Nine (16 page)

“Don't be jealous, Pankracy. Mr. Paweł's a person and you're a cat.” Interrupting her story for a moment, then going back to the dark stairs and the hope that in a minute, less, the door would open and in the bright stream of light she would see a blue denim shirt, the same that often appeared in the store and that she liked so much that one day she bought one like it, and alone in her apartment she would put it on to feel the touch of the blue cloth on her bare flesh. Like now.

She knocked loudly and for a long time, but no one opened. Since her knuckles hurt, she used her fist. Then a voice behind her:

“He's not there. He went out yesterday morning and hasn't been back since.”

 

The tea was pale yellow and sweet. The old lady had added three spoonfuls and stirred. “It'll do you good, dear. It must be cold outside.” On the wall, a large picture of Christ with a flaming heart. Dried palm leaves stuck behind the gilt frame. A smell of vanilla, warm air from the kitchen. On a walnut bookcase, lace napkins, a china shepherdess on each. Seven pink girls in
dancing
shoes and garlands striking poses beneath a green rhododendron. “And you know, Pankracy, there was a cat there too, a tabby. You would have liked her. Quite refined, with long hair, like a Persian, bluish with dark streaks.” The woman removed the cat from the armchair and sat down. “I've known him since he was this high, my dear. I knew his mother. Such a religious woman. She would even go to church during the week, and on Sundays she never missed confession and Holy Communion. Though I can't imagine what sins she committed. They were poor people but decent. I've known him since he was this high and won't say a bad word about him. He always said good morning. She was an orderly in the hospital, the husband worked at the plant, and Paweł collected bottles—he was always so resourceful. He would follow the drunks and wait till the bottle was empty. He had two sisters, but they always stayed home. They had a little house. It was only a few years ago, when he started to do well for himself, that he bought the apartment. His parents got two rooms in a complex, because their house was bulldozed for a highway His father worked all his life on that house; he was always building, patching, fixing, but it wasn't much of a place—maybe three small rooms. I don't know, I was never inside. I didn't know them well. Paweł was so resourceful and always did his best. He was an altar boy, and his clothes were clean, even if they were darned. They never had much money. Other kids loafed, but he would take a sack and pick grass for the rabbits. Back then people kept rabbits. Rabbits make good pâté. And in the fall he'd pick mushrooms in the woods. They aren't as many nowadays. The family ate them at home, but he also used to dry and sell them. At fourteen he was already working part-time on construction jobs. People built, though not as much as today. In these parts everyone was
putting things up, making extensions on their own. At most they'd hire a helper. The other boys would run about all summer long, but he'd be working. He worked at the greenhouses, growing carnations and gerbera, then freesias when they became popular; and on All Souls I'd see him outside the cemetery selling candles and chrysanthemums. When he was older, he delivered milk. At three or four in the morning he got on his bike and rode to Bródno, because there were no apartment buildings around here. He made it back in time for school at eight. He was starting to shave but didn't drink. With his schoolmates it was hello and good-bye. In the little garden at their house, he made a tunnel of plastic and sowed radishes and lettuce to sell. He bought an old motorcycle, made a sidecar for it, and took his produce out and sold it. But he went to church less, didn't have the time. He might have worked on Sundays too. The Lord will forgive him, because he's a good boy. Everyone wants a better life. There's nothing wrong with that. He always said good morning. Others stole. I know what they did. In the morning I'd see him from my window carrying his bags to the bus. One in each hand and one over his shoulder, like a refugee or a Russian. He'd stand on Marszałkowska in a transparent plastic raincoat. I saw him there one time. It was raining, and you couldn't even tell what he was selling, because it was covered up. He didn't recognize me. He was looking into the distance. The people walking by didn't stop, the wind flapped his raincoat, and there was a puddle, but he stood there all the same. The other merchants had packed up and left, and he was on his own out there. I remember it like yesterday.”

The cat stirred. Music went on in the apartment below. The woman said she knew they were young people, but it was Lent after all. Żosia sipped her tea to make the time pass more slowly.
“You know, ma'am, I came because there was something wrong with the phone. A busy signal the whole time.”

“Yes, the night before last. Someone was there. I was in bed, but you know old people, dear—I couldn't sleep. This house was built before the war and the walls are thick, so it must have been loud. Then I heard someone coming down the stairs, and a car or two drove away. I don't know, I didn't get up. But he must have still been there, because I didn't hear the door lock, and you can always hear that. He probably left in the morning. I'm always sound asleep then.”

 

“Those kind of people?” asked Beata.

Two men came into the bar and went to the counter.

“More or less,” said Jacek, and turned away from them.

One rested his foot on the crossbar of a stool. His sock was white. The other picked up an ashtray and tapped it on the counter.

“Storkie!” he called toward the bead curtain and spun the ashtray like a top. The bartender appeared with a glass in his hand. He came out slowly, dull, as in a black-and-white movie.

“Load us up, Storkie.”

The bartender put the glass down, reached under the counter, and took out a box of balls.

“The cues are in the other room,” he said.

“Bring us two beers,” said the man with the socks, and both went into the dark room by the john. A white glare flooded the pool table, but they were in shadow.

“You know them too?” asked Beata.

“They're all the same,” he said. “Like Chinamen.”

“Chinamen smile.”

“And those guys don't?”

“They give me the creeps. Their faces don't move, like animals. Dogs. As if they don't have face muscles.”

“Dogs have face muscles.”

“But they only use them for biting.”

The bartender, passing with two beers on a tray, didn't even glance at them.

“He's pretending he doesn't know you,” said Beata.

“Sometimes it's better that way.”

“For who?”

“For everyone,” said Jack, and rubbed his temples.

“The ears have the least blood supply of any part of the body,” said Beata.

“They feel funny.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Where there's little blood, little feeling.”

The bartender came back and vanished behind his bead curtain.

In the garish light over the pool table, hands, cuffs, and cues. The players circled lazily. They took off their jackets. Their shirts as if cut from black paper. Smoke gathered and hung beneath the lamp. The balls scattered with a crack, and one man said: “Fucking Sarajevo.” They moved slowly, prepared in an instant to leave on serious business. In their veins, not blood but images of actions. They were actors in a reality they had made up, because the time when sons repeated the gestures of their fathers was over. Cars went down Tamka. In the oxidized night the drivers gazed at the world and accepted it. Astras overtook Corsas, Corollas left Golfs behind, Nexias passed Twingos, Ibizas drove alongside Almeras. Darkness drifting in from the
river. The cars dove into it like lemmings, only to reappear on the far bank in the stench of the port. Green, yellow, red, blue, silver, and white, beads on a rosary in the fingers of the city.

“Shit,” said one of the players and straightened. Two balls dropped into the pockets and rolled into the low belly of the table with a dull rumble. “Maybe an easy round of bar billiards?”

“My ass,” said the other, and began to set up a new game. Three cigarettes burning down in the ashtray.

“Tell him to put something on,” said the one who had lost.

“He'll only put on fag music,” said the other.

“Whatever. Just so it's not quiet.”

“Quiet bothers you?”

“When it's quiet, something can happen.”

“And when the music's on, it can't?”

“It can, but you don't have to wait.”

“Shut up and play, Waldek.”

 

Jacek could see them out of the corner of his eye, could guess what they were talking about. The balls clicked on the table, like people who meet, do things for each other, go their separate ways, and meet different people, until the last one dies. He repeated to himself the telephone number that Paweł was supposed to call. A number useless to him, but to someone else wealth or salvation. The balls clicked less now. Then there was only the tap of the cue and the soft knock of a solitary ball against the cushions.

“Why are you smiling?” asked Beata.

“Nothing. Pool makes sense. Let's get out of here.”

 

Sleep came and went. At times he was in the apartment with the throbbing red neon outside the window. The salesclerk in the
deli had given him a look when Paweł said, “A hundred and fifty grams of sausage.” It was Easter Friday, and he had dirty fingernails. He noticed that when he handed her the money. The fingernails returned with the rhythm of the red light, and other images, floating up from the past, places he'd been. The Kudamm in Berlin, two Turks and him. He was walking behind them and trying to feel at ease. Loud talk and gesticulating, like the Gypsies from Targowa. Inconspicuous on the sidewalk, he sniffed at the unfamiliar smells, the Germans leaving a trail of scent behind them. It was getting dark. He had thirty-four marks, and his Caro cigarettes were almost all gone. He took one out with a cupped hand, so it wouldn't give him away, because on the first day he'd noticed that in this country there was no brand with such a short filter. The guy at whose place he was supposed to spend the night didn't show. The Turks eventually disappeared. In the drizzle, his white sneakers turned gray and shapeless. He was tempted by the shops but afraid of the light. All that he remembered about that night was that his feet hurt, he had a runny nose, he was cold. At dawn he met two Poles. Coming back from somewhere, they took up the whole sidewalk. He started telling them everything, quickly because he was afraid they'd sober up. They took him with them. He slept on the floor, woke at noon, the others still snoring. Then two more came and wanted to throw him out.

He tried to stop the images and rewind them like a movie, but they were fragile, kept breaking, and the darkness filled with noise. Someone sat down beside him. He tried to imagine a woman but was left on his own. He tried counting all the money he'd ever had, bills in wads, fans, piles, heaps of coins, his first ever five-zloty coin with the fisherman on it, but he couldn't recall whether it was really his, he might have stolen it
from his mother's purse. But he remembered the taste of the moment when he put it on the counter and watched the shop lady take a bottle of orangeade out of a crate and a chocolate bar with pink filling from the shelf, and give it to him with complete indifference, and with thirty groszy in change. He remembered the warm feel of the low wall in front of the store and the smell of gasoline from the blue moped that belonged to the mailman, who sat nearby drinking a beer. The five-zloty coin probably wasn't stolen; in those days he often took money, but it was mostly twos. He could have got it for ten bottles from the old geezer in black who drove around the neighborhood in a huge two-horse cart and bought empties. Only fifty groszy, but the empties didn't have to be rinsed. In the recycling center they paid a zloty, but the bottles had to be clean and the dragon with the cigarette holder would take every tenth one for free. “This is chipped,” she'd say, and no one would argue with her. In the bare yard, nothing but an awning of corrugated iron, boards for a tabletop, the steel box with the money, wooden crates filled with glass high as the sky. Cash without trouble, for nothing. All you had to do was know the corners where the pissheads hung out, the bushes where the better-off ones threw their bottles. The old guy too. He cleaned out cellars, junk rooms, attics. His cart trailed the stink of vinegar, stale beer, cheap fruit wine. Everyone said he was rich but to disguise it dressed in rags and didn't wash. He lived in a tumbledown house behind a wooden fence. He hired boys to help him. The filthy bottles were soaked in tin tubs and barrels. You stirred and skimmed the greasy scum from the top. Then the bottles were taken out and washed with a drill that instead of a bit had a wire brush attached. One kid got an electric shock. After a couple of days working your hands were raw, from the lye.

He saw it clearly now: the old geezer smiling, telling him to come back in a few days to see if there was an opening. Paweł walked along the fence made of sawmill castoffs. Golden droplets of sap oozed from under brown bark. He rounded the fence and tried entering again, but now instead of piles of bottles there were cages of foxes. The animals paced and circled in their wire-covered runs. In the pit underneath them, hot, fresh droppings. A woman in an army jacket showed him what to do. A shovel, a wheelbarrow, a path through the bushes, and a heap of old shit in a stand of pines. He wheeled new loads away, could barely breathe. The foxes never quit their hypnotic walk. The shit stuck to the spade, to the wheelbarrow. He had to scrape it off. She said, “You'll get a thousand.” Her hair dyed black. Later she showed him the cold storage room where the food was kept. The ground red meat smelled like a corpse. Each time the door was opened, green flies rushed. A bare lightbulb. She told him to wash the shovel, the wheelbarrow, which he then used to bring their food. The woman opened the little chain-link hatches and doled out the portions with a coal scoop. The only break in the animals' pacing. They ate on bent paws, their lowered tails quivering. Then he had to drag out a hose and pour water into the same bowls. “Not too much,” she told him. “That way the bowls are licked and we don't need to wash them.” It was summer, and he didn't have school. Sometimes an older man appeared. He'd put a small cage at the gate of a large one and prod the animal in. The new cage had a polished tin floor and was tight. The man would turn on the electricity and push a long spike up the animal's ass; the spike's handle was insulated. “A special order,” the woman explained. “The middle of July, and she decides she wants a fur-lined jacket.” The man did the skinning in the yard among the cages. The red body hung
from a hook where all the animals could see, but they kept on pacing as if nothing had happened. The rest was Paweł's job. He had to take it down, wheel it away, and dig a hole. It was hard to find a place where the spade didn't hit bone. The green and blue flies never left him alone. At times he felt that everything, the trees, farm, house, stood on a thin layer of earth and in a moment would sink into the animal graveyard.