Lovetown

by Michal Witkowski

  ***

  These stories certainly have some fire in them. Candles have been lit on the graves of Jessica, Angelica, and Lucia. But in fact, they’re constantly going out, because it’s cold, practically winter, and it keeps on raining and snowing, and the wind never stops howling. But we have little lanterns in our bags, too. All we have to do is stick matches inside them and make sure we don’t burn ourselves as we do so. The embers of cigarettes glow in the darkness. Throats burn. That’s how people usually start to die. All of a sudden, even in the early phases, the colours start to fade, to turn grey, no, not grey – it’s just that everything starts looking completely different. The oranges Jessica brings to the hospital and places on the white table with its chipped enamel. She looks at them, surprised they’re still there, because she no longer is, and existence has become something utterly foreign to her. This is what they call looking back from the other side. On the other side the pain is constant, as if Jessica’s body were trying to debase itself for her, so she won’t regret having to leave it behind. Jessica is afraid of her own body because she knows that in a couple of months it’s going to stink. She looks at her nails and can already see the livid crescents beneath them. Her old job told her of the charms of decay only too well. Oh, how she’d love to send that body of hers to the scrapheap! But it’s not possible. She doesn’t want her body any more, which is destroying itself, which suddenly turns out to be as durable as a soap bubble, as a drop of egg white. Especially when seen from overhead – and as a matter of fact, she sees everything as if she were on the moon looking down at it. Only now does she fully realise that never, not for a single moment, did she believe in the possibility of her own death.

  Nightly talks with the telephone hotline are in fact rather comforting.

  It took Jessica forever to die. It started with the throat infections, which were quickly remedied. A few days later, strep throat; likewise cured. Then the flu again. The doctor’s question:

  ‘During the past three months, might you have had…?’ Hysteria. Jessica vomits into the toilet. Blood tests, but not for that yet, just for antibodies, which, it turns out, she doesn’t have. The norm is 18, she has 22. She was practically donating blood, sent a total of five samples to the lab, getting the verdict a week later. During that time Jessica almost died, her pneumonia undiagnosed. For the first time she wasn’t winning against her own body. The medicine relieved her sore throat, but only for a few hours at a time, and then it came back like a fire that can’t be put out. The next time the nurses took her blood (cheerful, clueless, cracking jokes), the radio was playing Budka Suflera’s latest release, and Jessica regarded it as a breach of tact. In the toilet, while peeing, she noticed a sticker advertising some PVC window manufacturer; she seethed at the insensitivity. All around her the bustle of life was continuing, utterly unaware of how ephemeral it really was!

  ‘Please, sir, calm down, please calm down, sir, please stop shaking, sir!’ says the doctor, but he answers straightforward questions with an appalling earnestness, and on top of that he’s suspiciously friendly. Fuck this! He’s constantly asking if he can be of help with anything – that’s what’s worst about it! He acts as if he’s my friend or something! This toxic atmosphere, where everyone’s so nice and understanding, it’s revolting! Someone offers to go with her to get her results, because ‘you oughtn’t be alone at a time like this’. Someone else offers her a lift, because it’s practically winter, after all, and ‘you mustn’t be out in the cold with your immunity compromised like that! Besides, somebody might cough on you on the tram!’ All at once, everything turns into a mass of sticky pap; the pap envelops Jessica and penetrates to her lungs. Discreetly, so as not to cause panic, the doctor palpates her lymph nodes – neck, armpits. He washes his hands; but the armpits continue to reek: why bother showering when you have pneumonia?

  Her entire organism was out of tune like an old piano, and not only that but some secret enemy had battered the keyboard with an axe. And the dryness – a fire blazed in her throat, and whatever she drank was instantly soaked up like water in sand. Not even antibiotics were helping! There was no denying it. And Jessica, who always had so much verve – lift up your kisser when you’re talking to me, kitty cat, and that’s what she said, et cetera – was too embarrassed now even to mumble those two words: risk group. She sat there on the examining table, staring at the pharmaceuticals behind the padlocked glass doors of the medicine cabinet, tugging at her hair, muttering incomprehensibly, her lips drained of color. Her voice began to break, ’cause maybe, maybe… maybe I have… When at last she landed in the hospital, it was as if she were going through life half-asleep. The strangest thing for her was when she began to feel strangely consoled… But what kind of consolation could that have been? Whole processions of long-dead people filed past before her eyes. They were dead, so what? Consider it another way – it wouldn’t be long, a few thousand years from now, and even if it’s a million years, so what? At some point in the future there won’t be any humans at all left on this planet. Not even the earth is immortal. Even the universe isn’t immortal, let alone humans. Then, right after that, came memories from childhood, from a time as-yet unaware of the sad inevitability. Her mother’s head in a then-fashionable wig of big, russet curls. Her face still young, like in those old, black-and-white photographs that have lacy, jagged edges. Then came a tremendous gap in Jessica’s memory, although she did experience the sixties. She was in their new flat, in their newly built block, sitting in the kitchen, and her grandmother was holding her in her arms. She gestured with her ‘little piggy’ at the windowframe, which had some kind of lever at the bottom for opening the double panes, and asked, ‘What that?’ ‘Ohhh, that’s where the baker man bakes his bread,’ is what she heard. One of the never-explained enigmas of Jessica’s childhood, since from the window – and she looked for it many times – there was no bakery to be seen. And ever after, in that little knobby metal box sloppily daubed with white paint and fastened to the old-fashioned window, the baker man patiently baked his bread, and he must still be there baking away, because the only person capable of breaking that spell passed on long ago. Then the nurse came in and put her on the drip, but Jessie wanted to go as quickly as possible. At a certain moment, just as they were deciding to insert the tube in her throat to help her breathe, her deceptive calmness shattered and she flew into an hysterical rage. She screamed at the entire ward. When she had first got there, she would wake up at night and cry silently so as not to wake up anyone else. Now she stopped caring and ran out into the corridor, running and running until she collapsed by the radiator next to Surgery. She pulled her hair out, scratched up her face. She saw red spots in front of her eyes. She rubbed them and saw a crowd of people coming at her, yelling:

  ‘Pull down your pants, Jessica! Moon us, Jessica!’

  ‘But watch out, your hole’s been fucked so hard the shit’s pouring out! Everyone’s too disgusted to screw you, they don’t want to get your AIDS-infected diarrhoea spilling all over them!’ It seemed to her that someone was probing her anus with a cold, aluminium torch.

  ‘Moon us! Show us your arse! Everyone’s looking at your cunt! Oh look, you have a cock too – ooh, so soft!’

  ‘Noooooo!’ Jessica bellowed at the entire ward, at the entire, vast hospital. ‘Noooooo!’ she bellowed so the scream would kill her, so she’d finally expire. ‘Noooooo!’ She broke free, jerked back, hacked, spat; then someone caught her and held her tight. Jessica gnashed her teeth and bit that someone, drew blood, and got punched in the face, and already that someone was sticking her in the arm, all over her body. A tingling heat spread out from her arms and through her veins, burning, then a foaming cloud of mugginess spilled into her brain. Suddenly Jessica saw herself lying bare-arsed and arse-up on a cold examining table, covered in blood and discharge, and all around her patients in gowns were crowding in, nurses and orderlies too, until the consultant ordered them all to get out. One older fellow whispered to a nurse, ‘Tha
t AIDS really is awful – they say it attacks the brain and nervous system, people go off the deep end.’ Jessica fell asleep, feeling as if she were being carried somewhere in someone’s arms, probably to the common room, or maybe to isolation, or what if she was being taken somewhere else altogether, somewhere where nothing existed at all?

  * Russian: What do you want?

  ** Russian: To talk with you.

  *** Russian: I see you speak Russian, come over here.

  **** Russian: I have some porn. You want to watch it?

  † Russian: OK, show me, show me.

  †† Russian: You ever fucked a black [woman]?

  ††† Russian: No, I’ve never even fucked a woman…

  †††† Russian: You’ve never fucked a woman? You really are a homo then, yes?

  * Russian: Well, I don’t understand that.

  ** Russian: But are you into me? Is your dick getting hard? Are you into me?

  *** Russian: Yeah, I’m into you, it’s just I… I don’t have any money. How much you want?

  **** Russian: I don’t want anything. I’ll even give you money, but I want something in return!

  * Russian: What?

  ** Russian: It’s us, girls!

  * Russian: The girls are here, let us in!

  ** Russian: We can’t now.

  *** Russian: In five minutes.

  **** Czech: It will never come again!

  * Russian: What do you mean? A bloke with a bloke?

  * Russian: But you’re not a woman.

  ** Russian: What do you know, that’s how they do it in Germany, it’s normal!

  *** Russian: You know…

  * Russian: It smells.

  * Russian: That’s how nature wanted it; why it is so—isn’t our problem.

  PART II

  THE LEWD BEACH

  Hey

  Not sure if this will work (I don’t believe in ads anymore), but who knows, maybe I’ll find a good-looking gay guy on here, someone I can build a long-term relationship with, one that’s about more than just sex and stuff. I live in Wrocław. I’m straight-acting, good-looking (told so anyway), and a student. 5’7”, 70 kg, 5” ;-), blue eyes. I enjoy cycling, I’m polite, drama-free, friendly. No pic, no answer. Well, I’ll stop now, guess I’m out of charact …

  The Old Dears of Lubiewo

  Jeeeesus! I’ve got a case of Poontanga, camping it up in my speech, my gestures, I’m flaming so hard you could grill a steak on me!

  I’m dripping with sweat; a tricklet slowly seeps out from under my hair and comes to a halt on my brow. I struggle to roll from my stomach on to my side, smear on some suntan oil. From my hollow in the dunes I gaze upon a blond between two tufts of beach grass. I write. Grains of sand on the card. Now the tricklet slithers on to my nose. Once it drips off the end, a new one starts. And another is already forcing its way through my hair, tickling my scalp under my visor cap. Little twigs, cigarette filters, grains of sand. All of it yellow, independent, translucent, part of a whole.

  Long live Wolin Island! Long live the beach at Lubiewo!

  The name ‘Lubiewo’ is a cognate of libido – the insatiable libido that saturates this place. And we swim in it, foundering in the warm, gooey muck.

  From Międzyzdroje, you have to walk west along the coast towards Świnoujście for an eon or two. Long enough to get sunburned by the time you get there. About forty-five minutes. One way, your back gets it; the other way, your face. I prefer walking on the bluff, through the woods, along the dunes. Amid the feverish buzzing of dragonflies and bumblebees, with green pine cones getting into my sandals, with a view of the ruined army bunkers behind the barbed wire fence. Ghosts of SS men in the cellars, the standing water, the swarms of mosquitoes… Yes!

  If you’re walking down there and you look beyond the green, wooden steps, you’ll see the nudist beach, and there, some way (an appropriate distance) further along, is where we hold court – with our suntan lotion, flasks of coffee, and bodice-rippers! With our noses – and only our noses! – covered with maple leaves. Wearing coloured sunglasses studded with fake diamonds. With tanning oil, and keys to our rented single rooms in Międzyzdroje. Because it’s nothing but lonely single men here. The older regulars, the ones no one wants to go with, rent in Lubiewo, right where the green steps end at the top of the bluff, and all that is up there is a single shopping centre (which has – irony of ironies – a huge rainbow as its logo), the woods, and an unguarded pay parking lot. As the other visitors, the young ones, frolic in the dunes like kittens with soap bubbles, I carefully rearrange my blanket, take out my lotions and cigarettes, and beckon some old chanteuse to come over and keep me company, but not for the reason she thinks. I entice them for their stories… I want them to become my storytellers, like the ones in Pasolini’s Salò. And every day they’ll tell an even more perverted tale for the State, standing at the piano, in front of the burning doors. It’s a faggot Decameron I’m trying to turn out here.

  The only problem is that there’s no such thing as sin any more. It’s vanished, soaked up by the sand like a couple of drops they’d flicked off themselves after coming out of the sea. Where did it vanish? When?

  Today the waves tossed a red flag right on to the middle of the beach. Right where our section starts. This red flag marks the boundary of our People’s Republic, a concept these lady pensioners understand full well. One of them was just arriving at a nearby spot on the beach, so I took advantage of the fact that a bumblebee had started to attack me there on those sweltering dunes, lured no doubt by the fragrance of tanning products, and the old dear screamed ‘Begone!’ at that bumblebee, swatting the air with her book, and immediately set about getting acquainted with me.

  ‘That bee certainly had it in for you…’

  ‘Well, it was persistent…’

  ‘They’re awful when they get angry! Here, see? They’re… they’ve built a nest here in this heat. Can you rub some cream on my back?’

  She sets down on the sand the book she’d been waving about, swatting the bee, which was no less persistent than she was – oh, but that’s lovely! I’m dripping with sweat, the bumblebee comes back. I glance over: whatever was she reading? The Beach. Gold lettering and the face of Leonardo DiCaprio against an illuminated sky. They made a film of that?

  ‘Yes, he was divine in it! Just right for a beach read. Shall I go a little lower?’

  ‘Thanks, but no thanks. Uh-huh, I just did it there myself.’

  ‘Do you fancy some coffee?’ She’s brought her entire world with her. She’d put together a little ‘bag of essentials’, something for her to think about during the long winter evenings, and including everything that could possibly come in handy. A first-aid kit, some multifunctional pocketknife she’d bought off the TV…