Swimming in the Dark - Tomasz Jedrowski Page 0,18

something heavy and dangerous. ‘Why is it glued between other covers?’ you asked, eyebrows furrowed.

I shrugged. ‘It’s sort of unauthorised, I guess.’

To my surprise you laughed. ‘I didn’t suspect you of being such a rebel,’ you said, handing the book back. ‘Can I read it when you’re done?’

My stomach dropped. ‘If you want to.’

‘Yeah, I want to. I’ve never read an underground book.’

‘Really?’ I smiled, feeling pleasure, an ounce of power. ‘I would have suspected you of being more of a rebel.’

It surprises me that I shared the book’s existence with you so early. But I felt a strange trust there by the riverbank. There was something about the way you looked at me that made me feel as if you didn’t judge. There are only so many people we meet in life who give us that feeling. And yet that night, as I lay in bed reading after the others had gone to sleep, I was scared. Scared about the hole I had made by trusting you, scared by the vulnerability it had created. And the more I read, the more scared I became: the immensity of the truth and the lies I’d been telling myself all these years lay before me, mirrored in the narrator’s life, as if someone were pointing a finger at me, black on white, my shame illuminated by a cold, clear light. In the brightness I could examine it with almost scientific clarity, and suddenly the narrator’s pain didn’t soothe my pain any more. His fear fed my fear. I was like him, David, neither here nor there, comfortable in no place, and with no way out.

When I went to dinner one night, the book left hidden under my pillow, the duplicity of my life – both who I was inside and who I was to others – struck me as surreal. The book and you had brought it hurling back, and I decided never to be that vulnerable again, never to feel that panic again, never to depend on anyone else. So I avoided your eyes when you walked past our table that night, fixed my eyes on the blood-red borscht instead. And I didn’t come to the river on the days that followed. The end of the camp was in sight. I stayed in the hut and read and avoided you, hoping the days would slip by unnoticed and I could just go home to my old life. During the breaks in the field, I’d sit in the shade, leaning against the boards of the wooden tool shed while you’d join some of the guys by the water pump, smoking, joking with them, trying to catch my eye. I pretended I didn’t see.

By then the uniform had adapted to my body, yielded to its shape, and my body had adapted to the land. We knew what we were doing now, and all one could hear for most of the day was the thud of the beets falling into baskets. The mountains of them grew more quickly, until there were almost no rows left. At one point, during the last week, I was working away, lost in the repetition of my movements, when I saw you standing above me. You looked like you’d been there for a while, watching me work.

‘Did you finish reading the book?’ Your question sounded like a challenge.

‘Yes,’ I said, into the earth, feeling my jaw clench, continuing to work.

‘Do you still want to lend it to me?’

I stopped digging. My heart was galloping. I looked up at you and I don’t know what made me – maybe it was the sincerity with which you asked and which was drawn on your face, or maybe a sense of resignation – but I nodded. I decided I had nothing to lose. Our paths would never cross again, and I didn’t want to be like David, afraid of himself and devoured by regrets.

‘I’ll bring it round to you at dinner,’ I heard myself say.

That night I waited for you by the canteen exit, in the half-dark where people smoked and gossiped before they went to bed. I waited for you until late, until the streams of people leaving had dried up and I thought I had missed you. I was thinking about returning to my hut when finally you came through the door. The girl was right behind you. She looked poised. Her eyes, like her hair, were dark and intense, but her skin was light, pale even, as if she