All these years I kept seeing the same dream—I remember it clearly, and I’ve always thought I don’t dream; I was sure I didn’t, but maybe I just forgot my dreams as soon as I woke up because my mind, once conscious, bolted the doors to the rest of it, so maybe I did moan and call for you in that dream—the dream in which we are dancing in a great dark hall, like the one at Prosvita or the People’s House, only bigger, and at some point you vanish, and I don’t even notice how and when, just suddenly realize that I am dancing alone—an instant of abysmal cold, of sticky terror: Where are you, Geltsia? I dash around looking for you, run around the hall like a madman, and the hall is growing bigger; it’s not a hall anymore but a giant open space, a drilling field, only dark as night, but I know that you’re somewhere here, you must be here, only for some reason I can’t see you…. And now here you are, you’re found again, my girl, the gears of separated times have locked back together, and we are together and have already executed the first movement of our dance, the pas de deux with a handgun. Somewhere an invisible master of ceremonies is calling out the dances inaudibly as I lift myself into the streetcar behind Nusya, and for another ten or twelve minutes will have the pleasure of beholding your face over people’s heads, my brave little girl—this is the kind of music they’re playing for us, nothing to be done about that; we must dance until the end, until the last breath as our oath commands—we were always such a glorious couple, the best on any dance floor. They said the two of us were the spitting image of Marlene Dietrich and Clark Gable; all your friends must have envied you, so have no cares and fear not. It’s not for nothing that I have luck, and there’s always been enough of it to go around, to cover everyone who went with me, and those who went alone and did not come back—Igor, whom the Bolsheviks tortured to death in Drohobych jail so that his mother could only identify the shirt on the body; Nestor, who perished somewhere in Auschwitz after they arrested him in September of ’43; and Lodzio, Lodzio Daretsky, the most talented of our class, who went to Kyiv last summer, after the resistance there had already fallen, and one day, God be my witness, I will find that son of a bitch who sent Lodzio there, to be shot like a rabid dog by Gestapo the day after he got there—all of them, and there’s more every day, stand in the gloom along the dance hall’s walls, or maybe in formation around that drill field, and follow us with their eyes—Igor and Nestor and Lodzio, and God alone knows how many more. In my dream, I run past them without looking because I am searching for you alone, and only now that you have come back and the dream surfaces as a drowned man comes up from the bottom of the Tysa River when the highland pipes sound their call, do I realize that it was they who filled the hall; it had to grow bigger to make room for them all, all who stepped out of the dance and will never come back—but they stand there, mute, and do not move, and watch us, and wait, and this means that our party, Geltsia, is only now beginning.
“Grand rond! Avancez! A trois temps!”
“Time!” the voice urges, shoves, hard, from inside his skull. Gulp, one last time, an eyeful of her face, inhale her, almost taste her on your lips—what fool said you don’t drink off a face?—and off you run, brother, à trois temps, trá-ta-ta, trá-ta-ta, trá-ta-ta; the streetcar screeches as it contorts its body through the turn; stones of nearby buildings speckle your vision—jump, you useless fool!
Down, down the hill, ahead of the streetcar, with his hands now free and his eyes slashed raw, heavy as a pound of bleeding flesh severed from her radiant face in the gloom of the crowd, hammered now with endless rocks, stones, cat’s heads, Katzenkopfstein, run!
Run. Run. Run. Round the corner… through the gate… park… down the path… trees… trees—black stumps. Is it someone’s labored breath behind you? No, it’s your own raincoat, rustling. And why are your cheeks wet, and what are these tiny streams running from your nose to your lips—is this sweat, already?
I am crying, flashes in his mind. Sweet Lord, I am crying. These are my tears.
Without noticing, he slows his flight—à deux temps, à deux temps—and touches his cheeks with his hands, with his fingertips, carefully as though it were someone else’s face. Woe to you, Adrian, pulses in his head, woe and woe and endless woe, you’re done, you’re finished…
Why woe?! Everything went just fine!
He blinks at his watch again: the entire operation, from the moment his mark stepped into Serbska Street, has taken twelve minutes. Twelve and a half to be exact. Actually, almost thirteen. Thirteen.
So what—he’s never been one for signs—what is happening to him? A premonition? A hunch? What is he afraid of?
“And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said unto him, ‘Thou seest the multitude thronging thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me?’ And he looked round about to see her that had done this thing.”
He never really understood that Gospel episode of healing the bleeding woman, even when he got older and learned from his friends—in lewd, draffish words that did not accord with the Holy Scriptures—what that meant, that the woman was “bleeding,” and it tormented him for a long time, because he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. His dad read the Scriptures out loud to him when he was little; later, he didn’t dare ask him about it. The story remained a mystery to him: how could He, without seeing, feel that someone had taken of his power?
Now he knows. The Gospel was as precise as a medical diagnosis. You couldn’t have put it better. There are no better words, that’s it.
That’s exactly what he felt.
Something has changed—and he already knows what it is: of those twelve (no, thirteen, damn it, thirteen!) minutes, the last ten remain with him and do not pass. The minutes he spent with Geltsia. She remains with him. He carries her inside him and does not want to let go, not for all the treasures in the world. He knows this is how it will be from now on.
All these years without her he sped across the surface of time as though on smooth ice—light, unstoppable—and now it has cracked, opened a hole, given under his new weight. The power that had held him above time has left him.
Adrian Ortynsky, alias Beast, registered as a Fachkursen student at the Polytechnic, also Johannes Weiss by other papers, also Andrzej Ortynski. Twenty-three. Invulnerable. Elusive. Invincible. Immortal.
And, in this very moment, fully and clearly conscious, he is about to die.
His death has already set out for him; it began its countdown to their rendezvous precisely ten minutes ago. How long before it runs out—hours, months, years—doesn’t matter; he and death are out to find each other and will rendezvous as certainly as lovers who’d set a date.
TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK… The beast inside him reaches for his throat (how defenseless the moving pulsing bulge under his fingers, how easy it would be to crush the cartilage and shred the tendons), throws his head back at the snow-swollen sky, and bares its teeth as though to show his perfect mandibles to the invisible dentist somewhere above.
He may have seemed to be screaming—but mutely, without noise. Or laughing—also without noise. A single living soul under the war’s November sky, with his face turned up. The dead can rarely enact such a feat; only the luckiest of them fall down face-up, because, yes, even death has its share of luck to give to its chosen few. The rest die with their eyes down, into the ground. Into the ground.