Swimming in the Dark - Tomasz Jedrowski Page 0,66

someone had hurled me into a vortex, with no up and no down, nothing to hold on to. No one had ever said these things to me. Something private, something utterly unspoken yet essential, was being ripped out of me. I couldn’t say anything. Maybe they were baiting me, I thought, maybe I could argue my way out of this. But I was unable to think or manoeuvre; I was caught in the jaws of something much too powerful, something that paralysed me from within. Satisfaction flickered across his face – a face that could have been anyone’s, an unremarkable, everyday face.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, knowing I could never go through with this.

His face didn’t change. He looked back at the file. ‘Does the name Marian Zalewski mean anything to you?’

I shook my head, truthfully.

With his eyes on the file, he continued. ‘Zalewski was caught in the Staromiejski Park in Wroclaw over three years ago – April the twenty-third, 1977. Engaging in sodomy with another citizen.’ He looked back at me. ‘He obediently gave to us the names of others like him. All the names he knew. All contained in a statement, signed by him personally. One of them was yours.’

He took something out of the file and handed it to me. It was a photograph, passport-sized. It showed the face of an old man I had never seen before, staring straight into the camera. His face was deeply lined and hollow. Dried, emptied of life. And then, in a flash, I recognised him: it was the man from the park bench, from the night I’d run away from home. The man who’d told me his life story, the man whose mouth had relieved my anxiety for one night – and whom I had told my name. Instead of anger, a strange sort of tenderness invaded me. He looked so sad, so forsaken in the photo. Fury awoke in me on his behalf. I could see him being dragged out of the park, into the back of a police van; I could see him sitting in some cold underground office, beaten, blackmailed, made to sign this statement that now lay neatly before a bureaucrat.

‘What does this have to do with my passport?’ I asked, impatient. ‘Will you give it to me or not?’

He put down the file slowly and folded his hands over it, retaining his calm.

‘That depends entirely on you, citizen. On you and your common sense.’ He closed my file, placed his elbows on it and looked at me with narrowed eyes, his pupils small and intense like the heads of nails. ‘If you want your passport, you will do the same thing comrade Marian did: supply us with names. And dates. And circumstances.’

He pulled out a piece of blank paper from his desk drawer and pushed it across the table towards me.

‘Write.’

At first, there was emptiness. Thoughts flew through space, trying to ignite. A sky readied for fireworks, a stage cleared for decisions. But where do decisions come from?

I saw you and Hania slung together, dancing, oblivious to me on the other side of the window. My stomach began to burn, secreting pain like arrowheads, and then the two of you as a four-legged creature, struggling on the forest floor. Eating itself, aware only of itself. At the same time your pleas for trust rang in my ears, your pleas for my patience. The fire in my belly spread. My back reached for soreness, my eyes stirred and dampened. The man was still there, staring at me. And so was the piece of paper.

I felt the pause of time. A moment pulled into its smallest parts, spread so thin it threatened to break. When I imagined taking that piece of paper and reaching for the pen, pictured the possibility of it, of writing your name, my arm refused to move. I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel the fire in my gut, I couldn’t feel any pain. I’d gone numb.

I don’t know what took over then, in the void of the next moment. I guess it wasn’t anything distinct, more a hazy murmur, an animal voice, instinct. I followed what it said – what I could make out, anyway. I knew it spoke the truth. I opened my mouth. My body felt heavy, absurd, like two fur coats worn at once.

‘No,’ I said to the man’s stony face. ‘I don’t have any names.’

It wasn’t easy – he was determined to get what