Swallowing Mercury

by Wioletta Greg

  The next day at school, I left my bag on the floor during the lunch break. Big Witek sat on it, and my spare pen cartridges, which were in the same compartment as my painting for the competition, leaked all their ink. I went pale. The picture was ruined. I went to the toilet and smudged the ink on the page with a tissue. It looked as if the capital of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was being engulfed by a viscous ocean of indigo. I left the picture to dry out by the tile stove. During the next break, I put it in a brown envelope and handed it over to Mrs Walo. She didn’t even glance inside; she stamped it with the Wojsławice Primary School’s emblem and hurried off to the post office.

  A month later, a strange man appeared at the school. Nothing about him matched anything else: he had gentle facial features and pointy ears; he was dressed in a black turtleneck and a light-coloured suit jacket; his trousers were neatly creased but his shoes were muddy. He went straight to the headmistress’s office.

  ‘Rogalówna!’ I heard. I had been summoned.

  I ran along gladly because I thought I was going to get some sort of prize again. Through the clouds of cigarette smoke, I saw Mrs Walo’s tear-smeared face. My Moscow lay on the desk. The headmistress led the jittery teacher out of the room.

  After they left, the stranger said, ‘I’ve made a special trip all the way from the provincial government office to reward your work.’

  I imagined he would present me with a new set of oil paints and bars of Wedel milk chocolate with hazelnuts, or a bag of sweets. I swallowed – and he really did pull out some chocolate from his briefcase. He slowly unwrapped the silver foil. The velvety scent of cocoa filled the office.

  ‘Go on, help yourself.’ He held the desecrated bar right under my nose. I took three squares. My stomach was rumbling. I was hungry because I hadn’t eaten breakfast that morning.

  ‘Have you ever been to Moscow, Wiola?’

  ‘No.’

  The chocolate melted pleasantly in my mouth.

  ‘And who might have given you this… interesting idea? Was it your parents? Or maybe the teacher who runs the art club? What’s her name – Mrs Walo?’

  Don’t start a sentence with ‘and’, I thought.

  ‘That’s how I imagined Moscow myself, sir.’ I decided not to mention the whole business with my school bag, Big Witek and the ink.

  ‘But why so… so catastrophically?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Why so gloomily?’

  Why did the chicken cross the road? I sighed and remembered Mrs Walo’s teary face. I didn’t trust this man, but I reached for another square of chocolate.

  ‘If you tell me who gave you this idea, the competition organisers will send you on a free trip to Moscow. What do you say to that? You could see the Kremlin!’

  He looked at me slyly and smiled, showing his crooked teeth. This conversation was wearing me out. I started shifting from foot to foot. I felt nauseous from the chocolate, and to make things worse, the man kept on muttering something and walking around in circles. As he held the drawing up to my face, someone knocked on the door. A shaggy head peeked into the room.

  ‘Boss, I have some bad news. I swear I just popped to the gents’ for a minute, and when I got back, there were two punctured tyres.’

  ‘Don’t bother me right now; you know what to do. This always happens. Put the spares on.’

  ‘Yessir, right away.’

  The shaggy head disappeared and I felt faint. I heard the questions ‘Who?’ ‘Well, who?’ ‘When?’ ‘Why?’

  I leaned over the desk and saw my pale reflection in the polished surface. A fly sat on top of the painting, in the darkest nook of the Red Square, and proceeded to crawl freely over the ink-flooded Spasskaya Tower. I felt a cramp in my stomach, and then my brown vomit covered the light part of the city.

  The school nurse was called, and I was sat in an armchair and plied with bitter stomach drops diluted in water. I glanced at the Polish coat of arms hanging over the door frame. The crownless eagle was blurring into the red background. When I recovered, the caretaker walked me home. In the yard, I chased away hissing geese with my school bag, stepped up onto the porch and walked through the hallway, which stank of mouse droppings, and into the kitchen. I nodded hello to my mother, threw down my school bag by the dresser, climbed the ladder up to the attic, lay down beside the pigeon cage on sacks filled with wheat and thought that on Sunday I would travel to Olsztyn and find a cave for myself there, just like my grandfather.

  In the weeks that followed, the headmistress dissolved the school art club, and I did not participate in any more painting competitions. Once in a while, in secret, Miss Dorota from our neighbourhood would have me decorate a letter to her boyfriend, who was stationed with the army unit in Lubliniec. I also painted a skull for Big Witek on the ceiling of his room, in exchange for three matchbox labels, which I was collecting.

  On the tenth of December, Lech Wałęsa received the Nobel Peace Prize and I stayed behind at school for a Christmas play rehearsal. Dad was supposed to pick me up at six o’clock, but the bus which he usually took from the paper mill hadn’t come. I was standing by myself at the bus stop, shifting from foot to foot. The water dripping from the tap by the fire station had started to form an icicle in the freezing cold. In the shop across the street, the windows had frosted over. The street lights flickered and flickered, and then went out. The woman from the shop cracked open the door and stuck out her head, bundled up in a fox-fur hat.

  ‘What are you doing here, my child, all alone? Go home, or you’ll freeze in this chill!’ she shouted.

  I was very cold and hungry, so I decided to take her advice – to stop waiting for Dad and walk home by the shortcut through the farm fields. It didn’t occur to me, however, that I would have to wade through snowdrifts in the dark. Just before I reached the state-owned farm, I slipped, hit the back of my head on a stone, and then fell into a huge snowdrift and couldn’t dig myself out. One of my boots slipped off while I was struggling in the snow. My soaked tights were starting to freeze. My toes went numb. I felt faint.

  Suddenly, I was standing in Red Square, dressed in an embroidered vest and a carmine headscarf. My felt boots were muddied. It was an autumn morning, and the Orthodox church shimmered blue and gold in the sun. I didn’t know why I had come here with my grandparents, and I stood in the crowd frightened. The stench of horse dung and human sweat mingled with the smell of hot wax. I grabbed my grandmother’s hand. In the distance, someone was swinging from a gallows like a scrap of wet canvas. My grandmother was crying terribly; she had covered her face and was squeezing a candle in one hand, without even noticing the hot wax dripping onto her skin.

  When I came to, I realised I was in Hektary, not in Moscow, and I had simply dreamt about one of Vasily Surikov’s paintings, the one about the execution of the Streltsy. I was still lying in the snowdrift, but I wasn’t cold any more and I didn’t feel any pain in my toes. All of a sudden, I noticed the flash of a torch.

  ‘Boss, should I rescue her before she freezes?’

  I thought I heard the driver of the man from the provincial government, the one who had questioned me about Moscow at school a few weeks earlier. I could smell petrol, vodka and cigarettes. Someone pulled me out of the snowdrift and moved me to the road. That’s where my father, on his way back from work, found me a quarter of an hour later. He immediately wrapped me up in his trench coat and carried me home piggyback.

  After midnight, Mum ran over to the neighbour who made moonshine in his cellar and brought back two bottles. She poured out half a pint, mixed in strong tea and sugar, and served it to Dad, who still couldn’t calm down after finding me lying half-dead in the road. She rubbed the rest of the moonshine into my feet. After the application of all possible remedies – including a poultice of parboiled cabbage leaves on my calves and a greasing with mutton and dog tallow – I regained the feeling in my toes.

  A Picture Pays a Visit

  WHEN THE PRIEST ANNOUNCED THAT THE
PICTURE of Our Lady from St Anthony’s Basilica would pay a visit to Hektary, my mother and grandmother set about cleaning our neglected house at once: they started washing the grimy walls, waxing the floors, sweeping away spiderwebs from the ceilings and rubbish from under the beds, polishing the windowpanes with denatured alcohol and newspapers, changing the musty straw in the mattresses and spraying all the rooms with fly killer.

  ‘We can’t have bugs nesting in the corners when the Most Holy of Virgins crosses our threshold,’ my grandmother kept saying. She wiped plant leaves with cheesecloth and used a blessed palm frond to sprinkle the porch and the thresholds, so that flies wouldn’t come into our house. But the flies didn’t give two hoots about my grandmother’s prestidigitation: they kept flying in as usual through the holes in the net curtain and circling around the ceiling lamp.

  My grandmother reached into the wardrobe for the crucifix and the holy-water sprinkler, which had been wrapped in a shawl, then put a small table in the dining room, laid out a tablecloth and covered it with periwinkles and freesias, which my mother had brought back specially for this occasion from the greenhouse in the neighbouring village. I was squeezed into my cousin’s First Communion dress and told to stand nice and straight beside the wall unit, which was polished to a shine.

  In the meantime, the holy image, encased in a chest and placed in a litter, was making the rounds through Hektary. A strange procession plodded behind it, of the same sort as for the blessing of the fields. The curate’s white robe flickered between the trees. The firemen’s helmets glinted in the sun, casting bright reflections. At the last minute, some people tried to sweep their yards, air out their houses, drive poultry back into pens. Children kept getting lost and found. Untethered, thirsty cows mooed in the pastures. Dogs broke from their chains and ran around the village, astounded by their unexpected freedom.

  In the late afternoon, my grandfather burst into the house in muddy shoes and bellowed, ‘For Chrissake, women, tie up that cow right quick because she’s parked herself by the gate, blocking the way in.’

  ‘Holy Mother of God, they’re coming! They’re coming! I can already see them on the hill!’ cried my grandmother.

  My father, an inveterate atheist, grabbed a piece of poppyseed cake from the kitchen and fled to the barn. A moment later, our yard was filled with singing: ‘O Madonna, O Black Madonna, how good it is to be Your child.’ The curate entered first, stumbling over the threshold, and the crowd following him poured onto the porch and into the hallway, the kitchen, the dining room and the bedroom. The firemen carried in the chest, covered with tulle, and set it down on the waiting altar. My mother lit candles and turned on the light, which surprised me because she rarely used it during the day. An hour later, the curate blessed the assembled company and then returned to the presbytery with the sacristan in a Fiat, but the rattling off of prayers continued at our house until dusk. Timidly, my mother began to read the Litany of the Blessed Virgin from the service book: ‘Mother undefiled, Mother most amiable, Mother most admirable, Mother of good counsel, house of gold, Ark of the Covenant, gate of Heaven, morning star…’

  After the priest had left, everyone relaxed. People started to reach for the cake and sit down on the lino and the windowsills. Children ran outside to play on the sand heap by the fence. Someone let the chickens out of the pigsty. I leaned against the wall, chewing on the edge of a tablecloth. Even though I was seriously frightened, I desperately wanted to peek inside the tulle-covered box. I thought it might contain some sort of little green alien, smelling of wax, mothballs and dust. When I leaned forward, the lights went out.

  ‘The fuses are buggered.’

  ‘Is it an overload?’

  ‘Maybe it’s the Łagisza power station?’

  ‘Do you have matches?’

  ‘Light a candle.’

  The whispers came from the kitchen, the hallway, the porch – until finally the spell of peregrination was broken. The candles, which had melted down during the long hours of prayer, sputtered and spluttered and then also went out. My stomach growled. In the semidarkness, individual figures slunk off into the yard.

  ‘Janek, go and see what’s up with that fuse box!’ shouted my aunt to her husband the electrician. I heard a clatter behind the curtain in the hallway, the metallic sound of a knocked-over bucket of urine, swearing and laughter.

  ‘All our daily deeds…’ my mother intoned in an attempt to save the situation, but only a few people took up the tune.

  It occurred to me that the sudden power cut was my father’s doing: impatient for supper, he must have come into the hallway through the little door by the pigsty and unscrewed the fuses. I smiled to myself. After a quarter of an hour, before the dazzling lights came back on, the weary visitors began to disperse and go home. My mother kneeled before the holy picture, crossed herself and then chased us out of the dining room, put a sheer curtain over the Most Holy of Virgins, so that flies wouldn’t sit on her, turned off the lights and went to the kitchen to prepare supper.

  Whitsunday

  IN MAY 1984, I SET OUT FOR CHURCH CARRYING A bundle of sweet flag, which I had picked that morning by the pond and adorned with ribbons. Water dripped from the bouquet onto my Sunday shoes. The church was filled with the smell of sweet flag leaves and silt, like a drying bog. My head started to spin. When the parish priest began to read a passage about the Descent of the Holy Spirit, the boat-shaped pulpit sailed off with him into the unknown. I slid from the bench down to the floor. They carried me outside. A woman drew a cross on my forehead with her spit.

  ‘We must tie a red ribbon in her hair and break the spell,’ she said, turning to the gawkers.

  A few days later, my mother made an appointment for a private consultation with Dr Kwiecień. The sixty-year-old physician had the kindly face of Willy from Maya the Bee, but I saw through him right away, glowering at his clean-shaven, purplish cheeks. This weasel told my mother to wait in the hallway, where a large rubber plant stood next to a shelf, and led me to the consulting room, behind a privacy screen. He wiped the earpieces of his stethoscope on his white coat and came up so close to me that I could smell his perfume. He undid his fly, moved even closer and put his penis in my hand, like a roll of modelling clay. I jumped back and kicked his leg as hard as I could. The squeal of a slaughtered piglet must have been heard throughout the entire building. Alarmed, my mother came into the room. Kwiecień did up his fly and peeped out from behind the screen. A moment later, he sat down at his desk and started grumbling that I was a spoiled brat, since I had kicked his shin for no reason when he tried to examine my lymph nodes. He showed the red mark to my mother. Then suddenly he turned mild as an angel and declared that I seemed healthy but that I might be anaemic, which would explain my excessive irritability and fainting spells. He handed my mother a blood-test form.

  ‘After you pick up the results, please come back to see me with your daughter.’

  We were walking home. The afternoon sun was shining through the branches of the birch trees growing by the road, rubber-stamping the cream-coloured boughs with purple marks. My mother was silent for a long time. When we reached Boży Stok, she broke off a withy and shoved it right under my nose.

  ‘You see this? If you kick anyone again, I’ll give you a proper whipping, understood?’

  The following day, I came down with a high fever. I stayed home alone and lay in bed, sipping lime-flower tea. Around noon, I put an immersion heater in a metal mug, boiled some water and dipped a thermometer into the liquid. The mercury container burst. Silver beads spilled onto the bedding. I gathered them up. I hesitated for an instant, but when I remembered Kwiecień’s face, I swallowed the balls like caplets and fell asleep. I woke up a few hours later with my head swimming. I vomited as if I were trying to spit out my insides. In the end, I confessed to my parents, who had just come home from work, that I had swallowed mercury. My father dashed off to the village mayor’s house to call an ambulance.

  The room at the childre
n’s ward of the Lubliniec county hospital resembled a lime kiln in the Jurassic Uplands. Glaring light glided along the walls, condensed in the catheter of the IV drip and poured into the barely visible vein in my left wrist through plastic tubes. My mother’s face, red from crying, seemed ten years older in the fluorescent glow.

  After a while, a skinny doctor arrived and took my mother aside. As he spoke, his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, as if he had swallowed a frog. Pretending to be asleep, I eavesdropped on their conversation: ‘Elemental mercury is not dangerous… The intestines cannot absorb it… We’ll keep checking… We’ll keep checking every few hours.’

  After the doctor left, my mother looked at me with reproach. I wanted to explain everything, but I didn’t get a chance. In the neighbouring bed, a girl with crimson blisters around her mouth, who had swallowed some caustic potato-beetle poison, started to choke. There was a commotion. They took her away to a different ward.

  The visiting hours ended at seven. Mum left a jar of homemade redcurrant juice on the bedside table and went home. A nurse disconnected the drip and turned off the light. I was alone at last. The bare walls flashed and shifted in front of my eyes like an origami fortune teller. The last of the light seeped out onto the street, wrapping poplars with copper thread and coming to a halt at the barred windows of the women’s prison across from the hospital. I pressed my hot cheek against the cool pane. The prisoners were performing a secret pantomime in their windows. The longest day of my life ended with the Scorpions’ ballad ‘When the Smoke is Going Down’. Klaus Meine’s voice drifted towards me from the nurse’s station until, around midnight, all went quiet.