HANNA TOOK ALICIA deep into her mother’s old neighbourhood, over the river and down narrow cobbled streets Alicia had never seen before. It was nothing like Moscow, where the buildings were bursting with people, children spilling out of doorways, people hanging out of windows. Their footsteps echoed on the cobbles. When a child ran across the road in front of them, Alicia jumped. Hanna glanced behind as though worried Alicia would take a wrong turn or disappear, while Alicia trailed her, feeling relief so powerful it was like a teeth-rattling blow to the face: one of the ghosts had come back and was real, flesh, and that meant she wasn’t alone; she had a place to begin.
They came to the steps of a tenement block. A line of washing hung from a window and some wide-eyed children in dirty clothes clustered around the door. One of them held out a begging hand to Alicia, who ignored it, opening her hands to show they were empty.
‘Come on,’ Hanna called.
She led Alicia through the bottom floor, mattresses and blankets scattered, sheets hung between alcoves to make little private spaces, like children’s forts, but all empty. A pair of voices drifted from behind a wall.
The light had almost gone. The room was lit by one small lamp on the floor. Hanna tutted at it, muttered, ‘Waste!’ and gestured for Alicia to follow her in.
Jozef was standing in a trance by his sketch, his fingers covered in charcoal hovering around Karolina’s blurred face. He didn’t hear them come in, and didn’t move until Hanna went to touch his arm. ‘My love,’ she said. ‘You’ll never imagine who came into the office today. Look.’
Alicia stood with her arms folded around herself, unprepared for Jozef’s face as he turned. Years and grief told around his eyes and mouth, his thinner cheeks. He smiled at her.
‘Taking in waifs?’ he asked Hanna, and touched his lover’s hair as she wound her arms around him. ‘We can share some food with you tonight,’ he added to Alicia. ‘Then Hanna can help you with where you could go next. She always—’
‘Jozef,’ Hanna interrupted him.
‘Jozef, don’t you recognise me?’
Alicia came to the easel. Jozef was still as Hanna moved away to make space. He watched Alicia look at the sketch and then hover her fingers, just as he had done, over the pencil-line people. ‘Isn’t this …?’ she said.
Jozef felt laughter or tears or both build in his throat. ‘Alicia, is it you? You look so—’
He broke off, shocked, as she gripped him around the waist in a fierce hug, put her head against his chest. He put his arms gently around her, looked at Hanna, whose tears glinted in the lamplight.
‘Are you all right?’ He pushed her back softly, held her by the arms. ‘But of course it’s you. Look at those dark eyes, just the same. Are you … where did you go? I know it was Lwów first. Your parents and … and Karolina?’
‘Jozef, don’t ask too many things at once,’ Hanna said. ‘Let’s have a drink. Apparently Greta in the next block found some vodka. I’ll – you two stay here a moment.’ Her heavy tread echoed all the way out into the street.
Jozef kissed Alicia’s hand, his chapped lips a scratching scrap of affection.
‘I don’t want to ask you too many questions, but your sister—’
‘Mama died. I don’t know where Karolina and Papa are.’
Alicia paused, remembering the slick of sweat on her mother’s face, how she’d brought back the old joke, Alicia, won’t you tell them I’m friends with Stalin, tell them to get me a doctor, Stalin knows me, do you remember? When she died, it was mid-sentence, talking in delirium, France, France, I still can’t believe it, Margo. With Edie and little Marc …
Jozef was flicking through a kaleidoscope of memories: Adam, gesticulating wildly with his pipe, full of passion about some new project. Anna in an evening gown, smiling at him through red lips as she lit another cigarette. Karolina, still lost, in his arms.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, hating the hollow sound of it. ‘Your mother was—’ I can’t do it in words, he thought. I’ll have to paint Anna as I remember her.
‘She tried hard not to die,’ Alicia said. ‘She was angry about it.’
‘But Karolcia? The last letter I had from her was from Lwów. Then nothing. I tried to find out—’
‘You forgot about her. That woman is your new lover.’ Alicia was surprised by the shades of a forgotten voice returning: petulant and young. She could have stamped her foot like her old self, glared, thrown things. It might feel good to do those things, like acting in a play, like the way she fell into conversations in her head with Papa, and she was always careful to play the role of the girl he knew. When she looked at Jozef she felt a lurch of grief, as though his horror was flooding the room. He had covered his face with his hands, and the effect was so childlike that she put her arms around his waist again.
‘Never,’ he said.
‘She might still come back,’ Alicia said. ‘We’ll look for her.’
Jozef wiped his face and when his hands came down again he had smoothed his features over, recomposed himself.
‘I went to your old apartment today.’
Alicia laughed in surprise. ‘But I was just there.’
‘Did you go inside?’ Jozef asked.
‘No, there was a neighbour I spoke to … there are people staying there.’
‘Not today,’ he shrugged. ‘There’s a window you can get through in the back.’ He blushed. ‘I’ve been a few times, when I’m working on paintings from that time. It helps.’ He rubbed his face again. ‘Have some tea, it’s awful but – you just arrived, you must be starving—’
‘I ate a little on the journey,’ Alicia said as Jozef moved to the tiny kitchen, a line of hot plates along a wall. ‘I sold some sketches,’ she added, trying to suppress the pride in her voice.
He stopped bustling around a stove and looked at her, a cigarette held between his teeth. His haggard face was transformed for a moment. ‘You still draw?’
‘Yes, I’m good.’
He laughed. ‘Alicia, that’s wonderful. Show me, show me,’ he said, holding up a finger to wait a moment while he made the tea.
‘You were lucky,’ he said, lighting the stove. ‘I hope you know you were lucky that Anna got you out. Show me, come on!’
‘Come outside, the light is no good in here.’
So they sat on the step under a glowing sky as they sipped the weak tea. Hanna stayed away, chatting with neighbours and letting them be. Alicia showed him the sketches of Tomas and Rose, feeling safer with strangers to start with. Jozef was silent for a while, and she began to feel hopeless, until he began nodding and moving his fingers over the points that mattered: the clasped hands and the boy’s eyes.
‘How was the final drawing?’
‘Good,’ she said.
‘Show me more,’ he said, glancing up at the sky. ‘We have a few minutes.’
So she showed him the barn, the way she had tried to capture the warm sweetness of the hay in pencil lines. She showed him Margo’s house and the little room and fireplace, the chairs they had slept in, Janina’s hands around a clutch of sewing. She showed him Margo in a cramped kitchen, the ceiling brushing her bent back, and then Margo-in-layers: a piece she’d only finished a few weeks before, Margo’s faces lifting off one after the other, the beautiful sweetness of Margo’s true face left while her hands held the others. She hesitated and then showed him her mother’s face in profile, looking from a window in a thunderstorm, then again lying next to Leo with the light split by the barred windows, and the sketches of Anna’s broken and splitting hands. She showed him her older ghosts: Papa’s face and figure, often in motion, walking towards the frame, purposeful, his arms already open for an embrace. And finally Karolina, curled up like a sleeping seed inside flowers and vegetables, the back of her hair as she leaned over a book, her figure standing on the stairs in the Bernardyńska apartment. Alicia looked away as Jozef looked at these, his breath shallow. She kept looking away as he closed the sketchbook and wiped his face with the back of his sleeve. It was cold now that the sun had disappeared behind the pristine buildings and they sat shivering in the dusk.
‘They’re good.’
‘I know.’
‘You have lots of our painting in there.’
‘Yes – wait, I didn’t show you those.’
‘You’re a little off on the lines, but the details are almost perfect.’
Alicia felt herself flush.
‘Where are all your pieces from before?’ she asked.
Jozef shrugged. ‘All the unsold ones from my studio are just … gone. Some of them from good families like yours were seized. It was chaos.’
‘Where do you think my portrait is?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘We took it with us to Lwów.’
‘You kept it? I’m pleased.’ The thought of that portrait, that summer distilled in paint, travelling with his Karolcia, made him warm. ‘So it’s in Lwów, with your family? But that’s wonderful! You should sell it, Alicia, I don’t mean to brag but I think it will fetch—’
‘No, we lost it on the way. The same moment we lost Papa.’ Alicia remembered how she had cried out for her painting, how important it had seemed. As though they could hold it out like a talisman or a weapon, a symbol of who they were. Reaching further back, her memory offered up a glimpse of the monster in Glowny Square who had so frightened her on her birthday years before. She couldn’t remember or imagine how the two, the painting and that very first attack, were connected in her mind. Instead she thought of Papa sprawled helpless on the ice, with an answering squirm in her guts, still, after everything. She felt pinpricks of gladness that this and the moment in the mud outside Kraków were the worst she had seen of her Papa in the new world that had avalanched over them.
Jozef offered another useless I’m sorry and they drew together as the sky gave up the last of its light. The glow of the odd lamp in the windows of buildings made it seem like people were camping in the heart of the city.
‘What will you do?’ Jozef asked.
‘I need money.’
‘Yes, we all need that.’
‘I’d hoped … somehow the portrait of me had come back to you. Or you’d know where to look,’ she said.
‘Someone might have picked it up,’ he offered, opening his hands in a gesture of hope, ‘and … it’s on a wall somewhere, or …’
‘Or more likely it just got smashed and buried in the mud where we left it.’
‘I loved the painting too, Alicia. It meant a lot to me.’ He found her hand, gave it a squeeze.
Alicia looked at him. She could only see his profile now, looking down at his shoes, or into his hands. She gripped her sketchbook, smothered laughter at how he had misunderstood her. The painting could still save her.