The phantoms are fully assembled now, standing at the gates of reason, factory-made. They’re not really scary, it’s no biblical deluge, they include no Dantean scenes. Just the terrible inevitability of water, its omnipresence. The walls of his apartment soak it up. Kunicki checks the sick soggy plaster with his finger, the wet paint leaving a mark on his skin. The stains on the walls make maps of countries he can’t recognize, he can’t name. Drops seep through the window frames, wash away the carpet. You hammer a nail through the wall, and a little streamlet springs out; you open a drawer and water burbles out of it. You raise a stone and I will be there, murmurs the water. Whole rivulets pour onto computer keyboards, the screen splutters out underwater. Kunicki runs out in front of his apartment building and sees the sandpits and flowerbeds have disappeared, the low hedges ceased to exist. He goes with water up to his ankles to the car, he’ll try to drive it out of their neighbourhood and onto higher ground, but he won’t make it now. It turns out they are surrounded, in a trap.
Just be glad it all turned out okay, he tells himself, getting up in the dark to go to the bathroom. Of course I’m glad, he answers himself. But he isn’t glad. He lies back down on the warmed-up sheets and stays there with his eyes open till morning. His legs are unsettled, they keep heading off somewhere, taking a pretend walk of their own accord under the folds of the blanket, itching from within. Sometimes he dozes off for a little bit, and then his own snoring wakes him up. He lies there and sees it getting lighter and lighter out the window, listens to the rubbish collectors start to raise their ruckus, the first buses, trams set forth from the depot. In the morning the lift starts up, you can hear its despairing squeaks, the squeaks of a creature caught in two-dimensional space, up and down, never diagonally or sideways. The world moves forward, with that irreparable hole in it, crippled. It limps.
Kunicki limps along with it to the bathroom, then he drinks his coffee standing up, at the kitchen counter. He awakens his wife. She sleepily, wordlessly, vanishes into the bathroom.
He has found one advantage to not sleeping – he can hear what she says in her sleep. In this way the greatest mysteries give themselves away. They escape like wisps of smoke, of their own accord, and immediately vanish, you have to catch them right there at the lips. So he lies there, thinking, and eavesdrops. She sleeps quietly, on her stomach, you almost can’t hear her even breathing. Sometimes she sighs, but there aren’t any words in her sighing. When she turns over from one side to the other, her hand seeks out another body, on its own, tries to hold it, her leg travels over his hip. Then for a moment he stiffens, because what the hell would that mean? Then he realizes that it’s a mechanical movement, and he lets her get away with it.
It is as though nothing has changed, except that her hair has got brighter in the sun, and a couple of freckles came out on her nose. But when he touched her, when he slid his hand over her naked back, he thought he figured something out. He doesn’t even know himself. That skin puts up resistance now, it’s harder, more inert, like tarpaulin.
He can’t permit himself any further searching, he’s afraid, he draws back his hand. Half-asleep he imagines that his hand encounters some sort of foreign territory, something he’d overlooked for seven years of their marriage, something shameful, some defect, a strip of hairy skin, a fish scale, some bird down, an unusual structure, an anomaly.
He scoots over to the edge of the bed and from there looks at the shape that is his wife. In the pale light of the development that flows through the window her face is just a faint outline. He falls asleep gazing into that spot, and when she wakes up, it’s starting to get light in their bedroom. The light of dawn is metallic, it ashens colours. For a moment he has the frightening impression that she is dead – he sees her corpse, her empty dried-out body left a while ago now by its soul. He’s not afraid, exactly, just surprised, and quickly, in order to chase away this image, he touches her cheek. She sighs and turns to him, putting her arm on his chest, her soul returning. From now on her breathing is steady, but he doesn’t dare move. He waits for the alarm clock to release him from this awkward situation.
He’s unsettled by his own inaction. Shouldn’t he make a note of all these changes, in order not to overlook something? Get up quietly and slip out of bed and divide a piece of paper in half at the kitchen table and write: before and now. What would he write? Her skin is rougher – maybe she’s just ageing, or maybe it’s an effect of the sun. T-shirt instead of pyjamas? Maybe the heaters are on higher than they used to be. Her smell? She’s switched lotions.
He recalls the lipstick she had on the island. Now she has a different one! That one was a light, creamy, gentle one, the colour of her lips. This one is red, crimson, he doesn’t know how to define colour, he was never good at that, he never knew what the difference was between crimson and red, let alone purple.
Carefully he slides out of bed, touches down his bare feet on the floor, and blindly, so as not to wake her, he goes to the restroom. Only once he gets inside does he let himself be blinded by turning on the bright light. On the shelf under the mirror lies her cosmetics bag, embroidered with beads. He opens it carefully, in order to make sure of his suppositions. The lipstick is different.
In the morning he’s able to act it all out perfectly, that’s what he thinks: perfectly. That he’s forgotten something else and has to stay five minutes more at home.
‘Go on ahead, don’t wait for me.’
He pretends he’s in a hurry, that he’s looking for some papers. She puts her jacket on in front of the mirror, wraps a red scarf around herself and takes the boy by the hand. They slam the door. He hears them going down the stairs. He freezes over his papers and the echo of the slamming doors reverberates a few more times in his head like a ball – boom, boom, boom, until there’s silence. Then he takes a deep breath and stands up straight. Silence. He feels it wrap him up, and now he moves slowly and precisely. He goes to the closet, pulls back the glass door and stands facing her clothes. He stretches his hand out to a light-coloured blouse, she’s never worn it, it’s too formal. He palpates it and then runs his whole hand over it, gets his hand tangled in the folds of silk. But this blouse tells him nothing, so he keeps going; he recognizes the cashmere suit, which she also rarely wears, and her summer dresses, and a few shirts, one after the next; a winter jumper still wrapped up from the cleaners, and a long black coat. He hasn’t seen her much in that one, either. Then it occurs to him that this clothing is hanging here to throw him off, to trick him, to lead him astray.
They’re standing next to each other in the kitchen. Kunicki is dicing up parsley. He doesn’t really want to get into it again, but he can’t restrain himself. He can feel the words swelling up in his throat, and he can’t quite swallow them back down. Meaning the old ‘Well then what did happen?’ yet again.
She says in a tired voice, pointing out in a tone of I’m-reciting-this-yet-again that he’s being boring, that he’s making things difficult, ‘Here you go, one more time: I didn’t feel well, I think I had food poisoning, I told you.’
But he doesn’t give up so easily. ‘You didn’t feel sick when you went off,’ he says.
‘Right, but then I got sick, I got sick,’ she repeats, with pleasure. ‘And I guess I passed out for a minute, and then the child started crying, and that brought me to again. He was scared, and I was scared, too. We started towards the car, but just because of everything we ended up going the wrong way.’
‘Which way? Into town? Toward Vis?’
‘Yes, toward Vis. No, I mean, I don’t know, whether toward Vis or not, how was I supposed to know, if I had known, I would have come back, I’ve told you this a thousand times.’ She raises her voice. ‘When I figured out I had got us lost, we just sat down in this little grove, and the child fell asleep. I was still feeling weak…’
Kunicki knows she’s lying. He dices the parsley up and says in a sepulchral voice, not raising his eyes from the cutting board, ‘There was no grove.’
&n
bsp; She just about screams, ‘Of course there was!’
‘No, there wasn’t. All there was were individual olive trees and vineyards. What grove?’
There’s a silence, and then she suddenly says with deadly seriousness, ‘OK. You’ve cracked it. Good job. We were carried off by a flying saucer. They did experiments on us. They implanted chips in us, here,’ and she lifts up her hair to reveal the nape of her neck. Her gaze is icy.
Kunicki ignores her sarcasm. ‘Alright, alright, continue.’
‘I found a little stone house. We fell asleep, it got dark…’
‘Just like that? It got dark? What happened to the whole day? What were you doing all day?’
She presses on. ‘We had a nice morning. I thought that you might worry about us a little bit and actually remember that we exist. Like shock therapy. We ate grapes all the time and kept going swimming…’
‘You’re telling me you didn’t eat for three days?’
‘Like I say, we ate grapes all the time.’
‘What did you drink?’ Kunicki urges.
Here she grimaces. ‘Water from the sea.’
‘Why don’t you just tell me the truth?’
‘That is the truth.’
Kunicki severs meticulously the fleshy little stems. ‘OK, and then what?’
‘Nothing. We went back to the road and flagged down a car that took us to –’
‘After three days!’
‘So what?’
He throws the knife down into the parsley. The cutting board crashes to the floor. ‘Do you have any idea how much trouble you caused? There was a helicopter out looking for you! The whole island was mobilized!’
‘Well they shouldn’t have been. It just happens that people disappear for a little while, you know? There was no need for anybody to panic. We can just still say that I wasn’t feeling well, and that then I got better.’
‘What the fuck is wrong with you? What is going on? How can you explain it all?’
‘There’s nothing that requires an explanation. I’m telling you the truth, you’re just not listening.’
She’s screaming, but here she lowers her voice. ‘Just, what do you think, you tell me, what do you think happened?’
But he doesn’t answer her now. This conversation has already repeated itself multiple times. It seems both of them have lost the strength for it.
Sometimes she leans back against the wall and glares at him and taunts him: ‘A bus full of pimps drove by and took me to off to a brothel. They kept the child on the balcony, on bread and water. I had sixty clients over the course of those three days.’
When she does that he slams his fist into the table to not hit her.
He never thought or worried about it – that he can’t remember individual days. He doesn’t know what he did on a given Monday, or not even a given, but last Monday, Monday before last. He doesn’t know what he did the day before yesterday. He tries to remember the Thursday before they left Vis – and nothing comes to mind. But when he focuses it returns to him, that they walked down the path, that the dried-out bushes of herbs crackled beneath their shoes, and the grass was so dry that it scattered into dust under their shoes. And he remembers the low stone wall, although probably only because they saw a snake there, which ran away from them. She told him to take the boy’s hand. Then he picked him up, and she tore off the little leaves of some plant and rubbed it between her fingers. ‘Rue,’ she said. Then he realized that everything smelled like it here, like this herb, even raki, they put whole branches of it in the bottles. But he can’t know now how they got back and what happened to the evening of that day. And he doesn’t remember the other evenings. He doesn’t remember anything, he’s missed it all. And when you don’t remember it means it never happened.
Details, the weight of details: he used to not take them seriously. Now he’s sure that when he arranges them in a tightly made chain – cause plus effect – everything will be explained. He should sit quietly in his office, lay out a piece of paper, best if it’s large-format, the largest he can find, he has some like that from the paper books are wrapped in, and plot it all out in points. After all, that’s the truth.
So, okay. He slices through the plastic tape on a package of books and takes out the stack of them without even looking at them. That’s one of those bestsellers, who cares. He picks up the sheet of grey paper and straightens it out on the desk. This extended grey space, slightly creased, confuses him. With a black marker he writes: border. They fought there. But maybe he should go back to before they left? No, he’ll start there, at the border. He must have held out his passport through the car window. That was between Slovenia and Croatia. Then he recalls them going down the asphalt highway through empty villages. Stone homes without roofs, bearing traces of fire or bombs. Clear signs of war. Overgrown fields, dry, barren land lacking care. Its owners in exile. Dead paths. Gritted teeth. Nothing, nothing wrong, they’re in purgatory. They’re in the car and looking out in silence at those haunting landscapes. But her he can’t remember, she was sitting too close to him, next to him. He doesn’t remember if they stopped anywhere or not. Yes, they got petrol at some little station. He thinks they bought some ice cream. And the weather, that it was stifling. Milk in the sky.
Kunicki has a good job. At work he’s a free man. He works as a sales representative for a big Warsaw publisher – representative, meaning he peddles books. He has several spots in town he has to stop by every so often to tout his wares; he always brings them the latest stuff and makes them special offers.
He drives up to a little shop on the outskirts of town and gets the order he’s fulfiling out of the trunk of his car. The shop is called Book and School Supplies Shop, it’s too small to give itself such airs as a specific name, and anyway, most of what it sells are simply notebooks and textbooks.
The order fits into a plastic box: guidebooks, two copies of the sixth volume of the encyclopaedia, the memoirs of a famous actor, and the latest bestseller by the unrevealing title of Constellations – a whopping three copies of this. Kunicki promises himself he’s going to read it. They serve him coffee and a slice of cake. They like him. Washing down mouthfuls of cake with the coffee, he shows them the new catalogue. This sells well, he says, and this right here gets ordered all the time. Such is Kunicki’s job. As he’s leaving he purchases a calendar that’s on clearance.
In the evening in his tiny office he fills in the publisher’s corporate forms with the orders he’s received; he sends the forms by email. He’ll receive the books in the morning.
He takes deep, relieved breaths, inhaling the smoke from his cigarette: the work day is done. He’s been waiting for this moment since morning so he can look through the pictures in peace. He hooks up the camera to the computer.
There are 64 of them. He doesn’t delete any. They come up automatically, for 10-12 seconds each. The pictures are boring. Their one merit is that they fix instants that would otherwise have vanished completely. But would it be worth it to copy them? Even so, Kunicki copies them to a CD, turns off the computer and sets off for home.
All his actions he performs automatically: he turns the key in the ignition, turns off the alarm, fastens his seatbelt, flips on the radio, puts the car in first gear. It immediately rolls along from the car park into the busy street, in second gear. They’re doing the weather on the radio. They’re saying it’s going to rain. And sure enough it starts to rain, as if all the drops of rain had just been waiting to be conjured up by the radio; the windshield wipers come on.
And suddenly something changes. It’s not the weather, not the rain, not the view from the car, but somehow, in a single moment, he sees everything differently. It’s as if he’s taken off his sunglasses, or as if the windshield wipers have scraped off more than their usual skimming of urban grunge. He feels hot and steps on the gas in spite of himself. People are honking at him. He pulls himself together and tries to catch up with the black Volkswagen. His hands start to sweat. He would happily
pull over, but there’s nowhere to pull over to, he has to keep going.
He sees with terrible clarity that the road, so familiar to him, is suffused entirely with lurid signs. These signs are messages for him alone. The one-legged circles, the yellow triangles, the blue squares, the green and white markers, the arrows, the indicators. The lights. The lines painted on the asphalt, the motorway markers, warnings, reminders. The smile on the billboard, not immaterial either. He saw them this morning, but he didn’t understand them then, this morning he could ignore them, but now, now there is no way for him to do that. Now they are all communicating with him, quietly, categorically, there are so many more of them, in fact there is no space they do not inhabit. The names of shops, the ads, the post office symbol, the pharmacies, the bank, the lifted STOP paddle of the nursery school teacher overseeing the children crossing the road, sign goes through sign, across sign, sign indicating another sign – a little further on, a sign taken up by another sign, passed further along, a conspiracy of signs, a network of signs, an understanding between signs behind his back. Nothing is innocent, and nothing is insignificant, it’s all a big endless puzzle.
In a panic he looks for a place to park: he has to shut his eyes or he’ll go crazy. What is wrong with him? He starts to shake. Relieved he finds the bus stop and pulls over. He begins to be able to control himself. It occurs to him that he might have had a stroke. He’s afraid to look around. Maybe he has discovered a way of viewing things, or another Point of View, capitalized, all of it capitalized.
Flights Page 30