THE CARETAKER WAS exhausted, his stinging eyes struggling to stay open, his head heavy. He sat in his usual leather chair in the factory reception, where three well-spoken, serious young women used to answer telephones and march to take messages upstairs. On day shift, he liked to try to flirt with the two pretty ones, dark-haired and with pert bottoms in tight pencil skirts; at night, he was alone, a torch and a paper bag with something sweet from the bakery, picked up by his mother that morning. Now, it was just past what his mother called witching hour, and the night was bitter. Ice streaked the pavements outside, where he was supposed to patrol. The new bosses had told him he must patrol carefully.
He stretched and snuggled further down into his chair, looking again at the three empty chairs behind the reception desk. Martha, that was the name of the prettiest. She never smiled at him, rolled her eyes when he tried to talk to her, which made him wild for her. All three of the girls had been gone for two weeks now. Martha had left her little woollen shrug behind, still draped over the back of her chair. The workers, too, were depleted. The Jews were all gone. Some had left weeks before, presumably of their own accord, and the others bitched about them, dropping their team in the shit, with the boss gone too, and what was to happen? Others showed up for work one morning but had disappeared by first break, their work permits in a neat pile on the reception desk. The receptionists among them. It made sense perhaps, keep everything in its own place, a different factory where all the Jews could work together, over the river. But he had liked Martha, the way she punched numbers on the telephone with a sharply polished nail, tap tap tap.
He closed his eyes again. It wasn’t just the chill, the late hour. The panic that had risen in him like bile was receding. For weeks, the tension humming across the river and through the streets, in the crackle of radio static, the flick and crack of newspapers on the tram, had made everyone alert, unable to sleep; voices came out off-key, conversations were smothered around children. Then the Polish troops streamed out of Kraków, heads bowed, leaving behind mothers, lovers, school friends. The new flags went up, parades, new names for the squares were announced and ignored. His friends stopped meeting in their usual bar and went home early, straight after their shifts. The sound of marching troops, shouting German voices, the thud of boots on the pavement, was monstrous, terrifying, unbearable, until it became as normal as traffic. Then new faces, new names of new bosses to learn, new procedures, new papers, a new receptionist, a crone with bitten fingernails and a barking voice. The anxiety that had gripped them all was beginning to lessen, leaving exhaustion behind.
The caretaker jumped as his torch rattled to the floor, dropped from his almost-sleeping fingers. He yelled out, a childish cry of a boy seeing a monster-shadow on the wall: a figure stood at the door.
The figure raised a hand and came closer. A face became visible through the glass panels. ‘Lucaz? My keys don’t work,’ a voice called.
The caretaker felt a moment’s embarrassed relief. ‘Sir,’ he said, rising, for in the fug of his doze he had forgotten everything, falling into the old pattern. As he stood, the new reality gripped him and he stopped. ‘Sir? Mr Oderfeldt?’
‘Open the door.’
‘They … they changed the locks, sir.’
The figure was unmoving. Lucaz fumbled with his keys, his torch glinting on the edge of filing cabinets and the telephone’s gleam. As he opened the door, he began a speech without knowing what he was to say, only prompted by a nervous anger that his old boss had forgotten the new rules, was naïve, senseless, stupid.
‘Sir, you shouldn’t be here, I – we thought you’d already gone—’
‘I’ve just come to collect some things. From my office.’
Lucaz found the words of his speech fading away, as Adam strode past him.
‘Put the lights on,’ he said.
‘They said I wasn’t to … just to patrol.’
Adam stopped at the door that led onto the factory floor.
‘Just for a moment.’
Lucaz shook his head. He had an idea that his new bosses were testing him, watching from a nearby building. ‘You shouldn’t have come,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it’s … safe, you should leave. Most of the others, the Jews have left.’
Adam came back towards him. In the gloom Lucaz saw his face was thinner, his eyes bloodshot. He towered over Lucaz without threat, putting his hands in and out of the pockets of his good coat. He seemed to begin and dismiss several words before answering.
‘I am leaving. I am not causing any trouble, Lucaz. I only wish to go to my office. Just for a moment, you see. Then I will leave.’ When he marched to the door again, Lucaz trotted behind him.
Adam dug the sharp nails of his thumbs into the soft palms, an old childhood trick to stop him from the horror of crying in front of Lucaz. Opening the door of his office, he had been prepared for chaos, a stripped and broken room, all his pride lying in tatters on the floor. Instead it was the cruelty of the perfect room, just as he left it, already feeling like a relic, and he was clutched with a strange grief over this little piece of the world that had been his, that he had carved out for himself. It felt absurd, in that moment, that he would not settle into his chair, do some paperwork, tell Lucaz to fetch him a coffee, share a late-night doughnut and even a little gossip, before calling Robert to pick him up in the car, and crawling into bed next to Anna.
The young man was near sobbing, ‘Sir, please, they said I had to call, if – sir, Mr Oderfeldt, you don’t understand, this office will be cleared, you have to leave.’
He had been so proud of this room. When his father ran the business he had a different building outside the city, a tiny office at the back of the factory floor, down some stairs. Adam could still remember the uneven walls under his fingers as he tried to hold on, unbalanced by the depth of each step. He had insisted on a larger, lighter office when he grew the business and moved closer to the city, where he could stand and watch the workers, hear the hum of the machines running off sheet after sheet. Their textiles were in every bedroom in Kraków, he was sure. These new bosses probably slept in sheets and on pillowcases made on those machines they had stolen from him.
He went to his desk. The lock and key on the drawer was still his own. He shot a questioning look at Lucaz.
‘It’s all to be cleared, they said. Soon, I think,’ he shrugged. ‘I – you can’t take those,’ the caretaker added, jangling his keys in his hands, his torch wobbling over the papers and cash that Adam had taken from the drawer, feeling the steady, calming weight of them in his hands.
‘What? They’re mine.’
‘Don’t you read the newspapers? It’s all to be seized.’
‘Did you think I asked you to open up so I could have a farewell tour?’
Lucaz looked between Adam and the door, as though his new bosses were already standing there.
‘Are you going to keep working here?’ Adam continued. ‘For them?’
‘This is no time to be giving up work, sir. They say we have to keep everything routine. Except the factory space will be used to make other things and the change of … of management.’
Adam took a long look, to the window down onto the factory floor, the wooden desk, a thin layer of dust dulling its shine; the pictures of Alicia, framed and arranged so she grew up across the walls. In the low light he couldn’t see her face clearly.
‘I see,’ Adam said, putting the papers and the wad of notes, thick, heavy and comforting, wrapped in a band, into a briefcase. On impulse, he also snatched up some loose, unframed photographs in the drawer, ones he had brought from home and had meant to frame one day. The caretaker made a small sound carried on a sigh. He was a large man, the bulk of him blocking the door. Adam turned and clicked the briefcase shut, clenched his hands into brief fists, but when he turned, as straight-backed and authoritative as he could muster, Lucaz gave way, only mumbling, ‘They’ll ask me, they’ll ask me where everything is, they’ll think I stole it … Sir?’
Adam almost galloped down the stairs, back across the silent factory floor, and into reception. ‘Thank you, Lucaz, good luck,’ he called over his shoulder, as the young man called, ‘Wait, sir, I’m supposed to … I’ll have to tell them you came …’
Adam turned. ‘Could you arrange a telegram for me?’ He pinched out a wad of notes, held them out.
Lucaz eyed the notes. It was more than six months’ wages. Just sitting in the office all this time. Just spare cash. ‘I’ll have to tell them you came,’ he repeated, taking on the tone he used for the boys who tried to jump the fences in the summer, bored and looking for trouble. He rubbed his chin in an imitation of deep thought.
Adam’s breathing quickened. He offered more notes. ‘Lucaz, it’s just a telegram.’
‘Have you registered?’
‘What?’
‘You’re supposed to register,’ Lucaz said, feeling his stomach seethe at the strange thrill of reprimanding the boss. ‘So they can move you to the … the new place for all the Jews.’
‘Well I’m not going there. I’m going out of the country.’ Adam’s hand was still proffering the notes and he let his arm fall. Lucaz crossed his arms again as Adam took another wedge, folded it in half.
‘Lucaz, I just need you to—’
‘I’ll need all of it.’ Lucaz swallowed down his shame. The man had made it so easy, holding out money like that, coming alone in the middle of the night. He could do so much worse and no one would say anything. He’d even get pats on the back.
Adam stared at him. A series of tiny pulses seemed to go through his body, like little electric shocks. Lucaz counted on his fingers. ‘Opening up for you. Against orders. Covering up you were here. Unregistered, that’s, that’s extra. Sending a telegram extra again.’
‘I’ll give you half. That’s generous,’ Adam said, as Lucaz sucked air between his teeth like a market seller. Adam’s heart was racing. He’d spent all of the cash in his coat lining already. This was all he had to get out of Kraków and to Anna. ‘I need some,’ he offered honestly. ‘I have nothing but this.’
Immediately he realised his mistake. All residual deference ebbed out of his old employee. He simply took the notes from Adam’s hands.
‘Wait, please,’ Adam tried, but Lucaz only shrugged.
Adam’s scrambled mind struggled to make a decision. Forget the telegram, Stefan’s voice whispered. Get out. But if he could reach Sammy, find out they were safe, he could change course, after explaining to Anna, and get to France, sell the house, Edie would understand, recoup their losses, use the money for visas … he could still get out of this if he could get to France.
‘The telegram?’
‘I said so, didn’t I? I’m not a cheat,’ Lucaz mumbled, looking at the floor as he folded the cash into his pocket.
‘And I’ll need to come back here once more, to use the telephone.’