THE MORNING CAME cold and damp, so that despite the sharp scent of Janina’s skin, its sweat and old-woman mustiness, Alicia was grateful for her arm around her, and buried herself deeper under the old neighbour’s coat. Janina gave a deep snort and Alicia caught the sour edge of her breath, curdled by the slightly rotten teeth of a woman who lived on cakes, pastries and treacly coffee. There were sounds from the kitchen: the careful opening and moving of things, her mother and sister attempting to navigate in silence, in a strange place, without servants. The floorboards continued to creak and sag, shadows now visible through the slats. Perhaps her uncle had paced all night.
More knocking at the front door, and both the kitchen and upstairs stopped, sound and movement suspended for long seconds before starting up again. Then another knock, not of a tentative stranger but insistent, one who belonged.
Alicia sprang up to get her Papa in from the cold, making Janina gasp as she threw off the coat that she’d spread over them, like plunging into icy water. Anna and Karolina came from the kitchen, and footsteps came heavy on the stairs.
‘Sammy! Sammy!’ it was a woman’s voice, harsh like a cough. The name creaked in her mouth like a rusty see-saw. The wrong voice, but they all crowded into the tiny hallway anyway, Anna struggling with the old latch on the door. Behind them the footsteps had stopped, and a deep, creaking elephant sound indicated that Sammy had sat down on a step.
‘It’s Margo,’ he said.
‘Sam-my! I will—’
Anna flung the door open, and there was the Papa-less sight of a short, strong woman on the step, dark hair pulled into a rough ponytail like a servant’s, holding a basket. Anna and Margo eyed each other.
‘I suppose it is too much to ask to be allowed into my own house?’ the woman’s voice escalated from icy whisper to shriek, pitched behind them and towards Sammy.
Stunned, the women stepped aside. Margo tutted her way towards her husband, who gave her a weak, confused smile.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘When did you leave? I told you not to go to the market today.’
‘And so you locked me out. What a husband! What a lucky woman I am! What a gentleman!’ she spat. He nodded slowly along, opened his hands.
‘We can’t leave the door open in times like this—’
‘Don’t tell me about doors and strangers and the safety of my house! Making your wife go out in the streets to look for food! Well, lucky you to have me to find some bread, the last in Lwów, I’m sure.’
‘But how much did it cost? You said you would make bread yourself. We have some soup to keep us going—’
‘Oh! There’s my thanks!’
Margo wheeled around to face the invaders, who moved together a little for protection.
‘Thank you very much, Margo,’ Anna said. ‘Can I help you prepare a lunch?’
‘You see,’ Margo said in a low voice to her husband. ‘Manners, Sammy, better from strangers than from my own kin.’
‘We’re not strangers,’ said Anna, with a small, tinkling laugh that told Janina and her daughters her disgust, but that Margo greeted with a face of pure confusion. ‘We’re Adam’s wife and daughters—’
‘I know who you are, my God, am I an idiot now?’
‘Then we are family,’ Anna said, ‘and we must stay, at least until my husband, your brother-in-law, arrives.’
‘Oh! Now I am the wicked woman who throws destitute refugees out onto the streets! I didn’t buy you bread, I didn’t have a fire ready for you all these nights, I didn’t make you soup! How you will be safe in such a place of evil I don’t know! Worse than German-occupied Kraków, I’m sure!’
Margo threw the bread at her husband for him to catch, and squeezed her way past him, stomping up every step and calling for her son. As she clopped up the stairs she called back, ‘The Soviets are here.’
‘Ah,’ Sammy said, nodding, his brow furrowed, as though thinking through an interesting problem. The visitors stared at him.
Sammy opened his mouth, taking in breaths to speak, but then only breathed out, seeming to choose and then discard many replies. He looked around at them all, then spoke to Anna.
‘They’ve been saying either the Soviets or the Germans will come, for weeks. The Germans were camped out in the suburbs.’ He moved to the small cheap radio that sat on the mantelpiece as Janina sagged against the wall. He added, almost cheerfully, ‘Better the Soviets, they say.’ The radio blurred between voices, before settling on a calm, emotionless man’s voice, speaking in Polish, announcing the end of the Battle of Lwów. The Soviets now occupied the city. Sammy nodded, a little pale.
‘There you are.’ He turned to them, offered a smile. ‘At least we know where we are.’
‘In Russia now?’ Anna snapped, but he didn’t catch her tone, and gave her a tired laugh. He peeled one of the papers from the table, right where they had slept in exhausted ignorance. ‘See?’ he added, gently. He passed one to Anna, who glanced at the screaming letters, War. She responded with irritation.
‘Yes, yes, this is all we’ve been hearing for months: war, war, war …’ There was something hideous in the endless expectation, a hunger for it, obsessing over the newspapers and the newsreels, ruining a day at the cinema with chanting and ugliness.
‘But it’s real now,’ Sammy said. Anna heard the faintest tinge of the excitement that so disgusted her. She turned away, to find her daughters watching her: Alicia with her narrowed, inscrutable eyes, Karolina with the far-seeing stare that told she was elsewhere in her mind, wherever Jozef might be, caught up in this war that had been coming, coming and now dropped on them all like a hunting net. Anna went to sit down again, ignoring the offered newspaper and its smug hysteria.
‘But it’s safe here?’ Janina said.
‘Well, certainly safer than Kraków,’ came the reassuring, calm reply, so like her husband’s voice, that Janina felt anchored where she stood, could have kissed Sammy’s face.
‘All right.’ Anna smoothed her skirt. ‘Is there some kind of centre, we should register, I don’t know? A place for the refugees?’
‘Anna, you aren’t refugees! You are—’
‘Just visiting until things calm down, yes,’ she said, while at the edge of her sight Janina was nodding, rejecting the word refugee.
Sammy seemed about to say something else, but a gasp from Karolina stopped him. She had picked up another newspaper, begun turning the pages. It was from a week after they’d left the city. There was a photograph of the Wawel castle, taken from the other side of the river, so that to Karolina it seemed backwards. She searched the edges of it for the apartment, but it was blurred, and this distracted her from the image while her uncle had been talking, but then she looked properly, and the air burst into her lungs. She held it up for her mother to see. The shine of the sun on a black Cadillac, the sea of grainy flags, that they all coloured, in their minds’ eyes, in red. The sleek car was pulling right into the courtyard of the Wawel. Anna came closer, stared hard at the page.
‘No,’ she said, firmly, in answer to Karolina’s unvoiced question: Isn’t that our car?
‘It is, it is,’ Karolina said, flipping the page around with a rustle to look again.
‘Well we can’t see the plates to be certain,’ her mother argued.
‘If this’ – Karolina scanned the page – ‘this new “King of Kraków”—’
‘King of Kraków?’ Janina and Anna parroted back, their voices matched in eager outrage. ‘These people,’ Janina muttered, and Anna joined her, ‘Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous—’
‘—So vulgar!’
‘I suppose his wife will call herself Queen of Kraków, my God!’ Anna cried.
Janina hurried to Anna’s side. ‘What will the silly bitch do, parade around Glowny with a crown?’ she asked.
This was better, this was safer, the old ways of bitching and gossiping in scandalised delight; Anna found herself casting around for the others: Marta Hartmann, Hannah Friel, even Janie and Dorothea, even Stefan, who loved a gossip and delighted in the ridiculous, but glancing around the cold little room she found only Janina, and her daughters and brother-in-law, watching her.
‘Mama, if Papa has given his car to this, king—’
‘I’m sure this pretender-king has his own car, Karolcia,’ Anna said.
‘Hans Frank,’ Sammy said. ‘And, he isn’t really calling himself that, but the papers – it’s Governor, I think.’
This earned a sniff and a haughty, ‘Nonsense,’ from Janina, but Anna had been pulled into the newspaper, where Alicia and Karolina were already absorbed. Karolina kept turning the pages; photograph after photograph of their world was there. There was a photograph of the Glowny, seeming unchanged, but full of the same foreign soldiers and the same flags, as though they had simply dressed their city in a silly costume.
‘They say they’ll rename it Adolf Hitler Platz,’ said Sammy, softly.
‘He’s like a schoolboy writing his name all over everything,’ Janina said, making the others laugh, except Alicia, who was stone-faced. In truth, though she knew it was the fashionable thing, Janina didn’t hate Hitler in the way she ought to. He didn’t seem a real person at all, but a figure in a fairy tale, made of smoke and a disembodied, tantrumming voice. She felt it wasn’t Hitler who had dislodged her from her apartment at all, stolen her son and her life. It was her own fault: stumbling, afraid and slow, she should have read more, listened more, to the radio and to her own heart’s terror, which knew months, years before, and prodded her and prodded her until she was walking out into the streets on the day of the invasion, towards the Oderfeldts and their steadier, richer lives, in the hope they might save her.
Karolina turned a page: there was the Wawel and its mock coronation ceremony. Another page: lines of Polish soldiers, their heads bowed. There were images of the strange world of the journey, too, already seeming like another life, carts and streams of people, carrying everything they could piled on their backs and in bulging coats. Anna felt a jolt, as when she caught her own tired, un-made face in a mirror, on waking. Had she too looked like that, like a broken, small, frightened victim in a newspaper photograph, to be tutted at over breakfast across Europe?