A beam of light illuminates the garden on the other side of the track, at first high up at the level of the tall bean-sticks, then descending to the beetroots. It extinguishes itself. The darkness is blacker. Then the beam reappears, brighter: the headlights of a car. They have arrived.
When the three of them entered the house, it immediately became larger. The roof spread its wings. Houses shrink when lived in alone, and even more so when uninhabited. Danka was carrying Olek in her arms and as she crossed the threshold from the creaking portico-hallway into the dining room, they both smiled as if their two faces were expressing a single feeling which neither could have explained.
Mirek and I began to unload the car. There were cardboard boxes, shopping bags, a folded pushchair, a cot, suitcases, a thermos box, a crate of apricots, and, last of all, the wedding dress, hanging from a hanger inside a polythene bag. Fixed to the roof of the car was a ski container, shaped like something halfway between a coffin and a kayak. It had been thrown away and left on the street in Paris and Mirek had recuperated it.
Let’s take it off, said Mirek, though I’m not going to unpack it — it’s full of stuff for Warsaw, nothing else.
They intended to pass a long weekend in the house without a doorstep and then drive through Lublin to Warsaw, where they would begin their new married life as planned.
Danka, with her son in her arms, walked around the house. Nothing in it seemed to surprise her. She took her time. She tried to open a window and failed. Eventually, returning to the room with the photograph of the hunter, she announced: It’s big.
Olek wanted to be put down on the floor. Once there, he held on to her hands and walked a few steps, chuckling with satisfaction as if each unsteady step was a point of arrival. They saw a night butterfly. Olek stumbled and would have fallen if she hadn’t been holding him. Slowly, she murmured, slowly, one step, slowly, two steps. .
When he was sitting on the floor she caught the moth in her hands and showed it to him before putting it out of the front door. Cma! she said, Cma!
Danka had acquired another sense of time since the wedding. She could imagine looking back at the present from what, until a few days ago, was an impossibly distant future. She could imagine Olek being a father and Mirek and herself being grandparents. She was looking back at herself from a point in the future, and she was asking a question. I’m not sure to whom.
You haven’t forgotten have you? You remember? It was five days after Mirek and I got married. We drove all the way from Nowy Targ and we arrived at the house I’d never seen. Mirek had talked about it as though it belonged to another life before I was born, and it was dark when we arrived, and John had prepared some soup, and Mirek was making up our big bed in the room where there was an ostrich egg in a wickerwork basket, and it was the first time for ten days that Mirek and I were going to be alone. I realised how much lay ahead, and I was happy, doubly happy, one woman stepped into my wedding dress and two stepped out — my hair was curly and auburn, remember? — and I was going to love Mirek as he deserved, I knew how much he deserved, at that time it was one of the deepest things I knew, and Olek was healthy and very strong, I was proud, one morning when I was dressing him he accidentally gave me a biff and I had a black eye, that’s how sturdy he was at ten months, I was proud, and I was walking through this house I was seeing for the very first time and I said to myself, I don’t care, I don’t care how long it takes and how much I have to work, and if we have to move from room to room over the years, working on room after room until the house is at last finished, it won’t matter — is a house ever finished? — what I know is that I want to live here straight away and always. Remember? I can’t say what made me so confident that evening, maybe you told me it would be all right, maybe that’s what gave me confidence.
I’d better change him, she said out loud and picked up Olek.
I’ll set the table, I said.
The table was very long, a table for committee meetings, not for meals. Two-thirds of it was encumbered with what had been casually left on leaving the house, or abruptly deposited on arrivaclass="underline" clothes, hand tools, a coil of rope, basins, paper bags, a cap. The end nearest the kitchen was clearer and covered with dust. I wiped it, and laid out the garlic bread, raw herring and pickled mushrooms that Mirek had brought. I fetched the ladle and steaming saucepan from the kitchen, and the eggs. Then I served the soup into bowls with the ladle, and into each bowl put two halves of an egg.
The Poles call Ken’s soup szczawiowa. It is one of the most elementary soups in the world, and maybe that’s why, as well as nourishing, it provokes dreams. For example, if you’re cold it warms you and at the same time is refreshing. The acid sorrel makes the vegetables taste volatile and sharp. The eggs, which are larger than anything you usually find in a soup, have a rounded, solid taste. The sour cream, added at the last minute, permeates both. Jacob Boehme, the shoemaker who sold woollen gloves and lived a little to the west of Wroclaw in the seventeenth century, proposed that the world comes continually into existence by passing through seven phases. The first is Sourness, the second Sweetness, the third Bitterness, the fourth Warmth, and after Warmth, according to him, comes Love, to be followed by Sound and Language. I would place zupa szczawiowa somewhere between Warmth and Love. When you sip it, you have the impression of swallowing a place. The eggs taste of the earth of this place, the sorrel of its grass, the cream of its clouds.
We ate in silence for a moment. Danka blew on her spoon to cool it before testing whether Olek liked the soup. He did. After each spoonful he chortled and Danka wiped his mouth. Then Mirek said: You know what my dream was for a long while? It started in Paris, often when I was snarled up in the traffic, driving from one building site to another. Sometimes I thought of it when painting a ceiling. My dream was to run a little restaurant. Nothing big, twelve tables, in Zamość under the arcades, serving traditional dishes and new ones I’d introduce, using vegetables and fruit grown here in this garden, made larger for keeping chickens and rabbits too. I made up menus in the traffic jams! Crazy!
Danka put down her spoon and turned towards him with her full goose authority. If you don’t try to carry out that dream now — she spoke slowly, her dark green eyes screwed up — you never will!
Mirek didn’t reply. We finished the soup and chatted about other things. When nothing was said, I could hear the clock in the next room.
Olek wanted to get out of his feeding-seat and Danka took him in her arms and fed him pieces of apricot. Mirek unfastened the seat from the table and, leaving the door open, went into the room with the swing. There he attached Olek’s seat to the cords, higher up than the beech-slats. He tested it, made the knots tighter and then came back to fetch the boy.
Put into the seat, Olek grasped the two cords in his tiny fists and Mirek with his huge hand gave him a gentle push. He was swinging. He went higher and higher and was more and more full of delight.
The way Danka, who had left the table to watch, the way she stood there, watching her son soar away and come back, whispered to me that within two or three months she would be pregnant again.
Each time the seat came towards him, Mirek held it for an instant in his hand, raised it a little higher, and let it go once more. The house had changed as never before in Mirek’s lifetime.