GEORGE AND MARC STEFAN met first in Glowny Square, where they ordered hot cider and grinned at one another, almost overcome by shyness. They both laid out prepared packages of photographs on the tablecloth as a waiter placed the cider in smoking carafes at the edge of the table and brought them blankets for their knees.
‘You’ve been to Kraków before?’ Marc asked in French-accented English.
‘Yes, just once, years back. My mother always wanted me to come, and find the painting, but it turned out it was a fake! Must have been … let’s see, my Mum died in ’76 …’ George smiled at him. ‘Do you think we look like each other?’
Marc smiled too. ‘I don’t know! I think maybe you look a little like my granddaughter, you have the same ears.’
They smiled shyly at one another.
‘What time is the …’
‘Two o’clock.’
Marc took out a pen. He sketched out the family tree on the back of a napkin while George filled in gaps as he knew them.
‘So Karolina, she’s this branch … that’s my mother. And her sister, Alicia, that’s the girl in the painting, and she’s your … hang on … so my aunt and your half-sister.’
‘Okay, so, I add my mother here … Edie.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘And here I add me, my daughter Natalia, my granddaughter Sophie … so she’s the youngest of the line!’
‘A little heiress!’
‘Bof,’ Marc said, making George laugh with the French sound.
George hesitated, then asked, ‘Do you know what happened to your father, my grandfather?’
That made them smile at one another, both unused to family connections they hadn’t built themselves, but Marc’s faded.
‘Yes.’
‘You do? My Mum never …’
‘It’s easy to find. I asked at a library, I remember, doing a project in high school. My mother always knew or suspected I think but …’ Marc shrugged.
George took a sip of cider. ‘Could you …’
‘He was arrested in 1940, early. Taken to the ghetto. Then to the camp. Auschwitz. The second one, Birkenau.’
George felt an impulse to reach out, as though his mother had stirred somewhere in him, and wanted to embrace the little brother she never met.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said lamely.
‘I’m sorry too, very sad, but I never met him,’ Marc said. ‘That I remember, anyway.’
‘Do you … want to go to Auschwitz, while we’re here? You can do a day tour …’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
They sat looking out across the Glowny, pigeons chasing each other across the cobbles. George’s mind drifted and imagined, how right until the end, his grandfather couldn’t believe it: he still thought there would be a letter, a phone call, a car to pick him up, that Edie or Anna or both would be waiting for him beyond the barbed wire.
‘And this side … Anna, my grandmother?’
Marc smiled. ‘My mother never met her. I think, you know …’ he brought his hands together and then separated them.
George laughed again. ‘Yes, I wonder if they knew about each other.’
‘Oh yes, well my mother knew, anyway. She used to find pictures of Anna in his pockets, you know? And pictures of the daughters, said it drove her crazy.’
‘And here, Alicia,’ George said, underlining her name with his finger. ‘My Mum talked about her all the time.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘I think she must have died in Russia, perhaps. My mother looked for her when she came back to Kraków, but there was never any word of her. She said there were files, for if people had made enquiries, you know? At the Red Cross. And there was nothing for her, our, family at all. She went to her old apartment too but it was empty. She moved to England soon afterwards. Started again.’
The family tree sketched in, warmth brimming between the men, they paid the bill and made their way to the museum. There they wandered through rooms of landscapes and faces until they came to the little girl in the red dress, her hair falling across her shoulder. Next to her was Jozef and Alicia’s second painting, retrieved from the back rooms, the twin Jozef had sold to Kristopher and his crooked art gallery. The curators had written a small piece about the excellent quality of the forgery, mounted next to the brass plaque, but it was in Polish, which neither Marc nor George could read.
Adam’s son and his grandson stood with their arms folded, glancing at each other, Marc fiddling with his watch.
‘Well, there she is,’ George said. There you are, Mum, I found her, he added silently.
‘It’s a pretty enough painting.’
They laughed.
‘I’m afraid I don’t know anything about art,’ George said.
‘I prefer modern pieces, you know?’
They lapsed into silence.
‘Must have been a thrill to find it, though, in the walls like that!’ Marc Stefan tried.
‘Skirting board, they said. A panel.’
‘Skirt?’
George laughed, pointed to the ones in the room.
‘Ah! And … it’s nice, that it was at home all this time.’
George took a step closer to the portrait. The man on the phone had been almost breathless, telling him how a decorator had dropped a tin of paint that rolled across the room and cracked open a secret panel. Out they’d pulled the portrait, rolled up and covered in dust, along with old, flaking letters and books. George drew still closer to Alicia’s face. ‘My mother said she was terribly spoiled, her little sister.’
‘Yes, look at that dress!’ Marc gave a small laugh. ‘Though she must have been well behaved enough. Can’t imagine Sophie ever standing still long enough to be painted like that!’
‘Do you have a photograph of her? Do they,’ George gestured to the painting, ‘look alike?’
‘Oh! Not really …’ Marc fumbled in his bag, pulled out a phone. ‘Look. You should meet her! Come to France sometime, you must come in the summer …’
They drifted away to a bench and sat looking at photographs of the young Sophie, smiling in a sundress and shades with pink plastic frames.
Absorbed in this way, they almost missed her. She stood back from the portrait for a long time, legs crossed like a ballerina, her arms knotted behind her back. Her stillness was almost audible; people turned to her as though she spoke, and studied her poise, the elegant lines of her face. She seemed unaware of the room, fixed on the painting. Soon she moved closer. Marc and George, now delighting in the broken ice between them, were laughing over a story of Sophie’s naughtiness just as the woman passed them, and George glanced up. He watched the woman, admiring her elegant, slow movements and feeling a quietly reflected pride in how absorbed she was by his family’s portrait. She studied the plaque Marc and he had been unable to decipher. Marc followed his attention, and when the woman gave a little sound, of surprise or perhaps recognition, Marc stood and ventured, ‘Oh, do you speak French? Or English? Could you translate for us?’
‘We can’t read the Polish,’ George added, joining Marc as he approached the woman.
‘Of course,’ the woman said. ‘It’s about finding the forgery, this one,’ she gestured. ‘And then the real one so recently. It theorises,’ her face broke into a wide smile, ‘that Pienta himself made the forgery, so accurate and good it is.’
‘Thank you,’ George said, and she nodded. He glanced at Marc and shared a look of embarrassed pride as he began to add, ‘That’s actually our—’
‘They’re half right,’ the woman interrupted him. She had an accent, American or Canadian, that George couldn’t place. There was something powerfully familiar about her. ‘It was Jozef and my mother herself who made it together.’
Marc, translating in his head, took a second longer than George. By the time he had broken into a delighted, astonished laugh, George was already holding out his hand, embarrassed by how his fingers trembled with shock and joy. ‘I think we’re cousins,’ he said.