Nine Read Free Page B

bought a pack of Mars; he lit up, and his head spun. The spires of St. Florian’s aimed skyward like old-fashioned rockets. Old women were filing in, their outlines small and black. Rolling along like beads. A 162 left the stop. People looked straight ahead, or into the future. A red-headed girl glanced at him with vacant eyes. He waited for the green light and crossed. He decided to give himself a bit more time and have another cigarette, and as he was looking for a place to hunker down for a moment, to shield himself from the wind off the river, he realized he’d been born here. A few yards away was the hospital. Amid a tangle of bushes in the little square, in the mud, beneath a swollen sky, the white ambulances by the entrance looked as unreal and shameless as death. In the doorway
were the scrubs of the orderlies, because when shit happens, people get jumpy and try to put a bungled life to rights in fifteen minutes. “I ought to go in,” he thought, “and have myself sewn back up into some pussy. A C-section in reverse.”
    The bum in the coat passed him. Everyone was passing him, though there weren’t many. At nine thirty the city hides, halts, gives time to those who have nothing to do. He flicked the butt away. It landed on yellow grass. A thread of smoke rose vertically, then the wind caught it. He stopped thinking, turned, and went toward Floriańska, where since time immemorial men loitered at the curb in bouclé sweaters and flared pants whose creases had been ironed twenty years ago and had stayed that way ever since. Above their heads, over their whispered chatter, brick walls rose to the sky, but no one would bet there was anything behind them—apartments, a room with a kitchen, old furniture with peeling veneer. Teenagers copied their fathers, though their outfits were more garish, Ford, Bulls, or Nikes with tongues licking the sidewalk. They huddled in tight circles discussing how to handle the world that day, the angle to take. No women. A black-and-white mongrel ran from group to group, looking for its master. Someone threw a firecracker. “Oh, right,” he thought. “Easter’s here.”
    In front of the Pedet department store a memory came: he once went to a puppet theater with his mother. Cigarettes glowed in the dark. Men stood in entranceways talking in a language he didn’t understand, though some words were familiar. It was November, December. The white light of the street lamps couldn’t reach the sidewalk, remained trembling and hissing above. The bare branches were metallic. His mother quickened her pace; through her cold hand he could feel her fear.
    On the stage, in a flood of gold, in the silver dust of the spotlights, a prince was rescuing a princess or something like that, a story he cared about only because it was the first time he’d been in a place like this. He wanted to walk once more down that street scooped out of the darkness, a few steps from the brightly lit Targowa, once more see the red sparks wandering up and down. When the show was over, his mother took him firmly by the hand and slipped into a large group of children and adults. He was disappointed. Pedet resembled a glass cabinet. Somewhere inside was the plaster woman with large breasts squatting over a basket of food, her ass like two cushions. He often thought about her.
    As he crossed the deserted, glistening Okrzei, on which a single distant car was coming from the river, he remembered it was there, behind the department store, that he was with his father. Low, single-story buildings you entered through a gate in the wall. In a dingy room, men in rubber boots threw entrails into metal containers. A concrete cylinder filled with glistening pieces of liver—a mountain of slippery, shining red, with blood splashing underfoot. His father knew someone there.
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    A car passed him with a wet hiss. Carrying with it the smell of mist from the port. He turned