Sophia House: A Novel

Preface

Numerous people are to be thanked for their contributions to this book, some living, some dead. I am indebted to the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose Andrei Rublëv germinated the idea for the imaginary script composed by Pawel Tarnowski. Nor can I forget the painter Georges Rouault. His faith, creativity, and love of his family have ever been an inspiration to me. The little role he plays in this tale is of course fictional, yet in no way inconsonant with his personality and writings. By the same token, Pablo Picasso’s brief appearance is also fictional, though his utterances (so antithetical to the spirit of Rouault) are extracts from his manifestos on art.

Other aspects of the story are drawn from the lives of real people. With the fragments of their experience I have tried to form a portrait, as if in the assembly of a mosaic—Byzantine, complex, more than the sum of its parts. Stand too close to it and the image blurs. Focus on a single component and the part becomes the whole, throwing all into misinterpretation. Stand back, find proportion, locate the range of vision, and the portrait emerges. It is my hope that through the lives depicted here the face of Christ will be visible.

Prologue

New York, October 1963

The fat lady lay sweating and puffing on the floor of the dressing room. She was surrounded by five men: one of them the Israeli politician she had sought, the politician’s assistant, and three bodyguards. Two of the bodyguards held her to the floor while the third carefully picked through her purse and found identification.

Ewa Poselski, he said, Miami, Florida.

Anything else? said the politician. What is she? Political? Religious?

Driver’s license. Employee I.D. card—says she’s a ticket-taker at a place called Funworld.

No weapons, sir, said another bodyguard. No explosives. No chemicals.

They helped the old woman to her feet. Her lime-green dress was pinned with a sparkling glass heart. She reeked of sweet perfume.

How did you get in here? demanded Lev the assistant, shaking her arm roughly.

I walked in, she said. Her accent was thick. European. No one stopped me.

What do you mean, no one stopped you! The hall is full of guards.

The angel guided me.

The angel guided you, Lev mimicked with heavy sarcasm. The woman nodded toward the politician. After his talk I came up the back steps to the stage. Then down here to this room for the actors, yes.

"Poylish?" said the politician.

She nodded, "Tak."

Why do you want to see me?

The angel told me to speak to you.

The three bodyguards and Lev laughed. The politician smiled.

Should we take her out, sir?

Yes. Gently, please. Don’t hurt her. And tell the manager of the Coliseum I want a word with him.

Angel or no angel, you’d better give that guy hell, said Lev. She’s just a crank, but what if some of your real enemies got through?

The politician hesitated, eyeing the woman. What did you wish to say to me?

I know who you are, she said.

Five thousand people out there tonight know who I am. Lev smirked. This is a very important man in Israel. His name is—

Oh yes, I know the name that is in the television news, she replied in a low voice, keeping her eyes on the politician; there was no hatred in them, only tears. You are the man who prosecutes war criminals for your government.

She told him what everyone else knew: his public name, his exact position in the ministry, and the fact that probably soon he would be the deputy prime minister.

Then why do you say such a thing as you just said? the politician asked carefully.

That I know your real name?

Yes, that.

Because I do know your real name.

The bodyguards begged for permission to escort her out.

He silenced them with a glance.

He told her his public name. She shook her head and looked at him.

You can leave us, he said to the others. They stared at him perplexed, then went out. Lev went last, casting an irritated look over his shoulder.

When the door had closed behind them, he asked the woman, Why do you think you know me?

You were in Warsaw during the war. Your family is dead.

It is a matter of public record that I am a Polish Jew. It would take little effort to find out that my family died in the Shoah. This does not make you a prophet. As for the matter of another name—ah, madam, about that you are quite mistaken.

I am only an old woman. But an angel has spoken to me and guided my steps. I know you as if you are my own son, for I have thought about you for twenty years.

Who are you?

I am nobody.

Then what brought you to me? I do not believe in angels.

I think you should.

Answer me.

I bring you a letter and a gift from one who loved you. Now the man’s face became an impervious wall. Loved me?

Yes, loved.

A cold bitterness washed across his features. Love is an illusion, he said in a tone of indifference. She shook her head, staring at him, unblinking. He closed his eyes as if to erase her stupid watering eyes from his mind.

I have seen into the souls of more men than there are in your Florida—in your Funworld. And I tell you that love cannot overcome death.

Poor boy, she sighed, poor, poor boy.

She began to weep openly, and he hated it.

Tell me, for the sake of curiosity, what you think my real name is.

You are David Schäfer.

The politician looked momentarily stunned, then his face went blank.

How do you know this name? he demanded. Ah, then it is true. I have found you.

He stared at her. Only a handful of people on earth had known his real name, and almost certainly they were dead. There was no way she could know who he was, but somehow she did know. How? And more importantly—why?

He went to the door and pulled it open. Three guards tumbled in.

Tea, he said to them. Bring us tea.

He turned to the woman and said, as if speaking to a fabulous creature in which he did not yet believe, A glass of tea?

SANCTUARY

1

Warsaw, September 1942

His heart beating like a snared rabbit, he squirmed past the wire of the gate and was out. The guards saw him, of course, as he knew they would, but he dove into the crowd on the sidewalks and hoped they would hesitate an instant before firing. Though he could not run fast because of his hunger, he was able to bob and weave through the pedestrians, under a horse cart, and around a corner before the first shots echoed against the apartment buildings.

The crowd scattered; there were screams, the sound of a horse’s mad whinny, running jackboots, and more shots. Gentiles stared at him astonished, parting left and right as he plunged into a main thoroughfare. He tore off the arm band and threw it wide into the crowd, where the star floated down and landed like an embarrassment. Hands tried to grab him in passing, but he was like Moses fleeing the land of bondage. Two walls of human figures crashed in behind him, covering Pharaoh’s chariots.

His heart boomed in his chest and his side ached; his breath tore out of him in agonized gasps. He had his youth on his side and adrenaline—for he knew that this was the run of his life. Moreover, his pursuers were not sleek SS but older and heavier Wehrmacht sentries. A cold rain was falling, making the sidewalks treacherous. A bullet whined on the concrete at his heels. The soldiers were through the crowd, yelling in their harsh German, "Halt! Halt!"

Another bullet spattered chips of stone onto his coat as he wheeled around a corner into an avenue. He was heading east toward Stare Miasto now, the medieval core of the city, close by the banks of the Vistula. Block after block, past bombed or standing buildings, past a blur of people on the sidewalks, past stalls of tinsmiths and rag merchants, he ran blindly. First this way, then that, east, then north, then east again. Finally, utterly spent, he turned into a narrow side street of ancient three-story buildings in various degrees of ruin. Reaching its end, he found it blocked by a high wall. Frantic now, he gasped in a high, terrified voice, "Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheino, Adonai Echad. . ."

One of the shop doors along the street was more deeply recessed than the others, and into its shadows he now threw himself. Peering around the bricks, he saw the soldiers at the mouth of the street shaking an old woman. She pointed in the direction where he had run.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, he stammered, waiting for them to come.

Without warning, the door opened behind him. He stumbled backward and fell inside. A small bell swung above the head of a man who was staring at him from the dim interior of the shop. In a glance the man understood the situation, heard the boots of the soldiers clomping on the cobblestones, and pulled the rabbit farther inside.

Up those stairs, quickly, he said, pointing to the back of the room. The boy ran through a maze of floor-to-ceiling shelves loaded with books, found the staircase, and scrambled up frantically, leaving a trail of wet shoe prints. Staring through the dusty panes of the display window, the shopkeeper watched the soldiers working their way along the street toward him, banging on every door, smashing those that were locked, and entering each one. It would take them a few minutes to arrive at his door. Losing no more time, he wiped the floor with a rag, and when the trail had been erased he seated himself at the sales desk by the front entrance. When the soldiers threw open the door with a bang, he looked up from a book, met their eyes over the rim of his spectacles, and asked politely in German, "Ja, mein Herr?"

Bookseller, one barked, have you seen a Jew boy run this way?

"Nein, mein Herr."

"Da ist keiner hier! said the other soldier. Wir haben gesehen."

"Komm, wir gehen!"

When they had gone at a gallop on their chase, the bookseller permitted his hands a slight tremble, and he exhaled. He glanced around the shop and uttered a prayer of thanks that it had been deserted when the boy burst in. Why did I do it? he asked himself. Why such a decision, made without careful consideration of all the factors?

He stood, and stared at the floor, seeing nothing. For a few moments he slipped into the state of distraction or withdrawal that family members referred to as his spells, and that was in fact his place of retreat whenever life became too absurd. When the shadows of the soldiers ran past the window, retracing their steps out of the street, his eyes began to focus again.

Yes, go, he thought bitterly. Go and play your role in the Wagnerfest!

Pawel Tarnowski was not old, though his shoulders were slightly stooped, as if from decades of hovering over volumes of tiny script. He was a sturdy man in his early thirties, with brown eyes and un-Slavic black hair, deep black, which his father once called a little incident with the Tartars. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but he did not move as one might expect from a man so well proportioned. He shuffled, as if he were twenty or thirty years older.

Trouble, he muttered aloud. Trouble, trouble.

He went to his private writing desk in the alcove at the back of the shop and sat down. The worktable beside it was piled high with the litter of broken-spined volumes that he was rebinding, and with strips of leather, glue-pots, tissue-covered packets of gold leaf, prewar literary magazines, unpublished manuscripts, and a graveyard of abandoned tea cups. Before him on the desk stood a wicker basket stuffed with correspondence, the letters stamped from Paris, Berlin, Krakow, New York, and Florence. The bookseller did not especially relish the contents of these letters; it was the envelopes themselves that he passionately loved as touchstones of a broader, more cultured world—the multicolored stamps, the fading violet, cream, and blue of the paper, the striped borders. For the most part they contained inquiries from ungifted writers about his publishing house, Zofia Press. He had managed to get three titles into print before the Germans came.

He stared at the street door and thought, Someday they will leave. Someday paper and truth will no longer be a problem. Yes, then it would be possible to make beautiful books once more, to walk beside the Vistula River under the flowering trees, thinking of Chekhov, to sit at outdoor cafés, drink Turkish coffee, smoke those terrible French cigarettes, and discuss Kafka or Dante with sympathetic people. On that day he would reply to the letters. And he would be answered by those who had survived. In the meantime it was enough to have the envelopes waiting in promise of the future.

He had been reworking a letter to Kahlia when the boy burst in with terror on his face and a mouth open without explanations. A Jew. Now their troubles were spilling over into his life, as if he didn’t have enough of his own.

What am I going to do? he whispered.

Time, he thought. Time eases the beating of the heart, dries the perspiration, washes out the toxin of fear. To distract himself, he stared at a sheet of vellum paper on the desk before him.

Forcing himself to concentrate, he picked up a straight pen, the long green one, his favorite, and dipped the nib into a well of purple ink. This action hooked his eyes and would not let them go. He lifted the nib from the ink, and watched a drop roll slowly toward the point. All human actions proceed from thought, he mused, and this drop of ink is the subsidiary act played by forces I have set in motion.

The bead formed an oval as it paused at the tip, then hung suspended for a micro-instant before falling. It splashed on the vellum. A star, a violet nova, like the messages that angels let fall to earth from above.

He blinked and shook himself.

Write! he commanded. Write! Push out death with the face of the one you love.

12 September 1942, Warsaw

My Kahlia,

I do not know where you are at this moment. Nor can I know if one day, when this war is over, you will return with the glorious good news that you did not marry a nobleman or a professor. Of course, you could not have known my heart, for we never spoke. Yet so much was said when, at our first meeting, you glanced across the salon of the music faculty and saw me. I beheld the briefest pause in your look, then your eyes turned back to the score you were playing as if you had seen nothing. Even so, I know that you held an image of me within you.

I went to the university today and pinned another message to the door of the room that was your father’s office. Then I went down the hall to the salon. They have stolen the piano, and there are bullet holes in the walls. Do you remember how the Goldberg Variations fused us together on the night of our first and last meeting, just before the darkness fell? Never have I heard a musician play with such sensitivity. I knew then that we were to become one soul. Had the world been different we would have been introduced and befriended each other and never permitted a parting. Perhaps the adagio tempo betrayed my sense of reality, for the future I foresaw has not come to pass.

When they arrested the professors, I hoped that you had somehow escaped the fowler’s net. I cannot believe that you have been captured. Surely it is only a matter of time until you return. Until then I worry desperately over your fate.

I will write soon,

Pawel

He locked up, pulled the shades on all the windows, turned off the desk lamp and the overhead globes, and went to the storeroom. A mouse scurried across the floor in front of him. He opened the door to the staircase and ascended with a heavy tread.

On the landing of the second floor, he skirted a stack of wooden crates that contained more books, the remainder of an estate sale that he had not bothered to examine. They were an irritant to him, because he had invested good money in them only to find after opening a few that they were worthless things. He had intended to transport them all to the attic, where they would provide at least a little insulation against the cold. Most of the boxes were already up there, but he had not found sufficient energy to complete the task. He sighed, and entered the apartment. The rooms were as bleak as ever. The kitchen light bulb was burned out, so he lit a paraffin lamp, then went to the electric hot plate and got it warming up under a kettle. As he waited for it to hiss, he peered out the window overlooking the street. Far across the rooftops he could see dirty smoke hovering above the ghetto, from which direction there came occasional gunshots.

The apartment was of the same dimensions as the ground floor shop: a narrow rectangle about five meters wide by eight meters long. On this level it was divided into a front kitchen, a parlor, a toilet closet, a room containing a zinc wash tub, and a bedroom at the rear. The ceilings were four meters high, covered with plaster ornaments, yellowed badly and crumbling off in bits and pieces. The once elegant ivory wallpaper—embossed with fleurs de lis—was spotted and torn in many places. The few pieces of furniture, however, were of fine quality, and there were some oil paintings as well. Most of these were saccharine landscapes painted by Polish competents of the previous century. They brooded under a patina of age and smoke, their varnish badly crackled. The lack of regular heat during the winters since 1939 had not helped. He did not care about them overmuch, but he was worried about a small painting of flowers he had bought in Paris during his brief attempt to be an artist. In order to make this extravagant purchase, he had gone without meals for three weeks, surviving on scraps, enjoying the romance of starvation for art’s sake only during the first two days. It had been painted by an Italian, an obscure member of a sub-branch of the Impressionists, and was cheap in comparison to a Monet or a Picasso. He thought it the best thing in the room, though it was, perhaps, the worst—pretty and banal. A Greek icon of Saint Michael of the Apocalypse hung beside it, brilliant red and indigo blue, its gold so aged it looked like liquid rosewood poured over amber. He kissed it, made the sign of the cross slowly, then bowed toward his bedroom, in the corner of which hung a small wall-shrine containing other icons. A red votive candle flickered there.

While the tea was steeping, he cut black bread, cheese, and several slices from a blood sausage that was turning green. His cousin Marysia—Masha, they called her—had brought it to him from the farm at Mazowiecki late in the summer. He had desired to wolf it down on the spot but had resisted the impulse. He was now grateful for that moment of self-control.

Eat, Masha had said, placing the sausage atop a sack of onions, potatoes, beets, and a summer squash. The kitchen table sagged under this bounty. Her son staggered in, bearing a large turnip.

I will keep the meat for later, Pawel had said. Winter is coming.

Eat it now. It will spoil and then it will be wasted.

He sliced small pieces for the three of them, and when young Adam asked for more, his mother slapped his hand.

Uncle Pawel will need this food, she scolded. She called him uncle, though he was in fact the son of her mother’s brother. Masha’s father was peasant stock from Belorussia. Pawel’s family was descended from the landed middle class, from the south, near the Carpathians.

Matka, there is lots of food, cried the boy.

The woman shrugged and apologized to Pawel with her eyes.

For us on the farm there is enough food, though the Germans take much of it. He is too little to understand, Pawel. In there, she nodded toward the ghetto, they are living on a few pounds of bread and vegetables a month. I hear there are many deaths. Children abandoned, starving, begging. They are shooting people, too. They won’t permit us to give food.

She sighed. When I bring produce into the Old Town market, I come by way of the ghetto walls and throw in a few root vegetables. There is much energy in starch, you know.

Masha. Masha the Good, as homely as her squash.

It won’t be so easy to bring you things from now on. Since July, when the trains began taking all those people away, we are always watched. The entrances to the city are dangerous.

Why do you take such risks, Masha? I am very grateful for your help, but. . . why do you do it?

You are family.

You don’t do this for Bronek and Jan.

Bronek and Jan have wives to look after them.

And more mouths to feed.

She looked down. Then up at him with her serious expression—the charming scold.

Pawel, why don’t you get married? There are hundreds of fine girls in Warsaw who would marry a man like you. Remember when you were little, when you Tarnowski brothers would spend the summer at our farm. All the girl cousins were in love with you—Pawel the Beautiful. Sweet Pawel. Little Pawelek. Now you are Big Pawel.

Her eyes filled with tears.

You are such a good man!

She kissed his cheeks and then, after hesitating, she kissed him on the lips. In a rush she left with the little boy. He had not seen them since.

Onto a tray he now placed a silver pot of steeping tea, china cups, linen napkins, the slices of green meat and black bread, and a bowl of mashed turnip. He carried the tray into his bedroom and entered the closet. At the back, behind a curtain, there was an unlit staircase that led to the attic, and this he climbed slowly and carefully to keep the tea from spilling.

The attic had the same dimensions as the lower floors, but it was not divided into rooms. It was wood-paneled and smelled of old varnish. He rarely went up to the top floor. It was empty, save for a few trunks and the crates of worthless books. At the far end was a brick chimney, and beside it a gable window that allowed access to the slate-covered roof. There, crouching between two crates, was the fugitive—a young man, hardly more than a boy.

Pawel shuffled across the bare wooden floors, muttering to himself about the dust. The visitor stared at him and rose slowly to his feet.

Would you like to eat? Pawel asked.

Mistrust was written in bold letters across the fugitive’s face. Indeed, his eyes were stricken with a kind of terror Pawel had not seen before. He himself was familiar with many species of fear—in fact, it was his chief affliction—but he had not yet encountered the kind felt by hunted animals.

Pawel sat on a battered trunk and gestured the other to do likewise. He placed the tray between them.

Eat, he said diffidently, as if what had occurred was of no great consequence.

"Dziekuje! Thank you", the boy replied meekly. He was shivering, his clothing exuding the odor of a damp unwashed body, and worse, for the dominant smell was that of a sewer. The hand that reached for the food was pale blue. He studiously avoided the sausage but gobbled the other food. Between each bite, he glanced up furtively at his benefactor.

Pawel observed him with furrowed brow.

Is some of this for you? the boy murmured, flushing red.

No, it is all for you, said Pawel, though hunger was indeed gnawing at him.

I cannot eat this, the boy said, pointing at the sausage.

Pawel reached for it a little too quickly and bit a large chunk from one end.

What is your name? he asked between more bites.

My name is David Schäfer. And you, sir?

My name is Pawel Tarnowski.

"Witam, I greet you, Pan Tarnowski."

"Witam."

I wish to thank you for rescuing me from. . . them.

It is what anyone would do, Pawel shrugged. The boy greeted this with a dubious look. They are evil! he burst out in a harsh whisper. "They are from the sitra ahra!"

"What is the sitra ahra?"

"It is the other side, the domain of darkness."

The domain of darkness? What do you mean?

The demonic powers in the spiritual realm.

The Germans are men, not devils. They are under the influence of evil.

They regarded each other for some moments, as if across a void.

Why do you help me? the boy murmured. I am a Jew.

I can see you are, Pawel replied, pointing to the fringes of a prayer shawl, which hung below the hem of the felt jacket.

The boy removed a skullcap from his pocket and placed it on his head. There was not much hair, merely a skim of dark fuzz.

I could not wear this as I ran.

You must have run a long way. Muranow district is many blocks west.

I came out the northeast gate at Nalewki Street. A cart was going through the sentry post. I squeezed past it.

You took a great chance. Few people get away from the Germans.

If I remained in the ghetto, I would certainly die.

You speak Polish without an accent, Pawel said. Swallowing the last of the food, the fugitive turned his eyes to the floor and mumbled something that Pawel could not hear. What did you say? he prompted. I said, language is a gift.

A gift?

Without it we cannot think.

I agree, said Pawel, looking at the boy curiously. What other languages do you speak?

Yiddish, of course. I also read Hebrew and German—and English with a little effort. You?

Polish, French, German—and Russian with a little effort.

The boy’s eyes flickered at him, then looked away.

A glass of tea? Pawel asked. He filled a cup and pushed it into the visitor’s hands. The tea was gone in a gulp. He poured another. And another.

How old are you? Pawel asked.

Seventeen.

Then the boy began to tremble violently. He bent over and hid his face in his arms. Pawel was suddenly without any idea of what to do.

He muttered the nonsense sounds by which he had been consoled as a child, and which surged up from memory. He almost touched the boy’s shoulder to give it small pats, but drew his hand back without it’s being seen. It was soon over, and the visitor was now doubly embarrassed.

I must escape, he breathed, drying his eyes on a sleeve.

Where would you go? Do you have family?

All Jews are in the ghettos. Or in resettlement camps. My father and mother, my brothers and sisters, are almost certainly dead.

My mother and father—they too are dead, muttered Pawel weakly, realizing only after he had spoken that in the great democracy of death there were hierarchies of grief.

The other did not respond.

Perhaps you should return to the ghetto, Pawel suggested uncertainly.

The boy’s face told him that this was impossible, in fact, unthinkable. Surprised that his host did not understand the obvious, he said warily, The ghetto is slow death. The camp is swift death.

What will you do?

I will walk south and go over the Carpathians.

It is more than three hundred kilometers to the mountains, and then if you get over them the Germans are on the other side. They have taken everything in Europe and are in Africa and Asia also. There is no place to go.

At this the boy turned away and stared at the window.

They have won. They will devour everything.

I do not believe they can win the war. At some point they will be beaten back.

How long?

I don’t know.

I must try to think. Will you please hide me for a few days while I think?

Pawel stared at him, then nodded.

2

Pawel Tarnowski was not a man of exceptional intelligence, nor was he gifted with any outstanding talent, although many people considered him to possess both, an assumption they had made from his reflective and taciturn temperament and his occupation as a bookseller. His chief quality (he would have called it a curse) was a sensitivity to the complexity of life. He felt, moreover, that his life was of little value to anyone. His mother and father had loved him as best they could, but they were gone. His two older brothers were not unconcerned about him, but he was a burden to them, and always had been. They were so much more bold, so successful in everything they did. They were married. He was not. They were strong and aggressive personalities, while he was painfully shy, a fault he overcame daily, but only with great determination. It had not always been so.

His earliest memory was of snow. Snow falling from the sky over Warsaw, falling down into his open eyes, his laughing mouth. He was two years old then, perhaps three. His arms were lifted high above his head to invoke the outpouring of the heavens.

Yes, it was like that. Incense went up, light came down. Light above, darkness below. And whenever the darkness was above, at night or during the dreariest days of winter, the angels sent snow as a sign. Don’t forget, Pawelek, they seemed to say. We’re here. We give you these stars as messengers.

Then Papa went away. He was gone for years and years, it seemed. Priests and other important people sometimes came to visit Mama. Uncle Tadeusz visited now and then, brought money, made Mama cry with gratitude.

In the beginning Pawel often demanded to know when Papa would return, but gradually learned not to ask, because it always made Mama cry when he did. It was a different kind of crying, not gratitude.

So he asked his brothers. Bronek was eight, very old. Jan was older still, ten. They knew many things that Pawel did not know. Sometimes Jan would reply, When the Russians let him go. Now stop being a baby. Bronek would say the same thing, and underline it with a hard punch on Pawel’s arm so he would not forget. Leave Mama alone, you stupid. Can’t you see it makes her sad when you ask for Papa?

No letters came from him, no messages, no little gifts such as he used to give Pawel before he went away. The carved wooden airplane with four wings, all red, with a metal propeller that twirled on its pin. The magnifying glass for watching the tiny circus under wet leaves in the Saski Gardens. The blue marble, swirling with clouds like a planet. Because these were broken or lost, Papa’s face faded.

During the summers, Uncle Tadeusz paid for train tickets for everyone. Sometimes, not often, they went to the cousins’ farm at Mazowiecki in the flatter countryside east of Warsaw. Without fail, however, every August they went south to the Tatras, to the farm in the mountains where his grandfather had once been rich and now was poor. Grandfather was old with white hair, jolly sometimes, more often not. He jingled with the many religious medals of saints that he wore under his fancy linen shirt, even when he was stacking hay or shoveling manure from the goose shed. He liked the boys to call him Ja-Ja, though only Jan and Bronek did so. Pawel admired Grandfather, but did not know how to talk with him—he was so very big and mighty, sometimes kind, sometimes fierce, but always imposing.

Babscia was as old as Grandfather, though softer, with eyes that looked fondly at Pawel and often smiled. She smelled of lavender and sage, a sweet-sour scent that was her own—no other person had such a smell. She prayed the rosary with Pawel each night as he slipped toward dreams under the blue quilt with his name Pawelek and a heart and a cross stitched onto it. The wind poured through the window at the foot of the bed, the curtains billowing, the night larks calling to each other, the stars beyond counting and very bright, like snowflakes.

Deep were the sleeps of that house, sweet were its dreams, though Pawel would sometimes awake in the dark, alone in the alcove room where he slept, a little frightened by the sad songs of the owls in the cherry grove, and the lingering memory of tales of the cinnamon bears that Grandfather had hunted in the forest long ago when he was young. Or wolves chasing children across the winter snowdrifts. But such small frights were not many, and he always quickly fell asleep again.

Sometimes he dreamed of Papa. Sometimes he remembered. There was, for example, the most wonderful memory. Long ago, just before Papa went off to fight in the war against the Russians, he had taken Pawel onto his lap, all dressed in his soldier’s clothes, with the double-headed eagle on his breast. Papa held him and kissed his cheeks, gave him a ginger candy to suck.

"Dziecko, my child, Papa whispered. Mój synu, my little son."

Then while they were resting together like that, he put a lump of red tissue paper into Pawel’s hands.

For you, for you, Papa breathed into his ear, holding him tightly.

Gleefully Pawel tore open the paper and found inside of it a brass sculpture. It was a tiny knight slaying a dragon. He turned it this way and that, dribbled sugar juice on it when he kissed it, made Papa laugh.

How old are you, my son? Papa asked.

Pawel held up five fingers. Twooo, he said.

That’s right, you’re two, Papa said. I must go away now, Pawel, and I must fight like this brave knight. If the battle goes well, I will be back when you are— and he held up three fingers.

*    *    *

But three fingers came and went, then four fingers. Winters and summers. New leaves and old leaves. Ice and fire.

When he was five he ran away to the Saski Gardens, all by himself. That day, Mama was at the market buying greens and fish for lunch. Jan and Bronek were minding him. They started to quarrel and fell to wrestling in the bedroom. It made Pawel laugh, because they looked so much like squirrels chasing each other up and down the stone fence behind the barn at Zakopane. First one was the chaser, then the other, and whenever one caught the other they would pummel with their fists, their platinum hair flying, faces red with rage, throwing each other to the ground, knocking over furniture, crying, slapping, yelling, jumping up, and chasing through the apartment all over again.

Pawel soon tired of watching this and went to the parlor, where he lay down in a pool of sunshine to play with the angel shapes he had been cutting out of newspaper all morning. Wishing suddenly that Papa were there to stop Jan and Bronek from fighting, he returned to the bedroom and from under his pillow pulled the brass carving of the knight and dragon. Narrowly escaping a wild punch from Bronek, he ran to the front door and went out into the hall. From the other apartments came the sounds of families playing or fighting. The air was misty with the scent of boiling cabbage.

He skipped down the staircase to the street entrance and out onto the sidewalk. There he bumped into two other tenants of their apartment block, a man and a woman arguing, gesturing intensely. Pausing to observe this for a while, he soon lost interest and decided to find a quieter place to play with his angels. Going by sense more than by memory, he walked north on their street, singing its letters—z-i-e-l-n-a—as he went. Reaching a larger avenue—k-r-o-l-e-w-s-k-a—he turned right onto it and sang its letters, too. A little farther along, he crossed over into the trees and grassy stretches of the Saski Gardens.

For hours he walked its pathways, picked flowers for Mama, sat down under chestnut trees and watched their spiky green fruit sway in the breeze. It was too early in the year for them to begin dropping onto the ground, but he hoped it would happen soon, so that he could collect enough to take to Zakopane to make a giant rosary. He would ask Grandfather to drill holes in the brown chestnuts, beg some string, put it all together, and give it to Great-Uncle Nicholas for a Christmas present.

He took the paper angels from his pocket, and when a gust of wind made the trees sway and sigh, he let the angels go up into the air and spread out over the city. After that he sat down in the shade of a lime tree, holding the brass carving of the knight and dragon, talking to the knight, reminding him to be very, very brave. He thought of Papa, imagining what they would say to each other, the places they would go together, the feel of his arms. He stretched out on the grass and dozed for a while, awakening when flies buzzed on his face. He saw that his pants were dirty and wet because he had rolled off the grass onto the damp black soil of a rose bed.

He looked around for his knight and dragon but could not find them. He could think no more about this because a woman’s sob startled him. Looking up, he saw Mama striding along the walkway, coming toward him at great speed, Jan and Bronek trotting behind, worried looks on their faces.

Oh, there was a swat and a hug and tears and scolding! Mama angry and happy all at once, brushing the wet garden dirt from his pants and shirt. Jan and Bronek staring at their feet, because they were in trouble for losing him.

*    *    *

That August they went to Zakopane as usual—a fine clear-sky summer. He forgot to collect chestnuts and so did not make the rosary for Great-Uncle Nicholas. He also forgot where he had lost the brass sculpture of the knight and dragon. He missed it greatly because he was in the habit of talking to the knight as if he were Papa, feeling certain