were staring up into space. 'What a loser,' Vhatsisname said to
himself, 'he couldn't even hang himself properly.'
He took his bike and went home.
During the night he felt a bit uneasy. He wondered i f Marek
Marek's soul had gone to heaven or hell, or wherever a soul
goes, if it goes anywhere at all.
He woke up with a start at the first light of dawn, and saw
Marek Marek standing by the stove, staring at him.
Whatsisname lost his nerve. 'Please , I beg you, go away. This is
my house. You've got a house o f your own.' The apparition
didn't move; it kept staring straight at Whatsisname, but i ts
weird gaze seemed to pass right through him.
'Marek Marek, please go away,' repeated Whatsisname, but
Marek Marek, or whoever it was, didn't react. Then, overcoming
his fear of making any kind of movement, Whatsisname got out
of bed and picked up a gumboot. Thus armed , he walked
towards the stove, and the apparition disappeared right before
his eyes. He blinked and went back to bed.
In the morning on his way to fetch wood he looked through
the window of Marek Marek's house again. Nothing had changed,
the body was still lying in the same position, but today the face
looked darker. Whatsisname spent the whole day carting wood
down from the hills on the sledge he had made last summer. He
brought down small birches that he had felled himself, and the
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t 9
thick trunks of fallen spruces and beech trees. He stored them in
the shed and got them ready to cut into smaller pieces. Then he
whipped up the stove until the top plate was red hot. He made
some potato soup for himself and his dogs, switched on the
black-and-white television and watched the Oickering pictures as
he ate. Not a word of it sank in. As he was getting into bed he
crossed himself for the first time in decades, since his confirmation, or maybe since his wedding. This long-forgotten gesture prompted the idea that he should go and ask the priest about
something like this.
The next day he sheepishly hovered about outside the presbytery. Finally the priest came bowling along at high speed, sidestepping patches of melting snow on his way to the church.
Whatsisname wasn't stupid, he didn't come straight out with it.
'What would you do, Father, if you were haunted by a ghost?' he
asked. The priest gave him a look of surprise and then his gaze
wandered up to the church roof, where some endless repairs
were under way. 'I'd tell it to go away,' he said. 'And what if the
ghost was stubborn and wouldn't go away, then what would you
do?' 'You have to be firm in all things,' replied the priest thoughtfully, and n imbly slipped past Whatsisname.
That night everything happened the same as before.
Whatsisname awoke suddenly, as if someone were calling him,
sat up in bed and saw Marek Marek standing by the stove. 'Get
out of here ! ' he shouted. The apparition didn't move, and
Whatsisname even thought he could see an ironic smile on i ts
dark, swollen face. To hell with you, why can't you let me sleep?
Get lost!' said Whatsisname. He picked up the gumboot and
mo'ed towards the stove. 'Will you please get out of my house ! '
h e screamed, and the ghost vanished.
On the third night the apparition didn't appear, and on the
fourth day Marek Marek's sister found the body and raised the
lO
Olg a To k a r c z u k
alarm. The police arrived, wrapped Marek Marek up in black
plastic and took him away. They questioned Whatsisname about
where he had been and what he had been doing. He told them
he hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary. He also told
them that when someone drinks like Marek Marek did, sooner
or later it'll end like that. They agreed with him and left.
Whatsisname took his bike and shambled off to Nowa Ruda.
At the Lido restaurant he sat with a mug of beer in front of him
and sipped it slowly. Of all his emotions, the strongest was
relief.
R a d i o N o w a R u d a
The local radio station broadcasts twelve hours a day, mainly
music. There's national news on the hour, and local news on the
half hour. There's also a daily quiz, which almost always used to be
won by the same person, a man called Wadera. He must have been
immensely knowledgeable - he knew things that no one could
have guessed. I promised myself that one day I'd find out who Mr
Wadera was, where he lived and how he knew so much. I'd walk
over the hills to Nowa Ruda to ask him something important, I
don't know what. I imagined him casually picking up the phone
each day and saying: 'Yes, I know the answer, it's Canis lupus, the
largest member of the dog family,' or: The glaze used to coat
ceramic tiles before firing is called "slip",' or: 'Pythagoras's teachers are thought to have been Pherecides, Hermodamas and Archemanes.' And so on, every day. The prizes are books from the
local supplier. Mr Wadera must have quite a library.
One day, just before setting the question , I heard the
announcer say hesitantly: 'Mr Wadera, would you please not
call us today?'
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
l l
Between twelve and one a pleasant woman's voice reads a
serialized novel. It's impossible not to listen to it, we all have to
listen to every single novel because it's on when we're preparing
the dinner, when we're peeling potatoes or making meatballs.
Throughout April it was Anna Karcnina.
"'He loves another woman, that is clearer still," she said to
herself as she entered her own room. "I want love, and it is lacking. So everything is Hnished ! and it must be finished. But how?" she asked herself, and sat down in the armchair before
the looking-glass.'
Sometimes Marta comes over at noon and automatically starts
helping with something, such as dicing the carrots.
Marta listens quietly and solemnly, but she never says anything - about Anna Karo1ina, or any other novel read on the radio. I sometimes wonder if she can understand these stories
made up of dialogue read out by a single voice, and think maybe
she's only listening to individual words, to the melody of the language.
People of Marta's age suffer from senility and Alzheimer's.
Once I was weeding the kitchen garden when R. called me from
the other side of the house. I hadn't had t ime to answer.
'Is she there?' he asked Marta, who was standing where she
could see both of us. She glanced at me and shouted in reply:
'No, she's not here.'
Then she calmly turned round and went home.
M a re k M a r e k
There was something beautiful about that child - that's what
everyone said. Marek Marek had white-blonde hair and the face
of an angel. His older sisters adored him. They used to push him
12
O l g a To k a r c z u k
along the mountain paths in an old German pram and play with
him as if he were a doll. His mother didn't want to stop breastfeeding him: as he sucked at her, she dreamed of turning into pure milk for him and flowing out of herself through her own
nipple - that would have been better than her entire future as
Mrs Marek. But Marek Marek grew up and stopped seeking her
breasts. Old Marek found them i nstead, though, and made her
several more babies.
Despite being so lovely, little Marek Marek was a poor eater
and cried at night. Maybe that was why his father didn't like
him. Whenever he carne horne drunk he would start beating
Marek Marek. If his mother came to his defence, his father
would lay into her too, until they'd all escape upstairs, leaving
old Marek the rest of the house to fill with his snoring. Marek's
sisters felt sorry for their little brother, so they taught him to
hide at an agreed signal and from the fifth year of his life Marek
Marek sat out most of his evenings in the cellar. There he would
cry silently, without any tears.
There he realized that his pain did not come from the outside,
but from inside, and had nothing to do with his drunken father
or his mother's breast. It hurt for no particular reason , the way
the sun rises each morning and the stars come out each night. It
just hurt. He didn't know what it was yet, but sometimes he had
a vague memory of a sort of warm, hot light drowning and dissolving the entire world. Vhere it came from, he didn't know. All he could remember of his childhood was eternal twilight, a darkened sky, the world plunged into gloom, the chill and misery of evenings without beginning or end. He also remembered the
day electricity was brought to the village. He thought the pylons
that carne marching over the hills from the neighbouring village
were like the pillars of a vast church.
Marek Marek was the first and only person from his village to
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
1 3
subscribe to the district library i n N owa Ruda. Then he took to
hiding from his father with a book, which gave him a lot of time
for reading.
The library in Nowa Ruda was housed in the old brewery
building and it still smelled of hops and beer; the walls, Ooors
and ceilings all gave off the same pungent odour - even the
pages of the books reeked as if beer had been poured over them.
Marek Marek liked this smell. At fifteen he got drunk for the
first time. It felt good. He completely forgot about the gloom, he
could no longer see the difference between dark and light. His
body went slack and wouldn't obey him. He liked that, too. It
was as if he could come out of his body and live alongside himself, without thinking or feeling anything.
His older sisters got married and left home. One younger
brother was killed by an unexploded bomb. The other was in a
special school in Klodzko , so old Marek just had Marek Marek
left to beat - for not shutting in the hens, for not mowing the
grass short enough, for breaking the pivot off the threshing
machine. But when Marek Marek was about twenty he hit his
father back for the first time and from then on they beat each
other up on a regular basis. Meanwhile, whenever Marek Marek
had a little time and no money for drink, he read Stachura, the
beat poet. The library ladies bought the collected works especially for him, covered in blue fabric that looked like jeans.
Marek Marek was still as handsome as ever. H e had fa ir,
shoulder-length hair and a smooth, girlish face. And he had very
pale eyes, faded even, as if they had lost their colour through
straining for light in dark cellars, as if they were worn out from
reading all those blue-covered volumes. But women were afraid
of him. Once, during a disco, he went outside with nne, dragged
her into an elder bush and ripped off her blouse. It's a good
thing she yelled, because some other boys ran out ami punched
1 4 O l g a To k a r c z u k
him. I3ut she liked him; maybe he just didn't know how to talk
to women. Another time he got drunk and knifed a guy who was
friendly with a girl he knew, as if he had exclusive rights over
her. Afterwards, at home, he cried.
He continued to drink, and he liked the way it felt when his
legs made their own way across the hills while everything
inside - and thus all the pain - stopped, as i f a switch had been
snapped off and darkness had suddenly fallen. He liked to sit in
the Lido pub amid the din and smoke and then suddenly to
find himself, God knows how, in a field of flowering flax and to
lie there until morning. To die. Or to drink at the j ubilatka
and then suddenly to be snaking his way along the highway
towards the village with a bloody face and a broken tooth. To
be only partly alive, only partly conscious, slowly and gently
ceasing to be. To get up in the morning and feel his head
aching - at least he knew what hurt. To feel a thirst, and to be
able to quench it.
Finally Marek Marek caught up with his father. He gave the
old man such a battering against a stone bench that he broke his
ribs and knocked him out. When the police came they took
Marek Marek away to sober up, then kept him in custody, where
there was nothing to drink.
Between the waves of pain in his head, in his drowsy, hungover
state Marek Marek remembered that once, at the very beginning,
he had fallen ; that once he had been high up, and now he was
low down. He remembered the downward motion and the
terror - worse than terror, there was no word for it. Marek
Marek's stupid body mindlessly accepted his fear and began to
what it was taking upon itself - only an immortal soul could
bear such fear. His body was choked by it, shrank into itself and
struck against the walls of his tiny cell, foaming at the mouth.
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
1 5
'Damn you, Marek!' shouted the warders. They pinned him to the
ground, tied him up and gave him an injection.
He ended up in the detox ward, where with other figures in
faded pyjamas he shuffled along the wide hospital corridors and
winding staircases. He stood obediently in line for his medicine
and swallowed it down as if taking Communion. As he stared out
of the window it occurred to him for the first time that his aim
was to die as soon as possible, to free himself from this roLLen
country, from this red-grey earth, from this overheated hospital,
from these washed-out pyjamas, from this drugged-up body. From
then on he devoted every single thought to contriving a way to
die.
One night he slashed his veins in the shower. The white skin
on his forearm split open and Marek Marek's inside appeared. I t
was red and meaty like fresh beef. Before losing consciousness
he felt surprised because, God knows why, he thought he saw a
light in there.
Naturally he was locked up in isolation, a fuss was made and
his stay in hospital was extended. He spent the whole winter
there, and when he got back home he discovered that his parents
had moved to their daughter's place in town and now he was
alone. They had left him the horse, and he used it to brin
g down
wood from the forest, which he chopped up and sold. He had
money, so he could drink again.
Marek Marek had a bird inside him - thats how he felt. But this
wretched bird of his was strange, immaterial, unnameable and no
more birdlike than he was himself. He felt drawn to things he
didn't understand and was afraid of: to questions with no answer:
to people in whose presence he always felt uncomfortable. He felt
the urge to kneel clown and suddenly start praying in desperation ,
not t o ask for anything i n his prayers, but just t o talk and talk and
talk in the hope that someone might he listening.
1 6 Ol g a Tokarczuk
He hated this creature inside himself because it did nothing
but increase his pain. If it weren't there, he would have drunk
away quietly, sitting in front of the house and gazing at the
mountain that rose before it. Then he would have sobered up
and cured his hangover with the hair of the dog, then got drunk
again without thinking, without guilt or decisions. The hideous
great bird must have had wings. Sometimes it beat them blindly
inside his body, flapping at its leash, but he knew its legs were
fettered, maybe even tied to something heavy, because it could
never fly away. My God, he thought, though he didn't believe in
God at all, why am I being tortured by this thing inside me? The
creature was immune to alcohol; it always remained painfully
conscious; it remembered everything Marek Marek had done
and everything he had lost, squandered or neglected; everything
that had passed him by. 'Fuck it,' he mumbled drunkenly to
Whatsisname, 'why does it torment me like this, what's it doing
inside me?' But Whatsisname was deaf and didn't understand a
thing. 'You've stolen my new socks,' he said. They were drying
on the line.'
The bird inside Marek Marek had restless wings, fettered legs
and eyes filled with terror. Marek Marek assumed it was imprisoned inside him. Someone had incarcerated it in him, though he hadn't the faintest idea how that was possible. Sometimes, if he
let his thoughts wander, he ran into those terrible eyes deep
inside himself and heard a mournful, bestial lament. Then he
would jump up and run blindly up the mountain, into the birch
copses, along the forest paths. As he ran he looked up at the