Flights

KUNICKI: EARTH

Summer’s closed its door to Kunicki. Slammed its door. He is just settling in now, switching his sandals for slippers, his shorts for long trousers, sharpening the pencils on his desk, putting receipts in order. The past has ceased to exist, becoming just life’s scraps – no sense in regrets now. So what he feels must be a phantom pain, unreal, the pain of every incomplete, jagged form that by its nature longs for wholeness. There is no other explanation.

Lately he can’t sleep. Or rather – he falls asleep in the evenings, is exhausted to dropping, but he wakes up around three or four in the morning, as he did years ago, after the flood. But back then he knew where the insomnia was coming from – he’d been terrified of the disaster. Now it’s different. There is no catastrophe. And yet a kind of hole has opened up, a rupture. Kunicki knows that words would mend it; if he were to find the appropriate quantity of sensible, correct words to explain what had happened, the hole could be patched up, there wouldn’t be a trace of it, and he would sleep till eight. Sometimes, rarely, he thinks he hears a voice, one or two words, piercing, resounding. Words ripped from both the sleepless night and the frenetic day. Something sparking off between his neurons, unidentifiable impulses that leap from place to place. Is this not exactly how thought happens?

The phantoms are fully assembled now, standing at the gates of reason, factory-made. They’re not really scary, it’s no biblical deluge, they include no Dantean scenes. Just the terrible inevitability of water, its omnipresence. The walls of his apartment soak it up. Kunicki checks the sick soggy plaster with his finger, the wet paint leaving a mark on his skin. The stains on the walls make maps of countries he can’t recognize, he can’t name. Drops seep through the window frames, wash away the carpet. You hammer a nail through the wall, and a little streamlet springs out; you open a drawer and water burbles out of it. You raise a stone and I will be there, murmurs the water. Whole rivulets pour onto computer keyboards, the screen splutters out underwater. Kunicki runs out in front of his apartment building and sees the sandpits and flowerbeds have disappeared, the low hedges ceased to exist. He goes with water up to his ankles to the car, he’ll try to drive it out of their neighbourhood and onto higher ground, but he won’t make it now. It turns out they are surrounded, in a trap.

Just be glad it all turned out okay, he tells himself, getting up in the dark to go to the bathroom. Of course I’m glad, he answers himself. But he isn’t glad. He lies back down on the warmed-up sheets and stays there with his eyes open till morning. His legs are unsettled, they keep heading off somewhere, taking a pretend walk of their own accord under the folds of the blanket, itching from within. Sometimes he dozes off for a little bit, and then his own snoring wakes him up. He lies there and sees it getting lighter and lighter out the window, listens to the rubbish collectors start to raise their ruckus, the first buses, trams set forth from the depot. In the morning the lift starts up, you can hear its despairing squeaks, the squeaks of a creature caught in two-dimensional space, up and down, never diagonally or sideways. The world moves forward, with that irreparable hole in it, crippled. It limps.

Kunicki limps along with it to the bathroom, then he drinks his coffee standing up, at the kitchen counter. He awakens his wife. She sleepily, wordlessly, vanishes into the bathroom.

He has found one advantage to not sleeping – he can hear what she says in her sleep. In this way the greatest mysteries give themselves away. They escape like wisps of smoke, of their own accord, and immediately vanish, you have to catch them right there at the lips. So he lies there, thinking, and eavesdrops. She sleeps quietly, on her stomach, you almost can’t hear her even breathing. Sometimes she sighs, but there aren’t any words in her sighing. When she turns over from one side to the other, her hand seeks out another body, on its own, tries to hold it, her leg travels over his hip. Then for a moment he stiffens, because what the hell would that mean? Then he realizes that it’s a mechanical movement, and he lets her get away with it.

It is as though nothing has changed, except that her hair has got brighter in the sun, and a couple of freckles came out on her nose. But when he touched her, when he slid his hand over her naked back, he thought he figured something out. He doesn’t even know himself. That skin puts up resistance now, it’s harder, more inert, like tarpaulin.

He can’t permit himself any further searching, he’s afraid, he draws back his hand. Half-asleep he imagines that his hand encounters some sort of foreign territory, something he’d overlooked for seven years of their marriage, something shameful, some defect, a strip of hairy skin, a fish scale, some bird down, an unusual structure, an anomaly.

He scoots over to the edge of the bed and from there looks at the shape that is his wife. In the pale light of the development that flows through the window her face is just a faint outline. He falls asleep gazing into that spot, and when she wakes up, it’s starting to get light in their bedroom. The light of dawn is metallic, it ashens colours. For a moment he has the frightening impression that she is dead – he sees her corpse, her empty dried-out body left a while ago now by its soul. He’s not afraid, exactly, just surprised, and quickly, in order to chase away this image, he touches her cheek. She sighs and turns to him, putting her arm on his chest, her soul returning. From now on her breathing is steady, but he doesn’t dare move. He waits for the alarm clock to release him from this awkward situation.

He’s unsettled by his own inaction. Shouldn’t he make a note of all these changes, in order not to overlook something? Get up quietly and slip out of bed and divide a piece of paper in half at the kitchen table and write: before and now. What would he write? Her skin is rougher – maybe she’s just ageing, or maybe it’s an effect of the sun. T-shirt instead of pyjamas? Maybe the heaters are on higher than they used to be. Her smell? She’s switched lotions.

He recalls the lipstick she had on the island. Now she has a different one! That one was a light, creamy, gentle one, the colour of her lips. This one is red, crimson, he doesn’t know how to define colour, he was never good at that, he never knew what the difference was between crimson and red, let alone purple.

Carefully he slides out of bed, touches down his bare feet on the floor, and blindly, so as not to wake her, he goes to the restroom. Only once he gets inside does he let himself be blinded by turning on the bright light. On the shelf under the mirror lies her cosmetics bag, embroidered with beads. He opens it carefully, in order to make sure of his suppositions. The lipstick is different.

In the morning he’s able to act it all out perfectly, that’s what he thinks: perfectly. That he’s forgotten something else and has to stay five minutes more at home.

‘Go on ahead, don’t wait for me.’

He pretends he’s in a hurry, that he’s looking for some papers. She puts her jacket on in front of the mirror, wraps a red scarf around herself and takes the boy by the hand. They slam the door. He hears them going down the stairs. He freezes over his papers and the echo of the slamming doors reverberates a few more times in his head like a ball – boom, boom, boom, until there’s silence. Then he takes a deep breath and stands up straight. Silence. He feels it wrap him up, and now he moves slowly and precisely. He goes to the closet, pulls back the glass door and stands facing her clothes. He stretches his hand out to a light-coloured blouse, she’s never worn it, it’s too formal. He palpates it and then runs his whole hand over it, gets his hand tangled in the folds of silk. But this blouse tells him nothing, so he keeps going; he recognizes the cashmere suit, which she also rarely wears, and her summer dresses, and a few shirts, one after the next; a winter jumper still wrapped up from the cleaners, and a long black coat. He hasn’t seen her much in that one, either. Then it occurs to him that this clothing is hanging here to throw him off, to trick him, to lead him astray.

They’re standing next to each other in the kitchen. Kunicki is dicing up parsley. He doesn’t really want to get into it again, but he can’t restrain himself. He can feel the words swelling up in his throat, and he can’t quite swallow them back down. Meaning the old ‘Well then what did happen?’ yet again.

She says in a tired voice, pointing out in a tone of I’m-reciting-this-yet-again that he’s being boring, that he’s making things difficult, ‘Here you go, one more time: I didn’t feel well, I think I had food poisoning, I told you.’

But he doesn’t give up so easily. ‘You didn’t feel sick when you went off,’ he says.

‘Right, but then I got sick, I got sick,’ she repeats, with pleasure. ‘And I guess I passed out for a minute, and then the child started crying, and that brought me to again. He was scared, and I was scared, too. We started towards the car, but just because of everything we ended up going the wrong way.’

‘Which way? Into town? Toward Vis?’

‘Yes, toward Vis. No, I mean, I don’t know, whether toward Vis or not, how was I supposed to know, if I had known, I would have come back, I’ve told you this a thousand times.’ She raises her voice. ‘When I figured out I had got us lost, we just sat down in this little grove, and the child fell asleep. I was still feeling weak…’

Kunicki knows she’s lying. He dices the parsley up and says in a sepulchral voice, not raising his eyes from the cutting board, ‘There was no grove.’

She just about screams, ‘Of course there was!’

‘No, there wasn’t. All there was were individual olive trees and vineyards. What grove?’

There’s a silence, and then she suddenly says with deadly seriousness, ‘OK. You’ve cracked it. Good job. We were carried off by a flying saucer. They did experiments on us. They implanted chips in us, here,’ and she lifts up her hair to reveal the nape of her neck. Her gaze is icy.

Kunicki ignores her sarcasm. ‘Alright, alright, continue.’

‘I found a little stone house. We fell asleep, it got dark…’

‘Just like that? It got dark? What happened to the whole day? What were you doing all day?’

She presses on. ‘We had a nice morning. I thought that you might worry about us a little bit and actually remember that we exist. Like shock therapy. We ate grapes all the time and kept going swimming…’

‘You’re telling me you didn’t eat for three days?’

‘Like I say, we ate grapes all the time.’

‘What did you drink?’ Kunicki urges.

Here she grimaces. ‘Water from the sea.’

‘Why don’t you just tell me the truth?’

‘That is the truth.’

Kunicki severs meticulously the fleshy little stems. ‘OK, and then what?’

‘Nothing. We went back to the road and flagged down a car that took us to –’

‘After three days!’

‘So what?’

He throws the knife down into the parsley. The cutting board crashes to the floor. ‘Do you have any idea how much trouble you caused? There was a helicopter out looking for you! The whole island was mobilized!’

‘Well they shouldn’t have been. It just happens that people disappear for a little while, you know? There was no need for anybody to panic. We can just still say that I wasn’t feeling well, and that then I got better.’

‘What the fuck is wrong with you? What is going on? How can you explain it all?’

‘There’s nothing that requires an explanation. I’m telling you the truth, you’re just not listening.’

She’s screaming, but here she lowers her voice. ‘Just, what do you think, you tell me, what do you think happened?’

But he doesn’t answer her now. This conversation has already repeated itself multiple times. It seems both of them have lost the strength for it.

Sometimes she leans back against the wall and glares at him and taunts him: ‘A bus full of pimps drove by and took me to off to a brothel. They kept the child on the balcony, on bread and water. I had sixty clients over the course of those three days.’

When she does that he slams his fist into the table to not hit her.

He never thought or worried about it – that he can’t remember individual days. He doesn’t know what he did on a given Monday, or not even a given, but last Monday, Monday before last. He doesn’t know what he did the day before yesterday. He tries to remember the Thursday before they left Vis – and nothing comes to mind. But when he focuses it returns to him, that they walked down the path, that the dried-out bushes of herbs crackled beneath their shoes, and the grass was so dry that it scattered into dust under their shoes. And he remembers the low stone wall, although probably only because they saw a snake there, which ran away from them. She told him to take the boy’s hand. Then he picked him up, and she tore off the little leaves of some plant and rubbed it between her fingers. ‘Rue,’ she said. Then he realized that everything smelled like it here, like this herb, even raki, they put whole branches of it in the bottles. But he can’t know now how they got back and what happened to the evening of that day. And he doesn’t remember the other evenings. He doesn’t remember anything, he’s missed it all. And when you don’t remember it means it never happened.

Details, the weight of details: he used to not take them seriously. Now he’s sure that when he arranges them in a tightly made chain – cause plus effect – everything will be explained. He should sit quietly in his office, lay out a piece of paper, best if it’s large-format, the largest he can find, he has some like that from the paper books are wrapped in, and plot it all out in points. After all, that’s the truth.

So, okay. He slices through the plastic tape on a package of books and takes out the stack of them without even looking at them. That’s one of those bestsellers, who cares. He picks up the sheet of grey paper and straightens it out on the desk. This extended grey space, slightly creased, confuses him. With a black marker he writes: border. They fought there. But maybe he should go back to before they left? No, he’ll start there, at the border. He must have held out his passport through the car window. That was between Slovenia and Croatia. Then he recalls them going down the asphalt highway through empty villages. Stone homes without roofs, bearing traces of fire or bombs. Clear signs of war. Overgrown fields, dry, barren land lacking care. Its owners in exile. Dead paths. Gritted teeth. Nothing, nothing wrong, they’re in purgatory. They’re in the car and looking out in silence at those haunting landscapes. But her he can’t remember, she was sitting too close to him, next to him. He doesn’t remember if they stopped anywhere or not. Yes, they got petrol at some little station. He thinks they bought some ice cream. And the weather, that it was stifling. Milk in the sky.

Kunicki has a good job. At work he’s a free man. He works as a sales representative for a big Warsaw publisher – representative, meaning he peddles books. He has several spots in town he has to stop by every so often to tout his wares; he always brings them the latest stuff and makes them special offers.

He drives up to a little shop on the outskirts of town and gets the order he’s fulfiling out of the trunk of his car. The shop is called Book and School Supplies Shop, it’s too small to give itself such airs as a specific name, and anyway, most of what it sells are simply notebooks and textbooks.

The order fits into a plastic box: guidebooks, two copies of the sixth volume of the encyclopaedia, the memoirs of a famous actor, and the latest bestseller by the unrevealing title of Constellations – a whopping three copies of this. Kunicki promises himself he’s going to read it. They serve him coffee and a slice of cake. They like him. Washing down mouthfuls of cake with the coffee, he shows them the new catalogue. This sells well, he says, and this right here gets ordered all the time. Such is Kunicki’s job. As he’s leaving he purchases a calendar that’s on clearance.

In the evening in his tiny office he fills in the publisher’s corporate forms with the orders he’s received; he sends the forms by email. He’ll receive the books in the morning.

He takes deep, relieved breaths, inhaling the smoke from his cigarette: the work day is done. He’s been waiting for this moment since morning so he can look through the pictures in peace. He hooks up the camera to the computer.

There are 64 of them. He doesn’t delete any. They come up automatically, for 10-12 seconds each. The pictures are boring. Their one merit is that they fix instants that would otherwise have vanished completely. But would it be worth it to copy them? Even so, Kunicki copies them to a CD, turns off the computer and sets off for home.

All his actions he performs automatically: he turns the key in the ignition, turns off the alarm, fastens his seatbelt, flips on the radio, puts the car in first gear. It immediately rolls along from the car park into the busy street, in second gear. They’re doing the weather on the radio. They’re saying it’s going to rain. And sure enough it starts to rain, as if all the drops of rain had just been waiting to be conjured up by the radio; the windshield wipers come on.

And suddenly something changes. It’s not the weather, not the rain, not the view from the car, but somehow, in a single moment, he sees everything differently. It’s as if he’s taken off his sunglasses, or as if the windshield wipers have scraped off more than their usual skimming of urban grunge. He feels hot and steps on the gas in spite of himself. People are honking at him. He pulls himself together and tries to catch up with the black Volkswagen. His hands start to sweat. He would happily pull over, but there’s nowhere to pull over to, he has to keep going.

He sees with terrible clarity that the road, so familiar to him, is suffused entirely with lurid signs. These signs are messages for him alone. The one-legged circles, the yellow triangles, the blue squares, the green and white markers, the arrows, the indicators. The lights. The lines painted on the asphalt, the motorway markers, warnings, reminders. The smile on the billboard, not immaterial either. He saw them this morning, but he didn’t understand them then, this morning he could ignore them, but now, now there is no way for him to do that. Now they are all communicating with him, quietly, categorically, there are so many more of them, in fact there is no space they do not inhabit. The names of shops, the ads, the post office symbol, the pharmacies, the bank, the lifted STOP paddle of the nursery school teacher overseeing the children crossing the road, sign goes through sign, across sign, sign indicating another sign – a little further on, a sign taken up by another sign, passed further along, a conspiracy of signs, a network of signs, an understanding between signs behind his back. Nothing is innocent, and nothing is insignificant, it’s all a big endless puzzle.

In a panic he looks for a place to park: he has to shut his eyes or he’ll go crazy. What is wrong with him? He starts to shake. Relieved he finds the bus stop and pulls over. He begins to be able to control himself. It occurs to him that he might have had a stroke. He’s afraid to look around. Maybe he has discovered a way of viewing things, or another Point of View, capitalized, all of it capitalized.

His breathing returns after a little while to normal, although his hands are still shaking. He lights a cigarette, that’s it, let it pollute his lungs with a little nicotine, stupefy him with smoke, evict the demons. But he knows now that he can’t go any further, that he wouldn’t be able to handle this new knowledge that now overwhelms him. He gasps for breath with his head on the steering wheel.

He positions the car on the pavement, he’s sure they’ll give him a ticket, and carefully he walks away. The asphalt surface of the road seems viscous now.

‘Mr Untouchable,’ she says.

Provocatively, Kunicki doesn’t respond. She slams the cabinet door after pulling out a packet of tea, waiting out the duration she’s given him to react.

‘What’s going on with you?’ she asks. Aggressively now. Kunicki knows that if he doesn’t answer now she’ll launch a full-blown attack, so he says calmly:

‘Nothing. What would be going on?’

She snorts and says in a monotone:

‘You don’t say anything, you don’t let me touch you, you scoot over to the very edge of the bed, you’re not sleeping, you’re not watching TV, you come home late, smelling of alcohol…’

Kunicki contemplates how he should behave. He knows that whatever he does will be wrong. So he stops. He stiffens in the chair, looks at the table. He’s as uncomfortable as if he’d swallowed something that won’t go down his throat. He feels a menacing movement of air in the kitchen. He tries one last time:

‘We have to call things by their name…’ he starts, but she interrupts him.

‘I mean, yeah, if only we knew what their name was.’

‘Fine. You didn’t tell me what really…’

But he doesn’t finish, because she throws the tea on the floor and runs out of the kitchen. After a second the door slams.

Kunicki thinks she’s a great actress. She could have been a great actress.

He’s always known what he wanted. Now he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t even know what it is he ought to know. He pulls out trays of catalogues and inattentively looks over boxes impaled on skewers. He doesn’t know how to search or what to search for.

He sat up the whole previous night on the internet. And what did he find? An inexact map of Vis, the official Croatian tourism page, the ferry schedule. When he typed in the name Vis, dozens of pages came up. Only a few about the island. Hotel prices, attractions. Also Visible Imagine System, in English, with satellite photos, as far as he could tell. And Vaccine Information Statements, Victorian Institute of Sport. And System for Verification and Synthesis.

The internet itself led him from one word to the next, giving links, pointing out. When it didn’t know something it tactfully kept quiet or stubbornly showed him the same pages, ad nauseam. Then Kunicki had the impression that he had just landed at the border of the known world, at the wall, at the membrane of the heavenly firmament. There wasn’t any way to break through it with his head and look through.

The internet is a fraud. It promises so much – that it will execute your every command, that it will find you what you’re looking for; execution, fulfilment, reward. But in essence that promise is a kind of bait, because you immediately fall into a trance, into hypnosis. The paths quickly diverge, double and multiple, and you go down them, still chasing an aim that will now get blurry and undergo some transformations. You lose the ground beneath your feet, the place where you started from just gets forgotten, and your aim finally vanishes from sight, disappears in the passage of more and more pages, businesses that always promise more than they can give, shamelessly pretending that under the flat plane of the screen there is some cosmos. But nothing could be more deceptive, dear Kunicki. What are you, Kunicki, looking for? What are you aiming at? You feel like spreading out your arms and plunging into it, into that abyss, but there is nothing more deceptive: the landscape turns out to be a wallpaper, you can’t go any further.

His office is small, it’s a single room he rents for cheap on the fourth floor of a dilapidated office building. Next door there’s a real estate agency, and further down a tattoo parlour. What fits in here is a desk and a computer. On the floor lie packages of books. On the windowsill an electric kettle and a jar of coffee.

He cranks up the computer and waits for it to wake back up. Then he lights his first cigarette. He looks at the pictures again, but this time he carefully studies each one, for a long time, until he gets to the ones he took at the end – the contents of her purse laid out on the table, and that ticket with the inscription ‘Kairos,’ yes, he’s even memorized that word: καιρóς. Yes, that word will explain everything to him.

So he has found something he hadn’t noticed before. He has to light a cigarette, he’s so excited. He looks at that mysterious word, it will guide him now, he’ll let it up with the wind like a kite and follow it. ‘Kairos,’ Kunicki reads, ‘Kairos,’ repeating it, unsure how it’s pronounced. It has to be Greek, he thinks happily, Greek, and he dives into his bookshelves, but there’s no Greek dictionary there, only Useful Latin Phrases, a book he’s never even opened. Now he knows he’s on the right track. Now he can’t stop. He lays out the pictures of the contents of her purse, good thing he thought to take them. He places them next to one another like in solitaire, in even rows. He lights another cigarette and walks around the desk like he’s some kind of detective. He stops, inhales some smoke, examines the photographed lipstick and pen.

Suddenly he realizes: there are different kinds of looking. One kind of looking allows you to simply see objects, useful human things, honest and concrete, which you know right away how to use and what for. And then there’s panoramic viewing, a more general view, thanks to which you notice links between objects, their network of reflections. Things cease to be things, the fact that they serve a purpose is insignificant, just a surface. Now they’re signs, indicating something that isn’t in the photographs, referring beyond the frames of the pictures. You have to really concentrate to be able to maintain that gaze, at its essence it’s a gift, grace. Kunicki’s heart starts beating faster. This red pen with ‘Septolete’ written on it is obscuring some dark unknowable, impenetrable thing.

He knows this place, the last time he was here was when the water was going back down, just after the flood. The library, the respectable Ossolineum, sits by the river, faces it, a fatal error. Books should be kept in elevated places.

He remembers that view, when the sun showed itself again and the water was subsiding. The flood brought in sludge and mud, but some places had been cleared, and the library workers were laying out books there to dry. They set them out, open, on the floor, there were hundreds of them, thousands. In that position, unnatural for them, they looked like live creatures, a cross between a bird and an anemone. Hands in thin latex gloves patiently unsticking wet pages, in order for individual sentences and words to dry. Unfortunately the pages withered, darkened from the sludge and water, warping. People were walking between them carefully, women in white aprons, as at a hospital, opening volumes to the sun, letting the sun read. But in fact it was a terrifying sight, something like a meeting of the elements. Kunicki stood and looked on in horror, and then, animated by the example of some other passer-by, joined in enthusiastically to help.

Today at the library in the city centre, beautifully renovated after the flood, tucked away in buildings arranged around the well in the courtyard, he feels uneasy. When he goes into the great reading room he sees tables placed in even rows at discreet distances from one another. At almost every single one sits someone’s back – leaning over, hunched. Trees over a grave. A cemetery.

The books set on the shelves show only their spines to people, and it’s as though, thinks Kunicki, you could only see people in profile. They don’t tempt you with their colourful covers, don’t boast with banners on which every word is a superlative; as though being punished, like recruits, they present only their most basic facts: title and author, nothing more.

Instead of folders, posters and commercials there are catalogues. The egalitarian quality of those little cards stuffed into drawers inspires respect. Only a little information, numbers, a short description, no showing off.

He’s never been here. When he was at university he only used the modern library. He wrote out a title and author on a card and turned it in and after a quarter of an hour received the book. But even there he didn’t go too often, in truth he went only exceptionally, since most of the texts he needed he got Xeroxed. That was a new generation of literature – text without spine, fleeting copy, something like the Kleenex that took the helm after the abdication of cloth handkerchiefs. Kleenexes led a modest revolution, eliminating class differences. After using them once you just threw them away.

He has three dictionaries in front of him. Greek-Polish Dictionary. Edited by Zygmunt Węclewski, Lwów 1929. Samuel Bodek Bookstore, Batory Street 20. Little Greek-Polish Dictionary. Eds. Teresa Kambureli, Thanasis Kamburelis. Published by Wiedza Powszechna, Warsaw, 1999. And the four volumes of Greek-Polish Dictionary edited by Zofia Abramowiczówna, 1962. Published by PWN. There, with difficulty, using the tabular alphabet, he deciphers the word: καιρóς.

He only reads what’s written in Polish, in the Latin alphabet. ‘1. (On measure.) Due measure, appropriateness, moderation; difference; meaning. 2. (On place.) A vital, sensitive place in the body. 3. (On time.) Critical moment, right time, appropriateness, opportunity, nick of time, the propitious time is fleeting; those who turned up unexpectedly; miss the moment; when the right time comes, help in the event of a storm, on time, when the opportunity arises, prematurely, critical moments, periodic states, the chronological sequence of facts, situation, state of things, placement, ultimate danger, benefit, use, to what aim?, what will help you?, where would be convenient?’

That’s one dictionary. The next, older – Kunicki goes over the tiny entries with his eyes, passing over the Greek words and stumbling over old spellings: ‘in good measure, moderation, correct relations, attain an aim, overmuch, the appropriate moment, a suitable time, a nice moment, a convenient occasion, just here, time, hour, and in plural, circumstances, relations, times, cases, incidents, decisive moments of the revolution, dangers; the occasion is convenient, the occasion suits, it comes in time. It is also said: something happens at the appropriate time.’ In the newest dictionary they finally give the pronunciation in brackets: [kieros]. And: ‘weather, time, season, what’s the weather?, now is grape season, wasting time, from time to time, one time, how long? this was needed long ago.’

Kunicki looks around the reading room in despair. He sees the tops of heads leaned over books. He returns to the dictionaries, reads the previous entry, which looks similar, only different by one letter: καιριος. And here there’s still more: ‘done in time, purposeful, effective, lethal, fatal, question solved and: a dangerous place on the body where wounds are effective, what is always on time, what always has to happen.’

Kunicki gathers his things and heads home. At night he finds on Wikipedia a page about Kairos, from which he simply learns that it’s a god, of little importance, forgotten, Hellenic. And that this god was discovered in Trogir. That museum has its image, so she wrote down the word. Nothing more.

When his son was still a baby, when he was an infant, Kunicki had never thought of him as a person. And that was fine, because then they were close. People are always far away. He figured out how to change his nappies as efficiently as possible, he could do it in just a couple of swift motions, almost imperceptibly, but for the sound of nappies. He would submerge his little body in the bath, wash his belly, and then carry him still wrapped up in his towel into his room, where he would put him in his pyjamas. That was easy. When you have a little kid, you never have to think about anything, everything is obvious and natural. Attaching child to breast, and his weight; his smell – familiar and heart-warming. But children aren’t people. Children become people when they wriggle out of your arms and say ‘no’.

Kunicki is unnerved now by the silence. What was the child doing? He stands in the doorway and sees the child on the floor, surrounded by blocks. He sits down next to him and picks up one of his little plastic cars. He moves it along the painted road. He doesn’t know if he’s supposed to start off with a story: once upon a time there was a little car that got lost. He’s getting his mouth ready to speak when the boy rips the toy from his hands and gives him something else – a wooden truck carrying blocks in the back.

‘We’re going to build,’ says the child.

‘What are we going to build?’ improvises Kunicki.

‘A little house.’

Alright then, a little house. They position the blocks in a square. The truck brings the materials.

‘Hey, what if we build an island?’ says Kunicki.

‘No, a house,’ says the child as he plops the blocks down willy-nilly, one on top of the other. Kunicki delicately rearranges, so that the whole house doesn’t come crashing down.

‘But do you remember the sea?’ says Kunicki.

The child assents, and the truck empties out a new supply. Now Kunicki has no idea what to say or what to ask. He might point to the rug and say, this rug is the island, and we are on the island, but the boy is lost on the island, and daddy is worried, because where could his little son be? Which is what he says, but it doesn’t really work.

‘No,’ insists the boy. ‘Let’s build a little house.’

‘Do you remember when you and mummy got lost?’

‘No!’ screams the child, gleefully tossing blocks onto the little house.

‘Have you ever got lost?’ Kunicki asks again.

‘No,’ says the child, and the truck crashes into the newly constructed house at full speed. The walls fall down. ‘Boom! Boom!’ laughs the boy.

Kunicki begins patiently to build it back up again.

When she comes home, Kunicki first sees her from the floor, just like the child. She’s large, flushed from the cold, suspiciously excited. Her lips are red. She tosses a red (or maybe mauve, maybe plum) shawl onto the arm of a chair and hugs the child. ‘Are you guys hungry?’ she asks. Kunicki feels as though a wind has come with her into the room, the cold, blustery wind that comes off the sea. He would like to say, ‘Where were you?’ But he can’t afford to.

In the morning he has an erection and has to turn away from her; he has to hide these inconvenient notions the body sometimes gets, so that she won’t read them as encouragement, attempts at reconciliation, any type of attachment. He turns to face the wall and celebrates the erection, that purposeless readiness, that state of alert, that adherent, taut extremity; he has it all to himself.

The tip of his penis rises like a vector, pointing out the window, towards the world.

Legs. Feet. Even when he stops, when he sits down, they seem to keep going, they can’t restrain themselves, they cross a given space in small, hurried steps. When he wants to restrain them, they rebel. Kunicki is afraid his legs will break out into a run, whisk him off, take him a way he would never agree to, will leap up into the air like they’re folk dancing, against his will, or they’ll go into the gloomy courtyards of mouldy old stone buildings, work their way up someone else’s stairs, pull him up through hatches and onto steep, slippery roofs and make him walk along the scaly roofing tiles, like they would a sleepwalker.

It must be because of his restless legs that Kunicki can’t sleep: from the waist up he’s calm, relaxed, and sleepy; from the waist down – insuperable. He’s obviously made up of two people. His upper person wants calm and justice; his downward person is transgressive and ignores all principles. His upper person has a name, an address, a social security number; there’s not really anything his downward person can say for himself, in fact he’s had it up to here with himself.

He’d like to quiet his legs, rub a soothing ointment into them; as a matter of fact, this internal tickling sensation is painful. He finally takes a sleeping pill. He restores his legs to order.

Kunicki tries to control his own extremities. He invents a way of doing so: he lets them be in constant motion, even just his toes in his shoes, while the rest of his body is at rest. And when he sits down – he releases them then, too: let them be uneasy. He peers down at the toes of his shoes and sees the delicate movement of the leather as his feet begin their obsessive marching in place. But he also takes frequent walks around town. He thinks that this time he will have crossed all the possible bridges over the Odra and the canals. That he will not have missed a single one.

The third week of September is rainy and windy. They have to get their autumn things out of storage, jackets and rubber boots for the child. He picks him up from nursery school; they walk quickly to the car. The boy jumps into a puddle and splashes water everywhere. Kunicki doesn’t notice, he’s thinking about what to say, stringing together sentences. Such as, ‘I’m concerned the child may have had a kind of shock,’ or, with more self-confidence, ‘I believe my son has experienced a shock.’ Now he remembers the word ‘trauma’. ‘To experience trauma.’

They drive across the wet city, the windshield wipers working as hard as they can to clear off the water from the windshield, baring for just a second at a time the world plunged in rain, the smeared world.

It’s his day, Thursday. Thursdays he picks up his son from nursery school. She’s busy because she works all afternoon, she has some workshops or something, she won’t be back until late, so Kunicki has the child to himself.

They pull up to a big renovated brick building in the very centre of the city and look for a little while for a parking place.

‘Where are we going?’ asks the child, and because Kunicki doesn’t answer, the boy begins to repeat the question over and over: ‘Wherewegoing wherewegoing?’

‘Be quiet,’ says the father, but then, a moment later, he explains, ‘To see a lady.’

The child doesn’t protest. He must be intrigued.

There’s no one in the waiting room; a towering woman around the age of fifty appears almost immediately and ushers them into her office. The room is bright and pleasant – in the middle of it there’s a large, soft, colourful rug with toys and blocks on top. Then there’s a couch and two armchairs, a desk and an office chair. The child sits down cautiously on the edge of the couch, but his eyes wander over to the toys. The woman smiles and offers Kunicki her hand, greeting the boy, too. She talks to the child like she wants to make it very clear she’s not paying attention to the father. So he speaks first, preempting whatever questions she might ask.

‘My son has had trouble sleeping for some time,’ he lies. ‘He’s become anxious and –’

The woman doesn’t let him finish. ‘First let’s play,’ she says. This sounds ridiculous, and Kunicki wonders if she’s going to be playing around with him too. In his surprise he stands stock-still.

‘How old are you?’ the woman asks the child. The child holds up three fingers.

‘He turned three in April,’ says Kunicki.

She sits down on the rug, near the boy, and hands him some blocks; she says, ‘Your dad’s going to go sit out there for a little while and read, and we’re going to play, like this.’

‘No!’ says the child, jumping up and running over to the father. Kunicki gets it. He convinces the child to stay.

‘The door can stay open,’ the woman assures him.

He presses gently on the door without shutting it all the way. Kunicki sits in the waiting room and listens to their voices, but they’re hard to hear, he can’t tell what they’re saying. He had been expecting a lot of questions, he had even brought the little booklet with the child’s records, which he reads to himself now: birth at full term, spontaneous labour, Apgar score of 10, vaccinations, weight 3750 grams (8.3 pounds), length 57 centimetres (22.4 inches). We speak of grown-ups being ‘tall’, but a child is ‘long’. He takes a glossy magazine from the table and opens it mechanically, happening immediately upon ads for new books. He goes through the titles and compares prices. He feels a pleasant rush of adrenaline: his are cheaper.

‘Can you clarify what’s wrong, please? What you’re talking about?’ says the woman.

Kunicki feels embarrassed. What’s he supposed to say, that his wife and child just up and disappeared, that they weren’t there for three days, for forty-nine hours – he knows exactly how long it was. And he doesn’t know where they were. He’s always known everything there was to know about them, and now the most important thing is unknown to him. And then, for a split second, he imagines he says, ‘Please, you have to help me. Please just hypnotize him and get access to those forty-nine hours, minute by minute. I have to know.’

And she – that towering woman, standing straight as an arrow – comes up so close to him that he can smell the antiseptic scent of her jumper – that’s what nurses smelled of in his childhood – and takes his hand in her big, warm hands and holds him to her breast.

It doesn’t happen this way, though. Kunicki lies: ‘He’s just been restless lately, he wakes up in the night, cries. We went on holiday in August, to Croatia, to the island of Vis. I thought maybe something had happened, something we weren’t aware of, maybe something had scared him…’

He can tell she doesn’t believe him. She picks up a ballpoint pen and plays with it. She speaks with an enchanting, warm smile. ‘You have here a very intelligent child with above-average social skills. Sometimes these things just mean the child is going through a normal developmental phase. Don’t let him watch too much TV. But to me there’s nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with him.’

Then she looks at him with concern, or so he thinks.

As they’re walking out, as the child finishes up his bye-byes to the woman, Kunicki begins to consider her a bitch. Her smile strikes him as insincere. She’s hiding something, too. She hasn’t told him everything. He now realizes he should never have gone to a woman. Don’t they have men child psychologists in this city? Or have women established some kind of monopoly on children? Women are never really clear; you can never tell upon first inspection if they’re weak or strong, how they’re going to behave, what they want; you have to stay on your guard. He thinks of the pen she was holding in her hand. A yellow Bic, just like the one in the picture he got out of the purse.

It’s Tuesday, she has the day off. He’s been agitated since early, he can’t sleep, he pretends he’s not watching her morning meandering, from the bedroom to the bathroom, from the kitchen to the entrance and then back to the bathroom. The child emits a quick, impatient cry, probably when she’s tying his shoes. The sound of her spraying on her deodorant. The whistle of the kettle.

When they finally go out, he stands at the door and listens to see whether the lift has come yet. He counts to sixty – the time it will take them to make it downstairs. Fast as he can he slips on his boots and rips the bag off the jacket he’s bought used so she won’t spot him. He shuts the door quietly behind him. As long as he doesn’t have to wait too long for the lift.

Yep, things couldn’t be going smoother. He darts after her, at a safe distance, in a jacket she couldn’t recognize. He fixes on her back, he wonders if she feels somehow uncomfortable, probably not, because she’s walking quickly, briskly, you might even say joyfully. She and the child both leap over puddles, rather than bypassing them, they leap – why? Where did she get all that energy on a drizzly autumn day like today? Had the coffee kicked in already? The rest of the world seemed slow and sleepy, and she’s more vibrant than usual, her frenetic pink scarf a blot of brilliance against a background of that day; Kunicki hangs on to it like to a straw.

They finally make it to nursery school. He watches her take leave of the child, but it doesn’t move him in the least. She might be whispering something to him as she embraces him so tenderly, some word, exactly the word Kunicki has been searching for so frantically. If he knew what it was, he could type it into Wikipedia, and that cosmic search engine would in the blink of an eye give him a simple, straightforward answer.

Now he sees her as she pauses before the crosswalk, awaiting the green light, pulling out her phone and typing in a number. For a moment Kunicki has some hope that his own phone will begin to ring in his pocket, he’s got a different ringtone for her – a cicada, yes, he had assigned her the song of the cicada. Tropical insect. But his pocket remains silent. She crosses the road while she has a brief conversation with someone; she hangs up. Now he has to wait for the light to change, which is dangerous, because she’s actually going around the corner and out of sight, so he immediately, as soon as he can, speeds up his pace, already fearing he’s lost her, already beginning to be angry with himself and with those lights. Oh, to lose her only two hundred metres from home! But there she is; her scarf is floating into the revolving doors of the shop. It’s a big shop, a shopping centre, really, they’ve just opened it, it’s practically empty, so that Kunicki hesitates, whether to go in after her or not, whether or not he will actually be able to hide in between the different displays. But he has to, because the shop has another exit, onto another street, so he puts his hood on – which is perfectly reasonable, it is raining, after all – and enters the shop. He sees her – she’s walking around slowly, as if something were holding her back, and she looks at make-up, at perfume, she stops at a shelf and reaches for something. She holds a bottle of something in her hand. Kunicki rummages through the discounted socks.

When she moves, lost in thought, to the purses display, Kunicki picks up the bottle. Carolina Herrera, he reads. Should this name be retained or discarded from memory? Something tells him he should retain it. Everything means something, we just don’t know what, he repeats to himself.

He sees her from a distance – she’s standing in front of a mirror with a red purse on her arm, gazing at her reflection from one and then another angle. Then she goes to the checkout, right to Kunicki. He retreats in panic behind the socks shelf, bowing his head. She passes by him. Like a ghost. But then suddenly she turns around like she’s forgotten something, and she looks right at him, hunched over, with his hood pulled down to his forehead. He sees that her eyes are wide with astonishment, he feels her gaze, feels it physically: it works its way over his body, it gropes him.

‘What are you doing here?’ she says. ‘Do you have any idea what you look like?’

Then her eyes soften, a moment later, a kind of haze comes over them, and she blinks. ‘Jesus,’ she says, ‘what is going on with you? What is wrong?’

This is weird, this isn’t what Kunicki had expected. He had expected a fight. And then she wraps her arms around him and holds him to her, nestling her face into his bizarre second-hand jacket. A sigh works its way out of Kunicki, a little round ‘Oh,’ he’s not sure whether from surprise at her unexpected behaviour or because all of a sudden he can see himself bursting into tears into her fragrant down jacket.

It’s only when they’re in the lift that she says, ‘Are you okay?’

Kunicki says he’s fine, but he knows that they’re headed toward the final confrontation now. Their kitchen will serve as battlefield, and they’ll both take up attack positions – he by the table, she with her back to the window, as always. And he knows he shouldn’t underestimate this important moment, that this is perhaps the last and only possible moment to find out what happened. What the truth is. But he knows, too, that he is treading on a minefield. Every question will be like a bomb. He’s not a coward, and he will not back down in the face of establishing the facts. As the lift rises, he feels like a terrorist with a bomb under his clothes that will explode the second they open the door to their apartment and scatter everything to dust.

He props the door open with his leg so that he can slide in his shopping bags first, and then he squeezes in past them. In fact he doesn’t really notice anything out of the ordinary, he turns on the lights and sets out the groceries on the kitchen counter. He pours some water into a glass and sticks a fading bunch of parsley into it. This will bring him to, he thinks, parsley.

He passes through his own apartment like a ghost, he feels like he could walk through the walls. The rooms are empty. Kunicki is an eye that is figuring out one of those ‘Spot the differences between Picture A and Picture B’ puzzles. And Kunicki looks. There’s no doubt they’re different, the apartment now and the apartment from before. This puzzle would only work for the extremely unobservant. Her coat is gone from the coat rack, and her shawl, and the child’s jacket, the parade of boots (all that remains are his lone flip-flops), and the umbrella.

The child’s room seems totally deserted; in fact all that’s left is furniture. A single little toy car lies on the rug, like the bits and pieces leftover after an unimaginable cosmic crash. But Kunicki has to know for sure – and so with his hand held out before him he steals into the bedroom, to the wardrobe with the glass in the doors, which he pulls open; they are heavy, and they open begrudgingly, with a sad grumbling. All that’s left is a silk blouse, too fancy to wear. It looks lonely there by itself in the wardrobe. The motion of the doors. Kunicki looks over the empty shelves in the bathroom. His shaving appliances are still there, in the corner. And his battery-powered toothbrush.

He needs a lot of time to understand what he is seeing. All evening, all night, and even the next morning.

At around nine he brews himself some potent coffee and then gathers up some of his shaving things, a few shirts from the wardrobe, some trousers, and puts them in a bag. Before he leaves, as he’s about to go out the door, he checks his wallet: I.D., debit cards. Then he runs down to his car. Snow has fallen in the night, so he has to scrape off the windshield. He does so sloppily, by hand. He’s counting on being able to get to Zagreb by nightfall, and to Split by the following day. Meaning tomorrow he sees the sea.

He heads south, straight as an arrow, towards the Czech border.