Greetings, Hero
We stood in the foyer of the multiplex, me running through the starting times, adding up how long we had to wait, in this place, among these humid throngs. Weighing the length of the queue against the quality of the film. Wondering if there was something else entirely different we should be doing on this rare day. It had not yet rained. The high skylight of the atrium streamed down light. The ragged row of pale freckled faces clashed with the sharp bright lines of the metal balustrade. This place was too clean for these people. Too clean for me too.
I was about to propose to Stan that we flee, get the hell out of there, escape. Throw the suggestion out to him and see what idea he bounced back. Thigh-high stainless steel poles with belt fabric stretched between them coralled the crowds into a back-and-forth queue, filling up a solid rectangular block. For want of somewhere to rest their eyes, the people stared vacantly at one or other of the plasma screens showing endless previews of what's on now and what's coming soon.
It's Silent Michal, said Stan.
A joke. An artistic extravagance. I picked up a lettuce leaf and saw the face of my brother in it. In a dream my mother was speaking to me in Latin. I opened my mouth to protest, this is not my language, but the words came out in German.
And now another whimsy: Silent Michal in a multiplex in Dublin. This is a man I last met five years ago in a shoeshop in Bydgoszcz, except I stumble already on the word 'man'. The word is not right. It conjures up a broad smiling male holding a football, about to turn gentle or stubborn. This is not silent Michal. And 'a person' - that is just one more standing in a queue. Yet Michal too is a person.
Not the kind of person who turns up in a cinema in Dublin however. I was staring up at the programme on the screen when, in an indifferent mumble, Stan said It's Silent Michal and was gone. I cast my eyes around to locate him in the milling crowd. There he was, explaining something to a thin man whose face was a cubist artist's dream. Flat planes and angles, a jagged fringe of jet black hair. A mouth cut in wood. The thin man turned and looked blankly at Stan, stooped over to him, listened. Tolerant enough to bear with Stan's convoluted excuses for a case of mistaken recognition. But Stan talked on and on as I approached. The staccato rhythm of Wielkopolska Polish.
"This is Michal, you remember him of course," Stan said. I held out my hand. Michal took it, no flicker of recognition in his eyes. It was him. I don't know why I didn't recognise him at first.
"How are you. This is a surprise," I said and continued with a few of the usual banalities. He replied with a long-distance yes or no. Yes, he came here to work. Yes, he remembers me. No, he did not know Stan was in Dublin.
Stan stood the while to one side, smiling with pride at his protegé. Generously allowing long pauses to deepen and develop between Michal and I. He knew the wealth in that silence and the rich hesitation that bracketed the most banal remarks and recovered them to significance. But a few more questions and I was conscious of imposing on Michal. I looked at him, stared at him frankly. His eyebrows stood out over his eyes, but just a little. His cheeks were sunken in, but just a little. It takes a few decades for a face to resemble the person who inhabits it. But for now he is a thin sallow-skinned European with the attitude of one listening to an urgent whisper. An earnest student with halting English who pauses a moment to compose an answer in his head. Always one heartbeat too long, but perhaps he is a meticulous learner. His neat dark hair, open shirt and loose casual clothes didn't mark him out from the thousands of others in this multinational city. There was a flush to his cheeks from his several months in this blustery climate.
I suddenly realised. This is a thousand miles and several years away from the Michal I never got to know. If he was capable of moving over here to a foreign country, getting a job and interacting with new people, then he was a different person. The Irish air has re-formed him. He is recreated anew among strangers in a strange land. I of all people should not seek to impose the old personality on him. You know the way it is. That self-satisfied way old friends and family tell you you haven't changed a bit, still the same old absent-mindedness, shyness, morbidity, whatever it was. This was a new person in front of me I reminded myself. Though the flat black hair and astronaut gaze may seem the same, I should not hold any presumptions.
"Did Stan know you were here?" I asked.
"Nobody knows," he answered.
"But we found you," I laughed. He grinned and rocked back on his heels. Turned his smile to the bright skylight. Stan nodded agreeably, eyes smiling behind his thick glasses, stepping back out of the picture.
"And are you still looking for work or did you get something?" His head and shoulders shrugged derisively. After the usual five-second lag of course.
"I have work."
"What kind of work?"
"Nothing."
"Waiter? Cleaner? That sort of thing?"
"It's. A secret."
"That's OK. We all have secrets. So! Were you going to go to the cinema?"
He did not answer, but dug into his pocket and drew out a small plastic card. Stan and I leaned towards him.
"So you are a club member of the cinema," said Stan, "Your English must be pretty good if you can understand films. Do you understand most of what they are saying?"
"Yes," said Michal.
"This is fantastic," I said, "Last time I saw you in Grodgoszcz you didn't have a word of English. And now a few months in Ireland and you've got fluency like people who have studied for years in college. You've got a degree in English for nothing! So how do you like it here? What made you come here? Is life in Dublin any different?"
He exhaled. Paused. Inhaled.
"It is. The same."
"The same as Grodgoszcz?"
"No."
"So what do we do now? Go for a coffee?"
Michal pursed his lips. Frowned at the cards still in his hand. I could see his Polish ID and a couple of wage slips. "A pint, perhaps," he said. Stan nodded sagely. Michal strode out the doors before us. Left us standing. Staring at his long shadow on the tiles.
"This is unbelievable," said Stan. "You cannot imagine how amazed I am. And the way he talks to you. Words, words, words, buckets of words." He raised his arms. "And did you see the way he was the first one to suggest we do something! In front of you, a stranger. You cannot believe how impossible this is. This could never happen before."
We have lived to witness miracles. Yet it was true. I had grown used to the decay and forgetfulness that time brings. Grown immune to the stories of old acquaintances who had turned to the drink, or friends in Poland living in a shoebox with their parents, or people who had shut themselves away and nothing more to say than good to see you, sure nothing ever changes. That's the way things go, too bad. My own life too was nothing to boast of. Nothing had changed for three years. And now here was someone whom time had not decayed. He had consumed time and become stronger. He had plunged himself into a different universe and survived.
As we trooped up Parnell Street and round by Rutland Street I realised Stan had hardly spoken a word yet directly to Michal. I wondered what to say next. The lanes of traffic were caught in a gridlock extending down Dorset Street. Coloured flags waved from windows. The pubs had spilled their human contents across the pavements.
"Who is playing today?" I asked.
"A county called Wexford," said Michal. I looked along the road at the throng of fans all pressing their way through the grid-locked traffic towards the stadium. Cars were abandoned, double and triple-parked recklessly along the kerb. The air was warmed by the jostling and cheering, though out in the wide streets you found it was really quiet chilly.
"We should go to the match too and cheer," I said.
"It would be appropriate for this extraordinary day," said Stan. He lowered his glasses and squinted in the fresh wind.
Michal, Silent Michal. How did I ever meet him? But 'meet' is not the right word either. In a cellar bar called Pod Aniolem - at the sign of the Angel - in Grodgoszcz, a small industrial town of 240,000 inhabitants somewhere between Wroclaw and Katowice. I was there with Romeo, Stan, Stepan, some others gone from memory. A long unvarnished wooden table, Czech-style, tall heavy glasses of beer with handles, plates of bread with schmaltz, coarse-grain salt crystals sprinkled over. Light-golden beer with a raw whiff of alcohol off it. Weaker beers just smell beery. Polish beer hits you in the high nasal passages. Another jug is set on the table with a solid timber clunk. Someone has ordered a pitcher for us. Girls with swivel hips pass along the back of the bench. A few seconds after the door opens a draught of icy air flows like water around my ankles. It was winter. I don't remember well the summers. One more beer inside me and I felt I was making contact with a place called Poland. I was moving towards an intuitive grasp of what it is to be a Pole. Suffering patiently for decades - that bit seemed easiest to understand. But there was more.
Despite the three volatile beers I sat up alert, a readiness to concentrate. This was my constant state in my efforts to learn Polish. Waiting to pounce on a few phrases and contribute to the conversation Thinking, this time I will make effective communication. This time I will break the barrier. I bought into that idea that in each language there are things that cannot be communicated in English. Each language is the code to its own vision of the universe. If I listened long enough would break through that code. Then the secrets of the national soul would be revealed. I would break free of whatever insular attitudes were restricting me without my even being aware of it. The personality that had accumulated around me - that was weighing me down - would begin to crumble.
I had never learned a foreign language before.
There was another at the table, body erect but head slumped forward at a right angle. A long bony face, dark eyebrows, and the stringy build of a marathon runner. Romeo was standing, arguing a point, trying to convince the whole table.
"There was me and The Teacher and Silent Michal there for the weekend. The queue for tickets went all the way out to the crossing. It spread across the road then and held up the traffic. Chris and me and Silent Michal here. We slept out on a bench with the drinkers to get a ticket. Shared a blanket with them. And when we finally get to the office they say they smell drink off us and tell us we look drunk. We'd slept under the stars all night. Under the beautiful stars. Even Michal here too. Drunks came up and talked to him. And I swear no-one waited longer than us, me and Silent Michal here."
This way of calling someone as witness as if they weren't there struck me. I watched the same Michal closely. He held his hand to his jaw and rubbed it as his name cropped up three times in one sentence. I was impressed. The conversation moved on and he rearranged his long legs, sighed, took a long sip of his beer.
"We call him silent Michal," said Romeo at the bar, "An old friend from school. He's really quite a nice guy."
"Is he a student or what?" I asked.
"No, no. Not a student. He works in a clothes shop. Here in Grodgoszcz. We know him from way back."
We had our backs to the bar, holding two beers apiece but taking a moment away from the table. There he was queueing for a beer. Rubbing the coins in his hand. He was calculating if he had enough money. Mouth stretched to a straight line. Head slumped forward, eyes to the floor, like his neck had lost its muscles.
"In a clothes shop, yeah? What does he sell, shoes?" I asked.
Romeo laughed easy-going. We waited to see Michal order. He raised his head and said 'Four'. Though we stood only a few feet away he didn't notice us.
"You Westerners talk to everybody as though you've been friends for years. It's hey Jack, or hello call me Pat. And you don't know each other from FUCK."
Romeo was laying it out large. He was in a flamboyant mood, unstoppable. And he was speaking in English, clearly for my benefit. I rose to the bait. "People like it like that. They know full well they're not friends. It just make's it easier to get on."
"It's BULLSHIT. That's what it is. A big pretence." Romeo forced out the words. He stood up and rapped the table with knuckles of both hands. He was on to something, I was sure. This was what I was waiting for. The source of the difference. If I could follow what he meant.
"But why does it annoy you so much?" I asked.
"You talk to the boss like you talk to your best friend. Like there's no difference. All people are the same. In Polish a stranger is pan or pani until you get to know them. You know where you stand. There's no bullshit."
The one Romeo had called The Teacher pushed a stray beer an inch further in my direction. He tapped it towards me with the backs of his fingers.
"Where did this come from?" I asked
"Michal bought beers for people." He indicated with a finger the ones included in our group, five among the dozen or more at the table. I had not realised we were divided up in circles of friends.
"Tell him thanks." I tilted the tall beer toward Michal but there was no chance of catching his eye.
"My brother came back from an interview with a Western company that wants to set up here. Name a moment in your life when you were proud, tell us what things you did to help around the house when you were a kid. Unbelieveable questions. What's up with these people? Who can answer these questions? I tell you what, whoever is brainless enough to answer gets the job. That's the way it works. Imagine if you tell them 'mind your own fucking business'. They'll say sorry, that was not the required answer. In this company, they told him, we like staff to participate in after-hours activities. What ideas do you have for events we could hold? Do you know what he said? He was stuck for answer. This was the last question. Remember, he was getting on great up till this point. A nice job on quality control is in the balance. So he's got thirty seconds to come up with something. Communal mushroom picking, he told them. Do you think he got the job?"
I didn't like the fake chuminess of the corporate environment either. Creativity breaks where you get to splash each other with paint. Getting pissed with the EO and telling everyone at the water cooler he's the soundest guy you'd ever meet. Not for me at any rate. But Romeo was not finished.
"Everyone is a friend to you guys. I don't mean you obviously. I mean Westerners in general. The culture as it is today. You call anyone you know a friend. So in the end no-one is a friend. You pretend to have all these friends and in reality they are just people who say hello, how are you, how are you, hey, HEY, see you later."
"Catch you later," I said.
"Exactly. The more I speak your language the less I understand you people. I did interpretation for these guys out of Solvex and we're sitting down after a good day's work. The guy wants me to show him a good pub. Show me a good pub he tells me. So I say fine let's go there. It wasn't this place, he wouldn't like the benches. We sit down and he starts: I'm getting divorced from my fucking wife. She wants my condo. And I'm shrinking, you know? I'm hiding under the table, crawling on the floor, putting a towel over my head. And he goes on and on and on till I wanted to chew my knuckles off. Then the next day he switches off and becomes Mr Chief Negotiator again. Hey Romeo, you're doing great. Spot-on piece of work. Even though we're in the office alone he doesn't mention any of the other stuff. He's switched over. Click."
Stan pulled me away, we squeezed past the backs of the chairs. The queue to the bar parted a fraction to let us through. Brickwork curved low overhead. We passed under an arch into a second vault. An earthy smell seeped from the mortar joints and from under the toilet doors. Just one electric lamp was on, no candles in any of the holders, the staff didn't come in here. It was an extra chamber for when it was busy. Stan reached up and switched on the full lights. I remembered the carvings then. He'd told me about them on the way here. Over the evening I sort of forgot about them. I didn't expect them to be here stacked away in an alcove under the stairs where no-one could see them, in a part of the bar closed off for the winter. A little alcove like a fireplace with no chimney above it. And if I had seen them there I wouldn't be taking them out and placing them on the table like Stan was doing.
There were framed rectangular displays like sacred icons. No religious themes on them, but simple country scenes carved in relief. A farmer with a sheaf of corn. Children with buckets. A gaunt figure with a dark beard - the missing Jew. A jokerman playing the pipes. One a little more modern - a man walking a bicycle. Some had their garments painted with a thin matt paint that failed to hide the grain of the wood. Hidden here for storage or as part of the decor, it was hard to say. The images of peasants, priests and bears had a medieval look about them. Standing with their hands at their sides in attitudes of shock. Amazed at where they are and what has happened to them.
Maybe you could only appreciate the full force of them if you had never seen a photograph in your life. The carvings were pressing their archetypes on me. Here is the man with a burden, here is the man growing old. I felt there was something to understand here. Even if the mountain man was carving them for the thousandth time, in exactly the same way as his father and grandfather before him, it was still art, still genuine.
"Is this it then?" I asked. Meaning, is this why we came to this place.
"His mother is Russian," Stan whispered. He made yak-yakking gestures with his right hand. "It's inherited through the mother's line."
"Romeo," he clarified, "Romeo the last Great Slav. Pay no notice to him." Nobody sees them. They all look at these wood carvings and what they see is something cultural to be embarrassed about. Something best left to the ignorant tourists. I ran my fingers over the rough chisel cuts in the wood, trying to achieve a closer contact. Faces of terror, hope and joy. Their clothes were highlighted with red, yellow and black paint. The merchant, the farmer, and the Jew. The heady beer and frozen roof tops had made me sentimental. I was overwhelmed with nostalgia for a past that had nothing to do with me.
"The peasants in the mountains make these," said Stan.
"What do you mean peasants, there are no peasants any more," I said in annoyance.
"To a certain extent I grant you're right," said Stan. At that time he still occasionally answered with phrases straight from his archaic English books.
"They are just farmers and people like everyone else," I insisted.
"Of course. They are just people. But they have a simple way of life. In the city we call them peasants. To us a farmer is someone working on a huge mechanised farm. A peasant is a peasant."
I understood then that peasant meant nothing derogatory. I understood too that we were all tourists to these carvings, Stan and his friends, the people in this bar. They were just as distant from these carvings as I was. These were images from nowhere - I could picture the peasant's hands fashioning the timber but could not imagine what was in his head or what he would say about them.
I walked up the stone steps, each one a hazard after so much beer. The air cooled my ears, killed the red flush on my face. Stan followed to accompany me for a breath of air, but I insisted on going alone. He had obscure fears for me, a foreigner in a bleak industrial town. Always imagining I would be beaten up if left to fend for myself on the streets. He forgot that I had survived two years in Poland with even less of the language. And I was well aware that he had dragged me away from Romeo's diatribe in case I might be offended.
The slanted roofs opposite were so white that when I looked away I couldn't see anything else clearly for several seconds. Minus eight degrees perhaps. You could tell by the way it hits the ears after five minutes. Five more and the tips of the fingers hurt. Minus twelve and a deep breath becomes painful, dangerous even. I wanted it to sink lower. I wanted to see what it was like when it was so cold you could die if you fell over drunk in the night. When the breath forms ice crystals instantly. At minus twenty cars and trucks don't start and snow accumulates even on the major motorways.
The square was deserted. Not a single person. It was not yet ten o'clock. Street lights shining through the trees created vortices in the spindly branches. Whirling nests of bright whgite twigs. The air was brittle, taut, making a hard and sparkling diamond of every glimmer. The snow and ice of the past month had been tramped down to a thick plate of armour. Under the afternoon sun it would get slippery, mushy where it was well-trod, but now it was as solid underfoot as gritted concrete. Some shopowners cut a path with spades through the four-inch sheet. They hacked it like miners and carted away huge chunks in barrows. Other businesses, like this cellar pub, only cleared a little space around the doorway to prevent snow being kicked in. I stopped and watched the ghosts my breath made. When I picture such scenes I don't remember the cold. It never seemed cold to me in Grodgoszcz. The cold could not touch me.
Back inside Michal's chest heaved in laughter. He held his hands to his head and shook with sighs. What? What? They leaned towards him on both sides. He spoke in a long breath, one extended mutter that petered out. They asked again and he rubbed his forehead, took in a breath and looked at his beer. Romeo and Stepan spoke at the same time, you see, you see, each rapping the table with their knuckles, each laying claim to Michal's answer.
"Imagine being called Romeo," I said to Stan. "It gives you a great start in life."
"Do you ascribe to the theory that a name can influence what person you become?"
"Fucking right I do."
"I sometimes think I would like to have the name Socrates. Or perhaps Jesus Christ," he smiled. "I wonder what kind of person I would be with that name?"
"A little bit more exclusive than you already are. A little bit more arrogant."
"Yes perhaps it is best for humanity that I'm simply Stanislaw. And best for us that you are called Geoff. Your welcome here might be different if you had a different name. For example if you were called Adolf."
He would wait a little to see if I would smile; if I didn't he would push the whimsy a step further. Stan found it hard to hold down a steady job. More precisely, he'd never had a steady job. Romeo passed the odd translation on to him unofficially. He survived on that and god knows how else. Romeo, the wit, the clean-cut, the successful, the romantic - in every sense. And his best friend Stan.
I walked home - waving off Stan and Romeo who wanted to accompany me at least part of the way. My block was only fifteen minutes away. The main road south along the tram tracks (there was no tram at this hour) and then a turn to the right. I was in block 8, a number I had to remember at first or I wouldn't have been able to find it. I didn't take the turn. I walked on and on past the last tower block, past the blank walls of the co-op farm, out the road by the frozen stubble fields. Straight roads on a flat landscape. I wanted to walk until I felt enveloped by the cold. Out there where only my heart beating fast and warm kept the life within me. I wanted to be so far out in the cold that I had to keep walking to stay alive.
There was a turn-off to the right. A lane with a thin hedge on each side and the kind of cobbled surface that meant it was a public road. I turned this way, the less straight road. A snowplough had been down this way, but by the look of it that was some weeks before. The snow piled on each side had a hard grey shell. When I stumbled against it the surface broke and large gritty crystals scattered. This was not the kind of snow you squeeze into a snowball in your hands. It was as dry and hard as sand. And the stones crunching under my boots could be loose gravel on the road or could be bits of ice.
My only fear was a car might pass. The driver would stop in astonishment and ask me how he could help. I tried to compose my answer in advance. This is what I was thinking about as I plodded along.
And I thought of when I first came to this place, during a brief thaw in winter. A wet gash of black in the white snow. When I think of the city I seem to be looking down on it from a great height. I can see it all in one piece, the apartment blocks in four distinct clusters on the northern edge of town, the long green roof of the railway station, the little square space at the centre of town - the old market square, with empty benches and spindle trees. The main road - and named precisely that - led from the square southwards past my block. Five tall blocks of the model settlement, each painted kindergarten colours on the side facing the roadway. The vegetable oil factory - for which the town was famous throughout the province - was recognisable from the stainless steel ducts. And beyond were a few rows of little wooden houses. I can picture the town laid out like a childrens' picture map.
And little wonder. Every time I called by a friend I had to take a lift to the seventh, tenth or twelth floor. The higher the floor, the warmer it was in the corridors. And the cheaper the rent. All my friends were smokers. That meant we would stand for hours on a landing looking out the broad windows. I knew that city well from ten stories up. Down on ground level I might huddle inside my coat and scarf and press through air so cold it seeped through like water. Up there I could relax and open my heart to the city.
The road I was on began to curve back towards the city. It might be quicker to keep on the way I was going and hope it really would bring me back. There was no hedge or fence to close off the fields. I could always cut across. But it was wise to stick to the path, it will always lead you somewhere. And you can plod on and on and not think about anything. Hay foot, straw foot. I walked with my hands pressed to my ears. Hay foot straw foot.
A car whined and drew alongside me. What should I do now? I waved cheerily. He reached over, opened the door. The car jolted to a halt with the door hanging open.
"Hello there, hero," he roared. Dzien dobry Bohaterze. When he said that I could not refuse the lift.
"Hello there."
"Well are you getting in or are you going to walk all night?"
I kicked the snow off my boots, loosened my scarf. When I stooped to get in the door I felt the stiffness in my legs. One hand gripping the roof, I levered myself inside, arranged my legs carefully in front of me. My face would explode with the warmth from the dashboard. Through the window I could see nothing of where I had stood moments before.
And once inside he rattled on about the nightlife in the town.
"Luxusowa," I said.
"That's some place." He hammered his knees.
"Pod Kogutem."
He kissed his fingers, winked at me.
"Pod Aniolem. That's where I was."
"Quiet, but neat."
"Chimera."
He whooped with laughter and made gestures of gripping large objects. "You know good places, you quantum engineer," he said. Or something like that. There was no need to understand much. It was easy to keep up my end of the conversation. He didn't ask the usual questions - where I was from, what I worked at here. What I was doing out on a village road on a night so cold most people would think long and hard about making the five-mile journey to town in case the engine stalled along the way. He drove with a steady hand, gliding the car along at a stately pace. I could almost hear the little puff-puff of each piston keeping us going. A steady splutter even where the road was bumpy. When the headlights rose the beam disappeared in the clear dark night, when it dipped I caught garish glimpses of blue ridges piled on each side.
There was something interesting about this man. His talk of clubs and pubs was just to keep things simple, for my benefit. Perhaps he'd meant he was an engineer. He was hardly a local farmer. The car was clean and well-kept, with no oily rags, no scraps and empty bags. His talk of good vodka and gorgeous girls had served its purpose and now he concentrated on getting home.
"Where? Just here?" The car slowed.
"Yes, the square is fine."
"There's your place." He pointed through the window. Hotel pod Aniolem.
"Many thanks." I got out of the car into a bleak market square. The paths swept neatly and the snow on the grass unblemished. Three lamps glowed on three corners. All else was black except the orange letters above the hotel porch. I'd guessed for a long while that we were not heading in the direction of Grodgoszcz. Yet I thought it might only be my confusion, a secret wish to be abandoned in the snowy night. It was so obvious a foreigner would be staying in the big city that he'd not even asked.
But here I was outside Hotel pod Aniolem in a completely different town. Now if I was sensible I would walk up the four swept steps and ask at reception for a room for the night. I probably had enough money in my pocket, there night be a 20-zloty room. If not I could always hand in my ID card and give the name of the college where I taught. That would impress them. "I made a mistake!" I would smile and shrug helplessly. Of course they would let me stay the night.
Ten or fifteen, at most twenty kilometres. A distance not to be measured in bare numbers anyway. The important thing was this: I knew I could do it. Whether four hours or eight hours or ten, I would make it home.
I walked to the centre of the square, so as to begin at the beginning. Or just to see the four sides of the market square. Or to put my footsteps through the untouched snow. There was nobody about to see me anyway, nobody I had to give reasons to. A modern sleek-styled van outside the hotel bore the lettering Quanto Engineering. The significance of this didn't come to me at first.
As long as I didn't twist an ankle I would get home. I set off back along the same concrete-surfaced road. So I set out from the exact centre of the square on the road towards Grodgoszcz, pacing myself like a camel. I made narratives in my head of how I would describe the journey. I took note of the pre-war wooden houses, the steep pitch of the roofs and the way they projected dark and free of snow. The even rows of sheds on the edge of town. This is an unmistakeable feature of a collective farm. And to confirm it, three mowing attachments left side by side. I rehearsed what I would say about forced collectivisation in the Stalinist era and the questions I would ask. Then when the moment came I would speak in full sentences and be ready for the answer.
A field of beets, probably sugarbeet, with the leaves withered and drooping and the round root protruding from the ridges. Why had they not been pulled? The field seemed to go on for ever, the kind of field you stare at through the window of a train because the rows of crop glit by so evenly you have to blink and focus your eyes. But when I thought again about the field it was a long time later, I had covered several miles, and now there was just waste land or maybe it was hops or something with a lot of weeds running wild around them. If I turned my head a little slice of cold air got at my throat. I felt neither warm nor cold, but knew that if I stopped for a couple of minutes my muscles would find it hard to get going again. And in all that time not a single car had passed me.
I wouldn't be explaining this journey to anyone; it was just a game to talk through things in my mind. What was the value of remembering all these details on my way back? To what purpose am I storing up this view of the sandy margin of the road, that gritty band two hands wide where the cement thins to nothing and becomes fertile loam. I let myself slide down this pointless coil of thought. I will remember sharply, in focus, and waste my memory on this.
Some time during the night I realised I was moving diagonally, a trajectory that would soon begin to bring me farther away from the city, or where the city should be. I walked another while, looking out for a left turn. Even a field track would have been enough. But there was nothing, and I couldn't go the wrong road for ever. I looked back the way I'd come, a straight road. I waited until I was certain then lifted a foot across the blue ridge and stepped into the field. The furrows and ridges had a deceptive regularity. At any step I might put my weight on a shadow where the plough had cut deeper, or a ridge might only be a curl of frozen soil. There had been no snow for a week; the stark black and white confused my eyes. It all looked equally treacherous wherever I put my foot. I walked with high deliberate steps. A twisted ankle could kill me. There was no attraction in that thought. That dull orange glow against the clouds - was there cloud at all? - could be the dawn or could be the city.
I was a ship, guided by a glow from below the horizon.
I was a primal source of energy, dwindling to zero, warm inside, but there were reserves I had not yet touched, and reserves beneath the reserves that might never be touched.
The trolley buses rattled when I reached the outskirts. A grey pall hung over the city. People stood without looking at each other. The tramstop was at the far edge of a green crescent, away from the front steps of the apartment blocks. Nobody else was joining the people waiting, nobody running to be on time. Their faces looked the same to me, all like people who had smoked strong cigarettes for twenty years. Do no pretty girls have to get up at this hour? No-one under thirty?
I had never thought so many people had to get up at such an early hour. A couple of years of rising in the grey dawn would be enough to bring anyone down to assimilation. The cure for all wanton thoughts. The cobbled sound of trams on rails made me jittery. My eyes stared too long at things. I had to willfully move them. Or perhaps there was nothing wrong with my eyes. Perhaps they only look, the people, because I am walking down the street instead of waiting for the tram. Down the broad concrete street with the hard rails sunk into it. It is sunny because there is snow. This city is. A place on a map. I am walking into the city. The people with leather faces wait for a tram. The cure for all wanton thoughts. They stare because I am still walking with a high step like in the frozen field.
In my room I poured warm water into my basin. A red basin I'd bought by chance a few days before. The showers would have been too much to manage. At the best of times it was difficult to adjust the controls with the water streamiong over you.
I sat with my feet in the basin and when I coughed the phlegm came up cold in my mouth. It was some hours before I felt anything at all, some more before I felt sleepy.
I had got my wish. And was I satisfied?
Yes. I believe I was satisfied.
I was tutor at the city college. My title was "professor", but that was just for the wages office. Second day of October I tore a slip of paper the size of a bus ticket off a typed sheet pinned on the secretary's wall. This was my list of classes. I already knew from hearsay what was expected of me. I was to meet with the students and arrange whatever spare slots were left in their timetables, ask them what they did last year, then discuss with them what they wanted to learn this year.
This freedom scared the hell out of me. I wanted to play the professor role, come in and tell the students what to do. Instead they had to tell me - everything. The dates of public holidays, exams, where to get previous years' papers. We could negotiate days off for festivals and long weekends. Poland has the longest weekends in the world. Once a weekend went on for two weeks until the government declared it over.
Grodgoszcz is a small city. In Poland there are villages, small cities, and big cities. This place was big enough for me. Big enough to be surrounded by suburbs of high-rise flats, grouped by the half dozen with one name shared between them. Bare concrete skeletons with jutting balconies like vertebrae. Tracts of waste land between them. A kid pushing a tricycle along, a girl in a red skirt - the merely human sticks out awkwardly. You want to wave in recognition, say hey, what are you doing in a place like this? There are so few around out on the paths and rectangles of grass. Yet so many lights gleam inside the eight stories, seven windows wide, and only the odd one, a person, like this kid and a tricycle, caught out in the open.
The outside space is hostile. The first day here I asked what about all these half-built houses, bits of pipes and abandoned heaps of gravel in the gardens, grey blockwork left unsurfaced. Big anonymous sheds with metal doors pained anti-rust and surrounded by pitted earth ready to run riot in spring. But you knew close up that these buildings were years old, that they would never be finished. Outsides didn't matter much.
And after a while it didn't matter much to me either. I learned to see through the variations on grey. It was the insides of these skeletal blocks that impressed. Apartments where space was hoarded and conserved like the last pennies of an alcoholic. Bookshelves to the ceiling, home-made shelves bolted under the table. And not a bed in sight. All folded up and tucked away.
I had most afternoons free. The workload was not heavy. In fact I could do as much or as little as I liked. Nobody gave me a list of things to teach, nobody checked my timesheet. There was no such thing. Lots of afternoons I had free and might have gone for a walk except outside the town were just roads with no gravel margin for walkers, and there was just one park, mainly for mothers with children.
The moment I passed I thought immediately this must be it. Five steps up, a door with a handle, a lone dummy in the window wearing hat and scarf. I hadn't expect the bright skirts and pop-socks. Racks of ladies tops, camisoles, teenage disco-wear, multi-coloured jeans. Yet he was alone in the shop - no mother or sister to help him. Hello, I said heartily, in Polish of course. He laughed through his nose.
"You remember me from Friday night?" He nodded, raised his head a fraction to see me better.
"Of course."
"This is a nice clothes shop you have here." He shook his head, exhaled derisively. Kicked a chrome support. Tapped his foot and then stood with his hands behind his back, as close as he ever got to looking like a clothes merchant.
"You sell womens' clothes?" I picked up one of the tiny stretch-lycra tops popular that year. Pushed my knuckles against the thin fabric, making implicit shapes.
"Yes."
"You give women advice on what they should wear?" I weighed the filmy garment in my fingers.
"Sometimes," he said.
"Interesting job. I'd prefer it to mine."
"It's OK," he said. Short gusts escaped through his nose.
"Is this the family business?"
"Yes." He did not give any hint of impatience. I toyed with the idea of asking him straight out, why is it you say nothing. Everyone else is spewing it out, latching on to the weather, the price of houses, the latest church scandal. Anything to avoid those awful silences. And you just stand there contented. A smile and then a half-smile and then a nod.
A woman came up the steps. Late twenties, oval face with small mouth twisted to a pout against the cold. She hurried up the steps clutching her coat in front, two fists together. Sure-footed on the cracked slabs in her sharp clacking heels. I turned to the rack of casual shirts.
She spoke rapidly and breathlessly. He nodded, considered a moment, replied in a couple of words. Then he took a few pairs of stockings from behind the counter. This one, perhaps that one. I caught the few words he said. There was never any problem understanding Michal's Polish. She took two packs and handed over some notes. She caught my eye then and smiled. I nodded, said hello. She took her stockings, chirruped something about pretty, pretty, and left Michal nodding. Dowidzenia, goodbye, he said. About the only time I've ever heard him say just what people are expected to say.
"Do you have any special offers?" I asked. But my efforts at conversation thinned in my mouth. I longed to reach that contented silence where words could begin anew. He breathed in and drew himself up. For a moment I thought he was ignoring me. He had every right to. I would not have been offended.
"Nothing special." He pulled out a drawer with plain shirts wrapped in polythene. "It is always good to have six identical work shirts," he said. I nodded and picked through the samples for a suitable one. He charged me the price for five.
"Not so contented," said Stan. "I don't think he is very happy to be silent. Nor is he so happy to be working in the shop. You know he got accepted into college once. He was good at school and passed the state exams. But he gave up in second year. Now he just works in a simple clothes shop."
"Don't be a snob," I said, "It's a good job. A difficult job too. I'm sure he has to keep the books, deal with wholesalers, all that kind of thing." In truth I could not imagine Michal doing that kind of business. I could not imagine him dealing with accountants and wholesalers on the phone. I could not imagine him selling stockings to women either, yet I had seen it.
"His mother mainly runs the business. She's not in good health so leaves it to him more and more. I don't think he is very enthusiastic about it."
"Does he do good business there?"
"The place has its fans I believe. My family doesn't shop there. But it has its regular . . . clients." Stan was playing with his college RP English again. I had gone to visit him in his tenth floor apartment. In a way I was testing his friendship by dropping by unannounced. He had one room in a two bedroom apartment, sharing with some students. He himself was no longer one. He had finished up his five years of studies without collecting the degree, he told me. It sounded like it was sheer modesty that prevented him from picking up his signed scroll. "I completed the studies but did not yet collect my degree."
A drop-out, the rest of the world would call him. But he had indeed finished all the courses and passed all the exams he chose to sit. College rules meant it was open to him to return and sit the single exam he'd missed. A reminder letter came at the end of each term for the past three years. I knew that his sister and Romeo pestered him at each passing deadline. I wasn't going to join that chorus. If they couldn't convince him then I couldn't. This attention probably only fed his vanity - he'd be the first to admit it if I asked.
Stan had been sitting on his unfolded bed drinking a turkish coffee when I called. He had apologised and folded his bed, pushing the rebellious quilt down with his foot and making something of a battle of the task. Now we could stretch our legs under the coffee table. Stan edged the table a little to give me more leg room.
"Are you comfortable?"
I leaned back. Stretched my arms extravagantly to emphasis the spaciousness around me. "Yes. I'm fine. This is a very cosy place you have."
He fetched a couple of beers. When I first met him I was bothered by his habit of cracking open a beer at any time of the day.
"You know him a long time. Was he always the same as he is now? He must have been different as a kid?"
"Michal was always Michal. He was just the same at school. We used to go drinking together. We would take a day off school and Michal would say we have to go on a train going south."
"Would he?" I said.
"Yes. He always was the one to come up with the plan of what to do. And when he had an idea, that was it. We had to carry it out. There was no other way. It was quite scary sometimes."
"Scary? How?"
"We would be just drinking from a stupid can of cheap beer. Then he would get the idea to go on a train. An expedition. We had to go south to stand at the foot of the Sudety mountains. Or we had to buy a plastic spoon and nothing else from some particular shop and nowhere else. And we had to do it. There was no way to say no.
"So one day we ended up four hundred miles away in Sandomierz with no money for the ticket home. Actually I remember why we went there. We were drinking at the back of the school - this was also a sort of joke of his. He could tell his parents he was 'at school' because he was technically still on school property. That was another of his principles. It is better to say nothing than to tell a lie. And so he did not have to lie about being in school. Whenever we skipped school it was only to stand by some fucking grass mowers - old rusty harvesters left there - all sorts of junk. We could have been down in Pino's bar playing pool, or just drinking a beer by the lake, or back in my place playing music because my parents were working all day. But no, we had to stay all day in that shitty place. So many times it looked like a dosser's hideout with all the empty bottles and bits of toilet roll."
"Toilet roll?"
"Yes. We stayed there all day I told you. Anyway that day we were talking about the school. The saint of the school is ***** And he says, we must go to the place where the founder was born. Are you serious I said, you hate this fucking school. No, he insisted, we must go there. It was better to go there than to go to school. More noble. Like we were not just two kids taking a day off school to go on the piss. We had a 'higher' mission." He smiled drily. I shifted my legs one way then another. I hadn't the knack of sitting comfortably on the floor.
"So if you spent whole days there you must've talked lots with him."
Stan squinted. It was hard to reach back in memory and pluck out exactly one thing. "With just me and him maybe he did talk a bit more. Obviously I talked the most. I don't know. We didn't just sit there silently staring at the straw. I wasn't bored, otherwise I would have just gone somewhere else. Maybe he talked a bit more then. It's possible. Yes. I think he might have talked a bit more then. But he talked to me more than to most people. And when he had a few beers he was always able to talk more freely. Of course he would never be flowing with words. But with a whole day sitting among weeds and wild rye he could say all that he wanted to say.
"And this place, Sandomierz?"
"This was our pilgrimage. We bought our tickets and sat on the train. Six hours to Sandomierz. It was already closing time at school before we got there."
"Did he talk on the train?"
"Not small talk. Of course I bought the tickets and spoke to the conductor and so on. But after a few beers he would begin to speak."
"And what would he talk about?" I felt on the track, on the hunt for something.
"Just. His 'teachings.'" Again an enigmatic smile.
"His teachings," I repeated. I think I was beginning to guess. A refusal to engage in bullshit. A trust to omens and signs. An oblique contact with the world.
"So we got to Sandomierz at five o'clock. You might have been there? It's an amazing place. There is a weird tree in front of the castle that has fingers like a monster. The whole tree crawls forward and then moves back in the wind. The drunks all sit on one long bench, ten in a row, each with his own bottle. The tree makes a sudden move and they all look over their shoulders. Oh whore, they say, oh whore, watch out for the whoring tree. And they scatter to the safe ends of the bench and squabble. A few minutes later and they're back again. Oh whore, that thing will fall on us any minute. This is what makes Michal smile.
"We bought two beers to celebrate the occasion of our visit to Sandomierz. Then we went to the grave of the founder and sat there to drink them. We were pretty lucky to find the grave. Sandomierz has dozens of old churches for such a small city. We went to the first we saw and it was there, one of the first graves we looked at. Actuaally there was a little arrow pinned on the church wall. They must be pretty short of famous people. Of course it was just as Michal had expected. We stood over the grave and opened the beer. Our "pilgrimage". Pretty fucking sick, isn't it." He clicked out the side of his mouth, smiled grimly, took a draught from his can.
"But you don't think it's sick at all. You think it's pretty cool," I said.
He paused. "You're right. I am still in some way. Loyal."
I had the feeling Stan had borrowed some of the power of his silences from Michal. He allowed them to spread, filling the space between us while I waited for him to continue.
"Sandomierz."
"Yes, it's a beautiful town. All tourists come there, foreigners too. The market square is one of the best in Poland. Sandomierz is in the east, where people say they are the best Poles. You know they call us in the west half-Germans. We are little germanized robots according to them. It is true people are friendlier out east. As we found out when we arrived there with one bottle of beer between us, and about forty zloty. Old zloty. That's about enough for two buttered bread rolls. But of course we had to spend it on a cup of black coffee. In some cafe bar where the local drunks hang out.The woman wanted to know where we were from. This is where Michal is way beyond all bounds of society. If he doesn't like the question he doesn't answer. He can ignore anybody, anywhere. Hey, tall fellow, are you a spy, the woman joked. If he is he's not a very good one I said. She was just being friendly, but for Michal every word has significance. It cannot be possible that people say things for no reason. And so on the train journey home he was thinking a long time. I could see it. It wasn't just the normal Michal silence. Something was on his mind. 'I am a spy,' he said to me. 'That's what the woman said.' It made an impression on him. Even today, if you talk to Michal for long enough, at some point he will say to you, 'I am a spy'. He has said it to several different people over the years. Me, Romeo and his sister at least."
"His private joke."
Stan frowned. "He doesn't smile when he says it. It's not a joke. It's just something he says with no explanation. But if you hear him say it, you will know it dates back to Sandomierz."
"Sandomierz."
"Yes, Sandomierz. The woman put milk in his coffee. You don't put milk in coffee, but she looked at us and thought, these kids need to neutralise the caffeine. Always drink your coffee black. He left, out the door with the other half of the money, and I was standing like a fool. I didn't know whether to run or apologise. Finally she came out to grab me, this big fat woman, and only at that point I ran. I caught up with Michal. First I had to find him of course. He was up a laneway, the obvious place to hide, and so he just had to wait for me. That's that he told me. Our mission was now to get black coffee. Before anything else we had to do that. We took a long route through the back of the town to get back to the opposite side of the square. There was a milk bar there. But our problems were not over yet. Coffee, please, black, we said. And I had to shout to stop her from pouring the second coffee. This pissed her off. She wanted to throw us out. But at last we had our coffee. And it was strong and the right colour. So what do we do now? 'What do people do in Sandomierz? They visit the museum.' Fine, we had to visit the museum. It was early summer I think, a month or so before school ended. Anyway the weather was good that day, we could walk around in our jackets. I remember the crows in all the trees. These ragged crows in all the trees. Michal liked the crows, as you might guess."
I remember Sandomierz too, for the little white houses. It looked like a Greek village to me. Flat roofs and small square windows, nothing like the tall townhouses in other parts. I remember the people walking silently by on the streets. The only noise was the trolley buses and some bells. The local museum displayed Turkish curved sabres and uniforms of the Polish soldiery. I was the only visitor through the hour I was there. The matriarch who showed me around the castle followed two steps behind me through every room. Each time I left a room she turned off the lights fater me, then skipped by me to turn on the lights in the next room. She asked if I was a professor. Yes, I said, which was true but not the truth. I stood in front of an oil painting and learned my first sentence in this strange language. The girl with a red bucket..
"What were the crows a sign of?"
"The crows are not a sign. The crows are just crows. But it is true we were on the look out for a sign to go home. Or better, a sign for how we were going to get home with no money. Coffee and beer in my stomach. That's a familiar mixture. I was running on my own energy. But that's another one of Michal's principles."
"What is?"
"Pure thought does not need food. Food is an animal neccesity. Eat only if you have to."
"Why?"
"He thought eating was degrading. The less you do of it the better. He would eat at home because he couldn't avoid it then. But if we were out on a Saturday he might forget to eat all day. I asked him once and he definitely said this: 'Eating is for animals. I am not an animal.' He was disgusted at the whole process of chewing and swallowing food."
"Where does he get his ideas from? Where did he come up with that notion?"
"It comes from inside him."
I was exasperated. Obscurely I felt he had no right to his ideas. He was an annoyance. I wanted to pick him apart and find out that his father used to beat him his mother was a psychatrist he had been taught to read Latin when he was four his parents were in a sect a beloved uncle committed suicide - something, anything that would explain him. I wanted to pin him down and find he was not so extraordinary after all. But no. His parents run a clothes shop. His older sister is a primary school teacher. In his early teens he played on the school football team. Then one day - one year - he decided he was silent Michal. That was who he was. He had no right.
"You still follow the principle of eating only when necessary,"
It was true. Stan is the runt of the litter, with wispy colourless hair and thick glasses. His two brothers and sister have thick unruly dark hair, but Stan looks like the class nerd twelve years on. His skin is not pale, but a wan shade of olive. This is someone who has kept out of the sun for too long, who hesitates before committing himself to action.
But there was something more to the set of his eyes that contradicted that first impression of indolence. An intoxicated energy gleamed from behind his eyes, keeping him going, his fingers drumming on the low table, his legs curled up under him. He was always in motion, talking or fretting. We'd been sitting quite a while - he'd offered me beer several times, whiskey, tea and coffee. It did not occur to him to offer food. There was never any food in his room that I could see, nor empty plates or empty packaging. Now he jumped up and rummaged in his plywood boxes. A packet of pasta shells and a tin of pulped tomato.
"This is too much bother, I'm not hungry anyway," I lied. But he insisted, the kitchen would be empty at this time of day, we needed to eat. We took the ingredients and pots and beers out to the communal kitchen. Went back for the ashtray and a rag to wipe the worktop. We leaned against the wall in the garishly yellow kitchen. Doing what the residents have apparantly done for decades when waiting for their food to cook: picking holes in the friable plaster. Some were gouged to a depth of three inches right to the concrete wall within. They were there to hold your cigarette while you took two hands to a pot. Or maybe to hold a salt cellar, or hang clothes to dry, or just to pick at a little more every day to make you feel good.
"This is beautiful," I said running my fingers over the scarred wall.
"I think so too," he said, "All carved with finger nails. And very practical. You notice the way this one curves in to collect the ash of your cigarette. We East Europeans are inventive."
He went to the room and returned with a shoebox of sachets. Flicked through them like a librarian. It may have been just pasta and a tin of tomatoes, but he was concerned to get an opulent balance of flavours. Paprika, chilli, herbs Provencale, powdered garlic, marjoram, chicken spices, dill, and cinnamon. He lightly dusted them over the tomatoes. Toward the end he poured a capful of sunflower oil into the mix.
"I eat sunflower oil with everything," he said, "With sunflower oil and paprika you can make a meal out of anything."
"Not olive oil?"
"Olive oil is for cleaning the inside cavities of the ear."
We sat on cushions on opposite sides of the coffee table. The folded bed was alongside us. Behind that was the rest of the room: a massive wardrobe right of the window, a table up against the back wall stacked high with boxes of files. And a shiny chrome-plated clothes rack, such as you might see in a clothes shop. From Michal no doubt, but an extravagent waste of space here. It held a dozen shirts and five or six suits. Stan had never worked in an office to my knowledge, but his parents, perhaps in an effort to help him get a proper job, got him a new suit every Christmas. Perhaps at Michal's shop. A viola, or at any rate the case. He had studied music for a time. Some rearrangement could have freed up more legroom in the place. At the back wall was a solid antique table - antique meaning pre-war - stacked high with cloths and books.
"My room has eleven square metres," he'd warned me the first time he suggested calling by. That meant nothing to me. It gave no impression of how the books, box files, curtains and wall rugs pressed in on all sides. He was a fan of the kilim, a wool rug for the wall or floor, decorated with stylised bulls and eagles in patterns that date back to the settlement of Cathal Huyuk in ancient Anatolia. One hung on the wall on each side of the room, an older one on the floor at my heels. A gutted computer lay strewn over three shelves. I suppose he still cherished hopes of resurrecting it, not realising the past couple of years have made it obsolete.
We ate the pasta shells from thick white soup plates. The uneven off-white of hospital crockery. He didn't offer second helpings. When we finished he washed the plates and pot out in the kitchen and put them back in a box. Stan opened the window and took a bottle of vodka in off the balcony. He does not have a fridge, nor need one. There were a couple of tarry inches left in the coffee jug. He tipped it slowly to decant the grit-free upper layer into a shot glass, then topped it off with the chilled vodka. Sniffed and sipped it.
"That whiskey you gave me for Christmas helps keep my mind clear at night. I need a little to concentrate late into night. It's a tonic, completely the opposite effect to beer. But now there is only an inch left and I promised to keep a drop for March. A shot of vodka in coffee has the same effect. It clears the head immediately, no drunken feeling, nothing like that. I use it when I have to stay up late at night studying."
But you are no longer a student Stan. Or did you forget for a moment? I did not say this, of course.
I took a sip of the concoction. It concentrated my mind just to stop spewing it out again.
"This is your own invention?"
"No, it comes from the soul of our nation. We are the masters of copy."
"Ersatz," I said.
"Ersatz," he said, startled at the familiar word. "We have chocolate which contains no cocoa and no milk. Coffee made from barley. Beef Wellington you can buy which has no beef in it. And perhaps genuine wellington."
"All that changes."
"All that changes and we will have other fake things to replace them."
"Fake snow on your Christmas trees."
"It's early yet," I said. "What are you going to do today?"
He pulled a curtain to one side and looked out over the bleak vista of blocks and foot-tracks criss-crossed through the wet and dirty snow. Sighed deeply and sat down again. I regretted asking.
"I think I should get off my ass and do some translations. I need to make another two hundred zloty this week to make up the rent. What time is it at all? Hell, I could have gone to Strzelec today, now it's too late. At least I've made the dinner for today. That's one task settled and done with. Hmm. Now what can be next."
Stan was at his liveliest in the thick of a conversation, late at night preferably. On a free and easy Saturday morning like this he was close to being in form. But the one sure way to kill the spirit in him was to ask him what his plans are. I could feel the murk of indecision and apathy infecting the air. It was time to go, and maybe some other time I would hear the end of the Sandomierz story.
I looked back in my diary yesterday, the one I kept when I lived in Warsaw, before the move to Grodgoszcz. I can't figure out how so little happened in the four years I spent there. I read the cryptic remarks I wrote down at odd intervals, hust enough over four years to almost fill a notebook. "And after the years it is all as one; all action has gone down the drain opened in memory."
Yet Warsaw was a hectic city. I spent my time eating pizza with the numerous English teachers that drifted through the schools there. Every week I presented my face at yet another reception desk, trying to collect enough hours to live off. If they forgot your face they would never call you with extra hours.
I never got to know anyone well, certainly not Polish people. When I left I didn't write to anyone. Once or twice on a visit back there I made contact with some of the old friends and of we went out to the downtown places we knew. But I still can't figure out how I spent so long there and know nobody. Maybe for three years I was overwhelmed by the wide cityscapes, the vodka shops and vegetable markets, the everything foreign and new. "Today there were crocuses on the tram roundabout for the first time." Did I really write stuff like that? I certainly don't remember crocuses. I remember the market with baby clothes and soap powder, and I remember all those grey balconies and clothes hanging out to dry. And streets so wide it was an expedition to cross them.
But I never made proper contact with Poland until I moved to Grodgoszcz. That bleak industrial town was like a black rut in the snow that I stumbled into. Evil vapours issued from unmarked sheds around the outskirts and condensed in the heavy air. The pervasive coal smoke was recognisable. High vapours from the paint factory were part of the summer smell. But there was another volatile odour that hit the back of my nasal passages, dried my throat, made me spit constantly. When at last I opened the window of my room (for the first few days I had not realised it could be opened at all) it was there, hanging in the air six stories up. In a secret shameful way there was an attractive undertone to the smell. It was a smell to burrow back into. You knew it would there for you, familiar, close by. I could never ask anyone what it was because out on a cafe terrace or walking through the old square it was never strong enough to distinguish. When I asked anyway they said it was the vegetable oil factory, it was stronger some days and weaker others. Maybe so. But I still held on to my first theory: it was the collective smell of people when they are herded into ten-storey blocks.
Everything about Michal's family was completely average. Brought up in one of those eight storey blocks, in the apartment where his parents still live. His older brother worked in a textile factory on the outskirts of town. Got promoted to manager level recently. He was married with no kids yet. Stan and he would exchange a wave if they passed and once in a pub they had had a drunken conversation about the bourgeois lifestyle and the corruption of executives in suits. The brother bought Stan several beers and swore he envied him his lifestyle.
His sister was a primary-school teacher in the school they had all gone to as children. She still lived with the parents. Stan had only gotten to know the sister in the last couple of years. She was a nice girl, talked about the kids a lot, wanted to go to Italy on a holiday some day, to Florence in particular. I met her once when I was in town with Stan. He talked earnestly with a tall dark-haired girl in rapid Polish. Finally he introduced me, switching to English: "This is the guy I was telling you about." She smiled at such ineptitude, shook my hand. The second question she asked was which artist I preferred, Picasso or Dali. I thought she was a bit odd. Later I realised that in some peoples' eyes I was a college teacher, a cultured westerner.
"And what does his sister say about Michal?"
"Just like normal. Like he is a normal person. And in fact he is. Just sometimes she will ask me a question like 'How is his shop going'. Or she might ask me to tell him about a family dinner the next Sunday. I know that she prefers to tell me rather than him directly, which is a bit strange. They have accepted him the way he is and don't think about it any more. That's his name after all, Silent Michal."
Every thread I picked up led nowhere. Michal would appear in the Angels bar once a month or so, take a seat alongside the old school friends, drink a couple of beers and go home.
For a week in advance I wore a suit and tie to work and gave a friendly wave to the head of department when I passed. He was a moustached jovial man, full of American witticisms. He liked to tell little tales of his years in America, pointless crazy things that happened: smuggling a crate of beer across the state border, going out back to shoot a few beer cans. Would have stayed in the states too, if they hadn't caught up with me, he'd laugh.
He didn't have to pretend to be cool. I think he liked being more straight-forward with the native speakers. I'm sure he'd have to be more formal with the Polish staff. Yet still he was my boss and I wanted to make a profesional impression.
Stan was mouldering away with his textbooks still on the shelves, not yet quite dusty. He was a natural academic left running to seed doing cast-off translations and hanging around waiting for an omen. For once I could make the pretend-professor role do something real.
I arranged a meeting with the head of department and spoke about the relevance of practical experience in language study. He listened sympathetically. Yep, he said, you've got that right. I laid down Stan's CV. This for example is a guy I came across when I was doing some editing work for an international firm. He does top-quality translations for them, intrepretation too, yet he can't sign off official translations because he doesn't have a degree. There should be some access to the college for people like this, I said. Some way he can complete a degree here building on his experience, and with his year's practical experience abroad. (Stan had worked a long summer in London.) College should not be seen as just an extra few years at school. In other countries they were open to the idea of mature students.
The head agreed readily. Yes, mature students are something the college should have. The matter is on the board agenda. At the moment grants were only awarded to fresh school-leavers. The college was looking to get grants for mature students too. With no grant a student would have to pay the full fee. Maybe the firm he worked for could be flexible with his hours and allow him go to classes during the day?
I didn't feel good about raising the issue for merely personal motives, or at least for a personal friend. I had expected to encounter a fossilised bureaucrat, and instead there was this man with a baseball and chewinggum accent.
If your friend can work out some way of paying the fees, then sure he can apply, the head concluded. I'd be happy to look favourably on his application. He'd get credit for the years he's studied already, that can be worked out. Sure.
Just asking for information, I said. I'll pass it on to this guy.
Stan reluctantly made the applications. I played his own game against him; told him not to worry about the fees, if the application was successful it would be a sign that the money would come from somewhere. When did you begin to worry about money, I told him. Is this Stan, a person who worries about money? You can pay with butterfly wings and tell them it's thousand zloty notes. They'll believe. You can get a loan from Romeo's boss at HP. You can sing for it on the streets. You might find it lying in the gutter any day.
He contacted his old college and got transcripts. Letters from HP confirming he was a talented translator who would benefit from formal linguistic training. Tax returns from the district office to confirm his income. Four or five documents in all, but in practice it took weeks of coaxing and constant little reminders.
The fees were the big unknown. I pushed the thought to one side. Maybe I was thinking of Stan's older brother, who might give a loan. Or I could have another chat with the head and see if there was a way of unofficially attending the course and getting the official results. A little cheerfulness and charm would go a long way.
The eight fat women in administration found a problem that no charm could evade. They needed a certificate from the army confirming that Stan had performed his military service or that he would not be called up during his three years at college. Stan grinned wryly with resignation when I told him. The system of military service is a slumbering bear you don't want to awaken. Many, maybe most, get the non-standard rectangular postcard calling them to service a few months after they leave school. But some names fall through the cracks in the floorboards of the provincial barracks. Some people, for no reason - no influence or connections are involved - don't get the little card. The danger period of August to December passes and they are free for another year. It's a nervous existence, a life lived provisionally. Some stick it out year by year until the magic age of twenty-six when you are free of the curse. Others can't stick the tension. They write a letter to the local ministry asking when if ever they will be called up. The answer arrives back a week later. You are due to commence service next August. Please present yourself for a medical inspection.
Stan would not make that mistake. Not with just three years left before he was free of the threat. "Three years," he said wanly, "then I can return to college. So, it would take me three years anyway to save up the fees. What's the problem?"
Both of us knew he would never begin the application process again. It was like pulling a truck on a rope. It's hard to get it moving at all and it takes constant effort to keep it moving. But I wasn't going to join him in the universe of despondency. He had work whenever he really needed it, his own flat (most people didn't), and a good chance of getting a well-paid job if he tried. Truth was, Stan liked the occasional wallow in self-pity. That was how I saw it. His dream job was getting paid for reading books and making ironic remarks. There's no such job. And failing it, getting enough to live off from twenty hours a week translation came a close second.
I used occasionally to call by the shop on Mickiewicza and buy a pair of socks or a scarf. The front steps were crumbly, precarious in the icy weather. Michal would raise his head slightly to see who it was coming in the door, and then let it hang again, twisting to one side as though looking for an escape, then lift his head a fraction once more and say dzien dobry. He said it like it was a word only he and I knew from some childhood storybook. I never again tried to make small talk. I would browse unhurriedly along the clothes racks, taking my time at choosing whatever I needed. Time passed quickly there. And he was not totally silent; he might remark on whatever article I was holding. These are shirts from Romania. This pattern is dyed in, not printed. Once he stepped inside the window display and spent a long time meticulously arranging the limbs of the dummies.
When Stan rang me and said he was coming over to look for work I was dubious. I hoped for his sake it was another great decision that came to nothing. The cafes are full of foreign workers. Whenever you see a building site worker without a wary sneering set to his features, you can bet he's a Pole. He might be a Russian or from a Baltic state, but chances are he's a Pole. You can tell the serious expression, the quick determined movements.
You can't walk down a city street without hearing three or four east European languages. And Stan would be another one. I feared he would sink into the ordinary. Whatever that might mean.
But I couldn't tell him this. He would think I was reluctant to have him over. I could predict anyway that he wouldn't find work, certainly not translation work. He'd get disillusioned and go back home after a month.
People emerged in waves of twenty or thirty. Their attitude was jaded, yet watchful. One by one the faces lit up and smiled. Sometimes gazing straight at me, but I knew it was just someone in the rows crushed behind me. The arrivals display said the last plane landed was from Barcelona, but these didn't look like people returning from a sun holiday. And the ebb and flow coming out through customs seemed to have no connection with the times of arrival as given on the huge red signboards.
Stan was not among them. He had no money and no phone. I sat and closed my eyes for a couple of minutes. There was nowhere he could go.
I found him circling the lounge pulling a fantastic caravan of red check bags roped together. A chassis of wheels lashed underneath it. Where else would I be waiting except in the bar? Why did I not just sit there and wait?
I insisted on undoing the knots and carrying the bags by hand. Each was the weight of a sack of potatoes.
"Jesus what have you got here?" I asked.
"My life's equipment," he smiled wanly. I took the strain and the straps dug into the flesh of my shoulder. A few years in Dublin had made me soft. Soft white bread and soft spongy burgers. We struggled out to the cutting wind. Stan raised his hand to shield his eyes.
"Is there a taxi?"
"There's one there. But we're going by bus."
The strap held promise of deep pink speckles down to my chest. I cursed him and his red check carrier bags, and tottered over to the bus stop. Stan drew the string limply back around the remaining bags and pulled his swaying bazaar behind him. He needed it. He was so thin I was afraid the Irish wind would blow him away while he blinked and rubbed his eyes.
Minutes later our bus was trundling past the native version of the blocks of flats that blighted central Europe. Excited voices cut through the humid air. Stan in a Dublin bus: bubbles of laughter rose up in me at the idea. I had been mistaken. Ireland was a puny challenge to the likes of Stan. Someone who was born and reared in apartment 'n' of block 'm' in a town no-one has heard of is in no danger of sinking into the ordinary. Whatever that might be.
He stretched out his legs in my North Circular Road bedsit and said something about the cold. Yes, there is a damp cold wind that penetrates the thickest coats. And if you button up yet more to resist it, then it leaves you damp and sweaty inside your swaddling. Best stay indoors, wait for a dry sunny day. He stroked his nascent beard, looked about him at the four walls, the damp spots bulging out from the plaster, the sickly blue paintwork, the iron-framed spy window looking over the back yard.
"It's good to be here. It's a real nice place you've got."
I threw him a second glance but he was just being polite. "Yeah, we're just fifteen minutes from the city centre. It's not a bad spot to be in."
I tugged and worried the strings of his baggage, prodded the auspicious bulges.
"Just cut it with a knife. We won't be putting it together again."
I slashed the strings. The contents slew sideways across the floor. Like a kid at Christmas I pulled out items one by one from the corncupia. Cigarettes galore, potato starch, powdered dill, Cracow kielbasa, kabanosy, stomach vodka and cherry vodka, rye vodka and potato vodka, made from choice potatoes only. And underneath again; jars of beans, packets of soup, instant noodles made in Vietnam, long-life rye bread, more instant noodles.
He spread his hands. "I didn't want to be a burden. I won't have much money until I get a job."
I dug deeper into that tartan behemoth. The bottom was lined with six litre cartons of UHT milk. The stuff that lasts for years. I rubbed my shoulder tenderly.
"And in the other bag?"
"The other bag has my books and cds. And some more stuff for the kitchen." There was a half dozen bottles of cheap Mocne beer and a dictionary.
"So how are you doing since you got back to Ireland?" he asked. "We always talk about more significant things on the phone. You mentioned you were teaching in some school?"
"A few hours. It's summer now so I'm not doing much."
"So you will be starting back next month?"
I scratched my nose. "Perhaps. Who can tell the future? Anything can happen."
He jumped up animated. "Exactly. We must make the future. We have to reach out and grasp hold of our lives. Sieze control again and don't let the monkey hold the wheel." He was delighted. The slapped-on plaster and creaky floorboards quickened his soul. The pipes with their knobbly fittings gave him solace. He bounced out to the eerie blue cubicle with an iron-framed window set ten foot high. An iron creak and rattle of chains was followed by a gush that trailed off to high white noise. Interesting sound, he shouted from inside, I like it.
The bastard. I could see inside his secret fear. He had thought to find me a career-drone, absorbed in my job, speaking the language of winners and losers. From reading the newspapers he would have got the idea that I must be earning thirty, forty, or fifty thousand, just like everybody else. He had thought I would graciously tolerate an old friend from a backward country. Feed my pride with my ability to help an unfortunate immigrant, who truth be told, could have made something of himself once. Now that he realised I had nothing he felt far more comfortable about accepting my hospitality.
He rubbed his hands. "I'll make you a proper Polish dinner. We'll have a feast of kielbasa and gherkins. You know I have an optimistic feeling." He paced the room. "I think I will be able to get a job pretty soon. I feel like I could just walk in to the first place along the street, say Give me a job, and they'll say, you're just the person we were waiting for. Your name is not Stan is it? And I'll say, that's me, Stan the man and I'm ready for action. I could do anything here. Anything at all. Hey, maybe I could become a male model. I read in a magazine that Irish men are too shy to become models and that all the models in Ireland are foreign. That's pretty amazing. I have no objection to wearing a leather jacket and posing for photographs. Stanislaw sports an autumn shooting jacket. Stanislaw in this season's Ralph Lauren shirt."
"I wouldn't count on it. Better hand in your CV to McDonald's on the way to the modelling agency."
He stepped down off the bed. "What have you got to be negative about? Did you ever look at a clothes catalogue? Serious, did you ever look at one? The men are all ordinary as bread with schmalz. You just have to be slim and have a tan. What's up with you? Can I not even try?"
He looked disappointed with me.
"Go ahead then. Try. I just think it can't be that easy."
"Even Michal one day was in his shop and the supplier asked him to be a model. It was the suit factory from Stettin. We need someone for these clothes, he told him, do you want to come over on Saturday for a few hours. We'll pay you of course. Even Michal had a chance to be a model."
"And what did he say to that?"
Stan sighed.
"Nothing," he said wistfully.
I was glad that he was there. His mood was infectious. Over hard rye bread and black tea I began to feel foreign, a stranger in this city of opportunities. I'd let things slide for a year and a half now. It was time for a change. Stan would lift me out of the rut.
We stepped out onto the streets.
"What about Romeo?" I asked.
"Romeo got married to a doctor's daughter, his parents were very proud of him. He moved to Warsaw and set up a ccompany. It's a real company, he employs several people."
"What about Grodgoszcz, any changes?"
"Grodgoszcz 'won' - that's the word the local newspapers used - a Philips light bulb factory. Yeah, there are some changes you have to see. The block where I used to live is getting a face lift. Panels of blue glassy stuff are being fitted on the facade from top to bottom, shades of blue and green. The balconies were all ripped out and replaced with stainless steel frames. The whole thing looks like a rocket launcher. It's amazing to stand back and see it. You know there are buildings with cheap-looking bluey panels. This is nothing like that. It's completely different to the ordinary glass panels they use."
"Did the rent not go up?"
There's an agreement for the rent to go up year by year. There was no increase while the work was still going on and then it jumped ten percent. Next year it'll jump again but I probably won't go back there. I got someone to take my room and I've lost all rights to my place there. You'll have to see it though. The lift shaft was cored out and widened and a new lift put in. It's amazing experience just to go up in this lift. The whssssh sound makes me feel good."
I tossed out all the names I remembered. 'Angels' was till there, but now there were five new pubs it had to compete with. The new paving in the square was still not completed. Customers and tourists had to walk across compacted sand. A foreign teacher, perhaps my replacement, had started a fire in his room by accident and the upper floors of the block had to be evacuated. Since then the insurance company has demanded higher premiums for the foreign staff. This has led to cuts in pay and various disputes. Stan related all these scandals in a quick monotone, like he'd been waiitng a long time to tell someone all this.
Our steps took us out to where the carbon-monoxide winds of Phibsboro blow. We stood at the corner, thinking of where the nearest off-licence should be. A maelstrom of traffic flew past us and around us. A woman folded clothes neatly in the window of a charity shop. He feels more comfortable, Stan says, in a place where things are not perfect. In a city where shopkeepers paint their own signs outside, where the neon tubes flicker and buzz, the countertop does not meet seamlessly with the wall, and car mechanics operate out of seedy back lanes. Too much perfection is a sickness.
Yes, I agreed.
We passed three shops with handwritten signs staff required. Stan took it as an omen of good fortune, on his first day too, not forgetting the number 48 bus that slowed down at the stop with the driver roaring out: Stop me if you can me name is Stan. That was a sign and he was still disputing the interpretation.
And Michal?
The shop had gone bust years ago. The stock was sold off to a secondhand store and the windows boarded up. A private dentist was due to take over the premises and maybe he had already. For years the shop had been losing money. The family kept it going out of pride. They were the shopkeepers, and that was something to be. It also provided a job for Michal. But the mother no longer had the energy. The pace of change had quickened, new boutiques sprang up in the narrow streets off the main square. It became impossible to predict what might sell and what would sit on the shelves for months. For a time she complained about disloyal customers and wondered how they had the nerve to say hello to her in the streets one day and scurry past the shop the next. She realised at last that she didn't want to bear an eternal grudge against the neighbours she'd known all her life.
I had really thought Michal forced a breach in the rules of human nature. I liked the idea of him standing to one side in an unimposing silence while his customers picked out their wares. It might be there were thousands of shoppers who dropped in to the boutique by chance and returned again and again for that special atmosphere. It might be that though he was incapable of one-to-one communication, he could make a special connection with the dozens of anonymous customers who drifted into the shop, so they at once felt at ease. I pictured them like browsing sheep, paying no attention to the shepherd, but happy that he's there. Perhaps his brand of misanthropy was an intense aversion to the individual, but a serene acceptance of the everyman and everywoman.
But it even in Poland the laws of commerce operate as elsewhere in the world, and a business where the shopkeeper never speaks to his customers is doomed. The boutique shut its doors for good, Michal ceased to appear in the Angels bar. He no longer met up with the old friends. Romeo in any case was no longer in circulation, some of the others had gone abroad.
"That was it? He just dropped out of sight and you never called by?"
"I knew he'd be fine. If he doesn't want to call to people there's no point in forcing him. He lives at his own pace. Maybe two months or maybe four, but some day I was sure he would call. But he didn't." "And no-one you know met him? Even by chance on the streets?"
"A friend of Romeo's, an electrician who used to fix the lights in the shop, called by. Michal seemed fine then. Apparently there was a rumour gping around that Michal was suffering from depression."
"Depression?"
"This is what people were saying. Nobody had depression when we were teenagers. But now we have imported the idea. Now if you realise the world is a shit place, that's called depression. I don't believe myself that Silent Michal is depressed. But he may be showing some of the symptoms."
"Like?"
"Like not meeting friends. Like staying in your room and not going out. Like not eating very much."
"And like not talking very much."
"Exactly. And drinking too much black coffee. What we call 'being Silent Michal' is suddenly discovered to be depression. But this was only a rumour from a friend of a friend. I don't think he saw a doctor.
"How did the clothes shop end?"
"It stayed open day after day and nobody came in. He was earning nothing from it. I mean really nothing. He went to his parents for his meals every day to save money. When the hoover broke he used to sweep the shop floor with a brush. He was still staying in his own apartment then. I don't know how he paid the rent."
"Until his mother finally put an end to it?"
"Yes. His parents always gave him a certain amount of freedom. At least since, well, how shall I put it, since the change to Silent Michal. But in the end his mother told him to close it. The shop after all was in her name and she had worked ther up till a couple of years ago. It was a slow end. I would call by his shop sometimes and he would be standing there like a hero. He would never sit down on the job. Another principle. Nobody would call all day and he would still be standing. Eventually he had no money to pay for new clothes from the wholesalers. For six months he stood in that shop with the exact same clothes. He had run out of socks and the simple things, but he stayed open. Then the day arrived when he couldn't even pay the electricity bill."
"After that he dropped out of sight as you said. I didn't see him for a long time. I know you find it strange. Maybe OK I should have called for him. It's just that a few months doesn't seem that long to Michal. You can meet him after several months and things are the same and you start talking like nothing has happened. I'm sure for you everything moves quickly, you see a lot of people and a week is a long time. But with Michal I knew that we'd meet some day, eventually, whenever he was ready."
We sat on a low wall, our backs to a droning torrent of traffic. In front of us a line of cars crawled bumper to bumper on the long forecourt of the shopping arcade. The drivers cast glances left and right for a free parking space. Where we sat there was a four foot gap between the cars. The drivers gauged it with their eyes and looked at us irritated. There could never be enough spaces for all the cars that turned in. Some must emerge the far end and circle around again. Traffic in front and traffic behind, yet we'd be sitting there an hour oblivious to it all.
I could see Stan was making excuses for himself. He regretted not making contact with Michal. To me it sounded like a betrayal. Michal had lost his job and his apartment. At the exact moment he needed support his oldest friend had abandoned him, left him alone in a box room in his parents' apartment. The Stan I used to know would'nt have done that. Maybe he'd got too much common sense since then.
"Hey. Your first day in Ireland and we're stuck in memories of things that happened a thousand miles away. Look at where we are."
Stan lifted his head. Though he wore no glasses he always gave the impression of peering through a fog and discovering what lay around him. Perhaps he really did have a problem with his eyesight.
"Where is this place? Is it somewhere important?"
"It's nowhere special. I just thought you should see a bit of Dublin. What do you think of it?"
"It's nice," he said. He jumped up and walked to the window display opposite. "There's a lot of anti-sun lotion here," he called over. He looked up at the low grey sky. "It certainly seems to be working. And what's this green thing?"
"It's a postbox."
A flash of recognition crossed his face. He hugged the postbox. "Now I know what it is when I paint it red in my mind. The old red postbox. That was a chapter in our textbook at school. Every page had a picture of a postbox, from all possible angles. A roundy bouncy postbox. When did they change from red? What's this mucky green colour?"
"It's the English ones are red. Don't you know where you are?"
"The buses are green too instead of red! Yep, I've got it figured out now." Stan was delighted with his discovery. He looked as though he had suddenly fallen in love with this city. The traffic fumes smouldered in my nostrils. My head felt warm and pressurised, like there was an engine humming there.
"Let's get out of this shitty place," I said.
"Wait. Is this a beer shop next to us? The window looks like a toy shop, no wonder we didn't notice."
We pushed open the glass door. A bell tinkled somewhere. It was electronic, coming from behind the counter. The air was cool and clean inside. I could draw in deep breaths. As slowly as possible we walked down one aisle and up the other. Cans were stacked in a precise pyramid. The signs with prices were tiny, placed to one side, apologetically. Someone was proud of this display. Someone came around after each customer took a couple of cans, and thought about how to rearrange the remaining cans in a new order. There was just enough of each type of can and bottle to give the impression of a huddled group, just enough to count with your eyes without going wrong. I crouched and inspected the labels. Each was turned out to face whoever walked past. I was in no hurry to get back out on that frantic street. We had returned to the front display, still without choosing anything. Stan caught my eye and I knew what he would say.
"It's amazing here."
In all his time on the bus from the airport, and from the kielbasa meal in my clanky flat to the smoggy corner with the charity shop, Stan had not really touched down in Ireland. Now we were somewhere that could not possibly be in Poland. And though it was my city I also was overwhelmed. I felt too humble for this place, as though I should apologise: "I'm sorry, but I only came in to buy a beer."
Stan paid for two bottles and asked the shop attendant for a bottle opener. We went back to our place on the low dividing wall. Stan sat with dignity and poise and drank from the beer. He did not notice the second glance of the shop attendant through the window, nor the wary glances of afternoon shoppers. I always admired people like that.
"But you never called by to see him," I blurted. "You left him on his own. You talk and talk about him as if he's this famous friend of yours but in the end you just left him not knowing what was happening to him."
"What are you talking about? I knew from his brother and sister he was OK. I used to ask them every time I saw them, every couple of weeks. I knew he was alive and healthy. I don't know what stopped me from calling for so long. Sometimes I wanted to call and I had to stop myself, no don't do it Stan, that's exactly what he expects you to do. Let him call you, it's a perfectly ordinary thing to do, just pick up the phone and ring someone. Then at last I gave up. It wasn't worth making a contest out of it. As you say, something could have happened him - not physically of course. When I came back from the summer holidays a year had passed and I tried to get in contact with him. I stood on the street outside and threw pebbles up at his window. He has a new flat off Polwiejska."
"Did you not try knocking at his door?"
"Of course."
"Did you not shout through, it's me Stan?"
"Not 'shout'. In a loud whisper let's say. Enough for him to know it was me. But he didn't answer. He'd never done that to me before. This was being dramatic - hiding behind the door and not answering. This is like a television movie, not like Michal. Should I kick in the door? Stand there roaring through the keyhole? I was pissed off with him. I went back out and waited at the end of the road. Like a detective, leaning against a wall and smoking for hour after hour. I had work, translations, meetings with family. Maybe it would be a long time before I had time to waste like this again. Once I'd started it I didn't feel like stopping. He had to come out. According to his habits he had to come out for a bread roll before the shops closed. Unless he'd been out already. But this moment was as good as any to try and get him. There was no use asking his family. It was a good place to wait. In the passageway beside me there was a tap, so I had fresh drinking water. Otherwise I would have had to give up. With my liver I have to drink plenty of fresh water.
He came out the door. Walked by me and I started walking with him.
Hmm, seems like you want to be alone these days, I said. Hmm, what makes you draw that conclusion. Hmm, well I knocked on your door several times and you didn't answer. Hmm, so what made you suppose I was inside. Isn't it obvious I was not at home?
We went out for a meal of sweet rice and cinnamon. He told me he was considering joining the monks, he'd written off about it and even got an interview with the chief monk of the monastary at *****. But, he said, in the end he concluded the idea was too impractical.
Hmm, since when have you become a practical person Michal. Everything I ever do and have ever done is completely practical, he says to me. Or do you have an example that shows otherwise? No? So we are practical people. That is why I have decided to become a shepherd, he says. He had found a farmer in the Bieszczady who needed a shepherd. He had written out his CV and sent him a copy. By express registered mail. A letter came back, inviting him for a job interview in a cafe in Baligrod. It was lucky that I called by that day. He was going to go in three days time. He had been busy for the past two weeks preparing himself mentally for this interview. How? I asked. By reading about sheep, he answered."
Stan kicked the green post box and pressed his hands against his head. A passer-by threw us a second glance. Jesus Christ, such people as Stan and Silent Michal, walking the streets among us? And maybe one in a hundred of these spotty faces going by was just as complicated inside and you could never know, and maybe only one other person ever knew. The world was more incongruous than ever I could imagine. It opened up within, universes within universes, vortices within vortices. Either that or Stan and Michal were unique, each one of a kind, and I had just happened to run into the only people on the planet like that. I really didn't know. I still don't.
Stan wanted to get another beer. This was no time for beer I argued. Our heads were lucid and full of song. Beer makes us all sink back into the one. At home we have stomach vodka and rye vodka, potato vodka and ice vodka. I steered around him as I talked. Posted on the letterbox I had noticed a hand-scrawled page torn from a copybook. Polish good worker. Handwork experienced. Please to call me for all hours. 084 727 5463.
"So he became a shepherd?"
"I don't know. That was the last I saw of him. I didn't have the time to spare for another 'social call' like that. Some time later I moved to Warsaw to work in a branch of Romeo's company. Romeo's Translation Services. You were right. The name Romeo gives you a good start in life. The contracts are pouring in. All these foreigner businessmen love him. He goes out to dinner with them every evening."
"Romeo? The same Romeo who said he hated these shallow Westerners? The one who loves the poor Slav?"
"The same Romeo," affirmed Stan. "And he still jokes about them, calls them 'the suits', though to everyone else he also is wearing a suit. Hey Romeo, what's different about your suit? He is one of the reasons I came here to Dublin. I needed a break from him. His mission of being a better businessman than the real businessmen began to wear me out. One day he took a huge book from the shelf. I've been reading this book on management practice, he said. Stan we must set goals for ourselves. Stan we must have a vision. I think that was the last straw when he said that. Yes, I have a vision Romeo. I see myself walking out that door. I see myself getting on a plane to Ireland. I see myself telling you to stuff this job."
I had to laugh at Stan's wit. There was nothing bitter in it; I could see he and Romeo were still good friends. Stan was dependant on his friend to supply him with translation work. Having an old school friend as your boss was bound to be uncomfortable. Maybe the barbed jokes were Stan's way of getting even. But I was thinking about Michal. From peacefully overseeing customers he had gone to peacefully overseeing sheep. If he was watching over sheep. But if he wasn't in Grodgoszcz - and a person can't just vanish in a town that size - then he must be off somewhere else. It seems Stan didn't bother to ask around and see.
"I'm glad," I said. "I mean about Michal. That he found something to do."
"Yes. I hope he got the job and left. But it's possible he came back after a few weeks. Some people say thay saw him rummaging in a second-hand clothes shop choosing a pair of shoes. Always dress well, that's what he used to say. Always have polished shoes and a clean white or blue shirt. Not a tie. The idea was not to look any different from anyone else. You must not try to look extraordinary. That would be a deviation from the path. In every action be the same as everyone else. And whatever he is doing now, I'm sure he's kept to his teachings."
"His 'teachings'?"
Stan nodded. "Michal has a will of iron. He will not deviate."
"To what purpose?" I was livid. I shouted out above the roar of traffic on the North Circular Road. "He's a one-man sect putting himself through a regime of self-discipline, but for what? What's all this preparation for? What's he planning? What is his belief?"
"I don't know Geoff. What is there to say about a person who's primary message is silence? Don't beat your bare hands on the wall. Jesus, I came to this place thinking I needed to sort myself out. You need to get sorted out. Look your knuckles are bleeding. What the fuck is up with you?"
We got out of that place. The frantic exhalations of the traffic unnerved me. The very thought of so many going by made my stomach weak. I wished I was back there in Poland. It never felt as crowded as this. People there occupy less space. They are not always on the way from one pace to another.
We walked towards the city centre. A coffee in a nice cafe, Stan reckoned, was what I needed. Just sit down and let the world flow by. There would be time tomorrow to make plans. The cafes we looked at smelled of fried egg and chips, not coffee. Let's just stop here, I told Stan, but for once he had more energy than me and wouldn't give up so easily. It was somewhere off Camden Street before we halted. A simple cafe, chairs outside, cheesecake in the cold display. Stan leaned back, watched the waiter keenly.
"This is a good chance to observe my future career," he said. "Would it look odd to ask for a job when he brings the coffee?"
A couple of weeks of Stan in the flat was beginning to annoy me. It was not the extra presence in the room. It was the mild ironic smile. Playing the part of being a failure in life. Loving the role of being reduced to looking for work in a cafe. Behind it all this was just a pleasure trip for him. He could get a flight back at any moment (he had that cash in reserve) and resume his job as a successful interpretor, or get into the civil service through his well-connected brother. Yet he played the role of the unfortunate immigrant reduced to taking the jobs no-one else would do. He was in love with the idea of failure, whether his own, or Silent Michal's, or mine. As long as he could retire to success when he had had his fill.
That was how I felt then when I dragged my knuckles down a Phibsboro wall. I had a not-so-vague resentment of Stan. A premonition. This is the way things turned out: Day followed night and Stan slept until noon and read through the night, we visited friends and had parties four times a week. At the end of the second week the telephone rang for him. They were offering him a job. An Irish company was expanding in Poland and were impressed with the Excel and database stuff on his CV. They needed someone to do the basic administrative work and be on hand for any Polish executives whose confidence in English exceeded their ability. Just three weeks later he moved out of my flat and into a one-bedroomed apartment on Jervis Street. The landlord was an executive in the company and offered him the apartment at a special rate. A week later and he had it furnished with a stereo system and a thousand euro Apple Mac written off against tax.
The world had clarified its boundaries along the lines that had been forming in my head. I got on great with Stan, perhaps better than before. But our roles had changed.
"Geoff, you just have to keep a positive attitude. When you keep your hopes up a miracle can happen." He raised his arms in an uplifting gesture. "Think of the advice in the I Ching. Why shouldn't you trust it?"
Slowly, slowly, the idea grew in me of a return to Grodgoszcz. It began as a snippet of irony I was saving to tell to Stan when the right moment cropped up. You'll be successful here and I'll go back to Grodgoszcz and be a success there. But after he moved out we met less often. The right moment didn't arrive and then when at last we were sitting over a beer it didn't seem a joke any more.
It was luck that lifted his boat and it would be luck that took me away again. I just had to wait for it, like Stan said. He liked it in Ireland, no matter what he said. He enjoyed the office crack. After six months he'd settled in well.
That was how things stood when Stan said "It's Silent Michal", in the tall metallic atrium of the multiplex. And in that extended moment of recognition I thought to myself, this is his Bieszczady mountains. He walks among us as he would walk among the sheep. I said hello and his eyes betrayed no flicker of recognition. I held out my hand and he took it like an object. The chisel-cut planes of his face matched well the angled panes of glass around us. He stood with a stoop, long and undernourished, jagged locks of hair plastered to his forehead, and said, "A pint perhaps". It was the day of the big match.
We stopped at the door of the first pub we met. Michal pursed his lips, straightened his neck, almost. A pained expression crossed his face, like he might whine in a moment. We moved on, passed another couple of pubs until he stopped outside a place on Dorset Street. It had walls of porus red, grey, and yellow brick, the colour of dog biscuits. The window had a glowing neon Miller beer advertisement. A faded handwritten sign alongside read City and Country Pub and there were photographs of footballers in ninteen-fifties shorts and Brendan Behan falling off a bicycle. This was the place where we must stop.
"Should we sit or stand," I asked Michal. Stan ordered three pints of stout. The bare timbers were aged tar-black by decades of nicotine-stained hands. It must be one of the few pubs left with bare floorboards. The amber sparkle of glass and metal was at odds with the tarry timber.
"The calm before the storm," said the barman.
We stood with our pints on a shelf that ran around the bar at rib height. A glass case with photographs of the rare auld times faced us. Stan nooded, expressing his satisfaction with the authenticity of the place. He would run a mile from the working class Grodgoszcz equivalent. We sat and gave the atmosphere time to soak in. We spoke to Michal, mainly I did. This is what I learned:
He had been in Ireland for nine months.
Nobody in Poland knew he was here.
His job involved a uniform.
He did not know any Poles in Ireland.
He had no Irish friends.
He ate once a day.
When he first arrived he'd worked on a mushroom farm.
That was in a town called Cahir.
He moved to Dublin four weeks ago.
That was enough. I couldn't throw questions at him all evening. Michal sipped deeply into his pint. He reached in both his pockets, frowning. In his hands he had a wad of payslips, his Polish ID card, the cinema membership card and a hostel card. He extracted a ten euro note and laid it flat beside his pint, ready for the next round.
"Do you like this place?" Stan asked him.
"I live close to here, I was here many times before," he volunteered.
"Where exactly do you live? Gardiner Street?"
"Close. It is not important."
There was a distant swelling sound. The barman looked at the clock. "I don't bother with a television in here meself. Times like this though it would really draw them in."
"What time are they due out at?" I asked.
"That's them I'm after hearing. That must've been the final whistle. Stick your head out the door and see."
I looked out and saw a gathering swarm of black and yellow down by the canal. "The match is just over," I explained to Stan's questioning look. "This place will get pretty crowded in ten minutes."
We staggered out onto the street. A mass of black and yellow flags moved against us. Earnest hearty faces, all flushed with late summer heat. The low September sun glazed the street with orange light.
"My god," I said, "Your shoes are blinding me they're so well polished."
"I always wear good shoes."
We turned right, walking with long strides that took us further and further from anywhere we knew. Stopped at some pub on the North Strand, then another somewhere close to Fairview. By the third pint Michal was offering more than one word answers. Alcohol had always freed his tongue a little. This had nothing in common with the verbal spewing of a habitual drunk. Michal did not crave this ability to speak more freely and fluently, nor did he lose any inhibitions and start revealing intimacies. He simply spoke longer sentences, with shorter gaps between them. It was a direct physical effect.
He had not gotten the job as a shepherd. It was not a real job after all. But that attempt became a significant turning point in his life apparently. For the next three years there was no visible consequence, life went on as normal. Occasionally he took on a few days security work at the Philips plant where his brother worked. Once he travelled to Prague on his own and stayed the weekend. There was no crisis, no-one bothered him. He didn't go out much with friends, that was true, but he didn't shut himself in his room either. Then it was the year 1999 and the internet arrived in Grodgoszcz in a cafe cellar off the Stary Rynek. Someone told him you can look for jobs, any job you like, anywhere in the world. Michal was determined to try it out. The day came - perhaps a year later - when the time came. The internet cafe was in the cellar below Pod Kogutem, six computers with an open ledger on a music stand where you could reserve an hour. Michal went in on a quiet weekday morning and paid his five zloties. Typed shepherd job into the google window.
He read through the pages, took down names and address on a piece of paper. There was a job in the Czech Republic, in the Tatry mountains. He thought about this for a long time. In the public library he found a boxed set for learning the language. He borrowed it and took it home. Behind the locked door of his room he played the cassette again and again, stopping to repeat the foreign syllables. The language made new demands on his tongue and lips. Completely different to Polish, he insisted. People think it might be the same but no. Each language is different because the people have different feelings. Czech is a light-hearted language.
I interrupted him. "What do you mean?"
"People are not as worried as in Poland." Was this his own idea? It was important for me to know. But Michal was not someone to explain his reasons. And he had already said more then I'd heard from in my three years in Grodgoszcz.
After a few weeks of these solitary lessons he decided that Czech was neither slavic nor western, an in-between culture. Speaking a slavic language but with a work ethic like the Germans. For this reason he turned down the job.
"You refused the job?"
"Yes. I never posted an application to the address I got in the internet cafe."
He returned the boxed set to the library. He had always been interested in monks and monasteries and so he started reading about the Irish hermits. The sixth century monks, St. Kevin and St. Finbarr, the Skellig rocks. Then later history. The old woman of Beare. The famine, when people ate nettle soup.
"It was for this reason I decided to come to Ireland."
"But you know there are no hermit monks now," I said.
Michal stretched his neck back like a horse, then his head slumped down almost into his lap. He rubbed his eyes with his hands.
"Of course Michal knows that," Stan butted in angrily. "Are you trying to offend him?"
"No No. I meant it's the exact opposite of hermits," I quickly covered myself. "I meant we've gone to being the most talkative people on earth."
Michal did not immediately react. He was not being peevish. It just took him longer than most people to change moods. He remained slumped over looking at his lap. If he stayed in that position just a minute more the barman would come over to see what the problem was. I glanced across him at Stan, who smiled and nodded slowly. As though to say, you see how he is, do you still want him as a friend?
Michal had moved from living among placid ruminants to the most garrulous people on earth. This place was his Bieszczady, his Tatry mountains.
"What were the people like on the mushroom farm where you first worked?" I asked.
"They were good people. It was there I met the first Irish person I got to know." He paused. "Richard Callan."
The name struck us with the full force of the original Adam. A human had set foot on Crusoe's island. There was a name, a face. What he really meant was, this was the first and only person in Ireland he'd gotten to know. Probably the first since his school days. This was a universe populated by beings who converse with each other at three or four years intervals. Where a minute's conversation suffices for a month.
"And you spoke English with him? That's fantastic. To move to a foreign country where you don't know a word of the language. And learn it in just a few months. Enough to understand what people are saying anyway. And even watch films."
Silent Michal's chest heaved and he covered his face with his hands. His head moved from side to side. Stan was smiling.
"Michal is laughing," he said, "because in actual fact he studied English for a long time. He achieved the second highest grade in our school year in English."
I might have known. In all the times I'd spoken to him in Grodgoszcz he'd never spoken a word in English. But all the times - that was three or four times. Four times that I'd spoken to him or he'd spoken to me. Of course I'd seen him in company a lot more than that. And at the shop.
"This thing about becoming a shepherd," began Stan when Michal was at the toilets. "I never realised he was so determined about it. For four years he was trying to get a job as a shepherd. But now I have this vision that he is destined to be a shepherd. It is the perfect job for him. He told me he was practical and I didn't take it seriously. But Michal too is a person. He sees what kind of person he is. He doesn't like the bullshit of talking to people. So he makes his decision." He sliced the edge of his hand on the table. "Like an iron gate closing."
"Except he didn't become a shepherd," I pointed out. "He came here, the place in the world where blarney first came from. We invented it."
"You have a point. But I think this is only a stop on the way for him. We have to help him get a job as a shepherd. Is it that fucking strange in the world to want a job as a shepherd? It seems a simple thing to me. Is there no place in the world for someone who just wants to be a shepherd?"
"Yes," I said. "We are two of the few people who know him and can help him."
Stan looked at me. "Geoff, we are the only people who know him. There is nobody else."
We stood outside. It was a warm autumn night. Misplaced remnants of the match crowd slapped each other on the back and pissed against the side wall. We made arrangements to meet again Friday two weeks. Where? He didn't want to meet in a pub. Somewhere outside first, then maybe choose a pub. Somewhere not on a busy street. The canal, suggested Stan, seeing as we'd walked over it on the way to the pub and looked down at the low water in the lock.
The canal we agreed, though it was far to the north side of the city for me and Stan, and not at all close to the area where Michal lived. So be it. It was somewhere that sounded right. The Royal canal, Drumcondra end. One week's time.
Emmanual Mounier says, it is in the nature of outward action to glide imperceptibly towards objective death, and in the nature of inwardization to steal imperceptibly towards subjective dissolution. He speaks of the salvation of inwardness. Michal is the embodiment of this.
No, Michal is not the embodiment of anything.
It was a reasonable job, and reasonable to want it. My studies are several years back now. That linguistics and stuff was interesting for a while, but I never thought of working in that line. I want a steady job where I have time to myself and where people rely on me.
This is the attitude I practiced for the interview. The three faces sat opposite me across the table. I had no fear, no embarrassment now. These three men and a bottle of Aqua Vitalli had their allotted place in the world and good luck to them and their graphite suits. I could stand before them as an equal. My replies pleased them. Their skepticism was allayed, they could see my head was screwed on the right way, everyone needs a job, not everyone is cut out to be a banker.
The middle man, the chief security officer if I remember right, took out a sheet and ran through the items of my duty. I would have to remember a long list of telephone numbers, would that be a difficulty? And I would have to welcome all kinds of people at the gate and say hello by name, even the director himself. No problems remembering names and faces?
Only a few weeks before my inner face would have burned red with humiliation, I would have cringed and coiled like a pinched worm. I would have nodded woodenly, tried my best to sound enthusiastic, but they can tell, they can always tell, even these beefy-faced suits who have never read a novel in their life, they can tell when someone is not genuine. They have no inkling what else goes on in a person's mind, but they can latch on to that.
But here I felt I had reached an understanding. If you will allow me to play the security guard, then I will allow you to play the man in a suit with no rancour and no envy.
Here, he said, is the map of the route. Each hour you have to turn the key. And here are the three yellow phones that link to the police station directly. Five night shifts every three weeks. Are you comfortable with the idea of night shifts?
Yes, it suits me fine.
I had made peace with the world on this limited territory. They were not concerned with what went on inside my head. They just wanted to know if I could do the job. They had no opinion about who I am or what I think. And equally any of the three men opposite could be anyone at all inside, as strange as Michal or as degenerate as Nero.
This is what it means to be a man. You consent to play the game to make things easier for everyone. Things have to keep on going.
My mind was occupied only on the matter in front of me. I could concentrate totally on the job description and give the correct answers with a nod and smile.
"It's not too demanding. Not for someone with a degree anyway," he finished, and I could not tell from his tone if this was heartiness or irony and didn't care anyway.
"Hikikomori," I stated, "This is the clue we have been looking for." Stan looked skeptical but willing to hear me out. I read aloud from a scrap unnaturally aged in my pocket. "He spends his days reading newspapers, watching sports and thinking. 'Maybe I think too much,' Yenji admitted, his eyebrows fluttering nervously. 'After twenty years of being different I don't mean to sound arrogant . . . but maybe I think more deeply than others.' He lives his life locked in his room. He talks to nobody. It's a recognised phenomenon in Japan. Look at him."
I held up the photograph. "It even says he's as thin as a rake, and look at this he only eats once a day. This is Silent Michal."
Stan exhaled, set down the weighty bottle he cradled, walked to the edge of the lock.
"Yes, yes, yes."
"Listen: They are modern hermits. Going into their rooms and locking the doors."
"Yes, yes," said Stan nodding like a hen. "But what has this got to do with us?"
"The problem is the recession and lack of opportunities in a land that once was more wealthy. It is an extreme effort to escape the pressure to conform. Hmm. I haven't sorted it out yet. Poland is getting wealthier not poorer. But what about being made to conform? Was Michal ever forced to conform? In Japan they are forced to wear uniforms to school it says - is it the same in Poland?"
Stan lifted his arms in a Christ gesture. Kicked the green bench beloved of the winos. They sat on the one at the next lock gate, eyeing us jealously, gauging our street-toughness. I knew this area better than Stan. If he had known he'd get away somewhere else quick.
"Geoff, this has nothing to do with Michal. He is just a person, not a case. His parents are good boring people. What do you want to do with the guy, bring him to a pub and make him talk talk talk?"
"His mother takes plate of boiled rice to his room," I read further, "She leaves it on the floor outside his door. When the house is quiet he emerges and takes in the plate."
Stan stopped his pacing. He came at me like he was going to throw me onto the canal thistles. He snatched the scrap of paper.
"Who is this guy? I can't believe it. This is exactly what Michal used to do. He never told me that himself, his sister let it out. Yes, this guy in Japan, there might be something to it. He might not be so mad after all. What's his name? Hiroko Murakami? In the Tenji suburb of Tokyo." He clasped his hands together, a camp kind of gesture that had the drunks on the next bench sitting up straight and throwing us a hard look. "We can write this guy a letter. Tell him what we know about Michal. Maybe we can help him and the other way around."
I shook my head at his surprising naivité. "But there are millions like him! It's from a newspaper that millions of people read."
Stan didn't see my logic. He was intoxicated by the possibility of doing something. Wanted us to write a letter like kids writing to the star of a TV show thinking it's a real person.
"He's just someone they happened to report on. Probably thousands have written to him now and celebrity doctors have queued up to treat him. Once your name is made famous like that anything can happen. He's probably selling his memoirs for millions."
"Or on the other hand maybe he's still in his room. Why are you so against the idea? It will only take a few minutes to write a letter."
"And send it where? Jesus Stan, think about it a minute."
"The doctor's name is here. - Of course," here he laughed at himself, "we would hope that he understands English, but someone could translate for him."
I stopped arguing. Better not to mention it; Stan would forget it soon enough, just like he had already forgotten his plan of finding Michal a job as a shepherd. The drunks were shuffling over to test us out. Where are yis from, who's that fella, is he a foreigner, and so on.
"Here take your fuckin bench," I said to him coldly. "We have to be going."
"Fairies," he wheezed triumphantly.
" . . know what's good for them," growled the second. Stan was already doing his fast pace away.
"The fuck are you talking about," I said. I stood my ground, well aware of the fifteen foot drop to the empty lock at my back, standing with the edge just six foot behind me, showing I wasn't afraid of them. The can of cider in my hand as credential. They growled and grumbled, "Can I not fuckin sit down, want to watch yourself there, sitting here for sixteen years."
"Well sit down and shut the fuck up." I walked away without turning, leaving the drystone wall, the deep chasm of the canal lock and detritus sulking at the bottom. It was the best place to meet Michal after all. And we could talk and talk all night through our several theories about why he didn't show up, but the fact remained; he wasn't there. And with no phone number or address we would never see him again. He had proved without doubt that his potent silences and eccentric gestures were not a pose. He had proved he was not concerned with making an impression.
A part of me shrank and grew cold at the thought of how distant this person is. This one called Michal. A small cold place that is, in all the waves of bullshit, the real thing. Stan wouldn't know that. Stan was happy to have his exhibit A, his elephant man, or perhaps, his lone wolf.
That three metre deep canal lock holds the real Silent Michal. A green bench to sit and look down on that emptiness. Slow water seeping through empty cider cans and shopping trollies. He might as well be mouldering at the bottom. For him it was a non-event, one more silence in the many he created around him. He had said all that he wanted to say.
But I know him, Stan insisted. If he failed to meet us that Friday because of work or something then he will be there at the same time the next Friday. This is what he will do.
Bullshit. Michal was gone, submerged in this city of a million. I could wait at the corner of Gardiner Street every day for a week, leaning against a wall there smoking a cigarette, my feet turning to peat. Sure, he would eventually pass. What then? Hey, Michal, it's me. How about a pint?
He was gone to the anonymity he craved, and there was nothing we could do about it. I started my new job. A fresh uniform and an induction day. People were friendly to me. What I got home I wasn't exhausted at all, even though I was getting up at six every morning. Friday came around and I met up with Stan. Brand manager though he might be, he still was not above sitting on a bench with a can of beer. Thankfully the drunks had set up camp somewhere else tonight. We resumed our vigil, me in good spirits because I was already resigned, Stan fretting and starting, looking about him and asking if there were any aggressive drunks in this area, worried that if Michal came down the canal path he might have had trouble.
"Tell me," I said, "Tell me the beginning. What age were you when you first met him?"
"We were seven or eight."
I was gobsmacked. At a loss for how to grasp this fact. Two little boys.
"What was he like then?"
"I can't remember anything unusual. There was nothing unusual. I told you our parents knew each other, so I think - I can't exactly rememebr - but I believe we even knew each other before we started school. He was good at school. I remember him coming to my birthday party and he had to bring me this present of a pair of trousers. Everyone else had bags of toffee or a coloured pen and he comes up with a pair of black trousers. I think he was pissed off with that. Later he was good at running and at basketball. That was a new game in our school, as you can imagine it was not an 'official' sport. He won several medals at it and played against some other schools." He laughed whimsically. "I have a photograph of him."
"What, here with you now?"
Stan smiled helplessly, caught exposed. I took the creased rectangle from his fingers. The colours had that nineteen seventies greenish hue. A broad white border around it. The tacky chemical patina stuck to my sweaty fingers. Nine smiling teenagers, arms arranged a bit awkwardly at their sides and on each others' shoulders. Hard at first to pick him out, but there he was, grinning big-jawed, looking straight into the lens, standing as tall as the teacher. Head straight.
"That was before the change," said Stan. "I didn't know him well then, but I remember well the time he first said to me I am a decadent. All I want to do is get through life annoying as few people as possible. Something had changed in his head."
"It was a thought-change. Not a disease or a madness. He changed his way of thinking."
"It is still a change in the head. So yes, he changed his way of thinking."
"So he could change his way of thinking again."
"With Silent Michal, anything is possible."
"Tell me how it was. The things he said after that." Stan looked down at his feet.
"I am surrounded by animals. That was what he said once. He began to call his father the name-giver, and his mother he called the shop assistant."
"But not to their faces."
Stan looked at me, surprised at my obtuseness. "To their face, yes." he said blandly. Slowly the full horror grew on me. My stomach shrivelled around a small cold ball.
"Go on."
"And once on the street I asked him how his father was. He said I have nothing to do with these people. I said to him, your parents, in the next room. He said, there are strangers in the flat. And again one time he said, I don't suffer from sentimentality. That is my problem."
"But they fed him, gave him a home, sent him to school."
"Michal was sure about that legal point. The flat belonged to society, you know, the apartment was assigned by the communist authorities of the time. He had a full legal right to live there. And legally they were obliged to feed and clothe him until he was eighteen. He didn't eat much anyway. Of course they put up with his presence without complaint. They were ordinary people."
It hit me like a cramp in the stomach. I wanted to throw up. I knew now what he was. Not a wolf. A spider, growing and growing in the bedroom. Eyes of onyx, glinting black. The angles in his jaw. Feeding and pacing, his long tight-jointed legs, from the window to the bolted door. Inhaling and exhaling through his nose. Taking the world in through the eyes and watching. I pictured myself pressing a knife blade towards Michal's eye. Tell me, I say to him. Tell me what you feel. And he tells me nothing, even as the blade presses through the pupil. The old priests at school were fond of posing moral puzzlers where one person has to sacrifice himself to save the others. I saw clearly that if there was a situation where either Michal or me had to die, I would choose him. And all the religious and humanistic teaching would not divert me from claiming it would be the only moral decision to make. How can you have a person who is almost not a person. I had touched the cold hard soul of a spider and drawn back in disgust. And maybe it was this disgust that Michal wanted to avoid. Maybe that was why he hadn't turned up. Why he didn't want to speak much.
"Such things can't happen," I said.
"They happen."
"It's too much to believe."
"Most people would prefer to say the boy didn't get on with his parents. He was a loner. A quiet boy, never got into trouble. And so on. It is better not to see the full story."
"He won't change now. There's no helping him."
"There is no helping him." repeated Stan. "We can only believe he is real. That is all that he wants from us."
Much good that is to him if we never see him again. It is horrible to have no continuation, for events to gather their strands, swell to significance, and then, CUT! and a resumption of sitting in buses and washing the dishes, waiting for the next holiday. This was how it was. The best times with Stan were already over. He didn't need my advice any more in this country. He had his new circle fo friends.
Whenever I passed the stretch of road by the canal and felt the seductive breath of that decay I used slow my pace and hold my eyes alert, but I could never stoop to lying in wait, staking him out. That would be too dramatic. Pass through quietly. If I had spare time I'd stand at the lock edge looking down at the junk. One day they opened the lock so instead of a sodden layer of detritus there was fifteen foot of dark green water. A couple of ducks nested at the far side. The next summer the corporation laid cobbles and built a canal walk along that stretch. The old benches were replaced with anti-graffiti stainless steel ones. I got to like the area, and when my wages went up at the end of the first year I took out a year lease on one of the new apartments there.
Sttan was appointed regional brand manager. He often flew to Warsaw for meetings. He got a good laugh out of being introduced to the Polish counterparts as Stan the Dublin promotions man. After listening to their shaky English for a few minutes he'd launch into colloquial Polish. The change in atmosphere when they discovered he was one of their own gave him no end of pleasure. Almost the first they wanted to now was, was he on the Irish pay rate or Polish pay rate.
I called at his apartment the night before he moved back to Poland. We were going to hit the town to mark the occasion. There were several large boxes that he couldn't bring on the plane, and he said he'd take them back some other time. He'd be back in Dublin in a few months. I offered to keep them at my place. Why pay rent for an empty apartment for a whole month and maybe longer? That was how I found out he'd bought the place some time ago and was keeping it, as an investment. We exchanged long letters after he left. Strangely to me, more of the old Stan emerged in these letters than in the busy person I'd known over the previous months.
I have seen him! Today I saw him. the hermit of Grodgoszcz, the one who holds his silence. I was passing through one of the shopping arcades in the centre, the places I could while away hours. Where do they all come from, the shoppers? An ebb and flow of them. So many from a city that is only a swollen town.
Burrowing through a crowd of thousands saps the vital energy. I read somewhere that each new face costs a toll of stress on the nervous system. Friend or foe, we are forced to judge each face despite ourselves. So many so quickly leaves me exhausted. But I liked it. I plunged into these crowds the was others might plunge into the ocean. In a good mood I could look above the heads and notice the bright tubes and glass panes; all that modern engineering that goes unnoticed.
A tightness in my head, pinch of warm blood at the backs of my eyes. Twice-filtered air with the taste of carpet. A multitude of women pecked at the racks of cothes and discarded half-open packs to one side. Reducing the place to a more comfortable level of disorder. I thought of peasant women, somewhere where I used to live, bundled up in scarves and tumbling over a pile of cast-offs. I took the escalator and a humming rose from the metal step and the walls around me. I was cocooned inside my hangover and the buzzing sound wove textures around me. It was a good place to be.
He smiled at me, the thin man with tanned boney features, raised his eyebrows. If I were that way paranoid I would have imagined it was a come-on. But I am hardly an attraction to gay men, and besides I noticed he had the uniform. I nodded cheerily back, hiding my indecision. His head dropped momentarily as he laid down his stack of jumpers.
"! Michal", I said, the unuttered 'Silent' swallowed back down my throat.
"Geoff, it is good to see you." He swung his hand down slow and gripped mine. I stared in incomprehension, unable to connect this figure with the Michal of memory. It was the neck. He held his head straight now. I had never seen his nose and eyebrows from this angle.
"You work here?"
"Yes," he said lazily, tolerant of my incredulity. He wore the uniform and a metal badge, floor manager.
"That's pretty good," I stammered.
"I like it here, there's a great range of people, Dublin people and from lots of different countries."
"- Like this one here," he added. A short Chinese girl glided behind and prodded his rear. She walked on five steps and swivelled around. Turned her black droplet eyes on him. He held an open palm towards her. Counteracting her emanations. She let out an indignant sound and moved on, her feet paddling her forwards with an economy of motion that held my eyes. Michal stretched his neck lazily, a gesture that more than anything else showed me this was a different person before me. A string of twangy syllables issued from his mouth finishing on a loud note.
"You speak Chinese?"
"Vietnamese actually. She's trying to teach me." She called back some words in her language and bustled forward again.
"Your girlfriend?" He pursed his lips, his cheeks forming flat facets, hung his head in a faint echo of the former Michal. Sucked his breath in.
"It's a secret?" I said.
"Yes," he laughed. "We like secrets."
"How did you end up working here?" I raised my hands, indicating the rows of chrome clothes racks.
"I have always worked in a clothes shop."
I had to laugh at this. An evasion by telling the truth. This was Michal I was talking to I reminded myself. The man at the bottom of the canal. There was no need of the usual discretion. If there was one thing that Silent Michal stood for it was stop the bullshit. I was not about to spend these few second talking to him the way I talked to anyone at the window of my security hut.
"Yes, but you seem different now. More talkative." I gritted my teeth. "You were different when I last met you."
He nodded slowly, creased the planes of his jaw with the knuckles of one hand. A brunette in the shattered black-on-white pattern blouse of the Dunnes Stores girls passed close by. He drew a bead on her and clicked. She muttered something about keeping up the pace. Michal looked at me directly, clicked his tongue thoughtfully again.
"I am different from that time. Yes." He looked troubled, interrupted by untimely thoughts brought by the keeper of his old self.
"But how about you? How are you?"
"Good, good," I said.
"What are you working at?"
"I'm a security guard at Dell computers."
"Are you . . . happy doing that?" he inquired delicately.
"Yes. Why wouldn't I be?" He shrugged, shook his head.
"The Vietnamese are a great people," he anounced apropos of nothing. "I am reading about them all the time now."
"Will you go there?"
"I'm planning to go on a visit in June. I have to learn a bit more of the language before I go. It's an amazing language. And the people, the only small nation to defeat a superpower. Tell me about Stan. Do you speak to him or call him?"
The last letter was about four months ago now. Stan was a big translator with HP; I figured that out from what I heard about the monthly flights abroad, two am deadlines for the American office, free winter flights to Jamaica. Without his ever trying, success had landed softly on him and blessed him.
"Do you call him?" repeated Michal.
"No, not for a long time. Do you have contact with him?"
"Every few months, yes, he seems to be 'a big cheese'." He laughed softly and looked back and forth across the store. A queue was gathering at customer service.
"I suppose you have to get back to work. How about meeting up for a pint?"
"Yes," a lilt in his voice acknowledged the reasonableness of the idea. "I finish at six. We can meet at half past six in The Oval. Does that suit you?"
There was enough time to get home first. The day had split in two and I no longer thought about my headache or what had gone wrong the night before.
Back at the flat I boiled a pot of rice and heated a jar of tomato. Then I sat on the floor with my back against the sofa and ate my frugal meal. I stared at the clock approaching ten past six and I didn't move. I closed my eyes to get rid of the pain behind them and opened them again and it was a quarter past. Tension is another experience and another existence, and also worth living through. I stared challenging at the clock, I dared myself to go and not to go and couldn't think of anything much until the hands crept up towards seven. It was too late then, too late for certain, and I got up to resume my life. For three days I lived the enigma, woke with it and breathed it, seesawed with it and grappled in circles that wound ever further away from sleep. On the night shift I drank too much instant coffee and saw shadows slip from the corner of my eye. The executives waited for me to hand them the keys and their eyes seemed focus on the pen in my pocket. For three nights I had troubled sleep. It took me that long to hit on the idea of ringing Stan.
I bought a ten euro card and rooted out scraps of paper to find the number.
"Geoff, is it really you? I had forgotten your voice."
"Stan. Listen, I met Silent Michal."
"Yes?"
"He's working in a department store and seems to have a girlfriend." There was a silence.
"I can tell you something about Silent Michal."
"I'm listening."
"Some time ago, in Ireland, he saw a tv program about a doctor who cures people with communicative disorders. Michal wrote a long letter to this doctor, addressed to the hospital mention, somewhere in the states probably. The doctor wrote back with the name of a Polish doctor who works in the same field. Amazing really. It seems Michal wrote the letter from Ireland, but said he was just on a long holiday there. You know, like it was shameful to be a Pole working in Ireland - the doctor wouldn't know he was a cleaner. Stan looked up the address of the Polish doctor. No letter this time. He got on a flight and straight onto an overnight train. Eighteen hours travel non-stop. He got there in the middle of the night so he slept for an hour on a bench. This was in Szczecin. Then he called at the door, a private house, just as he was, no money, nothing. The first thing he said was, I speak very little. Would the doctor be interested in me? The doctor sent him for various tests. Michal moved back to Poland. They found the problem. It was something related to autism. There was a chemical missing in his brain which everyone else has, which makes them want to talk with others. Once they replaced it he could chat as normal. As normally as anyone else."
There was a silence on the phone line which I swear lasted forty seconds. It stretched and bloomed between us. A memorial silence to whatever it was that had laid claim to our awe. The last silence.
"Good news," I said.
"Good news," he replied.
I sank to the floor and thought how it was to live in a room in a red brick house identical to a thousand others along this endless street, and how it was that a city could be so big that you might run into a person once and once only in a lifetime, or maybe twice at the most.