Coffee and biscuits

Leopold was smoking a cigarette. The night air was cold as frosted glass, and the smoke he exhaled briefly took shape in the streetlight before dissolving. Then a man approached.

“Turn off the lights and move the car.”

Instead of answering, Leopold slowly lifted the hem of his coat. His black clothes were soaked through with blood, gleaming darker still under the light. The man returned to the shop without a word.

Leopold drove the black sedan toward a vacant lot on the edge of the city. Streetlights grew fewer, until at last only darkness stood ranked along both sides of the road. He abandoned the car in the lot and walked back the way he had come.

His apartment was an old building in the city center, its bulbs half-dead on every landing. He opened the door at the end of the corridor, put the clothes he had removed into a paper bag, ate his meal in his underwear, and went to bed.

Sleep was shallow. He woke before dawn. Nightmares had grown frequent of late. Their contents slipped away like water between his fingers the moment he opened his eyes, yet the chill that had entered his body lingered long afterward. It was not only the nightmares. Unexplained anxiety and dizziness had begun to visit him. He supposed he must have contracted some illness. He lay staring at the ceiling until first light, then rose, washed his face in cold water, and breakfasted on coffee and biscuits.

He waited until exactly eight o’clock, dressed, and went out. The weather was sharp with late autumn; the wind already carried the promise of winter.

Leopold walked a fixed distance at a fixed pace.

Among those going to work and those returning from it, he observed them. No one observed him. Or perhaps it was only that he believed himself unobserved. In the afternoon he stopped at a grocery and bought biscuits, tinned food, and coffee.

His days were largely repetitions of this.

He was walking back toward the apartment after leaving the shop. That day there seemed to be an unusual number of policemen on the streets. At the entrance to the building two officers stopped him. After the usual exchange, the older one asked his occupation.

“Police.”

The two officers looked at each other and laughed for some time.

Leopold’s mouth also curved upward.

“Be careful. A high-ranking man has been murdered, so the police are very busy. Amusing yourself is all very well, but next time you would do better to answer seriously.”

They let him go. He took a cigarette from the pack and set it between his lips. The lighter snapped open with a metallic sound; flame settled on the oil-soaked wick. He leaned his head forward, drew the lighter in his left hand toward him, and the cigarette caught. He inhaled deeply, as though the burning leaf were the last breathing-hole left in the world.

Watching his retreating back, the older officer thought it the back of a diligent and quick-witted young man just released from hard labor, and smiled with quiet satisfaction.

Winter had come, yet he did not turn on the heating. The apartment was as cold as a morgue, and he lay inside it like a corpse.

It was a day in early winter.

Someone knocked. Leopold had been waiting for precisely this moment. He opened the door. On the threshold lay a document envelope. Inside were car keys and papers. He put on his coat over the black shirt, loaded the pistol, and slipped it into his pocket.

Snow was falling outside. He drove for a long time. The city’s lights receded behind him; the road burrowed deeper into the mountains. At last he reached a country house in a mountain hamlet—a gabled house with a barn attached, a light burning behind the window. He left the car some distance away and walked through the snow to the door.

He knocked three times.

A tall man with pale skin appeared.

The man regarded Leopold in silence.

“Are you Walter?”

The man nodded. And smiled.

Leopold drew the pistol, aimed at the man’s head, and fired. The report rolled out across the snow-covered fields.

He shoved the body aside and entered the house. In the living room the remains of a meal still steamed. Three bowls. With Walter removed, two portions remained—exactly as the documents had stated.

He searched the ground floor and found no one. He went to the barn. The instant he opened the door, a shotgun blast meant for bear hunting tore the opposite panel apart.

A woman with a shotgun stood there, hiding a child behind her back, weeping. Walter’s wife and child.

This, too, had been written in the documents.

Leopold raised the pistol and shot the child once. The woman dropped the shotgun and gathered the small corpse in her arms, sobbing. The warmth that had, until moments ago, protected that small heart was out of place with the December cold.

Snowflakes settled on the woman’s cheek. White snow took the stain of blood, but blood never stained the snow.

The woman shouted something at him in Polish.

He killed her and lit a cigarette.

He drew the smoke deep and let it go. The breath that had taken on warmth would not return.

Leopold loaded the three bodies into the trunk and drove until he reached the vacant lot.

The car he had left there last time had vanished without trace. He parked in the same place and began walking toward the apartment.

The snow was falling harder. He felt the approach of a winter storm. Yet something else that had begun to stir within him—he did not feel.

That night, before he could fall asleep, his body began to shake with cold. At dawn he woke burning with fever.

Leopold swallowed cold medicine with hot instant coffee and lay down again.

But as soon as he slept he woke, trying to rise. His body would not obey.

Outside the window the winter storm passed. Beyond the curtains snow drove fiercely. Then, suddenly, the sound of wind ceased. The snow ceased to fall.

A moment later the window opened and did not close. Something climbed over the sill and entered.

It invaded. Its gaze, spanning tens of thousands of years, imprinted itself upon Leopold’s brain.

He opened his eyes—opened them once more.

Outside, the storm still passed. The window was closed.

His body being what it was, he thought himself little different from half-dead. In the fever he tried to recall what he had seen, but a barrier seemed to have dropped across some circuit in his brain; nothing would come.

The following day he woke unusually late in the afternoon. A faint dizziness remained, yet the symptoms of the cold had vanished as though washed away.

He opened the door to check for an envelope. There was none.

Leopold shaved late, dressed, and set out at an hour different from his usual, yet walked the same streets at the same measured pace.

His steps were light, as though it were difficult to believe that only hours earlier his body had burned like firewood.

Toward evening he entered a restaurant on the ground floor of a drab, ash-gray building. Old neon and harsh fluorescent light filled the interior.

He ordered black coffee and bacon-and-egg toast. He cut the crisp toast, dipped it in the warm yolk that had run onto the plate, laid sliced bacon on top, and ate. When he had nearly finished, he lifted the black coffee from the edge of the table. Steam rose. Leopold slowly drew the fragrant vapor into his lungs, then drank. It was a well-brewed coffee—smoky at first, with a final dark-chocolate bitterness and a delicate nutty finish.

He returned to the apartment and that night slept deeply, without once waking.

At dawn someone knocked on the apartment door. He rose, took a kitchen knife from the counter, waited the necessary moment, and opened the door carefully. A document lay on the threshold.

He checked the dark corridor. In the five years he had lived there, no order had ever come at this hour.

Leopold locked the door, replaced the knife, set the pistol on the table, and unfolded the paper.

“Polish reactionary Walter is……”

He tore through the clothes in the wardrobe, switched on the transmitter hidden behind them.

“Code.”

“Osobist 99.”

“Purpose.”

“Obey the Party and the People.”

“What is it, Osobist 99.”

“Walter is dead. I killed his entire family.”

“No. You did not kill Walter. Kill Walter and annihilate his entire family, Osobist 99. That is the mission.”

The line went dead.

His heart pounded as it had on the battlefield after a cardiac injection. Suddenly the fever seemed to return; he felt his organs cooking and dizziness rose. He swallowed antipyretics in the bathroom and dressed.

He took the pistol and the knife, got into the car parked in front of the building, and drove toward Walter’s house in the mountains.

He had left his identity papers on the passenger seat in case of checkpoints, but met none.

He passed through deep forest and reached the hills. Walter’s house stood there.

To his surprise, a light burned inside. Leopold stopped the car, shot the doorknob off with the pistol, kicked the door open, and entered. The living room came into view.

A meal for three had been laid. The soup had gone cold. Leopold began to search the house.

He finished the ground floor and went to the barn. Only the bloodstains from the previous day remained; nothing else.

Leopold gave a short, dry laugh. Then he laughed aloud. That the Party could make such a mistake struck him as supremely ridiculous. They, too, were human. Humans err. For a more perfect system, even these small matters ought to be handled with greater thoroughness. At last he examined the upper floor, smiling as he looked through the rooms. In the study, while glancing over the books, he noticed, inside a framed picture on the wall, the architectural plan of the house. The house possessed a basement.

Then the lights went out.

Leopold raised the pistol and took the lighter from his pocket. He could see nothing. He could hear nothing.

A ringing filled his ears. From the floor below came the sound of footsteps—several sets, clearly.

Perhaps he was running a fever. He shut the door and blocked it with a chair. The footsteps were now on the upper landing. Leopold climbed out the window, got into the car, and discovered that the key he had left in the ignition was gone.

His hands shook. Dizziness came; his vision wavered. He got out and lay on the ground. Nausea rose but brought nothing up. The ringing returned. At the edge of his shifting sight he saw the open trunk. He pushed himself up by the car body and went to it. The trunk was filled with blood, yet empty. Only when he saw the license plate did he realize it was the same car that had carried Walter’s family. The bodies were gone.

Leopold steadied his vision and listened. The ringing had ceased. There were no footsteps.

Only then did he remember he was ill. The cold had not left him. It might be pneumonia.

It occurred to him that the entire sequence of events might be a side effect of the medicine. He closed the trunk and sat in the driver’s seat.

He would wait for the fever to subside, he thought, then look for the key he must have lost somewhere inside the house.

His gaze fell on Walter’s documents lying on the passenger seat.

For a long time he had not bothered to read the charges against his targets.

What, exactly, had this man done to become a target of the secret police?

“3 February 1961, in Ostrałęka, abducted a five-year-old girl and murdered her as a sacrifice in idol worship.”

Leopold’s vision wavered again.

“7 June 1961, in Smolensk, murdered and decapitated a police officer during a checkpoint. The head was never recovered.”

His route had run consistently eastward.

“9 December 1961, shot dead by secret police officer Leopold Gustafson.”

Dizziness swept over him. He could not still his trembling hands. His fingers moved of their own accord and found another page still remaining.

Cold sweat ran down his bloodless face. He bit the palm of his left hand to anchor his mind.

He bit too hard; blood came. He turned to the final page.

In the center, scrawled letters:

Płat czołowy

Leopold felt a pain as though his amygdala were vibrating.

With shaking hands he shook antipyretics from the drawer into his mouth and swallowed.

Płat czołowy

He closed his eyes.

Płat czołowy

He tried to stop thinking.

Płat czołowy

His amygdala trembled.

Płat czołowy

Darkness whispered to him.

Płat czołowy

Light within darkness whispered to him.

Płat czołowy

A beast of tens of thousands of years whispered to him.

Płat czołowy

And Walter whispered.

“The basement.”

Heart lurching, Leopold swung the pistol toward the passenger seat.

Only Walter’s documents lay there.

Leopold took the pistol and the lighter and entered the house.

The lights would not come on. Footsteps were no longer heard.

Following the memory of the plan, he searched for the basement entrance.

The fever had not lessened; it had grown fiercer. He felt his frontal lobe swelling like a fruit at the very peak of ripeness, about to meet iron.

The passage to the cellar lay inside a cupboard beneath the stairs. When he opened it, an old wooden ladder appeared.

He shone the light downward. The floor was nothing but straw and darkness.

He threw the lighter in. Fire spread in an instant.

Leopold’s eyes never saw what lay below. He chose not to be curious. It was a decision made to end the fever’s nightmare.

Moonlight had begun to seep into the house. On the living-room floor lay car keys, shining silver.

As though purified by silver, the fever left him. Leopold picked up the keys.

Smoke was rising from the living-room floor. He walked toward the door.

At that moment the floor gave way and he fell into the basement.

Everything around him was burning. Leopold inhaled. Exhaled.

In an instant the fire vanished. The moon vanished. Light vanished.

There was only darkness.

In the ringing silence he heard a sound.

It was coming toward him.

Leopold ran. The sound seemed far away, then nearer, then directly behind him.

He screamed and ran.

The world had never been so dark; there was no light anywhere.

Even in Pluto’s age the fires of hell had illuminated the world, but now there was nothing.

Darkness, earth, heartbeat, and the pursuer’s footsteps.

That was all the world contained.

When the blood from his heart reached his brain, something occurred to him.

“The footsteps have stopped.”

Let there be light. Far off, the sun began to rise.

Nothing pursued him. And he understood.

He was in a forest. And he was naked.

Through the trees his apartment building was visible.

While Leopold wandered naked through the forest, he came upon an abandoned mountain cabin.

There he found old clothes and shoes.

He covered himself and walked into the city. Only toward evening did he reach his apartment. In his underwear he emptied a tin of food and fell asleep. He dreamed nothing. The next day, and the day after, he dreamed nothing. The nightmares and the unexplained anxiety that had tormented him for months had vanished. Like a tooth that has been pulled, only the absence remained, felt at the tip of the tongue.

On the third day he switched on the transmitter behind the wardrobe.

“Code.”

“Osobist 99.”

“Purpose.”

“Obey the Party and the People.”

“Report.”

“Walter and his family are dead. It was the ninth of December.”

“Confirmed. The matter is closed as of 9 December.”

“Afterward there was a second order. At dawn——”

“There was no second order.”

Static persisted for a long time.

“How is your body, Osobist 99.”

He did not answer. The line went dead.

He had left the documents in the car. The car stood in front of Walter’s house. Of everything that had happened that night, nothing remained in his hands. Only memory.

Leopold obtained a vehicle on the pretext of investigation and drove into the mountains. At the site of the house only charred remnants remained. They had not burned a few days earlier. The beams crumbled like wet ash at a touch; on the collapsed walls lay layered marks where snow had frozen and thawed over many years. The car was gone. The documents were gone. The place where the basement should have been was packed earth. He went down to the village and asked an old man outside the shop.

“That gabled house up there? Burned during the war.”

“The people who lived there.”

“After it burned, no one lived there. Walter? No one by that name in this valley.”

Leopold put a cigarette between his lips. He took out the lighter, laid his thumb on the flint, then put it away unlit.

In the archives he examined the original file on the Walter case. Witnesses in Ostrałęka had all spoken a single word in unison. On every page that word had been blacked out.

The girl had lain in the middle of a wheat field, her head turned eastward. The police officer’s head in Smolensk had never been found.

Dictionaries of various countries stood on the shelves in the interrogation room. Leopold opened a Polish dictionary.

Płat. Lobe, plate, piece.

Czołowy. Frontal, of the forehead.

Lobe of the forehead.

He turned the pages. There was a compound entry.

Płat czołowy — prefrontal lobe.

Leopold closed the dictionary. The wall clock in the archives room ticked with unusual loudness.

That night he made a list.

Side effects of antipyretics. Yet medicine cannot invent the memories of a village elder.

Gas poisoning. Yet gas cannot write the future into documents.

Psychological warfare by hostile services. Yet no service can burn a house fifteen years into the past.

Madness.

He studied this final item longest. He did not cross it out. Beneath it he added a single line: There are things in the world that cannot be understood. He set the pencil down.

If incomprehensible things existed, records of confronting them would exist as well. He knew in which building such records were kept.

The clerk at the seized-property store asked, “What does a secret policeman want with a Bible?”

“I’ve come to believe in God.”

The clerk laughed for a long time, then stamped the requisition, calling him an amusing fellow.

The Bible had a black cover. On the flyleaf a name and dedication were written. The priest who had owned it had been shot in March 1949.

Leopold’s days were reorganized. By day he walked the fixed distance at the fixed pace. When he finished his evening meal of coffee and biscuits it was eight o’clock. From then until midnight he read a fixed number of pages at a fixed speed. His breath scattered across the paper. Where the pistol had once lain on the table, a book now lay.

He noticed for the first time that a cathedral stood along his walking route. It was now used as a grain warehouse.

Only the pale rectangle where the cross had been removed remained unfaded on the outer wall.

Inside, he was told, wheat was stored.

His days had become largely repetitions of this.

He read from the first page.

“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

Leopold stopped.

In the darkness, immediately after the pursuer’s footsteps had ceased, that sentence had already passed through him once.

And the sun had risen. The hand holding the page tightened. The dead priest’s paper crumpled.

He opened his hand. That day he read no further.

A few days later he read the third chapter.

“Then the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”

He had woken naked in the forest and covered himself with old clothes from the cabin.

“And he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way.”

In the basement fire had surrounded him on every side, then vanished in an instant. And Walter’s movements had run consistently eastward.

Leopold spread a map. Ostrałęka. Smolensk. He drew a straight line with a ruler.

At the end of the line stood this city. More precisely, his apartment.

That night he attempted to pray. He did not know the form. So he used the only form he knew.

“Code.”

Darkness gave no answer.

“Purpose.”

Darkness gave no answer.

The response he knew—the sentence he had transmitted every night for five years. Obey.

He realized he had been praying every day for a long time. Only the recipient had been wrong.

Leopold knelt. For the first time, toward the correct frequency.

The year turned. Two more envelopes arrived. Now he read the charges.

Before pulling the trigger he had acquired the habit of looking for a moment at the target’s forehead. He did the same on the street. Among those going to work and those returning from it, he looked at their foreheads.

All of them were blue things. When he returned home he washed his hands and opened Genesis.

In the deepest month of winter he asked: What was the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil?

Apple. The word “apple” appears nowhere in the Bible. It is a calumny fastened upon the text by a Latin pun.

Fig. The leaves were produced immediately after the event.

Grape. Wine darkens the eyes; it does not enlighten them.

Wheat. An old legalist’s theory. Then this city would be one in which holy relics were piled in every warehouse.

He thought of the cathedral that had become a grain store and crossed the item out.

The list of candidates was empty. He changed direction. He asked not after identity but after function. The fruit of the knowledge of good and evil had performed one act: it had opened the eyes to know good and evil. If there was a function, there was an organ that performed it.

The entry in the medical encyclopedia began:

“Prefrontal lobe: governs thought and judgment, the inhibition of impulse, personality, and the discernment of good and evil.”

He read the line three times. At the end of the entry stood a note on surgery. Sectioning the white matter rendered the patient docile. Shame and guilt were forgotten. Nakedness caused no embarrassment. Physicians called the state tranquility.

Leopold knew the older name for that condition.

Before the Fall.

“And in the midst of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

In the midst—two.

In the middle of the skull there were also two. The brainstem, which holds breath and pulse—that was the tree of life.

And behind the forehead, that which discerns good and evil. The garden had not been closed. It had been transplanted.

The woman ate of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. The seed is not digested. To be eaten is precisely how the seed is spread. Eve did not steal the fruit; she carried it.

Thereafter every birth was a sowing, and every skull became an orchard.

Yet almost all the fruit remained unripe. They hung green and fell green.

Only rarely did one meet iron.

That night he had felt it—his frontal lobe swelling like a fruit at the peak of ripeness, about to meet iron.

Walter’s documents rose in his mind. The police officer’s head had never been found.

It had been a harvest. An unripe one, most likely.

“Fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.”

He tried to stop thinking.

“Fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.”

The dictionary whispered it.

“Fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.”

The medical encyclopedia whispered it.

“Fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.”

Genesis whispered it.

“Fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.”

A beast of tens of thousands of years whispered it.

And his frontal lobe whispered:

“Here.”

Leopold laid his hand upon his forehead.

Beneath a thin plate of bone it was ripening. Only then did everything return to its proper place.

What had climbed through the window and looked upon him had done so because it was pleasant to the eyes.

He shaved. He washed his face and undressed to his underwear. He spread a towel on the table and laid out, in order, an awl, the pistol, and a mirror.

The lighter snapped open with a metallic sound.

He held the tip of the awl in the flame until it blackened.

The apartment was as cold as a morgue.

He sat facing the man in the mirror. The right eye. The eye remained open.

With eyes open, he entered the eye.

The tip met thin bone.

He tapped three times.

“Fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.”

The frontal lobe whispered.

And he cut the whisper short.

The man in the mirror looked at it.

It set the awl down. Only a line of blood ran down the right eye.

It slept.

How deep the sleep was, winter passed and early spring arrived.

It went outside.

It walked with a strange gait. Among those going to work and those returning from it, everyone observed it.

Yet it observed nothing.

Children laughed. An old man in the crowd threw it a piece of bread. It picked the bread up and began to eat.

Two policemen approached. The younger one removed his coat and draped it over its shoulders. The older one asked its occupation.

“Police……”

This time no one laughed.

The older officer watched for a long time the back of it as it boarded the transport.

Interrogation at headquarters was cold.

A military physician was summoned. He lifted its eyelids and examined them for a long time.

The physician withdrew his hand, his face pale.

“White-matter transection.”

The room was silent.

The physician wrote one word on the report. A superior blacked the word out.

Disposition was discussed.

The clerk stamped the paper. From the seized-property store an old leather coat was brought.

They dressed it in the leather coat.

They put it outside the door.

Before the door closed, the old interrogator asked, “How is your body?”

It smiled. He asked no further.

When it walked in clothes, no one observed it.

Then someone in the crowd looked at it for a long time.

Because it was pleasant to the eyes. Yet what those eyes reflected was not fruit, but value.

At dusk men got out of a car. One of them carried a rope.

Because it followed obediently, the rope was not used.

The leader raised a lamp and examined it—teeth, eyelids.

“A finished product.”

The cage was narrow.

In the opposite cage was a snake. From time to time the two regarded each other for long periods.

But the snake offered it nothing.

Each beast had its name. The parrot was called Piotr; the bear was called Grand Duke.

It was called “monkey.”

Piotr spoke. The bear performed tricks. Their training was harsh, and there were days when even tricks failed to amuse the audience.

But “monkey” was different.

It received food without training.

It was never beaten.

The only thing “monkey” did in performance was one thing.

It mated with another “monkey.” That was all.

It had regressed across tens of thousands of years and crossed beyond the far side of good and evil.

Morning came. Light divided from darkness upon the straw.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

The troupe saw it. The beasts saw it. The passing seasons saw it.

And it was good.