They do everything hard. If you look at it a certain way, they’re avant-garde musicians, practitioners of the new urban art of percussive cleansing. The burlap sack contains their instruments.
The panel lights up, and he pushes a button and drags his load into the elevator. On the floor, in red paint, somebody has sprayed go fuck a llama. He knows it’s English and understands the first three words but not the last. He used to have a Polish-English dictionary, and at one time he would not have been able to rest until he looked it up. But he’s past the self-improvement phase. His self won’t ever improve.
He steps out on the top floor, then drags the sack over to number eight and unlocks the door. The flat is in a shambles. Nobody has lived here since last spring, and it was a mess long before they left: wallpaper peeling off in every room, the toilet bowl tinged by the substances it’s conveyed, the light fixtures broken or missing, the place reeking of cabbage and cigarette smoke. The only positive thing he could say about it is that it’s not a lot worse than where he lives.
He drops his bundle and walks into the kitchen, where he opens the cabinet under the sink. He pulls a pipe wrench from his tool belt and hits the elbow joint five or six times, great ringing blows that on the floor below probably sound like gunshots.
A few minutes later, his partner knocks on the door. Once he’s inside, they lock themselves in. Marek locates an outlet in the living room and plugs in the boom box, and within a few seconds some of the worst noise Bogdan has ever heard erupts. Pounding drums, belligerent bass. “What’s the name of this shit?” he shouts into the din.
“It’s a Swedish band named Steel Attack,” Marek hollers back. “Fabian recommended them. The record’s called Diabolic Symphony.”
“Are they Satanists?”
Marek cups a hand to his ear. Over the last few months, both of them have lost a bit of hearing. “Are they what?”
“Never mind.”
Together, they grab the sack and upend it, dumping the contents onto the floor. They’ve got a two-foot-high pile of broken bathroom tiles, bricks, and porcelain.
Bogdan tosses the sack aside. The cacophony is already giving him a headache. Every night when he gets home, his temples are pounding. “Well,” he yells, “no point in putting it off.” He picks up a bathroom tile and hurls it against the wall. Marek lifts a hunk of porcelain over his head and drops it on the floor.
After they shut down back in 2007, he applied for jobs in the produce departments at all the big stores. The only response came from Alma, a Krakow-based chain that started the same year he and Marek incorporated and now had over forty shops nationwide. A high percentage of its products were luxury goods: Russian caviar, Italian coffee, French champagne.
The kid who interviewed him looked several years shy of thirty and called him “Pop.” He informed him that there were presently no openings in either of the local produce departments and that even if there had been, most of the employees, including those who worked the bins, were college graduates. “It’s a buyer’s market,” he said. “But our branch in Galeria Kazimierz does have a position available in custodial engineering.”
“What would that involve?”
Seven days a week, from midnight until six a.m., he burned packaging left by the stock crew, then swept and mopped the floors and fronted the shelves. The good part of the job was that nobody watched him. He worked alone, locked into the store by the stock supervisor and set free the next morning by the assistant manager. The bad part was that because he worked alone, he had a lot of time to think. And he always thought about the same thing.
A few days after the accident, on the front of Gazeta Krakowska, he’d seen the face of the woman who’d been driving that night, along with those of her daughter and husband. Though he hadn’t bought a paper for a couple of years, he fumbled through his pockets for change, then hurried into an alley to read it. He learned the names of all three people. Both the woman and her daughter were dead. The man, an American journalist, was said to be in serious condition, suffering from a broken leg and dislocated shoulder and the effects of hypothermia. The Mercedes had not been spotted until sunrise on the 23rd, and a hospital spokesman was quoted as saying the journalist could have frozen to death while unconscious, since all the car windows were shattered. An officer of the highway patrol, who requested anonymity, said police were investigating the possibility that another vehicle had been involved.
That evening, in the privacy of the bathroom, he opened his laptop to search for news of the wealthy pool builder, figuring that by now the dead guard dog would have been reported and that perhaps the authorities had already linked the two events. What he discovered was something else altogether: on the morning of the 23rd, during his Christmas vacation in the Fiji Islands, the pool builder went swimming off the Coral Coast. The last time his young wife glimpsed him, he was about two hundred meters from the beach, on a perfectly calm day. His body had not been found. It was a while before a troubling intuition made Bogdan check to see how many time zones separated Poland from Fiji, at which point he realized the guy must’ve drowned just as his dog was being bludgeoned to death. He again recalled how he’d felt as if he were doing someone else’s bidding that night, as if his body were beyond his control.
For weeks that became months, he moved around in a fog, certain that at any moment there would be a knock on the door, a team of armed men waiting to escort him away. He read everything he could find online about the laws that pertained when you witnessed an accident. Even if you were not involved, it was illegal to leave the scene without notifying the police. And even if it hadn’t been, his guilt was unquestionable. First he’d killed an animal, and then he’d caused the deaths of two human beings and in the process ruined the life of a third. He was missing some essential element. What it was, he didn’t know. But he felt the absence as a void in his chest, and the void kept expanding, as though he were turning into absence itself.
After he got the job at Alma, he carried a small bottle with him to the store each time he reported for work. At first, he took care not to have a swig after three a.m. so the assistant manager would not witness the effects. But the analgesic wore off fast, and every time it did he’d return to that night on the side of the road, the lovely large eyes of the driver dead and unfocused, the blood gushing onto the blonde girl’s white fur, the shock and confusion he saw on the face of the man he’d left alone to die beside his family. Three a.m. turned into four, and four turned into five. And when his own small bottle was empty, all the tall, glistening ones in the store’s impressive liquor department began to beckon.
One cold morning a few days before Christmas, he felt a shoe prodding his rib cage. When he opened his eyes, he was looking straight up at the assistant manager, who held an empty bottle of Baczewski vodka, the least expensive brand sold by the store. “You know what I don’t understand?” he asked, this young man who always wore the same pressed slacks, crisp white shirt, and neatly knotted green tie.
“No, sir.”
“If you intended to drink yourself out of a job and shoplift too, why didn’t you go for something better than this piss?”
“I guess I’ve just got poor taste.”
He went home and told Krysia the truth, that he’d lost his job for drinking. She was in the kitchen when he gave her the bad news, and she didn’t say much more than “Oh,” just washed her hands and asked if he’d like some coffee.
Back in the ’80s, she’d worked as a hairstylist, so the next day she signed up to retake the licensing exam. Though the personal upkeep industry could legally practice age discrimination, she landed a job at an upscale boutique owned by a guy in his thirties who affected a French accent and called himself Jean-Claude. His real name was Waldemar, and he came from Katowice.
Bogdan went on unemployment. They survived winter and spring by living off Krysia’s wages and tips. He got up each morning and fixed their breakfast, which they ate in polite silence, and then while he washed dish
es she went into the bathroom and prepared herself for the day. She had only three or four suitable sets of clothing, but she always left the building looking great, every hair in place, not a trace of gray. He suspected, though she’d never told him and he didn’t dare ask, that she’d lied to “Jean-Claude” about her age. She could easily pass for forty or even younger.
For a while, he went out each morning and left applications at convenience stores, train-station kiosks, newsstands. But the gainfully employed were mostly in their twenties and thirties, occasionally their early forties. You might spot five new Lexus sedans rowed up waiting for a red light to turn green, but you almost never encountered a fifty-year-old man operating a checkout stand. If you wanted to see guys his age in public, the best place to look was a park bench. You’d find plenty of them there, even in foul weather, their faces pasty, unshaven.
Before long, he joined their ranks, though he kept to himself, and if somebody else plopped down beside him, he’d leave and find another spot. He usually drank three or four beers with high alcohol content because they’d give him a quick buzz that would wear off before Krysia came home. He was sitting in the park one day around the beginning of summer, finishing his third one and thinking about the American whose life he’d destroyed, wondering where he was at that moment, whether he’d ever remarry, father another little girl, whether he could sleep, if he’d begun to drink too much, whether he recalled anything about the aftermath of the accident, if he remembered the man with the flashlight—when he looked up to find his wife standing before him.
The city has eight hundred thousand residents, but the old town is confined within the boundaries of a lush green band known as Planty, which follows the contours of the medieval moat. That she might happen across him one day had never crossed his mind, but when he saw her standing there he realized it should have. Yes, she worked in a different part of town, and Planty was not on her way home, but if Krakowians can find a reason to walk through there, they will. What her reason might be, he couldn’t imagine. Wasn’t this Wednesday, and didn’t she work from nine till five on weekdays? It wasn’t even noon yet.
She reached out and gently pulled the can from his hand. He thought she’d throw it in the nearby garbage receptacle, but instead, she raised it to her lips and took a swallow. He’d never seen her drink beer before. She used to drink red wine, a couple of shots of vodka from time to time, but in recent years very little except water and black tea.
“That’s not bad,” she said. She gestured at the brown sack on the bench beside him. “Do you have any more?”
He realized then what she was doing there at this particular time. Jean-Claude must have let her go. Maybe he’d discovered she was older than he thought and decided it was bad for business. He catered to a young clientele. Everyone did. “There’s just one left,” he said. Then, apologetically, “I never drink more than four. On a single day, I mean.”
“Let’s go home and split it.” She patted her purse, which was large enough to conceal a small goose. “I’ve got a little something in here too.”
What she had, he learned when they got back to their place, was a bottle of bison grass vodka. Stunned, he stood near the kitchen table and watched her stick it in the freezer. She found another beer in the back of the refrigerator and suggested that they carry it and the one he had planned to drink on the park bench into the living room. He followed her with a rising sense of unease. He couldn’t imagine what had gotten into her. It scared him. He no longer believed she’d lost her job. If she had, she would’ve told him on the way home; he knew her well enough to say so with certainty. But instead she’d talked nonstop about a young woman she worked with who’d earned a degree in European studies at Jagiellonian University but now hoped to start her own salon.
She sat down on the couch, and he took his place beside her. She pulled both shoes off, leaned over and tapped the top of the beer can, then popped it.
“Why’d you do that?” he asked. For some reason, it bothered him.
“Why’d I do what?”
“Tap the top of the can before pulling the tab.”
She lifted the beer—a Tyskie that he suddenly understood she must have bought, since he didn’t like the taste of it and would never have bought it himself—and took a couple of big swallows. “You don’t remember who used to do that before opening one?”
“No.”
“My father. He did it every time.”
Then he did remember. “That’s right. He claimed it prevented the beer from spewing.”
“He thought it was a terrible thing when they started putting it in cans.”
“I remember that too.”
“It’s amazing what we forget,” she said. “Little things and big ones too. You think you could never forget them, and then you do.” She leaned against him. And then she let her head come to rest on his shoulder. “I’ve forgotten a lot of things I used to know about you. Things I always loved. The last few days, walking to and from work, I’ve made myself remember them. This may sound silly, but I even made a mental list. Want to know what’s on it?”
Somewhere inside, the voice that kept losing the battle to govern his emotions warned him it might be best not to find out. “Sure,” he said. “I mean, if you want to tell me.”
She said that though at first it appalled her, she used to love it when they were still living with her parents and at the breakfast table he sometimes pulled a small square of milk chocolate from his robe and ate it with a slice of sausage. “You thought nobody noticed, but I did.”
“Well, I used to love sugar and salt. Your mother, I guess, would’ve been appalled.”
“No, my father would’ve been. As far as Mother was concerned, you could do no wrong. Remember how you used to eat ice cream?”
He hadn’t thought about it for years. “I turned the spoon upside down right before it entered my mouth. The ones your folks had weren’t silver, they were aluminum, and if they made contact with my tongue before the ice cream did, it spoiled the taste. I quit doing that when we moved out and could afford our own silverware.”
“I know you did. You stopped doing a lot of things then, Bogdan.”
The quitting, he might have pointed out, had occurred on both sides: it seemed that her interest in him had waned after they’d tried and failed to have children. She gave up her job and began to stay home, where she watched a lot of TV and filled out crossword puzzles, and he never protested because for a while, in the’90s, he really could do no wrong. They vacationed in Rome, renting an apartment near the Pantheon, eating lunch day after day at the same trattoria, drinking a liter of wine every time, paying no more than cursory attention to the amount on each check. They spent Christmas on the snowy slopes of Zakopane, where he bowled over a group of Japanese tourists who waited helplessly on their skis at the bottom of the course. She captured the collision on camera and thought it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen. She used to play it on the VCR when Marek and his wife came over for dinner.
“There’s one thing I didn’t quit,” he said.
“I know. You never stopped loving me.”
They finished their beers, and she said she’d go get the vodka. But when she left, she headed down the hallway rather than into the kitchen.
He lingered there on the couch for a few minutes until it became clear that she didn’t intend to return. He finally rose and went to the sideboard where they kept porcelain and crystal. When he reached for the shot glasses, his fingers were trembling.
In the kitchen, he pulled the bottle from the freezer. It was coated by a layer of frost. He started for the hall, then stopped, screwed the cap off, and took a dainty swallow. Then he took a big one. In the hall he took another.
She’d closed the bedroom door. The icy bottle in one hand, the fragile shot glasses in the other, he pressed his forehead against the wood. The day was not that warm, yet in the last few moments his pores had opened, and he was damp from head to toe, perspiration tricklin
g down his back and under his belt. He could see what she would see when he entered the room: a man turning to mush, melting from the inside out, as if his body was trying to purge itself of his poisoned essence. It took all his remaining strength to open the door.
The near side of the bed belonged to her. But she sat on the far side, her back to him. She wore a black negligee that was at least seventeen or eighteen years old. He hadn’t known she still had it, but he recalled it well. She’d dubbed it the “Make-a-Baby Nightie” because of the ardor it always summoned when he watched her lift it over her head. No baby had ever been made, lust being an inadequate remedy for a low sperm count.
In the mirror on her dressing table, they established eye contact.
If she had been the daughter he’d never fathered, or either of his sisters, or Marek’s wife, Inga, or any other woman he’d ever cared about, and he’d somehow come to witness this scene, he would’ve urged her to do whatever was necessary to stop him from laying a hand on her.
He turned the bottle up and took two or three swallows, then studied her image in the mirror. It was sliding in and out of focus. She stood and, without turning around, lifted off the garment and dropped it on the floor. Then she did turn, and as she walked toward him, he looked away, staring at the bedside table, where a small autographed photo of Lech Walesa had remained propped in its frame for many years. They’d met him a world ago in Zakopane.
For the second time that day, she lifted a container of alcohol from his hands. When she turned it up to take a swallow, he allowed himself to look at her naked body, registering each detail: the shock of brown hair in her right armpit; her slightly asymmetrical breasts, the one on the left a little larger than its twin; her bold nipples; the dark thatch down below.
She stood the bottle on the nearby dresser. “It’s not easy not to make love for so long, is it?” she asked.
“No. But I don’t know if I can do it anymore. I got used to not doing it. Trying not to think about it. And in the meantime, I’ve become repulsive. Why would anybody want to do that with me?”
The Unmade World Page 6