HER UNCLE’S HOUSE in Lwów was smaller than Alicia had imagined, and smelled of damp.
‘Isaac and your Aunt Margo are in bed,’ the servant said, ushering them inside. They were stiff with cold, exhaustion and the remnants of shock that had lodged in them like shrapnel. The servant had small, kind eyes in a moon-shaped face, a short beard, and a belly that seemed hard and perfectly spherical, a ball for the beach kept under his shirt. Though he seemed to be dressed for the office rather than woken in the middle of the night, he carried sleep with him in the crumpled state of his thick dark hair and deep creases around his eyes, their purple, bruise-like shadows. His ample cheeks seemed to sag, and he shrank against the wall as they came in, nodding apologies as they were forced to brush against his stomach. As they staggered in, their feet burning, he looked behind them, then stood for a while at the door, looking out into the street, where a trickle of refugees was still coming into the city, more sacks and carts and suitcases, more exhausted and stooping backs. He stood watching for a while before the door clicked shut.
In the main room men sat around a fire with newspapers stacked up on a table. The room hummed with their worry. They got up as the women came in, unhurried but polite. Karolina and Janina propped Anna up between them, though their ankles and backs were also screaming. Alicia hung back, her mind tugged to the spot by the road, miles away, where all their life lay scattered in the mud, her own face left there for anyone to take; the red, softer than blood, bright among all the drab earthy colours of dirt and rags.
‘Please, tell my husband we’ve arrived,’ Anna said.
The collective shift of heads downwards, hands clasped, told them all he wasn’t there.
‘But it’s been weeks,’ Anna whispered. ‘It’s been weeks,’ she repeated, louder; she might be complaining about slow service in a restaurant.
‘Is it right the Soviets have put up a border?’ one of the men asked. ‘The newspaper says it’s a rumour, but the radio and people coming in are saying it’s true.’
‘Did you see German troops out there?’ someone else asked.
It’s all right, Alicia thought. Somewhere Papa is walking, or getting into another car, or riding a horse.
‘You haven’t heard from,’ Anna began, then faltered, picked up the stranger’s question instead. ‘I don’t think so, no …’
‘Maybe there are border checks we missed,’ Janina said.
‘Come, come,’ the man who had opened the door called from the kitchen. ‘Please, sit, get warm. Coffee, I think, and we have soup.’
‘But it’s been weeks,’ Anna said again to Janina, as they sank into low armchairs. Janina only nodded, holding her claw-like hands up to the fire, unfurling her fingers one by one. Karolina had already fallen into a chair, her skirt drawn up around her so her legs showed to the thigh. The men who had stood up for them began to file out, shaking hands with the servant as they went, sometimes gripping his shoulders and planting kisses on his cheeks.
Alicia’s mouth was dry. Her bladder’s dull ache, her companion for so many hours on the road, became again a throb. ‘Soup, please,’ she said to the servant. ‘And,’ she added, glancing at her mother in inspiration, ‘tell my uncle we are here.’
The man laughed sadly. ‘Ah! Little Ala doesn’t recognise me.’ He began to dance slowly, comical with his large belly. ‘You remember? Ignacy’s wedding? But you were very little.’ She shook her head.
‘Your Papa and I danced all night!’ He was whispering now, as Janina began to softly snore, though Anna’s eyes remained open, staring into the flames.
Her Uncle Schmuel’s face fell, as though pulled out of this memory. ‘So, your Papa, he’s still in Kraków?’
Anna spoke in a soft monotone. ‘Sammy, it was so awful,’ she said, and she burst into tears.
His cheeks seemed to fall further, his long girlish eyelashes fluttered.
‘Perhaps I should get Margo up. We’ve been waiting up every night, since … I’ll wake her?’
‘No, Uncle Schmuel,’ called Karolina in a low voice, turning, her face rosy in the fire glow. ‘We should all rest as we can.’ He blinked at her calm assurance; she looked so young in her simple dress and messy hair. On impulse, Sammy went to check the front door again, ran his fingers along the rusty, fragile bolts.
‘Have someone make us some soup, can’t you?’ Alicia called, and was surprised when her uncle gave a gentle laugh as he returned to the room.
‘Well, I’ll fetch it myself,’ Sammy said.
She trailed after him, resisting the fire with the heaviness of the three women there, who she knew would pull her to them, cry against her coat, kiss her fingers. After the long hours of the journey, she craved air around her, to be untouched, let the air touch her skin, in spite of the cold. The thought of any weight pressing on her swelling pain was unbearable.
The kitchen was also tiny, a shrunken, dirty version of the basement room at home, which Alicia only visited to retrieve the dogs now to play, and as a younger child had used for dares – touch Dorothea’s bread yeast, steal a sugar mouse from the pantry. This room was gloomy, with newspapers pasted over the dusty windows and a stickiness to the floor. Alicia’s senses snagged on the pot on the stove, with its simple, potato smell. She no longer felt the hunger in her stomach. It was in her limbs’ ache and the tremble of her hands as she watched, vaguely aware of the strange wrongness of it, her uncle taking a ladle and spooning out a bowl.
‘We’ve made extra for you since the invasion,’ Sammy continued. ‘Adam sent a telegram, and somehow, God’s will, it got through. We’ve been waiting. Not that we would have ever turned you away. My friends had a lot; we eat a lot when times are bad, may as well feel some comfort in the bones.’
Alicia was hardly listening. She drank the soup right from the bowl, dripping some onto her coat. She didn’t care what her poor uncle in his tiny house would think of her. He wiped her chin for her with a dirty cloth.
‘Poor Ala,’ he said. ‘Here, take more for your Mama and sister and friend.’
Something from the drips of her uncle’s words squeezed through.
‘Papa telegrammed?’
‘Yes, to my office.’
‘When? After we left? So he went back to Kraków?’
He scraped a finger around the edge of the pan of soup, licked a yellowed paw as Alicia watched in fascinated impatience.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he added as she slumped. ‘He sent me many telegrams, as he was preparing to leave, to get everything ready. I mean the last one was the morning you left, it was sent, but I didn’t get it until – everything has been chaotic, you know, here, there has been nothing but rumours and soldiers and is it the Germans or the Soviets—’ He stopped himself, scraped out soup from under a fingernail. ‘You should sleep, rest with the others. We can all talk in the morning.’ Alicia felt a slow well of homesickness build as this not-quite Papa spoke to her, the same restless hands and brown eyes, but squat and plump as though Papa had been swollen and flattened.
They slept in chairs by the fire that night, in the small front room, without even taking off their coats. The empty soup bowls, licked clean, lay at their feet, as though they were in a dog kennel, but if anyone cared it wasn’t spoken. Floorboards creaked above them as weight shifted around the house, and shouts and the rattle of movement outside was constant until morning. Through the night Alicia heard knocking at the door, saw figures and shadows at the windows, and sat in an agony of indecision while the others slept, wondering if it was her Papa come to his brother’s house, and shouldn’t she let him in? Once the knocking was so loud it woke Karolina too, who took Alicia’s hand into hers.
‘Sleep,’ she whispered. ‘You must sleep.’
‘But it could be Papa,’ Alicia whispered back.
Karolina slowly shook her head. ‘It isn’t.’
‘If we had my painting—’
‘Forget the painting, it’s just a thing.’ Karolina spoke in a rush, as she always did when anything touching Jozef was mentioned, unfocusing her eyes as she spoke.
‘You know that isn’t true.’ Alicia groped for the right words, how to explain. ‘It’s those days with us somehow. Those days making the painting. You and me and Jozef—’
‘It’s just a thing. Jozef is a person with breath, and sight, and a beating heart, and warm skin, flesh and blood, not colours on a piece of canvas.’ Karolina spoke mildly, but her hands gripped, and Alicia felt heat rising through her sister’s skin.
‘I only mean, I mean that – I don’t mean it’s him, I mean it’s—’ Alicia wrenched her hand back, dug at a nailbed in frustration. ‘I mean, if we had it—’
‘Where do you think he is?’ Karolina cut across her.
‘He’ll come.’
‘Jozef, not Papa.’
Alicia reached for her sister again. ‘That’s who I meant,’ she lied.
Hearing the lie and the fear in it, Karolina dropped her voice to a lulling whisper.
‘Close your eyes. Where shall we go? Out to sea? A forest … it’s late summer, and the light is golden through the branches—’
‘Let’s go home.’
So they whispered a route through their house in Kraków, describing everything they could see and touch, from the floorboards under their feet to the weight of the doors, to the sunlight, fractured by the Wawel, pouring through the windows, and the soothing sounds of the trams. Alicia had just reached the top of the staircase, heading for her room, when she fell asleep. Karolina felt her sister’s heaviness, noted her silence, and peeled her imaginary self from Alicia’s side. She slipped out of the house, flew across the river, landed silently on the rooftops of Jozef’s building. She glanced back at the family apartment as it glinted from across the water and crossed gratefully into a dream.