She didn’t answer his question. And when he considered it later, his failure to insist that she do so seemed at best pathetic and at worst an act of aggression.
She closed the scant distance, pressing her heavy breasts against him, her breath hot against his neck. “You can do it,” she murmured as she went to work on his belt. “I guarantee it.” She took him roughly in hand, pulling, kneading, squeezing, then uttering the first of several obscenities. Soon she was on her back, her legs spread wide, her heels poised against the mattress.
Still wearing his shirt, he lowered himself onto her.
She drew him inside. “What’d I tell you, Bogdan?” she whispered. “Wasn’t I right?”
As he began to move, he heard a plaintive cry, which he knew came from somewhere in his throat. Rather than study her face, like he always used to, he kept his eyes shut.
Her right arm lay stiffly at her side; her left hand gripped the corner post. Each time he moved into her, he heard her draw a shallow breath.
The lack of any other corresponding movement from her troubled and excited him. He sensed that she wanted it to be over, so he began to move faster. Suddenly, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pleaded, “Not yet. Not yet.”
He felt the strength in her shoulders and with it a surge of confidence. He eased off, and they began to move in rhythm, just as they used to. Grace did what grace must do to be worthy of its label, conveying itself upon the blighted.
“My God,” she cried near the end, her nails digging so deeply into his back that tomorrow he’d find his blood on the sheets. “Bogdan. Oh, Bogdan.”
He buried his face in the cleft between her neck and shoulder. As the deepest sleep of his life overtook him, he decided that upon waking, before either of them left the bed, he would look her in the eye, tell her what had happened Christmas before last, and beg her to help him figure out how to live as decently as he could, given the terrible thing he’d done.
When he woke, it was nearly ten p.m. and already dark, and she was no longer there beside him. He reached into the wardrobe and pulled out his ragged bathrobe, shrugged into it, and carelessly tied the sash.
She sat at the kitchen table, her head in her hands. At first, though she must have been aware that he was there, she didn’t look up. Then, finally, she did.
He stood no more than a meter away, so close that if he’d wanted to, he could have reached out and laid his hand on her shoulder. Yet even at this distance, her features faded to soft focus, her face and hair, her lips and eyes, the fine line of her jaw growing less and less distinct, turning into an assortment of pixels. He sensed that this was the final scene in a contemporary marital drama, and he was nothing more than a lens through which to view it. The presence of another person was implied, but the actor himself was invisible, and the scriptwriter had assigned him no lines. All he could do was listen.
“Bogdan,” she said, “it isn’t your fault, really it isn’t. It’s no one’s fault but mine, and I hope one day you’ll forgive me.” She told him she’d be moving in with the young woman she’d met at work, the one who hoped to open her own salon. Agnieszka was the name he heard spoken. She said they’d become “partners.”
Marek and Inga’s sons were grown and on their own, so for several months he stayed in their old room. Unlike him, Marek bore visible reminders of their bungled burglary and under interrogation had revealed a creative version of it to his wife, omitting Bogdan’s role and saying nothing about a wreck.
Before agreeing to let him live there, Inga made two stipulations. The first was that he had to shower every morning and go look for a job. The second was that as long as he slept beneath her roof he couldn’t drink a drop. He tried to turn the latter into a joke, protesting that he seldom slept, but she’d never had much use for irony. She reached across the kitchen table and seized his forearm. “I’m not fooling with you, Bogdan,” she told him. “It’s nice out right now, but before long it’ll be cold. Newspapers make shitty blankets.”
She was a big blonde woman with broad hips and German blood, and though Marek often called her “the Brandenburg Gate,” he also admitted that he would not trade her for anybody else. After the dog chewed him up, he said, he’d asked himself what really mattered, and the answer was family and friends and somehow finding just enough to get by.
Bogdan was being truthful when he told Inga he seldom slept. Most nights, he got only three or four hours before he woke, put his clothes back on, and let himself out to walk the streets. One rainy evening he crossed the Vistula twice on different bridges and walked all the way out to the western edge of the city before realizing he was retracing the route he and Marek had traveled eighteen months ago.
On those nocturnal meanderings, he avoided the part of town where his and Krysia’s flat was located. He’d agreed to let her put it on the market, and agreed to a divorce too, and while he’d promised to come get his things sometime soon, there wasn’t much he really wanted. He’d taken most of his clothes when he left as well as a couple boxes of books that would probably never be read again.
The place sold quickly. When she called to tell him, he didn’t answer. In her voicemail, she sounded as if she was working hard to conceal her euphoria, thanking him again for his kindness and informing him when his share of the funds would be deposited into his bank account. She also reminded him that their belongings needed to be removed before the new owners took possession. He texted back, wished her well, and asked if she’d mind mailing him a few of his old family photos.
They’d gotten much less for the flat than they would have if it had been properly maintained. But his portion was still enough to pay rent and live on until he figured out what to do next. The problem was, he didn’t care what he did next, or whether he did anything at all. “In the future” was a phrase he never used. The meaning of “tomorrow” had been radically reduced.
Once, around three a.m., a couple of weeks before he moved out of Marek and Inga’s place, he found himself standing in the middle of the Grunwald Bridge. It wasn’t really raining, not even sprinkling, but the air was full of mist. He stood with his back to the roadway, where every now and then a vehicle passed, setting off a small tremor. Ahead, to the northeast, Wawel Castle, brightly lit as always, loomed over the Vistula. Though spring had brought plenty of rain, the summer had been dry and hot, and the river was as low as he’d ever seen it. With no great sense of urgency, he wondered what it would feel like to hit the dark surface from this distance, whether the impact would knock you senseless, so that you were unaware when the water filled your lungs, or whether you’d flail your broken limbs as you sank into its depths.
He rented a studio in a smut-covered hulk on Blich, eye level with the elevated tracks. There was a balcony, barely large enough to accommodate a small stool, and that was where he sat and drank and smoked away much of the autumn. Trains clattered past all day and all night. Down below, on the sidewalk, people hustled along, most of them walking with their heads down, as Poles always do, even the happiest among them.
One afternoon, around the time people were getting off work, he saw Krysia. She’d just turned the corner. She wore a sheepskin that he’d never seen before, a green scarf knotted at her neck. She was gesturing with her hands while she talked to the woman walking along beside her, a much shorter blonde who carried a shopping bag and had a red purse suspended from one shoulder. The other woman kept nodding. As they drew closer he rose and leaned over the railing, hoping to catch a word, but just then yet another train rumbled by. He watched them all the way to the end of the block. There they paused, looked both ways, then crossed the street and disappeared under the viaduct.
Snow came, and when he could no longer sit on the balcony, he quietly began to go crazy. During a ten-day stretch in mid-December 2008, he didn’t leave his room at all, not even after draining the final bottle of vodka and eating the last can of sardines. He had no television, no Internet connection either, so he tried to read an old biography
of Pilsudski, but he kept having to go back and start over and finally gave up.
One day, he walked over to the snowy balcony, unlatched the door, and stepped outside. He looked down at the pedestrians hurrying along and understood that he had nothing in common with any of them and never would again. He considered jumping, but the sidewalk was not that far, and he estimated his chances of dying at no better than fifty-fifty. The thought of being confined to a hospital bed, facing questions from doctors and nurses, perhaps being catheterized and having his ass wiped by an orderly dissuaded him.
He hadn’t looked at his phone for days and was not aware that the battery had long since died. So he didn’t know that Marek had tried repeatedly to reach him, that Inga had too, as well as his sister in Zakopane. Nor did he know that Krysia had texted him holiday wishes. He’d lost track of time and could not have told you what day it was, though he’d heard a group of carolers one evening and understood it must be close to Christmas.
When the knock on the door came, it was dark outside. It was dark inside too, because he’d forgotten to turn on the lights. He’d fallen asleep sitting up and at first believed the knocking, insistent if not frantic, was just another element in the dreamscape where of late he resided. Dead eyes reigned there. Bloodstained fur.
“Bogdan? Bogdan!”
He stood. The room spun. He reached out and braced himself against the wall, then groped for the lamp on the table near the sofa bed and switched it on. Nothing happened. The bulb was gone.
“Please! Open the door, or I’m going to bash it in. I’ve got an ax. I swear it.”
He moved in the direction of the voice, and his hand settled on the wall switch. He flipped it on and was instantly blinded, and as light illuminated the sorry space he began to sob. It was the dry kind of crying. Either it originated in a place too deep for tears, or he was so dehydrated that his body could not produce them.
When the door swung open, Marek saw him standing there heaving, his shirt incorrectly buttoned so that it bunched up under his throat and, at the bottom, left bare a patch of belly. The only furniture was the sofa bed and the table that stood beside it and over by the balcony door a small stool. The odor made Marek cough. His eyes began to water. Later, in the kitchenette, he’d discover that after the trash bin had filled up, his old friend had begun to leave his garbage on the counter and floor.
He hustled over to the balcony and threw open the door. A gust of icy air rushed in, taking his breath away and clearing, for the moment, his nostrils.
Bogdan had propped himself up against the wall. Otherwise, he would’ve collapsed.
“What in the world is going on here? Bogdan, what’s happened? You’ve scared us all to death.”
“Where’s your ax?”
“What ax?”
“You said you had an ax. That’s why I let you in. I didn’t want to pay for a new door.”
He spent Christmas back at their place. Inga insisted he shower every morning, and when she didn’t think he’d eaten enough, she put more food on his plate and made him sit there and consume it while she watched. She let him have half a beer on Christmas Eve. One of her and Marek’s grandchildren, a three-year-old girl, sat on the floor near his armchair while gifts were opened. Every time someone tore the wrapping off another one, she shrieked and clapped her hands. Marek and Inga had a lot less than they once did, but everybody got a present, and the children got two. His own was a pair of slippers.
As breakfast concluded on the 29th, Inga convened a meeting at the kitchen table. He had to go to work, she said. He couldn’t just sit around wallowing in his own despair. He’d lose his mind. Anybody would.
“Go to work where?” he asked. “Get a job how? It’s not as if I haven’t tried.”
She nodded at her husband.
“I’ve got one for you,” Marek told him. “Fabian said he’d take you on.”
For the past year or so, he’d been employed by the same development company that had evicted them from the building where they’d had their last store. He’d told Bogdan he was performing “maintenance,” which seemed a little unusual because he’d never been able to fix or maintain much of anything. The developer himself hadn’t hired him, he’d been approached by an underling whose first name and last were the same: Fabian Fabian. That alone invested the guy with sinister properties, at least in Bogdan’s mind.
But Inga was right. He couldn’t keep spending his days caged in the room near the tracks. If he did, he’d eventually throw himself off the balcony or walk across the street, climb the embankment, lie down on the rails, and wait for the next train.
Since sobering up and regaining a bit of strength, he’d had a strange feeling: somebody somewhere would one day need his help. Who that person was or why he or she might require the assistance of a man like him, he couldn’t imagine. But he knew, as surely as he’d ever known anything, that the only honor left lay in being ready when the moment came. “All right,” he said. “When do I start?”
“A week from today. I’ll take you in to meet Fabian tomorrow.”
It was a couple of minutes before he thought to ask, “By the way, what exactly does the job involve?”
Marek glanced at Inga, then rose and stepped over to the counter, where he poured himself more tea. With his back to the table, he said, “A little of this. A little of that.”
They haven’t been at it long before someone starts pounding on the door. Marek drops a brick on the floor, then turns to open it.
Bogdan grabs him by the sleeve. He has to shout in his ear so he can be heard over the satanic racket. “Not yet. Let him simmer.” Back in January, when they began working together, his partner was nominally in charge. Now he is.
His Christmas awakening is only a distant memory, much like his marriage, the grocery chain he cofounded, the flat he was once so proud of. No one needs him, and no one ever will. Sometimes it seems that if he was put on the earth for any reason at all, it was to wreck the hopes of others. He rises each morning, drinks a pot of coffee, and goes out to do harm. He’s not like Marek, who views this work as a prelude to something better—namely, superintending a group of renovated buildings, just as soon as they get rid of the remaining tenants in these recently purchased properties. That’s what Fabian promised them. But Fabian’s a liar and a hoodlum. There won’t be a clean job at the end of this dirty job. There will just be more dirt.
The pounding doesn’t stop. Bogdan turns off the boom box, steps over, and opens the door.
One look at the old man tells him plenty. He’s in his eighties, slim and erect, with chiseled features and iron-gray hair, the collar of his powder-blue shirt stiffly starched, his bronze cufflinks untarnished. He almost certainly hails from what used to be called the intelligentsia. The Nazis seldom managed to rob men like him of their dignity, and neither did the Communists.
“May I ask,” he begins, “what you think you are doing? I’m downstairs trying to work.”
“We’re just preparing the flat for renovation. I’m sure you’ve received several notices from the new owner.”
“I know what you’re doing.”
“Well, then,” Bogdan says, starting to close the door, “you don’t need to ask.”
The old man shoves his palm against it. His strength takes Bogdan by surprise. “If you think hooligans, riffraff, and peasant rabble frighten me, you are dead wrong. I fought in the Home Army. I’ve taken the lives of better men than you.”
This is something new. All they’ve been told is that the last remaining resident used to be a professor at Jagiellonian University. His wife has been dead for many years. He’s probably lived in this building since sometime in the ’50s. He thinks it’s his home, but he’s wrong.
“I thought you were retired,” Bogdan says. He’s aware that Marek has stepped into the hallway behind him, that he’s looking over his shoulder at the old man. This is the first time they’ve laid eyes on him, which is odd when you think about it, because a couple of months a
go they spent a good bit of time in the building. Normally, they clear the stubborn ones from the top down, but Fabian knew the occupant in number six would be especially troublesome, so they started from the bottom up.
“I am retired from the university where I used to teach,” the old man says. “I am not retired from work.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I remain a scholar. I am composing an article about a great poet.”
“Which one?”
“One you will not have heard of.”
“Try me.”
“I will not speak her name to so foul a presence.” He tilts his chin up, and his cold blue eyes look directly into Bogdan’s. It comes to him that he would not have wanted to encounter this man in a forest at night. “I am warning you,” the professor says, “that I will not be driven from my home. I shared it with my wife, and within those walls we raised three children. I have told your Mr. Fabian”—he pronounces the name with disdain—“that I intend to expire in my own bed, beneath my own roof, in my own good time. Unfortunately, I can’t prevent his ‘renovations,’ but I can and will file harassment complaints. The city code prevents you from engaging in any activity that purposely creates a hostile environment for legal residents, of which I am one. If that hideous excuse for music disturbs my work again, of if you continue hurling missiles at the walls and dropping boulders on the floor, I promise you that you will come to regret it. If you think the scum that employs you will protect you from prosecution, you are every bit as stupid as you look. Now, good-bye.”
He turns and starts back downstairs. That’s when Bogdan notices that one of his legs is shorter than the other. He walks with a twisting motion that’s painful to observe. It looks as if his right hip might pop loose from his body.
He shuts the door and locks it. He’s perspiring badly, his armpits soaked.
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