The Stars Can Wait Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Copyright

  To Ann, Dipak, and Laura Basu, to my darling T. K., to Becky Strzeja, and to Paul Strzeja, without whose story this one could never have been written

  The incense was to heaven dear,

  Not as a perfume, but a tear.

  And stars show lovely in the night,

  But as they seem the tears of light.

  —Andrew Marvell, “Eyes and Tears”

  The village of Maleńkowice does not exist and has never existed; its surroundings and its likenesses, however, are real. The region of Eastern Europe known as Silesia, settled in the Middle Ages by Germans and Poles, belonged variously to the Kingdom of Poland, Bohemia, the Austrian Habsburgs, and Prussia. In 1918, as Polish independence came into existence, the Polish-speaking populace of Upper Silesia, east of the Oder River, expressed their desire to become part of Poland proper. After three Polish uprisings and a plebiscite, the region was divided chiefly between Poland and Germany, with Poland acquiring barely one-seventh of the original landmass of all Silesia. On this small slip of earth, our story unfolds.

  One

  On an autumn night in 1940, one year into German occupation, in a Polish mining village called Maleńkowice within the area known as Upper Silesia, a fifteen-year-old boy named Gracian Sófka sat poised and upright on his bed watching his sleeping brother. He breathed carefully and with respect for the silence, each breath composing itself into a white cloud, blooming and then fading into the cold air. His brother, Paweł, twelve years his elder, whispered in his sleep, a single long strip of moonlight tracing over his cheek and pillow. When Gracian was sure that sleep was absolute, he swung his legs slowly round and let his feet rest upon the floorboards. He reached down, hands fumbling in the dark, and pulled on his woollen trousers and a heavy sweater over his nightshirt and then his shoes, pausing now and again to let the low creaks of the mattress resolve themselves into silence. Then he stood and walked to the door, unhung his coat, and hunched it on. He patted the pocket to feel the bulk of its special cargo, waited with one hand on the rim of the open door for nothing, for the right time perhaps, and then slipped out.

  In the hall he walked too noisily past the room in which his mother slept. At the end of the hall was a window. The moonlight painted pale oblongs onto the dirty wood. Downstairs slept his older sister and her husband and their baby and some of the animals who were locked into the kitchen out of the cold. He reached the window. He undid the catch and eased the lower frame up as far as he needed. The wood was old, and tiny white flakes tumbled down onto his hands. A gap had opened in the night and his heart was already beating through it.

  * * *

  He climbed out with an ease that was practiced, turned himself around on the ledge and knelt and gripped the wood, then he lowered himself slowly down until he was hanging by his fingers flat against the wall of the house. The night was black and faultless and a chill breeze pricked at his skin. He reached out with one hand toward the crab-apple tree that grew in the yard and felt the rough cold bark of the nearest limb and held it tight. He gave a slight kick against the wall and then swung his other arm through space and clamped that hand around the branch and he was free, the whole canopy shifting with his weight and the red leaves rustling, cascading, a crimson snow melting into the shadows below. He edged down the branch until he reached the trunk and let himself fall and thud onto solid ground.

  Then he ran. He ran through the darkened yard, vaulting the wall there, and across the rise of field beyond, his shadow arcing up to catch him in the moonlight, his breath alive and white, up toward the forest edge. There were no patrols in the field, but once he reached the forest he needed to be careful.

  * * *

  The darkness of the forest was like no other, and the silence was not that of death but of the watching of things. The boy knew his way and moved as if following a path or thread of shadow visible only to himself. He weaved through trees and thickets, listening to the scuffling of his feet and the rasp of his breathing, tripping through blackness toward his goal. From somewhere further within the many kilometres of forest, further than he had dared to venture, came a brief ticklish rumble, and he knew that German vehicles were out there moving around the small outbuildings of the army base.

  Less than halfway there, he heard the sound of voices and of feet less careful than his own. And after that came a sudden sweep of flashlight against the trees, becoming two distinct haloes quivering and breaking and rebreaking, and the voices coming nearer speaking German to each other in hushed bursts. Gracian moved himself behind a thick pine and let the night consume him. The two men came nearer, their flashlights probing. In the dark the boy’s chest heaved and his throat burned and the muscles in his legs were wire-tight. The men were very close, their footsteps seeming to sound inside his head, and the lights were leaping and idling around the closest trees and picking out the furrowed bark, and then they reached the place where the boy waited. He closed his eyes. He could hear the men pausing, muttering about the cold, and could feel the light curling, extending around the heavy trunk, trying to reach his face and tear it from the darkness.

  The light was gone and the men were leaving. The boy waited and craned his head around the trunk. Two men. Olive coats and black pistol holsters. The patrol.

  Again he was running. Deep into the forest to the viewing place, the place he had been coming to since he was twelve years old. A tiny clearing only a few metres square, where the trees rose on all sides to frame the sky in an unbroken circle, as if to offer it to the earth below. When the boy reached it he threw himself down upon his back among the thick bracken and spike grass and regained his breath and let the air cool his sweat. Then he took his first real look at the sky. No clouds. A pure and boundless nothing, pinned through with one hundred billion stars. The universe gathered between treetops.

  He lay there and gazed up for a long while. Then he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the bronze-gilt magnifying glass his father had used for reading in the last months of the disease and weighed it in his hand. He reached back in and removed the small book and read again its title, eyes straining in the dim reflected starlight: WSTĘP DO ASTRONOMII, faded red letters on cream. He turned to his favourite pages, ignoring the words, and inspected the pictures there. Constellations, eighty-eight of them, their names below—names wild and restless in a language that was not his own—the River, the Furnace, the Hunting Dogs; Eridanus, Fornax, Canes Venatici. The Lion, the Wolf, the Southern Cross; Leo, Lupus, Crux.

  Propping the book next to his head, he lay back down and raised the magnifier before his eyes until the ring of sky had slid behind the lens, bulging out toward him. He watched the stars swell and settle as the glass swept over them, and he looked there for the printed shapes upon the page.

  In the east, the Great Bear. In the west, the Crab. He traced their shapes with his eyes, like reading.

  * * *

  After a while, he put down the glass and huddled in his coat for warmth and watched the sky unaided. He would have to leave soon, he knew, but the dreaminess had him and he imagined himself rising up into the expanse until he was nothing but another pinprick dancing above the world. Then a meteor shower on the northern rim of the trees sent
out five or six trails reaching out and dying back, as if a golden hand had risen through the distance and tried to grasp hold of the night, and Gracian was lost completely to the wonder.

  By the time he heard the footfalls it was too late. He felt two hands grip him roughly by his coat collar and he tried to gasp, but one of the hands had clamped his mouth shut. A man’s face was upside down over his, blocking the sky.

  “You idiot.”

  Paweł. It was his brother, Paweł, hauling him up with his good hand to face him. His bad hand was around Gracian’s neck.

  “What do you think you’re doing out here after curfew?” he was saying in a low voice, his expression violent. “Lying on the ground like a madman! Don’t you know they’ll kill you if they find you? The forest is crawling with patrols tonight, you stupid boy. Ty idioto!”

  Paweł snatched the magnifier from his brother’s hand. When Gracian could speak he said, “But what are you—? You were sleeping—”

  “You are a madman, do you know that?” Paweł said, dragging his brother up until they were both squatting. “Now be quiet and follow me. And stay close.”

  Paweł led his brother back through the forest a way he had never travelled before, until they were back at the house and the sun was lapping at the distant forest edge and the blackness was becoming candlelight orange. Tomorrow Gracian had to work an afternoon shift at colliery Richter, known formerly as colliery Siemianowice.

  Before they climbed back through the window, Gracian turned to his brother. “Please don’t tell Mother,” he whispered.

  Paweł placed his hands on his brother’s shoulders. “I won’t. This time. And you should be grateful for it until the day you die,” he said.

  Then he shook his head and looked hard at Gracian. “But this madness has to stop, understand?” he said. “This is the last time; I’ll make sure of it. This hobby of yours is not worth your life or Mother’s happiness. The stars can wait, boy—that’s all they ever do.”

  Gracian remained silent. Then he said, “How did you find me, Paweł?”

  His brother did not smile. He simply made a trough with his hands for Gracian to stand upon and told him to hurry before the sun was full.

  An hour later the cockerels began to sing. It was the autumn of 1940. In a small mining village in Upper Silesia.

  For the past year Gracian Sófka, fifteen years old, had been risking his skin to look at the sky.

  By the time half a year had passed, Gracian would journey twice more into the deep heart of the forest, the German army would reach the French Atlantic coast, the constellations would have followed their secret paths across the universe, and Paweł Sófka would no longer be alive.

  Gracian was woken by his mother a little time later. She was shaking him, and when he opened his eyes he saw that bright sunlight had broken into the room. His mother tugged at his blanket.

  “Get up,” she was saying sternly. “You sleep too much.”

  Gracian saw that his brother was gone, his bed empty and neatly made, and he was suddenly afraid.

  “Where’s Paweł?” he said.

  “Out,” his mother said. “Looking for work. Now get dressed; you need to feed the animals before you go.”

  Paweł had not told her.

  Gracian put his clothes on and went downstairs with his mother. At the table his sister, Francesca, was washing clothes in a tin bowl, the child on her knee. Her husband, Józef Kukła, had left for work. He was a baker. Before Gracian went into the yard he checked the drawer beneath the sink and saw his father’s old magnifying glass there, tucked back inside its brown cloth bag.

  * * *

  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 e
nough 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.