Patrycja Orzechowska

After all everyone knows you as a girl have to learn to walk in your own way. There’s no discussion. The world was constructed for people who move around and develop. And that world wouldn’t let anyone off, no matter what. It’s the way it is. In any case, every girl knew about it. They didn’t have their private context, but they had a shared context, and that was a plus. Because you know it’s a lot easier in a group than in one-person sub-units. In a tight group information spreads better. You know what’s what and what for. You know how too. So everyone knew. Our group was all worked out from start to finish. Everyone had to learn to walk on her own. Not only the ones here. I taught myself too. Even animals learn and the reason for that’s simple—an animal always shows another animal how to walk and where. Where to pee, where to eat, and where to sleep. Even if it doesn’t want to show, it shows it anyway. That’s how an animal is. Most often it’s animal mothers and fathers who show, relatives or neighbors. It’s usually animal children watching. But it doesn’t have to be that way, because we’ve known for ages that some human kids get brought up by wolves, and others by apes, which really confirms my words, my cases, and my competences.

unclean thoughts equals unclean walls

I remember I was walking along a very long and very gray corridor. Its monotony worked soothingly on me. Everything was in its place, and that was so because it wasn’t here, only somewhere else. Here there was me and the empty corridor. Besides that nothing. I walked, but the gray walls stayed motionless. That’s the color I’d have painted my room then, if I’d had one, but I didn’t. In any case, here all the rooms were painted white. Clean. So much it made you dizzy. Hell in your eyes. I preferred gray, because I felt that that kind of gray background makes ideal circumstances for flashy events with me in the lead role. And I then thought a super-thought that if I had a room, I could do what I wanted in my own too clean room, because no one here ever checks up on anything. Because besides a messy bed, a climbing frame, and a plastic spinning hoop, there’s nothing in it. Because apparently we don’t need anything else. Apparently. So why check up? It’s not like I would choke myself on a spring mattress—my throat’s too narrow. And I wouldn’t strangle myself with a wheel a meter in diameter and a half in radius—my neck’s too thin. So there you are. I thought this super-thought that in my white room I could cover myself like by chance with charcoal drawings, and then let’s say go and rub my hands and my skin on those too white walls. Simply. Go and rub. As I was thinking, I decided, and as I decided, I wanted to do it. That’s the way I was then. Decisive and crazy. And I wanted to rub away every day. I wanted to walk that corridor forever. But I didn’t have a room.

who stuck an extension on the floor?

I turned in the direction of the fitness room. There was no other choice—the topography of the building made it necessary to turn in some direction. I always turned left, and in the end, I always came to the same place. The fitness room. To my non-surprise, the order that was there gave my thoughts the expected regularity, substantially increasing the reserve of clam that I’d picked up in the corridor. That’s why I’d go there. An unconditional reflex. Dependency. I looked greedily at the long lines of climbing frames stretched along the walls up to the roof, and at the yin-yang of all those sporting-educational pieces of equipment with their right angles. Right away I wanted to cling to them and lie across them, so that there’d be even more peace inside me. That moment usually sucked me in and—putting the matter objectively—took up decidedly too much time. But I stretched it out in a premeditated fashion. I developed what was absolutely my own system of prolonging balance. It began this way—I went in and stood motionless. Next I went slowly and carefully in the direction of the windows. Through the whole fitness room, at the same pace. The parquet flooring, newly polished and in a herringbone pattern, bent my feet inwards, and sticking hungrily to me, got hold of my soles one at a time, and didn’t want to let me go. So each of my steps meant a noise like lips smacking together. For a moment I thought someone with a gluttonly empty belly was chomping milk soup in the canteen. Chomp. Chomp. Chomp. The canteen was just on the other side of the sports-field. Chomp. Chomp. The noise made me feel good. The parquet flooring gave off a smell of paper products with a bit of glue added. That made me feel good too, although they say it’s hard to walk in such unfavorable acoustic and olfactory circumstances. I liked it. The problems relaxed me. And in any case there were more difficult things to get through later.

you do it horizontally for your health

I went with a very correct staccato toward the windows. No, no one saw me, but when I got up to them, on the field in front of the entrance to the canteen I saw our group. Small, round little girls—the ones with the glasses at the end. Orthodontic braces too. All of them dressed in shorts with bibs and socks that stuck out of their tennis shoes. Lined up in single file, one behind the next, they were doing squats. Generally not coordinated ones. M stood at the end. All the rest at the beginning. I knew the script by heart: after twenty squats for their health they could go and lie down in the open air. And they went. The ones in glasses too. And the braces. M stayed.

She stood straight with her left leg bent at the knee and slightly outstretched. I saw how she hid a grapefruit in her pocket. Probably for later. Probably she hadn’t eaten it for breakfast. She put it away and her arms fell down along her body.

She stood beautifully. . . . In my personal opinion, the vertical position of the body suggests a moral uprightness, even an intellectual one. Generally it suggests a positive and enviable turnover of matters within a given person. But how to maintain that uprightness, tell me, madam?—someone could ask. I would answer: strengthen, strengthen, and keep on strengthening it. Stretch the muscles, whenever you can. At the desk. In the garden. When you’re playing or tinkering at something. Combine the pleasant and the useful. Always and everywhere. I don’t believe it can’t be done. Or there’s no time. Everything’s possible. By stages or in what they call the meantime. Step by step. Day by day. In fact, M moved around in that way. She was small and round. Dressed in shorts with a bib and white socks boldly sticking out of her tennis shoes. She had hair cut unevenly above her ears, and her bangs were too short. Actually, all the others did too, because in the fervor of conceptual ruminations relating to our group we decided to hire a blind hairdresser. It was supposed to be easier that way—cutting our hair in the same way was a challenge for him, and his imagination kept our satisfaction under control.

M moved around in an ultra-slow tempo. I looked at her with understanding: it was her private, after-school-hours course in walking. I knew. De facto, I hadn’t been in that class. That means that de facto I had been, but only as an external student and only I’d known about it. She had probably read the whole text book and done all the homework. That’s what I thought then. But maybe I simply knew because I know about stuff like that. She’d even done the extra homework for the ones who really want to get ahead. Up to lesson four, and we’d only got to lesson three, so you see. In any case, she knew that if she got it wrong with the walking, then it would stay with her to the end of her life. I said it to them, taught by the experience of my cut-out figures—if I cut too hard one way, there was no going back. It’s the same with everything.

My cut-outs were very modern. They had no clear use. Finally, they could as well simply not be. But maybe not after all. Maybe they had all kinds of applications and could be in the background of everything that itself wanted to be their background. I sometimes made little performances for these cut-outs, ones I directed myself and watched myself, every time trying to highlight their intentional, structural flaw. Fortunately they didn’t come out evenly and there was always some flaw. I was really successful with that.

around yourself in one hundred and sixty-four minutes

I watched how M tried to take a step. She was probably afraid to conclude this action in the past tense once and for all, because she stretched out her leg in front of her further and further and took it back closer and closer. She looked as if she were stuck on a strip of film, cut somewhere between REV and FF. The step in front that she couldn’t—didn’t want to—take, meant that she quivered all over. In those several hours, she made three steps, do you understand that? I know because when I went into the fitness room, I caught sight of her. Later, after around one hundred and sixty-four minutes, I stared at the wall bars, going very slowly and all under my own steam. But later I glanced at M again and she was exactly three steps and one hundred and sixty-four minutes further on.

In order to learn to walk in your own style, you have to know who you are. Though, looking at it from the other side, in order to know who you are, you have to be able to walk. In my opinion. From my second glance at M, I consciously followed her steps. And I saw that they were separated by the same distance and connected by the same tempo. And that they are all equal to each other, and there are no equal and more equal ones. If someone had gone up to her with a protractor and a ruler, there would have been irrefutable proof of the professional copying of each preceding step by the following one. But no one came with a protractor or with a ruler. Only we knew where they were kept. That is, we knew at the very beginning, because later we didn’t. After all, one thousand five hundred times I repeated the sentence: THE USE OF SCHOOL MATERIALS IS FORBIDDEN ON THE GROUNDS OF THE PENCIL CASE AND WITHIN THE EXERCISE-MEDICAL BUILDING. Since the use of school materials or in general anything that could be used to compare length, breadth, or depth might turn out to be very dangerous. We did not want there to be that sick rivalry among us. So as not to tempt them. So that they’d learn to walk. So once we’d hidden away all those measuring instruments, so then we looked for them ourselves not once, not twice, and not seventeen times. But still I knew how it was. I knew especially when it wasn’t good or accurate. That’s a very valuable and rare ability. Our institution was an elite one.

the principle of the perpendicular makes me dull

I looked at M and was afraid she would walk to the end of the world and one day more with her perfect half-step. Everything was at a right angle to everything else in her body. Her foot in relation to her calf, her calf to her thigh, her thigh to her backbone, and her backbone to her head— they all bent at a one hundred percent right angle. Her hand in relation to her arm. It was a shame that M began in her feet and ended in her head—my imagination ran much further than the anatomical-orthopedic circumstances that surrounded me. I simply wanted to see what she would look like around other little girls who were round like her. It threw me into a state of melancholy dullness. Then and now. So I’m doubly dull. That’s not OK.

In the fitness room it was cold. I shook all over. I looked like M, from the time I’d started looking at her. I moved from leg to leg, as if I were doing an Irish jig. But she went on shaking. Then I wasn’t surprised: that meant we were similar, because in our institution a whole fixed repertoire of movements was compulsory, and we had limited possibilities of doing things differently. That’s why it was so difficult to get through it. And there couldn’t be two the same. That’s principles for you.

I was her copy. Now I know. To a certain degree, it was allowed, but it was not permitted to cross the border beyond which you would become someone different from who you had been up to now. You had to know what you were reaching out for and how far you could go. You had to know where the end was. It’s just that how could I actually know, since I’d never seen my face. With us instead of mirrors there were black holes, of which we were very afraid. Hung in various places on the walls. Everywhere. In every room. And we were frightened of them. It wasn’t just them. You could fall into them, and once you’d fallen in, you never got out. I was afraid of that both then, at the window in the gym, and later. And I’m still frightened now.

choreographic rickets

It was goddam cold there. I was shaking all over. I probably looked like M. In any case, she saw me, lost balance, and fell down. One, two, three. Like someone had upped the tempo by forty-five percent, blown out her ear-drum, and trampled on it. That was the plan. M bent her body in a grotesquely unnatural manner. Not in the shape of a letter—rather in the shape of the whole alphabet at once. I’d never seen anything like it before.

Maybe it was because she saw me. But maybe it was a protective reaction against the whole world, not just me. Maybe it was some sudden illness. For example tooth decay or rickets. I don’t know. In any case I was no longer like her. Bravo for me.

Now M was lying by the big, green doors of the canteen, and she looked like she was sitting, though she was obviously lying there. In such a state of concentration she didn’t fit in with the sports field covered in black gravel or to the canteen. Nor really to the fitness room or to my soothing session. She spoiled the landscape. I know she didn’t mean it, but so what? Of course, it was good that she’d finally got to her ideal way of walking. Super good. It was just that she looked as if someone had removed her batteries in what—from an esthetic point of view—was the least appropriate moment. I couldn’t tear my eyes from her. She was different to everyone and everything.

From that time on, M walked on slightly bent legs and a little twisted to the side. Whichever side. In turns. She had a waterproof plaster over her left eye, and her shadow always fell crooked. From that time on, I saw her at the door of the canteen maybe five times. She came up, waited a minute, and stamped the imprint of her own feet into the black gravel. Finally she made a spectacular fall laid out in the same shape as then. The gravel remembered everything. She came there and waited till her leg slipped again, but somehow it couldn’t manage to slip again, so yet another time M had to do herself what should have happened on its own once more for the first time.

I saw how she looked in the window to see me and to frighten herself. Like then. It’s just that then was then. Then she hid a grapefruit in her pocket for later. But now it was later. She fell, and the gravel remembered. That’s all.

I hurt myself on syntax

Once in the night she called me to her because her tummy was sore. Her room was painted gray. Dressed in red plaid pajamas, she looked like a picnic sheet. In her hand she held a linen bag full of buckwheat groats—the kind of bag that helps to keep the head balanced. She was still bent continually in the same way, as in the morning by the canteen, but in addition she was pressing her little fist into her belly. This time she had the other eye sealed up, and not the first one. Although out of consistency the first eye was running.
“Pain in the belly-button command-center please miss.”
That’s what she said. She spoke oddly and that was in fact her strong point. That is, it was like a word problem and in fact one of those from the difficult ones. You understand all the words, but not the whole. M spoke like she thought. She wouldn’t let anyone colonize her tongue. It moved the way it wanted to. I liked that.
“When I press my hand into the meat it burns and it burns me. This meat is good for nothing. This center is good for nothing.
“You can’t burn meat that isn’t there have you eaten what have you eaten?” I asked, a bit senselessly and running a risk, stealing her wounded syntax. I was afraid I’d immediately start walking with crooked knees and that a plaster would grow over my right eye.
With M my automatic copy-machine switched on, the one I never like to acknowledge is there.
I didn’t say that. I just thought it. I never confessed that to anyone.
“I’ve no bones just skin and meat I ate milk and I’m burning please miss.
“It’s cold see there out the window cold only you can’t see because it’s dark but it doesn’t burn in cold milk because it doesn’t boil it’s a dream go lie down.”
Fuck, I did it again.
“I can’t walk I studied but I didn’t learn.”
Of course, I knew that she could and she was just bluffing. Because by this time she had perfected her wrong way of walking. Every day she left the building through one green door, walked down that gray corridor, and then walked and walked, and walked but she never turned where I did.
I saw how she pressed her gut in the shape of her belly-button. I felt I was going to do the same in a moment.

It’s exactly this situation. You look at a chocolate candy in a colorful silver paper and you know you’re going to eat it. You see the oncoming gold-red gherkin of the city tram and you know that you’ll get on. I got on. I ate. I did.

We stood opposite each other and we bent ourselves in half, in an equal series of repetitions. The girl who did more. Better. The girl who did it her way, and who didn’t. Simply like total retards. M saw too that she was aping and parroting like an ape and a parrot, two in one. An ape and a parrot always show another ape and another parrot how to walk and where. Where to pee, where to eat, and where to sleep. Even if they don’t want to show, they show them anyway. That’s the way they are. Most often it’s animal mothers and fathers who show, relatives or neighbors. But not always. M could complain about me, but I pushed my way on into the bushes.
“I drank the milk hook, line, and sinker like you said.”
I said that, not her. That’s how it sounded more or less. Or something similar.
M pressed her fist into her stomach. Later—all the time with bent legs—she began carefully to take a step forward and back. Forward with the other leg and then back. I wanted to leave, but I was already doing the same as her. Her fist stuck in her gut. In mine too.
Hands up and body stretched like a fragile half-moon scattered with sugar.
Turning on your own axis. Your head spins. The same on the floor.
Turn to the side. Seven sequences of four. The air whistles.
Moving legs from left to right and back. Sitting, with hands pressed into the floor.
The body’s weight from hands to legs and back again.
Our arms were broken. My left, her right.
M tried to grab me again several times. Like a wooden ladder or a rod.
Maybe I calmed her down just the same as the fitness room and the herring-bone parquet calmed me. Turning broken arms. And then straight again in front—along a balancing beam out of our imagination.

We went up to the black hole of the mirror. Too close.
We looked like my cut-outs. That’s what they told me.
Once it was all over, I stuck them all on the wall.
I bit into the grapefruit.