All the stars and planets arose from mist. There’s a cigarette, there’s a dusky room, a massive counter, a coffee maker, there are wooden tables and snow-white tablecloths, there are photographs on the walls, reflexes in window panes, colourful bottles, then again there is bright light from the street, there’s a grey gate, a chestnut tree casting a shadow on the tables, there are people, rose shrubs behind a wall, there are slabs of uneven paving, there’s a signboard and, in the middle of this scene, there is Agnieszka.
She sits on a chair placed in the doorway, at the border of two worlds, squints her eyes in the sun, runs her fingers along tissue paper and lights the cigarette. Smoke fills her lungs, redness the space under her eyelids.
Her guts feel as if tied into a knot; maybe a portion of nicotine will help them untangle. The length of time since she has seen Iwona is much greater than the span of their short but intense acquaintance. She practically stopped thinking of her: their mutual friends have become too distant to remind her about her existence. Only sometimes, although ever less often, Iwona haunts her like a spectre in her dreams.
In these dreams the analytical chemistry lab, where they spent hundreds of hours together as first-year students, is as large as a supermarket. Drenched in a yellow glow, it makes her think of a labyrinth, where rows of laboratory tables form never-ending aisles, the smell of acetone permeates the air while broken tiles flash underneath the wheels of the trolley she pushes. Eventually, around some corner, she happens upon Iwona, the way you might come across an annoying neighbour at your local supermarket, and starts a casual talk. She usually shoots envious glances at Iwona’s trolley, which — unlike Agnieszka’s empty one — is more often than not filled with laboratory glassware: flasks, graduated cylinders, desiccators, beakers. In one of these dreams, from a pocket of her lab coat, Iwona took out a Petri dish filled with fruit drops, took off the lid and asked her to try one. Agnieszka wanted to say no, but only looked at the bright face drenched in yellow light, at the thin neck, at the enormous, always anxious eyes, and, with weird longing, extended her hand. She wonders if these dreams are now going to stop.
Agnieszka doesn’t get to finish her smoke as a familiar white van rolls into the narrow Meisels Street and parks nearby. When Władek, a tall fortyish blond man in a T-shirt stretched over his big muscles and prominent belly, stands in the pub’s doorway, Agnieszka’s already waiting behind the bar. Good morning, ah, good morning, how’s it going, oh, fine, thank you. She engages as she always does in a delightful small talk, jokes as if nothing has happened, since nothing’s really happened, collects a clanking box with her small hands, signs a document, pays out money and says goodbye.
She puts a couple of hairpins in her bright hair and gets back to her place: where the dark interior of the pub ends and Kraków begins, trapped in the warm May air as if in amber, full of cars glistening in the sun and sluggish pigeons and dossers and café tables and groups of tourists claiming, still shyly, the streets of the Kazimierz district. With a shaky hand, she lights another cigarette; the unpleasant thought comes back like a toothache.
It was an accident like many others. One of Poznań’s city buses drove up to a stop and let out a few passengers, Iwona among them. A teen drunk driver was apparently in too much of a hurry to stop behind the bus and decided to overtake it. Iwona, ignoring a cry of warning, perhaps listening to music from her player, walked onto the zebra crossing to meet the bonnet of the hurtling vehicle.
Agnieszka read this all in a group email from a long unseen classmate. The funeral is set for Monday. Maybe she should go? She gets up from the chair and stands against the bright background of the street. Perhaps she’ll still manage to find a replacement; she just needs to phone her boss. She promises herself she’ll finish off the cigarette and arrange it.
+
The building holding the lab drenched in yellow light was an equally gloomy yellow from the outside. It reminded Agnieszka of the prison building in Kalisz, while its multipartite windows, massive doors, red plates by the entrance and high walls topped with an attic only magnified this overwhelming impression. She entered a gloomy lobby and took a turn into a dark corridor: the smell of chemicals, a swarm of students, some of them in lab coats, dust in the air, a girl with a burnt face, rows of doors. Finally, she found the entrance to the lab, surrounded by a noisy group of terrified nineteen-year-olds putting on a brave front. She said “hi”, cracked some joke, she’d always been good at breaking the ice. As she continued talking about nothing, a petite female figure standing to the side caught her attention.
Iwona leaned against the wall, looking at a point on the floor. Her black hair was tied in a ponytail, her face frostily pale. In her straight, crossed arms, she held a large briefcase sheathed with black rubber, with a round orange spot in the middle ineptly imitating the shape of a basketball and, slightly better, its texture full of tiny rubber projections. Iwona raised her eyes and their gazes fleetingly met.
+
Agnieszka’s eyeballs register a fuzzy blue shape approaching her in slow motion: in the dead-end part of Meisels Street, under a completely blurred signpost of a kebab shop, level with the equally unfocused umbrellas of a beer garden.
The coloured human shape, sharper with each second, lazily manoeuvres between parked cars, touches the back of its neck in a familiar gesture, and when it reaches Corpus Christi Street, Agnieszka’s poor sight finally allows her to recognise the prominent hips, bright complexion and thick-framed glasses of Joanna, who waves hello with a smile, wearing an airy, knee-length blue dress, with a linen bag on her shoulder.
Not waiting for her friend, Agnieszka hides in the cool interior. She pours beer into a tall glass (for Joanna), then into a cup (for herself); sounds of conversations in foreign languages come from the street; a middle-aged man, perhaps a Brit, stops in the doorway to examine the place (she greets him with a smile), but thankfully carries on. When Agnieszka gives Joanna the beer at the very doorstep, she only laughs and kisses Agnieszka on the cheek before taking the first, greedy gulp. Agnieszka’s mind flashes with images of blood-soaked asphalt, the caved-in bonnet of a car, bright street lights, Iwona’s deformed body.
+
A tram went by with a tremble over a flyover stretched above their heads, while Poznańska Street, with a roar, weaved into a crossroads with streets named after Libelt, Roosevelt and Pułaski. They sat on a scarp, piles of Xeroxed lecture notes tucked under their butts, the smell of earth mingling with the smell of car fumes, a clayey stretch in front of them blocked with parked cars and covered in a layer of November snow. Iwona handed Agnieszka a bottle of cheap wine; her hand was red with cold.
She remembers the pattern on her coat: wetlands full of reeds meant to ensure camouflage to those hunting waterfowl, and the way she smoked: in a manly manner, holding a Lucky Strike between her forefinger and thumb. The wine was disgusting and quickly got to Agnieszka’s head, her hand getting cold from holding the heavy bottle, while she kept telling Iwona about her flatmate, Tomasz, a friend from her secondary school years, whom she enjoyed living with, she couldn’t complain, but sometimes he just fucking lost it and threw a tantrum for no good reason. Once he yelled at her for squeezing toothpaste out of the middle of the tube instead of its end, another time for missing a spot while cleaning the bathtub. Good he’d finally found a job, in a nearby supermarket, otherwise they would argue all the time.
They sat so close she could see the smooth movement of Iwona’s chest as she breathed in smoke-filled air. From this distance, she could see the green irises of her restless eyes were densely covered with brown spots. Iwona complained about her lawyer father and doctor mother, who forced her to apply to study medicine, and when she didn’t get in, sent her to study chemistry to plug gaps in her knowledge before next year’s exams. In reality, she wanted to study literature, dreamed of becoming a writer, but when she told this to her mother, she just laughed her out of court, only to keep repeating this as a good joke at family functions.
It was their little ritual. They quickly realised, unlike the rest of the first-year students, that there was usually little point attending lectures when you could have a much more pleasant time talking and drinking cheap wine in Poznań’s ugliest nooks. Had Agnieszka at that time at least suspected what her emerging affection for Iwona was, maybe she wouldn’t have fallen into it completely defenceless as if into the treacherous depths of a seemingly quiet river.
+
Agnieszka refills the emptied glass with beer and gets back to Joanna, who sits on a short stool at the opposite side of the entrance, talking for a good half hour about her ex, Łukasz, whom she dumped several months ago. He texted her again, reiterating the same list of confessions, demands and complaints. How could she leave him in such a moment, he didn’t even come back from hospital, she finds his life worthless, she just has to come back to him, they’ll make things work again, she’ll see, it’ll be like their first months together, he promises to take his meds and, to start things off, maybe they’ll go to the mountains or somewhere, or maybe just have a beer together, she can’t leave him like that.
Once in a while, Joanna’s monologue is interrupted by customers, thankfully few at this time: a dolled-up lady nearing her forties asking for a latte, but please without milk, or a twenty-year-old Spaniard, who — clearly at a loss for Polish or English words to ask for a toilet — forms his hand into a pistol, puts it near his fly and starts making swaying motions with his hips. Joanna drinks her second beer while Agnieszka listens — full of understanding and empathy, but at the same time sensing an ever thicker, invisible wall separating them. She can’t imagine the funeral or meeting her classmates: all of them graduated, some of them surely married. In her mind’s eyes, she sees a sun-bathed cemetery and crowds of people, always attracted by a young person’s death, surrounding — no doubt — the grieving parents, sister, maybe Tomasz.
A client comes in. Agnieszka, reluctantly, puts out a barely started cigarette against the wall, hides it where the dossers of Kazimierz wouldn’t find it and returns behind the counter. While making coffee, she looks at Joanna sitting against the luminous background and writing something sadly on her phone. The coffee machine produces a loud hiss, particles of dust form constellations in the air, the client, an elderly German, looks for change in his wallet, while Agnieszka wonders wistfully when exactly her relationship with Joanna became so asymmetrical.
She suddenly thinks of Kinga (memories of long-unseen friends are like ghosts of the dead), with a strange certainty she could tell her everything. Perhaps it’s just an illusion. They haven’t seen each other in years, with Kinga now living in Barcelona with her husband, texting her a few sentences once every few months: about her new job, their new flat in Eixample, another failed attempt at IVF. For an instant, Agnieszka is back again in a dark staircase in that tenement house in Poznań’s Jeżyce district, at that party during which Kinga, having miscalculated the distance and her own dimensions, broke a window in the attic with her own arse, and — a moment later — at one of dozens of private English lessons with Kinga, which faded in her memory into one never-ending lesson, during which, smoking cigarettes (it was then when the addiction really set in), they talked in a foreign language about increasingly intimate matters: Kinga about her boyfriend, who’d gone abroad and dumped her a week later through a text message, and Agnieszka about her toxic relationship with Tomasz and Iwona. After the lessons, they would watch TV series.
Joanna, as if having overheard her thought, becomes all ears herself. Through her grimy glasses, she intently watches Agnieszka talk about her girlfriend, not-girlfriend, whom she’s been dating, not-dating for several weeks. It seems Paulina isn’t really a lesbian, maybe not even bi. Just another girl who wants to experiment, treating Agnieszka like a lab animal. She doesn’t know why she keeps doing this.
In her head, a network of Kalisz’s cobbled and asphalted streets unfolds, with red roofs and churches rising above them, the Planty Park unrolling like a rug, the Prosna River spilling in a lazy ribbon, bridges stretching over the river and its ducts. In her thoughts, she strolls once again past Łazienna Street’s piss-stenching doorways (the culture centre in front of her, the greenness of the dark park behind it), shyly steps into the glow of round street lamps in Kadecka Street, only to walk down the stairs into one of Kalisz’s pubs a moment later. She hopes she’ll find Tomasz there, surrounded by his popular friends.
It’s funny that while in Kalisz she never met Joanna, who — one year senior to Agnieszka — attended a nearby secondary school, walked the same streets, made appointments with friends in the same spot near the town hall, partied in the same few bars. Joanna, however, proved smarter and fulfilled her life-long dream of studying in Kraków right away, whereas Agnieszka, although having dreamt about the same thing, gave in to her parents’ suggestions that she studied in the much closer Poznań.
+
Even lines of white powder disappeared in a barrel formed by a rolled-up banknote. Silver, Tomasz’s band mate, tucked a strand of long bright hair behind his ear while leaning over a desk. Then it was Iwona’s turn. Agnieszka watched her friend take the roll in her thin, milky-white hand with fake confidence, repeat Silver’s gesture by moving the fingers of her other hand over her ear (completely unnecessarily — her dark hair was as always tied in a ponytail) and snort another line of amphetamine.
They were in Agnieszka’s narrow room. Most of the plywood desk was occupied by a CRT display monitor and — now tucked away to the side — keyboard and computer mouse; posters of von Trier’s and Almodóvar’s films taken from magazines hung on the wall covered with dingy wallpaper; a small divan bed stood next to a wall unit from the communist era. The blocks of flats of the night-time Under the Lime Trees Estate stretched outside the window, with a chain of amber-coloured lights wrapped around a plastic Christmas tree reflected in the pane. From behind the wall came pounding music interlaced with a hubbub of conversations and occasional cries.
Iwona handed Agnieszka the banknote (their fingertips touched for an eyeblink), so she — with similarly fake aplomb — brought one of its ends to her nose, leaned down and quickly inhaled drug-filled air. The powder stung from the inside, the soft lining of her nasal cavity suddenly thickened. Silver, with a debit card, formed the last, frail line and, before snorting it, sent Agnieszka a wink.
They opened the door, stormed into the loud entrance hall and then — sniffing a bit too ostentatiously — to Tomasz’s even louder bedroom (much bigger than Agnieszka’s cubbyhole) where the main part of the New Year’s Eve party took place. Inside the four long-unpainted walls and surrounded by dilapidated furniture were a few chemistry students, some friends from Kalisz, a decanter with cheap wine standing on a dirty coffee table and Tomasz sitting in a shabby red armchair in the corner.
He’d always inspired respect in her, which she once took for erotic fascination. Almost two metres tall with dark bushy eyebrows separated by a small clump, a prominent jaw and hair cut a millimetre long, perhaps to distract from his hairline, which was deeply receding for his age. When he saw them, he sprung up, with a sweeping movement took out a wallet from his combats, and — from inside the wallet — a few banknotes he handed to Silver, telling him to take a walk to the off-licence, ’cause they’re running out of booze, maybe let Agnieszka take him there so that he wouldn’t get lost. A black vest exposed Tomasz’s muscular arms and dark hair sprouting from his armpits while the smell of expensive cologne and male sweat hung around him. Before they went out, Agnieszka noticed how Iwona’s wide open eyes traced his massive silhouette.
The night was freezing cold, snowless, the sky over Poznań illuminated by occasional fireworks. As they walked to the off-license, Silver talked about the band he fronted, Phosphorescence, about how long they’d been looking for a drummer to replace Tomasz, that Agnieszka must say hello next time she was in Kalisz, maybe they’d be giving a concert, that he fucking loved her hairstyle, where had she learned to pin up her hair like this, that it was too bad they hadn’t got to know each other better before she’d moved to Poznań.
When they came back to the cramped ground-floor flat, Silver asked her a question. She didn’t reply. In the small, windowless kitchen, where Agnieszka chased away cockroaches when she turned on the light each morning, on a laminated worktop sat Iwona, her thin thighs wrapped around Tomasz’s hips. He kissed her voraciously, sinking his big hands into her black, suddenly loose hair.
Agnieszka stood still for a moment, feeling a hot wave running up her trunk and hitting her face, her heart pounding inside her chest, or maybe it was the speed, she wasn’t sure how speed was supposed to work, she replied something nonsensical to Silver and finally, carrying plastic bags filled to the brim, walked to the big room. She put the bags on the table (a greedy thicket of hands immediately sunk inside them to take out cans and bottles) and cautiously sat down in the shabby armchair. She felt as if submerging underwater, the air in her lungs resonating to the rhythm of the loud music. Silver asked if everything was okay. She ignored him, her eyes following Tomasz and Iwona, who were just walking through the entrance hall to lock themselves inside Agnieszka’s bedroom.
Minutes added up, turning to hours. The guests finally left. Silver, completely sloshed, threw himself on the bed, still managing to mumble out an unambiguous invitation before falling into a heavy sleep, while Agnieszka drank another of a series of who knows how many beers, unable to stop thinking of what was happening behind the locked door. She didn’t sleep a wink that night.
Something that was supposed to be a one-night stand soon transformed into a relationship. Iwona, despite her parents’ protests, moved out from her family villa in the district of Grunwald to settle with Tomasz in his room, wall-to-wall with Agnieszka, started working at the same supermarket, and soon the spring came. She wonders whether their relationship has survived; is Tomasz now mourning his tragically deceased girlfriend?
+ +
There’s the varnished counter top, afternoon light, a silent hubbub of conversations coming from the adjacent room, Jakub’s loud laugher, his strong wrists, a beer-filled glass on the counter, figures looking down from photos on the walls, there’s a flash of a passing car, mournful music from the speakers, a client at the bar, the pounding of the heart, the smell of brewed coffee, the rustle of a crumpled receipt, there are people on the street, there are pigeons, Agnieszka’s stealthy glances at her phone.
Jakub popped in just for a moment as he was supposed to have dinner with his girlfriend Oda, but she pissed him off through a text, so he decided he deserves a beer to cool down. Or two. Agnieszka laughs, lifts Jakub’s glass to wipe the counter beneath it and glances back at the phone’s screen.
Paulina doesn’t text back, even though she texted her some two hours ago, before Joanna left. Agnieszka tries not to think of it, instead listening to Jakub’s story about a translation, which has been a real pain, it’s literally been haunting him in his dreams. Since he moved with Oda to Kraków last summer, they’ve been working practically all the time. They could’ve stayed in Poznań just as easily, as they are glued to their laptops most of the time anyway.
For some reason, she doesn’t tell Jakub about Iwona’s death either. Maybe it’s because she has too many conflicting feelings? Or maybe she’s ashamed of this strange indifference? On the other hand, what would she say exactly? After so many years, Iwona is a complete stranger (though strangers usually don’t haunt us in our dreams).
A series of images runs through Agnieszka’s mind: a November afternoon when a soaking-wet Jakub sat in front of the bar for the first time, their futile attempts to find mutual friends in Poznań, his complaining about his years-long relationship with Oda; the first cigarettes smoked with Grzegorz in the park in Kalisz (Jakub has always reminded her of Grzegorz), their trips to the Baltic Sea with friends from secondary school, the murmur of the sea waking her every morning. Finally, one of the many nights in the flat in Under the Lime Trees Estate when Agnieszka lay powerless on the floor of her room, weeping spasmodically.
Warm evening air came in through a window left ajar, carrying the smell of trees and street dust as, from behind the wall, came the unduly loud moaning of Tomasz, who was shagging Iwona as he did every night. Agnieszka, not getting up from the carpet, reached out for her phone lying on the bed and texted Grzegorz. The message was short: that she was fed up, that she didn’t know whether she could bear this any longer. He called her right away, even though he was already in England, to reassure her with a stoned voice sweet like a fruit drop that everything was going to be fine; he said he loved her; he promised they will laugh at it in a couple of years.
Grzegorz left for the UK after he didn’t get into college. He quickly met a girl, who persuaded him into staying. Together they discovered the colourful world of psychoactive substances. He sent Agnieszka ever weirder emails about his psychedelic experiences, sex on drugs, heightened senses or a telepathic connection with his friends, which he allegedly established on mushrooms. One night, at some festival, he and his girlfriend took a couple of pills too many and both ended up believing in Jesus.
Now Grzegorz is a Baptist and dreams of becoming a pastor. Agnieszka no longer shares everything with him: in her messages she doesn’t mention his failed relationships with subsequent girls, afraid that he, now an ardent Christian, would have only one diagnosis. They see each other usually once a year, around Christmas, and every time it is strangely good. As if they weren’t separated by years of occasional meetings, Jesus, Agnieszka’s orientation; as if they were by the sea again and woke up to its swoosh.
A queue suddenly forms in front of the bar, making further conversation impossible. Jakub finishes his second beer, says he’s almost late anyway and, having blown a kiss at her friend, walks out to the street. Agnieszka keeps serving clients, spitting out all the pleases and thank yous like a machine, preparing coffees and cocktails, moving apple pie from a platter onto plates. She keeps glancing at her phone behind the counter.
+
Tomasz yelled at the doorway of Agnieszka’s cramped room, telling her to get up. She rose drowsily from the bed and walked towards the entrance hall, from where puzzling squelching sounds were coming (her eyelids sticky from sleep, retinas receiving a blurred image). She stopped in the doorway, speechless.
The small entrance hall was being engulfed in rising water, which — heavy with food scraps and faeces — flowed out from the bathroom, luckily bypassing, apparently a bit elevated, Agnieszka’s room, and carrying Q-tips, pieces of dental floss and sodden tampons into the windowless kitchen and Iwona and Tomasz’s bedroom. A second passed before Agnieszka’s somnolent mind realised the flood originated from a clogged toilet, which spewed out water flushed from the toilets of the floors above, with all the blessings: discarded food, excrement, personal care items.
For a moment, she stared at Tomasz, who — wearing only boxer shorts, in complete silence — gathered water in a bucket and poured it into the bathtub. His once muscular belly was now covered with fat accumulated during their everyday sessions of watching TV, his head was a mess of long uncut hair. If it hadn’t been for his rubber boots, the torrent would’ve reached his ankles. Iwona wasn’t home. Tomasz must have sent her to get help, or maybe she was working a morning shift. Too tired to ask questions, Agnieszka just put on the Wellingtons waiting for her in the doorway, reached for another bucket and entered the flooded hall.
Several weeks after the deluge in the two-bedroom flat, Agnieszka came back home from a lone visit to a cinema only to find herself in the middle of an unannounced party. The sounds of primitive music coming from the block could be heard from a good twenty metres away. She entered the building and walked down a dirty corridor, accompanied by the ever-louder dance beat and merciless wailing.
As she pushed the knob, the musical rumble hit her ears. Two open doors appeared before her eyes: the right one to Agnieszka’s dim, smoke-filled bedroom, with two young men having cigarettes inside, and the left one to Tomasz and Iwona’s bright room, now filled with people Agnieszka didn’t know. One of them — a thirty-year-old blonde woman with pink highlights — stared into a computer screen, holding the shaft of a wooden spoon near her screaming mouth.
Agnieszka greeted everyone (barely noticed by Tomasz and Iwona), and then, since what else could she do, went to a shop to get a few beers and joined this questionably entertaining get-together. Leaning against a chest of drawers in the corner, she watched in astonishment as Iwona laughed with the rest at the increasingly crass jokes, only to grab the wooden spoon like a microphone and yelp out some song by Madonna. It grew louder by the hour. Ever more often, the primitive jokes gave way to completely inarticulate growls until finally some neighbour showed mercy and called the police.
The very same night, she made a scene with Tomasz. She shouted out that she was sick of how he treated her, that she lived there as well, that she couldn’t stand him bossing her around any longer. After a brief quarrel, she slammed the door to her bedroom and, with weird relief, fell sleep.
+
The barmaid who is supposed to do the evening shift is several minutes late. Not waiting for her, Agnieszka pours herself the first beer. Looking at the foaming contents of the glass, she has a vision she is swimming downstream in a river, deep under the surface of the greenish water. Surrounded by water plants, she slowly loses her clothes, and shiny scales — one by one — erupt on her skin, while the water, completely soundlessly, enters her lungs.
When the barmaid finally storms into the pub with an apologetic smile, holding an armful of paper shopping bags, Agnieszka walks out from behind the bar and lets some distant friends invite her to their table.
She listens to Ala’s story, intertwined with her fiancé Marek’s interjections, about preparations for their wedding on one of the barges on the Vistula River and about the honeymoon they are going to spend in the Balkans. She drinks beer after beer, tells jokes and anecdotes about the pub’s clientele, glancing at the phone less and less often until she completely resigns herself to its silence. The alcohol finally relaxes the knot in her guts, slightly slows down her heartbeat, almost enabling her to forget about the yellow laboratory, the nightmarish corners of Poznań, the paper-thin wall, the taste of cheap wine, the flood engulfing the flat, the parallel lines of powder, the unexpected death on the zebra crossing.
+
The brick-red flame meant calcium. Agnieszka took away a wire loop from above a gas burner and noted down the result in a protocol. Lamps, hanging from the ceiling, cast a yellow, unhealthy glow on the laboratory worktops, lab coats, faces, papers. A row of burners on each table gushed out flames, colouring the thicket of laboratory glassware: flasks, test tubes, burettes, with fiery reflexes.
Agnieszka’s eyes involuntarily gravitated towards the other end of the room, where a dainty figure in a white coat stood leaning above a blue flame. Iwona’s recently cut hair was barely past her ears and the collar of an elegant purple blouse stuck out from the coat. As if sensing her gaze, she turned back to glance at Agnieszka with her big green eyes — without a trace of the former friendliness.
Since the quarrel, Agnieszka hadn’t seen Tomasz even once. Mostly because she avoided staying in the flat like the plague, and when she was there, Tomasz and Iwona bunkered down in their room. Luckily, it was May, as sunny as now, so she spent hours in the meadows by the Warta River, burning her lungs away with one cigarette after another.
She saw Iwona mainly during classes and could tell she was piqued; probably because she was now alone with Tomasz’s tantrums. Maybe it was Iwona’s cold gaze that filled Agnieszka with a sudden urge to ditch her studies without waiting for the end of term, move her modest belongings to Kinga’s, take the earliest train to Kraków, rent any room she could find there, find whatever job she could. When she lit a cigarette after classes at the feet of the gloomily yellow building, she was almost certain of her decision.
+
It’s night time and Agnieszka crosses Dietl Street at a diagonal. She wobbles as she walks, nearing the roadway, then again towards the lawn, feeling a pleasant buzz of alcohol in her head. She has the most absurd feeling that Kinga and Grzegorz, her private saints, watch her every step from their distant countries.
As she reaches the bridge, she looks at the Vistula River, all bathed in pale light; at a hot-air balloon crouched right next to the opposite bank; at the Forum hotel in the background, covered as it usually is with a huge advertisement. A drunken man pisses through the rail into the river, the murmur of sluggish cars comes from the roundabout, a rivery smell hangs in the air.
Several minutes later Agnieszka is already in her flat in the district of Dębniki. She turns on the light, tosses the keys on top of a shelf in a lilac entrance hall, takes off her shoes and walks into the quiet bedroom. As if curious, she looks at the reflection of her slight figure in a dark window, while taking the pins out of her hair and letting it softly fall on her back and shoulders. Too tired to climb the mezzanine, she curls up in a ball on a sofa in the corner, where she slowly, down to the last thought, sinks into sleep. Let the light be on.
+ + +
The cremation furnace opens its mouth, revealing the inside full of flames. Mourners watch as Iwona’s body, in a wooden package, slowly moves towards the light. Once the coffin is inside, tongues of fire hesitantly start to lick its oak wood surface. The hair melts, clothes are reduced to ashes.
The infernal heat breaks complex organic structures into fragments. Proteins, carbohydrates, fats, nucleic acids — all about Iwona — turn into coal and water.
The ashes stay obedient in the depths of the furnace, but the water molecules go higher. In the form of vapour they escape through a tall chimney. Bypassing filters, they mix with the air. They enter the sky over Poznań. Hang a moment over the sun-drenched Old Town, only to be driven by air currents above the Warta River, follow its course for an instant, flash over the shamelessly green Cytadela Park, creep over the landscape of the Winogrady district filled with blocks of flats. Stay for a second above Under the Lime Trees Estate. Soar higher, gather into clouds, let the winds take them over the vastness of fields and forests, over trunk roads and lakes, over factory chimneys and shopping malls of various towns and cities, finally reach Kraków and fall with an unexpected rain on the districts of Dębniki, Podgórze, Kazimierz, on a lone figure walking home from work, her eyes fixed on the suddenly cloudy sky.