Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Nine
About the Author
Copyright © by Andrzej Stasiuk, 1999
English translation copyright © Bill Johnston 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
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This is a translation of Dziewiec.
Published simultaneously in English in Great Britain by Harvill Secker in 2007.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Stasiuk, Andrzej, 1960-
[Dziewiec. English]
Nine/Andrzej Stasiuk; translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston.
p. cm.
I. Johnston, Bill. II. Title.
PG7178.T28D9713 2007
891.8'537—dc22 2006037396
ISBN 978-0-15-101064-6
eISBN 978-0-544-34162-3
v1.0315
To Jacek, also to Asia and Wojtek—they know what for.
SNOW HAD FALLEN IN THE NIGHT.
Paweł got out of bed and went into the bathroom. The light was on, the mirror was broken. Tubes and brushes and bottles had been swept off the shelf, were all over the floor. A stream of white toothpaste had shot out and dried on the willow-green wall. Disposable razors had been snapped in two and stepped on into a torn box of soap powder. The cracked toilet seat lay in the corner. It occurred to him there was a lot of glass, so he went back to the hallway for his shoes.
He picked up one of the toothbrushes, rinsed it under the faucet, scraped some toothpaste off the wall. Then he squatted and chose a razor with a cracked handle. He found the can of shaving cream under the bathtub. It was dented but something still swished inside it. He shaved in what was left of the mirror. He splashed water on his face. The Old Spice had been crushed, but there was still something left in the white plastic cover. He shook the crumpled container. It made a grating sound like a deaf-and-dumb version of a child’s rattle. A few drops splashed onto his palm. He rubbed them on his cheeks. It hardly stung, so this time he must have managed not to cut himself. He took a leak and went back into the living room.
Things were no better here. More smashed stuff. The cracked silver casing of the cassette player emptied its colorful guts onto the floor. He flicked the light switch. The lamp was in pieces. The light of early morning hung like dust in the air. Something white poked from the ripped upholstery of the sofa. He smoothed it with his hand and went to the pile of clothes spilling out of the wardrobe. He sniffed a few things to find something clean in the semidarkness. He put on a shirt and sweater. By the bed he found his pants; he dug out some socks from an untouched drawer and pulled them on, and at last stopped shivering.
He sipped at his coffee and gazed through the window. Snow lay on the roofs and on the sidewalk; the black trees were white now, and everything resembled a distant Christmas. A red bus cautiously made a turn. Sleepily and soundlessly it straightened, receded down the avenue of lime trees. The treetops faded into the low sky. He listened for the patter of drops in the gutters. There was no sound. “It’ll lie for a while,” he thought. He waited for the coffee to rouse him into a nervous flutter, into anything like fear or at least surprise. He drank the last mouthful, rinsed out the grinds, washed the mug, set it to dry, and went back into the living room. He shoved the pile of clothes back into the wardrobe to make room to walk—ten paces each way, from the door of the kitchen to the balcony window. He counted his steps, to a hundred and more, but in the end gave up, leaned his forehead against the cold pane, and closed his eyes. “Think, think,” he muttered. “I should take something to help me sleep at night.” Outside the window a sander was passing, casting shavings of snow from the blue asphalt, but he did not see this, and when he opened his eyes, the white landscape had been scored by a horizontal line. He felt sorrow—the kind of sadness accompanying a memory that can’t be summoned in its entirety.
He returned to the kitchen. The clock showed 5:32. Most of the poorest were now up and on their way to wherever they had to go. The long straight stretch of road to the bus terminal had been cleared. The dark band led to distance and the future. Two baby Fiats were approaching like toys the color of cheerful fire and green metal. From the second floor, drivers’ faces could not be made out, but he knew they were decent people: in less than nine hours they’d be coming back, in the same or reverse order. The bare asphalt echoed the growl of their two-cylinder engines. Two crows, indifferent to it all, remained in their chestnut tree, on branches that hung over the curve in the road like the spokes of a broken umbrella. The little cars accelerated and rumbled on, and Paweł felt a stab of envy in his heart.
He went into the living room to watch from the other window as the two patches of color grew smaller, disappearing in the gray mist of early morning, where the trees blended with the traction pillars. The ribbon of highway crawled onto the overpass across the train tracks, and for a moment it looked as if the little Fiats were climbing into the hazy sky.
He fetched the trash bucket, set it in the middle of the room. But all this mess wouldn’t fit in ten buckets. He kicked the broken bottles under the bookcase, and did the same with the books. Now he could even walk with his eyes closed. He extended the path to the kitchen window between the remains of the crockery. Ten and five made fifteen paces each way.
At five to six he said to himself: “Hell with this.” He put on his brown leather jacket in the hall, walked out, and slammed the door without even checking whether his keys were in his pocket.
On snowy mornings, when there’s no wind, the air of the city outskirts tastes of coal smoke, and the scrape of spades on the sidewalk is metallic. He decided to go to the terminal and sit for a while in a warm bus. Sugary snow stuck to the red twigs of the hedge. He passed an old-fashioned villa with a four-column veranda that had a child’s tricycle with an unmoving windmill stuck in a handlebar. On the path there were no prints except for a few cat’s paws. He passed the next house and two others, gray and square-cornered. The occupants had already left, removing the snow with the soles of their shoes. Mud and sorry grass remained. Then the buildings came to a sudden end to make room for the tapered bulk of a church. The brickwork had the color of congealed blood. Like a wound seeping through a bandage. At the far end of the street he saw a bus standing. There was no one around. Somewhere a dog barked. The yapping was drowned out by a distant clatter of railroad cars. It must have been an intercity or express train, because the sound quickly ended.
The warm purr of the bus made him feverish. In only a few minutes he had several dreams. People boarded and passed through his visions without dispelling them: the visions split, then fused again, because the stuff of the past from which they were woven still lived in the world. As alive as people. He dreamed several years, in episodes. He stopped at the night before, bounced back to his childhood, when no one yet imagined that commerce would save the world. He raised his shoulders, stuck his hands between his thighs. Leaning forward, his eyes closed, he looked like someone teetering on a cliff edge and about to jump, or to lose his nerve and fall safely on his back.
The buzzer sounded, doors hissed shut, and the bus moved. He kept his eyes closed. It was a game: to guess where on the route he was—he’d open his eyes quickly, “Just checking,” and win or lose. Zawadzki’s hous
e, the screwed-up Dumpster, the intersection with Bystrzycka, the stand of birch trees where the pissheads hung out on a bench, and so on till the next stop. Listening to the engine, counting distances in the dark. He’d get it right or not. It’s easier for the blind, because of the constant fear, and in the end they get used to it.
Feeling the bus turn, he looked out the window. The whiteness dazzled. The stop was coming up. A snow-covered square overgrown with bushes, then the tin wall of a warehouse and a path along which people approached from a small development of three barrack blocks where the weeks extended down long passageways: Monday at one end, at the other Saturday just beginning. The stop was deserted. The old-fashioned post was a red crayon stuck into dirty paper. Everywhere else they’d put up the new blue signs; not here. “Beirut,” he thought. “What do they need a stop for? They’re not going anywhere. They’re fucked.” And a sadness came, wretched self-pity, the kind of feeling you can get from memories, those unwanted images that crawl out from nowhere just when the mind needs to be cool, clear—as cool and clear as the present is.
The bus climbed the overpass. A Star milk truck came the other way. The crates were the color of rain, the caps glittered like cheap false teeth. That was how his imagination was working. The divider seemed thin, insubstantial. The openwork of the girders provided a hopelessly trite vision of infinity. The rails ran north and after three hundred kilometers fell into the sea like silver threads, while the power lines vanished in the sky, which at night was lit up by the fiery plumes of the refinery. A local train clattered away toward the city. It had emerged from the gray morning and plunged back into it at once. From the open driver’s cabin a radio played for those already up. The music of Station One had the taste of tedium; otherwise all those people would long ago have gone mad or died a violent death—you can’t take five thousand mornings; there has to be a way out, some poison, something to fill the void between heaven and earth.
The overpass ended, the houses reappeared. Each stood alone, surrounded by a chain-link fence; the square links repeated into infinity the angular shape of the buildings, windows, and lots. At the next stop three people got on. The bus lurched forward; a fat woman with a ticket in her hand stumbled backward and brushed his arm. He felt her soft backside, smelled her perfume.
To the right there’d once been fields. Clouds would gather over the river, rise and move across the sky, dragging their shadows over the fall stubble where cows grazed. Cars would move slowly in the narrow street. The horizon was a decoration made from torn green paper. One day he rode his bike there. Yellow paths twisted among willows. He saw a teenage girl in a red bathing suit. She was pissing. He even saw the dark patch on the sand. When she saw him, she stood up slowly and pulled up her suit bottom.
Now a row of billboards separated the road from the boundless gray grass that had taken over the vegetable gardens. On the horizon gray apartment complexes stood, or rather hung in the sky like ragged, dull drapes; the walls and the clouds were the same color. “A blond pussy,” he thought, remembering how the red cloth moved up, brushed her bright hair. Then it was gone with a snap as she pulled her thumbs from the elastic waistband and put her hands on her hips. He had pedaled harder, the hot wind in his face. The billboards separated him from all that now.
Someone came and stood by his seat.
“So you’re taking the bus today?”
He looked up, recognized the guy, said:
“Yeah, sometimes you have to.”
He stood by the window and stared at the brown building of the railroad administration. Here there wasn’t even a trace of snow. The road and sidewalk were wet. Wheels hissed on the asphalt. The facade behind the iron railings seemed to be sinking into the ground. “Tympanum”—he recalled the word from school, and then, also from long ago, “Brandenburg Gate,” and other images and words. Three minutes passed. He raised his eyes to the Orthodox church, its black spheres wreathed with a network of bare branches. “Who the fuck needs it?” he thought. “Russkies here, Germans there, Germans here, Russkies there.” An electric train pulled into Wileński Station, and the crowd filed over the crosswalk while the light was red, entered the maw of the underpass, and emerged on the other side, by the post office. The trams took bites from the churning mass of people, swallowed some and whisked them off to the four corners of the city. The ones traveling to the WZT television plant had it worst, they had to walk to Ząbkowska Street and catch a crowded, sagging 138 to the huge gas tank that he dreamed about at night. He dreamed that it exploded, that the fire moved across the ground, stripping it of everything, of the brush and grass and the unkempt Dumpsters in Olszynka, and it poured into the railroad tunnels on Kozia Góra, till all that was left were the frames of buildings and cars, naked skin with the raw veins of rails. Kamczatka Prison burned like a house of cards, and all the women thieves and the murderesses, beautiful and unattainable, melted into the metal skeletons of their own beds. He had dreamed this many times.
At the corner by the post office and Władysław IV Grammar School were three Gypsy women, brightly colored and motionless. The light of early morning could not deal with them. They waited for the crowd to thin, went underground. He looked for them, but they did not resurface. A number 21 tram scattered sparks, hurrying south. The air parted before it with a groan. A woman carrying a large red-and-blue striped bag barely managed to jump out of the way. He tried to remember whether there were trams in Moscow. He drew a curlicue on the window, a blurred, greasy smear on the dry pane. He went to the other end of the apartment. The hardwood floor creaked under the gray carpet. He went into the kitchen. Here the floor was broad varnished boards. On the table were the remains of breakfast—two egg cups, two stoneware bowls, and a basket with wheat bread. One of the eggs had barely been touched. The yolk showed through the white like an eye with cataracts. A cornflake, stuck to the rim of one of the bowls, was wet and cold. He took it and tasted it. No sugar. He tried a little milk from the other bowl. It was sweet as syrup. Back in the hallway, he pushed open a yellow door, but shut it again right away. He returned to the kitchen and opened a dark wooden cabinet. Plates and bowls were in two stacks; the rest of the space was taken up by a coffeepot and a soup tureen, both covered with dust. Three teacups from different sets. The smell of damp wood and food. The smell of old bread lingering, as it always does in cupboards rarely used. He looked out of the window but saw nothing moving. Lifeless windowpanes glistened on the wall of the building next door.
In the main room he circled around the spot where once a table would have stood. He broke away at the fourth lap, drawn to a white bookcase. His hands in his pockets, he studied the objects on it. They reminded him of nothing and served no purpose. A china ballerina, glass receptacles filled with knickknacks, an Egyptian dreambook, a Chinese I-Ching, a phonebook, four volumes of an encyclopedia, a row of cassette tapes: Marillion, the Pet Shop Boys, English for Beginners, Smoleń and Laskowik, Kora with Maanam. A hair brush, a shoehorn. He looked in the drinks cabinet and found an opened bottle of cabernet, wineglasses, an ashtray, and a reflection of his stomach in the mirror. He closed the flap; the glassware rattled, a tram sounded its bell, and the floor shook.
The cupboard was locked. He couldn’t get the key to turn. He pressed on one side, tried again.
The sheets and quilt cases lay close together, ironed flat. To slip his hand between them he had to wiggle his fingers as if separating the pages of a heavy book lying on its side. “From the cleaner’s,” he realized. It wasn’t so tight between the bedding and towels, so he put his hand in farther, almost to the elbow, and felt in a semicircle the cold, rough darkness, but there was nothing there. On the shelf below was an iron. He moved it aside so he could reach behind a stack of tablecloths and linen curtains. The iron was slightly warm. It was set to cotton. He examined the clothes. The T-shirts had the softness of things worn and washed a hundred times. Green, black, red, two white, another black, at the very bottom turquoise. Four pairs of jeans: white an
d light-blue Levi’s, dark green cords, and faded, frayed khakis lay next to thick tracksuit tops. Labels and logos could be seen on the edge of some. He could feel the embroidery or sticky rubber lettering against the back of his hand. Higher up were blouses and skirts. He ran his thumbs over them like two packs of large, flimsy playing cards, pushed them aside, and looked behind them. The little bundle was wrapped in newspaper. He took it out carefully, squatted, set it on the floor. He whistled a dirty song. “Fuck, oh fuck, he made a fucking mess,” as the yellowed page from Życie Warszawy crumbled like a wafer and Jaroszewicz’s face cracked in two. In the candy box he found a lock of light hair, a dry rose dark with age, and a stack of notecards with writing on them. He stopped whistling, wrapped it roughly, and thrust it back where it belonged. The scraps of newspaper he kicked under the rug.
The shelf with underwear was at face level, brassiere cups stuck into one another: black, white, black, flesh, ridiculous and disembodied, pairs of hats side by side, cycling caps without peaks. He stopped and went to the window. The crowd had thinned; the clock on the tower was frozen at a quarter after three on some unknown day. His eyes swept the sidewalks and pedestrian crossings, Świerczewskiego and Wileńska, Targowa. The pane was cool against his forehead. A 101 bus dragged its belly across the tram tracks and pulled up by the Orthodox church. A man in marbled jeans left the line at the kiosk and jumped through the doors as they were closing. Three characters came around the corner, turned into Cyryla, and marched toward the park, the wind from the river lifting their nylon jackets like wings—black, brown, navy blue. They’d been drinking already and did not feel the cold. He would have liked to be in their place. Another hundred meters, and they’d be among the tangled paths, hidden by the bare bushes, still visible but safe. The trees would close over them like a ceiling. They’d find a bench next to the old men playing checkers. They’d relax, and the smoky sky would provide light all the way till dusk and the moment when, freed of pain and fear, they would head back into a darkness filled with electric stars strewn by the pantographs of the trams moving down 11 Listopada and Stalowa toward the Bethlehem night of Szmulki and Targówek, and they would wait and wait an ocean of time, while time was exactly what he didn’t have.
Nine Page 1