Polychrome (25 page)

Waiting since early morning, Elżbieta Ogrodniczak asked
herself whether this was, in fact, the day. The reply arrived in
the afternoon, with the postman whom she glimpsed pushing
something into her letterbox. She waited, walked up to the
letterbox and extracted the envelope. She knew the sender. A
moment later, she also knew his address. She went back and
started preparing for the journey. She was in no hurry. She took
a long shower, calming her body which shook and sweated as
never before. She approached the chest of drawers where she
kept her underwear and took her time choosing some knickers.
All seemed inappropriate, bearing in mind that total strangers
might shortly be looking at them. The rest was easier.

She watered the flowers in the house and on the terrace.
Turned on the sprinklers.
She decided to pack. Then realised she wouldn’t really need
anything for this particular journey.
Finally, she closed the door behind her, slipped the keys
into her handbag, only to take them out again a moment later
and place them on the little wall nearby.
She climbed into the car and drove off. Only once did she
look back.
The sun was setting.
Night was falling slowly, stealthily, as it usually does in
summer.

Maciej Bartol’s second conversation with Mrs Gawlicka-Sęk
was even less pleasant than the first. He drove out to see her
although he didn’t expect to hear anything other than what
he’d heard one and a half hours earlier over the phone.
Her son, as before, apparently still wasn’t in, and when asked
whose son Jan Maria Pilski really was, she replied that he
was hers and that she wasn’t going to talk to Bartol anymore.
When he said he’d find out anyway, she retorted that he could
go ahead and find out, she didn’t have to talk to him. She turned
him out threatening to loose the dogs on him. The mention
of suspicion and danger didn’t help. She said she’d already
once made a mistake like that and wasn’t going to do so again.
She’d talk to her son herself because she didn’t believe a word
of what Bartol said. He didn’t know whether she said this
because she’d long got it into her head that she was his mother
and he her son, or because she’d been carefully instructed
in what to say.

How efficiently Pilski could manipulate people and reality,
Bartol was to experience for himself. He’d planned it out pretty
well. Dressed in a pink tie, coat, Oriental-patterned scarf, he
looked like the member of a club for careerists of various
kinds; and the invented fiancée fitted in well. Nor did he have
to invent much here: all the couple had in common was a
common staircase, and he must have passed her numerous
times. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the sort of conversations
they’d have and what a great problem the lettering on
wedding invitations would create for her, not to mention the
colour of the wedding dress. The idiotic ringtones announced
news of idiotic things and begged to be treated indulgently, just
like the scraps of conversation overheard by everyone. It was
hardly surprising that the dog trader, shamefully concealed,
did not fit in. Bartol himself had been caught out. He thought
he’d spared Pilski Polek’s teasing, and that’s what he’d been
supposed to think. Pilski had gained time, although God only
knows what he needed it for. He could have done it all in three
days, but no. Maybe the action was meant to unroll slowly, create
the unease inspired by random messengers and the acceptance
which comes with time. According to a formula known only
to himself, he’d chosen the messengers carefully. The gigolo
Rudzik had probably brought the sunflowers, which is why
Mikulski kept the business card; the glasses were delivered by
a woman so nondescript nobody even remembered her; Bartol
wondered who the third person would be. He also wondered
whether everything was going according to plan. Did Pilski
want to remain in the shadows, thinking that nobody would
guess what connected him with Mikulski? Who, after all, would
remember that Mikulski had taken in a little boy, given him
hope, then deprived him of it? Did he want to cast suspicion
on the son, Jan Mikulski, so as to stir things up a little, or did
he know the latter would remember? Had he expected the
police to find and bury Jan Maria Gawlicki – a fallen priest
who had killed faith, and not Lalek – Mirosław Trzaska? Was
he waiting that long so that Elżbieta Ogrodniczak, a mother
who’d bestowed her love unevenly, would know what she was
paying for and be prepared?

Bartol pondered all this as he drove with Lentz in the night
towards Fun Factory. He called the local police for a second time,
asking whether Elżbieta Ogrodniczak was at home. For a second
time, he heard that she was in Paris. This time, however, he asked
how they knew – and discovered that they hadn’t checked her
house but merely phoned her company, where a manager had
informed them that this was so – so it must be true. Bartol was
furious, screamed that he could have done that much himself!
The local big shot, not put off by any of this, retorted that he
could indeed and could also stop bothering them because they
had their own vice investigation to deal with, with the regional
leader figuring in the main role, all the female staff to interrogate,
and three television channels on their shoulders since morning.

Lentz drove. Without a word. In his own way, he was a little
surprised by the whole situation. And not even so much by the
fact that another suspect had suddenly appeared, which he
acknowledged with one sentence – that Polek had suspected
him all along – but by the fact that Bartol hadn’t told anybody
about any kinship between Pilski and Gawlicka. Lentz didn’t
have to add that this was going to cause problems; and he didn’t.
Bartol was grateful. He didn’t want to think about that now;
he wanted to find himself in Elżbieta Ogrodniczak’s house as
quickly as possible and, more importantly, find her alone. The
only thing he knew was that she hadn’t flown either to Paris
or anywhere else.

When they arrived, only the garden lights were on. She
could have turned them on herself, but they could equally well
have turned on automatically with the dusk. They couldn’t be
sure. They drove around twice. It looked as though nobody
was in. Nobody apart from the crickets which tried to drown
the sound of sprinklers as they stubbornly turned and turned,
watering the grass, plants and, in places, the paving stones. The
men entered the porch. Bartol grasped the door handle; there
was no bell. He yanked but it didn’t yield. He was just about
to walk around the house and enter by the terrace when Lentz
showed him the keys lying on the wall. For a moment longer,
he hoped they wouldn’t fit. But they did.

Dawn was already breaking when they returned to Poznań.
Bartol didn’t want to go home; there, domestic problems which
he didn’t want to face, awaited him. Once more he found himself
behind his desk and, having sat down, thumped it with his fist.

And so what if he’d found that bloody mirror – inscribed,
so he guessed – since he hadn’t thought of it sooner? He hadn’t
found either Pilski or Elizabeth. Neither in one house nor the
other, nor even in the cathedral; he’d called there, too.

He struggled with his thoughts for a long time before falling
asleep in the chair. He woke briefly and, out of the corner of
his eye, caught sight of the letter still lying on his desk. He read
the four sentences ten times.

I’m always at your disposal. I now have to take care of
my mother. You know the address at which to find me.
See you soon.

He read it for the eleventh time and still was none the wiser.
The only thing he knew was that he ought to know and that
soon it would be too late. Too late for everything.

In the end, he dozed off. He had no idea for how long: ten
minutes or an hour, it didn’t matter. He’d managed to dream
of all the mirrors and hand mirrors he knew, including car
mirrors, before he was abruptly woken by a thought reflected
by he knew not what.

‘It’s there! Where it all began! Where he began! Yes, it’s
there!’ Of this he was now certain.
He sprang to his feet. He wanted to protect her, whether she
wanted it or not. He was just scared he’d be too late.
And rightly so.
‘look, ANd I wAs so scAred
I wouldn’t be able to make you
up so well. Oh, I forgot, you can’t see anything anymore. Never
mind, I’ll look – that’s what counts,’ he said as he kept walking
away, then approaching the armchair again. Meticulously
adjusting every fold of her wide skirt. So that it lay well, broke
up the faint light well.
‘How beautifully you’ve sprawled out. A true
materfamilias
.’
He gazed, slowly tilting his head to one side then the other.
She looked good from every angle.
He walked up closer.
‘Well, maybe the head should be a little lower, like this. A
hideous grimace has distorted your face, but that’s no problem.
You’ll be gazing at the child with care and concern in your final
moments.’ He gently leaned her forward.
‘Like this.
‘Good, you can’t see it now.
‘It’s a good thing I finished before she started sobbing,’ he
said, untangling the rope still wound around her neck.
‘What? Did you think I’d be touched? How touching!
‘Look! The rope’s tied well. Triple twine doesn’t break all
that easily.
‘You know what moderation, renunciation and being
prepared for a journey mean. Now I’m ready, too.
‘At last,’ he added after a while, plunging the thin blade
right into her heart.
‘No need for more holes, this one’s enough, just right. There,
it went in smoothly. Maybe because there’s nothing there, there’s
never been a heart there, at least not for everyone,’ he laughed
out loud. ‘I forgot to ask, do you prefer
Alter
or
Alterius.
’ He studied
the inscription on the blade. ‘Or maybe I didn’t forget, I’m starting
with you, so we’ll go in turn.
Alter
for you,
Alterius
for me.’
He stepped away again, ecstatically, to gaze at his work from
a better perspective.
‘Of the three, you’re the most important. You’re my Love.
You, you, you, you, you, you,’ he laughed, threatening her with
his finger.
He glanced at a corner of the empty room.
‘And you took away my Hope. To take in and give away like
that, not nice. You’re no better.’ He turned in the other direction.
‘You deprived me of Faith, bad man. What – screwing, screwing
then no doing?
‘I put you to shame with my morality, I, the discarded fruit!’
he yelled, still laughing. ‘Yes, it’s me!
‘Done. The time’s come,’ he said, calmly sitting on the floor
next to her and pressing himself between her parted legs. Between
the folds of her wide skirt, deeply, as deeply as he could.
He raised his head.
‘There, I’m not standing behind your back anymore. You’re
looking at me now. Even gazing at me with care and concern.
Because I’m all you’ve got left. Well, look, look.’
He rolled his sleeves up to the elbows.
‘Take a look.’ He stroked the laddered scars on each arm, one
at a time, slowly recalling the shallow, momentary, old, still timid,
now pale cuts, and the deeper, newer, pinker slashes. ‘You think
it hurts, hurts, no, no, it soothes, soothes. I assure you. Now look
at the relief. The top level.’ He laughed, severing and tearing the
veins first of one arm then of the other, on a level with his elbows,
at the highest rung of the ladder scarred with cuts.
He closed his eyes, laid his head comfortably on her knee.
‘I told you. It doesn’t hurt. It’s a relief.’

‘Can you hear my heart beat, it’s beating fast, too loud, it’ll slow
down soon… There, it’s already slowing down, boom, boom,
boom… boom, boom. Divine rhythm… three.’

‘There, I can see you… Justice of mine…
Why are you… Why are your lips pursed so tight?
Smile… it’s for…’
zofIA pItuch
woke up just as tired as she had gone to bed,
no differently. She bore the night shifts less and less well. It
wasn’t so much the dissecting of the chickens as the cold of the
freezer-room, which penetrated the bones and was at its worst
in the summer. She didn’t even warm up waiting half an hour
for the bus to Moczanowo. The early morning, too, had taken
its time to grow warm.

The heat of the day, as well as the persistent flies, didn’t let
her sleep in. She got up and shambled to the kitchen thinking
she was alone. She hadn’t expected to see her daughter home
at eleven o’clock.

‘Painting my nails, are you blind or something?’ The girl
didn’t even raise her eyes from the table.
‘No, I’m not,’ replied her mother, looking at the daughter
fastidiously gluing glittery beads onto her two-centimetrelong talons. There wasn’t enough room for all the beads; two
fingernails were broken.
‘Why aren’t you at work?’ she asked. She wanted to scream
but had no strength left.
‘Because I’m not going anymore. Pawecka’s bought herself
a new car. Thinks she’s found herself an idiot who’s going to
work for what she pays,’ she answered, combing her outspread
fingers through the air.
‘Maybe that’s because it’s her shop,’ replied the mother,
although she no longer felt like talking. She went up to the
kettle full of water. Turned it on and wanted to take a clean glass
from the cupboard. There weren’t any; she glanced at the sink.
‘I don’t give a shit,’ the girl explained after a while. ‘I’m
getting ready now. Looks good, eh?’
The mother didn’t know what she was supposed to be
looking at. All she could see was a protruding belly, oozing out
of a too-short blouse; protruding, so that the pink ring wouldn’t
dare lose itself amidst the folds of fat. She had no strength left;
she didn’t even feel like washing a single glass ,but she did. She
didn’t want to waste the boiled water.
‘What’s that for?’ she finally asked, seeing the expectant
eyes of her daughter.
‘What for, what for! Television’s coming soon, ain’t it? At long
last something’s happening in this shit hole. We’re neighbours,
like, so they might ask us questions.’
‘My God, what are you talking about?’ Zofia Pituch was
ready to drop and, supporting herself, collapsed onto a chair.
‘Found two corpses in the old cottage next door, didn’t they,
the one with a curse on it, the one nobody lived in. It must be
important cos it’s crawling with police.
‘Listen, just you tell me what went on there ‘cos they’re goin’
to ask, like, ain’t they?’ she demanded as she went up to the
mirror.
‘Dear God,’ shouted the woman, and her head fell helplessly
into her open palms.
‘Jesus, there you go again. This really’s goin’ to be Great
Moczanowo now! Look good, do I? Go down well on TV?’
‘Dear God, dear God, dear God…’
he’d beeN stANdINg
in front of the door for a long time before
she opened it; but, in the end, she opened. He bore it and also
bore the way she looked at him. He said nothing, waited until
she spoke first.
‘Do you realise there’s nothing more naff than a guy with a
stupid look on his face and a red rose in his hand?’
‘I do. I went for a simple symbol. Look what else I’ve written
here.’
‘Well, well.
Amor vincit omnia
. Love conquers all.’ She looked
at him, almost smiled but only briefly; and, closing the door,
added: ‘Let’s not go over the top.’
He turned and said to himself: ‘Things aren’t that bad. It’ll
all sort itself out. Patience is also a virtue.’ And left the flower
on the doormat.
It looked as though it had been placed in a frame.