Short stories

"She held me so tightly that I couldn’t move. It was completely quiet; I could hear only the slow and painful beating of my own heart and her soft whisper. She probably spoke the same way to Johnny [her son] when he was very small and couldn’t fall asleep. I suppose that God created her for this purpose: to give men love, peace, and sleep. So that she would tire and lull them, and I think that God forgave her everything.
‘I’m just a little ponce,’ I said. ‘It’s not my fault you don’t want to believe me.’
‘You’re a big boy,’ she said. ‘You probably started shaving too early. In America, you’ll buy yourself a car and then crash it. I’ll help you with that myself. And now sleep. Be calm and sleep. It’s only the wind.’
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know, after all, what I should say; I delivered my own line that I had not agreed on earlier with Robert, and now I had run out of script. Robert would know what to say, but he wasn’t here. I lay next to her and tried to guess her face in the darkness. And it was pleasant: lying next to her without moving and trying to imagine her face—her good, pretty face, which I could have seen in the light if I had turned it on. But I didn’t turn on the light; I lay next to her motionless, thinking about her face. Later, I thought about her gentle, tight stomach and about the small, pale scars on her belly that appeared after Johnny’s birth, and I thought also that she smelled the way a woman should smell, and that in her scent there was something of ripe grain, because it was gentle and yet strong, and it couldn’t be compared with anything else. Now the bed and this small, dark room absorbed her scent. Slowly, I moved my hand along her soft and warm belly, and then she trapped my hand between her thighs, and I felt that now, after the sheet had been pushed away, her scent was becoming stronger. I thought that when she left in the morning, the scent would disappear after some time, and yet it would be good if this room and this town kept that scent forever; then I could always think about the fact that she had been with me, and it would be easier. Maybe I could think about it in Tweri, where we would go with Robert, and later someday, when I would be with other women.
I should have told her so much. And I didn’t need Robert and his damned good advice. I could have told her so much about myself and my life, but she probably wouldn’t have believed me. I could have told her that when I was fifteen, I committed an armed robbery and was never caught. And about how, three months later, we stole money from a railway station with a friend; he was caught, and I voluntarily followed him to prison so he wouldn’t be bored without me. But she wouldn’t have believed me. She also wouldn’t have believed me if I had told her that I lost my virginity at twelve because of a certain adult German woman, and that it happened at her own engagement party to a certain lieutenant. She wouldn’t have believed me either if I had told her about a certain German soldier who set his dog on me, and then kicked me and broke my nose, only because I wanted to play with his dog—I was seven then. And she wouldn’t have believed me that in 1944 in Warsaw, I saw how six Ukrainians raped a girl from our house, and then gouged out her eyes with a teaspoon, laughing and making jokes. Maybe I no longer believed all this myself. And I should have told her that I do not hold a grudge against the Germans for killing my family and several million other Poles, [——] and that no person is even a bit better than any other person, and that anyone who claims otherwise belongs to the worst category of beings and should be deprived of the right to live.
I should have told her: Listen, I’m just a fucking Polack; and I should have told her that my life experience does not resemble anyone else’s; and that I will have no use for anything in life, just as I myself am of no use to anyone; and that I will never manage to do anything good or valuable for others, because no one will ever believe what I have to say. And that is the truth. But I said nothing. I just lay next to her, and the warmth of her body wrapped around me and lulled me; and that was all I wanted to think about now, and all I wanted to feel.
It would have been good to tell her all of this. It would have been good to tell her about that Jewish family that hid during the war in our neighborhood, and whom the Germans killed. It was a man, a woman, and three children; everyone was already lying on the ground, and then the Germans gathered a few people off the street and ordered them to piss on the corpses; one of them called me over, and I too pissed, trembling with fear, while they took pictures of those pissing and of those lying dead. And it would have been good to tell her about that day when I was going to school in Warsaw, and the Germans closed off the street and we all watched as they hanged people from balconies, and no one moved or screamed; neither the people being hanged nor the ones watching. But how to tell all this? I didn’t know. And how could I tell her about the girl who fell in love with a German soldier, and who had done nothing wrong to anyone, but one day our underground resistance comrades shoved a half-liter bottle of vodka into her and smashed it, so that the girl died a few days later. And I could say even more about the Jewish mothers who, in 1943, threw their children into the fire, carrying them above their heads as if in triumph, while the Poles standing on the other side of the ghetto wall made many amusing remarks. But I suppose she would tell me to shut my mouth after a few words. I had already tried to talk about all this to many different people, but I don’t think even one of them took it seriously.
I pulled the sheet off her and carefully lit the lamp. She slept quietly and peacefully like a child. Her belly was brown, and a strand of hair running from her womb seemed golden."