The Institute

by Jakub Żulczyk

  “I’m not your sunshine,” I said. I removed his hand from my shoulder, took the glass from his hand and put it aside. I pulled out my mobile and entered a number. “And you’re no gentleman, but a filthy old prick,” I added, putting the phone to my ear.

  He burst into laughter and pulled back his hair.

  “You’re going to do three things,” I continued to explain. “Apologise, pay your tab and leave. And you’re never coming in here again.”

  “It’s okay, Hat, we’ll come to some agreement, don’t freak out,” Papa pleaded in a rough, tired voice. I didn’t even turn towards him.

  “Oh, princess, you’ve got your knickers in a right twist.” The musician picked up his glass. “I’ve been treated like a piece of trash here, and I’m no trash. I’m a serious man, an old-fashioned man. And some things a man just doesn’t forgive. And you, you are a tired old-fashioned woman, so go home and tell that darling of yours that he’s to come here. Or we’ll come for him.”

  “I’m going,” I replied, composed. “As soon as I’ve called the police.”

  His expression turned sour. He squinted, eyeing me from head to toe, but he didn’t make a move.

  “I want to report an assault,” I started to say into a silent phone, “in a bar called the Ugly Cat on Sławkowska Street.”

  The imaginary dispatcher asked for the details and I gave her the name of the musician and the approximate number of witnesses – about two hundred – then hung up, picked up my bag which lay by the bar and turned towards the exit.

  “What have you done, Hat?” groaned Papa. “There’s going to be bedlam.”

  The musician still stood motionless.

  “Think I’m frightened of the police?” He grinned. “I sat three years in the can during martial law, you stupid cunt.”

  “If you’re not frightened, then wait for them.”

  I turned towards him. He put his glass down on the bar again. I picked it up and flung the contents into his face, then took another half-drunk beer from the bar and did the same again before he had time to react.

  “That’s for all the old-fashioned women,” I explained.

  Everybody accompanied me with their eyes as I left, except for Papa. The next day, Goat phoned and said that they were gone within fifteen minutes, having first paid off everything on the musician’s tab. About ten thousand.

  When Ela walked into the Institute, she immediately threw herself at me with such force that something cracked in my spine. I hugged her for a good five minutes. We emitted a series of loud, inarticulate sounds, so loud that the remaining residents of the Institute, except Gypsy, came out of their rooms. Ela’s father stood in the doorway, silently watching everyone. When he caught Sebastian’s eye, he looked away.

  There’s something weird about two different groups from your life suddenly meeting. It’s like on your twentieth birthday when you’ve invited friends from school and friends from college, or your first dinner with your fiancé and both sets of parents. In situations like that, you usually feel extremely responsible for every misunderstanding or clash between the two groups. But even more than that, you suddenly realise that your life is not actually whole, but rather an incoherent story with serious scripting errors.

  Yet, when the past twelve years of my life came together in one place, I felt whole. All I needed was my daughter. Nothing but her needed to exist. When she entered the Institute and threw herself into my arms, it felt as though my spine, muscles and joints were regenerating cell by cell.

  “Hi,” Iga said to my daughter, shaking her hand. “I don’t think you want to know how much we’ve heard about you.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, too,” replied my daughter. “It’s great, you looking after Mum like that.”

  “Oh, it’s more like her looking after us.” Iga stroked her on the head.

  Ela’s father didn’t say a word; he just observed us from the doorway.

  “I’ll be here on Sunday at five,” he said, finally, and closed the door.

  I realised I hadn’t said a single word to him.

  This was possibly the happiest weekend of my life. The sun shone even during the night on Friday; we tried to sleep as little as possible because tomorrow was going to be Saturday and the day after was Sunday, so we tried to grab every single passing second. It was a Sisyphean task because time sped twice, three times, four times as fast. It ought to be a month, two months, six months, I thought, when a couple of hours after Ela’s arrival, we wandered through the zoo in enormous sunglasses, eating hideously greasy chips, gazing at the sleepy chimpanzees and unwashed tigers. It ought to be a lifetime, I thought, as we trotted through the shopping mall, shrieking in the changing rooms, running out of shops selling Chinese trash with dozens of plastic bracelets.

  “I’ve got to tell you something, Mum,” Ela announced when we were sitting in the ice cream parlour on Grodzka Street in the evening, staring at the brimming crowd.

  “I’m all ears.”

  “You’re extremely frivolous and even a bit crazy,” she said quietly, looking around to check whether anyone could hear.

  I poked my tongue out and jangled my twelve plastic bracelets. Then I turned to her attentively.

  “You really think so?” I asked, seeing her uncertainty. She was evading my eyes, chewing her lips as she always did when she caught herself gearing the conversation in the wrong direction, saying too much, exposing herself.

  “No, no…” She tried to smile. “No, you’re grown-up, serious, and I love you very much. But you know, six scoops of ice cream…”

  “Ice cream with topping,” I aimed my spoon at my portion, “is frivolous. I’m too old to eat ice cream. Ice cream is permitted only until you’re eighteen. Grown-ups, as I understand, should consume mainly vinegar and salt water.”

  “Well, no…” she stammered after a while. “It’s fattening, you know.”

  “You’re twisting something, my friend.” I looked at her carefully, and she turned her eyes towards the window, straining to find something in the crowd to which she could point and exclaim “look at that!” “You really do think I’m frivolous,” I pointed my spoon at her. “Because I left you, because I’m here, because I’m living with some odd people who are younger than me and a bit strange.”

  “No, Mum, no, God forbid. No.” My daughter started waving her hands as though what I’d said was smoke from one cigarette too many. “It’s not that. You wanted to be happy, and you couldn’t be happy with Dad, you never were, I understand.”

  I looked at her. She smiled again, a little more sincerely, considerably more sadly. I saw in her now something that wasn’t visible in the dark hallway of the Institute and through dark glasses in the dazzlingly sunny zoo. My daughter repeated to herself every morning, against her will, “I understand, I understand everything.” Again, I had to stop myself wailing and sobbing over the ice cream. What had I done? I ought to abduct her and run away to the far corners of the world with her. Ought to fight for her as hard as I could. I had let myself be bullied and manipulated by people who I didn’t respect, who I thought were idiots. I let my daughter be taken away from me and let my life be destroyed.

  “Frivolous” and “crazy” was putting it mildly.

  “And I know that we’re going to be together soon,” she said. “And that you’re doing everything to make it happen, Mum.”

  “Yes, we’ll be together soon, darling.” I stroked her face. “Soon, only—”

  “I know,” repeated my daughter, but no longer with the same certainty. Her voice was beginning to crumble.

  “We ought to go to the cinema now,” I decreed, “to see the silliest film going.”

  So we went to see some American film about people who were in love with each other, during which we, in turn, laughed, cried and invented alternative dialogues so that everyone sitting near us had to move down a few seats, and I wanted, more than anything, the screening to last ten, twenty, thirty hours. Time passed, minutes flew by
, and we tried to tear as much as we could from them, as if we wanted to gobble as much of the food that was being catapulted straight into our faces as we could.

  The following day was Ela’s birthday. We got up early and quickly, although we’d slept perhaps a couple of hours. I didn’t even need any coffee; I’d never felt so rested. We went for a walk and when we got back in the afternoon, after a few hours of roaming around Błonie, drinking cola and buying idiotic, useless trinkets, we found Iga had decorated the kitchen with paper garlands, stuck huge cardboard letters spelling ELA on the windows, poured champagne into paper cups and – like it had won first prize in a strange competition – stood my trashy pink cake in the middle of the table. She’d also managed to cook enough chips for an army, fry some soya nuggets, make two sorts of salads and bake some chocolate muffins with hazelnut butter.

  “No point in waiting,” she said to my daughter. “Let’s get this done as quickly as possible and start the party.”

  “What party?” I asked, watching with horror as my daughter approached the cake and studied it from every angle as if it was something from another planet.

  “The party.” Iga waved at the space around us. “I’ve invited about twenty people. I know, I didn’t tell you. Don’t get annoyed. The kid’s got to have her first proper birthday ball.”

  “Mum, you’re so tacky,” said Ela, licking pink icing from her finger. “How could you buy me such a cake?”

  “No smoking weed in front of her,” I whispered to Iga.

  “Mum, Dad’s always smoking it in front of me.” Ela shrugged, walked up and leant her back against mine. “Give yourself a break.”

  “Let him smoke to his heart’s content,” I said and reiterated, “No smoking in front of Ela.”

  An hour later, the guests arrived: people we knew from the Cat, Iga’s friends from her studies, even Yogi, the other guard from the Cat, came with his fiancée and her phosphorescent highlights. Everybody, of course, drank vodka, cheap champagne and beer, and smoked weed, but they were more careful, quieter, swore less. My daughter was over the moon. She talked to practically everyone but most of all to Iga and Yogi’s highlightened fiancée, whose sword-length tips made my daughter quake with fear.

  When she wanted to try some champagne, I tried to put on the sternest and firmest face I could, even though I’d gone through a whole bottle myself. My daughter stuck her index and middle fingers under her nose, aping Hitler’s moustache. I burst out laughing.

  After nine o’clock in the evening, we started dancing in my room, moving aside all the furniture, turning Abba, Prince and Michael Jackson up full blast, competing for the silliest moves. At one point, to everyone’s horror, Sebastian started spinning my daughter above his head.

  A while later, I stopped dancing and just watched. I wanted to stop the moment with my eyes. To give weight to the air, time, surroundings, to make what I saw slow down a hundredfold, so that I could observe my daughter to infinity, catch her smiling, moving and squealing. To make everything unfold at the speed of one frame per hour. I prayed for it. For her to be always happy.

  Somebody patted me on the back. I turned and everything grew chaotic, set in fast motion again; the speakers crackled with hits from the eighties, the door rattled with blows from Mrs Finkiel’s crutch, and – obeying my orders – everyone ignored her.

  “Sorry, do you have a moment?” asked Gypsy.

  I turned once more towards Ela, who was now dancing with Iga, executing quadruple pirouettes. I nodded. We went to the kitchen. It was empty.

  I sat on a chair; he sat opposite. He was collected, smiling even, probably for the first time since I’d told him to leave, since I’d told him that, even though he did mean a lot to me, the feeling was transitory.

  “I understand everything now,” he announced, opening a beer.

  “So, since you understand, what’s there to talk about?” I asked. “I’ve already said everything. Really.”

  “Because this ‘time being’ is still going to last for a while,” he added, taking a sip. He stretched his hand towards me but immediately pulled it back. “And it’s possible your daughter won’t be able to be with you for a long time yet. Possibly for a very long time. Possibly until she can make her own decisions.”

  “I really don’t want to listen to this now.” I stood up to return to my room where everybody was dancing and Sebastian, no doubt, had morphed into a DJ, because the apartment was drowning in dance music, the sort you always hear in night taxis.

  “But those parents of your husband, you know,” he said, looking at me with the same smile, “aren’t some sort of omnipotent ‘They’. There must be something you can do. They’re not omnipotent. I assure you.”

  “Gypsy, fucking hell!” I shouted. “I don’t need your expert opinion. I know who I am, who her grandparents are. I know everything.”

  “It’s just that I can see you’re suffering,” he replied, unfazed, still not moving.

  And suddenly, for a fleeting moment, I thought I saw something slimy, black, terrible in his eyes, but maybe it was simply the weed and champagne in my blood. Anyway, I didn’t want to talk to him. I was just about to leave the kitchen but turned towards him once more. He didn’t even flinch.

  “Let’s not talk about my family anymore. Gypsy, it really would be better if you moved out as soon as possible,” I said.

  The thumping on the door suddenly grew four times as loud, as though an enormous grown man was kicking it at a run, putting his whole strength behind it. I turned and ran into the hallway. Closed the door to my room but didn’t tell anyone to turn the music down. May that old hag finally snuff it, I thought unkindly.

  “Who is it?” I shouted through the door.

  “Open up!” croaked Mrs Finkiel. “Open up this minute.”

  I was furious; I was like a huge cauldron of simmering oil, like an overheated engine about to explode. I opened the door, pushed her two steps away and closed the door behind me. The two of us now stood on the landing.

  “Yes?” I shouted, and she aimed her crutch at my solar plexus. I grabbed it. “It’s my daughter’s birthday. We’re having a party and we’ve got the right. Ear plugs cost five złotys. I can get some from the pharmacy if you can’t afford them.” I looked her in the face. Mrs Finkiel wasn’t outraged like she normally was when I passed her on the stairs. She wasn’t as furious as when she’d interfered twenty thousand times before, like when one of us took a bath after eleven at night, for example. Her lips and eyes were clenched; faint, blue but pulsating veins bloomed on her temples. For a moment, I thought the old woman wasn’t angry at all. She’s terrified, I thought. But maybe it’s the weed.

  “You’ve got to get out of here,” she crackled, piercing me with crazy eyes, not pausing even to blink. “You’ve got to get out of here immediately, you idiot.”

  “Calm down, Mrs Finkiel,” I said, “or I’ll phone the police.”

  “You’ve got to get out of here,” she repeated, “otherwise something’s going to happen to you. Something bad.”

  “Are you threatening me?” I burst into laughter. “Go home, Mrs Finkiel. You’re mad.”

  “Listen to me!” she yelled, practically tearing her throat. “Listen to me. You’ve got to move out of here, you idiot, immediately. You can’t even imagine, can’t even imagine. It’s for your own good. If only you knew! It really is for your own good.”

  I brought my face up close to hers until it was just centimetres away. As usual, she smelled of mould and resin.

  “Please,” I said slowly, stressing every syllable. “Please leave me in peace, please go home or I’ll tell the police that you’re threatening me.”

  She grew limp, as though someone had tugged a metal string, which had reached to her throat, from out of her backside; she leant on her crutch and lowered her head. She looked at me, but entirely differently, with the hazy and sad eyes of a tired and old woman. Again I saw something, that black something, a strange crack, a break, which ha
d first been in Gypsy’s eyes and which I now felt was hanging in the darkness of the stairwell, just behind my neighbour’s head.

  “As you wish,” she said quietly. “Turn the music down a bit.”

  I went back into the apartment just as my daughter ran out of the room into the hall.

  “Mum!” She threw her arms around my neck with the same momentum as when she’d first stepped into the Institute. “I was looking for you, Mum, where were you? I looked all over, but you weren’t here. Don’t do that again. Don’t disappear, and don’t leave when I’m not looking.”

  “I just went outside for a moment. It’s okay, darling,” I replied, stroking Ela’s head. My hand was shaking. I pulled it away and clenched my fist.

  “Dad phoned,” said my daughter, and her breath was strangely sweet, like overripe apples, “and wished me happy birthday.”

  “That’s good,” I replied, and I walked into the room where the dancing was slowly coming to an end, caught Iga by the hand and whispered in her ear.

  “What foul weed is that? I told you.”

  “What weed?” She looked at me with surprise. “But it’s the same as we’ve been smoking for the past two months. Don’t you feel well?”

  I shook my head and took a deep breath, switched on “Mamma Mia” by Abba and started dancing with my daughter. When the song ended, I murmured into her ear:

  “I’ve still got another present for you.”

  I led her to the kitchen and, from the pile of wrapping paper (all the guests had given Ela a present), I pulled out a carrier bag with the washed-out Thelma and Louise T-shirt in it. My daughter stretched it out in front of her and was thrilled, although it made her cry a little. Tears were welling up in my eyes, too, so we quietly cried in the kitchen for a while, behind a hastily closed door, just like we had when I was packing to leave for Cracow.

  The party ended relatively early, about two, with three of us remaining on the battlefield – me, Iga and Ela, although really it was just me and Iga because Ela had fallen asleep on the table.