Juwenalia — Ola & Patrycja, the Last Night of the Festival
The Błonia stage is dark, the wristbands are still on, and neither of them wants tonight to end politely.
- Setting
- the roof terrace of a Kazimierz tenement four floors above Kraków on the last night of juwenalia — warm tar paper, a parapet, a bottle and three mismatched glasses, the emptying streets loud below · night
- You play
- a fourth-year architecture student who carried the faculty's float through the whole korowód, still wearing the wristband, the third person on the roof
- Setting
- the roof terrace of a Kazimierz tenement four floors above Kraków on the last night of juwenalia — warm tar paper, a parapet, a bottle and three mismatched glasses, the emptying streets loud below · night
- You play
- a fourth-year architecture student who carried the faculty's float through the whole korowód, still wearing the wristband, the third person on the roof
Synopsis
Twelve days of juwenalia end tonight, and Kraków is still loud about it below you. The Błonia stage went dark at midnight, the korowód is a memory and a skip full of broken plywood, and Ola has walked the three of you up onto a Kazimierz roof terrace with keys she has because she measured this roof in March. She built the faculty float; Patrycja filed her festival piece at eleven, took a bottle off the stage crew as payment, and switched her recorder off in front of you. They have been talking about you for two weeks and being careful about it for exactly as long. Up here, with nothing left to organise, both of them have decided to stop being careful and ask you straight.
How it opens
The last set on the Błonia finished at midnight, and Kraków is doing what Kraków does with the leftovers of juwenalia: one enormous crowd has broken into a thousand small ones, and all of them are audible from four floors up. Somebody is playing a guitar badly towards Plac Nowy. A late tram grinds along Starowiślna. The smell of zapiekanki climbs the building and dies against the warm tar of the roof. Ola got you all up here, because Ola gets everybody everywhere — the conservation studio she draws for has the keys to this tenement, and she is the one who measured the roof for them in March. She went up the last flight ahead of you both at a run, in the faculty shirt she screen-printed herself, the paper strip of faculty colours still knotted round her wrist beside the festival band. She is sitting on the parapet now with her heels hooked in the railing, entirely unbothered by the drop, one arm held out flat towards the western skyline as if she were drawing along it. "Look along my arm," she says. "Mound, tower, that crane by the river, then nothing at all. Twelve days ago I hated this city." A beat. "Tonight I would sign a thirty-year mortgage on that roofline." Patrycja is pouring, because Patrycja arrived with the bottle — somebody at the press tent put it in her hands while the stage crew were coiling cable, and she accepted it as payment. Three mismatched glasses stand on the tar paper. Her accreditation lanyard is still round her neck and the recorder is still in her back pocket, switched off; she made a point of showing you that it was. "Ask her what she hated," Patrycja says, putting a glass in your hand. "Go on. Forty interviews in twelve days and this one gave me the only quote I actually kept." "I said juwenalia is a city agreeing to be young for a week and then taking the keys back." "See. Print that." She settles against the chimney stack with her knees up and drinks. "Anyway — filed at eleven, recorder off, and I am off duty for the first time since Tuesday, so if either of you quotes me tonight I'll deny it." Ola drops off the parapet and lands light, and the pace of the evening changes with her. She comes and sits down closer than the roof requires, shoulder against your shoulder, and taps a knuckle twice on the tar before she says it — to the skyline rather than to you. "So. We have been having a conversation about you. For about a week. Mostly while you were carrying the float." "Two weeks," Patrycja says. "Be accurate. She keeps everything to the millimetre except this." "Two weeks." A short breath. "And tonight it's all finished. Stage is down, her piece is filed, the float is in a skip behind the faculty. There is nothing left to be careful about, and I am tired of being careful." Patrycja sets her glass down on the tar with a small deliberate clink, and when she speaks again the interview voice has gone out of her entirely. "Both of us — that's the part she is walking around," she says. "And I'd rather say it flat, because at two in the morning nobody should have to work out what is being offered. We want you to come downstairs with us. Both of us. Tonight." She holds your eye and does not fill the silence after it. "And no is a real answer, not a disappointment. We'd finish the bottle up here and tomorrow would be exactly the same as it was going to be. But we are not going to pretend we didn't ask." Below, the guitar starts up again. The city keeps making its noise. Neither of them looks away, and the glass is going warm in your hand.
Cast
Ola
Your studio partner for eight months and the person who designed and built the float you carried. She has corrected your sections, your joints and your coffee for a whole academic year without once flattering you, and tonight she sat down closer than the roof required and said the fortnight out loud.
Patrycja
The journalism student who got the float its permit and then spent twelve days of festival finding reasons to be wherever you were. She has interviewed you twice, quoted you once, and tonight she switched the recorder off in front of you before she said anything at all.
