I was warm, so warm. The fire was burning, heat enveloped us, and we started to undress, dreamlike, entranced. Looking at one another, like children, without a trace of shame. One by one, clothes fell to the ground—jeans and skirts and shirts and blouses, socks and pants. Until we were all naked, the air on our white bodies, the night around our pale skin. We were an army of erotic ghosts. And we were all beautiful. Hania and Agata with their dark triangles between their thighs and their breasts like overripe fruit, Agata rounder and softer than Hania, whose skin was translucent, blindingly white, a Venus and a nymph. Maksio, his fleshy body like Samson, a colossus, his penis massive like a bull’s, his chest hairy and broad like a drum. But you were the most beautiful of them all. Your body was made of marble and absorbed the light of the moon.
Agata opened the veranda and we ran outside, like children on midsummer night. We didn’t feel the cold, only the embrace of the night air on our skin. It was like swimming, dipping into the air. Our arms outstretched, reaching for the moon.
“Let’s play hide-and-seek!” cried Hania, taking a cloth from the garden table, blindfolding Maksio. We turned him around and around, our fingers on his waist and hips, his penis swinging along with the turns, our hands slapping his backside.
“Count to thirty!”
We ran into the garden, into the forest. The girls in one direction, you and I in another. Grass and twigs tickled our feet.
“You can take off your blindfold now!” Hania’s voice called from far away.
You and I behind a tree, somewhere by the edge of the forest. Our hands on the bark, beginning to freeze, and then finding warmth, our arms around each other. Our bodies formed one, protecting each other from the cold, perfect in the night. We kissed. You were mine. I realized then that this was the only thing that counted. Nothing else had ever existed. Just our lips and hips and sighs. I fell into different galaxies through you, your mouth a porthole to a better universe, and then the cracking of twigs behind us and there was Maksio, standing naked a couple of meters away, looking at us with his mouth wide open. His eyes dilated, his body frozen.
I could sense a quiver of fear run through your body. You tried to say something, but Maksio, completely out of nowhere, started to laugh. He laughed out loud like a crazed bear. It seemed like his laughter would bring the forest down, make the pines shed their needles.
Your face lightened up suddenly, and you laughed too. “It was a joke!” you cried, concentrating, looking at him. “Ludwik challenged me. I lost a bet.”
Maksio stopped laughing, his eyes flickering between you and me.
The girls emerged from behind the trees. “What happened?” asked Agata. “Why were you laughing?”
Maksio turned around to them and started walking away. “Nothing,” he said. “A hallucination. I won.”
We walked back to the veranda, and I couldn’t look at you, only at the ground, not sure what had just happened. I was hot. I was burning. I was entirely aflame. Then it was the next round and my turn to be blindfolded. I laughed and laughed as they spun me, despite myself, and I counted to thirty, cold and dizzy when I opened my eyes and they were gone. I walked into the forest, and there were Maksio and Agata, kissing in a clearing. I tapped them on the shoulder. They looked up, smiled, and continued their embrace. “I’ll find the other two!” I cried, running farther into the forest, over fallen trunks and little valleys. I ran until I was lost, until I was sure I’d lost you. I tried to find my way back. The forest had started to close in on me, to turn from enchanting to threatening. It felt like a nightmare, and I knew my mind wasn’t working clearly. I stopped, tried to calm myself. Then an owl hooted somewhere behind me and I turned. Whiteness glowed behind a tree, like a luminescent stone in the sea. I walked toward it, fast, my heart beating with imminent success. And then I saw the different shades of white—darker white on lighter white, matted marble on chalk. Two bodies on the forest floor, legs entwined. I stood, watching your feet move over each other, soles black with earth and leaves, writhing, struggling. There was cruelty in those round forms on top of each other—you over her, your chest over hers, her closed eyes lit by the moonlight. I turned back and ran. I ran and started to shiver all over, like a child who’s broken through ice and fallen into a lake and only just managed to crawl out. I ran and ran, becoming completely and utterly numb, not feeling a thing. Not feeling the cold, not feeling my lungs, only terror propelling me forward. It felt like, if only I ran fast enough, all this would not be true—that the farther I ran, the farther I would be from what I’d seen.
When I got to the house, Maksio and Agata were there, looking at me as if I were a ghost, asking me questions I couldn’t hear. I only saw their mouths moving. I thought I would suffocate or faint. It was as if I hadn’t breathed at all during my run, as if I hadn’t breathed in years. There I stood and felt my head deflating, my whole being draining of air, and I began to pant like a horse after a race. I bent over, hands on my knees, trying not to drown in the emptiness, the vacuum of myself. But something inside was broken, no doubt about it.
“Are you OK?” asked Maksio.
I saw then that they were dressed again. I had never felt so naked in my life, so utterly vulnerable. I shook my head. Then the lights went out.
I remember I vomited during the night, convulsively. It felt like I was setting something free, ridding myself of a monster. I remember nothing else, apart from the feeling that I wasn’t in control of my body. The thought went through my mind that I might die. That I didn’t have the strength or the wits to do anything about it. That I just had to let it happen—whatever “it” was going to be. And then, like something heavy and wet sliding into a black hole in the ground, I fell asleep again.
When I woke I didn’t know who I was. My mind was a clean slate, for just one beautiful moment. Until the memory came crashing down. I was lying in the bed in our room upstairs, naked under the covers. My guts and head were burning. The curtains were drawn. Faint sunlight glowed underneath and around their edges. You in the other bed, asleep. Your shoulder moved almost imperceptibly, your breathing inaudible. I pulled myself up. My body was heavy and unfamiliar; every movement felt unusual. I put on some clothes, threw the rest of my things into my bag. You didn’t stir as I walked out. I moved across the silent corridor, over the oriental carpets, downstairs to the room with the fireplace. It was cool. Empty bottles on tables, the faded smell of cigarettes. And in the middle of the room, like some bizarre offering, was a mound made up of our clothes. Outside on the veranda there was a burned spot where a fire had been. Birds—small and fat, with orange beaks—flew around excitedly, picking at something in the dewy grass. A pair of panties. White and lacy, discarded like someone’s fantasy.
I walked out through the front door, left it open behind me—across the gravel path, through the open gate at the end of the poplared avenue. The trees and the dirt road already made me feel as if I were breathing more lightly. The sun was still coming up, sending butter-colored light across the park. And I was so glad to be on this path by myself. So endlessly glad. But just when I was about to reach the road, a black limousine with tinted windows came toward me. I kept my head down, accelerated my steps, hoping it wouldn’t stop, hoping Hania’s parents—was that who was in there?—wouldn’t interrogate me. The car passed without stopping or slowing down, gravel crunching beneath its massive wheels. I reached the main road. Breathing in and out, I reveled in the emptiness. Then a church bell rang in the distance, and I decided to find it. I walked along the forest road. Horse-drawn carts with families passed by, and the ringing of the bell became more distinct. Not long after, a village appeared, along with the church. It was wooden and old, its spire almost black. People streamed in, families, old people, children in hordes. I followed them into the darkness inside. The organ was playing, and a soothing cloud of heavy incense hung in the air.
I stood among boys and young men in suits, some with unruly hair, many with heavy, broad faces, burned and we
athered, blue eyes, caps in their hands held in front of their crotches. Whenever a woman came in, another boy would get up from the benches, shooed by his mother, and stand with us men, letting the woman pass. No one seemed to notice me. I was invisible in the crowd. The priest stepped up to the pulpit in white-and-purple robes, greeting the congregation. Then the organ started up again and everyone began to sing. The notes moved slowly through space and through the crowd, elevated, unified us, passed through the single body of us and up to the murky windows and the dark ceiling. Tears gathered in my eyes, releasing themselves. I joined in the singing.
Chapter 7
Winter came early that year. Every week pulled us deeper into its gloom, every day shorter than the last, as if time was running out. What surprised me most was how calm I was. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe I was still in another drug-infused dimension, preternaturally wise. Or maybe it was shock. Or denial. Maybe the whole thing was just too big to comprehend. Or it didn’t mean anything yet. There were moments when I wanted to lie on the ground and feel the street’s concrete against my face. Just lie down, stop. To feel a heavy weight on me, feel my bones crack, feel myself drift off to sleep, forever. But all this I pushed back.
Amid the chaos in my mind, I knew that I could not continue my life as it had been. I knew I had to leave. I tried to think of only that. And so, on a terribly gray and cold morning, I went to the Passport Bureau. It was a tall brown building in a side street in the center of the city, not too far from the National Museum, where the strikes had been. I went with trembling hands, pushing away the memory of the night I’d released the flyers, my story assembled in my head. I sat in the cold hall, filling out the forms, strangely aware of my handwriting and, like whenever I had to supply the official data of my life, feeling as if I were lying. The form asked where I was going, for how long and why, and I stuck to my story.
For what felt like days, I sat in the dark and drab halls of the Bureau, on a hard, wooden bench, holding a piece of paper with a number, waiting for it to be my turn.
I sat in the hallway and tried not to cry. I wanted to cease existing. I wanted to un-be. I sat in the hallway and tried not to think of you and me. I tried not to think of us, under the covers of your bed. I tried not to think of your arms or your hands or your eyes. I tried not to think of all the things I had imagined we’d do together—return to our lake next summer, move in together someday. I tried not to think of Hania, and your fingers on her sequined dress. I tried not to think of Maksio or his eyes when he saw us in the forest. I tried not to think of Granny or Professor Mielewicz.
I tried to imagine my life in the future, in a year or so. I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t see anything because anything that wasn’t that moment—no, not even that—was beyond me. I started rocking my legs and feet, just to feel something. And then the office closed before my number was called. I left with nothing to show for my time except the flimsy piece of paper whose handwritten number had smudged from my holding it for too long.
I went home. I would get used to it, Pani Kolecka told me. She made us a sparse dinner, buckwheat with pickled cucumbers and beetroot mash, and we ate with the windows open, the cold drifting in, stirring us, the sound of cars rushing past in the streets.
“We’re just queuing for a possibility, queuing for something, maybe queuing for nothing,” she said, smiling her sad and loving smile. “But it will pass, my dear. Even the longest queue dissolves eventually.”
The next day I went back to the Bureau. I sat and waited, among rows of others, young and old and ageless, all silent, all torpid, reading or knitting or fiddling with their clothes with unnatural resigned slowness, while the large clock ticked and numbers were called out every now and then by a plaintive voice. My body hurt from the bench. I was hungry. But, bizarrely, I remained calm. The calm, I think, was still a form of shock. If I had let anything out, it all would have overwhelmed me. The fear, the terror of my life alone, was always there, like a clasping, growing abyss, waiting to devour me. I can still feel the tremors of that fear today, its echoes firmly anchored under my fingertips and in that small, weightless space inside my lower belly, just inches above the verge of my crotch.
At the end of the day, my number was called. I walked down the corridor, my footsteps echoing on the stone floor. I knocked on a door, my pulse thumping in my ears. I obeyed the voice that said, “Come in.”
The office was narrow and long and dim. I had to walk half a dozen steps to reach the desk, and I strained my eyes to see the man in a tiny patch of lamplight—a bald man with black-rimmed glasses.
“Take a seat,” he said, his voice formal but not unfriendly. “I’m just finishing something.”
I sat in the chair opposite him. He was bent over some files, absorbed in their contents. His desk was covered in piles of them, neatly stacked blocks of paper. There was only the sound of a clock ticking, slowly, unwillingly.
“So,” the man said, looking up at me, somewhat weary, bags under his eyes behind his glasses. He opened another file, which I assumed was mine. His eyes scurried over it, moving quickly, and second by second his expression hardened. I thought he’d ask me questions about my trip. I had my story ready—that I was going to visit an uncle in Chicago over Christmas and that I’d be back in January. I expected him to ask why I had never gone to visit my family before, how I could possibly afford the trip, and how they could possibly know I wouldn’t defect. I thought he’d launch into the standard lecture about the dangers of the capitalist world, how they were the enemies of socialism, and how I should never speak to foreigners about politics, except to praise the advance and success of socialist Poland. This is what people had said always happened. But none of that happened. Instead, he set down the file after a moment and looked at me with an expression that was impossible to read.
“We know about you, citizen,” he said, with an expectant look. “We know about you.”
I couldn’t breathe. The night of the flyers, the window, the faces staring up at me. Who’d told them? Had they been following me all along? I couldn’t make a sound. The man looked satisfied.
“We know about your deviancy, about your pederasty.” He said the words clinically, with a detached sort of judgment, the way I imagined he would have said “treason.” All feeling left my body, as if my cells were deserting me. It was as if someone had hurled me into a vortex, with no up and no down, nothing to hold on to. No one had ever said these things to me. Something private, something utterly unspoken yet essential, was being ripped out of me. I couldn’t say anything. Maybe they were baiting me, I thought, maybe I could argue my way out of this. But I was unable to think or maneuver; I was caught in the jaws of something much too powerful, something that paralyzed me from within. Satisfaction flickered across his face—a face that could have been anyone’s, an unremarkable, everyday face.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, knowing I could never carry through with this.
His face didn’t change. He looked back at the file. “Does the name Marian Zalewski mean anything to you?”
I shook my head truthfully.
With his eyes on the file, he continued. “Zalewski was caught in the Staromiejski Park in Wrocław over three years ago—April the twenty-third, 1977. Engaging in sodomy with another citizen.” He looked back at me. “He obediently gave to us the names of others like him. All the names he knew. All contained in a statement, signed by him personally. One of them was yours.”
He took something out of the file and handed it to me. It was a photograph, passport-size. It showed the face of an old man I had never seen before, staring straight into the camera. His face was deeply lined and hollow. Dried, emptied of life. And then, in a flash, I recognized him: it was the man from the park bench, from the night I’d run away from home. The man who’d told me his life story, the man whose mouth had relieved my anxiety for one night—and whom I had told my name. Instead of anger, a strange sort of tenderness invaded me. He looked
so sad, so forsaken in the photo. Fury awoke in me on his behalf. I could see him being dragged out of the park, into the back of a police van; I could see him sitting in some cold underground office, beaten, blackmailed, made to sign this statement that now lay neatly before a bureaucrat.
“What does this have to do with my passport?” I asked, impatient. “Will you give it to me or not?”
He put down the file slowly and folded his hands over it, retaining his calm.
“That depends entirely on you, citizen. On you and your common sense.” He closed my file, placed his elbows on it, and looked at me with narrowed eyes, his pupils small and intense, like the heads of nails. “If you want your passport, you will do the same thing Comrade Marian did: supply us with names. And dates. And circumstances.”
He pulled out a piece of blank paper from his desk drawer and pushed it across the table toward me.
“Write.”
At first, there was emptiness. Thoughts flew through space, trying to ignite. A sky readied for fireworks, a stage cleared for decisions. But where do decisions come from?
Swimming in the Dark Page 15