Александр Абрамов - The Time Scale

I looked at my watch; five to ten. How extraordinary! Why, I had spent a good half-hour at Ziga’s. I put the watch to my ear. It was still going.

‘It’s still raining,’ said Leszczycki, not looking at me, ‘and there’re no taxis.’

‘Here’s one. Let’s go,’ I said, and stepped out to meet the taxi as it emerged out of the darkness.

‘Not me,’ said Leszczycki, refusing. ‘I don’t like yellow cars.’

I didn’t try to persuade him. I got in next to the driver and gave him the address. It’s a free World, let him stay if he wants to get drenched. Then I regretted that I hadn’t taken his address – he was an entertaining man after all. But I soon forgot about him. It was bright and hot in the car, the speed we drove at lulled me and my thoughts began to get confused. I tried to remember what had happened to me before my meeting with Ziga and couldn’t. Someone had fired shots, there had been some shooting somewhere. Perhaps Leszczycki had been telling me about it and I’d forgotten. It seemed to me that he really had been telling me about something. What had it been? Something had happened to my memory, there was some sort of gap, a fog in my mind. I could only remember the last quarter of an hour. Two men had been killed by Ziga from behind the curtain. It happened before my eyes. And I had, with complete unconcern, stepped over their bodies and gone out. The one strange thing was that time was subtracting its flight from the moment we had stopped under the awning, from five to ten. I glanced at my watch. It was now ten o’clock. Was it possible that only five minutes had passed?

I turned to the driver: ‘What’s the time by yours?’

In my absent-mindedness, I asked him in Polish, but instead of the natural ‘What? What did you say?’ I heard the familiar Polish expression: ‘Dog’s blood! A countryman!’ The tired, sweaty face broke into a good-natured smile which disclosed pink gums and broken teeth. For all this he wasn’t at all old, this lantern-jawed tough in the windcheater – thirty-seven to forty, no more.

We were already nearing my hotel when he suddenly braked and rolled gently towards the footpath. ‘Let’s have a bit of a chat, I haven’t met a countryman for a long time. You must have been a kid when you skipped Poland?’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘I came legally. This winter.’

He froze at once, the smile died on his face and his reply was fairly vague. ‘It does happen of course.’

‘And you, why aren’t you back home?’ I asked in my turn.

‘Who needs me over there?’

‘Drivers are always heeded everywhere.’

He waved his great hands, as wide as shovels and beamed again.

‘I was a driver in the army, too,’ he said.

‘In what army?’

‘What army? What army?’ he repeated it like a challenge.

‘In ours. From Russia to Teheran, from here to there, pushed about from pillar to post, at Monte Cassino I crawled twenty-four hours on the seat of my pants…’ He started singing tunelessly: ‘Red poppies on Monte Cassino’. ‘And now I’m back behind a steering wheel again, slogging myself to death.’

‘So take out an application, go back,’ I said.

He spat out of the window without answering. I noticed that he hadn’t asked me anything about Poland today.

‘Who needs me over there?’ he repeated. ‘Here I’ll pick up something or other and I’ll be worth a different price. A bit here and a bit there. All you have to do is find it, there’s some of our lot hiding something.’

‘Something like letters?’ I asked unthinkingly.

He went completely tense, like a cat before it springs.

‘What do you know about the letters?’

‘One lot’s hiding them and the other lot’s looking for them. It’s funny,’ I said, and added, ‘We’ve had our chat, that’s enough. Let’s get to the corner.’

‘Got a cigarette?’ he asked hoarsely.

We lit up. ‘You can’t just say goodbye to a countryman like that,’ he said reproachfully. ‘I know a place not far away. Let’s go.’

I remembered Leszczycki smiling at my cautiousness and nodded rashly. Massive dark buildings unlit by advertisements rushed to meet us; the outskirts of even a city like this one are quite dark. I shut my eyes, not even attempting to recognize streets. What did it matter where this place was? The car finally stopped outside a bar with an unlit sign. Why was it unlit?

‘I don’t know – a blown fuse or something of the sort,’ my guide waved off my question indifferently. ‘There’s enough light inside,’ he added. And sure enough there was enough light inside.

Through the misty, unwashed window a high bar with its bottles and enamel and nickel-plated top was clearly visible. On the glass in the corner was a hand-painted black sign. Marian Zuber, coffee, tea, home-made cakes.

The bar was closed. My driver knocked for a long time at the glass door and for a long time someone looked at him from inside. Then the lock turned and the door opened.

In the tiny area in front of the bar there were a few empty tables where probably no one had sat since the week before. Their black plastic tops had turned grey with dust. The only occupant of the bar was standing with almost his whole body leaning across the bar, drinking a glass of some kind of misty liquid and chatting to the waitress. At first I didn’t pay any attention to her – she was a typical cafeteria waitress, with a stylish hairdo and painted eyes. Here they must mass produce them in some factory. But a moment later her eyes drew my attention; they were unusual eyes, intelligent and humorous, now glittering, now cloudy, and even their colour seemed to change at their owner’s will. Her companion occasionally twisted his mouth in a way that made the scar on his left cheek twitch. I was already beginning to regret that I had come.

‘It’s late, Janek,’ the girl behind the bar said reprovingly. ‘We’ve closed already.’

But my guide authoritatively motioned with his head towards a dusty table, whispered something to the beautiful waitress, brought me a whisky and soda, and taking the man with the scar by the arm went with him behind the bar where the entry to a lighted cellar was visible.

‘You’re a Pole too?’ the girl asked me indifferently.

I laughed. ‘Now ask me if I’m long out of Poland.’

‘It’s all the same to me,’ she said and turned away. Janek and his scarfaced companion had by then sat down at my table.

‘Janek says you know something about the letters,’ said crooked mouth, ‘so spill it.’

‘I’ll spill it ,’ I said mockingly, ‘only to Trybuna ludu.’

‘That’s some threat! In ‘45 we made mincemeat of your sort.’

‘Do you want me to call the police?’

‘Dry up. This isn’t Times Square. You can squeal like a pig if you like, no one will hear.’

I turned to Janek. ‘You’re scum, not a countryman.’

Scarface winked and Janek’s ham-like fists closed over my hands and pressed them to the table. I struggled ineffectually – the fists didn’t move.

‘We weren’t in the Gestapo, but we know a thing or two,’ said Scarface, puffing on a cigarette; ‘So you’re not going to spill it, eh?’ And he pressed the burning cigarette into my hand just above the wrist. I cried out with the pain.

‘You’re wasting your time,’ the waitress intervened. ‘He doesn’t know anything.’

Scarface grinned and his mouth twisted even more. It crossed my mind that if you were to slap a hat down over his forehead, he’d be in every detail the double of the man with the automatic who’d been killed by Ziga.

‘Button your lip, Elzbeta, before I smash it for you,’ he snapped. ‘Hold him there, Janek, while I bring something up from downstairs. It’ll loosen his tongue in a second.’