Being Followed (Part I)

It was almost two when I left Nowobogacky’s establishment. I had big plans. 

First I decided to visit something like a sports store and even though it was very far, I decided I would walk. When I was getting close, I became overwhelmed with strange discomfort, a strong sense of nervousness, and an unexplainable feeling of impending doom. 

I did not spend much time at the store. I bought the smallest collapsible fishing line, a Czech TAP reel, several pieces of bait and hook, and a hundred fifty meters of point thirty five millimeter nylon line. I spent a fortune. I wanted to take it home, mount the rod, play around with it a bit, and then go, without the rod, to the pool, because tomorrow again a heavy day awaited me. If tomorrow I were able to eviscerate at least five boxes, then I would get fifteen thousand, meaning I would have already more than seventeen percent of the much needed sum. 

The strange discomfort did not leave me until I noticed that for some time someone had been following me. Simply put, I was being watched. I had a natural instinct, very developed still from the time of the war, when as an adept eleven, twelve year old boy, many times I followed Uncle Stanley on his conspiratorial actions. 

I went then behind him at a safe distance, usually on the other side of the street, and I observed what was happening behind him. Concretely, whether he was being trailed.  I had contact with him by sight and if I noticed something wrong, and I was almost never mistaken, I gave him a pre-arranged signal. This usually consisted of moving something I was carrying from my left hand to my right hand. In the case of some very dangerous situation behind my uncle, for example if someone were pulling out a weapon, I was immediately to use a referee’s three-toned nickel whistle, which I always received at action time. 

Fortunately I never had to use it, but the bag of cookies, some small package or fruit basket or whatever, several times I had to move from my left to my right hand. Often I went to follow Uncle Stanley also to other towns. I enjoyed this very much, because I dressed then in my new, and only, suit. In the color of a rotting plum, it consisted of a jacket with a dragon, or even a tail, pants in the pump style, and a vest of which I was very proud. I looked so good to myself, that following my uncle, I watched myself exactly in every store window. 

In this situation, not giving myself up in any way, I went on. I very much wanted to see exactly who was following me. From time to time, in the corner of my eye, while noticing some prettier passing girl, I was able to get some look at him. But at last I got a great occasion, because coming towards me was a person whom I knew. It was the mother of Eva, my colleague from high school. 

She had a known name, because her father’s brother, her uncle, was in the capital one of the regime’s chosen architects, and in town her father was a known scientist and university professor. Eva, who did not grace with her presence, learned magnificently but belonged rather to the category of intelligence that was studious and required hard work. She was nevertheless very helpful, for example, in filling accumulated didactic shortcomings. 

A few times for this reason I visited her home. She was an uncorrectable lover of Goral folklore. At home she wore exclusively Goral clothing, Goral moccasins, some Goral knitted shirts, some Goral bandanas, other Goral accessories. She looked in this like a little old gazdzinka. She pressed her well placed parents to build for her, upstairs in the spacious post-German villa which they had, two rooms in the Goral style. 

Brought in from the Podhale, a four man crew worked through an entire month. Sleeping, eating, and working on site, they remodeled the interior well enough for Sabala or Kasprowicz. The entire time Eva found herself in such a state of amok, that she did not even notice when one of the workers made her a baby. I remember that she took her high school examinations already well along, which in this era was not a small scandal of the customary gossip. 

The courageous perpetrator secretly disappeared somewhere in the fogs of Giewont or Gubałówka. Luckily, Eva’s parents approached this as another caprice of a single child. So in this way the entire professorial family was happy, and now Eva’s mother, with unabashed pride, told me that Janosik had just the day before yesterday turned three.

While I was talking with Eva’s mother, I could position myself, as it were, with my front to my back and get a good look at the fool without arousing his suspicions. Now I knew almost everything. When the day before I looked for Anita, I saw him briefly at the shop, fooling around there in the absence of the owner. 

There were two possibilities: either this guy found out from the workers that I had a way to valuable resources, and now he wanted plainly to relieve me of this interest, or he was working at the beck of the cobbler Zapora’s son, Christopher, whom I however knew well enough. 

Christopher, in addition to drinking heavily, which after all as a cobbler’s son, it was in his genes, as a young person was fairly intelligent and well read. To the ZMP he never belonged. He scorned the rabble, and before his name, like the colonels of Marshall Joseph Piłsudski, he always added a kind of prefix. In addition, in order to hide his ostensibly low class, in the lounges, where he always tried to pass for a count, he introduced himself always as Christopher Prawdziw Zapora, often adding also the name of some suspect crest. 

In these horrible, gray times he managed to be a figure of color and interest. I always appraised him positively, even though I knew full well that he would do any rotten thing in order to acquire the financial means for his carousing and parasitic manner of life. 

The man trailing me left the impression of a fairly cunning simpleton. He was tall, sure of himself, well built, a balding blonde, by look maybe thirty five, forty years old. An ideal object for provocation. Thanks to the training which I systematically received from Plebanczyk, in a certain kind of social setting I was great at taking advantage of body language and in a split second my opponent would go face flying with a heavier or lighter contusion of the hand, which only a moment ago was getting ready to unload on my nose, my teeth or my chin. All of this I had to thank for my master and teacher—Plebanczyk.