CHAPTER XVII

The Price of Silence

The wedding did not automatically put an end to every unfinished matter from Piotr's life before it. Anna, with whom only a few months earlier he had been planning a Christmas wedding, did not even know that on August 24 he had married another woman. At their last meeting in Kraków, she had been told that their relationship had no future, but she had not been told the whole truth. Piotr had deliberately said nothing to her then about Małgorzata. He had wanted to spare Anna further humiliation while also avoiding a conversation in which he would have had to admit how quickly he had made plans for an entirely new life.

For several months, they had no contact. Later, Anna obtained the telephone number for the apartment on Mazowiecka Street. No one remembered any longer who had given it to her. When she called for the first time, she insisted on meeting. Piotr refused. He repeated that everything between them was over and that he saw no reason to return to it.

Anna did not accept his refusal. At one point, she threatened to take her own life and then hung up. There was no way to tell whether she had spoken out of despair or was trying to force Piotr into a conversation. The threat could not, however, be ignored.

Małgorzata reacted immediately. She was the one who called the police station in Bielsko-Biała, gave them Anna's address, and reported a possible suicide attempt. They never learned whether the police reached her or what the intervention looked like. They knew only that Anna was alive, because after some time she called again.

The later calls were no longer Piotr's concern alone. Małgorzata heard parts of the conversations and knew that his former fiancée did not regard the breakup as final. After discussing it together, the couple agreed to one meeting intended to close the matter. They chose the bus station by the Tenth Anniversary Stadium, a public and crowded place. Jacek Rogala was to remain nearby, ready to intervene if the situation got out of control.

The conversation was turbulent. Anna demanded explanations, while Piotr repeated that they were not right for one another and should not return to their former plans. At one point, she threw her handbag into the roadway and ran off. Jacek watched from a distance but did not have to intervene. The meeting ended without further threats.

— Gosiu, it wasn't easy, but this time I stood firm — Piotr said when he returned. — I told her clearly that it was over.

— Did you tell her you were married? — Małgorzata asked.

— No. I somehow... felt too awkward. Anka and I were supposed to get married at Christmas, and you and I were already married in August. I couldn't bring myself to tell her.

Małgorzata's question went to the heart of the matter. Piotr had ended the meeting, but he still had not told Anna the most important fact. From his point of view, silence was meant to spare her pain. From Anna's perspective, however, it left room to suppose that the breakup was not final and that the obstacles might still be removed.

Małgorzata did not hide her displeasure. She had reminded Piotr earlier that before they began their life together, he should honestly settle matters with his former fiancée. Now it turned out that even after the wedding he could not say one simple sentence to Anna: I am married. Even so, they concluded that the meeting had solved the problem. For a time, the telephone remained silent.

Anna contacted him again. She asked for one more conversation. Piotr already knew that Małgorzata had been right: as long as his former fiancée did not know the truth about the marriage, she could see hope in every postponed explanation. He did not tell his wife about the new call, however, and decided to handle the matter himself.

He told himself that he did not want to burden Małgorzata once again with someone else's drama. The first conversation was supposed to have been the last. Agreeing to another showed that he still could not draw the boundary his marriage required.

A planned trip to Janów gave him the opportunity. Piotr was still seeing patients there once a month in Małgorzata's former apartment. Several people had booked appointments for the coming weekend, so the Friday journey required no additional explanation. He was to travel with six-year-old Paweł.

He arranged to meet Anna at the bus station by the Tenth Anniversary Stadium. On Friday, he arrived in Warsaw with the boy and sat him on a chair in the terminal.

— Paweł, sit here and wait for a moment — he told him.

Anna was waiting two rows away. Piotr approached her, keeping the boy within sight. There was not much time before the bus was due to leave.

— Aniu, I don't know why you came again — he began. — We are not right for each other. This relationship would have no future.

Anna tried to return to one of their earlier conversations, which Piotr regarded as a violation of an important boundary. He did not let her finish. He spoke about differences in temperament, beliefs, and the way they planned a life together. She had a legal education, a professional position of her own, and the support of her parents; he had unfinished studies, irregular income, and political and religious convictions he had no intention of abandoning. For Anna, some of those differences might still have been open to discussion. For Piotr, they had already become the justification for a decision made many months earlier.

— You mean it's because I'm crippled! — she said at last.

— No. That was never the reason — he replied. — Your disability was not why we broke up.

He had no time to say anything more. An announcement over the loudspeakers said that the bus to Janów Podlaski was pulling in. Piotr returned to Paweł and took him to the platform. Once they had found their seats, he saw Anna board the same bus and sit directly behind them.

They traveled among people who knew Małgorzata, her parents, and Piotr himself. Anna tried to resume the conversation; he answered in a low voice and asked her to wait until they arrived. The situation changed when Paweł addressed him as "Dad." Anna knew the boy from Piotr's stories, but only then did she hear what place Piotr held in his life.

At the terminus in Janów, she could have returned to Warsaw on the same bus. She did not. She stayed because she wanted to finish the conversation. Piotr realized that the matter could no longer be closed with a few sentences exchanged between terminal announcements.

— Aniu, don't shout. Let's get away from here — he asked, noticing the interest of the people standing near the stop.

They headed toward Moniuszki Street. Piotr was thinking not only about what he should say, but also about how the presence of an unfamiliar woman would be received by people who knew his wife. He was already preparing an explanation that she was a patient who had come from far away. Before telling Anna the truth, he was therefore preparing another omission for everyone around them.

When they reached the house, Paweł ran to his grandparents. Piotr remained outside with Anna and again tried to persuade her to return. She refused to leave. She raised her voice, returned to their former plans, and demanded answers. Upstairs lived his sister-in-law Maryla and her son Adam. At any moment, she could come down and see her brother-in-law with a woman whose existence Małgorzata knew nothing about.

Piotr invited Anna into the apartment. He presented it to himself as a way to calm the conversation and avoid a scene in front of the house. In reality, he brought his former fiancée into a place bound up with his wife's history and that of her family, still without explaining what had happened since their breakup.

They sat in the large room. Piotr went out for a while, leaving Anna alone. She looked around the interior. On a shelf, in a prominent place, stood Małgorzata's dried wedding bouquet.

— You got married! — she shouted when Piotr returned.

He could no longer deny it. Anna therefore learned of his marriage not from him, but from an object left in the room. Only a few months earlier, she herself had been preparing to marry Piotr. Now she discovered that while she had been trying to understand the breakup, he had become another woman's husband and the father of her child.

Anna reacted violently. Piotr feared that Małgorzata's relatives would hear the shouting. Instead of allowing the truth to be fully spoken, he tried to calm Anna at any cost. He told her that the marriage had been a mistake, that he would divorce Małgorzata, and that he would return to Anna.

It was not a promise he intended to keep. Piotr was planning neither a divorce nor a return to the former relationship. He chose to lie because, at that moment, it seemed the quickest way to end the confrontation. He soothed one woman by making a promise that betrayed the other.

Anna accepted his words as a promise that their story would continue. She calmed down enough that the conversation could no longer be heard outside the apartment. By then it was too late to return to Bielsko-Biała. Piotr prepared a place for her to sleep and asked her to rest. Before going to sleep, she tried to become intimate with him. He refused, pleading fatigue.

The night passed without further scenes. In the morning, they ate breakfast, after which Piotr walked Anna to the bus. She left convinced that she had heard a promise worth waiting for. He returned to his patients and Małgorzata's relatives.

He told several people about a difficult patient who had come from far away. That version explained Anna's presence but said nothing about the true nature of the meeting. On Sunday evening, Piotr and Paweł returned to Nowy Dwór with food they had received in Janów. Małgorzata learned nothing about Anna's journey, the night she had spent in the apartment on Moniuszki Street, or the promise of divorce.

Anna never called again. Her silence, secured through a lie, could look like a final end to the matter. Piotr avoided any further meetings, but he brought into his marriage a secret he could not explain without admitting that he had knowingly deceived both women.

Everyday life continued. Their relatives did not visit the apartment on Mazowiecka Street, so the couple traveled instead to Janów or Legionowo. In December, they attended the wedding of Jacek Olichwiruk, Irena's son. Later, they spent Christmas in Janów, returned for Easter, and came again in May 1997. From the outside, their family looked like many young families trying to reconcile work, raising a child, commuting, and maintaining ties with relatives.

Inside the apartment, however, they still lacked a common language for the matters that mattered most. Piotr did not tell his wife about Anna. Małgorzata managed the money without her husband's full participation. Each of them therefore had an area from which the other was excluded. The two matters were not equivalent: one concerned a concealed meeting and a promise made in secret; the other concerned the way the household budget was managed. What connected them was that the spouses could not sit across from one another and tell the whole truth.

For years, Piotr had dreamed of Rozalka, the daughter he imagined. His attachment to Czarek and his acceptance of Paweł as his son did not diminish that desire. On the contrary, caring for the boy every day confirmed that fatherhood was the role he had sought for most of his adult life. Although only a few months had passed since the wedding, he began to fear that they would have no child together.

One evening, he told Małgorzata about his concern.

— Gosiu, I'm worried. I've been waiting for our child for so long... Maybe something is wrong?

— Maybe we should wait longer? — she replied. — First we should get settled and establish some stability. Only then should we think about having a child.

Małgorzata was clear: she did not consider the first months of marriage the right time for another pregnancy. She first wanted to arrange their shared life, improve their housing situation, and achieve greater stability. She did not say how long that might take. In practice, waiting could mean not a few months, but even several years.

— I've already waited too long — Piotr said. — Too long for a child of our own.

The conversation revealed a real difference between them. Małgorzata wanted first to create lasting conditions for the family; Piotr did not want to postpone fatherhood any longer. They did not reach a common position and never returned to the conversation.

And yet, early in 1997, Małgorzata came home from work and, as soon as she entered the apartment, announced:

— Piotrze, I'm pregnant.

Piotr did not hide his joy. The news meant the fulfillment of one of his oldest desires. Their earlier agreement to have a large family was no longer only a plan from their first evening on Miła Street. Rozalka was on her way.

The same news also meant another responsibility. Małgorzata was still working twelve-hour shifts, Piotr arranged his appointment hours around caring for Paweł, and the money regularly ran out before payday. The pregnancy removed none of those problems. It only made solving them more urgent.

As the end of the school year approached, Małgorzata said with increasing frequency that there was not enough money for the rent and current expenses. Piotr still did not know the full state of the household finances. He handed over his earnings but took no part in keeping the accounts. His low income deprived him of the confidence to ask questions, while his silence left Małgorzata with more and more decisions to make on her own.

The arguments were not about a single bill. The same problem returned in each of them: who was responsible for the household, who had the right to decide, and who was to blame when the money ran out. Małgorzata might see beside her a husband who did not provide enough and showed no interest in the details of the budget. Piotr saw a wife who managed everything and reduced his role to handing over his paycheck. Both had arguments of their own, but neither could present them without reopening old resentments.

After one of their arguments, Piotr packed a few things into a backpack and left the apartment. He had nowhere prepared to go and no plan for what came next. He sat on a bench and for a long time tried to convince himself that his decision was final.

After about an hour, he thought of his pregnant wife and Paweł. He asked himself what Małgorzata would do on her own and returned. He did not know how she understood his departure: as a genuine attempt to separate, a threat, or an impulsive response to an argument. They did not have the conversation that might have clarified it. The backpack was unpacked, but the possibility of leaving had now entered their marital disputes.

The second attempt began with a mistaken reading of an ordinary scene. One morning, after an argument, Piotr saw Małgorzata's wedding band and engagement ring lying on the table. His wife was not there; she had gone to work. The two pieces of jewelry together seemed to him an unmistakable message. He concluded that Małgorzata had decided to end the marriage.

Once again, he gathered his things and went to the clinic. This time, he did not return after an hour. He waited to see what would happen next, convinced that his wife had deliberately left him the signs of a separation.

In the afternoon, Małgorzata called. She explained that she had removed her wedding band and engagement ring in the bathroom before leaving and had then forgotten to put them back on. She had not intended to convey any message. Piotr had based the entire decision on his own fear of rejection without first trying to find out what had actually happened.

He returned this time as well. The marriage continued, but the two attempts to leave showed how little it took for each of them to begin acting alone. He packed his belongings before the conversation was over. She made financial or family decisions before asking his opinion. Increasingly, both responded to their own idea of the other's intentions rather than to what had actually been said.

In June 1997, the rent became the decisive problem. Małgorzata concluded that they could no longer afford the apartment on Mazowiecka Street. Piotr offered no solution that would allow them to stay. They gave up the lease and moved their belongings to the plot of land in Szczypiorno.

Once again, that place was expected to provide a solution to a family crisis. Earlier, Piotr had imagined a home of his own in Szczypiorno. Later, the building plan had collapsed in a dispute with his parents. Now the boxes, furniture, and possessions of a family that had once again lost its rented home were taken there. They intended to spend the summer on the property and look for a cheaper apartment in the meantime.

Yet the very next day, Małgorzata said that she would go to Janów with Paweł.

— I'll go to Janów with Paweł for two weeks. We'll rest.

She was already on extended medical leave because of the pregnancy. In Janów, she had her parents, her sisters, and a home where Paweł felt safe. Piotr remained in Szczypiorno with the belongings moved from Mazowiecka Street. He did not object to the trip, although he did not know whether his wife would really return after two weeks or where they would live then.

She left. He remained alone.