THE KRAKóW REFUGEES had imagined Isaac as a young boy, a precious child to be kept safe. Anna had sent cards and presents when he was born, then every year, prompted by the calendar on the desk in the study, filled in every new year with her best pen, her mother’s habit. She’d seen an old photograph of him from a visit Adam had made to Lwów on business: a skinny, happy child, with a ball under his arm. She was surprised by the sullen young man who came down the stairs, stretching to touch the beams of the ceiling in the little room.
He was all Margo, thin and sharp all over. His eyes were quick too, darting and taking in the four newcomers, and giving staccato polite nods to each as a kind of welcome. It seemed there was none of Sammy’s bumbling bear-like gentleness about him.
‘Your mother bought bread. Are you hungry?’ Sammy asked.
‘Give it to my aunt and cousins,’ came the reply, and his voice was like his father’s, low and lilting. He spoke such a gentle expression of kind, good manners that all four from Kraków felt a leap of warmth for him. Janina and Anna gave the boy approving smiles, but both waved away the offer of bread.
‘Is she coming down?’ Sammy called after Isaac as he went to the kitchen. In answer the boy came in with a plate of newly sliced bread, brow furrowed and shaking his head.
‘She’s very proud,’ Sammy said to Anna, by way of apology, as he buttoned his coat. Seeing he was about to leave for the office, Anna stood, smiling a refusal as Isaac offered her a slice.
‘I’ll come with you.’
Sammy seemed stricken by this idea, first gabbling about safety and let’s see how the land lies, which Anna prepared to ignore, rising to button her coat, but then she caught Sammy glancing over her unmade hair and dirty dress, her torn stockings, and flushing. Anna realised she would embarrass him. She sat down, smoothed her skirt.
‘When you make the calls, telephone to Bernardyńska, you have the number?’ Anna asked. ‘Robert might be there, he might have gone back to check on the apartment, so he can take a message for you, or he might already know where Adam is.’
‘Yes, yes, so the factory, the—’
‘The factory, the office, the apartment building, and Stefan’s office at the Jagiellonian,’ Anna said, counting off on her fingers. ‘And the message is—’
‘Anna, I know, I will tell him his family are here with us and safe—’
‘And that he must come to us,’ Alicia added.
‘Yes, Ala.’
The rest of the day was spent in more suspended strangeness; the same bubble of held breath Alicia felt they had lived in since they left home. The streets too had quietened, as though the city held its breath with them. Margo stayed upstairs, her sulk seeping through the floorboards, making the visitors tense, but her son seemed at ease, if a little shy. He sat with the visitors, his legs sprawled over a chair like a sunbathing cat, brewed endless carafes of weak tea. Alicia drank tepid water that tasted different from home, chalky and sweet.
Isaac gently asked about Kraków, the journey, Adam.
‘Why did you decide to leave, Aunt Anna? Lots have stayed. Lots of Mother’s friends.’
‘It was your uncle’s decision. It was a matter of safety for the children.’
‘Did you see any bombs or dead bodies?’ He asked this with such artless simplicity that Anna felt she couldn’t reprimand him for ghoulishness.
‘No.’
‘No, I think there aren’t any bombs there. There are lots everywhere else.’
‘Here?’
‘No, but lots of fighting just outside the city. Did you see any arrests and beatings and murders?’
Janina and Anna gave each other a helpless look. ‘We thought it would be safer here,’ Janina said.
‘It is safer. The Soviets will protect the population. We don’t want the Germans here.’ Isaac saw his aunt’s face had a small smile of surprise. ‘Father says,’ he added, with a small embarrassed shrug. ‘Did they arrest people there? Father says—’
‘Yes, I am sure there have been arrests, but we left just before the Germans came into the city,’ Janina said. ‘Of course, Adam …’ She trailed off as the Oderfeldts stiffened.
Soon visitors began to arrive, neighbours, full of news: And so Kraków is in Germany now … They say that Russia and Germany will take over the world between them now and carve it up like a pie … They are putting up notices in the Kraków streets … The shuls there are closed and the markets … And here? We’re all Russian now. Is it better? Hitler won’t last, but Stalin might. Are you going into work? No, no, not yet. Let’s see how the land lies.
The visitors offered kind smiles and shaking heads in sympathy, muttering, terrible, terrible. They brought blankets and clothes from their wives and daughters, extra food. Isaac offered them coffee, explained his mother was unwell upstairs.
Anna longed for women, to discuss things properly.
‘Where do you live?’ she asked a respectable-looking man, his beard well trimmed and smelling of good cologne. He smiled at her with kind grey eyes.
‘We’re just two doors down.’
‘Oh.’ This was a poorer neighbourhood; she had hoped for better. She held out her hand. ‘Anna Oderfeldt.’
‘Theo Skliar,’ he said, taking it gently. She was conscious of the state of her nails, the un-moisturised skin. ‘You’re the sister-in-law then?’
She nodded. ‘What do you do?’ she asked, and they both laughed a little, and she grimaced at the stupidity of making small talk as though at a dinner party.
‘I’m a doctor. I was researching childhood diseases. Measles mostly.’
‘Your research will stop?’
‘I honestly don’t know. Now that the siege is over, and the Soviets are here, we will have to reapply for funding perhaps.’
‘Will your wife visit? What’s her name? Sorry,’ she continued, blushing as he blinked at her, ‘I was just hoping—’
‘She’s been very active, she’s very busy organising help for the refugees, donations, that kind of thing, through her work at the university and so on.’
‘I can help, we’d love to help,’ Anna said. To be one of those busy, capable women, to make lists and pack boxes, to be occupied …
‘What would you like? Sophia keeps sending me with these blankets, that’s what everyone seems to be sending, but it’s rather warm in here by the fire anyway. She thought books – you must be bored? Some games for the youngest? Cards? It’s hard to know what refugees need, you see.’
‘But where is Mrs Skliar—’
‘Sophia, please—’
‘Where is Sophia active with the donations and so on? Is there somewhere we should go?’
Janina, sitting in perplexed boredom trying to follow a conversation about the Battle of Lwów on the other side of Anna, turned her head. ‘Anna really, you must correct people when they call us that. We aren’t refugees, really,’ Janina directed this over Anna’s lap to Theo. ‘I have a beautiful apartment in Kraków,’ she added, ‘and I have plenty of money, I should be able to access my account here, I have my identification papers – and you too, Anna.’ She turned to Theo again, ‘We aren’t homeless, you know, just as soon as everything is calmer we’ll go home again.’
‘My apologies,’ Theo smiled at them both, rising.
‘Please have Sophia visit,’ Anna called after him. ‘I’m sure Margo won’t mind. Or we’ll come to her, please have her leave a card …’
From her spot curled up in a chair by the window, taking peeks through the curtains, which Sammy insisted stay drawn, just in case, Alicia watched her mother flicking dirt from her skirt, patting her hair, noticing the stains and holes on her stockings and crossing her ankles to try to hide them.
As the afternoon died, the visitors left and Margo came to stand in the doorway of the main room with her hands on her hips. She let out a sharp breath from her nose, like an angry horse, Alicia thought, and began drumming her fingernails on the doorframe.
‘Are you going to stick to my furniture like honey all day?’ she said.
Anna glared at her, then softened her face. ‘Can we help?’ She and Janina slowly sat up straighter. Isaac turned a page of his book. His mother tutted and cast her head back, rolling her eyes as though appealing to God himself, muttered something under her breath.
‘I’m talking to my son,’ she said.
‘You said I wasn’t to go to school—’ Isaac started to protest.
‘Anna,’ Margo said, her voice blade-sharp. Alicia’s heart gave a rare lurch as her mother turned, and she caught her face, bleak with misery. Margo paused as she looked at her too, and seemed to forget what she was going to say. When she spoke, her voice was softer, more hesitant. ‘Would – would you and the girls like to wash?’ she asked. ‘Clean clothes, Isaac, why didn’t you offer before?’
‘Father said they should rest.’
‘My God, poor things, sitting in your own filth! Anna? You’ll go first,’ Margo said, taking her by the elbow and drawing her gently to her feet. She placed her hands either side of Anna’s face, and Anna let her. ‘Come on,’ she said, almost a whisper. She stroked Anna’s hair and kissed her forehead, radiating kindness until she’d cracked Anna open like a nut. Alicia turned away as her mother crumpled into Margo’s bird-like arms and sobbed, not in the pretty way she had cried on the road, not gentle streams of tears, but in a guttural wail, from the belly. Alicia took the chance to open the curtains a crack, look at the street, as footsteps told her that her mother was being led away. The crying continued to come through the ceiling, and the slosh and hush of water as Margo, sitting on a little stool by the tub and shushing, poured water over Anna’s back from a small jug, smoothing soap through her hair. Later, that would be Alicia’s memory of Margo’s house in Lwów: the sound of crying through the floorboards, magnified in the bathtub’s echoing tin.