The Unmade World

by Steve Yarbrough

  She’s still dying her hair—there’s not a streak of gray anywhere. It’s as black as the blouse she’s wearing. She rises onto her toes, just as she used to, so his lips can brush her cheek. “I’m so glad to see you,” she says, giving his hand a little squeeze. “You look great, Richard.”

  In fact, she finds his appearance disturbing. He’s far too thin, and his shoulders slope inward as if he’s spent a lot of time hugging himself.

  “So do you, Monika. But then, you always did. I would have called you,” he says, “and told you how late we were going to be. But I don’t have a European cell phone anymore, and I don’t think my other one works here.”

  “That’s all right. I checked ahead of time, so I knew you’d been delayed. Shall we go?”

  Across the street, where once there was nothing but a few trees and bushes, there’s now a large parking garage. She’s driving a small white BMW. She opens the trunk, and he puts his bag inside.

  “You’re traveling fairly light,” she says. “From what you said, I thought perhaps you planned to stay longer.”

  “Well, I might. I’m not sure.” The truth could embarrass or even alarm: he has no plans beyond the moment. He had planned to fly to Krakow, and now here he is.

  On the way into town, she says that since it’s nearly six, she thought maybe they would have dinner at their place. Afterward, she can drive him over to his apartment, or perhaps he will stay the night with them and she will take him there in the morning?

  “The latter option might be best,” he says. “I imagine I’m going to cave in pretty quickly after a meal.”

  “So that’s what we’ll do,” she says. “Franek will be there with his girlfriend, and Stefan invited Bronek.”

  “Bronek?”

  “Malinowski. The detective.”

  “Ah.”

  She casts a sidelong glance. “I hope that was all right?”

  “Of course it is,” he says, though the prospect is one he doesn’t relish. “Is Stefan any better?”

  “No. And he’s not going to be. I have to warn you, Richard, that he’s terribly frail. I’m with him every day, but it still sometimes shocks me when I walk into the room and see how he looks. He’s lost every last hair on his body, and he only weighs about forty-five kilos. According to his oncologist, the amount of chemo and radiation he’s absorbed through the years would be enough to kill the average person three or four times.”

  “Well, there’s nothing average about Stefan,” he says.

  “No, there isn’t. I can say many things about my husband, and that’s definitely one of them. Would you believe he still writes every day? He does it propped up in bed now, rather than in his study. Sometimes I hear him laughing, which tells me he’s just completed another sex scene. He behaves as if he’s too busy to die.”

  “With that kind of attitude, he may still beat it.”

  “No, he won’t. The doctor says that at best, hospice is only weeks away. Stefan wanted badly to see you again. And so did I.”

  The highway that used to be a two-lane blacktop is hardly recognizable. Multiple lanes go in each direction now, and due to his disorientation, he has only a general sense of where the accident happened. There’s probably no piece of ground anywhere on earth, he thinks, that hasn’t served as the site of one tragedy or another. Every spot sacred to someone means nothing to a few billion others.

  When they reach the city, just before crossing the Vistula, they pass an enormous asymmetrical building made of glass. “What’s that?”

  “ICE—the new Congress Hall. It hosts conferences, exhibits, concerts. The acoustics are much better than at the Philharmonic.”

  “Have you performed there?”

  “No. I’m sorry to say it opened after my retirement.”

  “Do you miss the orchestra?”

  “I would be lying if I claimed I didn’t. What I don’t miss is the constant pain. It had become more than I could stand.”

  “Pain has a way of becoming intolerable after a while, doesn’t it?”

  “It certainly does.”

  On the other side of the river, while they wait for the traffic light to change, he says, “I don’t think I ever told you how much your calls used to mean to me, Monika. Especially those first couple of years. The sound of your voice was about the only thing I looked forward to. You always cleared your throat before speaking to me. Were you aware of that?”

  “I don’t believe I was. But I knew you looked forward to the calls, as did I. I wish I could have made more of them. That was a hard time for me too. I don’t suppose I need to explain the reasons why?”

  “Not really.”

  “Did he ever discuss other women with you?”

  There seems little point in being untruthful. “Just once. It was the night of the wreck.”

  “When the two of you went to smoke cigars?”

  “Yes.”

  She doesn’t say anything for a while. “Well, I’m sure that made you very uncomfortable,” she finally observes, “since it’s the kind of thing you would never have done yourself. I used to be so terribly jealous of Julia, Richard. It seemed to me that she had everything, that one day she just walked into a café, and there it was waiting for her. I’m not proud of having felt that way, especially given what happened. But I did, and I’m sure she knew it.”

  “She liked you a lot.”

  “I know she liked me. I liked her too. But she knew. She had to.” She glances at him again. “What about you? Did you know?”

  “I’m not sure, Monika. I guess maybe I did.”

  The traffic begins to move, and she lets out the clutch. “If God were a composer,” she says, “he would write like Mahler. A teardrop one minute, a belly laugh the next. Following that, a loud belch.”

  They’re all waiting when he and Monika enter the apartment. The only one of the four he would be able to identify in a police lineup is the policeman himself. Malinowski looks more or less like he did when he visited Richard’s hospital room: heavy-lidded eyes, tall, wrinkled forehead, long ears. Franek now has shoulder-length hair and a beard every bit as bushy as his father’s used to be. He’s wearing Day-Glo orange pants and a tight black long-sleeved tee shirt. His girlfriend is a tall, dark-haired Brazilian named Rafaela who is twice his age, a visiting lecturer in the philosophy department. Richard has stayed in touch with his nephew, and he knew the woman he was involved with was from somewhere else. He just didn’t know she was forty.

  Still, the greatest surprise of the evening is his brother-in-law’s appearance. No amount of preparation could have prevented the shock. In the decade or so since they last saw each other, he has aged half a century. He’s sitting in a wheelchair, a small, shrunken creature with no eyebrows who looks like he might disintegrate if you touched him. The only thing left of the old Stefan—and it’s not to be discounted—is his sense of humor.

  “Rysiu,” he says, “don’t act so somber. When it comes time to bury me, you’ll be one of the pallbearers. You won’t have to do much more than lift a finger.”

  Monika leans down and puts her arms around his neck, kissing his bald head. He clasps her hands with his, and it looks like it took all his strength to do it. As far as Richard can recall, this is the first time he’s ever seen them touch each other with affection.

  The women disappear into the kitchen, where, unless his nose is badly off, duck is being roasted. Franek asks what he’d like to drink. Whiskey, if there is any. Stefan says, “Of course there is. I like to sniff it from time to time and grow nostalgic.” He nods toward the sideboard, and his son pulls out a bottle of Bushmills malt and pours half a glassful. Stefan continues to nurse a cup of tea.

  They talk politics for a while. The Law and Justice government, Franek tells him, has enacted various surveillance measures allegedly designed to protect the country against terrorists. They don’t require a warrant to read your e-mail or your texts, and they’ve given themselves permission to listen to everyone’s phone ca
lls. “A few days ago, they introduced another bill in the Sejm specifically targeting foreigners,” his nephew says, “and while it’s being read, a bomb just happens to go off in an empty bus a block or two away. They insult our intelligence day after day.”

  “You remember when all those refugees drowned in the Aegean?” Stefan asks Richard.

  “Sure. Over seven hundred of them.”

  “That night on TVP, they didn’t even mention it. Instead, they ran a segment about a Polish tourist who’d been assaulted in Greece by a Syrian. Public Television looks like it did under the Communists.”

  Detective Malinowski says he retired a month ago rather than hang around and get fired. They are letting people go left and right, he says. All you have to do is oppose them. They started with the media, firing producers and reporters from the state-run networks. Then they began cleaning house at publicly funded cultural institutions: museums, theaters, and so on. “At the Ministry of Agriculture,” he continues, “they even fired the director of a stud farm.”

  “And as for publishing,” Stefan says, “it’s gone straight to hell.” He leans over and lays a bony hand on Richard’s knee. “Being a journalist, you’ll want me to back up my statement. So here’s hard evidence: my books no longer sell!” When he laughs, his chest rattles.

  Franek is deeply involved in the Committee for the Defense of Democracy, and he says there will be a big demonstration the following weekend in Warsaw, which he and Rafaela plan to attend. The last one drew a couple hundred thousand protestors, he says, and the energy was incredible. His uncle would be more than welcome to accompany them.

  “I might take you up on that,” Richard tells him. “Very little of this is being reported in the American press.”

  “Of course not,” Stefan says. “They’ve forgotten us. We’re yesterday’s news.”

  Richard was right about the main course: roast duck with apples. Monika couldn’t know that the last time he had his once-favorite dish was the night of the accident. The thought of eating it makes him queasy, but he doesn’t want to be rude, so he fortifies himself with another slug of Bushmills, then lets his nephew pour him a big glass of Malbec.

  When he takes the first mouthful of dark meat and dissolving fruit, something startling happens. It’s as if his taste buds, so long dormant, erupt. He feels them rising on the surface of his tongue. For a moment, he shuts his eyes, overcome by the sensory onslaught. It’s the taste of his life, what’s lost and what’s left.

  He has an extra helping, along with several more glasses of Malbec, saying very little himself, just enjoying the smell of the food, the glow from the wine, the sound of their voices speaking Polish.

  Monika keeps an eye on him. When he rises to go to the bathroom, he’s unsteady, and for a moment, she fears he might lose his balance and crash to the floor. After they hear the door close, she tells Franek not to pour him more wine.

  “Why embarrass him?” Stefan says. His hand quivering, he points at Richard’s glass and tells Franek to fill it halfway up with water, then add a little Malbec. “He won’t taste the difference,” he says.

  They needn’t have worried: Richard knows he’s on the verge of collapse. When he returns, he says that jet lag has overtaken him and that though he’s enjoying the company, he’d better go to bed. He shakes hands with Malinowski, gives Rafaela a peck on the cheek, and hugs his nephew.

  Monika shows him to his room. He sits down on the side of the bed, starts to lean over and unlace his shoes, then realizes he’d better not risk it. “I’m really drunk,” he says.

  “Yes, I know.” She kneels on the bedside rug and unlaces first one shoe, then the other. She has to tug hard to pull them off, but she manages. Then she helps him lie back on the pillows. She’s not strong enough to get his clothes off, and she doesn’t want to call Franek. So she covers him with a blanket and tucks his feet in.

  “Stay with me a while?” he asks.

  “Of course.”

  She remains there on the side of the bed, hearing Rafaela removing dishes from the table, Bronek bidding everyone good-night, Franek rolling his father’s wheelchair down the hall, past the closed guest-room door and into their own bedroom. At some point, Richard takes her hand in his, and she sits there holding it until his eyes fall shut and his breathing grows shallow.

  He sleeps until eight thirty the next morning. He has a shadowy awareness of visiting the bathroom sometime around dawn. But dawn seemed to arrive about three forty-five. So he must be in Krakow. Once he’s acceded to that, fragments of the evening return: the image of his brother-in-law shrunken in his wheelchair; his nephew’s shaggy mane, so much like the Cowardly Lion; the tall Brazilian woman; the detective who resembles de Gaulle. Monika sitting on the side of the bed, her hand locked in his.

  He rises, pulls his shaving kit from the duffel bag, then walks down the hall to the bathroom. His mouth tastes like metal, so he brushes his teeth, rinses, then brushes them again. He splashes cold water on his face.

  He finds Monika in the kitchen, making coffee. “How do you feel?” she asks.

  “Physically? Like a bowl of microwaved dog shit.”

  “Well, that’s not surprising, is it?”

  “No. I drank far too much.”

  “Have you been doing a lot of that?”

  “Over the last month or two, I’m afraid so.”

  “I had the sense that something unpleasant recently happened.”

  He sits down at the kitchen table, tells her about the incident at Aarden College, the conversation with Alex, how he went home and resigned.

  She pours two cups of coffee, then sits down across from him. “You didn’t want to hire a lawyer and fight back?”

  “No. I realized there would be more of it ahead and that I was taking up a position somebody more in tune with the times ought to fill. I don’t know where I fit anymore. Left and right don’t mean what they used to, my profession is more or less on life support—sorry, that was a poor choice of words, but it seems I often choose them poorly these days. Bottom line, Monika? I’m just tired.”

  “Tired of exactly what, Richard?”

  “Just tired.” He takes a sip of coffee. “As horrible as my hangover is, though, I’m glad to be here with you. I’ve missed you. Is Stefan still asleep? Or is he writing?”

  “Oh, he’s been writing since six a.m. I think he hopes to finish this novel before . . . well, before.”

  “He and Franek seem to be getting along great these days.”

  “Stefan quit laughing at him years ago. He treats him with respect, though it may be respect born of envy.”

  “Because he’s young and healthy?”

  “Possibly. Franek had a number of girlfriends much younger than Rafaela, and I think maybe Stefan got a little vicarious pleasure from that. I really don’t always understand how his mind works. That’s one of the reasons I stayed interested all these years. I assumed one day I would get to the bottom of it. But that’s not going to happen.” She takes a swallow of coffee, then places her cup back on the saucer and asks what he’d like to do today.

  He tells her that if she wouldn’t mind, he’d like her to drive him over to the apartment, though of course he could also take a taxi. She says not to be silly, she wouldn’t dream of letting him do that. She had the place cleaned top to bottom last Friday, she says, and she placed fresh sheets on the bed and left him plenty of water and coffee as well as some beer. She went ahead and turned on the fridge. If he decides on a lengthy stay, she tells him, or perhaps even moves here permanently, he should probably install air conditioning, at least on the lower level. “It’s not the hassle it used to be. We had this entire flat vented for central air. But you could just buy a couple of standing units and have someone make openings in your window frames to attach the hoses to. When the weather cools off, you can remove them and replace the wooden blocks that were cut from the frames. It’s low-tech, but it works. Bronek did it at his place.”

  He knows she’s try
ing to find out what his long-term intentions might be, and if he knew what they were, he’d share the information. But he doesn’t. He just knows where he wants to go this morning.

  He finishes his coffee, takes a shower, and puts on clean clothes. She tells him to leave the dirty ones here, that she’ll wash them and bring them by tomorrow or the day after, so he wads them up and leaves them on the bed.

  It’s nearly noon when she parks in front of his building. She pulls out the keys that she has kept in her pantry all these years. “The door latches became recalcitrant,” she says, “so last week, I had a handyman spray them with some type of lubricant, and now they work just fine.” She shows him a gray plastic tab that’s attached to the ring. “Back in 2012, they installed a keypad by the door. You either type in a code—yours is 8888—or just tap the top of the pad with this tab. The lady in 1A died three years ago, and the couple in number 5 moved to Gdansk last fall. Other than that, I think you will find things pretty much as they were, except that your neighbors and your appliances are ten years older. Would you like me to go up with you, or would you prefer to be alone?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind,” he says, “I think maybe I’ll go by myself. Get reacclimated, then run some errands, buy a little food and so forth.”

  “That’s not a problem.” From her purse, she pulls a mobile phone. “This is one of those card-operated devices that tourists use. The number is printed on the back, and I put 150 zlotys’ worth of service on it. Use it until you buy a better one. I’ll leave you be for the rest of the day, but you can call me anytime. I’m free for lunch tomorrow if you feel like it.”

  He thanks her, and when they embrace, he holds her a little longer than he intended before getting out and removing his bag from the trunk. She waves and drives away. He watches until she reaches the end of the street and turns the corner. Then he walks over to the door. Heart fluttering, he taps the pad. The buzzer sounds. He opens the door, steps inside, and confronts the dark stairs.