Chapter Text
She hears the alarm faintly somewhere in space, far away. A calling otherworldly.
Calling for her, it seems.
The realisation comes immediately. She raises her head, blinking. Movement starts abruptly. She's halfway up, stumbling in sheets and duvet, tangling herself more than letting herself free.
These days, the alarm alone is sufficient to startle Zosia in a way that makes her heart clench inside her chest. It is the reminder and consequent realisation that another day is starting: another day with her insecurities, another day constantly waiting and antecipating something that will go wrong. A word misspoken. A stare. Something that would sink her heart further inside her chest.
The anxiety is quite unbearable. It sets the moment she wakes up.
She stops, inhales and exhales. Something that supposedly helps and that she does for the sake of it, though it never really does anything for her. She eyes the cup of water on her nightstand and reaches for it. The water is cold against her lips. She drinks slowly.
Zosia sets the cup back and sits on the edge of the bed for a moment.
The apartment is quiet. Warsaw mornings are quiet in her room. The double windows prevent the city noise from the street from reaching her ears. She is so glad for this. The grey morning light comes through a gap in the curtains, dust lingering in the air above her. She lets herself feel this moment.
She moves to the bathroom. The fluorescent light flickers once before settling, casting everything in that harsh light. She brushes her teeth looking somewhere just past her own reflection, a habit she developed without noticing.
She steps out of the bathroom, the light from the windows coming directly at her now in a straight line. She stands still and closes her eyes one more time and exhales.
____________
The commute is the first test of the day. The tram is crowded, as always, and Zosia stands near the door with her bag pressed to her chest like an armour. She pictures herself as Joan of Arc on these occasions, bracing herself, holy, but to save no one else but herself.
Someone shifts beside her and their elbow grazes her arm. She tenses, though deep inside she knows it is probably nothing. The man doesn't even look up from his phone. This is the thing people don't understand about it. It isn't fear, exactly. It is more like a constant, low current of wrongness and the sensation that at any moment something will be required of her that she will not know how to give.
Social interaction, that was her demon. A word. Eye contact. A smile timed correctly. Small, ordinary things that for others seem to happen effortlessly, but for Zosia, they require calculation, rehearsal, and above all, energy.
She's forty-four years old and has never learned how to navigate social interactions. She's stiff, controlled, only talks when necessary, the minimum necessary. Not because she doesn't feel things, but because she feels too much.
As most of the passengers exit, she turns and watches the city pass through smudged glass: the buildings, the pigeons sitting in rows like a small army. Her favorite part of the trip to work.
Leaving the tram, Zosia makes her way toward the museum, walking the remainder of the route along the long avenue, stopping first at her favourite café for a strong coffee.
The National Museum in Warsaw announces itself before you can properly take it in. The stone facade, the columns, the grandeur.
She takes the staff entrance on the side, punches in her code, nods at the security guard at his desk. He says something, good morning, probably, or something about the weather and she freezes there for a second longer, on delay. She tries to mumble something, gives up, half smiles, grows uncomfortable, and is already moving past him, leaving only the awkward moment behind.
She is not unkind. At least this is what she is constantly trying to remind herself of. She simply runs out.
The restoration lab is in the lower level, past the permanent collection, past the medieval wing she has always loved best. She pauses there, as she sometimes does when the corridors are still empty.
A Madonna from the fourteenth century, tempera on wood, the gold leaf worn thin at the edges. The Virgin's expression is one Zosia has spent a long time looking at over the years. Not sorrow, exactly. But she doesn't know what it is either. There is endurance. One of the kind that outlasted the hand that painted it, the century that commissioned it, perhaps even the faith that had given it meaning.
How did you manage it, Zosia thinks. All those centuries of being looked at.
____________
When Zosia focuses on the work, she almost believes there is nothing else in the whole world.
Under the magnifying glass, under the fine brush, she transforms. Now, there is only a certain number of things that she must be aware of: surface, damage and time. And then, on the microscopic side of things: the craquelure mapped like a small city from above, the overpaints of previous restorers she must carefully undo, the original colour underneath, waiting for her.
She had chosen this. The quiet and comtemplation of this work.
The work asked for attention, and she was eager to become immerse in it.
By eleven, her supervisor appears at the door.
"Zosia, we have a group coming through at two. I need someone to speak with them briefly about the Flemish restoration... Just for a few minutes." He looks at her, knowing. He narrows his eyes a bit.
"I can prepare some notes," she says. "Someone else could present them."
A pause. She can feel it without looking, the effort he makes not to sigh.
"It would be better coming from you. You know this piece best." He says, matter-of-factly.
She nods, slowly, and he takes it as agreement and leaves. She sits with the weight of the waiting hours now already pressing down on her chest. She does not move for a long moment, brush held still above the painting.
____________
The group arrives at two.
Zosia hears them before she sees them, the sound of a guided tour, the shuffle and murmur of people moving together. The supervisor leads them in. Twelve, perhaps fifteen people. A school group, she realises with a tightening in her chest. Teenagers, which is somehow worse than adults, because teenagers watch differently. It's open, raw, without the social courtesy of pretending not to stare.
He introduces her. She hears her own name from a slight distance. She steps forward.
"This painting," she begins, "dates from approximately 1625."
Her voice comes out steadier than she expected. This sometimes happens.
"It is oil on panel, Flemish in origin, and came to the museum's collection in…"
A phone screen lights up in the third row. A boy, perhaps sixteen, not looking at her. Typing something. She loses the thread for a fraction of a second but manages to find it again.
"…came to the collection in 1952, as part of a post-war repatriation effort."
She moves to the side, gesturing toward the painting. If she looks at the painting, she does not have to look at them. This is a strategy she has used before. She focuses on the right corner, on a detail she genuinely loves, a vanitas element the artist had tucked there, a skull.
"Restoration work on this piece presented several challenges. Previous interventions… Uhm… Attempts at repair done in earlier decades had introduced materials that were chemically incompatible with the original. Our work involved first identifying and then carefully reversing…"
Someone coughs. It is an ordinary cough. An involuntary thing. But her eyes move toward the sound before she can stop, and for a moment she is looking directly at the group, at all of them at once, and something in her chest tighten.
She looks back at the painting. "...carefully reversing these interventions," she continues, but the voice is different now. Thinner. "Using solvents… A series of solvents, specifically formulated… to…"
The room is very warm. She had not noticed it before, but she notices it now, the quality of air in a room with too many people. Her notes are in her left hand and she looks at her own handwriting and the words take a moment too long to take meaning.
"…to isolate the original… The original paint layer…"
"The… The technique we use is…"
She stops. The room is very warm. It's burning her. She thinks, unexpectedly, of Joan of Arc again. She doesn't know why these thoughts come to her, but they do.
"Zosia?"
Someones voice, from somewhere to her left.
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Her mouth is dry.
Her knees do not bend so much as simply cease. She goes down slowly, which is worse. Quite dramatic. Her back finds the wall on the way down, which saves her from hitting the floor outright. She ends sitting, legs at an odd angle, the notes still in her left hand.
Zosia looks at the painting from the floor. From here, the angle is different. She has never seen it from exactly this position before. The skull in the corner is more visible from here, she notices. The painter had known what he was doing, placing it like that. Perhaps had even imagined that eventually someone would see it from the ground.
Someone says her name. Someone calls her, seems like the supervisor. There is agitation in the room, she feels faintly.
"Zosia, can you hear me?"
"Yes," she says. Her voice is perfectly calm. "I can hear you."
She closes her eyes.
___________
Carol had a theory about boxes: they existed to be opened immediately or never. Hers, hauled from Oxford three weeks ago, still formed an irregular fortress across the living room, it was a cardboard civilisation she had named Tomorrow's Problem.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor between them, drinking tea from a mug that read World's Okayest Archaeologist, she flipped through her site notes.
"Noodle," she said, without looking up, "you're sitting on the Roman Period."
The cat was a round tuxedo with green eyes. He looked leisurely at her. Blinked twice. Hard. Did not move.
Carol stared at him for a moment, scoffed, then went back to her notes.
She stood up eventually, vertebrae popping in a sequence that was, to say at least, honest, for a woman of fifty-three.
The kitchen window was right there. With her hands cupped around the mug, she stepped close to look at the view.
The village, in the heart of the Yorkshire county, lay below in stillness. A handful of stone cottages gathered along a lane like they had simply grown there out of the earth. The fields beyond rolled out in long unhurried waves. There was a hedgerow that followed the land's countours. The sky had gone the colour of embers, and a lone tree on the far ridge stood black against it. A kestrel ripped restlessly through the air, probably hunting.
Carol sensed something in her chest. It told her that this place was not just a posting. Whatever was buried out there in that ancient ground was waiting for her. And that when she found it, nothing would be quite the same again.
Noodle suddenly jumped onto the windowsill and stared at the moors with grave authority. Then he looked back at her, and blinked.