Only then does it fall to Earth, and is immediately clothed in a body. Human, animal or vegetable.
That’s the way it is.
I was released the next day, before those unfortunate forty-eight hours had elapsed. All three of them came to fetch me, and I threw myself into their arms as if I had been in another world for years and years. Dizzy had a cry, while Good News and Oddball sat stiffly in the back of the car. They were plainly horrified by what had happened, far more than I was, and in the end I was the one who had to comfort them. I asked Dizzy to stop at the shop, and we bought ice cream.
But on the whole, from the time of my brief stay in custody I became very absent-minded. I couldn’t come to terms with the fact that the policemen had searched my house, and from then on I sensed their presence everywhere – they’d rummaged in the drawers, in the wardrobes and the desk. They hadn’t found anything, for what could they have found? But order had been disturbed, peace destroyed. I drifted about the house, incapable of any work. I kept talking to myself, and realised that there was something wrong with me. My large windows attracted me – I stood in them, unable to tear my gaze from what I could see – rippling russet grasses, their dance in the invisible wind, the instigators of that motion. And shimmering patches of green in all shades too. I’d become pensive and would be lost in thought for hours at a time. I put down my keys in the garage, for instance, and couldn’t find them for a week. I burned the kettle. I’d take vegetables out of the freezer and only rediscover them once they were shrivelled and past their best. From the corner of my eye I could see how much movement there was in my house – people coming and going, from the boiler room upstairs and into the garden, then back again. My Little Girls running joyfully through the hall. Mummy sitting on the terrace drinking tea. I could hear the clink of the teaspoon striking the cup and her long, sad sighs. It only went quiet when Dizzy came; and he was almost always with Good News, as long as she didn’t have a delivery of goods the next day.
When my pains intensified, one day Dizzy called for an ambulance. Apparently I had to go to hospital. It was a good time for an ambulance to come – August, the road was hard and dry, the weather was beautiful and – praise the planets – I had had my morning shower and my feet were nice and clean.
Now I was lying in the ward, strangely empty, with open windows, through which came aromas from the allotments – of ripe tomatoes, dry grasses, burning stalks. The Sun had entered Virgo, who was starting her autumn tidying and was already stocking up for the winter.
They came to see me, of course, but nothing makes me feel more uncomfortable than being visited in hospital. I really don’t know what to do with myself. Every conversation in this unpleasant place becomes unnatural and forced. I hope they didn’t think badly of me for telling them to go home.
Ali the dermatologist often came and sat on my bed. He’d drop in from the next ward, bringing me well-thumbed magazines. I told him about my bridge in Syria (I wonder if it’s still there?), and he told me about his work with itinerant tribes in the desert. For some time he had been a doctor for nomads, and had travelled with them, examining and treating them. Always on the move. He himself was a nomad. He had never stayed at any hospital for more than two years before something had suddenly started to make him itch and feel restless, so he’d try for another job in another place. The patients who had overcome all sorts of prejudices and finally come to trust him would be abandoned – one day a sign would appear on the door of his consulting room to say that Doctor Ali was no longer there. Naturally, his roving lifestyle and his ethnic origin doomed him to the interest of various special services – as a result his phone was always bugged. Or so at least he claimed.
‘Do you have any Ailments of your own?’ I once asked him.
Oh yes, he did. Every winter he suffered from depression, and the room at the workers’ hostel that the local authority had assigned him deepened his melancholy even more. He had one valuable object that he had acquired through years of work – it was a large lamp that emitted rays similar to sunlight, and was thus designed to raise the spirits. He often spent the evening exposing his face to this artificial Sun, while mentally wandering the deserts of Libya or Syria, or perhaps Iraq.
I wondered what his Horoscope was like. But I was too sick to do the calculations. This time I was in a bad way. I lay in a darkened room, suffering from a severe light allergy; my skin was red and blistered, stinging as if it were being slashed by tiny scalpels.
‘You must avoid Sunlight,’ he warned me. ‘I’ve never seen skin like yours before – you are crated for life underground.’
He laughed, because for him it was unimaginable – he was entirely geared towards the Sun, like a sunflower. Whereas I was like white chicory, a potato sprout – I should spend the rest of my life in the boiler room.
I admired him for the fact that – so he said – he only ever owned as many things as he could pack into two cases at the drop of a hat, in less than an hour. I resolved to learn this skill from him. I promised myself that as soon as I came out, I’d practise. A backpack and a laptop, that should suffice for any Person. Like this, wherever he ended up, Ali was at home.
This drifter physician reminded me that we should never make ourselves too comfortable in any particular place, in which case I had probably gone too far with my house. Doctor Ali gave me a jalabiya – a white ankle-length shirt, with long sleeves, that buttoned up to the neck. He said the white colour acts as a mirror, reflecting rays of light.
In the second half of August my condition grew so much worse that I was taken to Wrocław for tests, which didn’t really bother me. In a semi-conscious state for days on end, I anxiously fantasised about my sweet peas, worrying that I should be tending the sixth generation, or else the results of my research would cease to be valid and once again we would assume that we don’t inherit our life experience, that all the sciences in the world are a waste of time, and that we’re incapable of learning anything from history. I dreamed that I called Dizzy, but he didn’t answer the phone because my Little Girls had just given birth to children, and there were lots and lots of them on the floor in the hall and the kitchen. They were people, a completely new race of people brought forth by Animals. They were still blind – they hadn’t yet opened their eyes. And I dreamed I was looking for my Little Girls in the big city; in the dream I still had hope, but it was a stupid hope, so painful.
One day the Writer came to see me at the hospital in Wrocław to comfort me politely and to gently inform me that she was selling her house.
‘The place has changed,’ she said, offering me some mushroom pancakes from Agata.
She said she felt bad vibes there, she was afraid at night, and had lost her appetite.
‘It’s impossible to live in a place where things like that happen. Those dreadful murders have brought various minor deceptions and improprieties to light. It turns out I’ve been living among monsters,’ she said fretfully. ‘You are the only honest person in the whole place.’
‘You know what, I was planning to give up caring for the houses next winter anyway,’ I said, confused by the compliment.
‘A wise decision. You’d be better off in a warm country…’