ADAM FELT THE familiar sting of betrayal and guilt, even as he told himself, yet again, that this was the best way to help, a clever plan, and Anna would soon understand once he could explain everything. He took the photographs, the ones from his office drawer, from his inside pocket. On the top, Anna’s smile was wide, a rare full-toothed childish grin, and he brought the image closer to see the wrinkles at the side of her eyes, his favourite detail of her face.
Years before, in bed, he’d been telling her a story of him and Stefan as boys, a stupid prank on Stefan’s older brothers, and he glanced at her as she lay on her side, the sheet pulled up over her nose in the cool room. He so desperately wanted to make her laugh, made his voices ever sillier and higher, his gestures more elaborate, almost knocking over the jug of flowers next to the bed, but his new wife’s breathing was steady, her face still. He stopped, embarrassed, and lay next to her again. Her eyes narrowed to almonds, and spidery lines creased at the edges, ran right to the edges of her face.
‘Ah, you are laughing!’ He was elated, not just by the relief that he was not such a dull disappointment after all, but by the expressiveness of her eyes, how he could read her whole face by them.
‘I’m smiling, silly boy.’
‘That was a laugh.’
‘Come on, what did Oskar say?’
‘You don’t care,’ he teased, turning to light a cigarette.
Anna really did laugh then. ‘All right, I don’t I suppose. Tell me a different one.’
And then he’d lit the cigarette, or had she taken it from him and thrown it, pulled him to her? Was it even so early, perhaps after Karolina was born …? He glanced up from the photograph, young Anna’s smiling eyes, to think, then let the memory go. In the picture her eyes were closed, so she hated it, ‘It makes me look ridiculous, like one of those fussy old grandmothers in a long black dress, like I don’t know how a camera works!’ but he had kept it in his desk at work, because of her smiling eyes. In the image she held Karolina in her arms and stood on the front step of the apartment. Just behind them was a ghostly figure – Janie perhaps, or Anna’s mother, ducking out of frame. Adam searched Anna’s arms then, saw only the bundle, a tiny blurred suggestion of baby fingers poking out. He kissed the photograph, looked out of the window at the city, dull under grey soggy skies. The telephone sat shining on Stefan’s desk, waiting for its moment. He’d been too spooked to go back to the factory, too afraid of Lucaz’s greed and slowly dawning awareness of his power, which he’d soon start playing with like a glorious and frightening new toy. He’d taken a chance instead and hoped that Lucaz had sent the telegram as planned, and taken yet another one in trying Stefan’s office, a little ransacked but with the phone line still working, on a Sunday. Waiting for the time he’d asked for, he ran a finger along the huge globe that still sat next to Stefan’s desk, a terrible sickness settling on him at the thought of his friend still sitting in the prison, left behind if Adam’s plan came together.
He dialled for the operator, held for long minutes, was patched through across the broken and smoking land between him and where Anna sat in his brother’s office. When her voice came through the static his heart lurched for her. Where are you? Are you coming?
He talked through her, realising she would only hear his voice as he heard hers, as though carried on the high winds of a storm. Listen, I’m going to get to France to sell the house there. Edie can move back in with her mother. She’ll understand. Then we’ll have money for visas out of Europe, if it comes to that … I don’t have any other money.
The line went dead as he was trying to explain. Even through the stormy line he could hear her spiralling anger at the old incendiary words: France, Edie. And something with poor Karolina, heartbroken over Jozef. She hadn’t mentioned Alicia at all. He sat back in Stefan’s chair, feeling a fool for risking so much for a conversation that had achieved nothing but to know his wife and daughters were safely in Lwów, which perhaps was enough, though he felt sure he had known it anyway, that if any of them had come to harm he would have felt it in his cells, in the marrow of his skeleton.
Adam cast around his friend’s office. He should bring him something, before he left, before he found a way to France. He started to open drawers, but they had already been cleared out. He turned to look on the shelves, see if there was a beloved book he could bring, and became so lost in the titles, their gold lettering, that he didn’t hear the men coming down the corridor, Lucaz’s tip-off fresh in their ears.