Two men came into the bar and went to the counter.
“More or less,” said Jacek, and turned away from them.
One rested his foot on the crossbar of a stool. His sock was white. The other picked up an ashtray and tapped it on the counter.
“Storkie!” he called toward the bead curtain and spun the ashtray like a top. The bartender appeared with a glass in his hand. He came out slowly, dull, as in a black-and-white movie.
“Load us up, Storkie.”
The bartender put the glass down, reached under the counter, and took out a box of balls.
“The cues are in the other room,” he said.
“Bring us two beers,” said the man with the socks, and both went into the dark room by the john. A white glare flooded the pool table, but they were in shadow.
“You know them too?” asked Beata.
“They’re all the same,” he said. “Like Chinamen.”
“Chinamen smile.”
“And those guys don’t?”
“They give me the creeps. Their faces don’t move, like animals. Dogs. As if they don’t have face muscles.”
“Dogs have face muscles.”
“But they only use them for biting.”
The bartender, passing with two beers on a tray, didn’t even glance at them.
“He’s pretending he doesn’t know you,” said Beata.
“Sometimes it’s better that way.”
“For who?”
“For everyone,” said Jack, and rubbed his temples.
“The ears have the least blood supply of any part of the body,” said Beata.
“They feel funny.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Where there’s little blood, little feeling.”
The bartender came back and vanished behind his bead curtain.
In the garish light over the pool table, hands, cuffs, and cues. The players circled lazily. They took off their jackets. Their shirts as if cut from black paper. Smoke gathered and hung beneath the lamp. The balls scattered with a crack, and one man said: “Fucking Sarajevo.” They moved slowly, prepared in an instant to leave on serious business. In their veins, not blood but images of actions. They were actors in a reality they had made up, because the time when sons repeated the gestures of their fathers was over. Cars went down Tamka. In the oxidized night the drivers gazed at the world and accepted it. Astras overtook Corsas, Corollas left Golfs behind, Nexias passed Twingos, Ibizas drove alongside Almeras. Darkness drifting in from the river. The cars dove into it like lemmings, only to reappear on the far bank in the stench of the port. Green, yellow, red, blue, silver, and white, beads on a rosary in the fingers of the city.
“Shit,” said one of the players and straightened. Two balls dropped into the pockets and rolled into the low belly of the table with a dull rumble. “Maybe an easy round of bar billiards?”
“My ass,” said the other, and began to set up a new game. Three cigarettes burning down in the ashtray.
“Tell him to put something on,” said the one who had lost.
“He’ll only put on fag music,” said the other.
“Whatever. Just so it’s not quiet.”
“Quiet bothers you?”
“When it’s quiet, something can happen.”
“And when the music’s on, it can’t?”
“It can, but you don’t have to wait.”
“Shut up and play, Waldek.”
Jacek could see them out of the corner of his eye, could guess what they were talking about. The balls clicked on the table, like people who meet, do things for each other, go their separate ways, and meet different people, until the last one dies. He repeated to himself the telephone number that Paweł was supposed to call. A number useless to him, but to someone else wealth or salvation. The balls clicked less now. Then there was only the tap of the cue and the soft knock of a solitary ball against the cushions.
“Why are you smiling?” asked Beata.
“Nothing. Pool makes sense. Let’s get out of here.”
Sleep came and went. At times he was in the apartment with the throbbing red neon outside the window. The salesclerk in the deli had given him a look when Paweł said, “A hundred and fifty grams of sausage.” It was Easter Friday, and he had dirty fingernails. He noticed that when he handed her the money. The fingernails returned with the rhythm of the red light, and other images, floating up from the past, places he’d been. The Kudamm in Berlin, two Turks and him. He was walking behind them and trying to feel at ease. Loud talk and gesticulating, like the Gypsies from Targowa. Inconspicuous on the sidewalk, he sniffed at the unfamiliar smells, the Germans leaving a trail of scent behind them. It was getting dark. He had thirty-four marks, and his Caro cigarettes were almost all gone. He took one out with a cupped hand, so it wouldn’t give him away, because on the first day he’d noticed that in this country there was no brand with such a short filter. The guy at whose place he was supposed to spend the night didn’t show. The Turks eventually disappeared. In the drizzle, his white sneakers turned gray and shapeless. He was tempted by the shops but afraid of the light. All that he remembered about that night was that his feet hurt, he had a runny nose, he was cold. At dawn he met two Poles. Coming back from somewhere, they took up the whole sidewalk. He started telling them everything, quickly because he was afraid they’d sober up. They took him with them. He slept on the floor, woke at noon, the others still snoring. Then two more came and wanted to throw him out.
He tried to stop the images and rewind them like a movie, but they were fragile, kept breaking, and the darkness filled with noise. Someone sat down beside him. He tried to imagine a woman but was left on his own. He tried counting all the money he’d ever had, bills in wads, fans, piles, heaps of coins, his first ever five-zloty coin with the fisherman on it, but he couldn’t recall whether it was really his, he might have stolen it from his mother’s purse. But he remembered the taste of the moment when he put it on the counter and watched the shop lady take a bottle of orangeade out of a crate and a chocolate bar with pink filling from the shelf, and give it to him with complete indifference, and with thirty groszy in change. He remembered the warm feel of the low wall in front of the store and the smell of gasoline from the blue moped that belonged to the mailman, who sat nearby drinking a beer. The five-zloty coin probably wasn’t stolen; in those days he often took money, but it was mostly twos. He could have got it for ten bottles from the old geezer in black who drove around the neighborhood in a huge two-horse cart and bought empties. Only fifty groszy, but the empties didn’t have to be rinsed. In the recycling center they paid a zloty, but the bottles had to be clean and the dragon with the cigarette holder would take every tenth one for free. “This is chipped,” she’d say, and no one would argue with her. In the bare yard, nothing but an awning of corrugated iron, boards for a tabletop, the steel box with the money, wooden crates filled with glass high as the sky. Cash without trouble, for nothing. All you had to do was know the corners where the pissheads hung out, the bushes where the better-off ones threw their bottles. The old guy too. He cleaned out cellars, junk rooms, attics. His cart trailed the stink of vinegar, stale beer, cheap fruit wine. Everyone said he was rich but to disguise it dressed in rags and didn’t wash. He lived in a tumbledown house behind a wooden fence. He hired boys to help him. The filthy bottles were soaked in tin tubs and barrels. You stirred and skimmed the greasy scum from the top. Then the bottles were taken out and washed with a drill that instead of a bit had a wire brush attached. One kid got an electric shock. After a couple of days working your hands were raw, from the lye.
He saw it clearly now: the old geezer smiling, telling him to come back in a few days to see if there was an opening. Paweł walked along the fence made of sawmill castoffs. Golden droplets of sap oozed from under brown bark. He rounded the fence and tried entering again, but now instead of piles of bottles there were cages of foxes. The animals paced and circled in their wire-covered runs. In the pit underneath them,
hot, fresh droppings. A woman in an army jacket showed him what to do. A shovel, a wheelbarrow, a path through the bushes, and a heap of old shit in a stand of pines. He wheeled new loads away, could barely breathe. The foxes never quit their hypnotic walk. The shit stuck to the spade, to the wheelbarrow. He had to scrape it off. She said, “You’ll get a thousand.” Her hair dyed black. Later she showed him the cold storage room where the food was kept. The ground red meat smelled like a corpse. Each time the door was opened, green flies rushed. A bare lightbulb. She told him to wash the shovel, the wheelbarrow, which he then used to bring their food. The woman opened the little chain-link hatches and doled out the portions with a coal scoop. The only break in the animals’ pacing. They ate on bent paws, their lowered tails quivering. Then he had to drag out a hose and pour water into the same bowls. “Not too much,” she told him. “That way the bowls are licked and we don’t need to wash them.” It was summer, and he didn’t have school. Sometimes an older man appeared. He’d put a small cage at the gate of a large one and prod the animal in. The new cage had a polished tin floor and was tight. The man would turn on the electricity and push a long spike up the animal’s ass; the spike’s handle was insulated. “A special order,” the woman explained. “The middle of July, and she decides she wants a fur-lined jacket.” The man did the skinning in the yard among the cages. The red body hung from a hook where all the animals could see, but they kept on pacing as if nothing had happened. The rest was Paweł’s job. He had to take it down, wheel it away, and dig a hole. It was hard to find a place where the spade didn’t hit bone. The green and blue flies never left him alone. At times he felt that everything, the trees, farm, house, stood on a thin layer of earth and in a moment would sink into the animal graveyard.
After a month the woman stood on the steps of the house and called him in. In the sitting room everything cool and dark. Cut glass shiny in a cabinet. She sat him down in front of a picture of a naked woman asleep on her back. Roses twined, and in the background a deer drank from a pond. The woman wore a kimono with yellow and black flowers, and her leather slippers were red and gold. A scent he couldn’t put a name to. On a side table, a cage with an orange canary. On another, a lace napkin and a blue Virgin Mary with her foot on the head of a snake. He sat in a deep armchair and watched her open a cabinet and take out a white envelope. She had to stand on tiptoe. He could see her flexed calves and a yellowish raised heel. In the envelope, a thousand-zloty bill with a picture of Copernicus. “I’m pleased with you,” she said. She must have been as old as his mother but looked completely different. She lit up and pushed a hard pack of women’s cigarettes toward him. He took one and lit it with a refillable lighter of the kind he dreamed about every time he passed a kiosk. It was enamel and decorated with pictures of birds of paradise. Cost sixty-five zloty and was made in China. He smoked and answered her few questions. Out of the corner of his eye, her crossed legs. He could feel his crotch growing warm, but didn’t let it, because his mother kept appearing, as if standing in the door and watching. He didn’t want tea or cookies, he wanted to leave as soon as possible, to get rid of this shame and take a good look at the bill.
That same day he bought himself the Chinese lighter. He rode the bus for a few stops because he didn’t want to do it at his neighborhood kiosk. Then he walked back on foot and at a different kiosk bought a pack of Carmens. Eighteen zloty. He stopped for an orangeade, was tempted and bought a chocolate bar. Walking home, when the street was empty, he tried the lighter. A click, but no flame. The blue spark flared in the dusk and died. Then he realized there was no fuel, so he ran back to the kiosk where he bought the cigarettes. For eighty groszy, an egg-shaped capsule of soft plastic. It was then that he noticed the pack of cards. Thirty-six zloty. Hard, angular, pleasant to the touch. He also bought a tiny penknife on a chain for nineteen zloty. He cut the capsule with the knife and filled the lighter. It worked, and he was happy. As he walked, he touched the pockets in which he’d put his new things.
At night he had a dream. The woman in the kimono leaned over him and took out some bills, took them from her cleavage, waistband, between her legs, her ass, under her arms, and she handed them to him. He jammed the money into his pockets, but the bills wouldn’t fit, they kept falling out, scattering. He gathered them, excited and embarrassed, and when he woke up his pajamas were wet.
This dream inside his dream made him pull his knees up under his chin and wrap his arms tightly around them. Warmth swept over him. The sounds of the building, no longer gravelike, surrounded him like water. He was sinking to the bottom, convinced he would never emerge again, that time itself would yield to his weight.
On the last day of that summer he worked till sundown. The next day the job would end. From time to time he’d squat and take out a pack of twelve-zloty Albanian Arberias. In another pocket he had blue Caros that cost sixteen, but the Arberias had a stronger and stranger smell, so they did a better job of masking the stench of the cages. The glow of the cigarette red in the gathering darkness, he collected his tools, put them away, and went for his money. It was like before, but a lamp was on and the canary was gone. She handed him an envelope.
Inside, a thousand and two one-hundred notes. He looked at her. She said it was a bonus. “We should have a drink to celebrate the end of the job,” she added, and brought in a bottle of Yugoslav vermouth and two cut-glass tumblers. He liked the taste of it, a little like medicine and a little like juice. Sticky, and it left a bitterness on the lips. The flounced red curtains were drawn. On the wall, gold lamp brackets with colored shades. The rug a sheepskin. Hard to tell whether the flowers were real or not. He’d never seen so many expensive things and such a big living room. He sat in the same place as before. She stood in front of him. He didn’t raise his eyes and could see only her hands.
Later, when he was on her and licking slowly and evenly, because that was what she told him to do, he learned that skin does not always smell like skin. It reminded him of an object that can be owned. He tried with his teeth, nibbling and tasting. She told him to do this, that. He followed her orders delicately. When by accident his mouth met the fabric of the armchair, he did not stop the caress and felt no difference. It was the same with the rug when they moved to the floor. The touch of the white fur was just as nice as her body. He nuzzled the rug, until she had to call him back. It went on for a long time, because from the other end of the house he heard a clock strike the half hour, then the quarter, then eight and nine. She led him to the kitchen, to the bathroom, told him what she wanted, as if they were still at work. In the bright bathroom her nipples were the color of raw meat and hundred-zloty bills. She examined him too, touching, choosing this part, that, using it however she wanted. The water could not wash from her the smell of furniture, clothing, perfume, the whole house. Her hands were rough, like those of other people. He was surprised there was no hair under her arms, and her ass was tanned all over. Her red toenails were like the playing pieces of a board game.
When their clothes were back on, she told him that whenever he came around, he’d get money. He asked how much. She said it depended, say two hundred, and he remembered the extra two bills in the envelope.
Iron Man stayed behind, as Bolek told him to. He had no desire to leave. The last thing he heard was: “I’ll be back in two hours. Make yourself at home,” and Bolek gestured at the littered table, the unfinished bottle. Syl didn’t know what to make of it, so she pretended to sulk until the door closed behind Bolek. Then she smiled and said:
“Have another drink, Iron Man, and tell me more about those times.”
He poured himself a drink, settled comfortably, lit a cigarette, almost as if he were stalling, but actually he just felt good and had no desire to talk.
“What’s there to tell? Water under the bridge.”
“It interests me. I was born in December eighty-one, and Porkie, I mean Bolek, doesn’t tell me anything. He just comes and goes; he wants food on the table, and has only one thing on hi
s mind. And I’m so ignorant.”
“Don’t you go to school?” asked Iron Man.
“I went to cooking school for a bit, but there’s no future in that.”
“I’m not so sure,” he said pensively. “People need to eat. And they’re eating more and more. In our day there were only three kinds of soup. And now? Or main dishes. We used to have pork chops, ribs, dumplings, fish on Fridays, and once in a while a roast on a Sunday. That was it. If you wanted extra, you went out. Bolek and I would go over to the milk bar on Targowa near Ząbkowska for lazy pierogi, Silesian pierogi with mushrooms, or pyzy in butter . . .”
“What was that?”
“Pyzy. Round dumplings. They sold them at the bazaar too, but I was fussy, could never eat off plastic, and there they served them on those little saucers you put under flowerpots.”
“What else was there?”
“At the bazaar? Tripe soup. From a milk can. There was an old lady with a five-gallon can wrapped in a blanket or kid’s clothes, the whole thing in a baby carriage. And it was good business, because there was nothing else at the bazaar, and you had thousands of people. Everyone was hungry. Not like now.”
“And Bolek?”
“What about Bolek?”
“Did he eat that tripe soup?”
“Sure. He was never picky when it came to grub.”
The guy on the floor was moving less. He lay on his side, as if trying to ride a child’s bicycle, curled up, knees under his chin, turning his legs in a fading circular motion, his socks bright as bandages. The man in the purple tracksuit wondered what to do next. He was weighing options. He could keep kicking, but the guy was barely conscious and probably wouldn’t feel it. He could pick him up and sit him somewhere. “Screw that,” he thought. “He’d just fall down again. I’d have to keep putting him back like it was a potty.” He took a deep breath. “If we were somewhere out of the way, I’d run him over. With one wheel. He’d survive, but he’d remember. Cars are useful.” Holding the edge of the table, he jumped with both feet on the clenched hand of the man on the floor. He heard a crunch, but it wasn’t much, so he did it again. Sneakers were no good for work like this. Then his eye fell on a cue stick left on the pool table. He picked it up, hefted, tried to bend it, swept it through the air to hear the swish.
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