The Walls Came Down

Chapter 4 – Joanna, Warsaw

CHAPTER 4 – JOANNA

WARSAWAs predicted, Marek barely looked up from his desk as she entered.

“Ah, Joanna. Thanks for coming.” He pointed at his phone half-apologetically and motioned for her to wait.

She hovered before his desk, unsure of whether or not she should take a seat in the chair opposite him. He had summoned her into his office and she waited to find out whether she was going to be made redundant. She hadn’t been given any proper work in weeks, so it was most certainly on the cards. If she was lucky, she might receive a decent pay off.

“Yes,” she heard him repeat to whoever was on the phone. “We’ll run the conspiracy angle. I don’t care if you don’t believe it. The readers want to know all the possibilities. The Russians sent the plane. That’s a fact. Some say it’s a convenient way to get rid of our entire government in one fell swoop. What? Yeah, obviously include the weather conditions and poor visibility. We need a summary of all the theories…”

Joanna waited. It had been almost a week, and the office was still buzzing with the Smolensk Air disaster. The whole thing filled her with a sick feeling – not a personal guilt, but a guilt on behalf of her entire profession. Marek had dubbed the incident as the ‘best piece of news that he’d come across in his career.’ There were 96 people dead, and all he could think about was media angles.

He finally turned towards her. Joanna noticed that he’d put the phone down on whoever he’d been speaking to without saying goodbye.

“Sorry about that. Now, I called you in here because I want you to write our next feature.”

“What?” She’d been waiting to be given a major feature project ever since she’d started at the company almost a year ago. “Are you serious? Have you already settled on the subject?” she asked, still not quite daring to believe what she’d just been given.

“Yeah, finally.” He motioned with his hand that she should sit down. “Look, we need something different to all this disaster coverage. People will soon get sick of it. I was gunning for coverage of our biggest football achievements of the last hundred years, you know, ahead of the Euro? But Krystian says it’s bullshit. He thinks every other media outlet from tabloid to broadsheet will be running that kind of thing and that our readership won’t be interested. What do you reckon?”

Was he genuinely asking for her opinion or just testing her to see whether she would agree with him? Krystian was the non-executive director of the company, who was always sticking his nose into editorial issues that weren’t really his concern. He was small, snarly and mean-spirited, and Joanna hated him.

But on this occasion, she was forced to agree with his opinion. She was bored by everything that she’d seen so far to do with the Euro. The adverts with their three-dimensional eye-popping footballs seemed to scream out at her every time she turned on the TV, waited at a bus-stop or searched for something online. And she failed to believe that this was the sporting event that would ‘put Poland back on the map – make it great again.’ It was just another money spinner, which would have them paying back for the stadium building through taxes for the next three decades.

And that was when it happened. People say that emotions are on a higher level, beyond the body. But Joanna experienced every intense emotion as a deep, physical sensation. At that moment she could clearly feel a dull tickle at the base of her stomach that developed into a deep itch of frustration. The months of being ignored and overlooked when it came to proper news and feature stories, being treated constantly like the office intern, having to brush away the chauvinism and the patronising comments, seemed to come to a head and blend together into an unexpected rage.

She wouldn’t be grateful, oh no. She had deserved this months ago. And she would say exactly what she thought.

“I think we can give them something different,” she managed, in what she thought was a neutral tone, “I think they’ll have loads on the Euro everywhere else.”

To her great surprise, Marek conceded quickly. It was as if he didn’t have time to get into any further debate about it.

“Fine, fine. Maybe we’ll run something smaller on it. So in that case your other option is ‘Missing People’.”

“What?”

The blood rushed to her cheeks.

“I think it could work very well for us,” he continued. “To be honest, I don’t know why we didn’t come up with it before. Do you know that over 15,000 people are reported missing in this country every year? Many of them are found within 24 hours of course. But there are always those who are never found,” he announced dramatically.

“I want to report on a mix of the highest profile cases over the past few decades. Some of them have been closed for a few years, but you need to scout out how much information the police will give you. I want you to start working on it as soon as you can. I’ll send you all the info that we’ve found so far. I don’t think you need me to tell you that if you get this right, it will be amazing for your career.”

Her body had gone rigid. She wanted to lift herself off the chair, to move out of the stifling heat of the room, but an invisible force weighed down on her. The momentary elation that she’d experienced in voicing her true thoughts to Marek had vanished instantly. It was replaced with a sense of intense fear.

“Are you alright?” he asked, arranging the pages scattered across his desk.

“Yes, of course. I… I’ll get on it straight away.”

“Fantastic. It’ll go out in the second issue of June, so I want to see the first draft by 10th June at the latest. I’ve given you a bit more time than usual as this is your first one. Well done. Have a great weekend. Take some time to think about how you want to structure the piece.”

With that, he shut his laptop and began to put on his coat – a sign that the conversation had ended. Joanna wasn’t sure how it had happened, but she eventually managed to get herself out of the building onto the cold, dingy street. She realised with shock that she hadn’t even thanked Marek for the opportunity.

She wandered into the empty parking lot still dazed from the conversation, and struggled to locate her car. She eventually identified it by its broken, off centre bumper and climbed into the driver’s seat.

She turned her key in the ignition, but then hesitated and laid her head on the steering wheel. She suddenly couldn’t face the simple task of driving home to her empty flat.

The image of the first Christmas without her brother came flooding back to her. It was always there, as if imprinted on the insides of her eyelids, but it was at particular moments that it returned with a painful sharpness.

She saw the smiling faces of her young cousins around her aunt’s dining table; the Christmas tree with its folded top which didn’t quite fit in the hallway, and the swirling silver candlesticks, which her grandmother feared would set fire to the tablecloth. Apparently they had already done so once when Joanna was just a baby.

She remembered her grandfather’s prayer before they sat down to dinner. Being the patriarch of the family, he took it upon himself to read from the Bible about Mary and Joseph’s journey to Nazareth. Then he calmly wished health and hope to everyone, “even those who could not be with us today.” It was upon these words that Joanna’s mother had uttered the most piercing wail that her daughter had ever heard. She remembered covering her ears and throwing herself under the table to escape the sound.

Her aunt had stepped in at just the right moment.

“Monika. Shhh… Come with me. You need to get some rest.” She led Joanna’s mother through to one of the bedrooms and the Christmas dinner proceeded as if nothing had happened. It was somehow wordlessly decided by the family that it would be better this way.

Joanna was seated next to her grandfather who fed her tiny morsels of fish and smiled at her sadly. Her mother didn’t return to the table that evening. She also wasn’t there for the midnight church service or for the festive breakfast the following day. In fact, she didn’t get out of bed until the snows had melted and it was almost half way through March.

Four-year old Joanna couldn’t rid herself of the gnawing feeling of aloneness and spent much time wondering about why she was the only one amongst her friends who seemed to be losing family members at a very rapid rate – first her father, then her brother, and now her mother was near enough gone. She remembered that she’d spent the winter of 1988 wondering when she herself would begin to fade away. Surely it was only natural that she disappeared too? Maybe then she would be reunited with the others?

The oddest thing was that she’d almost come to terms with her father’s disappearance. She could remember very little about him by that stage, other than his musty smell and the prickly texture of his beard when she had run her fingers over it. But her feelings about her brother were very different. Joanna could sense that he was alive, she was certain of it. Whenever one of the multitude of tactless kids in her class asked her about his whereabouts, she would say confidently: “He got lost and he’s just trying to make his way back.”

She never accepted that Adam had disappeared for good. As a teenager, she had fought with her mother to keep his case open, but after 20 years with nothing but a few false leads, the police had decided that they had reached the end of their search.

What was worse was that since getting out of bed in the spring of 1989, Joanna’s mother had decided that the only way that she could carry on living was by pretending that Adam had never existed. She went as far as selling all of his clothes, giving his bed away to the neighbours and cutting up pictures of her children when they were little, leaving only the parts that featured her daughter. The problem was that Joanna and Adam had done everything together and the pictures ended up looking very peculiar, with a disembodied hand holding Joanna’s as she walked, or a tiny slither of a shoulder leaning on hers.

No, she wouldn’t put herself through it again. All her reserves of endurance and hope had finally left her. She’d ring Marek later that night and tell him that she couldn’t do it. Even if it meant working on minor film reviews for the rest of her career.