“It’s me.” She cleared her throat. “Gran Vera’s died.”
I gripped the phone harder so as not to drop it and calmly replied:
“I’ll call you back.”
I sat down. I’d just been cooking some spaghetti sauce. For fifteen minutes, I’d stirred it vigorously to stop it from sticking to the bottom of the pan. Now I sat on the chair and watched it start to burn.
Her death, of course, hadn’t come as a surprise – Gran Vera was ninety. As she herself had said, every day for the last twenty years she’d been over the moon to open her eyes and still see her bedroom ceiling and not a white-bearded man as large as the Palace of Culture – or something in that vein. It’s fine, really. She has, after all, lived a good, long life, I tried to convince myself, breathing deeply. Meanwhile, the sauce started to give off a smell similar to motor oil.
Bullshit. I could tell myself that she’d had a decent, long life, had passed away surrounded by love, support and so on, but in reality, deep despair surged within me. Gushed into my mouth. Filled it as though someone had forced sand into it. Some people should never die. Gran Vera was one of them.
At every family gathering, Gran Vera had sat at the head of the table. When she was eighty, she had danced on the table with my father at my older sister’s wedding, the same table she’d sat at a moment before, and when my dad’s face grew crimson and was dripping with sweat, she’d told him:
“Work on your fitness, young man.”
Gran knew everything about everybody. Little, if anything, was known about Gran Vera. She was a living mystery, unfathomable even to her own husband, who died around the time I was born. Grandad Wacław was a manager at some state enterprise. Gran treated her husband with kind-hearted tolerance, according to my mum. He was a docile, honest man, whose favourite things were his slippers, his book of crosswords and his armchair. Apparently, he met Vera at the actors’ club, SPATiF, during the mid-fifties. Legends circulated about Gran Vera, who was over thirty even then. Rumour in Warsaw had it that Vera came from a line of rich Greek merchants or Vilnius nobility, that she’d spent the entire Second World War with some gypsies in Sweden or with a wealthy American Jew on a yacht.
Vera was a puzzle. Grandad Wacław managed to respect that. He didn’t ask, because he knew that everybody we introduce into our lives carries with them the baggage of their past. “Why poke your nose into their rucksack if you can’t put it down?” he would say. He didn’t, for example, ask about the dark-haired man in thick-framed glasses who ran for a good half-mile behind the taxi that Gran Vera had climbed into at Grandad Wacław’s invitation that evening at SPATiF. Only later, seeing a photograph in the newspaper, did he realise that the guy looked suspiciously like the writer Tyrmand.
All that was known was that before Gran Vera came to Warsaw and before she met Grandad Wacław in SPATiF, she’d lived, studied and worked in Cracow, where she’d been allocated an apartment in the newly constructed Nowa Huta. She sincerely loathed the apartment, just as she did the whole of Nowa Huta and communism in general. But the small apartment belonged to her right up to this day; my father rented it out to some students. When he took Gran Vera there once, she apparently spat on the doormat.
Gran Vera’s manners belonged to the pre-war era. With steel consistency, she demanded the same from all those around her. If a man in a restaurant didn’t stand as she approached the table, she demonstratively didn’t speak to him for the whole evening. Yet, without blushing or vulgarity, she could tell jokes that turned everyone sitting at the table the colour of beetroot soup. I adored her. As she did me. One day, she said to me:
“Agnieszka, love, don’t let any brute think you belong to him. They all think that if you go to bed with them, they can call you by some idiotically sweet name rather than your real one, slap you on the backside like a cow and not hold the door open for you. There’s nothing more misguided, my dear.”
The gran–granddaughter pattern is obvious. Up to a certain moment, more or less when the granddaughter is fifteen, the gran is dearest gran, and granddaughter dearest granddaughter. Then everything falls apart, becomes diluted, blurred, more and more people join the party called your life and slowly you start to forget those who were there at the very beginning. And Gran was the sort of person who, instead of patting you on the shoulder and reminding you of their existence, politely retreated to the kitchen, where she finished her glass of wine, washed the glass, extinguished her cigarette in the sink and finally left the apartment without a sound.
The last time I spoke to Gran Vera for more than fifteen minutes was when I returned to Ela’s father so as to win Ela back. And because he loved me. With his whole stupid heart.
He’s not a bad man, I’d kept repeating to myself. It’s his mother who’s bad.
“He opened the door, Gran, and said ‘I’ve been waiting for you’,” I said, and Gran Vera shook her head.
“And were you waiting for him?” she asked.
I didn’t answer.
“I’ve got a child,” I repeated. “The child’s got a father, the child needs a family.”
Gran looked at me with a distinct combination of love and distaste.
I’d really believed what I was saying then. I was in the process of resolving my new inner disposition. Its laws were simple. Life has to be normal. The child needs a family. A mum and a dad. The child can’t go through her first years with a series of boyfriend-dads and then, at fourteen, cut words like “darkness” and “suicide” into her arms or inject drugs into her heel. Part of me didn’t believe that I could have what would be considered a successful relationship with anyone anymore. I’d decided that it was better for Ela to witness the shit going on with her own father than with some stranger. But the truth is, I didn’t ever want to lose her again.
“It’s your life, darling, and you do what you want.” Gran Vera took a sip of tea, pierced me with her eyes and added, “But that husband of yours…”
“He’s not a bad man, Gran,” I said. “It’s his mother who’s bad.”
“That’s even worse, darling. If he was a son of a bitch, it wouldn’t be half as bad…” It was the first and only time she had used coarser words than “stone the crows”. “But he’s simply stupid. Stupid and, what’s worse, weak.”
“Weak,” I repeated, not even trying to argue.
“Weak, because when they took little Ela, he didn’t say a word, didn’t lift a finger,” she said.
“She’s his daughter,” I replied.
“You’re a fool. You’re such a fool. Agnieszka, love. Go now, we’ll talk when I’m less worked up.” Gran gave me a big hug. “They took your daughter away from you. Never forget that.”
I gave her a kiss and left. That was the last time I saw her.
When I realised that, I sobbed so much that the neighbour upstairs phoned asking whether she should call the police or an ambulance.
I didn’t have time to get dehydrated from crying, because my mother called again.
“When’s the funeral?” I asked.
“In three days. But you have to come earlier.”
“Earlier? Why?” I wiped my eyes with a hanky and swallowed my words.
“You’ve got to go to the solicitor. Gran’s left the apartment in Cracow to you.”
“The one in Nowa Huta?” I gulped, counted to four and added, “I don’t want it. Gran hated it. You take it.”
“You’re mad,” said my mother. “You’ve got a daughter. Besides, it’s a different apartment.”
“Different?” The worst possible state is to be in despair and irritated at the same time. My mother was capable of getting me there even without letting me know that someone’s died. “Different? What the hell are you going on about?”
“A different one. Gran had another apartment. A hundred square metres in a tenement on Mickiewicz Avenue. She rented it out, no one knew about it. Everyone thought she’d sold it in ’89 to pay off Uncle Staszek’s debts when things didn’t work out with
his currency exchange bureau. But it turns out that she never did, so now it’s yours.”
“Mine,” I repeated.
“Yes, yours,” my mum confirmed.
“Why didn’t anyone know about it?”
“Because that’s Gran Vera for you.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Gran told me to tell you something before she died,” added my mother.
“Oh, God, do you have to tell me these things over the phone?” Tears ran down my face again.
“She said: ‘Tell Agnieszka that she’s going to have to be very, very strong.’”
“I’ll be there,” I announced, hung up, rose and turned down the gas under the burnt sauce, soaked the frying pan in hot water and entered the room where Ela’s father was lying on the sofa.
Ela’s father went through a deep, inner change. From a Polish Lynch, he transmuted into the director of Stars Look for Treasure. He also did adverts and continued to work on the filming of subsequent episodes of The Varsovians, where the now balding Adrian told Basia to have genetic tests done since their previous child, little Jasio, had turned out to be a bastard from a short-lived relationship the slightly stale Basia had had with her boss, Jarek, who’d taken her on a romantic working weekend to Madeira where he’d vigorously screwed her in a hotel that looked suspiciously like the Ibis on Ostrobramska Street. Apart from that, the would-be Polish Lynch had – eighteen months ago – managed to film the comedy Coolmen’s Five Days, the story of a secondary school’s indoor hockey team who’d come across an international conspiracy whose members, commissioned by the Russian secret service, were trying to distil a brain-washing drug from a human spleen. Coolmen’s Five Days ranked as one of the worst Polish films in twenty years.
For the first seven or eight years after I’d gone back to Ela’s father, things were more or less fine. I forgave him for letting them take Ela away from me and for using it to coerce me into coming back. Things were fine insofar as “fine” means forcing every single muscle, joint and nerve in your body to pretend things were normal.
Be that as it may, I tolerated Ela’s father’s presence. I even liked it at times. We watched TV together, ate Mum’s reheated pierogi and soup, read newspapers together, talked, mainly about our daughter, put her milk teeth into little plastic bags, mounted her pictures and first written letters in clip frames, stuck plasters over the cuts and grazes on her knees. We even exchanged jokes now and again. Sometimes laughed at them wholeheartedly. From time to time, I even went to bed with him. Who knows why, but I always needed two bottles of wine to do it, even though the whole thing took ten minutes at most. Once, we flew to Thailand together, where we argued merely fifteen times in ten days, and Ela caught a fever, which, thank God, turned out to be the flu and not malaria. Everything was fine, except that, day by day, the pots and pans grew heavier as though someone was adding tiny pieces of lead to them. Except that, day by day, the time between my hearing the alarm and getting up grew a few seconds longer. In a way, there’s always an “except that”. I bet that all the biggest personal tragedies in this shitty world begin with the words “except that”.
But it was fine. Once again, as at the beginning, I liked him talking a lot to me; I listened with care and attention to the visions he described, the scripts he was going to film, his ardent tirades about a director’s creativity, tutting over the commercial, plastic world that had lost its true spirit. I persuaded myself that it was good that he was talking because many husbands hardly talk to their wives. He still read books and still managed to pull me out for walks at five in the morning, took blurred photos of me lying naked in the bath. I was no longer fascinated but was pleased that he was doing something, that he was like a child imprisoned in a glass box who wants to smash its walls at any cost.
He tried. And since he tried, I tried. We were acting out the picture of the perfect family, like in some imaginary game. He changed the car wheels and mowed the communal lawn. He picked Ela up from school sometimes, attended parent–teacher meetings, went to the bank, repaired things in the house, bought me presents. All those normal things a guy does – a guy your mother considers a “decent man” – that make you start thinking of him in that way, even though you have no feelings for him.
He was trying, but beneath all this was silence, emptiness, hot air. And even deeper below, a scratching, burning conviction that really life was elsewhere, that I’d missed it, that I’d left it far behind at a crossroads at which I’d taken a wrong turn.
Ela went to pre-school. I spent my twenty-eighth birthday alone in the apartment, at the table, drinking three bottles of wine on the trot and listening to the radio where they played Polish rock, babbled talk and muzak from supermarkets. After the first bottle, it turned out that I remembered the words to “I Love You Like Ireland” by Kobranocka. After the second, I remembered the words to “Comet Nights” by Budka Suflera. Halfway through the third, my situation became as clear as a road sign. Apart from a little stability and Ela’s father who, when he wasn’t working, spent most of his time throwing dirty clothes around the apartment and staring at the TV, I didn’t have anything. I didn’t have any friends, because those I’d met at the party were still there, sadder and more tired by the year, or had disappeared somewhere into the abysses of London, Glasgow, Brussels or Amsterdam. I didn’t have a meaningful occupation, couldn’t do anything, didn’t have a profession; all I knew how to do was burn soup, peel potatoes too thickly, inadequately wash floors and dishes. My daughter, when she was still in my belly, had catapulted me from my studies, which resulted in my not having drawn since, not even a map explaining how to get to the station. And I was permanently nailed to rags, pans and the gas cooker; I was a woman whose most intense conversations were with paediatricians, opticians and vendors at market stalls selling vegetables.
I had terrible scruples that I wasn’t overwhelmingly happy. After all, I should have been. Because all was well. Because that’s how things were supposed to be.
A colleague of Ela’s father, a make-up artist, took me on set a few times. The normal make-up I did came out very well. For several months the job consisted of one phone call every two weeks. But one day, the make-up artist took me to the set of some cheap crime series like Brigade Invincibles, which was shelved after six episodes. It turned out that one of the make-up artists had been in a car crash in the city centre and was stuck there, hemmed in by police, a tow truck and a traffic jam a few kilometres long. A guy had to be made-up to look as if he’d been badly beaten by a couple of guys, bruises painted, a cut brow attached, a swelling on the lip formed. The other make-up artist gave me forty-five-second instructions because she herself had to make-up an actress as a Russian prostitute who’d fallen under a car. I panicked. I didn’t know how to use silicone, powder, stickers, fake blood, how to form scabs out of pulp, draw grazes, make peeling skin out of a special substance. I improvised, concentrated and began to produce scratches, injuries, swellings and grazes from modelling materials. When I’d finished, everybody on the set looked at me, then at the actor, then at me again, and again at the actor until, finally, Ela’s father’s colleague said:
“You were supposed to make him up, Agnieszka, not beat him up.”
Two months later, the phone was ringing every couple of days. After a year, I had to turn down half of the offers. Sometimes I earned nearly as much as Ela’s father. Sometimes more when they took me in to cover for someone in a German war film. I’d thrust a métier into my hands. Started to live for it. Started to breathe through my hands, which magicked the most exquisite crushed and broken noses in the world, gun wounds, gouged eyes, knocked-out teeth, burns, acne and eczema. The SS soldiers who’d been turned into zombies and lived in darkness, whom I’d made up for some French B film through someone I’d known, won an award at an international horror film festival. I no longer waited, listened out, looked out for, no longer sat alone at the table, did the laundry or cooked. All day long, I moulded, stuck and painted, turning
people into vampires, corpses, victims of car accidents. In the evenings, I played Scrabble, drank tea and watched romantic comedies on TV with my daughter. I’d detached myself from the rags; instead Ms Ałła appeared in our apartment every week in her enormous, black sunglasses and signet rings on her fingers like a rapping bishop and, while washing the floors, with the voice of a herald, told us not only the story of her life but that of the whole of Yalta from where she came. So the weeks went by as did the years of my life, measured by the marks of my daughter’s height on the doorframe, her increasingly grown-up questions, her move up to junior school, her learning to read, write, sing, play the piano and speak English.
The years slowly passed in this new, relative routine, somewhat more bearable but in wait of something bad, not a happy end. As though I already sensed that I was waiting for the end, that over our heads, clocks measured out the time to our downfall. But I didn’t think about it at the time. Didn’t think about anything. Maybe that’s why I recall this last period in which my daughter, my daughter’s father and I coexisted in relative harmony, as the most peaceful time in my life to date.
But everything comes to an end.
* * *
The walls are deadly cold, the air so dry that, although we’re all drinking water every few minutes, our mouths are constantly parched. Lack of sleep causes a tiny crack in reality felt by us all. Everything we see is overly vibrant, its acuity falsely turned up like taking a photograph using a flash at the end of a party. We want to sleep, but it’s impossible. We wait. We bump against the walls, but softly like oil poured into water, semi-comatose, scrunched up, hungover even though we haven’t been drinking. Someone gets up from the armchair, only for the next person to softly hit the seat. Someone goes to lie down for half an hour, only for somebody else to tell them to get up. We rarely speak to each other, as though every word we say could draw ‘Them’ a few centimetres closer to us.
The Institute Page 6