Nine (5 page)

“Sir,” the man said. “I need a few pennies. If you could help . . . just fifty thousand . . .”

Paweł quickened his pace, muttered, “No change, pal, and I'm in a hurry.” But then he slowed down, turned, and asked, “Jacek?”

Only now it occurred to him that it could have been a setup, that the guy knew whom he was stopping, though at the time Jacek seemed surprised, pleased. They spent the afternoon in the bar at the Metropol.

“So? Are things really that bad, man?”

“Things are fine,” Jacek had answered with a smile.

“Right, going up to people in the street and asking for fifty thousand . . .”

“You mean begging.”

“I guess.”

“Sometimes I need a couple thousand. I can see you're doing nicely for yourself. The suit has to be worth a couple of big ones.”

“A man has to look decent.”

“Business . . .”

“Yes.” For the rest of the evening he did most of the talking, told the long and boring story how he started out with a few hundred but in the end came out on top, so he couldn't complain, things were moving and in a few years it would be quite something. Only once did he stop and ask if he could help, get Jacek some work, something to start him off, but in Jacek's eyes there was only amusement, so Paweł dropped the subject and felt a surge of anger. Finally he put two million on the table. Jacek shook his head.

“No, man. I wanted fifty thousand.”

And now, lying on the dirty sheets, Paweł thought, “He conned me, the bastard.” He got up, paced, knocked a copy of
Captain Blood
from the shelf, kicked it into the corner under the seventies coffee table on which stood a Jubilat radio. He turned the knob through the stations. Nothing but talk, static, music he didn't know. On some fast-talking cackle of a program they gave the time, almost two.

“So many things we did together,” he thought, staring out the window. Blue sky, apartment buildings like cutouts made of gray paper, a grown-up version of those cardboard fairy tales
with little windows that held princesses or Hansel and Gretel or shepherd boys. In the narrow gap between walls the Palace of Culture jutted its freshly gilded spire. A red plane passed it, towing a condom labeled
Fenix
. Then he sensed someone's presence and turned. She was maybe eighteen and wanting to be older. Dull sweater, green jacket, rolled-up blue jeans, Doc Martens. A string bag over her arm. She looked at him without surprise.

“I brought him some food,” she said, and went into the kitchen.

“He's not here.”

“When will he be back?”

“I don't know. When I got here, he was gone.”

“What do you want from him?”

“I was just passing by.”

“He shouldn't go out.”

“Why not?”

“Because he doesn't come back for a long time.”

“You're his girlfriend?”

“I bring him food. Vegetables. He needs to eat more vegetables. He always wants meat. He shouldn't eat meat.”

“He's sick?”

“No. But meat is bad. It's like eating suffering and death. It isn't normal.”

“And eating lettuce is? What are you talking about, kid?”

She came out of the kitchen and draped her jacket over the arm of a chair. She had large breasts. Something loud was going on in the next apartment. The plane had swung over Wola and now headed east. She rolled up her sleeves, brass and copper jangling on her wrists, and returned to the kitchen, where she got a pot from under the sink, removed leeks, carrots, cauliflower, and parsnip from her bag, and began chopping everything up.

“They shut off the gas,” he said.

“I know. I'll take the seal off, then put it back again.”

Her breasts bounced under her sweater to the rhythm of the knife.

“He has to eat vegetables. When he goes out, he eats crap at those stalls.”

Watching her focused him. It was two; he had an hour yet.

 

He practically told her his life story as he stood in the doorway of the kitchen. The pot bubbled. His forehead was wet. It could have been from the heat and steam, or from nerves as he spoke and as she listened with half an ear, busy scrubbing the sink to remove the sticky filth of the week. “Fuck it, I'll never see her again, and she doesn't care anyway,” he thought. From time to time she glanced at him as if to check that he wasn't the radio but a real person. She had zits. She took her sweater off. Had on a black cotton blouse.

“I don't see why you need so much money. Me, I minimize. Minimize your needs, and you are independent. If only people realized they could do without all this . . . You have to live in harmony with your nature, not with what everyone tries to talk you into. Of course you don't eat enough vegetables, of course you prefer meat, you think it'll make you tough and all that. But eating vegetables changes your consciousness, and then you're living in harmony with yourself, not by some chauvinistic Christian ideology that lets people kill and eat innocent creatures, that leads to chaos in the cosmos, because humans are a part of it just like plants and animals, and the plants and animals don't do harm. Cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts without salt are good for the upper loins, and blocking the energy there
makes a person worry too much about material things. The right kind of massage could also work . . .”

“The problem is, I borrowed money and now I have to pay it back. But I don't have it. Brussels sprouts won't help.”

“If you started right, you never would have ended up in a situation like this. Me, I divided my body into seven zones, and every day I nourish myself with vegetables from one of the seven groups. In this way I live in total harmony. I mean, we're cosmic beings, aren't we?”

“Gagarin?”

“What?”

“The cosmonaut.”

“Oh, you mean those fascist technocrats. You know what Lao-tzu said?”

“Yeah. You can't jump higher than your prick.”

“What?”

It occurred to him that in ten minutes the plane from Prague would be landing at Okęcie. Long ago, he recalled, in the main hall of the airport, when the crowd thinned, they'd hunt for empty packs of foreign cigarettes. They'd look in the trash cans or see the little colored boxes in ashtrays. Finders keepers, and they didn't care who was watching. Green-and-white Suezes, white-and-red Winstons, brown plastic Philip Morris boxes, yellow, gold, and dark blue 555s, the kind that Mao smoked. If they'd only known then that the price would shoot up and for one pack you could get a green LM box with the carriage on it plus a dark-blue Dunhill. The black-and-silver Desires and the brown Kazbeks no one wanted. Tall men in dark suits and blue shirts watched them with a smile. Once, when he was picking through an ashtray, a dark-skinned guy gave him half a pack of
Marlboros, but they were the red ones, nothing special. Out on the concrete viewing terrace, a fine rain fell, and the planes emerged from the fog—silver, smooth, glistening—and disappeared back into it. Perhaps it all began then. They would take out the crumpled packets in the 175 bus, examine them, and pronounce their names.

“Nothing,” he said, and went to the living room. In the next apartment someone was hammering, or knocking someone's head against the wall. He read the spines of the books. There was a large black Jack London, a dark red Buster, a white Suchecki. The minutes hit the ground at his feet like droplets of mercury, quivering, rolling into the corner under the coffee table with the radio. “The floor's crooked,” he thought.

She stuck her head out of the kitchen and asked if he wanted some chicory coffee.

“It's made of thickly ground grains, so the structure hasn't been destroyed and—”

“I'll take the massage,” he said.

“All right, but go to the bathroom first. You need an empty bladder to reduce the tension. Then the energy can flow freely. In general, fluids have a negative effect . . .”

“OK.”

The bottom of the bathtub was rust red, the toilet as yellow as an old bone. He pissed into the sink, pulled the chain, washed his dick. The water was cold. A green tracksuit hung on a line. Next to the toilet was a pile of magazines. He squatted to look at them:
Razem, Perspektywy, ITD, Panorama
. Whoever lived here was freeing himself from the passage of time. There was no mirror to show change.

“A perfect spot,” he thought. Now safety had the smell of wet concrete and chlorine.

 

She told him to take his clothes off and lie on his stomach. From her bag she took a small bottle.

“This is a special oil,” she said.

She rubbed the yellow liquid on her hands, poured a little on his back. It felt cold, but when she touched him, he didn't mind. She started from his sides, kneaded firmly, almost roughly. Short fingernails. Then she moved lower, to his buttocks, and up again. She pinched his flesh as if handling fabric or the rubber of a shop dummy. He grew warm. Again thought about safety, which now had the acrid smell of her sweat. She did not use a deodorant. He closed his eyes, pressed his face into his arm, imagined her pulling out his flesh in handfuls and molding it into balls, cubes, shapeless and novel objects, tossing them around the room, into corners, under the kitchen sink, behind the radiator, on the windowsill. The stuff would be covered with dust, forgotten like children's clay, and no one would ask about him anymore. It didn't hurt. He was heavy, sticky dough, his nerves, blood, eyes all folded into putty meat. Then there was a chill on his ribs. Her slender hand slipped inside, felt for his lungs, bit by bit removed the spongy matter, making pink balls the size of doughnuts. He could survive in this disjointed state, his mind dimmed but not dead, and someone eventually would piece him back together. Except that the apartment was too small for him now, there weren't enough places to hide all the shapes, pieces, pellets. He didn't want to be thrown into the trash bin at the far end of the dark courtyard with high walls on all sides and where white shirts flashed in windows—some offices, though the main occupant was gloom and still air. And the cats, constantly fighting for food in the garbage cans. At night their yowls were louder than the traffic. He was barely living
stuff now, but those insatiable animals would tear at him. He felt her touch his heart.

“There,” she said, “you're relaxed.”

Now she slapped with open hands, tenderizing meat. He felt good. He imagined her large breasts bouncing under her black blouse and knocking together with the same wet sound of the hands on his back. He told her to stop a moment.

“All right,” she said.

He turned on his back, showing his hard-on. But she was sideways and paid no attention. Her forehead was covered with sweat. He noticed that she wore a silver earring.

“Where do you live?” he asked.

“In Praga.”

“What do you feel when you're doing it?”

“Nothing.”

“It doesn't turn you on?”

“What?”

“You know, massaging me?”

“It's supposed to relax you, not turn you on.”

“What turns you on?”

She shrugged. He reached out and touched a breast. She didn't move, didn't look. He took advantage of the reality of it, that there were no secrets, and slipped his other hand under her skirt.

“It'll all be wasted,” she said. “No benefit, just more tension and blocked energy channels.”

He found a nipple, pinched it lightly, gently twisted, but nothing. The other breast seemed heavier. He knelt on the bedding, put his arms around her from behind, squeezed both breasts. He and she made a strange pair. She leaned forward, not to defend herself, only to rest her elbows on her knees. He
brushed her hair with his lips. It hadn't been washed. He could see the white part at the top of her head.

“I also know Thai massage,” she said.

“What's that like?” he asked, holding her even tighter. He passed his hand over her stomach and found three small rolls of flesh and her navel among them.

“It's done with the feet. You lie on the floor, and I walk on you.”

“But you take your shoes off?”

“Yes. The energy mustn't be blocked.”

 

He liked this too, though at times he couldn't catch his breath. He was on his stomach next to the bookcase—she had to hold on to it so she wouldn't slip off his oiled back. He could feel her feet up to the ankles sinking into his body. She waded through his innards, which were warm and slippery, but there was no pain. Earlier had asked her to take off her jeans. She did it indifferently, as she had allowed him to lick the sweat from her forehead. “She doesn't have to be lively, as long as she's warm,” he thought, and knew exactly what he was doing as her fingers kneaded his hot mud. He was drawn to an old and formless thing, an inconspicuous, unmoved, and passive thing.

When he explained to her what he wanted and she got down on her knees by the chair, she asked him to turn on the radio, because the silence would bother her. He went and turned the knob, and remembered the time.

 

The voice at the other end was low, sleepy.

“He's not here. He'll be at this number at three.”

“Is there another number where I can reach him?”

There was laughter before the line went dead. The receiver
in his hand, he stared at the scratched-up case of the phone. The concrete ceiling of the booth was so low, he could touch it. Overhead trams dispersed rumbling to the four corners of the world. Where he stood was the center, and he felt like crying but didn't know how, he couldn't remember. Someone had left the smell of perfume. He pressed his cheek to the black plastic, but the touch was cold, gummy, sad.

“It broke?” he heard behind him.

“It broke,” he replied, and a Vietnamese in a dark-blue windbreaker smiled and went to look for another phone. He stayed a little longer in the booth, to use the phone to give sense to himself, dialing random numbers, breaking off imaginary conversations, seven two one three zero zero, and again, and once connected with a woman's voice, but heard only hello. He tried to reconstruct the sequence of numbers, but an angry man in an overcoat said in a loud voice: