Why am I doing this? I have listened to stories of actual human wreckage all through my life and remembered little in the morning and nothing at all just days later, not the facts nor the faces as the stories were told. Why does his persist? It must surely have to do with what happened with Angelina near Miedzyzdroje among the sand dunes of Wolin Island in the summer of 1956. Two stories, his and mine, hideously twinned – the disappearance of the women inexplicable, the ending absolute, the rapture something we had never known before and never would again. So I look at him not only with pity, but a pity felt by one whose wound has been the same.
But there is something else, no? Something that connects me to him. What is it? Something in his eyes – their nervousness, the ruin they carry, the excitement. I hesitate here. It seems so foolish, so grandiose. But who is listening anyway? I had the feeling that what I saw was myself looking back at me. We are of different times, different worlds. We would not know how to live each other’s lives. That is clear. But listen. People are born into this world and if they have the fortune are then born again when finally they discover who they are. This can happen slowly, like the healing of a wound, or as fast as a slap you do not expect. But whatever way it happens and at whatever point in your life it comes to you a lens is formed and it is through it that you will look at the world for ever more. Can it be that the flame that passed through me in the hotel room in Germany when I was twenty-four years old also passed through him somewhere else, that though he is from the West and I from the East we were somehow delivered into the world and marked in the same way? Is that what I saw in him, a birth in common with mine? And the ache I felt as I listened to him, was it recognition, nostalgia? For I too became lost once.
Now the world is his enemy. He feels alone on the dark roads. Even the thought of food makes him sick. His time with that woman of elegance and stories has made him forget who he is. Maybe the cruel truth is that this self which he once discovered will stay lost to him for ever. But it is there for him, nevertheless. It endures. This much I know.
It is when I am dressing and reach into the pocket of my jacket for a pencil that I find there M.’s photographs of his beautiful girl. Idiot! I have the urge to run out and find him. I try to think of a way of getting them to him. It happened when we were leaving that final bar after he showed them to me and I lifted them from the table rather than him. I was just a step behind him as we moved through the people but he didn’t hear me as I held them up and called to him. So I put them in my pocket. I only wanted to keep them safe until we got up the stairs and out into the open air. Then there was the ceremony of farewell. I have all three of them, all that he had with him. Double idiot! Drink on top of old age and then a person can’t think at all. Well, at least me. How many times each day did he look at them?
2
Hanna
M.’S STORY HAS taken up residence in my mind. I can feel it moving and there is a pressure inside my head. But I do not quite know what it is. It is a kind of organism hidden from me by a bank of cloud. I try to clear this cloud and coax it out. I want to see it. But it remains just a pressure, with the colour grey.
Each day I try to get out before noon and take a turn through the streets looking at all the people. Already the weather has turned and I’ve locked my bicycle in the janitor’s shed. I walk for three kilometres through this city where I have no past and then I call in to Mrs Slowacki’s shop. I buy bread, a block of white cheese and a nice ripe tomato. I smile at Mrs Slowacki as she hands me my change and tells me that at our age we need to be eating prunes.
I return home and prepare my food. If there is a bite in the air I will take a bowl of soup. I place my food on a little metal tray and sit before the television watching the breakfast news which arrives by satellite from America. So many doctors offering remedies, so many lawyers with opinions, so many women doing exercises! I lie on the sofa and M.’s story turns like a troubled sleeper in my mind. I listen to the birdsong and the shouts of children and the sighing of lorries. I call Renata. I go to the café. I go home again and get into my pyjamas. I offer a short prayer and I go into my bed hoping that I will sleep. Always his story, insistent yet out of reach.
Sometimes I have awakened from a dream and felt a great thought form in my mind. Sometimes I have run to the table to write it down. I cannot describe how terrible was the banality which the morning light would reveal when it fell on those pages. Now the nights are cold in Poland. I do not like to leave my bed in the mornings. Still less do I like to leave it at night when I feel the call of nature. But words which I do not understand form in my mind and will not go away. Cherries. Air. Baboon. Sea. What is that? They push through the clouds, they rap like a bailiff’s knuckles on my head. I look at them. Whenever they seem to reach an end they start again at the beginning. Nothing can move them. Finally I know that sleep will not come until they are taken from my mind and let out into the world, towards M.
One evening last summer when I was in Krakow visiting Renata a man in a black suit was singing like a wounded animal beside the Mariacki church. A sign at his feet said FORMER PROFESSOR OF FRENCH LITERATURE. I stopped to watch him. He sang nearly to the end of a verse, slowed and then halted. He pinched his nose, grimaced, and began again, but once more wound down and stopped. He looked all around the sky and then began for a third time. I dropped fifty groszys into his cup. He gripped me by the arm before I could pass. ‘Give me two zlotys and I’ll tell you a joke,’ he said. I told him I did not think a joke would suit me that day. ‘Well, give me one zloty and I’ll tell you something you may not know.’ I gave him the money. He looked a little surprised. I don’t think he had anything ready. His Adam’s apple went down into his throat like a bucket into a well. Then he spoke, his eyes wide. ‘You must know your song well before you start singing,’ he said, and his head swooped around and away from me like a diving bird.
M. was dreaming. The sun had turned the surface of the sea bright blue and chrome. The wind was blowing. He was standing in the bow of a round-bottomed boat, eating cherries. The currents in the air carried the smell of pine trees. A baboon was trying to reason with him. He was very happy.
A roar like the foghorn of a liner crashed through his head. The earth shook. The red dust of Spain swirled around him and caught in his throat.
He woke up in a lay-by. He could not quite get the picture. Everything in his limbs was heavy, the warm webbing of sleep still holding him. He saw the back of a lorry as it receded from him into the settling dusk. He remembered that his father was now a frail figure lying in his bed in Ireland and that he was about to begin work as an interpreter in the trade delegation in Barcelona. He had been travelling for two days, and now he was just thirty kilometres from his destination.
He drove into a small town he had never heard of before. He bought a newspaper and chocolate. A man in a wheelchair sold him a ticket he said could bring him a fortune. The last of the day’s light ran like water from a broken dam down the street where he was standing.
He turned from the man. Across from him was a bar. He moved back towards his car, but then stopped. The element of chance in this moment was high. He could see nothing except the particles of dust in the flooding light.
He crossed the street and went through the bead curtain of the bar into the darkness and the smell of stale beer and agriculture. He waited for a moment until his eyes adjusted to the change of light. He saw a man – he seemed a giant – standing before an electronic poker machine, blue and green light passing over his face as though through sea water. There were more men at the bar, heavy and still. On the television was a programme about the wild scavenger dogs of Africa.
He sensed something luminous to his right, and he turned. This was when he saw her. He sees her now in his long night, his tyres singing like wasps on the wet Central European roads. She was behind the bar in a single pool of light, standing very still and looking right at him. The men and their aromas and the African dogs faded away into the void.
She was dressed very demurely in a kind of alpine pinafore and a white blouse trimmed in pink and buttoned to the neck. Everything immaculately pressed. Pale golden hair. She was almost off balance, with her hand raised as though she had stopped in the midst of doing something, her mouth open a little, the light glimmering on her lower lip. Her eyes were wide and green and they seemed to be asking him for something. His mind at this moment was empty. But he felt something strange and powerful, a deep visceral explosion, warm and breathtaking, that sent its waves out to the ends of his limbs and upwards in a column into the core of his brain.
He did not recall what it was he intended to do in this place. He was still held somehow in the dream of the boat. He sat with the men at the bar. She took a step towards him and stopped. Then she continued. She did not look away from his eyes. She leaned towards him. She took his order. ‘Caña,’ she said after him. A small beer. She had a slight accent which he could not place, a voice full of music and intimacy that moved through his head like a vapour. He could feel her breathing. What was she thinking? In that moment it seemed that everything was possible.
On the morning that M. set off on his journey he sat on his father’s bed and took him up in his arms and held him. He seemed light as a cloud. Could it be that he would not see him again? He had not thought this before, but now the idea possessed him. ‘Are you afraid of anything?’ M. asked him. He looked at his father’s eyes. They were large and round and already they seemed half in another world. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not afraid of anything.’ He did not say this to reassure him. He said it as if M. were not there.
He sat at the bar and he watched her move – the way she leaned forward to open the bottles of beer, the way she held her hands up and shoulders back as though surprised when she punched the numbers into the till, the turn of her ankle when she stepped forward. She stopped for a moment to take an order, her hands leaning on the bar. A beam of light fell on her ring finger and he saw a slender gold band. It had not occurred to him that she could be married. He thought it tragic and unjust. He did not wish to think of the man who gave her the ring or the ceremony where it happened, but he could not stop himself. He pictured him lying across a sofa with his boots undone, her on the floor looking up at him in awe. Now there in the bar M. saw her hair fall across her left eye. Had the man across from her told her a joke? A smile broke over her white teeth, a smile full of the knowledge of folly and of pleasure. He thought, The man who is loved by this woman is blessed. But he did not wish him well.
He stayed in the bar that night for four and a half hours. He did not think of the man from the trade delegation in Barcelona who had prepared a bed for him. He placed her gold ring away outside his consciousness. He felt there was nothing greater than his need to gain knowledge of this woman whose name he did not know. She tended to the men. At times she became very still and turned to him. Or she would speak rapidly to him in a voice just louder than a whisper. She gave him the impression that she wanted nothing from this night except to be with him, but that something she could not express to him held her. She told him very little about herself – something about a boat out of the Baltic, a dart thrown at a map which pierced the name of this little town. It only deepened the mystery. There was urgency in her eyes, some kind of music crescendoing in his head. It all seemed just a breath away.
A man arrived to collect the money and lock the door. The lights went on. M. blinked a few times, sat upright on his stool. He waited until the man went into the back room and then he asked her what her name was.
‘Hanna,’ she said.
‘Would you like a lift home, Hanna?’ he said.
She looked startled, and a little unsettled. Then she said, ‘No.’
‘Do you work here regularly?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Four nights a week.’
He bid her good-night. If he’d had a hat he’d have lifted it to her. He got into his car and drove towards Barcelona with pictures of her wheeling like a flock of birds in his head.
I take out her photographs and lay them out on the table. Have I the power to draw her up from that paper – to find the way she looks when she combs her hair, the inclination of her head when listening, the pitch of her voice? Where does such a power come from? How is it found? I would like her to fall over me like a soft rain. Is that how a painter would find the face of an angel? It’s a long time since I have seen intimately a woman who is in her best years. I will have to use memory.
She stood before M. washing a glass. She had a faint smile meant to suggest that this was not her calling. She had been with the men, patting their arms and wagging her finger at their jokes. She had played a hand of poker on the electronic machine with the giant. Now she was before him, with her hands in the water. She seemed to be searching for something. Then she held up the gold band which he had not noticed was missing, and dried it. She placed it on her finger, moving it back and forth so that he could see how loose it was. She leaned forward. He could see the skin on her chest rising and falling as she breathed.
‘This is something you need in this job,’ she whispered. ‘I borrow it from the woman upstairs.’ She turned the ring on her finger. ‘She’s a little overweight.’
He did not allow himself to think about any of this. There was something about her that did not admit calculations of debit and credit. He just held on to his dream, the dream he nurtured each time he drove out to this little town. He built his weeks around the nights she was there. He didn’t miss any of them. What did she do the rest of the time? He didn’t know. He didn’t ask. He watched her move around behind the bar. There was a silence to her movements, like a current of air through grass.
He watched the men leave, one by one. He knew them by now – the car dealer who bought her perfume and invited her to race meetings and trips to Capri, the farmer who boasted of the wonder of his aubergines, the gravedigger who told her dirty jokes. They will think of her in their cars and in the darkness after they have gone into their beds next to their wives. They all hated him. He had unsettled their nights. They hated the silent looks between them, their urgent whispered conversations. He was taking her from them and they were angry. ‘They’ve complained to the owner,’ she told him. There was a silver-haired man who wore a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut at the shoulders. He seemed made from concrete and sat each night behind piles of coins and glasses of beer, his foot going up and down on the bar stool like a piston. Each time he saw M. his knuckles went white. When once M. sat next to him he heard the man’s teeth grinding, saw the muscles move in a spasm across his face. ‘Watch him,’ she told M. ‘He’s not long out of prison. He carries a knife the length of your forearm.’
Finally the men were gone and it was M. and her and the giant sleeping by his machine. Her movements slowed and became more rounded. She turned down the lights. She sat behind the bar facing him. She reached into a cupboard and poured him a vodka flavoured with blackberries, and then one for herself. She looked at him over the glass. He saw her parted lips through the rose-coloured liquid. She raised her glass and said something very softly, a smear of letters. He didn’t hear it very well.
‘What’s that?’ he asked her.
‘It’s a toast,’ she said. ‘You learn many in this job.’
For the first time it was just M. and her, face to face. She leaned back in her chair, turned away. The silence boomed like a vast heartbeat. He could have reached across to touch her hand but the bar between them seemed huge, dark, cavernous.
He heard a movement by the machine and the giant called out the name Ascension in a small, high voice. Then he fell to the floor, bringing two chairs and a table with him. Hanna went to him and knelt beside him. She cleared the hair away from his eyes. He nodded and smiled. He lifted his hand to her face. She righted the chairs and got him to his feet, whispering to him all the way out into the street, like a nurse leading someone away from a train crash.
She came back, sat in her chair. She took a small
sip of vodka.
‘His head is full of torments,’ she said. ‘They come out sometimes when he sleeps.’
‘Who’s Ascension?’ M. asked.
She seemed about to answer with a shrug, but then stopped. She lit a cigarette, smiled, looked up to the ceiling. It was a look he would see again, and already he feared it – serene, far away, without need.
‘Ascension was his younger sister,’ she said. ‘She was pale and blue-eyed and had something wrong with one of her feet. The bones were short. She had to wear a special shoe. There were no other children in the family. They went to their house in the country and one day when he was supposed to be minding her she fell into a pond and drowned. She was three years old. He’d been reading a book and hadn’t noticed.
‘After that, he couldn’t live with himself. He thought he shouldn’t be seen again by anyone he knew. He ran away. He wanted to be invisible, but of course he couldn’t be because he’s so big. He keeps moving from place to place. He lives in his car. He’s very brilliant and has a powerful memory. It’s curious the things he knows about. He knows about guns and diseases of the skin and about people who live in extremes of cold and heat and darkness. For company he most likes people who haven’t homes.’
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