In the apartment, they no longer spoke to each other. Dunia cried in the corner whenever she looked at Marian, while he, with a glass of whiskey without ice, wandered between the kitchen and the living room. He couldn't be ashamed of his family once he felt their call; yet he failed to gain either their trust or even a shred of approval. He was a Wlazło, but not truly one. He was a Wlazło only in Warsaw. A Master of Science in Wlazło, a specialist in fungi and bacteria; a Wlazło, the alpha and omega of protozoa at occasional banquets. In a quiet village in eastern Poland, he was a nobody, a gray stranger in torn underwear, even if he showed up in an Armani suit. And that can hurt a lot.
After a dozen or so quiet and sad days, both in the apartment and in the laboratory, Dunia dared to briefly wipe the tears from her flushed face, stand in the doorway of the studio apartment with her ever-growing, rounder belly, and remind Marian that he'd asked her to marry him some time ago. She even pointed suggestively at her gold ring, which she hadn't taken off since it arrived. Marian didn't know what to say. He sat silently in a small leather armchair with a sagging seat, almost lying down. He was puffing on a cigarillo, though since college he'd only smoked in company. He didn't look at Dunia, so he couldn't see her piercing, tear-filled eyes. The lamp on the bedside table illuminated his profile picturesquely: his slim, hooked nose, still reminiscent of Sylvia Z.'s hard pubic bone, and his prominent chin, hiding his deep-set eyes in shadow. He seemed to stare into the floor, as if trying to penetrate it and spy on the neighbors downstairs. He ignored his fiancée's soft sobs.
He sat there the entire time, staring blankly ahead, as Dunya, weeping, repeated the question several times: "Marian, my love, what about our wedding? What about the child? What about me?" But Marian no longer wanted a wedding, no longer wanted a child, and no longer wanted Dunya. Perhaps any other man in his place would have forgotten the whole distasteful incident with the cow meat, married the beautiful, rosy-cheeked, warm-hearted woman with the sweet breasts, and lived happily ever after. But Marian was different, and that should never be forgotten.
Dunya's hands wrung in her sad habit when Marian quietly and hesitantly told her what he felt, or rather what he didn't feel, because Marian didn't love her. At the same time, all the eloquence with which he had only recently been able to describe how magnificent the wedding would be, how many guests he would invite, and how the vodka would flow freely, suddenly vanished from him. A moment later, with an enthusiasm miraculous in its artistry, he could recount his wild misfortune, his family excommunication, and how his entire world had crumbled, and misfortunes had piled on his head in a heap. Now Marian was just Marian again. When Dunya left his apartment in tears, never to return, he poured the entire glass of whiskey down the sink and made himself a sandwich with luncheon meat.
In the laboratory, each day he simply did his duty, the one thing to which he was to remain faithful forever. He observed bacteria and jotted down observations, once again assuming a foolish expression; his notes constantly disappeared from his drawer, and he constantly failed to notice. Similarly, he was unable to notice Dunya sobbing in the corner, swallowing tears. However, she would remain a single woman for some time yet. Her belly grew and grew and grew, just like her love for Marian. The more she suffered because of him, the more she loved him and the more she longed for him. Marian seemed to ignore her; he had forgotten that this woman was carrying his child beneath her sensitive heart, his ring on her finger, and he had no idea of the date, the course, or even the actual birth. He was only surprised when he saw Dunya back in the laboratory, as thin as ever, with even more ample and rounded breasts.
But this did not move Marian. He didn't feel like a father; the call vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Miss Dunia, on the other hand, was unable to ask him to acknowledge paternity or pay child support. She couldn't talk to him at all, couldn't function in his presence, reacting to him like someone who had once had three toes or even a whole foot severed by a lawnmower might to the sound of a lawnmower. That's why his parents stepped in. They came together, as usual (they were one of that very few people who remain close to each other until death—out of love, of course, and Dunia had the dubious luck, in this situation, to inherit this trait from both of them—if she loved, it was to the death) from their small house in a small town, straight to the Warsaw laboratory to take their daughter and scold Marian.
A scolded Marian was no different from an unscolded Marian. The Kowalskis, greatly astonished by this sudden transformation of their would-be son-in-law, only negotiated an acknowledgment of paternity and financial support for their daughter (which, incidentally, wasn't difficult at all; Marian agreed to anything; who knows, if asked to give her his apartment and jump off a bridge for what he'd done to her, he wouldn't have agreed either). Afterwards, the elderly couple (exceptionally lively for elderly people!) left the laboratory, taking their only daughter with them forever. From then on, the woman was to live quietly in a small town near Warsaw, tending her garden and her son, who, of course, took her surname, and in the somewhat distant future, meet a wonderful man, throw her engagement ring into the river, and categorically forget about the ungrateful Marian—"he's just a moron from the Warsaw laboratory," she would later say of him to her husband. Meanwhile, his husband wondered, though he didn't ponder it aloud, how it was possible that his wonderful and beautiful wife could have gotten pregnant by some "moron from a Warsaw laboratory"...
Marian lived from hand to mouth, meaning everything returned to normal. Spam sandwiches and beer cans returned to his overflowing wastebasket. No one would ever find a drop of whiskey in his house again; he even began refusing it at parties. No one would ever clean his tiny hallway and tiny bathroom as neatly as Dunia had once done, and the laundry basket soon became just another ordinary, rude wastebasket, saving Marian the hassle of throwing out the trash. Perhaps he had simply forgotten what this invention was for and had found the only use for it he could afford. Marian wasn't a creative man.
He worked as before, lived as before, had sex with various women, though he never had a real orgasm again—everything was as before. Marian generally stopped thinking, at least not about anything remotely related to existential philosophy. The only things that could occupy his thoughts were bacteria, their food, notes about them, and birthday cards. He was ashamed of peasant Maciej again, and he shuddered every time he remembered his own enormous forehead lump, which had thankfully long since melted away, passing into the pages of the meaningless and boring story of his sexless life. Sexless, yes, that's the right word.
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