He turned to the policeman, but he was walking alone — there was no one beside him. Somewhere near a fence three old women stood gossiping, and the young policeman was running toward them, holding up his long coat. A moment later Franciszek could hear his resounding voice: “Do you like it or don’t you?” and the frightened chirping of the three old women.
He entered a telephone booth and dialed a number. After a while he heard the click of the receiver at the other end. “Excuse me,” he said; “may I speak to Jerzy?”
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice asked.
“My name is Kowalski.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Jerzy isn’t in,” the woman said. “Didn’t you know?”
“No, I didn’t.”
Again the receiver was silent for a moment. Someone knocked sharply at the booth window.
“On vacation,” said the voice in the receiver. “You understand — on va-ca-tion. Surely he is entitled to a vacation, isn’t he?”
Franciszek wanted to say something, but the receiver clicked at the other end. Again he was walking through the dark, empty city, which had been washed by rain for many weeks, and still refused to awaken to spring, the city with one neon sign over it: YOUNG PEOPLE READ THE BANNER OF YO H.” At home, he sat by the window in a cold draft; he looked at the blinking letters, and it seemed to him that over the noise and bustle of the city he could hear a sharp barking voice: “Do you like it or don’t you? Do you like it or don’t you? Do you like it or …”
Suddenly he turned around. “Why don’t you serve supper, Elzbieta?”
He heard her stand up heavily and move off to the kitchen. He followed her. “You’ve broken with Roman, haven’t you?”
She leaned on his arm and suddenly burst into tears.
“It will pass,” he said, stroking her cold, heavy hair. “Everything will pass, my child. Everything evil, stupid, inhuman. We must think that we are continually moving toward light; we must believe in it …” He fell silent, and stared at the darkness outside and the quivering neon letters, and once again — against his will — read them from beginning to end, mentally replacing the missing ones. Then he pushed Elzbieta away, and violently drew the curtain, so violently that some of its rings tore off.
XIII
HE STOPPED IN FRONT OF A TALL WHITE HOUSE, and checked the address on a slip of paper. He walked in, and was starting to climb the broad staircase when someone called from behind, “Hey, Citizen!”
He turned around, his hand on the banister: a soldier with a tommy gun slung over his shoulder stood on the landing below.
“Who do you want to see?” he asked Franciszek.
“A friend.”
“What’s this?” the soldier said, and his young face was suddenly clouded. “Without a pass? Come back down, Citizen.” He held out his hand. “Your papers.”
He slowly made out a pass for him on a red form, wetting his pencil and murmuring solemnly the while; finally he gave Franciszek his identification with the pass, and said, “Third floor.” Then, as Franciszek was beginning to climb, he added in a chiding tone, “Next time, Citizen, don’t try to get in without a pass.”
He stopped at the third floor and rang the bell. The door opened for him, there were whispers, and finally he stood before the man he had come to see. “Do you recognize me, Birch?” Franciszek asked.
The man standing before him, with a sickly face and sunken, lusterless black eyes, scrutinized him carefully. “Skinny,” he said at last, holding out his hand. “It’s Skinny, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Franciszek. “It’s me.”
They sat in armchairs. They looked at each other, trying to discover changes in one another’s faces and gestures; for a few moments an awkward silence prevailed. Then Franciszek, trying to hide his embarrassment, began to speak hurriedly: “You must excuse me for bothering you — I know people like you have no time even for their families, but my case …” He suddenly hesitated.
“Go on,” Birch said. “I’m listening.”
“Do you remember me as I was in the underground?”
“Yes, you, and the others too.”
“Will you help me?”
“Surely that goes without saying,” Birch said. “Talk.”
“I … I …” Franciszek said, trying to look the other straight in the eyes, “I raised my hand against the party. I don’t understand myself how it happened …” He turned scarlet. “You know, I was a bit tight, and I shouted that …”
He paused, suddenly overcome with a feeling that this talk was hopeless. “What did I shout?” he thought desperately, “What did I shout? After all, I said the truth, what I felt …” He went on: “I said that I didn’t believe that — that—”
“That what?”
“That it was possible to build anything valuable by means of crimes and lies, by destroying human dignity, by transforming Communist loyalty into slavery.”
“And what am I to do about it?”
“I want you — you, one of the men who have power and know the authorities — I want you to tell me: Where is the dividing line between loyalty and slavery, between crime and necessity? It was always reason that drew that line, reason and conscience. And now — that’s what I said then — now man has become only a miserable plaything of politics. We try to forget reason if we know what’s good for us; and as for conscience, that miserable thing, it’s better to think it never existed.”
“Whom did you say all this to?”
“To whom? To whom? Does it matter? What matters is that I’m saying it to myself.”
“What happened afterward?”
“What happened afterward is beside the point. I was expelled from the party. But that’s beside the point too.”
“And so?”
“I want you to tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“That I’m wrong.”
They were silent for a while. The other looked at Franciszek with his lusterless eyes, his head slightly bowed. “Listen,” he said at last. “The first year after the war I worked for the security police. I had a son; all through the occupation he was in the underground; then he took part in armed attacks, was riddled with bullets, lost one lung, and finally, as an invalid, he landed in my office. In my office, where he had to do the work of three strong healthy men. So he worked — interrogations, investigations, spies, saboteurs, diversionists. Once he questioned a diversionist; he had been questioning him I don’t know how many nights on end; the prisoner behaved provocatively, and finally my boy — sick, almost dead with exhaustion, his nerves strained to the breaking point — couldn’t stand it any more and struck the diversionist in the face.” He paused.
“Well, what then?” Franciszek asked.
Birch smiled strangely. “Well, nothing,” he said. “I had to lock him up — eight years in jail. I myself saw to it that he was sentenced. And do you know what the diversionist got? Five years. He was a halfwit; he didn’t even know what he was doing, or who he was working against. Whereas my son was a conscious, militant party member, and was supposed to know what he was doing.”
He rose suddenly and began to pace the room. His neck grew purple, and his upper lip quivered. “Goddam it to hell!” he said. “To hell with this goddam chatter! What matters are the consequences, the final consequences. Once you’ve started a revolution, you have to realize that it can’t be stopped, or moderated, or turned off, or delayed. A revolution can be only won or lost, and that’s all. What horrifies you? The dimensions? The methods?”