House of Day, House of Night E-Book

Olga Tokarczuk

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 514

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There's the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There's the man whose death – with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech – was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology. Another brilliant 'constellation novel' in the mode of her International Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night is a brilliantly imaginative epic novel of a small place by Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most daring and ambitious novelists of our time.

Leseprobe

123

‘A magnificent writer.’

— Svetlana Alexievich, 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate

‘A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.’

— Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News

‘Olga Tokarczuk is inspired by maps and a perspective from above, which tends to make her microcosmos a mirror of macrocosmos. She constructs her novels in a tension between cultural opposites: nature versus culture, reason versus madness, male versus female, home versus alienation.’

— 2018 Nobel Committee for Literature

‘One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.’

— The Economist

Praise for The Empusium

‘Tokarczuk’s fiction is built on filtering fragments of the past – people, stories, myths, orthodoxies – through a contemporary lens…. This too is a novel that in Tokarczuk’s dexterous hands transcends its own limits, further cementing the Nobel laureate as one of the most original storytellers of our age.’

— Matthew Janney, Financial Times

‘The Nobel Prize-winning novelist is exceptionally adept at blending the high-minded sanctimoniousness of the sanatorium with the ever-present threat and legacy of violence…. Tokarczuk’s outstanding novel is a striking reaffirmation of literature’s genius for nuance in a world darkened by murderous polarities.’

— Michael Cronin, Irish Times4

‘Deft and disturbing…. In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s crisp translation, Tokarczuk tells a folk horror story with a deceptively light and knowing tone … elegant and genuinely unsettling.’

— Hari Kunzru, New York Times

‘The eerily majestic finale is haunting, cathartic and gleeful – a zany confection that could only have come from this unpredictable, unique writer.’

— Claire Lowdon, Times Literary Supplement

Praise for The Books of Jacob

‘[A] visionary novel…. Tokarczuk is wrestling with the biggest philosophical themes: the purpose of life on earth, the nature of religion, the possibility of redemption, the fraught and terrible history of eastern European Jewry. With its formidable insistence on rendering an alien world with as much detail as possible, the novel reminded me at times of Paradise Lost. The vividness with which it’s done is amazing. At a micro-level, she sees things with a poetic freshness…. The Books of Jacob, which is so demanding and yet has so much to say about the issues that rack our times, will be a landmark in the life of any reader with the appetite to tackle it.’

— Marcel Theroux, Guardian

‘The Books of Jacob is a spellbinding epic, one of the great literary achievements of the decade: a poetically brimful recreation of the world of a Jewish false messiah in eighteenth-century Poland, but beyond as well to mystically drawn priests and errant aristocrats. Charged with a sensuous immediacy, it’s the kind of hypnotic novel you not so much read as dwell in, and which then, magically, comes to dwell in you.’

— Simon Schama, Financial Times 5

Praise for Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

‘Drive Your Plow is exhilarating in a way that feels fierce and private, almost inarticulable; it’s one of the most existentially refreshing novels I’ve read in a long time.’

— Jia Tolentino, New Yorker

‘Though the book functions perfectly as noir crime – moving towards a denouement that, for sleight of hand and shock, should draw admiration from the most seasoned Christie devotee – its chief preoccupation is with unanswerable questions of free will versus determinism, and with existential unease…. In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation, the prose is by turns witty and melancholy, and never slips out of that distinctive narrative voice…. [A]n astonishing amalgam of thriller, comedy and political treatise, written by a woman who combines an extraordinary intellect with an anarchic sensibility.’

— Sarah Perry, Guardian

Praise for Flights

‘Flights works like a dream does: with fragmentary trails that add up to a delightful reimagining of the novel itself.’

— Marlon James, author of Moon Witch, Spider King

‘It’s a busy, beautiful vexation, this novel, a quiver full of fables of pilgrims and pilgrimages, and the reasons – the hidden, the brave, the foolhardy – we venture forth into the world…. The book is transhistorical, transnational; it leaps back and forth through time, across fiction and fact…. In Jennifer Croft’s assured translation, each self-enclosed account is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language balletic, unforced.’

— Parul Sehgal, New York Times 6

78

HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT

OLGA TOKARCZUK

Translated by

ANTONIA LLOYD-JONES

9

Translator’s Note

The book is set in southwest Poland, in the region known as Silesia. This was part of the German Reich until 1945, when at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences the Allies agreed to move the borders of Poland westwards. Many Polish citizens were transported from the land lost to the east (annexed by the USSR) and resettled in formerly German territory to the west, where they were given the homes and property of evacuated Germans.

Readers are advised that some of the recipes in this book should carry the health warning, ‘Don’t try this at home!’10

11‘Your house is your larger body. It grows in the sun and sleeps in the stillness of the night; and it is not dreamless. Does not your house dream? And dreaming, leave the city for grove or hilltop?’

—Khalil Gibran, ‘On Houses’, The Prophet12

Contents

Title PageTranslator’s NoteEpigraphHouse of Day, House of NightAbout the AuthorsCopyright

House of Day, House of Night

13THE DREAM

The first night I had a static dream. I dreamed I was pure looking, pure sight, without a body or a name. I was suspended high above a valley at some undefined point from which I could see everything, or almost everything. I could move around my field of vision, yet remain in the same place. It was as if the world on view below were yielding to me as I looked at it, moving towards me and then away, so that I could see either everything at once or only the tiniest details.

I could see a valley with a house standing right in the middle of it, but it wasn’t my house, or my valley, because nothing belonged to me. I didn’t even belong to myself. There was no such thing as ‘I’. Yet I could see the circular line of the horizon enclosing the valley on all sides. I could see a turbulent, murky stream flowing down between the hills. I could see trees set deep into the ground on mighty feet, like one-legged, immobile creatures. The stillness I saw was only on the surface. Whenever I wished, I could penetrate this surface. Under the bark of the trees I could see rivulets of water, streams of sap flowing to and fro, up and down. Under the roof of the house I could see the bodies of people asleep, and their stillness too was only superficial – their hearts were beating gently, their blood was rippling in their veins, not even their dreams were as they seemed, because I could see what they really were: pulsating fragments of images. None of these sleeping bodies were closer to me, none further away. I was simply looking at them, and in their tangled dream-thoughts I could see myself – this was when I discovered the strange truth, that I was purely vision, without any reflections, judgements or emotions. Then at once I discovered that I could see through time as well, and that just as I could 14change my point of view in space, so I could change it in time too, as if I were the cursor on a computer screen moving of its own accord, or at least oblivious to the hand that is moving it.

I seemed to dream like this for an eternity. There was no before and no after, no sense of anticipation of anything new, because there was nothing to gain or lose. The night would never end. Nothing was happening. Even time would never change what I could see. I went on looking, not noticing anything new or forgetting anything I had seen.

MARTA

When we moved in three years ago, we spent the whole of the first day inspecting our property. Our gumboots kept sinking into the clay. The earth was red, it stained our hands red, and when we washed them the water ran red. R. examined the trees in the orchard again. They were old, bushy and rambling in all directions. Trees like that probably won’t bear much fruit. The orchard stretched down to the forest and stopped at a dark wall of spruces, standing there like soldiers. In the afternoon the sleet began to fall again. Water collected in pools on the clay-clogged earth, creating streamlets and rills that flowed straight down to the house, seeping into the walls and disappearing somewhere under the foundations. Worried by the constant trickling sound, we went to the cellar with a candle. Water was pouring down the stone steps, washing over the stone floor and flowing out again towards the pond. We realized that the house had been unwisely built on an underground river, and it was too late to do anything about it. The only option was to get used to the 15relentless murmur of water disturbing our dreams.

There was a second river outside, a stream full of cloudy red water that blindly washed away at the roots of the trees before vanishing into the forest.

From the window of the main room we can see Marta’s house. For the past three years I have wondered who Marta really is. She has told me many different versions of the facts about herself. Every time, she has given a different birth year. For me and R., Marta has only ever existed in the summer; in winter she disappears, like everything else around here. She is small, her hair is white as snow, and some of her teeth are missing. Her skin is wrinkled, dry and warm. I know this because we have sometimes greeted each other with a kiss or an awkward hug, and I have caught her smell – of damp forced to dry out quickly. This smell lingers forever, it can’t be got rid of. Clothing that has got wet in the rain should be washed, my mother used to say, but then she was always doing a lot of unnecessary laundry. She used to take clean, starched sheets out of the wardrobe and throw them in the washing machine, as if not using them made them just as dirty as using them. The smell of damp is usually unpleasant, but on Marta’s clothes and skin it smells nice and familiar. If Marta’s around, everything is in its place.

She came by on our second evening. First we drank tea, then last year’s wild rosehip wine, thick and dark, so sweet it made you feel dizzy at the first gulp. I was unpacking books. Marta held her glass in both hands and watched without curiosity. It occurred to me at the time that perhaps she didn’t know how to read. It was possible, as she was old enough to have missed out on state education. I have seen since that letters simply don’t hold her attention, but I have never asked her about it.

The dogs were excited and kept coming in and out 16of the house, bringing the scent of winter and wind on their fur. As soon as they had warmed up in front of the kitchen stove, they felt the lure of the garden again. Marta stroked their backs with her long, bony fingers, telling them how beautiful they were. She spoke only to the dogs all evening. I watched her out of the corner of my eye as I arranged the books on wooden shelves. A lamp on the wall lit up the crown of her head with a plume of fine white hairs, tied at the nape of her neck into a little pigtail.

I remember so many things, but I can’t remember the first time I saw Marta. I remember all my first encounters with the people who have subsequently become important to me: I can remember whether the sun was shining and what they were wearing (R.’s funny East German boots, for instance), I can remember how things smelled and tasted, and the texture of the air – whether it was crisp and sharp or cool and smooth as butter. That’s what first impressions are made of – these things get recorded somewhere in a detached, animal part of the brain and can never be forgotten. But I can’t remember my first encounter with Marta.

It must have been early spring – that’s when everything starts here. It must have been in this rugged part of the valley, because Marta never goes further afield on her own. There must have been a smell of water and melted snow, and she must have been wearing that grey cardigan with the loose buttonholes.

I’ve never known much about Marta, only what she has revealed to me herself. I have had to guess most of it, and I’ve been aware of fantasizing about her, of inventing an entire past and present for her. Whenever I’ve asked her to tell me something about herself, about when she was young, about how something that now appears obvious looked then, she has changed the subject, turned to 17face the window or simply fallen silent, concentrating on chopping up a cabbage or plaiting the hair that she uses to make wigs. It’s not as if she has seemed reluctant to talk, but just as if she simply has nothing to say about herself, as if she has no history. She only likes to talk about other people – some I might have seen once or twice by chance, others I may never have seen at all, and never could, because they lived too long ago. She also likes to talk about people who never actually existed – I have since found proof that Marta likes to invent things – and about the places where she has chosen to plant these people. I’ve known her to talk for hours, until I’ve had enough and find an excuse to interrupt her politely and go home across the green. Sometimes she breaks off these narratives of hers suddenly, for no reason, and doesn’t return to the subject for weeks, until one day out of the blue she says, ‘You remember how I was telling you…’ ‘Yes, I remember.’ ‘Well, what happened next was…’ – and she carries on with some tired old story while I’m racking my brain to remember whom she’s talking about and where she left off. Oddly, it’s never the actual story that comes back to me but the memory of Marta telling it, a small figure in the cardigan with the loose buttonholes, with round shoulders and bony fingers. Did she tell this one while staring at the windscreen as we were driving to Wambierzyce to order planks, or was it the time we were picking chamomile in Bobol’s field? I’ve never been able to reconstruct the story itself, but I always remember the exact scene and circumstances that first rooted it within me, as if these stories were unreal somehow, made up, imagined, imprinted nowhere but in her mind and in mine, blurred by words. Sometimes she breaks off mid-story just as abruptly as she started; a fork falls to the floor with a metallic clang, shattering the last sentence, 18and the next word comes to a halt on her lips as if she has had to swallow it. Or our neighbour So-and-So comes in without knocking, as he always does, stamping his great boots on the doorstep and trailing water, dew, mud – whatever there is outside – behind him, and once he’s around he makes so much noise that it’s impossible to have any sort of conversation.

Many of the things Marta has told me have not stayed in my memory, but have just left a vague impression, like mustard on the edge of a plate after the food has been eaten. Odd scenes, funny or frightening, and odd images torn out of context have remained – children catching trout from a stream with their bare hands, for instance. I don’t know why I have stored this kind of detail while forgetting the rest of the story. It must have made some sort of sense – it was a story, after all, with a beginning and an end – but I remember nothing but the pips, which my memory, quite rightly, has had to spit out later on.

It’s not that I do nothing but listen. Sometimes I talk to her too. Once, early on, I told her I was afraid of dying, not of death in general, but of the actual moment when I would no longer be able to put anything off till later, and that this fear always comes over me when it’s dark, never in the daytime, and goes on for several awful moments, like an epileptic fit. I immediately felt embarrassed at having made this rather abrupt confession. That time it was me who tried to change the subject.

Marta is not a therapist at heart. She doesn’t keep asking questions, she won’t suddenly abandon the washing up to sit down beside me and pat me on the back. She doesn’t try, as others do, to work out the chronological order of important events by asking, ‘When did it start?’ Even Jesus couldn’t resist the pointless temptation of asking the madman he was about to heal, ‘So when did it 19start?’ But in fact the most important thing is what’s actually going on here and now, right before your eyes, and questions about the beginning and end tell you nothing worth knowing.

Sometimes I have thought Marta wasn’t listening or that she lacked sensitivity, like a lifeless, cut-down tree, because when I’ve told her something meaningful the kitchen utensils have not stopped clattering, nor have her movements lost any of their mechanical fluency. She has even seemed cruel somehow, not just once or twice but often – like when she fattens up those roosters of hers, then kills and devours them in two days flat each autumn.

I have failed to understand Marta in the past, and I don’t understand her now, whenever I think of her. But why should I? What would I get from uncovering the motives for her behaviour, or the sources of all her tales? What would I gain from her life story, if indeed she has a life story to speak of? Maybe there are people with no life story, with no past or future, who are different, always in the present.

SO-AND-SO

For the past few evenings, just after the television news, our neighbour So-and-So has come by. Each time R. has warmed up some wine, sprinkled it with cinnamon and thrown in some cloves, and each time So-and-So has talked about the winter, because apparently the story of the winter has to be told before the summer can come. It’s always the same story – of how Marek Marek hanged himself.

We’ve heard this story from other people too, but yesterday and the day before we heard it from So-and-So. 20The second time, he forgot he had told it already and started all over again from the beginning, which was a question – why weren’t we at the funeral? We couldn’t come, we said, because it was in January. We simply couldn’t get our act together to come to the funeral. It was snowing and the cars wouldn’t start, their batteries were flat. The road beyond Jedlina was snowed up and all the buses were stuck in wretched traffic jams.

Marek Marek had lived in the cottage with the tin roof. Last autumn his mare kept coming into our orchard to eat the windfall apples. She would dig them out from under the rotting leaves, staring at us nonchalantly, ironically even, R. said.

One afternoon as darkness was starting to fall, So-and-So was on his way back from Nowa Ruda. He noticed that the door of Marek Marek’s house was slightly ajar, just as it had been that morning, so he leaned his bike against a wall and looked in through the window. He saw Marek Marek at once. He was half hanging, half lying by the door, twisted and unquestionably dead. So-and-So shaded his eyes with his hand to see better. Marek Marek’s face was livid, his tongue was sticking out and his eyes were staring up into space. ‘What a loser,’ So-and-So said to himself. ‘He couldn’t even hang himself properly.’

He took his bike and went home.

During the night he felt a bit uneasy. He wondered if Marek Marek’s soul had gone to heaven or hell, or wherever a soul goes, if it goes anywhere at all.

He woke up with a start at the first light of dawn and saw Marek Marek standing by the stove, staring at him. So-and-So lost his nerve. ‘Please, I beg you, go away. This is my house. You’ve got a house of your own.’ The apparition didn’t move; it kept staring straight at So-and-So, but its weird gaze seemed to pass right through him.21

‘Marek, please go away,’ repeated So-and-So, but Marek, or whoever it was, didn’t react. Then, overcoming his fear of making any kind of movement, So-and-So got out of bed and picked up a gumboot. Thus armed, he walked towards the stove, and the apparition disappeared right before his eyes. He blinked and went back to his nice warm bed.

In the morning, on his way to fetch wood, he looked through the window of Marek’s house again. Nothing had changed, the body was still lying in the same position, but today the face looked darker. So-and-So spent the whole day carting wood down from the hills on the sledge he had made last summer. He brought down birches small enough to fell by himself, and the thick trunks of fallen spruces and beech trees. He stored them in the shed and got them ready to cut into smaller pieces. Then he whipped up the stove until the top plate was red hot. He swiftly made some potato soup for himself and his dogs, switched on the black-and-white television and watched the flickering pictures as he ate. Not a word of it sank in. As he was getting into bed he crossed himself for the first time in decades, since his confirmation, or maybe since his wedding. This long-forgotten gesture prompted the idea that he should go and ask the priest about something like this.

The next day he hovered sheepishly outside the presbytery. Finally the priest came bowling along at high speed, sidestepping patches of melting snow on his way to the church. So-and-So wasn’t stupid, he didn’t come straight out with it. ‘What would you do, Father, if you were haunted by a ghost?’ he asked. The priest gave him a look of surprise and then his gaze wandered up to the church roof, where some endless repairs were underway. ‘I’d tell it to go away,’ he said. ‘And what if the ghost was 22stubborn and wouldn’t go away, then what would you do?’ ‘You have to be firm in all things,’ replied the priest thoughtfully, and nimbly slipped past So-and-So.

That night everything happened the same as before. So-and-So awoke suddenly, as if someone were calling him, sat up in bed and saw Marek Marek standing by the stove. ‘Get out of here!’ he shouted. The apparition didn’t move, and So-and-So even thought he could see an ironic smile on its dark, swollen face. ‘To hell with you, why can’t you let me sleep? Get lost!’ said So-and-So. He picked up the gumboot and moved towards the stove. ‘Will you please get out of my house!’ he screamed, and the ghost vanished.

On the third night the apparition didn’t appear, and on the fourth day Marek Marek’s sister found the body and raised the alarm. The police arrived, wrapped Marek up in black plastic and took him away. They questioned So-and-So about where he had been and what he had been doing. He told them he hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. He also told them that when someone drinks like Marek Marek did, sooner or later it’ll end like that. They agreed with him and went off.

So-and-So took his bike and shambled off to Nowa Ruda. At the Lido restaurant he sat with a mug of beer in front of him and sipped it slowly, one drop at a time. Of all his emotions, the strongest was relief.

RADIO NOWA RUDA

The local radio station broadcasts twelve hours a day, mainly music. There’s national news on the hour, and local news on the half hour. There’s also a daily quiz, which almost always used to be won by the same person, 23a man called Wadera. He must have been immensely knowledgeable – he knew things that no one could have guessed. I promised myself that one day I’d find out who Mr Wadera was, where he lived and how he knew so much. I’d walk over the hills to Nowa Ruda to ask him something important, I don’t know what. I imagined him casually picking up the phone each day and saying, ‘Yes, I know the answer, it’s Canis lupus, the largest member of the dog family,’ or, ‘The glaze used to coat ceramic tiles before firing is called “slip,”’ or, ‘Pythagoras’s teachers are thought to have been Pherecydes, Hermodamas and Archemanes.’ And so on, every day. The prizes are books from the local distributor. Mr Wadera must have had quite a library.

One day, just before the announcer revealed the day’s question, I heard him say hesitantly, ‘Mr Wadera, would you please not call us today?’

Between twelve and one a nice woman’s voice reads a serialized novel. It’s impossible not to listen to it; we all have to listen to every single novel because it’s on when we’re preparing dinner, when we’re peeling potatoes or making pierogi. Throughout April it was Anna Karenina.

‘“He loves another woman, that is clearer still,” she said to herself as she entered her own room. “I want love, and it is lacking. So everything is finished! And it must be finished. But how?” she asked herself, and sat down in the armchair before the looking glass.’

Sometimes Marta comes over at noon and automatically starts helping with something, such as dicing the carrots.

She listens quietly and solemnly, but she never says anything – about Anna Karenina or any other novel we’ve heard read on the radio. I sometimes wonder if she can understand these stories made up of dialogue read out by 24a single voice, and I think maybe she’s only listening to individual words, to the melody of the language.

People of Marta’s age often suffer from senility and Alzheimer’s. Once I was weeding the kitchen garden when R. called me from the other side of the house. I hadn’t had time to answer before he asked Marta, who was standing where she could see both of us, ‘Is she there?’ She glanced at me and shouted in reply, ‘No, she’s not here.’

Then she calmly turned round and went home.

‘Why does So-and-So see ghosts, but I don’t?’ I once asked Marta. She said it was because he was empty inside. At the time I took it to mean he was thoughtless and simple. A person who was full inside seemed to me more worthwhile than an empty one.

Later, as I was washing the floor in the kitchen, I suddenly realized what Marta was trying to tell me. So-and-So is one of those people who imagine God as if He’s standing over there, while they’re over here. So-and-So sees everything from outside himself – he even sees himself from outside himself, he looks at himself as if he were looking at a photograph. He can relate to himself only in the mirror. When he’s occupied, when he’s assembling those exquisitely detailed sledges of his, for instance, he ceases to exist for himself at all, because he’s thinking about the sledges, not about himself. He isn’t an interesting thing for himself to think about. Only when he’s getting dressed to set off on his daily pilgrimage to Nowa Ruda for a packet of cigarettes and some headache pills, when he sees himself ready to go in the mirror, only then does he think of himself, but as ‘he’, never as ‘I’. He can see himself only through the eyes of others, and that’s why his appearance is so important to him: a new Crimplene jacket, a cream-coloured shirt with a light 25collar that offsets his tanned face. That’s why even to himself So-and-So is on the outside. There’s nothing inside him that could be looking out, there’s no deep thought. That’s the kind of person who sees ghosts.

MAREK MAREK

There’s something beautiful about that child – that’s what everyone said. Marek Marek had almost white-blonde hair and the face of an angel. His older sisters adored him. They used to push him along the mountain paths in an old German pram and play with him as if he were a doll. His mother didn’t want to stop breastfeeding him; as he sucked at her, she vaguely dreamed of turning into pure milk for him and flowing out of herself through her own nipple – that would have been better than her entire future as Mrs Marek. But Marek Marek grew up and stopped seeking her breasts. Old Marek found them instead, and made her several more babies.

But despite being so lovely, little Marek Marek was a poor eater and cried at night. Maybe that was why his own father didn’t like him. Whenever he came home drunk he would start the beating with Marek Marek. If his mother came to his defence, his father would lay into her too, until finally they’d all escape upstairs, leaving old Marek the rest of the house, which he was quite capable of filling with his snoring. Marek’s older sisters felt sorry for their little brother, so they taught him to hide at an agreed signal, and from the fifth year of his life Marek Marek sat out most of his evenings in the cellar. There he would cry, silently and tearlessly.

That was when he realized that his pain came not from the outside but from inside, and that it had nothing 26to do with his drunken father or his mother’s breast. It simply hurt for no particular reason, just as the sun rises each morning and the stars come out each night. It just hurt. He didn’t know what it was yet, but sometimes he seemed to have a foggy memory of a sort of warm, hot light drowning and dissolving the entire world. Where it came from, he didn’t know. All he could remember of his childhood was gloom, eternal twilight, a darkened sky, the world plunged into blurred darkness, the chill and misery of evenings without beginning or end. He also remembered the day electricity was brought to the village. He thought the pylons that came marching over the hills from the neighbouring village were like the pillars of a vast church.

Marek Marek was the first and only person from his village to subscribe to the district library in Nowa Ruda. He took to hiding from his father with a book, which gave him a lot of time for reading.

The library in Nowa Ruda was housed in the old brewery building, which still smelled of hops and beer; the walls, floors and ceilings were all imbued with the same pungent odour – even the pages of the books reeked as if beer had been poured over them. Marek Marek liked this smell. At fifteen he got drunk for the first time. It felt good. He completely forgot about the gloom, he could no longer see the difference between dark and light. His body went slack and wouldn’t obey him. He liked that too. It was as if he could come out of his body and live alongside himself, without thinking or feeling anything.

His older sisters got married and left home. One younger brother was killed by an unexploded bomb. The other was in a special school in Kłodzko, so Old Marek just had Marek Marek left to beat – for not shutting in the hens, for not mowing the grass short enough, for 27breaking the pivot off the threshing machine. But when Marek Marek was about twenty, he hit his father back for the first time and from then on they beat each other up on a regular basis. Meanwhile, whenever Marek Marek was at a loose end and had no money for drink, he read Stachura, the beat poet. The library ladies bought the collected works especially for him, covered in blue fabric that looked like jeans.

Marek Marek was still as handsome as ever. He had fair, shoulder-length hair and a smooth, childish face. And he had very pale eyes, faded even, as if they had lost their colour through straining for light in dark attics, as if they were worn out from reading all those poetry books in blue covers. But women were afraid of him. Once, during a disco at the firehouse, he went outside with one, dragged her into an elder bush and ripped off her blouse. It’s a good thing she yelled, because some other boys ran out and smashed him in the gob. But she liked him; maybe he just didn’t know how to talk to women. Another time he got drunk and knifed a guy who was friendly with a girl he knew, as if he had exclusive rights to her, as if he had the right to defend his rights with a knife. Afterwards, at home, he cried.

He continued to drink, and he liked the way it felt when his legs made their own way across the hills while everything inside – and thus all the pain – was turned off, as if a switch had been flicked and darkness had suddenly fallen. He liked to sit in the Lido pub amid the din and smoke and then suddenly find himself, God knows how, in a field of flowering flax, and to lie there until morning. To die. Or to drink at the Jubilatka and then suddenly to be snaking along the highway towards the village with a bloody face and a broken tooth. To be only partly alive, only partly conscious, slowly and gently ceasing to be. 28To get up in the morning and feel his head aching – at least he knew what hurt. To feel a thirst, and to be able to quench it.

Finally Marek Marek caught up with his father. He gave the old man such a battering against a stone bench that he broke his ribs and knocked him out. When the police came, they took Marek Marek off to the drunk tank, then kept him in custody, where there was nothing to drink.

Between the waves of pain in his head, in his drowsy, hungover state Marek Marek remembered that once, at the very beginning, he had fallen; that once he had been high up, and now he was low down. He remembered the downwards motion and the terror – worse than terror, there was no word for it. Marek Marek’s stupid body mindlessly accepted his fear and began to tremble; his heart thumped fit to burst. But his body didn’t know what it was taking upon itself – only an immortal soul could bear such fear. His body was choked by it, shrank into itself and beat against the walls of his tiny cell, foaming at the mouth. ‘Damn you, Marek!’ shouted the warders. They pinned him to the ground, tied him up and gave him an injection.

He ended up in the detox ward, where with other figures in faded pyjamas he shuffled along the wide hospital corridors and winding staircases. He stood obediently in line for his medicine and swallowed it down as if taking Communion. As he stared out of the window it occurred to him for the first time that his aim was to die as soon as possible, to free himself from this mess of a country, from this red-grey earth, from this overheated hospital, from these washed-out pyjamas, from this poisoned body. From then on he devoted every single thought to contriving every possible way to die.29

One night he slashed his veins in the shower. The white skin on his forearm split open and Marek Marek’s inside appeared. It was red and meaty like fresh beef. Before losing consciousness he was surprised to perceive, God knows why, a light in there.

Naturally he was locked up in isolation, a fuss was made and his stay in hospital was extended. He spent the whole winter there, and when he got back home he discovered that his parents had moved in with his sister who lived in town, and now he was alone. They had left him the horse, and he used it to bring down wood from the forest, which he chopped up and sold. He was earning money so he could drink again.

Marek Marek had a bird inside him – that’s how he felt. But this wretched bird of his was strange, immaterial, unnameable and no more birdlike than he was. He felt drawn to things he didn’t understand and was afraid of, to questions with no answer, and to people in whose presence he always felt uncomfortable. He felt the urge to kneel down and suddenly start praying in desperation, not to ask for anything but just to talk and talk and talk in the hope that someone might be listening. He hated this creature inside himself because it did nothing but cause him pain. If it weren’t there, he would have drunk away quietly, sitting in front of the house and gazing at the mountain that rose before it. Then he would have sobered up and cured his hangover with the hair of the dog, getting drunk again without thinking, without guilt or decisions. The hideous great bird must have had wings. Sometimes it beat them blindly inside his body, flapping at its leash, but he knew its legs were fettered, maybe even tied to something heavy, because it could never fly away. My God, he thought, though he didn’t believe in God at all, why am I being tortured by this thing inside me? 30The creature was immune to alcohol; it always remained painfully conscious; it remembered everything Marek Marek had done and everything he had lost, squandered, neglected or failed to see; everything that had passed him by. ‘Fuck it,’ he mumbled drunkenly to So-and-So, ‘why does it torment me like this, what’s it doing inside me?’ But So-and-So was deaf and didn’t understand a thing. ‘You’ve stolen my new socks,’ he said. ‘They were drying on the line.’

So the bird inside Marek Marek had restless wings, fettered legs and terrified eyes. He assumed it was imprisoned inside him. Someone had incarcerated it there, though he hadn’t the faintest idea how that was possible. Sometimes, if he let his thoughts wander, he encountered its terrible gaze deep inside himself and heard a mournful, bestial lament. Then he would jump to his feet and run blindly up the mountain, into the birch copses, along the forest paths. As he ran he looked up at the branches – which one would hold his weight? The bird went on screaming inside him, ‘Let me out, set me free, I don’t belong to you, I’m from somewhere else.’

At first Marek Marek thought it was a pigeon, the kind his father used to breed. He hated pigeons, with their round, empty little eyes, their relentless mincing steps, their skittish flight, always changing direction. Whenever there was nothing left in the house to eat, his father would make him crawl into the pigeon loft and extract the silly, docile birds. He passed them to his father one by one, holding them in both hands as his father deftly wrung their necks. He hated their way of dying too. They died like things, like objects. He hated his father just as much. But once, by the Frosts’ pond, he had seen another kind of bird: it had hopped out at his feet and taken off heavily, rising above the bushes, soaring over the trees and the 31valley. It was large and black, with a red beak and long legs. It gave a piercing scream, and for a while the air went on rippling in the wake of its wings.

So the bird inside him was a black stork, with fettered red legs and lacerated wings. It screamed and fluttered. He would wake up at night hearing this scream inside himself, a horrible, hellish scream. He sat up in bed terrified. Clearly he wouldn’t fall asleep again until morning. His pillow stank of damp and vomit. He got up to look for something to drink. Sometimes there were a few drops left at the bottom of yesterday’s bottle, sometimes not. It was too early to go to the shop. It was too early to be alive, so he just walked from wall to wall, dying.

When he was sober he could feel the bird in every part of his body, just beneath the skin. Sometimes he even thought he was the bird, and then they suffered together. Every thought that touched on the past or the doubtful future was painful. This pain made it impossible for Marek Marek to think anything through; he had to blur and dispel his thoughts to stop them from having any meaning. If he thought about himself, and what he used to be like, it hurt. If he thought about what he was like now, it hurt even more. If he thought about what he would be like in the future, and what would become of him, the pain was unbearable. If he thought about his house, at once he saw the rotting beams that would come crashing down any day now. If he thought about the field, he remembered that he hadn’t sown it. If he thought about his father, he remembered that he had beaten him up. If he thought about his sister in town, he remembered that he had stolen money from her. If he thought of his beloved mare, he remembered how after sobering up he had found her dead with her newborn foal.

But when he drank, it was better. Not because the bird 32drank with him. No, the bird never got drunk, it never slept. But Marek Marek’s drunken body and drunken thoughts took no notice of the bird’s struggles. So he had to drink.

Once he tried to make himself some wine. Angrily he tore up the blackcurrant bushes – the orchard was full of them – and with trembling hands threw them into a demijohn. He sacrificed some of his cash and bought sugar, then set up the concoction in the warmth of the attic. He was glad he would have his own wine, and that whenever he started to feel thirsty he’d be able to go up there, stick in a tube and drink straight from the demijohn. But without knowing when, he drank it all up before it had fermented properly. He even chewed the must. He had long since sold the television and the radio and the tape recorder. In any case, he couldn’t listen to anything – he always had the flutter of wings in his ears. He sold the wardrobe with the mirror, the rug, the harrows, his bicycle, his suit, the refrigerator, the icons of Christ wearing his crown of thorns and the Virgin Mary with the heart on the outside, the watering can, the wheelbarrow, the sheaf binder, the hay tedder, the cart with rubber wheels, the plates, the pots and the hay – he even found a buyer for the manure. Then he went wandering about the ruins of the houses that had been abandoned by the Germans and discovered some stone troughs hidden in the grass. He sold them to a man who transported them to Germany. He would gladly have sold his tumbledown house to the devil, but he couldn’t – it still belonged to his father.

His best days were when by some miracle he had managed to save a little alcohol until morning, so that as soon as he woke up he could take a slug without even getting out of bed. It made him feel blissful, and he would try 33not to fall asleep and lose that state of mind. He would get up dizzily and sit on a bench in front of the house. Sooner or later So-and-So always came by on his way to Nowa Ruda, pushing his bike. ‘You silly old tramp,’ Marek Marek would say, raising a shaky hand in greeting. So-and-So would bestow a toothless grin on him. The socks had been found. The wind had caught them and blown them into the grass.

In November So-and-So brought him a black puppy. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘No need for you to go on grieving for your mare, though she was a fine horse.’ At first Marek Marek took the dog into the house, but it drove him mad by pissing on the floor. So he set up an old bathtub outside the house, turned it upside down and propped it up on two stones. He hammered a hook into the ground and tied the puppy to it by a chain. This was his ingenious makeshift kennel. At first the dog kept whining and howling, but eventually it got used to it. It wagged its tail at Marek Marek whenever he brought it some food. With the dog around he felt better somehow, and the bird inside him calmed down a bit. But then in December the snow fell and one night there was such a bad frost that the dog froze to death. He found it in the morning buried in snow. It looked like a bundle of rags. Marek Marek shoved it with his foot – it was completely stiff.

His sister invited him for Christmas Eve, but he quarrelled with her immediately because she refused to serve vodka with the dinner. ‘What sort of a Christmas Eve is it, for fuck’s sake, without vodka?’ he said to his brother-in-law. He put his coat back on and went out. People were already on their way to midnight Mass to make sure they got good seats. He hung about near the church, staring at the familiar faces in the darkness. He bumped into So-and-So – even he was stumbling his 34way across the snow to the village. ‘What a winter, eh?’ he said, smiling broadly and clapping Marek Marek on the shoulder. ‘Get lost, you silly old fool,’ replied Marek Marek. ‘Yes, yes, quite,’ said So-and-So, nodding, and went into the church. People kept walking past Marek Marek, bowing to him coldly. In the vestibule they shook the snow off their shoes and went on inside. He lit a cigarette and heard the fluttering of tattered wings. Finally the bells began to ring, the congregation fell silent and the priest’s voice rang out, distorted by a microphone. In the vestibule Marek Marek let the tips of his fingers skim the cold surface of the holy water, but he didn’t cross himself. After a while the smell of steaming furs and overcoats dragged out from God knows where made him feel sick. Then he had an idea. He pushed his way back through the vestibule and went outside. The snow was falling hard, as if trying to cover up all the tracks. Marek Marek headed for the store. On the way he stopped off at his sister’s shed and took a pickaxe. He used it to break down the shop door, then stuffed his pockets with bottles of vodka, shoving them into his shirt front and down his trousers. He felt like laughing. ‘They’ll never bloody well catch me,’ he said to himself, and he spent the whole night pouring vodka into the water tank by the stove. He threw the bottles into the well.

It was the best holiday of his life. As soon as he felt the slightest bit sober he knelt down by the tank, turned the tap and opened his mouth, and vodka poured down his throat straight from heaven.

Just after the holiday the thaw began; the snow turned into nasty rain and the surrounding world looked like a sodden grey mushroom. The vodka was finished too. Marek Marek didn’t get out of bed. He felt cold and ached all over. He kept trying to think where he might find 35something to drink. He got it into his head that old Marta might have some wine. Her house was empty because she always went away for the winter. In his mind’s eye he could see her kitchen with bottles of homemade wine standing under the table, although in fact he knew that old Marta never made any wine. But maybe this year she had, maybe she’d made some blackcurrant or plum wine and hidden it under the table. To hell with her, he thought, and tumbled out of bed. He walked shakily, because he hadn’t eaten for several days and his head hurt, as if it were going to explode.

The door was locked. He kicked it open. The hinges gave a nasty, damp creak. Marek Marek felt sick. The kitchen looked as if old Marta had left only the day before. The table was covered with a checked oilcloth that reached to the floor. On it lay a large bread knife. Marek Marek quickly peered under the table and saw to his surprise that there was nothing there. He began rummaging in the cupboards. He looked in the stove, in the wood basket, and in the chest of drawers where the bed linen lay neatly piled. Everything smelled of winter damp – of snow, wet wood and metal. He looked everywhere, feeling the mattress and eiderdown, even thrusting his hand into some old gumboots. He had a clear vision of Marta in the autumn, before she left, packing away bottles of homemade wine. But he didn’t know where. ‘Silly old bitch,’ he said and burst into tears. He sat at the table with his head in his hands, and his tears fell on the oilcloth, washing away some mouse droppings. He stared at the knife.

When he left, he propped the door shut with a wooden stake because he liked old Marta and didn’t want the snow to get into her kitchen. That same day the police called on him. ‘We know it was you,’ they said, adding that they’d be back.36

Marek Marek lay down again. He felt cold, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep hold of a hatchet long enough to chop firewood. The bird was fluttering inside him, and the fluttering was making his body shiver.

Dusk fell suddenly, as if someone had turned off the light outside. Freezing rain struck against the windowpanes in steady waves. If only I had a television, thought Marek Marek, as he lay on his back, unable to sleep. Several times in the night he got up and drank water from a bucket; it was cold and horrible. His body kept turning it into tears, which had started flowing that evening and went on till morning, filling his ears and tickling his neck. At daybreak he fell asleep for a while, but his first thought on waking was that there was no more vodka in the water tank.

He got up and peed into a pot. He started looking in the drawers for some string. When he couldn’t find any, he tore down an old faded calico curtain and pulled out the cable it had been hanging from. Through the window he saw So-and-So pushing his bike to Nowa Ruda. Suddenly Marek Marek felt blissful; the rain had finally stopped, and grey winter light was pouring in through all the windows. The bird had gone quiet too; maybe it was already dead. Marek Marek made a noose out of the cable and tied it to a hook by the door on which his mother used to hang frying pans. He felt like a smoke and started looking for a cigarette. He could hear the rustle of every scrap of paper, the creaking of the floor, and the pit-a-pat on the floorboards when he spilled some pills. He couldn’t find a cigarette, so he went straight up to the hook, placed the noose around his neck and slumped to the floor. He felt a massive, unjust pain in the back of his neck. Briefly the cable grew tighter, then it slackened and slipped off the hook. Marek Marek fell to the ground, not realizing what 37had happened. Pain radiated throughout his body and the bird began to scream again. ‘I’ve lived like a pig and I’ll die like a pig,’ said Marek Marek out loud, and in the empty house it sounded like a challenge. His hands were shaking as he tied the cable to the hook again. He knotted it, tangled and twisted it. The noose was now much higher than before, not so high that he needed a chair, but not so low that he could sit down. He placed the noose over his head, swayed backwards and forwards on his heels for a moment, and then suddenly threw himself to the ground. This time the pain was so great it made his head spin. His mouth gasped for air, and his legs scrabbled helplessly for support, though that wasn’t what he wanted. He struggled, amazed at what was happening, until all of a sudden he was seized with such great terror that he wet himself. He looked down at his feet in their threadbare socks, kicking out and slithering in pools of urine. I’ll do it tomorrow, he thought hopefully, but he could no longer find any support for his body. He threw himself forwards again and tried to prop himself up on his hands, but just then he heard a crack in his head; a bang, a shot, an explosion. He tried to clutch at the wall, but his hand just left a wet, dirty mark. Then he stopped moving, because he still hoped that everything bad would pass by without noticing him. He glued his eyes to the window and a vague, fading thought occurred to him: that So-and-So would come back. Then the bright rectangle of the window disappeared.

DREAMS

Last year I placed an announcement in the Lower Silesian Exchange saying that I collect dreams, but I soon went off 38the idea, because people tried to sell them to me. ‘Let’s agree on a price,’ they wrote. ‘How about twenty zlotys per dream? That’s a fair price.’ So I gave up; I would have gone bankrupt on other people’s dreams. I would have been afraid that they’d made them up for the money. Dreams by their very nature have nothing to do with money.

But I did find a website where people record their dreams voluntarily, for free. Each morning new items appear there, in various languages. People record their dreams for others, for strangers and foreigners, for reasons that aren’t really clear to me. Maybe the desire to relate your own dreams is as strong as hunger, stronger even, for people who switch on the computer as soon as they wake up, before they’ve had breakfast, and write, ‘Last night I dreamed…’ Soon I too plucked up the courage and added, to start with, a small, quite trivial dream. This was my passport to reading all those other people’s dreams. I soon got into the habit of opening up new worlds on the computer each morning – in winter when it was still dark and the coffee was brewing in the kitchen; and in summer when sunlight was pouring through the windows, the hall door was open onto the terrace, and the dogs were already back from touring their territory.

If you do it regularly, if you carefully read dozens – hundreds, even – of other people’s dreams every morning, it’s easy to see that there are similarities between them. I’ve been wondering for ages whether anyone else has noticed this too. There are nights of running away, nights of war, nights of babies being born, nights of dubious lovemaking. There are nights spent wandering in labyrinths – in hotels, stations, student hostels, or the dreamers’ own flats. Or nights spent opening doors, boxes, chests and wardrobes. And there are nights full 39of travel, when the dreamers negotiate stations, airports, trains, motorways and roadside motels, lose suitcases, wait for tickets, and worry that they won’t make their connections on time. Each morning you could string these dreams together like beads and end up with a sensible arrangement, a unique necklace that’s complete and beautiful in itself. Based on the most frequently recurring motifs, we could give the nights titles. ‘The night of feeding the weak and infirm.’ ‘The night things fell from the sky.’ ‘The night of strange animals.’ ‘The night of receiving letters.’ ‘The night precious things got lost.’ Maybe that’s not enough, maybe we should name the days after the previous night’s dreams. Or whole months, years, eras, in which people keep having similar dreams, at an even pace that can no longer be felt once the sun is up.

If someone were able to research this idea properly, if they could quantify the characters, images and emotions that appear in dreams, strip them of their motifs, and apply statistics, including all those correlation tests that work like a magic glue, linking things together that would seem impossible to connect, maybe they would discover some sense in it all, like the pattern according to which, here in this world, stock exchanges function, or large airports operate – a map of subtle connections or fixed timetables. Incalculable presentiments and precise algorithms.

I have often asked Marta to tell me her dreams, but she just shrugs. I don’t think she’s interested. I think that even if dreams did come to her at night, she would never allow herself to remember them. She would wipe them away, like spilled milk off her oilcloth with the wild strawberry pattern. She would wring out the rag and air her low-ceilinged kitchen. Her gaze would fall on the 40pelargoniums; she would rub their leaves between her fingers, and the pungent smell would stifle once and for all whatever she may have seen that night. I’d give a lot to know just one of Marta’s dreams.

But she has told me other people’s dreams. I have never asked her where she gets them from. Perhaps she makes them up, just like those stories of hers. She makes use of other people’s dreams, just as she makes wigs out of other people’s hair. Whenever we drive anywhere together, to Kłodzko or to Nowa Ruda, while she’s waiting for me in the car outside the bank, she stares at people through the window. Afterwards, in the car, as she’s rummaging about in her plastic carrier bags, quite casually she always starts telling me something, such as other people’s dreams.

I am never sure if there is a borderline between what Marta says and what I hear. I am unable to separate it from her, from me, from what we both know and what we don’t, from what I heard on the radio that morning or what I read in the weekend newspapers with the TV guide, from the time of day or even from the way the sunlight shines on the villages in the valleys along the way.

THE DAY OF CARS

We found a car in the forest. It was so well hidden that we stepped into its long bonnet, buried in pine needles. There was a small birch tree growing out of the front seat, and a strand of ivy on the steering wheel. R. said it was German, a prewar DKW; he knows about cars. The body of the car was completely corroded, and the wheels were half sunk in forest litter. When I tried to open the door on the driver’s side, the handle came off in my hand. There were yellow mushrooms growing in cascades on 41the leather upholstery, right down to the rust-eaten floor. We didn’t tell anyone about this find.

That evening another car came out of the forest, from the direction of the border – a smart red Toyota with Swiss registration plates. The setting sun was briefly reflected in its crimson veneer as it coasted down into the valley with its engine off. During the night some agitated border guards with torches came hurrying after it.

Next morning on the internet there were dreams about cars.

AMOS