Swimming in the Dark - Tomasz Jedrowski Page 0,36
grass like an archaeological site in the making. And then there was the Jewish cemetery. It was large and deep, a rectangle with no visible end; no one could look inside. It was abandoned, gates locked for ever. The only thing I could see was the army of giant poplars soaring above the wall that separated – protected – the city from this shard of history. I walked along that wall, its old red bricks covered in vines, and admired the sturdy trees swaying in the wind. I imagined nature taking its course unhindered on the other side, the little forest growing from the hearts of forsaken graves. From where I stood, they looked like the most beautiful trees in the city.
I walked on, passing the abandoned factories, where flocks of crows lingered and cawed with their chalky sword-like beaks, throwing large shadows across the dusty plots. Crossing Wola and going towards the centre of the city, I reached the square with the monument to the Ghetto Uprising. I shivered as I took in its size, the pain of the distorted faces carved into its facade. I quickened my pace along the large wide avenues. You could only cross every five hundred metres and it made you feel both exposed and removed. I walked and walked, across Feliks Dzier?yński Square, all the way to the centre, then a little south towards the Palace of Culture and its gigantic spire that pierced the late-summer sky. Standing beneath it – Stalin’s gift to the city, its concrete knot, its biggest scar – I looked up and my head began to spin. It was September, still warm, yet somehow the air already contained a hint of decay.
I walked home. The city had filled up again after the emptiness of summer. Students had returned for another year, workers had come back from their holidays. The queues for the shops swelled like bloody lips – deliveries had become so few and far between that the only way to get anything was to wait. The lines had started to occupy whole streets. I had to push through a queue for a grocery store, where women stood with empty baskets, trying to look over the heads of those in front to see what was happening. Sometimes they’d stand and talk, but mostly people kept to themselves, mumbling complaints, telling off those suspected of pushing in.
Pani Kolecka would go out every morning, early, and join the queues that seemed most promising, according to a rumour picked up by some acquaintance. She would walk the city carrying shopping nets in her handbag at all times, and whenever she chanced to walk past a queue that seemed like it might yield something – whether it was toilet paper or canned beans – she’d join and wait.
Most evenings Pani Kolecka came home empty-handed, tired. She’d sit at the table in the living room, her hands illuminated by a tiny lamp, using leftover cloth to make hats she’d sell in the queues. She’d smile at me when I got back from your place, night having fallen outside. ‘Waiting for nothing, queuing for a possibility, that’s what we’re all doing now,’ she said, quietly, one night. Her eyes sparkled with sadness and irony. ‘There is no other currency than time. And it’s cheap.’
We were eating less, and fewer things. I often ate at the campus canteen, though not the meat. But sometimes we’d be lucky. Sometimes I’d come home and she’d be standing in the kitchen, the radio beside her playing Chopin, something fragrant cooking on the stove, most likely with cumin. She loved cumin.
‘Come and eat, Ludzio,’ she’d say, with a smile in her small eyes. ‘You must be hungry. Sit down and tell me about your day.’
One morning, while I was still waiting to hear from Professor Mielewicz, I found Pani Kolecka lying on her bed in the living room, blanket pulled up to her chin. ‘It’s the standing,’ she said, coughing. Her cough was dry and violent, like a complaint. It seemed strange that a small, fragile being could make such a sound. I prepared some tea for her, dissolved honey in it that she’d brought from the countryside where her sisters lived. But it didn’t help. The coughing continued. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her eyes red with exhaustion. ‘I will need to get some medicine.’
That night the winds grew stronger, the trees in the courtyard moved against each other, air howling between their branches. I woke up and heard