April 23

Home sick from work on Friday- having a bath and waiting for Marcin to come home reminded me of winter trips to Poland. The division of the day into segments of time to kill, the early anticipation of his return, waiting for life to begin. Dragging myself eventually from a warm nest of blankets long after he had left, a desultory cruise of the internet which never gave quite as much satisfaction as it promised. Writing for an hour or so in a sort of desperation, thinking that it was the only thing that could justify my housewifely presence there.

Eventually I would be driven out by cabin fever or the presence of housemates in the middle of the afternoon to walk along the river: by this time the pale sluggish sun which had heaved itself onto the horizon for a few hours would be almost ready to sink exhausted into long dusk. The river was a sort of consolation prize, a vein of wildness colonising the heart of the city, thick with plates of ice with raised rims of ice shavings caused by the rubbing as they jostled and eddied against each other in the current. It is a monochrome world completely exotic to me, a world assimilated through early absorption of European fairy tales of wolves and cold forests, but never seen. A world in suspended animation where motionless fishermen crouch on stools above their ice holes in frozen backwaters, a black and white world of soot and snow. Easy to imagine how it could produce a sort of harshness of character, a dogmatism, an overwhelming moral certainty in its inhabitants (more difficult to accomodate the virulently fertile summers with this theory.)

Home late afternoon, shopping bags in hand. The fat gatekeepers ignore me, having worked out that I don't speak any human language. As the season progresses they don't even bother to leave their heated office. On the wall behind the intercom there is a postcard that Marcin sent them from Africa. I eat something, drink a can of beer. I get into the bath and marinate until my body is pliable with heat and dress myself with the care of a kept woman . Then I arrange myself on the couch to wait for the sound of the intercom buzzing ( I am in possession of the only keys) and the footsteps of my love on the stairs, the aura of cold emanating from his skin, the kiss in the doorway. I have buried another brief, barren day.