Things I Didn't Throw Out by Marcin Wicha

Author:Marcin Wicha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Daunt Books
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

My mother had no time for fountain pens. She had errands to run. Everything happened with too much haste. Too many things beyond her control. So many things to keep an eye on. Prescriptions. Phone calls. Recipes. She had too many things to take in hand to amuse herself with unruly ink on top of that.

Typewriter

On a day-to-day basis you made phone calls. To the building administration. To the energy provider. To the water supplier. The director. The manager. Sometimes even to the municipal duty technician, a mythical figure, a black spider with a hundred eyes staring at consoles and screens. But most frequently – simply to Kopściałko the engineer. Usually about water. That there isn’t any. That it’s leaking from the pipes. That it’s cold or rusty. That there’s a damp patch, a stain, mould. There’s no heating again. You called so that the caretaker would turn off the mains. So that he’d turn on the mains. So that someone would find the caretaker, the dead drunk guardian of the keys to the mains.

Pipes ran underground. Sometimes they surfaced like veins. They penetrated buildings. Wrapped us in a network of capillaries. In the bathroom they had been covered over by a piece of pale yellow plywood, so that you didn’t keep hacking open the wall and bricking it up again. Just move the screen aside and you revealed the innards of our world. Shoddily arranged bricks, rust, a musty smell, a black expanse and the neighbours’ voices.

All around us was a splashy end of the world. An apocalypse of limescale and rusted pipes. To us, the film Alien was a depiction of a plumbing failure: broken walls and the ostensible peace destroyed.

In his children’s book Cyryl, Where Are You? Wiktor Woroszylski blamed entropy for problems with the water supply. Andrzej Kondratiuk also made a comedy on a similar topic, entitled Hydro-puzzle. Songs and skits were produced. The favourite comedic cameo of socialist cinema remained the soaped-up man – as he wanders around, wearing only a towel and blinded by shampoo, in search of a plumber (or the drunk caretaker with keys to the mains).

There was a metaphor to be found there. But my mother wasn’t into that sort of thing. My mother believed in individual responsibility. The system leaked, dribbled and decayed, but from behind the communal catastrophe emerged a specific face. Namely, the mug of Kopściałko the engineer.

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