I drove home, weeping out of helplessness. My hands were shaking, and now I knew this would end badly. With a sigh of relief, the Samurai stopped outside the house, as if it were on my side in everything. I pressed my face against the steering wheel. The horn responded sadly, like a summons. Like a cry of mourning.
My Ailments appear treacherously; I never know when they’re coming. And then something happens inside my body, my bones begin to ache. It’s an unpleasant ache, sickening – that’s the word I’d use. It continues incessantly, it doesn’t stop for hours, sometimes days on end. There’s no hiding from this pain, there are no pills or injections for it. It must hurt, just as a river must flow and fire must burn. It spitefully reminds me that I consist of physical particles, which are slipping away by the second. Perhaps one could get used to it? Learn to live with it, just as people live in the cities of Auschwitz or Hiroshima without ever thinking about what happened there in the past. They simply live their lives.
But after these pains in my bones come pains in my stomach, intestine, liver, everything we have inside, without cease. Glucose is capable of soothing it for a while, so I always carry a small bottle in my pocket. I never know when an Attack will occur, or when I will feel worse. Sometimes it’s as if I’m composed of nothing but symptoms of illness, I am a phantom built out of pain. Whenever I find it hard to know what to do with myself, I imagine I have a zip fastener in my belly, from my neck to my groin, and that I’m slowly undoing it, from top to bottom. And then I pull my arms out of my arms, my legs out of my legs, and take my head off my head. As I extract myself from my own body, it falls off me like old clothes. Underneath them I’m finer, soft, almost transparent. I have a body like a Jellyfish, white, milky, phosphorescent.
This fantasy is the only thing capable of bringing me relief. Oh yes, then I am free.
Towards the end of the week, on Friday, I asked Dizzy to come later than usual, for I was feeling sick enough to have decided to go to the doctor.
I sat in the queue in the waiting room and remembered how I had met Doctor Ali.
Last year, the Sun had burned me again. I must have looked rather pitiful, because the terrified nurses on reception took me straight into the ward. They told me to wait there, and as I was hungry, I fetched some biscuits sprinkled with coconut out of my bag and tucked into them. Shortly after, the doctor appeared. He was pale brown, like a walnut. He looked at me and said: ‘I like coconut baskets too.’
That made me warm to him at once. He turned out to have a special Characteristic – like many people who have learned Polish in adult life, he swapped some words for completely different ones.
‘I’ll soon see what’s wailing you,’ he said this time.
This Man treated my Ailments very thoroughly, and not just the ones affecting my skin. His dark face was always calm. Taking his time, he would tell me convoluted anecdotes while carefully checking my pulse and blood pressure. Oh yes, he certainly went far beyond the duties of a dermatologist. Ali, who came from the Middle East, had very traditional, reliable methods for curing skin diseases – he’d tell the ladies at the pharmacy to prepare some unusually elaborate ointments and lotions, time-consuming to make and including many ingredients. I guessed the local pharmacists didn’t like him for this reason. His mixtures had startling colours and shocking smells. Perhaps he believed that the cure for an allergic rash had to be just as spectacular as the rash itself.
Today he closely examined the bruises on my arms as well. ‘How did this happen?’
I made light of the matter. Just a small knock has always been enough to give me a red mark for a month. He also looked down my throat, felt my lymph nodes and listened to my lungs.
‘Would you please give me something to anaesthetise me?’ I said. ‘There must be some sort of drug. I’d like that. To stop me from feeling anything, or worrying, to let me sleep. Is that possible?’
He started writing out the prescriptions. He contemplated each one at length, chewing the tip of his pen; finally he handed me a whole wad of them, and each medicine was to be made to order.
I returned home late. It had been dark for a long time now, and since yesterday a foehn wind had been blowing, so the snow was melting rapidly and dreadful sleet was falling. Luckily the stove had not gone out. Dizzy was late too, for once again it was impossible to drive up our road because of the softened, slippery snow. He left his little Fiat where the asphalt ended and came on foot, soaked through and frozen to the marrow.
Dizzy, official name Dionizy, showed up at my house every Friday, and as he came straight from work, I would make dinner that day. As I am alone the rest of the week, I make a large pot of soup on Sunday, and heat it up daily until Thursday, when I eat dry provisions from the kitchen cupboard, or a pizza Margarita in town.
Dizzy has a nasty allergy, so I can’t give free rein to my culinary imagination. I have to cook for him without using dairy products, nuts, peppers, eggs or wheat, which greatly limits our menu. Especially as we don’t eat meat. Sometimes, when he’d been recklessly tempted by something unsuitable for him, his skin would be covered in an itchy rash, and little blisters filled with water. Then he’d start to scratch uncontrollably, and the scratched skin would change into festering wounds. So it was better not to experiment. Even Ali and his mixtures weren’t capable of calming Dizzy’s allergy. Its nature was mysterious and perfidious – the symptoms varied. No one had ever managed to catch it in the act with any test.
From his tatty backpack Dizzy pulled an exercise book and a battery of coloured pens, at which he cast impatient glances throughout our meal; then, once we’d eaten every last scrap and were sipping black tea (the only kind that finds favour with us), he reported on what he had managed to do that week. Dizzy was translating Blake. Or so he had decided, and until now he had been rigorously pursuing his aim.
Once, long ago, he had been my pupil. Now he had reached the age of thirty, but in fact he was no different in any way from the Dizzy who had accidentally locked himself in the lavatory during his secondary-school graduation English exam, with the result that he had failed it. He’d been too embarrassed to call for help. He’d always been slight, boyish, or even girlish, with small hands and soft hair.
It’s strange that fate brought us together again many years after that unfortunate exam, here in the marketplace in town. I saw him one day as I was coming out of the post office. He was on his way to collect a book he had ordered on the internet. Unfortunately, I must have changed a lot, because he didn’t instantly recognise me, but stared at me with his mouth open, blinking.
‘Is it you?’ he finally whispered, sounding surprised.
‘Dionizy?’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I live near here. What about you?’
‘So do I, Mrs Duszejko.’
Then we spontaneously threw ourselves into each other’s arms. It turned out that while working in Wrocław as an IT specialist for the Police, he’d failed to avoid some reorganisation and restructuring. He’d been offered a job in the provinces, and even guaranteed temporary accommodation at a hostel until he found himself a proper flat. But Dizzy hadn’t found one, and was still living at the local workers’ hostel, a vast, ugly, concrete block where all the noisy tour groups stopped on their way to the Czech Republic, and businesses held their team-building events, with drunken parties until dawn. Dizzy had a large room in there, with a vestibule and a shared kitchen upstairs.