The Institute

by Jakub Żulczyk

  “You hear that?” I ask, but nobody replies.

  “You think you’re not scared anymore, don’t you, Agnieszka?” Gypsy addresses me.

  “What?” I ask.

  The door to the landing is ajar, I realise. The sound is clearer now, a rattling, scraping. Finally, footsteps.

  “You think you’re not scared anymore, don’t you?” he repeats. “That you’ve seen everything?”

  “Who are you?” Iga is shivering, pressed against Sebastian, not blinking. “Who are you?”

  “You’ll find out who we are in a few minutes. When they’ve finished tidying up upstairs.” His voice is hoarse, quiet.

  Now everybody – Sebastian, Iga, Veronica – turns towards the front door.

  Sebastian picks up the bloody scissors. He leads Iga to the toilet door. They stand around the corner. Iga is still shivering. I look at Gypsy. He is dying and laughing.

  I’m filled with a premonition that the worst is about to happen. First, it fills my stomach, then the rest of my body. I notice the screwdriver on the floor. Grab hold of it.

  The footsteps fall silent.

  “Remember the boy your daughter beat up?” Gypsy asks with what strength remains.

  Something’s hatching. Growing.

  “That shitface, Marek?” he asks.

  Now I can clearly hear somebody crossing Finkiel’s apartment towards the landing.

  “He and his friends followed your daughter to the cloakroom after school a few days ago.”

  “What?” I ask. “What are you saying?”

  I lock the front door from the inside, the screwdriver still in my hand.

  “They had their smartphones on them.” He smiles. “Told her to take off her blouse.”

  Strong shudders run through me as though I’m being electrocuted. My teeth clatter hard against each other. It takes a great amount of strength not to drop the screwdriver. Somebody walks up to the door of the Institute. Somebody presses the door handle. Sebastian’s waiting for a signal.

  “There were five of them. They started pulling her hair and spitting on her.” Gypsy’s talking faster and faster. “And Marek said, ‘Really? You say you don’t like giving blowjobs, you whore?’”

  I swallow. My mouth’s as dry as a stone, a nail, a metal slab.

  “What’s going to become of those shits, eh, Agnieszka?” He shakes his head. Grins again. Looks at the door.

  “You’re lying,” I throw at him. “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not,” he says. “The caretaker caught them just in time. Sent them packing. The caretaker at your daughter’s school’s called Hurrier. But you know that, you laughed at his name. When your daughter said that they shout ‘Why the hurry, Hurrier, sir?’”

  I grasp my face with my hands; my teeth are just about to snap against each other. He’s right. And I thought that I wasn’t scared anymore.

  The door to Finkiel’s apartment opens again, and again somebody crosses the landing. And another person. That makes three. Three people are standing at my door.

  “Anything could happen—” He chokes; a little blood dribbles from his mouth. He’s losing strength, still pressing his hands against the wound, but he’s going to let go soon, he’s going to fall asleep soon or else I’ll help him.

  “Reach into this pocket again, the one the fags were in,” he says.

  Sebastian holds a knife. Nods at me. Veronica is squatting on the floor with her arms around her as though trying to squeeze herself into a little ball. I reach into his pocket. There’s an old phone. One with large buttons for the elderly.

  “Call the last number,” he says.

  Somebody inserts a key in the lock.

  “Wait!” Gypsy shouts towards the door. He’s trying to shout as loudly as he can. I don’t realise I’m grasping the phone, don’t realise I’m pressing the green receiver icon twice, putting the phone to my ear. I hear the ringtone, it rings once, twice, three times. The crackle of the call being connected. I hear my own quickened breath, then a voice. All I hear now is the voice.

  “Mum.” My daughter’s sobs echo in the phone. I turn my head towards the door.

  “Help me, Mum, please. Mummy, help me.” I move the receiver away from my ear. My daughter’s voice. I’m beginning to burn from within.

  “Mummy, are you there?”

  “Yes, I am,” I reply, or maybe it’s the animal in my stomach speaking, or maybe somebody else. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore. I don’t feel much, but I do feel a fire deep within my stomach.

  “Mummy, I’m in Cracow, I was coming to see you. I’m sorry, Mummy, I’m sorry. The man in the taxi told me that he was taking me to see you, Mummy. I’m sorry,” says my daughter.

  “Nice girl. Shame I didn’t get to meet her,” Gypsy comments.

  A metallic rasp, the sound of a broken connection.

  “Hello?” I say. No, it’s not me, it’s somebody else talking – the animal in my stomach.

  My hand drops the phone.

  Somebody turns the key in the lock. The hand – the one with the screwdriver, the one that is trying to grip it as tightly as it can – takes a swing and drives the screwdriver into Gypsy’s throat. I see Gypsy’s eyes rolling back in his head, hear a soft crunch, I see my hand pulling the screwdriver out. It doesn’t take much strength, didn’t take much more strength to dig it into the throat of the man I’d once called Gypsy. I hear a sort of gurgle, air being sucked into the new aperture full of unrestrained fluid. I jump back. My lungs breathe, my mouth is open, my head turns towards Iga, who is staring at me expressionless, not blinking, hunched over like a puppet.

  The door to the Institute opens. A woman stands in the doorway, a key to my apartment in her hand.

  There’s blood all over my face. Gypsy’s lying dead on the floor, eyes wide open. There’s blood everywhere. Erratic, illegible signs, signatures in blood everywhere. Gypsy is dead but still smiling.

  I take a step backwards, then forwards again. I’m shaking. I feel hot.

  “Well done,” says the woman. “Well done, Agnieszka. But it’s the end.”

  The woman standing in the doorway to the Institute – I recognise her. Suddenly my memory registers where I’ve seen the symbol of the scout before. The word “jacket” lights up in my memory. There’s a badge in the woman’s lapel. It’s small, but I can see it clearly. Very clearly. Everything else is blurred, shapeless.

  My legs take a step forward, then another. I recognise the woman: she introduced herself as Marta in the bar on Bracka Street, when it rained, and she looks exactly like she did then.

  “Why didn’t you phone?” she asks. “Why did you throw my business card away? Maybe we wouldn’t have had to do all this.”

  The woman pulls a phone out of her pocket. Presses a key.

  “Mummy…” A drawn-out voice comes from the phone, the voice of the child I gave birth to and whom I named Ela. “Mummy, do everything they ask you to, do everything, please. Mummy, help.”

  “You should never have moved in here,” the woman tells me, devoid of all emotion. “You should have been rich and happy.”

  “Mummy!” somebody calls behind her back.

  “I’ll kill you, you whore,” I shout.

  “That wouldn’t be wise,” assures the woman. Her voice is like a stream of liquid nitrogen: quiet, chilling the walls.

  “My daughter,” I say, the animal says, every word like barbed wire pulled from the throat.

  “Your daughter’s here, in this building, and she is going to die if you do something stupid.”

  My body launches forward. But Sebastian is ahead of me. He reaches the woman in two long leaps as though he’d never sprained his ankle.

  He’s about a metre away from her. I don’t see him fall to the floor. Just hear a sudden, loud blast.

  There’s a gun in the woman’s hand.

  “But if you come with me, you’ll get your daughter back and I’ll let you both go.”

  She raises the gun again and fi
res at Veronica. Then Iga.

  “Shall we be less formal?” the woman suggests. And then I fall to my knees.

  * * *

  Ela’s father called me at nine in the morning. I’d finished work half an hour earlier and sensed that the holiday was over. This was my fourth nightshift in a row, and when Iga and I got home we felt as if we’d been tied to the rear bumper of a car that was being driven over cobblestones. That night, a famous musician from Cracow had been doing coke on the counter, groping women of all ages, slapping them on the backside and throwing chairs at the wall when we refused to serve him another Jack Daniel’s on tab. Papa forbade the security guards from intervening right up to the last round. The musician had once lent him some money and Papa had used it to open the Cat.

  At four in the morning, after the musician spat at Iga across the counter and called her an ugly whore, while circling his arms like the blades of a bony windmill, Sebastian approached Papa and asked:

  “How much money was it? That he lent you?”

  “I can’t remember. It was a long time ago and he lent me dollars.” Papa shrugged. He looked sad. He was getting worse by the week. Vodka was crushing him into gibbering catatonia. Every evening, when he’d talked to the same people as always about the same things as always, he started to sway to and fro on a bar stool, his eyes closed, extinguishing half-smoked cigarettes in ashtrays shoved under his nose at the last moment.

  “And you’ve paid him back?” questioned Sebastian.

  “Two years ago.” Papa closed his eyes and knocked back a glass of vodka on ice with a hint of lemon. It trickled down his beard; he couldn’t even be bothered to wipe it off.

  “So you don’t owe him anything,” Sebastian concluded.

  “Nope.” Papa nodded.

  Sebastian also nodded, then walked up to the famous musician from Cracow and caught him by the lapels of his hideous, sequin-adorned jacket. The musician tore himself away and threw a punch – a skilled, well-aimed right hook that struck Seba on the brow and made it bleed.

  I turned the music off. Silence.

  “You ape. What d’you think you’re doing, caveman?” the musician asked Seba. Sebastian waited. “So now…” The musician spoke with the typical, exaggerated manner of a drunk ringleader. “Now I’m asking you ladies to kindly pour me a double fucking whiskey on ice, right now. And you, you shithead, bugger off home!” he shouted at a terrified young Brit with a footballer’s haircut and a black corduroy jacket, before Sebastian grabbed his long hair and smashed his face against the bar with all his might.

  The place fell silent.

  Sebastian dragged him towards the door, which I’d opened just in time; otherwise, the rock legend from Cracow would have flown into the cobbled yard in a shower of glass.

  This wasn’t the end of the entertainment. Half an hour later, one of the barmaids found a fifteen-year-old girl in the toilets downstairs in a state of total collapse. Fortunately, the ambulance arrived quickly and left, sirens wailing. But before we’d found her, somebody had already taken advantage of her. She was lying in a pool of her own vomit, her dress and knickers pulled down.

  When I got home, I was pain personified – both of spine and muscles. My tendons were like old, damp pieces of rope. My tongue – from smoke, vodka and coffee – was like the sole of an old shoe. No game for an old woman, I thought. My seventeenth birthday has been and gone. I drank some water, removed my make-up, brushed my teeth, collapsed onto my bed and closed my eyes.

  And that’s when Ela’s father phoned.

  “As you wish,” he said, after seconds of silence.

  “Wish what?” I didn’t understand what he meant.

  “Ela’s going to visit you for her birthday. For the weekend. I’m bringing her on Friday, picking her up on Sunday. Don’t do anything stupid, please.”

  “Mummy finally let you?” I asked, sitting up, wide awake.

  “My mother doesn’t know anything about it,” he replied after a while. “I told her I’m taking Ela to the mountains.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “I’m picking her up on Sunday,” he repeated. “Don’t do anything stupid. You know I agree with my parents that Ela ought to be here, the way you live is—”

  “Shut up!” I ordered.

  “We’ll be there sometime in the afternoon,” he said.

  “So long,” I replied. I put the phone down, ran down the hall and flew into Iga’s room.

  “Iga,” I whispered in her ear, tugging at her clothes, trying to wake her from her torpor. “My daughter’s coming to see us. Here. On Friday. For her birthday.”

  Iga unstuck one eye – the other was nestling in her pillow – and smiled with difficulty.

  “I’ve got to get some sleep, sis,” she moaned. “But that’s great, she’s going to have a party to remember.”

  When I ran back out, Gypsy was standing in the hall. He was just getting up for work. Thin, broken and in his boxers, he weighed me up with the look of someone who’s just about to do a sixteen-hour shift in a factory while his wife is fatally ill.

  “Hi,” he said in the same dumb, dull way he’d done every day over the last two weeks.

  I suddenly realised that almost a month had gone by since our dismal conversation, and what was he still doing in the Institute? Yet I just said:

  “Hi, Gypsy.”

  He shrugged and went back to his room.

  “I hope I get a piece of cake,” he called as a goodbye.

  Ela was to come on Friday at ten in the morning, and her birthday was on Saturday. On Wednesday, I went to the patisserie and ordered the biggest, trashiest, pinkest cake with ELA YOU’RE THE BEST written on it in icing, pink sugar ponies, pink hearts and a marzipan SpongeBob stuck on top. I spent most of my money on presents: a rucksack, a DVD of the film Dusk, a pile of books, a coat and a dress. But I found the best present in a charity shop: a washed-out, greying T-shirt with a poster of Thelma and Louise printed on it.

  I also wanted to take the Thursday off, but as always when you want to take a day off, the person who was supposed to stand in for me woke up fatally sick. Papa begged me to come in for at least a couple of hours. The couple of hours prolonged itself, relentlessly and without any prospect of ever ending. At two in the morning, I begged Papa to let me go home, but swarms of students were flooding in. There were just the two of us on the bar, me and Papa. People were drawn to the counter like bees to sugar. I felt like a sniper on a besieged tower.

  “Do you have children, Papa?” I asked him, shouting over the noise.

  “Some, somewhere.” He shrugged.

  “Do you ever see them?” I slid the ashtray towards him.

  “Hey, Hat, what’s it to you all of a sudden?” he asked loudly, annoyed.

  “I want you to try to understand me!” I shouted, ignoring the outstretched hands in front of me, holding crumpled, wet notes. “My daughter’s coming. I’ve got to look like a normal human being. A healthy human being. I can’t look like a slob. Would you go and see your children looking the way you do?”

  Papa picked up the phone without a word and called another barman, Goat, telling him he had to be at the Cat immediately otherwise he’d be out of a job, pneumonia or no pneumonia. Fifteen minutes later, Goat appeared in a washed-out tracksuit and with mild catarrh.

  I’d started gathering my things when Papa caught me by the arm.

  “Hat,” he said, “maybe it was easier for me because I was the bad guy.”

  I shook my head, not understanding.

  “I’m the one who fucked things up because, as you can probably guess, I’m the sort of guy who fucks up everything he touches. I haven’t seen Iza for about ten years. But I’ve got what I wanted. It’s worse for you. You don’t know what the fuck you messed up to end up with all this shit.”

  I kissed him on his wrinkled cheek, which smelled like a Ukrainian cigarette factory.

  “I’d give my mother’s heart for a woman like you.” He smiled. “And now go home, g
et some sleep.”

  As I made for the door, the famous musician from Cracow burst in, digging his way to the bar like a bow saw through human roots. This time he was wearing a white jacket with a black shirt and white tie. Behind him sailed two closely cropped Sebastian clones, though I could see they lacked the warmth that, from time to time, shone through the eyes of my flatmate – when he got a second or third helping of supper, for example, or had smoked two grams of weed.

  “Papa!” yelled the musician, parting the people at the bar with his bony hands, then vaulting over the counter. Papa stepped back and held on to a chair. The musician stalked up to the computer and tried to turn off Winamp but decided it would be easier to yank the cable from the back of the computer tower. Everybody turned towards him. “Tell me where that ape is, Papa, you know which one, or you’re not going to recognise this brothel,” he said, unruffled now, taking Papa’s cigarette.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Goat choked out, and the musician took a swing and punched him in the face.

  Sebastian was in the Institute. It was his day off. At that moment, he was probably reading posts on fan forums or Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, one of his two favourite books, so he claimed. The other was The Godfather.

  “Boss,” said one of the musician’s heavyweights, shoving his way through the frightened and surprised crowd. “I know him from fights. He lives at that slut’s.”

  He pointed at me, and I put my bag down on the floor. Slowly, I walked up to him until we were at arm’s length.

  “Put that finger away,” I said calmly.

  “Don’t fucking butt in,” he retorted in a voice that sounded like a stretched tape.

  With all the strength that remained, I kicked him in the crotch with the tip of my shoe. He groaned and curled up like a little boy with appendicitis. Calmly, I walked around the bar and, equally calmly, stood between the rock star from Cracow and Papa.

  “You’re going to do three things,” I said, looking the musician in the eyes as he nonchalantly poured himself a glass of Jack Daniel’s from a bottle on the shelf.

  He touched my shoulder, leaned over me and announced in a deep voice, reeking of vodka:

  “I’m going to do one thing, sunshine. I’m going to be a gentleman and ask you to leave.”