The day before

'We're going to Praktiker in Janki to buy the wall tiles to kitchen, are you going with us'? My mother shouted from the ground floor to let me know my parents have finally decided to do something to bring the refurbrishment of our kitchen to an end. I replied I would. As far as I'm concerned it was around quarter past three in the afternoon.

The weather was typical for a gloomy, dejecing spring day. Temperature was somewhat around +10C, sky was overcast. I sat on the back seat. Whenever we all travel by car and my father drives don't sit next to him, because my mother refuses to fasten the belt. I don't know why she embraces the old belief that fastening safety belts on a back seat is unnecessary, but she does it. To avoid something bad I tell her to sit on the passenger seat. Just in case.

At 15:38 my mobile phone rang. It took me too long to take it out of my pocket and I didn't manage to answer it. I called the number it had displayed back, but no one picked up the phone. I was livid. Some two weeks earlier I began sending out my job applications for summer internships and I was totally aware recruiters from some companies call applicants only once. This was a potentially accidentally wasted chance; it proved later someone had misdialled the number. Of course I couldn't know at that time my decision to go in for Grasz o Staż contest would prove fortituous.

At 16:00 we listened to the news in the Polish Radio Programme 1. Two news items to hit the headlines in the afternoon were:
1. huge, one of the biggest in the history of Polish banking, breakdown of PKO BP computing systems, as a results of which millions of the bank's clients couldn't use their e-banking accounts nor take out money from cash machines,
2. currency intervention carried out unexpectedly around midday by the National Bank of Poland, aimed at weakening zloty, as in the central bank's view, apprecation of Polish currency could hamper economic recovery in Poland.
The almost unprecedented move made by the central bank (that was the only intervention on the currency market in the first decade of 21st century) was backed by the ministry of finance and the Monetary Policy Council. Speculators who had bet on Polish currency strenghtening had to cover their positions with losses. The last year's EUR/PLN quotations proved the central bank's success in deterring speculators. Funnily enough, many younger dealers in banks' dealing rooms didn't know what had been going on, as they had seen zloty falling one per cent against Euro within a second ...

We had actually no problems choosing the tiles. My father and I loaded them onto a trolley and pushed towards the till. On our way back I noticed fog began to linger. Visibility was lower and lower. Somewhere between Lesznowola and Nowa Wola, where a junction on S7 dual carriageway is to be bulit in a few years, I regretted not taking a camera. I couldn't snap the ultimate beauty of spring gloom. As I recall the day I still have it in mind and this was an ultimate beauty, but it carried something worrisome. I had an inkling of something really dreadful, I felt it deep under my skin. I had this feeling a few times in my life and one of my friends aptly described it as "if you were to head for the Satan's Grand Ball (from The Master and Margarita)" and since then I've experieced it once, on 18 March 2011. For no apparent reason it felt really pleasant...

In the evening we watched Władysław Stasiak giving an interview in TVN. He spoke something about the importance of president's next day's visit to Katyn. Then we turned over to another channel...