Chapter XIII

Uphill with Anna

That unconventional proposal immediately triggered a flood of plans. Before they even reached Piotr's allotment, they had already decided they would marry the following Christmas, chosen their witnesses, and started compiling a guest list.

When they arrived, they found that Piotr's father had ridden off on his bicycle, God only knew where. Overwhelmed by the suddenness of everything and the prospect of the wedding, Anna could not hold back her tears. Piotr sat beside her, gently stroking her straight hair that fell to her shoulders, and wiped them away. She pressed herself against him, and he, mindful of the lesson Danka had taught him, did not pull away.

After that, things were no longer so romantic. Although they spent many days together and continued preparing for the wedding, they were drifting further and further apart. Jadwiga made no secret of her displeasure—sometimes even her outrage—over the relationship. She considered Anna a poor choice for a daughter-in-law, accusing her of immoral behavior, a cold attitude toward faith, and an air of superiority. On many points, Piotr privately agreed with his mother, yet at home he defended his fiancée, mainly to prevent yet another argument from erupting.

It was not merely a matter of differing opinions. Anna had a habit of arranging their shared future as though the most important decisions had already been made. Once, during a conversation in company, an insect flew into Piotr's mouth. He instinctively spat it out. Anna immediately scolded him in front of everyone for his lack of manners. Piotr answered sharply, and the small incident quickly turned into another quarrel. To Anna, it was a question of etiquette; to Piotr, it was yet another sign that life with her would mean being constantly corrected and led by the hand. As a judge and the daughter of a former Security Service officer, she was accustomed to having her judgments taken seriously. At times she looked down on Piotr, as though his experiences, his work, and his convictions carried less weight than her professional position.

Such incidents multiplied. More and more often, she spoke of the future in the indicative mood; more and more clearly, he felt that in her plans, his role was simply to adapt. He longed for a home in which responsibility would be shared or clearly divided—not for the life of a boy forever being led by the hand.

It was then, when the wedding plans were being carried forward more by momentum than by genuine conviction, that a letter arrived from Janów Podlaski. The sender, Małgorzata, asked Piotr—by then already working as a bioenergy therapist and massage therapist—for help with her mother, whose condition deeply worried her. Along with the handwritten pages, she had enclosed a photograph.

When he drew the picture from the envelope, he froze for a moment. It was not the whole scene—only the young woman—who seemed somehow familiar. No clear memory returned: no place, no voice, no conversation. There was only a flicker of recognition, too faint to trust, yet too distinct to dismiss entirely. The other people at the table, including the little boy she was leaning toward, only blurred the vague impression instead of helping him grasp it.

He had no idea then that, among the hundreds of thousands of photographs that had passed and would yet pass through his hands, this one would one day... For now, it was simply a photograph like many others: a family gathering, strangers seated around a table, and in the foreground a pretty, short-haired young woman whispering into the ear of a small boy. What caught his attention was the caption: "This is me with my little boy."

The older woman had already visited another healer and had returned with something close to a death sentence. According to that diagnosis, her end was near. Piotr had recently completed a medical training program and several other courses he jokingly referred to as his "mystical schools." He was hungry for professional success, but above all he wanted to help. The beauty of the patient's daughter remained a detail he tried not to overvalue.

A few days later, they met beneath Sigismund's Column. Małgorzata stood there, chilled to the bone, while Piotr, who was late, watched her from a distance for a moment, more intimidated than he cared to admit. When he approached, that vague sense of familiarity returned. Yet he did not ask whether they had met before; he could not have explained where such a question had come from. By the time their conversation ended, he could remember neither what she had been wearing nor even exactly what they had talked about.

There was something incomprehensible about it. After all, Piotr was engaged to Anna. She lived far away, so he looked forward to every meeting with her and felt it deeply. None of them, however, had left him as unsettled as that brief conversation with Małgorzata in Warsaw's Old Town. He only reconstructed what had been said from her next letter. Małgorzata wrote that they had arranged to meet in Janów Podlaski—first at her home, and then at her mother's.

It was a late February afternoon in 1996. A worn-out bus departed from Warsaw's Stadion bus station, heading for the area near the Belarusian border. As long as the crowded passengers kept the interior warm, the journey was bearable. A few dozen kilometers before the destination, however, the bus emptied, and Piotr fell asleep with his head against the window.

"Sir... Sir..." an insistent voice woke him. "We've arrived. Time to get off."

The driver was trying to reach the sleepy man's consciousness. Piotr slowly came to. Getting up from the seat, however, proved difficult—his entire sleeve had frozen to the window.

6 Moniuszki Street. In those days, no navigation system could lead anyone to that address. Piotr did not need to ask for directions. Before leaving home, he had studied a map of the unfamiliar town and memorized the route step by step: from the bus loop onto Przechodnia Street, then right onto Brzeska. He recognized the tall white house without difficulty. He also remembered the instruction not to go up the stairs—because the upstairs was supposedly haunted—but to knock at the door on the ground floor, or rather in the semi-basement.

Małgorzata opened the door—a dark-haired woman with short hair, dressed plainly, like someone absorbed in the ordinary tasks of the day. He had not arrived in a suit or carrying flowers either. It was a therapist's visit, and after such a long journey, he needed rest and a place to spend the night.

The apartment immediately drew attention with its low ceilings and unusual layout. From the small entryway, stairs led to the raised ground floor, where Małgorzata's sister, Maryla, lived. Straight ahead, down two steps, was a large, warmly furnished room; beside it were the boiler room, a small bedroom for five-year-old Paweł, and the kitchen. The cramped space showed care and good taste, but also a shadow of sadness that was difficult to name.

Małgorzata prepared a meal and invited him into the kitchen. At first they talked about ordinary things, but gradually her story began to widen in circles. Sometimes she spoke quickly, as though trying to pour out whole years at once; at other times she fell silent for so long that the only sounds were the ticking of the clock and the house slowly coming to life around them. Piotr did not interrupt.

She was a midwife by profession. Since Paweł's birth, she had been on parental leave because the boy had suffered serious health problems from the very beginning. She knew the fear of the mothers she had attended in maternity wards; she knew how to calm them and guide them through the hardest moments. Faced with her own son's illness, however, she lost all professional distance. Every worsening of Paweł's condition came back to her like a warning of disaster.

She did not speak of her dreams in grand terms. Above all, she wanted Paweł to be healthy, to return to her profession one day without the constant fear of leaving him when he needed her most, and to have a home where neither she nor her child had to remain constantly on the defensive. From her broken sentences emerged a longing for ordinary peace—something she had never yet managed to secure for herself.

Maryla stirred the strongest emotions. The rivalry between the sisters had probably begun in childhood. Maryla, the apple of their father's eye, more often got what she wanted. She trained as a pharmacist, ran her own pharmacy, and—at least in her younger sister's eyes—carried herself as though professional success entitled her to judge everyone around her. Once her career began going well, she left her husband. She was raising Adam alone, though the boy's father lived only a few streets away; Adam was several years older than Paweł.

Małgorzata spoke of Maryla with a mixture of anger, hurt, and an old helplessness. The present-day fights over the bathroom, money, and the shared house were merely a continuation of an old dispute over their father's attention, fairness, and the right to a place of one's own. In Małgorzata's account, the older sister had always had more: more recognition, more freedom, more money, and more certainty that her judgment would be accepted as final.

She spoke of Paweł's father cautiously and ambiguously. Piotr understood her words in the easiest way possible: he assumed she had separated from her husband and that the boy missed his father. Only later would he learn that Małgorzata had never been married. That night, he did not ask why she and Paweł bore her parents' surname.

By the time the first light appeared in the sky, more confidences lay between these two near-strangers than most people exchange over many months. Not everything could be understood at once. Names, family conflicts, and old grievances overlapped, and every answer opened onto another story. What remained above all from that night was the image of a woman who had been forced to manage alone for a very long time.

Although dawn was breaking outside, they agreed they should get some sleep. Małgorzata made up a bed for her guest in the large room and lay down herself in the child's room, which was free that night because Paweł was staying with his grandparents.

They were supposed to get up at nine. Piotr woke earlier; the unfamiliar place and the awkward circumstances would not let him sleep long. He dressed, made his way to the bathroom, and waited. When he decided that Małgorzata might already have gone out, he looked into the small room. On the wide bed, her head and her entire left leg protruded from beneath the comforter. One glance was enough to make him withdraw without a sound. He did not want her to think he had entered merely to stare at her. He sat down in an armchair and tried to fall asleep again.

They did not leave the house until nearly noon. On Brzeska Street, Piotr saw Paweł for the first time. The five-year-old, a true live wire with a mass of curls, was riding a small white bicycle along the street. At the sight of his mother he wheeled around sharply, greeted her, and a moment later raced away again.

"Aren't you afraid for him? He's five years old and rides around the street by himself," Piotr asked, surprised by the boy's freedom.

Małgorzata did not share her concern. They had grown up in different kinds of homes, and from Piotr's very first meeting with Paweł, a difference appeared in how the two adults understood the care of a child.

Małgorzata's mother was not nearly as gravely ill as had been suggested, and her life was in no immediate danger. Piotr regarded the previous healer's dramatic diagnosis as an attempt to pressure the family: the greater their fear, the easier it would be to demand payment for supposedly saving the sick woman.

After the bioenergy treatment, a long massage, and dinner, Małgorzata walked Piotr toward the bus. At the wooden gate separating the property from the small square in front of the church, she stopped.

"Now tell me how it really is."

She clearly feared that what he had said in her mother's presence had been intended only to comfort her. Piotr assured her that he saw no immediate danger and proposed a consultation with Aleksander Wierzbiński, an instructor in bioenergy therapy and massage whom he held in high regard. Małgorzata accepted the suggestion without hesitation.

The following weeks brought the ordinary rhythm of daily life. Piotr was absorbed by his difficult relationship with Anna, arguments at home, and shifts at the clinic in Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki. Małgorzata attended to her mother, her son, and her own affairs. Their acquaintance might have ended with that single visit had it not been for the photograph and the next letter from Janów.

It was past the middle of April when an envelope arrived for Piotr with no return address and only one word by way of a signature: "Gośka." He tore it open faster than he intended.

"Hi, Piotr. Do you still remember me? You came to see my mother in Janów..." Małgorzata began. She described the visit from the Warsaw therapist he had recommended, her gratitude, and her hope that her mother would live. At the end she asked whether Piotr might be willing to come again. The invitation pleased him more than he wanted to admit to himself. He explained it away as the natural satisfaction of a beginning therapist whose help had been appreciated.

Before his shift he tried calling from the post office, but no one answered. At work he could not concentrate on his patients; his thoughts kept returning two hundred kilometers to the east. Mrs. Marzena noticed his distraction. When he told her about the meeting, the letter, and the treatments for the older woman, she offered him the clinic's telephone. Piotr did not want to burden the practice with the cost of a long-distance call, but this time he allowed himself to be persuaded. When he hung up, he knew one thing: they had agreed on May 1.

"Mrs. Marzena, I'm going to Janów in three days," he said, turning toward her.

"I know. I was here for the whole conversation," she answered with a smile.

"May second and third are days off too, so I suppose you'll stay there."

"No. I'm going in the morning and coming back the same day," he replied firmly, though for a moment he entertained the thought that he might remain longer. He dismissed it at once as impossible.

The journey began in the morning. The day was sunny and exceptionally warm. Małgorzata was waiting at the bus loop, and from there they went straight to her parents' house. Dinner, massage, treatment, and conversation lasted so long that the last bus left without him. Piotr had to stay until the following day.

"Well, every cloud has a silver lining," he said, though he worried that his parents would be waiting for him to return. They had no telephone, so he could not warn them. "I'll treat your mother again tomorrow. Tell me, how did the visit with Aleksander Wierzbiński go?"

Małgorzata laughed.

"He came only because he didn't realize how far Janów was. He thought you meant the one outside Warsaw."

"But did he help?"

"He did something, though I don't know exactly what. He said you could continue. And at the end he did something over my head. I hadn't asked him to. For three days I felt as though I'd been born again—happy, calm, full of hope."

"And then?"

"After three days it all disappeared. The old, sad reality came back."

Still talking, they returned to Moniuszki Street. There was plenty of time before evening, so Małgorzata suggested a bicycle ride to the Bug River. The three of them went together. From the outside they might have looked like a family on a May picnic: a woman, a man, and a child. The sight stirred in Piotr a longing he had carried for years.

In his imagination, a table stood beneath a curtained window, flowers remembered from childhood grew on the sill, and four children ran through the rooms. One of them already had a name and a face: Rozalia.

The years had passed, and the dream remained unfulfilled. After the earthquake in Georgia, there had been talk of Polish families adopting orphaned children, but a single man had no chance. Piotr was ready even to raise a child unrelated to him, a child who would nonetheless become wholly his own. He was planning marriage with Anna, yet the question kept returning: would they be able to have children? For a moment, the ride to the Bug with Małgorzata and Paweł gave his old imaginings a shape in the real world.

That evening they sat in the kitchen again, and once more the conversation stretched late into the night. This time Małgorzata was no longer recounting her life from beginning to end. She returned to individual scenes: Paweł's nighttime fevers, her own helplessness, quarrels with Maryla... Sometimes she cried; sometimes a sentence broke off and she stared at the table for a long while. She did not ask outright to be rescued. What she needed was for someone at last to listen without correcting her, judging her, or comparing her with her older sister.

Her deepest fear always returned to Paweł. She worried about his health, but also about whether a boy raised without a father would carry all his life an absence she could never fill. From these confidences there emerged for the first time not merely Małgorzata wounded by her family, but a woman torn between her own exhaustion, her responsibility for her child, and the desire to begin her life again someday.

"When was he born?" Piotr asked.

"March third, 1990," Małgorzata answered without hesitation, and a moment later continued speaking. The date stopped Piotr for a fraction of a second. Instinctively he counted backward through the months, but did not finish the calculation. All that returned was the familiar prick of unease, like the one he had felt while looking at the photograph and later beneath Sigismund's Column. Małgorzata noticed nothing—or chose not to. He asked no further question.

After midnight they moved into the large room. Music played from the stereo, a vase of spring flowers stood on the table, and Małgorzata brought out wine and two glasses. The silence between them was no longer the same silence as before. After the second glass, Piotr offered her a massage; she agreed without hesitation. There was no massage table, so she spread a blanket over the thick gray carpet. The first movements of his hands were professional, calm, and sure. Then they both stopped talking. The boundary did not vanish in a single gesture—it yielded slowly, in successive moments, each of which could still have been stopped. Neither of them stopped it.

"How do you see the two of us?" Małgorzata asked when they were about to fall asleep.

Until that moment they could both pretend the night had been nothing more than an accident, the result of closeness, wine, and a long conversation. Małgorzata's question took that refuge away. Piotr had not imagined that she might see their acquaintance as the beginning of something lasting. But since she asked directly, he answered just as directly: he spoke of serious intentions.

"First you have to settle things with Anna," she reminded him.

"Of course," he answered, pretending to be sleepy.

The matter of Anna could not be reduced to a single difficult conversation. For months they had broken up and returned to each other, as though the desire to start a family could somehow make up for incompatible characters. Every earlier attempt to leave for good, however, had ended with her tears and the words, "Because I'm ugly," or "because I'm crippled." That was what robbed him of the courage to say a firm, final no.

It was not love yet, at least not the kind that had been given time to mature. There was instead a sudden sense of mutual recognition: she had found a man willing to listen; he, a woman beside whom, for a moment, he could see a home and children. Before they fell asleep, the possibility of a life together ceased to be merely a fantasy. It became a plan, though neither of them yet knew how much of that plan was hope and how much was the longing to escape the life they had known.

The journey home from Janów brought Piotr no relief. On the way he tried to name what had happened during the night, but every name sounded like an excuse. The thought of Małgorzata and Paweł brought joy, and immediately beside it appeared Anna—not as an obstacle, but as a human being he was about to hurt.

His feeling for Anna did not disappear in an instant. In a certain sense he loved her: he had waited for their meetings, knew her fears, and understood how deeply she dreaded rejection. Most of all, he feared that she would see the breakup as a consequence of her disability. He did not want her to think he was leaving because she limped, because she was somehow "less," or because her body had ruled out a life together. He did not want to be responsible for her humiliation or for another flood of tears.

For the next several days he rehearsed a conversation in his mind that would be neither a lie nor an act of cruelty. He found no good words. He knew only that he would not mention Małgorzata.

The day was sunny and extraordinarily beautiful. Anna greeted him at the station with a joyful smile and a warm embrace. There was not a trace of suspicion in her manner; her fiancé had arrived, the man with whom she meant to build a future. Piotr returned the embrace and for a moment almost believed he could say nothing, that they could simply return to the old plan. Then he thought of Janów. He knew that further silence would be an even greater lie. Anna had prepared a surprise: after dinner they were going to Kraków. For her it was another day together; for him, an increasingly painful postponement of the breakup.

Anna's parents received him with their usual kindness. Her father, Ryszard, despite certain habits acquired in the machinery of the communist state, was warm and easygoing at home. Her mother worried about the future of her only daughter. Both were discreet and seized every opportunity to leave the young couple alone, clearly hoping for a wedding soon.

"Eat faster. We have to leave," Anna urged him.

"Anna, what have you planned?"

"I told you. A surprise."

She refused to say more. Piotr climbed into the Fiat 126p adapted for her disability and let her drive him toward the unknown. Anna handled the car skillfully and obeyed every traffic rule. All the functions usually controlled by the feet had been transferred to the steering area, so full use of her hands was all she needed to drive.

"Anna, where are we going?" he asked when they turned off the road toward Kraków.

"I told you there was a surprise. Actually, there are two."

Anna spoke of the future with the certainty of someone who had spent a long time arranging it: work, the apartment, her parents, their life after the wedding. Piotr answered in half-sentences. Every new detail that seemed to her an expression of care deepened his guilt. He did not know which was crueler—to let her go on, or to interrupt while she joyfully unveiled their common future.

After some time they entered a small town in the foothills. Anna stopped the car before an impressive house, took keys from her purse, and opened the door without knocking.

"Whose house is this?"

"My father's. It's a vacation house in the mountains. My parents want to move here someday and leave us the apartment in town."

"Don't you think I should have something to say about that too?"

"What is there to discuss? I'll be working here. We can't live in Warsaw."

They saw the same place in entirely different ways. Anna led him through the rooms, described the furnishings, explained where they could live and how her parents intended to help. There was relief in her voice: one of the hardest problems facing a young married couple had already been solved. Piotr heard a finished script in which no room had been left for his decision. When she reminded him to take off his shoes, he felt more like a guest than someone who would ever make a home there.

He did not begin the conversation. They were far from the station, and Anna was pleased with the day she had arranged. Yet every moment of silence prolonged an illusion he would soon have to take away. He followed her out of the house, knowing he could not escape the conversation forever.

They reached Kraków in the late afternoon. It was still too early for the second surprise. Piotr guessed that it involved the place they had visited the previous fall, where they both enjoyed looking down over the city from above. Under other circumstances, the outing might have delighted them. That day everything carried a second meaning.

"Come on. I want to show you something," Anna said, leading him toward a quiet park on the slope. Beyond the trees and neatly cut grass, the Vistula shimmered faintly in the distance.

"Do you like it?"

"It's pleasant here."

"See that linden tree?" She pointed toward one standing nearby.

"What about it?"

"I came here once with an old boyfriend. Right under that tree... you know..."

Piotr said nothing.

"Come on. I want to do it again—with you," she said, leaving no doubt what she meant.

"No, Anna. That's sick. You'll have to ask your old boyfriend to help you."

"Don't be ridiculous. That ended long ago, and I want to be with you. Besides, we need to talk about these things."

"Is something missing between us?"

"Not now. It's wonderful now. But I'm ill, and men still have needs even when they're old."

"Anna, that isn't the most important thing in life."

"I want you to know that if someday I can't, all I'll care about is that you still love me. I wouldn't hold it against you if you..."

"What are you talking about?" Piotr cut her off.

He did not want this conversation and felt increasingly uneasy. Anna, however, tried to explain how she imagined their future.

"I could even pay another woman, just so you'd be satisfied," she said at last.

Silence followed. Anna watched him tensely, waiting for him to understand the magnitude of the sacrifice she was prepared to make. In her own mind, she was trying to protect their future from what her illness might take away. Piotr heard the opposite: consent to a life he did not want, and an image of himself reduced to nothing but physical need. He stepped back. When gratitude and relief failed to appear on his face, incomprehension rose in Anna, followed by anger.

"Then what do you want?"

"I don't know, Anna. But I know I don't want this. First you show me a house and tell me where we're going to live, as if everything has already been settled. Now you're even arranging who I'm supposed to sleep with when you no longer can. There's no place for me in any of these plans."

"I'm doing it for you! I want you to be happy with me."

"But you always know better what's supposed to make me happy. Remember when that bug flew into my mouth while we were talking? I spat it out, and you lectured me in front of everyone about my manners. What was I supposed to do—swallow it and lick my lips?" he burst out. "I don't want to spend my whole life being told what to say, where to live, and how to behave."

"Now you're dragging up some stupid little thing because you don't like what I just said," she cried, still unable to see anything wrong in her behavior.

"It isn't one stupid little thing. It's always like this. You decide, and then you tell me what you've settled. I don't want to be a boy led around by the hand."

"So what? You're leaving me because I'm trying to think about our future?"

"No. And not because you're ill. That is the last thing I ever wanted you to think. You matter to me, Anna. In my own way, I love you. But we'll make each other miserable. You'll boss me around, and I'll fight you over everything. In the end we'll either hate each other or kill each other."

"Where did all this sudden wisdom come from?"

"It isn't sudden. I just didn't have the courage to say it before. After what I heard a moment ago, I can't keep pretending. When you say you'll pay a strange woman to satisfy me, you turn me into an animal. I don't want that kind of love. It makes no sense. Just tell me which way to the station."

"Is this the end?" she asked quietly.

"I think so," he answered. The words he had prepared throughout the journey sounded weaker than he wanted. For the first time, he was the one ending a relationship, and he could not do it without hesitation.

"Here's what we'll do. I'll drive you to the station, you'll go home and calm down. Everything will be all right," Anna had made another decision, and once again she did not notice.

By the time they reached the parking lot, Anna was calmer, as though during the drive she had already arranged the events into a version that could still be reversed.

"Go on by yourself now. You need to be alone. When you start missing me, call."

She received no confirmation, but the absence of protest was enough for her to leave open the possibility of his return. She embraced him warmly. The same gesture held a different meaning for each of them: to her it might be a pause; to him, it was farewell. She drove away, and Piotr remained in the parking lot for a moment longer, relief mingling with the emptiness left by something that, for all its flaws, had been meant to become his life.

The next day Piotr called Małgorzata from the first working pay phone he could find.

"Hi, Gosia. I've had the difficult conversation with Anna. It wasn't easy, but it's over."

"What did you tell her? Does she know about me?"

"I didn't have to tell her about you. Even if you didn't exist, our relationship would have ended today. This has nothing to do with you. I don't want to talk about it anymore. It's over."

— End of Chapter XIII —