Nine (4 page)

“Listen,” he said, “I have a wedding ring—take it. It's worth something.” He pulled at the ring, but it was fast. With spit, the ring came off.

 

In the meantime Bolek was pacing from room to room in his apartment. From the room where they sat before, black and gold, to the blue room with silver trinkets, to the red one. The kitchen was white and gleaming. Coming back, there were two more rooms—one the color of seawater with an empty aquarium, then a silver-gray room with a swivel chair in the middle and a mirror full of sky but brighter and prettier than the sky. The dog stayed in its corner. Bolek opened the last door—this room was pink. Dark inside, but smelling like a powder compact. He went to the window and parted the curtains. A woman lay under a white sheet, the thin fabric on her body like a second, looser skin. Her legs, ass—everything visible, just a little blurred. He sat on the edge of the bed and patted the ass. She murmured and stuck her head out, a peroxide blonde. She
turned over, her breasts pointing straight at the ceiling. He covered her left nipple with his hand.

“Come on, Porkie, I'm not even awake yet.”

“Then sleep. Who's stopping you.” He kicked off his slippers and lay next to her. He tried to roll on top, but she slipped a hand out and pinched his roll of belly flesh.

“Give it up, Porkie. Tell me who that was. I heard. Or was I dreaming?”

He put his hand between her legs. The sheet made rays like drapery representing the sun.

“Just a guy. Paweł.”

“What did he want?”

“Money. They all want money.”

“And?”

“I gave him Mr. Max's phone number.”

“You're heartless, Porkie.”

“I could have sicked Sheikh on him.” He moved closer, kissed her neck. Tried to throw his left thigh over her leg.

“Give it up,” she said.

“Please . . .”

“Did you shave?”

“Yes. And I showered.”

“Then you can do the thing I like.”

Bolek slid off the bedding and crawled to the foot of the bed. He lifted the hem of the sheet and pulled it over his head. He looked like an old-fashioned photographer. Three fire trucks raced down Ostrobramska. The blue magnesium of their lights tore the river of traffic in two. An old woman in a baby Fiat, afraid, rode up onto the sidewalk. Syl's eyes were wide open. It was a game she played: to keep them open as long as she could, till they shut on their own.

 

Paweł stepped out of the elevator, adjusting his eyes. In the semidark he thought about how he was safe as long as it was quiet and the elevator was still going down. No one would see him, no one would hear him. This floor was empty. Some Chinese had rented it, but all they did was put new locks on the doors. Below, life murmured and clattered. He could even smell people. The kitchens in those apartments were cramped; at dinnertime the women put the chain on and opened the door a crack. He took out a cigarette, lit a match. A gloom hung at the end of the hall, as if dust were rising from the floor, though the air was still. Old walls do that. The match was reflected in the pane of the door leading to the outside gallery, but there were no windows there, only a wall and the black overhang of the roof. The flame died. He put the cigarette back in the pack. He moved down the hall almost by touch. The sound of his steps carried far in the building. Six steps, a landing, six more, and a speck of light. He felt for the door with his hand and knocked softly.

 

The owner wasn't in—sweating somewhere else. An hour ago he had closed the door behind him and taken the stairs down. Afraid of the elevator, its closed space pressing in on the body and brain from all six sides, crushing them into a hot cube from which blood would spurt. This was how his imagination worked. He had run down six floors to feel the rush of cool air on his face, pushed open the steel door, which slammed behind him as if the whole goddamn building would collapse, but no one on the street noticed. He was dressed in gray. Jacket, sweater, pants; only his shoes were black. They had not been polished in a long time. On Marszałkowska he was swept by the
wind
into the underground passage near the hotel. Here the fretful neon equalized everyone, the ugly and the beautiful, rich and poor. The dead glow covered the skin like powder, getting into body and clothing like a bad smell or old age. No shadow, no pity Everyone swimming like upright fish. Jacek (that's right, I remember now, his name was Jacek) turned left, passed the tram stop for Å»oliborz, passed the exit for the Metropol Hotel and the Aleje Jerozolimskie, passed the trams for Praga, pushed through the human carpet rolling down the steps from the Domy Centrum department store, passed the tram stops for Ochota, and began the circle again. Because it was safe here, and what was left of the blood in his veins moved him in the safe orbit of his madness. Besides, he knew he looked awful, so it was better to stay underground. Scraggly beard, greasy hair, skin as if the winter had gone on forever and the sun was stupid scenery used up long ago like an old battery. “Fucking nuts,” he thought. “One more lap, and I'll go up.” But he did three, because the plain, dead faces meant he could imagine himself one of many He put his hand under his sweater and felt for his cigarettes. Some cops had pushed a wino into a dark corner. Four guys with caps on backwards were walking side by side. Headed for him, so he turned off and came out on a street next to a Vietnamese kiosk that smelled strange, while the palace cast its great shadow across the bare branches of the maples. Half the city could have fitted into that shadow standing shoulder to shoulder. It wasn't the shelter he was after. He moved west, along the row of stalls, where in the five minutes before they left town Russians were going through the clutter of displays in search of pornography, high-end cigarettes, and presents. In the distance was the train station: angular, massive, driven into the ground as if it had fallen from a height. He made for it but got
no closer. When thoughts pass too quickly through a person's head, they're always ragged, absurd. They detach themselves, are a weight on the chest, as in one of those dreams where running takes you no farther from your pursuers. “Shit, I'll never get there,” he thought. His body was dry, but he felt covered with cold sweat. Like wind going through him, like being empty inside, filled with nothing but pieces of the city—like a silent film speeded up inside him. “Shit,” he repeated, the beginning of a prayer but he didn't know what came next. The sky above made huge geometry, but he couldn't figure out the shape. Afraid to look up. No better than in the elevator, this. He lit a cigarette, took three short drags, three long ones, three short ones again, then reached the steps that led into the bowels of the station. “In Leviathan your stomach plays a march”—a name came to him from somewhere. Cold again, yet he felt warmer.

 

In red glow, kids were trying to beat arcade games: bells, electronic gurgling, shots, and the dismal, sensual sound of tokens swallowed. Jacek approached the boys, but they all shook their heads, eyes glued to the screen, hands gripping the machine tight, because this was their only protection from the world outside. He left, turned right, turned right again, a warm prickling still in his body. He glanced at a clock, quickened his pace. This passage was the busiest in the station. It linked two bus stops, the main hall, the platforms, and the two longest corridors. Plenty of light here, and the crowd was animated, as happens in a place where some come to in hope while others are glad to leave. He began to look for familiar faces. A short, scrawny, mop-haired kid with blank eyes shook his head. The kid was standing by the sliding doors—the only motionless figure in an unbroken stream of bodies. Jacek went toward him, but the kid
looked away. By the escalator to the platforms stood a girl in flared brown pants and a stained sheepskin jacket. Below, the rust-colored roof of a railroad car was passing, the train headed for the other side of the river—Białystok, Moscow, maybe even farther. He couldn't tell whether she recognized him, because her eyes were bottomless. Unable to remember he name, he just asked:

“What's going on? Is there any?”

She shrugged, regarded him. He saw a blackened tooth, and she was also missing a tooth. Her hands were covered by the sleeves of her jacket.

“Is there any?” he repeated, then placed her.

 

Last summer he'd been looking for a hit, and it was like today—not a gram to be found. They took her with them in the car because she knew a guy and so on. The hot seats burned; everyone was sweaty and dirty. At red lights at deserted intersections, the glare of the day poured from the sky like molten metal. They drank water, cursed, and drove in circles between two bars and the playground of an elementary school (yes, it was mid-June), she and three guys, and the pitiless sun filled their skulls and spilled from their eyes and noses, and in another minute they'd go crazy, their guts would catch fire, the car would explode, and white flame would engulf them forever. In the end she got out at the corner of Jana Pawła and Nowolipie, took the money, and was gone. They sat in the blaze and counted the red minutes on the dashboard clock, and the Broom reassured them: “She'll come back, I know her”—but they doubted he believed it himself. But she emerged from between the buildings, skinny, in oversized jeans and a blouse of yellow and green parrots. She got in the car and said she had two grams. They were
mad, because the deal was three. “She took it,” said the driver. “She took a gram for herself.” Then they were even madder, because the stuff was crap, sticky yellow. “I never saw shit this bad,” said the Broom, and he told her to give back the money or what she'd taken. She just sat there on the backseat with her arms hanging almost to the floor and said she took nothing, the guy knew how things were in the city and took advantage. If they wanted, they could go talk to him themselves, but it would be better if they didn't, because he could handle all three of them. While the other two were trying to divide the crap into lines, the driver took off like a madman and turned on Solidarności. They had a string of green lights, went down Wolska, and under the viaduct turned at Prymasa and found a quiet spot at the edge of the park, then the driver turned and told the girl to empty all her pockets and bag. There was nothing, a used-up tube of lipstick, a pack of cheap Klubowy cigarettes, an old piece of foil licked clean, thirty thousand zlotys, bloodstained tissues, so he pulled her from the car and patted her down. Nothing in her pockets either—lint, the smell of sweat, a clipping from a magazine. He got personal, but there wasn't anything in her panties either. She didn't even resist. She just kept asking them to leave her a hit. “All right,” said the driver, “but you have to blow us.”

Back in the car, the driver said more than once, “You should all know that she used to be a nice-looking girl.”

 

“No,” she answered. “Don't you watch TV?”

“No.”

“Then buy yesterday's paper.”

“You don't know someone?”

“I'm into different things now.”

Her eyes closed from the heroin, and that was the end of the conversation. Another train—this time the color of black velvet—rolled into the station. He left her, headed to the passage under the traffic circle, and found a phone that took tokens. It was midday, and the crowd had thinned out. In the receiver, a long signal. Trams rumbled overhead. He changed phones and tried a different number. Again, nothing but the long signal, calm, filling his head, then the labyrinth of the passageway, then the entire city. He hung up, and there was silence, only the rustle of people who walk quickly. He chose the Aleje Jerozolimskie exit and went up to the street. From the Poniatowski Bridge the wind blew, driving the occasional frigid cloud over the huge Coca-Cola billboards. The cold bore him toward unimaginably vast space, and this calmed him, for he was only a tiny figure in all this, his pulsing fear only a drop in the ocean of air. A small red plane flew east, towing an ad for Fenix life insurance. He decided on Saska Kępa: he knew someone there, though didn't have a phone number.

 

Paweł simply pressed down on the door handle and found himself inside the apartment. The air was only a little brighter than on the stairs. The smell of old clothes and shoes, the taste of dust. A door with a frosted glass pane led to the living room. A gray, powdery light filtered through the closed drapes and settled on the furniture. He opened the drapes. In the space of ten years, the apartment had faded, approaching invisibility. Nothing destroys color like time; nothing wears away edges like the passage of the hours. The red bookcase was now the color of brick, and the spines of the books had thinned out like teeth in old age. A glass of strong tea stood on the table growing cloudy. He looked for signs of life but found nothing. A clock
ticked. He went into the dark kitchen, cocked an ear, said, “Jacek.” He was answered by an echo to the side, a rumbling, a knock on the wall, noise in the pipes. In the ashtray, the butts were short and all of one cheap brand. He sat down and tried to recall, but all he could summon was a slim blond man in jeans and a denim jacket. Once they spent time together. But not a word was left in the memory, just scraps of feeling. He held them for a moment, to decipher them. “Life runs away from you,” he thought, “and leaves shit behind.” His shoulder hurt, and he was hungry. He turned on the kitchen light. No refrigerator. He looked in the cupboard and found some cream cheese. He scraped up a few stale bits and swallowed them. There was also tea. He turned the knob on the stove, but the burner was dead. In the living room, on a windowsill, was a prison-style heating element made from two razor blades. Afraid to plug it in, he drank some water from the tap. He lay on the narrow bed. The bedding was coarse, dirty, but in this filth he felt safe. A forgotten place suspended over the city; life went on elsewhere. At their last meeting three years ago, someone touched his arm on Marszałkowska. The guy was tall, gaunt, unkempt. His gray suit hung on him, with things stuffed in the bulging pockets.