Nine (11 page)

 

Patches of shadow on the long empty street. Leafless poplars and chestnut trees cast a tangled pattern across the asphalt. They passed the little brick church on the hill, the acacia wood as well, and the clump of pines. Now slowly, as if moving against the current of time. To the right, on a square that looked like a forest clearing, was an old wooden building like the prewar houses on
the Otwock line. Not many of its kind around here—in fact it was the only one. Two stories, a steep roof, a porch added later, and verandas clearly trying to separate from the rest of the building. The old crossbeams like Venetian blinds. Sawdust and dry leaves spilled from the crevices. Bolek said it used to be bigger, and Iron Man explained:

“The other half fell, so the folks in the first half had firewood for the winter.”

“What about the people in the second half?”

Iron Man shrugged. “I guess they moved.”

Farther on, set back from the roadway, surrounded by chain-link fences and half hidden by the bare stalks of raspberries and lilacs, a row of colorless cube buildings with flat tar-paper roofs. Ferns and geraniums behind windowpanes, so someone lived there, though not necessarily—maybe someone just came to water the plants. Driving slowly, they watched an old film in which men in polyester suits stroll at a self-satisfied pace toward a station of the suburban train, and in the afternoon they return by the same route, on a path through wild grass between stands of birch and willow, tired but calm, because time stands still, and food prices rarely change, and when they do, it's only a twitch, not the daily betrayal of modern times. Women carry groceries in open-weave bags that served their mothers and would be passed on to their daughters, along with heavy glass siphons with a plastic trigger lever, empty, carefully folded sugar bags, jam jars, milk bottles, colored candy boxes, plastic sacks, tin containers for sauerkraut from the private shop with the barrel in the corner, and a hundred other things whose quiet pulse slowed the turning of the world so much that between Saturday afternoon and Sunday you had the most matter-of-fact eternity filled with the fluttering of pigeons in a still blue sky.

“What did your old man make?” asked Bolek.

“When he was alive? About twenty-six hundred. As far back as I can remember, always about that.”

They slowed even more.

The bushes to the right thinned to an open area of trampled earth and a two-story apartment building. Pepper-and-salt brick beneath crumbling plaster. A red Fiat 125 stood with its nose down like a dog sniffing at something. Smoke from some of the chimneys. The bench by the wall on the sunny side was empty. Sixty degrees in the sun and no one drinking wine. In the windows upstairs no women leaning out, elbows on pillows, because there was no one now to look at. Those who hang around are the first to go in times like these. It's not easy for young people to gather in those small groups that can sit in one place all day, and if some leave, others appear in their place so the eye sees no change.

At an intersection Bolek asked:

“Where do you want to go?”

“Maybe to the store.”

 

Paweł stood at the corner of Dąbrowszczaków and thought about the voice that just told him to call a completely different number that evening. When he asked for Mr. Max, a woman answered, but it could also have been a man, a boy, a recorded message. A dead, flat voice. Though he did hear the person breathing. It gave seven numbers that Paweł was now trying to commit to memory.

Jacek approached with a large bottle of mineral water but nothing to write with.

“I'm good at remembering phone numbers,” he said, so Paweł repeated it, then asked what the mineral water was for.

“To drink.”

“But it's cold.”

“So?”

“I don't know. It seems odd.”

“Water is for drinking. Are you OK?”

“I wouldn't mind something to eat.”

They walked through the square and turned into Skoczylasa, where there were fewer people, hardly anyone—an occasional parked car, no shopwindows or displays, nothing but stubby apartment buildings from the 1950s, all yellow and gray, made for a hardworking life with no frills. The Albatross and the Seagull were gone. The young hoodlums gathered elsewhere. Paweł and Jacek both looked at the great iron doors that once led to two movie theaters, the left blue, the right red, with gilded balustrades and rooms as long and narrow as sausages, seating no more than fifty or sixty people.

Jacek stopped to say something. Paweł muttered, “I don't remember,” and walked on quickly toward Borowskiego, a stretch of brick huts, warehouses, garages, and the telecommunications depot with a row of orange vans in the yard. The cheerful Å»uks and Nysas—no trace of them. It occurred to Paweł that aside from bills he had only received three or four letters in his life, hadn't sent more than that himself, and this would never change. Then Ratuszowa, a 6 tram was turning carefully at Targowa. Jacek caught up with him and asked:

“Have you been to see your folks?”

“They don't have anything,” was the answer.

They followed the tram. Outside the school stood a bunch of kids in wide pants and their caps on backward. They were passing something from hand to hand with furtive glances. Paweł and Jacek walked through the group, and Paweł said:

“I was here yesterday. Remember Bogna?”

“Not really.”

“She didn't have anything either.”

“Does anyone have anything?”

“I already tried the people who do, and they don't have anything either.”

They cut across 11 Listopada and were swept up by the main current of Targowa. From the bus stop by the Four Sleepers monument a mass of men moved diagonally across the intersection and into the open doors of local trains: Ząbki, Drewnica, Zielonka, Kobyłka, and Tłuszcz were reclaiming their citizens after the first shift at the FSO plant. The lights were red, but the men walked like the old-fashioned working class, shoulder to shoulder, with the heroic feeling that the world still belonged to them and that the permanently smiling Koreans from Daewoo were a phantom only or a joke that would end before it turned ugly. Colorful Gypsy women stepped out of their way, while the pickpockets had no interest in the men's wallets, which contained nothing but pictures of wives and children and loose change for cigarettes. It was an age till pay day Everything smelled of sweat, metal, and a hurried wash after the factory whistle, and even at night in their beds lingered the stink of the factory, because fathers had passed it down to their sons, the way talents and traits are passed down. The stink of hot aluminum, steel, enamel, rubber, of air burned by arcs.

“Where are we going?” asked Paweł when they found themselves on the other side of the human wave.

“You wanted something to eat.”

They went down into the underpass, where the neon was like fog, blurring everything. In this place people regained their shape only when they emerged again by the post office and
went to catch a 4 tram or a 26 or a 34 and found themselves across the river, where the world was completely different. For decades they'd been getting out of trains and suburban buses at Wileński station dressed in garish clothing to invade, to conquer Downtown with its wonders, glitz, and glamour. From Łochów, Małkinia, Pustelnik, Radzymin, Poświętne, Guzowacizna, and Ciemne, from all those little backwaters with their roosters crowing at five in the morning, their fire stations and flat, plowed horizons, where instead of the sun the great city rises like a mirage magnified by the tales of those who have been there, seen it, touched it, or heard the legend. It was to tempt them that the Różyckiego bazaar appeared two streets on. By Brzeska, the smell of the country. White pyramids of heartshaped cheeses, eggs, pickled cucumbers, bundles of dead chickens, their pale, plucked bodies, live birds in shit-stained cages, carrots, parsnips, cream in metal cans, black rapeseed oil in old vodka bottles, sacks of wheat, linseed, poppy seed, dried peas and beans, barrels of sauerkraut, pigs' heads, cows' udders, flies, the stink of burnt feathers, the dry smell of burlap sacks, old women's armpits, honey in bottles, lard in jars, buckwheat, rhubarb, blueberries measured out in a half-liter mug, and the sour stench of cottages in which the air hasn't changed for generations.

But a moment later, the smell of shiny plastic, celluloid, and non-iron fabric. Beatles boots with stacked heels and turned-up tips, Plexiglas cuff links with naked women inside, neckties on elastic bands pre-tied and labeled “de Paris,” gold chains, crimson lipstick, Dacron, nylon raincoats with silver buttons, Cossack boots with zippers, baggy pants with a permanent crease, blouses tight as diving suits, badges, belts, buckles, bags, and beads—all made of bright psychedelic polymers as in a child's
kaleidoscope. From the reek of cabbage you entered a world of glistening, sterile color, everyone did, those too who had hardly anything, who had seen these man-made hues only in their churches during May services. And that was the real revolution, because it took place in their hearts and eyes, and from that time they were destined and nothing could stop them in their march from the eastern plains of Sokołów Podlaski all the way to Ostrów Mazowiecka, from Kałuszyn to Wyszków, from Mińsk Mazowiecki to Ciechanowiec. First they sent spies, then an advance guard, and eventually captured bridgeheads in Ząbki, Żielonka, Rembertów, on the Otwock line, in places where at sunset you could see the tattered line of the Downtown skyscrapers, with the Palace of Culture and Science against the disk of a sun as red as the Sacred Heart.

While Jacek phoned, Paweł stared at a youngster in a leather jacket who held black-strapped Casios on the fingers of both hands and twirled them like a juggler. Next to the kid stood an old man selling fluffy slippers, and a pisshead in a light jacket held out a pile of LPs with the band Christie on top. But mainly there were the Vietnamese, selling tracksuits, T-shirts, Puma and Adidas knock-offs. Their small, frail figures like theater puppets, or immaculate dolls whom someone had locked in the cellar but who kept their good humor and elegance.

Paweł went to a stall and touched a black tracksuit.

“How much?” he asked.

The girl in the quilted jacket smiled and said:

“Sis hundre.”

“Good deal,” he said. She looked him in the eyes and nodded.

“You buy thuree, one million fi hundre.”

He turned the packet in his hands and tried to feel the material through the plastic.

“You want see?” she asked.

“Yes. This one.”

She took out a turquoise blouse with an eagle on the breast. He rubbed the fabric between his fingers.

“Chinese.”

“Not China,”
she said in English, shaking her head. “Hong Kong.”

“It's really cheap,” he said. “What about those T-shirts?”

She fanned out a pile of white Ts bearing a comic-book drawing of a man's face.

“Che Guevara one hundre.”

“What?”

“One hundre thousan. For thuree, two hundre fitty.”

He couldn't tear his eyes from her long, dark, delicate fingers. Her nails had a pearly sheen and were convex.

“What about for five?”

“Fou hundre.”

She wore no jewelry. Fine sinews moving under brown skin. The cadaverous light of the underground passage did not affect her hands: he was certain they were warm. He asked her to show him a dark-green dressing gown patterned with brown and gold flowers. She held it up to her own body. Too big for her, it almost reached the ground. He leaned over the table and saw her feet in small, shining white sneakers.

“Million,” she said. “Look good. For wife?”

“No, not wife.” He was about to say something nice to her but felt someone touch his arm.

 

And Bolek and Iron Man were sitting in the Beamer drinking beer. To the left, a little store on the first floor of a crumbling apartment building. To the right, another building like it. On the
dirt courtyard a kid bounced a ball and took shots at an iron ring fastened to a tree. Two others appeared. He passed the ball to them. One had bandages on his arms. They tried a few times more but kept missing, so they began kicking the ball about. The other houses on the alley were single-story. Some with bullet holes. Jars of food on windowsills. Someone went into the store and immediately came out again. An elderly woman with a walking stick carried bottles in a bag. The sky was blue. The view down the street was blocked by a railroad embankment.

They drove slowly. The black roof flashed in the sun. From a window over the store a forty-year-old woman wearing makeup and a housecoat was watching them. She took a drag on her cigarette. She had red nails. Her name was Bożena. She turned around and shouted into the apartment. In the building opposite, on the second floor, a boy and girl lay on an imitation leather sofa and watched
Walker, Texas Ranger
. The boy slipped his hand under the girl's dress.

A left turn. A narrow cinder road led through a stand of pines. Beyond, a small green patch of winter crop. Houses reappeared—small dwellings assembled from brick, asbestos tiles, and reed mats roughly plastered over. A man cut firewood in one of the yards. His son digging in a vegetable patch. The mother baking a cake in the kitchen.

A right turn, stopping at the asphalt to let a bus go by. The doors of a church open. A little girl walking up the steps with a bouquet of white flowers. Her silhouette disappeared inside as if into dark water. A cat lay in the road, flattened, dry. By a kiosk a full trash can smoldered. A kid rode up on a bicycle and without getting off asked for a carton of Klubowys. There was no wind. Bare poplars cast graceful shadows. The air soft and sickly.

Iron Man popped another beer and passed it to Bolek. He opened one for himself too. They passed an overgrown villa with a veranda and columns. In the yard someone tinkering with a red Zastava, but they couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman because of the raised hood. Smoke rose from the chimney of a small bakery. On the square, once a playing field, was now an unfinished house. A woman in a pink sweater taking a shortcut through the bushes, smoking and talking to herself. Her high heels sinking into the earth. A green Laguna with a CD dangling from the rearview mirror moved toward them. Behind it a lumbering orange Kamaz truck carrying a full load of rubble. Young birches, a golden haze, two teenagers playing with a condom, blowing it up and releasing the air with a shrill farting sound.