The Chosen Child Read online

  ‘Something wrong with your pizza?’ she asked him.

  He shook his head. ‘It’s fine. It’s just that I don’t relish the idea of meeting it again later.’

  *

  Later the same evening, at two minutes after eleven, a young dark-haired woman alighted from the H bus at Grojecka and crossed the street towards a huge grey 1950s apartment block. Although Grojecka was a main road, it was almost deserted at this time of the evening, apart from two or three taxis and a huge tractor-trailer bellowing past with a load of rusty steel pipes.

  The ground floor of the apartment block was taken up by shops – all of them closed now, and shuttered with steel gates: the Biblios bookstore, the Kepliez delicatessen, and a furniture store which sold nylon-covered sofas in all kinds of hideous colours, such as raspberry and bronze and turquoise. The entrance to the apartments over the shops was down a narrow alley on the left-hand side of the building. The young woman took her keys out of her purse in readiness and jingled them as she entered the alley. She was late and she was tired, but she wasn’t frightened of coming home late at night.

  A single unshaded light-bulb shone under the curved concrete canopy above the entrance. It threw intense shadows along the alley and across the walls of the adjacent building, shadows like winged gargoyles and stretched-out monks and hunched-up dogs. It was so bright that it left dancing after-images on the young girl’s eyes.

  She climbed the steps, opened one of the double doors, and let herself in. Inside, the hallway was gloomy and smelled of dust and disinfectant. She reached across and pressed the light-switch, but the bulb had gone, and all she could hear was the ticking of the timer, which allowed residents just eleven seconds to reach the second storey and press the next switch.

  But over the ticking, she thought she heard something else. A deep, soft dragging sound, from the alley outside, as if somebody were pulling a hessian sack full of heavy, wet things from one end of the alley to the other. She stood by the door, holding it less than two centimetres open, listening and wondering what it was.

  She was curious, but still she wasn’t frightened. She opened the door, and cautiously stuck her head out. She peered up the alley towards Grojecka, but there was nothing there, only a passing bus, and a girl arguing with her boyfriend. She looked back the other way, which was a dead-end. There was nothing there either, only garbage bins. She waited, and listened. Nothing. She closed the door behind her, and made sure that it was locked.

  She climbed the stairs in darkness. She lived on the second floor, all on her own since Leon had left her. Her apartment was very small, but it still cost more than she could afford, which was why she had been taking evening classes at the College of Music, teaching piano for ‘junior and senior beginners’. She sat on her stool for four hours every evening and tried not to think that Chopin would have cut his wrists if he had heard what she was doing. She closed her ears to the sullen plonking of eleven-year-olds: and the rapturous discords of arthritic old age pensioners.

  She let herself into her apartment and her tortoiseshell cat Kaska came jumping off the sofa to greet her.

  ‘Come on, I know you’re hungry,’ she said. ‘Give me a chance to put my bags down.’

  She switched on the lights and drew the thin olive-green curtains. The apartment was painted cheese-coloured and sparsely furnished. She had just managed to buy a new arm-chair and a coffee table. The walls were decorated with posters for the Royal Castle Concert Hall and the Teatr Wielki, the opera theatre. In one corner stood an upright piano with a bust of Chopin on it.

  She took a paper napkin out of her bag and went into the kitchenette with it, hotly pursued by Kaska. She unwrapped the napkin and dropped a large lump of minced meat onto Kaska’s dish.

  ‘Pork zrazy tonight, madam,’ she said, but Kaska was too busy devouring it.

  She plugged in the electric kettle. Then she went back into the living-room to brush her hair in front of the mirror. She was a dark, striking girl with long hair and lambent eyes. She was very thin: she was wearing a sleeveless grey sweater and her arms looked almost breakable. Her father always used to complain that just because she was a musician, she didn’t have to look as if she were starving. But during the day, she worked as a waitress at Kuchcik, so she always had more than enough to eat – and so, of course, did Kaska.

  Her name was Ewa Zborowska, and she was three days away from her twenty-fourth birthday.

  She switched on her portable television. There was a discussion about drug abuse on TVP 1 and the movie Zorm on TVP 2. She switched it off again. She was saving up to buy herself a second-hand grand piano; but after the piano she wanted to buy a satellite receiver.

  She heard the kettle boiling, and she was just about to go back to the kitchenette when she heard something else: a fearsome, persistent banging.

  She hesitated, alarmed. It sounded as if somebody were beating with both fists on the doors downstairs. Now and then, one of the tenants would forget their key, and they would knock loudly until another tenant came grumbling down to let them in. But this wasn’t somebody knocking. This was somebody pounding the doors so furiously that Ewa could hear them shaking.

  She went to her apartment door and opened it. The banging noise echoed up the stairwell, so that it became a thunderous double-banging. It just went on and on, until Ewa could hardly hear herself think.

  Mr Wroblewski came down from the third floor, in a maroon cotton bathrobe and slippers.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded. ‘Who’s making all of that racket?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ewa. ‘It can’t be anybody who lives here.’

  ‘Maybe they’re drunk,’ said Mr Wroblewski, peering over the banisters.

  Mrs Konopnicka appeared on the landing below, her hair in curlers. ‘We should call the police.’

  ‘I don’t know why we just don’t tell them to stop,’ said Ewa.

  ‘Well, you can if you like,’ said Mr Wroblewski. ‘It sounds like a mad person to me.’

  ‘We should call the police,’ Mrs Konopnicka repeated.

  Ewa left her door on the latch and went down the first flight of stairs. The banging continued. The doors had been shaken so violently that the air was filled with dust. Ewa thought that if it went on much longer, it might even bring the doors right down. She went down the last flight into the darkened hall. Through the frosted-glass panels in the doors, she could see a black shadowy shape, violently heaving as it beat on the wooden doorframe.

  She approached as close as she dared, and called out, ‘What do you want? Stop that banging! Stop that banging and tell me what you want!’

  There were two or three more deafening bangs and then they stopped; although Ewa could still see the dark shape outside.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ she said. ‘Tell me what you want, and I’ll see if I can help you.’

  ‘Ewa – you be careful,’ called Mr Wroblewski.

  From close behind him, his wife snapped, ‘If you were any kind of a man, Kaczimicz, you’d go yourself!’

  Ewa glanced up. She could see everybody’s pale faces looking down the stairwell.

  ‘Have they gone?’ asked Mrs Konopnicka.

  ‘No, they’re still here,’ said Ewa. ‘I can see them on the step.’

  ‘Ask them again what they want. Disturbing everybody’s sleep like that.’

  Ewa approached the door more closely and strained her eyes to see who was standing outside. But even though the light over the doors was so bright, she could distinguish only darkness, only a shadow, as if a man were standing outside with a black cloak draped over his head.

  ‘Why were you knocking?’ she asked, quite quietly.

  ‘Knocking, she calls it,’ said Mrs Konopnicka, scornfully. ‘More like beating the door down. At night, already, when everybody’s trying to sleep.’

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Ewa. ‘Do you want to see anybody here?’

  Still there was no reply.

  Ewa said, ‘I can’t
help you unless I know what you want.’

  The dark shadow wavered for a moment. Then it moved away. Ewa found herself staring intently at a locked door, and nothing else.

  ‘They’ve gone?’ asked Mr Wroblewski.

  Ewa went right up to the door and touched the frosted glass panels with her fingertips. She had a strange, sad feeling – as if the man who had been banging so relentlessly was somebody who desperately needed friendship and help. He had banged and banged, but nobody had answered, and now he had turned away, and disappeared back into the night, rejected as he had always been rejected.

  She waited for a moment, and then she opened the door. She looked out into the alley, frowning a little against the bright, unshaded light.

  ‘Hallo?’ she called. ‘Is anybody there?’

  She put her head out further. The night was warm and noisy. In the distance she could hear traffic and music and somebody laughing. She waited for a moment, listening, breathing the city air, and then she went back inside... just as something huge and dark rushed towards her out of the alley, one of the gargoyle-shadows come to life.

  Ewa screamed, and slammed the door shut. There was an ear-splitting bang as the shape collided with the door, and the whole architrave trembled.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Mrs Konopnicka cried out, her voice as shrill as a chicken’s.

  ‘It’s all right!’ said Ewa. She felt bleached and trembly: but she was determined not to be scared. She had never been scared, ever since she had started living on her own. She had refused to be scared. She had been accosted by drunks on her way home from the College of Music; she had been jostled and pickpocketed when she was looking for bargains in Warsaw’s bazaars: she had been propositioned by customers when she was serving meals. Whatever this was, she could deal with it. She stood with her back to the doors and closed her eyes and said a prayer: God help me and protect me.

  ‘I should call the police!’ said Mrs Konopnicka.

  It was then that the mailbox in the right-hand door burst open, and a clawlike hand seized hold of Ewa’s wrist. She screamed, and tried to pull away, but her hand was dragged into the mailbox slot, and out of the other side, followed by her forearm. The bronze flap over the mailbox dug into her skin; and her arm was pulled so violently that her flesh was tom away from her bones, and ruffled up all the way to her elbow, like some thick, grotesque glove.

  Ewa struggled and pushed and kicked against the door, but whatever was dragging her through the mailbox was strong beyond belief. There was so much flesh bunched up around her elbow that it had to pause; but then it made another huge effort, and wrenched her entire arm outside, stripping all her skin and muscle away from her bones. She couldn’t see her arm, it had all been pulled out of the door, but she could feel the evening air on her naked nerves, and the pain was more than she could understand.

  She heard running. Mr and Mrs Wroblewski were hurrying down the stairs to help her. But she knew that something terrible was going to happen to her and that nobody could stop it. She had been so brave, in her life, but she had always been a victim, and tonight her destiny had come to the door and demanded its due.

  She knelt against the door, too shocked even to scream, as her arm was pulled harder and harder through the mailbox. Her face was pressed against the frosted glass. With her other hand, she tried to push herself free. But she didn’t have the strength. Her arm was pulled and pulled until she felt the few remaining tendons stretching and the cartilage crackling between the joints. Then her shoulder exploded, and her entire right arm disappeared through the mailbox, in a burst of blood.

  Ewa fell backwards onto the hall floor, convulsing in pain and shock. Blood jetted out of her axillary artery all over the mosaic tiles. Mr Wroblewski came rushing down the stairs, losing one of his slippers on the way. He knelt down beside her, dragged off the belt of his bathrobe, and tried to tie it around her shoulder in a tourniquet.

  ‘Call an ambulance!’ he shouted. There was blood spattered all over his face.

  He tried to find Ewa’s artery so that he could knot it, but her shoulder socket was nothing more than a welter of flesh and gristle. Her entire arm had gone, and so he had nothing to tie his belt around to stop the pumping of blood.

  ‘Ewa!’ he begged her. ‘Ewa, stop bleeding!’

  His wife came hurrying down with a bath towel. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Let me try.’

  ‘The ambulance is coming!’ called Mrs Konopnicka, in a wavering voice that almost a scream. ‘I told them hurry!’

  Mrs Wroblewski rolled up the towel and pressed it into Ewa’s arm socket. But almost as soon as she did so, it began to be darkly and irresistibly flooded with red.

  ‘Please God, don’t let them take too long,’ she said. ‘This poor girl is dying.’

  Mr Wroblewski stood up, his bathrobe belt hanging uselessly in his hand. ‘Who could do such a thing?’ He looked towards the front door. ‘How can you pull off somebody’s whole arm like that? I never saw anything like that before.’

  Ewa stopped twitching and lay still. The only indication that she was still alive was her fluttering eyelashes. But she didn’t have more than a few seconds left.

  Mr Wroblewski took two or three steps towards the door. His one bare foot made a sticky noise on the tiles. He peered through the frosted glass, and then he took hold of the door handle.

  ‘Don’t!’ warned his wife. ‘He could be waiting out there for the rest of us!’

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ said Mr Wroblewski.

  ‘Well, leave it, wait for the ambulance.’

  Mr Wroblewski opened the door just an inch. He hesitated, and listened, and then he said, ‘No, there’s nobody here. He’s gone.’

  Mrs Wroblewski leaned over Ewa and tried to detect if she was still breathing. ‘I think she’s dead, the poor darling.’

  Up on the landing. Mrs Konopnicka was twisting her handkerchief between her hands and sobbing loudly. ‘I said to call the police. Didn’t I say to call the police?’

  Mr Wroblewski opened the door a little more.

  ‘Be careful, for goodness’ sake,’ his wife warned him.

  ‘It’s all right. There’s nobody here. I’ll go stand on the corner to wait for the ambulance.’

  He stuck his head out of the door, looked left and then looked right.

  There was nothing. The night was quiet. But then there was a soft rumbling, rushing noise; and a sharp crack like somebody bursting a paper bag. Mr Wroblewski dropped heavily forwards onto the front doorstep, and lay there without moving.

  ‘Kaczimicz?’ said Mrs Wroblewski, turning around.

  There was no reply. The door remained half ajar. Mr Wroblewski lay on the doorstep in his maroon bathrobe, with one slipper and one bare blood-printed foot.

  ‘Kaczimicz, what’s happened?’ screamed Mrs Wroblewski. ‘Mrs Konopnicka, come down here! Please, help me! Something’s happened to Kaczic!’

  She glanced frantically down at Ewa. Ewa was lying still now; her face white; her head lolling. Mrs Wroblewski laid her down quickly and gently, and then stood up.

  She was about to open the front door wider, but her hand stopped itself in mid-air, and then slowly came back to cover her mouth. Now that she was standing up she could see what had happened.

  Mr Wroblewski was lying on the doorstep under the glare of the overhead bulb, his arms by his side, as if he had fallen without making any effort to save himself. Above the collar of his bathrobe there was nothing at all. No head. Just a steady river of blood that ran down the step, almost too liquidly bright to be real.

  Mrs Wroblewski tried to close her eyes but she couldn’t. In the distance she thought she heard people howling, the way she had heard them howling during the war; but it was only the ambulance, arriving too late to save anybody.

  *

  Sarah was looking over her new fourth-floor apartment on Jerozolimskie Avenue when Ben appeared, and knocked loose-wristed at the half-open door.

  ‘Anybody home?’
r />   ‘I’m in the living-room. How did you know I was here?’

  He strolled in with his hands in his pockets, wearing his navy sports coat and chinos. His silk necktie had hot-air balloons on it. ‘I’ve already made friends with your secretary.’

  ‘Irena? Well, don’t get too friendly or I might be forced to fire her.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re jealous?’

  ‘Where were you when God gave out modesty? I just don’t want every move I make to be bush-telegraphed around Warsaw.’

  Ben looked around the living-room and nodded in appreciation. The apartment was in one of the few art nouveau houses left in Warsaw after the destruction of the Second World War. It was airy, bright, with high ceilings and decorative windows, and a balcony overlooking the street. A huge marble fireplace was decorated with twining vines and languid lilies. The sofa and chairs were grandiose and gilded and pompous and completely out of period, but they made the apartment feel luxurious and comfortable.

  Sunshine quivered on the carpet, reflected from a huge art nouveau mirror.

  ‘This is wonderful,’ said Ben. ‘I’m almost tempted to move in with you.’

  ‘Don’t even think about it. Did you have your meeting with Gawlak?’

  ‘Sure. Great. Just finished.’

  ‘What’s the verdict?’

  ‘Well... he’s going to have to go back to his chums in the building department, and have a little pow-wow. But the general impression that he gave me was that some of his associates had been over-enthusiastic about safety standards.’

  ‘How can anybody be over-enthusiastic about safety standards?’

  ‘Very easy. If you construct a suspended ceiling weighing 400 tons and you hold it up with pinions that are capable of carrying 800 tons then that’s called over-engineering and it’s a waste of money.’

  ‘The ceiling wasn’t Gawlak’s only crib.’

  ‘No... but you know how it is.’

  Sarah sat down on the large satin-covered sofa. Today she was wearing a short aquamarine dress that matched her eyes, and a loose white linen jacket. The colours were a shade too pale for her: but in the bright sunlight they gave her an intriguing bleached-out look, as if she were scarcely there.