Steps

by Jerzy Kosiński

  The girl spent two days in the clinic, and after she was released she came immediately to me. She undressed to show me that the bruises had almost disappeared and then took a shower while I prepared the bed.

  Afraid to show any reluctance, I took her rapidly, before she was ready. She moaned and then collected herself, begging me to do what we had done so many times before, things I could not bring myself to do with her now. Afterward she asked me why I had been so violent. I told her the truth. Our relationship had changed.

  Her moods were fitful: she was either pensive and quiet, or exuberant and nervously excited, assuring me again and again that the doctors had given her a clean bill of health. She stressed the phrase—“as though nothing had happened”—attempting with difficulty to nullify the rape during which, she insisted, she had been numb and felt nothing.

  In my dreams I saw her emerging from a shell, twitching and quivering, creeping closer and closer until she touched me. Then suddenly each of us became male and female at the same time, seeking each other’s orifices and rearing up back to back, wounding each other with our organs, tumbling to the ground to discharge blood in rapid climaxes.

  My curiosity about her body intensified. Abruptly and forcefully I subjected her to various experiments, stimulating her responses, exploring and violating her in spite of her pleas and protests. She became an object which I could control or pair with other objects. I didn’t hesitate to employ artificial devices to arouse her or to sustain her excitement. She attributed the change in my behavior to the rape, and she demanded to know whether I was hating and punishing her or myself for what had happened. She wondered whether my new urgency was a disguise for the love which she claimed I was now ashamed to show her.

  One evening she mentioned a neighbor of hers, a girl, who was attracted to her and who had made several attempts to be intimate with her. I told her to invite this girl to share in our love-making. I explained that her neighbor did not interest me as a woman, but merely as another kind of object with which I could excite her and therefore myself even more. Surprisingly, she made no protest and called her.

  A few days later they both appeared; I noticed that her neighbor carried an overnight bag. I made it clear to our guest that she was free to employ any means she wanted to arouse my friend, but that I would come between them whenever I wanted. I pointed out that I had made their intimacy possible for my sake, and that she must comply. She agreed to spend the weekend with us.

  In the weeks that followed, my friend began to drink, and I decided not to discourage her: alcohol made her an even more responsive subject Now her passiveness kept me actively preoccupied with her.

  One of my friends was planning a party for some of his male colleagues. On the evening of the party my girl friend began drinking, obviously resentful that I intended to go without her. Finally I offered to take her along.

  The party was well under way when we arrived. She had no hesitation toasting each of the guests. I noted the easy familiarity with which she embraced my friends and her provocative, almost flaunting remarks. I realized that she would soon become an embarrassment to me; I felt trapped.

  In the next half hour I approached each of the men and whispered that the girl was my gift to the host and to his guests; if they would devise the situation, each could have his pleasure.

  The excitement increased: the girl began surrounding herself with the more boisterous guests. Amid a burst of laughter, I saw her being raised shoulder-high, her dress awry, her legs wrapped around the neck of the man whose head she clasped. As I watched, a dozen hands stretched up past her thighs to feel her belly and her breasts. She gave a sudden cry. The pearl necklace I once had given her snapped, and the tiny iridescent seeds cascaded down, lost now in the swaying, heaving rush that carried her toward the bedroom. I left

  These girls so carefully posed in the windows are prostitutes, aren’t they?

  Yes, they are.

  In other neighborhoods the prostitutes walk the streets and use hotel rooms, yet here they have their own apartments.

  The girls don’t own the apartments, they simply rent them. Often two or three of them use the same place, taking turns by day or night.

  Do they like working that way?

  Yes, they please the man who is disturbed by the crudeness of the streetwalker and the necessity of approaching her on the street and of following her to a hotel in full view of others. But these women at the windows suggest something else: their apartments mean privacy and comfort; doors can be locked, curtains drawn. A man can see himself as a guest in a home and the girl as his hostess. He comes in order to relax and without any particular motive. Then whatever happens seems more natural.

  Have you ever been with a prostitute?

  Yes.

  Before you met me or since?

  That can’t make any difference.

  But why would you want a prostitute? What could she do that I don’t? Is she more willing than I am?

  I do with her what you would find unacceptable.

  How do you know I would?

  Because you know me only in a certain way. And because our relationship is based on your acceptance of what I have been with you.

  Then what I assume to be you is only one side of you.

  You also offer only the side of yourself which you think is most acceptable to me. So far neither of us has revealed anything which contradicts what we have both always assumed.

  When you are with a prostitute, whatever she does or says is pretense; she wants your money, not you.

  Money extends my potency; without it I couldn’t be what I am. I wouldn’t be able to meet you where I do and in the fashion I do. I wouldn’t be living the way I do, nor could I afford the experiences I require.

  Still, whatever a prostitute does with you she also does with others, doesn’t she? Doesn’t that make you jealous?

  It doesn’t concern me: the knowledge that other men have her is not disturbing in her case. So many others possess her that they do not amount to rivals. In a way, one even feels a sort of sympathy with them, because one’s choice of a prostitute is confirmed by those who have had her before. Since no man is excluded from having her, she appears to be not so much a woman as a desire that all men share in common.

  But after you leave her, she isn’t even aware that you exist.

  When I leave her, the awareness of what has happened leaves with me: that awareness is mine, not hers.

  I FOUND HIM ATTRACTIVE and charming. He spoke with an accent; I think he’s a foreigner.

  He is. He came to this country some years ago. But he’s here permanently now.

  Do you know him well

  Yes.

  What does he do?

  He’s an architect. He designs highly functiond building?, where style is only secondary: hospitals, schools, prisons, funeral parlors, clinics for animals.

  Funeral parlors?

  Certainly. They have to be built, too, you know, just like maternity clinics.

  But that’s so unusual.

  Not really. He once told me that in the late thirties, just after he graduated from the university, he worked for a firm of architects. His first assignment was to draw up plans for a concentration camp.

  He refused.

  No, he didn’t. Even though it was difficult, because there were so few precedents, but that made it all the more challenging. He told me that at that time many architects were competing for projects sponsored by the government. Of course, when they were designing a school or hospital or even a prison he and his colleagues could easily imagine themselves inside it, but a concentration camp was entirely different: it required exceptional vision. Still, there was something of the school about it, of the hospital, the waiting rooms in public buildings, and something of the funeral home also, only the section for disposing of the bodies was more efficient. Above all, it had to be functional; this was the underlying philosophy. He had carefully taken the terrain into account: one style of camp for a bro
ken belt of rolling foothills and another for a treeless, steppe-like country. Since abundant funds and land were available, my friend’s designs were promptly accepted. Nevertheless, it was just a project. You could look at it from many points of view: in a maternity hospital, for instance, more people leave than arrive; in a concentration camp the reverse is true. Its main purpose is hygiene.

  Hygiene? What do you mean?

  Have you ever seen rats being exterminated? Or, better—do you like animals?

  Of course.

  Well, rats are also animals.

  Not really. I mean they’re not domestic animáis. They’re dangerous, and therefore they have to be exterminated.

  Exactly: they have to be exterminated; it’s a problem of hygiene. Rats have to be removed. We exterminate them, but this has nothing to do with our attitudes toward cats, dogs, or any other animal. Rats aren’t murdered—we get rid of them; or, to use a better word, they are eliminated; this act of elimination is empty of all meaning. There’s no ritual in it, no symbolism; the right of the executioner is never questioned. That’s why in the concentration camps my friend designed, the victims never remained individuals; they became as identical as rats. They existed only to be killed.

  I followed the river to my friend’s lodgings. It was yean since we had last met and only by chance that I learned he was living in the city. A few buildings clustered around what passed for a square; others straggled along the canals and the railroad tracks. Below his house a cemetery bordered the river.

  I walked toward the cemetery, knowing I would see him as he returned home. Already I could feel neglect hovering over the graves.

  Within minutes I heard my name called, and looked up to see my friend hurrying down from the road. He seemed amused that I had chosen to wait for him in the cemetery, adding that the place looked derelict from not having been used for so many years. The inscriptions on the headstones were barely legible, and many of the stones had sunk drunkenly into the ground. The people buried there, he said, constituted a religious minority who for a long time had not been allowed to bury their dead within the city limits, because their funeral processions incited the townspeople to attack them. The bodies were therefore transported here on boats.

  But, he went on, it was not the graves that were interesting; it was the caretaker. My friend said he had spoken to him many times, but hadn’t got more than the briefest responses. His curiosity aroused, he had inquired about him from the people of the town.

  According to them, the caretaker had been interned in a concentration camp during the war. Before that, he had been a heavyweight boxer; although no champion, he had been well known in boxing circles for his tremendous strength. Few managers would risk handling him because he had injured and crippled several of his opponents. The concentration-camp commandant had noticed the man while making selections for the gas chambers and decided to keep him as a private sparring partner for himself and for the guards who liked to box.

  The commandant invited a professional boxer to challenge the prisoner. He decided that both boxers would have to fight as hard as they would in a championship bout. If the prisoner-champion won the match, an extra prisoner would be executed. If he happened to be outpointed or knocked out, he could ask for the release of a single prisoner otherwise destined for the gas chamber. But he had to fight honestly, without exposing himself needlessly to his opponent and without pretending to lose strength or get groggy. If he were suspected of losing intentionally, he would be put to death.

  The commandant, who prided himself on his insight into the prison mentality and the survival instinct, obviously assumed that his prisoner-champion would fight well in order to stay alive and yet would not be overanxious for a victory which would condemn one of his fellow prisoners to the ovens. Deprived of the will to conquer he would still have to fight to win.

  When the professional arrived, it seemed probable that the prisoner would be defeated. Unfortunately for the commandant, the visiting boxer, faced with the choice of losing the contest to a prisoner, an enemy of his race, or winning it only to release another such enemy from death, refused to fight The prisoner survived, unable to save anyone but himself.

  Now he lived done, watching the headstones steadily sinking into the fetid mud.

  When I was attending the university, there were numerous obligatory meetings of the many student political organizations. During the lengthy sessions the students were required by the Party to evaluate each other and themselves. The meetings were tense and often dramatic: if a student’s progress or conduct was assessed unfavorably, the Party could remove him from the university and assign him to a job deep in some remote province. It was as if each of us were a stone resting in a slingshot; we never knew who would launch us, or where to.

  Just before a meeting I went to the lavatory. There I ran into another student, nicknamed “The Philosopher,” who looked haggard and began to vomit in uncontrollable spasms. When he saw me he tried to excuse himself and even attempted a smile.

  He found these meetings unbearable; he was far too nervous to handle the strain. He told me that a room crowded with people triggered off a panic in him, and he often spent hours alone in the corridors, trying to calm himself before returning to the classroom.

  One day I was late for an appointment with him. I explained that I had been delayed by a visit to the new state bank which had just opened a branch in the center of the city. In an offhand way I told him that on the ground floor there were imposing lavatories, all clean and as yet scarcely used. I said I had visited them.

  My friend became intensely interested, asking for the exact location of the bank. When I told him, he took a small map from his pocket and carefully marked its position. I noticed other markings on the map and asked him what they stood for. He said he had marked the locations of his “temples.” I didn’t understand. He asked whether I knew why our fellow students had nicknamed him “The Philosopher” I was mystified. He told me to follow him.

  We reached one of the city’s ethnic museums. He led me in and we walked straight down to the lavatories. They were deserted: it was early afternoon and the whole place was quiet and clean. He turned to me and with a note of pride said: “You can lock yourself in one of these cubicles and not be disturbed for hours! You know how seldom we can get away from meetings. Well, here your privacy is absolute: you can contemplate and enjoy your own world.” He proudly displayed his map. “I’ve discovered more than thirty public buildings in different parts of the city, all with temples like this, all waiting for me.”

  He began to describe them in meticulous detail. Some of them, especially those built recently, were grandiose: drenched in white marble, with brass and silver trimmings, with florid mosaics on the floor, crystal chandeliers, elaborate systems of ventilation. “You sit in your stall—and think,” he continued. “And you hear your thoughts hovering about you like Greek gods suddenly freed from the textbooks. But you are not overheard. What a joy to be left alone at last, not having to care about what others say or how they look at you, or how you seem to them, without having to look outside the white walls of your private sanctuary”

  An elderly man approached and went into one of the lavatories. Moments later he left; we listened to the whispers of the exhausted waterfall. “But there is one thing you have to do if you intend to sit inside for any length of time,” my friend said. He removed a wad of cotton from his pocket. In it was a small flask of cleaning fluid. “There are all sorts of markings in there,” he explained, “messages and slogans scrawled on the walls of the toilets. Many of them clearly the work of counterrevolutionaries. The temples are, apparently, the only place that they can safely discharge their resentment against the regime, against the collective farms, the purge trials and foreign policies, and even against the cult of our omnipotent leader. You see,” my friend continued, “I have to be prepared for anyone who accuses me of having scribbled these heresies while sitting in here for a more than normal period. So I begin
by wiping off every word on the walls. Then, if I’m asked by a policeman or a detective why I spend so much time in the lavatory, I have a valid and innocent answer. After all, a philosopher once wrote, “Gods and temples are not easily set up; to establish them rightfully is the work of a mighty intellect’ All of these erasures are a small price to pay for possessing a temple of one’s own, don’t you think?”

  In spite of his fears and apprehensions he faithfully attended all the meetings and seminars. I remember one occasion when the professor asked him to comment upon a political doctrine recently implemented by the Party. He rose, pale and sweating, yet trying to look composed and impersonal; he answered that certain aspects of the doctrine seemed to mirror perfectly the many oppressive aspects of the total state, and for this reason it lacked all humanity. Silence fell. Without comment, the professor gestured for him to sit down. There was a commotion among the students: several Party members got up and noisily left the room. We knew he was doomed.

  We continued our studies together until the end of the semester, and then I lost contact with The Philosopher. He had been removed from the university for his antisocial behavior. One of the university officials told me afterward that the man was no longer alive. He almost sneered as he recounted the sordid circumstances of his suicide in a lavatory. I was silent

  A spectacular reception was given by the Party for carefully selected local, political, military, and scientific dignitaries and delegates from foreign countries. I was surprised to see among the guests a scientist whom I had met at the university. He was the only living member of a once prominent family which had been exterminated during the purges. After many years spent in a labor camp, he had only recently been rehabilitated by the Party.