How I Got My Apartment (Part II)

For a few weeks meticulously going over every variable in this plan of action, we both fell onto the same idea. The thing would rely on the hot buzz of the day, meaning on the potato beetle which, dropped by American planes, wreaked economic, material and political havoc on the potato fields of our country. In the former estate of Vinny’s family, not far from Warsaw, there was a large State farm, a PGR.

In a few days I had in the capital a very important tournament, for qualification as a reserve for the national team and participation in the reserves was good, monthly, year round money.

Having all the possible material on the topic of the potato beetle and ready for anything that might link me to my present nearby mission, having false documents under another name and a completely different home address, dressed characteristically as a ZMP activist-speaker, in the late afternoon I arrived at the ZMP office at the PGR.

I said that under the auspices of the offices of the main and provincial ZMP I had been delegated here in the aim of leading training on the topic of various aspects related to the massive appearance in this area of potato beetles.

I added that I wanted to start the day after tomorrow at nine in the morning because tomorrow I had to complete certain preparations indispensible to this work and would need four white boards in the dimensions of a meter by a meter twenty. They welcomed me rather heartfully.

Of course for starters I was offered alcohol, which I declined, explaining it away with medical problems. I was attended to by the official leader of the local ZMP circle, comradette Wanda, to whom everyone listened and on whose word they relied.

She was approaching thirty, a reasonably buxomly and warm woman. Fortunately she did not have any of the various traits of the hysterically fanatical ZMP butch, who was a living denial of any kind of womanhood or any kind of sexual being.

Of course ideologically she had it messed up in the head pretty badly. She could even be dangerous, and not from natural meanness, but on account of the deep penetration of schooling and courses, which with someone like her were definitely able effectively and radically to turn her brain into mush.

In the palace there was no electricity. Sure, at some point apparently there had been, but everything had been stolen and now there wasn’t any.

Comradette Wanda gave me a stable-boy oil lamp, a sleeping sack packed with fresh straw, and an American field bed, from the UNRRA still, as well as two American blankets. I was to sleep in the palace, in which no one else slept, which I insisted on up front, directing myself supposedly with care for my technical instruments, which could be destroyed in some sabotage action.

Obviously, the class enemy didn’t sleep and definitely what I am going to be talking about will not please him at all.

Finally I installed myself in the corner of the main room, just at the exit to the giant landing, connected with oval parade stairs leading to the driveway that circled the large flowerbed. Evening fell.

When lying in bed I was trying to figure out how to turn off this shitty lamp, comradette Wanda quietly appeared.