| About the book
Since the envoys had brought news of the arrival of the Emperor, Bolesław’s kingdom had been overwhelmed by an all-encompassing state of commotion. Aside from the settlers living deep within the deepest forests, there was probably no one who did not, in some way or other, (...)
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8
The phones are always going wrong, so my parents aren’t upset when there’s no dialling tone. They’re at the fortieth birthday party of a female friend from their class at high school. They say they’re going downstairs to the phone booth for a (...)
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Wojciech JagielskiA good place to die
About the book
In the stairwell in Rubik’s building there was no door. Someone had stolen it, or maybe one of the neighbours had removed it in the night and cut it up for firewood. Holding the banister, Rubik clambered up to the third floor and fumbled in the dark to get his key into the door lock. Just over the threshold, on a shelf to the left lay a candle.
The lights were turned on for two hours a day, once early in the morning, another time at noon, and yet another time in the middle of the night. It was all meant to be organised and people given advance warning. The hours when the electricity was on in various districts were supposed to change according to a government schedule, in order to be fair.
In Rubik’s district they had started by switching on the electricity late at night, and that was how it had stayed. Rubik, Gayane and her mother took turns on duty for two or three hours each. As soon as the current came on, the whole family leaped to their feet. They bathed, Gayane did the laundry, and her mother washed piles of dirty dishes and made soup. Finally they filled the bath and some buckets with water.
It was worse for the people in houses where the electricity came on in the middle of the day. Sylvia’s teacher sent the children home after the third lesson and ran home herself, because in her district the hours when the current was on were between twelve and two. The heating was not on at school, and because of the freezing cold the lessons were reduced to twenty minutes each. Finally, the school closed for good.
Ever since Gayane and Sylvia had gone to stay with relatives in Russia, Rubik had stopped being on electricity duty. Once winter had set in, many Armenians had sent their families abroad. And now that his mother-in-law had gone to her village in Nagorno-Karabakh for potatoes, onions and meat, Rubik just slept and ate at home.
The old woman felt drawn to her native region, although her village had been burned down by the Azeris. She came back from every trip with more and more disdain for the Armenians in Yerevan.
“Ech, you city wimps,” she sneered. “You should be sent to learn a lesson from our boy scouts! Whoever heard the like?!” she cried indignantly. “Some people are starving, while others are crashing limousines and drinking champagne! Over there they’ve got war and famine, here there’s thieving, profiteering and criminality!”
Now Grandma had left, because you could no longer get anything in Yerevan. You even had to queue outside the bakeries in the freezing cold for hours on end. But the real nightmare began when the government decided to change the money. For several days Rubik couldn’t buy anything. They hadn’t yet been paid in the new currency, the dram, but the old roubles weren’t being accepted in the shops.
Rubik heated soup on a camp stove in the dining room. Grandma had made a whole pot of it.
There was a pile of books stacked on shelving by the wall. Some of them were on the shelves, others were piled on top of each other on the floor. They had already burned the old newspapers and exercise books last winter. Now Rubik was burning the books.
The ones arranged in even stacks against the wall were to go on the fire first, including Rubik and Gayane’s student textbooks, exercise books, some old romance novels in tatty paper covers, and Sylvia’s children’s books.
Rubik tore out page after page and carefully pressed them in between the sticks in the hearth. If the firewood had been dry, just a few pages would have been enough, but the recently cut branches refused to catch fire, so he had to use a lot of paper as kindling.
The books in the bookcase were not in a random order either. Rubik had done a lot of thinking before putting them in this, rather than any other sequence. All that was left were just novels, collections of poetry, encyclopaedias, textbooks on the history of literature and art, picture albums and biographies. They stood in a row from left to right.
It was an uneven row. Some books stuck out at the top, others pushed their spines out in front, and the thin ones were getting lost between the fat volumes of the encyclopaedias. Cloth spines were mixed with paperbacks.
As the pile of books on the floor dwindled, the ones on the shelving kept disappearing too. The ones from the bookcase made their way onto the floor, went to the very bottom of the pile and waited their turn for the fire.
Rubik inspected each one for a long time and thought hard before allotting it a place in the row. At the very end, right against the wall, stood two inconspicuous little books, one in hard covers and the other printed on cheap yellow paper with a thin, shoddy cover. They were Rubik’s poems.
For his first collection, the one in hard covers, he had won the Writers’ Union prize. In Rubik’s opinion, the second volume of love poems was miles better than the first. He wrote them between rallies at the Opera square and heated discussions in the editor-in-chief’s office, which was black with cigarette smoke. Rubik was head of the culture department, and in Armenia the Springtime of Nations had begun, the Armenian Age of Aquarius.
The second volume of poetry, in which Rubik had placed so much hope, was published on ugly yellow paper in a print-run of several hundred copies. Apparently only less than a hundred copies were sold. Soon after the publishing firm went bust. “You’re very unlucky, my boy, to be living in these bloody awful times,” the head of it told Rubik. “Your poems are really good, but in our country people are in no hurry to start reading poetry.”
Then the periodical for which Rubik wrote essays and literary criticism closed down. No one needed a poet.
The worst torment for Rubik was the cold weather. For three months it was like living in a fridge. It was cold outside, cold at the office, cold at home and cold in bed. It was a permanent state of bitter cold, constant numbness and icy stiffness that cramped his movements, enslaved his mind and discouraged any sort of initiative or activity. To get warm and sweat, that was what Rubik dreamed of all day long.
After supper Rubik heated some water on the camp stove. He brought out a bowl from under the sofa and poured the boiling water into it. Then leaning over the candle he soaked his feet in the scalding hot water, as he took another look through the books he had assigned for burning next day.
Once the water had started going cold, he quickly pulled a pair of woollen socks onto his burning feet and slid beneath the eiderdown. The damp bedding clung to his body, but his feet were warm. What luxury.
Rubik blew out the candle.
Translated b Antonia Lloyd-Jones
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There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
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