ANNA LOOKED BACK to where her husband and the car and all their possessions had been. The crowd was surging again, and she felt she would break her hands, so tight was her grip on the slippery coats of the girls. A man with a sack on his back, a storybook robber, knocked her almost off her feet. The ground was mulch beneath them, with the almost sweet smell of churned mud. Anna had no idea what to do.
‘Come,’ she said, and pulled the girls, pliant and in shock, in the wake of the sack robber-man, trying to match his path as people were forcibly removed from his way. Someone caught her arm and her very lungs seemed to leap out of her chest. She turned to find Janina Kardas gibbering something about a horse and cart.
‘We must get to that cart … but where is Adam? Where is your car? Anna, what is happening? This is awful!’ Anna could only nod at her.
‘Where is Adam?’
Alicia began sobbing, her tears riding on the name of her Papa.
‘I see,’ Janina said. She straightened herself, shoving a man who fell into her right in the chest.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘There is a horse and cart not far, which is taking people for money and things. What do you have with you?’
‘I – everything was in the car. But we should go back, Adam is—’
‘Absolutely not. What do you have? Fur? Jewels?’
‘I, yes. And … there are pearls sewn in here.’ Anna gestured to the back of her coat. ‘But we need them for … oh maybe we should just go back to the apartment, and Adam can find us there?’
Janina pulled her by the elbow, the girls trailing, now mute with astonishment. The horse and cart was standing a little way off the road, with a man clambering over what Anna thought must be sacks of grain, or material; when they got closer, she saw it was people.
Alicia was pulling her roughly. ‘Mama, we can’t, Papa, and all our things. Mama, my painting is just left there in the dirt!’
Karolina pulled her sister’s hair. ‘Be quiet,’ she hissed.
Anna turned to Janina, whose face was tight and ugly in its concentration.
‘We can’t possibly,’ she said helplessly.
‘What, are you going to walk to Lwów?’
‘Adam will come with the car, I suppose,’ Anna said in desperation.
‘Oh! The Germans will give it back, I’m sure,’ Janina replied acidly.
All four of them were holding each other’s arms now, like treading water in a sea current. Anna had a sudden image of Adam, twisted in the dirt, his head bleeding. She was silent. Janina helped her to undo the buttons on her coat when she found her own fingers were not able to grip them. Then Janina pulled the buttons off, one by one, leaving their threads dangling, making Anna think of plucked-out eyes. The older woman held the mother-of-pearl buttons in her palm, sorting through them like a fisherwoman looking for cockles.
‘You could try these,’ she said. ‘And then you have your fur as well.’ She had to shout as the murmur of the crowd became louder nearer to the cart, pushing and calling out offers. Somewhere below them, car engines purred. The sky was still clear, and the screaming noise of an invasion strangely absent. Shouldn’t there be, Anna thought, the whistle and thud of bombs, like the fields in France in the last war? She wondered if her beautiful apartment would be bombed, the front all ripped open for the world to see. Her new chinoiserie wallpaper would be ruined and covered in soot. Where was her husband?
Janina patted the shoulders and hair of Anna’s daughters, padded like swaddled babies. Alicia scowled at her, while Karolina’s face was alert, her breathing heavy.
‘Well, come, no time now.’ Janina heard the briskness and coldness of her own voice.
‘Mama, I can’t,’ Karolina said.
Anna glared at her. ‘You can and you will.’ She began to pull Karolina through the throng, but her daughter retaliated with strength. ‘No. Papa said we’d go to Jozef’s apartment on the way—’
‘Karolcia, please!’
‘—I want to be with him—’
‘The city is being invaded—’
‘I can’t leave without him, Mama, please, I—’
‘Your father has been arrested or God knows what, and you want us to go traipsing through the streets wailing for your lover?’
As they argued Anna was pulling Karolina, aided by Alicia and Janina, towards the horse and cart. The driver stood balanced on his seat, facing back towards the city, pointing. People in the cart were saying, ‘Go, go, please can we go?’
‘No free journeys,’ the driver called down. ‘We go straight to Lwów but you must pay.’
‘Please, Karolcia,’ her mother and sister said in unison. Alicia clung to her waist and Karolina sagged where she stood, defeated. Janina was holding out the mother-of-pearl buttons and caught hold of Anna’s fur stole.
‘Here,’ Janina said. ‘For all of us.’
The man appeared to click his tongue, though the sound was lost.
‘My daughters, at least,’ Anna said.
Janina began scrabbling at Anna’s coat, the shock of her strong, old fingers making Anna cry out. ‘She has pearls sewn in here,’ Janina was saying, pulling and prodding Anna in the back with her free hand. Anna shook Janina off, and quickly removed the whole coat, throwing it at the driver, who caught it deftly, and pulled her onto the cart. She hauled up Karolina, ignoring her tears, and then Alicia. From up here, Anna could see the extent of the crowd. It seemed the whole population of Kraków was flooding out of the city. Janina was holding out the buttons to the driver, arguing. The calls to go were getting louder now, and Anna realised she was adding to them, a rising wail, to leave her neighbour behind in the mud, leave her possessions and car and Adam somewhere next to the road, have the horse lumber on, move, move. The cart made a sudden lurch as the crowd pressed against it, and Anna heard screams, some from her girls. The driver made a settling motion with his hands, as though they were dogs, and sat on the stool, his reins in hand. One of her coat buttons dropped into the mud from his hand as he took the reins.
‘Help me up, help me up,’ Janina was screaming, but Anna couldn’t release her grip on her children. As the cart began to move Janina gave such a howl of rage that one of the other women pulled her up, and she sat heavily opposite Anna, her face contorted with fury. Anna looked away, finding it unbearable.
As the cart jolted, the crowd around seemed to press against it, and Anna felt again just as in the car how she could mow them all down if she was driving, crush them under her wheels, just to get away, before begging God to forgive her. Hands pulled at their clothes and limbs, trying to climb up. The horse stumbled and whinnied in fright as the driver braced and cajoled, his pockets full of jewels and beneath him a pile of furs, coats and money.
Anna carefully held the fact of her husband’s loss away from her, finding she could make her thoughts flow around it. Her eldest daughter’s face was slack with grief at leaving Jozef behind, and so she watched Alicia instead: poised now, quiet, a little pale, her hat still in place. Anna was proud of her. She should have left her to care for Karolina in her love-struck hysterics, even Janina, who would help, while she went to look for Adam like a good wife. But he was gone and she was glad to be on the lurching cart making its sickening dips and wrenches through the mud, glad to be elevated from the throng, with her children safe before her.
‘Unbelievable, that you would leave me there on the ground, after I helped you,’ Janina said.
A rush of unexpected tenderness for the old woman assaulted Anna. She threw her arms around her and buried her face into the space between her neck and shoulder. Janina’s dress smelled of sweat and lavender.
‘Thank you, thank you, Mrs Kardas,’ Anna said. ‘I don’t know why I— oh!’ They clutched at each other as the cart lurched again. ‘I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I was so afraid and I just want to get away, but Adam …’
‘Janina,’ the older woman replied stiffly, ‘please, for God’s sake, Anna, call me Janina.’
‘Janina, I’m so sorry.’
Around an hour out of the city, the old horse was getting tired. The crowd didn’t seem to thin but swell, as though they were rushing together to some powerful rapids. All around them the trundle of other carts and the trudge of feet against road, wooden wheels against tracks, praying, the calling of names. The Oderfeldts called silently for their lost ones, like a heartbeat pulse: Adam, Adam, Adam, and Papa, Papa, Papa, then Karolina’s Jozef, added to the thousands of silent calls bursting into the air.
Alicia had left her gloves in the car, along with their old life, and felt stripped in the cold as her hands throbbed. She watched the other women sucking their fingers and tucking them into armpits, enthralled and disgusted, before Karolina took her fingers, almost grey now, and folded them into the fabric of her coat. She curled herself into her sister’s side.
‘Papa,’ Alicia whispered into Karolina’s ribs. ‘My painting.’
Later the clamour of the crowd, its rhythmic calls and cries of distress, faded as exhaustion set in. The trundle of wheels around them slowed, and crouching figures, resting on haunches or even stretched out by the side of the road, sat grey in the fading light like boulders. Karolina murmured stories about them to her sister, how they were enchanted, like the rocks outside Aladdin’s cave. Janina, pinned in place by the squeeze of people on her cart bench, hadn’t moved her legs for several hours, and the blood pooled there, into her feet and ankles. Anna had put her head into Janina’s lap, not asleep but staring at her daughters.
The other passengers were all women. Janina tried to peer into faces to see if she recognised anyone. She thought she saw a woman who had sold her some shoes, and another, not a Jew but close to the neighbourhood, who was of a higher class and who might have attended a dinner or two. In the corner, two women with identical red, curly hair, sisters, were murmuring to each other over the creak of the cart’s wheels, the clop of the horse’s hooves on the path. One of them wriggled so that a small sack appeared between her feet, and she pulled out an apple and a plum. They were passed to Alicia, with an instruction, ‘Eat these.’ Alicia turned the small, bruised fruit over in her hands. The apple was wrinkled and she picked at a brown spot near the stem. The whole cart was watching her now. Even her mother and their old neighbour were staring. She blushed and ate the plum, sucking the fruit juice out so it ran down her chin and onto her wool coat.
‘Thank you,’ called Karolina, elbowing Alicia as she did so, but the red-headed women were folded in on themselves, one’s head on the other’s shoulder, readying for sleep.
The cart plodded on through the night. The skies were clear; there were no planes, nor clouds, and Janina could see the faint stars behind stars. Her husband had known so many of their names. He would have known what to do. But you are doing all right, Janina, she told herself. You are getting out of the city, you have found people, you will go to Lwów and this will all be all, all right. In the gloom the sounds and shifts of the cart, her ark, every throat clearing, every swallow and tooth click, were a comfort. She burrowed down into her coat a little, feeling the heaviness of Anna’s head in her lap.