The Stars Can Wait

Two

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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.

They were in the yard! The boy withdrew swiftly from the window, aware for the first time that he might be seen. He reasoned with himsef: They were still a distance away and without the aid of a telescope. They could not see him. He swallowed air and reapproached the window.

They were sitting with their backs against the wall and the man was leaning forward, talking to the woman. She appeared not to be looking at him but concentrating on her breathing, her chin lowered and her arms resting on her outstretched legs, bent at the elbows and palms upward like a doll’s. But now she was reaching up and laying her hand on the man’s face, the heel of it against his ear. And this action of hers must have been a sign, for the man stopped talking. He stopped talking and they looked at each other for a long time. Then slowly their two heads came together in a kiss.

Gracian thought their lips would part but they didn’t and instead the kiss became something different; it became a joining. Their heads in the darkness became the movement of one thing. And now the man was leaning forward and inward, not sitting anymore but almost kneeling, pressing into the woman. His hand and then his arm was against her stomach, and the woman, too, pressed into the man, pressing back with her own weight, their hands moving over each other slowly, then faster. Slowly, then faster, with the man’s head now buried in the crook of the woman’s neck and his hands disappearing into the darkness of them both, and though the moonlight struck stark the shifting surfaces of them, still the faces were unknowable. They went down slowly together now on the lucent ground, easing down; he could see the taut folds on the man’s sleeves. Then the man was lifting the woman’s torso from underneath, so that her head tipped back loose and came up to meet the man’s in a kiss renewed and there was a rhythm to it. There was a rhythm to it, how the man reached down, dragging his hands over her black skirt folds, which Gracian only now could see. Dragging his hands back and upward, lifting the black fabric of the skirt, the whites of her thighs showing in the night. And then he was over them, between them, and the both of them moving, moving together, their breaths bright coils of white.

And their breaths were Gracian’s breaths, loud in his ears, and their fingers were his fingers keeping the lens steady.

And their movement filled him with something he had felt before without placing it, and their movement coated them both with snow, so that the ground below them was a dark bare ring, and the stars shone wide above them, and then they were slowing and slowing and slowing until they were no longer moving, frozen.

He had been balancing on the chest and now his socked feet slipped, the telescope hitting the window frame. He could feel the nerves below his skin and in his muscles and could barely lift it back to his eye.

When he did he saw both figures moving swiftly back out along the exterior wall and slipping past its perimeter and around the outer edge of the house. Gracian ran out of the room. He went down the stairs two and three at a time and now he did not care who he woke, for a hot desire had bloomed within him and he jumped the last steps onto the floor and half skidded, half padded, taking long strides into the kitchen and to the window. There was no noise in the house. He pressed his hands and face against the cold glass and stared into the void beyond the side wall, knowing he was too late. He turned his face and crushed his cheek flat against the glass. Far away down the street two shapes like flapping black rags were vanishing along the house edges.

And still he had not seen their faces. But he had seen enough. Enough of the sleepy, loping gait—so like his own—and the wide back of the one, and enough of the hair darker than night and the long arms of the other. He had seen enough. He knew Paweł Sófka and he knew Anna Malewska; he knew them well.

It was a new year. January 1941. The snows fell less often. Far away in Africa, the British and the Australians and the Germans were fighting a war for Tobruk.

The next night Gracian waited for them to come, but they did not come. The night after that he waited for them to come, but still they did not come.

Two nights after that the man was there at three in the morning, racing down across the field. This time when he reached the wall of the yard he paused, and Gracian got his first conclusive look. It was Paweł all right, out of breath and breathing hard. But Anna did not join him that night, and in moments he had gone.

Over the space of the next fortnight Gracian watched every night, often sleeping for some hours in the late afternoon to keep strength for the night. Five times he saw his brother emerging from the distant forest, each time taking the same route down to and around the yard. Five times too he saw his brother moving in the opposite direction, slipping out from the darkness to appear before the wall and then making his way by the same method up toward the forest. He would appear from the same place between the trees, sometimes an hour later, sometimes two, sometimes more, and come back down.

Once or twice Gracian thought he saw more figures flitting by the hem of the forest, but he couldn’t be sure. Sometimes Paweł seemed as before to be waiting for someone or for a sign that Gracian could not see. But if it was Anna he was waiting for, she didn’t come to him.

At first he had wondered: Did they come here every night? Had he been missing this silent congress so close below the window? Was this a habit of theirs, to meet and kiss and lie upon each other on the cold floor of the yard? But why would they do such a thing? Out of necessity? Because it pleased them?

At first he had wondered: Did Paweł want him to see these things?

But as he watched his brother come and go without Anna more and more often, he began to see it was another meeting he had been missing. Some other meeting bigger than the one that had made him wait through the hours with the telescope clutched in his fingers, wait despite his desperate weariness, because his nerves were taut in expectation and desire.

Along the yard edge, across the field, inside the forest, something else was happening.

Gracian had felt a curiosity about Paweł since he could remember anything he thought important about himself. Like all else, he had learned to get used to it. But this new discovery, of which Paweł could not be aware, had lifted a tiny lid inside him, and he felt it lift, and now he was sick of not knowing. He wanted to know, to know something.

Because Paweł might find himself in danger. Because there were lives for the living outside of his own. Because of what he had seen in the stark moonlight, where two bodies could find themselves entangled so tightly that there seemed no hope of their parting.

He asked his sister first, going to her room after work. He had washed himself quickly in the shower rooms, and the black dust was still on his hands and in the creases of his neck and in slivers beneath his fingernails.

He knocked on the door and pushed it open and stood sheepish in the frame. Francesca sat on her bed with the baby at her breast, her finger delicately holding open the rough crease of her blouse. She looked up at the noise of him, her eyes preoccupied. Her face was distracted, shiny.

“Gracian. What is it?”

He had been preparing for this all day, but now the force went out of him. He simply stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, stirring the floor dust with a boot tip.

“What’s the matter? Can’t you see I’m busy?”

The baby had stopped his suckling and was making movements with his mouth, opening, closing. His little hands searched the air and his wide eyes roamed. Francesca pressed him back into place against her.

“Francesca … I … I’ve been thinking.”

“About what?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing.”

The baby starting to make noises like water in a pipe.

“Then why are you still here? What’s bothering you?”

“I’ve been thinking about Paweł.”

“Oh, yes? Well, he’s certainly done a lot to think about recently.”

“He has? Like what? What has he been doing?”

“Don’t be stupid. Refusing to work, first. Fighting with Józef like that. Storming out. Never calling on us. I don’t care if he has a job now, he needs to apologize. There needs to be respect. You understand, Gracian, there has to be respect between families, especially now.”

“Yes. But…” Gracian ran his dirty hand across his hair, smearing his forehead. “But I was thinking about it before. About Paweł before. When I was little. I know he did some things. No one ever told me what. I—”

Francesca sighed loudly then. The baby, startled, started gurgling.

“Oh,” she said flatly, as if making an announcement. She lowered the baby onto her lap and began to rock it slowly on her knee. Up, down, up, down. The baby made a sound like sha! and fell silent.

Francesca was looking out with steady brown eyes under glossy lids. Looking at her little brother.

“Listen to me, Gracian,” she said. “I have enough wars to fight. My own battles. I don’t have time for this one, and I have even less time for those of the past. Ask someone else. Or, on second thought, don’t. Don’t ask anyone. Just don’t ask at all.”

She had said all she would. Quietly she set the groggy child on her lap and began rebuttoning her blouse.

Gracian nodded, took hold of the doorknob, and began to close the door. When there was only the smallest slit of light visible between the door and its frame he heard Francesca’s voice again.

“Gracian,” she said, “just forget it. You’ll know someday. You just picked a bad time, that’s all. Bad time for all of us.”

* * *

Two days later he got a chance to raise the subject with Kukła. He felt somehow that this gaunt, guarded man might be willing to speak. And again he was wrong. They sat together alone in the kitchen in the fading dusk. It had been a day of exceptional brightness, the snow-covering a mirror for a high white sun. Only evening had brought relief.

Kukła was filling his pipe and reading one of his novels, Latarnik. It was his favourite. He had read it six or seven times while Gracian had known him. When he sat down Kukła glanced up from it, said, “Hello, boy,” and lapsed back into silence.

After a time Gracian said, “It’s still cold.”

Kukła did not look up or break his reading. “Will be for a time.”

“Must be warm in the bakery.”

“Too warm. Like hell, boy.”

Gracian sniffed and leaned in his chair, making it creak. “Wonder what Paweł is doing?” He tried to say this vaguely, as if it were a question that had merely leaked from his lips and was directed to the air.

“Don’t say that name near me,” Kukła said with no change in his tone.

It was very quiet. Perhaps the snow was falling again, for the falling of the snow seemed to smother sound. The beams of the house groaned somewhere.

“Just thinking,” the boy said.

Slowly Kukła placed the book open and face down on the table.

“Your brother is a kind of animal. Don’t ever think otherwise. He thinks he has charm, he thinks he’s full of puzzles like a circus magician with flowers up his sleeves. But there’s nothing there. Nothing but his own dirty animal selfishness. Don’t forget it, boy. And don’t go upsetting your mother and the rest of this house by bringing him up here.”

He pushed his chair back and stood and picked up his pipe and walked out of the room.

Gracian sat still, staring at the book lying spine upward in front of him and at the reflection of the book in the polished wood. After a minute Kukła came back, retrieved the book, tucked it under his arm, and left again.

* * *

He didn’t ask his mother. He couldn’t expect anything from her.

Gracian thought of Gerard Dylong only later, on his shift, after they’d blown the first charges of the morning. In recent times Dylong’s efforts to find the store of sulphur had seemed to intensify. Now instead of running his palms across the coal face he would lay the whole of himself against it and reach his hands up on either side in a slow circle. His big hands would skit and flutter against the rock and his eyelids too would flutter in his head and his pink tongue tip would come out from between his lips. To see this giant of a man pressing himself there was both comic and peculiar, and Gracian would often lower his eyes or turn away to tend the explosives when Dylong was prospecting like this.

Dylong’s efforts were never all in vain. They were clearing record amounts of coal with each blast because of Dylong’s instructions where to bore. And because each clearing revealed no sulphur, Dylong worked them both hard and strong to clear the coal to blast again, and Gracian’s weariness from staying awake far into each night could not reach him, because Dylong gave him a power in his blood that sprang straight from that man’s driven soul.

* * *

“Drill there, not there,” Dylong was saying now, pointing to his markings. “Don’t get it wrong, Galileo, don’t ever get it wrong.”

Watching Dylong there against the coal face, the idea came to Gracian almost with the force of a revelation. He remembered how he had once asked the veteran where he had learned his skills. At this, Dylong had laid down his hand axe and folded his arms. “The coal is a mystery to be unravelled,” he had said. “First you must teach yourself the nature of the mystery. Then you can start looking for the solution.”

* * *

He waited until they sat, as was their habit, side by side against the slatted wall braces, passing between them a single unfiltered cigarette burning in the carbide glow. In the quiet, Gracian wondered to himself about the solution Dylong had spoken of. He wondered at what moment Dylong had concluded that the riddle of coal had only a single possible answer: sulphur, green and pure.

What a curse it was, Gracian thought, to know the answer, yet never to find it.

He took a deep inhalation, rested the ball of his skull against the wall brace, and felt the smoke fill his body with its musty breath. He closed his eyes, saw the redness of his eyelids, and passed the cigarette back over to Dylong. His arms ached, deep in the tendons.

“Well, well, well,” Dylong was muttering, shaking his head as if in disbelief or perhaps mournfulness, whispering to himself. “Next time, next time.” He took the cigarette and put it to his lips and sucked on it and exhaled through mouth and nose. He tried to spit out a few stray strands of tobacco that clung to his lip, making a noise like thpt-thpt, but failed and had to pick them away with indelicate fingers.

“Dylong?” Gracian said, rolling his head over in Dylong’s direction.

“What is it, Galileo?”

“In your life. You’ve seen a lot of things?”

Dylong gave a laugh that turned into a cough. He bent forward, pressing his thick chest against his knees. He looked at Gracian and then looked back again. He scooped up a piece of rubble from the flooring before him, moved it about in his palm. Then he launched into speech.

“I have been a miner for forty years. I started when I was twelve. Saw two collapses in my career. Twenty-five men dead in the worst one, ten of them trapped for six hours, choked in the coal dust. I saw the people of this place rise up and find themselves, two long months in the spring of 1921. It took more than a vote—took blood, boy, took too much blood, going back years. Saw my own father wounded in the chest by the Freikorps, early 1919. He hardly spoke after that.

“Had women, many young women. Beautiful women. Had a wife the best of them all. Had a son. Not for long, but I had one, a beautiful son. I saw the Germans come in convoys over the hills, starved and pale like old women. Saw them fill their mouths up with Polish sausage, bread, butter, till they were shitting themselves in the fields. Shitting themselves and vomiting, right there in the grass, I’m telling you.”

He nodded at the empty space before them.

“You could say I’ve seen things, Galileo. You could say my eyes are all full up with seeing.”

Gracian considered the words. “Do you ever think of it all?” he said. “The past?” he said.

“The past should be left to the past,” Dylong said.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Gracian said.

Dylong glanced at him. Old ruddy skin, ingrained with coal. A smile trace lifting a cheekbone. “Ha,” he said.

“I’ve lived,” the boy said. “And things have happened. People have done things. I know they’ve done things, and I want to know about them. It’s time that I knew, Dylong.”

“What are you so worked up about?” Dylong said, turning to him. “What people?” His brow was lined.

“People like my brother. Like Paweł.”

Dylong closed his hand and reduced the rock there to dust and let the dust filter between his fingers in four coarse streams. Then he slapped his palms against each other. “Time to go,” he said. “They’ll think we’re starting another shift.”

He stood up, brushed down his coveralls, and began gathering: pick, shovel, drill, drill bits, anthracite.

Gracian watched him, agitated. “Do you know something?” he said, trying to keep his voice steady, aware of the close edge of Dylong’s temper. “Dylong, do you know something?”

And Dylong just buckled his canvas bag with the tin and the drill bits inside and put it diagonally over him and swung the drill up over his shoulder, hoisting the shovel under the strap, and starting away toward the bend of the face where the roofless trains left for the lift shaft.

Gracian pushed himself up and ran after him, and though he was not much shorter than Dylong the boy felt half his size. He ran and overtook Dylong and stood himself firm in front of him, his arms poised, not knowing what to ready himself for. The boy could feel anger clenching his gut tight. Dylong looked at him.

“Get out of my way, Galileo,” he said evenly.

“Please,” the boy said, his voice low. “Please tell me what it is you know. About Paweł.”

Dylong looked at him with grey eyes the colour of winter.

The anger had risen unexpectedly to the boy’s throat and now it began to choke him. He could not find the words; his lips moved but no sound came. He felt his face darken. He stood there in front of Dylong, his mind racing.

“How can I earn my past when no one will tell it to me?” he said, finally.

“Ah. But it is not your past we speak of, is it?” Dylong said.

“But it is. It is, don’t you see? My family. My past.” He could say no more.

Dylong looked at him. He breathed loudly through his nose. He shifted the drill from one shoulder to the other. Finally he sighed.

“All right,” he said.

They rode not speaking to the lift shaft, and the lift shuddered and then bored upward to ground, and they stepped out into light. They stopped the water flow in the carbide lamps and extinguished the lamps and then they walked to the equipment room and signed off the spare explosives and the drill and drill bits and went to the lockers. There were a few men there, loading up, and Dylong led the boy to a quiet place where rows of coats and jackets hung like shed skins and sat him down among them.

Dylong sat down opposite, glancing around warily as if he suspected ambush. He leaned forward, and the shadows of the hanging coattails on his face looked like the wings of bats.

“Now listen,” he said. “Listen close, Galileo.”

And Gracian listened. He listened to the silence between Dylong’s every breath as if that silence could yield to him a treasure unsurpassed. He became nothing but the act of listening, and such was the force of this transformation that Gracian felt that the very walls and the benches and the lockers and all about him listened too.

And then Dylong began.

“It must have been eleven or twelve years ago. Those were difficult times for all of us—you probably can’t even remember that far back, can you, Galileo?—but they were hard times, all right. Back then all the shops were full to bursting, that’s true. Far cry from these starved days we’re living now. But money was so scarce it didn’t really make a shred of difference. And jobs, too. Jobs most of all. If you weren’t already working you were in trouble. That’s why every day I still thank God for the mines, and thank Him twice for the blessing of coal. Y’understand, Galileo? Because the first thing you’ve got to know about all this is that a man will do strange things when he can’t get work.

“Twelve years ago. You were four years old, boy, nothing but a grub. Your father was alive. Your brother was about your age now, I suppose. A little older. A man, and full of a man’s ignorance. Always was a strange creature, your brother. Had his own ways and stuck to them. Stubborn, afraid of company. But strong, a fighter, always getting into brawls, always riling people up in some way or another. Despite the quickness of his temper I don’t think he asked for it, really. It just came to him.

“That was the time he began courting Anna Malewska, of course. And you can imagine, can’t you, the number of other men, same age and older, too, he had to contend with? Some days they would come to his door just to ask to fight him and sometimes he’d come back bloodied, though more often he’d wipe the floor with them. Got quite a reputation for it, at so young an age. A real reputation. Still carries it with him in this village.

“But young Anna never loved him for that, Galileo. You see, Anna was always chiding him and slapping him about the head and making him blush for it. Anna’s always been the only one who could keep the reins on him. No, she loved him for reasons all her own. Everyone could see she wouldn’t even look at another man, despite everything she could have had from them. Despite her beauty. Not another single man. In truth it was Anna and Paweł together always, as if they were the very model of love, as if their names had been written together in the book of love. Or in the stars, eh, Galileo?

“Anyway, your brother had been learning leatherwork since he was fourteen or so, but all the trouble he got himself into and those own natural habits of his put him far out of favour with the man he was apprenticed to—old Manasik, who died a few years ago from too much vodka. Manasik kept telling your brother to calm himself down or he would withdraw the apprenticeship with his shop, and what with so many men unemployed and what with him still living under your family’s roof that would be a thing worth regretting for the rest of his life. Paweł was sixteen when Manasik started his threats. He put up with it for half a year, and then finally his patience crumbled just like coal under rotting brackets, and one afternoon he threw the saddle he was making half finished right at Manasik’s belly, laying him to the floor. If he wasn’t such a fat beast, I think he would have been crippled or even worse by the force of it.

“So Paweł left the leather trade.

“Thing is, Galileo, your mother and your father, they never knew of this. Francesca found out later, but she didn’t tell them, didn’t want to cause them upset. Your mother and your father only knew when it was too late. That’s the next thing you have to understand about all this. Because Paweł told them he had left Manasik’s employ, true enough, but then he also told them that a hidesman near Pietraszowice, your mother’s birthplace, wanted his labour. This was a lie. This was the lie your brother told. And he worked hard and with great cunning to maintain that lie. You see, boy, Paweł did begin to work around Pietraszowice, but not in the way he told your family. And he came home the hours you would expect for a hardworking apprentice, often staying overnight on account of the travel distance. He made sure too that if your mother or your father had cared to make enquiries, a man who called himself Jorg Mroncz, bag-maker and saddlesmith, would vouch for him—as indeed would many others, for Paweł had made a lot of connections where he needed them and made them fast.

“Now you must understand that Paweł did not start this new venture all by himself. Even one such as Paweł could not have the knowledge to do it, or necessarily the will. To gain will, you must have others around prepared to foster it in you. So this is what happened: After Manasik kicked him out onto the street, Paweł fell in with a bad crowd. Not from this village, mind you, but from neighbouring parts. A wandering group of petty criminals and malingerers, Galileo, a no-good bunch. One or two of them had heard of Paweł’s troubles and had heard too of his street brawls and his surly reputation. They approached him, invited him to drink a bottle or two of vodka and to smoke with them, and persuaded him to join their team. And though great worry would be brought upon your own family, boy, by your brother’s decision that day, if the truth be told I never really blamed him for it. What could he do, without a job and a means to help the family thrive? Unemployable—in this village, anyway. Keen to keep Anna’s love, and young; young and filled with the heat of it in his blood. Perhaps I would have done the same, Galileo, given the chance. For what is crime but a darkened reflection of laws made to choke a man? And it’s always the young that get choked first.

“Have you guessed it yet, Galileo? I can see by that gape of yours you have not. Then I will tell you: smuggling. Your brother became a smuggler. You should have guessed it when I mentioned the land surrounding Pietraszowice. Nothing but forests, forests as dense and wild as those here in Maleńkowice. And to where do those forests stretch? A good few kilometres into German soil, with no sure way to police the border there. There’s just too much forest. But the smugglers had spent years learning the secret language of the trees and the brush, the tracks and trails that led through it and crossed the border into Germany. And Paweł too learned those paths and, so the story goes, learned them better than any of his fellow smugglers.

“Smuggling, Galileo, was no small trade back then. In that time of no work and little money in Poland and Germany alike, a good many farmers were willing to buy and exchange smuggled goods. The money you could make from smuggling was often less favourable than the payment in goods. There are things in Germany you can’t easily get here, and it was the same the other way around. A certain type of German orange. A certain breed of Polish horse. So these things they smuggled. In and out across the border, through the forest. Paweł learned his craft quickly. He learned how to monitor the movements of the border guards who sometimes patrolled the German fields. Learned how to pick a single route through the forest and memorize it. Flashlights were easy giveaways, you see; better by far to run in darkness. And finally he learned always to enter and exit at the same point of the forest, or else you might get lost. And if you got lost, you got caught.

“I’ve heard tell that your brother smuggled entire herds of horses into Germany. With the other men he would ask the farmers who were known to them as allies to forsake any spare animals they might have in return for goods or money. Then, I’m afraid, they would swell the numbers by rustling from the farmers who wouldn’t sell. Picking off an animal here and there where they had been allowed to roam abroad in the fields unsupervised, tossing their manes and blowing steam through their muzzles. And in the dead heart of the night they would lash the beasts together and ferry the whole lot through, stamping and blowing and rolling their eyes, straight into trucks waiting at the other end. That’s quite something, eh, Galileo? Quite something.

“So all that time your mother and father believed he was working for the leathersmith, and he would bring back gifts of bags and purses to keep them believing. Fact is, boy, no parent wants to distrust a son. No parent wants the pain of such a discovery, no matter how strongly they suspect there is something to be discovered. So they believed, with or without the gifts, and Paweł continued his runs across the border. Eventually, of course, Francesca found out. She found two sacks of fresh oranges under his bed. She always was a bright girl, and curious too, curious like all the Sófkas seem to be, but Paweł made her promise not to tell and she agreed, not wanting trouble in the house.

“She must have worried, though. Because sometime later, I suppose after fretting and arguing it out in her head, she told Anna Malewska. And Anna was furious. None of us had ever seen such fury, though of course we didn’t know then what stirred it in her. You should have seen her, marching through the village to the station! She went to Paweł that night and demanded he stop all his business with the smuggling, and stop it immediately.

“You see, Galileo, she was a bird keeper, and Paweł her falcon. She let him fly now and then, and hunt and dive and create mischief abroad, but always only in a circle around her. And when she felt it was time she would draw the falcon back in, remind him whose care he was under and upon whom he relied. And then he would become as harmless as a common cockerel. Of every man in the village, Paweł understood this best. He knew his calling to her.

“And because of that young woman, that young man Paweł Sófka, barely older than you, remember, agreed to find another way to live. Perhaps if he had been quicker about it things would have continued harmlessly, with none offended. Who can tell with such things, like guessing the outcome of a rolling die? No one, not even me. Because Anna’s pleas came only a few days too late.

“Paweł was already committed to one more night run through the forest, on the midnight between Saturday and Sunday. A small contraband, fruit and fish. He had given his word to the others, and you know Paweł is a man of his word. For Paweł, his word is his act; no gap exists between the two. Furthermore, if you ask me, he must have known full well then that to bow out of a smugglers’ pact is like signing the warrant for your own death.

“Without telling Anna, he made what was to be his last illegal border crossing. Now, the way that team did it sometimes, especially with the smaller contrabands, was to divide the run between two men. One would take the goods halfway, meeting another man at the border point, often marked in the forest by only a few stakes, painted Polish colours on one side and German on the other, and sometimes even left unmarked. The second man would then finish the job. This is how it was arranged on this occasion. Paweł was to do the first part, the Polish run.

“And so he arrived at the forest at midnight, resolved to make this the last time he would come to this place. He carried two loaded sacks and a pistol. The route he would take was imprinted on his mind; if he closed his eyes he was already running it. On the stroke of midnight he began his trip. I dare say, Galileo, that he thought of many things as he ran—of Anna particularly, and of the new kind of life they might soon begin together. It would have been a warm night, despite the hour.

“Eventually he reached the rotted border stakes, bent in the earth by crawling tree roots. He had no light. The darkness of the forest whispered around him. And the second man was not there. Only empty night, waiting. Well, Paweł stood and waited too, growing nervous. Still the second man did not turn up. Paweł was just about to turn back, relieved, I’m sure, that nothing had happened, so nothing could go wrong, when he heard a noise coming from beyond the borderline on the German side. The noise came and then vanished and then came again. Paweł hesitated. He took one step into German territory. Then another and another. The noise seemed always ahead of him and he took more paces to follow it, always ready to run the short distance back to safety.

“And then from the darkness emerged men, three or four of them. Men with torches and guns, German police. Your brother turned around and saw more behind him. Trapped. No going back.

“Men whose business is deception often betray each other. The second man had done just this. Perhaps he had got wind of Paweł’s plans to quit the team and wished to punish him or cut him off before he became a dangerous liability. Perhaps he had simply made some deal with the German authorities. It is impossible to tell. Whatever the truth was, Paweł had no choice now but to run, ever further into German soil. He dropped the sacks and bolted, and the police gave chase. He sprinted until his lungs must have felt like bursting. Sprinted and sprinted. He knew much of the forest, which gave him the advantage. And he was fast, fast like a startled wild horse. He ran through the night and the torches grew smaller behind him. Then they started firing. Shots booming in the early morning darkness, Galileo, louder in that still forest than a dynamite charge in a coal face. Must have been quite a sound.

“But Paweł escaped them all. Nothing could touch him. Until finally he could run no more. Exhausted, he found the twisted overgrown stump of a tree and sat himself upon it. He could never have known for sure if he had lost his pursuers. Perhaps he even resigned himself to the possibility that his luck had run its course. Because the story is that Paweł didn’t attempt to hide, didn’t even attempt to keep moving. Just sat there, waiting for something to change. Perhaps he sat down as a way of saying to them, to everyone, ‘Do with me what you will; there’s no more left that I can give.’

“Occasionally he would hear a volley of shots echoing up from the trees. Gradually the volleys grew closer, and still he sat there. And then from nowhere a stray bullet, fired at random by one of the border patrol, found its target. It had been slowed by the foliage all around, you see, so when it hit Paweł it would hardly have moved him. It would have hit him gently, like a pin piercing a tyre: deflating him. It entered the left side of his chest and sneaked through a rib and grazed his lung. You’ve seen the scar there, haven’t you, boy?”

He had; he had seen it! A thousand times he had seen it!

“They found him half an hour later, still sitting on the stump, one hand stemming the blood. He was arrested immediately. When the German police chief reached him, dragging his feet and wheezing from all the running, he stopped and unholstered his revolver. Then he pushed the catch and flipped open the chamber and tipped out one of the bullets. Held it up for Paweł to see, held it up reflecting the moon between his thumb and forefinger. Showed him what hit him.

“The rest? Well, the rest is a sad affair. Much of it you know or have seen, without knowing its true cause. Paweł was laid up in a hospital in Oppeln for three months and then thrown into Oppeln prison for another half year. When your parents found out they were truly shocked, I’m telling you. Your mother raged for weeks, wrote Paweł long letters about his disgrace, his betrayal of his family’s trust. And your father—your father just seemed to close himself up, like a book you’ve lost interest in. You couldn’t see inside him. He was still and solid, like brick. And sad. A sadness had him; he lost his fighter’s strength. Your mother despaired at it. When the disease came on your father so soon after, a part of her, I think, blamed Paweł for his yielding to it. It shook your family at its heart, boy; I know you must have felt the vibrations. Any child with brains would have, and you’ve never been short of those.

“It must be said, though, that Anna Malewska did her best to argue Paweł’s case, for she understood his predicament, despite his neglecting to tell her about that final job. She loved him, you see, and once love has been built, the foundations can take a lot of damage before they give way. At least that’s my opinion. And I’ve known love.

“And Paweł? A change came over him in prison. He wrote letters back to his mother and to Anna, his lover, telling of his guilt and of his shame. He spoke of wanting to make amends, to find principle and structure in his life. When a man does not have structure, Galileo, his confidence in himself fades and falters. Each one of us needs a frame to hang ourselves upon, a frame of principles and notions and actions which we believe in. Otherwise we are simply baggy skins, empty ghosts of people. I think in prison young Paweł first realized this.

“He spoke of wanting to join the army. Or, rather, of the army as his last hope of gainful work. Of course, boy, this was not true. There are always employers here who are prepared to hire a young man with strength, and in any case the Polish authorities would have no real issue with Paweł after his release, since he was captured in Germany. But he got it into his head to join the army. Perhaps he thought he could find his frame there. He was seventeen years old, one year before he would have been called up for compulsory service.

“When he got out of Oppeln prison, he came home only to apologize to his family and to Anna. He poured his heart out to them. Hoped they would forgive him. Then he travelled to the recruiting office in Katowice and lied about his age and signed the papers.

“They did forgive him, eventually, your mother and father, though the relationship between them all was never the same. A darkness slept always over them, casting its shadow. Anna was the only one to forgive him completely, forgive him as if nothing ever had happened.

“Paweł served in the Polish army for five years. By the time he left, your father had passed away. When he finally came back for good, his spirit had settled itself somewhat and he caused less trouble in the village. But there was an added intensity to him, a concentration of the old Paweł into something harder and sharper and more deep … within itself. He hardly spoke to the other villagers. He devoted himself to Anna. She became his fiancée and they lived together like monks, like hermits. In their own world. Then in ’thirty-eight he signed up again.

“But you know all this, Galileo; all this you know. And now you know it all. No one ever told you before because they believed what I have said to you already: The past is best left to the past. And let me tell you I feel cruel and like an idiot for telling you all this. But then you had to have it. You had to have it.”

Finally, Dylong had finished. He sat and looked at Gracian, the bat-wing shadows flitting over his face.

“Is this all true?” Gracian said at last.

“As true as it could be.”

“Are you sure? Did you see it with your own eyes? You couldn’t have.”

“I know everything that happens in this village. I told you; I am the eye that sees all.” And Dylong’s eyes were bright, but behind them shone a deep regretfulness.

“Now let’s go,” he said, “before someone takes us for conspirators and we end up in the camps. I tell you, boy, I don’t know who’s worse, the ones that invaded or the ones that’ve lived here all their lives.”

Dylong stood. “This village has turned against itself, like a dog biting on its own tail.”

With that, Dylong placed the flat of his hand on Gracian’s back, and the boy stood, unable to feel his legs. He swayed once and steadied himself, pushing his hands into the coats. With his words, Dylong had forged a lens in the boy’s head and peered down into it. Gracian felt a sense of invasion. He did not know what Dylong’s story might bring; perhaps nothing would change, or perhaps a door had swung open, never to be closed again.

His head was reeling. He thought to himself, The time is confused. He thought to himself, There’s no knowing it. He thought of Paweł’s face and his mother’s wooden spoon and the snow coming and then fading. He thought of Kukła’s childlike pipe and Dylong’s wide grin and the humming of heaters and the look in the eye of a German guard who had, on a day, let him pass: a look at once violent and furtive and knowing. He thought of the changes that had come over his own body. He thought of black sheets of coal, bruised eyes, telescopes, and the stars above, and he thought of Anna Malewska reaching up to touch her hair.