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About The Book:
Title: CONTROLLED CONVERSATIONS
Author: Karol
Lagodzki
Pub. Date: August 20, 2024
Publisher: Milford
House Press
Formats: Paperback, eBook
Pages: 228
Find it: Goodreads, https://books2read.com/CONTROLLED-CONVERSATIONS
In 1982 Soviet-controlled Poland-a time and place of suspicion and
mistrust-when geopolitical forces and violent men descend upon her little town
of Zygmuntowo, Emilia must decide if she’s willing to risk prison or worse for
self-respect and for her unexpected love.
A telephone station switchboard operator ordered to monitor the calls she
connects, Emilia overhears a mysterious coded conversation. It continues to
distract her, but not as much as the growing realization that she’s falling in
unsanctioned love with her best friend Kalina. Meanwhile, outside the city of
Frombork, Antek, a shipyard engineer and a Solidarity labor union treasurer,
escapes from prison and works to recover the union’s money, a task which in
time leads him to Emilia’s town. In the metropolitan city of Gdańsk, Roman, a
secret police major, wants the money for himself and dreams of his own escape
and the magical beaches of Rio de Janeiro.
As the only daughter of a local Communist Party apparatchik, Emilia has
enjoyed a sheltered life, but with the advent of martial law, her mother’s
influence can no longer shield her. She faces choices she never expected to
make when she discovers her best friend’s and lover’s involvement with the
resistance. With new allies and enemies in town, the time to choose a side is
now.
In his debut novel, Karol Lagodzki asks: What separates people who
transcend their fear and take risks for the sake of change from the rest of us?
The answer is up to the readers.
An excerpt from Controlled Conversations by Karol
Lagodzki 1
An
Excerpt from Controlled Conversations by
Karol Lagodzki
Copyright
© 2024 Karol Lagodzki
Milford
House Press, an imprint of Sunbury Press
Publication
date: August 20, 2024
Chapter Two: The Man
Called Adamczyk
Thursday, July 1,
1982. Frombork.
Antoni Adamczyk stole two sideways glances before he dumped the
fish entrails off the pier. He took
enough risks, and even though he had never seen a Milicja patrol on this
proletarian stretch of the coast at
six-thirty in the morning, shortly after curfew, it didn’t pay to be stupid. As
he put the carcasses in a cooler filled
with ice, a fish’s eye caught his before he closed the lid. He
grimaced. He killed
them but didn’t like the necessity.
Adamczyk. He answered to this name as his own now. Every so often,
he’d stand in front of the mirror.
Sometimes he addressed himself out loud to try it on. Adamczyk. It fit. One day
he’d get his own name back, but not today. At least his given name was
common enough to keep. He was still an
Antoni. Antek, for short.
He carried the bicycle along with the cooler to the top floor of
the four-story apartment building on the
outskirts of Frombork. Wiped the sweat off his forehead and unlocked the
door. Once in, Antek locked both
deadbolts.
Having
done most of the butchering by Wisła Bay, he now made the scales rain, coated
An excerpt from Controlled Conversations by Karol
Lagodzki 2
the
fish pieces in egg and flour, and floated them onto melted butter in the frying
pan. He soon sat down with a plate of
fried fish and a few slices of dense, dark bread he picked up on the way home. Breakfast.
He couldn’t get his hands on ration cards, not legally, and money
grew scarce quickly when one had to pay
double for a loaf of bread. He could think of no other easy source of
cheap protein. But the dead fish stare
had a way of sticking in his head. The cold vacuum where the life he had taken used to be. Having long ago
taken the measure of his courage and conscience, he understood that no matter the consequences,
he could never kill a human being. He found
comfort in knowing it.
Antek licked off his lips and stood over the sink long enough to
wash the frying pan, the plate, and the
fork, and to hum all of The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” Then
he brushed his teeth, put on dirty
clothes, and headed out to walk twenty minutes to the car garage.
The sign read Naprawa Samochodów.
The squat cinder-block building crouched over two garage bays sealed at night by wooden gates
reinforced by steel bars. During business hours, open, it yawned with two deep trenches
covered with a patina the color of tooth decay.
Antek checked to make sure the young fool working yesterday’s
afternoon shift had left the tools where
they belonged. He chased a couple of the wrenches down by the office and retrieved them to reunite the set. Idiot boy.
All zits and a sad attempt at a mustache. But a
necessary idiot. Bolek was the one of the two of them on whose meager
income Pan Stefan, the owner and Bolek’s
father, paid taxes and insurance. Antek’s role, played under the table, was
to be the mechanic.
“A smoke?” Stefan said, getting off the office phone. He presented
a butt of a filter-less tube out of a
white pack. “And good morning.”
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Lagodzki 3
“Morning.” Antek lit
the cigarette off Stefan’s.
The men walked out in front of the garage and stood in silence.
Stefan must have had considerable
connections to have been able to build in the middle of the housing
co-op’s designated green space and to
appropriate half of the parking lot for his own. Gray, prefabricated concrete
apartment buildings rose across the full one hundred and eighty degrees of his
field of view. Young trees came up to a
few feet above Antek’s head throughout the landscape. Crows perched on the branches when they weren’t
chasing seagulls away from roadkill.
Crows knew what they were about. When a part of a flock skittered
out of a bush, cackling, Antek suspected
they were having great fun at his expense. Telling dirty jokes about the size of his junk. Perhaps a thing or two
about his mother. Or his sister. Probably both.
You always knew where you stood with a crow.
“Son of a whore,” Stefan muttered and stomped on the cigarette
butt while sucking on his fingers. He
rubbed them. “Do the Łada and the Zaporozhets today. That’ll do. Got to respect
the work.”
“Didn’t Bolek do the
Zaporozhets?”
Stefan squinted. “Second opinion,” he said and stalked back to the
office. Antek got the keys and brought
the twenty-year-old miracle of Soviet engineering over to rest above a trench. His ears and nose told him most of what he
needed to know. Bolek had changed the sparkplugs. Meanwhile, it was the gasket that threatened
to split in half like Nadia Comăneci. That, and the brakes.
Antek was not a tall man but broad in the shoulders and strong
from working with his hands. If he were
willing to risk a hernia, he could have lifted the engine block out of the Zaporozhets. He sighed. One of the freighter
engines he used to build in the Gdynia shipyards
An excerpt from Controlled Conversations by Karol
Lagodzki 4
would have made him crane his neck and smile. You knew where you
stood with a ship. If you loved her, she
took that love and gave it to the men and women who trusted her with their
lives. No one fell in love with a
shitty, twenty-seven-horsepower Zaporozhets.
#
Antek
had always pursued two things: machines and love, the latter broadly defined.
He delighted in the ships he built.
Adored his wife. Yearned for the freedom to say what one thinks, to travel, to drink French wine, that others,
further west, enjoyed and took for granted.
He loved his first and, thus far, only job. After graduating from
Gdańsk Polytechnic, he joined the Gdynia
Shipyards in late 1976, around the time the new three-hundred-meter dry
dock came on-line. The Gdańsk plant
wasn’t going to hoard all the most exciting orders anymore. About forty minutes on a bus and a tram
separated the two shipyards, but it would take more than a new dock and a few prestigious builds
to change the perception of Gdynia’s shipbuilding as second-best.
Antek, who always
rooted for the underdog, loved that fact, too.
His first real assignment—after a few months’ training because
“there is book learning and there is
real learning,” according to his boss—was on a tanker that was to become
the Marshal Zhukov: a 105,000-tonnage,
245-meter-long beauty, that even Gdańsk would have been proud of. Antek joined the team a few weeks
before the job was done, and since he couldn’t have screwed anything up too much at that stage,
he suspected this had still been part of his “real learning.”
On a summer morning in 1978, a month after his wedding, Antek arrived
at work and proceeded to his station
only to be met there by old Matusiak, the boss. What he had lacked in formal education, Łukasz Matusiak gained
through thirty years of hands-on practice.
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Lagodzki 5
“Antek,” Matusiak
said, “you’re almost late.”
Antek knew there would be no profit in pointing out he was on
time. “Good morning,” he said and waited
for the older man to make his next move.
Matusiak motioned for Antek to follow, and a few minutes later
they were both sitting in the boss’s
office, with Matusiak leaning over the desk and offering the other man a
cigarette. Antek accepted; it would have
been rude not to.
After the boss leaned back with the cigarette stuck in the corner
of his mouth and a minute later still
said nothing, the hard silence finally broke Antek’s resolve to wait the man
out. “Panie Matusiak,” Antek said, “how can I help?”
“Not me you’d be helping.” The man took another few moments,
grimacing, his eyes wandering as if
trying on and discarding several options for what to say next. Then he
continued, “Paying your Solidarity
dues?”
Antek nodded, coughed—Matusiak’s favorite smokes were the
filterless Sport—but said nothing, now completely at a loss about the
purpose of this meeting.
“I’ve always said the best cigarettes came from Zygmuntowo,”
Matusiak said. “Must be something in the
soil. Isn’t that where you went off last month after the wedding?” “Camping.”
“Went into town,
though?”
“Boss, what’s this
about?
Matusiak leaned back, flicked off the ash from his cigarette in
the vicinity of the ashtray, and stared
at the younger man, his face expressionless as if deciding what size coffin
would fit Antek.
Antek
was about to get up and excuse himself when Matusiak said, “Had to go into town
An excerpt from Controlled Conversations by Karol
Lagodzki 6
to
deliver all that print paper to the girl running that silly underground rag.”
Antek did spring up now, would have sprung up, had he not tripped over his
chair trying to back off and stand at
the same time. Motion stopped after his head bounced off and then settled on the floor, and his jarred elbow
rang a peal of pain heard loudly by his fingertips. “Jezus
Maria, son, what in the world are you doing!?”
Matusiak’s voice came from the front of the room. Antek turned his
head and was glad to find his neck
obeyed. Not broken. His boss had closed the door and likely locked it since he
was putting a set of keys in his pocket.
Matusiak then knelt by his side.
“You think you can get
up?”
“Possibly. But what’s the point? Are you from Bezpieka or just
working for them?” “What? My God, no. Get up.” Matusiak clasped Antek’s arm,
the aching one, and hoisted him up. The
old man was strong. Once Antek was on his feet, his boss picked up and placed
the chair in front of his desk, then
gently guided the younger man to it.
“Sit.”
Antek did. He slouched, staring yet not seeing the papers on the
desk’s surface, while his right hand
rubbed his sore left elbow.
“Have you met the third shift foreman? Blond hair. Not tall, but
wide. Has got these wispy, curled up Pan
Wołodyjowski mustaches?” When Antek didn’t respond, Matusiak went on, “Lucky skurwysyn got the papers to go to
France and left yesterday. He said his brother-in law had set him up with a
construction gig. Never mind the names now, but he was the treasurer for the union chapter here, for Solidarity.”
Antek raised his head and stretched his neck both ways. It didn’t
hurt much at all. “You’ve been active in
Solidarity, even taking risks,” Matusiak said. “Trustworthy, I’m
An excerpt from Controlled Conversations by Karol
Lagodzki 7
hearing.
And in your personnel file, it says you’ve done some accounting.” “That was a
two-year certificate in retail management,” Antek said, relaxing, finally sensing the purpose of this meeting. “I had
to do something when I didn’t get into the
polytechnic the first time. And the second time. Mostly to get a
military deferral until I could get a
diploma. Six months of that useless torture beats the two years you have to do
without a master’s degree.”
“Sounds like we got
ourselves a new chapter treasurer.”
Antek nodded. But there was something else. He filled up his
lungs. “They’re doing good work. Taking
risks, too. A small-town free press doesn’t seem like much. I know. But the
least they deserve is some respect.”
Matusiak threw his
hand up and nodded a bow of contrition.
“How did you know,
though? About the paper?” Antek said.
“I helped teach them how to set it up. Maybe I should have started
with that.” Later, as he attempted to work, Antek re-lived the guilt he had
felt when, in his wife’s company, he
stammered like an idiot handing over the paper and ink to the press operators.
One specific operator. Antek had always
thought that only machines—made for a purpose, perfected through as many iterations as needed—could
achieve what some might call perfection. Organic life was messy. Always blemished. Often
simply disgusting.
That’s when Kalina—who had met them and their heavy backpacks in
the town square and led them to the
newsletter’s unadvertised location—had proved him wrong. He did his best to fight slack-jawed awe as if he had stood
in the presence of a Batillus-Class tanker and its 64,800-horsepower engines, while she revised
his idea of what’s possible by doing nothing more than being. Base physical attraction never
entered into it. That would have felt wrong, somehow.
An excerpt from Controlled Conversations by Karol
Lagodzki 8
Still, his wife—as perfect in every way as soft, breakable,
inconstant humans could get—thought she
hadn’t said anything at the time, that night picked up a separate blanket,
turned around, and went straight to
sleep.
#
In a Frombork repair shop, about four years after Antek and his
wife went to sleep angry and hurt for
the first time, the Łada just needed the new sparkplugs Bolek put in all the
cars by default. Antek double-checked to
make sure. He felt like a fraud when he was done with both the Zaporozhets and the Łada ten minutes past
noon.
He lit one of his own cigarettes and leaned against the side of
the garage with his right sole resting
against the wall. If he had a wide-brimmed hat, he could have been a cowboy out
of The
Magnificent Seven. Steve McQueen, preferably. Maybe he’d rent a videotape
and a VHS player and see a movie
tonight. He drew hard enough to make his head swim. Exhaled.
Antek pinched the cigarette, took a deep drag and, as he did most
days, allowed himself to worry just a
bit about Stefan. The man knew where Antek had come from and who he was. Stefan’s garage served as a safe house, a
safe identity, and yet Antek could never draw him out on politics, on Poland, on Solidarity. Stefan
kept his mouth shut and paid the going wage.
Antek rounded the corner to where the bushes behind the garage
provided a refuge in which to piss in
peace. He ground the cigarette into the clay soil and sighed when the shiver of
a long, satisfying leak shot through
him. The trick rested in getting far enough into the bushes to secure a cover, but far enough away from the
wall to prevent the backsplash from wetting your shoes. “Fuck,” Antek said, forced to shake
off both his cock and his boots. As soon as he zipped up, he heard the growl of four-cylinder
engines on compressed gravel.
He
came around and peeked in from behind the corner. His ear hadn’t lied. Two
Milicja
An excerpt from Controlled Conversations by Karol
Lagodzki 9
Ładas had stopped in front of the garage. But the men who got out
wore the military green instead of the
steel blue of Milicja footmen.
Antek had seen enough. He backed off and began to walk away toward
the apartment buildings across the
street while making sure to keep the garage between him and the cars. He hoped they wouldn’t think to check around the
building until he could disappear among the
concrete obelisks.
Going back to his apartment was stupid. But not going back meant
failure and betrayal. He walked steadily
while surveying the street. The effort of pretending not to hurry and not
to look around made his calves and neck
hurt. He’d seen nothing unusual as he approached and entered the building.
Two locks. He scanned
the apartment. No one. Two bolts.
Having grabbed his sharpest knife from the kitchen, Antek huffed
into his bedroom and dissected the
mattress in one stroke. He completed the butchery so that the mattress lay dead
and splayed open to reveal a notebook
and a thin stack of green American cash. He prayed that the rest—all twenty thousand dollars—was still
resting safely at its destination. Most people would never see that much cash at once, but Antek
had been trusted to count it and keep it safe. Then, expecting arrest late last fall, he’d had to
say a prayer and let it go, trusting others with so much more than just a fortune.
He stuffed the rainy-day money in his pockets and paged through
the notebook. He considered holding the
pages over a stove burner. No, he and others needed the information. He put it in his breast pocket instead.
Carrying his bicycle,
he measured his steps down the stairs.
“Citizen
Adamczyk,” the mostly bald man loitering on the bottom landing said. “Come
An excerpt from Controlled Conversations by Karol
Lagodzki 10
with us?”
Despite the tone,
Antek knew the words were no suggestion.
Us? Aside from a pile of trash swept into a corner, there was no
one else. He couldn’t tell how long he
stood staring into the man’s eyes. Some say there is no such thing as time, that it’s personal. Take a
look at the long hand of your watch. It always seems to take more than a second to take that first
tick. All embarrassed because you caught it dawdling. Then it keeps on ticking, as if nothing
notable happened, hoping you’ll take it at face value. By the time he blinked,
Antek had had all the time he needed. He let the bike go and, knocking the man aside with his larger body,
he bolted. The building’s door thundered like a
rifle.
“Halt!” someone yelled. Antek ran. Another rifle-like shot of the
door rang out. He kept his head forward
and his eyes on the space between two apartment buildings. Somebody slammed the door again, and something bit
Antek’s calf. He stumbled for a step but kept his legs churning.
When something pierced his right side and took his breath, Antek
tripped again but ran on.
#
He hadn’t been shot before. And now he’d been shot twice, and all
within seconds. It didn’t seem so bad at
first. When he fled, he had taken off toward the pier, a kilometer away, though
he hadn’t realized that until he saw the
water.
He stopped in the
shade of an oak, struggling for breath and seeing spots.
A summer afternoon. The sea. The pier. People. Suddenly adrenaline
swept away the haze. He glanced up and
down the street. People, but not too many. Whoever saw him run,
An excerpt from Controlled Conversations by Karol
Lagodzki 11
unless they worked for Bezpieka, would have been likely to turn
around and convince themselves they had
witnessed nothing. His right side pulsated, but the bullet had gone clean through and there was less pain than he would
have expected from getting shot. True, his right love handle might have absorbed the bulk of
the damage. The mostly sedentary existence of the last couple of months—home, work, sleep,
fishing, and back to the start—might have left him a bit wider than he had ever been.
He glanced up. A young tree still, the oak would one day command
this street corner and probably get cut
down for its impertinence. His wife’s affection, engineering, liberty, and definitely water and trees—if he could have
these things, he’d never ask for anything else. But for now, a sight of water from afar and this
tree behind his back were all he had and staying here so long had been dumb.
Antek stepped out from under the shade, and, God, did his side
sting all of the sudden. With each
jarring step, he felt as if something with teeth clamped down hard on his side.
His shirt seemed to stick more damply to
his skin. But he couldn’t stop, not until he got to his destination.
Where to go? Zygmuntowo, eventually, to find and move the money
somewhere safer. But first to see to the
wound. Antek took a course for Stefan’s repair shop. It was another stupid thing to do, but he couldn’t think of another
place with disinfectant, tape, and the privacy in which to wrap up his side.
Stefan’s first. But then Zygmuntowo. The presbytery of the Most
Sacred Heart of Christ Cathedral where
he’d delivered twenty thousand American dollars of Solidarity’s money. In
the first week of last December, when
the so-called Polish Unified Workers’ Party’s grip began to fray, Antek boarded a train to
Zygmuntowo—alone this time—with stacks of bills taped to his
An excerpt from Controlled Conversations by Karol
Lagodzki 12
body. On the way back, he’d hoped he had done the right thing,
that the priest would follow directions
and pass it through a couple more hands until neither he nor Antek could spill
its location under questioning. The
fortune could buy hardware for printing presses, transportation, food, and bribes. God have mercy, weapons. He
prayed it never came to that.
Antek’s mind still worked well enough to take a roundabout route
to the repair shop. Whether that helped
or only bought him more pain, he would never know, but when Stefan’s building came into view, only a couple of
stray mutts were hanging around.
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