Swimming in the Dark - Tomasz Jedrowski Page 0,12
park, never to look at the boys in class the same way again, to reform myself. After that night, when I came home, and Granny ran towards me and asked me where I had been and cried and smelled alcohol on my breath and slapped me and hugged me, I decided I would not let the bad in me take over.
It was around that time, or shortly after, that I met Jolka. She was a friend of a friend from school, and I knew she liked me. I’d watched her compete in the school gymnastics championships, and her body – firm and tall and slim – was unlike those of the other girls, whose softness and roundness scared me. One night, at a school dance in the gymnasium, I kissed her little mouth to the sound of Maryla Rodowicz, the song’s melancholy filling the room as I tried to get lost in something I knew would never cover me entirely. Just above our heads hung the gymnastic rings, giving off their scent of leather and sweat.
That week I took Jolka by the hand and walked her up and down our street. Granny and Mother watched us from the kitchen window. They were beaming with pride.
On the first morning of camp they woke us early, storming into the hut and blowing a whistle, leaving us just enough time to brush our teeth in the washrooms and have some milk soup and tea in the canteen. In the coming weeks, I realised the canteen always smelled of cabbage and grease no matter what we were having, as if the entire building had been soaked in a concoction of the two shortly before our arrival. Every day we’d queue for something we didn’t really want, which gradually became the only thing we knew.
After breakfast we were given our uniforms, a pair of green shorts and a green shirt, the same for boys and girls. They were made of stiff, rough cotton that felt like canvas on my skin. The morning sun was cool on our thighs and arms as we left the hut to assemble once again in front of the main building. The comrade leader’s eyes hovered over us with petty satisfaction.
‘For the coming weeks you’ll be picking beetroots from the fields over there,’ he barked, pointing beyond the camp’s fence. He called out names from a list and divided us into teams.
When my name was called, I joined a group standing to one side. I didn’t recognise anyone except for you. My stomach made an involuntary jump. We went around introducing ourselves, and when it came to you, you shook my hand – yours padded and large and warm – and said your name in that low clear voice that spoke of natural confidence. I could hardly respond. Your face was broad and solid, well constructed, with high cheekbones like outposts guarding your eyes, narrow and intensely grey-blue.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ you said. ‘I’m Janusz.’
Janusz. Two syllables that rise and fall and follow each other logically, almost inevitably, and whose sound together is so familiar, so natural, that the meaning of its parts remained hidden to me until years later: Ja meaning ‘I’ in our language, and nusz sounding just like our word for ‘knife’.
The comrade leader’s whistle screeched in the air as he gestured us across the camp. I let myself fall behind as the groups started to move, pained and relieved to see you walking ahead. We reassembled on the huge field that seemed to have no end and watched as the comrade leader and a farmer from the village, a man with a red face, wearing woollen trousers and an old shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, showed us how to pick the beets: breaking up the earth around them with our hands, grabbing the point where the leaves meet the bulb, pulling hard to tear the plant out with its roots. Each group was given a portion of the field to work, along with baskets and gloves. We had from nine until five each evening to reach our quotas.
‘And don’t procrastinate, comrades!’ Belka cried, trying to look at all of us at once. ‘I will be patrolling the fields.’
The whole operation seemed foreign to me, and as we started working my body felt like a metal construction, heavy and unyielding. I had to kneel in the brown earth to get a grip on the beets, and my mind was agitated. You were in the first row, as