sequences of numbers printed in books of ephemerides.
Sometimes he would pore over them until dawn, and at sunrise
he would start to see the future. It was always terrible - dead and
empty. There were never any people or animals in it. He could
see it springing up in the gloomy corners of the room and
spreading outside, into the stairwell of his block, on to the lawns
in front of it, into the streets and the marketplace in Nowa Ruda.
When he went for a quick walk in the evenings he would brush
against it, and it would leave a strange metallic smell on the
sleeves of his overcoat.
He became a proper clairvoyant when his wife died. It looked
as if it was she who had kept him down to earth and grounded
his every thought, his every presentiment. She was like a powerful atmospheric depression that squeezes every puff of smoke out of chimneys and casts winter smog over cities. She controlled his thoughts by magic, forcing them to concentrate on queuing in the shops, weeding the beetroots at the allotment and
tossing the coal into the cellar. What's more, her voice used to
follow him all round town. She would stick her head out of the
window and call across the courtyard, 'Leee-o, Leee-o, Leo ! '
until all the children looked up and repeated after her, 'Leo,
Leee-o, Leee-o !' She was a sorceress.
So when she died, suddenly it all went quiet, and images that
had been suppressed for years began to surface in his head and
spread like frost on a damp window-pane - they linked arms
unexpectedly and made rings and fancy sequences; quite at
random they built bewitching patterns that made perfect sense.
This was real clairvoyance.
His clients were all women. Only once in his career as a clairvoyant did a man turn up to see him - a well-dressed older gentleman, bloated from a bad d�et and, perhaps, from too much
H o u 5 e o f D a y, H o u 5 e o f N i g h t
1 49
vodka. He knew him by sight, but he couldn't help him much,
because the old guy's problem was love, that most overrated of
all emotions, and at best an absurd one anyway, arising as it did
out of inner confusion. He was looking for his teenage lover,
which was both funny and pitiful. Leo did not want to take this
on at all , especially since the young girl had not left even the
most trivial thing behind her, not a trace. But the man's despair
was so affecting, he looked so pathetic in his stiff woollen overcoat with his felt hat pulled over his eyes, as if he was completely lost, even in his own clothes.
'Where is she? That's all I want to know,' he said.
Leo looked into the past. He saw the girl at once, because she
was more restless and more conspicuous than other beings. She
horrified him; she wasn't a teenage girl at all, or a woman - she
wasn't even human. My God, Leo took serious fright, and only
told the sad old man, 'She's here,' because he could see her in the
present and the future too.
'In town?' said the man gladly and Leo saw his eyes for the
first time - they were puffy and tear-stained.
'Somewhere in the neighbourhood.'
Before leaving the man furtively pressed a banknote into his
hand.
'Please keep this a secret,' he requested.
There was no need to say that, thought Leo afterwards. You
should never talk about such things. Who would bel ieve it
anyway? That you can see something that isn't there , and that a
person may not necessarily be human through and through ,
that every decision you make is just an illusion. Thank G od
people have the capacity for disbelief - it is a truly bountiful gift
from God.
The women were always more specific when they asked about
love; they wanted to be hugged, to walk through the park arm in
1 50
O l g a To k a r c z u k
arm, to bear someone's children, to wash windows on Saturdays
and make soup for someone. When he closed his eyes he could
see their lives; they didn't interest him and he found it hard to
concentrate on the details that concerned them - whether their
husband would be auburn-haired or dark, whether they'd have
one or two children, a healthy body or a sick one, money or bare
cupboards. But if he made an effort he could manage it. In his
visions he counted children, peered into cupboards and
inspected the hair colour of men in white T-shirts eating soup on
Sundays. However, he found the women's lives touching. Sitting
opposite him, gazing expectantly at his face, they were like timid
creatures, deer, or hares in spring - gentle and shy, and at the
same time extremely clever at dodging, escaping and hiding.
Sometimes he thought of a woman's existence as a sort of mask
that she puts on as soon as she's born , enabling her to go
through life in camouflage, never fully revealing herself to
anyone. He reckoned they didn't ask the questions they ought to
ask.
He changed the money he earned through c lairvoyance
(which wasn't much) into dollars. He wanted to go to India,
which he never managed to do, because India, like everything
else, ceased to exist.
But first of all, he looked into many other people's futures,
and they all merged together in his mind into one single,
common future. He knew that the end of the world was coming,
and that it wouldn't be long now - it was only a matter of calculations.
He saw a valley, over which hung a low, orange sky. All the
lines of this world were indistinct and the shadows were blurred,
cast by some alien light. In the valley there were no houses, no
traces of humanity, not a single clump of nettles or a wild currant bush was growing. There was no stream, though the place
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
1 5 1
where one used to be was overgrown with thick, hard, tawny
grass, like a scar. There was no day in this world, and no night
either. The orange sky kept shining all the time - neither warm
nor cold, motionless and indifferent. The hill was still covered in
forest, but when he looked at it closely he could see that it was
dead; at some point it had hardened and turned to stone. Pinecones hung on the spruce trees, and their branches were still covered in ashen needles, because there was no wind to scatter
them. He had a terrible foreboding that if any sort of movement
were to occur in this landscape the forest would come crashing
down and turn to dust.
This was how the end must look. N o deluge, no rains of fire,
no Auschwitz, no comet. This is how the world will look when
God has deserted it, whoever he is. Like an abandoned house,
everything coated in cosmic dust, muggy and steeped in silence.
Everything living will congeal and grow mould in light that has
no pulse and is therefore dead. In this spectral light everything
will crumble.
The man who saw the end of the world every day lived calmly.
From time to time he went to Krakow for books and gazed out
of the train window at the passing scenery, mainly Upper Silesia
and its temples of industry, then the fields in Opole county
stretching to
the horizon, neatly sown with rapeseed that blooms
each year on the tenth of May. He had descriptions of all sorts of
apocalyptic visions in his canvas rucksack, typed out hundreds
of times, the pronouncements of the spirits on the collapse of
civilization, visions of the Virgin Mary, and the abstruse poetry
of N ostradamus.
Suddenly the plains ended and the mountains began. The
train entered the spruce forest, pushed its way through stony
ravines and wound through valleys until it reached the cen tre o f
Walbrzych. Some people got out at the Town Station. hut Leo
1 52
O l g a To k a r c z u k
went on to the Main Station, because that's where he changed
trains for Klodzko.
Walbrzych Main Station was dark and deserted, with a single
kiosk where miners from the night shift bought cigarettes and
condoms. At the bar they sold piroshki with bacon dripping
and weak tea, brewed with difficulty in lukewarm water. The
train to Klodzko via Nowa Ruda was usually empty. Leo liked to
find a seat on the upper deck to get a better view, because this
was the most beautiful train route ever. It ran along tall viaducts
across broad valleys, and along mountain slopes above villages
and streams. At every turn, breathtaking new views unfolded,
featuring the gentle line of the mountains, the silky sky, and
ribbons of greenery. Down below, people were walking along
the road, driving cows; dogs were running; a peasant burst into
laughter; the little bells jingled on the sheep's necks; higher up a
man with a rucksack went by and waved; smoke rose from the
chimneys into the sky, and birds flew blithely west. In a train like
that it's impossible to read - you simply have to look.
Leo began to write a book, and started with a title: The End is
Nigh. It was about the end of the world, and included a thorough
analysis of the heavens. The world would start to end on the
second of April 1 995, when Uranus would enter Aquarius, and
it would end once and for all in August 1 999, when the Sun,
Mars, Saturn and Uranus would form a great cross in the sky. He
wrote this book in the winter of 1980, when it wasn't yet clear
what would happen in Poland. But when the strikes began, and
the trams on strike in Wrodaw were drawn up in the shape of an
enormous cross, covering the entire city, Leo accepted that he
might have made a mistake in his vigilant observations, or in his
interpretation of the tiny little figures in the ephemerides, and
that the end of the world might be coming sooner. Indeed he
couldn't wait, and lived in a state of pure anticipation. He wore
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
1 53
out all his old shoes, his clothes tore at the seams, the elastic in
his underpants broke, his socks were full of holes, and the heels
became a very thin gauze of nylon threads with the hardened
skin showing through. He kept no supplies, nothing at all for the
future. The empty mayonnaise jars were begging to be filled
with jam and preserves for the winter, and with stewed fruit
just in case he were suddenly admitted to hospital. But the
winter might not come, there might not be a next summer. The
bread had to be eaten up to the last crumb, and the soap washed
down to a thin flake that could then be used for laundry.
He predicted that there would be a great flood in the summer
of I 993. Ice would suddenly melt in the north and the water in
the oceans would rise. Holland would disappear underwater.
The same would happen to Zulawy. It might be even worse,
with nothing but plateaux and mountains left above the surface.
Nowa Ruda would survive because it was high up. Then a war
would break out in the Near East that would turn into world war
over the following year. Once again armies would march across
the waterl ogged lowlands. The cathedral in Wrodaw would
become a mosque. Then, at the beginning of 1 994, the sky
would be dark for several days because of nuclear explosions.
People would start to fall sick. Nothing would happen to N owa
Ruda, thank goodness.
Leo published the book himself, using money earned from
clairvoyance, in I 990 when paper rationing ended. For three
years he waited for the first signs of the end of the world , but
they never came, despite all the jam-jars he emptied and the dry
bread crusts he consumed. In the summer of 1 993 there was a
heatwave, and he took the terrible heat to be the beginning of
the end, but it stopped when the season finished. The children
went back to school, and people baked plum tarts and gat hered
the potato harvest as usual. In Leo's kitchen the gas boiler broke
l 54
0 I g a To k a r c z u k
and because it was cold and he needed hot water he had to fix it.
As he was rummaging among its nozzles he had a chilling sense
of futility. When the end of the world is nigh all activity becomes
a form of sickness.
For Leo the world did end, however, on the fourteenth of
November 1 993 , during the great conjunction of Uranus and
Neptune in the eighteenth degree of Capricorn . He realized it
one night as he was sitting in the bathtub - which was the only
effective way of warming up his whole body quickly. That
evening on television they said that some sect in Uruguay was
expecting the world to end today. Then the Pope, with his right
arm in a sling, blessed the world with his left hand, and the
weather report included a blizzard warning. At the end a tired
presenter appeared and as she was saying good night, she added
in a sarcastic tone, 'Despite the pessimistic predictions of the
Uruguayan sect the world has not yet ended.' At that moment
Leo reckoned there were forty-five minutes left until the end of
the world, one school lesson's worth, and he went to have a
bath.
As he was sitting in the bathtub, the light in the bathroom
went out, the television fell silent and icy water began to flow
out of the tap. He froze in horror, but didn't even try to get help.
Columns of figures from the ephemerides were racing through
his head, along with a gloomy diagram of the configuration of
the Sun. The pipes in the bathroom started blaring like the trumpets on judgement Day, and Leo's naked body began to shiver.
He thought of all his nearest and dearest - though they were distant, rather than near, as he had no one else in his life - and
vondered what all the town's animals were doing, the dogs, cats,
guinea-pigs and hamsters, whether they were afraid too, and
whether animals would accompany people beyond this moment.
He wondered whether a fiery sword would appear in each and
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i gh t
1 5 5
every home, even o n the eleventh Ooor o f tower blocks, and
where the eanh would be rent asunder, when there wasn't even
room to park. Suddenly in the dark bathroom he had a clear
vision of an image that had terrified him as a child: the dead
rising from
the earth, naked and sleepy, rubbing their eyes and
raising their hands to their faces in the bl inding sunlight; stone
crosses shaking in the cemeteries and gravestones moving aside.
An angel stands on the horizon, his beautiful face contorted
with anger and disgust, while around his head a hurricane rages.
That was the image in Leo's head.
The bathroom remained dark.
The roar of the pipes was making the walls tremble slightly.
Leo's jaw began to shudder until he could hear his teeth chattering, but not out of fear. The only emotion he felt was disappointmen t. First it was faint, l ike the feeling at Christmas
when his mother had bought him pyjamas instead of the longedfor rocking-horse, then it grew stronger and stronger, until finally it was unbearable. Was that how the end of the world was
supposed to be? Darkness, and the pipes rumbling?
The man who predicted the end of the world - even if he
might have got the exact date wrong - was at hean an optimist.
He wanted to witness the whole thing, as if he himself had summoned it up, and even now he was remembering a rare conjunction of Neptune and Uranus, when they narrowly scrape
past each other, causing a clash of energies.
All he wanted now was to look at the sky, to sec if it had been
extinguished, to see if the planets had stopped orbiting, if galaxies had collided in a headlong dive and the apocalyptic dust solidified at zero degrees Kelvin. He clamped h is s huddering
jaws shut and got up from the stone-cold water.
And then, in the single most incomprehensible moment o f
Leo's life, the naked light bulb Oared on, t h e t a p wheezed and
1 56
0 I g a To k a r c z u k
gushed hot water, and the voice of the television rang out from
the sitting-room, as if the TV and its million faces was the only
life form to have risen from the dead. Startled by this unforeseen
turn of events, Leo froze with his foot on the edge of the bathtub
and blinked as his eyes adapted to the sudden light. Clouds of
steam were forming condensation on the broken mirror. The
faded towels hung motionless on their pegs just as indifferently
as before.
Leo got out of the bath, opened the door on to the corridor
and listened. Someone was shuffling down the stairwell. From
the neighbours above came the sound of monotonous mechanical music. Leo crossed the sitting-room and opened the door on to the balcony, so preoccupied that he didn't even notice the
cold. He saw the town before him, just the same as it had been
House of Day, House of Night Page 18
