that were swarming in his head. He imagined that she would die,
and he and Agni would leave and go to Upper Silesia. perhaps,
or Warsaw. He would have no trouble finding a job there. and
Agni would go and study, architecture perhaps. He would buy
her beautiful clothes and on Sundays they'd stroll down Nowy
Swiat Street, and all the young men would stare after them.
Even if she didn't die, in the end he'd leave her. He'd J USt
leave.
Strangely enough - despite the distance between them - they
had the same daydreams. She too was hoping she would die: it
would be the best solution. The thought of goi ng back to that
large, chilly house, of getting up in the morning to go to the
pharmacy, then doing the shopping on the way home, pla nting
Oowers, rattling away at the piano and lcaring through magazines for all eternity, made her feel p hysical ly sick. tgni was all she longed for. Would she have the courage to tell hun what they
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had done to her, that she was empty inside like a husk, and
would he then have the courage to plunge into the void inside
her? The wound in her abdomen hurt - the stitches didn't want
to heal, surely because death was in her thoughts. He could die
too - his company car could hit a tree, or there could be an accident at the factory. She didn't feel guilty about having these thoughts - her conscience was taking her side now. One night
she dreamed about the twins in their striped camp uniforms.
They showed her the scars on their bellies. They did experiments on us,' they said, 'they took everything out - our hearts, livers and lungs, but it doesn't hurt at all.' From then on she
started to get better.
While she was still in hospital he rented a small, damp room
in the suburbs, with a private entrance through a courtyard dirtied by chickens. It had green walls with an uneven white pattern painted with a roller. There was an iron bedstead with a stained
mattress, a bare little table and two chairs. On the wall there was
a picture of Jesus preaching from the boat. He arranged to meet
Agni there, but he couldn't make love to her; he didn't know
why. He was overcome with despair for being unable to cope
with it all, for ending up in this strange situation, with no way
out. He huddled up to the girl's small breasts and wept. 'I wish
she would die,' he suddenly said aloud, and was appalled by his
own words. Agni pushed back his head to look at his face. Her
pure young eyes seemed predatory somehow; he knew that look
from somewhere. 'What did you say? Say that again,' she said. 'I
wish she would die,' he dutifully repeated.
Agni's body was incredibly supple; it reminded him of a silk
shawl that he could wrap himself in. He could wrap himself up
in the wonderful Agnieszka, in her apricot body. She was like
water, she could always elude him if she wanted. He would
never be able to catch up with her, to seize her and hold her.
H o u s e o r D a y, H o u s e o r N i g h t
27 1
Whenever she stopped and Oowed over him it was a miracle ,
and he drank her in until he was choking.
He never compared her with anyone - that was impossible but sometimes, when he fell fast asleep, and then woke suddenly, he thought he was lying beside his wife. In panic he sought her name, which he had clean forgotten, and to his rel ief
he would find he was with Agni, and once again he couldn't help
wondering at her ephemeral quality. His wi fe was like a solid,
clay amphora. In their love-making he had to turn her and position her, he had to manipulate her. Her skinny body gave him the sort of pleasure that somewhere at base was always painful
and mechanical. He hadn't realized until now; he thought it had
to be like that, before he knew Agni.
Agni was a miracle.
He wanted to keep her, if he only could. He went on touchi ng
her when they were sleeping. Whenever they sat at the table, he
would stroke her hand with his index finger over and over again,
as if telling her, stay here, don't move. He liked to listen to her
doing something in the awful little kitchenette - he could hear
the clatter of glass, the clink of the teapot, and her footsteps. He
liked to have these sounds around him, because they were like a
support wall holding him up, like a safe border for the world ,
but she didn't make enough of this safe, everyday noise. She
was small and light, and her bare feet moved across the wooden
Ooor without a sound. Shout, he said to her as they made love,
shout.
As soon as his wife came back from the hospital, Agni stopped
appearing. He was frantic. He slipped out of the house and
roamed about the town , but never dared ask people question-..
He thought something must have happened to her, that ..,he had
problems, or that maybe she'd had an acciden t. EverT da) he
read the local paper, hut there was nothing there ahout , gn i . lor
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hours he sat i n the restaurant, right by the front window, drinking vodka after vodka and staring at all the young girls. Once he even thought he'd seen her - he ran outside, but he was too
drunk to decide what to do next. At home, he wept in the bathroom. He kept the rented flat for another year and left cards on the door for her, but they just went yellow in the sunlight and
the writing faded. He thought he would never survive, that he'd
die from the inside, and that this was the end. His entire world
would die, i ncluding his wife, that sad shadow of a human
being - even time would die.
'I know I've become a crabby old shrew,' said his wife, 'bu t
that's because I couldn't have children.' But she knew that wasn't
true - it was because she couldn't have had children with him.
She imagined she could have had them with Agni, if he had
come back, but Agni had disappeared. After returning from hospital she would put on her fur coat and, lying that she was going to the tailor's, she would walk the empty, freezing streets, peering in at people's windows, staring into restaurants and gazing at every male figure. Sometimes in her despair she went out to the
suburbs, where the streetlights were no longer on. In the darkness and rain she leaned her brow against a fence or a tree and said Agni, Agni, Agni, as if she had to keep saying that name
over and over again, as if she couldn't breathe without it. Agni,
Agni, Agni, she said, and then waited, believing that this magic
repetition would conquer space, even time too, and would
finally bring Agni back. She imagined the name flying from her
lips, zooming over the horizon, whizzing along, and landing on
Agni's beloved head, tangling in his hair and bringing him here,
to her. Sometimes people out late walked past her; they must
have thought she was drunk and raving. Occasionally someone
accosted her, so she hid her face in her collar - but eventually
everyone knew her by sight. She was the woman who had laid
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f :' i g h t
273
herself open to ridicule for love of a vagabond boy, a young man
who hadn't had his hair cut for a year; she had laid herself open
to ridicule for love. She was absurd - all because she was possessed b
y an emotion that only makes sense from deep inside, that people fail to understand, and because she aroused a mixture of astonishment and sympathy. But she was coming to terms with her own absurd behaviour - placing advertisements in the
newspaper, accosting people in the street, tugging at their sleeve
and asking, 'Have you seen . . .' She stood about at bus stops in
front of schools, and even begged a gloomy-looking policeman
to check those secret files they have on everyone. She was constantly visiting mortuaries; she even parted couples kissing in the park and always had to apologize for her mistake. At home
she would smear her breast and belly in baby oil and touch herself tenderly, while trying to pretend that it was Agni touching her. She would weep in the kitchen while washing up, slicing
bread, or listening to the banal words of a pop song for simpletons: Then suddenly you went away, a leaf fell at my feet, borne on a breath of wind.'
She slept, and when she awoke she thought about how to kill
hersel f. In the tunnels of her sorrow she considered all the
options, from throwing herself under a train to gassing herself in
the oven, but she never even attempted it. Once a bunch of
knives that she was cleaning and putting away in the drawer fell
from her hand. She squatted down to inspect their blades, which
lay criss-crossed on the floor. If every single thing, even t he very
smallest, is part of something larger, and if t he larger things arc
all part of some huge and powerful process, then each tiny t hing
must be in some way significant to the whole. So w hat do the
crossed blades of kitchen knives lying on the llagstonc-.. mea n �
And why did they cross - why didn't they fa ll far apart . Ill gentle
parallel lines at a soothing distance from one another�
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O l ga To k a r c z u k
From then on, each day she threw a bunch of knives to the
ground and thought up a divination. The blades always tended
towards one ano ther; in their mysterious world they either
wanted to huddle together or fight each other, as if there were no
other solution.
After a time her sick leave ended, and she went back to work
at the pharmacy, where she spent every free moment gazing at
the shelves holding the poisons. A few years later she retired and
went back to looking at magazines all day; she ordered steel-grey
suits from the tailor's, all much the same, like a uniform.
How does the world look when your life is filled with longing? It looks artificial, it crumbles and falls apart in your hands.
Every single movement, every thought is watching itself, each
emotion starts but never finishes, and finally even the object of
your longing becomes artificial and unreal. Only the longing is
real, imposing conditions on you - that you must be somewhere
else, that you must have something you don't possess, or touch
someone who doesn't exist. This state of being is self-contradictory - it is the quintessence of life, and at the same time it is opposed to life. It sinks through the skin into the muscles and
bones, which have a painful existence from then on. I t's not that
they hurt, but that the basis of their existence is pain. And there
is no escape from such longing. You would have to escape from
your own body, from yourself even - by getting drunk perhaps?
Or by sleeping for weeks on end? By losing yourself in your
work to a point of frenzy? Or by praying incessantly?
They both did all these things, but separately. To the outside
world they looked like normal people, with lives like anyone
else's, but then maybe that's how everyone lives. The years
change everything, except for that sense of longing. People's
hair falls out, papers go yellow, new houses are built on the edge
of town, regimes change, the rich become poor and the poor
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
2 7 5
rich, lonely old ladies next door die, and children's shoes become
too small.
They were such very different people now that they might a<>
well have changed their names - they could have filled in a
form, saying: 'We're no longer the people we used to he, so we're
applying to change our personal details,' or something of the
kind. What's the point of population censuses, if people keep
changing and turning into someone else? Vhy docs an adult
bear the same first name as when he was a child? Why docs a
once loved woman still have her husband's surname when he's
betrayed and abandoned her? Why do men go on bearing the
same name when they come back from war, or why does a boy
beaten by his father keep the same idiotic name when he starts
to beat his own children?
From the outside it looked as if nothing had changed, either
between them or beyond them , as if the world were asleep only
,
giving the occasional shudder because of a passing night mare.
For some time they were still afraid of the telephone ringing too
early in the morning or too late in the evening, and of leucrs
brought by postmen who changed as o ften as the wea ther.
Somewhere at the edge of consciousness they thought rgni
would suddenly make contact, without warning, like a peal of
thunder. Time doesn't dare to disturb images as sacred as rgni's
'So what happened to them?' asked R. just before the lunar
eclipse.
They never said 'I love you' 10 each other again, because low
had become a hidden weakness. They nc'cr said much to each
other about anyt hing except the shopping, and to exchange
Christmas greetings. They came home late from work then he
.
went to play bridge while she went to church ; they did nccasionally still huddle up to each other at night. not out of affect ton, hut for warmth, because the house was old and hard tn heat. : new
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O l g a To k a r c z u k
phrase had crept into their speech, and they said it whenever any
sort of problem came along - 'Let's stick together,' they told each
other over and over, until it sounded like an incantation.
T h e e c l i p s e
The end of September was a season of psychedelic impressions,
thanks to transparent mists in the mornings and elongated shadows in the evenings. The cannabis we sowed in May was mature now, but we had missed the best moment and the male grass had
already scattered its pollen about the plot and got the female
grass pregnant. Now we had to nip the seeds off the dried heads
with tweezers. All the strength of the grass had gone into those
seeds, so we had to smoke it for a long time, whole pipefuls,
before we could feel it taking our thoughts apart, breaking them
into digressions and shredding them into so many different ideas
that their sheer volume is frightening.
We had guests over for the lunar eclipse. just as in the
summer when we watched the full moon rise, the meadow was
full of cars. Children were running around, people were chinking glasses, bringing out chairs and scraping them across the terrace. Finally the children were pacified by the computer,
luminous and silent as it told them a story.
The moon now rose over Marta's house, which meant it was
already au
tumn. For a while i t was hidden by a cloud, but when
the cloud drifted away it wasn't the same as before - a rounded
shadow was visible on its plate-like face, narrow at first, then getting bigger and bigger. It all happened too quickly - barely one joint had time to go a single round before the moon vanished,
leaving a brown hole cut out of the sky, a burned-out circle. An
incredulous silence fell, and lasted for at least ten seconds, as
H o u s e o f D a y. H o u s e o f N 1 g h t 277
long as the face of the moon was dark. In that short while the stars
blazed bright; the sky was full of them. We had never seen them
look so brilliant - they seemed to be arranged in proper figures.
forming numbers, geometric shapes, and even road signs. You
could read them as you wished. You could see comic-strip stories
in them, Prometheus rescuing Andromeda, Berenice's hair waving
in the wind, the Lyre gliding through space, jangling with longing
for human fingers. You could see it as a piece of text written in
Braille, as row upon row of binary code, or as a computer screen
with ambiguous icons. If only we had a huge mouse, a supermouse, to click on one of those icons, then other skies would open up, fascinating us like a children's computer game. Then we
could play them, they would draw us in and deprive us of sleep.
In these skies we'd be other people, and we'd have both incredible
and quite ordinary adventures. As in a game, we'd die hundreds of
times and still have new lives in reserve, maps of our rambling
journeys between darkness and light hung out in time and space.
Then the moon flared up again. At first just a shining scrap
appeared, a celestial nail-clipping. We clinked glasses and the
joint was passed round again. We started to clap.
I walked across the wet grass to Marta's house. She was squatting in front of the stove laying the' fire. That cockerel of hers was tripping about at her side, unaware of his approaching
death. He looked at me suspiciously with his purple eye. l ie
was like a strange, silent person dressed in feathers.
'Aren't you asleep yet?' I asked.
'If you sleep all winter you've had enough sleep.' she said. or
at least, as often happens with Marta. I thought that w;b what I
heard.
She began to cut bread, several slices, half the loaf. I rcali:cd
House of Day, House of Night Page 32
