Wojciech Gunia

Drought

It’s been a long time since it rained. It’s even hard to say whether it’s ever rained; it must have, since we’re here. But why are we still here, with no sign that anything is going to change? Every day we look out our dust-caked windows for any approaching clouds, but all we can make out is the milky circle of the distant sun piercing through the sand-haze. None of us can say whether this lengthy daily ritual of anticipation is a matter of faith, or just plain habit.

“Habit” – that is, “second nature.” Ridiculous. I’m not even sure what my first nature is. Sometimes I try to figure it out, without success. What can I glean by gazing upon my ash-gray skin, my body which crackles every time I move? My skin which, when rubbed with the coarse surface of a palm, rustles up a cloud of flaked tissue? I go to the old mirror, covered like everything else in a faint film of grey, and try to make out the remnants of my face in its matte surface – sharp outlines of bone piercing through parchment. The air I breathed stirred up clouds, storms of dust in my lungs. The mirror – wiped clean with my hand, sprinkling particles of dust – didn’t return any miraculously changed image, only a thin, taut mask stretched over something hard. Is that my nature? I never managed to attain to anything else, and I am certain that this paper layer hides endless layers of powdery softness, and if I tear off this mask, I just might crumble apart like a sandcastle which has lost all adhesion. Even still, I am breathing

Breathing? What if that’s also a habit, a reflexive motion? Maybe I’m not breathing at all, and something is just causing my bones to move. Maybe changes in temperature make them contract and expand. I don’t know.

Sometimes, annoyed by my own helplessness, I go outside. The street looks like a faded, overexposed photo, in which the photographer had immortalized, unable to regulate the sharpness, low buildings falling into the cracked ground which, buffeted by a hot wind of dust, had taken on the color of the ash-grey ground. My footsteps kick up clouds which settle softly on my cracked shoes. I can plod along like this, taking care to avoid any abrupt movements so as not to expose the tenuous cohesion of my desiccated body until it reaches the park - a line of trees looms up under the hot sun like a thick cloud of particles suspended in mid-air. If I had any saliva left in me, I would spit phlegm the same colour and density as fresh cement. I touch the trees, and our tissues-- brittle, rough-- rub against each other, feeding this thick cloud with more dust. I look for my shadow, and when I find it-- I don’t know how-- I sit, crunching down on the crushed remains of fallen leaves. How long ago did they fall? No one can answer this for me. The answer might help us figure out roughly when this drought overcame us. It’s too much to know. This knowledge is clearly unnecessary, if we have been spared of it. I stop thinking about this and rest, exhausted by the heat. How long do I sleep? Hours? Weeks? Clinging to the grey trunk, I am as wrinkled as the petrified bark; I must look like a growth upon its surface.

How thick is the coating of this ubiquitous grey dust upon me? When I try to get it off, how do I know when I’ve stopped wiping what’s settled upon me, and begun crumbling off bits of my own body? Is that which I crumble off, and which clings back to me, to be classified as dirt, or rather as - for lack of a better term - reclaimed body? Body - grime; grime - body. Paradoxes of taxonomy and suspect dialectics. Despite everything, there is something that maintains my deplorable cohesion, some force that binds this dust in a single form, and even though it is breaking apart on me and within me - splinters of bone, shards of muscle, bits of flesh and the rags covering it - there is still some one thing holding me together. For how long? When I finally crumble apart, will it hurt? I used to crush bone-dry insects with my fingers. In my current state, am I more alive, or perhaps less dead, than they are?

It’s been a long time since I’ve talked about this with someone; though I’d like to, I can’t speak. It’s hard to say, however, when the formerly fleshy tissues of my vocal cords and epiglottis became roasted strips and hard, sharp plates of dried cartilage. The air, forced out of my rustling lungs with a strange spasm, escapes only as a rattling cough, dry as the sound of torn paper or broken brushwood. The earth under my fingers is so hard, so utterly compact. I scrape at it with a dirty fingernail, dull and brittle, as always. I’m scratching letters, words, phrases. Soon a cold dry wind will come and drive this mask of dust from the earth, scatter the kilometer-long clouds. By then I will probably resemble a fly squashed by a finger or pencil-end, but the hardness of the soil gives me the shadow of an assurance that someone will read my questions. I don’t know if that person will answer them; surely there are more interesting tasks, if of course they have to be done. Later, even if after a thousand years - the laws of statistics are inexorable and we place in them our utmost hope, thus rescuing it from pretentiousness - the downpour will come and wash it all away.

(Translated from Polish by Anthony Sciscione. Published in debut collection "Powrót", 2014)