Suddenly the doorbell rang. The sharp, short sound cut through the soft shuffle of my work and my effortful panting. Crouching by the corpse, I froze. I held my breath. The floorboards at the opposite end of the hallway creaked gently. I remembered that Mazan, a fellow student from my year, was to visit me today. Always with his nose in the books. At the same time it crossed my mind that the room was dark and the kitchen windows faced the courtyard, so the light should not betray me. I realized all this very quickly and the intruder soon began to bore and irritate me. I was not scared at all; he was simply disturbing me. Mazan rang the doorbell again, waited a bit … then tried knocking. Then the door rattled and I heard something like muffled rapping and scraping. Mazan was writing me a note. Finally he finished writing and walked away with a loud clank of his skiing boots, which I somehow missed when he first arrived. I was very tempted to read his note. After waiting a good while, I quietly opened the door and picked the note up off the floor. “Jurek, I came to see you at 6. Come to the lectures tomorrow, we’ll need you. Ciao. Tadek.”
“Ah, there we are,” I said aloud. “There we are …”
This was just what I expected. And I was not disappointed. I knew too what they would need me for. My friends were organizing tea with dancing, and wanted me to help. I couldn’t care less, but I couldn’t afford not to get involved.
I returned to my work. Pulling the corpse into the bathroom turned out to be easier than expected. Loading it into the bath was not so easy. The body was falling through my hands, resisting me. Now the head, now the feet knocked against the floor tiles. At long last I managed to fit it in. The legs stuck up in the air and the skirt slipped halfway down the thighs. Automatically I pulled it over the knees, only to realize the pointlessness of the gesture, as sooner or later I would have to strip the corpse naked anyway. I found the prospect rather embarrassing. I had never seen Auntie naked. Only once, in passing, I’d seen her bare buttocks, and for the rest of the day felt weird in her company.
I returned to the kitchen and on the gas stove made scrambled eggs, which I covered with cold frankfurters and bread. Luckily, by now the gas was working better.
4
IN THE MORNING I WOKE UP FRESH AND RESTED. I JUMPED out of bed and did a few vaguely gymnastic exercises. The room was a bit chilly, I had an appetite, good humor and felt very young. Auntie’s canary sent off a peel of brilliant trills from his cage:
“Tru – tiu – tu …”
I echoed him:
“Tiu – tiu … Good morning, little birdie. Good morning, Cracow, good morning, sun … Good morning, good morning!”
I ran to fetch a bag with seeds and served the birdie a copious spoonful in his bowl. The wall glittered with playful sun bunnies. It was cold outside but warmer than yesterday. The thermometer was showing twenty degrees. It was 8:20 am. Phew, at last I had had a good night’s sleep. I had slept almost ten hours. Now I felt rested, strong, young and independent. Whistling, I ran to the bathroom. I would have loved a bath but unfortunately the bathtub was filled with the corpse.
I stood in front of the mirror.
“Good morning, Jurek,” I smiled. “Hello, Jerzy.”
I ran the tap and washed myself from the waist up.
“Good morning, Auntie,” I turned towards the bath.
“How did my love
sleep in the tub?”
I was singing, crying and shaking off the cold water. After drying myself with a thick hairy towel, I started to shave. I was a bit cold but didn’t put my shirt on, showing off instead my arms and shoulders, perhaps still rather boyish for my age. As I dressed, I did gymnastics the whole time, and hummed to myself.
I put the kettle on the stove and started preparing breakfast. Once more I considered my situation. It was not bad. I was confident, but without the easy optimism which had momentarily swept over me immediately after killing Auntie. I was aware now that disposing of the corpse would require a long effort but I believed I was up to it. Auntie’s sudden disappearance should not arouse any suspicions from the neighbors or friends. She often went away without any warning and could even be absent for several days at a time. I decided that after ten days – during which time I should certainly manage to get rid of the corpse – I would start a search. First I would write to Granny, then to friends and Auntie’s business associates in other towns, and finally I would place an ad in the press and call the police.
The food in the larder would last me only two or three days. After breakfast I searched the flat for money. In Auntie’s handbag, in the linen cupboard between the sheets and in the drawer of her night table I found bills totaling one thousand and seven hundred zlotys. That would tide me over for now. Later I might sell Auntie’s clothes and her jewelry: her wedding ring, the ruby ring and the small necklace. Apart from that, inside the corpse’s mouth I would find a gold bridge, though I should probably wait a bit before selling it. At any rate, I’d be financially secure for a few months. Then it would be summer, I could go off on a camping trip, and in my last year at university I’d find a job.
I already started thinking of finding suitable, not-too-absorbing employment. But first things first – I had to get cracking with disposing of the corpse. I knew I couldn’t do it in one go, that the job had to be spread over several days and that I would have to be extremely careful. It crossed my mind that I could burn part of the body in the stove. Frequent trips with packages containing bits of the corpse struck me as too risky.
The lectures started in the afternoon. So I decided to get on with it now. What I could not decide on was whether to light the kitchen stove or the one in the bedroom. Eventually I settled on both. The flat was pretty cold. Although I sleep and spend most of my time in the room, recently I’d come to like sitting around the kitchen. Perhaps it was that silly power which brings the murderer to the scene of his crime, which one reads so much about in novels. Of course I did not feel like a murderer. Killing Auntie was in my case the result of so many interlocking mental states, of complexes and depression that I had analyzed and digested so many times before, and analyzing and digesting them all over again would have been only another pointless routine. In fact, my engagement with the corpse ruled out in advance any element of remorse, if I’d had any in the first place. The corpse was simply my partner in a hazardous game, in which admittedly I couldn’t win anything, but on the other hand could lose my life. I even had a kind of respect for the corpse, the way one usually does for a strong opponent.
I had a bit of stage fright before lighting the stove. It was a much more difficult task than peeling potatoes. I tried not to admit it to myself though. With a poker and a coal spade I swept out the ash, revealing the bare grate. Quite a large proportion of the ash missed the bucket and ended up on the floor. But I didn’t worry too much about it. The floor needed to be scrubbed anyway. It had small puddles of Auntie’s dried-up blood on it, as well as a few drops of mine from the unfortunate finger. I thought I would have to wash the shirt too; its sleeves were stained with blood from when I was trying to bandage my wound. Taking bloodied linen to a laundry would be rather risky in my situation.
I placed a few sheets of old newspaper on the grate, and on top of them a few dry splinters of wood. Only then I decided to place among all this flammable material some pieces of coal. The first match went out the moment I brought it near the stove. The second and the third likewise. I remembered that there was a draft inside the stove that put out small flames. I hit on the idea of lighting a piece of paper outside the stove and putting it inside only when it was properly burning. Alas, I ran out of matches. I looked on top of the stove; I found
