ADAM WAS ALREADY rifling through his pockets for his papers, ready for the arrest procedures, calculating how much cash was in the lining of his coat, enough to bribe these ones or perhaps the next, or at least to get a phone call, to get to Sammy or to Friel, when the soldiers slammed the door of his car, honking the horn like excited teenagers behind their first wheel. They waved him away, starting the engine and beginning to push through the crowd just as he had done. One of them was waving his gun through the windows, laughing at the cowering people who scattered as they saw it, saw them.
Adam stared after the car, becoming aware of the cold as the sun drained away, realising he was gloveless. He put his hands in his pockets, and struggled back towards where Anna had pulled the girls from the car, the piles of carpets and suitcases, paintings, books, jewellery, their life in Kraków scattered through the mud and grass. He stood on tiptoes, called Anna’s name, knowing it was trying to catch water in his hands.
The piles of things he tried to gather together into tighter space, waiting for Anna to find her way back to it with the girls. He sat for a while on one of the rolled-up carpets, yelling at people as they kicked over the piles as they walked, and one or two who simply picked up small boxes, even cases, wrapped furs around them and walked on.
‘Thieves!’ Adam cried, rage coursing through him, but unable to give chase, to take on the wretched criminals; only one he tackled, wrenching Jozef’s painting of Alicia from a woman’s hands, and pushing her violently back into the stream. He could have struck her face, but instead took the painted Alicia back with him, to sit on his knees and wait for her living figure to come back. Wrapping his hands in one of Anna’s scarves, snarling at the thieves, he waited for two hours. By then only the carpet he sat on, two suitcases, and the paintings were left.
He looked into Alicia’s painted face. When Jozef had first revealed it to him, back in the apartment, her portrait seemed on the point of laughing, the little smile just curbed; he imagined her biting her tongue behind her lips, so as to appear serious and not get into trouble. How he loved that rare look on her face, how he loved her laugh for its rarity, just as he did her mother’s. But now that he looked in the bleak grey light, the people streaming around him, picking at his things like crows at carrion, the painted eyes looked sad, the eyebrows just beginning to knot, as though tears were coming. Stupid, childish: Anna would roll her eyes at him, laugh at him, call him a boy. Still he held the portrait to him as though comforting it, or it him, wrapping his arms around the heavy frame.
‘Where have you and your mother and sister gone? Back home?’ he asked her. Alicia’s painted face stared up at him. He wrapped her up in one of the rugs, patting her in place as though tucking a child into bed. The evening was closing in.
Adam turned to go home. He looked back to see two German soldiers picking through his things. They didn’t notice him staring, or feel his fury at them and himself for leaving everything behind. One of them was holding the painting. It was pointless to torture himself and watch them carry it away, but he stood anyway, risking arrest and a beating and the what-else to twist the knife in his own stomach. Instead he watched the soldier lie the painting down against a rolled-up rug, and walk away, disappearing across the field. On impulse, Adam hurried back and flipped the painting over, unhooking the frame, and rolled his painted daughter up in his inner pocket.
When he was twisted by the shoulder to face the wrong way, carried with the current of refugees away from home, he dodged and stepped until he was back on the right path. As he approached Kraków he listened for the wail of sirens and the engine-shudder of planes, watched for drifting smoke, even fire. But there was only the trudge of people and the smell of churned-up ground, sweating bodies, fear. The radio had been so certain, but apart from the boys who had taken his car, there were no soldiers: was it all a trick? Were the boys who took his car even German? Adam felt himself grow hot with humiliation, a welcome distraction from the thought of Anna and his daughters standing in the mud, and what Anna must think of him, how angry she must be at his failure.
It was dusk as he limped back into the centre, his feet screaming in the smart shoes, made for pacing on carpet, in an office. The streets were still clogged with people, late-deciders, scurrying and looking around them like field mice under hunting owls. All eyes looked to the sky in impulsive, cringing expectation, but it remained clear. From streets away, Adam heard shouts, unmistakeably military in their strange sing-song aggression, but couldn’t make out words, whether German or Polish. As he turned onto Bernardyńska, like a runaway child slouching home, his insides, which had seemed to crawl upwards, cramming into his chest and throat, began to settle. Anna would be there, and they would make a new plan. He wondered, looking up at the row of shuttered windows, which other neighbours would still be here. Wawel Castle stood benign and calm, and he scanned for a new flag, reflexively, just as he had the last few days and that very morning, neighbours arriving with every new broadcast. He stopped with a withering feeling of horror as he saw, finally, the red and black fluttering on the highest turret. Perhaps until then he had not truly believed it. ‘Look, look,’ he urged one of the trickling people, who carried a suitcase in each hand. Adam grabbed the man by the arm. ‘Look, look, the Wawel. See, they’ve put up the flag, they’re really here.’
The man nodded. ‘I know, son,’ he said, and gave Adam a weak smile. Adam almost laughed at ‘son’, for they seemed to be of an age, but perhaps in his wonder Adam seemed younger.
‘Yes,’ Adam said, feeling a fool even as his fear grew. ‘So they’re really here.’
‘They’re really here,’ the man echoed kindly. He added, ‘Good luck to you,’ as he walked on, swinging his cases.
Adam was only yards from the apartment, but felt a thousand eyes, watching from every turret and wall of the castle, as he approached home. Reaching the door, he was already planning to stay sequestered in the back of the flat, away from the huge windows he was so proud of, as he waited for the family to arrive; or perhaps they were already here and waiting for him. He stood for stupid seconds touching the door, waiting in his panic for Robert to open it. Mechanically he felt his empty pockets, praying for the cool weight of brass. He tried the door, the bell, knocked on the window, knowing it was hopeless. When he laughed, an explosion of nervous tension, a woman rushing past, a young child swinging on her arm, spat on the floor. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she said, before storming on.
Adam cupped his hands to his face and looked through the tiny crack in the downstairs shutters. All was dark. His key was in his car. ‘Anna?’ he called through.
A narrow alleyway led to the back entrances of the apartment blocks, for deliveries and servant business. Adam trailed his hands along the damp wall, grateful for the glum light that shone from a lamp in the back courtyard. A pocket of quiet sat over the trees and benches of the shared garden, ice glittering on bark and wood. He felt the windows of the Bernardyńska buildings as eyes on him as he took the back steps leading to the kitchen. He knocked and called to silence. Even the dogs had gone. He looked up to see only darkness behind his neighbours’ shutters, listened hard for a few seconds, the rustle of his own blood in his ears, before looking for a rock to smash one of the window panes.
He crept through his own house like a burglar, shying at the floorboard that creaked too loudly, the coat hanging in the hallway that looked like a figure standing and waiting to arrest him. He battled with his body as he went, stern with his heart and his lungs, his shamefully shaking fingers as he clasped doorknobs. Dotty and Janie had left everything immaculate, from the swept kitchen floor to the folded newspapers neat in piles and screaming danger, serene next to a vase of chrysanthemums in the dining room. There was no sign of Anna and his daughters. The strange quiet persisted, his steps echoing: the rugs had gone, of course, he realised, and there was no hum of trams and traffic, only the odd stray cry from the street, wordless shouts. Across Kraków, people were vanishing under floorboards, disappearing into attics and cellars, climbing into the sewers, curling up like mice, trying to become dormant until this all passed.
In the room where that morning he had stood with his neighbours watching the Wawel and drinking, Adam paced for a few minutes, feeling his pockets. He drew out his wallet and papers, laid them on the small desk, next to the newspapers and flowers. He took off his coat and felt in the lining for the cash, thumbed it through the fabric where Janie had sewn it in. He would need more once the family arrived and they had to try again; now that the chaos of the first day had waned, it would be harder to slip away. Or they might stay, he thought, glancing around the dark room, stripes of light from the shutters slicing across the paintings on the wall. All seemed well enough. Stefan was staying.
He was still holding the coat, and his left hand strayed to the inner pocket, stroked the roll there for a moment, the smoothness of the canvas almost like marble under his fingers. When he pulled her out she was a little crushed, bent in the middle. He unrolled her on the desk, Alicia’s little hand holding the handkerchief, the red of the dress hanging in its folds, the beginning of her hair falling over the shoulder. The clumsy crease he had made cut her in half, across her arm and Jozef’s pleats in paint, the darker streams of red. In the low light the colour was warming in the chill room and Adam began to think of lighting a fire in the grate. He’d already turned to look at the fireplace when he heard breaking glass, the sound travelling up the staircase, from where something had smashed the windows around the front door. The apartment shuddered as the door was wrenched open by force of something. Footsteps in the hallway and on the stairs. He strained for Anna’s voice, Karolina’s unmistakeable measured tread, Alicia’s quicker, stomping feet, but it was male voices that called to one another as they came up the stairs, laughter mixed with German.
He snatched the painting, rolled it up again. Some strange panic-pulse in his mind drew him to the fireplace as though he could ignore the crisis and light the fire; he even cast about for a match before crouching down to look up the chimney. He couldn’t fit; even so thin, he would be stuck at the waist and his legs would dangle. They’d laugh at him and pull him out and beat him on his own carpet.
He heard them rifling through the lower rooms as he took the stairs up to his daughters’ rooms, full of scattered clothes and Karolina’s books. He knew where Alicia’s hiding place was, the loose panel of the skirting board. It popped out with a tiny satisfying click, and he almost vomited from fear, hearing the sound travel across the room and stop at the door. Voices were carrying from the rooms below, laughter and the turning over of furniture. He thought he heard the clink and glug of wine in glasses.
As he fled down the back stairs, feeling every hair on his body on end, every nerve set alight, Adam couldn’t believe his own stupidity; it was just a thing made of canvas and paint. Still, he reasoned as he clambered through the back window: it was for Alicia; his little Alicia loved that painting, and she would want it kept safe until the world could be put right again.