Island Operation (Part V)

This afternoon and evening I could not find Anita anywhere. No one picked up their telephone, and in the store I was told that maybe they had gone away somewhere. 

Because the whole time I felt the fire at my feet, I went to the number two shoemaker in town, Zapora, who I also knew and who I sometimes gave my shoes to for repair. I knew that he also dealt in production, of course on a much smaller scale than Nowobogacky. 

I showed him two of the square cork sheets, which I had with me. When he saw them, he was unable to hide his excitement. His hands trembled even. He asked how much. I told him, three hundred a piece. 

Do I have more? 

I said that I had four more, but not forty by forty like this, but bigger, forty by eighty, six hundred each, and that I could deliver them to him in ten minutes. Bławat was still not around and I picked them up from his substitute. I noticed that the packaging was lightly ripped on the corner. The substitute must have peeked inside. 

Eventually we got to that that I would get five hundred for each large one, and two hundred fifty for the small ones. Without any further discussion Zapora paid me two and a half thousand, saying that if I were to have more, he would gladly buy. It wasn’t turning out too badly, and I had already two and a half percent of the sum I needed so much. Now I had to work precisely, discretely and quickly. 

Before anything else I went for a swim. As usual I swam more than an hour. I had a nerve wracking and laborious day, such that I needed to relax. The time spent in the barracks full of dust and dirt did not work well on my well being. When I left the pool I knew exactly what to do. 

First I made my way to the central station, where for a long time I studied the timetables for the trains. From the station I went to the post office, not even a minute away, from which I sent a wire transfer of five hundred złoty and added the following message: COME FOR SURE STOP THURSDAY AT SEVEN ELEVEN STOP I AM WAITING AT THE STATION STOP... SEND HORSES TO THE TRAIN STATION – JANKOWSKI... 

The last phrase came from the framed sample telegram that was displayed in every post office. Any telegraph I sent out I always ended with this phrase. I did not like this post office, I associated it with an unfortunate thing that happened to me the previous year. 

Namely, thanks to Leo, for heavy money I got to procuring Italian glasses – panoramic and mirrored. They were revelational and maybe no one in Eastern Europe had any like these. Every girl wanted to see herself in them, even more because at this time you could only buy two ugly models: Czech and an even worse domestic type like a blind street musician’s… but my glasses were MADE IN ITALY and this was maximum extravagance. I remember it like it happened today; it was actually the day before my birthday. On just this day fell the one year anniversary of the execution of the pair of Soviet spies in America, none other than the Rosenbergs. The Communist propaganda went wild. Everywhere through the many megaphones and loudspeakers was spoken only of them. Streets, schools and factory floors were named after them. The entire day was devoted to them. In the early afternoon I went to the post office to send something to some magazines. For a second I left the glasses on the table and walked up to the window. When I returned—they weren’t there anymore.

The addressee of the telegram and wire this time was my cousin Bronco, the younger of the two sons of the already mentioned Uncle Apollinari and my mother’s sister, Aunt Marta. 

For several years during the war we were raised together and I could always count on him. Now I needed him very much. It was Tuesday, so Bronco would come in the day after tomorrow. From the post office I made my way back to the train station, to find out at the information window whether Bronco’s train came exactly on time or did it have, as was often the case at the time, a tendency to great lateness. 

There was no one at information, but someone told me that the agent was around the station bathroom. Something interesting was apparently happening there. In fact in one of the stalls some guy had slit with his razor his own throat. The excited attendant told everyone that, not sensing anything beforehand, he opened the stall for him, handed him four pieces of especially pre-cut newspaper and let him in. For a long time the man did not leave and the old attendant even thought that maybe, though he had everything under control here, he simply didn’t notice when the man left. 

When suddenly someone ran up to him and said that a stream of blood was pouring from under the doors of one of the stalls, the old attendant knew right away which door and which stall was being discussed. After all, the trouble making user of this stall looked to him somewhat suspicious. But how could he know that he would cut him such a number? 

“Such people should not even be allowed into public toilets, let them shit somewhere off by the tracks,” one of the militiamen who arrived chimed in intelligently, interrupting the old attendant. 

Everyone, including me, looked at the recently deceased. He sat on the toilet with his pants down, leaning back slightly. At the side of his neck a precise, slanted, deep cut was visible; undoubtedly this was a pro. Who knew to how many people he had done this before? The inside of the stall, painted in a gray green color, together with the cement floors, was covered all in blood. 

The open razor lay on the floor, exactly under the freely hanging right hand. Ill fortuned this fellow, even though he had been dead for some time, he had a face still like some UB-man, incredibly repulsive. Because at this time UB-men did not particularly commit suicide, this could have been some demasked and hunted SS-man, someone overtaken with psychotic suicidal mania, a targeted blackmailer or a full member of the UPA—so many of these types crawled about everywhere. In this town I saw already a countless amount of assassinations, murders and suicides, and I knew most of these were loose ends tied up from the war that ended several years ago. 

From the train station I took a taxi to my mother’s. During our delicious dinner, my mother told me an exceptional story about a neighbor’s son, a year older than me, who not long ago tried to get across the green border, to the American zone of occupation in Germany. Caught by the border patrol, he sat in jail and awaited trial. He faced a long sentence. I never actually got to know this guy, but my mother knew his family well, because his father or his uncle, long before the war, was a legal apprentice in Poznan with my grandfather. He was named Wardejn. I returned home in not the best mood. It was just about eleven, so I had made it still for the broadcast of the best big band from the station AMERICAN FORCES NETWORK IN EUROPE. The broadcast began, as always, with Charlie Barnet and his SKYLINER. Soon after this I fell asleep.