Deliciously bleak, disorienting, poetic tales by Poland’s master of weird fiction
Crumbs for the Night
The night, cut open by the headlights, seals itself instantly, its wound healing the same moment it’s inflicted. In this it holds a great advantage over us, creatures of flesh. I know that darkness, whose fabric we are pushing through, watches us from behind the trees lining the road, observes our race, and waits. Out of the corner of my eye, I glance through the window; the glow of the approaching city illuminates the clouds scudding across the sky, their strange shapes, like splayed, multi-jointed fingers, growing in further fractals from a vast hand in the heavens.
If I were to stop now and look up, and if the sky were cloudless, Orion would be above us with his beautiful belt, Sirius, and Betelgeuse, that magnificent, dying star. Perhaps it’s already gone; the sky, after all, is a gallery of spectres, ghosts, phantoms. Afterimages of the past. Whenever I think of this, I start calculating the shutter speed in my mind, dependent on the lens focal length, sensor format, and the position of the photographed area of the sky on the declination axis. The counting helps me forget the pain this thought causes me. The night watches us with millions of dead eyes and waits, waits. It doesn’t need to do anything more.
Every so often, either I or M. say something to the animal, listen to the sounds coming from the back, inhale the air filling the car to detect a discreet note of death scent. I tell the dog to hold on, that help is near, that we’ll manage. That he’ll be my dog, I’ll take him with me, regardless of whether he had a home before or not. After all, what has connected us, this race, this fight, must, must have some greater, deeper meaning; if it doesn’t, then nothing else, nothing beyond, can have even a shred of sense. The true meaning of history is written in its margins, in the light between the lines, and this road we’re speeding along through the darkness is one such margin. For now, we are writing it with hope.
The drive through the darkness stretches on endlessly, as if spacetime has buckled under the weight of fear, but finally, we pass the city limits, the first buildings. After a few minutes, we turn off the main road into one of the side streets. M. had already warned them that we were bringing in an injured dog, that we’d lost a lot of time bouncing between Gryfów and Lubań. They already know at the clinic and are waiting for us. There’s an X-ray, an orthopaedist, an operating theatre, and an animal hospital. It will cost, but I’ll pay any price. In the darkness of the side street, a white sign with green lettering gleams. That’s it, that’s where the rescue is. I finally pull into the car park. As soon as I put on the handbrake, M. gets out of the car and rushes, opening the lid. And he’s silent. And I sit there, staring at the ivy-clad fence in front of me. My knuckles, clenched on the steering wheel, are white in the dark.
‘He’s dead,’ M. says dully.
‘What the fuck are you on about?’
Translated by Wojciech Gunia
Deliciously bleak, disorienting, poetic tales by Poland’s master of weird fiction
Translation rights: Krzysztof Biliński, biuro@wydawnictwoix.pl
Wojciech Gunia keeps his readers constantly off-balance in this excellent collection of short stories, as he leads them into mysterious worlds, where the protagonists are confused, disorientated, and often disappointed. It is a place inhabited by traumatised people trying their best to function with little help or support. Child narrators have parents who are absent, ailing or deceased; or if not, follow rigid codes of conduct, are emotionally distant and lacking in empathy.
In the first, Kafka-adjacent story, a female victim of domestic abuse is fixated on spiders. Other tales include a warehouse worker trying to find the truth about an abandoned factory against a grim, industrial backdrop; a boy losing his brother in a monstrous inflatable park; a wounded soldier fighting to survive in extreme conditions; a boy and his sister forced to make life-defining choices following the deaths of their parents in their remote backwoods home.
Although Gunia’s worlds are often lonely, hopeless places, the author also reveals a dark sense of humour. The theme of a journey recurs. But rather than being a voyage of discovery, it will most likely be the stuff of nightmares, as certainties vanish and protagonists head deeper into the unknown, trying to make sense of what is around them. When You’re Ready, Go will be a joy to translate. Gunia’s prose is elegant, vivid and punchy, and he has a beautifully rich vocabulary.
David French
Selected samples
She climbed her first peaks in a headscarf at a time when women in the mountains were treated by climbers as an additional backpack. It was with her that female alpinism began! She gained recognition in a spectacular way. The path was considered a crossing for madmen. Especially since the tragic accident in 1929, preserved … Continue reading “Halina”
First, Marysia, a student of an exclusive private school in Warsaw’s Mokotów district, dies under the wheels of a train. Her teacher, Elżbieta, tries to find out what really happened. She starts a private investigation only soon to perish herself. But her body disappears, and the only people who have seen anything are Gniewomir, a … Continue reading “Wound”
A young girl, Regina Wieczorek, was found dead on the beach. She was nineteen years old and had no enemies. Fortunately, the culprit was quickly found. At least, that’s what the militia think. Meanwhile, one day in November, Jan Kowalski appears at the police station. He claims to have killed not only Regina but also … Continue reading “Penance”
The year is 1922. A dangerous time of breakthrough. In the Eastern Borderlands of the Republic of Poland, Bolshevik gangs sow terror, leaving behind the corpses of men and disgraced women. A ruthless secret intelligence race takes place between the Lviv-Warsaw-Free City of Gdańsk line. Lviv investigator Edward Popielski, called Łysy (“Hairless”), receives an offer … Continue reading “A Girl with Four Fingers”
This question is closely related to the next one, namely: if any goal exists, does life lead us to that goal in an orderly manner? In other words, is everything that happens to us just a set of chaotic events that, combined together, do not form a whole? To understand how the concept of providence … Continue reading “Order and Love”
The work of Józef Łobodowski (1909-1988) – a remarkable poet, prose writer, and translator, who spent most of his life in exile – is slowly being revived in Poland. Łobodowski’s brilliant three- volume novel, composed on an epic scale, concerns the fate of families and orphans unmoored by the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war and … Continue reading “Ukrainian Trilogy: Thickets, The Settlement, The Way Back”
