JOZEF HAD BEEN UP all night, trying to work while Hanna was asleep. Distracted for a while by her deep breaths and the memory of her warm skin on his in the narrow, hard bed, he’d soon sunk into the sketch. Hanna was too loud, somehow. Not in her voice, which was low and sweet, but in the space she took up in his vision: her body and hair and the awareness of where she was in the room always distracted him from a piece if she was awake. Trying and failing to sketch in the early weeks of their affair while she wrote in the corner, tiny scrawl in the notebook on her lap, her bare, thick legs stretched across the dirty floor, was the first time he had realised he had fallen in love with her, and his surprise was so great he had stared at the canvas for several minutes, before pacing the room as she watched him, amused and curious. Awake, she drew him too far from the half-awake state he needed to work well. Asleep, he could hold her separate from him for a few hours.
The sun was coming up now over the tenement blocks of the neighbourhood, not far from Jozef’s old apartment. A dreary bird cheep, monotone and half-hearted, irritated him. He looked behind him for the first time in hours to see Hanna’s bare feet sticking out from the covers, her large toes. He loved how solid she was, her thick waist and her heaviness, as though under her warm flesh were a skeleton made of steel.
He looked back at the sketch, to the spot where a grey smudge showed the space where Karolina’s figure had been. He ran a finger over the space, staining his knuckles further with charcoal. Karolina’s tiny bird-like limbs and the delicacy of her fingers came to him. The familiar dread soon followed, of how impossible it was that she had not been swallowed up, so young and trusting and loving and open and soft as a ripe peach. He tried to remember the feel of her in his arms, but could only think of the texture of Hanna’s body. He let his gaze fall to the others in the sketched room. A crowd scene: figures holding glasses and throwing back their heads in laughter. In the background, a familiar window. One of the faces was sketched in more detail, a terrified grimace forming in the pencil lines. Adam, his suit’s sharp lines exaggerated at the shoulder, his fear made raw at the surface. There was Anna, just the suggestion of a dress, a line to show a hand clinking glasses with another. Amid the other, nameless figures stood Alicia, leaning against the wall, watching. Her face was clearest, layered in his memory by months of sketching that long-ago portrait. She stared out at him now in miniature, challenging him to finish. Not for the first time, he felt the heaviness of the truth that he was painting ghosts, and that everyone in the piece was dead.
Karolina had been haunting him more intensely since he had found Hanna like a miraculous blooming fruit on a dead tree. When he and Hanna agreed to marry, start a family and live, he had a felt a rush of terror, something between hope and guilt, and he’d returned to the apartment on Bernardyńska, begun trying to paint Karolina again for the first time in years. She was elusive, escaping into the canvas and hiding behind other figures, or remaining stubbornly two-dimensional, too betrayed and hurt to show herself.
Hanna shifted and gave a low purring sound like a waking cat. Jozef went back to her, clung to her, living and real and half-awake.
‘You’ve been up all night, sleep,’ she murmured, laughing as his hands wandered over her body, across her stomach and hips. Like everyone, she’d had days and weeks of no food, months and years of malnutrition, but except for her hips sometimes bruising his own with their edge, she was healthy and strong. Jozef buried his face in her shoulder, breathed deeply, smiled into her neck, held her so tightly she gasped.
‘Will you sleep today?’ she asked him later, both sweat-slicked and exhausted by sex and guilt-laced happiness.
He cupped her face in his hands and she smiled at him. ‘No, I’m going on a sort of pilgrimage.’
Hanna had cut her hair short with a pair of rusty scissors she’d found in the kitchen when they first started squatting in the empty block. She ran her fingers through the jagged spot at the back of her beautiful strong neck. ‘Shall I come too?’
‘Don’t you have work today?’
Hanna nodded, shrugged. She was a volunteer, helping with the administration of lives and bodies flung across Europe and back again. She got a free lunch of grey sandwich and weak coffee, but no money, though they’d been promised they would be taken care of as things settled, and the best workers given good jobs by the new government. ‘I don’t have to go.’
‘But you should.’
‘And where is this quest?’
‘Here in the city.’
She smiled at him but with her head cocked to one side. It was rare for him not to confide in her, but she kissed him deeply, and silently began to get ready for work. Pulling her skirt over her hips she glanced at him as he watched her from the bed.
‘Do you want me to look for her again?’ she asked, keeping her voice as level as she could.
He shook his head. ‘I know you tried.’
‘People are coming back all the time.’ Hanna fiddled with the clasp on her skirt, avoiding her lover’s eye, but when his silence drew her gaze to him, in spite of herself, he wasn’t looking at her at all, but back at the beginnings of his painting.
The Red Cross offices were housed in the Jagiellonian, sprawling over three floors where piles of boxes and documents sat, holding lives: deportations, letters, queries, photographs, all the terrible bureaucracy and chaos of the years since the radio had propelled Janina out of her apartment and towards the Oderfeldts’ door. Hanna and the women like her – they were all women – sat behind the heavily marked desks, tracing the grooves of old graffiti with their fingers in rare slow moments. They offered quick, efficient smiles to the queues of returning lost ones, asked them to spell out names, give dates, the snippets of evidence that could lead to the truth, closure, or the dead brought back to life. Every person in the queue held a terrible hope, perhaps in the way they bit their lips or wound their sleeves around their hands. Even the hard-faced ones, the ones with ribs sticking out so far they seemed walking nightmares, had the tiniest flecks of that hope, and left the offices with either something taken from them forever, or with longing gouged open, painful as an open wound.
Ignoring the gathering lines, longer every day, Hanna pulled open a cabinet of box files and began rifling through. There were the photographs, faces staring out: find me. Names and details and dates. She looked under both O and P. Jozef had told Hanna that Karolina might use his name, that in their early letters, when she had been washed away to Lwów before he could get to her, and he had been swept away himself into the army, they had referred to themselves as already married.
Under O, she quickly found the file. There were the five enquiries from the aunt in Lwów: moving from polite, laywer-like language to shrill paragraph after paragraph. Hanna scanned one of the letters, finding familiar phrases. Can’t you help? I have no one left. Then the letters stopped in 1941, the poor lady caught up in the catastrophe of Lwów. Only yesterday Hanna had confided in Jozef her fear that she was losing her humanity in the sea of misery that washed up at the offices every day. She’d quoted this very phrase at him: Can’t you help? I have no one left. It’s meaningless now, Hanna said, curled in Jozef’s arms. I can’t hear the sadness of it anymore; perhaps there’s something breaking inside me. But reading the aunt’s handwriting, scrawling and quick, seeing the careful folds of the paper, imagining this woman, who searched for Jozef’s old love, tucking the letter into the envelope, she wished truly for the first time that Karolina could have been found, for this Margo’s sake. Then there were her Jozef’s own queries, one after the other, week after week at first, then monthly, before dwindling to nothing.
Hanna double-checked. Nothing else. She filled out a new enquiry form for their sister offices, ignoring the tightness of her chest, the rising fear that she could be stitching together a future of her own heartbreak. She typed out copies of the letters and stuffed everything into envelopes, as her colleagues bustled around her carrying out the same paperwork for the people trickling in in their lines, for friends, lovers and themselves. It felt impossible, Hanna thought, that anyone ever found anyone again. Her own lost ones, her parents and brother and nieces, had died with their hands in hers, something she had not realised at the time would come to feel like a luxury.
‘There, Jozef,’ she said, putting the envelopes into the out tray. Silently, she added, to the spirit of a woman she’d never meet, ‘There, Margo.’ And somewhere beyond the reach of Hanna’s own awareness an inner voice spoke to Karolina: Please, please, please stay lost.
When she returned to her desk, Hanna smiled an apology as her colleague slapped her on the arm and asked, ‘Can’t you do that in your break? Some have been waiting all night—’
‘Sorry. Yes, who’s next please?’ Hanna liked the sound of her voice in this place, comforting and sure. She knew Jozef loved that about her and tried to live up to it, always calm in his presence. The two women she’d addressed glanced at each other, making an invisible agreement. One stepped forward. She was slight and had a sharp, angular face, dark brown eyes. Her hair was cut short, curling around her ears.
‘Yes, I’m next,’ the woman said. ‘What do I need to … um … I have papers, but …’ she hesitated, drawing them from the pocket of a surprisingly good old-fashioned coat.
‘Are they fakes?’ Hanna asked, in a low voice so as not to frighten the woman away. The woman nodded.
‘We see that a lot. You can still enquire. Name?’
‘Mine, or the people I’m …?’
‘Give me the name of the person you’re searching for first, then we’ll fill out a form.’
‘I’m looking for several … all Oderfeldt, is the name. And … um. Just look for Oderfeldt first please.’
Hanna almost laughed. ‘Oderfeldt? But I was just …’ Hanna gestured behind her. She used the moments of turning her head to take a deep breath, and wipe at her hopelessly stinging eyes. ‘I was just looking at that file.’
‘Did someone come looking for me?’
‘I was just, I was just this second … it’s … right back here, one moment please …’
The woman leaned over the desk. ‘Who was it?’ she called after Hanna, who had moved mechanically, shocked, back to the boxes of files. ‘Are they here?’ the woman looked around.
‘But maybe there are several families with that name,’ Hanna gabbled, her hands shaking a little as she brought the file forward. ‘It might not be …’ She looked into the woman’s face, alight with that familiar look of terrified yearning. A sudden urge to embrace the woman came over her, at war with the building dread in her throat.
‘It’s … Karolina, isn’t it?’ Hanna asked. ‘I – this is your file.’ She found her throat choking the words, ‘Jozef is looking for you.’
‘Karolina, yes, yes, I’m looking for Karolina and Adam. Oderfeldt. Are they … is Karolina here? Sorry, I don’t understand, can you? Please, are they here? Are they looking for me?’ Alicia stared at the woman behind the desk. ‘Are you crying? What did you say about Jozef?’