Her terrace looks out over vast meadows, and past these the azure waters of the bay; the rising tide plays with colours, mixes them, varnishes the waves with a silver sheen. She always goes out onto the terrace in the evenings after dinner – a hangover from when she used to smoke. She stands there and watches people engaged in all manner of pleasure and delight. If you painted it, it would look like a joyful, sunny, and perhaps slightly childish Brueghel. A southern Brueghel. People flew kites – one was in the shape of a big, bright fish, whose long, slender fins floated in the air with the grace of a veiltail. Another was a panda bear, an enormous oval that rose high above the people’s tiny little figures. Another is a white sail that pulls its owner’s short cart along the ground. Think of all the uses you can get out of a kite! Think how helpful the wind is. How good.
People play with dogs, throwing them colourful little balls. The dogs retrieve them with boundless enthusiasm. Itsy-bitsy figures run and ride bikes and rollerskate and play volleyball and badminton and practise yoga. Along the nearby highway glide cars with trailers, and on them boats, catamarans, bicycles, mobile homes. There is a light breeze, the sun is shining, little birds scuffle over some forgotten crumbs beneath a tree.
This is how she understands it: life on this planet gets developed by some powerful force contained in every atom of organic matter. It’s a force there is no physical evidence of, for the time being – you can’t catch it on even the most precise microscopic images, nor in photographs of the atomic spectrum. It’s a thing that consists in bursting open, thrusting forward, in constantly going beyond what it is. That is the engine that drives changes, a blind and powerful energy. To ascribe goals or intentions to it is to misunderstand. Darwin read this energy as well as he could, but he still read it wrong. Competition shmompetition. The more experienced a biologist you become, the longer and harder you look at the complex structures and connections in the biosystem, the stronger your hunch that all animate things cooperate in this growth and bursting, supporting one another. Living organisms give themselves to one another, permit one another to make use of them. If rivalry exists, it is a localized phenomenon, an upsetting of the balance. It is true that tree branches jostle one another out of the way to reach the light, their roots collide in the race to a water source, animals eat each other, but there is in all this a kind of accord, it’s just an accord that men find frightening. It might appear that we are actors in a great bodily theatre, as though those wars we wage were merely civil wars. This – what other word to use? – lives, has a million traits and qualities, so that everything is contained within it, and there is nothing that might lie outside of it, all death is part of life, and in some sense there is no death. There are no errors. There are no guilty parties and no innocents, either, no merits, no sins, no good or evil; whoever thought up those notions led humankind astray.
She went back into the bedroom and read his letter, which had just arrived, announced by an electronic ping, and suddenly she recalls all the despair this person, this letter-writer had provoked in her, long, long ago. Despair at leaving while he stayed. He came to the train station back then, but she doesn’t remember him standing on the platform, although she knows she’d carefully preserved that image once – but all she can remember now is the movement of the train and the flashes of a wintry Warsaw as they slipped faster and faster away, and the words ‘never again’, and the conviction they had triggered. Now it sounds so sentimental, and to tell the truth, she can’t understand that pain. It was a good pain, like menstrual pain. A thing reaches completion, an internal process is finalized, eliminating all that is unnecessary. That’s why it hurts, but it’s just the pain of purging.
For some time they wrote letters to one another; his letters came in light blue envelopes with stamps the colour of whole-wheat bread. Their plan, of course, was for him to someday make it to where she was. But, of course, he never made it; how could she ever have believed he would? There were reasons, all of which seem vague now, and even incomprehensible – no passport, politics, the abyss of the winters, which you could get stuck in as though you’d fallen into a crevasse and couldn’t move again.
Just before she’d come here she’d suddenly been battered by waves of a strange nostalgia. Strange because it had to do with things that were too trivial to really be missed: the water that collects in puddles in the holes in the pavements, the shades of neon left in that water by stray drops of petrol; the heavy, creaky old doors to the dark stairwells. She also missed the glazed earthenware plates with the brown band with the Społem co-op logo on it that they used at the cafeteria to serve lazy pierogi with melted butter and sugar sprinkled on top. But then with time that nostalgia had seeped into the new land like spilled milk, not leaving any trace. She graduated, and she got a fellowship. She travelled around the world, and she got married to the man she’s still with now. They had twins, who will soon have their own children. So it would appear that memory is a drawer stuffed with papers – some of them are totally useless, those one-time documents like dry cleaning tickets and the proofs of purchase of winter boots or a toaster long since gone. But then there are other reusable ones, testaments not to events but to whole processes: a child’s vaccination booklet, her student ID like a tiny passport, its pages half-filled with stamps from each term, her school diploma, a certificate of completion from a dressmaking course.
In the next letter she got from him, he wrote that although he was in the hospital now, they’d said they’d let him out for Christmas, and he wouldn’t go back after that. They’d already done everything they could, scanned everything they could, diagnosed it all. So now he’d be at home, and he lived outside of Warsaw, in the country, and there was snow, and severe cold all over Europe, with people even freezing to death. He also gave her the name of his illness, but in Polish, so she had no idea what it was, because she just didn’t know the Polish name for it. ‘Do you remember our promise?’ he wrote. ‘Do you remember that last night before you left? We were sitting in the park, on the grass, it was very hot, it was June, we’d already aced all our exams, and the city, after being heated all day long, now gave off a warmth mixed with the scent of concrete, like it was sweating. Do you remember? You’d brought a bottle of vodka, but we couldn’t finish it. We promised we would see each other. That no matter what happened, we would meet again. And there was one other thing. Do you remember?’
She remembered, of course.
He’d had a little pocket knife with a bone handle that had had the corkscrew he’d just used to open the bottle (because back then vodka bottles had had corks, too, and wax seals), and now with the sharp part of the corkscrew he dug into his hand – if she remembered right, it had been a long cut between his index finger and his thumb – and she had taken that curly metal blade from him and done the same to herself. Then they touched these bloodstains together, applying one scratch to another. This youthful romantic gesture was called blood brotherhood, and it must have come from some movie that had been popular then, or maybe a book, maybe one of Karl May’s series on the Apache chief.