CHAPTER XX

A Stranger at Home

The apartment on Marysieńki Street greeted Piotr with the illusion that nothing had changed. His old room, the one that had once belonged to his sister, remained almost untouched—like a relic awaiting the return of the prodigal son. He ran his hand over the back of the chair on which, as a teenager, he had drawn a griffin in ink. Beneath the layer of varnish, the griffin was still visible, though faded like a memory. "A museum of my past," he thought.

Małgorzata and the children arrived in Legionowo on December 15. The family of four settled into Piotr's old room. He, Gosia, and one-year-old Rozalka slept on a single narrow sofa bed. Paweł slept on a makeshift pallet spread out on the floor each evening, right beside the bed.

The room was so small that anyone getting off the sofa bed had to step across the boy's bedding. There was no way around it and nowhere else to place a foot. With their one-year-old child waking at night, needing feeding, changing, or soothing, those nighttime crossings were unavoidable. Piotr or Małgorzata would carefully step over the sleeping Paweł, sometimes brushing against his blanket or waking him with the creak of the bed.

It was uncomfortable, but at first there was closeness in it as well. After weeks apart, they were together again. Rozalka toddled uncertainly across the linoleum, trying to keep her balance and reaching out toward her father. Paweł, more withdrawn, watched his new surroundings with distrust. For several days Piotr allowed himself to believe that the old, better dreams might be restored. That all his divided worlds might fit beneath one roof.

Meeting his godmother on Sowińskiego Street was like an accidental scratch across a canvas, exposing a hidden layer of paint beneath it. Wanda Włochińska, dressed in an overcoat of carefully calculated splendor, stopped him with an inquiring look.

— So how are all of you managing in that crowded M-4?[1] — she tossed out. Her voice carried a false solicitude, tinged with the curiosity of a canary.

— Urszula has lived there for five years — he replied, tasting the bitterness of his own malice. — Now I'll live there for another five.

Piotr had said it only to be provocative. He wanted to answer a nosy question with a barb of his own and had no intention of presenting Wanda with any genuine plan. He did not know whether his godmother repeated his words to anyone in the family. She never admitted it, and he never obtained any proof.

Later, however, that was precisely how he connected the events: the chance encounter on Sowińskiego Street, the reckless joke about five years, and then the abrupt change in the atmosphere on Marysieńki Street. It was just before Christmas Eve. The conflict erupted almost at once, as though word had reached the apartment that Piotr did not intend to treat his stay as a brief visit.

When he returned home, no one was shouting. There was the silence after a battle in which he had not even had time to take part. Jadwiga avoided his eyes, moving about the kitchen with exaggerated concentration. Urszula stood by the window, upright and motionless.

— So when are you planning to move out? — his mother asked without looking at him.

The question hung in the room like smoke from a stubbed-out cigarette.

Piotr felt the ground give way beneath his feet. This was no longer a home. It was more like a stage on which a play called "Family" was being performed. And he, returning with hope, had turned out to be an uninvited guest who did not know the role assigned to him.

Christmas Eve had something of a funeral about it. The table was laid with the dishes traditionally served in this family—cabbage with mushrooms, stewed dried fruit with noodles, and boiled peas still in their skins. Yet the scent of pine needles mingled with the odor of unspoken grievances. They sat around it—Piotr, Gosia, the children, his parents, Urszula with Tadeusz and Czarek—like ambassadors of hostile powers who had signed a temporary truce in order to share a meal with people they would have preferred not to see at the table at all.

Piotr looked at the scene: the elegantly laid table, the decorated Christmas tree, and faces tightened with anger. Suddenly he saw it all through Holbein's eyes. They were like the figures in his painting—surrounded by the attributes of prosperity and tradition, while beneath the surface lay an anamorphic skull: the distorted truth about this family.

The festive silverware resembled the globes and astrolabes in the painting—beautiful, yet useless in the face of a real war. His mother's smile, like the robe of the French ambassador, concealed coldness. His sister's obstinacy, like the fur worn by the second figure, expressed a status that had to be guarded at any cost.

The skull. It was the thing that spoiled the composition of their perfect life: the unspoken thoughts, intentions, and grievances that everyone tried not to look at. It stood in the foreground, though only someone who knew where to look could see it.

Małgorzata was not the only one to understand that they were not at home there. Piotr understood it too. The family, the apartment, and the room that had seemed to await the return of its former master could no longer become a place for their life together. It all resembled a painting beneath which someone had written: Vanitas. Only a shadow of the old family remained, and Piotr had become a foreign ambassador within it, bearing the unwelcome news that the world had changed. And that there might no longer be a place in that home for him, his wife, and their children.

After Christmas, which had proved no more than a brief suspension of hostilities, open conflict broke out again. Like a chief diplomat, Urszula rarely became directly involved. Piotr nevertheless had the impression that his mother was speaking for her more and more often. Jadwiga became the voice of her daughter's demands while adding anger of her own.

At first they were insistent requests. They quickly became orders, and at last words that Piotr received like blows aimed at the places that hurt most.

— Get out of here! — Jadwiga shouted. — Get back to Janów—that's where you belong! Even in Janów they saw through you?! Even they don't want you there!

She invoked Janów and the defeats he had suffered there, striking at his sense of worth as a man, a father, and a human being. When Piotr, still searching for some last means of rescue, told her that Małgorzata was pregnant again, all he heard was:

— Take them and get out.

The atmosphere thickened by the hour. Adam joined Jadwiga and Urszula; usually withdrawn, he now openly defended his daughter's position. Then Tadeusz arrived and crossed a boundary that should never have been crossed. In the cramped entryway, between the mirror and the hanging coats, he shoved the pregnant Małgorzata against the wall. Even he, usually quiet and calm, had become a participant in the conflict.

Their room became a fortress under siege. Piotr and Małgorzata slept on the single sofa bed with Rozalka beside them. Paweł occupied the makeshift pallet spread out on the floor next to the bed each night. Yet even that primitive redoubt gave them no sense of security. One day Urszula entered without knocking and took the old wall rug down—the same rug that belonged to Piotr, had hung there for years, and during January nights had separated him from the freezing concrete.

It was theft, brazen theft, committed in front of the owner's eyes. The value of the old rug was not the point. In the gesture Piotr saw a deliberate taking of yet another thing that still belonged to him, and of the last remnants of warmth in the room to which they were trying to deny him any right.

When the New Year failed to bring the expected departure, the police and the court were drawn into the conflict. Piotr believed that Urszula stood behind his mother's actions, though it was Jadwiga who twice reported to the police that her son had unlawfully brought a "concubine"[2] into the apartment.

He received that word, used of his wife and the mother of his children, as though someone had spat on their marriage. After hearing Piotr's explanation, the police took no further action. Jadwiga Korycka then petitioned the court to have her son forcibly removed from the official register of residents.

In the courtroom Piotr looked at his mother, who appeared against him as a party to the proceedings. He saw no hesitation in her. He saw only determination to carry the matter through to the end. At that moment he could not look at her as his mother. He saw an accuser.

There was only one hearing. Piotr decided that he would not fight for the right to remain in a place where he was unwanted. Dignity required him to leave.

Before he voluntarily removed his registration from the apartment in the spring, however, living conditions there became even harder. Adam turned off the hot water. For the adults it meant severe discomfort. For Rozalka, who still had nighttime accidents, it was something far worse. Piotr had to wash his daughter's small body in ice-cold tap water. Each such morning hurt him almost physically.

Later he reached into the refrigerator for Rozalka's bottle of milk. A dirty dish sponge was floating in the white liquid.

He stood holding the bottle, staring at the filthy sponge submerged in the milk intended for his daughter. Who had done it? Her grandfather? Her aunt? He did not know.

The identity of the culprit mattered, but Piotr could not establish it. He knew only that in the family apartment even a child's food was no longer safe. The home to which he had returned seeking shelter had become a place where he had to protect his daughter from the actions of his own relatives.

That struggle for survival ended with the beginning of the winter school break. Paweł was already attending school in Legionowo, and Małgorzata had not wanted to interrupt his education in the middle of the semester. Yet she herself, pregnant and emotionally exhausted, could no longer endure the apartment on Marysieńki Street. She packed the essentials and left with the children for Gdańsk, where her sister Krystyna lived.

Piotr was left alone. In the place that had once been his home and now resembled a fort surrounded by a hostile army commanded by his own sister.

Why had he not gone with them? He did not entirely know himself.

After everything he had endured in the preceding weeks, he no longer had the strength to go on fighting. He shut himself in the room. At first he came out only to use the bathroom. Later, when he stopped eating and drinking, he had almost no reason to rise from his bedding at all.

He did not call his wife. What could he tell her? That she had married a failure whom even his closest relatives were driving from the family home? That she had a husband without a penny to his name? A husband who thought about death? A husband who had allowed her to leave with the children for Krystyna's house... that Krystyna...?

After Małgorzata left, the room suddenly seemed larger. Paweł's pallet was gone from the floor, Rozalka was no longer on the sofa bed, and Piotr no longer had to step across the sleeping boy at night or take care not to wake his daughter. Only recently he had cursed the cramped space. Now every empty patch reminded him that the children were gone.

He missed Rozalka most. Not her image in a photograph or the memory of her first steps, but her ordinary presence—the weight of her small body lifted from the bedding, her arms reaching toward him, and the certainty that, at least for her, his place was not subject to any family decision.

He lay on the sofa bed where, not long before, the three of them had somehow fit, and could not decide what he should do. Go to Gdańsk? Return to Szczypiorno? Look for work? Ask for help from people who had just made it clear that he was a stranger? Every possibility required strength, and he had none.

He did not eat. He did not drink. He did not open the door. At times he thought it would be best to fall asleep and not wake the next day. Then he remembered Rozalka and the child growing beneath Małgorzata's heart. It was not yet hope. It was more like a thin thread he lacked the strength to grasp but could not bring himself to break.

— Uncle is in there — he heard Czarek say to his grandfather through the closed door.

— No. There's some Gypsy in there who refuses to move out — Adam replied.

At first the sentence was another blow delivered to a man already lying on the ground. After several hours, however, it began to work differently.

Gypsy.

The word meant to humiliate him unexpectedly became a spark that brought him back to life.

"I won't give in," he thought. "If I am to be a Gypsy, then I'll be one who fights for his caravan."

His longing returned as well—for Rozalka and for someone still intangible, yet already loved: the child growing beneath Małgorzata's heart.

After several days of searching the classified ads, he finally found something suited to him: a rehabilitation clinic in central Warsaw was looking for a massage therapist. He called and arranged his first treatment.

He was not satisfied with his work. His hands remembered every movement, but tension had robbed them of their former confidence.

"Too much stress," he thought.

The patient thought otherwise.

— We're prepared to hire you — the owner of the clinic told him. — We'll call whenever we schedule a patient. Please give me your telephone number.

— 22 774-18-01.

Piotr gave the telephone number that, after many years of waiting, had finally been installed in his parents' apartment. He did not yet suspect that his chance to work would depend on those digits—and that the telephone would soon become an instrument of another humiliation.

With a payment larger than he had expected, he returned to Legionowo carried on a wave of hope. For the first time in many weeks he held something more than a promise in his hand. Someone had assessed his work, found it useful, and wanted to pay him for it.

— Mom, I've been hired! I'll be giving massages. As soon as they schedule a patient, they'll call! — He spoke chaotically, almost like a child who, in a rush of joy, forgets the wounds just inflicted on him.

The answer brought him back to earth at once.

— They'll call? Do you have a telephone?

For a moment he did not understand the question.

— I gave them your number — he replied. — This is the only place where they can reach me.

Only after his mother's next words did he understand that they would not allow him to use his parents' telephone. The clinic could call, but no one was going to take a message meant for him.

Soon the telephone set, for whose installation the Koryckis had waited many years, was unplugged and hidden in a wardrobe. The telephone that was meant to connect them with the world disappeared at the very moment when Piotr's work began to depend on a single call.

Help came from Artur Nowak.

— Give them my number — he suggested when he learned about the telephone hidden in the wardrobe.

A few days later he pressed a leaflet into Piotr's hand.

— Read it — he ordered.

The editorial office of a new biweekly newspaper being founded in Legionowo, "Dziś," was looking for journalists. The notice was already several days old, but the position was still open. Piotr went to the address given and got the job. It was a few days before Easter 1999.

Urszula would not give up.

— I'd like to clean this room now — she told her brother on Holy Saturday.

She did not have to say what she expected of him. This time Piotr did not object. He had a job now and at least the semblance of a foothold outside his parents' apartment. He packed his most necessary belongings into a plastic shopping bag and left the home he had regarded as his own for years. The same home in which the entire family had once taken shelter after the unexpected fire in Szczypiorno.

On Piłsudskiego Street the overloaded bag tore open. Almost everything he owned at that moment spilled across the sidewalk. Piotr gathered his things in a hurry, avoiding the eyes of passersby. He tied the bundle together as best he could, carried it to the editorial office, and hid it behind a curtain. Then he returned to the city park, only two hundred meters from the home from which he had been driven.

He spent two Easter nights on a park bench.

On the first, as the cold gnawed into his bones, he felt free. In appearance he was no one: without an address, without a family, battered and humiliated. He no longer had to obey orders, ask permission to use the telephone, or wait for someone to remind him once again that he was occupying a place that was not his. There was only his breath in the cold spring air and the pain that proved he was still alive.

From the bench he could see isolated lights in the windows of the apartment blocks around the park. Behind each one was an apartment, someone's table, a bed, and a door that could be locked from the inside. Only a few hundred meters separated him from Marysieńki Street, yet the family home seemed farther away than Janów, Szczypiorno, and all the places among which he had tried to arrange his life.

Then the thought of the Book and the ancient curse returned to him. For years he had remembered only broken sentences, isolated images, and a meaning he had never managed to reconstruct in full. There had been a rejected girl, a Lithuanian prince, and the promise of a feeling that would cross the boundary set by nature, family, and custom.

He had never wanted to take those words literally. He treated them as the dark language of old tales in which fear took the form of curses and family misfortunes were explained through forces older than human memory.

Sitting on the park bench, however, he wondered for the first time whether the prophecy was never meant to be fulfilled literally. Perhaps the curse did not awaken a forbidden feeling but distorted the ordinary bond between brother and sister. It turned closeness into a need to possess, attachment into jealousy, and jealousy into hatred of anyone who tried to take a place beside the brother.

He pushed the thought away at once. It was too repellent, too unjust, and founded on nothing he could call evidence. He did not know what truly drove Urszula. He knew only that her hostility seemed out of all proportion to anything that had happened between them.

He had not taken her home or her parents away from her. He had not tried to deprive her of her place in the family. He had merely returned with his wife and children, asking for shelter for a few months. And yet his presence seemed to wound her as though the mere fact that he had a family of his own were directed against her.

"What if hatred is only a feeling turned inside out?" the thought passed through his mind.

He did not allow himself to pursue the question. There were boundaries he did not want to cross even in his imagination. Yet there remained the obscure impression that something in his sister's behavior went beyond a dispute over a cramped apartment, a telephone, or an old room. Something that no external cause could fully explain.

Perhaps that was the nature of the curse: not the open fulfillment of the words written in the Book, but their distorted echo. A feeling that could find no proper name and therefore revealed itself only as anger, jealousy, and the desire to remove the brother from sight.

Piotr looked at the dark windows of the blocks surrounding the park. He did not know whether the Book described a real force or merely a mechanism of family madness passed from one generation to the next. He knew only that, once again, a sister was driving her brother from his home, and reason could identify no cause great enough to justify such hatred.

Or perhaps the cause of that hatred was far more practical?

As long as Urszula could count on her brother to remain at her beck and call, look after her child, help her, give way, and subordinate his own plans to her needs, she accepted both him and the woman he intended to marry. The change came only when it became clear that, after his wedding, Piotr would no longer belong exclusively to the old family arrangement.

Małgorzata proved strong enough not to let her sister-in-law make decisions for either her or her husband. She had no intention of becoming yet another person who carried out Urszula's orders. Perhaps that was when goodwill gave way to hostility—when the sister understood that what she was losing was not her brother but the power she had held over him.

"Maybe it wasn't about my coming back," Piotr thought. "Maybe it was about my no longer being at her disposal."

He found no answer that first night. Toward dawn he dozed briefly with his head resting against the cold back of the bench. He was awakened by the city stirring and by people walking to Easter Masses. None of them knew that the man sleeping in the park had living parents only a few streets away and a room in which his belongings had still lain the day before.

On the second night, freedom ceased even to be an illusion. The cold was sharper, his body more exhausted, and the park no longer resembled a place he had chosen but one into which he had been pushed. Piotr understood that he was more bound than ever—by the hatred that had thrown him out of the house and by the love that would not let him truly walk away.

He thought of Rozalka. Of Małgorzata carrying another child beneath her heart. Of Paweł, whose father he had tried to become, though he had never been allowed to feel like one without reservation. He thought also of Staś and of his grave. All those images intertwined with the stories written in the Book, as though the old curse did not follow a single straight path but circled through the family, returning each time in a different form.

"I won't let it have the last word," he thought.

He still did not know where he would sleep the following night or whether his work at the newspaper would enable him to bring his family back. He knew only that he could not remain on the bench and accept that the story had already been written. If the curse existed, it had to feed on the conviction that a person had no choice.

He rose, straightened his stiff legs, and started walking. He had been left alone on the battlefield after a lost battle. But the war for his family was not over.

After Easter he returned briefly to Marysieńki Street. He wandered like his great-grandfather Stanisław between Kosewo and Śniadowo—an eternal exile among his own blood.

Meanwhile Małgorzata returned from Gdańsk to Janów. Paweł also went back to the school in Janów.

On May 16, 1999, the boy received his First Holy Communion. For the occasion, Piotr went to see his wife and children for the first time in months. They agreed then that they had to rent an apartment in Legionowo. Małgorzata and the children, however, could not move until the school year had ended.

Before that happened, Piotr found another job opening. "Nasz Dziennik," a newspaper associated with Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, was looking for journalists. The new position meant higher pay and greater prestige. One problem remained: how could he honorably withdraw from the job he had only just accepted?

— I've been offered a job at "Nasz Dziennik" — he told the publisher of "Dziś" frankly.

The publisher did not want to lose him and urged him to stay. Piotr therefore named a financial condition that he believed could not possibly be accepted. To his surprise, the publisher agreed. In the end, Piotr decided to work for both newspapers.

His work at "Dziś" and "Nasz Dziennik" was not a career. It was a lifeline grasped by a drowning man. Every article and every payment became another brick with which he laboriously built a new home—not of walls, but of hope.

At the beginning of June 1999, he rented a three-room apartment on the ninth floor of a block at the intersection of Sowińskiego and 3 Maja Streets. He brought furniture and the most necessary belongings from Janów.

When Małgorzata crossed the threshold of the new apartment, Piotr expected... He did not know what. Tears? An embrace? A shared silence?

He heard:

— No... That sofa bed has to go against that wall over there.

For a moment he stood motionless, listening to that perfect and at the same time terrifying return to normality. After everything they had been through, his wife's first concern was the arrangement of the furniture.

Perhaps there was hope hidden in that madness. That life, despite everything, went on.