“Where are you going?” the driver asked. His motor gave off black fumes. “Want a lift?”
“Thanks,” Franciszek said. “I’ll walk.”
The car rolled on, and vanished beyond the street corner. After a few dozen yards the street was suddenly all lit up. A night shift was working on a building; elevators whirred inside the stone walls; platforms swinging like big formless birds moved slowly upward; the green light of drilling crews gleamed from dark scaffoldings that merged with the empty sky — lumpy human spiders amid showers of burning metal. Compressors hissed monotonously in the ditches; a sign said:
“THIS MONTH WE HAVE FULFILLED …” The figures were hidden in the shadows.
“Where are you going?” cried someone he could not see. “No loitering here; this is a construction project.”
… “We build everything from the foundations up — if I may use big words — from the very fundamentals.” Someone — who was it? — had said that at the meeting. “We are building something in the name of which people have died not by dozens and not by hundreds, but by whole generations. The struggle for social justice began the moment two people first met in the world. Socialism is the final form of this struggle (applause); the sacrifices made by the party (applause), the martyrs of socialism (applause) …” A short interruption — and what next?…
He was tired; he was dragging himself through the night and its murky echoes; a dark wave was pulsing within him, growing stronger and stronger. Now he was walking across a vacant lot, through aseptically clean places, with a lump of lead in his head; he could not strike a single spark in himself. He wanted only one thing — to relive the moment he had experienced a few hours earlier, although between that moment and now there was a whole life — years, oceans, worlds of defeat, loneliness, exhaustion, futility. Thus reviewing the different areas of his life, he was unable to fix them in time: the past, the present, memories and facts, everything was fluid, incomprehensible; he thought only of that moment which was the kernel of the universe — the moment when someone had told him to turn in his party card. That was real — as real as the street he was walking in, as real as the shabby dawn beginning to creep over the stones of the city, as real as the visible and persuasive neon sign, YOUNG PEOPLE READ — wherever he might hide, sit down, or stop. He raised his head — YOUNG PEOPLE READ THE BANNER OF YO H—and gasped for air. He wanted to think, he wanted to remember, but he could do nothing now; his thoughts were turning in a void — it was like trying to strike a spark with two damp stones. All he could recall was the moment when he rose and looked at the audience, but he could remember nothing he had said or done. He wanted to think, to set the machine of his awareness in motion; he wanted something to put him on the right track. He picked up a crumpled newspaper from the sidewalk, and stopped under a street lamp. “Tarnow Already Ahead.” “The world camp …” “Polish Youth Flings a Powerful No in Kałużyński’s Face.” He walked, the newspaper dangling from his hand. This helped — the familiar words, always arranged the same way, sounding always the same, had put his thoughts on the right track; he had been there before, he remembered. The rest, like the date of the newspaper, had no importance.
… “We imagine that the most painful thing that can happen to us is when someone dear to us dies. He leaves an empty place behind; we love, we respect, we cherish; and sometimes years go by before the place is somehow filled and the pain is gone. But worse than death, comrades, is to be betrayed by a man who is close to us; it is more painful, for we ourselves are responsible for that empty and painful place in our lives” (long, heavy applause) — who had said that? Pawlak? The Second Secretary? The district delegate? Someone in the audience? Whose voice was that? Now I am walking through the city; I pass by unknown people, drunks, thieves, lovers — and someone spoke to me, someone who had power, whom others trust, someone who could strike me from party membership. Before that it was day; after that it was night; now there will be dawn — who said that? Somewhere among the walls of this city is my house to which I shall return — changed; somewhere — to the right, to the east or the west — is my place of work, where I shall go presently — changed; all around me are alien people — but who said that? (Long, heavy applause.) “An accident has unmasked you. You said what you really think. I checked it with the police station, and I won’t dare repeat what you had said (cries of indignation), what you screamed (here someone applauded, by mistake; cries of fury and indignation); I have too much respect for what we all believe in. You’re an alien.” An alien. Do we come from monkeys? There was starvation, there was capitalism, there was misery. I ask you, comrades, why Sambo? Such people use napalm bombs in Korea. Had it not been for an accident, you’d still be among us; you’d go on doing your dirty work — a former partisan, officer, party comrade. And then came a man named Lenin. Those who are for the expulsion of Comrade Kowalski, let them show their party cards. Step out, Comrade Kowalski. Come in, Kowalski. Why Sambo? Now it’s a dog, and what will it be later on? People, not peoples, from monkeys. Hand in your card, Kowalski; don’t make a monkey of yourself; we know you’re clever at wearing masks. May this accident be a lesson to you, comrades, that at every moment of our lives, in every situation, we must be vigilant. This is what the party demands of us. This is what the great Stalin teaches us. Well, and how about our glee club? We begin tomorrow …
“He’s drunk,” a boy cried. “A big man like that! Blubbering like a baby!”
The sidewalks were filled with people; the factory sirens were howling, and the sounds vanished somewhere under the cardboard sky. A crowded noisy tramcar clattered by. The neon sign over the city went out.
IX
HE WAS WIFELESS; HIS WIFE HAD DIED A FEW weeks after the end of hostilities; though of poor health, she had managed to stay alive until his return from the woods. He lived with his son and daughter. His son’s name was Mikołaj, his daughter’s Elzbieta. Mikołaj, a magnificently handsome boy, was twenty-four; Elzbieta was younger. They occupied two small rooms in a new housing project. The day after the meeting, when Franciszek came home, he found his daughter with her fiancé, Roman. They attended the same courses, and planned to marry immediately after getting their degrees. Both looked happy.
“Got something for supper?” Franciszek asked. He stood in the middle of the room without removing his overcoat and hat.
“I’ll warm up something for you,” Elzbieta said. She rose. She was tall, towheaded, attractive. Franciszek’s heart sometimes tightened when he looked at her: he had the feeling that he was seeing the woman with whom he had lived his happiest moments twenty years earlier. No one could have discovered any difference between Elzbieta and her mother; both were the image of health, though both spent their time complaining. “I’ll warm the macaroni for you,” Elzbieta said. “I can make you an omelet too.” She went to the kitchen. Franciszek sat down stiffly on a chair.
“Well, Pop,” said Roman, a black-haired, swarthy boy with fiery eyes, “what’s the matter? Troubles?” Roman called Franciszek “little father-in-law,” “old man,” or “Pop.” The dry and forbidding Franciszek forgave him much for the sake of his daughter’s love-drenched eyes.
“Everybody has troubles,” he said, and broke off, crushed by the stupidity of his own words.
“Clever observation,” Roman said. “Elzbieta and I got drunk today.”
Franciszek started. “Really?”
“Really. We drank a bottle of wine after passing our exams. Ha-ha-ha.”