Beneath Hucisko by Liam Bishop
He woke with a terrible cramping in his stomach, and whether or not this was a sign of things to come, the cramping did not abate on arrival at the church. Silently listing the members of the parish council, Pawel stood above the grey object. It was a rock. A part of him hoped that he would never have to confront the person responsible for throwing it through the window. A part of him hoped that he would never have to confront the parish council. There was no message attached to the fist-sized thing — he knew it wasn’t that kind of crime — instead, there was only the rock and the awful, jagged hole in the virgin’s abdomen. I’m sorry that I could not do more, he whispered to himself. After reporting the crime to the police, he called the doctors to see if he could get an appointment.
Patients are now supposed to list their symptoms on a slip of paper before their appointments. Pawel did not write his down. As he sat in front of the doctor, he apologised.
“It just speeds things up a little,” said the doctor. “Anyway, we’re here now.”
“It was morning. I woke with the feeling. I’ve had it before, not as bad, but terrible now, and I tried, tried... relieving myself, but nothing came out. And then when I arrived at work, I look after the church.” Pawel crossed his arms, “I saw the damage to the window. Those windows are artistry. I then called the police. I doubt that it will be the constabulary’s priority, although I’m not sure what their priority could be in a place like this.”
“How long have you had the feeling, you say?”
“Oh, this morning. On and off for years. I don’t drink lots of caffeine. After I called the contractors, I merely sat down. It’s not painting by numbers, you see.”
“Well determining symptoms can be a bit of painting by numbers. You hear about epidemics of anxiety,” the doctor said writing on a notepad, “but I’d like to find out how you are in a week. Don’t read the news too much and write down anything you notice. Oh, and I hope your window is okay.”
At the teachers meeting they talk about traumatised children. Pawel thinks of Jakub. Jakub always lingers behind after class. He thinks that Jakub’s poor, young mind functions in a state of brokenness — hopes, rather, this is the case because Jakub could also be working for the State, his parents in fealty to the ruling parties inspiring their children to inform on potentially dissenting adults, even relatives and teachers. He is trying not to concede surprise, nor shock or any other emotion as he thinks about the slip of paper he keeps in his drawer that contains the description of the guard he is supposed to meet. Depending on the manifestation of his trauma, Jakub might see Pawel as either someone who is prepared to give unyielding care to something for which Jakub is searching for, or someone to inform on and ruin Pawel’s plans and his life. After the meeting, Pawel decides to take the paper out of his drawer and home with him, and the next day, when Pawel tries to coax Jakub out of his chair to go home, he knows that Jakub will not have any evidence on him.
The horrendous cramping felt permanently lodged in his abdomen and, standing at the foot of the aisle, he associated this cramping with some form of transgression. A dietary transgression, not necessarily a moral one. But the ‘epidemic of anxiety’ the doctor spoke of seemed to exempt Pawel, and if the doctor hadn’t wanted to see him a week later she would have left Pawel to the epidemic. Surely. Pawel wanted to retrace, repeat his own actions, and it wasn’t the Bible he thought of now — instead he thought of Donne, a poet whom he’d read before he’d joined this church, and whom he taught to students when he was an English teacher. He found excitement building within him knowing that he was returning home to prayers Donne had written when he was ill. I am not dying like him, I hope, but I can believe that “by dulling my bodily senses to the meats and eases of my world, that hast whet and sharpened my spiritual senses to the apprehension of thee,” I can locate my pain, he thought.
The policeman spoke of cows, meats before pontificating on the beauty of stained-glass windows.
“They really are magic aren’t they Mr...”
“Pawel.”
“Er, Pawel. Thank you. Magical they are. Rest assured, we will do everything we can to find out what happened. Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens until the cows come home.”
Pawel winced. Meat intolerances were not common, were they? Actual bodily intolerances, not dietary choices like vegetarianism.
“Sorry, is there something the matter?”
“No, sorry. No there isn’t,” said Pawel, aware the policeman was looking at him.
Pinching the collar of his jacket, the policeman said, “Call me on this number if you need anything: not to be used in emergencies I should add.”
“No, of course not,” said Pawel. “Thank you.”
“Not a problem.” The policeman stopped. “Actually, I shouldn’t worry at all. It’s likely to be an exception you know: a dare, a game that got out of hand. Yes, that’s it you see. It won’t happen again, although you should act fast with any crime, father, you understand?”
Should he have told the policeman he wasn’t the priest? He returns to Donne. My stomach is not gone... Immediately, he closes the book. “The pain in my stomach,’ Pawel then wrote, “is an intolerance to meat.”
Pawel wipes the board for Monday’s teacher. That Friday in Gdańsk was supposed to be his final Friday in Gdańsk. Tomorrow, Pawel is supposed to meet the guard beneath Hucisko. It’s a place he knows well — he once was beaten up beneath Hucisko as he crawled on his belly like a snake for pennies. From there he will go to the translator. He will find a way, unlike the time he was beaten up, out of there. As he watches the children leave, the hats and scarves loose on the strong boys and tight around the girls, Jakub doesn’t move.
“It’s time to go, Jakub.”
Jakub looks at the trails of chalk.
“What don’t you understand about this, Jakub?”
Jakub’s face does not move. In the meeting they’d been told about the signs of the “damaged child”: impassive; do not react to external stimuli that is either upsetting or exciting; find it difficult to relate to others. Pawel does not think Jakub is one of those children.
“Jakub!”
A flicker of movement in the eyes.
“What don’t you understand Jakub? Can’t you see that it’s time to leave? Can’t you see that it’s time to go home?”
As his voice rises, he finds his focus moving away from Jakub and a smaller voice is heard, a smaller voice that tells him it’s unlikely he is going to see Megan any time soon, and, at first, he thinks the smaller voice is Jakub’s voice. Instead, as his throat blooms, he realises that it’s a voice of his own somewhere inside him, a voice that is eventually going to be proven right.
He turns at night thinking about the exchange with the policeman. It’s crucial to act fast, with any crime. It was dark by the time the policeman left. The rock was no longer there and had been taken away by the police for fingerprint testing. The pews, the aisles. His mind wandered. He could not stay with the cramping in his stomach, and he thought of his fingerprints like they were on a huge database with millions of others. He then thought of a big door like the one at his parent’s barn. At the big door, his hands are being inspected. A child waits for him behind the big door. He didn’t have children, but it wasn’t his child behind the big door anyway, it was himself only younger and waiting for the results from the fingerprint testing of his older, bigger being. Behind the big door he was scared that he would meet the perpetrator of this crime.
When he arrived, the children ran up to him with salt-dough figures they’d painted in school. One of the figures was a friesian cow. His stomach felt like it was about to rupture.
“Did you actually believe she was going to drive here?” Serafim said over dinner. Their mother had never liked flying, had never made it to England to visit Pawel, so the idea had been that this weekend Pawel would fly to his brother’s home in Chareloi and accompany their mother for the rest of the journey in her car. Suspecting that their mother approved of Serafim’s life more than she did Pawel’s, he thought the reason she was more compelled to visit Chareloi was so that she could wonder over Serafim’s IT business, his multi-lingual children and their salt-dough figures, and his wife, a medical lawyer who made frequent trips to Brussels. He hoped Serafim would pay for the flight home.
“She wouldn’t like the North anyway,” said Pawel. At least now he wouldn’t have justify his life to her, give reasons to the choices he had made, and, on Monday, his first act after driving home from the airport — Serafim did not pay — was to take his binoculars and view the tide roll in whilst watching the seals that ,even with binoculars, still looked like amorphous, wet boulders. Although there wasn’t much life or change where he lived, there was simply something to be said for that.
On Tuesday he found the rock sitting in the chancel below the virgin’s shattered abdomen.
The concrete rumbles above him. Beneath the dark underpass, the contrast with the daylight embellishes a certainty in his spirit that strangely goes some way in comforting a part of himself that knows he is never going to find a translator for his marriage certificate. Telling Megan to stay in England had been a part of that decision and, from that moment, he had begun consolidating himself in the fact that he would never see her again.
“We’ve taken the measurements, so we’re going to head back to the warehouse now.”
Pawel nodded. Grey light teems through the now exposed gap in the window and, although he doesn’t need to, Pawel will wait for the men to return from the warehouse. This is the right thing to do, he thinks; he is safer in here because, soon, forty-eight hours will have elapsed, and who knows what the perpetrators are planning next. He must plan what he will say to the priest. But before that, when the window is repaired, he will phone Serafim and ask if their mother eventually reached Chareloi and when he finds out she didn’t, he’ll go to bed early. Bed is one of the few places he feels protected and he can listen in silence to the noises his stomach makes.
That night he dreams about the boy he used to teach, Jakub. In his dream, he walks to Jakub’s desk, places his arm around Jakub and tells him that it is time to leave. He looks into Jakub’s eyes where the sclera is white and holding not irises, but pale-centred flowers, and Jakub, remarkably, stands up and follows him out of the room. The next morning he doesn’t receive any news from the police, which means they are still yet to find the perpetrator. Pawel is glad. It’s easy to be scared of children; he’s glad that he won’t have to reason with one, the likely instigator of the crime.
………………..
Liam Bishop is a writer from Leeds, UK. His writing has appeared in the Brixton Review of Books, 3:AM Magazine, and Review 31.
Twitter: @liamhbishop