Absolute Sunset (18 page)

She walked slowly, her hands trailing along the black walls. The corridor led down, and further down, and the more she walked the smaller and smaller it got. Hanka cried from time to time. She hoped she wouldn’t have to crawl. Then her walk was over. She had reached a small cavern, also lit with candles, and in the middle stood a cage. Inside was her raven. But without feathers, without skin, without muscle—only the bones were left. At the sight of Hanka, the skeleton gave a few small hops and then began to recite.

The air itself can suffocate

You in December’s frosty night

Poison has no foul bouquet

Brings no pain and does not scare

Four wise creatures in their sleep

One man’s friend that guard should keep

Though it cannot speak at all

What is coming it does know

The air, a deadly weapon now

Wake up! And run to save your life!

Hanka woke suddenly. Her heart was beating like crazy and she couldn’t catch her breath, as if she’d dived deep underwater and had just surfaced. But her thoughts were clear. Sharp. She knew.

“Dad!” she cried and sprang out of bed. “Dad!”

She burst into his bedroom, half dragging her father out of bed.

“Dad, we have to go!”

“But—why?”

“Dad, come on, don’t ask me why!” She put the duvet on her father’s back like a cloak and then pulled on her jacket. On the table was a mobile phone, for emergencies only—she grabbed it as they left. They ran downstairs and Hanka led Janusz outside the building.

“Stay here, I’m going back for Agata!” She put the phone in his hand. “Call 112!”

“But what am I supposed to say?”

“I don’t know, just call them, they need to come!”

She raced off to her friend’s door and knocked as loudly as she could.

“Agata! Agata!”

Nothing happened. She ran back into her flat and out onto the balcony. Agata’s balcony was very close—half a meter away, maybe less. Hanka put her foot on the railing. It was slippery. She jumped across to Agata’s balcony, falling down on the other side.

“Agata! Agata!” She banged on the balcony door and the glass rang with an almost musical tone. No one answered. She grabbed an old flowerpot that lay in a pile of miscellaneous junk and an old plant bulb fell out.
Onion plant
, some part of her mind noted automatically, nonsensically. In the distance, the lights of fire trucks twinkled and a siren wailed. Hanka covered her eyes and hurled the flowerpot into the balcony door, shattering the glass. Hanka leapt inside, tearing her jacket on the broken glass.

“Agata!” She called, rushing to the bedroom.

Her friend lay on the bed beside Robert. The dog lay on the rug beside the bed. Hanka pulled at Agata’s hands.

“Get up, get up!” she called. Her friend didn’t respond. “The kids!” She found them in the children’s room, motionless. Closed eyes. Stiff hands. “Dead.”

The fire trucks stopped outside the building and Hanka was suddenly surrounded by firefighters and paramedics and doctors, running up and down the stairs.

“Out, please,” they said, leading her away. Only now did she realize that she had nothing on her feet, which had been cut on the glass. They dressed her and gave her an injection of something.

They inspected the entire building, measuring concentration of various gases. Carbon monoxide, very high! They wondered how it had happened. They came to talk to her, cross-examining her as if she might have done it. The emergency personnel mostly blocked her view, but she still could see the bodies as they were taken out: four sacks, two big and two small.

“What woke you up?” they asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Did you have the window open?”

“Yes.”

“You were lucky. That saved your life.”

“Yes.”

“What happened earlier this evening?” they wanted to know.

She said that she had been at Agata’s, they’d given her kids a bath together. They speculated some more.

“The heater must have already been leaking at that point. Damn gas heaters! Every year we get dozens of poisonings like this.”

She told them that the dog had been howling earlier in the evening.

“The dog smelled it,” they said. “Dogs may not be very smart, but they have an instinct. It smelled the carbon monoxide and was trying to let the family know. What a good pal, huh? Poor boy, dying with them. What a terrible night—we’re very sorry for your loss.”

But Hanka wasn’t listening any more.

Hanka—A Dream Book

Hanka woke up the following day in a daze. The sun shone brightly, as if it were August rather than frosty winter, and reflected from the snow. Hanka opened her eyes with considerable effort. She vaguely remembered that she had swallowed some pills to fall asleep, something the paramedics had given her. She’d fallen asleep in dirty clothes, lying on top of the duvet. In spite of the firefighters’ warnings, she and Janusz had gone back to their flat, the only residents of the block who did. The rest spread out around Katowice, bringing the sensational news to other housing estates. “Carbon monoxide at
Tysiąclecie
.”

For a moment she considered going back to sleep. In the end she got up, but only because she was worried about her father. Unnecessarily, as it turned out—he was already sitting in the kitchen, sipping tea.

“Good morning, Hanka,” he greeted her quietly.

“Good morning.”

“I’m so sorry...”

Hanka lifted a hand. Stop. Not now. She didn’t have the energy to listen to condolences. Agata, her husband, her children, her dog.

“We’ll talk about it later,” she said and headed to the bathroom.

Warm water washed away the smell of the gas. It’s supposed to be odourless, but Hanka could smell it. She scrubbed herself briskly with a sponge and some soap and the water that flowed down her body seemed greyish.

When she finally got out, a towel wrapped around her head, she called the office.

“I’m not coming in. There was an accident last night. Carbon monoxide.”

She heard her boss inhale with a hiss. Usually fast-talking, she was silent for a moment, then spoke in her shrill voice.

“Any casualties?”

“Yes. Four people. And a dog,” Hanka replied.

Silence. A good minute of silence—in memory of the dead. A sigh.

“Will this ever end, these accidents with leaky stoves?” Hanka’s supervisor asked rhetorically. She sniffled. She was probably crying. “A week ago a young girl died, a student at secondary school. She was taking a bath and she fell asleep in the bathtub. Terrible!”

Hanka agreed—terrible. She promised to return to work in a few days. After visiting a doctor and so on.

“Take the time to get yourself together, look after your father as long as you need to, then come back. We’ll be waiting for you.”

She ate a piece of a dry bread roll and drank some coffee, standing at the counter. She spoke a little to her father, feeling guilty about how she’d treated him at first. She shouldn’t have pushed him away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Janusz forgave her right away. He was sad, too.

“Do you have the day off today?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m going to the clinic. What about you?”

“I have one day off, too. Tomorrow I have to go to work. We have an audit from the tax office, so I can’t stay home.”

“Uh-huh. But will you go to the see the doctor?”

“I don’t feel like visiting any of those quacks. They’ll whine again about my heart!” Janusz was irritated. He couldn’t stand the clinic, he hated being sick, he detested doctors and called them wastrels who would ruin the mining industry with their strikes.

“Calm down, dad,” Hanka stroked her father’s hand as it rested on the newspaper.

“Why?” Janusz demanded, just getting warmed up. “Those leeches! Anything you want, you have to pay, pay, pay. Idiots—idiots at the clinic! And not just idiots, but louts too!”

Hanka didn’t even try to stop his tirade, preferring that he vent his anger. Let him shout it out, and never mind the words he used. Maybe it would help him get over such an awful fucking night. He might play the tough guy, but his heart was weak.

Around eleven o’clock she put on her tracksuit and went to the clinic. The waiting line was short, as it usually is in winter. Only in the early days of spring would the crowds of mothers with sick kindergarten kids appear, along with elderly folks sick of the frost.

She got her exemption from work without any problem, for ten days, plus a referral for testing that she didn’t actually plan to do. The doctor went on and on about the long-term consequences of the carbon monoxide poisoning, about the loss of pulmonary tissue, about hyperbaric chambers. Hanka politely listened until he was done, nodding her head.

“Thank you, doctor, goodbye!” She left with her L4 in hand.

From the clinic she went straight to a nearby stationer’s. Hanka liked the place a lot. The owners hadn’t changed the decorations or displays in years. Through the grimy glass you could see dozens of notebooks, boxes of coloured pencils, and ring binders, all piled high to encourage customer to buy them—and all of them dusty.

The ancient shopkeeper with the trembling hands packed two thick notebooks for her, as well as a four-coloured ballpoint pen. Red, green, dark blue, and black. Hanka had always dreamed of having one.

On her way back to the flat she stopped by the post office. To make sure she’d be left in peace, she faxed the L4 to the office. Her boss’s sympathy and her agreeable state of mind were both sure to be unpredictable. Better not to risk it.

At the flat, she looked in the wardrobe. Deep in the back she found the old curtains, the ones from bedrooms, as thick and green as the water in the lake. Sabina had planned to hang them, but her mum had only managed to put the net ones up before her water broke. Why did she want them now? They would fit in the window in her room. Just a bit too wide, she’d be able to allow them to fall nicely, with loose folds, while ensuring that not a single ray of sunlight would make it through. Perfect.

Hanka rested the notebooks on the bedside table with the ballpoint pen on top. She tested the pen on the back cover of one of the notebooks to make sure it was writing properly. It worked very well—perfectly. Great. Now she could calmly go to bed.

To begin with, she only wrote down her dreams. And not all of them, just those in which the raven appeared. Sometimes the bird came, and sometimes not. Sometimes he took Hanka somewhere, while other times he simply delivered an incoherent monologue. That was just his style. Sometimes they chatted about the weather. No matter what the content, Hanka busily took everything down exactly as it was, trying hard to recall every word, every place, every object.

Then she analyzed them. She put the dreams together in groups according to the images that appeared in them. Dreams with a cat. Dreams about flying. Dreams with massacres. Then she ran through the notes, every day she would correct something, finish writing something, deleted some idiotic remarks.

Each day she looked through all the newspapers, regional, and national. She read them on her way to work, during lunch, in the evening before sleeping. She cut out information she selected. An accident. A tragedy. A fire. Twelve dead. Seven injured. “Now I just have to connect them,” she thought. But nothing matched. Sometimes she could relate one dream to more than one event, and sometimes nothing happened that seemed to be related to a given prophecy.

For example, one night the raven took her to the old, densely overgrown park. Unnaturally tall trees blocked out the sky. There was complete darkness amongst them, a heavy, deep shade. And everything was quiet. Hanka liked it, especially the beetles, tinted green and dark blue, that flew amidst the trees, rattling their wings like castanets.

“Come on!” the raven urged her, pulling gently at the leg of her pyjamas. She followed him, excited. They walked quickly, and after a moment they saw a building through the trees. It was blood red—the setting sun was reflecting from its walls. Yes, it had to be sun—nobody builds a scarlet building. Beetles crawled along the walls. Perhaps they were tired from flying and had landed on it to rest a little, shining in the light.

“It’s here,” the raven said.

“I know,” Hanka stopped for a moment. The house’s elaborate decorations made her anxious. The colour. The bizarre angels above the entry, which at first appeared to be hugging but who actually did disgusting things to one another. Penetrating and repulsive. Twisted stone ivy seemed to reach for her. And the beetles had started to seem sinister—bigger than they should be. Hanka started to retreat.

“Hey, don’t back away!” The raven pecked at her ankle. Gently—to begin with. Hanka shifted to the right. She climbed the four steps in front of her, bit as slowly as she could. Unexpectedly, the door opened by itself, hissing an invitation. Hanka went inside.

She was in a hall. It was narrow, and much longer than she would have thought possible judging by the building’s outer dimensions. It had a stone floor, but it was made cosy by lamps hanging from the ceiling. Hanka could see a series of doors along its walls.