House of Day, House of Night

by Olga Tokarczuk

  that were swarming in his head. He imagined that she would die,

  and he and Agni would leave and go to Upper Silesia. perhaps,

  or Warsaw. He would have no trouble finding a job there. and

  Agni would go and study, architecture perhaps. He would buy

  her beautiful clothes and on Sundays they'd stroll down Nowy

  Swiat Street, and all the young men would stare after them.

  Even if she didn't die, in the end he'd leave her. He'd J USt

  leave.

  Strangely enough - despite the distance between them - they

  had the same daydreams. She too was hoping she would die: it

  would be the best solution. The thought of goi ng back to that

  large, chilly house, of getting up in the morning to go to the

  pharmacy, then doing the shopping on the way home, pla nting

  Oowers, rattling away at the piano and lcaring through magazines for all eternity, made her feel p hysical ly sick. tgni was all she longed for. Would she have the courage to tell hun what they

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  had done to her, that she was empty inside like a husk, and

  would he then have the courage to plunge into the void inside

  her? The wound in her abdomen hurt - the stitches didn't want

  to heal, surely because death was in her thoughts. He could die

  too - his company car could hit a tree, or there could be an accident at the factory. She didn't feel guilty about having these thoughts - her conscience was taking her side now. One night

  she dreamed about the twins in their striped camp uniforms.

  They showed her the scars on their bellies. They did experiments on us,' they said, 'they took everything out - our hearts, livers and lungs, but it doesn't hurt at all.' From then on she

  started to get better.

  While she was still in hospital he rented a small, damp room

  in the suburbs, with a private entrance through a courtyard dirtied by chickens. It had green walls with an uneven white pattern painted with a roller. There was an iron bedstead with a stained

  mattress, a bare little table and two chairs. On the wall there was

  a picture of Jesus preaching from the boat. He arranged to meet

  Agni there, but he couldn't make love to her; he didn't know

  why. He was overcome with despair for being unable to cope

  with it all, for ending up in this strange situation, with no way

  out. He huddled up to the girl's small breasts and wept. 'I wish

  she would die,' he suddenly said aloud, and was appalled by his

  own words. Agni pushed back his head to look at his face. Her

  pure young eyes seemed predatory somehow; he knew that look

  from somewhere. 'What did you say? Say that again,' she said. 'I

  wish she would die,' he dutifully repeated.

  Agni's body was incredibly supple; it reminded him of a silk

  shawl that he could wrap himself in. He could wrap himself up

  in the wonderful Agnieszka, in her apricot body. She was like

  water, she could always elude him if she wanted. He would

  never be able to catch up with her, to seize her and hold her.

  H o u s e o r D a y, H o u s e o r N i g h t

  27 1

  Whenever she stopped and Oowed over him it was a miracle ,

  and he drank her in until he was choking.

  He never compared her with anyone - that was impossible but sometimes, when he fell fast asleep, and then woke suddenly, he thought he was lying beside his wife. In panic he sought her name, which he had clean forgotten, and to his rel ief

  he would find he was with Agni, and once again he couldn't help

  wondering at her ephemeral quality. His wi fe was like a solid,

  clay amphora. In their love-making he had to turn her and position her, he had to manipulate her. Her skinny body gave him the sort of pleasure that somewhere at base was always painful

  and mechanical. He hadn't realized until now; he thought it had

  to be like that, before he knew Agni.

  Agni was a miracle.

  He wanted to keep her, if he only could. He went on touchi ng

  her when they were sleeping. Whenever they sat at the table, he

  would stroke her hand with his index finger over and over again,

  as if telling her, stay here, don't move. He liked to listen to her

  doing something in the awful little kitchenette - he could hear

  the clatter of glass, the clink of the teapot, and her footsteps. He

  liked to have these sounds around him, because they were like a

  support wall holding him up, like a safe border for the world ,

  but she didn't make enough of this safe, everyday noise. She

  was small and light, and her bare feet moved across the wooden

  Ooor without a sound. Shout, he said to her as they made love,

  shout.

  As soon as his wife came back from the hospital, Agni stopped

  appearing. He was frantic. He slipped out of the house and

  roamed about the town , but never dared ask people question-..

  He thought something must have happened to her, that ..,he had

  problems, or that maybe she'd had an acciden t. EverT da) he

  read the local paper, hut there was nothing there ahout , gn i . lor

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  hours he sat i n the restaurant, right by the front window, drinking vodka after vodka and staring at all the young girls. Once he even thought he'd seen her - he ran outside, but he was too

  drunk to decide what to do next. At home, he wept in the bathroom. He kept the rented flat for another year and left cards on the door for her, but they just went yellow in the sunlight and

  the writing faded. He thought he would never survive, that he'd

  die from the inside, and that this was the end. His entire world

  would die, i ncluding his wife, that sad shadow of a human

  being - even time would die.

  'I know I've become a crabby old shrew,' said his wife, 'bu t

  that's because I couldn't have children.' But she knew that wasn't

  true - it was because she couldn't have had children with him.

  She imagined she could have had them with Agni, if he had

  come back, but Agni had disappeared. After returning from hospital she would put on her fur coat and, lying that she was going to the tailor's, she would walk the empty, freezing streets, peering in at people's windows, staring into restaurants and gazing at every male figure. Sometimes in her despair she went out to the

  suburbs, where the streetlights were no longer on. In the darkness and rain she leaned her brow against a fence or a tree and said Agni, Agni, Agni, as if she had to keep saying that name

  over and over again, as if she couldn't breathe without it. Agni,

  Agni, Agni, she said, and then waited, believing that this magic

  repetition would conquer space, even time too, and would

  finally bring Agni back. She imagined the name flying from her

  lips, zooming over the horizon, whizzing along, and landing on

  Agni's beloved head, tangling in his hair and bringing him here,

  to her. Sometimes people out late walked past her; they must

  have thought she was drunk and raving. Occasionally someone

  accosted her, so she hid her face in her collar - but eventually

  everyone knew her by sight. She was the woman who had laid

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  herself open to ridicule for love of a vagabond boy, a young man

  who hadn't had his hair cut for a year; she had laid herself open

  to ridicule for love. She was absurd - all because she was possessed b
y an emotion that only makes sense from deep inside, that people fail to understand, and because she aroused a mixture of astonishment and sympathy. But she was coming to terms with her own absurd behaviour - placing advertisements in the

  newspaper, accosting people in the street, tugging at their sleeve

  and asking, 'Have you seen . . .' She stood about at bus stops in

  front of schools, and even begged a gloomy-looking policeman

  to check those secret files they have on everyone. She was constantly visiting mortuaries; she even parted couples kissing in the park and always had to apologize for her mistake. At home

  she would smear her breast and belly in baby oil and touch herself tenderly, while trying to pretend that it was Agni touching her. She would weep in the kitchen while washing up, slicing

  bread, or listening to the banal words of a pop song for simpletons: Then suddenly you went away, a leaf fell at my feet, borne on a breath of wind.'

  She slept, and when she awoke she thought about how to kill

  hersel f. In the tunnels of her sorrow she considered all the

  options, from throwing herself under a train to gassing herself in

  the oven, but she never even attempted it. Once a bunch of

  knives that she was cleaning and putting away in the drawer fell

  from her hand. She squatted down to inspect their blades, which

  lay criss-crossed on the floor. If every single thing, even t he very

  smallest, is part of something larger, and if t he larger things arc

  all part of some huge and powerful process, then each tiny t hing

  must be in some way significant to the whole. So w hat do the

  crossed blades of kitchen knives lying on the llagstonc-.. mea n �

  And why did they cross - why didn't they fa ll far apart . Ill gentle

  parallel lines at a soothing distance from one another�

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  From then on, each day she threw a bunch of knives to the

  ground and thought up a divination. The blades always tended

  towards one ano ther; in their mysterious world they either

  wanted to huddle together or fight each other, as if there were no

  other solution.

  After a time her sick leave ended, and she went back to work

  at the pharmacy, where she spent every free moment gazing at

  the shelves holding the poisons. A few years later she retired and

  went back to looking at magazines all day; she ordered steel-grey

  suits from the tailor's, all much the same, like a uniform.

  How does the world look when your life is filled with longing? It looks artificial, it crumbles and falls apart in your hands.

  Every single movement, every thought is watching itself, each

  emotion starts but never finishes, and finally even the object of

  your longing becomes artificial and unreal. Only the longing is

  real, imposing conditions on you - that you must be somewhere

  else, that you must have something you don't possess, or touch

  someone who doesn't exist. This state of being is self-contradictory - it is the quintessence of life, and at the same time it is opposed to life. It sinks through the skin into the muscles and

  bones, which have a painful existence from then on. I t's not that

  they hurt, but that the basis of their existence is pain. And there

  is no escape from such longing. You would have to escape from

  your own body, from yourself even - by getting drunk perhaps?

  Or by sleeping for weeks on end? By losing yourself in your

  work to a point of frenzy? Or by praying incessantly?

  They both did all these things, but separately. To the outside

  world they looked like normal people, with lives like anyone

  else's, but then maybe that's how everyone lives. The years

  change everything, except for that sense of longing. People's

  hair falls out, papers go yellow, new houses are built on the edge

  of town, regimes change, the rich become poor and the poor

  H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t

  2 7 5

  rich, lonely old ladies next door die, and children's shoes become

  too small.

  They were such very different people now that they might a<>

  well have changed their names - they could have filled in a

  form, saying: 'We're no longer the people we used to he, so we're

  applying to change our personal details,' or something of the

  kind. What's the point of population censuses, if people keep

  changing and turning into someone else? Vhy docs an adult

  bear the same first name as when he was a child? Why docs a

  once loved woman still have her husband's surname when he's

  betrayed and abandoned her? Why do men go on bearing the

  same name when they come back from war, or why does a boy

  beaten by his father keep the same idiotic name when he starts

  to beat his own children?

  From the outside it looked as if nothing had changed, either

  between them or beyond them , as if the world were asleep only

  ,

  giving the occasional shudder because of a passing night mare.

  For some time they were still afraid of the telephone ringing too

  early in the morning or too late in the evening, and of leucrs

  brought by postmen who changed as o ften as the wea ther.

  Somewhere at the edge of consciousness they thought rgni

  would suddenly make contact, without warning, like a peal of

  thunder. Time doesn't dare to disturb images as sacred as rgni's

  'So what happened to them?' asked R. just before the lunar

  eclipse.

  They never said 'I love you' 10 each other again, because low

  had become a hidden weakness. They nc'cr said much to each

  other about anyt hing except the shopping, and to exchange

  Christmas greetings. They came home late from work then he

  .

  went to play bridge while she went to church ; they did nccasionally still huddle up to each other at night. not out of affect ton, hut for warmth, because the house was old and hard tn heat. : new

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  phrase had crept into their speech, and they said it whenever any

  sort of problem came along - 'Let's stick together,' they told each

  other over and over, until it sounded like an incantation.

  T h e e c l i p s e

  The end of September was a season of psychedelic impressions,

  thanks to transparent mists in the mornings and elongated shadows in the evenings. The cannabis we sowed in May was mature now, but we had missed the best moment and the male grass had

  already scattered its pollen about the plot and got the female

  grass pregnant. Now we had to nip the seeds off the dried heads

  with tweezers. All the strength of the grass had gone into those

  seeds, so we had to smoke it for a long time, whole pipefuls,

  before we could feel it taking our thoughts apart, breaking them

  into digressions and shredding them into so many different ideas

  that their sheer volume is frightening.

  We had guests over for the lunar eclipse. just as in the

  summer when we watched the full moon rise, the meadow was

  full of cars. Children were running around, people were chinking glasses, bringing out chairs and scraping them across the terrace. Finally the children were pacified by the computer,

  luminous and silent as it told them a story.

  The moon now rose over Marta's house, which meant it was

  already au
tumn. For a while i t was hidden by a cloud, but when

  the cloud drifted away it wasn't the same as before - a rounded

  shadow was visible on its plate-like face, narrow at first, then getting bigger and bigger. It all happened too quickly - barely one joint had time to go a single round before the moon vanished,

  leaving a brown hole cut out of the sky, a burned-out circle. An

  incredulous silence fell, and lasted for at least ten seconds, as

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  long as the face of the moon was dark. In that short while the stars

  blazed bright; the sky was full of them. We had never seen them

  look so brilliant - they seemed to be arranged in proper figures.

  forming numbers, geometric shapes, and even road signs. You

  could read them as you wished. You could see comic-strip stories

  in them, Prometheus rescuing Andromeda, Berenice's hair waving

  in the wind, the Lyre gliding through space, jangling with longing

  for human fingers. You could see it as a piece of text written in

  Braille, as row upon row of binary code, or as a computer screen

  with ambiguous icons. If only we had a huge mouse, a supermouse, to click on one of those icons, then other skies would open up, fascinating us like a children's computer game. Then we

  could play them, they would draw us in and deprive us of sleep.

  In these skies we'd be other people, and we'd have both incredible

  and quite ordinary adventures. As in a game, we'd die hundreds of

  times and still have new lives in reserve, maps of our rambling

  journeys between darkness and light hung out in time and space.

  Then the moon flared up again. At first just a shining scrap

  appeared, a celestial nail-clipping. We clinked glasses and the

  joint was passed round again. We started to clap.

  I walked across the wet grass to Marta's house. She was squatting in front of the stove laying the' fire. That cockerel of hers was tripping about at her side, unaware of his approaching

  death. He looked at me suspiciously with his purple eye. l ie

  was like a strange, silent person dressed in feathers.

  'Aren't you asleep yet?' I asked.

  'If you sleep all winter you've had enough sleep.' she said. or

  at least, as often happens with Marta. I thought that w;b what I

  heard.

  She began to cut bread, several slices, half the loaf. I rcali:cd