Rage

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  “Did you form the group yourself?”

  “There’s something about me that makes people do what I say.”

  “What a wonderful gift.” He couldn’t conceal his malice. “So what’s my part in all this? And what role is my daughter playing?”

  “As I’m sure you’ve guessed, a prosecutor did play a major role in this story. A lady prosecutor, to be precise. The first person my mother eventually went to for help. Too little, too late. I’m sure you know what’s coming next; it’s often described in the papers. This prosecutor was no different from the norm—well-meaning, but instead of enforcing the law, she persuaded my mother to come to terms with her husband, to settle out of court. My mother had a fit, at which the stupid bitch lawyer started threatening to send her for psychiatric tests. Her, not my father, in case she was nuts and was making it all up. My mother wasn’t smart, but she had the wits to know that during a divorce case, tests like those could be used as evidence against her. So she backed down.”

  “And what happened to that prosecutor?”

  More hesitation.

  “She died in an accident. I almost believed in a higher power when I heard about it.”

  Force of habit prompted Szacki to make a mental note that Sendrowska must have access to the legal authorities, either at the police or the prosecution service.

  “My mother believed the system would help her. But the system just told her to fuck off.”

  Suddenly he realized what Wiktoria was telling him between the lines, and he couldn’t believe it.

  “So what? Am I supposed to be some substitute victim? To pay for the mistakes of the incompetent, heartless legal system? Are you completely out of your mind?”

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t react. She just gazed at him in silence, a sad creature. Perhaps if he weren’t so weary and emotionally drained, he would have sensed the falsity of the scene and the whole situation. At least that was how he explained it to himself afterward. But he was very tired. The instinct that would normally have kicked him in this situation barely gave him a prod. Szacki felt nothing but a mosquito bite, and he ignored it.

  Unfortunately.

  “At first sight you seem exceptional,” he said coldly. “But in actual fact you’re no different from all the little fucks I’ve been interrogating for the past twenty years. You like death, pain, and suffering because something’s come loose in your brain. And you tack on an ideology that changes you in your own eyes into an evil genius, an avenger from a B movie. But you’re just a nasty, spoiled little brat who’ll spend the rest of her life in jail. After a week in there you’ll understand there’s nothing romantic about it. Just confinement, bad food, and a nasty smell. And most of all, stultifying, infinite boredom.”

  He yawned ostentatiously.

  “As opposed to you, I hand out justice,” she said, and sparks flared in her eyes.

  “Of course. Are there any adults here I could speak to?”

  “Your daughter’s life is in my hands. Are you aware of that?”

  “I am. But I’ve just realized I have no influence on what you’re going to do in your madness. I’m sorry, but you’re too far from normal for an ordinary person to be able to come to terms with you. Let’s put an end to this farce. My proposal is simple. If my daughter is alive, let her go, then you can keep me here and dissolve me at will. If she’s not alive, just own up to it.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then I’ll kill you.”

  He was surprised how easily those words tripped off his tongue. He was absolutely sure that if Hela was dead he would kill Sendrowska with his bare hands without batting an eye. For the first time he realized what the criminals he’d interrogated had meant when they kept saying over and over that at the moment they did it, they were sure they had no alternative. He’d always thought it was a stupid lie. But now he knew they were speaking God’s honest truth.

  “Well, I never. It’s as if I were hearing my father again.”

  “Once a nasty little brat, always a nasty little brat.”

  The light in the room, warm and yellow until now, underwent a change. He looked around. To his right a television had come on, invisible until now. For a short while Szacki saw only interference, and then he saw the top of his daughter’s head, stuck inside a cast-iron pipe. The image was of such high quality that he could see flecks of dandruff on her black turtleneck.

  That was when he should have understood it all. But he was so tired.

  Szacki stood up and took a few steps toward the screen. Hela craned her neck. Her lovely eyes were wide with terror, but there was no sign of tears or panic, just a look of resignation.

  Sound came on. He could hear her rapid breathing.

  He clenched his fists. He felt a movement and turned around. Wiktoria was standing right behind him. Like the statue of a beautiful goddess of revenge, a porcelain face with classic features, framed with black hair.

  “You’ve got one last chance to stop this madness,” he rasped.

  “She’s been in the same place all day, easy to find, guarded by just one person. You could have saved your daughter. I gave you a chance you didn’t take, because you’re incompetent, like all you people. And now you’re going to feel what sort of pain the incompetent legal system causes. Watch this.”

  A murmur came from the television.

  Szacki looked around, and saw a shadow on his daughter’s face—someone had blocked the source of light. All her muscles tensed in a grimace of horror, which momentarily made her pretty face lose its humanity, changing it into the snout of a little creature that knows for sure it’s about to die, knows it can’t fight back, and has nothing left inside apart from terror. He’d never seen a grimace like that on a living person’s face before. But he could remember corpses being found with the same expression.

  He didn’t pass out, but something strange happened to him, as if he’d become detached from himself. For the next few seconds he felt as if he were viewing the scene rather than starring in it. That was how he remembered it.

  He seemed to be watching from one side. To the left stood the table with the thermos and the lamp. Then Wiktoria, slender, proud, head held high, hands folded on her chest, and black hair flowing. Then himself, his black coat a splash against the black wall, and only the white stain of his face and hair visible, hovering in midair. To the right was the large television set, with Hela’s contorted face filling the entire screen.

  And then a nasty rustling noise, a stream of little white spheres spilling into the cast-iron pipe, and his daughter’s terrible, animal scream, combined with a dull thudding sound as her body convulsively began to defend itself in panic, despair, and pain.

  As the white granules of sodium hydroxide filled the inside of the pipe at lightning speed, burying Hela up to her neck and higher, she was trying her hardest not to swallow them, stretching her neck and tipping her head back, breathing rapidly through her nose. He could see her nostrils flaring, and he could see her terrified, inhuman eyes. Then he saw her part her lips in spite of herself, and her wild scream changed into coughing as the first body-dissolving granules fell inside her mouth.

  At that moment he turned and put his hands around Wiktoria Sendrowska’s throat.

  A LITTLE LATER

  By the gate he turned back and looked at the house of horror. Its contours were melting into the darkness, a monstrous scene painted in shades of black. The pitch-black house with black gaping windows, set against the gray-and-black wall of forest. Suddenly something disturbed this festival of blackness, twinkling in his field of vision. He shuddered, sure they were coming for him. He would be next, the third creature to cross the border from life to death in under fifteen minutes.

  He had no objection. Quite the opposite. He didn’t want to be alive. He had no greater wish right now than to stop living.

  But there was nobody behind the twinkling, no flashlight, no flare of a gunshot, or flash of a blade. Soon more sparks twinkled in the blackn
ess around him, and he realized it was the first snow. Bigger and bigger flakes were falling more and more boldly from the sky, settling on the frozen, muddy earth, on the house of horror, and on Szacki’s black overcoat.

  He touched a large snowflake on his collar, as if to take a closer look at it, but it instantly dissolved, changing into a drop of cold water.

  He looked at the drop, and a strange thought appeared in his mind. At first it was just a shadow, a mirage, almost imperceptible. He could tell who he was, he knew where he was, and what had happened. He realized he must get in the car and drive away, but on the other hand, all his thoughts and emotions were whirling behind a wall of smoky glass. There was something going on. He could hear muffled voices, shouts, he could see faint, hazy images—but it was all beyond him, at a safe distance, without access to his consciousness.

  Apart from one insistent thought that was beating on the glass in one particular spot, screaming the same thing over and over, demanding to be noticed and heard.

  “Impossible,” he whispered aloud when he finally grasped the meaning of this thought. “Impossible.”

  When he stood up from the girl’s corpse, the television was off. He couldn’t remember when it had been switched off, but nothing had distracted him for the entire duration of the struggle. That was one thing. And then, it made absolutely no sense, apart from decency, for them to have put Hela into the pipe with her clothes on. The more he let this thought get through to him, the more he realized that as soon as he saw the dandruff on Hela’s turtleneck, he should have seen through the whole thing. Except that at that point, the truth would have seemed even more implausible than all this insanity.

  But what for? To what purpose? Why?

  In the first instance he took the movement to his left to be the snowstorm, snowflakes dancing in the wind. But when he looked that way, he saw part of the darkness moving toward him—over there the snowflakes were coming together to form a human shape.

  He started walking toward it, at first more slowly, then faster and faster.

  And soon he came face-to-face with his daughter, shivering with cold and shock, but as alive as alive can be.

  He grabbed her by the arms to be sure he wasn’t hallucinating.

  “Ow,” said the hallucination. “Please tell me you drove here.”

  He nodded, incapable of uttering a word.

  “Great. Let’s go find the old wreck and get out of here. You have no idea what I’ve been through.”

  With his arms around her, he stroked her hair, and his hand was wet with snowflakes. As he glanced at his own palm, he saw that one of the snowflakes hadn’t melted but was resting in the dip between his life line and his head line, as if heat-resistant. A new kind of snowflake, imported from China so the shopping malls could control the magic of Christmas more easily?

  He looked at his daughter’s hair; meanwhile she was gradually regaining her original, slightly sulky expression that said, “OK, but what’s the point?” She had more artificial snowflakes in her hair, and on her black turtleneck too. He picked one of them off, held it between his thumb and index finger, and squeezed.

  The penny dropped.

  “Dad? Is everything OK? ᾿Cos I really want to get in where it’s warm.”

  A polystyrene bead.

  He flicked it away, and they walked toward the car without looking back.

  LATER

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Thursday, December 5, 2013

  International Volunteer Day. Birthday celebrations for Józef Piłsudski (146), Walt Disney (112), and the Internet. Nelson Mandela dies at the age of ninety-five. Another legendary world leader, Lech Wałęsa, is bubbling with life. He attends the premiere of a movie about himself at the Capitol in Washington, and after the screening he comments that he can’t wait to see how other filmmakers will portray his life. The European Commission blocks the construction of a new gas pipeline that would cross the Black Sea and bypass Ukraine. The Vatican appoints a committee to combat pedophilia among priests. Meanwhile in Poland curious things are happening. In Poznań a university debate on gender studies ends in a fight and requires police intervention. Pomerania is attacked by Cyclone Xaver blowing in from Germany. Warmia is under a blanket of snow. In Olsztyn it’s the first day of winter. The whole city is stuck in traffic jams. Firstly because of the snow, and secondly because of a sudden decision to reschedule roadwork at the pivotal Bem Square roundabout to peak hours. Drivers are swooning with fury, and the mayor is talking about a public transport administration center, predicting that when the golden era of the tramway sets in, special cameras will control the lights. The passengers are rejoicing and so are the students, because the university announces that a ski lift will be built on the campus hill.

  1

  Poland is ugly. Not all of it, of course—no place is entirely ugly. But on average, Poland is uglier than any other country in Europe. Our most beautiful mountains are no lovelier than the ones in the Czech Republic or Slovakia, not to mention the Alps. Our lake district is a remote shadow of the Scandinavian ones. The beaches of the icy Baltic Sea are a joke to anyone who has ever been to the Mediterranean. The rivers don’t attract visitors the way the Rhine, the Seine, or the Loire do. The rest is flat, boring terrain, partly covered in forests, but compared with the wildernesses of Norway or the Alpine countries, we come out rather pale.

  There are no miracles of nature likely to grace the covers of a family travel album. It’s nobody’s fault, we simply happened to settle on boring, agriculturally promising land, that’s all. What looked like a good idea in the days of crop rotation is not quite so obvious in the era of mass tourism.

  Nor are there any entirely attractive cities. There’s no Siena, no Bruges, no Besançon, Basel, or even Pardubice. There are cities in our country, though, where if you look carefully, without turning your head too much, or God forbid going one block too far, you can see the nice part.

  No one’s to blame. That’s just the way it is.

  But there are moments when Poland is the most beautiful place on earth. Those days in May following a storm, when the foliage is lush and fresh, the sidewalks wet and shiny, and we take off our coats for the first time in six months, and feel moved by the power of nature.

  Those August evenings, refreshingly crisp after a long, hot day, when we fill the streets and gardens to drink in the air, catch the tail end of summer, and watch for a falling star.

  But best of all is that first real winter morning, when we rise with the day after an all-night blizzard to find that the outside world has been transformed into a fairy-tale scene. All the minor defects have been covered up, the bigger ones are veiled, and the worst eyesores have gained a shining white frame, striking in its simplicity.

  Jan Paweł Bierut was sitting on a bench in the children’s section at the communal cemetery on Poprzeczna Street. He took in a deep breath of frosty air and reveled in the winter morning, which had changed the gloomy necropolis into a fantastical landscape, a sea of crosses protruding from immaculate white fluff, like the masts of ships sailing across clouds.

  Not wanting to spoil this, he only swept enough snow off the little gravestone to be able to read the name of not-quite-two-year-old Olga Dymecka. He lit a memorial candle, crossed himself, said a prayer for the dead, and added a few words of his own, asking the celestial powers as usual to be sure to provide a proper playground. If those kiddies didn’t grow after death, they’d be bored in the company of adults deep in prayer, and surely an awesome slide and a merry-go-round couldn’t possibly offend the divinities.

  The policeman was not related to little Olga, nor was she close to him in any other way. Just like the dozen other children whose graves he regularly visited on the anniversary of their deaths.

  He knew people either laughed at him or were surprised that absolutely nothing ever shocked him. Usually the rookies in CID puked their guts out at the sight of their first bloated victims of drowning, or the old guys that had melted into the fol
ding couch, found after decomposing for three weeks in the heat of July. There were corpses that made even the veteran detectives go pale and leave the room for a cigarette. But not Bierut. He was just as capable of functioning at the site of a death as at the site of a cell phone theft. The job was to carry out some defined duties, and that’s what he did. Even the grisly tale of Piotr Najman being dissolved alive had failed to rattle him. He realized it was a particularly hideous crime, but he didn’t spend weeks feeling upset, lose his appetite, or feel his heart beat faster.

  In fact, Jan Paweł Bierut had spent ten years working as a traffic cop; he knew he would never see anything worse than the sights he’d already witnessed on the Polish roads. He’d seen families on vacation, tangled up with toys, provisions, and air mattresses, as if someone had thrown them all into a blender. He remembered a father and two sons on a cycling trip, all three dragged several hundred yards along the road—it had taken them two days to pick up the pieces. He’d seen children’s safety seats with only parts of the passenger left in them. He had once mistaken a child’s head, severed by a badly installed seat belt, for a football. He had seen death equalize the passengers in used Skodas and brand-new BMWs. It was always the same blood, the same white bones puncturing the air bag in exactly the same way.

  Raised Catholic, and a genuine believer, after his first summer as a traffic cop he had lost his faith entirely. A world allowing that sort of thing to happen couldn’t possibly have a guardian—no truth had ever been so plain to Bierut. With no regret or pangs of conscience, he had turned his back on God and the Church with the cold certainty of someone who knows.