Nine

by Andrzej Stasiuk

  “Right,” said Iron Man. “It’s hard to find a Mirosław. It used to be easier. Like with other things.” He made a few foot motions, swung his elbows in a windmill, and to get out of that he sat down on the sofa. He rubbed his hands and poured himself a drink from a fresh bottle. Syl immediately sat next to him.

  “And how about me, Mirosław?”

  He tried to speak but hadn’t finished swallowing. It went down the wrong way, and when he filled her glass, he had tears in his eyes and got some on the tablecloth.

  “Looks like you’ve had enough,” laughed Syl. “When Porkie starts spilling it like that, he goes off to bed.”

  Iron Man caught his breath and said:

  “It always went to his head. We’d have to carry him.”

  “That must have been hard.”

  “No, he wasn’t that big then. He could even borrow my pants. They were a bit short on him.”

  Syl ran her fingers through her hair and sighed:

  “I’d like to have known him then.”

  “You weren’t alive then, kid. It wouldn’t have come to anything.”

  She was still playing with her hair, her eyes fixed on something far. She kicked her slippers off and pulled her feet up onto the sofa.

  “I actually prefer slim guys,” she said.

  Iron Man sensed a problem, so he edged away, poured a drink, and looked at his watch.

  “He said he’d be back in two hours,” he said.

  “He always says that,” said Syl. “Then he comes home in the middle of the night and tells me to run him a bath, make him something hot, and get the bed ready. He snores too.”

  “A man should snore. When my dad stopped, my mom would wake up to see if he was still alive. She couldn’t sleep if he wasn’t sawing away.”

  “He snores even on his stomach,” said Syl.

  “He was always that way.”

  “With the snoring?”

  “He only slept on his stomach. And he liked to have his head covered but not his feet. The opposite of me. My feet always get cold,” said Iron Man.

  The music came to an end, and the CD player gave a click. On the floor above someone dropped something. Iron Man looked around. He took a cigarette, turned it a few times in his fingers, put it in his mouth.

  “Light one for me too,” said Syl.

  He handed her the pack and the lighter. She lit up herself, pouting slightly.

  “If we’re not dancing, maybe we could put a film on?” she suggested after a while.

  “We could, why not,” answered Iron Man, and felt relief.

  Beata waited. She walked in the hall, her hands in her jacket pockets, fingering the yellow toothbrushes and the tube of Colgate. Yellow were the most cheerful. She’d thought about buying soap but decided to ask Jacek. It occurred to her that they’d never bought things together. She was working out a plan: they’d also get a plastic bag, paper towels, something to drink, and sandwiches. For a start. And maybe newspapers, because six or seven hours traveling in the dark would be boring, nothing to see out the window but lighted platforms and the names of the stations. She imagined an empty compartment with brown seats, a curtain, and a little rug on the floor. A little warm room gliding safely through the night. They’d choose a smoking car and open the window to let the wind in. She thought of going up to one of the windows to ask how much the ticket was, but there were people at every window. It was a little embarrassing. A woman was taking a pile of checkered bags in a baby carriage. She looked like Beata’s mother. Three men with shaven heads wearing Flyers were walking like a patrol. They probably had nowhere to go to and just came to watch others setting off, because it was either that or the windblown streets. She tried to guess people’s destinations but didn’t know many places. People from the country were drabber or more colorful than those from cities. They looked around the hall furtively, like nonbelievers in church.

  Hipsters in short jackets stood along the wall, talking in a whisper and keeping an eye out. They weren’t going anywhere either, condemned to remain in the endless cross draft of this station, which brought people together but rarely linked them. She recalled the huge aquarium in the biology lab at school: the fish swam within a hairbreadth of one another without paying attention. Once, one died. It floated just above the floor of the aquarium, and the others swam by and nibbled at its red fins. She wondered how it would end, whether a little fish skeleton would be left, but someone removed the body.

  “It can’t be more than three or four hundred,” she decided. “It’s a regular express.”

  A wreath of men surrounded an automobile on a platform, leaning toward one another and exchanging comments in an undertone. She pictured herself on that platform, separated by a rope, with a sign that gave her date of birth, measurements, likes, and secret desires. They’d be standing just as they were now, talking to one another. There were two railwaymen too, their uniforms crumpled as if they’d just completed a journey.

  It was then that she saw the three: a big thickset man, a curly-haired kid, and a guy in a tracksuit—the one who’d thrown them out of the apartment earlier that day. They entered from the direction of the taxis and headed for the stairs leading down, the kid in the lead, the others a few steps behind.

  There are times when the mind works faster than it can understand, so fast that afterward, when everything’s over, it’s amazed at itself. Or perhaps it’s just that the body takes charge for a moment, in its unerring, animal way.

  Electronic bubbling sounds filled the terrarium as creatures passed across the screens taking one another’s lives as boys leaned forward to take in the bloodless massacre. They looked a little like surgeons, and a little like their mothers making dinner on gas stoves. Jacek felt suffocated, so he stepped out into the passage. And the curly-haired kid appeared. The two went off to the side, and Jacek said:

  “About time. You have the money?”

  The kid said yes.

  “So where do we go?” asked Jacek.

  The kid shrugged.

  “Then who’s supposed to know?” asked Jacek.

  “Maybe the john,” said the kid.

  “No, somewhere else.”

  “Where then?”

  “Think of something.”

  “I don’t know,” said the kid, looking down the passage, and Jacek sensed he was afraid and lying, because it was a straightforward matter. All they had to do was take a short walk toward the Palace or the Holiday Inn and settle it in the regular way, like giving someone a cigarette.

  The kid said, “Maybe the platforms . . .”

  Jacek followed his gaze and among the rapidly moving outlines of people he saw the big man, by the kiosk and the left luggage lockers, a motionless figure but coming toward them. Even at this distance he was certain the man was looking at them. He glanced to the right and saw the man in the tracksuit. Only a few steps away, but when their eyes met, the man recognized him and stupid surprise appeared on his face. The curly-haired kid moved away: he had done his job.

  “There’s no one at the tram stops, no one on Emilii Plater, no one on Jan Pawła,” Jacek was thinking, though they weren’t so much thoughts as images against which he saw his solitary silhouette on the lit-up sidewalk. So he ran forward, down the busy passage lined with kiosks. The big man quickened his pace to cut him off, but he was too heavy and his shoes too fancy, with thin and slippery soles. Behind Jacek someone shouted, and he was sure that the man in the purple tracksuit had bumped into someone or knocked him over. A moment later he ran into someone himself; instinctively he grabbed the person by the shoulders, spun him around, pushed him away. There was a commotion, someone on the ground, but out of the corner of his eye he saw that the purple tracksuit was forging through, knocking bodies aside as if pushing through underbrush.

  Jacek ran in a zigzag, a nervous slalom, a jump left, right, a woman with a child, diagonally to two nuns in smart overcoats, a gap between them, perfume, then a rigid row of faces, then back into a jumbled cr
owd, a train had just arrived, a stream of passengers pouring up the escalator from the platform, bags and suitcases everywhere. Something hard hit his knee, but it occurred to him that this throng would slow the other two a little, so he stopped dodging and plowed forward, because the more confusion the better.

  He heard her calling. She stood on the steps leading up to the main hall. “Jacek!” Her hands at her side, shouting. He had never seen anything so frozen. He turned, forgot about her, ran.

  Then he dreamed of an old hundred-zloty bill. It glowed as if the steelworks on the back were real and in operation. Plumes of red smoke from the stacks. Though maybe it wasn’t steelworks but a general factory, because he also dreamed of the smell of his father, who once a month would take bills from his wallet and place them in front of his mother on the kitchen table. His father’s jacket smelled of dust and fatigue, and something else. Later, when Paweł started work himself, he found out what it was: the metal lockers in the changing room. Sweat gathered in those lockers, even when it was cold outside. Sticky air drifted in from the shop floor and got into the enamel, clothing, shoe leather, the plastic shoulder bags they brought their sandwiches in. The bread, meat, and cheese soaked it up like a sponge, so even at lunchtime it entered the body. But that was later. As a child he would touch the bills laid out on the table and feel their soft cloth texture, the black creases. They looked like his father’s hands. His father washed them frequently, but something always remained: under his fingernails or in the cracks of his thumb. Once in a while there were new bills, stiff and crackly. Where the red faded out, the paper was creamy gold. But most of the bills were ragged, made no sound, smelled like his father’s jacket and the black bag for carrying sandwiches, with the pocket where he always kept his time card. Once Paweł took it out and read it: 5:56, 5:58, 5:52, 6:00, 5:59, a rare 6:07 or 6:01 in red, the same color as on the bills. Even the numbers smelled of the factory.

  His mother would hand him a hundred zloty and a list and send him to buy groceries, and the coins he got in change had the same smell, and so did the food he brought home. He learned why years later, in a line of men just before six o’clock, crossing the road, ignoring the cars. They passed through the factory gate in a clatter of time-card punches and, more slowly now, headed for the damp changing rooms with the rows of gray lockers, only there exchanging a few words as they stood in their undershirts and long johns. Their underwear white as skeleton bones. They smoked, transferred money and watches to their overalls, padlocked their lockers, tossed their cigarette butts onto the tiled floor, walked down the hallways toward the shop floor. On the first day he didn’t do much. Someone was supposed to show him everything, but after he was given his overalls, beret, and a wad of chits for tools, they left him on his own. He waited, walked, before long was lost among the throbbing, hot machines, so in winter he wouldn’t be cold here. At the exits from the shop floor, instead of doors there were curtains of hot air. He went through a few times, to feel the blast on his pants. He came on a metal shop, where pneumatic hammers several stories high pounded pieces of red-hot metal into disks, bulging cubes, long bars, the ground shaking as if about to cave in along with the deafening hiss and clatter of the blazing furnaces. The whole time, redness and smoke, rolled-up flannel sleeves, the stink of burning minerals from the welding and soldering shops, the hellish glow of white metal turning to yellow, orange, red, then slowly filming over with gray, until you saw rainbow stripes on the hardened surface.

  When he left at two in the afternoon with all the others, he smelled the same as they. He had it in his hair, on his hands, in his throat, even his cigarette.

  Half an hour later, in the bus, as they passed the huge power plant, he calculated that he’d earned a hundred-zloty bill, even a little more.

  Syl went to the cupboard with the TV and VCR and started flipping through the tapes. They were on the bottom shelf, so she bent over, and Iron Man could see the bright triangle of her panties. Yellow, pink, he couldn’t say. He decided it wasn’t important and tried to look elsewhere. But nothing held his attention, the television was no different, and the ass stuck out at him and even swayed a little, because Syl was choosing. Her red fingernail ran over the boxes, sliding them aside, starting over. There were more than thirty tapes, but she knew them all by heart.

  “What do you feel like, Iron Man?” she asked.

  “An action movie,” he said to her ass. “American.”

  Syl chose, and the VCR swallowed the tape. She picked up the remote and sat on the sofa.

  “It needs rewinding,” she said.

  “We can’t wait.” Sleepiness came over Iron Man, so he made himself comfortable and slid down, his feet out. He took the bottle, ashtray, and smokes from the table and arranged them so they’d be in arm’s reach. He liked movies but often fell asleep in the middle, because the days were long gone when he’d sit in the Syrena Theater on Inżynierska and the start of the newsreel music would give him a shudder of excitement.

  The VCR stopped whirring, Syl held out the remote, and there were two men on the screen talking in German.

  “I thought we were watching an American movie,” Iron Man objected.

  “We are. It’s just dubbed into German.”

  “Can’t they dub stuff into Polish?” he muttered.

  The men were walking down the street. One had blond hair, the other brown. They were in suits. Nothing was happening. The picture jerked a little.

  “I don’t think much of this,” said Iron Man, and his eyelids drooped.

  He dreamed about the Syrena, Godzilla knocking buildings down, then Rodan the Bird of Death and Mechagodzilla, He-dora, finally the Chimera Califa, all pleasant, small, and not at all frightening, so he wanted the dream to go on and tried to stretch out more on the sofa, but Syl’s proximity prevented him. Through half-open eyes he noticed that it wasn’t Chimera with three curved necks but three people having a party: the two men, the blond and the brown-haired one, having fun with a redheaded woman in stockings and high heels, on a couch and armchairs, doing one thing after another nonstop. “Well, that’s action,” Iron Man thought, waking up. But didn’t move a muscle, feeling Syl press against his hip and side. He kept thinking, “Jesus, no . . .” and felt really stupid. Of course he’d watched this sort of thing in his day, but it had always been with his buddies, no women present. Iron Man was mortified. If only he could sleep through the whole thing, but he was afraid of what might happen during that real or pretend sleep, so he lay flatter and stiller, washing his hands of everything. Syl’s body had become hot and heavy, even though he knew she was skin and bones.

  The phone chirped. The pressure eased, and a moment later Iron Man saw her stand, turn down the German panting, and pick up the receiver.

  “It’s for you, Iron Man,” she said, blocking the screen.

  “For me?” In surprise.

  “Like I said.”

  After the call, two minutes, he was wide awake and didn’t give a damn about the action. He had his jacket on, standing in the middle of the room and putting cigarettes and lighter into his pockets.

  “We need pants, underwear, a plastic bag. And call a taxi, kid. Come on, get moving!”

  First they ran through the crowd and hoped they’d be lucky. Looked through the windows of the little stores and kiosks. People looked back.

  “Fuck,” said Bolek. “We should check the tram stops.” Tracksuit said, “OK,” and in three bounds was outside by the tracks of the Praga to Ochota line, while Bolek went up to the stops to and from Mokotów. His stomach hurt. At this time of day, all the people were gray, indistinct. “He won’t be standing here waiting, the prick,” he thought, and ran down again. The other guy was already by the fountain searching the crowd, standing on tiptoe, looking like a complete idiot.

  “Nothing, boss. Thin air.”

  “He was damn fast.”

  “He saw us too soon.”

  “If I were a couple of years younger . . .”

  They t
alked like this, wandering, glancing at dozens of heads. Tracksuit kept clenching his hands, as if he had glue between his fingers. Bolek thrust his fists into his pants pockets and placed one foot in front of the other, to steady himself.

  “What now, boss?”

  “You go back. The girl that shouted—she might still be around.”

  “I heard someone shout, but I didn’t see who it was.”

  “A girl in an army jacket.”

  “All right, I’ll take a look. And that bastard, I know him from somewhere, boss. It went fast, but I could swear . . .”

  “All right, but go now. I’ll stay here a bit.”

  And Bolek was left on his own. He watched the other guy, made sure he was going where he was supposed to, and carefully took a few steps. The pain in his stomach was sharper, knotting, twisting. He bent forward and took a few more steps, pushed his hands into his pockets, tried to think about peaceful things that had happened to him in life, but he kept counting his steps, the distance separating him from the tiled passage where young boys stood with cigarettes in their mouths. He stopped for a moment, and the pain let up. Five more yards to go, but he could already smell it. Two good-looking kids with earrings were watching him. One even smiled and at the same time lowered his eyes. Heavy black boots with silver fittings. The other adjusted a salmon-pink scarf around his neck. They exchanged a few words and the first one smiled again, this time no longer turning his eyes away. “Jeez,” Bolek thought, but realized he was helpless. “Any other time, you’d be dead.” And the boys went on waiting, because they’d seen worse than him in their lives.

  Just as he was about to go in—the boys sure that the better part of the day was starting—from inside, accompanied by the echo of flushing and the smell of toilet freshener and the mirage sheen of tiles, Jacek appeared. The two stood almost face-to-face, and it was only a question of in whose brain a spark would fire first.