The Institute

by Jakub Żulczyk

  “My wife and I once considered poisoning her.”

  When we finally got down to the cellar, Black was meowing in pain, his body jammed between the wall and an old, peeling sofa bed. Sebastian had to move the sofa aside while I picked him up. He was traumatised, covered in shit and so hungry that when I took him in my arms, he immediately bit my finger. His meowing and growling could be heard throughout the whole building. Now, standing on the landing in front of Mrs Finkiel’s door, we heard nothing.

  “I saw her about a week ago,” Veronica finally says, without taking her eyes off the floor, as though there was something there only she could see.

  “And what?” I ask.

  “Same as always,” she answers indifferently. “I was coming home, and she was hobbling towards the lift. I said hello and she didn’t reply. As usual.”

  “Right.” Sebastian pushes me gently aside and studies the door carefully.

  “What are you going to do?” I ask.

  He’s concentrating so hard he doesn’t hear me. He turns to Iga and says:

  “Give me a hairpin.”

  “Sebastian, what are you going to do?” I repeat.

  “What we all want to do,” he replies, staring at the two locks – one old and thick, with a heavy steel key no doubt, the other a very ordinary Polish Yeti. “Find out what the shit’s going on. Iga, hairpin.”

  “Please and thank you.” Iga hands him one.

  “We used to sneak into houses in Kazimierz when I was a kid.” Sticking out his tongue and, with a concentration that contrasts comically with his size and voice, Sebastian carefully slips the wire into the Yeti lock. “At about three in the afternoon, teatime. The woman would usually be cooking and the man reading or nodding off in front of the TV after working all day. We’d open the front door, grope the coats in the hallway and leg it.”

  “I don’t think I want to go in. I don’t think I do,” Veronica mutters under her breath.

  “We’d think up all these fucking amazing contests.” Sebastian turns the hairpin in the lock, left and right, waiting for the moment he gains control over the lock. “The others only did houses where the doors were open. I did them with the doors locked. A guy called Wacław taught me. He’d been locked up half his life. Robbed more screws than you’ve had hot dinners.”

  I wouldn’t have suspected Sebastian of having fingers capable of moving and working individually. I’d thought they could only operate together, clenched in a fist. Nor did I suspect that he could be so focused and scrupulous.

  “Seeing as you can open this door, why didn’t you open the lock on the grating?” I ask.

  “No chance. The bars are too fucking close together. I can’t squeeze my hand through. Besides, I’ve never opened one like that in my life, it’s some sort of pre-war piece of shit. Don’t you think I thought of that? Okay, hold on, if the big one’s locked, we’re fucked; we’ll have to kick the door in,” he says, constantly poking the tip of his tongue out. “But if this… yep… got it…”

  The clank of a lock turning. When Sebastian opens the door, we all hold our breath.

  The corridor is as I remember. The coat rack spilling over with clothes, moth-eaten coats, polyester jackets from the Polish Red Cross, woollen Sunday-best overcoats. Beneath it, piles of assorted shoes – worn-down, fake-leather slippers, flip-flops, rubber moon boots for bad weather. On a table next to the wall stands a lone glass of unfinished tea, a teabag drifting limply inside. Just as I remember, there are no ornaments, no photographs, no framed pictures, Jesuses or Our Ladies hanging on the walls. There are bottles of medicine and half-empty blister packs of pills. A peculiar smell hangs in the air, a mixture of old, arduously conserved bodies, cheap soap and hair spray, damp and mould. But there are no souvenirs, no photographs of children, no calendars, holy pictures. Strange, for an apartment belonging to an old couple, I think once again.

  We step into the corridor, switch on the light, and close the door behind us. The layout is exactly the same as that of the Institute – two rooms to the left, two to the right, a bathroom, and beyond that a kitchen. It’s a mirror image. Forty years ago, the Institute must have looked identical.

  “Mrs Finkiel,” I say. “Mrs Finkiel, are you in?”

  We’re answered by nothing but a dull, low hum spilling out in a dense wave across the floor, as though one of the rooms was entirely taken up by an enormous old generator.

  “It’s an old fridge. Russian probably. My gran used to have one. It made the exact same noise,” says Iga.

  “Then maybe there’s some grub around.” Sebastian heads towards the kitchen. “I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but we don’t have any left.”

  “Wait.” I grab him by the am. “You and Iga check the kitchen and bathroom. Veronica and I will take the bedrooms.”

  Robert and Anna stand at the threshold, utterly still. They haven’t got the strength or courage to go any further. I understand. Anna is shaking a little, her body gripped by a strange tremor. She can’t move for fear. Doesn’t even look at her boyfriend, Robert, while he in turn doesn’t try to comfort her. He, too, stands still as though groggy from some heavy medication.

  Maybe it’s odd that the rest of us are not behaving like them, that despite everything we’re still moving, still searching, shouting – but perhaps we all still have something that keeps us going, something greater than the fear. For me, it’s Ela. It’s Ela who reminds me that after each nightmare comes an awakening. That every house, every cage, every trap has a way in and a way out. That every situation comes to an end.

  Veronica is standing next to me. She is listening in, trying to become one with the apartment, to hear what, according to her, is hidden within the walls. To start talking to this something. Ask this something for clemency and in return help it to get out, escape – that something, after all, doesn’t want to be here, that something is imprisoned here. Veronica inhabits the world of ghosts.

  Nobody took Veronica seriously when she made a strange movement over her plate and told me not to leave the house at four in the afternoon one day. Nor did we take her seriously two days later when we found out that some stoned moron had driven his vamped-up Ford into some people on the zebra crossing on Plac Inwalidów at exactly ten minutes past four.

  We thought Veronica was mad when Iga told her the dream in which she was being followed down the street by a blurry, black and white figure against a coloured background. “Gucek wants to talk to you,” Veronica had said.

  Gucek was Iga’s boyfriend from when she was a teenager and she’d left home and lived in a squat with forty other punks. Gucek was eighteen, smoked heroin, wrote abysmal poems about endlessly high towers and walls that disappeared into the cosmos (“and every brick in the wall is you”), kept rats – two but wanted more – and had started a punk band called Mayor’s Last Obstruction. Iga had told Gucek she loved him and that her period was late. A couple of days later, Gucek jumped out of a window on the seventh floor, and Iga went to Germany for a few days.

  She’d never talked about Gucek or what had happened. Not to her mother. Not her other boyfriends. Not me. Nobody. Especially not Veronica. Veronica was a stranger who’d answered our “Room to Let” ad.

  From what Iga said, it seemed that Gucek had had a fixation with black and white films. When watching TV, he’d fiddle with the contrast until the image lost its colour.

  “Makes no sense otherwise,” he’d say.

  The figure in the dream whom Veronica called Gucek was black and white, even though everything else was in colour.

  There was another incident. One morning, I returned from my shift at the Cat with a bottle of vodka magnanimously given to us by comatose Papa. Four or five of us sat in the kitchen knocking it back to spite ourselves, because the anticipated hangover might otherwise have been too light. We opened the windows wide to allow all the sounds and colours of dawn inside and we drank until below us, in the street, well-groomed people marched to church, parents led screaming ch
ildren for a walk to Krakowski Park or Błonie, and Brits, knocked out by vodka like us, slowly dragged themselves to Karmelicka Street for breakfast and a hair of the dog. There were many mornings like this, but on this particular one, trashed after two drinks, the usually teetotal Veronica, who’d been living in the Institute for about two weeks, propped her head on her hands to stop it gravitating all the way to the table and said:

  “It’s bliss living with you guys. Such a shame something bad’s going to happen to us.”

  I soon forgot the comment but today remembered her words.

  “There’s nobody here,” says Veronica. “The apartment’s empty.”

  “Good. We’ve got to open the windows,” I urge. “We’ve got to open the windows, make another rope and climb down it. We’ll tie all these coats together, and there must be some blankets somewhere, there must—”

  “It’s probably the middle of the night,” Iga interrupts. “I think it’s night time.”

  “Shouldn’t we go further in?” I ask. “Or are we going to just hang around in the corridor?”

  “How do you know there’s nobody here?” Iga turns towards Veronica.

  “I just know,” she replies.

  “We’ll stay by the door,” says Robert, finally putting his arm around Anna. Anna nods silently, without changing her expression.

  Sebastian is already making his way forward. Robert turns and locks the door from the inside.

  “Anna’s scared,” he says, hugging his girlfriend into his chest. She, in response, closes her eyes, and two huge tears trickle down her face.

  I nod to them and wave to Veronica. I enter the first room on the left – the room corresponding to Gypsy’s in the Institute. We switch on the light. There’s nobody there. It’s not a large room, a living space of no more than a few metres.

  “No,” I whisper. “No. Fuck, no.”

  The window is bricked up.

  Of course it is. We couldn’t just step out of our apartment, enter the one next door and leave when ‘They’ had gone to so much trouble to make sure we couldn’t escape.

  The room is so small I can barely stretch my arms. On one side is a plywood wall unit that takes up the entire wall and is practically empty. Apart from dust, all it contains is a small display of photographs stuck to the inner side of the glass.

  The photographs are black and white, posed, with motionless figures staring at the camera lens with both amusing stateliness and troubled confusion. Old people, children, young women with backcombed hair and heavy make-up, all standing against a background of trees and dilapidated fences. I bring my face close to the photographs, trying to find Mrs Finkiel, but Veronica edges me away from the cabinet and says:

  “Come on, let’s move on.”

  We go to the second room on the left. It is larger but also dark. The windows are bricked up in here too. On the right-hand side of the room stands a battered, bare divan, and next to it a wardrobe. I slip my hand between the wardrobe and the wall, feel for a socket and switch on the light.

  The whole wall above the bed is covered by an enormous and hideous painting. Someone, the person who had painted it, had tried – despite having no knowledge of proportions – to depict its essence, meaning a man on a horse. But all that remained were grey-purple outlines, the original colours now impossible to make out. The man has horns or is wearing a horned helmet on his head, and he holds a long object to his eye with one hand and a weighing scale in the other.

  “What’s he holding?” I ask myself out loud, and Veronica replies:

  “A telescope.”

  “Hold on,” I urge. “Hold on.” I return to the first room on the left.

  Veronica follows me.

  “What are you doing? What’s the matter?” she asks.

  “Hold on,” I repeat.

  “Don’t touch. It’s not yours. You’ll be cursed. Don’t touch,” she says. I study one of the photographs. It’s a retouched portrait photograph of a man with a neatly trimmed moustache, a strong square jawline and resolute little eyes set beneath narrow brows.

  “Look, Veronica.” I point to a badge pinned to the man’s wide lapel. “It’s the same, look.”

  The badge adorning the man’s jacket shows a man with a telescope riding a horse. And suddenly, in a brief flash of déjà-vu, I know I’ve seen this image somewhere before. And in the same place, on the lapel of a jacket.

  “Come on,” says Veronica. “That’s not so important now. Come on.”

  She places her palm on my back. I can feel her hand shaking.

  The next room we enter, the second on the right, is probably the Finkiels’ bedroom. There are two single beds, each with a bedside table. On one – presumably Mrs Finkiel’s – there are crosswords, more bagged medicine, a silver spoon and some illegible notes, probably a shopping list; on the other, nothing but a glass of water. On a chest of drawers are several books: Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy, an encyclopaedia, some crumpled crime novels and a number of short novels about the Second World War from the Biblioteka Żόłtego Tygrysa series.

  The apartment’s like a tomb, a cold and ugly grave. I’m beginning to understand why Mrs Finkiel screamed at me through the door. I’d scream non-stop if I lived in a place like this.

  “There’s nothing here,” growls Sebastian from the depths of the apartment. We quickly walk down the corridor, though we haven’t yet checked the room on the right, and burst into what ought to be the kitchen. I switch on the light. It’s just as dead and ascetic as the rest of the apartment, devoid of any furniture other than one wooden cupboard, a couple of chairs and a fridge. Not even the trace of a plant. No cookbooks. The chipped, miserable mugs by the sink look like they belonged to a canteen three decades ago. The walls are the piss-like colour of faded bile. Sebastian looks twice as large as usual, like a giant against a backdrop of dwarf furniture.

  “Aha, a tin. Two tins. And tomato paste. And pasta. There’s going to be some munch,” he says and loads the contents of the fridge into a shabby carrier bag decorated with a picture of a bowl of citrus fruits. He picks up various items, unscrews the lids, opens and sniffs. What’s gone off, he returns to the fridge.

  “Agnieszka, come and look at this.” I hear a whisper behind my back. It’s Iga.

  I follow her down the corridor and she points to a pale blue light pouring through the glazed panes in the door of the second room on the right. Ten seconds ago, it hadn’t been there. A pain shoots behind my ribs. I hold my breath.

  It was the room where Mr Finkiel had been watching Clan the last time I’d been here.

  “A screen,” whispers Veronica. “Someone’s switched on the TV.”

  Sebastian rushes out into the corridor and approaches the door. He presses the handle.

  “It’s locked from the inside,” he says. “Shall I blast the fucking shit out of the damned door?”

  Yes, Sebastian, you do that, you blast the fucking shit out of the damned door, I want to say. I want to go in, see where the blue glow is coming from and destroy it, but suddenly I forget about what might be in the room and say nothing, because when I turn to ask Robert how Anna’s doing, I realise there’s nobody there.

  “Robert!” I shout. “Anna!”

  I inspect every room except the one that’s locked. Sebastian drops his bag of stolen fridge contents and darts to the front door. Presses the handle.

  “It’s locked,” he says. “Double locked. Someone’s locked the other lock from the outside.”

  The door of the room with the TV is still closed; the blue-grey glow floods the empty hallway.

  “What?” I ask.

  “The front door – it’s locked,” he repeats, wrenching the handle as hard as he can.

  “Finkiel, you old whore!” yells Iga. I run to the door, try to open it too, but it’s as though someone has rammed a heavy chest against the door and barricaded it shut. Sebastian waves me out of the way and kicks the door with all his might, but all he accomplishes is a dent in the brown leather pad
ding.

  Somebody – Robert? Anna? someone else? – has locked us in Mrs Finkiel’s apartment.

  “Open up! Open up, you cunt!” screams Iga.

  We hear something behind the door. Footsteps. Shuffling. A metal clank, then the distant, muffled sound of a key being inserted on the other side of the landing, of a key being turned, a slam, then muted footsteps growing fainter as they descend, as though someone has put carpet slippers over their shoes.

  Someone had opened the door to the Institute with a key. Someone had entered.

  We begin to push and kick the door with all our strength. Sebastian retreats to the kitchen. There’s the sound of cutlery crashing to the floor, plates smashing. After a while, Sebastian returns carrying two kitchen knives with heavy wooden handles; one he grips tightly, the other he hands to Iga. The landing is quiet.

  We bang on the door as hard as we can. We want to tear the door from its hinges. And then, as though all the elements of the house are being controlled by a supernatural force, the blue glow disappears from the hallway, and the front door opens with momentum, almost breaking my nose.

  “Robert! Anna!” we call, running out onto the empty landing. Iga shakes the metal grating. It’s locked, as before. I press the lift button violently. Nothing happens. Robert and Anna are nowhere to be seen.

  “We’re going back to the Institute,” states Iga. “Can you relock it?”

  “What the fuck for?” Sebastian turns and disappears back inside Mrs Finkiel’s apartment. He comes back with the old, torn plastic bag stuffed with stolen food.

  “I locked the door. I locked it.” I repeat the sentence aloud like some mantra at a tai chi class, in the vein of “I’m a ball of light”. “I locked it.”

  I had locked the door of the Institute. Both locks – top and bottom. The top, which requires a fat, conical key, and the bottom, a Yeti, like the Finkiels’. Air enters my body through my nose but takes three times as long to get to my lungs. I locked both locks.