Swimming in the Dark

by Tomasz Jedrowski

  The man’s voice was different from the voices that usually came out of the radio. It was calmer, less aggressive. He wasn’t shouting or proclaiming. Mother and Granny sat frozen, their hands holding up their chins and covering their mouths. I tried to concentrate like them, but I didn’t understand much of what was said. He used many words I didn’t know, acronyms that meant nothing to me. It was like another language. At one point he mentioned “Israel,” those jagged syllables that had become so potent in only a day. I tried to guess the meaning of it all but only saw blanks. When the program was over, Mother moved the indicator back to another station and turned up the volume. This, I discovered, is what she would do every night, so no one would ever know they had listened to the forbidden station. And while the music played, they began to explain. They explained about the Jews, that there had been many in Poland before. For a thousand years. That most had been killed in the camps that the Germans had set up during the war. Granny recalled seeing her neighbors forced onto trains, never to be seen again. Of course we weren’t really taught this at school. We were taught that the Germans had suppressed the Poles and how our Russian brothers had saved us. Jews weren’t Polish, of course. Some Poles still blamed them for the war. That year, Mother said, there had been unrest, student strikes all across the country. So the Party had turned on the Jews. They had called them traitors, dismissed them from their jobs. This was why Beniek’s family had left. Once they were gone, no one ever spoke about them again. One day your country is yours, and the next it isn’t.

  Beniek’s departure spelled the end of my childhood, and of the childhood of my mind: it was as if everything I’d assumed before had turned out to be false, as if behind every innocuous thing in the world lay something much darker and uglier. Every evening now Granny and Mother would let me into the little room. We’d huddle together by the speaker, silent and serious, leaning forward, listening to the voices from across the Wall, and after the program was over, Granny and Mother would explain something new about our history. How for over a century the country had been divided by Russia and Germany, how it had ceased to exist on the maps. How our culture had survived in the underground, parents teaching children their forbidden language and history, and how the country had finally gained independence after the First Great War. They taught me about the second one too, the side we were never told. How, after years of occupation, the people of Warszawa rose up against the Nazis, how the Soviets arrived, and how, instead of helping the Uprising, they stayed on the other side of the Wisła and waited. They knew they’d win the war, knew the Germans would retreat eventually, so they let them take revenge on the Poles. The Soviets watched on as the city was decimated and its population slaughtered or deported. When the Germans finally left, there were fewer than a thousand survivors in the capital.

  I guess you believed what they told us in school, that the Soviets were our liberators. That they were the good ones. Our allies. Sometimes I wish I could have been as light as you. Because I didn’t enjoy those nights in my mother’s room, those terrible truth-spills. They were a ritual, their pull too strong to resist. Even if I didn’t understand it all, I understood enough for anger to collect at the bottom of my stomach. The fact that I couldn’t tell anyone made it all worse. I’d been handed a poisoned gift, powerful truths I could never admit to knowing. Mother had made me swear never to mention anything to anyone, lest they sack her—or worse.

  I suppose the scariest thing was the lack of certainty. The fifties were over, and people no longer disappeared for speaking out. But in the sixties—and even later—things were more arbitrary. Almost anything was possible, depending on who happened to denounce you and what they thought they could get from you. Even with my childish intuition I sensed that a single mother was more vulnerable than most.

  So, just like before, I’d take part in the morning salutes at school, and bow in front of the portrait that hung above the teacher’s desk, of Party Chairman Gomułka’s ancient, crumpled face scowling down at us. I took part in the marches, in the parades, in the May 1 celebrations, the anniversaries of the October Revolution. Holding banners with obsequious slogans praising our Soviet brothers, singing the songs they had taught us. I was like the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” except I didn’t speak up. I pretended not to see the obvious truth: that we had never asked for this system. That it had been forced upon us. I sat through the lessons and endured it all, carrying Beniek’s banishment inside me, bile collecting in the pit of me. During breaks I’d pick fights with other boys, coming away with a bloody nose or busted lips and temporary relief. And I swore that I would never become one of them, of those who led their mendacious lives in submission to the system.

  * * *

  One day, as you came out of the lake, you asked me whether I had a girlfriend. I shook my head, thrown by your question. You were bent over drying your thighs, and I couldn’t see your face. I smiled to hide my embarrassment, even though you couldn’t see me.

  “No,” I finally said. “And you?”

  You’d reached your feet. I watched you run a corner of your flimsy towel through the crevices between your toes. Then you looked up, confident that I was waiting for you.

  “No,” you said carefully. “Not really.”

  “What does that mean?”

  You straightened, brushing your hair back with a hand. You looked both defiant and amused.

  “It means I used to. But not anymore. I prefer this now.”

  And before I could ask anything further, before I could gauge your words and the corridors lying beyond them, you came over and pulled me in. Your mouth set down on my neck, avidly. Like a vampire, I thought, and closed my eyes.

  On the last morning at the lake we packed our things and dismantled the tent. We watched it collapse onto the ground like a dying hot-air balloon. Then we flattened and folded its lifeless body and pushed it into its cylindrical bag. We did it all without exchanging a word.

  “You know we can’t tell anyone,” you said to me, suddenly serious, pulling the bag closed.

  “About what?” I asked. I knew exactly. My stomach was like a towel being twisted. I watched you collect the rods lying scattered on the ground, opening the bag again and shoving them inside.

  You threw me a furtive look. “About this.”

  I picked up a stick and threw it toward the lake, seeing it fly and fall in vain, not making a sound.

  “No. I guess we can’t.”

  We hadn’t really talked about “us,” or what it would be like back in the city, or anything else. There was no “us.” Of course, I had thought about it, had wanted to ask: “What is this? What are we going to do with it when we get back?”

  But I never asked in the glare of daylight—I wouldn’t have dared. Maybe I’m confused, the moments merging into one another, disfiguring one another like too many voices speaking at once. But now that I think of it, I remember I only dared ask on the last night, as we lay in the dark of the tent, about to fall asleep after having made love. I asked the question into the dark, afraid. You didn’t say anything for an interminable moment, and I thought you had fallen asleep. Finally, you whispered, “I don’t want this to end.”

  My heart beating hard, knocking against the wall of my chest, I replied: “Me neither.”

  When we arrived in the city, light came from every corner, bounced off every facade as hotly and radiantly as I felt flooded with happiness and anxiety. I was no longer in control. I’d think back to the lake, the tent—compulsively, like the birth of something I could not yet imagine. I had found my place on your sandstone body—between your thighs and the mounds of your nipples, in the cave of your armpits. The geography of you was suddenly as clear as that of the city, skin warmed like the bricks of the tenement houses, the lines of your body like the straight and unbroken lines of the avenues, of the tram tracks and the stiff metal barriers that threw crisscrossed shadows onto the streets. The same barriers that appeared
stable but could move under your weight, creaking when you leaned on them for too long, threatening to release you onto the busy car-ridden tar.

  When I arrived in the flat, it seemed smaller to me than before. The kitchen was to the right, as soon as you entered. It was long and narrow and only big enough to hold my landlady, Pani Kolecka. This was her territory. No matter how scarce the supplies, no matter how harsh the rationing, she was always in there, baking. Somehow, there would always be sugar and flour and something she’d scrape up or exchange. There’d be szarlotka apple tarts or babeczka cakes with cream, or layered gingerbread with plum jam. She baked like her life depended on it, and maybe it did. I had loved her ever since I’d moved in, fresh from Wrocław, referred from the center for student accommodation. I loved her warm voice and her soft presence and her small, childlike face. She seemed so old it almost made her ageless, like a being from another world. Usually she’d sleep on the brown couch in the living room, next to the table where we ate and the cabinet with the collection of rocks her husband had left behind. But in the summer the block heated up like a glasshouse, and sometimes, when I got up at night to go to the bathroom, I’d see her sleeping there on the tiled floor of the kitchen with the door open, large and peaceful, like some creature swept up by the sea.

  The door to my room was next to the rock cabinet. It held a foldable bed and a small desk one pushed aside to open the door to the balcony. We were on the seventh floor. All you could see were the tops of the other blocks, like the heads of people standing in front of you in a crowd.

  You and I lived on opposite sides of the city: me to the west, you to the east, and separated by the Wisła. A tram connected us, passing through the Old Town and across the river. To the south, always visible, the gigantic Palace of Culture towered over the rest of the city.

  I lived where the Ghetto had been, where the Nazis had razed everything to the ground to leave no trace of their crimes. Wola was the name of the neighborhood, “Will” or “Determination” in English. The Party had rebuilt it as part of their socialist dream. A network of identical blocks stood lined up neatly like cardboard boxes, as far as the eye could see. We called this the blokowisko. There were new parks, new trees, and new children, playing obliviously in between the blocks on layers of invisible footprints and the dust of forgotten lives.

  You lived in Praga, one of the few neighborhoods that had made it almost unscathed through the war, where the Russians had waited and watched the destruction of the city by the Germans, where they had looked on without firing a bullet as the Germans destroyed Wola. As they quietly and clearheadedly decimated the Old Town, the museums, the libraries, the archives, allowing a whole world to burn into oblivion.

  In the first weeks back, Warszawa was empty and hot. We walked the bright avenues and bought berries and sunflower heads from the old ladies and ate them at the Saski Gardens near me, by the hill with the white pavilion. We stopped at milk bars. We ate cool chłodnik soup, the sour milk and pink beetroot soothing our throats. We drank fruit kompot, which colored our tongues, and for dessert, noodles with melted butter and raspberry jam. Later, full and content, we’d lie in the high grass near the zoo in Praga and watch the sky through the gaps in the solid branches of the trees above. Our words, our stories, poured forth like springs. I told you about Mother and Granny and even about Father. How he’d left us when I was very young, how I could barely remember him. How I barely wanted to. He’d moved to Kalisz and never visited, and all we saw of him were the meager alimony payments the postman brought every month. Mother always said he’d never wanted children, that he’d wanted her all to himself to love and control.

  You listened, really listened, gentle eyes taking me in without judgment, making me feel more heard than I knew I could be. Then you told me about your family in the mountains. About your brothers, whom you had looked up to as a boy and who’d become “nothing,” drunks like so many others, passing out every payday, whose bodies the police picked up from the benches and pavements and left overnight in the sobering cells. You talked about your parents and their work in the sawmill. How ignorant they were of you. “They hardly know what this means,” you said, looking around at the city. “I want to show them. They can be proud of me.” You told me about your job, starting a week from then. “For the Office of Press Control,” you half-whispered, as if pronouncing the name of a god. A shiver ran through me, made me forget it was summer.

  “You mean the Office of Censorship,” I said, despising you for a moment. “The ones who ban the books we need the most.”

  Irritation flickered across your face. “Don’t be such a square. Everyone’s got to start somewhere. You have a better idea?”

  “Let’s go away,” I said, surprised by the boldness of this. But you only looked amused.

  “Where would you like to go? Rome, Paris?”

  “I’m not joking, Janusz.”

  “You know what, Ludzio? You’re a crazy one. Look around you.” We were protected by the high grass, the sun shining on us. “Why would we leave all this?”

  That evening we climbed to the top of the Palace of Culture and saw the city lying before us, its vastness suddenly tiny, its end—the chimneys of the factories and the forests behind the last houses—a secret resolved. The Wisła snaked itself through the middle and continued on, beyond the human-made structures, toward the mountains in the south and the sea to the north. The mist of the day’s heat dissolved above the blocks. Summer was at its height; time was suspended. And I never wanted it to run again. Like a dice, spinning and spinning without ever coming to a standstill.

  The weeks passed, and I hadn’t seen Karolina since the camp. I decided to visit her. She rented a room from a crane driver in Żoliborz, in the far north of the city, the only part Bowie had ever seen, when his train stopped on the way from Moscow to Berlin, just a couple of years before you and I met. It made him write “Warszawa,” a terribly desolate song. But Żoliborz isn’t the worst neighborhood by far. It’s residential, made up of 1930s Bauhaus-style flats, a run-down garden city. There are trees everywhere, large and oblivious, and carpets of grass occupy every space between the gray buildings. In summer, it’s a two-colored world—gray and green. But, of course, Bowie saw it all in winter, when there is only one color left.

  I knocked on Karolina’s door. The crane driver opened it, wearing curlers in her hair and a dressing gown around her barrel-like body. She knew me, although she never showed any sign of it. With a dry “good morning” she led me along the corridor, which was decorated with empty packets of Western cigarettes (Camel, Ambassador, Marlboro) arranged on a shelf. She led me toward Karolina’s room at the far end of the flat and knocked on her door before I could. Her curlers shook in her short hair.

  “Miss Patocka,” she cried, “another man for you!” She threw me a satisfied look and walked off. The door opened, and Karolina’s face appeared, breaking into a smile.

  “Ludzio, it’s you.” She kissed me on both cheeks, her blouse soft against my bare upper arm. “Come in, close the door.”

  She walked across the room, picking up clothes that were lying strewn on the floor, the chair of her desk, the bed, and pushed them into a wardrobe in a corner.

  “Never mind the mess,” she said, throwing herself onto her bed and looking at me wide-eyed. “I didn’t expect you. But I’m glad you came. Sit.” With her palm she tapped the space next to her. I obeyed. “I hope she wasn’t too mean?” She looked at the door and rolled her eyes.

  “She hasn’t become any more refined.”

  “Did you hear how she tries to humiliate me?”

  “As if that could humiliate you—another gentleman caller.”

  She smiled, her coral-colored lips stretching over her big teeth.

  “So, how have you been?” She looked at me for a moment, as if reading me. “You’ve changed,” she said calmly, like a clairvoyant announcing someone’s fate.

  “Have I?” I made a grimace.

  “Your fa
ce.” She held her hand to it, her middle finger resting on my cheekbone. “It looks like something’s opened up, something that was folded tight. Like a fist. I’d never noticed it before, but now I do.”

  “You can save your wise words for one of your gentleman callers.” I laughed, gently pushing her hand away. “I’m the same.”

  She shrugged, getting up from the bed and sitting down at her desk, which also functioned as her dressing table with a mirror on the wall. A photo of Isabelle Adjani was tucked between the mirror’s frame and its glass, a still from Polanski’s The Tenant. Adjani looked rapt behind an enormous pair of tortoiseshell glasses, hair big and frizzy, ring-covered fingers seductively placed by her lips. Karolina picked up a pair of tweezers and started plucking an eyebrow. She was sitting with her back to me. In the reflection of the mirror she looked startled and concentrated, her gaze moving from her brows to the photo to me. “Don’t make me pull every word out of you individually—what was it like with him?”

  She never called you by your name.

  “Good,” I said, shrugging, trying to sound as natural as I could. “We camped by a lake. Swam, fished. It was fun.”

  “Mmmh.” She ran the tip of her ring finger along the brow she had been working on and moved on to the other. “I had no idea you two were friends.” She sounded absentminded, but I sensed her disinterest was feigned.

  “He asked me on the last night, in the forest,” I said, shrugging. “And we weren’t really friends. He had no one to go with and I had nothing to do, so I thought I might just as well.”

  She stopped what she was doing, and her eyes moved over me in the mirror. “You know you can tell me,” she said softly. Her words ran through me like a string pulled tight.

  “There’s nothing to say,” I said, looking at her for a moment and then turning to the window. There was a silence, and in its space I tried to decide whether my sudden anger was with her or with myself, for being unable to speak the truth. Through the door we heard a radio playing, a marching band blasting out a tune with insistent joy.