CHAPTER VI

A House of Three Walls

Spring had already come, yet the morning of May 1, 1965, gave little reason to believe it. A clouded sky and a cold wind had not kept everyone indoors. Jadwiga, with the child wrapped in a swaddling bundle, had just set out for the road to catch the bus. After that she still had to wait for two more before she finally reached Pomiechówek.

"Could you hold the baby for me so I can get down?" she asked a man waiting to board by the bus's high steps. He bristled and stepped back. She had to manage by herself. Tired and chilled through, she decided to rest. Not far away, near the bridge, a path led down toward the river. That same path brought Jadwiga to the house of Alina Pawlicka, Aunt Józefa's daughter. The woman received her cousin with uncommon kindness, let her rest and warm herself, and then helped her reach the Kamińskis' house.

No, Jadwiga had not run away from her husband. At that same time Adam was riding on a tractor that pulled a trailer loaded with all their possessions. He had taken his sister along as well. He wanted to show her Aunt Chojnacka's plot, on which he was to spend the next fourteen years of his life. Jadwiga arrived there only several hours later.

"Jadzia, who was that girl with your man?" Auntie asked as soon as she was alone with her niece, and, when she had heard the explanation, added, "She said that if he beat you, you'd be different—meaning better."

"You should have hit her over the head with something!"

"I didn't know who she was. I didn't recognize her," the old woman defended herself. She had seen that girl only once, at the December wedding.

In Aunt Chojnacka's little room it suddenly became even more crowded than usual. The entrance door, set almost at the left-hand end of the house and opening from the rear, stood only a narrow, though rather tall, cabinet's width from the wall. Beside the cabinet were the chimney and a tiny two-burner stove. All of this filled the western gable of the house as tightly as could be.

To the right of the door a coat rack hung on the wall, and beyond it was a narrow, two-part window. Farther on, in the corner at the eastern gable, stood a chest of drawers with four drawers. On it there was only a crucifix set upon a doily and two candles in candlesticks.

The corner made by the wall opposite the window and the eastern gable was taken up by an old wooden bed, over which someone had once hung a picture of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.

Now living space had to be made there for three more people. The wardrobe was squeezed in between the bed and the stove. Finding room for a place to sleep proved much harder. In the end, the pull-out sofa was placed between the door and the window, taking the place of one of the two chairs. To get it in at all, they chose a desperate arrangement and set it sideways against the wall. Only that way did it fit, though once it was opened out the exit door was blocked. At night it was impossible to get to the privy standing outside without waking everyone in the household.

At first the owner of the room entered, with some emotion, into the plight of her younger lodgers.

"Give me the child for the night, and you get some sleep," she suggested one evening, seeing how tired her niece was.

Jadwiga accepted the offer gratefully, yet in the night she still woke at every cry from her child. She saw how bravely her aunt bore the hardships of the first night, and how angry she became on the second. By the third she had had enough.

Everything drove the young couple to action. Adam took work close to the house, where the Warsaw Rosa Luxemburg Lighting Works was building a children's summer-camp center. A few minutes after his shift ended he was already home and could take up his second labor, this time the building of his own house. Time pressed. Marianna Chojnacka was growing more and more weary of life in such confinement. After a few months she began reproaching him that he would probably finish the building only "by Saint Michael's Day.[1]"

Why Michael in particular, whose feast falls in September, no one knew. It was true that the work moved more slowly than everyone would have wished, but Adam was doing all of it himself, with only occasional help from his wife. The cement, white brick, timber, and tar paper for the roof they bought new, though they also made use of red brick purchased secondhand from someone's demolition.

After roughly a year of hard work, they could move into a place of their own. Beside the old wooden house once built by Stanisław Chojnacki there now stood a house—or rather, three new walls with a roof sloping toward the road, onto which one large window looked out.

Against the opposite wall, the one adjoining the wooden house, stood the wardrobe; to the left of the window stood the stove. The middle was filled by a round table and two chairs. From the room one could go out directly to the west.

When the last piece of furniture had been carried inside, they sat down to rest. For a moment they were happy.

They had a house of their own over their heads. It was a truth almost impossible to believe. The building stood on Auntie's plot, but that carried no risk. Marianna Chojnacka had once expected a child, an heir. Well, it had been winter, and, having come home, she had wanted to warm her feet in hot salt water. Her feet grew pleasantly warm; soon afterward she felt a sharp pain low in her abdomen. She miscarried. Now whatever she left behind would fall to the orphan. At least there would be care for her in old age.

Adam and Jadwiga began to dream. Their little son was asleep; one could look into the future with the eyes of imagination and see their house growing, another child appearing, and themselves happy.

Before them was the large window covered by a curtain. When they looked through it, they saw not only the fence and, beyond it, the road separating them from the woods, where the blocks of the summer-camp center had just risen. They also saw a world—a world different for each of them.

Jadwiga, though raised in want, knew the worth of learning, culture, and knowledge. The history of the world was not foreign to her, and especially the history of her homeland; nor were geography, or even the exact sciences. Above all, she valued moral and religious principles.

She lived, and wanted to live, in a world to which only her family had access. She understood that family very narrowly. There was room in it for part of her mother's siblings, together with those nearest to them, and also for her husband and child. Everything else appeared as an alien and hostile world, against which she had to defend herself; otherwise she would be attacked, used, robbed, wronged. The people from that other world were worse, although one was not to live at odds with anyone or wage wars. One was simply to live one's own affairs and keep others beyond a clear boundary. A certain breach in that boundary was her friend Stasia Wierzbicka, née Radomska, beside whom she had lived from the first months of life. Together they played in the sand; together they played tag and hide-and-seek; together they went to school and together stood for their First Communion photograph in Pomiechowo. When the Kamińskis left Szczypiorno, to the girls' delight it was the Radomskis who bought their plot. They were even closer to one another. Stasia married somewhat earlier, which only deepened her friend's longing for a family of her own. Only for their first child, the dreamed-of and longed-for Ewa, did she and her husband have to wait two years longer. In the end that happiness came as well.

In this inward world, the most problematic person was, paradoxically, her husband. There was a place for him there, but a precisely defined and limited one. Naturally his rank did not equal Jadwiga's own position—well, he ought to have been grateful that "some fool had been found who would take him." Adam's place in Jadwiga's world also depended on whether he would cut himself off from his own world, and those two worlds were entirely different.

Adam lived in an open world. With the exception of those with whom his mother was at war, almost anyone could be family. He was highly intelligent; to beat him at checkers was no ordinary success. That gift, wasted for lack of any real education, bore fruit only in a talent for every sort of expedient. In the house where he had grown up, he had become accustomed to having only what he could manage to obtain for himself, and he never lost the habit. He had mastered reading only poorly, though writing came still harder. On the other hand, some kind of genius showed itself in him: once he wrote something, he wrote it without errors, though he never understood why "they" made life difficult for people by forcing them to write both ż and rz, when one letter would have been enough.

He never smoked, although he allowed himself to be offered cigarettes. The goods thus collected he brought to his father. He liked alcohol, though almost never could one see that he had had too much.

He was perfectly aware of his low social position. The result was pitiful, and often comic. He could not abide people who lived on a higher level; he criticized "bourgeois" types, kings, and anyone who, in his opinion, lived at his expense. At the same time, he himself could pretend to be someone he was not and had no chance of becoming. At construction sites in those days, workers wore white helmets, while the higher staff wore orange ones. Adam painted half of his white helmet pink. "I'm sort of a half-foreman," he explained. Despite some desire for advancement, he could not take any real step toward it. In the first months of his marriage he enrolled in a tractor-driver's course. It was meant not only to raise his earnings, but also to give him much lighter work. He failed the examination. He did not, however, fail to drink to the fact so effectively that he barely found his way home, earning the applause of his mother.

Those two worlds lay far apart. When Adam tried to enter his wife's world, he was welcome there—but only as himself stripped of everything that he and his earlier surroundings had been. He was supposed to become a different man, without a past, without the people close to him from childhood, without his habits or his manner of living. In their place he would have had to accept everything his wife valued and considered worthy. Whatever right the woman may have had, she achieved only this much: her husband agreed with her aloud, and then did as he pleased. He fled from home to people who, sincerely or not, approved of what he said and did.

Jadwiga knew that her world was narrow. In it there were only those who had passed the test of time: Aunt Kamińska, Aunt Chojnacka, Stasia Wierzbicka—the friend of her childhood—Uncle Kazik Kiliś, and her son, the apple of her eye. The rest of mankind stood on the other side of the fence. Not because it was worse. Because it could not be trusted.

She knew, too, that this might be unjust. But the world had taught her one thing: without that armor, they would long since have destroyed her. And she had no intention of taking it off, even if it meant being alone.

The following spring the couple set about enlarging the house. Onto the wall with the entrance door, the one on the side of the Wierzbickis, they began to add a new little room that was to serve as the kitchen. At first it was small; later it was extended somewhat in the direction away from the road. This very addition must have been so important to little Piotr that it was bound up with the first memory of his life preserved forever. He is standing on some makeshift scaffolding. Beside him a new wall is rising. Two layers of brick, and a gap between them. He takes the pliers in his hand to pass them to his father, but they slip from the small palm and fall into the abyss between the layers of the wall.

The tool must have been replaced somehow, for the building went on. At the very end, on the road side, a small entryway was added, to protect the inside of the house from the cold and the dirt of the yard. When the whole construction was finished, its effect gave the little boy a sense of warmth and became the source of further pleasant memories.

When Piotr woke in the morning, his father was no longer at home. He was at work. What he remembered instead was the image of his mother kneeling for her morning prayers. She knelt bent over the foldout sofa that stood at the end of the kitchen. Beneath her breasts lay her little son, at that moment playing with the chain that hung from his mother's neck.

Lying on that same sofa, one could observe a strange phenomenon. When a heavy rain fell, a balloon formed in the ceiling overhead. Then a hole was made in the ceiling. Water ran down in a swift stream, playing in the bucket set beneath it, and the balloon grew somewhat thinner.

All the same, life in Szczypiorno was somehow strangely gentler, friendlier than what they had known in Kępa. Only the year before, when Jadwiga had gone to a doctor in Pomiechówek, he had had no good news for her:

"You are headed for the grave anyway," he declared without hesitation.

"One never knows who is nearer the edge," his patient replied, though the doctor had not made his diagnosis without grounds. The result of the tests before him spoke for itself: 1,700,000 red blood cells; and the other values were not necessarily better.

The child, too, was constantly ill. The ambulance often had not managed to return to Nowy Dwór before it had to go back to Szczypiorno again. When the villagers saw the ambulance, they were certain they knew whom it was coming for.

After the enlargement of the house, the room was not often entered. It was cold and uninviting. All of life went on in the heated, cluttered kitchen. There, too, the boy received his first lessons in life and knowledge. Sometimes it was knowledge of anatomy. It was evening; almost in the middle of the room, a little nearer the coal stove, stood a large basin in which his mother was washing herself. That her upper body looked different from most people's he had known from the beginning, and it had not aroused his interest. Now, in addition, he saw that down there as well something was not quite the same with her. What is more, a little later his father sat at the table in his undershorts. Suddenly Jadwiga began making nervous signs to him, nodding toward the area of the seat. Piotr saw nothing there, but he noticed his mother's behavior. "What do grown-ups have in their underpants that they hide it so?" The thought gave him no peace for a long time, and even grew into an interest in physiology.

"Mama, may I borrow the little mirror?" he asked one summer day, reaching for the mirror that stood on the table.

"What do you need it for?"

"I want to look at the world," he lied, referring to his habit of looking at reality in reflection.

Taking the mirror, he went outside, but he did not look into it in order to seek the reflection of nature. He went through the little gate separating the yard from the garden and straight to the back of the house. There no one should see him. He leaned the glass against the wall, bent over it. "I wonder what it looks like," he thought, peering at the reflection. Although he learned one of the mechanisms of physiology that day, he was also thoroughly ashamed. He had been watched. Plainly, the little lie with which he had borrowed the mirror had not been convincing.

On Christmas Eve evenings, Saint Nicholas would find his way to Szczypiorno as well. Szczypiorno lay far from Warsaw; it was a small village, and so the Saint reached it worn out, as it were, in torn rags. He was not as handsome or rich as in the great city. He came to Piotr for the first time when the boy was not yet three. Saint Nicholas himself was nothing special: he had been cold, and so he was mercilessly bundled in old clothes, with some cap on his head and gloves on his hands; all in all, in rags. Curiously, he had no beard—neither white nor any other. Saint Nicholas himself did not matter. What mattered was what he brought, and that was an entirely new and unknown world.

From the great sack he pulled out only one toy: a red metal battery-powered rocket. It was an extraordinary rocket. True, it looked more like a car, but who then knew what a real rocket looked like? Most important, it drove across the floor, shining in different colors; the great radar mounted on top turned round and round, and the toy made a terrible racket. When it touched a chair leg, it turned back by itself, seeking a free space for further travel. That night two flat batteries were used up, and the first day of Christmas had to arrive.

The kitchen, too, had something magical in it. When winter came, frost covered the windowpanes in a thick layer. When a coin was pressed to the glass, or breath blown upon it, a little hole appeared through which one could look at the world—though not the whole world, only the fence. Beyond the fence, moreover, stood the neighbors' house. It, too, had a window. At times one could see Ewa in it. Watching the little neighbor girl was especially absorbing in winter, when Mother had gone in the morning to the Kurpiewskis' for milk and the cold would not allow one to put one's nose outdoors.

The next summer after the visit of the generous Saint Nicholas, some stranger came into the room.

"Is your mama here?"

"She is. In the room."

"Then tell her some fellow's come to put in the electricity."

Piotr, who was a little over three, jumped down from the foldout sofa. He opened the white wooden door that separated him from his mother.

"Some gentleman came, but he says a fellow came," he announced, though he had no idea what the mysterious word meant. Whatever it was, it meant one thing: electricity had appeared in the house, and with it a weak, barely glowing bulb—and a radio. That golden box, placed on a shelf hung high on the wall, was remarkably mysterious. It was so small that no one could have fit inside it, yet it kept talking. When it stopped talking, it played music. His parents had to let their little son examine it carefully so that he could make sure no one was hiding inside. Once he was certain of that, he essentially ceased to be interested in the radio. It was different when, in the evenings, his parents listened to Radio Free Europe. The voice from the box came scratchy and sometimes vanished, but the adults listened to it breathlessly. It had to be something important and precious.

"Where are you climbing?" Aunt Chojnacka asked.

"I have to listen to Radio Free Europe," the little boy answered, climbing from a stool onto the table and reaching for the knobs of the radio.

Marianna Chojnacka, though in her parents' absence she had been left in the role of the child's caretaker, could only look on helplessly at these exploits. She herself, requiring care and help, could not restrain the amateur listener to news from the world. She could only pray that he would climb down as skillfully as he had climbed up. The adventure shook her so much that she never came again to help. Piotr, however, often ran to Auntie's. In general the woman did not like children, though she believed they were sometimes useful. Once, when she had overbaked a cake rather badly, Jadwiga, her sister, tried to console her:

"Mania, I've burned a cake too!"

"Yes, but you have children, so they'll eat it. What am I to do?"

Piotr was the only child she tolerated, and even liked. He liked going there too. The peculiar atmosphere of the old house, Auntie telling one story or another, and even the stale air of a room never aired—all of it created a mood he loved.

Marianna Chojnacka no longer went out of the house, so the child's visits were a pleasant diversion for her; besides, there was someone to scratch her back.

The woods surrounding Szczypiorno are not very extensive, and so there is little wild game there. Nothing comes up to the homesteads, even in a hard winter. Yet once it happened that a bear was breaking into the house. At least that was how it seemed to the frightened Jadwiga. The door flew open with a crash, and over the threshold moved something about a yard high, furry and breathing loudly. It took her a good while to realize that this was not a bear's attack, but her husband returning home after a dangerous adventure. Adam, as every morning, had gone to work. Whether he ever reached it was unknown. Some time later he had found himself by the Wkra, fishing under the ice. When the ice gave way, he managed with difficulty to drag himself onto the bank, and then, dripping icy water, reached home on all fours. After drying her husband, Jadwiga dressed herself and the child, and the two of them went to look at the tracks "of the bear." Indeed, they led straight to the Wkra and then to a great hole in the ice. All around one could see the traces of a struggle, a real struggle for the life of a man who had suddenly fallen beneath the ice. He had been there alone.

At the summer-camp center under construction there also worked Mrs. Przybysz, an older woman from the other side of the village. Her only task was to keep watch, that is, to look after the company's property, which in any case all the workmen, as well as the people of the neighborhood, plundered in solidarity. Since she did not have much work, the woman passed the time by chatting with anyone who happened to come near. In that way she also came to know Jadwiga, who lived a few steps from the worksite, and her little son.

The child, who avoided food more than nightmares, aroused such pity in the woman that she wished to share her sandwich with him. To everyone's surprise, the sandwich tasted good. In time, not wishing to expose a stranger to the burden of feeding her son out of pure kindness, Jadwiga began bringing her own food, which the boy accepted from "Grandma" and in this way ate what he would not eat at home. The feeding ended when the older woman gave up the job. But had the child been starving?

When Piotr was already several years old, he was coming back from the woods. He felt strange. Something troubled him in his belly; a feeling appeared that he had never known before. He became uneasy. Suddenly a surprising thought came to him: "Maybe I'm hungry." He returned home, where for the first time in his life he asked for food. He ate, and the strange sensations in his belly passed. "So that is what hunger feels like," he thought with astonishment. Jadwiga, too, was astonished, accustomed as she was to her firstborn's answering every question about what he would eat in always the same way: "Nothing." At best he might eat a slice of bread soaked with water and sprinkled with sugar. Sometimes he managed to force down that slice covered with sour cream.

The child's tastes did not always agree with what his mother considered nourishing. For a very long time a certain duel was fought over milk dishes. Milk dumplings, oatmeal, and semolina porridge appeared to Jadwiga as foods essential to a child's development. Her son had another opinion on the matter. Semolina, and especially the lumps that appeared in it, filled him with outright disgust. He endured the hateful sight of milk dumplings still worse.

"You will sit here until you eat it," the woman ordered, seating her son on a small stool in the entryway. Beside him she set a plate of semolina and shut the door behind her. The little fellow did not want to sit there alone, though what was on the plate aroused in him an indescribable aversion. He tried to eat. One spoonful, another, a pause, then a little more, until—

Jadwiga ran out of the room at sounds she associated with trouble. Indeed, when she looked into the plate, she understood that nothing more could be eaten from it. Piotr had vomited. That was the last time he tried to eat a dish cooked with milk.

Early childhood was also the memory of long conversations with his mother. While her husband was at work, Jadwiga spent much time with the child, sometimes carrying on discussions that were beyond him and troubled him.

"Someday you'll meet some girl and leave your mother."

"No, I'll never leave you," he assured her earnestly, but his mother apparently did not believe his words, for similar quarrels were repeated several times. Worse still, when the boy was somewhat older, the woman explained to him more complicated nuances of family life, proving that one could be certain of grandchildren only from a daughter. "From a son, one never knows," she argued—a thing the boy did not understand, but which began to shape in him a sensitivity to unequal treatment of children by parents.

Life moved along in its settled course until the autumn of 1969, which brought a marital crisis that would leave its mark on the whole future of the family. The construction work at the summer-camp center had just ended. Some of the men who had worked there found employment in the new facility. Others, whose attachment to their duties had been more modest, had to look for another occupation. Adam's sister Wanda, who for some time had been employed at the hospital in Bielany, helped him find new work. So that he would not have to commute every day from Szczypiorno, he began spending the nights at his parents' house, returning to his wife and son on Saturday evening and leaving again twenty-four hours later.

This arrangement pleased neither wife nor son. The latter, wanting to keep his parent with him, decided to act. Taking advantage of his father's heavy sleep, he tied his hands and feet with long strips of cloth. The prisoner, on waking, naturally had no great difficulty freeing himself. Even so, something in him broke open; a thought came that made him consider the situation of the family and his own future. He decided to change jobs and devote himself to those nearest him. Nine months later a second child was to appear in the house. That autumn, then, it was not only father and son who were reconciled.