I don't see Tadeusz for a week. He doesn't meet me at Mikro on Friday, and he doesn't come to Stash's. Finally, on Thursday, on my way back from Hipermarket Europa, I call him from the teachers' dormitory at the end of Pani Bożena's street. The receptionist at the front desk is friendly, and even though she knows I don't live there, she looks the other way as I close myself into one of the booths.
"Hello?" A little girl answers the phone.
"Hello, this is Baba Yaga. Could I please speak to Tadeusz?" There's giggling on the other end. Whenever I call Tadeusz, the phone passes through three or four of his sisters before he finally answers.
"Hello?"
"Tadeusz?"
"Baba Yaga?" There's a scream in the background behind him, followed by more giggling.
"You didn't come to Mikro on Friday. Or Stash's. I was worried."
"I had to babysit. I talked to Stash about it."
"Can you see a film tomorrow? I think Miś is playing."
"I don't know, Baba Yaga. My parents are really counting on me to babysit. They're really in trouble with the shop, and my father can't seem to find another job," he says.
"I'm sorry," I say. "I didn't realize it was so serious."
There's a long pause. "Hold on," he says. "Just a second." He puts his hand over the phone, and there's a long conference that involves five or six people. I look out onto the empty street, powdered with snow, and roll the phone cord between my fingers.
"Okay, I can meet you tomorrow. Five o'clock?"
"Okay. Five o'clock."
"Na razie."
When we meet at the Square of the Invalids on Friday afternoon, the dusk is already drifting down through the branches of the trees. At this time of year, it seems that the sky is always dark or getting dark or emerging from the dark. We watch Miś, but Tadeusz doesn't laugh as much as Nela used to, and it doesn't seem as funny as before. Afterward, we walk through Freedom Park, shivering in the cold.
"I talked to Irena about the Cabaret," I tell Tadeusz, "and she said she'll ask for you."
Tadeusz stuffs his hands into his pockets, and his feet scrape the pavement as he walks.
"She said she thinks she might be able to arrange an audition. From there you'll have to prove yourself of course, but at least you'll get the chance."
We stop on the sidewalk in front of the bookmaker's. His face is impassive, his hair blowing in blond drifts around his face.
"Imagine," I say, but I can already feel that something is terribly wrong. "Playing for Piotr Skrzynecki. Can you imagine?"
Tadeusz clears his throat, covering his mouth with his fist. "Baba Yaga, I want to tell you something," he says. "I have been thinking about joining the army."
"The army?"
"The army."
"But..."
"I have to help out my parents."
"Well, is army pay that good anyway?"
"Not at first, but at least it's something if I volunteer. And after that, I would have a better chance at getting a spot in the police academy."
"I didn't know you wanted to be a policeman."
He shrugs.
"But what about your clarinet?"
He shrugs again. He can't look me in the eye.
"Tadeusz, you are so close. So close."
"Look, if I don't volunteer for the army now, I'll have to do my mandatory service anyway."
"Why don't you just try to załatwić a medical excuse for yourself? Everyone does it these days. I'm sure Stash knows someone who could help you."
"Baba Yaga, try and understand. I have to help my parents," he says. "My sisters."
I feel a dark cloud suddenly enveloping both of us. I try to picture Tadeusz in the army, his long hair shaved into a crew cut, his paunch tightened, his face clean shaven. I try to imagine him as one of the boys I've seen on the Rynek at the end of their military service: drunk, whooping and hollering, swinging their capes around and climbing flagpoles, the police just looking on and smiling, fondly remembering the end of their service and the cape stored away in a trunk somewhere.
"Hey," he says, reaching for my hand. "We can still see each other."
To say the truth, it hadn't even crossed my mind. All I can picture is the blank spot on the stage at Stash's. "But Tadeusz, don't quit now. You are so close."
"I'm still thinking about it, okay?" he says. "I just wanted to tell you before you and Irena go through the trouble of setting up an audition with Piotr Skrzynecki."
"Why don't you just play for him, meet with him and see? Surely your parents wouldn't want you to miss this."
"You act like it's life or death," he says. "There will be other chances. Besides, the army's not so bad. It's just a lot of sitting around. And there's an army orchestra. I can play for the orchestra to keep in practice, and then maybe I can try again when I come out."
"But you'll lose your momentum."
We're standing in front of Irena's door already.
"I have to go," he says. He leans over to give me a peck on the cheek, then changes his mind and kisses me full on the mouth. It's a wet, awkward kiss, and I feel his tongue filling up my mouth, flopping around like a half-asleep fish pulled from one of the tanks in the market. It feels desperate, the kind of desperation that only surfaces near the end, when it's too late.
"I'll see you on Wednesday," he says.
He walks away, and I'm left standing there, protesting and arguing with myself about why he can't go to the army, why he must continue, why if he wants to become a klarnecista, he should become a klarnecista. And for the first time, it dawns on me that maybe my protesting has very little to do with Tadeusz and his clarinet at all.
I sleep uneasily that night, and the next morning, I get up while it's still dark and take the video camera down from the shelf. I don't turn on the light, and I sit in the middle of the floor, fiddling with the tape and playing the clips of Tadeusz and Pani Bożena over and over in the little screen. Irena bursts into my room without knocking.
"Come on. Hup, hup. Let's go."
"Irena! Don't you knock? What if I had been changing?" Indeed, I feel as if she's caught me naked, as if I'm doing something illicit.
"Please. There's nothing I haven't seen in this lifetime. Come on. Hup, hup. No time to waste." She reaches over the daybed to open the window shade. There's a steady rain beating against the windows.
"Where are you going?"
"Shhh ... I don't want to wake Magda."
"Where are you going?" I whisper.
"We," she says, "are going to Malina today."
"Where?"
"Malina. It's All Souls Day. I have to visit the cemetery where Magda's father is buried."
"I thought you didn't celebrate holy days. I thought you said you wanted to go to hell, where all the interesting people are."
"I'll go to hell when I die. Today we are going to Malina."
"Why don't you take Magda?"
"She has enough to worry about."
"But it's Saturday. I have to work tonight."
"We'll be back in time."
"And I didn't even know your husband."
"Ex-husband," she corrects me. "And consider yourself one of the lucky ones. That skurwysyn. Come on. Enough excuses. Let's go. Hup, hup."
We take a tram to the PKS station. The rain has stopped for now, but the streets are flooded, the water swirling around the tires of the cars and crashing like waves against the curb. Irena walks a few feet ahead of me. I hadn't even thought of going back to the village to visit Nela's grave or my mother's. Nela had arranged for simple crosses for them both, side by side outside the church in Pisarowice.
"Chodż, snail," Irena says. She's carrying a bouquet of chrysanthemums wrapped in tissue, but when I ask about them, she insists that she pulled them from the vacant lot opposite the flat.
"You really think I would go out and buy flowers for that dead skurwysyn?"
She pushes our way to the front of the line, and we take a seat on the bus near the back. The aisle is overflowing with bags of flowers, candles, brooms, dustpans, and pruning shears, and the driver can only make it halfway up the aisle on his final check. He takes his time buckling himself in, flipping his mirrors and visors, stopping to talk to one of the other drivers out the window, and waiting for a few more passengers to get on. But no one gets impatient. We all have the same itinerary today.
The engine idles in the low gears as we thread the narrow streets and low viaducts of the old town, and as we reach the wide aleje, it grumbles and groans through the rest of the gears. Irena stares out the window. I watch her expressions open and close and wonder what is running through her mind.
"Irena?"
"Yes?"
"Tell me about your husband."
"Ex-husband. Wiktor." She doesn't even bother to look at me. "And there's nothing interesting to tell."
"There must be something."
"We met in the Bermuda Triangle. Koniec. Finish. It was doomed from the start."
I wait for her to continue, but she doesn't, so I try again. "At Feniks?"
She looks over at me. "Pod Gruszką."
"Was that back when you were a painter?"
"That was back when I was a głupia panienka, that's what I was."
Again there is silence.
"And then?"
She looks at me and laughs. "You're not going to leave me alone until I tell you, are you?"
"You're the one who made me come. At least you can entertain me."
She smiles. "Very well." She readjusts herself so she's facing me. "It was 1972. We met in January, married in June, and Magda came in November. I remember when we were dating, my father—your Great-Uncle Władysław Jagiełło—hated him. I was still living with my parents, so even though I was already thirty-two, we still had to sneak around."
"Irena, June to November is only six months."
"So they teach you math in the village, do they?" She laughs. "Yes, Magda was a few months premature, as many Polish babies are. Anyway, I ask you to imagine: I was thirty-two, painting and scraping by, living with my parents, already on the shelf, and this handsome man walked on the scene, trying very hard to impress me. He did impress me. With the people I normally associated with, it wasn't hard to impress me then, and he was a manager at the Cracovia Hotel and knew many, many important people. He would take me to the best restaurants, the best cafés. We would go out dancing and all the girls would stare at him. And then he would take me home by taxi. By taxi! In those days—can you imagine? And then he would say good night very sweetly, and I would be in the flat by midnight."
"That sounds nice."
"It was."
"But?"
She laughs at my persistence. "But later, when we were married, he admitted that after he would drop me off, he'd go back to the parties and get as drunk as a pig."
"You never found out?"
She shook her head. "Like I said, I was a głupia panienka. Worse than Magda, truth be told. At least she will admit to being a głupia panienka sometimes. I always thought I was above that."
She pauses. I wait patiently, and to my surprise, she continues.
"And so we were married." She shakes her head and flicks her neck as Nela always did when talking about my father. "Without the vodka, he really would have been something. Instead, he became a terrible drunk. Terrible. He would come home late every night from work, stinking drunk. Every night. Even when Magda was only a little brat. Terrible, you know?"
"Yes, I know."
"Yes, you know."
She looks out the window again, as if she's looking for someone else to tell the story for her. The tightly wrapped streets of the city have unraveled, and we're driving through open fields now, anchored down in places by unfinished A-frame houses, piles of concrete blocks, and half-sheets of corrugated steel. Every once in a while, there's a block flat rising ten or twenty stories out of the ground, as if the block flats in the city went to seed and were blown out to the countryside by a stiff gust of wind.
"So I decided to divorce him. Oh, my parents were happily married until my father died, and my mother was terribly upset when she found out that I had asked for a divorce. Divorces were not common in those days. In those days, you just shut your mouth and slept with someone else as discreetly as you could. And my mother, even though she lived with us and saw what he did, she was an eternal optimist. She kept saying that it would get better, that he would stop drinking. But I asked for a divorce anyway, and eventually I got one." Irena's eyes are darker now, the years stamped around them in the purple ink of passports. For a moment, I think that's the end.
"But then he refused to leave."
"What do you mean?"
"He said he would not leave the flat. Simply refused. And in Poland at that time, you could not force the man to leave. The woman could move out, but you could not force the man to leave. That was when he started staying in the third room—your room. Every night drunk. And I would look at him and wish I had never met him, that I had just gone on with my painting and my głupstwa."
"But then there would be no Magda."
"Exactly. So I became very determined. Very determined that it would not all be a waste. So I started looking for a new flat for him. For Wiktor."
"How?"
"The truth was, I didn't know how it was going to happen. But I started visiting the housing office. I would go every Friday. Every Friday. They were so sick of seeing my face there, but I kept going back, and each Friday they would tell me the same thing: 'Your name is on the list. There are no flats available. Come back in a few months.' So I would return the very next Friday. And the next. Every Friday I did this. Every Friday for five years."
"Five years?"
"Five. And then, finally, one Friday they told me they had good news for me and showed me a flat."
"So he moved?"
She shakes her head. "No. He refused. And then two more, but he refused those as well."
"Just refused?"
She nods. "And then they showed me a garsoniera on Rydla Street."
"So he moved to Rydla Street?"
"No, no. He refused to move there too."
"And then?"
"And then we had another six years of living together, so I decided to make the best of it. It was in the middle of Martial Law. Magda was ten. I had to think about her going to liceum and university. So I quit painting, broke all my ties, and Pani Bożena got me the job in the cafeteria."
The bus is quiet. The other passengers are snoozing, and the rain has stopped.
"Why didn't you move to the garsoniera?"
"My mother was still alive at that time, and we couldn't fit the three of us in a tiny garsoniera."
"So when..."
"When did he die? Right after the elections. Three years ago. I remember telling someone that it was time for the country's freedom and mine too."
"He died from drinking?"
"No, no, not from drinking. His liver was made of iron. No, it was his heart. Apparently he'd had a hole in his heart all his life, but no one had ever found it. I had the police break the lock on his door when I realized that there hadn't been any food missing from the refrigerator in two days." Her eyes glisten with tears, and I can't tell if it's the sadness of those years squeezing her like milkweed or pure relief bubbling up from within.
"I remember telling a friend at the time that I was surprised he even had a heart at all." She laughs.
"But you visit his grave every year?"
"No. This is the first time."
"Oh."
"I don't know why."
"Because of the letters?"
She doesn't answer. She turns back toward the window. Koniec. Finish.
After another half an hour, the bus stops appear more frequently, picking up and dropping off. The bus comes alive with people grabbing for bags, digging in their purses for change, applying lipstick, finger-combing their hair. We get off with a small crowd of people headed for the same cemetery. From the bus stop, we walk single file along the muddy path on the shoulder, plodding along blindly until we see a few cars parked by the side of the road and the unmistakable cold granite fingers grasping skyward.
"Irena, maybe I'll wait for you here," I say.
"Don't be silly. This will only take a minute. I don't even have two minutes for that skurwysyn. Come on."
A thin mist crawls around and tugs at the tree trunks, like a small child trying to stand. We continue along the path, the mud sucking at our heels, the brown leaves clumping together on the ground and in the trees like mange. As we approach the gates of the cemetery, Irena walks more slowly than usual, even allowing an older woman to cut ahead of us.
"Irena," I say again, "maybe I'll just wait here for you."
"Don't be silly. You came this far, another twenty steps won't kill you." We step carefully on the narrow wooden planks that someone has thought to lay between the gravestones, and mud oozes from the edges. Irena pulls me along by the sleeve of my coat like I'm a child, and I let her. The gravestones here are more elaborate than the simple crosses in the cemetery in Pisarowice, some of them the size of small beds hovering half a meter above the ground, some of them demarcated by a tiny iron fence. Soggy flowers crown the headstones, and candles cover every surface, a few still flickering defiantly against the fog and the spittle of rain. Suddenly, Irena turns and touches my sleeve.
"Baba Yaga," she says, "maybe you can wait here for me."
I nod. I watch as Irena makes her way to a small gravestone near the back fence of the cemetery, and it is only then that I notice she has worn her best wool skirt. She gathers it under her and squats on one of the wooden planks next to a simple headstone, brushes it off with a few crumpled tissues and carefully sets down a few candles. She shakes the bouquet of chrysanthemums and sets them upright in a metal vase already filled with rainwater, fluffing them to make them look bigger than they are. She doesn't stop to bow her head or fold her hands; I don't see her lips forming around either a prayer or a curse. When she's finished, she simply gathers her skirt, stands up, and navigates her way back along the wobbly boards, her eyes cast downward.
As she reaches me, she draws a tissue from her pocket and presses it against her lips. "Skurwysyn" she whispers. Son of a bitch.
On the way home, Irena stares out the window, her jaw set like stone. It's almost dark by the time we reach the city. The streets and the trams are packed with people traveling to and from Rakowicki Cemetery, and as we drive over the bridge by Jubilat, we see the thousands of flickering candles floating down the river. I leave Irena on the bus and get off at the Square of the Invalids. Magda and Kinga have already set up the chairs and are sitting at the bar, Magda with her cigarette, Stash and Kinga drinking beers.
"And where have you been?" Magda asks.
"What do you mean?"
"Where did you and mama sneak off to this morning?"
"She wanted me to go somewhere with her."
"Secret, secret. Where?"
"To Malina."
"What for?"
"To visit your father's grave."
"Boże." Kinga brings her hand to her chest, her fingertips just touching her sternum. On someone with a larger chest, it might appear vulgar, but on Kinga, it's a sincere gesture, like a child making a pledge.
"Why would she go there?" Magda asks. "She can barely take a tram to the other side of town, and all of a sudden, she takes a twohour bus to Malina? She's never gone before. Why would she go and open up that chapter again? And why would she take you? You didn't even know him."
Stash looks up at me too, impatient for the answer.
"I don't know," I say. But it's a lie. I didn't know this morning, but now I know exactly why. She wasn't answering to the faint knock of nostalgia or reopening a chapter. Today was for closing something off. Koniec. Finish. And just like the people suffering on the retrospectives and the grandmothers and grandfathers at the tram stops who talk about the war as if it ended only a few weeks ago, Irena needed a witness.