An excerpt from House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk

Krysia from the Cooperative Bank in Nowa Ruda had a dream. It was early in the spring of 1969.

She dreamed she heard voices in her left ear. At first it was a woman’s voice that kept on talking and talking, but Krysia couldn’t work out what it was saying. She felt worried in the dream. “How am I going to work if someone keeps droning in my ear?” In this dream she thought it might be possible to switch the voice off, just like switching off the radio or hanging up the telephone receiver, but she couldn’t do it. The source of the sound lay deep in her ear, somewhere in those small, winding corridors full of drums and spirals, in those labyrinths of moist membrane, in the dark caverns inside her head. She tried sticking her fingers in her ears, she tried covering them with her hands, but she couldn’t stifle it. She felt as if the whole world must be able to hear this noise. Maybe that was it—the voice was making the whole world vibrate. Some phrases kept being repeated—they were grammatically perfect and sounded fine, but they made no sense, they were just imitations of human speech. Krysia was afraid of them. But then she started hearing a different voice in her ear, a man’s voice, clear and pleasant. “My name is Amos,” he said. It was nice to talk to him. He asked about her work, and about her parents’ health, but in fact—or so she imagined—he didn’t really need to, because he knew all about her already. “Where are you?” she asked him hesitantly. “In Mariand,” he replied; she had heard of this region in central Poland. “Why can I hear you in my ear?” she wanted to know. “You’re an unusual person,” said Amos, “and I’ve fallen in love with you. I love you.” Krysia dreamed the same dream three or four more times, always with the same ending.

One morning she was drinking her coffee surrounded by piles of bank documents. Outside, sleet was falling and immediately melting. The damp penetrated the bank’s centrally heated offices, permeating the overcoats on their pegs, the bank clerks’ imitation leather handbags, their knee boots and even the clients. But on that unusual day Krysia Flaster, head of the bank’s credit department, realized that for the first time in her life she was wholly, omnipotently and unconditionally loved. This discovery was as powerful as a slap in the face. It made her head spin. Her view of the banking hall faded, and all she could hear was silence. Suddenly suffused with this love, Krysia felt like a brand-new kettle, filled for the very first time with crystal clear water. Meanwhile, her coffee had gone cold.

That day she left work early and made her way to the post office. She got out the phone books for all the large cities in central Poland: Łódź, Sieradz, Konin, Kielce, Radom and Częstochowa, home of the Black Madonna, the Virgin Mary’s city. She opened each one at A and ran a painted fingernail down the columns of names. There was no Amos or Amoz in Łódź, Sieradz, Konin and so on. She couldn’t find him among the small list of names from the surrounding countryside either. What she felt now would best be described as indignation. She knew he must be out there somewhere. For a while she sat still, her mind a blank, and then she began all over again, taking in Radom, Tarnów, Lublin and Włocławek as well. She found Lidia Amoszewicz and the Amosińskis. Then in desperation she began to contrive new combinations: Amos, Soma, Maso, Samo, Omas, until finally her hands with their painted fingernails broke the dream code—and there he was, A. Mos, 54 Sienkiewicz Street, Częstochowa.

Krysia lived in the countryside, and every morning a dirty blue bus took her to town, crawling up the twists and turns of the road like a dingy beetle. In winter, when darkness fell early, its blazing eyes swept over the stony mountain slopes. The bus was a blessing—it gave people the chance to know the world beyond the mountains. All manner of journeys started in it.

Krysia went to work in it every day. The journey took twenty minutes, from the moment the bus picked her up at the stop to the moment she stood before the massive doors of the bank. In those twenty minutes the world changed out of all recognition. The forest became houses, the mountain pastures became town squares, the meadows became streets, and the stream became a small river, which was a different color every day, because it had the misfortune to flow past the Tinworld textile mill. Still on the bus, Krysia would change her gum boots (which she called Wellingtons) for a pair of pumps. Her heels clicked on the broad steps of the old German building.

Krysia was the most elegant girl at the bank. She had a fashionable hairstyle—a well-shaped blond perm with carefully dyed roots. The fluorescent bulbs brought out its doll-and-diamond highlights. Her mascara-coated lashes cast subtle shadows on her smooth cheeks. Her pearly lipstick discreetly emphasized the shape of her mouth. As she grew older, she wore more and more makeup. Nowadays she sometimes told herself, “Stop, that’s enough,” but then she worried that the passing years were blurring her features, depriving her face of definition. She thought her eyebrows were thinning, her blue irises fading, the lines of her lips growing fainter and fainter—that her whole face was becoming foggy, as if trying to disappear. This was Krysia’s greatest fear—that her face would disappear before it had developed and truly come into being.

At the age of thirty she still lived with her parents in a village outside Nowa Ruda. Their house stood beside the winding, potholed local highway, looking hopeful, as if it expected this location to bring it a role in history, in the march of passing armies, in the adventures of treasure hunters, or in the border guards’ pursuit of bootleggers from the Czech Republic. But neither the highway nor the house had much good fortune. Nothing ever happened, except that the forest above the house grew sparser, like Krysia’s eyebrows. Her father kept chopping down the young birch trees to make shafts and poles, and every year he cut down the spruces for Christmas trees. Meanwhile the pathways in the tall grass grew blurred, just like the line of her mouth, and the sky-blue walls of their house kept fading, like Krysia’s eyes.

At home Krysia was quite important; she earned the money and did the shopping, carrying it home in bags her mother had made. She had her own room in the loft, with a sofa bed and a wardrobe. But only at the bank did she really start to come into her own. She had her own office, separated from the banking hall by a plywood partition as thin as cardboard. As she sat at her desk she could hear the hubbub of the bank—doors creaking, heavy farm boots shuffling across the wooden floor, the murmur of women’s hushed voices gossiping nonstop, and the rattle of the two remaining abacuses that the management hadn’t yet got round to replacing with the modern machines with handles that made a whirring sound.

At about ten the daily coffee-drinking ritual began, announced by the clatter of aluminum teaspoons and the sound of glasses striking softly against saucers—the usual office chimes. The precious ground coffee brought from home in jam jars was shared equally between the glasses, and formed a thick brown skin on the surface, briefly holding up the torrents of sugar. The smell of coffee filled the bank to the ceiling, and the farmers queuing for service kicked themselves for having run into the sacred coffee hour.

That was when Krysia remembered her dream.

How painful it is to be loved for nothing, just for existing. What anxiety this sort of love brings. How muddled your thoughts become out of disbelief, how badly your heart aches from beating faster. How quickly the world recedes and slips from your grasp. Krysia had suddenly become lonely.

Following the Easter break, the bank was notified about a training course for employees to be held in Częstochowa. Krysia saw it as an undeniable sign and decided to go. As she was packing her things into her synthetic leather bag, she thought of God, and that despite what they say about Him, He always turns up at the crucial moment.

Sluggish trains full of crumpled people took her there. There were no seats free in the compartments, so she stood glued to a grubby window in the corridor and dozed standing up. Then someone got out in the middle of the night, and at last she could sit down. Squashed between hot bodies in the dry air, she fell into a heavy, black viscous sleep, without any images at all, not even the tail ends of thoughts. Only when she awoke did she realize that she was on a journey; until then she had just been drifting about in space, casually changing location. Only sleep closes the old and opens the new—one person dies and another awakes. This black, featureless space between days is the real journey. Luckily all the trains from Nowa Ruda to the world at large run at night. It crossed her mind that after this journey nothing would ever be the same.

She found herself in Częstochowa before daybreak. It was still too early to go anywhere, so she ordered some tea at the station bar and warmed her hands on the glass. At the neighboring tables sat old women swathed in checked shawls and men stupefied by tobacco—husbands and fathers crushed by life, with leathery faces like old wallets—and children flushed with sleep, from the corners of whose half-open mouths trickled thin streaks of dribble.

Two lemon teas and one coffee later, dawn finally came. She found Sienkiewicz Street and walked right up the middle of it, because the cars weren’t awake yet. She looked into the windows and saw thick, pleated curtains and rubber plants nestling up against the glass. In some of the houses the lights were still shining, but they were weak and insignificant. By this light people were hurriedly getting dressed and eating breakfast, women were drying out their tights over the gas or packing sandwiches for school, beds were being made, trapping the warmth of bodies until the following night, there was a smell of burned milk, shoelaces were being threaded back into their nice safe holes, and the radio was broadcasting news that no one was listening to. Then she came across the first bread queue. Everyone in the queue was silent.

Number 54 Sienkiewicz Street was a large gray apartment block with a fishmonger’s shop on the ground floor and a cavernous courtyard. Krysia stood in front of it and slowly studied the windows. My God, they were so ordinary.

She stood there for half an hour, until she stopped feeling the cold.

The training course was extremely boring. In the exercise book she had bought specially to make notes, Krysia doodled with her pen. The green cloth on the chairman’s table cheered her up a bit. Absent-mindedly, she stroked it. The Cooperative Bank employees seemed all alike to her. The women had peroxide hair fashionably cut à la Simone Signoret and cyclamen-pink lips. The men wore navy blue suits and had pigskin briefcases, as if by mutual agreement. They cracked jokes in the cigarette breaks.

For supper there was bread and cheese and tea in ceramic mugs.

After supper everyone went through to the clubroom, where vodka and gherkins had appeared on the tables. Someone produced a set of tin shot glasses from his briefcase. A man’s hand wandered over a woman’s nylon-clad knees.

Krysia went to bed feeling rather tipsy. Her two roommates turned up around dawn and shushed each other in a loud whisper. And so it went on for three days.

On the fourth day she stood before a door painted brown, bearing a china nameplate reading “A. Mos.” She knocked.

The door was opened by a tall, thin man in pajamas with a cigarette in his mouth. He had dark, bloodshot eyes, as if he hadn’t slept for days. They blinked when she asked, “A. Mos?”

“Yes,” he said. “A. Mos.”

She smiled, because she thought she recognized his voice. “Well, I’m Krysia.”

Surprised, he stepped aside and let her into the hall. The apartment was small and cramped, flooded in silvery fluorescent light, which made it look grubby, like a station waiting room. There were boxes of books, piles of newspapers and half-packed suitcases lying around. Steam came gushing through the open bathroom door.

“It’s me,” she repeated. “I’ve come.”

The man spun around and laughed. “But who are you?” he said. “Do I know you?” He clapped his hand to his brow. “Of course, you’re . . . you’re . . .” he said, snapping his fingers in the air.

Krysia realized that he didn’t recognize her, but there was nothing odd about that. After all, he knew her in a different way, through a dream, from the inside, not the way people usually know each other.

“I’ll explain everything. May I go on in?”

The man hesitated. The ash from his cigarette fell to the floor and he ushered her into the sitting room.

She took off her shoes and went in.

After all, he knew her in a different way, through a dream, from the inside, not the way people usually know each other.

“I’m packing, as you can see,” said the man, explaining the mess. He removed the crumpled bedclothes from the sofa bed and took them into another room, then came back and sat down opposite her. His faded pajamas exposed a strip of bare chest; it was thin and bony.

“Mr. A. Mos, do you ever have dreams?” she asked hesitantly, and immediately knew she had made a mistake. The man laughed, slapped his thighs and gave her a look that seemed to her ironic.

“Well, I never—a young lady comes to see a strange man and asks if he has dreams. It’s just like a dream.”

“But I know you.”

“Do you? How come you know me, but I don’t know you? Oh, maybe we met at Jaś’s party? At Jaś Latka’s?”

She shook her head.

“No? Where was it, then?”

“Mr. A. Mos . . .”

“My name’s Andrzej. Andrzej Mos.”

“Krysia Flaster,” she said. They both stood up, shook hands and sat down again awkwardly.

“So . . .” he said after a while.

“My name’s Krysia Flaster . . .”

“I know that.”

“. . . I’m thirty years old, I work in a bank, where I’m quite senior. I live in Nowa Ruda—do you know where that is?”

“Somewhere near Katowice?”

“No, no. It’s near Wrocław.”

“Aha,” he said distractedly. “Would you like a beer?”

“No, thank you.”

“Well, I’m going to have one.”

He stood up and went into the kitchen. Krysia noticed a typewriter on the desk with a piece of paper in it. Suddenly she got the idea that what she should do and say next was written on it, so she got up to take a look, but Andrzej Mos came back with a bottle of beer.

“Actually, I thought you were from Częstochowa. For a while there I even thought I knew you.”

“Really?” said Krysia, perking up.

“I even thought . . .” he said, his eyes shining. He took a large swig of the bottle.

“What?”

“You know how it is. You don’t remember everything. Not always. Was there something between us? At the party at . . .”

“No,” said Krysia quickly and felt herself go red. “I’ve never seen you before.”

“But didn’t you say you know me?”

“Yes, I do, but only your voice.”

“My voice? God, what are you on about? I must be dreaming. A chick comes round and insists she knows me, but it’s the first time she’s ever seen me in her life. She only knows my voice . . .”

Suddenly he froze with the bottle to his lips and his eyes bored into Krysia.

“Now I know. You’re from the secret police. You know my voice because you’ve been tapping my phone, right?”

“No. I work in a bank.”

“All right, all right, but I’ve got my passport now and I’m leaving. I’m leaving, get it? For the free world. I’m packing up, as you can see. It’s all over, you people can’t do anything to me now.”

“Please don’t.”

“What do you want?”

“I dreamed about you. I found you through the phone book.”

The man lit a cigarette and stood up. He started pacing up and down the cluttered room. Krysia took her identity card out of her handbag and placed it open on the table.

“Please take a look, I’m not from the secret police.”

He leaned over the table and examined it.

“That doesn’t prove a thing,” he said. “You don’t write on an identity card that you’re a secret policeman, do you?”

“What can I do to convince you?”

He stood over her, smoking his cigarette.

“You know what? It’s getting late. I’m just on my way out. I have an appointment. And besides, I’m packing. I’ve got all sorts of important things to see to.”

Krysia took her identity card from the table and put it back in her handbag. Her throat felt painfully tight.

“I’ll be off, then.”

He didn’t protest. He saw her to the door.

“So you dreamed about me?”

“Yes,” she said, slipping on her shoes.

“And you found me through the phone book?”

She nodded.

“Goodbye. I’m sorry,” she said.

“Goodbye.”

She ran down the stairs and found herself in the street. She walked downhill toward the station, crying. Her mascara ran and stung her eyes, turning the world into a brightly colored blur. At the ticket office she was told that the last train for Wrocław had just left. The next one was in the morning, so she went to the station bar and ordered some tea. Her mind was a blank as she sat staring at the slice of lemon floating limply in the glass. From the platforms a damp, foggy night came drifting into the station hall. This is no reason not to believe in dreams, it finally occurred to her. They always make sense, they never get it wrong—it’s the real world that doesn’t live up to their perfection. Phone books tell lies, trains go in the wrong direction, streets look too similar, the letters in the names of cities get mixed up, and people forget their own names. Only dreams are real. She thought she could hear that warm voice full of love in her left ear again.

This is no reason not to believe in dreams, it finally occurred to her.

“I called the travel information line. The last train to Nowa Ruda has already gone,” said Andrzej Mos, and he sat down at her table. He drew a little cross on the wet oilcloth. “Your makeup’s run.”

She took out a handkerchief, wetted the corner with spit and wiped her eyelids.

“So you dreamed about me? It’s an incredible honor to be dreamed about by someone you don’t know, who lives at the other end of the country. . . . So what happened in the dream?”

“Nothing. You just spoke to me.”

“What did I say?”

“That I’m unusual and that you love me.”

He snapped his fingers and took a long stare at the ceiling.

“What a crazy way to pick up a guy! I take my hat off to you.”

She didn’t reply, but just went on sipping her tea.

“I wish I was at home now,” she said at last. 

“Let’s go to my place. I’ve got a spare bed.”

“No. I’m going to wait here.”

“As you wish.”

He went to the buffet and got himself a mug of beer.

“I don’t think you are A. Mos. I mean, not the one I dreamed about. I must have gone wrong somewhere. Maybe it’s another city, not Częstochowa.”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll have to look again.”

The man plonked his mug down on the table with such force that he spilled some beer.

“Pity I won’t know the results.”

“But you do have a similar voice.”

“Let’s go to my place. You can spend the night in a bed, not at a bar table.”

He could see that she was wavering. Without the ghastly mascara she looked younger. Tiredness had diluted the image of a provincial girl.

“Let’s go,” he repeated, and she stood up without a word.

He took her luggage and they went back up the hill along Sienkiewicz Street, now deserted.

“And what else was in the dream?” he asked, as he made up the sofa bed in the main room for her.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore. It doesn’t matter.”

“Shall we have a beer? Or some vodka as a nightcap? Mind if I light up?”

She agreed. He disappeared into the kitchen, and after a moment’s hesitation she went up to the typewriter. Before she had even read the title of the poem written there her heart began to beat. It said: “A Night in Mariand.” She stood over the typewriter as if rooted to the spot. Behind her, clattering about in the kitchen, was Amos from her dream, a real, live skinny man with bloodshot eyes, someone who knew everything and understood everything, who entered into people’s dreams, sowing love and anxiety, someone who moved the world aside as if it were a curtain concealing some other, elusive truth, not supported by things, events, or anything permanent.

Her fingers trembled as she touched the keys.

“I write poetry,” he said behind her. “I’ve even published a small volume.”

She couldn’t turn round.

“Do sit down. It doesn’t matter anymore, because I’m off to the free world now. Give me your address and I’ll write to you.”

She could hear his voice just behind her, in her left ear.

“Do you like it? Do you read poetry? It’s just a draft, I haven’t finished it yet. Do you like it?”

She let her head drop. The blood was pounding in her ears. He gently touched her arm.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

She turned round to face him and saw his eyes fixed on her curiously. She could smell his scent—of cigarettes, dust and paper. She snuggled up to that scent, and they stood there without moving for several minutes. His hands rose and hesitated for a while, but then he began to stroke her back.

“It is you, I’ve found you,” she whispered. 

He touched her cheek and kissed her.

“If you like.”

He pushed his fingers into her peroxide hair and pressed his lips to hers. Then he pulled her onto the sofa bed and started to undress her. She didn’t like this, it was too abrupt, she wasn’t going to enjoy it, but it had to be done, like a sacrifice. She had to allow him anything, so she slipped out of her suit and blouse, her suspender belt and bra. His thin rib cage loomed before her eyes, dry and angular like a stone.

“So how did you hear me in the dream?” he asked in a breathy whisper.

“You spoke in my ear.”

“Which one?”

“The left one.”

“Here?” he asked and slipped his tongue into her ear.

She squeezed her eyelids shut. She could no longer break free. It was too late. He was pinning her down with the whole weight of his body, touching her, penetrating her, piercing her. But somehow she knew that this had to happen, that she had to give Amos his due before she’d be able to take him away with her and plant him in front of her home like a huge tree. And so she surrendered to the alien body, and even embraced it awkwardly, joining in the bizarre, rhythmical dance.

“Well, I never!” the man said afterward, and he lit a cigarette.

Krysia got dressed and sat down beside him. He poured vodka into two shot glasses.

“How was it for you?” he asked, glancing at her and draining the vodka.

“Fine,” she replied.

“Let’s get some sleep.”

“Already?”

“You’ve got a train to catch tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“I’d better set the alarm.”

A. Mos shuffled off to the bathroom. Krysia sat still and looked around Amos’s temple. The walls were painted orange, but the cold fluorescent light made them look a dull shade of blue. Where a patch of burlap had come away from the wall she could see a brighter orange color. It seemed to be shining, dazzling her. A curtain yellow with cigarette smoke hung at the window, and to her right stood the abandoned desk and the typewriter with “A Night in Mariand” in it.

“Why did you fall in love with me?” she asked when he came back. “What makes me different from other people?” 

“For God’s sake, you’re cracked.”

He was wearing the striped pajamas that exposed his chest again.

“What do you mean, I’m cracked?”

“You’re crazy. Off your rocker.”

He poured himself a shot of vodka and downed it in one gulp.

“You came halfway across Poland to see a complete stranger,” he said. “You told him your dream and you went to bed with him. That’s all. You’re cracked.”

“Why are you lying to me? Why don’t you admit you’re Amos and you know all about me?”

“I’m not Amos. My name’s Andrzej Mos.”

“What about Mariand?”

“What Mariand?”

“A Night in Mariand. What’s Mariand?” 

He laughed and sat on a chair beside her.

“It’s a pub in the marketplace. All the local vagrants come there to booze. I wrote a poem about it. I know it’s bad. I’ve written better things.”

She stared at him incredulously.

---

The return journey was filled with the crashing of doors closing—the doors of the cars on the night train, of the compartments, of the station restrooms and buses. Finally the front door of the house gave a hollow crash behind her. Krysia threw down her bag and went to bed. She slept all day, and when her anxious mother called her down to supper in the evening, Krysia had forgotten that she had been anywhere at all. Sleep, like an eraser, had wiped out the entire journey. A few nights later, Krysia heard the familiar voice in her left ear. “It’s me, Amos, where have you been?”

“How come you don’t know where I’ve been?” “I don’t,” he replied. “Don’t you travel about with me?” she asked. The voice fell silent. Krysia felt that this silence expressed some sort of embarrassment. “Never go so far away again,” he answered in her ear shortly after. “What do you mean by far away?” she asked him angrily. Maybe her tone frightened him, because he stopped talking, and Krysia had to wake up.

After the trip to Częstochowa nothing was the same. The streets of Nowa Ruda dried out and were flooded with sunshine. The girls put bunches of forsythia on their desks. The varnish began to peel off Krysia’s nails, the roots of her peroxide hair grew dark and the fair ends worked their way down to her shoulders. At noon a large window in the banking hall was opened, letting the din from the street flood in—children’s voices, the noise of cars streaming by, the rapid clatter of stiletto heels, and the flutter of pigeons’ wings. It was a pleasure to leave work. The narrow streets beckoned you to enter, to look at the people’s faces and be reminded of a painting of a courtyard scene. The cafés were inviting, their smoke-filled expanses full of curious glances and idle conversation. Even better, they offered the timeless fragrance of coffee brewing in glasses and the tinkle of metal teaspoons.

In May Krysia went to see a clairvoyant and asked him about her future. The clairvoyant read her horoscope, then spent a long time concentrating with his eyes shut.

“What do you want to know?” he asked her.

“What’s going to happen to me?” she said, and he must have been able to see into distant space beneath his eyelids, because his eyeballs kept moving from left to right as if he were surveying inner landscapes.

Krysia lit a cigarette and waited. The clairvoyant saw ash-gray valleys, with the remains of cities and villages. The scene was dead still, reduced to ashes, and was growing dimmer from moment to moment. The sky was orange, low and light as a tent cover. There was nothing moving, not a breath of wind, not a hint of life. The trees looked like stone pillars, as if frozen by the same sight as Lot’s wife. He thought he could hear them creaking gently. Krysia wasn’t in this landscape, nor was he there either, nor anyone. He didn’t know what to say. He only felt a spasm of fear in his stomach at the thought that now he would have to lie and invent something.

“No one dies forever. Your soul will come back again many times, until it finds what it’s looking for,” he said, then took a deep breath and added, “You’ll get married and have a child. It will fall ill, and you’ll look after it. Your husband will be older than you and will leave you a widow. Your child will go away from you, far away, over the ocean perhaps. You’ll be very old when you die. Dying will not cause you pain.”

That was all. Krysia went away calm, because she knew all that already. She had spent her money in vain. She could have spent it on a willow-green bouclé top of the sort that were arriving in parcels from abroad. That night she heard Amos’s voice again. “I love you, you’re an unusual person,” he said.

In her sleepy state she thought she recognized the voice, and felt sure she knew whose it was, and she fell asleep happy. But as happens with dreams and semi-dreams, in the morning it had all drifted away and she was left with nothing but a vague impression of knowing something, without being quite sure what. And that was all.