Nobody Leaves Page 5

  After that number, the girls tell me, the boys started pushing and shoving each other. They didn’t know what that violent, predatory pushing and shoving was about. The girls think that if there’s a fight at a dance, its purpose is not immediate, but rather more distant and somewhat metaphysical. It’s necessary to make the dance memorable. A dance sinks into oblivion like a stone in the lake and the waters of time close over it. The dance itself is coarse and boorish, and too many factors prevent it from living on. With a fight there are no inhibitions, and it lives on in full. A fight has everything that sticks in human memory: blood, pain, eyes fixed in hatred, the prickly thrill of death. The village will rehash the details of the fight, and the names of the participants will be repeated many times.

  During the quick waltz that followed the fight, the couples adopted a style ordained by the fantastic entertainer. They passed in front of the band with the step that’s obligatory during the Sunday promenade. The girls tell me that the promenade takes place every Sunday afternoon in the village. First the boy shows up at the girl’s house and asks: ‘Want to promenade with me?’ The girl must introduce him to her father and the father must converse with the boy. On this occasion the beau opens a flask, because dry conversation is like goose down in a gale. This legalizes the act of promenading. They walk along the road from house number one to the last house in the village, and back. They can’t go into the woods, because that’s disapproved of. From time to time during the fulfilment of this sterile and tedious procedure, a word is uttered.

  ‘So what do you talk about?’ I asked.

  One of them replied: ‘This and that.’

  On this basis I could not deduce whether these conversations are interesting or boring, because I do not possess the Egyptological talent that can derive the stormy history of a dynasty from a single hieroglyph.

  In the opinion of the girls, their friends in other villages, where the balance of the sexes is not so glaringly disproportionate, are better off because they can be choosy. They can be choosy when it comes to boys. When he comes along with his invitation to go globetrotting, the girl first asks him: ‘Are you going to move to the city or stay on the farm?’ If he intends to stay on the farm, the girl sends him away: ‘Go promenade by yourself.’

  With a boy like that, there’s no hope of getting out of the village, and all the girls want to move to the city.

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  ‘Because in the city there are so many cinemas, and people don’t have to do things.’

  ‘But on the other hand it’s dangerous in the city,’ I say. ‘There are lots of accidents.’

  ‘So? We have accidents here too. Not long ago one girl was going to feed the chickens, and she slipped and broke her arm. That’s an accident, too.’

  The fantastic guy known throughout the province performed his routines. He managed to conjure a flag out of thin air and hung it on a specially prepared pole. The band played the national anthem and the scrawny singer stood at attention on stage. That was the last waltz, the end of the planetary revolutions, and the metaphorical significance of the red and blue was no more. The door of the village hall opened and four snuggling couples walked out into the tunnel of the night. A moment later, the group of stiff, silent, resentful girls followed in their trail. These were the eleven not chosen, abandoned to the predations of loneliness, neglect, and the night – that same night in which Jesion’s grandmother, at the end of her strength, managed to whisper on the forest road: ‘Oh God, why did he …’

  And she fainted.

  A police van took grandmother to the old people’s home in Nowa Wieś, outside Ełk. Now she sits on a bench, rubbing the knee that is swollen from her fall on the road. ‘No,’ she lisps, ‘he didn’t throw me out. He only said: “Grandmother is leaving the village.” ’ In itself, the sentence does not sound threatening. It’s more like something out of a primer, descriptive and narrative: Grandmother is leaving the village. Why did he say this to his grandmother? Grandmother thinks it over: ‘Because there’s not much room in the cottage and my grandson, you see, Marian Jesion, is going to get married. The need has come over him. That’s what he told me: “Grandmother, the need has come over me.” ’

  That’s why, on that evening when there was a beautiful dance party with very impressive special effects, Jesion’s grandmother set out into the vortex of darkness, walking straight ahead into the unknown, into the world. Grandmother entered into the darkness, and her grandson, Marian Jesion, in his romantic black suit, the brilliantined master of the world in clouds of Derby Eau de Cologne (produced by Lechia, Poznań), danced to the dazzling and at the same time shocking hit of the season, ‘Twenty-Four Thousand Kisses’, piercingly wailed by the saxophonist known throughout the province.

  And everything’s the way it should be.

  Marian Jesion will ease his excruciating need, and his grandmother will have a government roof over her head and a government bowl of bean soup with bacon. What will change is this: because there will be one less mouth to feed in the Jesion household, expenses will be reduced and Marian, with all his needs, will be able to buy himself a plastic tie on an elastic band. This is unquestionably a symbol of modernity, and in Pratki there is a big turning towards modernity. My girls tell me that people are now buying everything: sewing machines, WFM motorcycles, sofas and watches. People are striving after radios, suits, crystal and washing machines. In strict confidence, the girls tell me that some people, in order to keep up with this universal inclination to material prosperity, are simply stealing. And so for instance the cooks at the nearby collective farm steal meat. How clever they are! They sneak ham and pork cheeks out in pails of slop. Then they just rinse the meat at the well and the whole village can buy it. Hence on a fine Sunday the sly cooks can adorn their bell-shaped bosoms in the blue mist of expensive chiffon blouses.

  ‘Do you know that stealing is a sin?’ I ask.

  My charming girls from Pratki laugh, but it’s not a natural laugh, pearly and dazzling, but rather a grotesque, clownish grimace of a laugh in which their lips stretch from ear to ear but remain clamped tightly shut, and their insides seem to shake autonomously in a hysterical convulsion. They have to laugh that way because they have no teeth, or, more precisely, they have a few teeth, scattered here and there, sparsely, like rotting stakes in a forest clearing.

  As badly brought up, as notorious a boor as I am, I ask my girls: ‘Why don’t you gals brush your teeth?’ But why ask about that? Nobody in Pratki brushes their teeth. Pratki girls chew that ham with devastated, bare gums, and the boys, after downing a glass of moonshine, ruminate like old men over a mouthful of pickles. Pratki bachelors buy themselves motorcycles and the girls acquire, for a pretty penny, fashionable organdie slips, which is why nobody can afford a tube of Odonto toothpaste (produced by Lechia, Poznań) for three zloty and five grosz. It immediately occurred to me to launch a campaign to lower the price of toothpaste, and particularly to roll back the retail price by those five grosz, because maybe that’s what discourages people from an excessive, budget-straining purchase when they are set on buying themselves a collection of crystal. I counted on lining up a cohort of backers; the whole issue would meet with a favourable response in the Ministry. Steps would be taken and, with a special directive, that five-grosz barrier would be rescinded once and for all.

  But later I came to a different understanding. If they don’t brush their teeth, and the idea of such a procedure has never even entered their heads, they could hardly be interested in the price of Odonto toothpaste (produced by Lechia, Poznań), amounting to 3.05 zloty, or take into consideration the fact of those five grosz that were over-zealously added to the round sum of three zloty. The hygienic principle under discussion is ignored because not a word has been said to the people of Pratki in this regard, and no one in the village has independently and spontaneously stumbled upon the idea of brushing their teeth.

  And that’s the whole truth.

  Namely, the truth is that
Pratki dances to the newest, dazzling hits, races all over the place on WFMs, stocks up on televisions, purchases electric sewing machines and Master Picasso curtains, while at the same time the idol of Pratki is still an idiot known throughout the province who is a fantastic entertainer, and at the same time Pratki forces a sick old lady out into the unknown, gets into brawls and foams at the mouth with hatred, and doesn’t brush its teeth.

  Thinking in these terms, I slipped immediately into idealism and started dreaming. I dreamed that, at the cost of playing three dance records, some responsible person on the radio would say a few words about teeth. That you have to put the toothpaste on the toothbrush, and then you have to rub it in with a back-and-forth rotational motion, and afterwards you have to spit it out instead of swallowing it. That there are hopes for a reduction in the price of a single tube to three zloty. I went on to dream that the county instructor sitting in at the next Party meeting, after discussing the critical issues in the ongoing flourishing of our fatherland, would deign to ask, in spite of himself and out of nowhere: ‘And how about those teeth, comrades? Are you brushing those teeth or not?’

  Because sewing machines and nylon ties have been exported to Pratki, chiffon blouses and convertible sofas, but no one has gone to the trouble of inculcating a few elementary concepts from the domain of elementary culture.

  Grandmothers, and teeth.

  Apparently two different matters, but not quite entirely.

  On the Ground Floor

  This weather is like a slice of bread: familiar, an everyday taste, but without it … The three of them are walking along the road, and I tag along as the fourth.

  ‘Can I go with you?’

  At first they are a little suspicious, but soon they’re joking. ‘Why not? Except you have to buy your way in.’

  The road runs from Bielawa to Nowa Ruda. Along the way is Wolibórz, where there ought to be an inn, sticky-topped tables and a few shots of vodka in a soft-drink bottle, because today is payday and they aren’t selling alcohol.

  ‘Fine. I agree.’

  That promise is like a contract. Now things are different. Now we’re all buddies. They’re manual labourers. They last worked in the Bielawa Textile Works and now they’re on the road to Nowa Ruda, because the coal mine there is hiring. Such a change is nothing new for them. On the contrary – it’s something of a principle to which they remain faithful. The three of them met up two years ago as dockers in Szczecin. They stuck together because they all come from Rzeszów province, and even from Brzozowski county, so they’re home-town boys. From that time on they’ve been roaming. From among the more important cities, they’ve been in Poznań, Gorzów, Konin, Rybnik and Tarnobrzeg. They’ve found employment as construction labourers, farmhands, weavers and machinists. Now they’ll be coalminers. They’ve changed occupations so many times because, in fact, they don’t know any. They have no qualifications. They never settle down anywhere. They never work anywhere for long. They never find a home port.

  They take life as it comes. Right now it’s Wolibórz, that inn, that table and that bottle. Mushy herrings on a plate. Sweaty foreheads and jostling –‘Wait, Władek, wait, not like that, you’re doing it all wrong.’ For perhaps the first time they wonder about the sense of their vagabond life. It’s not easy for them. Why tramp around like that? What attracts them? What’s in it for them?

  In the corner stand three tattered suitcases, almost empty, held together by string. What’s in them? A shirt, shoes, a mackintosh, a brush missing lots of bristles. They’re so penniless that they have to go to Ruda on foot. (I stayed at the workers’ dormitory in Bielawa with them. ‘On payday,’ the porter tells me, ‘they start drinking. It lasts them a week. Then they’re broke. After a couple such cycles,’ she goes on, ‘they pack up whatever they have and disappear.’)

  The great industrial migration is over, but the stream still flows in waves, and these three are the spume. Young boys driven from the village by overcrowding, seekers of easier bread. Administrators complain about the trouble they have with them. They depart no one knows where and appear no one knows when. ‘An unsettled element,’ they say, ‘enemies of discipline.’

  ‘When the foreman got on my back, I could see it coming – time to go. I talked it over with the others and that was the last they saw of us.’

  Then begin the nights in train stations, the nights on trains, the nights in barns. Workers’ dormitories, barracks, attic rooms. They follow an iron rule: stick to the big factories. New building sites. Nobody knows you there, and they’re afraid to ask too many questions. You disappear into the mass, melt away into the unkempt crowd. It is impermissible to grow into the tissue of any collective, to permit oneself to become entangled in a mesh of dependencies in which one starts to let one’s guard down and believe that things will have to stay this way. They don’t have to! Somebody says that things are better a hundred kilometres away. Better? Let’s go! What do we have to lose? That surly boss? The corner of a dormitory room? What’s to be gained? Everything. And they’re already on the train, already on the move. Do you think that Konin can’t savour of Colorado for a day? After a couple of disappointments they no longer count on anything sensational. But the habit remains, a stupefying impulse that they submit to with inert docility.

  Torn away from one environment, they cannot put down roots in a new one. They are viewed from the start with suspicion. The way you bounce around the world, brothers, your consciences cannot be clear. As soon as there’s a brawl or a theft, they are blamed immediately. ‘An unsettled element, enemies of discipline.’ Everywhere, they are strangers who violate small-town tranquillity, the stabilization of a housing settlement, workplace harmony. They don’t have to take account of their reputation, which is why their reputation is abysmal. They cannot be penalized, because they don’t need anything. They do not contribute any values, yet they threaten existing values.

  Are they sincere when they praise their situation?

  ‘We don’t push towards the top. We’re here at the bottom, on the ground floor.’

  So this is the one place they have chosen for keeps: on the margins. They change towns and factories, but they remain on the margins. This element of permanency is anchored in the fluid, swirling current of days. They camp out in this isolated spot because it’s not crowded, and not even the law reaches here very often.

  How they sneered at the world, this world on the make! How they mocked people who pursue the tangible goods that are generally esteemed: Mikrus cars, Belweder II TVs, SHL washing machines! If thrifty people can be said to be making their way through life, then these three are taking a side road. The workaday world has no time for their ilk. Let them sit out the game. There are enough people willing to play! The world has concluded a non-intervention pact with them – let’s leave each other in peace. This is indeed a judicious attitude, of the highest humanistic order. The three khagans boast that they’ve made the right choice. They feel that outside intervention could only knock them off their chosen path. It wouldn’t do any good! Perhaps somewhere they conceal a desire for those goods, but it is not ardent and imperative enough to guide their decisions. They could renounce nomadism and choose one vocation. And laboriously line their nest. In their view, however, this would clearly be no solution.

  ‘What’s the hurry, sir?’

  A lovely stretch of road connects Wolibórz and Ruda. A little buzz in the head, and the sun does the rest. This colour-filled afternoon would enchant even the immortal master, Vincent Van Gogh. The light is so intense that in a moment the air will detonate in a golden explosion. The sweat-eaten suitcase handles stick to our palms.

  It’s hard for people to understand each other. They’ll be taking new jobs, participating in the life of a new collective, but – when they go away – will anyone be able to say a word about them? Over the course of a year, a thousand people will know their faces, only a few will know their names, and no one will know their thoughts. Reactions, not motives, count in ca
sual contacts. They go away and so replacements must be found. They arrive, so they must be hired. Is there even any need for probing into the depths of a man? Decoding fates that he himself cannot explain? What is it that I want? I myself have nothing more to say about them. What connects us? Two kilometres of road? The inn?

  A reporter is not only a megaphone into which dozens of figures, names and opinions are shouted. He’d also like to say something on his own occasionally. But what am I supposed to say? Two worlds that never intersect. Ground level. You have to live there before you can philosophize about it.

  There are those who try to build higher. Even if not for themselves. But what kind of story does it take to show this? Two ranges of experience. Words are incomprehensible if you haven’t lived what they describe. If it hasn’t got into your blood.

  ‘Life,’ they say, ‘comes down to a few concrete things: A shovel. Payday. A movie. Wine.’

  What else? Is everything else an aroma diffused on the air? It is, because you can smell it, but how can you grasp it?

  ‘Saluto,’ one of them said in farewell.

  ‘Arrivederci,’ I called, so as not to be outdone.

  No Known Address

  He said:

  Why not? A small beer, and I’ll talk for what it’s worth.

  Have you ever been hungry? That’s what I mean, fog and people in that fog. A man might as well be made of cotton wool. Hands, arms, all the rest. Please write: The boy called himself the Jack of Spades. The worst of all the Jacks. In the game of One Thousand, they only give the Jack of Spades forty points. The bum of cards. When I talk about the others, I’ll call them the Jack of Diamonds, or of Hearts, or of Clubs. I might also mention a couple of Queens and a few Kings. There won’t, unfortunately, be any Aces. Aha – we also have Homer. An inquisitive guy. He says: When your age equals the number of medals I hold, then we can talk. He’s been through a lot, you can see that. He’s worth listening to, although he’s a bitter talker. Like somebody out of Rififi.