The Institute

by Jakub Żulczyk

  TRAGEDY ON MICKIEWICZ AVENUE.

  UNEXPLAINED GAS POISONING.

  CURSED APARTMENT.

  OLD MAN’S SUICIDE.

  It was enough to skim my eyes over the extracts in bold type and the photos to see that they were all about 20 Mickiewicz Avenue, apartment 12.

  “Every apartment here has its story,” said Marta.

  “Exactly,” I retorted.

  “But none so interesting as this one, you know.” Marta shook her head.

  I vowed to myself that if she said “you know” or “you understand” one more time, I’d dig a fork into her artery.

  “Do you really think I’ll get scared and agree to sell?” I said. “You’re quite something.”

  “This is interesting,” she said, pointing to one photocopied extract. Judging by the font and layout, it was an opposition paper from the seventies. The headline read:

  ANOTHER FATAL ASSAULT ON

  OPPOSITION ACTIVIST.

  “Let me guess, he was assaulted in my apartment?”

  “Not quite,” she said. “Darek Kusiak. It was in ’77. Sometime in September. It wasn’t as loud as the Pyjas case. Maybe because Kusiak wasn’t a student. He was just a guy who worked in a galvanising plant in Huta. He’d somehow wangled himself into the opposition and distributed leaflets for them. One day, he was found dead on a bench in Krakowski Park. The keys to your apartment in his pocket.”

  “How come?” I asked. I took a large gulp of my coffee even though my heart was beating much too fast already.

  “It turned out that your grandmother had opened the apartment to the opposition. They ran a printing press, collated samizdat, held meetings. They left after Kusiak’s death. But the case was investigated again after ’89 by the public prosecutor’s office and it suddenly turned out that politics had nothing to do with it, that yes, the boy had helped the oppositionists, they knew and trusted him, but only for about two months. Kusiak wasn’t under any surveillance; he wasn’t of interest to anyone, didn’t even have a case file. Somebody had simply beaten him up. It was completely unrelated. But, due to Kusiak’s death, the militia learned that the opposition were printing and hiding in your grandmother’s apartment, you understand, and the oppositionists thought that it was the militia who killed the boy, so they left practically the next day.”

  “My grandmother was never involved with the opposition. She wasn’t really interested in politics,” I said. The coffee was finished; it was time to part ways. Nobody had ever tried to force me into something with so much impertinence before. By the end of the meeting, I knew I wasn’t going to sell the apartment even for a billion dollars, even if I was starving to death.

  “In that case, it might have been another way of trying to get rid of the apartment.” Marta shrugged. “I don’t know. There are indications in the documents of her efforts to transfer the apartment into yet another person’s name.”

  “I really admire your efforts,” I said, gazing at the evenly arranged photocopies.

  “And you say I’m stubborn. It’s you who is stubborn,” she retorted.

  Her voice seemed to come, not from her larynx, but from a speaker located somewhere on her body.

  “Perhaps you could email me the rest of the story.” I looked meaningfully at my watch, then at Ola. “I’ve still got a few things to sort out.”

  “The apartment belongs to you as of today.” Marta, too, glanced at hers. “They’re just interesting titbits. I’m not going to use them to force you into a deal.”

  “Good.” I smiled.

  “I’m in a hurry, too.” She got up, slid the photocopies into her bag, which she slung over her shoulder, smiled her fake smile at her friend, shook my hand and made her way to the exit.

  I was sure that she’d turn around at the door and say something else. People like that always keep trying, right to the very end.

  “You know what’s interesting?” She turned, of course. “Antoni Waraszyl died in ’88. Two years later, your grandmother had hundreds of opportunities to sell the apartment. Got masses of offers. But she didn’t take up any of them. Communism fell and her view on the matter changed completely.”

  “My grandmother was wise. She understood that times had changed, that nobody was going to hand accommodation out to anyone.” I shrugged.

  “It could be that.” She smiled again.

  Now I remembered something.

  “Do you have any idea what ‘The Institute’ means? On the entryphone?”

  “No idea!” She spread her arms. “Lots of things happened in that apartment, as I told you. But that sign is terribly old. It’s probably been there ever since the entryphone was installed. Since the sixties. You’ve got my business card, haven’t you?”

  I nodded. Marta left. She walked briskly. I heard her heels tapping on the pavement for some time.

  Ola was still pale, her lips pursed; she drummed her nails nervously on the table. She tried to say something, but I preempted her by raising my hand.

  “It’s all too absurd for me to be really mad at you. Don’t worry,” I said.

  “Shall we go to my office?” she asked.

  She was still scared, but I realised it wasn’t me she was scared of. She was scared of someone, or something, entirely different. I had no idea what.

  * * *

  The candle around which we’re sitting came from the supermarket and is called Almond Breeze. It gives off a faintly nauseous scent similar to that of a toilet freshener, which has nothing to do with almonds or breeze. But that doesn’t matter. Almond Breeze and its five friends in the multipack we found in a drawer are our only supply of light. ‘They’ have cut off our power. We don’t know how ‘They’ did it. There was no short circuit; the fuses are in place and functioning. So, what’s left are lighters and these candles, which cast our giant shadows on the wall. ‘They’ have left traces – shattered objects, ripped clothing. I found my favourite jacket torn in half. Torn as though somebody exceptionally strong had picked it up and simply ripped it like a sheet of paper. Books torn apart, scrunched-up documents, contracts and tax forms, trampled DVDs. I found my old cork board – which I’d rooted out from behind the wardrobe when I moved out of Ela’s father’s – crushed. The photograph of me and Ela pulled out of a smashed frame, ripped up. The candle picks the scattered remnants of our home out of the darkness. We huddle around it. It feels as though we’ve been bombed, buried in a basement beneath rubble.

  “Why didn’t you mention it before?” Iga speaks slowly, quietly. She is sharing one of the last cigarettes with me. They’re nearly all gone. The tea, rice and Xanax are already finished.

  I hope they’re not going to cut off the water.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t want to think about it,” I reply truthfully, and Iga just nods.

  I’d give anything to get drunk now. To drink some beer, a bottle of wine, half a litre of vodka. I’d be happy with moonshine, any old cheap plonk. Amol or eau de cologne. Any alcohol, fuck it.

  “You think it’s him then, the guy with the two and a half million? The one who wanted to buy the apartment?” asks Iga, and I shrug. I don’t care who ‘They’ are. What matters is our helplessness. Their complete upper hand. We’re like animals in a slaughterhouse. Rats in a laboratory. Anything could happen at any moment and there’s nothing we can do about it.

  At any moment, we might die. Somebody who chops a cat to pieces and leaves it in a carrier bag for the owner to find won’t hesitate to hurt a human being.

  “And you’d have two and a half mill,” Sebastian says from the kitchen. “Instead of what’s happening right now. You’d have a nice house near Warsaw, a good car. Run a business.”

  Again, I shrug.

  “Reasonable people don’t think in terms of what ifs,” I say. “It can drive you mad.”

  “That’s soon to come,” chuckles Sebastian. “Soon we’ll all be totally fucking nuts.”

  “Do you think they’re going to kill us?” asks Iga, to no one i
n particular.

  The question’s cropped up many times since we returned to the apartment. First through tears, then calmer, quieter. Each time, the answer is “I don’t know.” Because nobody knows what’s going to happen next.

  ‘They’ could come in with cake, candles and party hats and shout, “Surprise, happy birthday!” Or ‘They’ could pump gas in through the door, set us alight, put us to sleep, then come with saws, pliers and knives and start to cut us to pieces, like they did to our cats.

  Anything can happen, and we won’t be able to do anything about it.

  The candle flickers and I pick out the edge of the carrier bag with the cats in it in the corner of the hallway. We haven’t decided what to do with it yet, so we’ve shoved it into a cardboard box. We covered their bodies with sawdust and the remainder of their cat litter, to hold back the stench for a while. The apartment’s getting colder and colder, as though ‘They’ were gradually turning down the heating. Maybe soon the cats’ corpses will freeze.

  Sebastian suggests we burn them in a huge bonfire on the landing. That maybe starting a fire is a good idea anyway. Iga agrees. She says ‘They’ must be in the building with us and we should smoke them out; that when it starts burning, the fire brigade will come and we’ll finally get out.

  I don’t think I’ve gone mad yet, because I know how ridiculous the idea is.

  I feel myself shaking from the inside; I’m being tugged around by something coming from within my belly. I feel as though I’m dangling over an abyss and holding onto a thick, coarse rope. That’s why we keep whispering to each other, to convince each other that we’ve not yet gone mad. Perhaps that’s why I told them the whole story about the solicitor. Not to explain anything but simply for the sake of speaking. Perhaps it’s something to do with the people she mentioned, perhaps not; perhaps it’s the descendants of my grandmother’s former husband, or perhaps the ghosts of young boys from the opposition who fled from here terrified by the death of their aide?

  But from where I stand, it’s not important. When somebody holds a gun to your head, you don’t ask for their ID.

  Apart from our voices, all we can hear are the sounds of the apartment. The creaking of the floors, the hum of pipes. The quiet purr somewhere beneath the floorboards.

  If I had two and a half million złotys now, I’d give them all away just to hear the sounds of the street, to know that day still continues out there, that there are normal people going to work, people walking to the park to recharge their batteries; I’d give them all to know that, outside, truth, life and the world still exist.

  I imagine that it’s my favourite sort of weather outside: blood-freezing, healing frost, blue sky like on a postcard from a surf camp, snow crunching underfoot like crumbled polystyrene. I imagine it, but I can’t check. Not even a single ray of light can get through the bricked-up windows. If I had it, I’d give two and a half million złotys for a ray of light.

  Robert and Anna. They’re nowhere to be found. We try to talk about what’s happened to them, where they could be, but our questions just lead us round in circles.

  “Maybe they ran out when ‘They’ opened the gate. Maybe ‘They’ let them out, maybe they’re not important to ‘Them’, because they don’t live here,” I say.

  “Ran out? Got out, like Gypsy? And haven’t come back either? If they got out, why didn’t they go to the police?” asks Iga.

  “They just wanted to get out of here. They were sick with fear.”

  “I just don’t feel anything.” Veronica is looking nervously around the room like a cat observing a laser beam projected on the wall. “I don’t know what’s happened to them. I’ve got no idea. I’d sense it if something bad was happening. Or something good.”

  “Give us a break with all that mumbo jumbo, please.” Iga hides her face in her hands. “But if you really do have magical powers, then use your telepathy and summon the lift. Get those bricks to fuck off from the windows.”

  Veronica doesn’t respond. She nervously starts cleaning her glasses.

  “Do you know Robert and Anna well?” I ask.

  “No.” She shrugs, and now she’s staring at something hidden in the dark somewhere behind me. “I knew Robert at college. A bit. We talked sometimes.”

  “So why did they come here on Sunday? And last Sunday, too?”

  Veronica shrugs again, nervously, as though she wants to say “I don’t know”, but then decides that we won’t believe her anyway, so she gestures with what’s partially a shrug and partially a plea to leave her in peace.

  “They came to see the clairvoyant.” Sebastian’s voice reaches us from behind the wall.

  Veronica raises her head as though trying to bring the ceiling down on her through sheer willpower. She avoids us with her eyes. Sebastian steps out of the kitchen and says:

  “Veronica was telling them whether the kid was going to be okay. Tell them, Veronica.” He quickly returns to the kitchen, lighting his way with a small torch attached to his keys. There, the cooker still working, he continues cooking the pasta he stole from Mrs Finkiel’s.

  “Kid? What kid?” I ask Veronica, who shakes her head and says:

  “She’s pregnant. Let’s not talk about it. It won’t change anything.” She stares at me for a moment, then pulls her head up again. “She’s not here and we don’t know where she is.”

  “Jesus Christ.” I let my breath go.

  “I told them there might be some problems,” continues Veronica. “That’s what came up. I wasn’t going to lie to them. I told them to go and see a doctor. But the doctor didn’t see anything. Didn’t want to hear of it, said it was a con, that I wanted to extort money from them. She insisted on coming again. And this time I said I didn’t want any money.”

  “What problems?” I ask.

  “You get paid for it?” Iga grills.

  “The child might be ill.” Veronica finally focuses her eyes on one point: the door of the small, unused toilet. “In my opinion, it’s something to do with the head. Some sort of blockage, a lack of something. Air or blood, I’m not sure. An obstruction. I don’t know, I’m not a doctor. I just put my hand on her belly and I could tell that something wasn’t right.”

  The argument over the cigarettes. That’s why Robert didn’t want Anna to smoke. Sometimes we’re all blind fools.

  I have to tell myself that somebody let them out. That in blind terror, they took the opportunity of the grating being open and went straight home, that they’ll live long and happy lives.

  The dish that Sebastian’s trying to concoct reeks like a sack of dirty socks. But I don’t care. It reminds me that I’m still alive. I imagine that we’re at some sort of survival camp, that this is all a game. A strange version of some stalking game. That the tools we’ve laid out next to us – a hammer beside Sebastian, a knife beside Iga, a screwdriver, sharpened with a file, next to me, scissors next to Veronica – are only props meant to add to the atmosphere, to immerse us deeper in the game.

  “Wait. Wait, Iga,” I say and look round at everyone. “Don’t we have anything from the Cat? Have we checked everywhere? Is there definitely nothing? No vodka stashed away for somebody’s birthday? Nothing?”

  I’m answered by silence and shaking heads.

  “Old wine?” I ask again, as though repeating the question would conjure up a bottle of wine. “Flat beer? Amol?”

  “I can take a look, Aga, but there really is nothing, we’ve drunk it all.” Iga gets up and tiptoes to the kitchen, lighting her way with the small pocket torch attached to her keyring.

  I follow her. Sebastian loads a mushy sauce onto the pasta and shoves a plate in my hands. Iga searches the drawers again, the fridges, baskets, any hiding place she can think of, but everything’s empty, everything’s finished.

  “Thank you,” I say as I put a piece of pasta mush in my mouth. It tastes foul, like a reheated pudding of meat and fat. But it’s hot. It’s carbs, it will fill us up.

  “I did a course in cooking bu
t didn’t pay much attention,” he explains, as though justifying the pasta mush he’s prepared. I forgive him, but Iga protests:

  “I’m not eating this.”

  “Why?” Sebastian is baffled. He looks at the contents of his plate. Then at the contents of Iga’s. Sticks the plate under her nose.

  “I don’t eat meat. You know that, Seba,” Iga answers calmly, gently pushing the plate away.

  “There’s nothing else,” Sebastian says after holding the plate under her nose for a while. “There’s nothing else to eat.”

  “I know there isn’t,” replies Iga.

  “Shove all that leftist diet crap up your arse!” Sebastian explodes and forces Iga’s plate up under her nose as though he’s going to decapitate her with it. “Eat it and stop fucking around.”

  Iga shakes her head.

  Sebastian is starting to pant. He doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s the sort of person who, when he comes across any resistance, usually belts it until the resistance is felled, and that’s what he’d like to do now, but he can’t. He’s confused. He puts the plate aside.

  “So, it doesn’t suit you?” He raises his voice. “It doesn’t suit you?”

  “No, it doesn’t suit me,” Iga replies calmly. “I’m a vegan, Sebastian. Which means I don’t eat meat and don’t drink milk.”

  Sebastian stares at her, turns and puts the plate on the table. He takes a couple of deep breaths, grabs the plate again and takes it out into the hallway, then returns, stands in the doorway, takes another deep breath and says to Iga:

  “You’re all fucked up. When we get out of here, you can get back to your filthy mates. But right now, we’re stuck here together.”

  “Let’s just not talk, Sebastian, we’re too different,” Iga states and turns away.

  “How are we fucking different?”

  Iga turns towards him.

  “Civilised-wise,” she says, still calmly, quietly.

  Sebastian scratches his head. Looks at her blankly, coldly. He’s breathing more rapidly now, more forcefully. I’m starting to feel scared.