“We’ll live together,” I continued with great difficulty, as though I was spitting razor blades. “For the time being, you’re going to stay with Dad. You’ll call me every day and tell me what Dad’s doing, how school’s going, how you are. You’re going to be good to Dad and Gran. From time to time, I’ll come for the weekend and we’ll spend time together.”
“And then?” asked my daughter.
“Then… then we’ll go to Cracow and stay there forever, or we’ll go to a totally different place,” I said.
The longer I spoke, the more I realised that I was giving her my word. A word I had to keep.
“But why so far? Why Cracow and not just another part of Warsaw?” asked my daughter.
“Because I’ve got a super apartment there. And we’re soon going to live in it together.” I lay on the bed again and loaded a spoonful of now lukewarm chocolate slush into my mouth.
“Gran Vera’s old apartment?” She moved closer to me.
“Yes, Gran Vera’s old apartment. It’s got an incredible history. I can tell you about it if you like. But it’s a bit scary.”
“What?” My daughter sat up.
“Yes, it’s a bit horrific.” I smiled and scratched her head. “Well, something very strange happened there once.”
My daughter became all ears, even though it was four in the morning and I needed to catch a train in three hours. I wanted us to finally stop sobbing like two butchered goats, so I started to tell her what the solicitor and her friend, the estate agent, had told me. I started to tell her the strange and funny story about the apartment I was going to move into the following day.
And, finally, my daughter stopped crying.
* * *
When I open my eyes, it’s dark. The Xanax, I suspect. I’ve slept through the day. The first question that flashes through my mind, as loud and clear as the adverts in a cinema, is Where’s Gypsy? After a split second, more follow: Is he back? When did he get back? Are we still locked in? Why didn’t anyone wake me if he’s back? And if he isn’t, where is he?
I rub my eyes. Feel like I’ve been shaken out of an anaesthetic. The apartment is completely silent. I switch on the lamp and get out of bed. Walk to the window. My heart sinks and then, in a fraction of a second, bounces back into my throat.
“Iga!” I yell. “Iga! Iga!”
Iga rushes to my room.
“What’s up?” she asks. “What’s happened? Why’s it so dark?”
“They’ve bricked up the windows.” I speak quietly, slowly, as though I don’t believe it myself.
“What? How? Bricked up?” asks Iga.
“I’ve no idea.” I still speak quietly. “I’ve no idea.”
Instead of the street and Krakowski Park, instead of trees appearing opposite, straight rows of white bricks loom at our windows. I slap myself in the face, once, twice, three times. Pray that this is a dream, that I’ll immediately wake up. Still imprisoned in the Institute, but with open windows. I slap myself a fourth time, and a fifth, hard. The bricks don’t disappear, are still in the windows. White, separated by strips of grey mortar.
The rows of bricks dance momentarily in front of my eyes. I close my eyes, open them again: the bricks are still again.
Very briefly, I want to laugh, but I stop myself at the last moment and bite my tongue, hard.
“I don’t understand why we didn’t wake up! Or how they could have done it, because they must have come up here on some, fuck it, I don’t know, platform or something. I can’t understand it,” says Iga. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands. Keeps alternating between touching her face and compulsively searching for something in her pockets. She approaches Sebastian and hits him on the shoulder several times. At first, Sebastian doesn’t react, then finally pushes her away. I grab Iga’s hand.
“I fell asleep for a moment, okay? For fuck’s sake!” he hollers.
“Fell asleep? You fell asleep?!” Iga raises her voice. “What do you mean you fell asleep?”
“Just like you fucking fell asleep because you got stoned!” Sebastian shouts back.
“You took pills too?” Iga shouts, getting louder with every word.
“Stop screaming! Stop bloody screaming!” Now I, too, am yelling. For a moment, they fall silent. I leave my room and inspect the whole apartment. It’s the same everywhere. Bricks in all the windows. As though what I’d imagined would happen really has happened, as though someone has ripped the Institute away from this street, this building, and thrown it into a black vacuum, sentenced it, with us inside, to endless drifting.
Maybe we’re dead, I think fleetingly, and we’re in purgatory. Maybe it’s some sort of afterlife.
My head is spinning. I close my eyes. I need to rest against something, grope the wall with my hands. Lean on it. Breathe deeply. I must be alive, blood still flows through me; a corpse doesn’t get dizzy, grey lines don’t dance in front of a corpse’s eyes, a corpse doesn’t bite its tongue to stop itself laughing hysterically. Or maybe I did laugh but nobody noticed.
“Sebastian,” I say. “You must have heard something. You must have. ‘They’ couldn’t have done this without making a noise.”
“But they did,” replies Robert, emerging from the bathroom.
He looks a little better than yesterday. But only a little. He leans against the doorframe. “They must have come in and put us all to sleep.” He approaches the walled-up window and stares at the bricks for a while. “Concrete,” he states, as though it made any difference.
“What do you mean come in? Put us to sleep?” Questions tumble from me of their own accord, asked by some other Agnieszka concealed in my stomach.
“It could be done in a couple of hours, probably. If you’ve got everything ready,” he answers obliquely.
I notice that he’s calm – strangely calm.
“What do you mean they put us to sleep?” I repeat, raising my voice.
“You don’t know what time it is, what day it is, how long you’ve been asleep…” he replies.
For a moment, we say nothing. I look at my watch. It says one o’clock. I don’t know if it’s one in the morning or one in the afternoon. I’m filled with panic, filled with dread.
“There must be several of them,” states Robert, and he shuts himself in the bathroom again.
I return to my room and sit on the bed. I feel powerless in my body. I have the impression that my bones are weak and dissolved, my muscles wet pieces of string.
“They must have seen Gypsy,” says Iga. “Shit. They must’ve seen him. Maybe they were standing at the bus stop. Saw him get out and caught him straight away, round the corner. They’ve got him. I want to leave! I don’t want any more of this!” She sits next to me and starts to sob violently; the crying jerks her body as if she were being systematically punched in the jaw. She’s exploding. I, too, am on the verge of exploding. I feel everything tear away from me: first my clothes, then my fingers, feet and hands, legs and arms, then my internal organs, liver, lungs, heart – every part of my body falls one by one into a bottomless, black well and the last to fall is going to be my head, then I suddenly realise something.
“Hold on.” I look around. “Hold on, hold on.”
Veronica comes in, spreading her arms. Looks at us as though, apart from the bricked-up windows, there is something else we hadn’t noticed.
“The cats have gone,” says Veronica.
“Exactly.” I look around. “The cats aren’t here. They’ve disappeared.”
I leap from my bed. Walk the length and breadth of the apartment. Peer into the kitchen, the bathroom, every room. Black and White are nowhere to be seen. I search for them for long minutes, calling them and, though it’s idiotic, ring their toy bell balls. I scatter leftover hotdogs in the corners.
They’re not here, our cats aren’t here, somebody’s taken them.
I return to my room. Look at Veronica, my eyes searching hers for an explanation as to why our cats have disappeared, why the window
s have been bricked up, imploring her to tell us why all this is happening. But she only glances at me and her feet in turn, as though trying to calm us down by cooling the air with her steely eyes.
“They’re not here,” she repeats yet again, without stirring a fraction of an inch. “I told you.”
“Finkiel,” I say. “We have to knock on Finkiel’s door again.”
“But we hammered on it on Sunday evening.” Iga wipes her nose and face. “She’s not there, just as there’s nobody else in the building.”
“No,” I reply. “We’ve got to try again. The cats. She hates our cats.”
“This wasn’t done by one old woman,” remarks Robert from the bathroom.
“She hates our cats,” I repeat, trying to cling on to what remains of my sanity.
“It’s not her, the woman’s old,” repeats Robert, and this time emerges from the bathroom.
He’s so calm, I think. So strangely calm.
Sebastian, on the other hand, is not in the least bit calm.
“Why didn’t we think of it before, damn it? It’s her, it’s that old whore – that’s why she’s not opening the door!” shouts Sebastian as he runs out onto the landing.
We run after him. The landing looks a bit different and a bit askew. Maybe it’s the same, but I can’t fully describe it. There’s something different about it, something doesn’t add up. We pass the locked grating and lift. Stand in front of Mrs Finkiel’s door. Knock. Pound. Kick. Knock. No response.
“Mrs Finkiel!” I scream, knocking harder and harder.
No answer. Nobody opens. I put my ear to the door. It would take a long time to pick up any sound from behind the old pre-war door. I block one ear and press the other right into the wood while trying to breathe as quietly as possible. But we can’t hear anything. No movement, scraping of furniture.
Mrs Finkiel is our nearest neighbour. It’s possible that she got locked in her apartment like us. She must know something about what’s been going on over the last seventy-two hours. Either she’ll open or we’ll break down the door.
Mrs Finkiel lives with her husband, Mr Finkiel, but the man is, to all intents and purposes, totally immaterial – from what we know, he’s had several strokes and has been sick for a long time. His life seems to consist mainly of watching the test card on television or paint peel off the walls, whereas Mrs Finkiel has a far greater number of active interests. Phoning the police, for example, if somebody’s running a bath after ten in the evening.
“They could have slipped out when I was barricading the door.” Sebastian rubs his sticky eyes. “I could have missed them.”
“You can’t miss them, they’re enormous,” I say, putting my ear to the door.
“So? They’ve fucking evaporated?” Sebastian’s voice bounces off every corner of the stairwell. “They’ve somehow fucked off, and that’s it. We haven’t got any grub, so they went in search. Or that old whore grabbed them for her soup.”
Black, who is older and fatter, had gone missing before. He’d sneaked out of the apartment and wandered all the way down to the cellar. We heard him when we were in the yard, growling and meowing because he couldn’t get out. We didn’t have our own key, so I went to Mrs Finkiel for hers. I knocked. She opened after two minutes. A combination of smells hit me as though Mrs Finkiel’s apartment secretly contained a number of different places: milk bar, old hospital corridor, antique dealer, taxidermist’s workshop. Nowhere did I see any ornaments, artificial flowers, framed photographs. The walls were bare, splattered here and there with greasy stains. Old, scratched lino covered the floor. From one room jutted the corner of a colour TV. I also saw a hand, the hand of an old man, dangling limply from the armrest of an armchair. The hand was still; for a brief moment, the thought crossed my mind that Mrs Finkiel might be keeping a mummified corpse in her apartment.
From what I could hear, the sitcom Clan was on the TV. The volume was turned up to maximum; the speakers crackled, and the actors sounded like they were speaking through a megaphone at a procession. I squinted. Felt there was something missing. I’d seen many an old woman’s apartment, and this one was in some way incomplete.
“What?” Mrs Finkiel had asked that time and Mr Finkiel, watching the TV, emitted a throaty groan.
“I wanted to ask for the key to the cellar,” I said and automatically curtsied like a little girl at a school performance. I wanted to be nice to her, because I didn’t know yet that it was pointless being nice to her.
“Why?” asked Mrs Finkiel, not looking me in the eyes but at my lips, as though there was something on them. I touched my face automatically, to check if anything was there.
“My cat’s gone in there,” I replied.
“No,” said Mrs Finkiel. “I’m not giving you the key.”
I leaned against the doorframe and sighed. Mrs Finkiel, draped in a torn pink dressing gown, its pockets stuffed with foil packs of pills, kept observing my mouth with the attention of a retired dentist. Her greasy hair was slicked back into a tangled bun and her eyeballs, protruding from her wrinkled skin, pierced right through me. I glanced once more at the corridor behind her. Now I knew what was missing. There were no crosses, no images or statues of Our Lady, no holy pictures. No K+M+B on the door to show that a priest had visited. Mrs Finkiel, unlike most of her peers, didn’t have any religious accessories in her apartment. That’s when I noticed there were no calendars, framed photographs or crystal vases on the shelves of her glazed cabinets, either.
“Why?” I asked, finding it harder and harder to breathe evenly. “I’ll bring it straight back.”
“Because I’m not giving you anything,” growled Mrs Finkiel. Almost without breathing, she added, “Get out of here. Scram. Those shitty cats of yours stink and make a noise. I’d throw them into the cellar myself if I saw them or out of the window to stop them meowing and howling. Go back to that brothel of yours; go on, clear off.”
I remember that I froze. I’ve come across enough sanctimonious, demented, nasty old bags to know how to talk to them, but Mrs Finkiel showed me that you can always learn something new. I inhaled a good quantity of air and tried to hiss out as politely as I could:
“Mrs Finkiel, we don’t have to speak like this.”
Mrs Finkiel took two steps towards me and, supporting herself on a crutch with a trembling arm, gathered all her strength and brought her face up to mine. Her breath smelt old and carried a peculiar yet oddly familiar odour. To avoid her eyes, I peered into the corridor again. Next to the coat rack, overgrown with old coats, stood the case of a large string instrument, a cello or double bass. Resin. Mrs Finkiel smelled of resin.
“Don’t bother me again about your cats. Or anything else,” said Mrs Finkiel. She pushed me lightly and I retreated two steps. She slammed the door.
I stood in front of it for a while, just as I was doing now, trying to listen for any sounds, but everything was muffled by the noise from the TV. And just like now, I couldn’t hear any shuffling, grunting or the tapping of a crutch. Mrs Finkiel must have known that I was standing in front of the door. Just as I was about to turn away, I heard:
“You should have stayed with your daughter and not gone whoring.”
It was as though someone had thrown me against the door. I grabbed the doorknob. I later thanked all the powers that be that the old woman had already slammed it shut. If she hadn’t, I’d have torn the crutch from her and beat her wrinkled head with it until it turned to pulp.
I hadn’t asked myself at the time how the old witch knew about Ela. It had seemed obvious – evil old women know everything.
Now, with my face pressed against the old, flaking door, I try to convince myself that an eighty-year-old woman who needs a crutch even at home wouldn’t be able to close the heavy stair grating or cut the phone and internet cables. I repeat to myself: Don’t kill her as soon as she opens the door. Don’t do it. Even if it is Mrs Finkiel who’s poisoned your cats. Even if it’s her, leaning on her crutch, with her snake eye
s, who supervised the bricking up of your windows.
I put my ear back to the door. Nothing. I look at my flatmates.
If she opens the door, just ask if everything’s alright, apologise for disturbing her, and ask if she’s seen our cats, I think.
“Don’t be scared, Mrs Finkiel!” I shout, banging my hand on the door.
“Open up, you old whore!” booms Sebastian. I thump his meaty arm. He clutches where I hit him and looks at me with the eyes of a dog who’s been smacked on the head with a leash for no reason. “It’s her, Hat. It’s that old slut.”
“Listen.” I turn to them. “Robert’s right. Maybe it really isn’t her. She can barely walk. I only want to see if she’s still alive, if she knows anything. They sometimes don’t leave their apartment for weeks on end.”
“It’s her.” Iga moves me and Sebastian away from the door and kicks the letterbox. “Fuck it, Aga, when all this started, the old hag somehow packed her bags and went on holiday. Like everybody else in the building by the look of things.”
“It could have been her at the pizza place,” adds Sebastian. “The old cunt.”
“She can barely make it to the corner shop. The pizza place is at the end of Karmelicka Street,” says Veronica.
“Tell me again,” I ask, eyeing everyone, “without working yourselves up: who saw her last? Before we got locked in.”
After Mrs Finkiel refused to give me the cellar key the first time Black disappeared I went down to Mr Banicki, the neighbour below. Moving in a dignified manner in a fleece tracksuit, the retired neurosurgeon had invited me in as usual and offered me some tea. He said it might take him a while to find the key, so I had the choice of either hanging around at his door or going in and “savouring a cigarette”.
Our conversation, as usual, had been pleasant enough. Mr Banicki’s wife had just left for a spa break and he, as he described it, “relished the sacred peace”. While searching for the key, he talked about his sons, who were living in England; his house by the Masurian Lakes; his Volkswagen Passat, which kept breaking down. Between telling me all this and looking for the key, Mr Banicki kept eyeing me up and down as usual but tried to do so discretely – he was a well-bred gentleman. So well-bred that, when I asked him about Mrs Finkiel, he refused to comment extensively and merely said:
The Institute Page 9
