He moved past her bed, his eyes taking in what they could. She’d mounted a couple of icons on the wall: Madonna and Child, the Archangel Michael. At the foot of her bed lay a magazine, the title in Cyrillic. An orange duffel bag was open on the floor, still only partially unpacked.
He checked for leaks, found none, then turned to go.
“I was rude,” she said. She hadn’t moved since he entered.
“It’s all right. Nobody likes being disturbed late at night.”
“That Saturday. I was scared.”
He wasn’t sure what she was referring to, then realized she must mean the night he’d seen her coming out of the bar.
“Your sister,” she said. “She told me not to big drink.”
He laughed, though not at the grammatical slip. Her Polish is more than serviceable. “Oh. Well, she tells me not to drink big too. But sometimes I do it anyway.”
“Different,” she said. She shook her head. “Very different.”
“That’s true. After all, we’re relatives.”
“It’s good to have relatives,” she said. She glanced toward the alarm clock on her bedside table.
He took the hint. “Well, good night. See you in the morning.”
In the shower now, he turns his back to the nozzle, letting the spray pepper his neck and shoulders, loosening muscles grown tense from lack of sleep. Last night, around eleven, he again heard her praying. He caught a word here, a word there, but he couldn’t understand whom or what she was praying for. It lasted five or ten minutes. Then the floor began to creak, as he had known it would. She started walking back and forth, from one side of the room to the other. Four steps west, four steps east, the ceiling giving an extra little shudder each time she reversed direction. She’s not a large woman, just average-sized, and she was probably trying to be quiet. But he heard every step. Her pace is metronomic. Around seventy steps per minute, night after night.
The first time it happened, he thought that, like Teresa, she must be an exercise fanatic, but weeks ago, he discarded that notion. For one thing, she does it for no set period. One night, it will last an hour and eighteen minutes, the next night an hour and thirty-two minutes, the night after that an hour and ten minutes. People who are simply out for exercise usually have a goal in mind that can be measured in time or distance, but she appears to have neither. One night she kept it up for nearly two hours.
He could put an end to it by telling his sister about it or by simply climbing the stairs, knocking on her door, and either asking or demanding that she stop. But he can’t bring himself to do it. He doesn’t know her story, but he knows she’s trying to walk away from something big.
He showers, dresses, and heads downstairs. It’s Saturday again, and for the first time in three days the sky is clear, the forecast good, so he decides to make the trip to Krakow that he’s been putting off due to the weather. Every couple of weeks, he drives the van into the city for provisions. His sister buys in bulk from Tesco, placing her order online. By the time he gets there, it will be waiting. All he has to do is drive up to the loading dock and give them the number. It’s a wonder he and Marek remained in the grocery business as long as they did. If only they’d given up sooner.
He borrows a copy of Gazeta Wyborcza from the young woman at the front desk, then steps into the dining room. The pension is booked to capacity right now, and most of the tables are already taken, everyone eager to get caffeinated and fed and head for the slopes. He chooses the table nearest the kitchen and opens the paper.
The lead item, predictably, concerns the new government’s release of documents purporting to prove that back in the ’70s, Lech Walesa collaborated with the secret police. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Either way, Bogdan can’t bring himself to read it. Let the merchants of unforgiveness hawk their wares to those who will buy. Plenty of willing customers are out there. He flips to the sports.
He looks up to find Elena holding a coffee pot. She turns his cup right-side up and fills it. She seldom speaks when serving breakfast, not even a good-morning to him or the guests, but today she says, “You’re going to Krakow?”
“Actually, I am.” He wonders how she could know that.
“Your sister told me,” she says, as though his mind were a browser accidently left open. Later, he will realize she was giving him a chance to lie to her in case he anticipated the coming request and wanted to squelch it. “She said maybe I might go with you? I have this business I need to do.”
He’s not sure he wants her company. Though he used to dread the trips, fearing that he couldn’t keep himself from driving by his old building, or that he might see Krysia on the street with the other woman, or that returning to the scene of his crimes might shatter the fragile peace he’d found, he long ago began to savor them. He likes the drive down from the mountains, how the countryside spreads out before him: green in summer, white in winter, an impressionist landscape in spring and fall. Along the way, he listens to audiobooks. The novels of Sienkiewicz and Hugo and Dumas, Pan Tadeusz, John Grisham, Harry Potter, all sorts of things. On most trips, he meets Marek for a beer and once or twice has eaten supper with him and Inga.
Neither is he certain that he doesn’t want Elena’s company. The last time he tended to what’s left of his sexual needs, he imagined making love to her instead of Krysia. It puzzled him that he felt the urge to do that. She’s not especially attractive, and she’s never been pleasant. But she’s intriguing, and he knows she gets Saturday nights off.
“Sure,” he says. “You can go with me. Can I ask where you want me to take you, though? That’ll determine which route into the city we use.”
“The Ukrainian Consulate. On Beliny-Prazmowskiego.”
“But this is Saturday. All the consulates are closed.”
“For me, it won’t be.”
“Okay,” he says. “Could you be ready in an hour?” There’s a chance of snow again tonight, and he’d rather not be driving through bad weather in the dark.
She nods and returns to the kitchen. Later, when she brings a basket of rolls and again when she brings his eggs and fruit, she doesn’t say a word.
He finishes breakfast and steps into the office to see his sister. Roman says she drove over to her other local property but that she sent her order to Tesco before leaving. So he climbs the stairs, grabs his coat, iPad, and earbuds and goes back to the deserted living room, where he seats himself beside the fire.
While waiting for Elena, he puts the buds in, opens iTunes, and clicks on Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa. He started listening to what he now thinks of as “serious” music after visiting Szymanowski’s villa, which is only a few blocks away and has been turned into a museum. Like almost everyone else, he hated this kind of music when it was inflicted on him in school, but he has grown to enjoy it and likes reading about how mountain string bands inspired such composers as Bartók and Ligeti. He would never have thought that people who spent their days herding sheep and their nights drunkenly playing the fiddle could influence what was being performed in concert halls in Paris, London, New York, or Los Angeles. But they did. The poor and the dirty inform the divine.
Thinking about Los Angeles leads him to open Safari and type the words “Richard Brennan.”
One day in late 2010, near the end of his jail term, he’d visited the prison library. To call it a library was misleading, as it had only four shelves of books, at least two-thirds of them geared toward the vocational: Fundamentals of Plumbing, Eternal Principles of the Internal Combustion Engine. What it did have plenty of was computers. You had to log in with an assigned password, and they’d all been warned that porn sites were forbidden and that their browsing history would be retained and checked, but the word was that in reality, nobody gave a damn what you did online unless you initiated a correspondence with Osama bin Laden. Still, he hadn’t wanted to take too many risks.
That day, he visited the Los Angeles newspaper’s website for the first time in more than a year. Until he w
ent to jail, he’d made a habit of checking the paper every month or two to see if the American journalist’s articles were still appearing there, as they had since the summer of 2007, when he must have regained enough of his health to go back to work. He couldn’t read any of the pieces or even tell for certain what they were about. Nevertheless, it gave him comfort to see them. He hoped the man would recover more than just physical health, that he’d find someone else to love, maybe even start another family.
There was nothing in the paper by him that day or three days later, when he checked again. He checked the following week. Nothing. He checked off and on until the day he was released, never finding a piece with Brennan’s name on it.
As agreed with the probation officer, he moved into the pension and went to work for his sister. Here, he had daily access to the Internet, and over the next year, he visited the newspaper’s site every day, sometimes more than once. He never saw the name “Richard Brennan” there again. He did a Google search, thinking that maybe Brennan had changed jobs and gone to work for a different paper. To his chagrin, more than thirty-five million items came up, and while some of them were archived newspaper articles written by his Richard Brennan, all of those pieces were old, the last one dated March 2010. Most of what he found concerned other people with that apparently common name.
This morning, he again does what he’s been doing off and on for many years, checking a few Richard Brennans to see if he can find the one who never leaves his mind for very long. There are several he can’t rule out. Without being able to read the language, he can’t tell a whole lot. But none of the images he examines resembles the face he recalls from that night nearly ten years ago. He’s beginning to wonder if the man he thinks of as “my Richard Brennan” is now dead. Maybe he’s been dead a long time.
He becomes aware, in the diminished way that we all do when staring at our mobile devices and listening to music, that a set of arms and legs and the torso they’re attached to is moving toward him. As the physical presence draws closer, he realizes that a black-and-white wool skirt is involved, as are black leggings. For those reasons, he does not look up until they stop right in front of him. It never occurred to him that the body might belong to Elena.
She’s wearing a black blouse and the faux sheepskin he saw her in before. She’s also wearing lipstick—if he had to name the color, he’d say it’s purple—and her pale complexion makes it look even brighter and more daring than it otherwise might. She’s done something to her hair too, and whatever it was has revealed more of her face, where the lines he’s used to seeing have either been hidden or somehow disappeared, though the second possibility seems unlikely.
He pulls the earbuds out. “Ready to go?”
“Yes. They expect me early afternoon.”
“Okay.” He switches off the iPad and grabs his coat.
The van is parked behind the pension. It was still snowing yesterday afternoon when he left it there, and it’s covered. He climbs in and starts it, then reaches under the seat for the ice scraper.
In the meantime, she has begun clearing the passenger-side windows using only her gloved right hand, and he notices that she’s sweeping the white power aside forcefully, as if its presence were an affront. “I’ll take care of it,” he says, but she pays him no mind and keeps swatting snow.
For the first forty-five minutes, they’re both silent. He doesn’t know what to say to her, and she appears to have no interest in saying anything to him. He turns the radio on, but reception is not that good, and all he can hear is the crackly voice of the new justice minister, who’s intoning about “the worst sort of Poles,” meaning any of those whose views don’t jibe with the government’s. Forty-five years of Communism, twenty-five of Capitalism, and now an era that he doesn’t know a name for. Too bad “Vindictivism” isn’t a word. He reaches over and switches it off.
By the time they reach Rabka, he’s in physical distress. He can’t hold liquids like he once did. He pulls into a gas station and asks if she needs to visit the restroom, but she shakes her head.
The men’s is taken, so he waits four or five minutes. When it’s finally free, he has to stand in front of the urinal a good while before anything happens. He probably ought to see a urologist, but he hates going to the doctor, and the obligatory medical exams at the correctional facility didn’t improve his attitude.
When he climbs back into the van and apologizes for taking so long, his passenger remains silent. He starts the engine, looks both ways, and pulls out of the parking lot.
He drives on a few more kilometers, his dissatisfaction building. There’s such a thing as basic courtesy. He doesn’t deserve a lot from life, but it seems to him that he deserves that, at least as long as he extends it to others. Finally, he says, “Do you mind if I ask you something?”
“I might,” she replies. “It depend.”
In front of them, he sees a tractor. It’s driving right down the middle of the road, putting along at about fifteen kilometers an hour, loosing clouds of smoke. There are two people on it: the driver and a woman who’s perched on the fender. As they get closer, he can see that she’s laughing and talking with her hands, like she’s on the biggest lark of her life. Why anybody would be taking his girlfriend joy-riding on a tractor, on a mountain road in the middle of winter, is not just puzzling, it’s outrageous. When he’s within about fifty meters, he slams the horn.
The sound startles the woman. She flinches, turns, and nearly loses her balance, reaching out to grab the arm of the driver, who swerves to the right. For an instant, Bogdan fears he will steer the tractor off the road. The drop would not be precipitous, but the hillside is strewn with boulders.
As he starts around them, he hears the woman yell something, then gets a look at her face: she’s probably no more than twenty, a farm girl with long blonde hair that sweeps out from under her cap. The driver has a thick red beard and a red face to go with it, and there’s a large object in his right hand: a hatchet, it looks like, though they will never know for sure because when he throws it, aiming at the window in the cargo door, he misses. It strikes the van’s roof, prompting Elena to scream, lurch forward, and cover her head. Bogdan floors it.
The consulate is a whitewashed villa on a residential street, not far from one of the last blocks he and Marek “cleansed.” She hasn’t spoken since the incident on the road, but then neither has he. It left him shaken, and he needs a beer. When he asks her what time she wants to be picked up, she simply shakes her head.
He’s had enough of this behavior. “I’ll stop right here at three thirty,” he says. “If I don’t see you, you’re on your own getting back.” She climbs out and shuts the door so softly that the latch doesn’t catch. He reaches over, reopens it, and gives it a good jerk. The impact rattles the windowpane.
He drives by Tesco and picks up Teresa’s order, throwing a few sacks of ice into the coolers with the frozen goods. Then he calls Marek to see if he’s available. His old friend answers, but he and Inga are watching their grandchildren for the weekend. So Bogdan parks the van near Plac Szczepanski and walks through snow-blanketed Planty to Bunkier Café. It’s the one where he had his first drink all those years ago, on the day he got out of jail to await trial. He thinks of that day now as among the most important of his life, when he began to honor the small pleasures to which he will never be entitled: a cold beer after a long dry spell, a pretzel with mustard, an evening with friends. He visits this café almost every time he comes to Krakow.
Today, the canopy is covered with snow. The plastic drop panels are down, but because they’re transparent, he can watch people stroll by. The tall dishwater blonde comes to take his order. She’s the same one who served him that day in the fall of 2009, which means she’s been working at the café for about seven years, if not longer. Since he averages a couple of trips to Krakow a month and nearly always drinks a beer here, she’s waited on him countless times. Yet if she recognizes him, there’s no evidence of it. She lays
the menu down on the table and is about to turn away when he says, “I don’t need the menu. I’ll just have a large beer.”
“Tyskie?”
“Pilsner Urquell.”
While he drinks, he thinks about what happened back there on the road. The tractor driver and his girlfriend or wife, or whoever she was, weren’t doing anything wrong. They had as much right to the road as he did. He understands why he slammed the horn—anger at Elena’s strange behavior—but he can’t fathom why he allowed himself to vent when he was behind the wheel of an automobile. He believes there are a handful of mistakes he is not allowed to make. Reckless driving is number one. Taking too much of anything for himself, be it food, drink, or space on a sofa, is number two. Cruelty to animals is number three.
It’s a while before he notices that today, almost everyone who passes the café is heading in the same direction—toward Plac Szczepanski, near where the van is parked—and many of them are carrying flags. When the waitress brings his check, he asks if something special is going on there this afternoon.
She lays his change on the table. “Some kind of demonstration,” she says.
“For or against?”
She looks at him as if he’s yet another nuisance in a day filled with them. “Excuse me?”
“I meant are they demonstrating for something or against it?”
“What difference would it make?” she says, then picks up his empty beer glass and carries it inside.
The demonstration is definitely against something: the new government, which has fired numerous people at state television and radio, revamped the constitutional court to prevent rulings it opposes, and released those Walesa documents that may or may not be genuine. The crowd is a fraction of the fifty-five thousand that will be reported in Warsaw, but the square is still packed, hardly enough room to move, and it seems as if almost everyone has a flag or two, the Polish banner waving alongside the EU’s. When he gets there, the speaker on the raised platform is shouting that this is not about finding scapegoats; there’s been too much of that already. This is about maintaining twenty-seven years’ worth of progress. “We’ve got to rush to meet the challenge.” He illustrates by jogging in place.
The Unmade World Page 24