“This changes nothing. The risk is unaltered. All you do here is make life easier to part with.”
“Well, I just think you have to make a start.”
Our arguments always ended on the same side street. I maintained that the victim of a first strike would have no reason to retaliate, and would probably not do so.
“Oh?” said Bujak.
“What would be the point? You’d have nothing to protect. No country, no people. You’d gain nothing. Why add to it all?”
“Revenge.”
“Oh yeah. The heat of the battle. But that’s not a reason.”
“In war, revenge is a reason. Revenge is as reasonable as anything. They say nuclear war will not be really war but something else. True, but it will feel like war to those who fight it.”
On the other hand, he added, nobody could guess how people would react under the strong force. Having crossed that line the whole world would be crazy or animal and certainly no longer human.
One day in the fall of 1980 Bujak traveled north. I never knew why. I saw him on the street that morning, a formidable sight in the edifice of his dark blue suit. Something about his air of courtly gaiety, his cap, his tie, suggested to me that he was off to investigate an old ladyfriend. The sky was gray and gristly, with interesting bruises, the street damp and stickered with leaves. Bujak pointed a tight umbrella at his own front door. “I come back tomorrow night,” he said. “Keep an eye on them.”
“Me? Well, sure. Okay.”
“Leokadia, I learn, is pregnant. Two months. Pat. Oh, Pat—he really was too bad.” Then he shrugged powerfully and said, “But I’m pleased. Look at Boguslawa. Her father was an animal too. But look at her. A flower. An angel from heaven.”
And off he went, pacing out the street, content, if necessary, to walk the whole way. That afternoon I looked in on the girls and drank a cup of tea with old Roza. Christ, I remember thinking, what is it with these Polacks? Roza was seventy-eight. By that age my mother had been dead for twenty years. (Cancer. Cancer is the other thing—the third thing. Cancer will come for me too, I guess. Sometimes I feel it right in front of me, fizzing like television inches from my face.) I sat there and wondered how the quality of wildness was distributed among the Bujak ladies. With pious eyes and hair like antique silver, Roza was nonetheless the sort of old woman who still enjoyed laughing at the odd salacious joke—and she laughed very musically, one hand raised in gentle propitiation. “Hey, Roza,” I would say: “I got one for you.” And she would start laughing before I began. Little Boguslawa—seven, silent, sensitive—lay reading by the fire, her eyes lit by the page. Even the brawny beauty Leokadia seemed steadier, her eyes more easily containing their glow. She spoke to me now as levelly as she used to before we had that awkward tangle in my apartment. You know, I think the reason she put out for the boys so much was the usual thing about trying to accumulate approval. Approval is funny stuff, and some people need a lot more of it than others. Also she was obviously very rich in her female properties and essences; being prudent isn’t so easy for girls kitted out like that. Now she sat there equably doing nothing. The red flag was down. All was calm with her dangerous floods and tides. A moony peace—Michi was like that herself sometimes, when our child was on the way. Our little one. Expecting. I stuck around for an hour or so and then crossed the road again, back to my study and its small life. I sat and read Mosby’s Memoirs for the rest of the evening; and through my window I did indeed keep an eye on the Bujak front door. The next day was Friday. I looked in on the ladies to drop off a key before heading north myself —to Manchester and to Michiko. Meanwhile, energetic actors, vivid representatives of the twentieth century—Einstein’s monsters—were on their way south.