CHAPTER XIX

Fear of Love

After Christmas, life in Janów returned to a rhythm that, from the outside, might have seemed peaceful. Paweł went to school, Małgorzata looked after the home and the children, and Piotr tried to build a livelihood that would allow the family to support itself without constantly relying on relatives. Yet Rozalka occupied the largest place in his daily life. After his daughter's illness, ordinary tasks took on a particular weight. Feeding her, bathing her, getting up at night, and checking her breathing were not burdens. They were proof that the child was alive and with him.

Sometimes he woke for no clear reason and went to the crib. He did not touch his daughter for fear of waking her. He merely watched her chest rise and fall, the hand resting beside her face, the hair clinging to her forehead. Only then would he return to bed. The fear he had carried home from the hospital in Biała Podlaska did not disappear when the pneumonia passed. It was no longer violent, but it remained in the small gestures of a father who no longer wished to take anything for granted.

He registered the "Siloe" Natural Medicine Clinic and set up an office in one of the outbuildings. People often came to him not only with a specific ailment, but also with a need to talk and a hope that someone would take their suffering seriously. At times a single patient took far more time than he had expected. Piotr listened, gave massages, performed treatments, and tried to find the source of the problem even when the person sitting before him could not name it.

He remembered some cases as particularly important. One patient, who had long been undergoing follow-up examinations for a breast lesion, brought him the results of another test after a series of treatments. She said that the lesion previously observed was no longer found. Piotr regarded the news as one of the greatest successes of his practice. The office gave him a sense of purpose and the conviction that he could be useful. It did not, however, provide the steady income that would solve the family's housing and financial problems.

In early spring, he brought Małgorzata the results of her tests. He entered the house more quickly than usual and, without putting the papers down, said:

— Gosia, we're expecting a baby.

For him, the news brought immediate joy. He needed no time to grow accustomed to the thought of another child. In an instant, what until then had existed only as a possibility became a person who began to take up space in his imagination. Małgorzata received the news differently. Only a few months had passed since Rozalka's birth. She was still recovering from pregnancy, childbirth, and the hospital stay with her daughter. The family had neither a home of its own nor a reliable income. Her concerns were concrete, and she did not intend to hide them.

Piotr heard them, but he could not share her first reaction. To him, the child was not another expense or complication. It was the fulfillment of his old longing for a large family. Rozalka had not diminished that longing. On the contrary, every night he spent holding his daughter confirmed that this was the life he wanted. He saw children growing up beside one another, a shared table, conversations, quarrels, school notebooks spread across several places, and a home that did not fall empty when one door closed.

He did not know the child's sex or the due date, yet he was already trying to see its face. He wondered whether it would resemble its mother or him; whether Rozalka would be protective of the younger child or jealous; whether Paweł would welcome a new brother or sister without fearing for his own place. He imagined that one day they would all go for a walk together: he carrying one child, Małgorzata pushing the stroller, Paweł walking beside them, and Rozalka trying to keep up.

Małgorzata did not share his unconditional euphoria, but she did not remain outside the expectation either. After her initial anxiety, she began to discuss what they would need to prepare, where they could fit another crib, and how they would divide the responsibilities. They differed in their assessment of what they could manage, but the child gradually ceased to be an unexpected test result. It entered their conversations, their plans, and their daily reckoning with the future.

At an Easter gathering at the Olichwiruks' home on April 12, 1998, they told their relatives that the family would grow again. The news was shared at a laden table amid conversation, laughter, and ordinary holiday commotion. Piotr accepted the congratulations with the joy of a man who already regarded the child as present, even though no one but Małgorzata could yet feel it move.

Ryszard Andrzejuk was also at the table. After a hemorrhage during a visit to the dentist, he had spent several days in the hospital, but he was allowed home for Easter. He played the accordion, sang, told stories, and posed for family photographs. For a few hours, illness was pushed beyond the bounds of the family gathering. That evening he returned to the ward. The next day, when the family sat down at the table again, his place remained empty.

Not long afterward, Małgorzata stopped feeling the baby move. At first she could tell herself that it was simply quieter, that it had changed position, or that the stillness would last only a few hours. With every passing hour, however, those explanations lost their force. At last the anxiety became too strong to wait. She went to a hospital in Warsaw.

Piotr remained in Janów. He waited for the phone to ring, trying to occupy himself with anything that required no concentration. He moved from the room to the office, picked things up, and put them down before realizing why he had reached for them. He kept the smallest possibility open in his mind: that the examination would bring reassurance and that by evening he would hear that everything was all right.

When the phone rang, he understood from Małgorzata's first words that no reassurance would come. The baby was dead.

He could not take in the news at once. That very morning, a future had still existed: the birth, the return from the hospital, another crib, a first word, first steps, illnesses, school—an entire life they did not know, but for which they had already made room. A few sentences spoken over the telephone canceled all of it at once. They took no memories away, because there had not yet been time to gather any. They took away a future Piotr had lived so intensely in his imagination that losing it was real to him.

He waited for his wife to return, knowing she would come home without a living child, though she would still be carrying the baby with her. That evening he saw her enter the house with a small bundle. She did not have to explain anything. He knew what she held in her hands.

The sight exceeded everything for which he had tried to prepare himself. Their son's entire body, the entire future they had imagined, fit into a bundle that could be carried in one hand. There was something unbearable in that disproportion: so much expectation, conversation, and love, and so little space occupied by death when it entered the house.

There was no newborn's cry, no hurried calls to relatives, no setting up of a crib. Rozalka still needed to be fed, Paweł came home from school, and water still had to be boiled and a meal prepared in the kitchen. Daily life did not stop, but from that moment on they performed every ordinary task beside the bundle whose presence stripped those tasks of their former meaning.

They decided to name their son Staś. A name could not restore his life, but they did not want him to remain a nameless medical case or a "pregnancy" that had failed. He was their child. Throughout the evening and night, he held a place of honor in a house that was never to become his home. He had not been baptized; they had never seen his eyes open or heard his voice. Yet he had existed, and he deserved a grave of his own.

The decision to hold a funeral was met in their families not with awkward silence or ordinary incomprehension, but with hostility. Małgorzata's sisters mocked the parents' grief and their need to arrange a funeral ceremony. In their view, there was no one to mourn in the way Piotr and Małgorzata considered self-evident. Jadwiga, speaking with her son about the funeral, also dismissed their decision. After consulting her daughter, she justified her refusal to attend by accusing them of 'making a farce out of it.'

For Piotr, this was not merely a dispute over a rite. He took those reactions as a refusal to acknowledge that Staś belonged to the family and that his death was a real loss. The same people who had heard the news of the pregnancy at the Easter table only weeks earlier now refused to accept the consequence of the expected child's death.

In this matter, Małgorzata did not side with her mother or sisters. She stood with her husband and her son. They agreed that the funeral had to take place even if none of their relatives would go with them. They were not asking for grand speeches or demonstrative mourning. They wanted a presence—the simplest acknowledgment that their child had lived and that they were allowed to grieve for him.

On June 18, they went to Pomiechowo. Staś was buried in the grave where Aunt Chojnacka had previously been laid to rest. No family procession accompanied them. There were no siblings, grandparents, aunts, or any of those who only weeks earlier had received the news that the family was growing. Only the parents stood at the grave.

The solitude of that ceremony carried a weight of its own. Małgorzata stood beside him and made no attempt to diminish the loss. On this one matter, they were in complete agreement. Their son was not to be erased from family memory merely because he had died before he could see the world God had made.

The funeral did not end their grief. After returning, they still had to get up in the morning, care for Rozalka and Paweł, receive patients, and cook dinner. The world went on with an indifference that felt like an insult. There were no belongings of Staś in the house, no photographs, no baby clothes he had ever worn. Even so, his absence appeared at the table, beside Rozalka's crib, and in every conversation about the future.

The most difficult change took place within Piotr himself. Until then, love had meant above all a longing for closeness: to have a family, to be needed, to love without reserve, and in return to be given a place no one could question. After Staś's death, he understood something he had never wished to accept—that the more he gave to love, the more could be taken from him.

He did not stop loving Rozalka. On the contrary, he became even more deeply attached to her. When he held her, he felt gratitude that she was alive and, at the same time, a fear he could not push aside. Every fever, cough, or unusually long sleep could summon back the hospital and the empty stroller. His love for his daughter did not grow smaller. It became the love of a man who already knew that a child could be lost. The feeling reached further still. In the past, he had sometimes joked about his mother's fears: every telegram, the siren of an ambulance, even an unexpected phone call made her react as though it must bring the worst possible news. Now he began to feel the same. Death and disaster seemed to be waiting everywhere.

In the summer of 1998, before Rozalka had learned to walk, she came out of the house one day and crawled along the path toward her father's office. Piotr saw her through the window. He ran outside, but instead of picking her up at once, he passed her for a moment, grabbed his camera, and returned. He wanted to preserve the image of the little girl who had chosen the road toward him on her own.

Rozalka looked at him in surprise when he passed her and then approached with the camera. After taking the photograph, he picked her up and held her close. She was not a consolation meant to take Staś's place. She could not be. She was a separate child, loved with all the strength he possessed. That was precisely why the fear was so painful: he already knew what attachment could cost.

He fed her, bathed her, changed her diapers, and often got up with her at night. He did not regard any of it as a sacrifice. In those duties he found the most certain part of his life. Conflicts with the family, uncertainty in the marriage, and the lack of steady work could deprive him of any sense of control. With his daughter, he knew who he was. He was the man she called for, the one toward whom she reached her arms, the one beside whom she fell asleep.

He also tried to return to journalistic work. He wrote dispatches from Janów for Echo Podlasia, reported on events in the area, and encouraged Małgorzata to prepare articles of her own. Among other things, she interviewed Minister Kamińska during a visit to Janów. For a time, their shared work gave them a subject beyond household conflicts and bills.

Paweł soon became interested in Piotr's former ties to the Strzelec Riflemen's Association. The boy wanted a uniform and a chance to take part in training, so his father renewed old contacts and organized field exercises in Janów for a youth platoon. The age difference quickly made itself felt. After several hours of training, Paweł—much younger than the other participants—burst into tears from exhaustion. Marianna immediately came to her grandson's defense, accusing her son-in-law of subjecting the boy to excessive strain. She saw an exhausted child; Piotr saw yet another situation in which his decision as a parent was judged and overruled in Paweł's presence.

A far more serious dispute brought the stench of sewage into their apartment. A pipe from Maryla's bathroom one floor above was leaking as it ran through the bathroom used by the Koryckis. When his wife led him there, foul-smelling liquid was already running down the plumbing.

— Maryla thinks that because the pipe is in our bathroom, we should be the ones to fix it — she said.

This time Małgorzata did not defend her sister. To both of them, it was obvious that the failure belonged to the upstairs apartment.

The matter did not end there. While Małgorzata was away, Maryla came downstairs and entered the bathroom. Her conversation with Piotr quickly ceased to be about the pipe. Voices rose and accusation followed accusation. At one point—as he later related it—his sister-in-law swung at him. He shielded his face with his right hand, and the blow dislocated his middle finger. Maryla later maintained that she was the one who had been hurt. When Marianna came running, she made no attempt to establish what had happened. She sided with her daughter and, shouting at her son-in-law, struck him across the face with a glove.

When Małgorzata returned, her husband told her about the quarrel and showed her his injured finger.

— Gosia, I think our time in this house is coming to an end.

To his surprise, she did not try to defend either her sister or her mother. She, too, had had enough of the dispute over the pipe and of living in a house where an argument over a repair could end in physical violence. She agreed that they should look for another place. The old differences between husband and wife had not disappeared, but this time they stood on the same side.

That autumn, tensions at home gave way for a time to the local-election campaign of Solidarity Electoral Action. It was Piotr who persuaded his wife to run. Together they prepared leaflets and speeches, but their modest resources allowed them to conduct a real campaign almost exclusively in Janów and the immediate area. There Małgorzata received a very good result. In the wider district, which they had been unable to reach, she fell short of winning a seat. Małgorzata did not speak of it later with pride. Rather with regret that she had let herself be drawn into something she had not chosen for herself.

In September, they celebrated Rozalka's first birthday. She had taken her first uncertain steps before then; by her birthday she could walk on her own, though she still sometimes lost her balance and fell. The house filled with guests, conversation, and movement. Piotr watched his daughter more closely than anyone else. Only recently she had crawled toward his office; now she crossed the room by herself, got up after a fall, and tried again. Every step was an ordinary stage of development and, at the same time, something her father no longer regarded as guaranteed.

A few weeks later, they learned of another pregnancy.

Małgorzata again spoke of money, cramped living conditions, and an uncertain future. Piotr was happy, but his joy was no longer defenseless. The first thought was happiness: another child, another person at the table, another chance at the family he had dreamed of. Immediately behind it came a second, colder thought: do not become attached too soon. Do not build your whole life around someone you may still lose.

He tried to remain cautious. Not to imagine the day of birth, not to compose the child's face in his mind, not to speak to it in his imagination. He could not. Love did not submit to a decision. With each passing week, the child reclaimed a place of its own in his thoughts. The fear did not disappear, but hope grew beside it.

They discussed names. Małgorzata suggested Andrzej. Piotr wanted a Polish, Slavic name. For a time, none of their proposals led to agreement. He found the solution in a wholly unceremonious place—while leafing through a calendar hanging in the outhouse in the yard.

— What about Tomisław? We could call him Tomek, and perhaps Saint Thomas could be his patron — he suggested when he came back.

Małgorzata accepted the suggestion. From that moment, the child ceased to be merely "another pregnancy." He had a name. Piotr knew that by doing this he was once again exposing himself to the possibility of suffering. Even so, he allowed himself to speak of Tomisław, to plan for his birth, and to imagine Rozalka beside her younger brother. Staś's death had not taken away his desire for fatherhood. It had only taught him that every joy could carry the shadow of loss from the very beginning.

The growing family needed greater stability, and Janów offered no prospect of a secure income. The full-time position at Echo Podlasia that had been promised to Piotr kept being postponed until the following month. The couple agreed that they had to look for work and a place to live closer to Warsaw. They differed, however, over how the move should be carried out.

— Go on your own, find work, and rent an apartment. Then I'll join you with the children — Małgorzata proposed.

From a practical point of view, the solution was reasonable. Piotr could not accept it. The months in Janów had taught him that his mother-in-law and sisters-in-law had real influence over decisions concerning Paweł, housing, and daily life. He did not trust that his departure alone would truly become the first stage of a shared move. He feared that once he disappeared from the house, all that would remain of him would be the argument that the family was better off without him.

— This isn't an ordinary trip to find work — he explained. — If I go alone, your mother and sisters will have the final argument for making you stay. I don't want to leave without all of you.

He also objected because it meant leaving Rozalka behind. After years of waiting for a daughter, after her illness and Staś's death, he could not willingly separate himself from the child for an unknown length of time. The thought of leaving without her was more than longing. It awakened the fear that when he returned, he would find the family arrangement even more closed against him and his daughter accustomed to a life in which her father appeared only from time to time.

Lack of money ultimately imposed the solution he had wanted to avoid. Jarosław Bujan found him temporary work renovating and painting a garage. The wages were enough for one ticket. Piotr made Małgorzata promise that as soon as he found a roof for them, she would come to him with the children. He did not know whether the promise alone would be enough. It was, however, the only safeguard he could take with him.

In the first half of December, he traveled to Warsaw, took a train from there to Pomiechówek, and walked the rest of the way to Szczypiorno. The temperature had suddenly fallen to well below zero. The small cottage had two rooms and a tiny bathroom, about fifteen square meters in all. It was solidly built, but not equipped for winter living. It had no electricity, running water, or usable heating. A small coal stove stood in the corner, but the poorly built chimney made it unsafe to light.

Inside, the boxes and bags brought from Mazowiecka in the summer still stood where they had been left. The belongings had absorbed the cold. Narrow passages remained between the furniture. In June, the disorder had meant a move left suspended. Now, in the December frost, it showed that the family had never truly settled there, and that Piotr had returned alone to a place meant to have been the beginning of a shared home.

He spent the first night in his trousers, sweater, and coat. He covered himself with every quilt he could find, but the cold penetrated layer after layer. He slept only in short stretches. He woke with numb hands, drew his knees up, and tried to keep a little warmth close to his body. In the silence of the cottage, he heard the wind striking the walls and the rustle of things inside the boxes.

He thought of Janów. Of Rozalka asleep in a warm house, of her hands reaching for her father in the morning, of Paweł going to school, and of Małgorzata carrying Tomisław beneath her heart. He knew he had left precisely in order to find a place for them, yet that night the distance did not feel like the first stage of a journey they were taking together. It felt like the separation he had feared.

By morning, the water left in the bucket was a solid block of ice. His joints hurt when he tried to move his fingers. For a moment he stood over the frozen surface and watched the light reflect from its dull crust. He needed no metaphor to understand his situation. The fact was enough: a man awaiting the birth of a child had spent the night alone in an unheated house, twenty kilometers from his parents, whose door he no longer believed he could simply knock on.

He tried to prepare the cottage for another night. He found a large roll of plastic sheeting and stretched it along the beams of the veranda, hoping to shield the entrance from the gusting wind and snow. He fastened it until he could no longer feel his fingers. During the night, the wind tore part of the covering loose. In the morning, strips of plastic flapped across the snow, and inside it was almost as cold as it had been before.

The next night brought no sleep. Piotr tried to lie still, but the cold forced him to get up and walk the narrow passage between the boxes. He had nowhere to go. Nor could he bring his pregnant wife and the children there. The entire plan for the move depended on his first finding work and an apartment. Meanwhile, merely surviving the next few days was becoming a problem.

Stanisława Wierzbicka, who lived next door, quickly noticed that no smoke rose from the cottage chimney and no light appeared in its windows after dark. Yet she knew that Piotr was sleeping there. She stopped him at the fence.

She no longer called him "son-in-law," as she had years before. When Piotr and her daughter Ewa were children, Mrs. Wierzbicka liked to imagine that one day something more than neighborliness would bind them. For a time, he too had entertained such a future. Later he moved away, Ewa met the man with whom she built her life, and in time Piotr also started a family. The old form of address would now have been awkward, to say the least. What remained was the warm, familiar "Piotruś."

— Piotruś, you'll freeze to death in there. Call your mother. She can't possibly leave you like this.

He replied that he had already been refused a place in the family apartment twice before. He did not want to ask for a roof over his head a third time, as though he were a stranger. Mrs. Wierzbicka would not let the matter rest. The following day, the conversation was repeated in almost the same words.

— I don't even have a telephone here — he said at last, hoping to close the subject.

— We have one now. Come inside and call.

He could find no further reason to refuse. As he walked to his neighbor's house, he arranged the opening sentences in his mind. He needed a few weeks, perhaps two or three months: time to find work and an apartment to which Małgorzata, Paweł, Rozalka, and the unborn child could come. He was not asking for money or support. He wanted only to enter the family home temporarily and sleep in a place where water did not freeze solid in a bucket.

The request itself was humiliating. Traveling by train from Warsaw to Pomiechówek, he passed through Legionowo but did not get off. His parents still lived there, in the home that for years had also been his. Even so, he no longer believed he could simply arrive with a suitcase and say that he needed help. He had to telephone, explain himself, and wait for a decision.

Stanisława Wierzbicka handed him the receiver. Piotr heard his mother's voice. He tried to speak calmly. He told her about the frost, the lack of heat, and his plan to bring the family once he found work. He asked whether they could stay in Legionowo for two or three months.

— Yes, you can come, but I still have to ask Ula — Jadwiga replied.

For a moment, he did not know what to say. The apartment belonged to his parents. He was asking his mother for help, yet the decision whether her son, his pregnant wife, and their children could temporarily return to the family home was to be discussed with Urszula. This was not an invitation to dinner or a request for a single night. It was shelter from the frost and the few weeks the family needed in order to begin a new life.

He felt relief because his mother's words were not a refusal. Then something far heavier followed. His place in the family home had proved conditional. It did not depend on his being the son of Adam and Jadwiga, on his having traveled alone precisely to prepare a future for his wife and children, or on the fact that he could genuinely freeze in Szczypiorno. It depended on his sister's answer.

He stood with the receiver in his hand while, at the other end of the line, his mother still had to ask Urszula whether she might help her own son. In that single sentence returned everything Piotr had tried for years to push away: the conviction that there was no place in the family that belonged to him unconditionally, that every bond could be put to a vote, and that every return required the consent of a third person.

Rozalka was waiting in Janów, and because he loved her with all his strength, he feared losing her. Tomisław was growing beneath Małgorzata's heart, and Piotr had once again allowed himself to hope for him. Staś's grave remained in Pomiechowo, reminding him that a child could die before a father had the chance to hold him. And Piotr himself stood in his neighbor's house asking permission to enter his own family home for a time.

Snow lay outside the window. At the cottage on the allotment, the frozen bucket, the torn plastic, and the unopened boxes were waiting. On the other end of the telephone, Urszula's decision was waiting. Piotr understood then that the fear of love was not only about death. A person could be lost before being born. One could also have living parents, a sister, a wife, and children, and still not know whether anywhere in the world there was a home one could return to without asking permission.