Excerpt of Controlled Conversations by Karol Lagodzki

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the CONTROLLED CONVERSATIONS by Karol Lagodzki Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

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

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 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.”

“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 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.

“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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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.

 

About Karol Lagodzki:

Karol Lagodzki, a native of Poland, is an exophonic, English-language author of fiction. His  stories have appeared in Invisible City, Storm Cellar, NUNUM, Streetlight Magazine, and  elsewhere, and he has won Panel Magazine’s Ruritania Prize for Short Fiction. Controlled  Conversations is his debut novel. 

He holds an MFA in creative writing, buys more books than he can read or afford—usually  novels and short story collections, though he’s been known to pick up an odd book of poetry or  accessible science—and gives back to the literary community by serving as a reader for several journals. Karol’s non-writing careers have ranged from fixing stucco while dangling from roofs  in Paris to sorting through human cadaver heads in Florida to developing and marketing medical  devices for critically ill people in the American Midwest, but his true ambition is to remain a  student for as long as he possibly can and make sure more stories make it out onto the page. 

Karol lives halfway down a Southern Indiana ravine with his wonderful, unconventional family,  a scurry of squirrels, a passel of possums, a gaze of raccoons, a descent of woodpeckers, and a  large dog.

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Threads | BlueSky | Goodreads | Amazon

 

Giveaway Details:

1 winner will receive a $10 Amazon Gift Card, International.

Ends October 5th, midnight EST.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Tour Schedule:

Week One:

9/2/2024	Two Chicks on Books	Excerpt/IG Post
9/3/2024	Writer of Wrongs	Excerpt
9/4/2024	Daily Waffle	Excerpt
9/5/2024	Fire and Ice Reads	Excerpt/IG Post
9/6/2024	Edith's Little Free Library	IG & TikTok Post

Week Two:

9/9/2024	Lady Hawkeye	Excerpt/IG Post
9/10/2024	Book Review Virginia Lee Blog	Excerpt
9/11/2024	Rajiv's reviews	Review/IG Post
9/12/2024	GryffindorBookishnerd	IG Review
9/13/2024	Lifestyle of Me	Review

Week Three:

9/16/2024	@heyashleyyreads	IG Review/TikTok Post
9/17/2024	The Momma Spot	Review
9/18/2024	@callistoscalling	IG Post
9/19/2024	Nerdophiles	Review
9/20/2024	jlreadstoperpetuity	IG Review/TikTok Post

Week Four:

9/23/2024	@evergirl200	IG Review
9/24/2024	A Blue Box Full of Books	IG Review/LFL Drop Pic/TikTok Post
9/25/2024	Kim's Book Reviews and Writing Aha's	Review/IG Post
9/26/2024	@amysbookshelf82	IG Review
9/27/2024	Country Mamas With Kids	Review/IG Post

Week Five:

9/30/2024

Two Points of Interest

Review