Swimming in the Dark - Tomasz Jedrowski Page 0,7
we’re not in East Germany, thank God. Here, they’re sleepwalking.’
The countryside began and we bumped along the roads past vast fields and birch forests and endless stretches of pines, and little tired towns with church spires sticking out. I don’t know whether Karolina fully knew about me – I think she suspected it. But she never pushed me, never confronted me, and I have always been grateful to her for that. It’s the sort of subtlety I’m not sure I would have had in her place. Only once did she come close to overstepping the line. It was a month or so before the camp, after a play at the National Theatre – we’d gone to see Mro?ek’s Tango. We felt like a drink and she took me to a small bar tucked away in a narrow side street in the Old Town. She said this was where the actors went. The place was full of smoke and dark animated figures by the bar, spilling out on to the pavement. It was the beginning of summer. I could tell what many of those men were but, at first, didn’t want it to be real. There was an exuberance about them that disturbed me deeply. It was their curling voices, the ‘darlings’ that padded their sentences, their quick, voracious eyes, the movement of their hips as Donna Summer moaned ‘I Feel Love’ over hypnotic electric beats, a song I had loved and now berated myself for ever having liked. They threw one furtive glance at me and I felt see-through. Karolina didn’t seem to notice anything unusual – there were women too, relaxed and sly and loud. I looked at her sideways, wondering whether she was really oblivious or just pretending. I wanted to leave right then and there, wanted to stop noticing, stop searching for a face that I would desire and could never have, but Karolina ordered us drinks and I managed to stay and talk and to keep my eyes mostly on her. By the time our beers were almost empty, I’d grown restless and angry, asked her why she had brought me there. She was casual, as always. She said a friend had recommended the place.
‘What friend?’ I asked.
She made a face like she was thinking. ‘You wouldn’t know him.’
I nodded, smiled ironically. ‘Fine. Can we leave now?’
Her face was unchanged, as if she hadn’t heard me. She drank the rest of her beer in one go, put her money on the bar and got up from her stool. ‘Let me just go to the bathroom.’
She walked off and I stood alone in the crowd, feeling entirely powerless, an embarrassed child in the midst of pleasures it couldn’t grasp. No, it was worse than that. Beside me, two old men in suits who had appraised us spoke in excited voices.
‘You know, darling,’ said one to his friend, in a stage whisper, with a fur collar around the lapel of his jacket, sounding drunk, ‘you must read that unpublished Baldwin I told you about. It moved me to tears. If that won’t make you wake up, nothing will.’
The other one – very thin – nodded. ‘You’ll pass it to me, will you, darling?’
‘Yes, but be careful with it, you know it’s not even my copy, it’s hers,’ and he pointed at a man in a white silk shirt across the bar, deep in conversation with what looked like one of the actors from the play we had seen, a pretty boy with wavy blond hair and a small upturned nose.
After this, Karolina came back from the ladies’ and we left. I was determined to take nothing from this place, not one memory, not one conclusion for myself. But like stones thrown into the sky with all one’s might, pieces of that night – the boys and the men who wanted them, the flirtation, the codes of seduction I could only guess at – returned to me with even greater intensity than I had lived them. The law of gravity applies to memories too. And one day, as I sat in the library trying to work, to clear my mind, I remembered the book. I found his name in a catalogue of the foreign literature department. Baldwin. James. There was a list of his works, and only one of them had no official translation: Giovanni’s Room. This had to be it, I thought. I shut the catalogue, tried to forget about it. But the title wouldn’t leave me in