Einstein's Monsters (5 page)

I first met Bujak one wintry morning in the late spring of 1980—or of PN 35, if you use the postnuclear calendar that he sometimes favored. Michiko’s car had something wrong with it, as usual (a flat, on this occasion), and I was down on the street grappling with the burglar tools and the spare. Compact and silent, Michiko watched me sadly. I’d managed to loosen the nuts on the collapsed wheel, but the aperture for the jack was ominously soft and sticky with rust. The long-suffering little car received the vertical spear in its chassis and stayed stoically earthbound. Now I have to say that I am already on very bad terms with the inanimate world. Even when making a cup of coffee or changing a light bulb (or a fuse!), I think—What is it with objects? Why are they so aggressive? What’s their beef with
me?
Objects and I, we can’t go on like this. We must work out a compromise, a freeze, before one of us does something rash. I’ve got to meet with their people and hammer out a deal.

“Stop it, Sam,” said Michiko.

“Get a real car,” I told her.

“Please, just stop. Stop it! I’ll call a towtruck or something.”

“Get a real car,” I said and thought—yeah, or a real boyfriend. Anyway, I was throwing the tools into their pouch, dusting my palms and wiping away my tears when I saw Bujak pacing across the road toward us. Warily I monitored his approach. I had seen this hulking Bohunk or throwback Polack from my study window, busying himself down on the street, always ready to flex his primitive can-do and know-how. I wasn’t pleased to see him. I have enough of the standard-issue paranoia, or I did then. Now I’ve grown up a little and realize that I have absolutely nothing to fear, except the end of the world. Along with everybody else. At least in the next war there won’t be any special wimps, punchbags, or unpopularity contests. Genocide has had its day and we’re on to something bigger now. Suicide.

“You a Jew?” asked Bujak in his deeply speckled voice.

“Yup,” I said.

“Name?”

And number? “Sam,” I told him.

“Short for?”

I hesitated and felt Michi’s eyes on my back.

“Is it Samuel?”

“No,” I said. “Actually it’s Samson.”

The smile he gave told me many things, most obviously that here—here was a happy man. All eyes and teeth, the smile was ridiculous in its gaiety, its candor. But then happiness is a pretty clownish condition, when you stop to think about it. I mean, round-the-clock happiness, it’s hardly an appropriate response. To me, this gave him an element of instability, of counterstrength, of violence. But Bujak here was clearly happy, in his universe. Bujak, with his happiness accessory.

“Jews usually good up here,” he said, and knocked a fingertip on his shaved head. “No good with their hands.”

Bujak was good with
his
hands: to prove it, he bent forward and picked up the car with them.

“You’re kidding,” I said. But he wasn’t. As I got to work he was already shooting the breeze with Michiko, nonchalantly asking her if she’d lost any family at Nagasaki or Hiroshima. Michi had, as it happened—a cousin of her father’s. This was news to me but I felt no surprise. It seems that everyone loses someone in the big deaths. Bujak changed stance freely, and, at one point, lifted a forgetful hand to scratch his skull. The car never wavered. I watched Bujak as I worked, and saw that the strength he called on owed nothing to the shoulders or the great curved back—just the arms, the arms. It was as if he were raising the lid of a cellar door, or holding up a towel while a little girl dressed on the beach. Then he roughly took the tire iron from my hands and knelt on one knee to rivet the bolts. As the grained slab of his head loomed upward again Bujak’s eyes were tight and unamused, and they moved roughly too across my face. He nodded at Michi and said to me, “And who did you lose?”

“Uh?” I said. If I understood his question, then the answer was none of his business.

“I give money to Israel every year,” he said. “Not much. Some. Why? Because the Polish record on the Jews is disgraceful. After the war even,” he said, and grinned. “Quite disgraceful. Look. There is a tire mender in Basing Street. Tell them Bujak and they will make it for you fairly.”

Thanks, we both said. Off he went, measuring the road with his strides. Later, from my study window, I saw him pruning roses in the small front garden. A little girl, his granddaughter, was crawling all over his back. I saw him often, from my study window. In those days, in 1980, I was trying to be a writer. No longer. I can’t take the study life, the life of the study. This is the only story I’ll ever tell, and this story is true.… Michiko was sold on Bujak right away and dropped a thank-you note through his door that same afternoon. But it took a while before I had really made terms with Bujak.

I asked around about this character, as you will when you’re playing at writing. Like I said, everybody knew Bujak. In the streets, the pubs, the shops, they spoke of him as a fixer and handyman, omnicompetent: all the systems that keep a house going, that keep it alive—Bujak could handle them, the veins, the linings, the glands, and the bowels. He was also marked down as a definite eccentric, a stargazer, a “philosopher”—not, I gathered, a valued calling in these parts—and on occasion as an out-and-out
nutter
(one of those words that never sound right on American lips, like
quid
and
bloody).
People gave Bujak his due as a family man: once Michi and I glimpsed him quite far afield, outside the Russian church on the junction of St. Petersburg Place and Moscow Road, erect in his suit, with his mother, his daughter, and his granddaughter; I remember thinking that even huge Bujak could show the fussed delicacy you get from living in a house full of ladies. But most eagerly and vehemently, of course, they spoke of Bujak the peacekeeper, the vigilante, the rough-justice artist. They spoke of skirmishes, vendettas, one-man wars, preemptive strikes. Standing there in the pub, the shoulderless and bespectacled American with his beer mug awkwardly poised, or peering over a counter, or standing on a corner with milk carton and newspaper under my arm, I was indulged with tales of Bujak and the strong force.

The time he caught two black kids prying at a neighbor’s basement window and sent them twirling into the street with two flicks of his wrist, like someone mucking out a trench. Or what he did to their big brothers when they jumped him in Golbourne Road the following night. Any brawler or burglar nabbed by Bujak soon wished himself under the hosepipe in some nice safe slammer. He took on all comers. Feuding with the council, he once dragged a skip full of rubbish a hundred yards from his front door. He went out one night and upended a truck after a row about a generator with some local building contractors. The Bujak women could walk the All Saints Road at any hour and expect no bother. And Bujak himself could silence a pub just by walking past it. He was popular, though. He was the community man, and such community as the street had devolved upon Bujak. He was our deterrent.

And it wasn’t enough.… Now, in 1985, it is hard for me to believe that a city is anything more or other than the sum of its streets, as I sit here with the Upper West Side blatting at my window and fingering my heart. Sometimes in my dreams of New York danger I stare down over the city—and it looks half made, half wrecked, one half (the base perhaps) of something larger torn in two, frayed, twangy, moist with rain or solder. And you mean to tell me, I say to myself, that this is supposed to be a
community?
 … My wife and daughter move around among all this, among the violations, the life-trashers, the innocent murderers. Michiko takes our little girl to the daycare center where she works. Daycare—that’s good. But what about dawn care, dusk care, what about night care? If I just had a force I could enfold them with, oh, if I just had the strong force.… Bujak was right. In the city now there are loose components, accelerated particles—something
has
come loose, something is wriggling, lassooing, spinning toward the edge of its groove. Something must give and it isn’t safe. You ought to be terribly careful. Because safety has left our lives. It’s gone forever. And what do animals do when you give them only danger? They make more danger, more, much more.

It was 1980, the birth year of Solidarity, and Bujak was Polish. This combination of circumstances led me to assume that Bujak was liberal in his sentiments. Actually it didn’t follow. As I proudly strolled with him to the timber yard or the home-improvement stores off the Portobello Road, Bujak would fume against the blacks, the
czarnuchy
, as they strutted and gabbled round about us. The blacks were fine, he grinningly argued, in a context of sun, surf, and plentiful bananas; but in a Western city they were just children—understandably angry children too. Once he stopped dead to marvel at two gay punks in
NO FUTURE
T-shirts, with hair like old ladies’ bonnets, as they walked toward us hand in hand. “It’s incredible, isn’t it,” he said, rolling the
r.
With the faggots, Bujak saw their plight, and their profusion, as an Einsteinian matter also. He confessed to the fantasy of leading a cavalry charge against the streets and their strange ensembles—the sound of the hooves, the twirling cutlasses. “A desire which I suppress of course. But if I could just press a button,” he added, greedily eying the
pedaly
, the
czarnuchy
, the street dwellers as they turned and gesticulated and reshuffled and moved on.

Violence in a man is usually the overspill of something else. You know how it is. You see these guys. I appear to have an almost disabling sensitivity to violence in other men, a fallout detector for those spots of waste or exorbitance that spill over into force. Like a canary in a prewar coalmine, I check out early when there is violence, when there is poison in the air. What is this propensity? Call it
fear
, if you like.
Fear
will do fine. The raised voice in the restaurant and its sour tang of brutality and booze, the look a man will give his wife which demotes her on the human scale, which prepares her for the human disgrace of violence, the pumping leg, the fizzing eye, the public bar at ten fifty-five. I see all this—my body sees it, and gives me adrenaline, gives me sweat. I faint at the sight of blood. I faint at the sight of a Band-Aid, an aspirin. This sense of critical fragility (myself, my wife, my daughter, even the poor planet, baby blue in its shawls), it drove me from my study in the end. The study life is all thought and anxiety and I cannot take the study life anymore.

Late at night, over at Bujak’s large, aromatic, icon-infested apartment (the blue glow of saints, candles, vigils), I scanned the big Pole for the excresences of violence. His mother, old Roza, made the tea. The old woman (“rouge” with an a on the end), she calmed me with her iconic presence, the moist hair grained like silver, as Bujak talked about the strong force, the energy locked in matter. Grinning in the gloom, Bujak told me what he had done to the Nazi collaborator in Warsaw, in 1943. Boy, I thought; I bet the guy didn’t do much collaborating after that. However, I couldn’t conceal my distaste. “But aren’t you glad?” urged Bujak. No, I said, why should I be? “You lost two grandparents to these people.” Yeah, I said. So? That doesn’t change anything. “Revenge,” said Bujak simply. Revenge is overrated, I told him. And out of date. He looked at me with violent contempt. He opened his hands in an explanatory gesture: the hands, the arms, the policemen of his will. Bujak was a big fan of revenge. He had a lot of time for revenge.

I once saw him use those hands, those arms. I saw it all from my study window, the four-paneled screen (moon-spotted, with refracting crossbar) through which the world came in at me then. I saw the four guys climb from the two cars and steady themselves in front of Bujak’s stoop. Did I hear a scream from within, a cry of warning or yearning? … Bujak’s daughter gave the old man a lot of grief. Her first name was Leokadia. Her second name was trouble. Rural-looking yet glamorous, thirty-three, tall, plump, fierce, and tearful, she was the unstable element in Bujak’s nucleus. She had, I noticed, two voices, one for truth, and one for nonsense, one for lies. Against the brown and shiny surface of her old-style dresses, the convex and the concave were interestingly disposed.
Her
daughter, little Boguslawa, was the by blow of some chaotic twelve-hour romance. It was well known on the street that Leokadia had round heels: the sort of girl (we used to say) who went into a hot flush every time she saw an army personnel carrier. She even made a pitch at me, here at the flat one time. Needless to say, I failed to come across. I had my reasons: fear of reprisals from Michiko and Bujak himself (they both loomed in my mind, incongruously equal in size); also, more basically, I’m by no means sure I could handle someone like Leokadia in the cot. All that breast and haunch. All those freckles and tears.… For six months she had been living with a man who beat her, lithe little Pat, sinewy, angular, wired very tight. I think she beat him too, a bit. But violence is finally a masculine accomplishment. Violence—now that’s man’s work. Leokadia kept going back to Pat, don’t ask me why. I don’t know. They don’t know. There she goes again, ticking back to him on her heels, with black eye, grazed cheek, wrenched hair. Nobody knows why. Not even they know. Bujak, surprisingly, stayed out of it, held his distance, remained solid—though he did try to keep the little girl, Boguslawa, safely at home, out of the turbulence. You would often see old Roza ferrying the kid from one flat to the other. After her second spell in the hospital (cracked ribs this time) Leokadia called it a day and went home for good. Then Pat showed up with his pals and found Bujak waiting.

The three men (I saw it all) had an unmistakable look about them, with that English bad-boy build, proud guts and tapering legs that bent backward from the knee down, sparse-haired with old-young faces, as if they had done their aging a lot quicker than one year at a time. I don’t know whether these guys would have frightened anybody much on the American circuit, but I guess they were big enough and their intention was plain. (Did you read about the Yablonsky murders? In the States these days, if you’re on the list, they come in and do the whole family. Yes, they just nuke you now.) Anyway, they frightened me. I sat writhing at my desk as Pat led them through the garden gate. I hated the flares of his jeans, the compact running shoes, the tight Fred Perry. Then the front door opened: bespectacled Bujak, wearing braces over his vest, old, huge. In a reflex that spelt seriousness and scorn, the men loosened their shoulders and let their hands dangle in readiness. Words were exchanged—demand, denial. They moved forward.