Paweł's New Device

Paweł stretched the earphones over his ears and released them with a heavy heart. As Mr. Wojczyk’s voice droned on about the relative costs of natively produced and imported tin, he admonished himself to ignore the clock, pay close attention, and stop making mistakes.

   Late that morning, Ms. Lizabeta had stood across from him, angled a degree or two from parallel, which perhaps expressed her reluctance to confront him, but there she was, proffering three curled sheets of paper. “These were in my cubby,” she said, scowling down as if to lay the offense on the sheets themselves. “And Mr. Wojczyk came round earlier and he was really out of sorts.” As she spoke, she set her eyes patrolling up and down Paweł’s tie, scurrying past the patina of wiped mustard, sauce, and soup spills. “He had two memos addressed to me, one of which was marked Urgent and the other Confidential, which is really bad luck, given I so infrequently receive anything Urgent and almost never Confidential. But he found these,” she looked down at them in dismay, “rolled up a bit too tightly among the other sheaves of paper and—so he said—screwed into his pigeonhole. He was really put out, bringing them to me.” Ms. Lizabeta looked away from his tie, her gaze travelling with increasing desperation across his hastily pressed shirtfront until she surrendered, withdrawing from a crazed pocket. She redirected her eyes to the papers in her hands. “Now, I’m not one of those who minds a quick sortie from my desk. I was just reading in the newspaper about a new study saying a small break here and there increases productivity. But, you know, we can’t be seen to take liberties, and, Mr. Paweł, you want to maintain the reputation you have built for yourself of efficiency and accuracy.” Her duty done, Ms. Lizabeta allowed herself to meet Paweł’s eyes, and she squared to face him. “Oh, Mr. Paweł, normally you do such a fine job. And one can see you could do even more with a bit of ambition. If you only had someone to look after you. One can’t help thinking if there were a Mrs. Paweł, if you had someone to make it all worthwhile—like I have my Tomek—” Ms. Lizabeta looked searchingly into his eyes. “The places you could go.”

   Paweł looked down at his stained tie and crumpled shirt. He thanked Ms. Lizabeta and promised to do better. Despite the scolding and entreaty, Paweł had thrilled at Ms. Lizabeta’s last statement, thinking of the unopened package lying on his bed. The places you could go. He could just go home.

   Then, that afternoon, he was called into Mr. Wojczyk’s blustery office, its sealed windows looking out over the mouth of the Oder River. “Listen, Mr. Korzeniowski: this just won’t do,” Mr. Wojczyk said. “You have been entrusted, Mr. Korzeniowski, not only with dispatching extra- and intra-office mail—a task at which you recently—and I must say—unaccountably blundered, but also with the vital task of transcribing management’s dictated recordings. This responsibility was endowed upon you by myself at the behest of some of your more well-respected colleagues, and we even went a step further, allowing you to employ the use of one of the infernal calculating television sets that we were obliged to obtain and you’re so fond of, as if simple, painstaking, typewritten pages weren’t good enough in the year 2024. I know our little Szczecin office might not be exciting for you, might not be up to the standards of what they have in Poznan or Warsaw or Riga or …” Mr. Wojczyk trailed off, apparently having lost the thrust of his argument somewhere along his journey of illustrious cities. He pushed his thumb between the buttons of his vest and seemed to find it there: “Or Moscow! But I like to think we can do our best, can do without that which, insofar as I can tell, is little more than a typewriter that casts spells on another machine down the hall, which in turn demands to be fed paper that’s as evil-smelling and flimsy as it is dear.” Mr. Wojczyk held up a length of thermal-printed output and squinted at the copy. “Misspellings, grammatical errors, missing and disjointed phrases. Do it again, please, Mr. Korzeniowski.”

   And so it was that Paweł found himself, after five, alone in the office with earphones covering his ears, clattering out Mr. Wojczyk’s words into the computer terminal. The designation terminal, in this case, being only too apt: this particular computer was connected to nothing other than its printer, and Paweł’s relationship to it quite possibly, for him, professionally, the end of the line.

   At a quarter to nine, with the elevator predictably out of service, Paweł careened around and down eight flights of stairs, ran headlong through the lobby, and burst out onto the street, where the cold slapped him in the face and reminded him to watch his step as he hurried along the icy pavement. The harbor lights, blurred by fog, reflected off the river’s end. There was a whole world out there.

   He cut through the park, suddenly alive to the dangers of stumbling in the dark and scaring up whatever criminal element might be lurking in the shadows. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket, put his head down, and made careful haste.

   Having exited the park unscathed, he jogged along the dimly lit sidewalks to a milk bar that was open late. He asked for a double portion of pork schnitzel with potato dumplings. Regardless of the posted hours, he was made to feel he was imposing. The woman behind the counter looked up at the clock with something like a sneer and then glared at him. And yet, when he paid and then handed her his ration card, she stamped only one portion of meat.

   The woman disappeared into the back. He sat alone in the bar, sipping at a glass of a watery, smoked apple drink while waiting for his food. When it arrived, he ate hurriedly, drained his drink, said thank you to an empty room, and pushed back out into the cold. 

   He was home in less than five minutes. He was already unwinding the scarf from his neck and tearing off his coat as he went through the door of his apartment. It was stifling, even though the radiators were cranked down to zero. He hung up his coat, hat, and scarf, threw open all the windows, and went into the kitchen. He set the kettle going and spooned finely ground coffee into a glass. When the water had boiled, he poured it over the coffee and stirred vigorously. Carrying the coffee on a saucer, with the spoon still in the glass, he closed the windows, went into his bedroom, set the coffee on his desk, and sat down next to the package at the foot of his bed.

   The package was wrapped in layers of clinging black plastic, which he unwound to reveal a cardboard box emblazoned with the words RoboTel 2500X Encoder-Decoder. He cut through the kraft-tape seal and opened the box. Inside, beneath a slim instruction manual, a beige, egg-shaped object, about the size of his hand, nestled in amongst a variety of cables and plastic blocks. Holding it level, Paweł transferred the opened cardboard box from the bed to the desk, next to his computer terminal.

   He studied the first three inside pages of the instruction manual, with its line drawings, labels, and setup procedures, and then flipped quickly through the remaining pages of compliance statements and warnings. His coffee was lukewarm now, and he drank it down to the grounds, holding the spoon up away from his mouth.

   Then he set to connecting the numerous cables of the egg-shaped device to the power outlet, the phone jack, and his computer, meticulously following each step. Once that was done, he switched on the device, switched on his computer, and waited. If everything worked properly, he would now be able to interface with other computers that were connected to phone lines using similar devices. Copying from the manual, he keyed some instructions into his computer and hit RETURN, triggering a muted cacophony of short tones and crackling clicks from within the small device.

   A directory appeared, filling the screen with three columns of entries followed by a highlighted text that read PAGE DOWN -> NEXT PAGE. Paweł paged through the entries, counting hundreds of different destinations. He licked his lips and then grasped the tip of his tongue lightly between his teeth. He paged back up until he found the entry he was looking for: American Maids.

   He selected the entry, hit RETURN, and then scrolled down a list of names until he landed on Lane, Melody: NewChi WY, 19y, 1,57M, brunette, hazel, viable. RETURN.

   He wrote: Hi Mel! I’m late. I’m sorry. He waited a few minutes, but there was no response. I’m sorry. I was so excited at the prospect of talking to you FROM MY HOME I made some mistakes at work and had to stay late. Can you believe it?

   Paweł stared at the screen. It remained unclear whether the American Melody Lane believed it or not. After ten minutes, he went to the kitchen and made himself another coffee. When he returned with his fresh cup, he found the following message written in Russian:

   Meoldy no there.. I go to watch. Peacefully to wait.

   OK! I’ll be here, he answered in Polish. He scratched the back of his hand against the stubble on his chin and looked at the shelf above his desk. Wedged in among a hodgepodge of books, including A History of Modern Soviet Europe: 1962-2022, From the Ashes of Babylon: America Today, Advanced Computing Principles, and Polish-English and Russian-Polish dictionaries, was the manual that had come with his computer. He took the manual down, found the entry on foreign language inputs, and, using a keyboard map, attempted to write, OK. I will wait for her, in Russian. He clenched his teeth and hit RETURN.

   He gathered up the packing material from the encoder-decoder he had spread on his desk, closed the lid on the box, and put it in his closet. He stirred his coffee, waited a few minutes, and then sipped at it until he reached the grounds at the bottom of the cup. He changed out of his work clothes into pajamas. Then he hurried to the bathroom, relieved himself, and hurried back to check the computer screen. He waited.

   He was stifling a yawn with his fist and leaning over his keyboard with his forehead nearly touching the screen when, Good evening Paweł, written in Polish, appeared. He started back and sat up straight.

   Is that you, Melody? I was worried I missed you.

   Yes. It is Melody.

   Paweł waited a few moments and then replied, It’s incredible to write to you from my home. We don’t have to watch the time, and I can relax knowing our messages are private.

   A long pause, and then he read: At the computer center your messages are recorded. A moment later: This is the question.

   I don’t know if they’re recorded and kept, but I’m sure they can be read, somehow. I’m sure they ARE read, sometimes.

   It is not good.

   Paweł sighed. It’s life. We don’t care about that, though, anymore. We can be alone.

   Another long pause: Yes, we can be alone. All the other girls went to dinner, so I’m with you only. Even if, for now, we are very far apart, we are still close to each other. The sun set not long ago. Every day the sunset is so beautiful, purples and oranges and reds. They say it is the one beautiful thing that came from the devastation.

   Paweł looked up at his books. Yes, it’s a global phenomenon. Supposedly the sunsets 60 years ago weren’t nearly so lovely, but we could see more stars. What did you do today? Did you go out?

   Yes, came the reply. The Bq levels were low today, and I spent almost an hour outside. It was cold, but the sun was shining. I took off my coat and my sweater and I felt the sun on my bare shoulders. I felt healthy. It’s warm in my room and it seems I can still feel the sun on me, so I took off my sweater and got into my nightgown. I feel quite naked!

   They exchanged scores of messages. Paweł typed feverishly, then waited in frozen anticipation for each reply. By two in the morning, they were repeating to each other how wonderful it would be when they would finally get to meet in person. They had calculated that Paweł needed to work only five more months, and he would have enough money to pay the American Maids agency and secure her passage to Szczecin. He would supply the agency his bank details to forward a bit of money to her now, so that she could get her photo taken and collect the documents she needed for her visa.

   At quarter to three, they had finished telling each other goodnight. Paweł eventually succumbed to a fitful sleep, bothered by caffeine and his excitement.

   When he woke up, it was too bright in his room. He panicked. He had slept through his alarm, and he was already an hour and a half late for work. He skipped his shower, skipped coffee and breakfast, and rushed to the office.

   He ran up the stairs, two at a time for three flights, and then lugged himself up by the handrail until he reached the eighth floor. He came upon an angry-looking Mr. Wojczyk in the hall. The older man brushed by, without acknowledging him.

   Paweł went to his station and hung up his coat. The back of his shirt was soaked through with sweat. His basket of incoming mail sat empty. He shivered.

   He moved warily through the office, up and down hallways, looking for his mailcart and whoever had started delivering his mail. There was uncommon activity and heightened emotion in the office. Finally, he made his way to Ms. Lizabeta’s office and was beginning to knock timidly on the door when it was yanked open.

   “Oh! Mr. Paweł! You scared me.” Ms. Lizabeta said over her shoulder, as she headed down the hallway.

   Paweł rushed to catch up with her. “Ms. Lizabeta, do you know who delivered the mail this morning? I couldn’t find my cart. Or the mail?”

   “Mr. Paweł, you really shouldn’t have to come to me for this sort of thing anymore, and today of all days I have no time to help you.”

   “But Ms. Lizabeta, what has happened? Why is everyone running around like the sky is falling?”

   “You haven’t heard? This morning Mr. Wojczyk called the bank to pay one of our suppliers. The company’s account has been cleaned out. All of our personal accounts have been cleaned out. No one knows what happened, but around three in the morning last night, we all got robbed.” She turned to stop and faced him, studying him carefully.

   “Mr. Paweł,” she remonstrated. “This is too much.”

   “What?” Paweł gulped.

   “You wore that same shirt and that same, awful tie yesterday. Mr. Paweł, I implore you to get a wife. I’m certain there’s a woman out there, just for you. Maybe you just need to set your sites wider. Even this morning, I was reading in the newspaper, that more and more Polish men are taking brides from America. It’s a whole business.”

   “I don’t know, Ms. Lizabeta, you know what they say: you can’t trust girls from the West.”