Chapter XXI

Blocks

The new flat had not yet acquired a character of its own. It smelled of paint, newness and unfamiliarity. It was on the ninth floor, high above the streets of Legionowo, in one of the many identical concrete apartment blocks.

Piotr often stood at the window and gazed at the nocturnal mosaic of lights. They were nothing like the welcoming windows of the houses he remembered from Szczypiorno. They were cold points set upon the geometric grid of streets, each concealing the life of people he did not know.

Instead of the griffin once drawn on the back of a chair, he now saw the roof of a bus shelter. People came there, departed and returned, certain that somewhere a home was waiting for them. Piotr could not yet say whether this flat would become a home for him as well.

Placing the sofa bed against "that" wall proved ominous. From the very beginning, Małgorzata arranged the flat according to her own design, assigning places to the furniture, the dishes and the members of the household. She did not ask Piotr how he imagined their shared space. She made decisions and expected them to be carried out.

She moved about the kitchen, arranging everything according to her own order, and every gesture seemed to say that since she had to organise the family's life anew, she would also determine its rules. Practicality was becoming a form of power—quiet, everyday power, and therefore harder to challenge than an open command.

Piotr felt that Małgorzata was furnishing not only the flat but their shared world as well: for herself, according to herself and under her own control. An invisible wall was growing between them, built from his humiliations and her conviction that only she knew how to impose the proper order upon their lives.

They were bound together by the children and the need to survive, yet there was less and less room between them for equality. He was expected to earn, bring home money and carry out tasks. She set the direction, arranged the space and decided what their daily life would look like.

Working for two newsrooms became more than a job for Piotr; it gave him room to breathe. "Dziś" and "Nasz Dziennik" were two different worlds, speaking different languages. He moved between them like a diplomatic courier travelling between states that maintained no friendly relations, adopting a different way of thinking each time.

At "Dziś" he felt a sense of freedom and the thrill of a reporter's adventure. At "Nasz Dziennik" he entered a realm of iron rules and ideological vigilance, where every word might be read as a declaration.

Writing was now not only his livelihood but also a form of therapy and an escape from the silence that filled the three-room flat on the ninth floor. He could still control words. His own life—still not.

Małgorzata was not in paid employment. She was on childcare leave after Rozalka's birth, and the approaching delivery made it likely that she would not return to her hospital job for several years.

Her days were filled with nappies, cooking, laundry and caring for the children. The repetition of the same duties was becoming increasingly oppressive. Piotr watched his wife gradually fade. Her eyes, once full of fire, more and more often glazed over in front of the television screen, as though she were looking not at the images displayed there but at a reflection of her own helplessness.

The new baby was due in September, almost exactly two years after Rozalka's birth. Piotr wanted to feel the same joy he had felt before she was born. He truly did, but he could not find that same unrestrained happiness within himself.

He longed for that former joy as a traveller in the desert longs for water, yet the spring from which he had drunk two years earlier seemed to have dried up. He had understood this from the moment he learnt of the pregnancy. The joy that had accompanied his expectation of Rozalka had been pure, almost childlike, not yet tainted by the bitter taste of what came later.

This time everything was different. His feelings reached him muffled, like a distant rumble from beyond the mountains. Thoughts of the child broke through a thickening fog of fear. Piotr did not recognise himself in this numb and frightened man.

Małgorzata, although she herself received the news of the pregnancy coldly, did not fail to reproach Piotr for his indifference. Her words were quiet, but sharp as a razor. They forced him, for the first time, to consider seriously what was choking him.

Only then did he understand that he could not rejoice in the life that was to come until he had made peace with the one that had gone.

Staś...

The memory of his expected birth still hurt like a wound that refused to heal. The shadow of the small coffin that had never been used lay across everything. Piotr was not yet able to form an attachment to another child without fear, for this child too might never be born.

Too little time had passed since that loss.

One evening, after Paweł and Rozalka had fallen asleep and Małgorzata was silently folding the clean laundry, Piotr spoke. His voice trembled in the silence of the flat.

She looked up at him. There was none of the resignation he had seen in her on Marysieńki Street, but neither could he find the tenderness of the days before their wedding. There was only weariness—deep, bone-deep weariness.

Małgorzata's answer made Piotr realise that they remained together above all for the sake of the children. The romance of the past had given way to duty, everyday work and the effort to preserve the family.^[1]

He knew that this compact had many weak links. He himself was one of them. Every uncertain step he took, and every memory of failure, cast a shadow over their shared future.

The blocks around them were made of concrete. The ones he carried within him were made of fear. Shadows approached from every side, only to meet in their hearts those they had brought with them from Janów, Gdańsk and perhaps Warsaw as well.

In order to keep going, Piotr tried to find at least one ray of light among the shadows. He placed his hope in his son—still unseen, yet increasingly present in his thoughts, his plans and his daily life.

They had to decide where the cot would stand and prepare for the birth in such a way that this time it would become a shared experience for both parents. Piotr had been present at Rozalka's birth, but his memories of those moments were very bad. The sight of blood did not make him faint; he had long since grown used to it. What he could not bear was his own helplessness: his inability to help his suffering wife, and the near paralysis with which he stood while pain tore through her body.

"Never again," he told himself, clenching his fists.

And yet he could not imagine being absent when his son first saw the world—the work of the Creator. Being present at the birth became for him a new mission, a penance and an obligation.

His son's name had been chosen earlier. The name Piotr had dreamed of and long intended for a boy remained on a plaque fixed to a small grave among the crosses of the cemetery in Pomiechówek. The other was to be Polish, native, reaching back to the roots of the Slavic tribes—rooted in this land at a time when Piotr himself felt less and less rooted anywhere.

The choice was not made without disagreement. Małgorzata rejected several suggestions before accepting the name Piotr had found in a calendar once hung in Janów by Ryszard Andrzejuk.

From that moment, the child was no longer merely the son who was to be born. He was Tomisław. They accepted the name together, though without their former elation. It became the seal upon their compromise.

Their agreement over the name did not extend to other areas of their life. Despite the move to Legionowo, Małgorzata's trips to Janów remained a regular part of life. Several months spent in her family home, preceded by an earlier stay with her sister in Gdańsk, drew her once again towards her mother and, above all, her sisters.

Her husband and all the children were no longer the centre of her world. At its centre stood Małgorzata herself, Paweł and the family in Janów and Gdańsk. It was becoming less and less a question of how to live together with her husband, and increasingly a question of how to arrange her life despite him.

This was most clearly visible in her relationship with Paweł. The boy who, less than two years earlier, was to have fulfilled Piotr's dreams of raising a son had been almost completely removed from him. Piotr watched as an understanding developed between mother and son to which he had no access. Their glances became those of allies, and an invisible front formed around them from which he was excluded.

He could find no way to oppose it. He no longer had support within his own family, and he stood alone before his wife's close-knit and well-organised clan. He had neither the strength nor the means to fight another battle.

And so he focused on his daughter. The bond between him and Rozalka had in a sense existed even before her conception, but now it took on particular importance. The little girl gave him a sense of closeness and belonging that he increasingly lacked in his other family relationships. Her laughter, lighting up the gloomy interior of the block, was a light that did not burn him.^[2]

It was difficult to determine how far the trauma of losing Staś affected the way Piotr experienced the wait for Tomisław's birth. He loved the child who was to be born, thought about him and prepared for his arrival, but these feelings did not have the same intensity as the joy with which he had once awaited Rozalka.

There was hope within him, but fear accompanied it. There was love, though a more cautious love, as if Piotr would not yet allow it to unfold fully. Tomisław was not merely the next stage of his life. He was the son he was waiting for, though he was afraid to rejoice in him too soon.

At the end of August 1999, the cot prepared for Tomisław was set up in the bedroom. In the corner of the room, it looked like a silent question about what the coming days would bring.

Piotr ran his hand along the smooth rails. He felt joy and anticipation, but he could not separate them from fear. Since Staś's death, every hope had carried within it the shadow of possible loss.

Determination, however, was strongest of all. Piotr wanted to believe that this time everything would end well. That the child for whom they had prepared the cot and whom they had already named would truly take his place in it.

Tomisław was born on 8 September 1999, at around half past five in the morning, in the same hospital where the older children had been born.

Piotr was beside his wife, holding her hand tightly. This time his sense of helplessness did not turn into panic. He tried to remain calm and to be there for Małgorzata as best he could, although he still could not free her from the pain.

When, after the midwife had completed the first procedures, the small, wrinkled Tomisław was placed in his arms, Piotr did not experience a sudden burst of euphoria. He did, however, feel warmth, relief and love, growing gradually with the weight of the tiny body.

There was also a sense of responsibility—obvious and irrevocable. His son was alive. He was here. Piotr could finally hold him.

The following day, Tomisław was visited by his two-year-old sister, Rozalka. Paweł had spent the time around his brother's birth in the care of Dominika Sęczyk, Piotr's colleague from "Dziś". Not long afterwards, she became Tomisław's godmother.

Looking at his son, however, Piotr knew that the birth had not ended the family war. It was only a brief truce, declared in the airless hospital ward under the sign of a new Slavic name.

The struggle to return to normality, to recover his bond with his wife and to build a relationship with his son was only beginning. They still had to create a home in which Tomisław would not become another child drawn into the conflicts of adults.

Nothing made that struggle any easier. Direct relations with the Korycki family had been almost completely severed. The Andrzejuks, by contrast, quickly occupied the place they had vacated and asserted an ever stronger presence in the lives of Małgorzata and the children.

This time Marianna Andrzejuk took the leading role. She did not ask herself whether she was a welcome guest and paid little attention to the boundaries set by the hosts. She wanted to support her daughter and to be the most important grandmother in Paweł's life. She not only came to Legionowo regularly, but behaved with increasing freedom in her son-in-law's flat.

She did not enter into open conflict with Piotr. Rather, she behaved as though his presence and opinions were of little consequence. She scarcely involved herself in Rozalka's upbringing. She treated the girl with marked distance, as though her arrival had meant that Paweł lost his former place at the centre of his mother's attention.

It may also have been difficult for Marianna that Rozalka bore such a striking resemblance to Jadwiga.

She therefore concentrated on helping her daughter and reinforcing Paweł's belief that she was the person in whom he could find the surest support. Besides words, she also used money—an instrument of influence that Piotr did not possess.^[3]

Jadwiga Korycka continued to avoid contact with her son. Even so, for Rozalka's second birthday she bought her granddaughter a bicycle with stabilisers.

It was designed for learning to ride, but it was also so large and heavy that the two-year-old girl did not yet have enough strength to set it in motion by herself.

On 17 October 1999, the parents carried little Tomisław into the Church of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. He was baptised by the parish priest, Father Zygmunt Podstawka.

Adam and Jadwiga Korycki were present in the church, but they did not stand with the family or take a direct part in the rite. They remained at the back of the church, away from the family and those directly participating in the ceremony.^[4]

Marianna Andrzejuk, although she often came to Legionowo both before and after that day, did not appear in the church.

The group of guests was small. Apart from the godparents—Krzysztof Włochiński and Dominika Sęczyk, together with their families—only Jacek Rogala came. Piotr could not even find anyone willing to take a few commemorative photographs of his son's baptism.

They spent Christmas 1999 alone—Piotr, Małgorzata and the three children. There were no grandparents, sisters or more distant relatives. In the flat on the ninth floor, they sat down at the Christmas table with no one but their immediate family.

Another change came at the beginning of the new year.

Piotr had little desire for another move and all the effort it would involve. He also felt that leaving after only a few months might be somewhat discourteous towards the owner of their present flat. The offer was so advantageous, however, that he quickly overcame his reservations.

Only two days later, he and Artur Nowak were transporting the Koryckis' belongings to the block at 8 Sobieskiego Street, less than half a kilometre away. A child's pram served as their means of transport.

There were losses along the way.

More serious problems followed. Artur could not always help him, so Piotr transported some of the belongings alone. During one such trip, outside the entrance to the new block, he slipped on ice concealed beneath a thin layer of snow. As he fell, he broke his wrist.

The accident did not alter their plans. The move had to be completed, and holes still had to be drilled in the concrete walls of the new flat so that kitchen cupboards, shelves and plant holders could be hung. The cast prevented Piotr from using the hammer drill. After a few days, he removed it himself.

Once the most urgent work had been completed, Tomisław too could be brought into the new flat.

Despite Piotr's steadily improving earnings from the two newsrooms, Małgorzata still believed there was too little money. She managed the household budget and regularly confronted her husband with the shortfall. Every conversation about finances easily turned into a skirmish in which the same words returned: "we're short" and "we can't afford it".

They were spoken over dinner, after payday, while shopping and when the refrigerator was opened. Piotr heard them not only as an assessment of the household budget, but also as a constant reminder that his efforts were still not enough.

In Małgorzata's view, they lived on the brink of a financial abyss. This sense of shortage became a permanent backdrop to their daily life and one of the sources of their recurring arguments.

That was why, when an interview with Roman Wierzbicki, chairman of the agricultural branch of "Solidarity", led to an offer of work for the union's monthly magazine, Piotr saw it not only as a professional opportunity but also as another chance to increase his income.

This third job consumed what remained of his time and energy, but it was also an escape—one more reason to leave the flat on Sobieskiego Street and return home later.

He soon became a regular visitor to the Union's headquarters in central Warsaw. In time, he ceased to be merely an outside editor for "Nasza Ziemia". He prepared information materials and even wrote speeches for the chairman.

The fees were not high, but in a situation that Małgorzata regarded as a constant financial crisis, every sum mattered. Piotr could not afford to give it up.

His frequent, almost daily visits to the office building on Szkolna Street gradually drew Piotr into the Union's world. He got to know the staff, officials and heads of the various departments.

Among the Union's new employees was Anna, the chairman's secretary. In time, for convenience, Piotr was given a desk in her office. The hours they spent together over materials, corrections and plans soon became part of their daily routine.

Anna was then going through a painful separation. Their conversations returned increasingly often to the relationship she had lost, her hope of reconciliation and questions to which she could find no answers.

Piotr understood the language of her despair almost instinctively. He himself was trapped in an emotional impasse, in a home where every gesture became a comment on unresolved matters and the silence thickened with unspoken grievances.

He did not limit himself to sympathy. He analysed the messages Anna received, helped her compose replies and explained how he understood the behaviour of the man with whom she had been involved. He believed he was helping her regain her peace of mind and escape loneliness.

In time, their meetings moved beyond the office. A friendship founded on confidences, long conversations and time spent together occupied an ever larger place in Piotr's life.

In it he found a space where he felt competent, needed and listened to. His words mattered there. They did not break against silence and resignation as they did at home.^[5]

During a stay by the sea, Piotr and Małgorzata went for a walk alone along an empty beach. They walked for a long time in silence. At one point Małgorzata began quietly humming "This Last Sunday". Piotr understood the allusion, but considered it exaggerated. He still believed that, since he had no intention of leaving his family, nothing truly threatened their marriage.

He did not yet see that, for his wife, the threat already lay in the transfer of time, attention and emotional intimacy to another person.^[6]

Meanwhile, with growing anxiety and helplessness, Małgorzata watched another, much older wound in her husband. They lived only a few dozen steps from his parents' block, yet they were divided by an emptiness of silence harder to cross than any physical distance.

On 9 December 1999, Kacper, the second son of Tadeusz and Urszula Bożek, was born. As he had previously done with Czarek, Adam lavished his entire store of tenderness and adoration upon his new grandson. After Piotr moved to Sobieskiego Street, Adam began appearing regularly beneath his son's balcony with the baby, as though displaying living proof of the family life from which Piotr had been excluded.

During the second such visit, Piotr neither asked permission nor waited for an invitation. He reached over the balcony railing, took his little nephew into his arms and disappeared with him into the flat. Then he closed the balcony door.

Adam, paralysed by fear of Urszula's reaction, did not dare go inside. He remained outside and waited helplessly for the child to be returned. After a long, tense moment, the Koryckis carried out the little "hostage" and handed him back to his grandfather.

This grotesque yet painful scene remained in Piotr's memory as a symbol of his exclusion from the family into which he had been born. His father could come beneath his balcony with Urszula's child, but he was afraid to cross the threshold of his own son's flat.

Piotr said nothing. He clenched his teeth and returned to his articles, but Małgorzata saw how the theatre of the absurd unfolding beneath their balcony devoured him from within and left fresh wounds behind.

Piotr was speechless. A year earlier Małgorzata had been humiliated and driven from the house at Christmas; now she intended to make a humble gesture towards the woman who, in the previous conflict, had turned against her son and his family.^[7]

This did not mean that Małgorzata accepted any blame. The apology was intended to end the family war, even at the price of humiliation and of taking upon herself responsibility that was not hers.

It was an act of courage of which Piotr, wounded and enclosed within his own pride, would not have been capable. In later years he never managed to express to his wife the boundless admiration he felt for that gesture. At that moment, however, a wave of gratitude passed through him and, for an instant, washed away all the bitterness.

Małgorzata's gesture produced a tangible, almost miraculous result. On 9 September 2000, Adam and Jadwiga Korycki also came to the joint birthday celebration for Rozalia and Tomisław.

For the first time in many months, they crossed the threshold of their son's flat not as accidental passers-by or people standing apart during a family ceremony, but as grandparents invited to the shared table.

The door that had seemed closed for ever had been opened a little. The reconciliation was still fragile and uncertain. No one knew how much of it reflected genuine change and how much was merely a temporary suspension of old grievances. Yet on that day Piotr's parents were present. After everything that had happened, that fact alone mattered.

Yet as a truce began to settle over one family front, another became the source of a new and far more dangerous tension.

At first Piotr told his wife about the friendship and about Anna's problems. In time, however, he directed more and more of his emotional attention towards his colleague. In his own mind the relationship was pure and innocent, yet it was also becoming an escape from home and a form of rebellion against the control he felt Małgorzata exercised over him.

He went to bed after long conversations with Anna and, in the morning, before breakfast, sent her his first message:

"Good morning."

Those two ordinary words were neither a declaration of love nor proof of betrayal. They did, however, show towards whom his first thought was increasingly turning.^[8]

In September 2000, the three of them attended an agricultural conference in Żegocina, which concluded on 24 September: Piotr as an associate of the Union chairman, Anna as his secretary, and Małgorzata as press officer. The situation laid bare a tension that could no longer be ignored.^[9]

The final confrontation came one afternoon in the cramped hallway of the flat on Sobieskiego Street.

She stood between him and the door. Tears appeared in her tired eyes—real tears that she could no longer hide.

A long and dramatic exchange followed, full of broken thoughts, repetitions and appeals to the children, the home and what they had tried to build together. Małgorzata begged him to stay. Piotr, however, heard above all another prohibition.

Every word she spoke confirmed his belief that she was once again trying to corner him, issue an order and decide on his behalf.

"She won't let me, so that is all the more reason I have to go," he thought, his mind seething.

He squeezed past his wife and reached for the handle. Then he heard a sentence spoken in a strangled whisper, barely audible:

The question stopped him at the door. Piotr was not in love with Anna, and he was certain of it. For the first time, however, he understood that his wife was no longer trying to direct his life, but defending a marriage she believed to be under threat.

He sat down in the hallway and began to wonder whether he still controlled the relationship, and whether the boundary he had no intention of crossing truly remained safely distant. He understood that good intentions were not enough if his conduct wounded the woman to whom he had vowed his love.

He took off his jacket and remained at home. That day, he ended his close relationship with Anna.^[10]

For many years they did not return to that scene. Piotr knew, however, that the preceding months had been marked both by his guilt and by Małgorzata's heroism. His guilt lay in disregarding her suffering and stubbornly maintaining a friendship that was drawing him ever farther from home.

His wife's heroism was expressed not only in her patient endurance of the situation. Earlier, after all, she had found the courage to offer an "apology" to her mother-in-law—a gesture of humility and courage of which Piotr himself had been incapable.

Małgorzata's "apology"—that act of humility and strength—proved effective. At Christmas 2000, not only Jadwiga Korycka but also Urszula, Tadeusz and their children came to the flat at 8 Sobieskiego Street. Once the mother had crossed the threshold of her son's home, the daughter could no longer remain entirely on the sidelines.

For the first time since the conflict began, Christmas was spent with the entire family present. The reconciliation was still uncertain and tentative. Old grievances had not disappeared, but that day no one tried to begin another war.

The twentieth century was ending for them in an accord as fragile as a sheet of ice, yet still capable of bearing the weight of those who had chosen to stand upon it. It was a truce, not peace. On this front, however, the guns had fallen silent.

The year was also ending—a year that had badly damaged Piotr's almost flawless self-portrait. He could no longer see himself solely as a man wronged by others. He knew that he too had much on his conscience, especially towards the woman to whom he had vowed his love.

That burden would remain within him for a long time, hardening with every passing year like the concrete blocks among which he had tried to build his home.