They crossed Jagiellońska by the gas station. A 509 hurried them with its horn, but he no longer saw this. He had returned to the open cupboard. He touched the panties. They were like a stack of colorful children’s books. Fairy tales in pastel shades, read to me Mommy, a yellow Donald Duck, a green Funny Ducky, the Adventures of Fiki-Miki, the Tricky Monkey . . . He passed his fingers over them, from top to bottom, back again, then pushed gently between the white and the black ones. He felt himself getting hard.
A moment later he sensed that he was not alone. He froze, listened. The tapping repeated. It was barely audible but definitely came from the apartment. He took a breath and closed his lips tightly. He took a step; the floor creaked. He stopped, and there was an even clearer knock. He approached the sofa covered with a white furry throw. He lifted the edge.
The tortoise stared at him, motionless and cold as a camera. Matte brown, like something very old and leathery. It moved, and the empty cup in which its leg was stuck tapped the floor. “Fucking reptile,” he said softly, and started to breathe again.
Just as he closed the wardrobe door, he heard the click of the bolt in the hallway.
She was wearing a long gray woolen overcoat. He went to help her off with it, but she slipped it from her shoulders with a quick, deft movement and hung it on a hook. She removed her shoes, put on slippers, and went to the kitchen. She started clearing the table, putting the dishes in the sink, scraping the leftovers into the trash, the half-eaten egg on the draining board. She didn’t look at him once; her hands shook.
In the gray light, in the silence, the clatter was hard to bear. Then she said finally, “Sorry I left you like that. I had to get there on time. The director is a dragon, and I owe them from last month.” She glanced at the green plastic clock on the wall. It read 8:22. “What do you want? Coffee or tea? I have to leave in a minute.”
“When does the kid start school?”
“Next year. I’ll make you coffee.”
He sat on a chair and looked at her legs. Her feet, in their blue slippers with raised heels, pattered between sink and stove. She liked to look smart, even at home. She never wore her tattered slippers. Pat, pat, pat, and a cup and spoon, pat, pat, the coffee jar, the whistle of the kettle. “With cream?” “Whatever,” he answered, and stared at her ass under her beige dress. Not a crease, so she must have got up at some ungodly hour to see to herself and the child. And do the ironing—he remembered the warm iron. Her dark hair was tied at the back.
“What’s going on with you?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“You come here after all these years, at the crack of dawn, and you say nothing’s going on?”
“I was passing by. I thought I’d just check to see if you still live here.”
“Where did you think I’d be living? California?”
She put a brown cup with a green stripe in front of him. He caught the scent of her perfume and the warmth of her body and suddenly noticed that it was cold in the apartment. When she leaned forward, he glanced at her breasts. That was where the scent was coming from. Little bits of heat stole out from under her dress, rising from her pussy to her stomach and flowing out between her tits like water from a fountain. He thought of putting his hand there after all these years, to see what would happen, if something could be done with time, curious. But this lasted only a moment. She straightened and moved away. Again he found himself in the cold, empty air of a home that rarely has visitors.
“How’s Jolka?” he asked. “And the rest?”
“She married a Greek guy and emigrated. Bolek . . .”
“Yes? I met him on the street one time. He was in a hurry.”
“He’s making money. Actually, it seems to make itself for him. He sells, buys—I don’t know what.” She set her cup down on the sill. Gray dust dropped from the window, the ceiling, the wall; a dog barked in the courtyard; beneath the radiator lay a wounded plush toy.
“I go see him sometimes.” She took the cup to the sink, came back for his. “I really have to go now.”
“He’s still living in the same place?”
“Yes.”
An almost empty number 26 took her into the distance due west, by the putrid branch of the river—a minute in space when from the other bank the city looks like a model of something that hasn’t been built yet. Little towers try to touch the sky, as always—they are always too short.
Without thinking he followed the tram. He cut across Jagiellońska, turned into the park to think. The brown tree trunks shone with a moist gleam that made things even darker. He passed a bum on a bench, who looked like an old mannequin. The man didn’t look up. He was smoking a cigarette in a dark holder, his hands thrust into the pockets of an army coat. “This April’s like fall,” Paweł thought. He reached a broad avenue that led to the zoo. But he had no time for monkeys or penguins. He turned left, went back to the street. Seeing a kiosk reminded him he was out of cigarettes. He rummaged through his pockets, adding bill to bill. A hundred and twenty thousand, not a penny more. A Zippo knock-off, keys, a used-up phone card, no ID, two tokens. He bought a pack of Mars; he lit up, and his head spun. The spires of St. Florian’s aimed skyward like old-fashioned rockets. Old women were filing in, their outlines small and black. Rolling along like beads. A 162 left the stop. People looked straight ahead, or into the future. A red-headed girl glanced at him with vacant eyes. He waited for the green light and crossed. He decided to give himself a bit more time and have another cigarette, and as he was looking for a place to hunker down for a moment, to shield himself from the wind off the river, he realized he’d been born here. A few yards away was the hospital. Amid a tangle of bushes in the little square, in the mud, beneath a swollen sky, the white ambulances by the entrance looked as unreal and shameless as death. In the doorway were the scrubs of the orderlies, because when shit happens, people get jumpy and try to put a bungled life to rights in fifteen minutes. “I ought to go in,” he thought, “and have myself sewn back up into some pussy. A C-section in reverse.”
The bum in the coat passed him. Everyone was passing him, though there weren’t many. At nine thirty the city hides, halts, gives time to those who have nothing to do. He flicked the butt away. It landed on yellow grass. A thread of smoke rose vertically, then the wind caught it. He stopped thinking, turned, and went toward Floriańska, where since time immemorial men loitered at the curb in bouclé sweaters and flared pants whose creases had been ironed twenty years ago and had stayed that way ever since. Above their heads, over their whispered chatter, brick walls rose to the sky, but no one would bet there was anything behind them—apartments, a room with a kitchen, old furniture with peeling veneer. Teenagers copied their fathers, though their outfits were more garish, Ford, Bulls, or Nikes with tongues licking the sidewalk. They huddled in tight circles discussing how to handle the world that day, the angle to take. No women. A black-and-white mongrel ran from group to group, looking for its master. Someone threw a firecracker. “Oh, right,” he thought. “Easter’s here.”
In front of the Pedet department store a memory came: he once went to a puppet theater with his mother. Cigarettes glowed in the dark. Men stood in entranceways talking in a language he didn’t understand, though some words were familiar. It was November, December. The white light of the street lamps couldn’t reach the sidewalk, remained trembling and hissing above. The bare branches were metallic. His mother quickened her pace; through her cold hand he could feel her fear.
On the stage, in a flood of gold, in the silver dust of the spotlights, a prince was rescuing a princess or something like that, a story he cared about only because it was the first time he’d been in a place like this. He wanted to walk once more down that street scooped out of the darkness, a few steps from the brightly lit Targowa, once more see the red sparks wandering up and down. When the show was over, his mother took him firmly by the hand and slipped into a large group of children and adults. He was disappointed. Pedet resembled a glass cabinet.
Somewhere inside was the plaster woman with large breasts squatting over a basket of food, her ass like two cushions. He often thought about her.
As he crossed the deserted, glistening Okrzei, on which a single distant car was coming from the river, he remembered it was there, behind the department store, that he was with his father. Low, single-story buildings you entered through a gate in the wall. In a dingy room, men in rubber boots threw entrails into metal containers. A concrete cylinder filled with glistening pieces of liver—a mountain of slippery, shining red, with blood splashing underfoot. His father knew someone there.
A car passed him with a wet hiss. Carrying with it the smell of mist from the port. He turned left. At this hour the buses were empty.
He walked by an endless line of cars, noted the makes. A mustard apartment building protected him from the wind. The trees had grown, and the field of rubble had become a playground. He reached the end of the building, and the cold hit him in the face, but then came the next building. He counted the stairways. Intercoms had been installed everywhere. Block 4, stairway 6. It was supposed to add up to ten. He could never remember the numbers. His finger roamed the buttons. Someone asked questions, stopped, then someone else, then finally the buzzer sounded. He pushed open the door, caught the smell of wet concrete, and to save time took the stairs.
The man who opened was tall, big.
“I’m not buying anything,” he said, and was about to close the door. “Lot of good that goddamn intercom did,” he muttered.
“Bolek?”
The door stopped closing.
“Oh? Who are you? Listen, pal . . .” The man raised his voice. In the apartment a dog barked. A moment later a rottweiler poked its head between the man’s jeans and the door frame.
“Easy, Sheikh. What’s this about?”
“Bolek, it’s me, Paweł.”
“Paweł who?” He frowned. The ball in his memory started to spin and clatter till in the end it found its slot.
“Kicior’s friend?”
“Bogna’s, from way back . . .”
The man relaxed. A faint smile of disbelief. He opened the door wider and grabbed the dog by its collar.
“And here I thought you were a door-to-door salesman . . .”
“I bought the place next door and took the wall out. It makes thirteen hundred square feet in all.” His gold chain slipped from his wrist onto his forearm. He shook it back when he reached for the bottle. Each time he raised his glass or cigarette, the bracelet fell halfway to his elbow. The dog lay on a red mat dozing. Paweł said he was picking up his car from the shop in the afternoon, and he only drank every other round. Fire blazed in his empty stomach and rose to his throat, but his head was clear, cold. The day was filling out, rising; an umbrella of clouds hung over Downtown, but the light gradually cleared a path for itself, and the sky kept getting higher. Over a hotel fluttered a blue flag. It probably wouldn’t get warmer, but as it got brighter, he looked around the apartment. It was like a copy of something that doesn’t exist. Heavy black furniture with yellow fittings on the corners. A huge cabinet went all the way to the ceiling, may have continued to the floor above. China lay behind frosted glass decorated with golden flourishes. He was sitting in a black leather armchair, drinking from a glass with a silver pattern. Bolek let his belly spill out of his T-shirt. A palm in a glazed pot threw a shadow on them. Above the palm a brass chandelier burned. His thoughts were calm, exact, but had nothing to hold on to. He felt hunger, so he smoked cigarette after cigarette. An airplane moved across the window from right to left: a twinkling green firefly on a tattered strip of cloud-free sky.
“Paweł, you remember when those soldiers went for us at the Caprice?”
He remembered. The drunken corporal got a chair over his head, so the cloakroom attendant locked the door and they used the chair to climb out a big window and ran toward the station, down the steps into the park, to hide in the dark. Out of breath, they fell on the snow and howled with laughter as the trains on the bridge tore through the sky like yellow lightning.
“You couldn’t run now, you bastard,” he thought. Bolek took another drink, pouring from glass to throat. The vodka arced through the air, fell between the parted lips. Time was playing tricks, hurrying, slowing, making almost invisible things almost visible. He couldn’t remember if two strikes meant the quarter hour or the half hour. The sun had come out, but it shone only on the back of the building. Another plane flew past, this time from left to right, its nose up, bright as a speck of fire, heading north, Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, maybe even Greenland, where it would be extinguished with a hiss in the snow. His left boot was cold, he wiggled his toes, the sock was wet. Bolek crushed his butt in the ashtray with a soft clink of gold, hiccuped, got up, walked to the back of the apartment.
Now alone, Paweł could take everything in. To his left was the sea. Boundless, blue, with whitecaps and a sailboat halfway between the armchair and the horizon. The potted palm stood where the land should have been. He turned even more to the left. The photo mural did not end with the wall but bent at the corner and continued on the next wall, the one with the window, and if not for the window frame it would have blended with the sky.
He turned back. He’d already seen the cabinet, so only the right side remained. The wall was covered with flesh roses on brown fabric. A green-flower lamp bracket jutted. Below it, a bronze bar tray on lion paws and wheels. Jack Daniel’s and Johnny Walker shoulder to shoulder, hardly touched. The Smirnoff wasn’t so flush, but the brandy hid both label and level in shadow. “Son of a bitch,” he thought, the white fever of rye in his mouth. The dead body of a television gleaned in the far corner and had everything needed under it, VCR, videocassettes, CD player, radio. Three remotes poked from the shelf like the tips of polished shoes. His gaze returned to the cabinet. His thoughts circled the room, sometimes keeping up with his eyes, sometimes not. He reached for a cigarette, a Marlboro, but put it back. He could have hidden the writing under his finger, but there was no gold band like on his Mars. He got up.
Bolek returned just in time, zipping up while the flush sounded behind. Paweł felt his hair stand on end. He froze, tried to look behind him.
“Don’t move. Not another step.”
“I’ve been meaning to get rid of this stuff. I could have chucked half these things and got new.” He adjusted the picture on its hook. The frame knocked the wall. Somewhere in the building an elevator moved. Bolek looked once more at the boy in the white suit with a Candlemas candle in his hand; he sat on the sofa and poured another drink. “You’d have lost your balls, you know.”
“I wanted to look up close,” said Paweł.
“Yeah, well you wouldn’t have. I forgot to tell you not to move. He’s like that. You know what I paid to have him trained? It probably would have been cheaper to get a new one.”
They drank; time passed. Paweł felt himself moving through the room like a draft, speeding up, down the stairs, pouring out into the street, sweeping everyone up like a flood, carrying them. The people would try to stay on the surface but would sink, only the restless and the single would manage, so he set his glass aside but didn’t reach for a cigarette.
“Bolek, I need money.”
The other man looked at him with eyes as empty as the bottle on the table, completely sober. He folded his hands on his belly.
“Don’t we all . . .”
“Bolek, I’m serious.”
“Me too. Everyone’s serious about money.”
“Bogna told me to see you.”
Bolek leaned forward, pulled the sleeves of his jacket back a little as if preparing to make an important shape in the air.
“What’s she got to do with it? If she’s so smart, let her lend you the money.”
“She just said . . .”
“How much?”
“Two hundred.”
Bolek unclasped his hands, straightened his leg, reached into a pants pocket. He took out a roll of notes, peeled off two, and
threw them on the glass tabletop. They looked like unfinished paper flowers.
“Bolek, I need two hundred million old zlotys.”
Bolek rested his elbows on his knees and looked at Paweł as if for the first time.
“Are you nuts? I hardly fucking know you.”
The bus was almost empty. They were riding beneath the concrete rainbows of the overpass. Two juveniles were spitting on the traffic from above. An old game that all boys play: hit the moving target. At their feet by the edge of the walkway, a beer bottle waited quietly. To the left and right the apartment buildings took deeper root. They were old. They brought to mind steep riverbanks where birds nest. The people in them had had time to age; some died, and new people moved in and were now stuck with the lingering smell of others. A person must sweat a lot in a room for the stink to get into the walls. He tried to remember which building he threw up in once, how then he tried to get home in the middle of the night but had nothing, not one cigarette, or money for a ticket. In those days he didn’t smoke as much, so he walked for two or three hours, the city at night as huge and still as a thing from a dream. “She had a bra but no tits”—but he couldn’t recall the building or her name. The vegetable gardens appeared. The cumulus sky flattened the land, the fences, sheds, and trees were like toys, a country of tiny folk, dolls. A naked tangle of branches along the horizon like a stiff web and not a soul, only the little vanes on the roofs of summer houses with their faces to the wind and spinning in endless air. That too went by. Again they found themselves in the shadow of apartment buildings. The daylight congealed; the cross-street traffic thinned it for a moment, then the sun put the car in its cement, while he tried to recall another distant thing to escape the present, to catch his breath and stay in the past, where there is never danger.
Nine Page 2