The Stars Can Wait (2 page)

That Paweł had found him in the viewing place did not seem very strange to Gracian Sófka. For Paweł was a mystery—to Gracian, to his mother and sister, to the whole village. A mystery.

When Gracian was five years of age, Paweł disappeared from the family home for nine months. His mother and his father, who was still alive then, said that he had gone to live in Germany for a time. No one spoke of it, least of all his father, who would become silent at the mention of Paweł's name and remove and fold up his glasses in his big hand and stare out the window toward the shadowed forest.

Paweł returned with plans to join the Polish army. He became a corporal. He could ride horses. He left after seven years of service and came back home and secured a little leatherwork. In 1938 he volunteered again and was stationed as a mounted radio operator in southern Slovakia to help defend against the coming German invasion. His job was to ride between unit encampments with a giant coil of radio wire slung over his shoulder and lay the wire down as he rode.

There he had fought long and hard and had seen many men injured or killed. Then two days before the Germans overwhelmed the Poles, Paweł had been caught in a mortar storm. His horse was killed beneath him and two fingers from his left hand were blown off. For a while he had searched for them among the field grasses before his division found him and took him to safety. When Gracian could coax his brother to speak of his experiences in the army—rarely, for Paweł spoke little at the best of times—he would say, “What do I need two useless fingers for, boy? Now at least they're doing some good, feeding the crimson flowers by the river Hron.”

When the Polish army was finally defeated, Paweł had stripped off his uniform and dressed himself up as a civilian. Where he had obtained the clothes he would never tell, though Paweł was an enterprising man, and Gracian imagined that he had persuaded one of the Slovak villagers to come to his aid.

His hand bleeding through the tight-wound bandages, turning them slowly red as the flowers of which he would speak, Paweł had started to walk. He walked, alone, up through Stredoslovensky province, following the Hron as far as Brezno, then across open land until reaching the dark Carpathians, where he sheltered among the mountain crags. Then onward toward the High Tatra peaks sheathed in dust and snow, along the lonely passes, traversing the border into Poland, where in Rabka he was able to steal a horse and ride down through rough country south of Kraców into Silesia, the horse half dead from starvation by the time the lights of Katowice could be seen. And then on foot to Maleńkowice and finally home, collapsed at the door, his bones jutting like shipwrecks beneath red-baked skin.

He had been moving for three weeks, avoiding capture. He had travelled nearly two hundred kilometres.

After his return, many men in the village asked Paweł why he had not, as others had, fled into Italy or Switzerland and rejoined the Polish forces. But Paweł never answered them, for the answer was clear. The answer he had given upon the day of his return, whispering it through lips parched and dusty at the kitchen table as his family fetched him food and water. The answer, captured pure and simple within the breadth of a single word:
“Anna…”

Anna Malewska. Daughter of William and Urszula Malewska. Paweł's love and his fiancée. She was a beauty such as the village of Maleńkowice had never before witnessed. Her skin was as pale as morning milk, her parted hair two folds of black silk across her shoulders. Eyes the fragrant brown of sandalwood. A man would gladly walk the length of the world for Anna Malewska, thought Gracian, as his brother gasped her name one day a year ago, and he had closed his eyes to picture her face and felt once more that silver pang of something he could not name.

Paweł had recovered and now spent much of his time away from the house, with Anna or looking for work, although where he went and who he saw about this remained obscure. His three-fingered hand kept him from re-entering the craft professions, and he always claimed the mines were not for him. This made their mother, who was paying what she could for Paweł's upkeep, bitterly angry.

“They'll give you a job there, Paweł—I can't fend for you forever. There isn't enough,” she would say.

Paweł would tut and rake his hair and fold his arms. “Just give me time, Mother. I'll find something. I never asked for your money.”

“Listen.” Her face calm but her voice becoming steely. “I've had about enough of your ingratitude. If the mines were good enough for your father and if they're good enough for your brother—”

And Paweł would fling back his chair, sending it tumbling across the floor, and stand up. “Well, maybe it shouldn't be good enough for Gracian! All he's doing is feeding the Germans.”

His mother would be frozen then, her face red and her wooden cooking spoon drawn up into the air between them. She would not let them talk of the Germans. She was as afraid as the rest of the village.

“Don't start, Paweł,” she would say in an urgent voice, her eyes wide and alarmed. “Your talk could kill us all.”

He would leave. And then the silence of the house and of his mother would silt down upon Gracian, weighting his shoulders. Later, Paweł would return and apologize and embrace his mother and promise to visit the mines tomorrow, but no one believed he would.

Such was the way of Paweł Sófka. Always leaving. Never staying. There were times when Gracian was tired from work and he would sit with his brother unspeaking, feeling a great swell of desire to question him about the way in which he led his life, but something about his brother's quiet face made the words falter and drown before they left his mouth, and he would be unable to say a word and then it was too late and Paweł was up and dusting his trouser fronts with his palms and vanishing outside again—back out into the close-guarded mystery of himself.

 

 

 

When he was a child of six or seven Gracian had once gone through the pockets of Paweł's midnight-blue suit, which hung on its own heavy wooden hanger in the wardrobe. He was looking for a few stray złotys to buy some boiled
cukierki
with in the village. He had to stand on a chair to reach the suit, which was worn to a shine at knees and elbows as if to retain there the force of Paweł's joints, and he dipped his hands first into the trouser pockets and then under the flap of the jacket and finally up into the inside pocket. He found nothing but fluff. He tried the side pockets of the jacket, left and then right. In the right he came across something on which he stubbed his fingers. He wrapped his fingers back over it and felt the weight, the smoothness. He brought it out and spread his palm to reveal it.

The gun was small and square and only a little bigger than his hand span. The surface was silver and polished to a liquid shine, and there were a few embossed letters and numbers that he could not read. The handle was white, hard. He held it in both hands and pointed it away from him at the floor, the chair shifting and protesting on the uneven boards. He put both index fingers of both hands around the trigger and pulled hard. Something moved at the back of the weapon and there was a loud solid click that echoed. In surprise he dropped the gun, and it fell with a crack against the wood. Immediately he jumped off the chair and picked it up and pushed it back into the pocket, his heart racing, suddenly afraid of the strip of light under the door.

 

 

 

Gracian walked to the mines, a heaviness inside him. Paweł had said he would not let him back out into the nighttime forest, and Gracian believed this was true. A joy he had taken for himself since he was twelve years old was to be snatched away; he felt as if something too large to see whole had come to an end, before he was ready.

He walked through the village with his coat collar drawn up around his ears. Winter was coming. The day was clearer than usual, the coal-soaked air swept fresh by winds blowing cold from the north. As he passed, a German special policeman watched with eyes as pale as waterlilies.

He hung his coat in the locker room, then stripped and shrugged into his coveralls and joined the other workers in the gated forecourt. He looked at the moss and weeds growing in the cracks of the concrete as the lift came up to the surface. He stepped in with the others, and the lift plunged and his stomach floated inside him. At level four, one kilometre beneath the earth, he stepped out.

The mine was its own kind of night. But there were no stars there. There were only the wide black walls glistening and the white haloes of acetylene lamps.

The foreman had a lit cigarette stub in the corner of his mouth. Gracian listened for his designation, watching the deep orange ring of it rise and fall as the foreman spoke, and then he boarded the roofless train and swayed with its momentum until he reached his section of coal face. Gerard Dylong, his partner, was already there.

“Hello, Galileo,” Dylong said.

Dylong had heard Gracian talk of the stars a thousand times. He was the only one who would listen. He slung his arm over Gracian's shoulder.

“Today we're going to blast this entire face into dust,” he said.

Dylong, with his dark, creased, animal-hide skin and his bear's shoulders. Dylong, whose mind many of the men believed had been poisoned by tragedy. “Don't listen to Gerard Dylong! He's a madman! His head is sick!”

So said the men.

Dylong was fifty-three years old, the oldest miner in the whole of southern Poland. When he turned forty, close to the usual retirement age for miners, his wife had died in childbirth, and his only son with her. Dylong refused to leave work, then, and had remained at the colliery ever since.

“What am I to do at home?” he had said. “Die as well, that's what.”

But no one could deny his skills as a miner, for they were incomparable. Dylong's understanding of the coal seams appeared to verge up on telepathy. Every shift he would stand in front of the face, one thick hand upon his hip, the other cradling his chin, deep in thought. He would step forward, run his palm over the rock, click his tongue and chew his lip, and glance over at Gracian, who observed, expectant. Then he would instruct the boy exactly where to place the explosives and how much, watching in silence as the coal cascaded down in the blast, and after the dust cloud was ventilated there lay revealed a quantity of prime coal for loading. Together, Dylong and the boy could clear twice as much in a few hours as other teams could in a day.

Dylong had a theory. He believed that somewhere deep within the black tonnes of coal there lay a rich untapped reservoir of sulphur. He said he could feel its presence in his skin. He said he could feel the green mineral down deep in the bone, where the marrow was. He said that one day he would find those sulphur deposits, and they would make him the richest man in the country.

Every shift he vowed to discover sulphur, and every shift his vow was left unfulfilled.

*   *   *

They worked hard and with few words. Dylong completed his deliberations and then bored holes into various points of the face. Gracian prepared the explosives, lifting out the grey sticks wrapped in oilpaper, pressing the detonators into the tips, pushing them down to the lip of the bore channels. Then both men packed in the clay, soft in the dry flint, and stood back, and the blast thundered, and Dylong powered the ventilator to survey the yield. Now they could begin to brace the ceiling with damp wood slats before loading the carts.

But Gracian's mind was not on the work today. He could think only of being found out last night and of the viewing place remaining empty, tonight and every next night to come. The thought made his muscles sag and he began to drop behind in his loading, the shovel like a dead weight in his hands. Dylong noticed this and paused in his work.

“What's the matter, Galileo. Those scrawny muscles of yours finally given up?”

“Nothing,” the boy said.

Dylong propped his shovel on the cart edge and folded his arms and flexed his biceps and grinned. “Cloudy last night, was it?” he said.

“Just shut up, Dylong,” Gracian said.

Dylong flung out an arm and slapped the boy hard on the back of his scalp. Then he was leaning into him.

“The last man to say that to me soon regretted it,” he said.

But before Gracian could speak Dylong was grinning again and winking.

“Get your head out of the sky, boy, and back where it belongs.” And Dylong turned away.

After the shift was over they sat tired and dirty against the wooden props, and Dylong pulled out a pack of cigarettes, snared one in his mouth, and then passed another to Gracian, and the boy knew all was good between them because cigarettes were rationed, now, and rare. As they smoked, Gracian watched the older man, saw how he sat with his face set in sadness, and knew he was thinking again of the sulphur. Then Dylong said what he said at the end of every shift.

“Maybe next time, Galileo. There's still hope.”

 

 

 

When he got home, Paweł was not there, but the upstairs window had been sealed shut with a row of silver wood tacks. Gracian ran his hands over their sharp heads and gazed at the sky beyond the glass.

“Paweł did it,” Francesca said as she came up the stairs. Her voice surprised him. “He said we needed to stop the winter draughts from coming in.”

Gracian ate with his sister and mother. The women were talking about Antoni Dukaj, the son of a leatherworker in the village. Antoni Dukaj was only a little older than Gracian.

“They took him off the street, just like that,” Gracian's mother was saying. “Kicking and screaming. He tried to say he was working for his father, but they wouldn't hear it. They just put him on the next train to Austria. Said he was needed to work the fields.”

Francesca shook her head. “Who knows what to believe?” she said, crossing herself.

“And do you know who they say reported him?” their mother said. “Karl Holzman! That bastard's been here as long as we have, and now they come and suddenly he's a German again.”