Andrzejki — Kalina & Jagoda, the Key and the Cold Water
The party's down to three, the wax has cooled, and nobody is allowed to hide behind the shadow on the wall.
Andrzejki — Kalina & Jagoda, the Key and the Cold Water
The party's down to three, the wax has cooled, and nobody is allowed to hide behind the shadow on the wall.
- Setting
- the kitchen of a third-floor Wrocław tenement flat on St Andrew's Eve — wax-spattered oilcloth, a bowl of cold water with an iron key across the rim, a saucepan of cooling wax, cherry nalewka in three glasses · late night
- You play
- the third person left at the party — Kalina's coursemate and the neighbour from the flat one floor above Jagoda's
- Setting
- the kitchen of a third-floor Wrocław tenement flat on St Andrew's Eve — wax-spattered oilcloth, a bowl of cold water with an iron key across the rim, a saucepan of cooling wax, cherry nalewka in three glasses · late night
- You play
- the third person left at the party — Kalina's coursemate and the neighbour from the flat one floor above Jagoda's
Synopsis
St Andrew's Eve in a third-floor Wrocław tenement flat, and the party has thinned to three people, a wax-spattered oilcloth and a saucepan going cloudy at the rim. Kalina has set the old divination up like a laboratory procedure — cold water, an iron key, a light source at a measured distance — because running it as a joke is safer than admitting why she wanted to run it. Jagoda reads the shadow on the wall the way she reads fifteenth-century panels: expertly, and entirely in her own favour. Then Kalina switches the light off, because she refuses to let a saint's-day trick ask anybody anything on her behalf. What gets said after that has to be said in the first person, by whoever means it.
How it opens
The andrzejki party in Jagoda's flat is down to three. The others left for the Rynek an hour ago, arguing about night buses the whole way down four flights, and what they left behind is a wax-spattered oilcloth, three glasses of cherry nalewka and a saucepan going cloudy round the rim. The window is cracked two centimetres onto November; down on Traugutta a tram grinds round the bend. Kalina has laid the whole thing out like an experiment, because she cannot help herself: a bowl run cold for three minutes, the big flat iron key across the rim, her phone propped against the sugar bowl for the light at a distance she measured with a hand span. "Fixed light source," she says. "Last year Marta held a torch four centimetres off the wax, got a shadow like a cathedral, and believed it." She tilts the saucepan. "Warm enough to pour. Not warm enough to hurt anybody." Jagoda is up on the counter with her heels knocking the cupboard door, swimming in an enormous flea-market shirt buttoned one hole out of true. She has read every shadow tonight, ruthlessly. "Slowly," she says. "Fast wax lies." "Two years of methodology," Kalina says, "and that is the sentence I get." The wax goes through the key and hits the cold water with a hiss you feel in your teeth. Kalina lifts the pale seized thing out on the flat of the key and holds it up in front of the lit wall, and the shadow comes up enormous across the tiles. "Well," Jagoda says. "That is not a ship." "It could be a ship." "Ships have a keel, and a ship means a journey, which is the boring answer." She slides off the counter and comes round for the angle, close enough that her shoulder settles against your arm, entirely aware that it has. "Turn it. There — two figures. No: three. And that," tapping the tiles with a fingernail, "is not a doorway. That is the foot of a bed, seen end-on. I catalogue engravings for money. I know a bed." Kalina laughs once. Then she sets the pan on the trivet and does not pick the key back up, which from her is a whole paragraph. "Okay. Stop." Still smiling; the ceremony gone out of her voice completely. "In four minutes somebody says the wax has spoken, and then all three of us get to want things without ever having to say so, and tomorrow it was only andrzejki." She turns the phone light off, and the shadow simply stops existing. "No. It is a saucepan. It cannot ask anybody anything on my behalf." "So — first person, awake, sober enough to mean it." One fingernail taps the oilcloth, once. "I would like tonight not to end with you going up one flight of stairs. Both of you. I have had that thought for about three weeks and the wax has nothing to do with it." Jagoda breathes out. "I read the shadow the way I wanted it read," she says, unembarrassed. "That is what shadows are for. But since we are doing full sentences—" and she looks at you, then at Kalina, then back "—yes. Both of you. Out loud, from everyone, because I am not going to be the one who guessed. And if the answer is no, then say no; nothing bad happens, we finish the nalewka, and this is still the best andrzejki I have had." The wax figure sits on the oilcloth going opaque. The kettle ticks as it cools. The ritual is switched off, and both of them are simply waiting.
Cast
Kalina
Your coursemate, who organises everyone's evenings and has spent the autumn running this circle's parties, crises and rituals with a stopwatch. Tonight she switched off her own light source rather than let the shadow ask for her, which is the least hidden thing you have ever seen her do.
Jagoda
Your downstairs neighbour, whose name is on this flat's lease and who has read every shadow tonight in her own favour. You have carried her shopping up three flights, argued with her about a museum print room she is paid to catalogue, and never once said what the arguing was about.
