Александр Абрамов - The Time Scale

I came out of the darkness in another frame – not in the car but at that same crossing with Leszczycki. The rain which had attacked the town with its short massed invasion, was moving away to the east leaving behind a dark star-spotted sky and an equally dark street spattered with the reflections of street-lamps. It was five to ten. Leszczycki looked at me and smiled. ‘As you see,’ he said. ‘just as much time has passed as we would have needed to get from the bar to this crossing. But the scale has been played already.’

I didn’t ask him what scale. He looked at me with understanding and sympathy, as if he knew everything that I had been through. But I was mistaken.

‘I don’t know anything, Waek,’ he added. ‘I wasn’t with you. You were surrounded by people from another time.’

‘But the same people?’

‘Of course.’

‘What was it?’ I asked. ‘Induced hallucination?’

‘What do you yourself think?’

‘I don’t know. I’d very much like to know how my last take ended.’

‘What did you call it? A take? Why?’

‘A take – that’s a cinematic term,’ I explained. ‘They usually shoot several variations of one and the same scene. They’re called takes.’

He was pleased with the comparison.

‘A take,’ he repeated. ‘Take…perhaps your take is still going on in its own time. Who knows? Even I don’t know altogether what it’s all about. Time is a bottle of gin – I poured out a little and now I’m glad to have caught it all back.’ He held out his hand to me. ‘Don’t be offended, Waek. I only wanted to help you try your strength, it always helps. Perhaps you have grown up a little and become a little wiser. Don’t be angry with an old man.’

‘I’m not angry,’ I said. ‘I just don’t understand.’

‘You don’t have to. Just assume that I played a joke. Such stupid jokes do happen,’ he sighed, and without saying goodbye, moved off, overtaking passers-by who had appeared from somewhere – they must like us have been waiting out the sudden downpour and were now hurrying about their business.

Only I didn’t hurry anywhere, as I tried to clarify to myself what it had all been. A dream? But I hadn’t been asleep and I hadn’t been daydreaming, although I had lost consciousness. Hypnosis? But I had never heard of this form of hypnosis – and was it even at all possible? Six different hallucinations in one flash in a thousandth, perhaps even in a millionth part of a second. And could a hallucination bring on a burn? I pulled up my sleeve and saw clearly the bluish-purple mark left by Woyekh’s cigarette. And the grazed skin on the knuckles of my left hand – yet another mark of my encounter with Woyekh. And the medal? Of course, here it was! I took it out of my pocket and looked at it in the light. It wasn’t a phantom medal, an illusion medal, but a real medal out of old bronze. The bas-relief of Poniatowski with the laurel wreath on his brow, and the inscription around it: ‘He lived for the fatherland and died for honour’ – all this was not at all ghostly, not illusory, I could feel every letter.

And the volume of Mickiewicz was in its place. I didn’t take it out, just felt the raised portrait on the cover. So everything had really happened. It was not a hallucination, not a dream and not a vision under hypnosis. Leszczycki’s cigarette case had played its scale for me, caused me to live through a half-hour or an hour, each time in a different way. I really had lain here shot through the chest, had raced for my life in a mad motor chase, had fought for Elzbeta’s honour and become the owner of the letters, whose publication so terrified the White йmigrй riff-raff.

The medal, Mickiewicz and the letters were visitors from another time. Perhaps in ours, they had their counterparts, but did that really change anything? Ziga wanted to take the letters to the embassy, and I promised to help Elzbeta in this. Wasn’t it all one in what time this took place and if it took place at all? Now I was the master of my own time..

Without hesitating or pausing to think, I determinedly strode off across the street to the very familiar entrance opposite.