The Institute

by Jakub Żulczyk

  I hear Veronica scream and Iga swear.

  Seconds later, as though roused from a stupor, Sebastian and I cover the distance between us and the Institute. Everything that’s happening seems distanced, removed, as though I am watching myself in a bad film. A bad film directed by Ela’s father, crosses my mind. Silhouette, scream, blue light.

  We burst into the Institute. The first person I see is Iga. She’s kneeling, kneeling in shards of glass, shaking with effort, holding somebody by the neck. Somebody dressed in black and wearing a balaclava. The person I saw on the screen. The person is wailing in pain. The handle of the heavy sewing scissors is protruding from their thigh. Blood runs down the leg.

  “I heard somebody open the grating,” says Iga. “So I stood by the door. He didn’t see me. I struck blindly, as hard as I could.”

  Veronica doesn’t say a word, just sobs and shakes her head. She’s taken off her glasses, tears run down her cheeks.

  I crouch over the person in the black balaclava. The person is howling and breathing heavily, presses his hand to the wound. Blood seeps between his fingers.

  “Who are you, you son of a bitch?” I ask him, clutching the scissors in his thigh. Suddenly, I’m calm. Suddenly, I’m warm. As though I were slowly falling down an enormous abyss yet convinced that I was going to die. “Who are you?” I ask once more. Calmly. Or so I believe.

  He shakes his head, wants to struggle, lash out, but knows he can’t. The blood seeps slowly, bright red. The scissors haven’t severed any major artery. Probably. But even so, one abrupt move would do it.

  “Right, you motherfucker,” says Sebastian, moving me gently aside and leaning over him. He wants to move Iga aside, too, but she punches him in the shoulder. So he leaves her there, crouches and punches him in the face, once, hard, without even taking a swing, as though wanting to hammer in a nail. We hear one loud crunch, like a packet of crisps being scrunched up.

  Veronica looks on, now standing at the side, lighting us with Almond Breeze. A scene from some medieval surgical operation.

  I tear off the balaclava. The man catches his breath, choking. Tries to breath through the mouth. Still doesn’t say anything.

  “What the fuck?” I yell, instinctively drawing back, almost knocking Veronica over.

  “It’s Gypsy,” I say, looking around at them all, my eyes pleading them to say it’s not him. But they can’t, because beneath the balaclava is Gypsy’s face, his eyes wide open and something like squashed fruit in the place of a nose. “You must have broken his nose, Sebastian.”

  “I never liked the bastard,” says Sebastian and hits him again, even harder.

  * * *

  I slipped out at dawn, like a thief. The taxi driver just needed one look at me to cotton on to what was happening, so he let me smoke all the way to the station.

  In running away, I realised two things. Firstly, never, absolutely never in my life had I decided to change anything; secondly, now, having made my first decision about a real change, I didn’t feel a thing. As though the anticipation of change is harder to bear than change itself.

  When I ran away from Ela’s father for the first time, I didn’t get far. I knew only one place. Moving back to my parents, to their house in Rembertόw, wasn’t much of a change. I landed back in my old room, which, when I’d lived with my parents, had only served as a place to regain consciousness every few days. I was surprised that something like “my room” in my house still existed.

  When I found myself there with Ela, I spent more time in the room than ever before. At night, I squatted on the divan watching TV, surrounded by what now looked like a cheap set in a TV serial about my past life: books, posters, boxes full of old make-up and cassettes, postcards and handmade T-shirts – the useless and faded objects of a stranger.

  Ela played on the floor with my old teddy bear, which at her age I called Beggar. Sometimes I picked her up and told her stories, went downstairs with her and made her porridge or sandwiches, or sometimes simply handed her over to my mother and watched TV until I fell asleep. From time to time, I smoked grass, which I bought from some kids on the estate. I smoked it in the loo, blowing out of the window. My mum pretended she didn’t notice.

  That wasn’t a change. A step backwards isn’t change. A step backwards is a step backwards.

  Mum found me a job working in a nursery, but I turned it down. I only had patience for my own child.

  I stayed at home. To contribute to the bills and buy food and things for my daughter, I decorated shop windows, worked on simple graphic commissions. Then I met a guy somewhere, whose face I can’t remember anymore. He didn’t mind my life being in pieces with an added bonus in the shape of a small child. Then I met another. I deleted all of them from my phone after two, three weeks. They never came to my home. None of them met my daughter.

  In this way, six months went by. Then one day, my husband’s parents, with his unspoken consent, took Ela away from me. My mum suddenly had to go to her sister’s for some reason. I had to go into town to sort something out, I can’t remember what – probably to sign some shitty agreement for some shitty commission that paid five złotys. I left Ela with my cousin Daria, who was at home with her own new baby. When I returned, Ela wasn’t there.

  “Her gran took her,” said Daria, standing in the doorway with the expression of a dopey fish and wearing an over-stretched tracksuit. She’d never been too bright, to put it mildly.

  “You mean my mum?” I spluttered, rummaging in my bag for my phone to call my mother and reproach her for taking Ela without telling me.

  “No.” Daria’s expression didn’t change. “No, not your mum. Your mother-in-law. She said you’d arranged for her to take Ela to the zoo.”

  My heart and stomach were flooded with a corrosive substance. Then I turned ice cold.

  “No,” I whispered. “No, we hadn’t arranged anything.”

  “Well, that’s what she said,” replied my moron of a cousin, and it took all my strength not to grab her stupid, pale head covered in old dye and smash it against the doorframe.

  I rushed away without even saying goodbye. Pulled out my phone. The evil old witch picked up on the first ring.

  “Ela’s fine,” a croak at the end of the line informed me.

  “Give me back my daughter!” I yelled. People in the street were looking at me. “Give me back my daughter!”

  “She’s fine,” she repeated. “You’ve no right to her. You think we don’t know what you’ve been doing. We hired a private eye to follow you. We know everything. Drugs. Whoring. You’ve no chance in court. You’re a hopeless wife, a slut, a terrible mother.”

  “Give me back my daughter!” I yelled again, as hard as I could. My hoarse throat seemed to spit blood over my phone.

  “She’s fine,” she repeated and hung up.

  Ela’s father came in the evening. Alone. I was sitting at home having consulted a lawyer my parents knew (who, knowing who my father-in-law was, informed me that I didn’t stand a chance), numb from grass, wine and tranquillisers. I didn’t let him in even though he rang for half an hour. He came again the next day. And the next.

  “You bring Ela, and I’ll let you in,” I said through the door.

  “You’re not going to see her unless you let me in,” he replied. “I’m coming one last time tomorrow.”

  The following day, when he entered, I ran up to him, and with all the strength I could muster, I slapped him so hard on the jaw that his head fell back and bounced off the door. He reeled.

  “Give me back my daughter!” I yelled.

  “Agnieszka, let’s talk,” he stammered, holding his jaw. “Nothing’s happened to our daughter. She’s fine. Please, let’s talk.”

  I slapped him again in the same place. He tried to grab me by the hand but was too slow.

  “Give me back my daughter, you prick!”

  “Nothing has happened. Nothing has happened between us. You had no reason to do this. No reason to take Ela and run,” he sa
id, rubbing his jaw.

  He left. I stood in the hallway, frozen stiff, shivering, exhausted. He returned a moment later with a huge basket of flowers. Stood it on the kitchen table.

  “I love you,” he declared, standing at a safe distance. “I love you and want us to be a family. Let’s talk. I don’t even know what happened. I don’t even know why you’ve done this.”

  “Your parents have taken my daughter away from me.” It was only the moisture on my lips that made me realise I was howling. “Your parents took my daughter away from me, and you’re to give her back. Give her back to me right now.”

  He looked like he wanted to come closer and touch me, but instead he took a step backwards and left. I put the flowers in the bin.

  This went on for a month. Every day for a month, I found a basket of flowers outside the door, and every day for a month, I lived on a cocktail of wine and tranquillisers, damaging my liver, and every day for a month, my mother-in-law informed me in the same tone of voice that, “Ela’s fine.”

  Once, they let me see her in the park. They stood at a distance, with pursed lips, piercing me with police eyes, watching me hug Ela so hard that it was only later that I realised I could have hurt her, that something could have snapped in her beautiful, tiny body.

  I talked to everyone. My mother, Gran Vera, my father, cousins. I didn’t have the slightest chance of getting Ela back. The private eyes had photos of me with four different guys, had taken shots of me in some shitty gateway in Praga buying awful grass, and had got hold of my prescriptions for the psychotropic drugs I had started taking in order to sleep, eat, wash and excrete after Ela was abducted. I had the official stamped certificate of a junkie, a slut and a terrible mother.

  Yet Ela’s father came every day with flowers.

  In the end, I gave in and went back. I rang the bell, one bag in my hand with all my things packed into it. He opened the door. He wasn’t surprised; he stood there and said “I’ve been waiting for you,” and looked on blankly as I hugged my daughter, as I showered her with trillions of kisses, as I wiped my tears against her, as I let go of her for a moment just so as to hug her again, as I cuddled her close as though wanting to rub her into me, attach her permanently to my breast, stomach, skin, as I repeated her name ten, fifty, a thousand times.

  I went back to him and I stayed. Later, things were calm and relatively normal. Later, we started to simulate a so-called “normal” life. We simulated it so well that, for a while, I almost believed it was real. Almost began to like it. All the while repeating to myself that a child needs a family.

  I repeated many things to myself to chase away the thought of defeat. Of being cornered. The thought that in leaving Ela’s father, I would also lose Ela. Unless I ran away with her in the middle of the night to the far end of the world.

  Climbing out of the taxi in front of the Institute, I was sure I was soon going to do just that. I was sure that moving to Cracow was only the beginning of a plan. I gripped the bunch of keys in my hand like a talisman, ran my finger over the entryphone, wiped the layer of dust from the plate by my number. The sign “The Institute” became clearer.

  I’d take her from him, put him off his guard. And perhaps sell the apartment later and take the two and a half million. Then we’d run away.

  I talked to my daughter on the phone regularly, for half an hour. I always called her mobile, always at eight in the evening.

  “You probably don’t care what Dad’s up to,” said Ela over the phone. “But he’s drinking a lot now, a lot. And he sleeps a lot and sometimes cries, quietly, but I see the water running from his eyes.”

  “That’s sad, darling. I want to cry, too,” I answered.

  “When am I going to be able to come and see you, Mum?” asked my daughter.

  “When I finish redecorating,” I said, wondering if there was a small muscle in the tear ducts that could be tensed by sheer willpower to stop the flow.

  “Okay, Mum, I love you,” said my daughter.

  “Good night, darling, sleep well,” I answered and hung up.

  You have to put them off their guard, I kept repeating to myself. You have to be careful though; this time it’s you who has to do the abducting.

  A few days later, the redecorating was, indeed, finished. I’d done the bathroom – tiles, loo, bath, a finishing coat on the walls, painted them, sanded the floors. But really, it was two moustachioed, constantly tired men who did it, starting their day with five beers and a miniature bottle of flavoured vodka each. Whenever I tried to force them to tell me what they were actually doing at any given moment, they looked at me as if I were a monkey with two heads.

  But, in the end, they got the job done, and I learned not to look at the places where things were a bit crooked or coming away a little.

  I bought a huge unvarnished brown table for the kitchen. Changed the chandeliers, bought plastic and plywood furniture from IKEA, bought a few standing and table lamps, changed some of the sockets, took all the old, worn carpets and curtains to the rubbish dump.

  Once I’d finished, the apartment no longer looked or smelt like a hospice, the walls weren’t corpse-grey, but something was still not right.

  The apartment somehow wasn’t mine. It was too big. Too empty. I bounced off the walls, unable to sit anywhere for long, to lie down, watch a film, write an email, read a book. I had a strange feeling that I wouldn’t be there for long. That I’d furnished it for somebody else. That all this was some sort of experiment, a transitional stage. That this space wasn’t home and there was no sense in trying to turn it into one.

  “The redecorating’s done, darling,” I told my daughter on the phone that evening.

  “So I can come, Mum?” She screamed with joy at the other end.

  “In a while, darling,” I replied. “We have to wait a bit. But not long.”

  “What for? Father’s not talking to me. He only asks about homework. And if I like what he’s cooked for dinner.” My daughter’s voice was already breaking.

  “And do you?”

  “Do you like coal?” asked my daughter, and I briefly laughed.

  “Just a little longer, darling, a little longer,” I said.

  “When?” questioned Ela, demanding a firm date.

  But I couldn’t give her a date. Although I’d have given anything to be able to tell her she could come tomorrow.

  I choked out some questions about school, English and karate, and my daughter choked out the answers. When we ended the conversation, I lay on my IKEA mattress and cried. I cried for about two hours, then fell asleep, exhausted.

  “I take it you’ve left,” said Ela’s father over the phone, when he finally called.

  “I have,” I replied.

  “I’ve started therapy. I’m getting a grip on myself. Finishing the script,” he said, but none of it interested me.

  “I want Ela to come and see me,” I informed him. “And I don’t want her anywhere near your mother.”

  “No chance,” he said quietly, phlegmatically. It felt like somebody had punched me in the throat.

  “She’s my daughter,” I whispered.

  “You made a choice,” he retorted. “You want to see her, then come to Warsaw. You want to live with her, you come back.”

  I said nothing. Couldn’t say what I wanted to say, meaning I’ll kill you, you prick.

  “You made a choice. You knew what you were doing, Agnieszka,” he concluded.

  Once the apartment had been redecorated, I realised a couple of other things, such as I didn’t have a job and I didn’t know anybody here. I had to change this in order to not go mad and die of hunger.

  I found a temporary post in Cracow television, creating bruises and streams of blood for Police Intervention, the only TV programme still being shot in Cracow. Then I got a job at a drama festival, which I think was called Kantor’s Genotype, and created school uniforms out of cellophane for a student’s interpretation of Dead Class, the action for which the twenty-something-year-o
ld director had decided to set in space. I still didn’t know anyone, even though – in spite of everything – I wanted to, more and more as the days went by. But most people limited themselves to a “hi”, especially when they were fed the information that I’d come from Warsaw, where, what was worse, I’d lived all my life.

  From time to time, I talked to my neighbour, Dr Banicki, by the stairwell or in his apartment when he invited me in.

  “Did you know my grandmother?” I asked one day when I realised that I ought to stay longer than a few minutes so he didn’t think I was rude. I also thought I might be able to learn something about the place in which my failure as a wife had interned me.

  “Oh, not very well, not very well at all.” Mr Banicki shook his head. “You know, nobody’s lived there for a long time.”

  “And the Institute?” I asked. “What does it mean, why is that on the entryphone?”

  “Ah!” He waved it away, turning his eyes away from me for a moment. “That was some nonsense. There was some sort of sect here for a couple of months.”

  “Sect?” I repeated, wondering whether I’d heard right.

  “Sect.” Mr Banicki smiled and dug his warm doctor’s eyes into my cleavage. “Some company like Amway or Rainbow Vacuum Cleaners or something. They had an office here for a while, in the nineties, but it soon went bankrupt. No shortage of bankruptcies at the time.”

  “And the company was called Institute?”

  “It seemed to be, the institute of something or other… They sold toothpaste, I think…”

  “But apparently, the name was there before. In the sixties even,” I said, recalling what Marta had said.

  “Maybe it was? Maybe the company got its name from the sign?” mused Doctor Banicki, gazing through the window and directing his question at the air. Then, unexpectedly, he said, “Please forgive me, but I have to lie down. But do please come tomorrow.”

  That had to suffice me as an answer. I didn’t see the other neighbours often. Sometimes I had the impression that this part of the tenement was practically deserted. Sometimes a sleepy, scared student would flit past me on the staircase – I never knew whether it was the same person each time or several look-alikes. A mysterious family lived on the first floor, who, according to Doctor Banicki, never left their apartment. They’d been allocated it in the sixties and were now scared of being evicted. On the second floor lived, I believe, a young married couple with a baby, at least that’s what I imagined when I saw a buggy outside the door. And there was Mrs Finkiel who, if she ever replied to my “good morning”, made it sound like a cross between an African curse and phlegm being brought up.