Swimming in the Dark

by Tomasz Jedrowski

  The next morning we stripped the sheets off our beds and packed our things. The boys were excited, talking about the disco, about the prettiest girls, about home and real food.

  “I can’t wait for a four-egg omelet,” said one pudgy boy.

  Someone else made a face at him. “You voracious hedgehog!”

  Everyone laughed, including Beniek, his mouth wide open, all his teeth showing. I could see right in to his tonsils, dangling at the back of his throat, moving with the rhythm of his laughter. And despite the sweeping wave of communal cheer, I couldn’t join in. It was as if there were a wall separating me from the other boys, one I hadn’t seen before but which was now clear and irreversible. Beniek tried to catch my eye, and I turned away in shame. When we arrived in Wrocław and our parents picked us up, I felt like I was returning as a different, putrid person and could never go back to who I had been before.

  We had no more Bible class the following week, and Mother and Granny finished sewing my white gown for the ceremony. Soon, they started cooking and preparing for our relatives to visit. There was excitement in the house, and I shared none of it. Beniek was a reminder that I had unleashed something terrible into the world, something precious and dangerous. Yet I still wanted to see him. I couldn’t bring myself to go to his house, but I listened for a knock on the door, hoping he would come. He didn’t. Instead, the day of the Communion arrived. I hardly slept the night before, knowing that I would see him again. In the morning, I got up and washed my face with cold water. It was a sunny day in that one week of summer when fluffy white balls of seeds fly through the streets and cover the pavements, and the morning light is brilliant, almost blinding. I pulled on the white high-collared robe, which reached all the way to my ankles. It was hard to move in. I had to hold myself evenly and seriously, like a monk. We got to the church early, and I stood on the steps overlooking the street. Families hurried past me, girls in their white lace robes and with flower wreaths on their heads. Father Klaszewski was there, in a long robe with red sleeves and gold threads, talking to excited parents. Everyone was there, except for Beniek. I stood and looked for him in the crowd. The church bells started to ring, announcing the beginning of the ceremony, and my stomach felt hollow.

  “Come in, dear,” said Granny, taking me by the shoulder. “It’s about to begin.”

  “But Beniek—”

  “He must be inside,” she said, her voice grave. I knew she was lying. She dragged me by the hand, and I let her.

  The church was cool, and the organ started playing as Granny led me to Halina, a stolid girl with lacy gloves and thick braids, and we moved down the aisle hand in hand, a procession of couples, little boys and little girls in pairs, dressed all in white. Father Klaszewski stood at the front and spoke of our souls, our innocence, and the beginning of a journey with God. The thick, heavy incense made my head turn. From the corner of my eye I saw the benches filled with families and spotted Granny and her sisters and Mother, looking at me with tense pride. Halina’s hand was hot and sweaty in mine, like a little animal. And still, no Beniek. Father Klaszewski opened the tabernacle and took out a silver bowl filled with wafers. The music became like thunder, the organ loud and plaintive, and one by one boy and girl stepped up to him to get on their knees as he placed the wafer into our mouths, onto our tongues, and one by one we walked off and out of the church. The queue ahead of me diminished and diminished, and soon it was my turn. I knelt on the red carpet. His old fingers set the flake onto my tongue, dry meeting wet. I stood and walked out into the blinding sunlight, confused and afraid, swallowing the bitter mixture in my mouth.

  The next day I went to Beniek’s house and knocked on his door with a trembling hand, my palms sweating beyond my control. A moment later I heard steps on the other side; then the door opened, revealing a woman I had never seen before.

  “What?” she said roughly. She was large, and her face was like gray creased paper. A cigarette dangled from her mouth.

  I was taken aback and asked, my voice aware of its own futility, whether Beniek was there. She took the cigarette out of her mouth.

  “Can’t you see the name on the door?” She tapped on the little square by the doorbell. “kowalski,” it said in capital letters. “Those Jews don’t live here anymore. Understood?” It sounded as if she were telling off a dog. “Now don’t ever bother us again, or else my husband will give you a beating you won’t forget.” She shut the door in my face.

  I stood there, dumbfounded. Then I ran up and down the stairs, looking for the Eisenszteins on the neighboring doors, ringing the other bells, wondering whether I was in the wrong building.

  “They left,” whispered a voice through a half-opened door. It was a lady I knew from church.

  “Where to?” I asked, my despair suspended for an instant.

  She looked around the landing as if to see whether someone was listening. “Israel.” The word was a whisper and meant nothing to me, though its ominous rolled sound was still unsettling.

  “When are they coming back?”

  Her hands were wrapped around the door, and she shook her head slowly. “You better find someone else to play with, little one.” She nodded and closed the door.

  I stood in the silent stairwell and felt terror travel from my navel, tying my throat, pinching my eyes. Tears started to slide down my cheeks like melted butter. For a long time I felt nothing but their heat.

  Did you ever have someone like that, someone that you loved in vain when you were younger? Did you ever feel something like my shame? I always assumed that you must have, that you can’t possibly have gone through life as carelessly as you made out. But now I begin to think that not everyone suffers in the same way; that not everyone, in fact, suffers. Not from the same things, at any rate. And in a way this is what made us possible, you and me.

  Chapter 2

  We were on that bus together. Warszawa, 1980. It was warm, the beginning of June, the summer after our final university exams. And although we’d been in the same year throughout our studies, we didn’t know each other. You’d never gone to lectures, never needed to. So we could have just as well never met.

  The bus was waiting for more people to arrive. I sat by the window, the orange wool curtains drawn to block out the sun, rereading Quo Vadis. I cared less about the religious part than about the love story, the heroic turns, the bravery of opposition. This is how I lived back then—through books. I locked myself into their stories, dreamt of their characters at night, pretended to be them. They were my armor against the hard edges of reality. I carried them with me wherever I went, like a talisman in my pocket, thinking of them as almost more real than the people around me, who spoke and lived in denial, destined, I thought, to never do anything worth recounting.

  I drew back the curtain and looked at myself in the reflection of the window. There were days that I liked what I saw—the long, arched nose, the almond-shaped eyes. But most days not. Most days I felt a dull reproach against myself, an alienation from my twenty-two-year-old body.

  The bus was filling up, the atmosphere giddy, laced with the promise of summer. The seat next to me was empty until Karolina appeared and hurled herself onto it, her big-mouthed smile tinged with her particular kind of sarcasm.

  “Ready to be turned into a peasant?” she said.

  I put the book on my lap. “Can’t wait,” I said, trying to look deadpan.

  Karolina laughed, throwing back her head. “And I can’t wait to see you getting down and dirty in those fields.”

  The bus was almost full now, and the driver climbed in, cigarette glued to his lips, and off we went. We vibrated with the rhythm of the clattering engine. Sun streamed onto my face, and outside, the spire of the city’s symbol—Stalin’s Palace of Culture—reached so high into the soft-blue sky it made your neck hurt to look at it. I was strangely elated. I had always liked the act of leaving, the expanse between departure and arrival when you’re seemingly nowhere, defined by another kind of time. This j
ourney reminded me of the ride I’d taken four years earlier: the day I’d taken the train to Warszawa for the first time by myself, to come to the capital, to leave my old self behind. I’d stood on the platform with Granny, two large suitcases next to us, a handkerchief in her gloved hand dabbing her glassy eyes. She didn’t want me to go, but she didn’t say anything. I was eighteen, itching to leave. I’d kissed her hastily and gotten on the train, feeling selfish to be leaving her, dragging the suitcases to my compartment, passing smoking soldiers leaning out of the window in the narrow corridor. I’d settled into my compartment, between men in worn suits and women in hats, drinking tea from flasks and peeling apples and eating boiled eggs wrapped in white-lace cloths like christened babies. The train had moved off, and I’d fallen into a lull, villages sunk in forests rushing past. Selfish. Growing into yourself is nothing but that.

  Our bus drove onto a bridge to cross the Wisła. The trees were a clear green, and the banks of the river filled with them like a head of dense curls. The smell of linden trees and lilac was in the air, sweet and colorful and intoxicating, submerging the city. The sandy shores were deserted, making the whole embankment appear wild. If it hadn’t been for the tops of the gray tower blocks just behind the thickness of the trees, it would have looked as if no human had ever lived here.

  I turned back to Karolina. She was smoking, her wide lips painted coral red and leaving a mark on the mouth of the cigarette. I can’t remember ever having seen her without that lipstick or without the dark-blond fringe that framed her unruly eyes.

  “You’re all right?” she asked, cocking her head. I nodded and couldn’t help but smile. I was glad to have her with me. We’d met in first year, and since then she’d become like a sister to me. It was she who’d taught me half of what I cared to know. She had a stack of under-the-counter books, which we read and discussed together. She’d introduced me to Simone de Beauvoir and Miłosz, to the poems of Szymborska and the travel accounts of Kapuściński. Sometimes, she’d compare our country with Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia and declare we needed a similar revolution. I admired her courage to speak her mind.

  “Please,” she’d say, and pull her eyebrows together whenever I’d ask if she wasn’t afraid of speaking out. Mother and Granny had fed me stories of terror, of people they knew back in the day disappearing for one critical comment.

  “Stalin’s been dead for a long time,” Karolina would say. “We know the system is a farce; they know it’s a farce. And we’re not in East Germany, thank God. Here they’re sleepwalking.”

  The countryside began, and we bumped along the roads past vast fields and birch forests and endless stretches of pines and little tired towns with church spires sticking out. I don’t know whether Karolina fully knew about me—I think she suspected it. But she never pushed me, never confronted me, and I have always been grateful to her for that. It’s the sort of subtlety I’m not sure I would have had in her place. Only once did she come close to overstepping the line. It was a month or so before the camp, after a play at the National Theatre—we’d gone to see Mrożek’s Tango. We felt like a drink, and she took me to a small bar tucked away in a narrow side street in the Old Town. She said that was where the actors went. The place was full of smoke and dark animated figures by the bar, spilling out onto the pavement. It felt like the beginning of summer. I could tell what many of those men were but, at first, didn’t want it to be real. There was an exuberance about them that disturbed me deeply. It was their curling voices, the “darlings” that padded their sentences, their quick, voracious eyes, the movement of their hips as Donna Summer moaned “I Feel Love” over hypnotic electric beats, a song I had loved and now berated myself for ever having liked. They threw one furtive glance at me and I felt see-through. Karolina didn’t seem to notice anything unusual—there were women too, relaxed and sly and loud. I looked at her sideways, wondering whether she was really oblivious or just pretending. I wanted to leave right then and there, wanted to stop noticing, stop searching for a face that I would desire and could never have, but Karolina ordered us drinks and I managed to stay and talk and to keep my eyes mostly on her. By the time our beers were almost empty, I’d grown restless and angry, asked her why she had brought me there. She was casual, as always. She said a friend had recommended the place.

  “What friend?” I asked.

  She made a face like she was thinking. “You wouldn’t know him.”

  I nodded, smiled ironically. “Fine. Can we leave now?”

  Her face was unchanged, as if she hadn’t heard me. She drank the rest of her beer in one go, put her money on the bar, and got up from her stool. “Let me just go to the bathroom.”

  She walked off, and I stood alone in the crowd, feeling entirely powerless, an embarrassed child in the midst of pleasures he couldn’t grasp. No, it was worse than that. Beside me, two old men in suits who had appraised us spoke in excited voices.

  “You know, darling,” said one to his friend, in a stage whisper, with a fur collar around the lapel of his jacket, sounding drunk, “you must read that unpublished Baldwin I told you about. It moved me to tears. If that won’t make you wake up, nothing will.”

  The other one—very thin—nodded. “You’ll pass it to me, will you, darling?”

  “Yes, but be careful with it, you know it’s not even my copy, it’s hers”—and he pointed at a man in a white silk shirt across the bar, deep in conversation with what looked like one of the actors from the play we had seen, a pretty boy with wavy blond hair and a small, upturned nose.

  After this, Karolina came back from the ladies’ and we left. I was determined to take nothing from that place, not one memory, not one conclusion for myself. But like stones thrown into the sky with all one’s might, pieces of that night—the boys and the men who wanted them, the flirtation, the codes of seduction I could only guess at—returned to me with even greater intensity than I had lived them. The law of gravity applies to memories too. And one day, as I sat in the library trying to work, to clear my mind, I remembered the book. I found his name in a catalogue of the foreign literature department. Baldwin. James. There was a list of his works, and only one of them had no official translation: Giovanni’s Room. This had to be it, I thought. I shut the catalogue, tried to forget about it. But the title wouldn’t leave me in peace, tantalizing like a loose tooth. I set out for it. And after weeks of searching, weeks of questions to suspicious-looking shop attendants who’d tell me there was no such book, that it had never been translated, I got lucky. It was just a few days before camp, in a tiny antykwariat bookshop that specialized in art and history, run by a man who could have been a friend of those men in the bar. He shot me a meaningful, almost amused look, then walked off to a back room and returned with a rustling brown-paper package.

  When it was time to pack for the camp, I tore off the cover and glued the pages neatly into another book, burying it deep down at the bottom of my bag.

  Our bus arrived at the end of the afternoon, as the sun was getting weaker but hadn’t yet begun to set. The camp lay just outside a village, surrounded by low wooden fences and lined by a little river on one side. The bus stopped in front of the main building, a wide concrete bungalow with a clock on its facade and a set of flags (white and red, hammer and sickle) hanging limply from its front. A short, stout man in a uniform watched us with small, attentive eyes as we climbed out of the bus, slightly dizzy, shaken from the ride.

  “I’m Comrade Leader Belka,” he boomed, commanding us to line up in front of him. There was something imperious in his voice and something both weary and angry about his manner. It was the same anger and weariness I’d observed in my schoolteachers, those who struggled to believe in the system yet punished others for doing the same. “Welcome to the work education camp,” Belka called out, walking up and down the line we’d formed. “I congratulate you for having signed on for this important service.” Our faces were impassive, but the irony of his words couldn’t have escaped anyone. The camp was obligato
ry—no one would be allowed to graduate without participating. He continued his speech, extolling the importance of agricultural work, the role of the working classes in our socialist struggle, and the duty, even for “intellectuals” (he grimaced at the word), to contribute to the efforts of the fatherland. Obedience was key, he said.

  It was the same spiel we’d heard all our lives, with more or less conviction. I turned my head and looked along the line to find Karolina, but instead my eyes fell on you. I had never seen you before—not consciously, anyway. Yet my mind felt strangely relieved, as if it had recognized someone. You were as tall as me, broad-shouldered, and your eyes were light, contrasting with your dark hair. You were looking at Belka, concentrating, and I took a moment to take you in, unguarded, forgetting myself. As if by instinct, like an animal suddenly aware of being watched, you turned your head toward me, and before I could avert my gaze, our eyes met, locked for an infinite, interminable instant in mid-air. A flash of heat traveled from my stomach to my cheeks, my thoughts jumbled like a ball of string. I turned my head as quickly as I could. For the rest of the speech I looked straight at the comrade leader, my mind scrambling for composure, stumbling over itself.

  When Belka had finished, we grabbed our bags from the bus and were assigned to the different wooden huts scattered around the campgrounds. I was in one with three other guys, Wojtek, Darek, and Filip. They were nice boys, strangely immature and innocent. We shared two bunk beds, a table, and two chairs. We went to have dinner in the canteen, served by an army of women in aprons and deflated paper bonnets, standing behind the counter as if someone had left them there many years earlier. A large lady with an immobile face served the tomato soup with rice, while an ageless-looking girl with reddish skin piled on beetroot mash and potatoes. I sat with Karolina and the boys from my hut. They spoke easily, joking and jesting. But I wasn’t really there. I looked around the canteen, across the long tables and through the tangled voices and ringing cutlery, until I spotted you: sitting at a table at the other end of the room, deep in conversation with a girl, your head turned toward her. In the stark white light of the canteen your black hair glistened, and there was something strangely focused about you, something light yet unyielding in your eyes that stirred both envy and desire in me. It was as if your presence already overpowered me, like a prophecy I was unable to read.