“Not yet, you bastard,” Paweł muttered, taking a crusted saucepan from the kitchen table and tossing it at the dog. “Wait, damn you.”
The dog snapped its head forward with unlikely speed and caught the pan’s handle in its mouth as it spun by. It dropped the pan and investigated it with a disgusting red tongue.
“Bastard,” Paweł said, and pulled open the front door. The door was as warped, as Nowak liked to point out every time he came to call, as a politician, and Paweł had to put his back into the task of dragging it open. As he did so, he detected several new aches.
The privy stood fifty metres away, by the edge of the forest. Its door had rotted off years before; he pulled down his trousers, opened the trapdoor in his thermals, and sat, looking back towards the house.
The little house still looked like the fairytale hunting lodge it had been built to resemble, back in the early years of the last century when Dukes and Princes had come here to hunt the żubr and the elk and the wild boar. It was still solid, though the years had not been kind to the fabric. All the windows on the upper storey were broken; most of those on the ground floor were broken too, and had been filled in with planking that had gone silver with the years. The verandah along the front – admittedly a later addition – was rotten and unsafe and piled with rubbish. It was… well, he couldn’t remember exactly when smoke had last emerged from the chimney; it seemed that all his life bottled gas had been preferable, and now the chimney must be choked solid with old birds’ nests and muck.
He had been meaning, these past four or five years, to reopen the upper storey. He had no use for the rooms up there, particularly, since the tourist trade dried up, but he thought that perhaps some of the hunters of years gone by might have left something valuable behind, and since his imbecile children couldn’t be bothered to help him out it might be time to go up the stairs and see if he could find something to sell in the village.
His bowels, like everything else, had slowed to a crawl over the years, but he didn’t mind that. Sometimes he sat here for an hour or more, looking at the house and thinking. The view never changed; there was just the view of the house. Sometimes he planned what he would do with the house; sometimes he thought about cutting back another metre or so of new growth around the clearing in which it stood. He rarely acted on these meditations, but he found them calming, and they took his mind off the increasingly wayward nature of his digestive system.
This morning, for example, he considered cleaning the chimney. The living room – into which he had not ventured for three years or so – had a hearth nearly three metres across, implanted with intricate and antique ironwork and still piled with ancient ashes. He knew the chimney was a job that was beyond him, and he had no money to pay for the work, but it soothed him to think about doing it, and now he did think about it he might be able to sell the antique grate somewhere, if he ever got around to prising it out of the fireplace.
Finishing, finally, he wiped himself with a torn sheet from an old copy of Gazeta Wyborcza, pulled up his lower garments, and stepped out of the privy.
The house was entirely surrounded by the forest. Beyond the privy marched endless dark avenues of oak and fir, spruce and beech and alder, populated by żubr and elk and the Tarpan and beaver and wild boar. The last dark corner of Europe, Nowak called it. It straddled the border between Poland and Lithuania, but it had shifted with the demands of history ever since the concept of frontiers had come into being. It had been Polish, Lithuanian, German, Russian. Secrets had been buried here, and the lawless post-Communist years, both in Poland and across the border, had brought countless bodies to the soil under the trees. Paweł had seen it all, and very little of it had impressed him.
Back in the kitchen, he lit the two burners and set a pan of water over one. Over the other he put his frying pan and let the solidified fat melt. When it was spitting, he cut some slices from a haunch of elk venison and put them in to fry. The dog Halina stirred and raised its head; thick cords of saliva dripped from its jowls as it smelled the cooking meat.
The water was boiling; Paweł spooned ground coffee into a metal jug and a plastic bowl, and poured water into both. He let them brew; Halina was a caffeine addict and was more than usually unbearable if its coffee wasn’t strong enough.
By the time the venison was cooked, the coffee was ready. He put the dog’s bowl down on the floor and the evil creature slurped at it. He poured his own coffee from the jug into a cracked ceramic mug advertising Vienna’s Tiergarten – another Christmas gift from his son the idiot – and stood eating the meat from the frying pan. He dropped a few scraps on the floor to satisfy the dog.
“What day is it, bastard?” he asked as he slurped coffee. The dog, as usual, had no sensible answer, only thick wet chewing sounds as it breakfasted. “I think it’s a day to go into the village.”
At the word ‘village,’ the dog stopped chewing and raised its head. When he was young, Paweł had attended school with a boy named Stanisław. Stanisław had liked to amuse himself by trapping insects and pulling off their wings and legs. He kept his crippled victims, as long as their tiny lives persisted, in a little cardboard box, and liked to show them to the girls.
Later, Stanisław had graduated to small animals, trapping and mutilating dogs and cats. By then, he had abandoned all attempts to impress the girls. Later still, the girls themselves had become his subjects. He had killed fifteen before he was arrested. Paweł had seen his eyes at the trial, and occasionally he saw something of Stanisław in Halina’s eyes.
It amazed him that the dog recognised the word ‘village’ and showed such interest. He had never taken it to the village; he didn’t dare, in case it decided to start chewing on a child. He shook his head and threw a dirty plate in the dog’s direction. The dog ignored it and continued to stare at him.
“I can’t take you, you bastard,” Paweł told the dog angrily. “Stupid useless creature.”
Halina watched him a moment longer, then seemed to perform a slight shrug and went back to its coffee, as if it had completely forgotten he was there.
PAWEŁ FOUND THAT he had forgotten quite how long it was since he had last visited the village. He thought it might have been in the late spring or early summer. On the other hand, he thought it could have been even earlier.
Whatever. Going to the shed, he found that his bicycle was almost useless. Both tyres were flat and there was rust on almost every metal surface. He couldn’t remember the chain breaking, but there it was, hanging uselessly. He stood, hands in the pockets of his thick jacket, staring up at the machine hanging from the ceiling of the shed. He stood there quite a long time, trying and failing to remember when he had last used the bike. Clearly it was a while.
Never mind. He went back to the caretaker’s cottage and found a stout pair of hiking boots, only faintly ghosted with mildew, under a pile of clothes. He laced them up and put on a coat and slung a rucksack over one shoulder and set off down the path that led to the track that led to the road that led to the village.
The village had about seventy inhabitants. It boasted a bar, a shop, and a garage, all of them run by the same man, and a post office run by a wan, nervous woman who had either come here or been banished here from Warsaw twenty years before. Paweł always expected her to leave, so he had never bothered to learn her name, but year after year, there she was, patiently collecting his post and waiting for him to come into the village for it.