The Institute Read online

  “The cable’s been cut,” she said, “right by the window. The cable to—”

  “The router,” finished Gypsy.

  “Has been cut,” repeated Iga.

  Sebastian returned from the kitchen, leaned against the wall and looked at us without the slightest sign of any emotion. Veronica closed her eyes and sat on the floor. Started moving her lips silently. After a while, she looked at me again, her eyes flashing with unease.

  “I wasn’t home today,” she said. “I was at work. I met Robert and Anna by the Bagatela at six and we came here.”

  “And the note wasn’t there then?”

  “No, no note.”

  “The door was open?”

  “Yes,” she replied without hesitating. “The door was open.”

  “What’s happening? You losing it, Hat?” Sebastian finally spoke. He called me Hat, as did Papa, our mutual boss. Both knew I hated it.

  “I’ve told you so many fucking times to lock the door!” Iga raised her voice. I stopped her with a wave of my hand. I pointed first to myself, then to her.

  “It doesn’t make any difference, Iga, they’ve got the keys to the grating, so they could easily have the keys to the door, too,” I said.

  “You’re taking the fucking piss out of me,” said Sebastian, and he took a sip of tea.

  I lit a cigarette. Cigarettes are meant to calm your nerves, but it didn’t work this time. It was as if I’d swallowed a piece of metal along with the smoke, and it now travelled through my whole body, shredding it slowly from the inside. I looked at Veronica and remembered what she’d said when she entered my room, and then a heaving in my belly told me to lay off the cigarette and grab my stomach with both hands.

  “You said it’s strange. That something strange has happened.” I turned to her.

  “Yes.” Veronica looked at me quizzically. “Yes, I did say something like that.”

  “I’ve known you for months. You’ve never called anything strange. Never used that word.”

  Veronica gazed at me as though trying to recognise me. But, as usual, it was really only her eyes that were doing the work – two hypnotising, green tunnels. Sometimes when I peered into them, it felt as though I was being X-rayed. She didn’t answer.

  Again, we all either stood or sat in silence for a long time.

  Iga got up, walked over to the grating and began shaking it and yelling down the stairs. A while later, Gypsy and I joined her. We screamed “help!”, “hello!”, “open the door!”, “emergency!”, then we just screamed, our throats paring as though they’d been scrubbed with sandpaper. Gypsy threw a bottle through the grating. The sound of shattering glass echoed throughout the whole stairwell but to no avail. No doors opened, no lights came on, nobody came out or shouted that the police were coming. It was as if everybody had suddenly run away, driven out by an alarm through which we’d slept.

  Sebastian tried to shake the grating with all his might, but it was useless. The only effect was a clattering that echoed to the lower floors.

  The windows from my room and Iga’s gave on to the street. We looked out, shouted, but there was hardly anyone around. A couple of cars went by. Besides, you wouldn’t be able to see anything from the driver’s seat.

  Iga threw a wine bottle, which shattered against the pavement. Nobody reacted. Nobody ever reacts to such incidents.

  The windows on the other side of the apartment, those in Seba and Gypsy’s rooms, look out to the yard. It was even emptier and darker than usual. No lights were on in any of the windows opposite.

  We began to stomp around the apartment, jump up and down, scream. Thump on our only neighbour’s, Mrs Finkiel’s, door – no response. We turned music on in all the rooms at once, full blast, waiting for the police to knock on our door and summon us to court, which had happened before, when we’d emitted far fewer decibels. Nothing. But we continued to leap around and make a noise in order to ward off the panic; fear was growing, filling our bellies, curdling our blood.

  At about one in the morning, we stopped. We’d no strength left. We kept the music on in my room, closed the door and went through to the kitchen.

  We discussed who could have done this and why.

  The neighbours. Apart from Mrs Finkiel, we were on fairly good terms with all our neighbours.

  Each of us examined our conscience. Betrayed girlfriends, ditched boyfriends, forgotten moneylenders, past friends, all the nutters we could possibly have come across.

  We sat, taking turns to sip from the last two bottles of beer we’d found in the fridge, and waited for something, anything – a sign, a movement, a knock on the door, a rustle. We killed time and fear by exchanging ever less plausible theories.

  At two in the morning, we tried screaming again, leaning out of the window, shouting into the empty, cold and sombre street and into the dark patch of Krakowski Park on the other side, but nothing came of it; our cries bounced across the city and disappeared without response. When a police car drew near, Sebastian threw another bottle in its direction and yelled something like:

  “Fuck!” The bottle smashed right in front of the car. The car accelerated.

  “When I get hold of this fucking moron, I’m going to drive over his legs then chuck him down Skałki,” said Sebastian, taking it that one man was responsible for the whole thing.

  At about four, we went to sleep. We spread some mattresses and blankets out on the floor for Robert and Anna and collapsed on our own beds fully dressed.

  We didn’t sleep long. At half past five, we heard a clanging. It was as though someone had struck the stairwell grating with a thick metal rod. Then we heard someone run up the stairs, followed by a forceful kick on the door, which resounded in all the windows and doorframes of the apartment.

  The first to leap out of bed was Sebastian, emitting a guttural roar, which I understood to be something like “son of a bitch!” He held the kitchen knife he’d kept ready. We ran after him. But we didn’t even manage to yank the front door open before there was another loud crash. The doors to the lift had closed.

  There was nobody behind the door. The stairwell was just as empty, dark and cold as it had been a few hours ago. We just saw the cables slide as the lift went down. Heard someone get out a couple of floors down. We pressed the button as though trying to get a coin back from a broken coffee machine – the lift didn’t return.

  We heard the slow, measured sound of shoes hitting the stairs, two pairs, growing quieter by the second, by the tread. The regular stride of those living with impunity and the calm certainty that nobody’s going to try to follow them. The stride of a prison warden.

  I glanced under my feet. There was another piece of paper. The same – squared, ripped from a school exercise book. I picked it up with two fingers, carefully, turned it over and read the message, scribbled again with a red felt-tip pen, the same unsteady writing.

  SAY THAT YOU’LL NEVER COME BACK HERE AND WE’LL LET YOU OUT. SWEAR.

  I was just about to say something, shout, but Sebastian was quicker. He leapt onto the grating, grabbed the bars and started bellowing down the stairwell.

  “Come here! Come back, you bastard! I’ll give you shit! Do you hear me? I’ll get you back for this! Fuck you, come here now!”

  But even if somebody had heard him, nobody answered. The footfalls had long grown silent at the tenement gate. The stairwell was silent and cold, dark and empty.

  * * *

  When my daughter wants to ask me something, she assumes the most streetwise expression possible. Legs astride, one to the side, the other forward, hands on hips. She carefully arranges the angle of her head, tilting it slightly in the direction of the leg to the side. She knows what she’s doing. If I knew what I was doing as well as she does, maybe everything would have been different.

  When my daughter finally asks me her question, it sounds rhetorical. Besides, my daughter never slouches. Always looks you straight in the eye. Doesn’t cover her mouth when she speaks. And she speaks lo
ud and clear. Maybe deep down inside she’s unsure of herself, but, generally, she looks like an invincible warrior, even when all she’s asking is whether there’s any milk left. A twelve-year-old Valkyrie in leggings and with a collection of Japanese comics. I’d like to think that it’s the result of something I’d been drumming into her since I’d started to suspect that she understood Polish. But it’s more likely that she was simply born this way. Must take after some great-great-grandmother.

  “Ela, remember, you must never be vulnerable. Never show you’re weaker than anyone. If somebody offends you, fight. If they hit you, hit them back twice as hard. Remember that you’re the cleverest, prettiest and the best, and no piece of rubbish has the right to kick you around.”

  I repeat this to her non-stop, but really I’m repeating it for myself.

  I kept drumming this message into her until, one day, I realised that she understood it better than I did. I was just preparing a silicone cast of a human jaw when I got a call from her form teacher. A quarter of an hour earlier, I’d received a call from the director with whom I was working at the time. He was a daydreamer and, that day, had fantasised about showing a fight scene with a four-second close-up of a guy whose jawbone had just been broken. He’d said:

  “Aga, these idiots are making it look like something from a fucking cop soap, like Borewicz. Like when a guy works another over, it sounds like they’re kicking sandbags and everyone knows their mugs are covered in ketchup. I want it to look real, you know. Like in A History of Violence.”

  “The guys making A History of Violence didn’t work alone, from home, after hours and with a kid around,” I said.

  To which he replied:

  “Look, we need to do it right so that they don’t, like, fucking axe it in Paris and London, and you’re going to be behind this, you know, it’s your name that’s going to be on it.”

  “It’s definitely going to be shown in Paris and London.”

  “I won’t ask again – get those casts and silicone scars to me by tomorrow night, or the production manager’s going to kill me,” he said and hung up before I could comment or say that if the production manager killed him, it would be a blessing.

  Fifteen minutes later, the squealing cunt, meaning my daughter’s form teacher who spits dust and chalk even over the phone, called and squawked:

  “Mrs Celińska, please come to the school. We’ve got a bit of a problem here.”

  I was just modelling some false teeth in mother of pearl, which I would then chip and paint yellow. Looking at a paused shot from Dawn of the Dead out of the corner of my eye. One zombie had a chipped jawbone exactly the way I wanted it.

  I asked what the problem was.

  “Ela pushed one of her classmates against the wall, scratched him and started kicking him. Marek has suspected concussion. He’s a top student.”

  I released the pause button. The zombie’s head turned into a green and red splodge. Unfortunately, the shooter had run out of ammo; a second later, another zombie ran up to him and bit off half his neck as easily as if he were chomping cheesecake. I pressed pause again. The scene had lasted two or three seconds. A whole team of special effects and make-up artists had worked on it for a week. And they probably weren’t being shouted at down the phone by their daughters’ teachers. Didn’t have a twelve-year-old daughter. Weren’t getting divorced.

  “I’ll be there shortly.”

  Ela was in the headmistress’s office, which looked as though it hadn’t changed since the days when I was my daughter’s age: white eagle, ferns, subtle olfactory hints of rags and unwashed bodies. Except that instead of a typewriter, there was a computer and a photocopier. And there were colourful posters on the wall saying things like Child’s Day, All Children Belong to Us, Clean Up the Earth.

  When I entered, my daughter was standing in front of the headmistress’s desk, arms folded and lips drawn into a headstrong line. She stared at me, sending a telepathic signal: “Get me out of here, surely you can see there’s no point in talking to these people.”

  Behind the desk sat a nurse in a helmet formed by a honey-coloured perm and a jacket that reminded me of the Balcerowicz Plan, the economic Shock Therapy of the nineties. The squealing cunt stood nearby in a long, black dress-like thing out of a bonprix fashion catalogue, her face plastered with powder. They were staring at me, sending me the telepathic signal: “You’re another one of those self-made hussies who have their children up their arse and dump them here for us to look after like some friend’s dog when they go on holiday. Oh, you’ll get your just desserts in hell, you bitch, a kick in the arse for those Wysokie Obcasy magazines, all that sushi and yoga. Try teaching classics like Knights of the Teutonic Order to a bunch of hormone-charged half-wits, then you’ll see what it’s like.”

  I was wearing pink tracksuit bottoms and a fifteen-year-old World of Witches band T-shirt splashed with silicone and fake blood. My colourful turban was better than what was under it, meaning my hair, which I’d tried to dye the night before while holding five telephone conversations at once. I was the image of the end of counterculture.

  I stood between them. Looked at the squealing cunt. She cleared her throat. The headmistress drummed an object that resembled a Chinese-like fountain pen against the table, hoping to add gravity to the situation. A bell rang in the background.

  “We’ve got a problem here, Mrs Celińska,” said the headmistress.

  “Ela’s been very aggressive of late,” added the squealing cunt.

  “Her classmates have said that Ela doesn’t join in. She’s been argumentative, unfriendly, has poor grades, and now—”

  “He said I was a slut, Mum, that I do stuff with old guys for money.” My daughter looked down and sniffed, but she didn’t slouch; her arms were by her sides but not dangling uselessly. Tears glistened in her eyes, but I knew that she didn’t have the slightest intention of bawling. “He said it during break in front of the whole class,” she continued. “Then he followed me into the cloakroom and said he was going to post stuff on Facebook saying I give old men blowjobs…”

  The headmistress cleared her throat. The squealing cunt wanted to raise her voice, but my glare stopped her. From that moment, I didn’t have to act out the furious mother. I was so furious I had to hold back from throwing myself at her and biting into her aorta like the zombie in the film, the one with the jawbone.

  “Watch what you say,” I told my daughter.

  “He went on and on about it, saying things like that,” my daughter said loudly without a breath, like any child who has to speak out in their own defence and is simply trying to get as much in as they can before someone interrupts. “That I kiss boys on the willy, that I’m a slut and a chav. Maybe because I didn’t want to kiss him at the school disco and told him that if he lost weight and washed more often, maybe I would. But he’s really fat and ugly, Mum.”

  “What did he call you?” I wanted to make sure I’d heard correctly.

  “Was I supposed to wait until he posted all that and smeared my reputation? I’d rather kill myself, Mum, he had to get what he deserved,” concluded my daughter in defence, looking me in the eye. I subtly winked at her.

  “You can see for yourself.” The headmistress dotted her i’s, so she thought.

  “I certainly do.” I dotted mine.

  “We’ll talk about it at home,” I said, sweeping the air above Ela with my arm as though gathering her to leave. “I’m confiscating your tablet.”

  The headmistress glared at me, peeved and doubtful. The squealing cunt exhaled loudly and was at the door in a flash, cutting off my hasty retreat.

  “Marek might be scarred for the rest of his life.” She pronounced her medical opinion with deadly calm.

  Personally, I regretted Marek had survived at all. Although we might have had a few problems if he hadn’t.

  “Olympian.” The headmistress’s voice reached me from behind her desk. “Winner of the Kangura Prize.”

  Actually, my daughter
was the winner of the Regional Fine Arts Olympics for the best papier-mâché sculpture, which, according to her, represented the mysterious Japanese white magic symbol from her favourite Japanese cartoon. But I kept that information to myself.

  “I’ll talk to my daughter at home,” I repeated, without turning around.

  “Go to the car,” I said, simulating an angry command aimed at my daughter. My daughter simulated outrage. Together we simulated slamming the door.

  Once in the car, I hugged my daughter and kissed her about seventeen times until she started struggling.

  “Mum, what’s going on?” she asked while I, because of the silicone jawbone and missed lunch, pointed to the KFC looming on the horizon. She nodded and immersed herself in examining her nails, painted with some pink varnish she’d got as a freebie with a magazine.

  “I’m proud of you,” I told her, joining the traffic. My car wasn’t exactly king of the road; it was a battered, bird-shitspattered, sputtering, fifteen-year-old Volvo, which, in an act of great generosity, my husband had given to me when he’d bought himself a sparkling new Volvo to celebrate finishing some powdered soup adverts and a few episodes of The Varsovians.

  My daughter scraped the varnish off her nails. I patted her on the hand and told her I’d give her some nail varnish remover at home.

  “No moron’s got the right to say things like that to you.”

  “Especially as it’s not true, Mum,” pointed out my daughter.

  “That’s neither here nor there,” I said. “I hope he hurts.”

  “Alright, Mum, but it’s not you who hit him. What if they chuck me out of school?” my daughter said and returned to scraping off the varnish. The sound reminded me of polystyrene being ripped and set my teeth on edge. But I was too proud of Ela to tell her off.

  “You’ll go to another,” I said. “And finish one in the end. Ela, it’s more important that you know how to punch somebody in the face when they’ve offended you.”

  I parked in front of the KFC and realised that my daughter knew this better than I did. She knew how to punch somebody in the face when they offended her. She could already teach me. She deserved some fried chicken and some hideous strawberry ice cream. We bought more than we could eat in three days and drove home.