She knew. Somewhere inside her body, she knew that they would come. They had been in the city for just over a year, and Anielica was almost three months pregnant, home alone with morning sickness. Everyone said it would let up soon, that she should be happy because it meant that it was probably a boy, but Anielica was growing weary, both of her body's constant rebellion against her and the reciprocal revulsion she felt for her body. She felt disgusted with herself before the Knock even came.
People who have never heard the Knock, who have never felt the Knock echoing against their temples or ricocheting around their insides always tell about it happening in the middle of the night, but the truth is that the middle of the night is only a euphemism for when you least expect it, and honestly, you never quite expect it. Anielica did not think twice that morning when she flung open the door, her mouth full of acid, her heart racing, her eyes bleary, like a wild animal under attack, looking for either relief or someone to blame. And certainly the man on the other side of the door did not look threatening in the least. He was only about ten years older, with creased leather shoes and an ill-fitting brown jacket.
"I am here to see Czesław Mrozek."
"He's at work," Anielica mumbled, and began to shut the door. She could feel her stomach churning again.
"You may be able to help me then."
"I don't want to buy anything. Whatever it is, we can't afford it."
"I am not selling anything. I only want to verify some information with you."
"I would feel better if you came by when my husband was at home."
She tried to shut the door again, but his shoe blocked it. "I just need to verify some information with you, Anielica."
When he said her name, she took a step back, and he took the opportunity to step into the flat.
"As I believe you have just confirmed, you are Anielica Hetmańska, now Anielica Mrozek, married to one Czesław Mrozek, also known as the Pigeon. You were married at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher here in Krakow, about four months ago."
She felt the breath being sucked out of her.
"You live here with your brother ... by the name of ... Władysław Jagiełło?" He raised an eyebrow but continued reading from his notebook. "...who is married to Marysia Holcman, an ethnic Jew, though she doesn't practice, or at least not that we know of. Her parents are Jonasz and Judyta Holcman, currently residents of Rømø, Denmark..."
"Who is we?"
"Your brother and sister-in-law have one child, Irenka, five years old, who attends Żłobek Number Two on First of May Street. You are pregnant with your first..." He looked up at her. "Congratulations."
She did not reply. Her head was reeling, and her stomach followed.
"Your mother is Maria Hetmańska, formerly Maria Kukla, born December 11, 1902, married to Franciszek Hetmański on April 4, 1919. They live in the village of ... Half-Village ... approximately ten kilometers south of Osiek in the Nowosądeckie region..."
The room began to close in on her. She felt her skin grow hot and the saliva fill her mouth.
"...where, on January 22, 1945, one Russian soldier, there to liberate the village, was mysteriously shot by partisans believed to be fighting for the Home Army. There are currently fifteen residents in Half-Village: one Pani Lubicz, widowed recently, one Pani Epler, also widowed recently..."
The back of her throat convulsed. She ran to the bathroom and slammed the door behind her, lurching for the toilet. She didn't make it, and she threw up on the rim and on the floor. She sat on the edge of the bathtub, exhausted, and cupped her hand under the water, rinsing the acrid taste from her mouth, splashing the cool water on her face, holding her wrists under the stream. When she turned the water off, she could hear him walking around the flat, the parquet creaking under his feet. This man she had never seen before was suddenly making himself at home in their lives, in their present and in their past. It was up to her to prevent him from skulking into their future.
She stood up and stared at her reflection in the small piece of mirror the Pigeon had mounted for her on the wall. She didn't want to recognize herself. She had been disgusted with her body for the past month, its softening and bloating and cramping, and the face staring back at her was ugly, blotchy, with pale lips, her damp hair sticking to her forehead. She knew what she must do, and she began, marching through it as she had marched through so many other things in the past six years. She took the rag from under the bathtub and cleaned up the mess, rinsing it down the drain, and when she was done with the floor, she went to work on herself with the same detachment, the same mechanical movements as any other distasteful chore. She brushed her teeth and pulled her hair back, powdered her face and put on lipstick, pulled her housedress tight and retied it. She stared one last time into the mirror, and what looked back at her was someone else's face, not hers, not the one her mother had borne, her father had named, her brother had teased, certainly not the one the Pigeon had fallen in love with.
She went back out into the main room, into the room occupied by the two couples from Bielsko-Biała. He was staring out the window, his back to her, and when he turned around and saw her transformation, she could see it registering in his eyes.
"I apologize," she said sweetly. "I am, as you say, pregnant." She brought it up, thinking that in this situation it might be a selling point, especially for a married man.
His eyes drifted over her, resting wherever they pleased.
"And forgive me for my rudeness earlier. I just don't understand why a man of your ... your clear authority would even want to be bothered with us."
"Maybe your husband would be better able to answer that. He doesn't seem to tell you much."
She looked at the man's hands, still gripping the composition notebook he had read from. He wore an aluminum wedding ring, bent and chinked in places, and she tried to imagine the wife who had placed it on his finger. She saw a meek little woman, a woman who picked out his clothes and always had his dinner ready when he came home in the afternoon.
"Surely there must be something we can do."
"I'm not sure that there is."
But the way his eye had flickered made her ask again. "Surely there must be something"
"Nothing, I'm afraid," he said. "Unless the notes are lost. Terrible makeshift system we have at the moment. If this notebook and the file back at the station are both lost..."
He moved toward her, and everything that had only moments before been cloaked in vagaries and bundled in euphemism suddenly lay bare. She couldn't bear to bring him into the second room—their room—and so she led him to the bed Gosia and the younger brother shared. It was better that way. The revulsion she felt lying on their sheets, saturated by their odors and oils helped her to crawl into the inner recesses of herself, so that his motions on top of her seemed as distant as the noises from the flat above. He thrust awkwardly, groaning like an animal, not caring at all what he sounded like, and her thoughts suddenly went to the meek wife waiting for him at home. She pushed the image away, ashamed. The grunts came more deeply, more quickly, and he tried to suppress them by pressing his lips to hers, but she turned her head violently away, and he stopped suddenly and chuckled before resuming. She concentrated her gaze on the brown jacket on the floor, the shoes that had been stepped out of and left with the heels touching. The coat was even shabbier, the shoes even more worn up close.
There was no blood this time. No howling, no clinging to the leg of a table. No dramatic rescue, no rage. Only a simple transaction. A choice. A choice between Scylla and Charybdis, between the devil and Beelzebub, but nonetheless, a choice. One of the millions like it that would be made in the next fifty years, the secret negotiations taking place in the privacy of souls, never a win-win solution, only a not-lose. In the New Poland, there was survival for the ones who could stuff themselves down into the deepest part of themselves, who could lock the room of their conscience behind them.
When he left, the notebook remained, and Anielica held it with both hands, as if it were something precious and fragile. It was a small composition notebook, the kind that schoolchildren carry, and she marveled that somewhere there was a factory turning them out so soon after the war. She carefully turned the pages with her fingertips. Everything, everyone she loved was named: their parents, the church in Pisarowice, Irenka's nursery, their neighbors in Half-Village, the small town in England where the Pigeon's family was temporarily living before they got their papers to America, the boss at the uniform factory, the foreman at the Pigeon's job.
It was almost beautiful, really, to have the entirety of one's life contained within neat edges, within straight, even lines and thick, durable covers. But now the stench of that morning emanated from it, overpowering the entire record of life it contained. It had to be destroyed. Completely. Immediately. She brought the notebook into the bathroom, opened it and pinched the covers back between her fingers like one of those paper Christmas trees that decorated the table for a month and was folded neatly away. She stuck the corner of a single page into the open mouth of the water heater, where the pilot light glistened like a small blue tongue, licking at the edge. At first, she fed the flame slowly, twisting her wrist to control the ebb and flare. She wanted to watch the flames spread from one page to the next, to look over each name, each place, each date, and then watch the fire consume it completely, but the orange flames grew quickly out of control. She dropped the composition book into the tub, and it landed flat on its covers, the white pages in between bursting into a fireball, sending off tiny black flags of surrender into the air.
When it burned itself out, all that remained was the dampened cover, and Anielica carried it over to the trash bucket and simply threw it out. She paced back and forth, fearful of sitting on any of the beds, which seemed infested with her deed. She tried to forget the notebook, but it nagged at her from the trash bucket, and she could not think about anything else. Finally she went over and retrieved it, pinching it cautiously between two fingers, as if it were the corpse of a small animal or a bird. She carried it over to the window. She swung it open with her free hand and climbed over the sill and onto the balcony. She had hung up the washing that morning, and it was nearly dry in the warm September sun. She ducked under the Pigeon's work shirts, under her own skirts and blouses, under little Irenka's underpants, and she held the cover of the notebook over the railing for a moment before letting go.
For a split second, she actually thought it might spread its wings, glide gently across Bishop Square, and ride a breeze over the rooftops, disappearing behind the chimneys, drifting to the ground in a land far, far away. Instead, it dropped like a stone to the sidewalk just below the window, and Anielica stared down at it, watching the pedestrians divert around it or nudge it out of the way with their feet.
No one ever found out. Anielica washed the ashes from the tub and drew a bath. The blackened cover was gone from the sidewalk by the evening. Gosia and her husband slept in the sheets for the rest of the week, rolling around and marinating in the evil. She could never prove it of course, but it seemed that when Gosia returned from her job at the milk bar that night, she was surprised and perplexed to find the Half-Villagers still there.
Whether she did it to spite Gosia, to hide it from the Pigeon, or deny it to herself, Anielica somehow managed to stuff that morning so far inside herself that not even her memory could reach it. Only her body knew. Before Gosia had even changed the sheets on the bed, Anielica miscarried, and before they were able to move out of the flat on Bishop Square, she miscarried twice more, as if her womb were trying to expel an unwelcome stranger that would not leave.
In the spring of 1947, the five Half-Villagers finally moved into a newly built garsoniera on Rydla Street, which the Pigeon and Władysław Jagiełło had been able to załatwić through their connections. It was a big improvement since they did not have to share it with anyone, but Anielica was still not used to being stacked like firewood on top of her neighbors. There was always someone knocking on someone's door or pounding meat or beating a rug or listening to the radio or yelling at their children.
There was always someone watching you.
She never saw the man with the brown jacket and the creased shoes again, but plenty of others came and went at all times of the day and night. Sometimes someone was home; other times they would ransack the flat while they were gone or merely leave one item out of place as a calling card. The Pigeon would be picked up at work or on his way home, and Anielica would have to wait up into the wee hours for the click of the entrance door downstairs that signaled his return.
"Don't worry," her brother whispered to her. "He will be back by the morning. Just like last time. Try to get some sleep."
The volume of his reassurances calmed her. In the New Poland, the truths were separated from the untruths by decibels. The untruths were now proclaimed loudly with a brass band, relentless marching, and waving banners. Toward the Bright Future. All Power to the Workers. Life Has Become Better, Comrades; Life Has Become More Cheerful. The Soviets Will Keep You Warm. Meanwhile, everything real was whispered, passed softly and meticulously from one person to the next. For the next fifty years, this is how it would be. The quietest sounds would be the most important ones. And so, when she heard the click of the entrance door downstairs and the quiet scratching of the key in the lock, when she saw his silhouette and felt him gently slip into bed beside her, when she whispered his name, and he whispered back that everything would be okay, she believed him.
"Nothing happened," he said. "And nothing will happen. They only want to inconvenience me, nothing more. They will leave me alone after the elections."
"I just don't understand why they are still after you," Anielica whispered. "Why have they stopped coming after Władysław Jagiełło, but they are still after you?"
"Because they are fools," he whispered back. "Because they are fools."
Anielica was too scared to ask if this was a reaffirmation of his own innocence or an indictment of her brother, but she eventually learned to live around it. She lived around the doubt, the intruders, the disarray, the neighbors looking through their peepholes, the empty spot on the bed next to her some nights, the not-knowing. She got used to it, just as everyone else did. And as soon as she learned to live with it, her body dropped its guard, and one of her pregnancies finally stuck.