Lovetown

by Michal Witkowski

  ‘What? And what?’

  ‘I look at him, and… It’s the Countess!’

  ‘Her ghost?’

  ‘The ghastly, ghostly slag herself. There’s a white light glowing out of her eyes, her gums, her ears, as if she had a candle stuck up in her. She’s wearing that jacket she got off the market, the greenish one, but it looks like it’s covered in mud, in caked dirt, like the contents of her grave have been mixed with the rain and mud. I cross myself, and she says to me: “Here did I come for grunt, here did I come for the holy rod, through these ruts and underbrush, e’en after death! We observe this day Forefathers’ Eve! Give me jism, give, and I to thee this moral lesson shall impart, that he who never…”

  ‘“Why, that’s blasphemy, you whore! To mock our nation’s literature even from beyond the grave!”

  ‘As a whore she always was exceptional! She continues her mocking, and says: “My name is Million! My name is Million!” she cries. “Because I’ve done a million grunts!”

  ‘Heavens!’

  ‘A thunderbolt strikes with a crash somewhere off in the distance, and suddenly she turns to me and out of the blue proclaims: “Macbeth! Thane of Cawdor!”

  ‘“Begone!” I say to her. “Begone! Be no more, thou vile shade!” But she keeps at it, something about wanting neither victuals nor drink, just a drop of jism, jism of grunt, jism and more jism. Oh, and then she starts making fun of the Bible, too, getting all prophetic like some off-her-rocker Pythia, or Cassandra; she says, “There, Nellies, shall you stand before the zippered gate of the nads of grunt, and it shall not be opened to you.” And then she holds her mangled hand out to me and says, “Come to me!”’ (Here they look at each other and breathe out slowly.) ‘Obviously I’m shit-scared because you can see her skull showing under her hair, but I know it’s her because even outdoors she always smelt of that public toilet where she worked in the underpass; all her life she had that pine-scented whiff of urinal cake about her. Even in the dark I could always tell whether it was the Countess crouching down in the bushes, or some grunt. And I know it’s her because she’s talking exactly as she did when she was alive, the same country accent. I stand there like I’ve been hypnotised. All I know is that I need a drink, that if I don’t have a drink, I’ll lose it. Finally I dig a crumpled fag out of my pocket, and my hands are shaking, like this.’

  Patricia’s hands are skinny and covered with liver spots. She has long fingernails and wears a metal bracelet with the word LOVE etched on it in English, like the ones they sell on souvenir stalls at the seaside. She shows us how her hands shook. The bracelet rattles and clanks against a large, gold Russian watch.

  ‘Somehow I manage to light it, probably stuck it in backwards with the filter lit, and I try to talk some sense into her gently (inside I’m still trembling like mad). So I say to her:

  ‘“Get a hold of yourself, girl! We were best girlfriends when you were alive. All that sperm has gone to your head if you can’t recognise a girlfriend after death, the same sister you shagged all that grunt with, and went visiting the Russians at the barracks with, and all that cum you milked out of them – if you poured it into a bath, all of it at once, it would’ve been enough to take a bath in, wouldn’t it? And with a fat girl like you in there, it would’ve brimmed right over! Kyrie Eleison! Begone! Can’t you see I’m not grunt at all? It’s just me, old Patricia from the Centre.” Her eyes were all cloudy; you could see she carried on knocking it back in the next world just as she had in life. It looked like she was starting to recognise me, then she mumbled her disappointment:

  ‘“Pachisha?” (It wasn’t “Patricia” she said, but something weird like “Pachisha” or “Chisha”, as if her mouth were full of potatoes, but maybe that’s what it’s like when you’re dead.) So I said, “Huh!” Then she muttered something, more garbled words, and went off to carry on cruising on the hill. Without so much as a goodbye, she took off, vanished without a trace, even though we hadn’t seen each other for a good ten years and she probably had lots of stories to tell. Anyway, there was this old slapper there,’ Patricia snorts with laughter, winking at Lucretia, ‘You know the one: Owl. When she saw the Countess coming out of the ruins, she followed her right up the hill. Was she ever in for a surprise. And then there was something else I’d noticed earlier: a group of what looked like skinheads coming up from the river on the other side of the hill – they didn’t look too friendly. I thought about warning her, but then I thought, what can they do to her if she’s a ghost? It was all I could do to contain my own fear. For one thing, I had a ghost on my hands, and then there were the screams I heard coming from the top of the hill, as if someone were getting beaten to death. But I wasn’t so frightened that I couldn’t… I mean, that Zbigniew-with-the-moustache turned up right then. The one who’s always on a bike.’

  Lucretia knows. She stands up and smoothes the grey residue of her hair. She turns the record over. She tugs her cheap jumper with its naff pattern down over her protruding belly. She’s ugly. Even though she’s practically bald, she has dandruff. Now her lips curl up in a malicious smile, and she says smugly, through clenched teeth: ‘Well, the Countess was highly strung even when she was alive, so I’m sure her own death must have come as an enormous shock to her. Do you remember that time we went with her to visit the Russians at the barracks?’

  The two old men become animated. Patricia goes over to the drinks cabinet (‘high gloss finish’) and reverently pulls something out of it. A second later, she sets down on the table a number of sealed plastic bags with brown things inside them. I start to open one, but they both lunge towards me.

  ‘The fragrance! You’ll let the fragrance out! For God’s sake don’t open it! We only open them on anniversaries…’ They’d stashed their sorry relics in the bags for safekeeping: army belts, knives, foot wrappings, a few sepia or black-and-white photos torn from identity cards and stamped with the purple half-moons of large and long-invalid official seals – mugshots of twenty-something Russian musclemen with potato noses and mouths, faces wholesome, salt of the earth. Or else ugly and crooked, their fringes like triangles pasted over their foreheads. Dedications in Cyrillic on the reverse. Over the kitchen door, where you might expect to see a picture of the Holy Virgin, they have a tangle of rusty barbed wire hanging from a nail. They’d cut it down recently; it came away easily enough, all they had to do was twist it round a bit, right, left, done. They filled their pockets with the barbed wire, so they’d have some for Uterina and the others, for later on, when there was nothing left.

  They show me pictures of the ruined barracks, the graffiti on the wall around the windows, carved, scratched, scrawled in hard-to-reach places. For example:

  100

  I don’t get it.

  ‘The number 100,’ Patricia explains matter-of-factly, ‘means they had a hundred days left until their discharge.’

  ‘Discharge!’ sighs Lucretia.

  ‘And Bransk, of course,’ Patricia continues, ‘is where they were returning after those hundred days. Why a hundred? Because they had to shave their heads down to zero every day for a hundred days before they left so they wouldn’t take their lice with them. Then the party could begin. Their graffiti is still there on the walls today. Only today the walls are conspicuous, right on the street, while back then they were further away, back behind another wall, impossible to get to.’

  ‘But not for us! Look,’ Lucretia shows me another photo. ‘Here’s the private road (though it’s not so private now), here’s where the bushes were, and here’s where Patricia would get down on all fours. Those barracks on Barracks Street, we used to call them “headquarters”. I’d always say, “Come on Patricia, let’s go to headquarters.” There were other barracks in town, of course…’

  Lucretia starts to bawl. Patricia’s voice cracks. Lucretia recounts her initiation. A moving tale replete with the poetic motif of lost gloves:

  The first cock I ever laid lips on belonged to a Russian soldier behind the railway sta
tion. That was a thing of beauty! It was just before Christmas, I rang up Patricia, deepest communism. It’s hard for me to say now what year it was. It was before Christmas, and there wasn’t any snow, but it was certainly cold. And I had a pair of new gloves. Really good ones too, which I left in his car, and had to go back later to collect. I had a porn movie, I had this one porno, you see, and I knocked on the window, my heart pounding wildly, because I’d seen how Guard Lady did it! How Guard Lady gave blowjobs. At first the cars all parked in front of the station, later on they’d be behind. And they would sit there in those military lorries, one in each – behind the wheel, often all day long, freezing outside. Later on, after the fall of the system, they’d be parked behind the station, so people wouldn’t notice them. So I mustered up the courage and went with that porno, because I’d seen how courageously Guard Lady would approach them. And I went up to this soldier (a boy, eighteen), and the soldier says to me:

  ‘Chto ty hot’yel?’*

  And I say: ‘Umm… Pogovorit’ s taboi…’**

  ‘Ehh… Ya vizhu, chto ty po ruski govorish, no zahodi…’*** I started talking politics, and he told me he was from Rostov-on-Don, how they have Kazakh traditions there. By now I was totally turned on, my cock hard, my heart banging, and I’m thinking ‘I’m gonna explode!’ So I say:

  ‘U menya yest taka pornucha, hotyel’ ty uvidyet?’**** And he says:

  ‘Nu davai, davai…’† So he watches it, and then he says: ‘A chornuyu ty uzhe yebal?’†† ‘No,’ I say. ‘Nyet, ya yeshcho nikogda babiy nye yebal…’††† He’s visibly pissed off:

  ‘Ty nye yebal babiy? Ty navyerno pyedik, da?’†††† And I say:

  ‘Da! Da!’ The Russians used the phrase Pyedik Gamburskii – Hamburg Homo. You know how Slavs usually associate anything pervy with Germany… And he says:

  ‘No, ya tym nye zanimayus…’* And I reply:

  ‘A nravitsya tyebye, chui tyebya stayit? Nravitsya tyebye?’** He says:

  ‘No nravitsya, no ya… u myenya dyenyeg nyet. Skolka hochesh?’*** And I say:

  ‘Ya nichevo nye hochu, ya tyebye yeshcho dyengi dam, hochu vrot!’**** And fuck if he didn’t look around nervously to see if anyone was passing, then unbutton his fly. And right there, fuck, the palm tree loomed, and Lucretia didn’t have even the slightest gag reflex! One two three, and the lad shot his load down my throat… I immediately spat it out into a tissue, and when it was over I asked him:

  ‘Do you want to set a date for moving in?’ And he says:

  ‘Never! Bye.’ Huh. I continue walking, and fuck if I haven’t lost my gloves! So I walk back to him and tell him I left my gloves there, and he gives them back to me and everything, but with such a screwed-up look on his face, he wasn’t at all happy, he probably wanted to chuck those gloves away. In my euphoria I rang up Patricia and said:

  ‘Patricia, I had cock in my mouth!’ He was a really clean-cut bloke, I have to admit. But I say, ‘God, what am I going to do to stop myself catching the clap in my mouth?’ And Patricia says:

  ‘Cretia, go to the late-night chemist and get a bottle of Sebidin, all you need is Sebidin, take it and gargle, that’s the positive gamma, the negative gamma kills everything. And don’t worry if you deepthroated that brute either, I’ll set you up with some Doxycycline, I have some at home and all you have to do is take it. So now you’ve done it, now you see what I’ve been talking about. Now you’ve done it, just like you said, so now you see. Right? You’ll have to reinvent yourself, you’ll have to start making the rounds.’ There was no going back.

  ***

  I can’t bear it anymore. I excuse myself, put my cigarette in the ashtray (a large glass brick meant to look like cut glass but obviously dislodged from a wall), and go to the toilet.

  This is horrible. Horrible and fascinating both at once. There’s no way I can publish this. How can I? What can I possibly do with it? An investigative piece for Polityka? A special segment on Eyewitness? Impossible. Highway prostitutes, thieves, murderers, smugglers, kidnappers, spies – anything but this. Even though there’s nothing criminal going on at all. There just isn’t a language for this. Unless it’s arse, cock, blowjob or grunt. Unless I could repeat those words over and over for so long they neutralised the taint of the barracks. Like the word vagina in The Vagina Monologues. I’m not surprised reporters have shied away from this topic!

  My thoughts meander along in this manner while I pee and have a look round their bathroom… First of all, right in front of my eyes, pinned to the wall above the toilet, is a photo, carefully cut out of some magazine, of a grunt being led away in handcuffs by two very grunty-looking policemen. It could be someone famous, but he’s completely immobilised in any case, and the perverse thing about it is that you can’t pee without looking at it. Then there’s the washing machine – not an automatic one, but a grotty toploading thing – which is rattling like mad. The tap is dripping. The sink is full of pots of ferns and dreary houseplants like the ones you see on the windowsills at any public health clinic. I look at the pathetic products lining the rim of their yellowing and only partly tiled-in bathtub: an uncapped bottle of Three Herbs shampoo, a shaving brush thick with dust, bottles of generic aftershave and lotions, an extremely frayed and yellowing toothbrush. There’s even a tube of self-tan – proof of their reckless struggle for beauty. But anyone who caught sight of Lucretia and Patricia in broad daylight would simply shrug his shoulders out of pity. All those cheap cosmetics, survivors of their own sell-by dates, collected by Lucretia, used on the sly by Patricia, those piddling anti-cellulite gels he thought would make his fat belly go away… All of it evidence that the room I’m in isn’t a lavatory at all, but an armoury. Suddenly the gas water boiler behind me starts up with a roar – no doubt one of them is washing his hands in the kitchen. I look at the blue filaments of flame, the sallow bathtub. There’s a saucepan filled with yellow water sitting at the bottom of it. The curtains on the window over the toilet are yellow, too. A flat for old ladies. And everywhere houseplants in flowerpots… Old ladies adore growing plants.

  ***

  The tin, the tin can, the cottage, the tearoom: for fifty years it did for homos what today’s shopping centres do for the middle classes. Located somewhere in a park of ill repute, coated with rust, built before the war, usually sporting remnants of the original trim. From a bird’s eye view they looked like stars, each cropped point an entryway, and the stars all went in! Inside, in the middle, was the shaft – a pole or thick column pissed on from all sides. Waste floated around its base, fetid as the foyers of old buildings.

  They were part of the municipal infrastructure, along with streetlamps, benches, and those railings that stopped pedestrians from falling into rivers or lanes of traffic. Under communism they were the only public space of their kind without a toilet lady sulking in the corner. While the streetwalkers had their streetlamps to stand under, we had our tin: we’d stand in front of it – and it was more like standing at the pillory than anything else, since any passerby could spit at you. Inside, the place stank invariably of disinfectant and piss. You’d go in, fish out your cock, splash the blotchy, rimey wall. Sometimes there’d be graffiti scratched with a fingernail into the palimpsest of rime, a peace sign or some completely incomprehensible joke. If you only came in for a piss, you’d walk right back out. On the other hand, you might circle the tin for hours waiting for someone else to go in. When this happened, you had to wait a few minutes, then walk in after him, stand off to one side and start masturbating, throwing sidelong glances at the man, who usually wasn’t even pissing, just delicately, slowly stroking his foreskin. By then the ice was broken and you could stop pretending. Without even looking up at his face, which you may not even have seen at all since you’d been following him at a distance, you grabbed hold of his cock and let him grab yours, too. You didn’t look up because you still felt some residue of shame, accompanied by the monotonous spatter of drops, the echoes and the cold, which was even more extreme than at t
he station. Since the tin had no doors, it was never completely dark inside. At some point every night, a mysterious Park Authority simply blocked the entryways with grilles.

  But not always. When it rained, the entire park caught an incurable venereal disease called drizzle. Sometimes the Beaux Arts was open on nights like that. Standing in the narrow entry, there’d be this bloke we used to call the Rainy Lover. He’d be therewith his trousers around his ankles and his sweater yanked up just under his beard. He’d be wet or masturbating, half-hidden in the depths of the entry. He never wanted anything from anyone, just the echo of rain beating against the tin walls, the amplified sound of ordinary, everyday raindrops. He probably didn’t even feel the cold, nor the embarrassment, nor the wind. Who knows, maybe that was what he was into? How does it feel to have cold drops of rain slowly trickle down your naked body, and the water’s not even clean, but leaking from the rusty roof of a latrine? Sometimes it’s hard to remember what he looked like. What kind of face does a moustachioed thirtysomething make when he’s got his unfashionable sweater all bunched up against his neck in one hand? What does he think about? Does he get excited by the slightest rustle in the nearby bushes? Is he disappointed when it turns out to be nothing more than a hedgehog? Maybe it excites him a little too much? One night I saw him during a summer storm. He was standing there smoking a cigarette while the tin was attracting a barrage of lightning. A mound of wet sheet metal. To die in the public conveniences. In Romantic drama it’s always the villains who get struck dead by lightning. Like Balladyna, who died on the throne. The Rainy Lover looked pale, somewhat statuesque, the condensation slicking his hair back in an old-fashioned, pre-war do. Even his moustache looked a little like Hitler’s. Any good mystery novel has the killer going after his quarry on a rainy night. At night the park promised everything, and there was no time left for it to deliver before the cold day dawned.