Absolute Sunset (28 page)

“Yes, it’s remarkable that it wasn’t worse,” Paweł agreed. “And now I’d better be going or I’ll miss my bus!”

He put on his jacket, grabbed his bag, and left, thinking that Hanka had finally got everything she’d ever dreamed of having.

Hanka—A Happy Ending

Hanka lay in her room. Beside her, Bartek was sleeping. Mum and Dad had gone to bed, too. They’d promised to take her to the park tomorrow, and she was too excited to sleep! Fortunately, the warden dropped by.

“Oh, Hanka, you’re so anxious!” she stated.

“It’s because I’m going to the park tomorrow, Ms Jadzia!” Hanka answered.

“That’s nice! You’re pleased, aren’t you?”

“Yes!”

“Will you fall asleep?”

“No...”

“Give me your hand. I’ll give you an injection and then you’ll be able to rest!”

Hanka obediently offered her hand. The injection didn’t really hurt, just smarted a little. By the time the nurse had pressed the plunger all the way to the end of the syringe, Hanka could feel dizziness coming on.

“Good night!” she mumbled.

“Good night, Hanka. Sleep well!” Ms Jadzia said, then left.

Hanka looked out the window. Her favourite streetlight had just turned on.

“Good night, Bartek! Bright sunshine will wake us tomorrow,” she murmured and fell asleep.

I began writing
Absolute Sunset
in March 2012. I had written a few short stories and one novel already, which—to be honest—is so terribly bad, that my eyes ache when I read it. It is simply horrible, nothing will help it, I am not going to resuscitate this stinking corpse. But I am leaving the file on my Mac, so it can frighten me away from ever going that way again.

What I wrote was really very, very bad. But I didn’t care—I’ve always wanted to write, even if that meant some epic fails along the way. My approach to accomplishing something is to simply keep trying until I reach my goal. So I tried. Along the way I decided to go to some writing workshops, which definitely helped me. I learned to control myself and—let’s use the big word—my talent.

Talent is an exceptionally skittish animal. You know that you have it and it makes you feel very sure, certain, capable of everything. You feel exceptional; you feel that you have something that only a few have. And once you take on that point of view, you’re only one step from pride. I experienced this pride, and I wrote something of which I’m very much ashamed. I sent my pride to the corner and I started working on my workshop. Because it turned out talent isn’t enough.

I started writing
Absolute Sunset
during an exceptionally difficult period of my life. I had the feeling that I was losing control over what was happening to me and happening around me. I lost control over my emotions. I needed first to name them, second to decide what to do about them, and third: I needed the illusion that I could control or affect events. In my books, I have absolute control—here I dictate terms. From the first page to the back cover. And I don’t hesitate to use this power: I send characters away and I summon them whenever I want to, I challenge them or pour could water over them.
Absolute Sunset
gave me the feeling of control which, at that time, I needed more than air.

I wrote like a machine. I didn’t have my desk yet, so I wrote at a table, opposite from a grey wall. I looked at this wall—I touch-type—and I wrote, I wrote, I wrote. On one hand I wrote on a complete high, on the other hand—completely consciously. I knew what was supposed to take place and when. Which word to use. Which point of view. I knew everything; I knew, I embraced everything and I saw everything. In the book. Outside of the book things still happened, simply took place, one worse than another. But at any time I could fall back on Hanka and the raven and cause them to obey me. I could entrust them with everything that ached in me, to talk about it to them. Let people die, let them suffer, let them feel the way I felt then. Let my fear paralyze them, let them cry the way I was crying.

In the first draft (there were seven drafts I think) the fully distilled pain is tangible. It is stinging. My editor, after reading the first manuscript, said he was afraid of me. Well, even today, after smoothing out the book and the reducing its harshness, people who read
Absolute Sunset
change their attitude towards me. I am able to say when someone has read it—I can see it in their attitude. I’ve changed them. I’ve touched them. And since I’ve touched them, it is necessary for them to be on their guard in my presence.

It’s not true. I don’t want to hurt anybody. It simply turns out that we feel the same. I am pleased with that—I am not alone. I learned that, when the novel was published for the first time in Poland. I am not alone. I’m not the only one feeling what I feel. This was, for me, a very valuable message.

Absolute Sunset
is very different from my first, unsuccessful novel. So to speak, this book formed me as a writer. For good, it formed my style—very economical, very precise. Not very decorative. And yet—in my opinion—unusually effective. Through my books I can reach deep inside other people. To leave my tracks in them. Somebody once told me I have a power that not many people have—I can change people. And I want to do that, not by writing self-help guides, but by creating something that will inspire my readers, something they will agree with—or not... it’s unimportant. Let them simply carry my book with themselves, let them use what I say in the way they feel is right. I will leave, as far as
Absolute Sunset
is concerned, complete freedom for interpretation. In this novel you will not find answers, there are only questions. You want the answer? It depends on the reader.

Many reviewers have asked me about the raven. Where did it come from, why a raven, why a talking raven? The raven is my own dream. I say this unwillingly, after what I suggested in the book about connecting pecking with certain traumatic experiences—my raven didn’t peck me. When I was small, when I slept still in a child’s small bed, he came to me. He sat on the headboard, then strolled, precisely the way you see in the first scene of the book. He talked to me. I was afraid of him. In a natural way he simply fit this book, and it seemed to me that if I wrote about him, he wouldn’t visit me again. Believe it or not, I never met him again. And I am pleased with that.

I do still have nightmares occasionally. Some time ago I tried to explain them, I searched for their meanings, and what’s more I reached for Tarot cards, which are a family tradition. I groped for an answer, I searched for messages. Today, now that I am older, I’ve written so many words that I’ve found the border between real and unreal and I can state with full responsibility that there is nothing like prophecy, fate and so on. The only thing that is real is us. Me and you. And we are in charge of what will happen to us. Indeed, there are events out of our control, but at all times we control how we react to them. It is a similar control to the one I have over the plot of my books—unrestricted. Unlimited.

Today, after many years of writing, I can see how much it has changed me. In the past I was despotic and very much wanted to dictate terms, every condition, but today I am able to distinguish the impossible from the potentially attainable. Today I am able to call a spade a spade: my desires, dreams, fears, and I am able to decide what I will do about them. However, in
Absolute Sunset
one can see that I didn’t have this feeling of self-control. This book functioned as a release valve, as if it were safeguarding water against brimming over the rim of the bathtub. But it was still a step forward for me. A lesson, in both writing and living, simply, of living in a deliberate way. Living firmly, good and bad, experiencing pleasant and unpleasant things. Accepting that it’s impossible to fly high all the time. Accepting that to feel good, you must also feel bad. You don’t have to run away from negative emotions—they also build you up.

This is my final conclusion.

Kata Mlek

Some readers have no problem figuring out that many of the catastrophes mentioned in
Absolute Sunset
are real events that took place in Poland and abroad. However, nobody has managed to expound a complete list of these episodes. So, for the first time, I have decided to list them all, give a brief comment on each of them, and explain why I picked these particular events.

Every year in Poland, lifeguards conduct a massive campaign to inform people of the risks related to jumping into water without first checking what lies beneath the surface. Despite this, every year many divers get injured or die.

I was raised by the river and I know well that this is a particularly dangerous place. You never know what the current has left in the river bed. I am very afraid of open water, I don’t actually know why, but it shows in this chapter. (And by the way: the river in this chapter is my river, the Liswarta, which runs through the region where I was born.) Nowadays it is not clean enough to eat fish that are caught there, but I think this is a general problem everywhere.

Natural therapies are faring extremely well in Poland. Of course, I don’t mind, unless they are fatal—which is exactly what happened here a few years ago. Some famous Polish healer ordered a parent not to feed their child, and the child starved to death. Other therapies also garner my objection, specifically, any of them that involve some kind of violence toward the sick person as part of the therapy.

As long as the procedure does not require physical or psychological violence, does not lead to suffering, it is more-or-less acceptable to me. But in general I prefer to seek a doctor’s advice.

The therapy used on Bartek in this chapter—bathing a child in water with some magic powder and scrubbing away worms—is an actual therapy prescribed pretty often by healers here. It does not work—I have witnessed an attempt. The child was screaming like crazy, the mother scrubbed his back and there was NOTHING on the boy’s skin. But such is the power of suggestion—the healer said there are worms which are eating the baby from the inside, so the mother saw worms. There was no way to persuade her this was nonsense. I am sorry, but I will not say what I did to stop this procedure.

Feeding children various mixtures is also pretty popular. Most healers prefer... water, specifically, water in which you’ve made sour cucumbers. (These cucumbers are similar to pickles, but a bit rotten—thus the sour taste. To make them, you put cucumbers into salty water with garlic and leave them for a few days. One of my friends from Greece, when I gave her a sour cucumber, spat it out and said it was disgusting.) Anyway, adults may occasionally eat sour cucumbers; kids—not a good idea. But some people feed babies with cucumber water and this is what inspired me to write the passage about Bartek’s therapy.

In this chapter Sabina drops her son, Bartek, onto a street from a bridge. Nothing like this has ever happened here in Poland, but believe me: if I described some of the real child abuse, you would be shocked.

Unfortunately in Poland people still say a small spank will not do any harm. Our society accepts shouting at kids, spanking them, and jerking them by the arm. And much more—almost every month the headlines are screaming about another child abuse case. So many children die here due to domestic violence; even infants are killed by abusive parents, and the neighbors (who must have noticed something) are always so surprised.

This is part of our heritage—in my opinion the post-war generation was a generation of broken people, who could not cope with emotions, express love, deal with anger. Every family in this country was affected by the war and the post-war transition to communism, which also brought terror and eroded human rights. But this is history—I hope that we can move on.

Describing the death of a child in such a drastic way in my book was my comment on all of the cases I’ve heard about over the last few years. As I said once in the past, my voice is very weak, so in my writing I scream about what hurts me, what I see as wrong. Other times, I simply tell people “look, this is reality”.

In this chapter I refer to a disaster which took place in 2006 in Katowice. The fair hall collapsed due to snow at a time when over 700 people were inside. 65 people died, 170 were injured. As I have quite a few friends in Katowice, I was calling them like crazy to find out whether they were alive and safe. Fortunately, none of them was there at the time of the exhibition, which was about carrier pigeons. The region was mourning for months after this catastrophe.

Later in this chapter I reference a methane explosion which occurred in 2006 in Halemba mine, wherein 23 miners died. This was one of the worst disasters in the history of the Polish mining industry, but not the only one, of course.

Natural methane has no smell, and when it mixes with the air its explosive power is comparable to dynamite. It enters the mine tunnels from between the rocks and pieces of coal, and when the concentration reaches five percent—it explodes, ignited by any small spark or even by one rock striking another. The power of the explosion is typically increased further by the methane mixing with coal dust.