Violence in a man is usually the overspill of something else. You know how it is. You see these guys. I appear to have an almost disabling sensitivity to violence in other men, a fallout detector for those spots of waste or exorbitance that spill over into force. Like a canary in a prewar coalmine, I check out early when there is violence, when there is poison in the air. What is this propensity? Call it fear, if you like. Fear will do fine. The raised voice in the restaurant and its sour tang of brutality and booze, the look a man will give his wife which demotes her on the human scale, which prepares her for the human disgrace of violence, the pumping leg, the fizzing eye, the public bar at ten fifty-five. I see all this—my body sees it, and gives me adrenaline, gives me sweat. I faint at the sight of blood. I faint at the sight of a Band-Aid, an aspirin. This sense of critical fragility (myself, my wife, my daughter, even the poor planet, baby blue in its shawls), it drove me from my study in the end. The study life is all thought and anxiety and I cannot take the study life anymore.
Late at night, over at Bujak’s large, aromatic, icon-infested apartment (the blue glow of saints, candles, vigils), I scanned the big Pole for the excresences of violence. His mother, old Roza, made the tea. The old woman (“rouge” with an a on the end), she calmed me with her iconic presence, the moist hair grained like silver, as Bujak talked about the strong force, the energy locked in matter. Grinning in the gloom, Bujak told me what he had done to the Nazi collaborator in Warsaw, in 1943. Boy, I thought; I bet the guy didn’t do much collaborating after that. However, I couldn’t conceal my distaste. “But aren’t you glad?” urged Bujak. No, I said, why should I be? “You lost two grandparents to these people.” Yeah, I said. So? That doesn’t change anything. “Revenge,” said Bujak simply. Revenge is overrated, I told him. And out of date. He looked at me with violent contempt. He opened his hands in an explanatory gesture: the hands, the arms, the policemen of his will. Bujak was a big fan of revenge. He had a lot of time for revenge.
I once saw him use those hands, those arms. I saw it all from my study window, the four-paneled screen (moon-spotted, with refracting crossbar) through which the world came in at me then. I saw the four guys climb from the two cars and steady themselves in front of Bujak’s stoop. Did I hear a scream from within, a cry of warning or yearning? . . . Bujak’s daughter gave the old man a lot of grief. Her first name was Leokadia. Her second name was trouble. Rural-looking yet glamorous, thirty-three, tall, plump, fierce, and tearful, she was the unstable element in Bujak’s nucleus. She had, I noticed, two voices, one for truth, and one for nonsense, one for lies. Against the brown and shiny surface of her old-style dresses, the convex and the concave were interestingly disposed. Her daughter, little Boguslawa, was the byblow of some chaotic twelve-hour romance. It was well known on the street that Leokadia had round heels: the sort of girl (we used to say) who went into a hot flush every time she saw an army personnel carrier. She even made a pitch at me, here at the flat one time. Needless to say, I failed to come across, í had my reasons: fear of reprisals from Michiko and Bujak himself (they both loomed in my mind, incongruously equal in size); also, more basically, I’m by no means sure I could handle someone like Leokadia in the cot. All that breast and haunch. All those freckles and tears. . . . For six months she had been living with a man who beat her, lithe little Pat, sinewy, angular, wired very tight. I think she beat him too, a bit. But violence is finally a masculine accomplishment. Violence—now that’s man’s work. Leokadia kept going back to Pat, don’t ask me why. I don’t know. They don’t know. There she goes again, ticking back to him on her heels, with black eye, grazed cheek, wrenched hair. Nobody knows why. Not even they know. Bujak, surprisingly, stayed out of it, held his distance, remained solid—though he did try to keep the little girl, Boguslawa, safely at home, out of the turbulence. You would often see old Roza ferrying the kid from one flat to the other. After her second spell in the hospital (cracked ribs this time) Leokadia called it a day and went home for good. Then Pat showed up with his pals and found Bujak waiting.