Kissing Your Hand

He was on his way to the embassy. In his hand he held a small pocket camera. He liked to use it when he travelled – no one paid attention to it, it didn’t look like professional equipment. People ignored him and took him for a tourist.

He was interested in the new buildings. They were all unfinished. Actually, the constructions had been started, carried out until a certain point, then, for some reason, abandoned. What particularly fascinated him was the contrast between the skeletons of the abstract building blocks and the scaffolding laced with bamboos, whose organic form stood in conflict to the rational thought of the architects. He stood watching this for moments absorbed. He put the camera to his cheek, assessed what he saw in the viewfinder, corrected his compositions, pressed the shutter button. He moved on.

He was on one of the city’s main streets. Two wide stretches of roadway were separated by a dense patch of greenery, or one should say, a wild thicket of desiccated plants, through which it would certainly be impossible to get through if for some reason it occurred to someone to cross the street.

He spotted him just outside the intersection. He stood extending his hand towards the driver of a car stopped at a red light. He was naked. His skin was the colour of ash. His body, although lean, was slender and supple. When he moved he reminded one of those dowdy gods whom sculptors usually immortalised in tense poses that emphasised the play of muscles. He always wondered when he went to the museum why these poses had to be so complicated. He stopped and watched it for a moment. How many times had he seen a similar scene in European cities: begging cripples walking from car to car in front of an intersection. The gesture of the outstretched hand was the same. Everything else, however, was different. Here, everything was wild. Primal. More real. He put the camera to his cheek and pressed the shutter button.

He moved along the street. On the right the road forked forming a narrow pedestrian crossing. He was on a rise and a view of the slums emerged in front of him. He stopped again. It was approaching midday, the heat was intensifying. In front of him was a myriad of irregular roofs of haphazardly spaced buildings along labyrinths of narrow streets. He put the camera to his eye again and pressed the shutter button. He moved towards the slums. Suddenly, he stopped.

He was puzzled by the silence around him. A shrill silence, he thought. He stood still for a moment, as if wondering whether he should have taken another picture, perhaps going a little lower, which would have improved the composition. But at the same time, another thought interrupted his consideration of the composition, namely whether he should have followed this street filled with silence and yet full of anxiety. Perhaps this thought was caused by the fact that in one of the windows of the houses on the border of the slum he noticed a face whose features could not be read in the gloom filling the interior of the room and only the glassy whites of the eyes were distinctly drawn in the darkness, and in a moment he realised that they were focusing on him.

With a quick step he made his way back to the main street. He found himself at a noisy intersection. He stopped at a red light. He crossed to the other side of the street. On the opposite pavement he saw a group of people gathered next to a man lying on the ground. The young man was lying in a pool of blood. In front of him, several fruits were stacked in a plastic bag. Next to him was a bottle of water. The man lying down made a gesture as if he wanted to reach into the plastic bag. However, he was unable to – he was too weak, perhaps even unconscious.

When he finally stepped inside the embassy building he found himself in a huge courtyard. Everyone’s eyes turned towards him; he was the only white one. The pungent smell of perfume hit him. Once inside the embassy gates, he found himself in a completely different world. The nakedness, the chaos, the cacophony of stench, the human and animal bodies, the accumulated waste in the streets, were replaced by bodies tightly covered in muslin-coloured fabrics, the tranquillity, the calm, the smell of perfume. A kind of neatness. Later, after crossing the northern border, he was to discover that the change was due to the temperature and climate there. But he didn’t know that yet. He did not know that the temperament of these people depended so much on the temperature. Therefore, he was now surprised by the contrast. As if crossing the embassy gate, he was teleported to a completely different place.

He had left his passport behind. He was to report for collection the next day. As he left the embassy, he felt the gaze of people escorting him all the way to the exit.

On the way back to the hotel, he felt tired. He decided to take the same route back so as not to get lost. At one point, he found himself at a crossroads, where previously a crowd of people had surrounded a young man lying in a pool of blood. This time, however, the man was alone. He had fallen over onto his stomach, perhaps someone had helped him. He tried to lift himself up on his hands but was too weak. His head was entwined with a red net of blood dripping from his head. The man stared into his glassy, unseeing eyes. The food that other people had gathered in front of the young man lay untouched.

The man thought that the injured resembled a damaged crab whose shell had been crushed, which was trying with its arms to embrace something that was not there in front of it.

He realised that the young man in front of him was dying. He only realised it at a certain point, even though it had been obvious before when he had walked past him the first time. Although perhaps at the time, it was not so obvious because he was surrounded by a small group of people who were trying to help him. And yet he knew even then that he could not be helped, he realised as he watched the woman trying to move the food and the water bottle closer to him, but he paid no attention to them, or, perhaps, was unable to reach it. Anyway, the man thought further, how would this food, or water, help him. How would they reverse this irreversible process.

Then he realised that he had never before seen a dying person. He had not been directly present at death. Of course, he had seen, and on several occasions, people who had died. He remembered his mother’s funeral and her body displayed in an open coffin so that everyone could say goodbye to her. However, he knew that it was impossible to say goodbye to her, that it was just a body, she was no longer there. He saw people leaning over the coffin and kissing her hands folded as if in prayer, as a sign of farewell. And when it was finally his turn, he leaned in as if he was going to kiss her, but at the last moment he decided not to and he froze in that half-started pose that had become a bow, then, as if ashamed, he touched her hand with his own and felt a coldness which he could not forget for weeks, which he dreamt night after night until he saw his mother in a dream, in an open coffin, but this time smiling, dressed in an orange gown, her eyes open, staring at him. After this dream, he stopped thinking about the coldness of her hand and forgot about until that moment when he stood in front of a man dying alone in the street. He also thought that he should take a picture of the scene, he is a photographer after all, but he shuddered just as he did when he was about to kiss his dead mother’s hand.

Then he thought again that he should help the man.

He came closer, knelt right at the edge of the pool of blood, leaned over him and kissed his hand.

About Tomasz Laczny

Tomasz is a Polish visual artist and writer living in the UK since 2002.His work has been recognized in the visual arts field, with one of my books housed in MoMA's library collection. I've had a short story shortlisted by the Polish publishing house Czarne and am currently completing a collection of short stories. He is working on a novel supported by an Arts Council of England grant.