Free The Stars Can Wait by Jay Basu Page A

mother and Francesca talking, their voices coming to him as if through water. He turned and walked to the room in which his mother slept and placed his hand upon the doorknob. He turned it slowly, wincing with expectation of the noise that would alert them, but none came, and he swung the door open and walked inside. It smelled of his mother there, fragrant and with an under-spice that reminded him of being a small child close to her. He moved to the chest of drawers that stood at the foot of the bed in the small unaired room and opened the bottom of the five drawers. This was his father’s drawer, where his mother kept mementos: a bundle of yellowed letters tied with string; a seashell shaped like an ear; reading glasses, coated now with dust; a pair of rolling dice; a watch that no longer ran, and whose snapped strap his father had worn mended with sealing tape. And photographs.
    He picked up the slim pile of pictures and shuffled through them until he found what he had been looking for. It was a photograph with white lacy paper edges taken by one of his father’s friends with a new box camera some years after the war, the black now ebbed to brown and the white to cream. His father looked young; he was standing in his work clothes in the soft shadows of a summer morning glade in the forest, a smile just breaking across his wide face. For some years he had done a seasonal job felling trees, and here he stood with one boot up on a tree stump looking like some popular hero or explorer, the long axe over his shoulder. Behind him other men were working. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old.
    Gracian had not set his eyes on this photograph for some time, and the youth and strength of the man he saw there seemed strange to him. He turned the picture about briefly in the filtered half-light, letting the moon sheen the surface, and then pushed it into his shirt pocket and hurried out.
    In the quiet of his room he took it out and placed it on the window ledge to let the light from outside illuminate it. He did not wish to light the lamps, for in the encroaching darkness he felt a sanctity and the sanctity seemed fitting. He manoeuvered the picture so that it lay vertically on the ledge before him, his father’s face facing his. Then he stepped away and back, moved again over to the photograph, closed one eye, and lifted the telescope.
    In such close-up the features of his father’s face shimmered and dispersed into granules. Gracian did not know what he was looking for among them; perhaps for the shadow of the disease that later ravaged him, perhaps for the fainter shadows of his own face. Yet as he looked, other pictures with sharper focus began to crowd the lens, moving, bringing their brightness upward to him.
    *   *   *
    His father sitting at the end of his bed in a room choked with light and heat despite the open window. Tomorrow was Gracian’s ninth birthday.
    What would you like, boy? his father was saying in that way he spoke: Silesian dialect, more old Slav than Polish. What would you most like to have?
    Gracian propped himself up on his elbows. A finch, he said, imagining the bird in his palm. A golden finch.
    His father frowned. And how do you expect to get one of those?
    I don’t know. But I’ve wanted one all my life.
    There were creases in the corners of his father’s eyes. All your life? You haven’t lived yet. You have a whole past to earn.
    How?
    You earn it by years lived.
    But I do want one. I have a cage for it. I made it myself. From wood.
    That’s no cage, boy. That’s a box. A finch needs to feel free.
    It will. It will feel free. I’ll make sure.
    His father’s big rough hand patting his head, messing his hair, fingers stained the colour of amber from all the rolling tobacco he smoked. Well. We’ll see.
    The next day his father had gone to work in the forest. The story was that in the midday heat he