Absolute Sunset (24 page)

“Well.” The raven seemed half amused and half irritated. “Anyone can promise wealth, happiness, health, and love. Anyone, even the dumbest fortune-teller. But misfortune is a challenge. No one wants to face it.”

“Sabina didn’t want it, did she?” Hanka asked—she’d wanted to talk about this for a long time.

“Sabina? Why are you coming back to that old skeleton in the closet so suddenly?” The bird laughed, surprised.

“I saw the tattoo on her hand. Did you drop by her, too?” She got up and started to cross the room with steps that, as a child, she’d called tip-tops.

“Uh-huh, you’re in a mood for memories.” The raven turned his head and sighed. “Yes, I visited her. But she understood nothing. She just smoked her cigarettes, drank, and cried. I was going mad. I need someone with an open mind, a truth-seeker—not a housewife with a crush on vodka. I need the philosopher, a thinker.”

“How could you?!” Hanka took her head in her hands.

“How could I what?”

“How could you kill her? You fucking rat, how could you?!”

“Be quieter or else somebody will come!” the raven warned her. “I didn’t kill her at all. She did it. She didn’t get a single thing, but that has nothing to do with her death.”

“Stop! Don’t talk about her that way!” Hanka screamed.

“Why? Do you suddenly love her? After what she did to Bartek? That was a result of her stupidity as well.”

“What!”

“Shit!” The raven clearly considered the matter closed. But Hanka—just the opposite.

“I’ll tell Niewiara everything. I’ll tell everything! You killed everyone! It’s your fault!” Hanka felt like kicking the raven in his stupid head. But he just looked offended.

“I’m telling you for the last time: I killed nobody,” he said with dignity. “Life killed them. And you weren’t able to predict what would happen. Do you want to tell Niewiara? Go on, tell him. You’ll see it makes no sense.”

Somewhere far on the other side of department a door banged open and Hanka heard the sound of clogs, like a kettledrum. A nurse. “I told you that if you shouted somebody would come.” The raven snapped his bill in disgust. “You do what you want. You want to tell, so tell. But don’t you moan later that I didn’t warn you.” He flapped his wings and escaped through the open window.

Hanka had been thinking for nearly three months, during which time the raven hadn’t appeared once. In the end she made a decision.

“I want to tell you about something,” she started the conversation with Paweł. “But it’s a hell of a secret.”

“I won’t tell anyone, you know that!” Paweł stroked her hand. Just like Janusz used to do.

“Promise?”

“I promise!”

Since he promised, she told him. Paweł was excited by the story about the bird. Whenever they talked about it, he would walk from wall to wall, as if he’d discovered some incredible treasure in Hanka.

“It can’t be, it cannot be! That explains everything! That explains it all!” he would mutter. It appeared to Hanka that he wasn’t listening carefully. She thought he hadn’t even written down that she and Sabina had both dreamt the same dream. She tried to draw his attention to the connection between the dreamy visions and reality. She gave him an example. The dream about the circus—Janusz’s death. But Niewiara just held her up with a gesture of his hand.

“It’s impossible to see the future,” he said, and Hanka felt as if he had punched her in the stomach.

“But, why don’t you get it? I could see everything, the raven showed me everything! It’s my fault that my father died!” Hanka didn’t give up.

“Your sense of guilt has a completely different basis! The whole issue of prophecies is just a smokescreen!” Niewiara interrupted and Hanka lowered her eyes. The raven had been right. Paweł understood nothing. He didn’t even try! Hanka wanted to scream at him:
traitor!
But she didn’t. She wanted to end the conversation, but Paweł insisted.

“Do you remember what you said about the raven? What did it do to you in your sleep?” he asked.

“Of course I remember!” Hanka snorted. She wanted to add “you sucker”, but she decided it was a waste of time. “It pecked at me!”

“Where?” The next stage of the riddle. Paweł looked at Hanka like a grandfather playing a game, telling his granddaughter to guess which of his closed hands held a candy.

“My ears, my nails, my head. Plus he punished me with pecking when I didn’t want to do something,” Hanka replied.

“Do you know who has this kind of dream?” he asked.

“No.”

“Sexually abused children.”

“What!” Hanka felt something sour rising in her throat. She swallowed it with an effort and made herself concentrate. “What the fuck are you talking about?” she hissed, clenching her fists. She was ready to attack. To tear his stupid face with her nails, to bite through his carotid artery! Fuck! It’d be worth the price of spending the rest of her life in the loony bin! Paweł wasn’t scared, though.

“Did your father come to you at night? Did he sleep with you in bed?” he asked.

“Shut up!” Hanka got sick again.

“Hanka!” Niewiara patted her cheek, as to bring her around. “Think about it,” he suggested gently. “Slowly. It’s only a thought. Just a thought. Look. Maybe something may come from your subconscious. You remember I told you about not being aware of some things?”

“Yeah...” Hanka couldn’t stand any more. She felt as if she’d swallowed a cotton ball.

“Think about it. You have to face it, to admit that your father abused you,” Niewiara looked at his patient, squinting a little. “Otherwise, you’ll never leave here. You won’t make your way back to a normal life unless you face it.”

Hanka didn’t need to hear that part twice. She waited for three weeks, then decided to give Niewiara a detailed report on how Janusz had abused her. Completely imaginary. She thought it through carefully, having decided that a little time should pass before she told the psychologist her story. Otherwise Paweł would be suspicious.

In the end, the right day came. “I’m sorry, dad, but I don’t have a choice,” Hanka whispered toward the sky that morning. She was sure that her father wouldn’t be angry with her. After a moment Niewiara knocked. He said hello, sat down on the window sill, and waited. He was nearly bouncing with excitement, like a kid waiting for a show to start.

“I don’t remember much,” Hanka started. He was smiling like a saint.

“It’s understandable—you pushed it away into your subconscious.”

“I remember one situation, though.” Hanka did her best to play the role. She rubbed her temples, as if with effort. Niewiara was all ears. She told him about the trip to the open-air ethnographic museum.

“Where was it?” the psychologist asked, writing down every word in his notebook. His face was flushed.

“I don’t know, I was little. Maybe four years old.”

She told him how she had run after some baby geese behind an old barn. Her father had followed her. They’d sat down on high grass. The nestlings got away, swimming in a nearby pond. Janusz sat her on his knees. That was how it happened.

Hanka made up a few similar stories. About baths they took together, about telling goodnight stories with the spider-tickler as the main hero. Niewiara was satisfied. He released her six months later, wishing her happiness. With tears. He had good intentions, but he’d read too many books and saw deviance everywhere he looked. But Hanka was free.

Hanka—Home, Sweet Home

Where was she supposed to go? There was nowhere she
could
go other than
Tysiąclecie
. So she returned to living under her own roof, to the flat full of memories, to the suspicious neighbours who were afraid of living in the same building with a joker like her. Old Mrs Ram, who visited Hanka at the hospital sometimes, had died a few months earlier. Hanka had no allies left.

She managed to get a small government benefit. It was enough to buy the absolute essentials provided that Hanka saved on electricity and gas. It didn’t really matter to her. She was waiting for the raven. He was important—him and his prophecies. He came quickly, the third or fourth night. He sat in his favourite place on the bed frame.

“You came back,” he began.

“Uh-huh,” Hanka muttered, more or less in its direction.

“Are you angry? About Sabina?” She could sense anxiety in the raven’s voice.

“No, I’m not. I understand, I thought it over and I understand.”

“Seriously?” The bird was pleased.

“Seriously. My mother simply couldn’t cope with the burden you put on her. Not everyone is strong enough, not everyone can stand it. In fact, it’s a waste of time even to talk about it. Never mind. Let’s not waste of time.” Hanka rubbed her forehead. “Do you know what happened at the hospital?” she asked, just to change the subject.

“I know, I know. That doctor Niewiara is a jerk. But I warned you!” Her friend’s tone became familiar again—mocking.

“You know what? Shame on me that I said such things about my father,” Hanka started chewing on a lock of her hair.

“Don’t you worry. He would forgive you. You had to get out of that place.”

“I had to. To save others. For my father.”

“Yes, for your father. To pay respect. He died, but others still have a chance!” the raven agreed.

“They have a chance. I’ll try hard. Sabina failed, but I’ll find a way to do it! Let’s fly!”

They went to a field. It looked like something from a painting by Chełmoński: blue sky, the chemical green of grass. A lonely pear tree, bent like something arthritic, was visible in the distance. Hanka noticed happily that there was fruit on it. She wanted to eat one, juicy and sweet like caramel.

“I want to pick a pear!” she said firmly, and the raven didn’t argue.

They approached the tree and then she realized. The pears were huge, as was the tree. They went even closer. Pears... these were people! People hung upside down! Old and wrinkled, bound and suspended, their faces red and engorged with blood. The mouths were open wide, exhausted by torture, with no energy left to scream.

“No, I want to wake up, I want to wake up!” Hanka began waving her arms, as if to chase the image away.

“Shut your mouth!” The raven jumped up and pecked her on the temple. “Shut up! Wait and watch!”

A woman approached them down the balk. She wore all black and carried a huge basket on her back, a long stick in her right hand. She came to the pear tree.

“Time for reaping!” she squawked and started bashing the elderly people with the stick.

They began to scream. The stick sounded like a carpet beater slapping soundly against a dusty old carpet—rhythmically, tirelessly. Rocking bodies began to break free of the branch and fall into the woman’s basket, tears all over their faces.

“What a rich harvest!” The black widow was pleased. Again and again she looked into the basket to judge the size of the crop.

“I have to get away from here,” Hanka whispered.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’ve seen enough. I’ll guess.”

“I’ll help you a little bit. I think you would eventually figure this out on your own, but you don’t have much time. These people, they live in a retirement home. The staff doesn’t take care of them, leave them for days without water, leave them without food so that they die. The ones who don’t die, the staff beat. You have to guess where they are! You have to say where, when, and who’s doing it!”

“Yes!” Hanka looked for a longer moment at the pear tree, then at the woman in black, trying to take in every detail. “I’ll find them.”

She got down to work early the next morning, dressing without paying much attention to what she put on and racing off to the post office. Despite the plague of mobile phones, the building still had payphones, and she went to one of the available booths. The damaged phones with their round dials were almost certainly out of order, but nobody had had time to dismantle the booths.

The clerks must have been playing a joke, putting phone directories inside—in the age of the Internet these, too, had become relics. But somebody had bothered to publish them, so maybe it was charitable to pretend that the exercise hadn’t been entirely pointless. Hanka stole one. Inside were the phone numbers and addresses of retirement homes in Katowice and throughout the entire district. It would be a place to start.

She sat down on a bench and tore out the pages that interested her, then hurled the rest of the thick book into some nearby bushes. She skimmed through the list of institutions, but none of the names seemed to connect to the dream. The Golden Nook. The Quiet Forest. It was going to be complicated, but she’d expected it would be. She’d have to visit each one of them.

“Good morning! Hanka Borowska,” Hanka, wearing a formal women’s suit, tried to make her tone sound haughty.

“What do you need?” a guard grunted, though he didn’t really seem to care.

“I want to see the institution, evaluate conditions. I’m planning to bring my mum here.”

Hearing this, the man’s attitude transformed.

“How nice!” he clucked.

Hanka had seen similar behaviour in few other institutions she’d visited so far. The promise of a new paying guest did wonders. Unfortunately, in previous retirement homes they hadn’t allowed her to see the residents.