“On temperate evenings,” I read, “as Saint Jerzy plays the violin, it’s so entrancing that any living person who happened to listen would die right away of an excess of emotion. But in general such sinful creatures never get to hear these songs. Only occasionally a baby, asleep in the cradle, may suddenly smile in the night; the parents are unable to explain such infant bliss, yet it is a sign that the child has managed to hear, through a dream, the songs of highest Heaven. For innocent children have the gift of seeing extraordinary things; according to Jewish tradition, they are able to understand the speech of fire, of animals, of the wind, and of ghosts. Adults, however, cannot even look upon the Moon as Saint Jerzy plays, for if they do his strings might snap, blinding the erstwhile viewer.”
Suddenly a metallic sound like the impact of a mallet on the bars of a xylophone carries across the courtyard. I look out the little open window. The moon clings to the tower on Jasna Góra like a bracket fungus to a birch trunk. A man’s shadow gets longer on the asphalt. Just past the hedge his leather jacket flashes. I can’t believe it. It’s him, it’s Kamil! I’ve been looking for him for so many months, and now he’s here, right outside the iron gate. He looks exactly as he did in Hektary. He’s standing on the street, trying to signal something. I throw my clogs into the corner and, heart pounding, in just my pajamas, I race barefoot downstairs. I wait a moment in the hallway and then, taking advantage of the porter’s bathroom break, I press the orange button on the console. The entrance opens. I pass through the vestibule and with feet clapping against the concrete of the courtyard I run to the iron gate, where I can smell gasoline, oriental cologne, and tobacco. I’m near tears. I seize the bars in my hands. In the August air the metal loses density. At first I can’t understand Kamil’s words, which he pronounces quickly and chaotically. Only after a while do shreds of sentences finally reach me:
“Forgive me, forgive …” He kisses my hand.
“What could I possibly have to forgive you for?”
“Everything. I’ve only just returned to Częstochowa.”
“Did you move away?”
“I go every so often to see my mother, who is ill, in Katowice.”
“I was a little worried about you when you stopped coming to Hektary.”
“What about you, are you okay?” he asks, staring into the V of my pajama top, which reveals a sliver of my firm little breast. “You’ve gotten very thin, Wiola, since the last time I saw you. Are you ill? Is that why you’re hiding in this strange convent?”
“No, no, I’m fine,” I say in a trembling voice. “I’m just renting a room from the sisters here, in the attic. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you all about it someday.”
“I was worried.”
“How did you find me?”
“I was at your house several times. I finally got your grandpa to give me your address.”
“My grandpa?” I ask. Wresting any information out of that old coot borders on the miraculous.
“Oh, don’t think it was easy.” He smiles. “First I had to feed him half a liter of vodka.”
We must be talking too loud, because the light in the vestibule of the convent flickers, filtering out through the window into the courtyard along a faltering path. We hear the door slam. Someone slowly comes down the stairs, clacking the convent’s clogs against the concrete, getting closer and closer to us.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “but there are no guests allowed at this hour.”
“I understand, of course—I didn’t even tell you I was planning to drop by. Come to Staszic Park tomorrow at four. I’ll be waiting by the fountain.” He blows me a kiss and moves behind the wall.
“Who’s there?” I hear the resounding voice of the Mother Superior.
“It’s me, Mother. It got a little stuffy so I came out for a minute to get some fresh air, and then I heard some noise outside the gate and wanted to see what it was.”
The Mother Superior shines her flashlight in my face, and examining me mistrustfully then directs the beam of light towards the gate.
“There are cats out, roaming around.”
“Yet the man who was standing here just a moment ago looked nothing like a cat. That was your Leon. Was it not?”
“Leon?” I repeat after her, the name of that stranger unexpectedly becoming as close to me as though I’d known him half my life.
“You know exactly whom I refer to. Don’t play the fool with me. Zyta saw you two kissing at the gate once. You must stop these rendezvous, for your own good! The war is hardly the best time for such tomfoolery.”
“But, Mother …”
“I’m begging you, Anula: do not risk it! I know it’s him you’ve been distributing those papers for.”
I try to think of something to say, but at that moment thunder booms. Clouds convulse and scatter out across the sky. The Mother Superior raises her hands and tries to outshout the storm:
“Margot, you bitch!”
Remembering the newspaper clipping I found on her desk not long ago, I assume she must have known Margot. I can’t move. We stand facing one another: me barefoot, shivering in my disheveled pajama, she in a halo of light, her hands raised like a prisoner at roll call.
Fat drops of rain knock loose the rose petals in the fading flowerbeds and hit the dirty concrete.
Over the courtyard hovers the scent of wet dust, so unlike the scent of anything else at all. My morning Latin practice is as prolonged as a Rorate Mass. The instructor scrawls out the third conjugation on the chalkboard:
“Vivo, I live, vivis, you live, vivit, he lives, vivimus, we live,” she recites. I’m staring out the window.
In the hedge outside the registrar’s on Home Army Avenue a magpie ransacks the trash, screeching: Rorate caeli desuper, Release the heavens’ dew. Then it flies down onto the sidewalk and tries to peck out the eye of a plastic doll lying near the dumpster.
I grind down the words in my mouth, break them down into prime factors in my notebook. I can’t wait for my rendezvous with Kamil and try to picture his face, his hands, his lips. But it’s hard for me to recreate his image from memory because it still seems so unlike him.
After my classes I flit to the restroom, where I put on mascara, change into a tight bodysuit, switch from my comfortable sneakers into brown wedges. I let down my hair and spritz it with purple Impuls, which smells like cheap knock-off Chanel No. 5, and in a cloud of melted wax, orange, and violets I rush to Staszic Park.
Kamil is waiting for me at the southern end of the park, by the fountain, as promised, and he keeps glancing at his watch. I stop near the weeping willow, where he won’t notice me. Perhaps after all these months, from the time of our last meeting in Hektary, I want to take in the sight of him, memorize him once and for all: against the backdrop of the fountain, those sprays sending iridescent Easter bunnies hopping all across his face. Tall, swarthy, with that wavy hair that goes down to his shoulders, he is a Nazarene vision in a stained glass window.
I can’t take it anymore and call out his name. He comes up—actually running toward me—and hands me a bouquet of cornflowers and tries to kiss my hand. I’m not into that old-fashioned gesture, which I associate with drooling uncles from harvest fairs, weddings, and name days, and I twist my hand away in self-defense. His lips brush my wrist. This is too much for me. I get up on my tiptoes because even in wedges I’m not that tall, and I want to return his kiss on his just-shaved cheek with its little nicks. I manage to plant my lips on his neck. Kamil puts his arms around me, and then we’re both leaning over.
“Let me go!” I squeal in delight.
We take a walk down the Avenue, which was modeled on the boulevards of Paris by a Polish engineer of German descent named Jan Bernhard. After our fifteen-minute promenade around town, we pause at the outbuilding at number 52, where on the façade, above the window of the second story, there is a bust of Johannes Gutenberg.
“There was once a printer’s in this building, where Franciszek Wilkoszewski used to pub
lish his National Democracy daily The Dispatch and watercolor series with views of the city. I read that he used the type from linotypes in a rotary printing press, but perhaps I’d better quit boring you now. How about we head to Cepelianka for a beer.”
Instead of answering, I just take another look around the courtyard, where for some reason, I can hear the rhythmic echoes of the printing presses, the buzz of the typesetting department, the clatter of that linotype.
The setting sun catches our eyes as it shifts slowly into the windows of the annex.
At Cepelianka we sit down by the little pond out back and order two steins of beer. The tipsy bartender disappears around the counter, going back to focusing on his efforts on his Gameboy.
“My God, I’m really worried about you. Why would you want to live in that nunnery? Did they not give you university accommodations?”
“I’m just renting a room with the nuns for now, planning to move out soon,” I say, not particularly certain of my own words.
Kamil scoots over towards me and cups my disheveled curls in his hand, sweeps them behind my ear. At his touch my hair becomes electric. These summoned sparks burn like meteorites, then vanish into thin, warm air.
He says, “So I hear there’s one professor students call the Brückner of Częstochowa.”
“Brankowski?”
“Yes, that’s it, Brankowski. He’s the one who gets up on top of a bench and gets in lotus pose? He was a monk, right? Or he calls himself a theologian.”
“Exactly, that’s him. Have you come across him?”
Kamil orders us each another beer and as a carp smacks its lips in the pond he leans forward in his chair and taps the surface of the water with his fingertips. I recognize this gesture and feel my stomach tighten. Instinctually I reach out towards him but withdraw my hand when out of the corner of my eye I see the door to Cepelianka open and then see Piotrek, who goes and stands at the bar, watching us through the window. I move over a little towards the palm, wanting to hide behind it.
“Once Brankowski started talking to me in this academic bookstore,” says Kamil, returning to the subject at hand without having noticed a thing, “and he asked to bum a cigarette because, he explained, bacteria won’t attack the organism of a smoker. I told him that some organisms are safe regardless, due to just being so closely related.”
My exuberant laughter releases the bartender from his enslavement; he sets down his Gameboy and glances around the back patio with his bloodshot eyes. Piotrek finishes his beer, turns on his heel, and stalks out of Cepelianka.
“Is he really hard on you, grade-wise?”
“Who?”
“Dictionary Guy.”
“Last Friday he tried to talk a couple of the girls from our cohort into heading up into the Sokole Góry with him, on some sort of excursion.”
“What for?”
“I don’t think you want to know the kinds of things he gets up to on those excursions. I mean, I’ve heard he takes the girls on piggyback rides, teaches them to pee standing up, and checks the size of their bra cups.”
“What a pig! Does he bother you like that, too?”
“I’m not his type. He likes curvy girls with dark hair. But he has given me some pretty disgusting things to read.”
“You should get together and file a complaint with the dean. In Katowice there was a professor like that who told his female students to do a word-formation analysis of the word ‘dick.’ One of the female lecturers filed a complaint with the university, and after a disciplinary hearing the guy had to go on early retirement.”
He talks a moment longer, but I’m no longer listening, contemplating instead the outline of his lips, his skin, his eyes that look like amber under the patio lights. Then he, too, falls silent, tugging at a strip of napkin. We sit staring at each other, relishing the silence, our knees meeting underneath the table.
When by eight Cepelianka gets crowded, we decide to move on to some other, more intimate place. We walk down Second Avenue. All the nooks that have been so important to me since 1994 have suddenly become invisible. Częstochowa sliced through by the tram line: wagons chugging along from the turning loop at Raków on past the North neighborhood slowly accustom me to their rhythm. I don’t look as closely at the displays, don’t peruse the windows of the classic tenement houses, don’t stare stubbornly in at the gates.
I walk intent upon the rhythm of our steps, watching our shadows as they shamelessly slide into one another on the sidewalks.
IN THE ANTIQUITIES CAFÉ, a coffee shop located on the ground floor of a tall building just past the Freedom Cinema, it’s empty and cozy. I relax into my armchair, inhaling the fragrance of strong tea. The walls are decorated with male nudes in gilded frames. Atop the round oak tables, candlesticks bulge with wax. Frank Sinatra’s soothing elegance transports us back to the times of swinging love affairs. Behind the bar appears a man around fifty with salt-and-pepper hair wearing a suit jacket and a snow-white button-down shirt. We order a pot of Earl Gray to share, little toasts, then beer.
A little tipsy now, Kamil takes me by the hand. “I remember the day I first saw you,” he whispers, leaning into me. “I remember it like it was yesterday. It was Sunday. The very start of summer. I was sitting at a little table in your grandfather’s room, writing down in my lap the songs he reluctantly dictated—I suspect only because I’d bring him candy and those little bottles of vodka in exchange. I never really felt at home at your place. It wasn’t just that everybody in your family seemed so stiff to me, and melancholy, and marked by all these traumas—on top of that, hanging everywhere were taxidermied birds. So one day I went out to smoke in the yard—on the square, as you guys call it—and then as I was going back through the entryway to his room you just landed right on top of me, coming down the ladder from the attic. Your cheek smeared with green paint, smelling of hay and turpentine, you brought into the house with you the light of a summer’s day. I think you must have been embarrassed, because you ran out in front of the house and put a bucket on a stump next to the barn and squatted down spreading your legs like a boy to wash your face off. Your underwear was showing. The bucket tipped. Cold water spilled over your bruised knees and bare calves. I wanted to go up to you and say hi and talk, but you didn’t even look back at me. You marched off into the fields like you couldn’t have cared less.”
Nearing eleven we get ready to leave. As he stands, Kamil bumps into a brass ashtray that slides off the table and onto the floor. Both of us bend down for it. I can feel his breath on my forehead, my eyelids, my temples. Our lips meet in the darkness.
THE LAST DAY OF SUMMER is misty and smells like fermented blackberry juice, and it sticks to me and makes me gag. I sit in my room in the attic and try to read what I’ve been assigned. Briefly I wonder whether the non-believing daughter of a Catholic woman and a Volunteer Reserve Militiaman might still be able to join the oblates and spend a few year living in the Congregation of the Sisters in Christ’s Heart, like Sister Anna or Sister Lucja, in the world of old women, where all things are determined by Mother Stanislawa and Sister Zyta, where reality intermingles with dreams, present with past, sacred with profane and the mundane with the supernatural, asceticism with eroticism, sin with saintliness; I could really learn Latin, habita tecum, delve into the mysteries of my own heart, and write, and read big books as soon as the Mother Superior gets me those entry cards she promised me for the Old Library and the one in Jasna Góra.
I get dizzy; still, I go downstairs.
After lunch I look out the window of the refectory onto the courtyard, where a group of German pilgrims is filing out of the visitors’ wing of the congregation, one by one. They stand in a circle, count off and then tuck into small black rucksacks the pins and pennants they purchased at the stalls on Saint Barbara Street and hobble unhurriedly to their bus, which sparkles with the advertising of the transport company Exodus Bremen. When they have all disappeared inside it, Mother Stanislawa runs out into the courtyard and spits
onto the sidewalk again and again. One of the boys now inside the bus notices her, and evidently recognizing in her the nice old lady who just yesterday had offered him candy in the common room after lunch, now follows her gestures with his nose pressed to the window as she raises her fist against the world.
“She’s clearly deteriorated,” says Sister Anna, coming into the refectory and standing next to me.
When the bus drives off, the Mother Superior, going back and forth between sobbing and cursing, sits down on a patch of grass. Then Sister Zyta runs up and tries to pick her up, but she can’t manage by herself. Soon more sisters join in, forming a row like the line for the turnip the grandfather planted in the garden in Tuwim’s poem, all trying to raise up the Mother Superior from the ground.
“Are Sister Zyta and Mother Stanislawa siblings?” I ask Sister Anna.
“I never thought about them being related, I always just assumed it was the intimacy of living in close quarters for a long time—but now that you ask, I wonder. The Mother Superior is fairly full-figured, while Sister Zyta is skinny, but there is something alike in their appearances. They have similar movements, and they have the same pageboy haircuts, and they both like to wear black. Although Zyta has more energy, wouldn’t you say? I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your attention that they run this place together?” Sister Anna shakes the tassel loose and lets down the curtain. “You don’t have to worry too much about their commands, you know. They’re perfectionists. Have you ever noticed how much time Sister Zyta spends on polishing the Mother Superior’s shoes?”
“We do not have mice here,” interrupts the Mother Superior, who suddenly appears in the doorway of the refectory, dirty, without her clogs, leaves tangled up in her hair. Seating herself at the table, several meters long, where the oblates consume their three meals daily, she grabs up some breadcrumbs from the wicker basket and stuffs them into her apron pocket with a face that suggests she’s afraid someone will take them away from her. “When we got back to our barrack after the roll call we had one under the cot,” she sighs. “Remember, Anula?” she turns to me. “You tamed her and kept her in the straw of the mattress and fed her bread crumbs, but that damned Aufseherin Margot finally spotted her and crushed her to death with her truncheon.”
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