The Institute

by Jakub Żulczyk

  There are two bedrooms on each side of the hallway – all four of which have the same heavy brown door with glazed panes of thick cut glass. Beyond the two rooms on the left, the hallway turns towards a bright kitchen with a fridge, gas stove, table and an insurance company’s calendar. The calendar shows the victims of accidents – a different pile-up for every month of the year. Above the stove hang cupboards pasted with cuttings from colourful culinary magazines. We stare at them while chewing on rice and hotdogs. Pictures of panna cotta with caramelised pears, eels baked in a sauce of caramelised lemons, black tiger prawn tart, Thai soup with marinated ginger. I’m sure that if I ever go to a Thai restaurant and order Thai soup, I’ll stab the waitress in the artery with my fork if I find even a single grain of rice in it.

  Straight up the hallway, your back to the front door, are doors to the toilet and the bathroom. The unused toilet is the size of a small wardrobe, ninety percent of its surface taken up by the toilet bowl; the rest of the space just about fits some toilet paper and a newspaper. We don’t use it, because its stuffed with piles of old shoes, clothes and boxes. It acts as storage space because I didn’t have enough money left to refurbish it. But I did have enough to do the bathroom, which is fitted with navy-blue tiles, a gleaming white bath, imitation marble taps and chrome towel rails. Now, however, a hardened, slippery layer of hair, dust and old skin grows on the navy-blue tiles, and even in the morning, only cold water runs from both taps. It takes forty minutes to fill the bath with water. We wouldn’t have the slightest chance of winning a world championship in cleaning and home repairs.

  Every hour we restart our ritual, stomping on the floor and turning the music up as loud as possible in every room. We’ve tried shouting to passers-by since seven in the morning, but they don’t even look up. None of our actions get a response, so we carry on waiting until ‘They’ come, carry on sitting or walking around in circles, talking less and less, saving our voices for the next bout of shouting. Black and White make the most noise meowing, demanding food that has already run out. Yet in the intervals between their meows, they listen out like us, ready to attack, as though they know something is wrong. White lies on a radiator; Black sits on the gas meter. Two distinguished, fat and castrated tomcats with the monitoring abilities of military radar. We give them what we ourselves eat, but both are fussy. They sniff the overcooked rice and, wagging their tails, walk away from their bowls and, meowing, return to their posts.

  Just in case, we’ve collected all the sharp instruments in one place. Screwdrivers, bread knives, scissors.

  “These people haven’t got the faintest idea what they’re doing, sis. Because when they finally let us out, you’re going straight to the police and reporting all this,” says Iga for what must be the fifth time as she traces endless circles with her burning cigarette.

  I nod. She’s right, but my attention is preoccupied with the walls of my apartment, which we’d painted rainbow orange, blood red and fluorescent green, spattered with postcards from Berlin bars, posters we’d torn down in the streets advertising festivals, video installations, exhibition openings and gatherings of religious sects and raves at the Cat with names such as “Beach party”, “American surf rock from the eighties”, “Ladies in bikinis – first drink free” or “Alojzy Krzemień, Digging up the unknown”. I remember the feeling surging in me as I painted the walls, previously mouldy, heavy and brown, covered with patches of old dirt. The sense of lifting a spell, drawing out the colours of the real home from under the enchantment cast over it. For two weeks I’d painted, sanded the floor, shopped and returned with carrier bags full of air fresheners and rowanberry scented candles from IKEA to kill the omnipresent bouquet of smells that pervaded the apartment – flowering mycelium, yellowing shirts, valerian and methylated spirits.

  “I hope they get ten years,” says Iga.

  “For what crime?” asks Gypsy, barely raising his eyes.

  “Attempted illegal possession of property, kidnapping, threat, blackmail, mental abuse?”

  “What the fuck do we need the police for? We’ll sort it out ourselves.” Sebastian’s standing in the hallway, still in the same Banda tracksuit, brushing his teeth, his mouth full of froth.

  Iga asks me whether I want to eat something. I nod, although all we’ve got is rice, hotdogs and rusty, chlorinated running water, a bag of tea from the discount store containing four hundred teabags from which you can make a hundred and fifty relatively strong mugs of tea, and a carrier bag full of flowering potatoes. The packets of rice are what’s left of supplies bought a few months ago – Iga had dragged them back after a campaign called “Food not bombs”. The massive box of hotdogs was brought in one day by Sebastian who declared from the threshold that he’d received it as a gift. When we tried to press him to tell us which friend hands out such original gifts, he said something about an indebted cold meats wholesaler. Apart from being a security guard at the Ugly Cat, Sebastian occasionally makes ends meet as a debt collector.

  So that’s all we have. No cheese, cold meats, frozen fish, jarred sauces, milk, bread, no normal food, because none of us remembered to go shopping, nobody thought we were going to be incarcerated.

  Iga shares a room with Veronica. The second on the right. It’s the largest room in the Institute, divided into two different galaxies, something like a living room with a bed and a disorderly stack of books, CDs and photocopied posters on Iga’s side, and a perfectly made mattress, table with television, Japanese pictures and amulets pinned to the wall on Veronica’s.

  Iga’s the youngest of us. She’s twenty-five and has black dreads with a forever backcombed fringe. My mum would have described her face as bright and chubby if it weren’t for the many earrings and piercings. Iga’s always swaddled in belts and pockets; her jackets, covered with sew-ons and pin-ons, have ninety pockets, just like her trousers and skirts, all in black. To go with these black multipurpose clothes of a leftist terrorist, she always wears glaring bright pink tights.

  For Iga, ‘They’, for whom we are waiting, ‘They’, who are breaking into our apartment, are the sort of people who call and pant into the receiver or repeat one word – the German raus. ‘They’, like Sebastian, are bald and at their peak, dripping with testosterone, and use the words “faggot”, “lesbo”, “fucker”. Just as Sebastian is big, Iga is short but thickset and strong, with a voice like a foghorn. She’s got a PhD in Cultural Studies and has been a punk since she was twelve. She has a stiff, moral backbone and straightforward tenets. Loyalty and friendship, faithfulness and honesty, one for all and all for one. Iga can’t lie, can’t say “No, I’m not giving you anything to eat”, “I’m not putting you up for the night”, “I’m not going to lend you any money”. She has the heart of Mother Teresa and, when necessary, the fists of a thug from Nowa Huta. And it is from her room – and not Sebastian’s – that Polish hip-hop about fucking the police and a hard life behind bars sometimes thumps throughout the entire apartment and gives me a headache.

  Gypsy has the first room on the left. Right now, he’s sitting next to me on the sofa, trying not to touch me, gazing at my room with the look of someone who might be deep in thought but could just as easily be thinking of nothing. Gypsy is tall, sickeningly thin, unshaven, with wide-open eyes that give him the look of someone who’s just experienced their first hallucinations. He’s twenty-nine, but his unshaven and wasted face make it hard to guess his age, just as it’s hard to guess the age of someone who’s homeless or a drug addict. A strange, sinuous and clearly unfinished tattoo coils around his arm. He works for some obscure company that officially offers insurance and investment advice but, in reality, pours its clients’ money into stocks, doubles it, buys crude oil, gold and shares. He’s always got money. Once, having drunk a horrific amount of vodka, he confessed that he had a hell of a lot of it. But for some reason he prefers to rent a small room, unfurnished apart from the mattress, laptop, a few newspapers and a cardboard box for his clothes.

  “It’
s easier that way, Agnieszka,” he said, “because all those things are just a burden. And I want to be able to move from place to place and not be weighed down. Light. Besides, I’m not interested in money. I’m interested in the process of making it.”

  “Why’s it so interesting?” I asked.

  “Because a child could do it. I don’t understand why everybody goes on about how impossible it is,” he replied.

  Gypsy got into the Sorbonne and got thrown out after a year for spending more time with the dossers in the Paris suburbs than studying. Back in Poland, he finished the Warsaw School of Economics with distinction. In three years.

  Jacek became Gypsy because that’s what Sebastian christened him due to his forever creased trousers and shirts, his habit of walking barefoot and his long beard, which is now sprouting shoots. I know Gypsy best. All in all, I’d like to know him a little less. Then at least he’d look me in the eye, not automatically try to leave the room when I ask him something, not move away from me when sitting on the same sofa. But that’s not important at the moment.

  What’s important is what’s going on now. The explanations we’d come up with throughout the morning had stopped making sense. All afternoon we’d tried to answer the question of who ‘They’ are and what ‘They’ want in vain. Our theories were illogical, a load of nonsense; after all, there’s not the slightest hint of logic in what’s going on.

  “But you’re not going to hand over the apartment to them.” Iga doesn’t stop tapping her foot, or smoking cigarettes. “It’s absurd. ‘They’ are doing something that will send them to prison for a good number of years. People once tried bullying us like that when we were squatting. Bolted the door, chucked bottles full of petrol through the window. They all got six months when the police caught them. And this isn’t some sort of squat. It’s your apartment.”

  Gypsy merely shakes his head. In his opinion, nothing can be done. Nobody’s going to go to jail because ‘They’ can do anything. To Gypsy, ‘They’ are financial freemasons. Owners of capital, main shareholders, owners of control packages. Synods of anonymous billionaires hiding in the dark. People whose money he transfers from account to account as though picking air out of one cardboard box and putting it into another. Gypsy says that the old communist system’s far from over in Poland. Capital remains in the same hands. It always has been in private hands. Once, the money had been kept in Swiss accounts. Then cable factories were bought, computer equipment imported and banks set up. But Gypsy claims it’s the same people. It’s ‘Them’. He says all this without getting overexcited, which is something he usually does when spouting his theories. He’s speaking quietly, barely opening his lips, slowly dragging on his cigarette, shrugging.

  The second room on the left is Sebastian’s. Sebastian is a bald, block-like mass, his name a joke. He weighs a hundred and twenty kilos. Is a metre ninety-five tall. Thirty-two years of age. His head and shoulders are covered with tiny scars; one, particularly large – a motorbike accident, he claims – runs from one ear, over his brow to the middle of his forehead. His face is coarse cut; the first thing to catch your eye is the huge, even line of his brows, but beneath it peer surprisingly expressive deep brown eyes that reveal every mood swing. When he falls into a rage, reined in by remnants of upbringing and awareness, the eyes become terrifying. Sebastian is an active fan of Cracovia FC and sometimes shows us photos of himself wearing tight jeans and a Fred Perry jacket, his face clad in a balaclava. I take his word for it because the other fifty men in the photos also wear balaclavas and Fred Perry jackets. And when he touches the screen with his finger to show us what’s supposedly him pushing a plastic rubbish bin towards five policemen, his eyes glisten damply and he laughs so much I have to believe him.

  When he’s not being a security guard or an occasional debt collector, Sebastian does weights, lifting one hundred kilo barbells for two, three hours a day and working out diets for bodybuilders on the www.beefitup.pl forum. His room is neat with the neatness of a grandson living at his grandmother’s. Pastel-coloured walls. On the shelf, framed photos of him with a girl. Soft toys, flowers in flowerpots, Cracovia’s ensign, a poster in a clip frame of some MMA contender who looks like an oiled, sinewy sack of meat with a head attached. Dumbbells and big tubs of powdered protein by the bed.

  To Sebastian, ‘They’ are the police. Or Wisła FC fans. Or the united power of both. Sometimes he says this aloud, adding that he’s joking, then returns to his previous theory, shouting that the whole thing is aimed at him. Threatens he’ll kill them if needs be, crush them underfoot, rip their throats apart.

  Sebastian is the calmest of us all – apart from brief moments when every single muscle, every individual ligament vibrates; at moments like these, he presses his fists into his eyes like binoculars and swallows huge gulps of air. While trying to control himself, he speaks quickly, swallows his syllables.

  “You’re not giving anything back to them. We’re going to sit here until they come, and when they do, they’re going to get the shit beaten out of them. They just try to come in and I’ll throw them down the stairs one by one.”

  In the end, he simmers down, although it looks as if he’s crushed the calmness into his head with his fists. He stretches and stands over us, hands in pockets.

  “My handbag,” says a voice that I don’t instantly recognise. I turn in its direction and see Anna, Robert’s girlfriend. She’s squatting by the wall, smoking a cigarette with fast, shallow drags. Unshaken ash falls on her shoes. Robert is standing in the doorway looking at her as vacantly as Gypsy. By the look of him, he’s not slept a wink.

  Anna and Robert, Veronica’s friends who’d come for a coffee right before we got locked in. One of them works, the other studies. Maybe they both work and study. I can’t remember. All I know is that it’s something to do with Spanish, because the last time Anna was here, she’d mainly talked about Spain, the Basques, flamenco and Sephardic music. To be honest, I don’t know them – this is only the second, third or maybe fourth time they’d been here. Anna is shaking all over as though there was a little messed-up engine in her stomach. She’s drumming her fingers on her knee and tapping her foot on the floor. Robert isn’t paying her any attention, he just sits, turning a tin candle-coaster, which has assumed the shape of aluminium snot, over and over in his fingers. He looks like he’s trying to be present, be in the here and now, but something, probably fear, freezes his muscles, makes him fold in on himself and shrink.

  Anna suddenly breaks out into a cough. Controlling herself, she gestures apologetically at the cigarette.

  “Why are you smoking?” asks Robert.

  “It’s my first,” she says.

  “Since when?” I ask, lighting another.

  “First ever,” she explains, choking again. Robert sits on the floor. They are now both sitting in the same position, on opposite sides of the room. He’s looking at her as though wanting to say something but not knowing what.

  “What handbag?” asks Iga, leaving the kitchen carrying two plates, one with rice and hotdogs, the other only rice.

  “Someone stole my bag on the tram on the way here.” Anna keeps choking over her cigarette, trying to inhale as shallowly as possible but without success. “All my things were in it: documents, phone, everything. Somebody – I don’t know who – cut the strap with a knife. I didn’t even notice.”

  “Your phone was in it?” I echo.

  We’d all forgotten to ask these two whether they had a phone.

  “Have you got yours?” I ask Robert, but he shakes his head.

  “I left it in a taxi a few days ago,” he says.

  “Yes, phone, documents, everything, absolutely everything,” repeats Anna, her voice breaking more and more, her words snapping in half, phrase by phrase.

  Robert stands up, walks over to her and plucks the cigarette from her fingers, extinguishes it in the ashtray.

  “Don’t panic, Anna. Calm down. And don’t smoke.”

  Anna starts to cry
silently. I get up, take her by the hand and lead her to the bathroom.

  “Come on, I’ll touch up your make-up for you. It’s smudged,” I say and plunge both my hands into a box full of cosmetics. I feel an old pregnancy test beneath my hand. The cosmetics are rejects, used up – remains of foundation at the bottom, lumps of old powder, broken pencils. I pick up my make-up remover and a cotton pad, slowly wipe away the salt and old mascara from Anna’s face. Try to smile.

  Apart from rice, tea and hotdogs, we’ve also got cigarettes, which Papa gave us. We started with two cartons, now have less than one and a half. It would be much harder without them.

  I want the girl to relax. I smile at her, but it doesn’t help. Maybe I’m no good at faking sincere smiles. I rest one hand on her knee, and with gentle, short strokes, start to paint her eyelashes, tell her to look up, but she keeps blinking and staring vacantly into my eyes. It’s like making-up a drunk guy.

  “Anna,” I say. “Anna, it’ll be over soon.”

  “The question is how,” she replies breathlessly.

  “I’m sure it’s going to be alright,” I add and wipe away a new set of tears and mascara. An endless task.

  “And what if they really do do something to us?” she asks.

  “They’re not going to do anything. Somebody will come and let us out. And a locksmith will come and cut the grating,” I say.

  There’s a crash against the wall and the loud smack of something large against metal. I throw the mascara on the floor and run out to the landing. Everyone has jumped up and is standing in the doorway; I shove them aside and see a boy on the other side of the grating. He can’t move. Sebastian, arms outstretched through the grating, is gripping his jacket and squashing him against the bars with all his strength. The boy is about eighteen, underweight like someone on speed, and visibly shaking.