and infirm.' 'The night things fell from the sky.' The night of
strange animals.' 'The night of receiving letters.' The night precious things got lost.' Maybe you could name the days after the previous night's dreams. Or name whole months, years, eras, in
which people keep having similar dreams, their minds synchronized in a way that can no longer be felt once the sun is up.
If someone were able to research this idea properly, if they
could quantify the characters, images and emotions that appear
in dreams, strip them down to their motifs, and apply statistics,
including those correlation tests that work like a magic glue,
linking things together that seem impossible to connect, maybe
they would discover some sense in it all, like the pattern
according to which stock exchanges function, or large airports
operate.
I have often asked Marta to tell me her dreams, but she just
shrugs her shoulders. I don't think she's interested. Even if
dreams did come to her at night, I don't think she would allow
herself to remember them. She would wipe them away, like spilt
milk off her oilcloth with the wild strawberry pattern. She would
wring out the rag and air her low-ceilinged kitchen. Her gaze
would fall on the pelargoniums; she would rub their leaves
between her fingers, and the pungent smell would stiOe once
and for all whatever she may have seen that night. I'd give a lot
to know just one of Marta's dreams.
But she has told me other people's dreams. I have never asked
her where she gets them from. Perhaps she makes them up, just
like those stories of hers. She makes use of other people's
dreams, just as she makes wigs out of other people s hair.
'
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0 I g a To k a r c z u k
Whenever we drive to town together, while she's waiting for me
in the car outside the bank, she stares at people through the
window. Afterwards, in the car, as she's rummaging about in her
plastic carrier bags, quite casually she always starts telling me
something, such as other people's dreams.
I am never sure if there is a borderline between what Marta
says and what I hear. I am unable to separate it from her, from
me, from what we both know, and what we don't, from what I
heard on the radio that morning, or what I read in the weekend
newspapers, from the time of day, or even from how the sunlight
shines on the villages in the valleys along the way.
T h e d ay of c a r s
We found a car in the forest. I t was so well hidden that we
stepped into its long bonnet, buried in pine needles. There was
a small birch tree growing on the front seat, and a strand of ivy
on the steering-wheel. R. said it was German, a pre-war DKW:
he knows about cars. The body of the car was completely corroded, and the wheels were half sunk in forest litter. When I tried to open the door on the driver's side, the handle came off in
my hand. There were yellow mushrooms growing in cascades on
the leather upholstery, right down to the rust-eaten floor. We
didn't tell anyone about this find.
That evening another car came out of the forest, from the
direction of the border - a smart red Toyota with Swiss registration plates. The setting sun was briefly reflected in its crimson veneer as it coasted down into the valley with its engine off.
During the night some agitated border guards with torches came
hurrying after it.
Next morning on the I nternet there were dreams about cars.
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
27
A m o s
Krysia from the Cooperative Bank in Nowa Ruda had a dream. It
was early in the spring of 1 969.
She dreamed she heard voices in her left ear. At first it was a
woman's voice that kept on talking and talking, but Krysia
couldn't work out what it was saying. She felt worried in the
dream. 'How am I going to be able to work if someone keeps
droning in my ear?' she said to herself. She thought she might be
able to switch the voice off, just like switching off the radio or
hanging up the telephone, but she couldn't do it. The source of
the sound lay deep in her ear, somewhere in those small, winding corridors, those labyrinths of moist membrane, in the dark caverns inside her head. She tried sticking her fingers in her
ears, she tried covering them with her hands, but she couldn't
stifle it. She felt as if the whole world must be able to hear this
noise. Maybe that was it - the voice was making the whole world
vibrate. Some sentences kept being repeated - they were grammatically perfect and sounded fine, but they made no sense, they were just imitations of human speech. Krysia was afraid of
them. But then she started hearing a different voice in her ear, a
man's voice, clear and pleasant. 'My name is Amos,' he said. I t
was nice to talk t o him. H e asked about her work, and about her
parents' health , but in fact - or so she imagined - he didn't really
need to, because he knew all about her already. 'Where arc you?'
she asked him hesitantly. 'In Mariand,' he replied; she had heard
of this region in central Poland. 'Why can I hear you in my ear7'
she asked. 'You're an unusual person,' said Amos, 'and I've fallen
in love with you. I love you.' Krysia dreamed the same dream
three or four more times, always with the same ending.
In the morning she drank her coffee s urrounded by pi les of
bank documents. Outside sleet was falling and immed iately
28
0 I g a To k a r c z u k
melting. The damp penetrated the bank's central ly heated
offices, permeating the overcoats on their pegs, the bank clerks'
imitation leather handbags , their knee boots and even the
clients. But on that unusual day Krysia Poploch, head of the
credit division , realized that for the first time in her life she was
wholly and unconditionally loved. This discovery was as powerful as a slap in the face. It made her head spin. Her view of the banking hall faded, and all she could hear was silence. Suddenly
suffused with this love, Krysia fel t like a brand new kettle, filled
for the very first time with crystal-clear water. Meanwhile, her
coffee had gone cold.
That day she left work early and made her way to the post
office. She got out the phone books for all the large cities in central Poland: L6di, Sieradz, Konin, Kielce, Radom, and Cz�stochowa, home of the Black Madonna, the Virgin Mary's
city. She opened each one at A and ran a painted fingernail down
the columns of names. There was no Amos or Amoz in L6di,
Sicradz, Konin and so on. She couldn't find him among the small
list of names from the surrounding countryside either. What
she felt now would best be described as indignation. She knew
he must be out there somewhere. For a while she sat still, her
mind a blank, and then she began all over again, taking in
Radom, Tarnow, Lublin and Wlodawek as well. She found Lidia
Amoszewicz and the Amosinskis. Then in desperation she began
to contrive new combinations: Amos, Soma, Maso, Sarno, Omas,
until finally her painted fingernails broke the dream code - there
he was, A. Mos, 54 Sienkiewicz Street, Cz�stochowa.
>
Krysia lived in the countryside, and every morning a dirty
blue bus took her to town, crawling up the twists and turns of
the road like a dingy beetle. In winter, when darkness fel l early,
its blazing eyes swept over the stony mountain slopes. The bus
was a blessing - it gave people the chance to know the world
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
29
beyond the mountains. All manner of journeys started in it.
Krysia's journey to work took twenty minutes, from the moment
the bus picked her up at the stop to the moment she stood
before the massive doors of the bank. In those twenty minutes
the world changed out of all recognition. The forest became
houses, the mountain pastures became town squares, the meadows became streets, and the stream became a river, which was a different colour every day, because unfortunately it flowed past
the Blachobyt textile mill. Still on the bus, Krysia would change
her gumboots for a pair of court shoes. Her heels clicked on the
broad steps of the old German building.
Krysia was the most elegant girl at the bank. She had a fashionable hairstyle - a well-shaped blonde perm with carefully dyed roots. The fluorescent lighting brought out its highlights.
Her mascara-coated lashes cast subtle shadows on her smooth
cheeks. Her pearly lipstick discreetly emphasized the shape of
her mouth. As she grew older, she wore more and more makeup. Nowadays she sometimes told herself, 'Stop, that's enough,'
but she worried that the passing years were blurring her features,
depriving her face of definition. She thought her eyebrows were
thinning, her blue irises fading, and the lines of her lips growing
fainter and fainter - her whole face was becoming foggy, as if it
were trying to disappear. This was Krysia's greatest fear - that
her face would disappear before it had developed and truly come
into being.
At the age of thirty she still lived with her parents. Their
house stood beside the winding, pot-holed local highway, looking hopeful, as if it expected this location to bring it a role in history, in the march of passing armies, in the advent ures o f
treasure hunters, o r i n the border guards' pursuit o f bootleggers
from the Czech Republic. But neither the highway nor the house
had much good fortune. Nothing ever happened, except that the
30
0 I g a To k a r c z u k
forest above the house grew sparser, like Krysia's eyebrows. Her
father kept chopping down the young birch trees to make poles
and rods, and every year he cut down the spruces for Christmas
trees. Meanwhile the pathways in the tall grass grew blurred, just
like the line of her mouth, and the sky-blue walls of their house
kept fading, like Krysia's eyes.
At home Krysia was quite important; she earned money and
did the shopping, carrying it home in bags her mother had made.
She had her own room in the attic, with a sofa-bed and a
wardrobe. But only at the bank did she really start to come into
her own. Her office was separated from the banking hall by a plywood partition as thin as cardboard. As she sat at her desk she could hear the hubbub of the bank - doors creaking, heavy farm
boots shuffling across the wooden floor, the murmur of women's
voices gossiping and the rattle of the two remaining abacuses
that the management hadn't yet got round to replacing with the
modern machines with handles that made a whirring sound.
At about ten the daily coffee-drinking ritual began,
announced by the clatter of aluminium teaspoons and the sound
of glasses striking softly agai nst saucers - the usual office
chimes. The precious ground coffee brought from home in jamjars was shared equally between the glasses, and formed a thick brown skin on the surface, briefly holding up the torrents of
sugar. The smell of coffee filled the bank to the ceiling, and the
farmers queuing for service kicked themselves for having run
into the sacred coffee hour.
After the Easter holiday the bank received information about
a training course for employees to be held in Cz�stochowa .
Krysia saw it as an undeniable sign and decided to go. As she
was packing her things into her synthetic leather bag, she
thought of God, and that, despite what they say about him, he
always turns up at the crucial moment.
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
3 1
Sluggish trains full o f crumpled people took her there. There
were no seats free in the compartments, so she stood glued to a
grubby window in the corridor and dozed standing up. Someone
got out in the middle of the night, and at last she could sit down.
Squashed between hot bodies in the dry air she fell into a heavy,
solid sleep, without any images at all, not even the tail-ends of
thoughts. Only when she awoke did she realize that she was on
a journey; until then she had just been drifting about in space,
casually changing location. Only sleep closes the old and opens
the new - one person dies and another awakes. This black, featureless space between days is the real journey. Luckily all the trains from N owa Ruda to the world at large run at night. It
crossed her mind that after this journey nothing would ever be
the same.
She found herself in Cz�stochowa before daybreak. It was
still too early to go anywhere, so she ordered some tea at the station bar and warmed her hands on the glass. At the neighbouring tables sat old women swathed in checked shawls
and men stupefied by tobacco - husbands and fathers crushed
by life, with leathery faces like old wallets, and children flushed
with sleep, from whose half-open mouths trickled thin streaks of
dribble.
Two lemon teas and one coffee later, dawn finally came. She
found Sienkiewicz Street and walked right up the middle of it,
because the cars weren't awake yet. She looked into the windows
and saw thick, pleated curtains and rubber plants nestling up
against the glass. In some of the houses the lights were still shining weakly. By this light people were hurriedly getting dressed and eating breakfast, women were drying out their tights O'er
the gas or packing sandwiches for school, beds were being made,
trapping the warmth of bodies until the following night, there
was a smell of burned milk, shoelaces were being threaded back
32
O l g a To k a r c z u k
into their nice safe holes, and the radio was broadcasting news
that no one was listening to. Then she came across the first
bread queue. Everyone in the queue was silent.
Number 54 Sienkiewicz Street was a large, grey apartment
block with a fishmonger's shop on the ground floor and a
canyon-like courtyard. Krysia stood in front of it and slowly
studied the windows. My God, they were so ordinary. She stood
there for half an hour, until she stopped feeling the cold.
The training course was extremely boring. In the exercise
book she had bought specially to make notes, Krysia doodled
with her pen. The green cloth on the chairman's table cheered
her up a bit. Absent-mindedly, she stroked it. The Cooperative
Bank employees seemed all alike to her. The women had fashionably cut perox
ide hair and bright pink lips. The men wore navy blue suits and had pigskin briefcases, as if by mutual
agreement. They cracked jokes in the cigarette breaks.
For dinner there was bread and cheese and mugs of tea. After
dinner everyone went through to the clubroom, where vodka
and gherkins had appeared on the tables. Someone produced a
set of tin shot glasses from his briefcase. A man's hand wandered over a woman's nylon-clad knees.
Krysia went to bed feeling rather tipsy. Her two room-mates
turned up around dawn and shushed each other in a loud whisper. And so it went on for three days.
On the fourth day she stood before a brown door bearing a
china nameplate reading 'A. Mos'. She knocked.
The door was opened by a tall, thin man in pyjamas with a
cigarette in his mouth. He had dark, bloodshot eyes, as if he
hadn't slept for days. They blinked when she asked, 'A. Mos?'
'Yes,' he said. 'A. Mos.'
She smiled, because she thought she recognized his voice.
'Well, I'm Krysia.'
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i gh t
33
Surprised, he stepped aside and let her into the hall. The flat
was small and cramped, flooded in fluorescent light, which made
it look grubby, like a station waiting room. There were boxes of
books, piles of newspapers and half-packed suitcases lying about.
Stearn carne gushing through the open bathroom door.
'It's me,' she repeated. 'I've come.'
The man turned round and laughed. 'But who are you?' he
said. 'Do I know you?' He clapped his hand to his brow. 'Of
course, you're . . . you're . . .' he said, snapping his fingers in the
air.
Krysia realized that he didn't recognize her, but there was
nothing odd about that. After all, he knew her in a different
way, through a dream, from the inside, not the way people usually know each other.
'I'll explain everything. May I go on in?'
The man hesitated. The ash from his cigarette fell to the floor
and he ushered her into the sitting-room. She took oiT her shoes
and went in.
'I'm packing, as you can see,' said the man, explaining the
mess. He removed the crumpled bedclothes from the sofa-bed
and took them into another room, then came back and sat down
opposite her. His faded pyjamas exposed a strip of bare chest; it
House of Day, House of Night Page 4
