After two weeks of collecting scrap, the five of us had become the terror of Hektary, Kolonia and Świnica. Anyone could suddenly find themselves missing a hinge off their gate, a chain, a key, an anchor plate; we were instruments of unexpected loss. Most of all, we loved wandering around makeshift rubbish tips which the locals had started in disused limestone quarries; we would disarm old lamps and radios with a hammer and blow up deodorant cans in campfires.
The last day of collection was nearly upon us when Older Lajboś announced that he’d secured so much scrap at his uncle’s that we wouldn’t be able to carry it: we needed to borrow a cart from somewhere to get it over to the school. The next day, I got my grandfather to lend me the cart he used for transporting hay from the field to the barn. When we arrived, Older Lajboś’s words were confirmed: it turned out that his uncle had a whole shed full of metal junk. We loaded it all onto the cart, drank a glass each of fresh milk straight from the cow and began slowly dragging our booty home.
Suddenly, the heavy cart, with its cargo of scrap tied on with pieces of rope, started rolling towards a precipice. We tried to stop it by pulling on the handle as hard as we could, but Younger Lajboś lost his grip, slid down along the wet grass and hung suspended over the chasm. With the last of his strength, he managed to grab on to something, I don’t know what, maybe roots or brambles.
‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’ Justyna squealed. ‘He’s going to fall!’
‘Don’t look at him, just hold on!’ yelled Older Lajboś. But then he also let go of the handle, threw himself down on the grass in front of where his brother was hanging and reached out his arm to rescue him.
‘Put a stone under the wheel first! Fuck, do you hear me? A stone!’ Big Witek shouted.
The cart was moving closer and closer to the edge. We couldn’t hold on any longer. Older Lajboś managed to pull his brother up in the nick of time. Almost simultaneously, we all let go of the handle and jumped back. The cart tilted and slid down into a deep limestone pit filled with dark water. Our haul of scrap, our chance of top grades and a perfect conduct mark on the final report, our dream tickets to Warsaw all plunged with it into the abyss, but we weren’t paying attention any more. We lay on the trampled grass like waterlogged fascines, sweaty, passive, with sore arms, but strangely calm.
‘That’s it for collecting scrap,’ I said hoarsely.
‘The headmistress can piss off with her contest,’ Older Lajboś finished my thought. The others agreed.
I looked in the direction of the village. The smoke from my grandfather’s stoves was rising straight up to the clouds. The low sun was rusting over the fields.
The Return of Zorro
ONCE IN A WHILE, WHEN MY MOTHER WENT TO visit her sister in Katowice, my father would invite his pals from the paper mill over for a little game of poker. I would sleep in the dining room, those evenings, with nothing better to do than eavesdrop on their conversations, since the men spun fantastic tales about silver foxes, fishing accessories, Rambo films and their adventures in the army. Only Tadek, a guy who had the look of a sacristan, usually just nodded in agreement and said nothing about himself.
Late one night, when they could hardly stay upright in their seats, I nodded off, and when I woke up well after midnight I could hear Tadek telling a story which made it clear that he was no sacristan at all, but a pickpocket with multiple convictions, well known throughout Europe. In 1973, his father had got into a drunken fight and gone to prison for three years. His mother earned a pittance working at a grocer’s shop and could barely make ends meet. When Tadek turned thirteen, he decided to help her somehow: he started collecting cans and bottles left by pilgrims in Staszic Park near Jasna Góra. That’s where he met a swindler from Lviv who taught him the trade, meaning he turned the boy into a petty thief. After Tadek filched his first wallet, he bought himself a pile of pastries at Blikle’s. He also gave a Zorro costume, complete with a cape and a mask, to each of his friends from Krakowska Street. Vocational school was not young Tadzio’s strong point, but he was a very diligent pupil of the Lviv swindler. He brought home more and more money, treated his mother to a leather handbag and a suit, and would tell everyone that he was earning extra cash working at a cobbler’s – while in fact he and the Lviv swindler went marauding at train stations in Warsaw, Bratislava, Berlin and Vienna.
‘Sometimes I managed to make twenty K in ten minutes,’ Tadek finished, and I almost choked on a piece of halva.
My father knew Tadek well, so unlike me he let these stories go in one ear and out the other. That night, Dad wasn’t having much luck with the cards. Every so often, he’d lose a game and would run to get more jars of pickles and preserved mushrooms from the hallway, stoke the fire in the stove or demonstrate his disappearing-coin trick to his friends, while trying to figure out a way of not being dealt in again.
I had worked out that coin trick of his only shortly before, when I learned that he had ordered a special one-złoty piece, with the reverse hollowed out, from a turner he knew in Cynków. Its diameter was slightly larger than that of a normal coin, so that when somebody put their złoty on the table, all that was needed was a dextrous movement of my father’s hand for it to disappear for ever inside the magic coin.
Alas, pickled mushrooms, sardines, tinned snails and other delicacies could not save my father; neither could his burnt-match trick, which involved wrapping an invisible thread around the carbonised head of a match and breaking it off with one precise jerk. Play continued. When my father had nothing more left to lose, he promised his friends he’d taw them three muskrat skins each.
In the morning, after downing two glasses of water with baking soda and vinegar, my father tried to get ready for work: he ran around the room knocking over bottles, opening and closing wardrobe doors and getting tangled up in the leads sticking out from behind the wall unit.
‘Oh my God, where’s my wallet?! It was in my jacket pocket yesterday!’ he yelled so loudly that the flypaper swayed under the ceiling lamps.
‘Shh, Dad, or you’re going to wake up Grandpa,’ I said sleepily from the adjacent room. ‘What do you need your wallet for anyway, now that you’ve gambled away all your pay?’
Silence fell.
‘All of it? Oh, I’ll make it up, I have some goshawks I can stuff. But right now I need to find my wallet because my monthly bus pass is in it.’
The problem of the lost bus pass seemed pretty serious to me. Even though I was sleepy and my head was crammed full of tales from the criminal underworld, like an issue of Detective, I could foresee what would happen in an hour, when Mum got back from her sister’s in Katowice, saw the mess and caught my father at home, and in such a state to boot. I threw aside my duvet, drank some flat water straight from the soda siphon and went to help him with his search. We looked under the table and under the bed, in the wardrobe, among the crystal, in the coal scuttle. The wallet had disappeared off the face of the earth.
‘Maybe you should say a prayer to Saint Anthony,’ my grandfather piped up from his room, which took me by complete surprise, because for a long time I had thought he’d totally lost his grip. ‘“Dear Saint Anthony, please come around; something’s been lost and cannot be found,”’ he recited.
‘Grandpa, how can Dad pray when he doesn’t believe in the saints?’
‘That’s right, he only believes in his party. So he can pray to it, and maybe the party’s going to give him back his wallet, and the pay he frittered away, and that house in Sosnowiec, and then he won’t have to go to work any more.’
‘Oh come on, just leave me be. Such harassment first thing in the morning…’ my father replied. With resignation, he sank into a chair and laid his head on the table.
I had a sudden flash of inspiration. I went to look inside the glass hen where we stored eggs, and there, among cigarette ration cards, I saw my father’s wallet. We checked its contents. Nothing was missing. A slip of paper fell out of his savings book to the floor: it bore the mark of Zorro. Before I c
ould show it to my father, he grabbed his pass and ran off like a madman to the bus stop.
The Belated Feeding of Bees
ON SUNDAY RIGHT AFTER LUNCH, MY FATHER began preparing muskrat skins and cut his finger on a dirty penknife. An orange erythema appeared around the wound. When he got a fever, his lymph nodes swelled up and purple spots spread over his back, my mother called the ambulance from the village mayor’s house. It came two hours later and took him away to the hospital, sirens blaring, with a suspected case of blood poisoning. My mother said they replaced all his blood and pumped medicines into his stomach with a special pump.
Miraculously, he managed to turn the corner after three weeks, but when he came home I hardly recognised him: he had lost more than twenty pounds and had gone almost completely deaf. His eyes had lost their brightness, and his formerly swarthy face had turned the colour of a horseradish root. He was given sick leave and for the time being stopped going to the paper mill. He would get up at seven, throw his camouflage jacket over his shoulders and look out of the dining-room window at the pond and the beehives, which stood scattered among bare currant bushes. At nine, he would wash, put on his loafers and change into a shirt and his favourite, slightly too-tight jumper with a black-and-white diamond pattern. After swallowing two raw eggs, he’d look through old illustrated books about birds and fish which he’d brought home from the recycling centre at the mill, or he’d take out an old hunting knife with a deer-hoof handle from his taxidermy box and would sit opening and closing it as if he were playing some sort of game. That’s how it was almost every day: he didn’t stuff animals any more, he didn’t play poker, he didn’t go fishing and, increasingly, he hardly ever said a word to anyone.
He perked up only when he read in Beekeeping magazine that over the course of the harsh winter the frost had destroyed numerous apiaries in southern Poland. He jumped up from the sofa, fetched a blackened saucepan from the dresser, poured in two bags of sugar, added hot water from the kettle and put the pan on the stove. About ten minutes later, the thick golden liquid began to boil, with bubbles of air escaping from the saucepan and touching my father’s swollen fingers. The pleasant smell of caramel filled the smoky room. My father ran outside in his slippers, skidding on the icy path, and began installing feeders made from cut plastic bottles at the entrances to the hives, then filling them halfway with cooled syrup.
He returned an hour later and sat down resignedly on the sofa, which wobbled on its birch pegs.
‘Damn it, I was too late,’ he whispered miserably and shook the snow off his slipper onto the floor. ‘I forgot to feed them in the autumn and all the colonies have died.’
For the first time in a long while, I had a chance to take a close look at him, and I noticed just how much he had aged in the past few weeks. He didn’t blacken his moustache with the soot from the bottom of the kettle any more, and he looked as if he’d glued a rotten leaf under his nose. He had also stopped putting on a tie, and his snow-white shirts had started turning musty in the wardrobe. My searching gaze must have embarrassed him because he turned his face away towards the window.
I didn’t know how to cheer him up. I felt sorry both for my father and for the bees, but I didn’t let on. In those days, my teenage head was teeming with so many different thoughts at once that I preferred to keep quiet or, in secret from my mother, sneak up to the medicine cabinet and swallow more and more drops of Milocardin, which smelled of hops and mint. I took a Gdańsk Match Producers label out of my shoebox – ‘Bees are your ally, 48 matches for 30 groszy’ – and handed it to my father. Then I put on a jacket, moved to the unheated dining room and began studying German vocabulary for a test, taking advantage of my grandfather’s absence, since the harsh jabber always irritated him.
An hour later, like twin comets, the tungsten filaments inside the bulb turned red, flickered and went out, but nobody in the house paid any attention. We were used to living in constant semi-darkness because of the fuses blowing, or the power station introducing energy-saving measures, or gale-force winds bringing down power lines. That evening, we sat in the glow of the stove like prehistoric insects frozen in amber: my father submerged in his new world of muffled sounds, and me stupefied by Milocardin and irregular forms of German verbs. The air shimmered over the hot stovepipe. Sparks shot out of the ash pan and vanished on the marbled lino like meteors falling into a dark, dense ocean.
My father looked pensively at the bee inscribed within a symmetrical sunflower on the matchbox label I’d given him, then he picked a leaf off the English ivy that was climbing along a fishing line between the lamp and the door frame and began playing such a piercing melody that shivers ran down my spine. Under the influence of my father’s music, to which I was listening with pleasure for the first time, something woke up inside me and shook me out of my apathy. I smelled burning juniper branches, saw Gypsy caravans and people in colourful costumes jumping through flaming hoops in a forest clearing. My father stopped playing; he curled up on the sofa like a child and lay motionless. The shadow of a queen bee flickered in the window.
Unripe
THE SUMMER CAMP MANAGER DROPPED ME OFF by the main road. I waited until her rust-stained white Polonez disappeared in the fog behind the Jupiter Inn before crossing to the other side, stealthily wiping my tears. Next to a row of clay gnomes, I turned towards Hektary. I walked past the bus stop, the old women selling mushrooms and blueberries by the roadside, the holy spring, or rather a pit and a piece of mossy pipe, which were all that was left of it. The village, with its freshly asphalted roads and new signs – Long Street, Crystal Street, Green Street, Field Street – seemed foreign somehow, as if someone had tied it together with hair bands cut from the inner tubes of tyres.
I turned into our yard. A death notice pinned to the fence was blowing in the wind. A large white butterfly paused for a moment on the coffin lid propped against a wall. I was afraid to go inside. I sat down by the gate. During the last two weeks of August, which I had spent at summer camp, the roof of the barn had had time to change colour from dirty green to brown.
Eventually, I went up onto the porch, laid my rucksack down next to the curtain in the hallway and smelled marjoram and melting wax. It was so quiet I could hear the pigeons cooing up in the attic. My grandfather was waiting for me in the kitchen with scissors and a little comb.
‘You’re here at last. Can you trim my hair?’
‘Later, Grandpa. I don’t have the energy right now.’
‘But how can I show myself like this at the wake?’
‘First I have to see how Mum is doing,’ I cut him off and sat down on the edge of the bed, feeling tired.
‘Oh. She’s fine… I can cut my own nails, but hair? Just trim it a little at the back of my neck and around the ears, will you?’
‘Okay, quick, give me the scissors.’
‘Hurry up, before your mother comes.’
I flung a chequered tea towel over his shoulders and began cutting, slipping the comb under the hair the way my father had taught me and the way a pre-war barber had taught him when he was in prison. As I waved the scissors around all over the place, grey locks fell into the coal scuttle. My grandfather watched himself intently in a mirror to make sure I didn’t cut off what he called the Danube wave over his forehead.
Pale and dressed in a black mourning outfit, my mother looked into the kitchen. It was clear she hadn’t slept all night. I kissed her on the cheek to say hello.
‘What are you two doing? Don’t you have any shame? You’re making a mess before the wake?’
‘Shh, Zosia, I asked her myself. I can’t go to the funeral all shaggy,’ my grandfather replied.
‘They were supposed to bring you home yesterday, not just in time for the wake,’ my mother said to me coldly and passed me the Milocardin. I took a swig straight out of the bottle.
‘It’s a long way from Masuria. They didn’t want to drive me back right away.’
‘You could’ve called our neighbour from so
mewhere on the road.’
‘I didn’t have any cash for phone tokens.’
‘There’s sour rye soup on the stove. Do you want some?’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘I’ll serve you some because it won’t be possible later.’
When I finished cutting my grandfather’s hair, I washed my hands and went into the next room. The doors to the dining room were closed. My mother was arranging chairs in a row along the wall. On the windowsill, I noticed a blessed candle, a prayer book, a rosary and cakes laid out on stands covered with napkins. I grabbed a piece of chocolate cake and started helping my mother with the chairs.
‘Don’t you try to suck up to me now,’ she said, smiling slightly.
I looked around the room. Everything was in its place: the porcelain tableware set, which served only as decoration and for keeping buttons and screws in its chipped sugar bowl, the glass hen for storing eggs, the glass fish, the stoneware knick-knacks, the barometer in the shape of a Tatra mountain cabin with the highland woman looking out to indicate rain and the man emerging to forecast sunshine, the cockerels made from strips of aspen bast, the books which my father had rescued from the recycling centre at the paper mill in Myszków, the collection of empty beer cans crowning the wall unit. The stain on the ceiling, which used to be shaped like the pond behind our house, had swelled and become a river, its deltas running down the wall, feeding a network of fungus under the floor.
Swallowing Mercury Page 8
