Midsummer Dream House

 
THE SLEEPWALKERS

 
Warsaw, 10 October, 1959. I was sitting in a small dimly-lit bar off Nowy Świat Street. Actually, that makes it sound more glamorous than it was. I was sitting in a drab little corner bar on the ground floor of a concrete apartment building, a few blocks, but an irretrievably distant few blocks, from the lights and traffic and people on the main boulevard. It was a bar you’d only go to because you could walk there from your flat, and walk back again afterwards, no matter what condition you were in. There were no cars in the street outside; nobody who had a car would be bothered to come to this street, and nobody who lived here could afford one. Somebody had parked a scooter next to the door, though. I remember seeing the rain falling on its vinyl seat under the streetlight.

I was fairly drunk. Not too drunk to be sitting by myself in a bar, but too drunk to do much else. The radio was playing jazz, someone I liked, maybe Namysłowski. I was thinking about Wanda. From time to time I was also thinking I really should take off my jacket, which was wet from the rain, but then I’d forget about that and think about Wanda again.

Then she was there in the bar. I didn’t see her come in, but I realised the pale object hovering near the door, shaped like a big seashell, was her blonde hairdo. As I watched it, trying to focus, she walked over to me. I had been thinking about Wanda and about seeing her all night, but now I didn’t stand up when she stood next to my table. I didn’t decide to be rude, I just knew there was no point in welcoming her, because it wasn’t going to work out whatever I did. So I sat there and looked up at her. She had on a white sleeveless dress, and she was carrying a plastic raincoat over one arm and trailing a scarf from her hand. Her hair was always beautifully untroubled; I suppose hairspray kept it in in place under the scarf. Now I was staring at this exquisitely shaped blonde coiffure, hypnotised by it.

‘Jerzy, come home with me,’ she said.

I drew in a deep breath. ‘Look, I can’t. I’m claustrophobic. I can’t bear being inside. It’ll just make things worse if I come to your place. Why don’t you sit with me and have a drink?’

She frowned. ‘I don’t want to drink. I want you to come home with me.’

I shook my head. I didn’t know what else I could say to her, so I lit another cigarette and sat staring down at the table, ignoring her, to make her go away. It worked. When I next looked up, I saw her all-white shape going out the door.

I had waited all day for her to find me and ask me to come back. I’d imagined the conversation over and over again. Somehow it hadn’t come off as I’d imagined it. Anyway, she’d gone, which meant I could have another drink.

 

I woke up in my single-room flat alone and badly hung over. I went out into the hallway, fumbled with the telephone and eventually managed to call Wanda’s number. She wasn’t home. No doubt she’d already left for work. She was a typist in the Department of Culture. Her jazz singing was something she did a couple of times a month, when musicians and a place to play could be arranged. It didn’t pay anything, but it was important to her. She told me once she only really felt alive when she was on stage singing. Of course, she spent far more of her waking hours typing than singing; maybe that’s why she seemed only half there a lot of the time.

I was meant to be at work too, at my desk at the Ministry, but the idea of shaving and putting on a shirt and tie and going out and getting the tram – forget it, I decided, and fell back onto the bed. It didn’t matter whether I went in or not. They were never going to promote me and they were never going to fire me, so it really didn’t matter.

Then I wondered about my raincoat. I couldn’t remember taking it off when I got home. Maybe I’d left it behind in the bar. I prised open my eyes and saw the coat hanging on the back of the door, hanging crookedly, but there. One less thing to worry about.

An hour or so later I woke up again, and this time I got up and made coffee on the gas ring. It was too late to turn up at work now, so I got dressed and went out to get some fresh air. Yesterday’s rain had gone, the sun was out, and the day was warm for autumn, so I decided to go to the park, to Łazienki Królewskie. A tram came along straight away.

By the time I got to the park the sun had gone in again. It was a weekday, so there weren’t many people about; a few old fellows playing chess on the benches, a couple of women pushing prams. I avoided the Chopin statue and walked past the clipped hedges and lawns on to the far end of the park, where the trees grew more or less naturally and there were just muddy footpaths, not gravel walks.

The park was quiet under the grey sky. Big brown piles of fallen leaves stood where they had been raked up. They seemed to be moving, quivering and rustling somehow. I looked at them more closely. Ravens were burrowing under the heaped-up leaves, chasing worms, I suppose. Every mound I passed was shaking from inside. Black shiny birds’ heads popped out of the leaves and dived back in again; it was strange to see birds apparently going underground. There were ravens in the bare trees above, too, swooping from branch to branch and calling out to each other drily. They always sound like they are speaking out of the side of their mouths, ravens.

For a while I stood staring at a mossy stone urn on a pedestal, tucked away in the far corner of the park. I knew it was meant to tell me something about life, about my life, but I couldn’t grasp it, except perhaps that the urn had obviously been placed here before I was born and would probably still be here after I’d gone; it was a lot more permanent than I was.

I strolled around smoking and trying to think about Wanda, trying to understand what she really wanted and what I really felt about her, and to decide what to do about her. After an hour I had understood nothing, decided nothing. I left the park and took the tram back to the centre, then walked toward home. People were still at work, and the streets were quiet, but the autumn afternoon was already well advanced and the low grey sky was beginning to darken. A cold wind had got up; it snapped at the hem of my overcoat. A few brown leaves whipped past me as I walked. I hadn’t eaten all day, I realised. I went into a cafeteria on Sawicka Street and ordered soup and potatoes. My cooking wasn’t up to much, and anyway I didn’t feel like going home too early; in the evening my neighbours watched television, and the old man was deaf so it was always up loud, coming through the wall as a dull booming.

I didn’t see Wanda again until the next weekend. She very pointedly didn’t call me for the rest of the week, and it was only on Saturday evening, after I’d rung her and apologised and asked to see her, that we met. This time I wasn’t drunk.

The autumn had turned cold, and she was wearing a black roll-neck sweater under her overcoat when she got off the tram. I still remember seeing her standing on the pavement, her blonde coiffure freshly done, the glowing white spheres of the streetlights, fuzzy in the evening mist, receding in a long row behind her head along Jerozolimskie Avenue. We went to a bar up near the Europejski Hotel, a much more civilised bar than my local. I hung our coats on the rack inside the door and found a table in one corner. We sat facing each other without speaking, close, both with our elbows on the table. She really was very beautiful. A wide white forehead, pale blue eyes under marked brows, a straight nose and lips that always reminded me of a rose. Shapely long-fingered hands. That big cast of blonde hair. Only the small lines beside her eyes showed she wasn’t twenty.

After looking at me for a minute or so she sat back, sighed, and fished in her bag for her cigarettes. I offered her one of mine but she shook her head. Eventually she got a cigarette started, puffing on it in that awkward way women have, and began to talk.

She must have intended to ask me some questions she knew I didn’t want to answer, like ‘Why do you act that way?’ or ‘Tell me honestly, do you love me or not?’ or ‘Will we ever get married?’ but decided against it at the last moment, because now she started unravelling some inane story about her work, all the time looking down at the table and tapping her cigarette unnecessarily on the edge of the ashtray.

I got bored with this pretty quickly and interrupted to ask her about her music, whether she had any concerts lined up. She shook her blonde hairdo slightly, no, but she brightened up a bit and sat forward in her chair again.

‘Marcin told me Andrzej is going to make a film here, a film about musicians, with a jazz soundtrack. He says Krysztof will be doing the music, and he says I might be a chance to sing the title song.’

‘That’s great, absolutely great. Why didn’t you tell me straight away?’

‘Oh, well, it’s a chance, that’s all, not definite. I hardly know Andrzej and I don’t believe everything Marcin says.’ She was right about that, Marcin was a cunning little bastard, clever, but like most short men always on the make where women were concerned. That’s probably why she hesitated to talk about it, I thought, because she didn’t want to invest too much belief in one of Marcin’s stories, or to have too much to do with Marcin at all.

Even so, she looked happy when she’d finished telling me, her face almost flushed. I knew if she did get the chance to sing the title song for a film with a proper director like Andrzej, it would be a very big thing for her, it would define her life. I said some encouraging things about her talent and how it was a good time for young artists, and what I said wasn’t all hypocrisy, it was pretty much true. And I really wanted her to have that success, even though I sensed she would likely move out of my orbit if she did.

We had a happy evening together after that. We sat on in the bar for a while but didn’t drink much, and then we went to her place and we were happy there too, and I stayed the night. And on Sunday morning we went for a walk together along the river bank, and Wanda cooked me lunch, borsht with sour cream; I realised she must have prepared it in advance, expecting me to be there with her. We spent the afternoon in her bed, one of our best times together, actually. I suspected this kind of weekend was leading up to her asking once again when we would get married, but she didn’t ask, and I let it go, I just enjoyed the time we spent together.

During the next week I went to work every day and I didn’t see Wanda until Friday night. By eight I was waiting for her outside the Hybrydy club. I saw her at a distance, walking towards me from the tram stop. I was happy to see her, and I took her hand as we walked inside.

Jan Wróblewski was going to play, and the place was already packed. I got a couple of beers from the bar and carried them through the crowd to the tiny table that Wanda, Zofia Komeda, my schoolmate Marius, and a couple of other guys from the jazz scene were crammed around. By the time I sat down we were just about sitting in each other’s laps. The place was noisy, and it was hard to have anything more than a shouted conversation. I did notice Wanda didn’t say much unless I asked her directly, but I put that down to the noise in the club.

After a while Jan came on with a quartet, Krysztof on piano. They started with Round About Midnight but then played a lot of new things, including some pieces sounding almost like etudes, delicate but sharp and edgy, really very good.

The club got even more crowded after the band began playing, people were standing round the walls and sitting on the floor between the tables. We all admired Jan, he’d been to America, actually played at the Newport Festival, and every tune got huge applause, people shouting and drumming their feet on the floor until I thought the place would fall in on us. As always, Zofia sat stock still and stared at Krysztof the whole time; she was obsessively in love with him, especially when he was playing. The music was great, so good that a couple of hours went past without us noticing it. After the last set the applause was so loud and wild they had to come back and do encore after encore; we wouldn’t let them leave the stage.

Afterwards I got our coats from the garderobe and walked with Wanda to the tram stop on Marszałkowska. The sky was black, no stars at all; I could see the glow of the big four-branched streetlights further on at Plac Konstytucji. Two guys on a motor-scooter went by; one whistled at Wanda. We waited for the tram to rattle into view.

She stood staring down the street for a minute or two and then looked up at me. ‘Thanks, Jerzy. I’ll be all right, don’t wait.’

I felt like I’d been punched. ‘Actually, I thought we were going home together,’ I said, ‘to your place.’ It was true, I hadn’t just thought it, I’d been certain that’s what we were doing, I was already thinking about the feel of her smooth white skin, the warmth of her room. She stared down at her feet, and swivelled one shoe on its heel. ‘No, I’ll go home myself,’ she said, without looking at me.

‘Wanda, we were so happy last weekend, we can be like that again now. Don’t make me beg you, it spoils it.’

‘No, Jerzy. You might be happy, but I wonder all the time where this is going, whether you’re serious, whether next week I’ll find you drunk and ignoring me again. We just go on weekend to weekend and nothing is any different. I’m not sure I want to continue like this.’

So our happy time together a week ago has brought us here after all, she wants me to marry her. Even with Jan and Krysztof’s beautiful music in my head I wasn’t ready to agree to that.

We had five minutes of pointless argument; she wasn’t changing her mind and whatever I said only made it worse. When the number 2A tram pulled up, she got in, and I stood and watched it out of sight before crossing Marszałkowska and walking home. I didn’t call her on Saturday. Or Sunday.

I wanted to, but I knew if I called her, I had to say something about my intentions toward her. Whether I would marry her or not, basically. I couldn’t ignore what she’d told me, pretend it hadn’t been said. So I didn’t call her. And that, I knew, was giving her its own message.

But the next weekend, when we still hadn’t spoken, I got irritated. We were lovers, not children. When we were together we were happy. It was absurd that we shouldn’t see each other. So I called her. She sounded cool. I asked her to meet me for a drink at the bar near the Europejski, and she came. She had a bright silk scarf in a geometric pattern knotted round her neck, an ostentatiously young style I’d never seen on her before. I didn’t like it. It distracted me.

She realised within a few minutes I wasn’t going to ask her to marry me; I could see it in her face, which gradually cooled as we spoke. Instead I asked her about the film score; was she going to do the song for Krysztof?

She frowned, and stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Another girl got to do it, she knew Marcin and Andrzej. I never really believed it, anyway.’

I was sorry I’d asked, because that news spoilt the mood of the evening, gave it a sense of failure. I said something meant to be encouraging, but she turned her head away and waved dismissively. It was difficult to be cheerful after that. We had a couple of drinks and went back to her flat. We went to bed, but it was clear her heart wasn’t in it, she was distant. I knew she was waiting for me to say something, and every minute I didn’t the atmosphere got worse. In the end we were lying side by side without speaking; I couldn’t sleep, my head was aching, and I worked myself into a state of indignation and self-pity and left about dawn.

I was thinking so much about myself that it didn’t occur to me Wanda would be offended by my leaving, but as I was buttoning my shirt, she spoke to me from the darkness. ‘You’re going now, in the middle of the night?’ I grunted. ‘You make me feel like a whore,’ she said. She pulled the blankets over her head and I heard her begin to sob. I left anyway. I walked along the icy, gritty pavement past the Palace in the grey half-light, walking angrily, my teeth clenched, thinking that this stupid concept of marriage had ruined us, messed up our lives, and for nothing.

I didn’t blame Wanda; I blamed whoever had put this idea about marriage into her head in the first place. It was absurd. We were young, our friends were young, we lived day to day. it was impossible to take ourselves so seriously as to get married. And there was the music and all of us that loved it and followed it around. Why would Wanda and I become domestic, have the inevitable child, withdraw from the one bit of brightness we had in our lives?

After that evening we didn’t go out together any more. I only saw her at concerts. It was awkward; there was no pleasure in talking to her. We had gone overnight from being lovers to being confused, unhappy people behaving childishly.

Now that I was not seeing Wanda, I had nothing really to do; I went to work, more or less. I came home. I had a drink. I walked round the streets of Warsaw. I went to bed. There was nothing else.

Nothing else apart from the music, that is. The music was the one good thing about the weeks and months after Wanda and I broke up. It was a special time just then. Almost every weekend somebody good played at the Hybrydy or somewhere, and the music was wonderful, better than anything we heard coming from America, let alone from Czechoslovakia or East Germany. Krysztof had Tomasz Stańko playing with him, Adam Makowicz had a swinging piano trio; there were good musicians everywhere. Some nights, when the music really sparkled and sang, you’d find yourself embracing a stranger next to you in a bar because the music was so great. Those nights were everything, they were the counterpoint to the grey pointless days. We weren’t allowed a church, but the crowded, smoky jazz clubs were a kind of church for us.

One evening I sat in a cellar bar with fifty people listening in hushed silence to Andrzej Kurylewicz playing a long solo piano piece. It was hypnotic, strong and beautiful, so beautiful that at the end we hesitated to applaud, but then we did, like mad; he just sat there, head bowed, looking down at the keyboard.

I went up to him afterward and asked him what the piece was called. ‘Somnambulicy,’ he said, ‘Sleepwalkers.’ He looked at me for a moment and added, ‘Aren’t we all sleepwalking here?’ I thought about my own life, what I’d done and what I was going to do, and I couldn’t argue with him.

We were all absolutely sleepwalking. Things just happened in our lives, there was nothing we could do about them. We were powerless. I don’t mean in a political sense, most of us didn’t care about that, but just in our daily lives. Days followed nights followed days. We argued amongst ourselves about how things ought to be done, but nothing happened, nobody got any smarter, nothing got better or resolved or decided, we kept on repeating the same lines, and the days just kept on rolling on, one after another. I had absolutely no idea how to make it any different.

Wanda rang me about three months later. It was nearly summer, and probably because the trees were in full green leaf, the streets seemed wider and the city felt less restricting and harsh than when we’d broken up. She told me she’d got a gig at the Hybrydy, singing with her own band, the next Saturday night. Over the phone her voice sounded different, deeper and more confident. I supposed it was from singing more. She invited me to come to the gig and I congratulated her and said yes, I would certainly come. I realised from her tone it was important to her that I be at her first serious concert. I’d assumed she had taken up with someone else after me, but I wondered, from the warmth in her voice, if this call was an offer of peace, if it meant we would be able to start again. I thought about what that would be like, how it would be to have Wanda with me again; perhaps I should marry her, or at least promise to marry her.

I didn’t get to Wanda’s concert. I dropped in for a quick drink at my local bar early on Saturday evening, and by eight I was too drunk to go anywhere. I told myself it didn’t matter, Wanda had only invited me to show off, there was no chance of getting together with her again, because I wasn’t going to marry her. I can’t remember much of that night now, the usual stupid boring night with stupid drunken people, me most of all. At some point a fat girl, a fat farmer’s daughter, was sitting on my lap. I don’t know why I allowed that, but I did. When I woke up the next day, I felt so bad I would have gone to confession if I could have.

After that Wanda didn’t ring me again. The centre of Warsaw is a small place, and I saw her in the clubs and coffee shops where people in the jazz scene hung out. I couldn’t tell if she was on her own or not. I wasn’t going to ask. Every time I saw her, every time I thought about her, I knew what had happened between us was stupid. But I didn’t do anything about it. One Saturday night, in a moment of clarity, I punched a hole in the fibreboard wall of the Panic coffee shop, because I realised I was wilfully throwing away the chance of being happy, and it was unbearable. That was only one moment, though. The rest of the time it all felt as remote as if I were sleepwalking.

In June Andrzej’s film came out. It was good and bad. It was meant to be about us, our generation, but the dialogue was artificial, not how we really talked. On the other hand it caught the atmosphere of Warsaw beautifully, all in black and white. And Krysztof’s music was wonderful, especially the theme song, the song Wanda didn’t get to sing. It was filmed in places I knew, even in some of the clubs and bars I had been with Wanda. Quite a few people I knew were extras in it, and of course Marcin fiddled himself a small speaking part.

Although the film irritated me, I went to see it half a dozen times. Each time I was looking for a scene that wasn’t actually in the movie, a scene showing my story with Wanda, even if it was in the background. If I could see us through Andrzej’s eyes, objectively, I might be able to understand what had happened, know what to do.

The last time I watched it, that came true. I was sitting as usual near the back of the theatre. Not long after the opening credits, through the clouds of cigarette smoke, I saw Wanda’s blonde seashell hairdo. At first I thought it was in the film after all, then I realised she was sitting up the front. There were people on either side of her, but the theatre was full, and I couldn’t tell if she was there alone or not. I watched the back of her hairdo throughout the film. Everything on the screen was a blurry backdrop; I knew all the lines by heart anyway. She sat unmoving through all of it.

At the end, I hurried out of my row, bumping past people’s knees, and pushed through the crowd going down the stairs. I caught up with Wanda in the lobby. I actually had my mouth open to speak to her when I saw Marcin beside her. They were holding hands. Wanda stared at me without any expression. Marcin pretended to be looking the other way. Just as well; if he’d turned to me with his usual smug face I would have bashed him. As it was, I stood back and let them leave without saying anything. Then I walked home. There wasn’t anything else I could do.

 

Fiction by Peter Newall
First published in Glassworks Magazine

 

 

Peter Newall has lived in Sydney, Australia, Kyoto, Japan, and now Odesa, Ukraine, where before the war he sang for a local R’n’B band, the Newall Band. He has been published in England, Hong Kong, India, Australia and the USA.