One

 

 

 

On an autumn night in 1940, one year into German occupation, in a Polish mining village called Maleńkowice within the area known as Upper Silesia, a fifteen-year-old boy named Gracian Sófka sat poised and upright on his bed watching his sleeping brother. He breathed carefully and with respect for the silence, each breath composing itself into a white cloud, blooming and then fading into the cold air. His brother, Paweł, twelve years his elder, whispered in his sleep, a single long strip of moonlight tracing over his cheek and pillow. When Gracian was sure that sleep was absolute, he swung his legs slowly round and let his feet rest upon the floorboards. He reached down, hands fumbling in the dark, and pulled on his woollen trousers and a heavy sweater over his nightshirt and then his shoes, pausing now and again to let the low creaks of the mattress resolve themselves into silence. Then he stood and walked to the door, unhung his coat, and hunched it on. He patted the pocket to feel the bulk of its special cargo, waited with one hand on the rim of the open door for nothing, for the right time perhaps, and then slipped out.

In the hall he walked too noisily past the room in which his mother slept. At the end of the hall was a window. The moonlight painted pale oblongs onto the dirty wood. Downstairs slept his older sister and her husband and their baby and some of the animals who were locked into the kitchen out of the cold. He reached the window. He undid the catch and eased the lower frame up as far as he needed. The wood was old, and tiny white flakes tumbled down onto his hands. A gap had opened in the night and his heart was already beating through it.

*   *   *

He climbed out with an ease that was practiced, turned himself around on the ledge and knelt and gripped the wood, then he lowered himself slowly down until he was hanging by his fingers flat against the wall of the house. The night was black and faultless and a chill breeze pricked at his skin. He reached out with one hand toward the crab-apple tree that grew in the yard and felt the rough cold bark of the nearest limb and held it tight. He gave a slight kick against the wall and then swung his other arm through space and clamped that hand around the branch and he was free, the whole canopy shifting with his weight and the red leaves rustling, cascading, a crimson snow melting into the shadows below. He edged down the branch until he reached the trunk and let himself fall and thud onto solid ground.

Then he ran. He ran through the darkened yard, vaulting the wall there, and across the rise of field beyond, his shadow arcing up to catch him in the moonlight, his breath alive and white, up toward the forest edge. There were no patrols in the field, but once he reached the forest he needed to be careful.

*   *   *

The darkness of the forest was like no other, and the silence was not that of death but of the watching of things. The boy knew his way and moved as if following a path or thread of shadow visible only to himself. He weaved through trees and thickets, listening to the scuffling of his feet and the rasp of his breathing, tripping through blackness toward his goal. From somewhere further within the many kilometres of forest, further than he had dared to venture, came a brief ticklish rumble, and he knew that German vehicles were out there moving around the small outbuildings of the army base.

Less than halfway there, he heard the sound of voices and of feet less careful than his own. And after that came a sudden sweep of flashlight against the trees, becoming two distinct haloes quivering and breaking and rebreaking, and the voices coming nearer speaking German to each other in hushed bursts. Gracian moved himself behind a thick pine and let the night consume him. The two men came nearer, their flashlights probing. In the dark the boy’s chest heaved and his throat burned and the muscles in his legs were wire-tight. The men were very close, their footsteps seeming to sound inside his head, and the lights were leaping and idling around the closest trees and picking out the furrowed bark, and then they reached the place where the boy waited. He closed his eyes. He could hear the men pausing, muttering about the cold, and could feel the light curling, extending around the heavy trunk, trying to reach his face and tear it from the darkness.

The light was gone and the men were leaving. The boy waited and craned his head around the trunk. Two men. Olive coats and black pistol holsters. The patrol.

Again he was running. Deep into the forest to the viewing place, the place he had been coming to since he was twelve years old. A tiny clearing only a few metres square, where the trees rose on all sides to frame the sky in an unbroken circle, as if to offer it to the earth below. When the boy reached it he threw himself down upon his back among the thick bracken and spike grass and regained his breath and let the air cool his sweat. Then he took his first real look at the sky. No clouds. A pure and boundless nothing, pinned through with one hundred billion stars. The universe gathered between treetops.

He lay there and gazed up for a long while. Then he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the bronze-gilt magnifying glass his father had used for reading in the last months of the disease and weighed it in his hand. He reached back in and removed the small book and read again its title, eyes straining in the dim reflected starlight: WSTĘP DO ASTRONOMII, faded red letters on cream. He turned to his favourite pages, ignoring the words, and inspected the pictures there. Constellations, eighty-eight of them, their names below—names wild and restless in a language that was not his own—the River, the Furnace, the Hunting Dogs; Eridanus, Fornax, Canes Venatici. The Lion, the Wolf, the Southern Cross; Leo, Lupus, Crux.

Propping the book next to his head, he lay back down and raised the magnifier before his eyes until the ring of sky had slid behind the lens, bulging out toward him. He watched the stars swell and settle as the glass swept over them, and he looked there for the printed shapes upon the page.

In the east, the Great Bear. In the west, the Crab. He traced their shapes with his eyes, like reading.

*   *   *

After a while, he put down the glass and huddled in his coat for warmth and watched the sky unaided. He would have to leave soon, he knew, but the dreaminess had him and he imagined himself rising up into the expanse until he was nothing but another pinprick dancing above the world. Then a meteor shower on the northern rim of the trees sent out five or six trails reaching out and dying back, as if a golden hand had risen through the distance and tried to grasp hold of the night, and Gracian was lost completely to the wonder.

 

 

 

By the time he heard the footfalls it was too late. He felt two hands grip him roughly by his coat collar and he tried to gasp, but one of the hands had clamped his mouth shut. A man’s face was upside down over his, blocking the sky.

“You idiot.”

Paweł. It was his brother, Paweł, hauling him up with his good hand to face him. His bad hand was around Gracian’s neck.

“What do you think you’re doing out here after curfew?” he was saying in a low voice, his expression violent. “Lying on the ground like a madman! Don’t you know they’ll kill you if they find you? The forest is crawling with patrols tonight, you stupid boy. Ty idioto!”

Paweł snatched the magnifier from his brother’s hand. When Gracian could speak he said, “But what are you—? You were sleeping—”

“You are a madman, do you know that?” Paweł said, dragging his brother up until they were both squatting. “Now be quiet and follow me. And stay close.”

Paweł led his brother back through the forest a way he had never travelled before, until they were back at the house and the sun was lapping at the distant forest edge and the blackness was becoming candlelight orange. Tomorrow Gracian had to work an afternoon shift at colliery Richter, known formerly as colliery Siemianowice.

Before they climbed back through the window, Gracian turned to his brother. “Please don’t tell Mother,” he whispered.

Paweł placed his hands on his brother’s shoulders. “I won’t. This time. And you should be grateful for it until the day you die,” he said.

Then he shook his head and looked hard at Gracian. “But this madness has to stop, understand?” he said. “This is the last time; I’ll make sure of it. This hobby of yours is not worth your life or Mother’s happiness. The stars can wait, boy—that’s all they ever do.”

Gracian remained silent. Then he said, “How did you find me, Paweł?”

His brother did not smile. He simply made a trough with his hands for Gracian to stand upon and told him to hurry before the sun was full.

An hour later the cockerels began to sing. It was the autumn of 1940. In a small mining village in Upper Silesia.

For the past year Gracian Sófka, fifteen years old, had been risking his skin to look at the sky.

By the time half a year had passed, Gracian would journey twice more into the deep heart of the forest, the German army would reach the French Atlantic coast, the constellations would have followed their secret paths across the universe, and Paweł Sófka would no longer be alive.

 

 

 

Gracian was woken by his mother a little time later. She was shaking him, and when he opened his eyes he saw that bright sunlight had broken into the room. His mother tugged at his blanket.

“Get up,” she was saying sternly. “You sleep too much.”

Gracian saw that his brother was gone, his bed empty and neatly made, and he was suddenly afraid.

“Where’s Paweł?” he said.

“Out,” his mother said. “Looking for work. Now get dressed; you need to feed the animals before you go.”

Paweł had not told her.

Gracian put his clothes on and went downstairs with his mother. At the table his sister, Francesca, was washing clothes in a tin bowl, the child on her knee. Her husband, Józef Kukła, had left for work. He was a baker. Before Gracian went into the yard he checked the drawer beneath the sink and saw his father’s old magnifying glass there, tucked back inside its brown cloth bag.

*   *   *

That Paweł had found him in the viewing place did not seem very strange to Gracian Sófka. For Paweł was a mystery—to Gracian, to his mother and sister, to the whole village. A mystery.

When Gracian was five years of age, Paweł disappeared from the family home for nine months. His mother and his father, who was still alive then, said that he had gone to live in Germany for a time. No one spoke of it, least of all his father, who would become silent at the mention of Paweł’s name and remove and fold up his glasses in his big hand and stare out the window toward the shadowed forest.

Paweł returned with plans to join the Polish army. He became a corporal. He could ride horses. He left after seven years of service and came back home and secured a little leatherwork. In 1938 he volunteered again and was stationed as a mounted radio operator in southern Slovakia to help defend against the coming German invasion. His job was to ride between unit encampments with a giant coil of radio wire slung over his shoulder and lay the wire down as he rode.

There he had fought long and hard and had seen many men injured or killed. Then two days before the Germans overwhelmed the Poles, Paweł had been caught in a mortar storm. His horse was killed beneath him and two fingers from his left hand were blown off. For a while he had searched for them among the field grasses before his division found him and took him to safety. When Gracian could coax his brother to speak of his experiences in the army—rarely, for Paweł spoke little at the best of times—he would say, “What do I need two useless fingers for, boy? Now at least they’re doing some good, feeding the crimson flowers by the river Hron.”

When the Polish army was finally defeated, Paweł had stripped off his uniform and dressed himself up as a civilian. Where he had obtained the clothes he would never tell, though Paweł was an enterprising man, and Gracian imagined that he had persuaded one of the Slovak villagers to come to his aid.

His hand bleeding through the tight-wound bandages, turning them slowly red as the flowers of which he would speak, Paweł had started to walk. He walked, alone, up through Stredoslovensky province, following the Hron as far as Brezno, then across open land until reaching the dark Carpathians, where he sheltered among the mountain crags. Then onward toward the High Tatra peaks sheathed in dust and snow, along the lonely passes, traversing the border into Poland, where in Rabka he was able to steal a horse and ride down through rough country south of Kraców into Silesia, the horse half dead from starvation by the time the lights of Katowice could be seen. And then on foot to Maleńkowice and finally home, collapsed at the door, his bones jutting like shipwrecks beneath red-baked skin.

He had been moving for three weeks, avoiding capture. He had travelled nearly two hundred kilometres.

After his return, many men in the village asked Paweł why he had not, as others had, fled into Italy or Switzerland and rejoined the Polish forces. But Paweł never answered them, for the answer was clear. The answer he had given upon the day of his return, whispering it through lips parched and dusty at the kitchen table as his family fetched him food and water. The answer, captured pure and simple within the breadth of a single word: “Anna…”

Anna Malewska. Daughter of William and Urszula Malewska. Paweł’s love and his fiancée. She was a beauty such as the village of Maleńkowice had never before witnessed. Her skin was as pale as morning milk, her parted hair two folds of black silk across her shoulders. Eyes the fragrant brown of sandalwood. A man would gladly walk the length of the world for Anna Malewska, thought Gracian, as his brother gasped her name one day a year ago, and he had closed his eyes to picture her face and felt once more that silver pang of something he could not name.

Paweł had recovered and now spent much of his time away from the house, with Anna or looking for work, although where he went and who he saw about this remained obscure. His three-fingered hand kept him from re-entering the craft professions, and he always claimed the mines were not for him. This made their mother, who was paying what she could for Paweł’s upkeep, bitterly angry.

“They’ll give you a job there, Paweł—I can’t fend for you forever. There isn’t enough,” she would say.

Paweł would tut and rake his hair and fold his arms. “Just give me time, Mother. I’ll find something. I never asked for your money.”

“Listen.” Her face calm but her voice becoming steely. “I’ve had about enough of your ingratitude. If the mines were good enough for your father and if they’re good enough for your brother—”

And Paweł would fling back his chair, sending it tumbling across the floor, and stand up. “Well, maybe it shouldn’t be good enough for Gracian! All he’s doing is feeding the Germans.”

His mother would be frozen then, her face red and her wooden cooking spoon drawn up into the air between them. She would not let them talk of the Germans. She was as afraid as the rest of the village.

“Don’t start, Paweł,” she would say in an urgent voice, her eyes wide and alarmed. “Your talk could kill us all.”

He would leave. And then the silence of the house and of his mother would silt down upon Gracian, weighting his shoulders. Later, Paweł would return and apologize and embrace his mother and promise to visit the mines tomorrow, but no one believed he would.

Such was the way of Paweł Sófka. Always leaving. Never staying. There were times when Gracian was tired from work and he would sit with his brother unspeaking, feeling a great swell of desire to question him about the way in which he led his life, but something about his brother’s quiet face made the words falter and drown before they left his mouth, and he would be unable to say a word and then it was too late and Paweł was up and dusting his trouser fronts with his palms and vanishing outside again—back out into the close-guarded mystery of himself.

 

 

 

When he was a child of six or seven Gracian had once gone through the pockets of Paweł’s midnight-blue suit, which hung on its own heavy wooden hanger in the wardrobe. He was looking for a few stray złotys to buy some boiled cukierki with in the village. He had to stand on a chair to reach the suit, which was worn to a shine at knees and elbows as if to retain there the force of Paweł’s joints, and he dipped his hands first into the trouser pockets and then under the flap of the jacket and finally up into the inside pocket. He found nothing but fluff. He tried the side pockets of the jacket, left and then right. In the right he came across something on which he stubbed his fingers. He wrapped his fingers back over it and felt the weight, the smoothness. He brought it out and spread his palm to reveal it.

The gun was small and square and only a little bigger than his hand span. The surface was silver and polished to a liquid shine, and there were a few embossed letters and numbers that he could not read. The handle was white, hard. He held it in both hands and pointed it away from him at the floor, the chair shifting and protesting on the uneven boards. He put both index fingers of both hands around the trigger and pulled hard. Something moved at the back of the weapon and there was a loud solid click that echoed. In surprise he dropped the gun, and it fell with a crack against the wood. Immediately he jumped off the chair and picked it up and pushed it back into the pocket, his heart racing, suddenly afraid of the strip of light under the door.

 

 

 

Gracian walked to the mines, a heaviness inside him. Paweł had said he would not let him back out into the nighttime forest, and Gracian believed this was true. A joy he had taken for himself since he was twelve years old was to be snatched away; he felt as if something too large to see whole had come to an end, before he was ready.

He walked through the village with his coat collar drawn up around his ears. Winter was coming. The day was clearer than usual, the coal-soaked air swept fresh by winds blowing cold from the north. As he passed, a German special policeman watched with eyes as pale as waterlilies.

He hung his coat in the locker room, then stripped and shrugged into his coveralls and joined the other workers in the gated forecourt. He looked at the moss and weeds growing in the cracks of the concrete as the lift came up to the surface. He stepped in with the others, and the lift plunged and his stomach floated inside him. At level four, one kilometre beneath the earth, he stepped out.

The mine was its own kind of night. But there were no stars there. There were only the wide black walls glistening and the white haloes of acetylene lamps.

The foreman had a lit cigarette stub in the corner of his mouth. Gracian listened for his designation, watching the deep orange ring of it rise and fall as the foreman spoke, and then he boarded the roofless train and swayed with its momentum until he reached his section of coal face. Gerard Dylong, his partner, was already there.

“Hello, Galileo,” Dylong said.

Dylong had heard Gracian talk of the stars a thousand times. He was the only one who would listen. He slung his arm over Gracian’s shoulder.

“Today we’re going to blast this entire face into dust,” he said.

Dylong, with his dark, creased, animal-hide skin and his bear’s shoulders. Dylong, whose mind many of the men believed had been poisoned by tragedy. “Don’t listen to Gerard Dylong! He’s a madman! His head is sick!”

So said the men.

Dylong was fifty-three years old, the oldest miner in the whole of southern Poland. When he turned forty, close to the usual retirement age for miners, his wife had died in childbirth, and his only son with her. Dylong refused to leave work, then, and had remained at the colliery ever since.

“What am I to do at home?” he had said. “Die as well, that’s what.”

But no one could deny his skills as a miner, for they were incomparable. Dylong’s understanding of the coal seams appeared to verge up on telepathy. Every shift he would stand in front of the face, one thick hand upon his hip, the other cradling his chin, deep in thought. He would step forward, run his palm over the rock, click his tongue and chew his lip, and glance over at Gracian, who observed, expectant. Then he would instruct the boy exactly where to place the explosives and how much, watching in silence as the coal cascaded down in the blast, and after the dust cloud was ventilated there lay revealed a quantity of prime coal for loading. Together, Dylong and the boy could clear twice as much in a few hours as other teams could in a day.

Dylong had a theory. He believed that somewhere deep within the black tonnes of coal there lay a rich untapped reservoir of sulphur. He said he could feel its presence in his skin. He said he could feel the green mineral down deep in the bone, where the marrow was. He said that one day he would find those sulphur deposits, and they would make him the richest man in the country.

Every shift he vowed to discover sulphur, and every shift his vow was left unfulfilled.

*   *   *

They worked hard and with few words. Dylong completed his deliberations and then bored holes into various points of the face. Gracian prepared the explosives, lifting out the grey sticks wrapped in oilpaper, pressing the detonators into the tips, pushing them down to the lip of the bore channels. Then both men packed in the clay, soft in the dry flint, and stood back, and the blast thundered, and Dylong powered the ventilator to survey the yield. Now they could begin to brace the ceiling with damp wood slats before loading the carts.

But Gracian’s mind was not on the work today. He could think only of being found out last night and of the viewing place remaining empty, tonight and every next night to come. The thought made his muscles sag and he began to drop behind in his loading, the shovel like a dead weight in his hands. Dylong noticed this and paused in his work.

“What’s the matter, Galileo. Those scrawny muscles of yours finally given up?”

“Nothing,” the boy said.

Dylong propped his shovel on the cart edge and folded his arms and flexed his biceps and grinned. “Cloudy last night, was it?” he said.

“Just shut up, Dylong,” Gracian said.

Dylong flung out an arm and slapped the boy hard on the back of his scalp. Then he was leaning into him.

“The last man to say that to me soon regretted it,” he said.

But before Gracian could speak Dylong was grinning again and winking.

“Get your head out of the sky, boy, and back where it belongs.” And Dylong turned away.

After the shift was over they sat tired and dirty against the wooden props, and Dylong pulled out a pack of cigarettes, snared one in his mouth, and then passed another to Gracian, and the boy knew all was good between them because cigarettes were rationed, now, and rare. As they smoked, Gracian watched the older man, saw how he sat with his face set in sadness, and knew he was thinking again of the sulphur. Then Dylong said what he said at the end of every shift.

“Maybe next time, Galileo. There’s still hope.”

 

 

 

When he got home, Paweł was not there, but the upstairs window had been sealed shut with a row of silver wood tacks. Gracian ran his hands over their sharp heads and gazed at the sky beyond the glass.

“Paweł did it,” Francesca said as she came up the stairs. Her voice surprised him. “He said we needed to stop the winter draughts from coming in.”

Gracian ate with his sister and mother. The women were talking about Antoni Dukaj, the son of a leatherworker in the village. Antoni Dukaj was only a little older than Gracian.

“They took him off the street, just like that,” Gracian’s mother was saying. “Kicking and screaming. He tried to say he was working for his father, but they wouldn’t hear it. They just put him on the next train to Austria. Said he was needed to work the fields.”

Francesca shook her head. “Who knows what to believe?” she said, crossing herself.

“And do you know who they say reported him?” their mother said. “Karl Holzman! That bastard’s been here as long as we have, and now they come and suddenly he’s a German again.”

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!”

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.

And now his mother was yelling, no words but only noises—“Haaaa! Haaaa!”—dancing around the two men, shaking her hands and brushing her fingers against them and slipping off them, repelled, as if the two men had become one liquid mass; and the door slammed open once more and Francesca rushed in, her eyes wide and unbelieving and the baby crying in her arms, wailing, its tiny face raw and crumpled, and Francesca setting the baby on the tabletop and moving over to help her mother. And finally Paweł was dragged up, breathless, panting, his neck veins throbbing, and Kukła rolling on the floor covering his eyes with his palms, and Paweł’s hair smeared against his forehead, no blood on his face but dark reddened blotches. And his mother shouting.

“Out! Out! Out! Out! Out! Get out of here! Haaa! You are not welcome in this house!”

Paweł sniffed and pushed his damp hair back and snatched his coat and hat. Without speaking, he walked past the table across the room and to the door. He did not look at Gracian. He opened the door onto a rectangle of frozen white. Outside, the snow was still falling, and he stepped into it.

Gracian watched him go. He felt despair. He felt it as a candle flame, starting at his feet and rising up to ignite his body until his heart burned and his eyes stung and a choking pressure in his throat caused him to gasp out, a gasp that crippled him, bending him at the waist. “Paweł!”

From where he was now, in the street, in the snow, Paweł stopped and turned and saw Gracian. He stood for a few moments and raised one hand. Then he turned back again into the blank white afternoon and was soon gone, and Gracian felt suddenly certain that he would never see his brother again.

 

 

 

Later, as Francesca tried to nurse Józef Kukła, who would not stop cursing, Gracian’s mother stood and came over to Gracian and looked her son in the eyes and embraced him and refused to let go.

“Secrets, nothing but secrets,” she said in a low voice, close to his ear, almost whispering. Then she looked steadily at the boy’s face. “You don’t have secrets, do you, Gracian? Not like your reckless brother. You wouldn’t keep secrets from me? At least not big ones?”

Gracian not struggling, but thinking it best to yield to his mother’s arms, and shaking his head no, rested his cheek on the cleft of her shoulder which was shaking gently now, and remembered.

*   *   *

Eleven years old. The black shape of a man filling the yellow doorway. Perhaps now you’ll have a hobby, the book spinning from his hand down onto the mattress.

The constellation of his birth was Gemini. Wstęp Do Astronomii had shown him; fifteen stars formed its main body, and the two largest in the diagram signified the heads of twin brothers. Their names were Castor and Pollux. They were born from an egg, for their mother was a swan; each had a different father. It was said that Pollux was the son of a god and immortal but that Castor was human and could perish. In their lifetimes Castor became famous as a rider of horses, and Pollux fought and won many battles. The brothers had power together over winds and sea. When Castor was killed by his cousin, Pollux begged the gods to let him die with his brother, for in his heart he had only abiding love for him. The gods listened to his pleas, and finally the twins were etched together in the heavens, their hands bearing spears aloft.

Fifteen stars. It had seemed amazing to Gracian how something so simple could make for such a story. That was the marvel of it—from points of light, whole destinies might unfurl.

 

 

 

A week passed without a sign of Paweł. No one in the house spoke of the argument. Only the bruises on the face of Józef Kukła acknowledged its occurrence, and those too were fading.

In the village, Old Man Morek kept his vigil, his hats and coats a livery of snowflakes. He had begun to sing a new song, a song Gracian had never before heard him sing. It boomed and lilted endlessly on the bitter wind. It was about the mountain people.

Góralu, czy ci nie żal,

odchodić od stron ojczystych,

świerkowych lasów i hal,

i tych potoków srebrzystych?

Góralu! Czy ci nie żal,

Góralu! wracaj do hal.

Highlander, aren’t you regretful

for leaving your homeland,

the forests of pine and the meadows,

the silver mountain streams?

Highlander! Aren’t you regretful?

Highlander! Turn back to your green meadows.

Gracian mined each day from 6 A.M. to 2 P.M., seven and a half straight hours with one half-hour break. He lost himself in the work. With Gerard Dylong he could load eight or nine wagons over the twenty-wagon quota. There were no days off.

“Well, well, Galileo,” Dylong would say, watching the boy work as if there were not an end to his endurance. “Finally becoming a man?”

Always Dylong told him aimless, rambling stories of the old Silesia. Always they found no sulphur. Always they smoked a cigarette together after their shift. For Gracian, there was nothing but this daily ritual.

At the end of the week, Gracian passed out into the day after finishing and crossed the courtyard, where men walked quickly or lingered for a time, talking in the cold. His body ached with the work. He looked at his feet as he went, his mind empty. In his right hand he held the carbide lamp, which he kept always at home with him. Despite having showered, he felt the coal dust still on his skin, clinging like sweat. He felt the hardness of his arms and shoulders, the tautness of sinew. Approaching the wire-mesh perimeter fence, he glanced up.

Beneath the battered metal sign that read RICHTER stood Paweł. He was leaning against the gate edge with his hands dug into his coat pockets and his hat pulled down, breathing white. Gracian stopped and closed his eyes and counted to five and then opened them and found Paweł still standing there in the winter glare.

“Hello, Gracian,” Paweł said.

Gracian gave a flick of his hand by way of greeting. He looked at his brother. There was some swelling on his cheek.

“How is Mother?” Paweł said.

Again he simply gestured. No words would come to him.

Paweł cleared his throat and squinted into the sky above Gracian’s head and then looked at the ground.

“Blasted cold,” he said, as if to himself. Then he looked at Gracian. “There is work down at colliery Osok. In two days’ time I will see the foreman. I need someone who can speak German. To translate,” he said.

Like many other villagers born in the early years of independence, Paweł had never learned German. Gracian had learned mostly from his mother, but Paweł was never one to listen hard to the teachings of others.

Gracian continued looking at Paweł. He examined his face and saw a strange expression in his eyes. Eventually he spoke.

“I’ll come,” he said.

It was December 1940. The snows showed no sign of abating.

*   *   *

Two days later, after his shift, Gracian walked through the snow to the Malewskas’ flat. The flat was owned by the mining company. It was small and saw little light. The walls were the green of damp earth.

When he arrived, there was only Anna. Her voice told him to come in and he pushed open the door and saw her standing with her back to him, framed in the doorway of the tiny kitchen. She was engaged in some task: drying crockery, perhaps. Her black silken hair was pulled back and tied with a thin length of red cloth.

“Sit down, Gracian,” she said, without turning.

Gracian took his hat off and sat on one of the wooden chairs. In Anna’s unobserving presence he felt aware of the details of his own body: the largeness of his hands, the gestures of his arms, the heavy, mechanical movements of his legs. Already he felt the heat growing in his cheeks and temples. He sat still and stared at the matted fur of his hat.

Anna came in now with a mug of coffee, saying, “You must be tired.” He reached up and took it, keeping his eyes lowered and feeling the coolness of her fingers in the exchange. He took a sip. Between the hem of her long skirt and the rim of her leather slippers he could see her bare ankles. He watched them move across the room and saw her sit opposite him and watched the ankles cross over each other lightly, feet heels-up on the worn tan carpet.

“Paweł is just coming. He’s getting dressed,” she said.

Gracian looked up then and met her eyes and saw she was smiling in a way he thought suggested puzzlement. Her face had a radiance that Gracian thought could make even time stop to look in its direction.

“And how is young Gracian?” she said.

He drank again from the mug. The coffee fumes bathed his face. “Fine,” he said. And then, “I’m fifteen,” his eyes averted.

Anna smiled. They sat together there for a time in silence.

There was a noise then, a loud shuffling, and Paweł came in through a door Gracian had not noticed. He was wearing old suit trousers, a pale shirt and a brown sweater and over that a woollen jacket. He was newly shaven, red about the ears and throat. He seemed agitated, alert. He was tugging at the points of his shirt collar, folding them down and smoothing them over the neckline of his sweater.

He placed his good hand on Anna’s shoulder and she tilted her head slightly and reached up to brush his knuckles and then with her fingers reached back to feel the smooth black knot of hair, her movements quick and tender, probing.

“Gracian! Good!” Paweł said passionately, his face animated. “Are you ready? It’ll be a long walk and a cold one. We need something to warm us, I think. Anna, will you fetch us something to warm our hearts?”

Gracian had never heard Paweł speak like this, with such abandon. In his mind he tried to fit the words to Paweł or Paweł to the words but could accomplish neither. He was not enjoying his stay here. He was filled with the wariness of the trespasser and wanted only to leave.

Anna shook her head and laughed and then stood. Paweł sat down heavily in her place and rubbed his hands together and grinned at Gracian. Anna returned with a half-full bottle of rye vodka and two clean shot glasses. She filled them, handed them over, and stood with her hands upon her hips.

“Drink!” Paweł said.

Gracian looked at the crystal liquid in his hand and then raised the glass to his mouth. They drained their glasses together. Gracian gagged once, then felt the seeping flame in his throat.

Paweł clapped his hands together and stood. They put on their coats and fastened them and tied their hats close under their chins, then gloves and woollen scarves. Gracian led the way to the door. He heard Paweł say, “I’ll be back soon,” and turned and saw Paweł and Anna embrace. She slid her arms around the bulk of his coat, and he placed his hand on her cheek. They kissed on the mouth, and when they parted both seemed struck with a sadness.

Looking at them like this, Gracian felt as if he were invisible; he had become nothing but a frame containing this image of his brother and Anna Malewska collected between the dull walls. And as an image yields up only its surface, so Gracian understood then that an impenetrable wall encased and sealed them both and held them safe from all enquiry.

*   *   *

It was over four kilometres to colliery Osok. The wind had picked up, and in it the snow did not fall but sucked and circulated in shifting rhythms. It clung lightly but persistently to everything, until the walking figures seemed built of snow: concentrations of white moving in the haze. They were heading northeastward, faces into the wind, and if they had tried to talk—which they did not—their voices would have been swept up and lost completely.

Soon they left the narrow outskirts and were on a country lane where the white was thicker and unbroken and great banks of it sat upon the lane edges. As they passed, it would occasionally slide and collapse and reform itself, locked in the private geologies of snow. On the path they were utterly alone. They met no one. They walked with their backs bent and their hands pressing their collars against their cheeks. The path was straight and unrelenting.

They stopped once for Gracian to wrap his scarf tighter in a wadded loop about his chin. Paweł grappled with his own hat straps, hands clumsy in their gloves, and retied them firm. Gracian squinted into grey and saw there was no distinction now between earth and sky. They seemed in neither day nor night but rather in a lost and in-between time, a single moment extended out forever. Gracian longed for the mist to part before him and reveal the special clarity of a darkened sky. And as he longed, it seemed to him that the stars he could not see were also certainty; they were all the certainty of the universe gathered and condensed and sharpened until the black night was punctured a billion times and the light of eternity shone through, bright and clear and unwavering.

“We’re over halfway!” Paweł shouted hoarsely into the whirling snow, gesturing at his brother to continue.

Gracian had never felt such cold. He thought their journey would not end.

*   *   *

Then through it came the first houses of Osok. Two German guards sat hunched and shivering in a small wooden signal shack, their rifles drawn up against them and held by the barrels, but the brothers passed without question. Between the snow-washed shadows of houses the wind retracted its needle claws.

The village of Osok existed only as a bare and tiny annex to its colliery. Its mines were ancillary, smaller than those of colliery Richter, and it was for this reason perhaps that its nameplate had not been Germanized. The colliery building was brown-brick solid and without embellishment and towered up as if it had sprung directly from the rock from which it had for so long drawn its means of business. Reaching it, the brothers crossed the forecourt and found the offices and the door marked FOREMAN, gold on glass.

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.

“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.