Marie (Part IV)

When I returned, everything was shining and clean, and Marika, again having nothing on her, except for the shiner on her eye, was busy painting her toenails. It was already well after six, and the heat was not preparing even to let down.

When I began to prepare dinner, I realized that the kefirs I bought last night were rather not for consumption. They stood already a good many hours in the heat and they had become sour and curdled, in the color of light urine.

Only Marika was happy, because she could use the kefir for what she was covering her eye with, because up to then she was soaking the covering in tea. The next day it was hot again and we didn’t go anywhere.

We still had food and in fact it was all good. I tried drawing something and Marika the whole time amused herself with painting her nails. We played cards, but mainly we dallied on the davenport in the depths of the room.

We got rid of any kind of scruples, to this case I guess I approached it with a certain non-emotion, while Marika oscillated between two moods: strong, constantly growing feeling of hatreds towards her husband and a strong, constantly growing feeling of fear of getting pregnant.

The possibility that someone would want to peep in on us in all reality did not exist, because my apartment found itself on a fairly high second floor, and all the nearby buildings lay in ruins.

The overgrown garden, which my terrace overlooked, had not been fenced off in any way since the war and in the form of wild bush it spread out uninterruptedly and spiritedly more than fifty meters.

The next day at half to six in the morning I was scheduled for an hour of training with Plebanczyk, and afterwards at five in the afternoon I had my sports training.

This day I had to make some money too, because I did not have any left even for the trolley, but luckily everything was close to me, even though the town was huge. Before the war, after all, it was the second largest city in Germany, after Berlin.

Moreover we were running out of cigarettes.

From Plebanczyk I returned around half past seven in the morning. There were all the symptoms, as radio RIAS Berlin had said, of a day just as hot if not hotter than the last. Marika was still sleeping so I, without even turning on the radio, laid down quietly next to her.

Thinking the whole time how to earn some money I fell asleep. I slept maybe an hour because Marika, half awake, began to soothe me, how poor I was that I had to wake up so early in the morning and still wander in the night.

I only got to turn on the radio.

Embracing each other the whole time, she pitied me until eleven, when someone downstairs rang at the door. I quickly jumped into a pair of pants.

It was the mailman, bringing a wire from one of the publications in the sum of three hundred twenty five złoty, which he paid out in cash immediately. I gave him a five złoty tip, and we were saved for a few days.

Because our food was already running out, before the evening I left to do some light groceries. I brought what I needed; I was even able to buy a bottle of some Bulgarian wine, which was a big occasion because Bulgarian wine appeared very rarely on the shelves, only Polish vodka was ubiquitous.

From some time Marika began to lament that she had to call her father, but how with this eye could she leave and show herself to people. Moreover, to Lucifer, as she called Cezary, for no amount of treasure would she go, because she claimed her own treatment was already starting to work.

This was kind of convenient for me, because Lucer was an exceedingly handsome man of the category of the always well tanned, light blondes, and he never let a beautiful girl pass, while I did not yet want to be cast aside.

Thinking a long time how to alleviate Marika in her great problem, I remembered that rather long ago when with my mother I traveled to Łeba, something hit her and she bought me ugly domestic sunglasses of the blind musician’s type.

Because I had decided that I looked in them like an idiot, or even worse—like Maxim Gorky on the island Capri, I hid them somewhere just in case. After breakfast, I led a serious search campaign. I found them. I quickly oriented myself as to what kind of imperfections they had, and stealthily taking with me a screwdriver, I closed myself with them in the bathroom. There I unscrewed two of the screws and took off the copper Junkers cover. I turned on the ventilator and the faucet for warm water. The burner lit, and I, carefully and with great precaution, heated the glasses on the fire, mainly the part that sat on the nose, I bent them such that they covered exactly the whole eye.

“You probably want to go telephone your father today?” I asked her and, standing behind her, delicately put the glasses on her.

“You look like you’re from Hollywood,” I said.

“A beautiful person looks beautiful in everything, soon we can go,” she decided.

The post office was nearby, I gave her fifty złoty, because she wanted to use the express telephone, while I, smoking a cigarette, sat outside on a moor.

She came out after some fifteen minutes, holding in her hands the banknote she got from me.

“You know I ordered the call for the recipient to pay. I don’t understand, I told him everything about my husband, but my father and my mother asked me only about some Jankowski and his horses. My husband has probably been looking for me here since yesterday, they will soon wire money to the post office."

During my training she politely waited in the hall and every now and then someone asked me mean-spiritedly, why I gave her a black eye. Despite this, she impressed all my friends. Then again they always liked my girls.

Later in not too bad a restaurant we ate a late supper or early dinner and I took her out dancing.

She looked like an early bloomer blind orphan and as we went, everyone looked back at us. 

We returned very late.