdrop, or perhaps the view of the land on a clear day atop an empty tor. But for man to achieve one of the true visions, he must always forsake the other. Both universes at once, the far and the near, were beyond his grasp. See the grace of a spider's movement and miss the structure of its body; see the structure, and miss the movement. One or the other. Such were the choices.

If only, Gracian thought, there was a way of reconciling the two. To see truly and with both eyes together. Then what secret might be unveiled? What story might at last be told?

But even in the urgent beating of his mind and of his heart, there beside the cool transparency of the window and the scrabbling of the spider, he knew this to be impossible. It was the fate of man to see with eyes unlike the stars'. Eyes weighted to earth, their scope always stopping short of forever.

 

 

 

On an evening soon after he had seen the spider, Gracian sat in his empty room thinking about Paweł. He had not seen his brother since he had given him the telescope, though he still half expected to meet him one afternoon leaning against the colliery gates amid the snow. He did not know if Paweł was holding his job in Osok, but he supposed from his lack of contact with the family that he was. His mother did not ask after him, though he knew her thoughts wandered frequently to her elder son, for when they did she would draw herself up, flexing her jaw as if to brace herself. One day Gracian had thought about visiting him, but had turned back embarrassed less than halfway to the Malewskas' flat. If Paweł wanted to see him, he told himself, he would make himself seen. Until then, their lives were best left to trace their separate tracks.

The evening was drawing close around him, and he sat on his bed with his boots off feeling the hardness of the mattress beneath him and listening to the wind blow the snow outside. The telescope lay some distance away from him, on the cabinet that stood beside Paweł's bed. The round blank lens was facing at an angle toward him, and he saw his own face reflected, stretched upward and ghostly in the circular darkness. For a moment he did not recognize it; the chin was too defined, the cheeks too narrow, the eyes had about them an intensity. The image he saw was of a man and not a boy.

He stood quickly, dug his hands into his trouser pockets, and scraped his fingertips against the rough inner cloth. Then he walked out of the room and paused in the hallway. He could hear his mother and Francesca talking, their voices coming to him as if through water. He turned and walked to the room in which his mother slept and placed his hand upon the doorknob. He turned it slowly, wincing with expectation of the noise that would alert them, but none came, and he swung the door open and walked inside. It smelled of his mother there, fragrant and with an under-spice that reminded him of being a small child close to her. He moved to the chest of drawers that stood at the foot of the bed in the small unaired room and opened the bottom of the five drawers. This was his father's drawer, where his mother kept mementos: a bundle of yellowed letters tied with string; a seashell shaped like an ear; reading glasses, coated now with dust; a pair of rolling dice; a watch that no longer ran, and whose snapped strap his father had worn mended with sealing tape. And photographs.

He picked up the slim pile of pictures and shuffled through them until he found what he had been looking for. It was a photograph with white lacy paper edges taken by one of his father's friends with a new box camera some years after the war, the black now ebbed to brown and the white to cream. His father looked young; he was standing in his work clothes in the soft shadows of a summer morning glade in the forest, a smile just breaking across his wide face. For some years he had done a seasonal job felling trees, and here he stood with one boot up on a tree stump looking like some popular hero or explorer, the long axe over his shoulder. Behind him other men were working. He couldn't have been more than twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old.

Gracian had not set his eyes on this photograph for some time, and the youth and strength of the man he saw there seemed strange to him. He turned the picture about briefly in the filtered half-light, letting the moon sheen the surface, and then pushed it into his shirt pocket and hurried out.

In the quiet of his room he took it out and placed it on the window ledge to let the light from outside illuminate it. He did not wish to light the lamps, for in the encroaching darkness he felt a sanctity and the sanctity seemed fitting. He manoeuvered the picture so that it lay vertically on the ledge before him, his father's face facing his. Then he stepped away and back, moved again over to the photograph, closed one eye, and lifted the telescope.

In such close-up the features of his father's face shimmered and dispersed into granules. Gracian did not know what he was looking for among them; perhaps for the shadow of the disease that later ravaged him, perhaps for the fainter shadows of his own face. Yet as he looked, other pictures with sharper focus began to crowd the lens, moving, bringing their brightness upward to him.

*   *   *

His father sitting at the end of his bed in a room choked with light and heat despite the open window. Tomorrow was Gracian's ninth birthday.

What would you like, boy? his father was saying in that way he spoke: Silesian dialect, more old Slav than Polish. What would you most like to have?

Gracian propped himself up on his elbows. A finch, he said, imagining the bird in his palm. A golden finch.

His father frowned. And how do you expect to get one of those?

I don't know. But I've wanted one all my life.

There were creases in the corners of his father's eyes. All your life? You haven't lived yet. You have a whole past to earn.

How?

You earn it by years lived.

But I do want one. I have a cage for it. I made it myself. From wood.

That's no cage, boy. That's a box. A finch needs to feel free.

It will. It will feel free. I'll make sure.

His father's big rough hand patting his head, messing his hair, fingers stained the colour of amber from all the rolling tobacco he smoked. Well. We'll see.

The next day his father had gone to work in the forest. The story was that in the midday heat he had seen a nest of finches high up in a birch, squawking as their mother fed them. He laid down his equipment and tested the grip of the bark and then began to climb the tree. He climbed until he reached the nest. While he was trying to cup one of the young birds in his hand the mother bird had dived down from the higher branches, eyes like angry pearls, beating her wings to keep steady and biting at his fingers. He dropped the young bird and grabbed at the trunk, but he knew he had lost it and fell in a hurtling daze of green and yellow. He hit the ground and lay there panting, shocked. Some of the men gathered around him and offered him their hands to pull him off the ground. But he had just brushed them away and got to his feet and shook his head, as if to clear it of a thought, and then made his way back up the tree.

He came home that night with scratches all over him. He strode over to his son and scooped him up against him so the boy could smell him, smoke and sweat.

How's my boy? he said, and then put him down. I have something for you.

Where? Where? What is it?

He turned to his side and nodded down at his jacket pocket. Have a look.

Gracian, breathing heavy with expectation, hooked one finger over the rim of his father's pocket, pulled it open a little and peered in.

The baby finch sat among a small soft cloud of mustard feathers. Its crown was a little black thumb pressing down onto vivid red, its head was darting to its own bird rhythms, its eye was an opal, and from its tiny beak came soft chirpings. Gracian let it hop onto his hand and took it out for all to see.

It'll feel free, he said.

*   *   *

Later his father made him a proper cage from a wooden disc and strands of silver wire. He kept that bird in his room for two years. The day after his father died, it escaped through the wire and soared out into the yard.

 

 

 

It was deepest night now, when the sun is most distant from the earth. Gracian took the photograph from the sill and dropped it on the bed, letting it slip from his hand as a man might let slip a used wrapper or spent ticket. He stood by the window and saw the yard and the forest beyond that.

Something pulled his eye into focus, a warp of movement out among the shadows of the field beyond the yard. A small black shape was passing from each tree shadow to the next, as if made from the same substance as the darkness. It was making its way slowly, moving in bursts, quick and agile, leaping, stopping, vanishing, and then returning, in a wide zigzag motion down the face of the field. Gracian felt the small hairs rise up on his scalp. He thought what he saw was a phantom, born from the wanderings of his thoughts. But the closer it came, rushing out across the dark earth, the surer Gracian became of its reality.

Finally he remembered the telescope in his hand. He slid the chest over with the outside of his foot and stepped up onto it and tried to force the top pane further down to give him better vantage. It gave only a few inches before he felt it wedge there. He raised the telescope.

It was gone. There was nothing but the fields and the still air, in which seemed to hang low motes of dust, catching moonlight. As he moved the telescope in a small parabola around his eye, the scene became nervous, halting to right itself and then shattering again.

And then, finally, movement renewed. The spirit had detached itself from the far edge of the field and was passing quickly over an area of white. The boy could see that it left behind it a trail of shallow pockmarks in relief against the snow.

Footprints. It was, then, a figure. A man. A man running.

The man had reached the low end of the field and was almost at the perimeter wall of the backyard, and when he reached it he stopped. He bent down to catch his breath, his open mouth visible, and then stood again. Although Gracian could see the man now, see the muted colours and contours of his body and even a little detail on his hat and coat, both of which were as black as the trousers and shoes, he could not quite make out the face. It would not remain stationary and there was too much shadow; the hat drawn low over the brow seemed to leak its darkness onto the skin below.

Instead of moving on, the man seemed to be waiting. He had crooked one hand up onto his side as if to depress a stitch and the other hand was stroking his chin and so further obscuring his face to Gracian. The man was gazing out into the field beyond the rectangle of space prescribed by the window frame, and Gracian knew he had no chance of looking where the man looked.

Some emotion was transforming the figure. His body became more animated, his arms coming down to his sides and hanging tensed, and then he bent himself over a little, his head facing side on to Gracian at the window. He was gesturing beyond Gracian's frame of vision, sweeping his hand toward himself, mouthing urgent but inaudible words.

Then came another figure, also dressed in black, running in from the left. The boy's grip on the telescope tightened. The figure came running, and the man opened his arms and embraced it, lifting it a foot or more from the ground. By the size and movement of this second figure, Gracian could tell it was a woman.

The man and the woman stood together in the cold silence. Then the man glanced around and gestured toward the wall, and with sudden grace both of them had vaulted it and were in the yard.