Swimming in the Dark - Tomasz Jedrowski Page 0,31

desk, which also functioned as her dressing table with a mirror on the wall. A photo of Isabelle Adjani was tucked between the mirror’s frame and its glass, a still from Polanski’s The Tenant. Adjani looked rapt behind an enormous pair of tortoiseshell glasses, hair big and frizzy, ring-covered fingers seductively placed by her lips. Karolina picked up a pair of tweezers and started plucking an eyebrow. She was sitting with her back to me. In the reflection of the mirror she looked startled and concentrated, her gaze moving from her brows to the photo to me. ‘Don’t make me pull every word out of you individually – what was it like with him?’

She never called you by your name.

‘Good,’ I said, shrugging, trying to sound as natural as I could. ‘We camped by a lake. Swam, fished. It was fun.’

‘Mmmh.’ She ran the tip of her ring finger along the brow she had been working on, and moved on to the other. ‘I had no idea you two were friends.’ She sounded absent-minded, but I sensed her disinterest was feigned.

‘He asked me on the last night, in the forest,’ I said, shrugging. ‘And we weren’t really friends. He had no one to go with and I had nothing to do, so I thought I might just as well.’

She stopped what she was doing and her eyes moved over me in the mirror. ‘You know you can tell me,’ she said softly. Her words ran through me like a string pulled tight.

‘There’s nothing to say,’ I said, looking at her for a moment, and then turning to the window. There was a silence, and in its space I tried to decide whether my sudden anger was with her or with myself, for being unable to speak the truth. Through the door we heard a radio playing, a marching band blasting out a tune with insistent joy.

‘What’s new with you?’ I made myself ask.

‘Me?’ She continued plucking. ‘Your friend here got herself a job.’

‘What? That’s great.’

She set down her tweezers, took a cigarette from a packet on the desk, lit it, and quickly blew the smoke through her nostrils. The tips of her fingers were blackened from the soot of her cheap Romanian Snagovs. ‘As a secretary to some asshole in the Ministry of Justice.’ She sounded like a judge announcing someone’s prison sentence, matter-of-fact, a little gleeful.

I was taken aback. ‘What about the placement? Weren’t you going to train with the divorce lawyers?’

‘No vacancies.’ She blew out smoke with her head lowered, staring at the carpet. I could see her eyelashes pointing towards the floor. ‘Turns out I had no chance of getting anywhere without connections, whatever my grades. Who was I fooling anyway?’ She sighed, lifting her head. Her sad eyes grazed mine for an instant and then she turned her head towards the window. ‘But maybe it’s better this way, I don’t know. Maybe I would have hated it. I might apply again next year.’

I nodded, tried to seem encouraging. ‘Yes, you will. This is just temporary.’

She nodded, as if she was trying to believe me.

‘So what’s it like?’ I asked.

She shrugged, took a deep drag. ‘I only started last week. Don’t ask me what they actually do in that office. I get the councillor his vodka in the morning and type up a letter or two in the afternoon. Other than that he treats me like a showpiece for his colleagues. He asked me to wear my tight sweater more often. So much for my four years of higher education.’

She took an ashtray from her desk and crushed the half-finished cigarette. ‘I smoke too much,’ she muttered, placing the ashtray on the table, trying to smile at me.

‘Come here.’ I patted the empty space beside me on the bed. She obeyed. Her head sank on to my shoulder and I slung my arm around her. We sat like this for a while, seeing ourselves in the mirror, searching for something in our own reflections. ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered finally.

‘Oh, don’t be. It never turns out the way we think it will. And anyway, I was one of the lucky ones. At least I have permission to stay in the city now that we’ve graduated. Otherwise they would have sent me straight back to Tychy, and God knows what I’d be doing there. Living with my parents.’ She straightened and tried to laugh. ‘I’m just not sure I’ll be able to take it for long.’

‘You won’t have to,’