Swimming in the Dark - Tomasz Jedrowski Page 0,32

I said. ‘I’m sure of it.’

‘Yeah?’ There was doubt in her eyes, a need for reassurance. I nodded and took her into my arms. Her body was like a furnace. I almost felt like I was burning myself.

‘It swallows up all your thoughts, all your self-respect,’ she said, with a note of despair I had rarely heard her use. ‘I can already see myself becoming one of those bitter office ladies.’

‘You won’t become one of those,’ I said, taking her by the shoulders and looking her straight in the eyes. ‘I’ll make sure of it. Not while I’m alive.’

She smiled and released me. ‘See, you have changed,’ she said. ‘You’ve become an optimist.’

She stood and walked over to the window. Branches of blindingly green leaves rocked in the breeze, slowly, peacefully. She opened the window and stood there for a moment, looking out, breathing in deeply.

‘And you? Have you figured out what you will do with yourself, Ludzio?’

‘I’ve had some time to think this summer,’ I said, hyper-aware of my voice. I was looking at my hands, assembling my words. ‘I think I’ll try for that doctorate after all. You know, the one Professor Mielewicz said I should do.’

She turned around slowly, her face immobile. ‘Really.’

I shrugged, meeting her eyes for a moment. They were hard and vulnerable at the same time.

‘What made you change your mind?’

‘I thought about it again. The allowance from my father will run out soon, and I have to do something. This might be better than rotting away in some school or library, no?’

‘You once said you’d rather work in a factory than sell out.’

I bit my lip. ‘Well, that wasn’t true, was it?’ I said, trying to smile.

‘And what about the topic? What if they make you write about what they want?’

I shrugged again, harder. ‘I’ll find a way around it. Or not.’

She nodded, turning back to the window, putting her hands on the sill. I got up and joined her there.

Beyond the branches, in the houses across the street, clothes hung from lines strung outside the windows: the fabric of people’s lives drying in the sun, swaying with the wind. Large dresses in faded reds and mustard-yellow, shirts with stiff collars that resembled obese men whenever a gush of wind filled their interior, towels rubbed down over the years. In the street, girls in knee-high white socks had drawn boxes on the ground with chalk, were counting and singing, jumping one-legged from hell to heaven.

‘I was serious when I said we can always leave,’ she said, lifting her head towards me. ‘You know that, right? My uncle in Chicago could find us something. Or we could book a bus tour to Germany or France, and just get off and run away.’ She smiled, somehow sadly.

‘There’s no need to rush into anything,’ I said, feeling the weight of her stare. ‘We always said we’d try our chances here first. Maybe things will get better.’

‘Nothing ever gets better here,’ she said, closing the window and walking back to her bed.

‘We don’t know that yet.’

‘Do we not?’ She looked at me with curiosity. ‘I guess you still need to find that out for yourself.’

The next day I walked to the Old Town, along the New World Promenade, Nowy ?wiat, past the cafes and busy shops, past the church where Chopin’s heart is buried in a pink marble column and where the students rioted in 1968 and were beaten by the police. I walked through the iron entrance gate of the university, into the faculty grounds. It was strange to come here in the middle of summer, before term had begun: empty lanes and empty lawns and the large shade-giving trees with no one underneath them, the library deserted but for a couple of researchers. The peace of the place took me aback. I felt like a ghost as I passed through the literature department, the corridor that echoed every single one of my steps, and knocked on the thick door that said ‘Professor Mielewicz’. I could hardly believe it when my knock was answered with a ‘Come in’. As usual the professor was sitting in his armchair surrounded by stacks of books, papers piled before him like the unsteady skyscrapers of a conjured-up city. He was a round man of about fifty, with dark hair he combed back over his large head, an affable expansive face with round glasses.

‘Pan G?owacki, what a pleasure to see you.’ He said this calmly, as if somehow he’d known I’d