The Institute Read online

  Everything’s going to be fine.

  Gypsy turns right and runs ahead, cuts across the pedestrian crossing, runs along Krakowski Park. We can still see him for a short while as he passes the people at the bus stop, but then he leaps over the wall between the park and the pavement and completely disappears from view.

  And now, ten hours later, he’s still not back. The Towering Inferno has nearly finished. Veronica, Anna and I sit on my sofa without saying a word. We keep drinking water, but still our mouths are completely dry. The walls might be cold, but I’m so hot that I’d be more than willing to strip my skin off if it would help. Anna and Veronica sit wrapped in blankets, warming up even more beneath the cats curled up on their stomachs. Robert, meanwhile, is lying in Gypsy’s room and only leaves it to take a leak.

  “Barricade the door carefully, Sebastian,” says Iga. “We’ve got to get some sleep.”

  “Sleep?” Iga’s suggestion is just as absurd as the idea of drinking a crate of champagne. “Now? And what about Gypsy?”

  “You wait up for him, Sebastian. I’ve just got to get some sleep,” she pleads.

  Sebastian nods and returns to what he’s been doing for the last hour – sharpening all the kitchen knives on an old leather belt.

  I switch channels. On Polsat, I can just make out Aliens through the snow and hum, but it doesn’t matter what they’re showing, white noise would be enough; I just need to watch something, something that moves, a collection of dynamic dots.

  “And you, Veronica? Do you want some?” asks Iga. She stretches her clasped hand towards Veronica and shows her the contents – four halved Xanax pills.

  Veronica shakes her head.

  “You said we’ve got to be on the ball,” I remind her.

  “We’re long past that.” She shrugs. “And I’ve got to get some sleep. Just got to.”

  She’s right. I long for sleep more than anything in the world. I’d told her I’d slept, but it hadn’t been proper sleep, only lethargy perforated by awakenings.

  “You take a half too, sis.” Iga tries to smile. “It’ll be alright. When you wake up, Gypsy will be here.”

  I try to smile at her, then swallow the pill without water. When I wake up, Gypsy will be here.

  * * *

  Ela’s father and I went out to dinner. We were celebrating my success in creating artificial wounds and the start of the Coolmen’s Five Days production, which, according to the producer, was going to be a hit not only in Poland but even Canada, the RSA and Jupiter. Ela’s father couldn’t sit still, wriggled in his chair like a little boy with a new PlayStation. I really and wholeheartedly believed in his success. I wasn’t interested in the film, I was interested in him.

  I wanted him to become an adult in his own mind. I wanted him to make enough money to finally make his film about the blue corridor. In the brief moments between his gunfire of monologues about the bright future and more bottles of dry table wine, the fact that Ela’s father was still with me meant little more than just Ela having a father.

  I didn’t love Ela’s father. There was no deep bond. I observed him from the side, studied him like a stranger. I wondered what had got into me at the time that made me leave the club with him and prompted me to be with him. But now it was too late, now we had a daughter, now I had no rational reason to end our collaboration other than my feelings. So, in the belief that all that feelings did was ruin everything and thus shouldn’t be given much importance, I simply wanted us to be together and I wanted it to work.`

  “Sure, the film’s commercial. Very commercial,” said Ela’s father, as though justifying himself. “But it’s going to be a hit. The producer predicts a box office attendance of something like one and a half million. And then, you know, I’m going to be free to do what I want. I’m going to be able to…”

  Blue room. Silhouette, a light, hypnotic music, scream were the last things I wanted to remember.

  “I’ve already got the script. It’s called Confined Woman.” He leaned over the table and, knocking the carafe of wine onto the floor, kissed me on the cheek.

  “I’d like to read it,” I lied.

  “I’ll give you the next version.” He tried to smile mysteriously, succeeded even.

  I remember that when we got home, we had sex, and I remember I liked the Polish Lynch as I fell asleep. In the morning, he made us breakfast, which was inedible because he even managed to burn the tea, but I still liked him.

  And I liked him for as long as they were shooting the film. The next six months were like a hot and smooth béchamel sauce. Peaceful and safe. Everything worked. Ela went to school. We did homework with her. We visited friends. Organised family dinners.

  That’s how it was until, two weeks after its premiere, Coolmen’s Five Days stopped showing in cinemas. I’d just come home after twelve hours of making-up prisoners of war on the set of a series about Westerplatte and was scouring an ovenproof dish from a hideously burnt pie when Ela’s father phoned the producer and asked:

  “What’s going on, why aren’t they showing it anymore?”

  “Because about nine hundred people went to see it,” came the voice at the other end of the line. “Because all the papers say it’s a load of shit, full stop. Every single one. Read them.”

  “What now?” asked Ela’s father, his voice like that of a panicking officer who’s sent his battalion to certain death and now has to report to his general.

  “What now? What’s now is that I’ve fucked three million because you couldn’t fucking direct a film,” said the producer, a fat, incessantly belching guy who, whenever I saw him, always had a starving little Pekingese under his arm.

  Ela’s father froze.

  “It’s you who fucking got me into it,” announced Ela’s father in a tone I’d never heard before, cold and icy. “I wanted to do my own stuff.”

  “Then go and do it,” retorted the producer.

  “We’ve got an agreement,” said Ela’s father.

  “We didn’t agree that I’d lose three million.”

  Ela’s father hung up and sat on the chair and, as he’d seen in so many films, hid his face in his hands. I wiped my forehead with a hand clad in a rubber glove.

  “The film’s really fallen through,” he said and, shrugging, added, “It was a mistake. I made a mistake.”

  “You didn’t make a mistake. You did a good job,” I consoled him.

  “It was a mistake to have fucking started it,” said Ela’s father.

  “You’ve just got to do your own thing, darling,” I added and, with all the tenderness I could muster, I laid my hand in its rubber glove on his head.

  Ela’s father wept, and I finally realised that I had two children.

  He still tried to submit all sorts of applications and documents to get more money for his film. Sent the script to various financing commissions and institutes. They kept him in suspense for weeks, which he spent fidgeting in the armchair and compulsively checking his emails. Finally, an old school friend phoned him, a guy who’d had some success in the form of two romantic comedies shot in IKEA with titles like Life is a Piece of Cake or Love to Madness. He’d received the script about the blue corridor and the scream and wasn’t at all happy at having to play the good pal offering advice.

  “Listen, old man. I’d ease up in your shoes. It’s… well, you know… I’d… well… Don’t take this the wrong way, but… Oh, fuck it… I talked to David at the gala. It’s too big a risk, you know… You should, well, fucking polish it up,” he said. “You know, even if you get there, remember that you’re a good craftsman now. Okay, Coolmen… but it’s the producer’s fault, everybody knows that, old man. But if you do this, it’ll be your own fault.”

  “Maybe I should give it to somebody to rewrite?” asked Ela’s father.

  “Look, there’s already one Lynch and, well, he’s Lynch!” replied Ela’s father’s friend.

  When you love someone who’s just experienced a great setback, perhaps one of the bigge
st setbacks in their life, you should lay them in a horizontal position, drink with them and hug them, repeating over and over again that it’s not true, that they’re still going to get a chance and that everything’s going to be okay. Yet I couldn’t even look at him. I was angry, and it made me feel terrible. But I couldn’t look on as he craved support, moped around the kitchen snivelling and, to mark his great failure, started his days with a bottle of wine. He repulsed me as though he were covered in mould. What’s more, I found myself a little repulsive.

  I put Ela in the car and we drove to the woods, drank fizzy pop and ate cakes, tried in vain to fly a kite and take in a stray cat the size of a toy bulldozer, also in vain. We then went to a pizzeria with plastic seats and plastic plants, where they served huge pizzas as thick as old sleeping bags.

  Meanwhile, Ela’s father drank. That is, he’d always drank, but when it turned out that he wasn’t ever going to leave The Varsovians serial, Biedronki adverts and the European Omnibus game show, that the temporary work he’d been doing for ten years was indeed for life, that his name was never going to find itself in the thick book with the words Great Directors embossed on it, his alcoholic hobby stepped up a gear.

  Ela’s father became a drunk.

  It’s not that he suddenly started throwing dinner plates at the walls or leaping at us with his claws, trying to force the door open with an axe at four o’clock in the morning or the gate of the secured estate with his car. Something else happened. After his bottle of wine for breakfast, he plunged his glazed eyes into the TV or computer screen, sipping vodka on ice. The slight indigestion that he’d always had after drinking neat vodka passed after a couple of days. He took a shine to it. He was out of it, absent and drunk, spent entire days like that, unless he had a shoot. At three, four in the morning, he crashed on the bed or fell asleep in the armchair. He didn’t yell, didn’t say anything; he stopped talking, stopped reacting.

  He phoned only his mother. And a few friends I didn’t know. He came back in the early hours, collapsed on the bed fully clothed, so I threw him off onto the floor and covered him with a blanket.

  When I tried to talk to him about it, he waved it off. When I proposed he get some therapy, he yelled at me. So I suggested he cut down or limit himself. He retorted that he knew how much he could take and drank as much as he could take, and could I kindly please fucking leave him alone because he needs support and I’m not giving him any.

  “I’ve got to keep this family together,” I replied coldly.

  “Nobody’s asking you to,” he riposted, gripping the armchair, partly because he was surprised by his own insolence and partly because he nearly lost his balance.

  I could have slapped him, but I let him be.

  It was a typical story, played out in dozens of Polish homes.

  As time went by, the sound of him opening the door reminded me more and more of polystyrene being dragged along glass. When I needed to say something to him, even if it was some simple communication like “get up”, “move up”, “I’ve made some dinner”, it felt increasingly like my mouth was full of coarse breadcrumbs.

  On some nights, at first, then every other night and finally every night, when I lay next to him under the duvet, I had to make sure that no part of my body was touching any part of his. I’d discovered that Ela’s father had happily fucked his colleague, the make-up artist to whom I was indebted for getting me work, when they were shooting an advert for some make-up in Tenerife. I took it with indifference, didn’t bear him a grudge. I didn’t have the slightest desire for him to even breathe in my direction. I bought my own duvet.

  When Ela’s father started to drink, he stopped pretending that he was my husband and that I was his wife. In a word, we stopped pretending to be a family. When Ela’s father realised that he’d lived his whole life mistakenly convinced of his own worth, he stopped trying. Stopped doing anything. Once in a while, he went to work, but less and less frequently. He didn’t open the door, even for the postman. He was out of it, unconscious, unfamiliar and terribly pitiful, so pitiful that I didn’t even have the strength to shout at him.

  He was sure nothing else was ever going to happen to him. And I myself was becoming certain that nothing else was going to happen to us.

  Besides, for ten years, ever since I’d gone back to him, I’d hoped that he’d finally become a strong person. He was pretty good at pretending to be strong, laughing at small setbacks and temporary lulls, turning somebody’s sneers into a joke and once even punching somebody in the face – somebody smaller than him, in fact – a camera operator who’d groped me on set. But you can’t count on people changing. My husband hid in a room, weeping quietly, slept in his clothes and totally neglected his family, all because somebody had made it impossible for him to shoot a film about a woman screaming in a corridor.

  This was far worse than him shagging some idiot. Besides, one night I found his script behind the bookshelf. I read twenty pages and put it back. I was glad he hadn’t shot it.

  There was no point in continuing with this charade. Ela’s father hardly spoke to me. I was spending my life in a nice big apartment with a young daughter and a drunk stranger. So when Gran Vera died, and I was given her apartment, I just needed two weeks to pack my things up, re-register and go back to Cracow to sort out all the formalities with the solicitor. Those two weeks passed with him yelling that I was a vile, heartless, loose woman.

  “I’ve also needed support a few times over the years,” I replied quietly, tersely.

  “I love you.” He started snivelling and crying like an old woman. I didn’t even look in his direction. “You’re the meaning in my life,” he whined and I covered my ears.

  “Please understand,” I said. “You’re the lack of meaning in mine.”

  “I’ll stop drinking. You’re right. I’ll go get some help,” he said.

  “That’s good. Good for you. But as far as we’re concerned, it’s not going to change anything,” I replied.

  “You’re despicable. You’re a whore!” he screamed.

  “Calm down. Dignity – the most important thing is dignity,” I tried to remind him.

  When Ela’s father had stopped yelling and whining and sought solace in his vodka again, calls started coming from his mother.

  “Don’t even try to take Ela with you,” said my mother-inlaw. “We know what you’re like. We’ll take her away from you straight away. You’re a drug addict and a drunk. You’re crazy. You think I don’t know, but I do.”

  “The law in Poland sides with the mother.” It was the one sentence I could manage to force through the wall I’d erected to hold back all the screams and oaths whirling around in my mouth.

  “In our family, the law’s on our side,” retorted my mother-in-law, “because our family is on the side of the law.”

  Ela’s father’s father knew everybody and could work miracles, as though he had magical buttons at his fingertips to speed up or slow down time. With the help of his telephone directory, he could get people back their driving licences, get property locked by bailiffs, free those who’d been arrested. He specialised in alimonies.

  “You’re going to end up in a loony bin and you’ll never see her again,” said Ela’s father’s mother, “so watch it. Ela stays with her father. You do what you like. We don’t care what happens to you. You wound him round your little finger and landed him with a child. You go to court and you’ll never see Ela again. Try the same trick as before. Try it, really. Try it.”

  I didn’t interrupt her. She liked talking. She really had a great talent for loud, long oration. Like Hitler.

  “It’s because of you, this whole situation with the film,” she continued. “How could the poor man do anything sensible with a monster like you around? It’s simply impossible. I know what happened. Everything was on his shoulders – his home, his child – because you didn’t lift a finger, didn’t do a thing. You never supported him. It’s a good thing that you’re leaving. When he took you back
, it was the worst day of my life; I prayed for him not to do it.” And then she started to cry. “How can you do this to my baby?” she moaned. “How can you make him suffer so much?”

  “Oh, shut up,” I said.

  “We’ll take the little one away from you the same as before,” she said.

  “Shut up,” I said again. “Just fucking stop.”

  “You take the child with you and we’ll destroy your life. We really will. You won’t be the first. You don’t even know what we can do. They’ll take away all your parental rights. Legally incapacitate you. You think things like that don’t happen,” she spewed out, long and loud, then added more quietly, “I knew from the very start that all you could offer him was suffering and heartache.”

  “Goodbye,” I said and hung up, then threw the phone at the wall. I knew the woman was capable of doing all she said.

  “We’ll soon be together.” I consoled my daughter as she lay in bed and I removed Mamma Mia! from the drive and flung DVDs across the room, searching for Bridget Jones’s Diary. My daughter nodded. I’d bought her more ice cream. “I’ve got to go,” I said for what must have been the hundredth time that evening, more to myself than to her, as usual. “You know that if I take you now, Gran will come to fetch you and we’ll never see each other again.”

  “I told you, Mum, please, let’s do it – let’s run away somewhere.” She dipped her spoon in the ice cream carton, sobbing.

  “We will, but I’ve got to get things ready. It’s a plan we’ve got to have together, the two of us. It has to be our supersecret, our secret plan, yours and mine, okay?” I kissed her on the cheek.

  Ela nodded. I couldn’t tell her that her Gran had already taken her away from me once or scare her by saying that she’d do it again and then I’d probably never see her again. It might have made Ela do something rash. It could have spoiled my plan.