Swimming in the Dark - Tomasz Jedrowski Page 0,65

Hania, and your fingers on her sequinned dress. I tried not to think of Maksio or his eyes when he saw us in the forest. I tried not to think of Granny, or Professor Mielewicz.

I tried to imagine my life in the future, in a year or so. I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t see anything because anything that wasn’t that moment – no, not even that – was beyond me. I started rocking my legs and feet, just to feel something. And then the office closed before my number was called. I left with nothing to show for my time except the flimsy piece of paper whose handwritten number had smudged from my holding it for too long.

I went home. I would get used to it, Pani Kolecka told me. She made us a sparse dinner, buckwheat with pickled cucumbers and beetroot mash, and we ate with the windows open, the cold drifting in, stirring us, the sound of cars rushing past in the streets.

‘We’re just queuing for a possibility, queuing for something, maybe queuing for nothing,’ she said, smiling her sad and loving smile. ‘But it will pass, my dear. Even the longest queue dissolves eventually.’

The next day I went back to the Bureau. I sat and waited, among rows of others, young and old and ageless, all silent, all torpid, reading or knitting or fiddling with their clothes with unnatural resigned slowness, while the large clock ticked and numbers were called out every now and then by a plaintive voice. My body hurt from the bench. I was hungry. But, bizarrely, I remained calm. The calm, I think, was still a form of shock. If I had let anything out, it would have all overwhelmed me. The fear, the terror of my life alone, was always there, like a clasping, growing abyss, waiting to devour me. I can still feel the tremors of that fear today, its echoes firmly anchored under my fingertips and in that small weightless space inside my lower belly, just inches above the verge of my crotch.

At the end of the day my number was called. I walked down the corridor, my footsteps echoing on the stone floor. I knocked on a door, my pulse thumping in my ears. I obeyed the voice that said, ‘Come in.’

The office was narrow and long and dim. I had to walk half a dozen steps to reach the desk and I strained my eyes to see the man in a tiny patch of lamplight – a bald man with black-rimmed glasses.

‘Take a seat,’ he said, his voice formal but not unfriendly. ‘I’m just finishing something.’

I sat on the chair opposite him. He was bent over some files, absorbed in their contents. His desk was covered in piles of them, neatly stacked blocks of paper. There was only the sound of a clock ticking, slowly, unwillingly.

‘So,’ the man said, looking up at me, somewhat weary, bags under his eyes behind his glasses. He opened another file, which I assumed was mine. His eyes scurried over it, moving quickly, and second by second his expression hardened. I thought he’d ask me questions about my trip. I had my story ready – that I was going to visit an uncle in Chicago over Christmas and that I’d be back in January. I expected him to ask why I had never gone to visit my family before, how I could possibly afford the trip, and how they could possibly know I wouldn’t defect. I thought he’d launch into the standard lecture about the dangers of the capitalist world, how they were the enemies of socialism, and how I should never speak to foreigners about politics, except to praise the advance and success of socialist Poland. This is what people had said always happened. But none of that happened. Instead, he set the file down after a moment, and looked at me with an expression that was impossible to read.

‘We know about you, citizen,’ he said, with an expectant look. ‘We know about you.’

I couldn’t breathe. The night of the flyers, the window, the faces staring up at me. Who’d told them? Had they been following me all along? I couldn’t make a sound. The man looked satisfied.

‘We know about your deviancy, about your pederasty.’ He said the words clinically, with a detached sort of judgement, the way I imagined he would have said ‘treason’. All feeling left my body, as if my cells were deserting me. It was as if