The tap water had a metallic taste, even when it only washed over her hands. Marta stood over the sink in her bathroom, watching pink foam swirl down the drain. She had scrubbed her skin with pumice until it was red and taut, but the dirt wouldn't go away. Because it wasn't on the outside.
It was a feeling of stickiness beneath the skin. As though someone had injected gravel under it, or thick, overworked grease.
She turned off the tap. The silence in the apartment hit her with the force of a physical blow. Usually silence was her ally — a soft duvet she wrapped herself in after a day full of rustling paper and human voices. Now silence had teeth. In the silence she heard the echo of footsteps in the corridor at Górów, the crack of shattering glass, and that hum. The hum of magnetic tape, which came not from any speaker but from the back of her skull, just above the nape of her neck.
She looked in the mirror. Her eyes were shadowed, her irises appearing faded, like an old photograph left in the sun. For a fraction of a second — shorter than a blink — she saw in the reflection not her own face. She saw thin, pressed lips and a deep furrow on a brow that had never been there.
She blinked. Her face returned to normal. Only her hands were still trembling.
"Rationalization," she said aloud. Her voice sounded hoarse, unfamiliar. "Post-traumatic stress. Material fatigue."
She left the bathroom without drying her hands. The wet prints on the floor looked like a map of an archipelago that appears on no map. She had to go to work. The Archive. The basement. There was order there. Things had inventory numbers and didn't move when no one was looking.
The journey to the Archive was a series of broken frames. She remembered locking her apartment door. Then there was the sound of a horn that jolted her back to awareness in the middle of a pedestrian crossing. Then the smell of mustiness in the elevator descending to level minus one. Between those points was a black hole. A quarter-hour of her life had simply evaporated, consumed by something that sat inside her head.
She entered the digitization department. The fluorescent lights hummed — familiar, soothing. Katarzyna Bednarek was sitting at her desk, surrounded by a wall of coffee cups and coloured folders. At the sight of Marta, her face lit up, but the smile faded halfway when she looked at her friend more closely.
"Jesus, Marta," Kasia stood up, catching her knee on the edge of the desk. "You look like you've escaped from a morgue. What happened in that Górów?"
Marta hung up her jacket. The movement was mechanical. Her body felt heavy, clumsy, as though she'd suddenly gained ten kilograms of muscle and bone she wasn't accustomed to. Her hands seemed too large.
"Nothing," she answered. She reached for her headphones, but her fingers slipped off the plastic. She couldn't put them on. The mere thought of cutting herself off from surrounding sounds triggered a sudden clench in her stomach. She had to hear. She had to know if anyone was coming.
"Don't give me that," Kasia stepped closer, studying her with that insufferable, sanguine concern of hers. "Tomasz called. He only said it was 'intense' and that I should keep an eye on you. What did he do to you? Did you two...?"
"No," Marta cut her off. She sat at her workstation. Switched on the monitor. The screen blazed blue, stinging her eyes. "It's just old walls, Kasia. Dust and history. Nothing more."
She wanted to work. She needed to focus on something concrete. She reached for a folder marked 89/WZ/12. Her fingers closed on the paper with a force that surprised her. The cardboard folded in half.
"Hey, easy," Kasia rested her hip against Marta's desk. "You'll destroy the files. Walczak will kill you. Listen, why don't we slip out for lunch? There's that new ramen place on the corner. You look like you need something hot and a large dose of glutamate."
Marta stared at her own hands. Her nails were cut short, clean. And yet, at the corner of her eye, she could see black residue beneath them. Grease. Coal. Dirt that can't be washed off with soap, because it grows into the skin over years.
"I don't like rice," said Marta. But it wasn't her voice. It was a growl. Low, guttural, rising from the diaphragm rather than the throat.
Kasia frowned.
"What? You were just there last week and you said it was fine. Marta, are you feeling alright?"
Marta felt a sudden surge of irritation. No — not irritation. Rage. Dense, hot, viscous rage of someone worn out by questions that have no good answers. The rage of someone who has spent their whole life taking orders from idiots.
"I'm not eating that crap," she snarled. The words fell from her mouth hard as stones. "Let the city folk eat their noodle water. I need meat, you understand? Something solid."
Kasia took a step back. Her eyes widened.
"Marta? What are you saying? How are you talking?"
Marta stood up. The chair rolled back with a crash, striking the shelf behind her. She felt strangely stable on her feet. She planted them wide apart, shifting her weight in a way she never did. She was slightly hunched, her head pushed forward.
"You're looking at me like I stole someone's day-wage," she said, pointing at Kasia. The finger was an accusation. "Why are you staring? You think I don't see it? Everyone thinks that when a man sits in a hole, he can't see anything."
"Marta, stop it," Kasia's voice trembled. "You're scaring me. This isn't funny."
"Funny?" Marta snorted. It was an ugly, cynical sound. "Halina thought it was funny too. That you can just walk into someone's head and rearrange the furniture. And then you walk out and you don't know which hand is your own."
Suddenly she grabbed her head. Pain pierced her temple like a red-hot nail. The image before her eyes shimmered. She saw not the office but a narrow corridor tiled in dirty ceramic. She smelled cheap tobacco and wet concrete. And fear. Animal fear of a door at the end of the corridor.
"She's lying," she hissed through clenched teeth, squeezing her eyelids shut. "That red-haired bitch is lying. She took the papers. She thinks she's safe with her herbs."
"Which Halina? What are you talking about?" Kasia was already by the door, ready to flee, but loyalty held her in place. "Marta, I'm calling Tomasz. Or an ambulance."
The word "ambulance" worked like smelling salts. Marta drew a deep, wheezing breath. Reality snapped back. Fluorescent lights. The smell of coffee. Kasia's frightened face. The metallic taste in her mouth vanished, replaced by dryness.
Marta sank onto the chair. Her legs felt like cotton wool. She looked at her hands. They were hers again. Slender, pale, bearing marks from a keyboard rather than a shovel.
"God," she whispered. "Kasia. I'm sorry."
Kasia stood by the door, phone in hand. She hadn't dialled, but her thumb hovered over the screen.
"What was that?" she asked quietly. "You said... you sounded like an old man. Like some kind of laborer. You used the word 'day-wage.' You don't even know what minimum wage is, Marta."
Marta rubbed her face. The skin was cold and damp.
"I don't know," she lied. She did know. Somewhere at the bottom of her stomach, in that place where fear settles, she knew exactly.
This was not possession. This was not a film. This was dissociation. A fracture. A crack through which something was seeping — something that should have remained in the year 1986. Henryk Czajka's memories of other patients. Memory that wasn't recorded on paper, but in something more durable.
"Dissociation," she repeated the word that had imposed itself. "I'm exhausted. Truly. I'm sorry I shouted at you. It's the noise in the archive. Sometimes... sometimes I think I hear more than I should."
Kasia slowly lowered her phone. She didn't look convinced, but she wanted to believe. People always want to believe in simple explanations. Exhaustion is better than madness.
"Go home," said Kasia firmly. "I don't care about Walczak. I'll tell him you've got a migraine. You look like you're about to faint. And... Marta?"
Marta looked up. She felt naked.
"Don't talk like that again," Kasia requested. "That voice... that wasn't you. It was horrible."
Marta nodded. She picked up her bag. On the way out, she tried not to look at her reflection in the glass of the door.
Outside, the air was cool, autumnal. Warsaw lived its own rhythm, indifferent to what was happening inside the head of one archivist. Marta sat on a bench at the tram stop, ignoring the pigeons pecking the pavement at her feet.
She pulled out her phone. She dialled Tomasz's number, but didn't call. She stared at the blinking cursor.
Zbigniew. The name surfaced in her thoughts like a cork. Zbigniew Kutera. She remembered that name from the files she and Tomasz had been going through. One of the survivors. The one who hated Halina Mróz.
She felt a sudden spasm in her hand. Her right hand — independent of her will — clenched into a fist so tightly that her knuckles went white. It was a fighting reflex. The reflex of someone bracing for a blow.
"You're in there," she whispered to herself, staring at her fist. "I can hear you."
The fist relaxed slowly, reluctantly.
The erosion of rationalism she had been contemplating only that morning was complete. She no longer needed scientific proof. She felt the proof in her muscles. The vision in the hospital at Górów had not been a hallucination. It had been a transmission. Rawski had not merely studied the transfer of memories. He had carried it out. And she — Marta Solak — was a receiver that someone had switched on after thirty years of silence.
She had to find Zbigniew Kutera. Not to conduct an interview. She had to find him to check whether he too felt her presence in his head. Whether it worked both ways.
She rose from the bench. The movement was fluid, deliberate. She no longer felt tired. She felt purpose. And she felt something else — anger. An alien, cold anger demanding justice for wrongs that Marta had never suffered.
She dialled. This time not Tomasz.
"State Archive, hello?" Kasia's voice was still slightly trembling.
"Kasia, it's me," said Marta. Her voice was her own again — cool and composed. "I need an address. Łódź, Włókiennicza Street. Zbigniew Kutera. Check the PESEL database, if you still have access to Walczak's login."
"Marta, are you out of your mind? Walczak will fire me if he checks the logs. Besides... what do you want with him? You said you were going home."
"I am," said Marta, watching the approaching tram. "But first I need to know. Kasia, please. That... that voice. I want it gone. I think this man knows how to silence it."
The pause on the line lasted a long time. All she could hear was rapid tapping on a keyboard.
"Włókiennicza 14, flat 4," Kasia finally said. "But Marta... take care of yourself. You sound normal now, but a moment ago... it was like an exorcism, seriously."
"Thanks." Marta hung up.
She boarded the tram. Sat by the window. The glass vibrated. She pressed her forehead against it, letting the tremors travel through her skull. Maybe it would drown out the hum. Maybe.
In the reflection of the glass she saw her own eyes. They were dark, calm. But the corner of her mouth twitched in a grimace she didn't control. The mocking, bitter smile of an old person who knows the game is rigged but sits down at the table anyway.
We'll see, Doctor, she thought — and the thought carried the timbre of Henryk Czajka's voice. We'll see what's left in the walls.