Swimming in the Dark - Tomasz Jedrowski Page 0,11
and I followed him. I followed him into complete darkness, towards a hole in the bushes so black it felt like I was blind. My steps were uncertain. At some point he stopped, me bumping into him, the two of us suddenly facing each other. The darkness was a comfort: it was as if we’d melted into the night and nothing that would happen would be fully real. He began to stroke my neck, his fingers rough and calloused, and his sharp breath on my face. My heart was threatening to break out of my chest. With a hurried but practised hand he loosened the belt of my trousers and pulled out my cock, which welcomed the touch of unknown fingers and summer air. He knelt down, disappearing from my vision, and enveloped me in the warm cave of his mouth. It was the best feeling. It felt like I was gliding down a tunnel, or that it was riding through me. My head thrown back, I saw the stars in the sky. Then I heard his fly unzipping and sensed him masturbating, rapid, urgent movements that excited me. And as we rode like this, him panting and me gasping, the urgency and abjection rose within me like heat, like an irrepressible scream, mounting, pushing, taking over, until the lights went off and I closed my eyes and exploded in his mouth, warmth and wetness meeting in one great terrible relief.
I wanted to run home straight away, knew I had to get away from this place, and remembered Granny, who’d already be worried to death. But I didn’t. Because after I had released myself in this stranger’s mouth, it almost felt like I no longer had a home. So, after he had finished with a low grunt and we’d zipped up, we returned to the bench, where we had met on the other side of my life, and began to talk, our barriers suddenly removed. He unwrapped story after story, and I kept asking him questions, feeling it was my duty to learn. He told me about his first time, in the forest with a farmer from his village. He told me how he’d been in the war and how he’d almost died, and how he’d been raped by Russian soldiers in a prison camp. I nodded and said I was sorry, and made myself feel nothing. I couldn’t allow his pain to penetrate me.
‘Do you live with your family?’ I asked quickly.
He laughed. He lived on his own, he said, in a single room in one of those large bourgeois apartments the Germans had built when the city was still called Breslau, the same apartments that were now ruins and which housed up to a dozen people. He shared his kitchen and bathroom with three families, each one in a single room. He came to the park every night, he said. I don’t know why he was so honest with me, but it made me feel less alone.
‘What about finding someone you could …’ I hesitated. ‘Love.’
He huffed, and smiled for the first time, revealing a set of grey teeth. ‘As a ciota, a fag,’ he finally said, ‘you will always be lonely. And you will learn to bear it. Some have a wife and children’ – he nodded his head – ‘like that one you saw walking past earlier, but they are the worst. They can stand themselves even less. At least I’m free.’ He looked across the dark park, lit a cigarette and exhaled the smoke into the night. ‘We give and take love for one night, maybe a couple of weeks. But not longer than that. There is too much resentment. Too much hatred. You live for pleasure if you’re like this, and hope the police won’t stop you. Mind you, they’ve stopped me a couple of times, but I’ve always managed to talk my way out.’
His words haunted me for a long time afterwards. I had told him my name – he had told me his, and I felt like I owed it to him – but I never wanted to relapse, to come near the sordid temptation again. I never wanted to be like him. My greatest terror was ending up alone. Yet part of me was sure that’s how I would end up, and that it was the worst thing that could happen to someone. I knew I would not be able to bear it. I decided never to go back to the