# The Inventory

The book had been on the kitchen table for three days, and Marta had been walking around it.

It was the morning of the fourth day. The light came in low across the oilcloth, the cheap blue-and-white pattern that Zofia had bought in 1991 and complained about ever after. The book sat where Marta had set it down on Monday: square to the edge, spine toward the window, the cloth cover the colour of a bruise. *Lalka*. The Doll. Volume one. The 1972 Czytelnik edition, the one Zofia had carried in her satchel to the lyceum and underlined in violet pencil and then, forty years later, lent to Marta on a train to Kraków and read aloud from while the fields outside went from stubble to snow.

Marta filled the kettle from the bucket. Two fingers of water; she would heat it for the oats and pour what was left back. The blue cylinder of the bottled-gas burner ticked twice and caught. She stood with her hands flat on the counter and looked at the book without looking at it.

The remembered paragraph started in her head again. Without permission. *In the first days of 1878, in the office of the firm of J. Mincel and S. Wokulski, located on the Krakowskie Przedmieście* — and then her own voice in her own head, in Zofia's cadence — *behind a glass partition* — and then the gap where Zofia's voice had been, on the train, and Marta could not remember whether the next clause was about the clerks or about the snow. She had been carrying the paragraph in approximate memory for thirty-one years. She had not spoken it aloud in any of them.

She poured the oats. Half a cup. She had been doing half a cup since the end of February.

Above her, through the ceiling, Pan Henryk coughed. The dry one, the morning one, three coughs and a pause and then a fourth. He was alive. He had been alive on Monday and on Tuesday and on Wednesday and on this Thursday, and they had not spoken in seven weeks. The last conversation had been on the second-floor landing about the smell from the rubbish chute. He had said: *They will come back to collect it.* She had said: *Yes, Pan Henryk.* Then she had carried the bag down to the courtyard herself.

She ate the oats standing up. The book did not move.

—

She picked it up at ten, or what she still called ten. The clock in the hall had stopped at four-seventeen on a Tuesday in November and she had not wound it. The light said ten.

The cloth was cold. She had forgotten that books were cold. She turned it spine-up and the postcard fell out onto the oilcloth: Zakopane, 1989, the wooden church at Jaszczurówka, a stamp with Lech Wałęsa's face. *Marciu* — Zofia's hand, the violet pencil, the slanted letters — *the air here is what we were promised. Z.* The postcard had been on page forty-seven of *Lalka* for thirty-six years. Marta did not pick it up.

She opened the book to page one.

The page was a grey rectangle with a grey grain. There was a darker grey along the top — the chapter heading, she knew the typography — and then the paragraph began and the letters would not hold their edges. She held the book at the distance she had always held a book. She moved it closer. She moved it away.

She thought: *the light is bad.*

She carried the book into the front room, where the south window was uncovered, and held the page to the light, and the page resolved into a finer grain of grey, and the print was still fog.

She thought: *I am tired. I have been up since before the light.*

She sat down in Zofia's chair. The springs gave the way they had always given. She held the book on her lap and waited for the print to come.

It did not come.

—

She got up. She crossed the front room to the bookshelf and stood in front of it. The shelf ran the length of the wall, three hundred and forty-one books alphabetized by Zofia in the autumn of 1998, the autumn Zofia had been forty-eight and well, the autumn before the autumn before the autumn before everything. Marta had not moved a book on this shelf in ten years except to take down *Lalka* on Monday. The gap where *Lalka* had been was a black slot two inches wide between Konwicki and Lem.

She did not look at the gap. She looked at the row above it. The Mickiewicz, the Norwid, the four volumes of Orzeszkowa. Zofia's pencil bled through onto the facing pages of *Pan Tadeusz*; you could see the violet ghost of an underlining through the cloth. Marta had known this for ten years and had never opened the book to see what Zofia had wanted to remember.

The remembered paragraph started again. *In the first days of 1878* — and the train, the compartment with the brown vinyl bench, Zofia in the window seat with the book open on her knees and the snow starting outside Włoszczowa, and the way Zofia's voice had gone quieter when she came to a sentence she liked, not louder, *quieter*, so that Marta had to lean in. Marta had leaned in.

*Behind a glass partition* — and then what.

She went to the kitchen drawer.

She did not pretend, even to herself, that she did not know where the glasses were. They were in the second drawer down, beneath the dish towel that had been Zofia's mother's, in the small cardboard box that had once held a pair of earrings Marta had given Zofia for her fortieth birthday and that Zofia had worn twice. Marta opened the drawer, lifted the dish towel, took out the box.

The two halves of the glasses were inside. The bridge had snapped clean. The left lens had a hairline that ran from the temple to the centre. She had stepped on them on the kitchen tile in October, getting up in the dark to check whether the water in the bucket had frozen, and she had not even sworn; she had picked up the pieces and put them in the box and the box in the drawer, and she had not opened the drawer since.

She had been walking past the bookshelves for four months.

She held the two halves in her palm. The cheap tortoiseshell plastic from the optician on Krucza, the pair she had bought in 2019 because the good ones had been at the cottage and she had forgotten them and had needed something to read the bus schedule. She had never gone back for the good ones. The cottage was outside Otwock and she had not been to Otwock since. She did not know whether the cottage was still standing. She did not know whether Otwock was.

She put the halves back in the box. She put the box back in the drawer. She put the dish towel back over the box. She closed the drawer.

She went back to the front room.

—

The book was on the arm of Zofia's chair where she had left it. She picked it up and tried again.

She held it at arm's length. The print was a uniform grey. She held it close enough to touch her nose. The grey resolved into specks and the specks did not become letters. She closed her left eye. She closed her right. The right was worse than she had remembered.

She thought of the magnifying glass in the sewing kit, the small round one with the brass rim that Zofia had used for threading needles after she turned fifty. She went to get it and held it over the page.

The letters under the glass were larger. They were not clearer. They were the same fog at a larger size.

She set the magnifying glass on the side table and the book on her lap. She put her hands flat on the cloth cover, one on top of the other, the way she used to put her hands on the spines at the library when she was alphabetizing a returned cart and wanted to feel that they were all there.

The light had moved. It was on the western wall now, the wall with the sideboard, the wall with the water stain shaped like Italy. The stain had been there since the pipe in the flat above had burst in 2014, the year Zofia would have been sixty if she had lived to be sixty. Marta had meant to have it painted over. She had not.

The light was on the eastern edge of Italy. It was on Trieste. She knew the geography of the stain the way she had once known the Dewey Decimal subdivisions of Polish literature: 891.85, with the further breakdown into period and form. She had spent forty-one years at the regional library in Mokotów. She had handled perhaps two hundred thousand books. She had read perhaps eleven of them through.

—

She got up and went to the shoebox on the sideboard.

The shoebox was Bata, size 38, Zofia's size. The lid had a brown ring on it from a cup Marta had set down once and forgotten. Inside the box: a tape recorder, the small grey one from 1989, the kind with the single speaker and the hard plastic buttons; a cassette in a clear case labelled in Zofia's hand, *Z reads Lalka, Christmas '92*; and the empty bay where the batteries should have been. Marta had taken the batteries out years ago, when she had still believed in saving them for something.

She lifted the cassette out of the case. The brown tape inside the plastic window was still. She turned it in her hand and read the label and put it back in the case and the case back in the box.

She thought of Zofia at fifty-six, in the hospital bed in Praga, in the eighth month, with the book on the blanket and the reading glasses on her nose and the voice that was already rougher than the voice on the cassette. *Marciu, sit down. Listen.* Marta had not sat down. Marta had said: *I'll bring the soup back hot, just give me twenty minutes*, and had gone out into the corridor and stood at the window at the end of the corridor for twenty-two minutes looking at the courtyard until the soup was cold enough to bring back without lying. She had done this on the third visit. She had done other versions of it on the fifth visit and the eleventh visit. She had visited fourteen times in eight months. She lived a forty-minute tram ride away. She had visited fourteen times.

She closed the lid of the shoebox.

The light was past Trieste. It was on Venice, on the small bulge of the lagoon. She had perhaps an hour.

—

She went back to the chair and sat down with the book.

The remembered paragraph started again, the way it had been starting all morning, the way it had been starting at intervals for thirty-one years. *In the first days of 1878* — and the compartment, the snow outside Włoszczowa, Zofia's quieter voice — *behind a glass partition* — and then. And then.

She tried to push past the gap. She tried to hear Zofia's voice across the gap, in 1994, the brown vinyl bench. The next clause had been about — about the clerks. Or about the cold. The clerks were arguing about something. About — about the price of something. The price of herring. No. The price of — she did not know. She had never known. She had been twenty-eight and she had been thinking about a man at the ministry of culture and she had not been listening to the next clause; she had been listening to her sister's voice and not to the words, and it was the voice she remembered and not the words, and the voice was not on the cassette because the cassette was dead and the voice was not in Marta's mouth because Marta had never said it.

She held the book closed on her lap. Her left thumb was inside it, marking page one, which she could not read.

The light was at the western edge of Venice.

—

She thought: *I could light the candle.*

There was a candle. There were three candles. They were in the cupboard above the sink, in the blue tin that had once held tea, and she had been not-using them since the end of January in the same way that she had been not-opening the drawer with the broken glasses. She had told herself the candles were for an emergency. She had told herself the emergency had not yet arrived. She had told herself this on the night the power went off for good and on the night the water in the building went off for good and on the morning her radio had finally drained its last batteries between a Chopin nocturne and the announcer's first syllable.

She did not get up.

Pan Henryk coughed, upstairs. Twice. A pause. A third.

The light was off Venice. It was crossing the open sea between the boot and the heel.

—

She opened the book.

She opened it not to page one but to a page somewhere in the middle, somewhere her thumb fell. She did not look at it. She put her left thumb between the pages to hold them open and she set the book on her lap with the open page facing up and she put her right hand flat on the lid of the shoebox on the table beside her, on the lid where the brown coffee ring was, on the cardboard above where the cassette was lying still in its case.

She said it aloud.

*In the first days of 1878* — her own voice in the empty room, in her own apartment — *in the office of the firm of J. Mincel and S. Wokulski, located on the Krakowskie Przedmieście, behind a glass partition* — and the gap, the snow outside Włoszczowa, the brown vinyl bench — *the chief clerk was arguing with the bookkeeper about the* —

She said: *price of herring.*

She did not know if it had been herring. She thought it had been, perhaps, coal. Or sugar. She said herring. She said the clause as though it were the clause Zofia had read.

She went on. She said the next sentence, which she remembered better, about the wind on the street outside, and then the sentence after, which was the one Zofia had read most quietly, about a man in the doorway. She said *a man in the doorway* and she heard her own voice say *man* where Zofia had said *a stranger* — *a stranger in the doorway* — and she did not go back. She kept on.

The light was on the heel of the boot.

She finished the paragraph. She finished it in her own voice, in her own apartment, with her left thumb in a book she could not read and her right hand on the lid of a shoebox that held a cassette she could not play.

Pan Henryk coughed, once, upstairs.

The light left the wall.