Swimming in the Dark - Tomasz Jedrowski Page 0,13

if leading us, moving nimbly with your legs bent and your back straight. The workings of your leg muscles showed just underneath the skin, tendons contracting like strings being drawn, veins running down your lower arms and confounding themselves like rivers on a map. Your hands were strong and bulky, with square nails and fingers thick like screwdriver handles. Those aren’t city hands, I remember thinking.

After a while, my body started to ache, but seeing you like this made me push ahead too. The sun grew stronger, throwing its warmth on to our arms and legs and the backs of our heads. As we moved along, sweat started to form – discrete drops at first, here and there, on the forehead and on the tips of our spines, and then, as we continued, little streams trickled, fuelled by our movement. I pushed on, feeling the pain in my body, but beyond that, sensing that it had started to give way. I was surprised by the energy that lay beyond the discomfort. The rhythm made me move on, the touch of the earth and the feel of the plants becoming hypnotic. The smell was humid and pungent and fresh. It made me think of Aunt Marysia’s garden outside Wroc?aw, with its berry bushes and fruit trees and places where one could hide, and beyond its fence nothing but fields. I hadn’t thought of that in ages. As a child, Mother would take me there and I would play for hours by myself, dig and find worms and beetles and hold the soil, have it crumble in-between my fingers, try to eat it.

I worked with the earth, forgot myself in it. Further out, there were other groups, all bent over the beets, breathing with effort, the sky open and wide. We broke for lunch, and afterwards we napped in our huts for an hour and went back to work, the sun milder now, our bodies cooler. When we had worked for longer than enough, the comrade leader’s whistle sounded across the field to mark the end of the day. I hurt in places I had never been aware of before, and went to bed exhausted, sleeping more deeply than I had since childhood.

I got used to the sight of you, but we never spoke. In the breaks, the group would rest in the shade of a hut by the edge of the field and you and some other boys smoked, and I chatted to the girls. But not to you. I avoided you, so that you couldn’t avoid me. I didn’t want to be in the field of your power. I envied your lightness and the beauty you carried with such ease.

At mealtimes I sat with Karolina and Beata, a friend from lectures. She was short and round-faced and busty, quick to laugh and quick to be frightened. She told us she was getting married right after the camp was over, to a guy from the year below.

‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’ asked Karolina, looking concerned.

‘God, no!’ cried Beata, blushing a little.

‘Because you know you cannot trust condoms,’ Karolina said, pretending not to notice Beata’s deepening colour. ‘Some of those old hags in the shops pierce them with the tiniest of needles and sell them on like that. They can’t bear to see us having fun. So really, you need the pill. If you want to, I’ll take you to my doctor. She’s a woman and she won’t ask if you’re married.’

Beata had turned beetroot-red and shook her head. ‘We’ve only been going out for six months,’ she muttered, looking at her plate. ‘But the Bureau will give flats to married couples as a priority. I’m sick of living with my parents.’

‘Darling, that can take for ever,’ said Karolina, trying not to sound mean. ‘Two years or more. But maybe you’ll be lucky.’

While the two of them talked, I watched you on the other side of the hall, sitting with the same girl I’d seen you with the night before. She wore a denim jacket, new and brilliantly blue, something that one could only buy with dollars at the government Pewex stores. I stared at her, transfixed. She wasn’t exactly pretty – not at first sight, with her straight dark hair parted so plainly in the middle. But there was something very cool and self-assured about her, in the way she held her body and smiled at you while you spoke. Next to her sat Maksio Karowski, a bulky guy who was