Regardless of honour and self-defence, it’s hard not to create what are generally believed to be problems of upbringing when you watch your mum at home trying to squeeze as many things as she can into small suitcases, compress her belongings, blouses, trousers, skirts, jewellery, tights, books, cosmetics, discs, laptop, documents, powders, fake blood, silicone, gum, foams, wigs, dyes and latex into a tiny space. When her eyes look like two huge swellings with a little, narrow slit in the middle; when she’s pacing the apartment from corner to corner with fast but uncertain steps, when her movements are abrupt but not in the least effective.
“So, you’re moving out, Mum?” asked Ela.
I nodded, blew my nose and once more started rearranging things. I couldn’t allow myself to stop and sit on the bed in front of my daughter, wring my hands while tears ran silently from my eyes.
“You don’t have to pretend to be a supermum, Mum,” remarked my daughter.
I could see that she wanted to burst into tears too, and knew how bravely she was holding back. I started to look around the apartment in search of things that were indisputably mine, not bought together during mutual arguments conventionally known as shopping or given to me as a present to say “I beg you, please forgive me.” I searched for things that were completely mine, those I’d brought to the relationship as a dowry – but there weren’t many. More had been bought with the grand gesture of a momentarily independent woman, for what was undeniably her money, far from home and in loneliness. But these things – DVDs, French and English magazines, clothes, bags, other pieces of crap – I probably didn’t need.
Thirty-five isn’t a good age to suddenly have to choose your own colours from a smeared palette that won’t separate regardless of how much solvent you use. Some things can’t be easily divided between two people who have lived together and thank each other for cooperating. Even if that cooperation was a sham, purely professional, continued out of habit, even if its best moments meant mechanical sex and polite indifference.
My daughter doesn’t cry, she shakes and whimpers like a broken toy. Now she shuffles up and puts her thin arms around me. They’re smudged with paint and sticky with some gungy chewing gum. I sit down instantly and start to howl. We howl together, two broken dolls.
“I want to go with you, Mum,” snivels my daughter, and I feel that I haven’t got an ordinary heart but alien offal scratched with a rusty fork. I’ve never had a heart attack, but this is worse. “It’ll be a fantastic adventure,” she goes on. “The two of us will go on a long road trip. We’ll even go to the States and see the Grand Canyon. We’ll sleep in cheap hotels and buy hideous sunglasses. Eat hamburgers in cheap diners until we get terribly fat. It’ll be fantastic, Mum, you’ll see, like in a film. Like in your favourite film.”
“Thelma and Louise die in the end, darling,” I say to my daughter.
“No, they don’t. They go to heaven,” replies my daughter. She’s the world’s best.
I catch sight of my old CD holder, smeared with fluorescent paints and covered with stickers from long gone Warsaw techno clubs.
“Dad’s not a bad person. He loves you, and you need to stay with him for a bit.” I try to speak like a reader on a tape teaching a foreign language; it’s the only calm I’m capable of feigning now. My daughter snuggles even closer. My heart isn’t pulsating of its own accord, more like leaping convulsively in some corrosive, boiling liquid. “But we’ll keep seeing each other. More and more often,” I add, my speech even slower, as though the tape has stretched. I don’t feel I’m myself, more like I’m looking at a stranger who is saying things completely against their will, but the will gains the upper hand in articulation, stretches the vowels, stretches the tape.
“Dad’s an idiot,” declares my daughter.
“Don’t say that,” I reply.
“You’re the only one who’s allowed to say it,” my daughter reproaches me.
“Yes, I am,” I uphold.
Ela’s father’s nothing but my husband, someone whom I’ve already run away from once. I could have not returned. But it’s pointless using the past conditional in the present. It can finish you off; besides, it doesn’t suit rational people.
I met my daughter’s father thirteen years ago. I was twenty-two and studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. You could say I was a party girl who painted terrible pictures. I copied images from leaflets handed out by Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, and gave the people on them heads of cows or pigs. My friends liked all that, because we took a lot of drugs at the time. I frequented the Blue Velvet, Paragraf 5ą and Przestrzeń Graffenberg clubs. Pre-Cambrian now, of course. Post-Second World War Polish history for today’s youngsters, those from Barka and Plan. But for me they were a colourful and pulsating world made up of beautiful boys and extravagant girls, continuous glittering raves, non-stop balls and hundreds of far from clever ideas. In my mind, this entire period features as a swimming pool full of sweet wrappers. Everything rustled and glistened. True enough, I wasn’t exceptionally degenerate, didn’t do drugs every day, wasn’t addicted to alcohol, didn’t jump into bed with any man who came along; but I loved being surrounded by hundreds of people, laughing so loudly and for so long that my head spun. I remember, I adored ecstasy. I don’t know whether it still exists.
Then I met Ela’s father, who was twenty-five at the time and had just finished film school. I remember that he was the handsomest guy around, but I don’t remember where we met; he’d have to remind me. Although, when we do speak now, we’re not exactly inclined to reminisce. I just remember that I saw him and knew that it had to be him; these things used to happen to me very often at the time, but I walked up to him and said: “Come.”
And he came.
Everything was great at first. It was like a hit song. Ela’s father loved talking. He talked a lot and spun beautiful fairy tales. He really knew a lot of words, had written an erratum to everything. He read and watched as though his life depended on it and recounted everything with unparalleled vehemence. He loved the cinema. The heavier, the better. When he started talking about Satantango or Cries and Whispers, he really did tremble. On top of that, he had masses of great ideas. He’d get up in the middle of the night and wake me up to go to the Vistula. We’d walk until dawn and he’d say what a beautiful dawn it was, then talk for three hours about filming the dawn. He’d take photos of me naked, as many as five thousand a day. Once, we hitch-hiked to Sicily. Then we went a second time, in his car. He knew how to cook, and those were days when only our mothers cooked, so I was really impressed.
I was truly in love with him. Or perhaps he was so loud, there was so much of him, that he left me no room to realise that he’d simply beguiled me.
Then everything started to get screwed up, which is far more interesting because things get screwed up a little differently for everybody.
Ela’s father was a young director. Like every young director, he wanted to direct his own film, like every young director, he had a fascinating script and, like every young director, didn’t have any money. He kept trying to improve his ingenious script and sent it to every Polish producer, all of whom turned out to be grey-haired guys in Italian jackets costing four times the average national wage, a golden chain with a medal of Our Lady dangling from it, and a signet ring. All of them made it clear: “Nobody’s going to buy this, man, nobody’s going to understand it. Wipe the snot from your nose and stop trying to be another Lynch.” Ela’s father really wanted to be a young Lynch and tried extremely hard to become one. At night, lying next to me in bed straight after sex, he’d say: “I see the first scene as being set in a corridor flooded with blue light. Hypnotic music – no rhythm, no tune, just a hum. And then somebody comes from the far end of the corridor and stands in the middle, in front of the camera, but far away. We don’t see who it is, don’t see where they’ve really come from, whether there’s a door. We don’t know who it is; they’re a black smudge to the viewer. We just hear them start to scream.”
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Ela’s father also had a lot of ideas regarding us. He wanted a house in the country. A large family. Wanted an apiary and to rear cows. Wanted a yurt in Tuscany and to tread fresh olives with his bare feet as he’d once done with a friend. Wanted us to go to Africa. He wanted a lot and talked a lot. But everything was a vague idea, a fantasy on the horizon. Nothing materialised because Ela’s father was, and is, a man of ideas thrown at people who are supposed to catch them politely and make them real. He simply knew how to and liked to talk. Little else.
At first, I was drunk on his talk. Only later did I start to pay attention to the details. That Ela’s father still lived with his parents. That he didn’t really listen to me, that when I said something about myself, he turned the other way and jiggled his leg. That he was extremely nice to women, various women, including his past girlfriends whom he absolutely wanted me to meet. That he was sometimes nicer to them than to me. That he often didn’t pick up his phone, especially when I wanted something from him. That he often spent the night at his friends’ places, concocting scripts.
But by the time these details had become very clear, there was also a very clear Ela the size of a tennis ball in my belly.
Ela’s father’s parents gave us an apartment left by his grandmother. It didn’t cost them a great deal because Ela’s father’s father ran one of the oldest law establishments in Warsaw. To make it clear, I didn’t demand anything of them. I didn’t demand anything of anyone, so I didn’t demand anything of them either. But I started to realise, in that apartment, that I’d locked myself in a cage with a stranger on whom I couldn’t particularly count and who didn’t have much to say to me.
The apartment was lifeless and full of objects belonging to a dead woman I’d never known. We were forbidden to throw anything away, so we existed in a waiting room among unfamiliar books, flea-ridden clothes, plywood furniture. The grandmother’s heavy, damp coats and furs hung in the wardrobe. I was scared of touching anything. Ela’s father’s mother hated me and thought I was a drifter, a drug addict, satanist and HIV carrier. Despite hating me, she managed to visit our apartment as though it were her own – it had, after all, been her mother’s – and spend hours telling me that my child was going to be blighted because I was blighted. She was right, I was full of venom, I swelled a million times in her starched linen, couldn’t hold my shit in, and blood kept pouring out of me. By night, Ela’s father polished his script about screaming in a blue corridor. Or simply went off to Dębki with his friends. “On a recce,” he claimed.
His mother came every day. Kept doing the laundry and disinfecting the house, although she’d have to throw out all the awful old flea-ridden things in order to disinfect it properly.
Ela’s birth was inhuman. She came into the world without an epidural and without her father there. When I screamed that I was having contractions, the midwife, without looking at me, came out with various encouraging phrases such as “go and pull yourself together”. My daughter scored low on the Apgar scale, had the cord wrapped around her neck and was blue, and they only handed her to me the following day. After the birth, Ela’s father’s mother still kept coming to our apartment. She entered without knocking, then sauntered around, opened the windows, moved objects from place to place. Didn’t speak to me. Sometimes, she’d take her granddaughter in her arms and perform typical, idiotic things grandmothers perform with grandchildren, all that “a coochie coochie coo” talk, or “Who’s a beautiful little girly whirly?” It sounded like someone sanding the floor.
Ela’s father was a broken man at the time because his father didn’t want to give him any money for his film. He’d said that they’d already given him the apartment, that his career as the new Lynch could wait and that, all in all, he should stop making a fool of himself. But really, Ela’s father’s parents, both of them, just couldn’t accept the fact that their son had had a child with a woman he hadn’t married. They didn’t know how to tell their families or friends. After some time, Ela’s father’s father told Ela’s father that he was to marry me because, firstly, what did it look like? And secondly, if he didn’t, then he wouldn’t get any money.
I wasn’t screaming yet. Ela’s father told me that we were going to have a lot of money some day, that we were going to be happy, that his parents would be dead. He talked about this or about the first scene in his film, which changed every week; I couldn’t get even an hour’s sleep.
I was more and more out of it every day. I did everything on autopilot. Got up on autopilot, fed the baby on autopilot, carried her non-stop in my arms, gently rocking her on autopilot, because she cried when I put her down, listened to screaming blue corridors on autopilot, opened the envelope that contained the decision about my being crossed off the student list on autopilot – people still got crossed off student lists in those days. We got married on autopilot in the Ursus Registry Office at the beginning of 1998 or thereabouts. I don’t remember much of the reception apart from the fact that I didn’t even invite my best friend, and that Ela’s father’s drunk uncle pinched me on the backside as I danced with him to some jaunty song about summer, knickers and blueberries. And I also remember that my mum followed me to the Ladies’, wiped the mascara that had run down my face and said: “You can still get out of this, darling.” I wasn’t screaming yet. A long time ago, before the wedding, my mum had wished me: “May you never scream. The only people who scream are those who are naturally bad or those driven to the extreme.” As it turned out, it took much, much more for me to start screaming.
Ela’s father said that it would be great if we had a boy to complete our family, one who’d be called Stanisław. “Stanisław, great,” I agreed, staring at the many layered, pink christening cake. “Stanisław’s my father’s name,” declared Ela’s father. “And so it is,” I replied.
A year after Ela was born, I ran away for the first time. Outwardly, everything seemed to be getting better and happier. Ela’s father got a job as first assistant director on the soap opera The Varsovians. He adored it and soon forgot about his blue light, non-rhythmic hum and black, screaming figure. The Varsovians was about the adventures of three young couples who had just moved into their own colourful new apartments on the first best, newly constructed housing estate. These colourful people in the colourful serial had problems such as having nowhere to park, being stuck in traffic jams, smog in the city centre and unexpected invasions from their parents. All this set to a soundtrack of overly happy, farty music.
Ela’s father earned a fair amount of money, bought a car with a child’s seat in it and declared that we were going to rent a better apartment and let the one in which we lived. He didn’t talk much to me at all any more. Sometimes picked up his daughter, tried to hide his unease.
Ela’s father’s mother bought some pink blinds and, without a word, hung them up in the window of the smallest room, which she decided was to be the nursery.
I slept two hours a day, spending the rest of the twenty-four hours in a state of stupefied wakefulness like a monitor with a flickering screensaver. I didn’t have any friends; my friends had stayed behind at that unidentified party where I’d met the father of my child, and nobody had realised yet that I’d left the club. Maybe I didn’t want those friends. I didn’t really have anything to say to anybody. I fed the child, ignored my mother-in-law and surfed from TV channel to TV channel. Ela’s father filmed the series, as well as some adverts for medicines. We painted the apartment. The dead grandmother’s things were finally disposed of.
Finally, we moved out of there to a three-room apartment in Ochota. It was bright and white. I’d wake in the mornings convinced that I was still in the old one. Nothing had changed. In the newly bought wardrobes, I picked up the smell of damp furs.
I remember a time when Ela’s father left in the early morning to shoot the Christmas episode of The Varsovians. Before leaving, he told me that Adrian, one of the characters, was wondering whether to buy Basia a Peugeot or a Renault for Christmas. He talked
about nothing else. I didn’t feel the need to talk. I couldn’t, to be honest. Somewhere I’d lost the knowledge of who he really was. I forgot how to attach a first name and a surname to the face, stature, gait and voice. One day, when he got out of bed and traipsed in his underwear to brush his teeth, I saw an entirely different person. He, his mother, most people – all had lost their contours, had changed into smudges without outlines. That’s exactly how my life as a mentally unbalanced person began.
I knew only that my daughter was my daughter and that she was called Ela, and that I was called Agnieszka and that I loved my daughter. I told myself over and over again: “I know that I love my daughter, I love my daughter, I love my daughter, I love my daughter…” When Ela’s father talked about the happy Christmas adventures of The Varsovians, I stared at the pink blinds.
In the morning, I took one-year-old Ela and went to my mum’s. That was when I ran away for the first time. I ran away peacefully. Stuck a note to the fridge. Lied that I’d be back soon. Everything was still alright. I wasn’t screaming yet.
* * *
The hallway constitutes the main aorta of the Institute. It contains a white lamp from IKEA with a synthetic fabric shade on which a drunk and stoned Iga had once painted a cartoon of two philosophising bunnies; two run-down armchairs from the interwar years picked up from a rubbish dump; an old green fake-leather sofa from the Ugly Cat; and ashtrays, cardboard boxes full of unread newspapers, scratched discs, washed-out clothes, boxes creaking with unused objects that didn’t fit in the improvised closet in the toilet.
Right now, we are all pacing the hallway, biting our nails, sharing cigarettes, gnawing holes into our sleeves, waiting. It’s Monday, ten o’clock in the morning. We’ve spent the last few hours shouting and calling out through the window, but Aleje Trzech Wieszczόw, completely deserted earlier, is now so choked with a stream of cars, hooting buses and lorries that nobody’s going to hear a bunch of people screaming from the fifth floor. The windows on the other side of the apartment overlook the yard, where there’s never anybody apart from residents taking their rubbish out; there aren’t even any students getting drunk in the gateway, because the entrance to the tenement is always locked.
The Institute Page 3