Chodź ze mną

Come With Me is a popular novel aimed at a wide readership, full of dynamic events and plot twists. The story centres around the unusual adventures of a Polish woman named Helena and a Russian man named Kolya. He was a Soviet naval officer, and she was a student of dentistry. They were passionately in love with each other, but it was an affair without prospects. In desperation, the lovers found a risky solution – they decided to escape to Sweden by motorboat. They set off from the port in Gdynia in 1959. Almost fifty years later their son, Dustin, tells the tale of these events, and especially what happened in Helena and Kolya’s life together after they ran away. In fact he doesn’t so much tell the tale as – before our very eyes – feverishly spend his nights writing out the story on the basis of his mother’s verbal account. He’s fighting against time, because Helena’s health is in serious decline.

Orbitowski’s novel develops in two directions: on one level we have something like a thriller/ spy story (on arriving in the USA, Dustin’s father became a secret agent), and on the other the main character’s efforts to find out about his father, who has always been absent from his life, and the painful consequences of this absence. Another important theme is Dustin’s emotional rapprochement with his mother, who at the end of her life, when her days are numbered, has become particularly close to him. As he gets to the bottom of his mother’s secrets he finally learns something about his own origin. Both layers of the novel, the adventure story and the psychological/social aspect, are cleverly interwoven. But there’s a third strand to the story too, located closer to fantasy: on the night when the lovers set off on their desperate voyage, an unidentified flying object fell into the harbour. Apparently a strange visitor emerged from it – or at least so said the local gossip. The theme of this alien from Gdynia will recur when Dustin’s father encounters it on one of his spying missions.