THE DRAWING ROOM smelled of musky perfume and sweat; despite the cool day, people’s heavy, dark coats, the layers of wool, were making pools under their arms and on their lower backs. Jozef imagined the bloom of dark patches creeping along silk and the drips among the tiny hairs at the backs of necks. It pleased him to think of the elegant guests this way, their fleshy under-selves, the sharp tang of their bodies: under breasts, underarms, the lines under the buttocks. It wasn’t that he found it titillating, or even subversive, to strip them like this. He did it as a kind of guard against his nerves, certainly, but also as a kind of painter’s exercise, tracing the body, enjoying peeling away layers of careful pinning and arranging, the theatrical absurdity, really, of money and its pretence at being better, because of a thicker, denser, softer fabric, a shinier pin.
He stood in his accustomed place at the edge of the room, near the windows, sipping the best quality Russian vodka. He’d come to know the view from this point in the room very well over the last few weeks, where his easel was set up, and the sketches of Alicia layered over one another, so he could flip through them like a child’s game and watch her shape emerging, the lines becoming cleaner. As the afternoon progressed several of the guests had come over to peer at it, made practised noises of appreciation, turned away with barely concealed sniggers. They could only see charcoal and pencil, not the painting to come.
The vodka was too strong. Jozef would have liked it watered down, but when the servant, Robert, had offered the glass, he felt somehow it wouldn’t be the thing to ask. He held the glass in both hands, trying to warm the ice. The cold against his skin was welcome: he too was wearing a too-thick suit, black, borrowed from his landlord. Watching more guests arrive, he realised he stood out. Some of the men wore the caps on the back of their heads, and it was only he and the servants who were in full black. The women wore smart dresses and scarves, high heels, as though attending a society wedding.
Anna was circulating and Jozef watched her with interest, how she made a complicated dance of the room, touching arms and guiding guests together, catching an eye here, a wave there, a whisper to someone that led to a smile and a squeeze. Jozef tried to imagine her body beneath the silk dress with its long, flowing jacket that trailed behind her, as with the others, but found he couldn’t do so easily; instead she seemed made of fabric and pins, like a clothespin doll. He followed her as she navigated the invisible currents of the room with supreme confidence until she came to Jozef’s side.
‘And Jozef,’ she said, as though continuing a conversation from earlier, ‘you must be lonely, standing here by your easel. Come, I’ll introduce you to some of Adam’s friends.’
‘I prefer to be here, Mrs Oderfeldt.’
‘Anna, please. But you look rather odd standing here alone.’
He shrugged, a little stung. ‘I am a little odd, I suppose.’
She gave him a vague smile, but stayed still.
‘I like to watch people,’ he added.
‘Artists do that, I suppose.’
‘Yes, I imagine most of us do.’
‘I don’t really.’
‘You don’t find people interesting?’
‘I hope you aren’t going to paint us all, drinking in the middle of the day.’ She looked over his shoulder, where the easel stood. ‘Alicia and Karolina are enjoying your company, I think.’
She was still looking over his shoulder as they spoke. The effect was unnerving and somehow belittling. He felt like a small child being reprimanded.
‘Karolina must find it a little boring, sitting with us all the time,’ he said.
Anna shrugged, took a glass from a circulating waiter, sipped. Jozef realised she was a little drunk. ‘I’m not sure I know what Karolina thinks about anything,’ she said, and let out a laugh, the controlled merriment of rich ladies who must flirt and be charming.
Jozef wondered where Karolina was, spotted her in conversation with Stefan on the other side of the room. Even in that second-long glimpse he noted the supple bend of her spine as she perched on the arm of a chair, leaning in to whatever Stefan was saying, nodding. It struck him that she was perfectly relaxed; he had never seen her that way before, so languid and happy. It made her mother’s tension, the set of her neck and back, the tightness in her shoulders, still more noticeable.
Anna continued, ‘But I think as long as she has one of Stefan’s books—’ she broke off as Alicia approached. Jozef noticed how the younger daughter ghosted Anna’s movements, the confidence of her stride, the slightly arrogant cast of the neck, even though she was shorter than everyone in the room. She threw indulgent smiles at the guests as a film star might: Jozef half expected her to give a regal wave. Anna made a tiny pulse-like movement towards her daughter, but seemed to catch herself, placed a hand on her hip.
‘I don’t like your hair this way, Alicia,’ she said. ‘It’s rather too grown up.’
The girl’s hair was pinned up, very much like Anna’s and the other older women’s, in a French chignon.
‘Papa likes it,’ Alicia said, in a neutral way that could be defiant, but was hard to read. ‘He said I look like Pola Negri.’
Anna laughed. ‘Stay here with Mr Pienta while I talk to the other guests.’
‘Yes, Mama.’
Anna gave him a nod and swept away, was soon embedded in a circle of women, joining their choruses of Did you hears and Well I nevers.
Jozef sank down onto the sill and Alicia joined him, her back to the Wawel.
‘Are you sad?’ she asked.
‘No, why?’
‘About Germany.’
‘Oh! Well, I know your Papa was upset. But I, I think …’ he dropped his voice, and she smiled slightly, moved her head closer, ‘I think, well, that—’
‘I don’t care,’ she interrupted him. ‘I don’t know why we should all be here being upset about dead men we don’t know. If it was Papa or you I would be sad or Uncle Stefan a bit but I don’t really care about anyone else.’
He was surprised by the strength of the warmth he felt on her casual dropping in his name next to Adam’s, and suppressed a grin.
‘What about poor Karolina and your Mama?’
She looked shocked. ‘I meant men of course!’ but she covered her mouth in delight at her faux pas. ‘If Karolina died I would cry for days.’
Should he ask again about Anna? He decided not to. Alicia seemed to fall into thought, and they sat for a moment in comfortable silence. This felt the most natural state for them after these weeks, the only sound the scratch of his work and the occasional murmur if he wished her to move, but she was so instinctive in her understanding of the shape that he only needed to raise a hand, nudge the air, and she would find it perfectly. It was like conducting the world’s most talented orchestra.
‘Is the painting going to be good?’ she asked, after a while. She asked this often; in the beginning he had read in it the whine of a child, and dismissed it with a shrug; now he weighed the question.
‘Yes, Alicia. I think it is going to be good.’
‘The shape is right,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘And soon we’ll be painting?’
He laughed. ‘Soon I’ll be painting.’
A hush fell over the buzzing room. Karolina’s laugh was the last voice to die, a clear ringing laugh that was beautiful, Jozef thought, in its difference to Anna’s earlier studied one. He wondered what her Uncle Stefan had said to make her laugh like that. She was usually so solemn, even sad, with him, but then he was practically a stranger to her. Adam’s silver spoon against crystal glass silenced them all.
‘A moment for our friends in Germany,’ he said.
A collective hanging of heads then. Some people looked into their glasses, others shifted their stance. A general air of uncertainty hovered: was a party the right thing? Were they playing this all wrong? Glances shifted to the Weiss family and their German visitors. A couple, thin and tired-looking. They were both blond, with the kind of pale freckled skin that made a person look always on the brink of illness. They could have easily passed, Jozef thought, and wondered briefly why they didn’t simply pretend; then he remembered they must have had to register. That’s when they should have come, he thought, not waited around for things to get worse. The couple blinked around, seeming to shrink back as the room looked at them, raised glasses, nodded with comforting smiles. Through the minds of the neighbourhood ran currents of thought not unlike Jozef’s. People imagined their own family, and their own streets, their own offices and surgeries, lecture halls; they imagined the thugs coming, the glass glinting in the streets like jewels, but then came the thought, Except we would have left sooner, imagine staying, when things were already so bad; wearing stars on their sleeves like in some kind of children’s game, imagine being so reckless, careless with your safety, your children’s safety, so foolish. And even though the smiles stayed fixed in place, the gentle nods, the kind eyes, the German couple felt a change in the air, dropped a hand each from their own glasses, found each other’s. The quiet stayed a little too long, and the husband, Friedrich, found his voice, spoke in Polish.
‘Thank you. We are so lucky to have family here in Kraków, and the comfort of the community here.’
This was too banal for the neighbourhood, who waited, watching.
‘Thank you,’ Friedrich repeated.
His wife, glancing at her sister, added, in worse Polish but with a better understanding of the audience, ‘It feels so very different here. It is such a joy to feel safe again. Our son was – was beaten. He’s only fourteen,’ she faltered. She had a whole store of angry descriptions, in German anyway, an urgent desire to explain how he’d been dragged from Friedrich’s grasp, before the neighbours had intervened, and the look of nightmarish terror that had crossed his confident features, as though the years had fallen away and he was a little child again. Instead, she burst into tears.
This satisfied them for now. The tears were infectious: soon the room was wiping cheeks with the backs of hands, producing silk handkerchiefs that flapped around like tiny processional flags. A huddling began, a shifting together. Jozef couldn’t keep his usual position as watching outsider from here, all of them bunched up together like this, and it made him feel anxious. Adam, his eyes red-rimmed whether from tears or the daytime drinking, shot him a hard kind of look. Behind him, Jozef felt the Hartmanns shift closer together, and to the side of him, the movement caught his eye as Anna and Janina Kardas held hands. The older woman was whispering something, and he wondered if they were supposed to be praying, felt a sudden embarrassed horror at the idea: would he ignore it, pretend he knew the words, say the Lord’s Prayer instead? He caught some of Janina’s voiceless words and found it was only the soothing whisper to a nightmare-woken child: It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s going to be all, all right.