If you wanted to survive in this country, you had to be cynical. There was no other way. If you weren’t, reality would kick in just too hard. It was a very dark sitcom no one would ever like to live in. Public healthcare was dying out, and every day inflation broke its own previous all-time record. The job market was a joke further polarized by the appearance of AI. Without connections, you could achieve nothing.
Luckily, I worked in a well-paid and stable field, where no company could achieve anything without a human. I was safe. And even rarer than those things, I liked my job. Especially since I didn’t have to work at an office or do any paperwork. I was employed by a modern, foreign company, which took care of such matters, allowing me to simply focus on my critical tasks. They were not very complicated if you knew what you were doing. However, the catch was that the tiniest mistake could lead to more damage than one could pay off. But I made no mistakes. So I guaranteed myself nice, long breaks. My working day consisted of fifteen minutes of work followed by forty-five-minute breaks full of relaxation. And I was paid for all of it.
When you spent three-quarters of your working day doing what you wanted instead of what you were paid for, it was easy to judge others. So I judged from above, looking through the window of a rented flat in a slowly crumbling and decaying blok.
As almost every other middle-aged Pole out there, I was forced by the real estate market to rent a flat. Tired of the high cost of living in a big city, I had tried to find basically anything that could meet the not-so-high standards of a single person in their early 30s.
The thing was that every decent flat had already been rented. The only ones still available had been merely livable: The current standard on the real estate market consisted of deteriorating single-room 45-square-foot flats with a toilet on the other side of the common hallway. I could not grasp how a well-earning middle-aged person struggled to find a regular flat with a regular kitchen and bathroom.
But I managed to find a decent one. A really decent one. Two rooms and a balcony with a few other amenities. The landlords were straightforward and easy-going. They even allowed pets. Not that I had any. But I was planning to get a cat, so I liked that this matter had sorted itself out already.
In the meantime, I was still waiting for the bloody telecommunications company to finally connect my home to the internet. The pleasant and polite lady on the phone told me that the specialist was on sick leave and that she could not reach the backup. But the in-app notifications showed that the backup was in a bigger city, doing only the jobs in close proximity. From what I had learned, the internet guys were paid per location served, so it did not puzzle me at all. What puzzled me was the inability of an average customer to do something about such a case. I was only told to patiently wait. I even tried intimidating them with the threat of cancelling the agreement, but they must have read my bluff, as I had no other internet services available to choose from. They were the only supplier with a fiber-optic cable connected to the blok.
The other suppliers’ upload and download speeds would not let me work at full capacity. My job required a stable and fast internet connection. It was true that a slow connection would be better than mobile Wi-Fi and using my smartphone as a router. The connection was so weak that I had to reschedule some of the video calls again, as I had done for three consecutive weeks so far. I only hoped that it would not affect my reputation, which seemed to be the case as colleagues took my place without hesitation.
Nonetheless, although decent, the flat was still just a plain one in a simple, post-communist blok. The density of residential families per square meter in the building was so high that you could never feel left alone. The tremors of water pipes accompanied by shreds of conversations flying through the common ventilation shaft constantly reminded me of all the other human beings flocking to the square, brutally gray building.
The blok’s surroundings were rather clean. It generally was tidy around here. But sometimes, when entering the blok’s elevator, I could not help but wonder whether I had rented a flat in some kind of slum. At best, it stank of wet dogs and cheap cigarettes. At best. Quite often, however, this unpleasant smell was suppressed by an even worse one – cheap vodka and an old, unwashed body. It was awful. Almost as awful as the Stain, but I did not need to go to the elevator too often. The Stain, on the other hand, peeked at me all day long. But apart from that, the whole district was clean. People picked up after their pets, polished their windows every few weeks and the municipal services swept the streets and pavements constantly.
The windows of the other buildings nearby looked more like a kaleidoscope of alien realities I was not supposed to see. Creepy insights on matters so personal that they should not be obviously accessible. All the families’ secrets and drama were easy to understand when they were not blocked out by curtains. And that was the reason everybody used them. The heavier, the better. So the nosey neighbors could not get any fuel for their juicy gossip to run on. But even without peeking through their windows, just by looking through your own several times a day, you could flesh out a lot about the others. After a few weeks, you could easily recognize the children and their families; you knew exactly who went to church, who was a dog owner and who was owned by a dog.
(…to be continued…)
Transadaptation Volume 5 – Of Flowing Vicissitudes
January: The Night the Stars Stopped Shining – Sarah-Leah Pimentel (South Africa)
February: Three Sides to Every Story – Krisztina Janosi (Hungary)
March: Rain Trap – Adriana Uribe (Columbia)
April: Priorities – Narantsogt Baatarkhuu (Mongolia)
May: The Night in Heaven – Armine Asryan (Armenia)
June: Witches Don’t Burn – Alejandra Baccino (Uruguay)
July: A Regular Flat – Mateusz Tymoszewski (Poland)
August: Many Happy Returns – Svetlana Molchanova (Russia)
September: And Now, It Will All Go Downhill – Jonay Quintero Hernandez (Spain)
October: Planet Qirim – Anastasiia Leonova (Ukraine)
November: You Are Her, Aren’t You? – Seyit Ali Dastan (Turkey)
December: Culture Shock – Veronika Groke (Austria)
Background – Context
Transadaptation Volume 4: Material Dissent – Adulthood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2023)
Transadaptation Volume 3: Evanescent – Young Adulthood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2022)
Transadaptation Volume 2: Conceived – Childhood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2021)
Transadaptation Volume 1: In the Middle – Prelude to a Contemporary Transadaptation, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2020)
Peripatetic Alterity: A Philosophical Treatise on the Spectrum of Being – Romantics and Pragmatists by Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2019)
La Syncrétion of Polarization and Extremes Transposée, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2019)
The Codex of Uncertainty Transposed, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2018)
L’anthologie of Global Instability Transpuesta, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2017)
From Wahnsinnig to the Loony Bin: German and Russian Stories Transposed to Modern-day America, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2013)
Emblems and stories on the international community
Perception by country – Transposing emblems, articles, short stories and reports from around the world
Credits
Background image: Poland – Residential building of communist era – uslatar (Shutterstock)
Top row (from left to right): 1. Tomaszow Mazowiecki, Poland – Commuting – WrS.tm.pl (Unsplash); 2. Warsaw, Poland – On the street – Grand Warszawski (Shutterstock); 3. Tomaszow Mazowiecki, Poland – Residential bloks 2 – WrS.tm.pl (Unsplash)
Center image: Warsaw, Poland – The intersection – Grand Warszawski (Shutterstock)
Bottom row (from left to right): 1. Warsaw, Poland – Residential bloks – Tomek Baginski (Unsplash); 2. Ustronie Morskie, Poland – Residential buildings – Marekusz (Shutterstock); 3. Warsaw, Poland – On the street – Grand Warszawski (Shutterstock)
Source: The Codex of Uncertainty Transposed