Continued

Little Graves

Little Graves I come to see Maciek after severalyears, and already they have a calm, healthy child, who sleeps and doesn't want to show her eyes. They call her Maryska. Maryska has just turned thirteen days old, but then she's three weeks, and now she shows one eye, and peeks up, a little to the right. Maciek says "Maryska," "Marychna," as if he were getting used to it, gently, paternally, and Agnieszka, who has as many meat coupons as a miner, and who's dripping with milk, starts clucking her tongue at her. The white of the other eye, the unfixed gaze, open mouth, tongue sticking out, the whole concentrated face. I look at the mystery of the navel, at thefleshyvulva, which seems disproportionately large — it will probably be Agnieszkawho informs her about those things; Maciek doesn't like the word "vulva," maybe some bad experience. Milk pours into her mouth. Walking downstairs, we hear her choking, then she's all right. We sit, we smoke —All Saints' Day in three weeks. A week or two after my son was born I kicked two of his mother's aunts down the stairs, well, almost, no violence involved. One of them bent over him without taking off her coat, the other was ready, it seems, to give him a bath, or maybe just some advice. Everybody could see I was being rational, but our rations 61 started to shrink soon after, to shrink before us, and in the back, whatever that might mean. What's more, the one with the bath used to sell meat in a meat store long before they had coupons ho ho. Well, we used to be impulsive, and could really hold a grudge, solemn and brief, like a resolution to improve, until the judgment— or what do you call it —the fatal day! Besides, we do need to forgive. How else could we survive, all swollen with pain that won't condense or liquefy, but is always there— though one doesn't have to say right away that one has forgiven. With Maciek, I either told him or somehow let him know, but if I'd done to him what he did to me, I wouldn't believe such declarations, either. My thing is talking, but in fact I like to listen, that is, to ask things. And give names — when the time is right. And me, where will I lie in the end? In Powa/ki, in France, in Lodz, in Otwock? Or perhaps, God only knows, since God knows everything, in some completely foreign country? Impossible. Lately I don't even want to talk about it, because we always fight, that is, if silence, or singing out of spite (tra la), can be called fighting. Besides, is it worth it— 62 and what if they ship me out to rest in Waibrzych? Maciek wakes me up at half past ten. I go back to bed for ten more minutes, and get up— at twelve. Tea! Bread (with cheese). A sprint to the florist —a basket of violets for the doctor who operated on my mother. We leave the hospital, armslocked, slowly, but — I'm forgetting, it wasn't such an easy surgery. At home my mother lies down, and I go out to make calls, run errands, have coffee, I come back, and we have supper. Because there's still no curfew, no gas rations yet, no passports needed to go from Otwock to Swider, because the air is clean and it's evening, I go see Maciek. Tomorrow Marysia will successfully complete her first half-year, or: will begin, gloriously and without pain, her second six months. Maciek turns on the light, I lean over the netting of her bed, and Marysia smiles at me. Of course, why should Maciek be wondering where Agnieszka will lie? Agnieszka looks good, she's lost weight, has a new haircut with curls — 63 must have got it at Janek's, and she's excitedly telling us howJacek bawled her out. One thing is certain: in Otwock, where else. Jacek, no doubt, will lie somewhere in Australia, because there's a lot of sun there, and plenty of room, tra la, unless he ends up in some West Germany or other, together with his son and his wife, if she stays with him. 64 ...