Nine (3 page)

 

A car passed him with a wet hiss. Carrying with it the smell of mist from the port. He turned left. At this hour the buses were empty.

 

He walked by an endless line of cars, noted the makes. A mustard apartment building protected him from the wind. The trees had grown, and the field of rubble had become a playground. He reached the end of the building, and the cold hit him in the face, but then came the next building. He counted the stairways. Intercoms had been installed everywhere. Block 4, stairway 6. It
was supposed to add up to ten. He could never remember the numbers. His finger roamed the buttons. Someone asked questions, stopped, then someone else, then finally the buzzer sounded. He pushed open the door, caught the smell of wet concrete, and to save time took the stairs.

 

The man who opened was tall, big.

“I'm not buying anything,” he said, and was about to close the door. “Lot of good that goddamn intercom did,” he muttered.

“Bolek?”

The door stopped closing.

“Oh? Who are you? Listen, pal . . .” The man raised his voice. In the apartment a dog barked. A moment later a rottweiler poked its head between the man's jeans and the door frame.

“Easy, Sheikh. What's this about?”

“Bolek, it's me, Paweł.”

“Paweł who?” He frowned. The ball in his memory started to spin and clatter till in the end it found its slot.

“Kicior's friend?”

“Bogna's, from way back . . .”

The man relaxed. A faint smile of disbelief. He opened the door wider and grabbed the dog by its collar.

“And here I thought you were a door-to-door salesman . . .”

 

“I bought the place next door and took the wall out. It makes thirteen hundred square feet in all.” His gold chain slipped from his wrist onto his forearm. He shook it back when he reached for the bottle. Each time he raised his glass or cigarette, the bracelet fell halfway to his elbow. The dog lay on a red mat
dozing. Paweł said he was picking up his car from the shop in the afternoon, and he only drank every other round. Fire blazed in his empty stomach and rose to his throat, but his head was clear, cold. The day was filling out, rising; an umbrella of clouds hung over Downtown, but the light gradually cleared a path for itself, and the sky kept getting higher. Over a hotel fluttered a blue flag. It probably wouldn't get warmer, but as it got brighter, he looked around the apartment. It was like a copy of something that doesn't exist. Heavy black furniture with yellow fittings on the corners. A huge cabinet went all the way to the ceiling, may have continued to the floor above. China lay behind frosted glass decorated with golden flourishes. He was sitting in a black leather armchair, drinking from a glass with a silver pattern. Bolek let his belly spill out of his T-shirt. A palm in a glazed pot threw a shadow on them. Above the palm a brass chandelier burned. His thoughts were calm, exact, but had nothing to hold on to. He felt hunger, so he smoked cigarette after cigarette. An airplane moved across the window from right to left: a twinkling green firefly on a tattered strip of cloud-free sky.

“Paweł, you remember when those soldiers went for us at the Caprice?”

He remembered. The drunken corporal got a chair over his head, so the cloakroom attendant locked the door and they used the chair to climb out a big window and ran toward the station, down the steps into the park, to hide in the dark. Out of breath, they fell on the snow and howled with laughter as the trains on the bridge tore through the sky like yellow lightning.

“You couldn't run now, you bastard,” he thought. Bolek took another drink, pouring from glass to throat. The vodka arced through the air, fell between the parted lips. Time was
playing tricks, hurrying, slowing, making almost invisible things almost visible. He couldn't remember if two strikes meant the quarter hour or the half hour. The sun had come out, but it shone only on the back of the building. Another plane flew past, this time from left to right, its nose up, bright as a speck of fire, heading north, Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, maybe even Greenland, where it would be extinguished with a hiss in the snow. His left boot was cold, he wiggled his toes, the sock was wet. Bolek crushed his butt in the ashtray with a soft clink of gold, hiccuped, got up, walked to the back of the apartment.

 

Now alone, Paweł could take everything in. To his left was the sea. Boundless, blue, with whitecaps and a sailboat halfway between the armchair and the horizon. The potted palm stood where the land should have been. He turned even more to the left. The photo mural did not end with the wall but bent at the corner and continued on the next wall, the one with the window, and if not for the window frame it would have blended with the sky.

He turned back. He'd already seen the cabinet, so only the right side remained. The wall was covered with flesh roses on brown fabric. A green-flower lamp bracket jutted. Below it, a bronze bar tray on lion paws and wheels. Jack Daniel's and Johnny Walker shoulder to shoulder, hardly touched. The Smirnoff wasn't so flush, but the brandy hid both label and level in shadow. “Son of a bitch,” he thought, the white fever of rye in his mouth. The dead body of a television gleaned in the far corner and had everything needed under it, VCR, videocassettes, CD player, radio. Three remotes poked from the shelf like the tips of polished shoes. His gaze returned to the cabinet. His thoughts circled the room, sometimes keeping up with his
eyes, sometimes not. He reached for a cigarette, a Marlboro, but put it back. He could have hidden the writing under his finger, but there was no gold band like on his Mars. He got up.

 

Bolek returned just in time, zipping up while the flush sounded behind. Paweł felt his hair stand on end. He froze, tried to look behind him.

“Don't move. Not another step.”

 

“I've been meaning to get rid of this stuff. I could have chucked half these things and got new.” He adjusted the picture on its hook. The frame knocked the wall. Somewhere in the building an elevator moved. Bolek looked once more at the boy in the white suit with a Candlemas candle in his hand; he sat on the sofa and poured another drink. “You'd have lost your balls, you know.”

“I wanted to look up close,” said Paweł.

“Yeah, well you wouldn't have. I forgot to tell you not to move. He's like that. You know what I paid to have him trained? It probably would have been cheaper to get a new one.”

They drank; time passed. Paweł felt himself moving through the room like a draft, speeding up, down the stairs, pouring out into the street, sweeping everyone up like a flood, carrying them. The people would try to stay on the surface but would sink, only the restless and the single would manage, so he set his glass aside but didn't reach for a cigarette.

“Bolek, I need money.”

The other man looked at him with eyes as empty as the bottle on the table, completely sober. He folded his hands on his belly.

“Don't we all . . .”

“Bolek, I'm serious.”

“Me too. Everyone's serious about money.”

“Bogna told me to see you.”

Bolek leaned forward, pulled the sleeves of his jacket back a little as if preparing to make an important shape in the air.

“What's she got to do with it? If she's so smart, let her lend you the money.”

“She just said . . .”

“How much?”

“Two hundred.”

Bolek unclasped his hands, straightened his leg, reached into a pants pocket. He took out a roll of notes, peeled off two, and threw them on the glass tabletop. They looked like unfinished paper flowers.

“Bolek, I need two hundred million old zlotys.”

Bolek rested his elbows on his knees and looked at Paweł as if for the first time.

“Are you nuts? I hardly fucking know you.”

 

The bus was almost empty. They were riding beneath the concrete rainbows of the overpass. Two juveniles were spitting on the traffic from above. An old game that all boys play: hit the moving target. At their feet by the edge of the walkway, a beer bottle waited quietly. To the left and right the apartment buildings took deeper root. They were old. They brought to mind steep riverbanks where birds nest. The people in them had had time to age; some died, and new people moved in and were now stuck with the lingering smell of others. A person must sweat a lot in a room for the stink to get into the walls. He tried to remember which building he threw up in once, how then he tried to get home in the middle of the night but had nothing, not one
cigarette, or money for a ticket. In those days he didn't smoke as much, so he walked for two or three hours, the city at night as huge and still as a thing from a dream. “She had a bra but no tits”—but he couldn't recall the building or her name. The vegetable gardens appeared. The cumulus sky flattened the land, the fences, sheds, and trees were like toys, a country of tiny folk, dolls. A naked tangle of branches along the horizon like a stiff web and not a soul, only the little vanes on the roofs of summer houses with their faces to the wind and spinning in endless air. That too went by. Again they found themselves in the shadow of apartment buildings. The daylight congealed; the cross-street traffic thinned it for a moment, then the sun put the car in its cement, while he tried to recall another distant thing to escape the present, to catch his breath and stay in the past, where there is never danger.

But there was no time, they were on the bridge. The chimneys of the Siekerki power plant smoked, the wind pulling their white braids west. They drifted over the Sadyba River and Paluch, over the dogs howling day and night in the animal shelter cages, though no one came. Something whizzed by in the left lane; he saw a red rear with Berlin plates. “If it went from west to east, it'd be easier,” he thought. “Some could go with the current, some could use sails.” He remembered a schoolbook picture: ragged, bearded men pulling a barge along a bank. It would be easier, but now it was all fucking train, car, plane. The yellow river crept its oily way. Slow eddies made swirls of foam, straightened, and moved north under the bridges: five here, then in Nowy Dwór, Wyszogród, Płock, two in Włocławek, one in Toruń, another in Fordon, which stuck in his mind ever since he learned there was a women's prison there—the name had been familiar only from the labels on jars
of jam. A long time ago, but the river always woke the memory: red, sweet strawberry jam, with the delicate crack of those things not seeds or chewy bits but like bumps on the skin of a fruit. And the cool, dim corridors where silent women move in solitude, more untouchable than the queens of old and a thousand times more physical. He imagined their fingers on the jars, and he sought the taste of their skin, no doubt smooth and white under that dull prison cloth, delicate as plants that grow in darkness. But that was long ago; he remembered it but felt nothing now. The tavern ship gleamed on the bank like a gnawed bone. The bus was moving at speed. The day was taking a deep breath before the afternoon crap when the route would clog and come to a standstill. In the distance, the black maw of Rozdroże. Then a guy in a bomber jacket, sheepskin, asked for his ticket.

He went through his pockets with the lethargy of a hopeless cause. In his jacket two inside pockets and two low, then the back pockets of his pants, the front, the rubber pouch, the jacket again, watching the dark tunnel come dizzyingly. The conductor stood holding the overhead bar with both hands. Out of the corner of Paweł's eye, a white sneaker tapping the black floor. A woman in a red coat stood at the exit. “So what now—keep playing stupid or do we get off and talk like people?” The bus slowed and rolled into a stop. He waited for the hiss and jumped. He felt a hand on his hair, ducked, the woman jumped too, pushing the crowd aside, clearing a path, stumbling. He jumped over her, hit someone with his shoulder, and made it to the steps. Running up, he knew he didn't have much of a chance, but didn't stop, went right, to the open gate of the park. The place was empty, damp, quiet. He tried to go faster but tripped, and his knees barely kept him up. He'd had enough,
thought of stopping, then was tackled. Headfirst, his hands in the gravel. Now he could catch his breath. He tried to get up, but a foot was on his neck pushing his face into the ground. He got two kicks; he curled up, turned on his side, and saw there were three of them. The one in leather was doubled over and gasping for breath, the others too, though less so. On his knees, he waited in the middle of the triangle.

“What good did that do you?” asked the short one in jeans and a baseball cap. “Fucking sprinter,” said the third. From his panting, his words were tattered, faint.

Paweł got up slowly and sat on a bench. The men surrounded him and waited for their hearts and lungs to manage the air and blood. Their anger gradually left them, and his fear left him. Red lights from the buses on the Aleje, through the gloom of the park; drops of silver on the branches. The drops fell, losing their gleam in the air.

“All right, your papers,” said the one in leather.

“I don't have any,” he replied.

“Then out with the money.”

“No money either.”

The one in leather nodded, and the other two pulled Paweł to his feet. They found some change, less than a hundred, looked at his lighter, then gave it all back.

“Crap,” said the one in the baseball cap. “We should take this joker in. If we tell the cops he resisted, they'll keep him for a bit.”

“Why bother?” said the third.

“He pissed me off. I got all sweaty.”

They tried to push him toward the exit on Piękna, but he wouldn't move. They grabbed him by the shoulders, and one of
them whacked him on the back of the head. “Move it, you piece of shit, or you stay here for good.”

“Please, I can't go to the cops—I don't have time.”

He tried to break away. They pulled him; the gravel crunched. A woman with a stroller appeared, and feverishly he remembered the black grip of the gun he saw in Bolek's hall, it had been sticking out between the clothes in the cabinet by the front door. Just a glimpse, but Bolek had been behind him and knew he saw it. The woman with the stroller was getting closer; she had on a gray coat. In the mist the glasses she wore were like disks of ice. She slowed, then took a side path and broke into a run. The child started crying.